Ring of Years

by Grant Oliphant

  “You know how I can tell?” he asks. “Because it’s happened to both of us, you and me. I know what Tethys meant now when I left and she told me I was going to be a lot like her. She meant I was going to know how it felt to be left behind, just like she did once, just like you did once. We’re both orphans.” He edges closer. “You can’t lie to me, Natalie, because I can see through it. You know who it is, you know, and you’re going to tell me, damn it, you’re going to tell me.”

  His hand slowly lifts the globe upward. He’s moving deliberately, theatrically, giving her time, but she has no doubt he’ll swing if he feels it’s necessary.

  “Put that down!”

  Maureen has emerged from the kitchen and is standing directly behind him. Startled, he swings around, the globe still held aloft. It’s an easy gesture to misconstrue. Maureen nails him with a quick jab to the midsection, a specialty of hers. The air whooshes audibly from his lungs as he collapses to his knees, and Dorothy flies from his hand. The globe seems to float for a second, then hits the floor with a simple thud, bounces and rolls to a stop near Natalie’s feet.

  “Plastic?” she asks. staring at its still intact dome.

  Maureen smiles. “Still might have hurt.”

  Hartlow whimpers from the floor. “You said you’d help me.” he gasps, his words gulps of air. “Please, I have to know. l have to know how to go to her.”

  Natalie should be furious with him. but somehow she’s not. She identifies with him too much to be angry. “Alima?” she asks.

  He nods. sobbing.

  “Alima’s dead. Bret. You need to come to grips with that. There is no Atlantis, and there is no Alima anymore. She’s gone.”

  He glares at her with renewed hostility. “She is not!” he shouts as loudly as his depleted lungs will allow.

  “Whatever,” Maureen snaps, yanking him to his feet. She guides him to the door and pushes him unceremoniously into the hallway. ‘‘I’m sure you’ll figure it out” she adds, just before slamming the door in his face. “Just leave Natalie out of it—she already said she can’t help you.”

  Maureen’s no one to screw with when she’s fed up, and at the moment, sorry as Natalie might feel for Bret, she’s glad for her friend’s rough impatience.

  “Why didn’t you tell him?” Maureen asks when they are alone again.

  “What good would it do me, or him for that matter? Thanks for coming to the rescue like that. l take it you heard?”

  “Every word.” Maureen’s kitchen is the perfect place to eavesdrop on conversations in the living room. Natalie figured she would be listening. “Do you think it’s Ralston?”

  “Last one, ready to be freed?” Natalie snorts. “Of course it is.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  Maureen offers her a cigarette, and when she refuses it, apologizes. “Oh shit, sorry, force of habit. Didn’t mean to be insensitive.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Natalie assures her. The truth is, a cigarette sounds good right about now, despite the rattling in her lungs. Crazy.

  She tracks down her mug and pours herself another cup of coffee, which is only middling hot, and tries to process what she has just heard. Why should she be shocked? Hartlow merely confirmed what she has known all along, that Aunt Katie never did let go of her passion for Father, that freeing him was indeed the point of this whole little exercise.

  But there was something new, too, in what he said, something that fills her with a deep dread.

  The last one…

  Can you be that she wonders, and not know it?

  “Jesus,” she mutters.

  “What?”

  “You know anything about prisons?”

  Maureen smiles. She has sent her share of people to jail, and had a few ex-cons as clients, too. “Some.”

  “If you were in one, a convict, how hard would it be to communicate with someone outside without the authorities knowing about it?”

  Maureen mulls this over for just a second. “Not hard.”

  “If they were really watching?”

  “Still. Happens all the time. You could have a sympathetic guard smuggle messages in and out. Or you could communicate through other prisoners. You’d have to be smart about it, but it’s doable. What are you thinking?”

  There is a racing in Natalie’s chest that seems to radiate outward in cold, powerful waves. This is a chill even worse than the grief-cold, because it takes greater liberties with her body, shaking it along the length of her spine. This has terror added into it, the sort of fear you feel deep in your bones. She crosses her arms and rubs them hard, desperately trying to suppress the shivering of her limbs, and wipes a sudden dampness from her eyes.

  “I’m thinking the FBI told me Ralston hadn’t contacted Aunt Katie since landing in prison,” she says.

  Maureen stops to think this over. “And you think otherwise?”

  Natalie retrieves the snow globe that Hartlow had dropped on the floor. It has a light, cheap feel, hardly a tool for bludgeoning. Nothing to fear. But then that’s how everything is in Father’s world, artificial and misleading. The people he lures in become prisoners of small things, trivia writ large and transformed into the promise of salvation—or the threat of damnation, as the case may be.

  Father could read prophecy from the flakes swirling around Dorothy’s head, and others would believe him. He has that gift.

  “It was all his idea, Mo,” Natalie says in a flash of understanding. “Aunt Katie wouldn’t have done this—I don’t care how much she thought it would help him. She wouldn’t take the risk with his reputation, not on her own, not without his permission. He told her to do it, Mo, he fucking told her to do lt.”

  Maureen seems to be thinking this over. “That’s a big leap.”

  “But it’s right.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  It takes Natalie only a second to arrive at the answer. In a sense, she is only surprised that it took her this long to acknowledge the truth, since it really should have been obvious from the start.

  With unnecessary care, she places the snow globe back on its shelf. Surrender, Dorothy. Yes, that would have been so easy, wouldn’t it? And she had come so close, so absurdly close.

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” she says, more to herself than to Maureen.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Can I use your phone? I need to call Agent Scopes.”

  “Sure, but –”

  “The great and powerful Oz. Mo. I have to go and see him. I have to go and see the man behind the curtain.”

  17

  Reunion

  Natalie has had this impulse before.

  Three times, to be exact. And not for a dozen years now. But each is still alive inside of her.

  The first time, she is still twelve and fidgeting in Aunt Emily’s chair. The police are interviewing her again—a man and a woman, both very serious in their dark suits, both very precise in their choice of words—and she is tired of them and their prying, awful questions. Their compassion is studied, the man’s more posed. It’s obvious they pity her, a child so misused; but they have a job to do, and locked inside her head is information they need. They are there to extract it, pull it apart make sure it all reassembles into a coherent story.

  Did Father always carry a gun?

  After the men came, not much before.

  Was this the gun he usually carried?

  Yes.

  Did he carry other guns?

  Sometimes.

  Other weapons?

  Not that she knew.

  Had he ever threatened the children with a gun before?

  No.

  Ever physically abused them, hit them, spanked them, hurt them?

  No. There were spankings sometimes, but mostly the mothers did that. And Rumer. of course. He hurt them sometimes.

  Did Father ever touch any of them in their privates?

  Yuck. No.

  Ever make them touch hi
m in his privates?

  No!

  That’s when she asks if she can see him. The question surprises them, she can tell. Why would she want to see him?

  She shrugs and says she wants to, that’s all. It’s too difficult to explain. She wants to ask him why—isn’t that enough? None of what happened makes any sense to her, and she needs for it to make sense. Everything she knew was gone, except him, except this man who for the last few years has been at center stage of her life, and even though he did a terrible thing, he is all she has. There was Aunt Emily, of course, but she hasn’t been part of Natalie’s world in recent years, not the way Father has. He is her only real connection to that time, to her mother, to Stephanie. She thinks maybe he can tell her something that would help her to understand, maybe make it feel just a little less terrible, take some of the ache away.

  He is Father, after all.

  None of which the two detectives would understand. They just tell her no, that won’t be possible, and return to the sex questions. They seem to find it significant that she asked to see Ralston right when they were asking about the touching.

  She doesn’t raise the idea again until late in the trial. The hate has begun to blossom in her by then. it still seems unreal, what Father did, but seeing him in the courtroom, feeling his sad stare on her while she testifies, makes her angrier than she has ever been before. How can he just sit there like that, saying nothing, letting his lawyers lie?

  She wants to ask him why he won’t tell the truth, why he keeps pretending it was all just on accident, how he can live with himself. She wants him to say he’s sorry.

  But everyone just says no, she can’t see him. that would be insane.

  The third time she broaches the subject is after his conviction. Late one night, she has a dream that he is calling to her. Following his voice, which is filled with sorrowful recrimination, she wanders downstairs and finds him sitting in Aunt Emily’s chair, wrapped in chains. “Why did you do this to me, Natalie?” he asks. “How could you do this to me?”

  It is the first time she fully appreciates that it was her words that put him away. Her words, her memories.

  What sort of daughter sentences her father to prison?

  She wants to explain herself to him, to tell him why she did it, why she had to, that this is his fault, not hers. She wants him to understand. That morning, she asks Aunt Emily to arrange a visit.

  Em looks as though her niece is asking for permission to disembowel herself. “Don’t be absurd,” she says, turning away. “That’s all behind you now.”

  This time, it goes differently.

  * * *

  Scopes initially gives Natalie updated versions of all the old familiar arguments, but changes her tune without explanation after consulting with her higher-ups. By early afternoon, she and Natalie are on the interstate heading south toward the state correctional facility in Greene County.

  They drive in silence most of the way, Natalie wrapped up in thoughts of her aunt. But as their destination draws near, the reality of what she is about to do intrudes.

  “I was surprised you guys agreed to let me do this,” she says, staring out the window at the scraggy hills crawling by. Above them, the sky is a blown-clear blue, clean and vivid.

  “So was I,” Scopes replies.

  “You still don’t have any clue where she is, do you?”

  Scopes turns on the radio and tunes it to a local classical station. “Not really,” she concedes over the softly playing music. “We still figure they’re hiding somewhere within a day’s drive of the first drowning—that’s where we’re concentrating our search.”

  “Isn’t that pretty much where you started?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “How many lakes are there within a day’s drive of that spot?”

  “Plenty. And just as many rivers. More miles of waterfront than you can imagine.”

  “You must have narrowed it down a bit?”

  Scopes fiddles with the volume control on the radio, turning it up, then down, then back again, until it’s essentially the same as it was before. “That all right?” she asks.

  Like Natalie cares. “Fine.”

  “We’ve had hundreds of tips, but no good leads. These guys covered their tracks pretty well. They clearly had this thing totally mapped out. As it stands, they’re effectively free to kill themselves at will. Not much we can do about it, really, except keep on looking and hope we get lucky. Meanwhile, my superiors are beginning to panic. That’s why you and I are in this car right now, because they’re at the point where they’re willing to try just about anything.”

  There is a note of disgust in Scopes’ voice, and Natalie glances over at her. “You don’t think they should have agreed to let me do this, do you?” she asks.

  “Ballard certainly didn’t,” Scopes answers, ducking the question. “He was dead-set against it. But with you having told him you’re not going to testify anyway, I guess he figured it wasn’t much of his concern anymore.”

  “What about you?”

  The agent keeps her eyes fixed on the road. “Truthfully?”

  “I asked.”

  “I don’t know what you think you’re going to learn. I’ve talked with Ralston—he doesn’t know anything. We’ve checked him out completely. Since going to prison, he’s never been in contact with any member of the Guardians. But even if you were right and he really is in on this, why would he tell you? Hell, for that matter, how could he tell you? He gives you something that leads us to Selena and we’d be all over his ass. Everything he’s done to build up his new image goes down the toilet, his retrial gets all tucked up. And for what? From what I hear, it’s going to be a lot harder to convict him this time around. He has a pretty good shot at just walking right out of there. Why would he put all that in jeopardy? It just doesn’t compute.”

  There’s another long, awkward silence between them.

  “He’s not the sort of man to settle for maybe,” Natalie finally comments.

  She turns her gaze back outside. It’s difficult to explain family politics, especially to outsiders. The deal Ralston is offering her—his freedom for Selena—is one she was willing to take when she thought Aunt Katie was behind it. But now, knowing it’s him, her feelings have changed. In Father’s house, children did as they were told, no arguing and no questions. That’s how he is expecting her to behave now, and she hates him for it, for his arrogant presumption. She doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of playing the game by his rules, which in her experience never served anyone well, except him of course. In asking to see him she was doing the one thing he wouldn’t have been expecting. He will be puzzled, curious, annoyed—maybe enough to slip up and tell her something.

  And then again, maybe not. But regardless of where this leads, at least she will have finally had the opportunity to confront him. Not on his terms, but on hers.

  “Have you talked to Hartlow yet?” she asks.

  “Can’t find him.”

  She isn’t surprised. “He’s decided to go look for them himself.”

  “Seems likely. That’s what his sister thinks. She blames you, you know.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  Natalie wonders why Scopes would bother to share this with her. Does she want her to feel guilty? Or is this just the agent’s way of politely telling her to butt out and stop meddling?

  “He had to approve this. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Who?” Natalie asks, confused. “Hartlow?”

  “Ralston. We couldn’t just make him see you—he had to grant his permission. His lawyers weren’t happy, but he agreed anyway. I’m told he didn’t even think twice about it. What does that tell you?”

  It doesn’t tell her anything, other than that Ralston is as unflappable today as he ever was. “He knows we have things to discuss.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Scopes’ tone softens. “You sure you’re up to this, Natalie? I mean, this whole thing with your aunt—I d
on’t think I could do it.”

  Natalie stares out at the hills. They have seen so much, countless gusts of wind, as many drops of rain, untold millennia of tiny insults, and it has beaten them down, made them tired, heavy with old secrets.

  Aunt Emily is dead. She will have to deal with that eventually, really deal with it.

  “I’ll be fine,” she says as Scopes’ car leaves the interstate. “Thanks.”

  * * *

  They arrive at the prison ten minutes later. The facility is true to the images Natalie has seen on television, a grim mass of concrete and steel, a place that couldn’t be anything but a landfill for discarded souls. Everything about it is bleak—its dirty gray walls, its narrow windows; even the razor wire glinting in the bright sunlight slices around the perimeter in a ring so dark it seems to hold the sun at bay.

  A shudder comes over Natalie, a quiet rebellion against what she is about to do. There is something familiar about the compound, and then it comes to her: Normalville. Prisons take on many forms.

  The trip inside is a blur—heavy doors swinging open and shut, buzzers sounding, metal detectors scanning them for weapons. Natalie, her anticipation growing, notices small details. The guard manning the scanner, who has a thick scar over his left eye, leers at her as she goes through. Another guard, assigned to take them to the warden, has an enormous gut that seems to pull him forward, as if walking is all that keeps him from belly flopping onto the bare floor. A single sheet of paper with the word “Quiet!” printed on it interrupts the otherwise vacant expanse of pastel green cinderblock that lines the corridor. A distant laugh, robbed of intent, echoes off the walls.

  The heavy guard leads the two women down a winding corridor to the visiting room where the warden is waiting to greet them. He is a bald chunk of a man, thick and short, Napoleon in a pinstripe suit defying anyone to make an issue of looking down at him. Still, he seems pleasant enough, and oddly happy to be involved in this moment.