Ring of Years

by Grant Oliphant

  She hesitates, distressed. This has never happened to her before in this place, this total loss of bearings. Where is the grave?

  She thinks of the car’s headlights, but turning them back on would be an admission that she doesn’t know the way—that, in effect, she has lost her sister. She climbs the hill to a spot she thinks is right, then fumbles her way to Stephanie by crawling on her hands and knees through the wet grass and reading the markers with her fingers. Stephanie’s is the sixth grave she tries. As her fingers trace the name, the letters seem alien to her, as if this person lying below her is suddenly a stranger, someone she never really knew.

  “Tell me it’s not true,” Natalie says into the darkness. “Steph?”

  But of course there’s only silence.

  “He’s doing it again, Steph, trying to take you away from me. This stuff with him being your father. I don’t believe it, I want you to know that. I don’t.”

  It sounds unconvincing even to her.

  “I mean, there could be other fathers. Things were loose that way.”

  Except they weren’t really. Megan Krill was strictly Father’s girl, and everyone knew it.

  That’s when Natalie knows: Emily wasn’t lying. Until tonight, this was her sister’s grave. Now it’s her half-sister’s.

  Can she love just the half?

  It’s a horrible question, a hateful question. She despises herself for even thinking it. But there it is, in her head, still reverberating: Can you love just the half, Natalie? Can you?

  Yes! She thinks vehemently, as much to admonish herself as to reassure her sister. Yes, of course.

  “Even if it were true,” she says aloud, “it wouldn’t matter. I still love you, you’re still my sister. It just makes it weirder is all.”

  Maybe that’s all it is, she tries to convince herself, an added dose of strange in a universe of the bizarre. You look at things that way, you can get past them.

  But the truth is, she can’t look at things that way. She is losing Stephanie a second time, that’s how she really feels, as though Father is taking her away once more, claiming her to himself again. All these words, these messages of reassurance, are just pabulum she’s feeding into the night to make herself feel better, but they won’t fool anyone, not even herself. The fact is she feels as far from Stephanie as she has ever, and every inch of that distance is an agony expressed inside of her as guilt and pain.

  How can she hold Stephanie accountable for her parentage, how can she let that come between them?

  And yet, she has.

  “I’m sorry, Steph,” she sobs. “I’m so sorry.”

  Her thoughts trail off. Worn out from the day and its excesses, she rests her face in the grass and lets the night slip inside. Just a quick rest, she thinks as the darkness overtakes her. Just a quick rest.

  * * *

  In the dream, she is back in her aunt’s living room again, still looking at the mirror. The eyes staring back to her belong to her mother.

  Her mother in the gas mask.

  Megan Krill, alive and real. Her skin shines with sweat and anticipation, the lines in her face are deep and full of worry.

  “Stay,” Natalie whispers, and Stephanie says it too.

  Natalie can feel her sister’s weight in her arms but for some reason can’t look down to see her. She tries, but her head and neck will only bend so far and all she sees is a few strands of hair.

  Their mother smiles. Natalie knows that because, through the glass of the mask, she can make out a slight wrinkling around her mother’s eyes.

  Is that how it happened, Natalie wonders? Did their mother smile at them?

  She knows what’s coming next—the kiss. She doesn’t want this kiss, this cold, distant act of love and obligation. As her mother’s fingers lift toward where her mouth would be, Natalie leaps forward, the weight of Stephanie still in her arms.

  “Don’t you dare!” she screams. “Not like that! Not through the mask!”

  This kind of impertinence isn’t allowed, yelling at her mother this way. Father will reprimand her, but she’s willing to risk that. Then it hits her: Father isn’t here. Except for Natalie, Stephanie and their mother, the room is empty. it’s just the three of them, no other children, no authority figure ordering them about, but still her mother is blowing her daughters a harried kiss through a gas mask she won’t remove.

  “Take it off,” Natalie pleads. “At least take it off.”

  She doesn’t. of course. She isn’t listening. She isn’t really even here—she never was.

  As if in slow motion, her fingers press against the rubber over her mouth and then float out toward the two girls. A second or so longer and they will flick the kiss into the air and then Natalie will be stuck accepting this pathetic gesture as real and done.

  “No!”

  She dashes across the room and manages to get there while her mother’s hand is still extended. It’s a tempting target, that hand, and Natalie, no longer a child, can’t resist swatting it away.

  It disintegrates in a cloud of fine dust.

  Natalie freezes. What has she done?

  Her mother peers down at the stump where her hand was, then up at her daughter. She seems amused somehow, as if she’s smiling again behind the mask, but says nothing. The skin around the stump turns a powdery gray, and as it does her arm begins to fall away, a sculpture of packed flour, disintegrating upward from the stump like a character in a cartoon.

  “Please,” Natalie begs, too horrified to say more.

  But her mother is impassive. She just continues to stare at her daughter while the grayness spreads slowly across her body, consuming it, until finally her eyes themselves become powder and drop into the pile of dust at what a moment ago had been her feet, and all that’s left is the memory of what might have been a smile.

  Was it a smile? Would it matter if it was?

  Stephanie’s grip tightens painfully around Natalie’s neck, little fingers hooking into her flesh like talons. Natalie tries to pry them loose but they only dig deeper.

  “Stop it Steph,” she says, “Let go. You’re hurting me.”

  She grabs Stephanie under the arms and lifts her so that her face comes into view, then feels her own body go numb. This thing clinging to her isn’t her sister. Or rather, it is, it’s her body, but not her head.

  In place of Stephanie’s sweet countenance is another face, large and masculine atop her little frame. It’s Father whose eyes she finds looking into her own. Father, and he’s smiling. A huge, powdery grin.

  “Come on,” he says, “kiss me.”

  The voice is Stephanie’s. Stephanie’s voice in Father’s head on Stephanie’s body.

  “Get away!” Natalie cries.

  The monstrous hybrid flashes gray and in an instant drops through her fingers in a scream of dust. The room fades, and Natalie is alone.

  * * *

  The fire hits in the deep of night after Emily has fallen asleep.

  The house has two smoke detectors, but the batteries haven’t been replaced in years. They never sound.

  The reporters who were staking out the house earlier have long since given up and gone home. No one is outside to see the flames and call 911.

  With the help of a redundant nightcap poured after Natalie left, Emily sleeps through it all and dies in her bed. Smoke inhalation, according to the paramedics on the scene.

  Natalie doesn’t find out until morning, when she wakes with a start at the cemetery and returns home.

  The fire marshal asks if her aunt was a smoker. They can’t be sure yet, they won’t know until they can investigate further, but they think the fire started in the living room, probably from something like a smoldering cigarette.

  16

  Prisoners of Small Things

  Natalie steps from the shower and is instantly cold again. She wraps one of Maureen’s thick towels around herself and another over her hair and shuffles, shivering, into the guestroom where Maureen has laid out some t
hings, mostly items scrounged from her closets and shelves. At some point Natalie will have to go back inside her house—Emily’s, actually, but hers now—to reclaim whatever possessions weren’t destroyed in the fire.

  At some point, Natalie thinks. Not now, not yet.

  She pulls on her borrowed sweater and borrowed jeans, and straightens her hair with her borrowed brush. The only thought she allows herself is how strange it is that people can go on worrying about brushing their hair at times like this and that it really doesn’t matter whose brush she’s using or how her hair looks.

  There’s a slight knock at the door. Maureen comes in carrying a big mug of steaming coffee. Natalie greedily wraps her icy fingers around the hot ceramic. Coffee doesn’t interest her but she drinks the dark liquid anyway for its warmth.

  For just a fraction of a second. the sips chase away the cold. But it’s like being a drug addict—the more she swallows, the worse the chill feels when it returns.

  “I killed her,” she observes matter-of-factly.

  She avoids looking at Maureen, just as she avoids letting any intonation into her voice or stray thoughts into her head. She is safeguarding a dam that’s cracking and crumbling faster than she can patch it, but she refuses merely to consent to its collapse, knowing that once it goes, it will wash her away in a tidal wave of grief and guilt. Still, there are facts to be dealt with, difficult, incontrovertible facts.

  Like that Emily is dead.

  Like that she is responsible.

  “I know you believe that,” Maureen says. “But it’s not the case.”

  “It was my cigarette, Mo.”

  “Maybe, but you can’t be sure. She could have dropped one after you left. And even if it was yours, she’s the one who knocked it out of your hand.”

  “l should have picked it up. If I hadn’t been so drunk myself, I would have remembered, and none of this would have happened.”

  “Natalie, I doubt seriously this had anything to do with you drinking. If anything, you were in shock, not drunk. it must have been awful, getting news like that. This isn’t your fault. Your aunt was an adult, she could have looked after herself, she chose not to. Simple as that. Stop making excuses for her—she did this to herself.”

  “You don’t understand.” Natalie sips at her coffee, lukewarm now, hardly worth the effort. “I knew about the ash creatures, that was my job.”

  Once, in a perverse moment of morbid curiosity, she made the mistake of visiting a crematorium. Even in the controlled environment of the oven, her rather chipper tour guide told her, the body isn’t perfectly reduced to ash. The flesh is, along with the casket, but since the undertaker can’t distinguish between the ash residue of one and the ash residue of the other, all of that gets swept into a bin and tossed, or left as dust on the bricks. The so-called ashes that people scatter or leave housed in a vase on a shelf are in fact the leftover bone shards, which the undertaker picks out and grinds up in something that looks very much like an old hand-cranked meat grinder.

  There’s no such thing as the perfect ash creature, she reflects. But it seems the members of her family keep trying.

  You think you’re so different than me? she hears her aunt asking.

  Because you’re not you know. Different.

  “The ash what?” Maureen asks.

  “Never mind. it doesn’t matter.”

  Maureen sighs and turns to go. “Oh, I almost forgot. There’s a guy out front who says he knows you, says you came by to see him last night. Name’s Brad, something like that. He seems pretty agitated, says it’s real important he talk to you.”

  “Bret? You mean Bret Hartlow, is that his name?”

  “That’s him,” Maureen confirms.

  “What’s he want?”

  “Don’t know. But I can tell you he’s not a cop, not a reporter, and certainly no one you have to see right now. Want me to get rid of him?”

  The truth is, Natalie’s not in a mood to see anyone, let alone this quirky and messed up guy. But her mind seizes on the opportunity to focus on something other than the dam disintegrating around her.

  “No, it’s all right. I’ll talk to him.”

  * * *

  Hartlow greets her like she’s a friend he hasn’t seen in twenty years—crying out her name enthusiastically, pumping her hand eagerly when she backs off from his attempt at a hug. From their previous meetings, she wouldn’t have guessed he could ever be this animated. His body is a constant flurry of small movements: hands in pockets, then out, clasped together, held apart, scratching at his chin, his ear, his nose. Feet shifting this way, then that. Hands back in pockets—a dance of impatience. He reminds her of how she felt the time she tried speed, which she suspects wouldn’t be out of the question in his case.

  ‘‘I’m sorry about your aunt,” he says quickly and with no obvious sympathy.

  “Thanks. What brings you by?”

  He glances past her at Maureen. “It’s all right,” Natalie assures him. “Maureen’s a friend. We can talk in front of her.”

  Still, he hesitates. “I can take a hint,” Maureen says. “I’ll be in the kitchen. Shout if you need me.”

  “So speak,” Natalie says when she’s gone.

  Hartlow seems to gather himself in a series of rapid tics, flutters of inconsequential motion. He is standing by the bookshelf where Maureen keeps her snow globe collection, an old passion from a decade or two ago. Nervously, he grabs one—it’s a scene from The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her pals in the poppy field, the Wicked Witch flying overhead spelling out “Surrender Dorothy”—and absently tosses it from hand to hand like a baseball.

  “That Abby woman you told me about,” he says, “you said she went to Atlantis the same night as the others did?”

  “That’s when she drowned herself, that’s right.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely. Why?”

  He is visibly relieved. “Good, then it can’t be her.”

  “What are you talking about, Bret?”

  The snow globe stops momentarily, then resumes its shuttling back and forth. “I guess I can tell you, given your background and all. That’s why I came here, actually—after last night, I figured maybe you know stuff I don’t, maybe we can help each other.”

  He says it with a question mark at the end, one of those veiled inquiries that uncertain people use to couch a secret wish.

  “Okay,” Natalie nods, curious. “Maybe, sure, if you tell me what this is about.”

  He smiles, pleased with himself. “You know, I guessed it right away, when I heard that only half the group was with Tethys when they found their bodies in that lake.”

  “That wasn’t the plan all along?”

  “Oh hell no, no, no. We were all traveling together, at least that’s how it was when I was there. No one ever mentioned anything about splitting up. Tethys was sick, real sick, did you know that?”

  Natalie tries not to show her impatience. “She was dying, I’m told.”

  “Exactly! She had to leave, she had no choice, her time was up. But she could only take half of them with her because the others had to stay behind to wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Not what, who. A few times Tethys told us there was another one of us out there, someone very important, someone who wanted to live with us but for whatever reason couldn’t. She said she wouldn’t go to Atlantis until she knew this last one was ready to be freed.”

  Natalie’s blood seems to freeze. The cold she felt before had nothing on this. “Not until the last one—” she repeats. “That’s how she put it?”

  “Exactly. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Please.” She motions for him to continue.

  “Well, the way I figure it, whoever this last person is, wasn’t ready, so the others had to wait for him. Last night it occurred to me that if you and I can find out who it is, maybe we can get to him first and ask where the others are. Whoever it is has to know how to find them.”


  He says “others” the way a lost child might in talking about his schoolmates, and Natalie realizes what’s driving him, this frantic, hepped-up urgency in his voice, the manic excess in his movements. He thinks—hopes, believes—that Natalie might be able to help lead him to his lost brethren. He is a junkie filled with the depraved anticipation that comes with the promise of being reunited with a favorite fix.

  Natalie’s head is spinning. The grief, the alcohol, the cigarettes come welling up inside her, the rolling spoils of sin. She struggles to keep it in.

  “So will you?” she hears Bret ask as the nausea begins to pass.

  “Will I what?”

  “Help me?”

  His gaze is filled with such pathetic hopefulness, Natalie almost says okay. But she doesn’t need him, and all he really wants to do is die. “Sorry, l would if I could, really. But I don’t know anything.”

  He isn’t fooled. “Please, “ he begs, flipping Dorothy back and forth now at a startling rate. “You have to.”

  “I can’t.”

  The globe slaps loudly into his right hand and stays there. Dorothy is consumed in a blizzard of poppy fluff. “You’re lying,” Hartlow says, his voice hard, his whole body abruptly still.

  Natalie hasn’t seen this side of him before. But of course he has it, all people do, especially people who feel trapped and lost all at the same time. ‘‘I’m telling you the truth,” she says evenly.

  He takes a step forward, closing his fist menacingly around the swirling globe. He’s close enough to hit her with it now, close enough to send it smashing into the side of her head. Normally she wouldn’t be afraid—he’s small enough she could handle him—but his eyes are full of a rampant fury, the kind that changes the odds and favors the temporarily insane.