Ring of Years

by Grant Oliphant

  “What more could there be? The world ends and that’s pretty much it, isn’t it?”

  Stott’s eyes light up. “There’s always something more. Religious notions of the apocalypse almost never lead to nothingness—something new and glorious is always waiting out there beyond the cataclysm. The world ends, but a new world invariably dawns.”

  Natalie’s tea is lukewarm, almost cold. Time is passing, quickly, and here she is listening to an old man discuss the finer points of Ellsworth Ralston’s theology. What possible difference does that make now?

  “Not always,” she says bitterly.

  “We’re talking about faith here, Natalie, not fact. It is what Katie believed that matters.”

  “She believed in Ralston. And in his world view. What we hear Katie talking about on this tape isn’t a vision of heaven, the opening of the gates to paradise, the dawn of a new era. It’s a return to an old one, life returning to its roots.” He stares at her expectantly. “Don’t you see?”

  Natalie shakes her head.

  “Where did life begin?” Stott prods.

  The intensity of his gaze is too much. She stares into her cup again, and as soon as she does, it hits her, what he’s implying. Her hand begins to tremble, more than she can understand, and the dark liquid jitters around inside its translucent bowl. “Christ,” she whispers. “Water.”

  “Precisely!” Stott says. “The rains come and bring the water, just like in the Bible. Visions of the flood. The oceans reclaiming their progeny.”

  A metallic taste fills Natalie’s mouth. For a brief moment, she is tempted to jam her finger down her throat again. Get it out of me!

  “Are you suggesting this Atlantis nonsense came from Father originally?” she asks. it isn’t until the question is hanging in the air that she realizes what name she used for Ralston.

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “Just because of that one remark? That’s kind of a stretch, don’t you think, Professor?”

  Stott stands and takes a notebook from a box on one of the shelves. He riffles through the pages almost absently, as if to say he is referring to them less out of need than as an academic prop, proof that he has done his homework. “When I was thinking of writing that second book, I did some additional prying into Ralston’s past. Do you know what he wanted to study when he went to college?”

  During her late teens, Natalie went through a phase of thinking that if she digested enough information about her past she would finally understand what had happened to her. She read everything she could about Ralston and his followers. None of it helped. Every new piece of information merely served to increase the dimensions of the puzzle by that amount.

  “He was an English major,” she says.

  “English was a default position. When he first started college, in that first year of starry-eyed ambition, young Ellsworth set out to study marine biology. Didn’t have the grades, unfortunately, but that was his passion in those days. It’s just a guess, but I suspect it stayed with him.”

  “But that’s crazy I He never talked about Atlantis. No one did.”

  ‘‘In front of you.”

  “But I grew up in his damn house. I would have known!” Even as she says it, she knows it’s not true. The group’s articles of high faith, especially those about the end time, were not the domain of young children. Hadn’t she just admitted as much? The fact is, she probably wouldn’t have known.

  Marine biology. Shit.

  Stott closes the notebook and lowers himself back into his seat. He rests a reassuring hand on her knee. She doesn’t mind; there’s something about him she finds comforting, although she’s not sure what it is. “They might not have called it Atlantis in those days,” he says. “The whole concept may have been only vaguely defined. But if you ask me, I don’t think Aunt Katie started her own religion, not from whole cloth. She was just building on an old one, the one she knew best, the one Ellsworth Ralston taught her. And while I suppose it’s possible she went to her grave hating the man who taught her the religion she died for, I personally do not believe it.”

  “You think she still loved him?”

  “Absolutely. I have no way of proving it, but absolutely.”

  “So do I.” she says quietly. It is the payoff she came here to find, confirmation of a vague suspicion, but still it leaves her breathless and unsure, like she’s been on a treasure hunt and, having retrieved the chest from the pirate’s secret lair, found it filled with gems of questionable value. This man agrees with her, but so what? It doesn’t matter whether a proposition is shared

  by one person or a hundred it if it doesn’t make sense, and certain as she is of this one, it defies logic.

  “But why would she –”

  “Embarrass him that way?” Stott asks, completing her thought.

  Natalie nods.

  “I doubt she even thought of it in those terms. Do you remember those Japanese soldiers they used to find periodically on Pacific islands?”

  “The ones who didn’t know the war was over?’’

  “Right. Decades later, they were still fighting the Second World War, and not always because they hadn’t heard Japan had lost. Some of them simply didn’t believe it because they couldn’t believe it. Whatever they heard to the contrary, they dismissed as lies and propaganda. I think that’s how it was for Aunt Katie. Anything that Ralston did to distance himself from her and the past they shared, she attributed to coercion or blamed on his captors. In a perverse way, I think she did this terrible thing to prove herself to him, to show she hadn’t been fooled. This was her offering, a gift of what for her would have been the ultimate gesture of love and affection—and done publicly, with a splash, if you’ll forgive the pun, to guarantee that he would find out. She was dying, you know.”

  It’s a throwaway comment, almost an aside. “Who told you that?” she demands.

  “The FBI. They said she was riddled with cancer, probably wouldn’t have lived much longer anyway. It helps to explain why she did it now, while she still had a chance. She wasn’t going to get to stick around for his new trial. She had plain run out of time.” He sighs and, returning to his feet, offers her a hand up. “I suppose it’s all moot now. The FBI doesn’t think much of my theory, and even if they did, I don’t know what good it would do.”

  Natalie allows herself to be pulled from her seat, and as she does, she understands. She sees it in its entirety, the logic of Aunt Katie’s actions, including the parts that this sage old man doesn’t see, because he doesn’t have all the facts. It’s so obvious – so totally fucking clear – she can’t believe she didn’t see it sooner. It’s all she can do to make her legs accept the weight of her body.

  Aunt Katie was dying. Of course.

  Dying.

  Desperate times call for desperate measures. What did Stott call it—“the ultimate gesture of love and affection?”

  Which would be what exactly? The gift of her own life? A flamboyant act of hari-kari, the ultra-public fulfillment of some long-forgotten creed?

  Or was it, perhaps, something a bit more practical? A soldier carrying out her mission, years beyond its time.

  Natalie drains the contents of her teacup. The final swig is cold and bitter, like pond water, but it’s infinitely preferable to the metal shavings backwashing into her mouth. She swishes the last drops of liquid around her teeth and gums, hoping to drown one unsavory taste with another, and looks sadly into her cup before handing it to Stott and making her goodbyes. There are no leaves clinging wetly to the bottom, waiting to be read, just the emptiness of the smooth china mocking her.

  It’s just as well. She knows what they would say, those leftover insights, those words from the bottom. The same thing you always say to people who miss the mark when trying to solve a riddle. The same thing Aunt Katie is telling her with a sly wink from her watery grave.

  Guess again.

  * * *

  There were three ways to play Guess. The first was the playing-It-
for-laughs version. in which the players were more concerned with entertaining their audience than with providing realistic portrayals. The goal was mostly amusement. not precision. That was the version the children played that last day on the bluff.

  The second version was the flip side, a serious attempt to mimic the sort of situations the children might have encountered in real life. Scores were kept and rules enforced. and the children used the exercise, Natalie realized later, as a form of training. In their family, the ability to interpret and anticipate were valuable skills, and the game allowed the children the opportunity to practice them.

  Driving trance-like down streets she barely registers, the heat in her car jacked up against the cold and the trembling she feels inside, Natalie realizes she isn’t playing either of those more benign versions. This is the third version, the one from which the other two sprang, in which everything is real and the stakes are high and only the notion of the game, of sport, is false.

  Her body shakes. She wants to close her eyes and cry and scream, to go home and crawl into a ball and lie among the ash creatures and say to hell with all of this what’s it to me? The beast inside her stomach is so huge now it feels as though it has swallowed her, so that it’s no longer a case of wanting to vomit but of wanting to be expelled, of being squeezed inside something soft and wet and foul and pleading to be spewed out.

  She knew, didn’t she? As soon as she saw the old lady eating cemetery dirt, she knew. The game is rigged, it has been from the very beginning. She can play—she has no choice, really, because even opting out is a way of deciding the outcome—but she can’t win. When this is all over, something or someone important to her is going to die, one or the other.

  Selena Latham is a bargaining chip, nothing more. That’s the real answer to this riddle, this particular game of Guess. Aunt Katie, recently dead, loyal beyond the grave, wants to cut a deal.

  Selena lives if Ralston walks.

  All Natalie has to do is trade away justice for Stephanie. All she has to do is betray her own sister.

  There’s a ringing in her ears that she abruptly recognizes as a voice. Aunt Katie’s voice, strong and sure like it was thirteen years ago. Like it still is, on Stott’s videotape. The voice of a woman accustomed to being in command, a woman who still believes she is bargaining from a position of strength.

  Maybe because in this case, she is. Damn her to the slithering beasts of her wet hell, she is.

  “Come on. child,” the voice sneers. “You know the rules. There isn’t much time. Decide.”

  The words are so startlingly clear that Natalie slams down hard on the brake and twists around to confront their source. She half expects to find an apparition of the drowned Katie dripping venom from the back seat. But of course the seat is empty and she is, as always, alone. She tells herself not to get carried away, that she could be wrong, that there’s a fairly straightforward way to check. The whole theory hinges on her being right about the involvement of one person—if she’s wrong on that score, she’s wrong on the whole thing. And that’s what she must find out. It’s not good enough just to suspect it anymore, even just to believe it; she needs to know.

  * * *

  A few minutes later she turns onto a familiar street and parks in front of Marida Latham’s pastel Victorian. It seems so confident, this house, like nothing bad could ever happen here. Houses are bold liars. She imagines Marida still huddled inside that back room, a figurine frozen by despair, just the largest in her melee of keepsakes, waiting for the dreaded knock at the door and wishing time would stop or skip faster to the end. Natalie guesses this moment has by now become infinite for Marida, sucking the life out of the universe, a black hole bending even the concept of eternity to its will. And yet Marida will also have a sense of it as fragile, fleeting, gone too soon, this last moment when she can still think of her daughter as alive.

  You don’t see that when you look at her house. Natalie does, because she has been there, but most people won’t. In old snapshots, the house in which Natalie grew up—the one she lived in before her mother moved out and took her along for the ride—seems so tranquil, so demurely perfect. Only inside, the core was rotting, and every day her parents were gnawing away at the timbers of their distressed marriage until finally it collapsed, which was how Natalie learned that the house was just a mask they all wore.

  Just like this house is a mask, and the one next to it. Which is, of course, the one she has come to visit. The mask behind which Abby Wible used to hide.

  Slowly, reluctantly, Natalie ascends the steep concrete steps to Phil Wible’s narrow front porch. “You know you’re wasting your time,” Aunt Katie chides as she climbs. “She was obviously a part of it.”

  Again Natalie spins around, looking for the voice, and again she’s greeted by empty space. The air around her is raw and cold and has a slight charge to it, like it does when lightning strikes. “Maybe not,” she replies, answering out loud to a voice she knows is speaking to her from deep within her brain. “Abby was a tough broad, and when it comes right down to it, she just didn’t seem like the type.”

  “The type to what?”

  “Join a group like that.”

  The Katie voice laughs. “Oh, do tell, Natalie. What, precisely, is the type?”

  There is, unfortunately, no good answer to that question.

  “You already know what you have to do,” Katie insists. “Stop procrastinating and go do it.”

  Natalie ignores this and rings the bell. Nothing is clear, nothing is certain.

  Not until she proves it to herself.

  “Come on, what’s it going to be?” Katie presses. “Door number one, or door number two?”

  “Fuck you,” Natalie says.

  Which, in one of those miracles of comedic timing, is precisely when Phil opens the door.

  He is dressed in a t-shirt and sweatpants and has the slightly deranged look of a man who hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. He greets her with a scowl that creases his face along the fault lines beneath his stubble. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” Natalie stammers.

  “Bullshit. You said fuck you.”

  “I was talking to myself.”

  Some conversations find their way to the bottom slowly; others more quickly. This one starts there.

  “You come to my house,” Phil says, his voice rising, “and tell me fuck you? Just like that. Fuck you? Unbelievable. After all you’ve done, you have the balls to come back here and tell me to go fuck myself. That’s just great. Perfect. My lawyer’s going to love it.”

  “Your lawyer?”

  “Like you don’t know.”

  “You’re suing me?”

  “You and that bitch you work for, you bet. And if you’re here to talk me out of it, you can forget it. I’m going to take the two of you for every penny you have. Someone has to put you out of commission, stop you from hurting anyone else, and I’m making that my personal crusade.”

  Natalie isn’t surprised, just hurt, which is of course immensely stupid. What else does she expect from Phil, gratitude? So he’s suing her, big deal. All she has is a bunch of memories, and if he took those it would be the happiest day of her life. “Knock yourself out,” she says. “I just needed to ask you a question about your wife.”

  “You think I’m going to give you anything you can use in court? No way. You have questions, have your lawyer talk to my lawyer.”

  He starts to close the door but Natalie slams her fist against it. “We don’t have time for lawyers! I just want to know if Abby was wrapped up with the Portal Guardians somehow. That is why she drowned herself, isn’t it? She was one of them, wasn’t she?”

  The muscles in Phil’s face suddenly freeze. “You really are unbelievable, you know that?” he says, his jaw barely moving. “Is that your strategy, to try to paint Abby as a member of that sicko cult? Are you out of your mind? You think anyone’s going to buy that horseshit? Anyone with half a brain is going to see that for wha
t it is, just a pathetic attempt to cover up how you drove my wife to suicide. You bitch. How dare you? How fucking dare you?”

  He steps out onto the porch and backs Natalie up to the top of the steps, where he hovers over her, eyes fixed on hers. They are full of a weary, almost delirious rage. Natalie’s heels teeter over empty space. She reaches behind her, searching for the railing, but finds only air. Phil’s face is so close that she is forced to inhale the thick stench of his breath – this morning’s coffee and eggs served on a bed of last night’s cigars and liquor. Appetizing.

  “Why don’t you just mind your own goddam business?” he growls.

  “This is my business,” she says with as much calm as she can muster.

  He’s so close he could send her hurtling down the steps just by puffing out his chest. “Bullshit!”

  A fleck of something flies out of his mouth and slaps her wetly in the cheek. She wipes it away with the back of her hand, moving very slowly, so as not to startle him. “I think Selena Latham was kidnapped because of me. If I’m right I may be able to help her.”

  Phil hesitates. “What the hell does that have to do with Abby?”

  “That night we met, your neighbor Marida phoned me at home to ask if I would help her find her daughter. I don’t get requests like that every day, it’s not exactly my line of work. Your wife was the one who told her to call me. When I met Abby, I didn’t exactly get the impression that she thought very highly of me. But then that same day, the same day she killed herself. she goes and refers Marida to me. It doesn’t make sense.”

  A silence follows. The color seems to drain from Phil’s face, and along with it the absolute crazy rage. It’s like watching an actor forget in mid-scene who he is, the role he is playing. He shakes his head, as if trying to recover the memory, and backs slowly away, giving her room to breathe. “You’re wrong,” he says. “Selena was kidnapped because her father’s an asshole, end of story. it’s not about you, and it’s not about Abby. It’s about a jerk who didn’t care how many lives he wrecked, and it’s too late to do anything about it.”