Ring of Years

by Grant Oliphant

  She can die here.

  Her wrist slides gently over the serrated surface of the blade, gauging the sharpness of its teeth. their cold metallic efficiency. Salty tears sting her injured cheek.

  This is, after all, where she should have died to begin with. Her death in this place is overdue, her survival until now a cosmic oversight. Whatever divine functionary was in charge that day of stitching together her frayed little strand of fate screwed up, that’s all. It was a mistake, and it can be rectified. That’s all she would be doing, really, just tidying up a freakish error, the one that separated her from her sister.

  Her wrist caresses the blade. “I have to make things right. Steph,” she whispers.

  Just as she begins to bear down on the sharp metal something small and furry skitters across the floor and stops inches in front of her face, a tiny ball of whiskers and teeth. Natalie instinctively drops the saw and, with a loud scream, whips at the creature with her hands. Terrified, it scampers into the darkness beneath one of the pieces of farm equipment.

  Natalie stares after it, her heart pounding, blood rushing through her ears. The sound of its frantic gushing brings a puzzled smile to her lips. How could this fluid have been so at peace when she was about to drain it from her body and yet be so terrorized by the intrusion of a field mouse?

  No great mystery, she supposes. Just another one of Mother Nature’s design flaws. We never recognize the real threats.

  Her wrist stings, but the only mark is a thin bead of red, barely more than a paper cut. Nothing she can’t survive, if she decides she wants to.

  A scrap of paper pinned to the end of the pegboard wall catches her eye. Rising to her feet and moving closer, she realizes it’s a photo of the barn, clipped from an unidentified newspaper. She yanks down the yellowed newsprint and brings it back into the light. where she can read the caption. “Back to Normal in Normalville,” it reads at the top. And then underneath it says, “A massive storage shed now occupies the land that was once home to Ellsworth Ralston’s farmhouse.” That’s all there is. There must have been an article that accompanied the photograph, but whoever owns this barn didn’t bother to include it in the clipping.

  Natalie glances down. At her feet the saw rests with its blade jutting straight up, offering itself to her, inviting her to rejoin it in their lethal embrace. She could return to that now, there’s no reason not to. Nothing’s different about her situation. Nothing has changed.

  And yet somehow it has. She can’t explain it but somehow it has. This isn’t holy ground, a magical spot that will receive the offering of her blood and transport her soul back to her sister. It’s just a barn, the eradication of a memory. An ugly, cold place peopled only by the lifeless forms she herself has brought here, and that will follow her when she leaves.

  How would dying here now set things right? She would just be feeding herself into the emptiness and paying tribute to ghosts that aren’t even there.

  Which is more appealing than it might sound. For now, though, she has a different decision to make, a game of Guess to play, and she doesn’t deserve to escape it so easily. She can neither duck this decision nor expect someone else to choose for her.

  Maybe, in a way, that’s what Stephanie has been saying with her silence. If she has. indeed, been silent.

  Natalie peers at the dark space where the field mouse disappeared. “Who sent you, little mouse?” she asks softly.

  Could it have been her sister? Part of her would like to believe that. Part but not all. It is far from certain yet that this mouse was any friend of hers, that in postponing her self-selected end it did her any favors.

  She slips the newspaper clipping into her pocket returns the saw to its shelf and heads outside. Back to normal in Normalville. Right.

  * * *

  The rain has started again, gentle but steady. Natalie lets it wash over her face as she trudges back up the hill to her car. She drives back out the way she came, back past the grocery store and the little restaurant, relics of another place and time. How long before someone tears them down, she wonders, before someone “improves” them, wipes away everything but the memory of them?

  She hangs a left onto Route 31. The wet pavement has a grimy sheen, fresh scrubbed and dirty all at once. Some things you can’t sanitize.

  She takes her mobile phone from the glove box, punches in a number and waits, imagining the scene. Somewhere back in the city, a man approaches his office phone, with no clue of what’s about to hit him.

  “We have to talk,” Natalie tells him when he picks up. “It can’t wait.”

  In her rearview mirror, Normalville disappears over the rise. Gone, but not forgotten. Never forgotten.

  14

  Someone Else’s Miseries

  “You want to what?”

  Natalie stares out the window of Simon Ballard’s office, trying not to flinch at the tone of his voice, the hint of flabbergasted accusation. She wonders if this is how all traitors feel at the moment their acts of betrayal become real—if Judas felt this way when the Pharisees tossed him their pieces of sliver, his stomach a clump of broken sod crawling with worms. If they all wish they could die at this moment, painfully aware of how merciful that would be, and thus how cosmically unjust.

  Outside, the light is beginning to fade. People in long coats hustle past along the gray sidewalks. She watches them through her reflection, through the image of the unrecognizable woman with the gash on her face and floor crud stuck in her hair, a mirror self who has no feet but who if she did would look down and see mud caked all over her shoes and legs. A sight to behold, she thinks.

  What’s happening to you?

  The question comes to her quietly, like a confidence shared between friends, but her gaze stays on the street. She is afraid of looking into this other woman’s eyes. She read somewhere that looking into the eyes of a lunatic can make you crazy, which makes her wonder whether there are mirrors in asylums and whether peering into them keeps the inmates mad, a kind of endless lunacy loop.

  “You heard me.” she whispers.

  The words scrape past her throat, every syllable like a splinter of glass, every word like spitting up a piece of herself.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not really sure I did.”

  Tentative. full of doubt. A reasonable man confronted with gross irrationality.

  Natalie turns to face him, struggling to meet his puzzled stare. He is Pontius Pilate, greeting the crowd’s selection of Barabbas—surprised, chagrined: You choose whom?

  She has known people whose eyes can rob you of your will. Father’s eyes were like that. Look into them and you were his.

  The wall behind Ballard is covered with pictures of the prosecutor at play—mountain climbing, windsurfing, skydiving. She wonders what it’s like, jumping out of a plane, the earth rushing up to smash you, your only defense a thin sheet of fabric and a fleeting cushion of air.

  Easy, she thinks. Easy compared to this.

  “I want,” she repeats slowly, “to drop the charges against Ralston.”

  The silence in the room is enormous, cavernous. There is a half-eaten sandwich—corned beef on rye, from the smell of it—sitting on Ballard’s desk, in among the files and the dossiers. Slowly, he pushes it aside. crinkling the paper wrapper, a strangely futile noise, like something forgotten. He has a lawyer’s face, trained to conceal. but the mask fails him.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  She shrugs. She has told him why, the whole story. What else is there to say?

  Ballard falls quiet again. It’s one of those angry quiets, like he’s counting to ten, but if so he only makes it to five. “All because Abby Wible drowned herself?” he demands. “That’s what you’re basing this whole thing on? For God’s sake, Natalie, you’d just dropped one hell of a bombshell on her. Why is it so hard for you to believe she killed herself over that?”

  “The bath…”

  “Lots of people kill themselves in the bathtub! It’s a popular point o
f departure among the suicide set.” A knowing look comes over his face. “Is this because you feel guilty over what she did? Is that it?”

  “That’s right. I’m so distraught over this woman I hardly knew that I’m ready to sell out my own sister.”

  “Then what is it? I mean, think about this. Let’s say you’re right, and Anne Coyne – now deceased, mind you – is using Selena to convince you not to testify against Ralston. What are you going to do? Go out there and tell the press you were wrong about Ralston, that he didn’t really kill your sister? Can you really do that? Could you even live with yourself?”

  “That’s not what I’d say!”

  But he has reminded her of something. She will need to make a public statement, go before the cameras, speak through them to the surviving Guardians, who are out there somewhere waiting to hear from her. How else did she imagine she would communicate with them? The thought terrifies her. It’s hard enough to commit this act here, one on one, in the privacy of a lawyer’s office. Next, she will have to broadcast her betrayal across the airwaves, fill the very air with it until she can feel it vibrating around her.

  What will she say?

  “It doesn’t matter.” Ballard says. “Say what you want, the bottom line is, Ralston will walk. I could compel you to testify, but why bother? At that point your value to me as a witness is shot. So out he goes, a free man. And what do you have, aside from that on your conscience? Selena? Do you honestly think the Guardians are just going to let her go? Do you?”

  It’s a fair question with no good answer—she’s not blind to that. ‘‘I’m not sure,” she admits.

  “Then why do it?” he explodes. “The whole world’s looking for Selena—the FBI, the media, everybody. Give them time, give them a chance to find her.”

  “So they can save her the way they did Stephanie?” She shakes her head. “You go ahead and put your faith in that, but don’t expect me to. That little girl has one chance, just one, and unfortunately, you’re looking at her. I’m not going to screw it up, not this time.”

  Ballard stares at her, his jaw clenched. How he must despise her, Natalie thinks. At last, something they have in common.

  “It won’t bring her back, you know that, don’t you? It won’t undo the past.”

  “Won’t it, though?”

  She lets the window capture her attention again. The sidewalks are still alive with people hustling to their cars and their buses and their routes home. Rushing back to the normalcy they claim as a right, the little Normalvilles they carve out of the hours of the day that are theirs to shape. She doesn’t mock them for it. God bless them if they can find refuge that way, if they can sneak through life without discovering how easily a stranger can slip inside the most perfectly constructed little town and twist it into nightmare.

  Ballard walks up behind her, his feet heavy on the carpeted floor. “Damn it, Natalie,” he sighs. “Don’t you want justice for Stephanie? For what he did to your family, to all those people?”

  In the glass, her lips curl up into a bitter smile. Justice. What a great concept.

  “Pretty heavy for a guy who just yesterday told me we didn’t have much of a case.”

  “That’s not what I said. I said we have a difficult case. I’d rather that than this.”

  “Would you?” Easy for him. All he has to worry about is winning and losing. “Tell me something,” she adds. “If you had to choose between justice for someone you loved and saving the life of someone you’d never met, which would you pick?”

  He says something that she only half hears. It doesn’t matter. Her question was really directed at her reflection, and her reflection, caught up in the sidewalk world, the mad rush home, the flight into denial, refuses to answer.

  * * *

  This is how it goes down:

  None of the people behind the decision to storm the compound that day are ever fired. A couple of flunkies are reprimanded, men whose lack of authority, rather than exculpating them as it should, makes them convenient scapegoats. Otherwise the whole event—that’s what they call it, The Event—is judged little more than an unfortunate error in judgment.

  Whoops! Wiped out your family, sorry about that. Wow. Sheesh. Who would have guessed something like that could happen?

  Morons.

  The political appointee who ultimately approved the raid bravely steps before the microphones and accepts “responsibility.” This apparently is code for, “Gee, what a shame.” There are no consequences. None.

  Not even, apparently, for the man at the heart of this frivolity. The years work their magic, scrubbing away what they can of the past. Stephanie remains dead, but Ralston moves on, transforming himself into a modern-day Bird Man of Alcatraz, just with angels instead of pigeons.

  Justice? Natalie chews the word over in her mind as she walks out of Ballard’s building and along the street to her car. Justice is for the birds. Or angels, perhaps, if you happen to believe in them.

  * * *

  “So when are you going to do it?”

  Natalie sips the bitter top off her bottom-shelf martini and lights a cigarette. sucking the harsh smoke deep inside her lungs. She glances at Maureen just long enough to acknowledge the question. It’s getting harder to look people in the eyes, she notices. Harder to sit still, too, but at the same time harder to move, to know what to do next. It’s an antsy form of paralysis.

  “Tomorrow,” she answers. “Late. As late as I can push it and still make the news.”

  Maureen grunts. It’s obvious she doesn’t know what to say, even more obvious she doesn’t approve, although she’s doing her good-friend’s best to keep her opinion to herself.

  “You sure they’ll wait until then?” she asks.

  Natalie scans the seedy bar. Fading vinyl, mirrored walls, disco ball hanging from the ceiling, men with wide ties and blank looks staring at them from their post a few barstools down. The place feels like it never recovered from the ‘70s, which is pretty much what you’d expect from a nightclub named Sparkles wedged into a narrow space at the butt end of Maureen’s decrepit mall. It gives Natalie the creeps—she’d run the wrecking ball herself, except that wouldn’t be terribly supportive.

  “This is nuts,” she mutters.

  “What?”

  “Me being here, having a drink, like nothing’s going on. Like I didn’t just decide to sell out my sister. Why am I just sitting here?”

  It’s a rhetorical question. She’s here because it’s where her vacant stare of a mind brought her after leaving Ballard’s office. Run and hide. Here seemed as good a place as any.

  “What else should you be doing?”

  “That’s my point—I don’t know. Investigating, maybe. Isn’t that what they’d be doing if this were a movie? People always know what to do in the movies.” The smoke from her cigarette caresses her face. “Even if it’s just chase pointless leads, at least that’s something.”

  “In Hollywood, maybe.” Maureen laughs. “Real life is boredom and guesswork punctuated by long bouts of cluelessness. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

  Natalie nods and takes another sip of her drink, another drag on the cigarette. People like Maureen, the type who watch the way things really are with people, get pretty good at dime-store philosophy.

  “They’ll wait,” she says. “Until tomorrow, at least. I’m pretty sure of that. They might wait another day, maybe even two, but I don’t want to push my luck. There was always a time limit in Guess.”

  “How long?”

  “Nothing definite. Until someone got bored. Someone always does.”

  They let some time pass watching the creepy bar guys watch them. Natalie takes a last hit off her cigarette and flicks the long ash onto the bar. An ash turd. Now she is beginning to lay them, heir to the family dysfunctions.

  “What if he’s right?” Maureen finally asks, unable to contain herself any longer.

  “Ballard?”

  Maureen nods.

  “What if
he’s wrong?”

  But Maureen won’t be deflected so easily. “Seriously, what if he’s right? Are you really going to be able to handle that?”

  Natalie flicks the ash around the bar top with the end of her fingernail. The nail’s painted a muddy hue. She doesn’t remember when she did that, but the color goes well with ash turds, like they belong together.

  She wonders again what kind of creature would leave behind piles like this. The answer comes to her as her finger stirs the ash. A creature annealed in fire, that’s what. A creature like her.

  “No,” she answers. “If I’m wrong, if this doesn’t work ... no, I won’t be okay with that.”

  “Then don’t do it.”

  Natalie is silent for a while. One of the men down the bar whispers something to his friend, something about tits. She stands up and walks over to him. “Hey. buddy,” she says, “Want to hear about how my sister died?”

  The man glances uncomfortably at his compatriot.

  “Well?” she presses.

  “What the hell you talking about?” he asks.

  “Natalie,” Maureen calls.

  Natalie ignores her. “It was because I stood up,” she says, her eyes locked on the breast man. “Actually, it was because a man shot her, but he might not have if I hadn’t stood up. So I’m in this situation again now that’s a bit similar. What do you think I should do, stand up again? Let another little girl take the bullet for me? Or maybe this time I should try and save her. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re a crazy bitch,” the man says. He throws a wad of money onto the bar and stumbles out into the mall, his wide-eyed friend in tow.

  Maureen watches them go. “I get your point” she says quietly when Natalie returns to her seat.