“Huh?”
“There’s been a change of plans,” Leila says, kindly but firmly.
Natalie turns to her aunt for an explanation, but Emily, wiping her eyes with a tissue, turns away.
“Did the plane get cancelled?” Natalie asks. “Do we need to wait another day? Because I can do that.”
“That’s not it,” her father says, grasping her hand more tightly. He glances back at Leila, who nods at him and rests her hand on his shoulder. “Your stepmother and I have been talking, Natalie, and we think it would be best for you to stay here with your aunt.”
“But, what? For how long?”
Her father averts his eyes and his wife fills the uneasy silence. “You can come visit us anytime,” she says. “We just don’t think it would be good for you to come live with us full time right now, if you know what I mean.”
But of course Natalie doesn’t have the slightest idea what she means. “Is it something I did?” she asks desperately, struggling against the urge to cry. “Because I can do it differently, I can change, I can be better. Just tell me what it is and I’ll fix it, promise.”
“Oh. Natalie,” her father says, pulling her close. “It’s not you. It’s just, well, it’s for the best, that’s all. We don’t think you’d be happy there. One day you’ll understand. I promise you will.”
Natalie’s eyes well up with tears and she feels the dampness pressing into her father’s starched shirt. She understands now. Her father has his new life, the one he built when she and her mother left him; he has his new wife, his new children. There isn’t a place for Natalie anymore.
“You don’t want me, do you?” she asks. pulling away from her father’s embrace.
“Natalie!” Leila admonishes. “That’s not fair! Your father loves you very much, and so do I. Don’t be ridiculous!”
“I hate you!” Natalie screams. “You told me I could come with you and you lied and I hate you!”
She doesn’t wait to hear any more of their explanations and lies. Sobbing, she runs up the stairs and throws herself into her room. She can hear muffled, angry voices—the adults arguing—through the floor. A little while later, her father leaves without saying goodbye. “So as not to upset her more,” or at least that’s how Aunt Emily explains it later.
Through the open bedroom window, Natalie can hear them talking as they make their way down the front path, the tight voices of adults straining to be polite. “Do you understand now?” Leila asks, apparently of Natalie’s father. “Can you imagine having that in our house all the time, the effect she would have on our children, how disruptive she would be?”
Our children.
The words replay in Natalie’s head.
“She’s just upset,” her father says.
“Still, it’s too much, just too much. We have a family to raise. We are so right to handle it this way.”
Aunt Emily’s voice: “Natalie’s your family, too.”
Our children.
There’s an angry snort, which Natalie attributes to Leila, and then her father speaks again: “Honey, please, don’t.” A pause and then: “Leila’s right, Emily. It wouldn’t be good for any of us. Natalie’s going to need a lot of attention from someone who can focus all their energy on her. You can do that, we can’t. We have kids—I mean, our own kids—you know what I mean. They need us, too. I lost Natalie a long time ago. I don’t want to miss out on the chance to get to know these kids the way I never got to know her. And it would just confuse them too much to have her in the house. This is the only way. I’ll send money when you need it, and otherwise just let me know if she needs anything, anything at all.”
Her aunt utters a reply—Natalie can’t make out the words—and that’s it.
A moment later, she hears the sound of their rental car pulling away from the curb and purring its way up the street and out of earshot.
“Bye, Daddy,” she whispers into her pillow. “Sorry.”
* * *
“I never speak with him anymore.”
Natalie presses her finger into the grooves of “luvver boy.” The Vs feel like a W, as if they were carved in a quick, continuous stroke – the furtive work of a knife or some other sharp instrument that should never have found its way into this place.
“Why not?” Ralston asks.
She shrugs. “We aren’t close. Nothing to talk about I guess.”
‘‘I’m not surprised.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Merely that it was predictable.” His gaze drifts down to the table, as if it’s covered in memories and he’s sorting through them. “How many times did he come to visit after you and your mother came to live with me, do you remember?”
Natalie feels her breath catch in her throat. She knows what he’s implying, but it isn’t fair, especially coming from him, of all people. “He wasn’t exactly made to feel welcome,” she points out. “My mother painted a pretty clear picture of how she felt about him. She told him she didn’t want him hanging around, that he should just stay away.”
“Still, was it once? Twice?” he presses. “Not three times, I don’t think.”
“No,” she confirms. It wasn’t three times. It wasn’t even twice. Her father had visited just once.
“We did make it difficult for him,” Ralston acknowledges, “I don’t disagree. Looking back now, I can appreciate how much courage and commitment it would have taken someone like him to keep coming back, to keep visiting you and being a part of your life. But your father never even tried, did he? Never came to visit, never tried to take you away, never hired a lawyer to work something out through the courts.”
“What are you implying? That he abandoned me? My mother and I walked out on him, remember?”
“You didn’t leave anybody, Natalie. You were just a child, or have you forgotten that?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Actually, I don’t. Your parents were both adults, both perfectly capable of standing up for themselves. But your father didn’t do that, did he? Your mother took you away and he just let her. It must have made you feel terrible—in fact, I know it did, because I remember how you used to look when you’d bring up his name. You were so sad, so melancholy, like someone who had suffered a loss, which in effect you had. You were grieving, Natalie, because in essence, yes, he had abandoned you. That’s exactly what he did. But you’ve never admitted that to yourself, have you? Instead, you’ve protected him, this false image you have of him, because it’s easier than dealing with the truth. Except the truth will find you, Natalie. It always does.”
Natalie follows the motion of her finger as it presses harder into the Vs that keep becoming Ws. She met a man once who had spent most of his adult life in and out of facilities like this. He told her that the first thing he did whenever he arrived at a new prison was to make himself a knife. Didn’t matter where you were, he told her; there was always something you could turn into a knife.
In the oppressive stillness of the room, she can feel Ralston’s we-both-know-l’m-right gaze drilling into the top of her head. She wishes she could make herself a knife right now. What she would use it for, she isn’t sure, but it would relate to cutting out her own pain, the throbbing in her chest, the ache in her gut. Maybe she’d use it on Ralston, maybe on herself, maybe both.
Or maybe just on the table. Maybe she’d add her own inscription—give “luvver boy” a “luvver gal” to keep him company. Or perhaps she’d carve something more appropriate: “lost girl.”
She doesn’t know. It just intrigues her right then, the thought of a knife.
“That’s awfully twisted, isn’t it?” she asks, not looking up. “You took my mother and me away from him and now you want me to blame him? Kind of self-serving, don’t you think?”
“A bit, but still accurate.” There’s a slight rustling noise as he shifts position and leans across the table toward her again. “Do you know anything about trees, Natalie, about how they grow?”
&n
bsp; She shakes her head, thinking about her father. Why are they talking about him? Why is she allowing this?
“We think of trees as these vast expressions of life,” Ralston continues before she can stop him, “but in fact a tree’s life exists only in a thin layer underneath the bark. For a while that layer is the exultant expression of everything the tree can aspire to be, feeding on air and soil, towering far above the land. But eventually the layer dies, becomes wood, one of those rings children and scientists like to count, and a new layer takes its place, a new layer in the ring of years.”
He leans closer and she looks up to find his face startlingly near, not so much across the table anymore as floating above it.
“A tree is mostly dead, you see,” he continues, “mostly an expression of what has gone before, a fragile web of living cells stretched over a skeleton composed of its own past. Each new layer of life builds a bigger tree but never a new tree, never a different tree, just the same tree newly expressed. That’s how it is with us, Natalie—trapped in the ring of years. Old wounds don’t just go away. We grow up around them, over them, in them even. And that’s why it’s so important to understand them, to understand this skeleton we’re building on, this dead, defining core. Your relationship with your father is one of those scars. Your visit here today is as much about that, about your need for a father, as it is about anything else. Can you see that, Natalie? Do you see that now?”
W-W-W-W
Natalie traces the pattern over and over. She has a feeling of being absent from her body, not floating. just detached, like she isn’t really here. How did Ralston do it? She was determined not to let him inside, but here he is, uncovering nasty little truths from deep within her. Her father, her son-of-a-bitch father—why has she made excuses for him all these years? Maybe because his sins seemed so benign compared to Ralston’s. It’s hard to get worked up over one father neglecting you when your other father murdered your sister.
That’s when it hits her, what he’s implying: her need for a father. He believes she’s here because she still thinks of him in some sick, twisted way as her father, her surrogate dad. And that’s how he wants her to see him, even now, even after everything that’s happened.
“You’re insane,” she whispers.
“Am I?” He stretches forward, and before Natalie realizes what’s happening he has taken her hand in his and grasped it gently, like a parent talking to a child. Her mind screams to her to pull it away, but something keeps her from moving; even her breathing seems to have stopped. His hands are firm and warm and she looks up from them into the kind, wise eyes she remembers from her youth, from her days in this man’s house, and wavers. Not all evil, she thinks; it was at the end that the evil came.
Then she remembers: These are also the eyes. filled then with crazy obsession, that hovered over the barrel of the gun that spit death at Stephanie.
She yanks her hand away. “I’m leaving,” she declares, rising to her feet. Her hand is burning, and she wants to wash it, scrub it free of his contaminating touch.
He stands, too, his eyes locked on hers, daring her to turn away. “Natalie,” he says, enunciating each syllable—and the words following—with unusual emphasis, “this girl, this Selena, I don’t know her and—understand me on this—I cannot save her. But I can help you, by telling you the truth about what I see. And what I see is a woman who will find what she’s looking for only when she is willing to confront the pain that her father caused her. You have to go back, Natalie, into that past, exhume that skeleton. That’s where you’ll find the answers you really seek, and nowhere else. It’s a trip you have to take by yourself, alone. No one can do it for you, or even with you.”
Natalie stares at him, her body shaking with rage. “Screw your help.” She bangs on the door. “Guard!” As she turns away, her gaze falls again on “luvver boy,” and she stops. There is one question still remaining, one terrible question still hovering in the ether, waiting to be asked.
“Speaking of fathers. “ she says.
Ralston glances quickly at the words carved into the wood and grimaces. “Stephanie?”
She nods.
“I’m surprised your aunt told you. Your mother didn’t want you ever to know. She thought it might upset you and your sister. But yes, Natalie, she was mine. My daughter, not someone I would intentionally harm.”
The door creaks open behind Natalie. “All done?” the guard asks from the other side.
Natalie ignores him. “You’re a liar,” she says, her voice rising. “A total, fucking liar. You always were, and you still are. You know how I know that? Because I watched you on that Max Temple TV show, that’s how. You took a call from an old lady who wanted to know if her sister forgave her, and you told her she did. The only problem was, that old lady was my Aunt Emily. The spirit you said forgave her was my mother. Do you hear me? My mother. Only you told somebody earlier in the program that you couldn’t talk to any of the people who died in Normalville. So you couldn’t have been speaking to my mother, could you? It was all just a lie, like everything else you’ve ever said, every word you’ve ever uttered. You disgust me.”
Ralston doesn’t react. He just stares at her, an expression devoid of feeling or comment. She spits on the floor and turns to the guard. “Get me out of here.”
“Natalie.”
Ralston’s voice, low and somber, compels her to wait.
“You’re right,” he says after a hesitation. “I did lie. But not to your aunt. it was the first caller I lied to, because that’s nobody’s business but mine. And now yours. The truth is I hear their voices every day, including your mother’s and your sister’s. They’re with us right now. I can see them, bright shadows hovering around you. They’re anxious to speak with you, I think.”
A trembling cold creeps down through Natalie’s body. Stephanie, here. An angel on her shoulder. Could it be? God, what wouldn’t she give to be able to speak to her again even for just a few seconds? What price wouldn’t she pay?
“Tell them I’m busy,” she says.
Choking back tears, fighting the urge at least to listen for echoes of her sister’s voice in Ralston’s well-spun lies, she steps out into the desolate hallway and loses herself in the click of the guard’s shoes as she follows him back toward daylight.
18
A Dead and Lonely Place
She waits for Scopes by the car.
Overhead, the sky is deliciously blue and open, so unlike where she just was that she wants to absorb it with her eyes. She craves the light, the pristine blueness, the uncluttered infinitude of it. But here, surrounded by razor wire that lops off the sky’s edges, it’s like trying to breathe through a narrow straw—pointless and unsatisfying. No matter how long she stares, there will never be enough sky, not here, so eventually she just gives up.
Scopes is agitated when she appears several minutes later. “Why the quick exit?” she demands.
Natalie makes no attempt to explain. There is no such thing as a quick exit from a place like this. She insisted that the guard who escorted her from Ralston’s cell take her out the way she had come ln. Not having any instructions to the contrary, the guard obliged.
She sighs and, opening the car door, collapses into her seat. The leather is cold and stiff. She is tired, fatigued in every fiber of her being; not just physically worn, but weary in her soul, defeated. She is sick at the thought of Selena, whom she now knows she won’t be able to help. And sick at the thought of Stephanie, whom she must now share with Father. And she is sick at the thought of everyone she has failed—not just Stephanie any longer, or Selena, but also Emily, whom she must now bury, and Selena’s mother, who will now live as she does in a dead and lonely place.
And she is sick of being lied to, of being played for the fool, of being used. She is sick of being Ralston’s patsy and daddy’s forgotten good little girl. She is sick of the world and its curious sense of justice, the way it keeps turning back on itself, revisiting old horrors.
>
The ring of years. That’s what Ralston called it and she thinks that for once, he has it right.
“You already know,” Natalie says.
‘‘I’m not sure I follow,” Scopes replies.
“Ralston didn’t tell me anything—he just toyed with me, tried to screw with my head. This was all just a colossal waste of time, like you predicted. And you know why? Because he believed our conversation was being monitored, that it wasn’t private. He was right, wasn’t he?”
Scopes doesn’t hesitate. “Of course he was right. You didn’t think we could let that conversation happen without knowing what was said?”
“But it changed what was said! He didn’t tell me anything because he knew you were listening.”
“Come on. Be real. The two of you could have been standing naked in an empty field and he still would have thought we were listening. It wouldn’t have changed anything, and you know it.”
Unfortunately, she does. Whether Scopes had been eavesdropping or not, Ralston would have assumed someone was. The outcome would have been the same—a conversation that went nowhere. Nonetheless, Natalie feels strangely violated, as though she just gave away a very private part of herself only to discover that she had been standing in a roomful of strangers.
No small irony, she thinks, given her line of work.
“You get a recording?” she asks.
“For what it’s worth.”
Scopes starts up the car and they drive out through the gates and back onto the road. When the prison disappears behind them, Natalie lowers her window and leans out into the cold wind. The rush of frigid air shocks her lungs, but she doesn’t care. She imagines the wind as a kind of light, pure and raw and untouched by shadows, and she gulps it down, like she’s drinking in the sky.
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