He turns to go back inside. Natalie grabs him by the arm. “Please!” she pleads. Why the sudden change in his mood? There’s something he isn’t telling her. “I need to know.”
“There’s nothing to know,” he insists, easily breaking free of her grasp.
“There must be!”
He shakes his head and steps back inside. “You had no right to do what you did, I hope you realize that. I loved my wife. Do you get that yet? I loved her.” His voice cracks, and he turns away, hiding his face. It’s a genuine grief that Natalie wasn’t expecting. “That tape you gave her,” he continues, “it was what she wanted. My permission, like I was saying it was okay. But it wasn’t okay. and I never meant to give her my permission. For God’s sake, I didn’t want her to go. I didn’t want her to go.”
Choking back tears, he slams the door shut between them.
13
The Girl inside the House inside the Box
Natalie stares at the road, driving hard and fast and trying not to get caught up in the wave of depression chasing her. The dreary asphalt strip leads her out of the city and up into the mountains, along the turnpike at first and then down one of those winding two lane roods where drunken teenage boys in pickup trucks joust with death on weekend nights. Eventually, a sign catches her eye as it flashes by: NORMALVILLE GUN CLUB. She hits her brakes and lets the car coast up the gentle grade into town.
Her head fills with Aunt Katie’s voice again. “You know why you’re here, don’t you?”
The abrupt intrusion falls to startle her this time. She was almost expecting it. “Aren’t you going to chide me for wasting more time?’’ she asks.
Katie seems merry. “Oh, no. This is good. You have journeyed here to ask for permission.”
“Permission for what?”
“You know the answer to that question.”
“You’re wrong. Phil said Abby had nothing to do with your little clan. And let’s face it, no Abby, no you.”
Katie’s reply is sharp. “He was hiding something, and you know it. Why else would you be here? You know what you have to do, and you want your sister to tell you it’s okay. Problem is, you have never really sensed her soul in that wretched cemetery. You’re hoping you will here, though, and when you do, you will ask for guidance and forgiveness and then you will do what you must to save the living. Am I right?”
“Go to hell, you presumptuous bitch,” Natalie whispers, adding, “Oh, that’s right. you’re already there.”
For some reason. Katie complies with the spirit of her request and falls silent. Why, of all the specters of the dead, is this wicked creature the one she has chosen to let inside her head?
Normalville isn’t much to look at. It’s one of those passing-through places, an intersection where city people and other tourists turn left on their way to visit the Frank Lloyd Wright house up the road. There’s a gas station, a little place to buy groceries, a video rental shop and a restaurant that beckons diners with a sign boasting the dally special—today’s is meatloaf, $3.95, cheap, and probably good. Outsiders mostly turn up their noses and continue on their way. Natalie’s never been inside, but for a different reason: Father didn’t like them going out for dinner, even to a place just down the road from home.
Home. What an odd name for it.
The grocery store resides in an old wooden house that was once a gas station. “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it,” the sign outside boasts, a cute admonishment to the yuppies driving through in their fancified sport utility vehicles. Natalie pulls into the little area next to the island where the pumps were and goes inside. It’s just like she remembers, a couple of rooms with the combined size of maybe a double-wide, bookshelves stacked with basics, low-hanging fluorescent lights. Not pretty, but the sign outside is right: Pretty much anything you need—at least as long as it comes packaged or canned—is right here.
And what she needs right now is a cigarette. She’s off-duty, but that doesn’t matter. This is a smoking moment.
Behind the counter is an obviously well-fed woman who has the vague look of forgotten familiarity. Probably someone who once sold her candy, or toilet paper. She stares at Natalie as she hands her a pack of Camels. “You from around here?” she asks.
“No, just passing through.” Like in those old cowboy movies, when the stranger rides into town.
On her way out, she lets the screen door slam behind her and wonders why she lied. Because she didn’t want to get into it, probably. And because she didn’t want the woman’s pity. Or her anger. These people were always friendly to Father and his family, despite how bizarre the group must have seemed. Live and let live, that was their attitude, and part of why Father chose this place as his home. That and the community’s faith in firearms. But he ruined it in the end, betraying them by putting their town on the map for a madman’s lunacy. Normalville. The world thought that was so funny at the time, so perfectly ironic—it became more of a joke than a place.
Which was part of the master plan, no doubt. The name would have appealed to Father’s literary bent. Where better to screw with the notion of normalcy than in a place called Normalville?
The rest of the drive takes only a few minutes. At the big old oak, she turns left onto the rutted dirt lane and follows it upward along the curve of the hillside. Just shy of the crest she stops, lights her cigarette, inhales gratefully, and walks the rest of the way.
* * *
In the news footage, you can’t see the little girl peering hopefully out from the basement window—the angle’s wrong—but Natalie knows she’s there.
The first time she sees the clip, she is thirteen, sitting in her aunt’s living room. This is where Natalie has lived for almost a year now, ever since it happened, but she still feels out of place, like a visitor uncertain of both her status and the rules. Aunt Emily and some overly solicitous strangers are conferring in the kitchen, something about Father’s trial. They speak softly, thinking they won’t upset her that way, which of course is wrong. This urge to protect her is just so lame and so late—what do they suppose they’re protecting her from now?
To fill the empty space, maybe to distract herself from the murmuring, she starts flicking through the channels on cable, hoping to get lost in them. Which is how the replay finds her.
And so she watches everyone die from the outside in.
An out-of-body experience for the media age.
It starts with the farmhouse. The camera is peering down from the line of trees that runs along the ridge, probably from a spot not far from where their tire swing used to hang. This is how the house always looked from up there, its expansive front porch an invitation to come and sit and watch the world go by, like something you would see on a postcard from a nice country inn. Except the windows have been blown out so that shards of glass glint in the sunlight and someone has sprayed bullet-hole graffiti across the white wood siding.
None of which she could see, of course, peeking out from the basement window that day. But she can see it now, and it’s like living a moment from two directions, like looking into a mirror with another mirror behind you. Infinite regression. In the yard, the tricycle is still lying on its side and the flag is still dancing a crazy jig atop the flagpole, but this time the background isn’t the men on the hill; it’s the doomed house, with her in it, sneaking a glimpse outward.
Impulsively, her hand reaches out toward the house and touches the cold screen. “Don’t,” she whispers. “Please, don’t.” As if she can talk to herself this way. As if the girl inside the house inside the box can hear her and change what happens next.
A waste of breath. The volume’s muted—Natalie doesn’t want Aunt Emily to hear—but her brain fills in the popping noises as projectiles suddenly rip through the blankets covering the windows and smoke starts streaming out and people inside the house jam rifle barrels out and start firing back. The sound of popcorn fills her head again. And the smell of apples. The house is quickly shrouded in a grayish
white haze. Somewhere inside it, Father is calmly reciting a goodnight story and a terrified girl is about to leap to her feet, and Natalie says it again.
Don’t.
A swarm of trucks and tanks and soldiers rushes toward the house, like madmen attacking a cloud. Suddenly the camera shakes violently, and there’s a percussion that Natalie can hear and feel even with the sound turned down. The cloud rips open, doors and shutters and pieces of dying house shoot into the air like scraps of confetti, and then the cloud collapses back in on itself, heavy and dark, rolling with dust and debris. Somber orange flames spit their way toward daylight, lifting dozens of souls up toward whatever heaven awaits them on a current of greasy, black smoke.
By now, Natalie is leaning against the television, her young arms embracing it as best they can, tears running down her cheeks. “Don’t,” she cries.
And what she means is: Don’t go. Don’t leave me.
But they’re already gone. And Natalie is left with the murmuring of the adults in Aunt Emily’s kitchen.
* * *
A stiff breeze is blowing across the ridge, and she lets it push her to a stop when she can see all the way down the slope on the other side. Stretching away below her is a field littered with the stubbled remains of some crop whose value has recently been extracted. Rising up from the bottom of the hill, in the little hollow where the farmhouse used to sit is an immense new structure, a prefabricated barn that squats squarely on the land like a misplaced warehouse, its gunship gray exterior a perfect reflection of the clouds glowering down at her from the noontime sky. Beyond it the apple orchard has given way to an empty field, not even a stump left to bear witness to a history of trees.
Everything’s gone.
She knew that. The site was cleared a couple of years after it all happened, so of course there’s nothing left. Still, it comes as a shock, the absence of everything familiar. Her mind searches in vain for what it remembers, and she finds herself stealing furtive glances at the spaces where she should see a flag, a tricycle, a house. Maybe still standing, maybe just a charred ruin; maybe nothing more than a heap of shattered memories or an outline carved in the packed dirt like an ancient rune.
Something.
She flicks away her cigarette butt and heads down the hill. All she wants is something she can touch and hold onto. It’s a simple request: a memento of what happened, something that didn’t get buried or consumed in the conflagration. A little bit of dust from the past. that’s all. Her own little residue of hell.
Her path takes her down behind the barn. Up close, it seems even more massive and awkward than she realized. In the Star Trek sequels she used to watch as a kid there was a species of creature called the Borg that piloted through space in these monster cubes, assimilating everything in sight, technology run amuck. That’s what this barn reminds her of, as if one of those assimilation machines just plopped down here in the middle of this field. Wrong for the place, perfect for the times: oversized, ugly, functional, oblivious. For a moment Natalie even sympathizes with Maureen, until she realizes she’s waxing nostalgic for Father’s farmhouse, of all things. This barn may lack poetry, but at least it’s honest; it is what it is, nothing more or less than a butt-ugly place for storing too much equipment. There’s something appealing about its lack of pretense, its blithe indifference to everything on a human scale.
Despite last night’s rain, the ground beneath her feet is hard like concrete, and it conceals whatever secrets it might be keeping well. Shuffling through the dirt, she can’t find anything that suggests even the outline of the house, a clue to orient her. But as she approaches the side of the barn, she looks back up at the hillside, and something about the roll of the land strikes her as familiar. This is how it appeared from the firing range that day, which means that she could very well be standing precisely where she was when Father told her to look out the window. A chill goes down her spine. She has a sudden sense of not being alone. The last time she stood here, Stephanie and all the others were standing behind her, still alive, anxious for good news. She spins around, half expecting to see their expectant, upturned faces staring back at her, totally aware of how demented that is.
“Talk to me, Steph,” she whispers.
The breeze is picking up again, blowing a fine, cold mist. She waits for her sister to respond, but all she hears is the huffing of the wind and, on it, a faint noise, metal flapping against metal. It sounds like cackling, as if Aunt Katie were sitting across the hollow, mocking her.
Natalie looks around again. If she’s right in her guesswork, the place where the children’s bedroom once was would now be somewhere in the middle of the barn. And the realization dawns on her that this is part of what she has come here to do, to stand in exactly that space and—what?
She hasn’t figured that part out yet.
Ignoring the mist, she circles around the barn until its big main doors come into view. They are closed, and a shiny padlock hanging from a thick, rusty chain binds them together. But off to the right is a much smaller door, the kind people walk through when they’re not on tractors, and when Natalie presses down on the latch she feels something give. On the first try, the door screeches open.
The barn’s interior is dark. Natalie yells, “Hello?” but there’s no answer. Wondering if she should be doing this, she reaches inside and finds a light switch near the door frame. A couple of bare bulbs come on toward the center of the huge space. The lighting scheme strikes her as familiar, so much so it takes her breath away. To the left, just inside the massive doors, is a huge tractor. The rest of the room, what of it she can see, is a jumble of equipment and crates and shadows, and she can easily imagine a group of children passing the time in here by playing hide-and-seek. Not just Imagine: she can actually see lt.
“Stephanie?” she calls.
No answer, but then there wouldn’t be. Her sister is hiding, after all. Natalie checks over her shoulder to make sure no one is coming. then steps inside, into the past.
* * *
By the dim light of the overhead bulb. Peter roots through the boxes he has discovered in the attic. The house came furnished, but it isn’t equipped for children. There are no games, toys, or even books to help a child pass the time, and he’s hoping to find something up here. He bangs his head against the rafters a couple of times but eventually finds what he’s after: an oversized shoe box filled with crayons, coloring books, craft scissors and construction paper. Triumphantly, he carries his find down into the basement, where he has set Selena up in what was once the game room, now just a large empty space with a couch and a television, which he has tuned to the cartoon channel.
Selena seems pleased by his offerings. “Thanks,” she beams. She plops down on the green carpet, bringing along the bowl of crackers and glass of milk he brought earlier, and begins coloring in one of the books. She is an absolute delight, this child. Peter wonders why Roger couldn’t see that, why Sara can’t see that.
“You’re going to stay down here with me, aren’t you?” she asks.
“I can’t, honey. I have some work to do.”
“That’s okay. I’ll go with you.”
“What about the TV?”
“I don’t need it. I’ll color!”
“No, it would be better if you stay here.”
“But I don’t want to be alone.”
“Selena . . . “
She peers up at him with a canny gaze. “It’s because of Sara, isn’t it? She’s mad at me and you’re afraid she might get madder.”
He decides not to lie. “Something like that.”
“It’s okay. I’m mad at her, too. She scares me. She won’t come yell at me down here, will she?”
“Of course not. She’s not a bad lady, really. She just has a lot on her mind, and I do have a tendency to try her patience.”
She thinks a moment. “Me, too. I’ll stay here if you’ll come check on me lots.”
He chuckles. “Deal.” He tussles her hair and heads up
the stairs. She follows him with her eyes.
“Peter?” she says as he nears the top.
“Yes?”
“You won’t let Sara talk you out of keeping your promise to me, will you?”
He wonders for a minute what promise she’s talking about then he remembers their exchange upstairs. “About going home?’’
She nods, biting her lip.
“Of course not” he assures her. “We’re in this together, you and I. You can count on it.”
And he means it. With every fiber of his being, he means it. No matter what, that’s a promise he intends to keep.
* * *
They are in waiting mode now, and waiting, as a sage once said, is the hardest part. They have already written their letters of farewell, which Peter is beginning to think might have been a mistake. No, not a mistake—Sara is right, he shouldn’t question Tethys that way. They had to write the letters all at once because that was part of the ritual, and the sharing of it was important in helping to keep the two groups bound closely together. Still, it would be nice right now to have that—or anything else, for that matter—to focus on as a distraction. They are like
a clutch of weary travelers waiting on a railroad platform for the final leg of a journey home, all dressed and packed and nothing to do until the train comes.
The mood in the kitchen is subdued. Most everyone has come downstairs now, either finished with their showers or still waiting their turns. Julie is slicing carrots and celery by the sink. Victor is mixing up a huge bowl of oatmeal. Vera and Diana are fussing over a bowl of fruit. The others are milling about waiting for food or orders, whatever comes their way. The only person sitting at the table is Sara. who doesn’t even look up when Peter enters the room.
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