Natalie stares at him. She can feel the hairs on the back of her neck growing rigid.
“Can I see it?”
He hands her a sheet of stationery from his desk. The letter crinkles between her fingers, the sort of sturdy correspondence no one sends any more. It’s written on lavender paper, and there’s a hint of perfume, which she recognizes as Obsession. Of course, what else? The handwriting is thin and shaky, and an exaggerated string of X’s and O’s fills the page beneath the cramped signature. Alima, who has signed her name here in tiny, self-deprecating letters, wasn’t at all confident of the journey she was about to make, not at all certain she wanted to go.
The letter is exactly as Hartlow recited it word for word. He has a remarkable memory.
“You really don’t know where they are, do you?” Natalie asks.
“If I did, I wouldn’t be here.” He takes the letter out of her hands and clutches it close. ‘‘I’m not brave enough to do it like this, on my own. But if I was with the others—well, it’s too late for that, I guess, huh?”
His tone is every bit as desolate as Marida’s was when she posed much the same question to Natalie earlier. She pats him on the arm again and stands up to leave. As she’s heading for the door, he calls to her. “Hey?”
“Yes?”
She can see the torment in his eyes. “When I decided to leave,” he says, “I mean really decided, Tethys wasn’t angry, not the way I thought she would be. She was even kind of nice to me, actually. She told me I was going to end up having a lot in common with her one day. What do you suppose she meant by that?”
Natalie watches him for a second, this portrait of abandonment. He’s like a child who has been left by the side of a dusty road. So now it’s him turning to her for answers, as if he can see in her something that he misconstrues as the power to decipher the rantings of lunatics.
“No clue,” she shrugs, wishing she could offer him more. But she doesn’t have what he wants. “You have someone to be with you?”
“My sister’s coming in from Cleveland.”
She nods. The heavy door sweeps along the floor and clangs shut behind her, forlorn sounds, like noises in a prison. As she descends the stairs, Natalie imagines she can hear someone singing, in more dirge-like tones now, “Yes, Jesus loves me, yes, Jesus loves me . . . “
One day soon he will find the courage he’s looking for, there’s little doubt of that. Natalie sadly wonders when.
* * *
“So did he have anything to add?” Carter asks sarcastically when she joins him downstairs.
“Just that he thought you were charming,” Natalie answers testily.
“I normally am.” he jokes.
She isn’t amused. In silence, they trudge back across the gravel parking lot to their cars. The clouds have fully consumed the sky now, and they are busy thickening from gray to black. Thunder rumbles in the distance.
Carter, his jacket turned up against the suddenly whipping wind, waits with Natalie while she unlocks her door. “Listen, I’m sorry,” he says. “I should have listened to you up there. It’s just—his attitude really got under my skin, you know? Can I buy you dinner to make up for it?”
“Don’t you have a story to file?”
“I’m not writing for today. I can phone in what I have for the guy who is.”
It sounds like an honest invitation and she’s tempted to accept. She likes Carter, despite his heavy-handedness with Bret Hartlow, and she wouldn’t mind the company right now. He seems interested in her. and she wouldn’t mind that either. it’s been a while. But the whole thought of eating, and of spending an hour making idle chatter with someone who’s an expert in prying into other people’s lives, it just doesn’t appeal. The truth is, she’s afraid to be with someone like him. He scares her, and that’s not likely ever to change.
“I’m not really hungry, but thanks.”
A drop of rain slaps her cheek, and for some reason that’s when she focuses on the light. It’s fading, and not just because of the storm. Carter asked her to dinner, and dinner means nightfall, and for most people, bed, sleep, dreams, at worst a time to sit up hand-wringing over the commonplace anxieties of a so-called normal life.
But not for everyone. For someone, somewhere, it means strapping a little girl into a van and promising to take her to a better place. Natalie finds herself silently praying. to whom she doesn’t know: Please don’t let it be tonight. She remembers being admonished once not to beleaguer the God of her parents with selfish prayers. and wonders if this counts as one. Because it’s as much herself she’s praying for.
She steps into her car and Carter motions to her to lower her window. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“Probably.”
“You’re trying to find her, aren’t you? That’s what this is about. Why you were at Mrs. Latham’s, why you came with me here? You want to help Selena.”
Just as she thought. A man who can’t stop asking questions. “Is this an interview?” she asks.
“Just curious.”
“I don’t want to be in your story, Carter. Thanks for bringing me along.”
10
Your Basic No-No Combo, Supersized
“Where have you been?” Emily demands, peering up from the La-Z-Boy as Natalie comes in from the garage. “You weren’t supposed to work tonight.”
Her words are liquid, flowing one into the other in a sleepy stream. They float idly through the air, mixing with the cigarette smoke spinning slowly in languid whirls and eddies above the lampshade. Drunk is a much easier language to speak than to understand, but when you swim in it long enough, as Natalie has, you learn to find your way upstream. “I had some things to do,” she answers.
Her aunt grunts and turns back to the television. “Might have told me. I worry, you know.”
She does, of course. Not enough to notice her niece’s anxiety, but then this is past her noticing hours.
All Natalie says is, “I know.”
“You have visitors. In there.”
Emily waves her cigarette toward the closed kitchen door. A long segment of ash drops off onto the carpet where it lies, perfectly formed, like an accidental turd, the excrement of some tiny ash creature. Natalie wonders what it would look like, the creature that would drop a turd like that.
“Been waiting for you for a while,” Emily adds. “Patient bunch.”
“Who is it?”
No answer.
“Em?”
But she’s already gone, disappeared back into TV land. A hasty retreat, even for her.
“Great,” Natalie says, even though she’s functionally alone. “This should be fun.”
The ash disintegrates into the carpet when she tries to scoop it up. It leaves a dusty gray splotch that she’ll have to dab out later, if she remembers. No point lying to herself, though—she won’t remember.
The second she enters the kitchen she understands why her aunt was so eager to scamper back up the pixel highway into fantasy land. Seated at the kitchen table, an anxious look on his face, is Simon Ballard. Across the room, leaning against the counter, is a woman Natalie doesn’t recognize. Round is the word that springs to mind. She’s wearing a beige suit and looks like a pirogue, all soft and doughy, except for the eyes, which fix on Natalie with an intensity that makes her uneasy.
Simon leaps up as she enters. “Natalie,” he exclaims, “you’re back.” His tone is peevish, like she’s late for on appointment.
“I live here,” she points out dryly.
“Your aunt said you would be home earlier.”
“My aunt’s drunk. Did you get a chance to talk to her at all, or was she already annihilated when you arrived?”
He frowns. “I tried. Frankly, it doesn’t seem like she really wants to help.”
“You sound puzzled by that.”
“You’re not?”
“You get used to lt.”
The conversation seems ready to die young when the stranger fill
s the void by extending a pudgy hand. “Rhonda Scopes.” she announces in a voice that seems too tough for her body. Almost in the same motion she pulls out a badge with her other hand and adds. “FBI.”
Natalie grasps the agent’s hand just long enough to let it go. She hopes her discomfort doesn’t show. A federal agent. Why would Ballard come here with the feds? Natalie isn’t fond of cops and their ilk. The mental health folks might say she has some unresolved issues around law enforcement and they would be right. Experience has, to say the least, jaded her. Besides, a federal agent shows up uninvited in your kitchen, it’s pretty much guaranteed not to be
a good thing.
As something to do, Natalie opens the refrigerator and roots around for something left over. In the back there’s a plate of ravioli from a forgotten number of nights ago. She pops it into the microwave. “You guys eat yet?” she asks.
“We’re fine.” Ballard says, as if she had just offered him a plateful of yard waste.
“Mind telling me what’s going on?”
Ballard clears his throat uneasily. “There was some news today,” he says. “Maybe you heard it—about a group called the Portal Guardians?”
“Those people in the lake.” she answers guardedly.
He seems pleasantly surprised that she has been tuning into current events for once. The prick. It’s so easy for him. “Did you hear about the girl who’s missing?” he asks.
“How could you miss it?”
“Agent Scopes here is heading up the investigation on that. Something’s come up, and we think you might be able to shed some light on it.”
“Me?” she asks, surprised.
“Most of the bodies that were found this morning have been IDed now.” Scopes says matter-of-factly. “It turns out that one of the victims was an acquaintance of yours.”
Like any normal person given this tidbit of information, Natalie panics. “Who?” she demands.
“No one close to you now, don’t worry.” Scopes assures her. “It was someone from a long time ago.”
The microwave dings but Natalie barely notices. A long time ago. Her hand feels cold, and she suddenly realizes it’s wrapped around a vodka-rocks. When did she fix that? Doesn’t matter. She takes a sip and lets the gut-burn kick in.
“So who?”
“Does the name Tethys mean anything to you?” Scopes asks.
“Hard name to forget. She was their leader, right?”
“Exactly. Cagey broad, from what we can tell. Crazy as bat shit, but smart. And experienced.”
“Experienced?”
“She’s been down this road before, I guess is what I mean. Her real name – the one they’ll print on the death certificate at least – is Anne, Anne Coyne. Ring a bell?”
* * *
Who knows the things that will save or kill us? The decision we made a month ago, the impulse we followed a minute ago; the sudden change of heart, the refusal to change lt. How often does the never-ending parade of apparently random acts and inconsequential decisions lead us to the brink, and what will be the one little thing that finally carries us over?
Natalie knows why she didn’t die along with the others. The reason was banal and stupid.
She stood up.
Simple as that.
That’s what the experts concluded. at least—her life was spared because she rose from her bed to challenge Father. Stephanie’s life probably would have been saved, too, if Father hadn’t shot her.
The explosion, it was later determined, didn’t kill the children directly. Instead, it caused one of the walls upstairs to collapse through the floor and shower concrete and fiery debris onto the line of bunk beds, crushing them and their occupants. By standing up and taking a few trivial steps, Natalie managed to avoid the worst of the lethal rain. The blast or the collapsing wall, one or the other, knocked her, Stephanie, and Father across the room. slamming them against the far wall, which is where they were found before fire consumed the entire structure.
People called it a miracle that anyone survived.
Everyone gets killed but her and Father. Define miracle.
Was it a miracle that she stood up when she did? That Father aimed his gun at them. provoking her?
When did the miracle start exactly? When Ellsworth Ralston decided to set up shop as a god? When their mother brought them to live with him? How far back are the seeds of a miracle sown, and in what fetid soil?
Every day we do something, the latest act in a long string of equally meaningless somethings, that has the potential to decide whether we live or die. But we can never guess the thing, nor how far back its roots will stretch.
* * *
The call comes in after dinner, when the sun has lost itself in the hills and cool artificial light comes slanting into the kitchen from the floodlights the men keep trained on the house. The adults have started pulling back the window covers slightly at night, enough to admit some of the borrowed light, even though it has a lifeless quality that fills the room with shadows so edgy they almost make Natalie wish for the dark.
Two of the younger children are washing dishes while she dries. Part of her task is to play overseer, to make sure the children don’t waste any of the water—every drop has to be saved and filtered and reused.
The siege is still young enough that the adults hope, many of them, that the men can yet be persuaded to leave. Their captors are misguided, that’s all; they have made a mistake. Surely they can be made to understand that. And once they do, they’ll go away. Why wouldn’t they? When you awake to an error, especially one so obvious, you don’t go on committing it. You stop, you say sorry, you walk away.
But it may be a while until that happens, so in the meantime, they save dishwater and steal light and wait.
Several of the adults congregate around the kitchen table. At first, it’s just some of the women—Natalie’s mother, Aunt Yvonne, Aunt Katie—but then Father comes in, followed by Uncle Rumer. Father pulls back a chair and sits down in a shadow-filled corner, and one by one, the others follow suit.
Father is in a subdued mood tonight. At dinner, he barely spoke, which meant no one else really did either. He has been waiting to hear from the men, who this morning promised to get back to him by midday. But midday came and went with no word. Now the adults sit around the kitchen table and talk in muted tones about how long this might go on, how long they can hold out.
That’s what they’re doing when the phone rings. It’s more of a warble than a ring, like the caw of an injured bird, and they all look up, surprised. Rumer is the first to react. He grabs the phone and places it on the table.
Father lets it warble a second time, and then a third. The children exchange anxious glances—why doesn’t he pick up?
Midway through the fourth ring, his hand darts out and lifts the receiver to his ear. “Kind of you to wait until we finished dinner,” he says cheerily. “I assume you knew?”
He smiles at whatever the reply is. “I’m sure,” he says. “You have the utmost respect for our privacy. Have you had a chance to think over what we discussed this morning?”
The grin fades slowly from his face, and he leans forward slightly so that a band of light crosses over his lips and casts his eyes into shadow. He has the captive look of a statue, a sculpture of a man trapped inside a moment of unsurpassed disbelief.
“I told you,” he says with an angry calm, “that is not going to happen. We will never agree to that. Do you hear me? Never.”
There is complete silence in the room as he listens. The adults all seem to have been turned to stone. “As long as it takes,” Father says bitterly, and hangs up.
There’s silence for a moment then, the black silence you get when people are absorbing bad news, trying to figure out how to fit the shock inside, too much into too small a space. Then Father lashes out, a vehement slap with his powerful right hand that sends the phone flying off the table and clattering across the floor. The sudden expression of fury startles Natalie, an
d a dish slips from her hand and crashes to the floor, scattering pieces in every direction. Immediately, she drops to her knees and starts gathering the shards with her trembling fingers. Thankfully, the adults, their eyes on Father, don’t seem to notice.
“What did they say?” Rumer asks. It’s like how people ask what happened at the scene of an accident, even though they pretty much know. There’s this need to have someone give them the details, a retelling that becomes a way of reliving.
Father’s gaze settles slowly on Natalie as her palm sweeps the floor. A fine sliver catches against the linoleum, stabbing painfully through her skin. She winces but tries to hide the pain as she extracts lt. There’s a trace of blood on her hand and she wipes it against her shirt. All the while she’s waiting for Father to say something, waiting for him to reprimand her. Why did she have to drop the plate right then, while he was watching her, and so angry?
He stares at her a moment longer and then just looks away. “They still want the children,” he says.
“You can’t let them!” Aunt Yvonne hisses, a bit too urgently.
“You heard what I told them,” Father snaps. His glare lets her know that she crossed the line, and she immediately begins to whimper an apology.
Natalie feels sorry for her. Maybe she shouldn’t have said what she did, not that way, but at least it was an honest reaction, an instinct to protect.
Natalie’s mother accepts the news that the men outside still want her to hand over her children before they will negotiate any further with serene indifference. She stares placidly into Father’s face, waiting for him to continue. Hands wedged between seat and thighs, she is the picture of obedience and trust, and totally oblivious to her daughter’s presence.
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