Ring of Years

by Grant Oliphant

  The phone at the other end begins to ring. Almost immediately, a machine picks up and a friendly male voice tells her to leave her name and number after the beep. Natalie checks her watch, notes the fading daylight, and stifles the impulse to curse out loud. “You may not remember me,’’ she begins, and after leaving Maureen’s number, heads to her friend’s apartment to gather some things for an overnight trip west.

  * * *

  “You’re going where?”

  The disbelief in Maureen’s voice is impossible to miss, even for Natalie in her distracted state. The two women are in Maureen’s guest room, where Natalie is packing some of her borrowed belongings in an overnight bag while Maureen tries to convince her—gratuitously, Natalie thinks—that she’s nuts. The glare from the overhead light grates on her already sandpapery eyes, and she wants more than anything just to lie down on the bed and close them.

  But sleep is a luxury she can ill afford right now.

  Besides, sleep just brings ugly dreams and the prospect of waking to more bad news. Better to drive all night in pursuit of a slim hope than to consent to sleep and its false promise of reprieve.

  “Wisconsin,” she repeats.

  “Because of this?” Maureen holds out the photo of the swimming lesson and waves it in front of Natalie’s face. “You honestly think this is the same lake?”

  “I think there’s a chance.”

  Natalie zips up the small canvas bag. Her few things slide around inside it as she grabs the handles and heads purposefully out of the room. Maureen catches up with her out in the dining area. She grabs Natalie’s shoulder from behind and gently but firmly pushes her down into one of the straight-backed chairs at the table. Natalie thinks of resisting—she knows what’s coming and doesn’t want to hear a single word of it—but can’t muster the energy. The day is finally taking its toll, and her body feels limp and empty.

  “Would you please stop running away and just talk to me?” Maureen asks.

  “I’m not running away. I just don’t have time.”

  “Bullshit. Even if you left now, you couldn’t get to Wisconsin until—what?” Maureen checks her watch. “Four in the morning? If these people really are there and tonight’s the night, they’re going without you. Nothing you can do about it.” Maureen tosses the photo of the swimming lesson on the table and jabs it with her finger. “But it doesn’t matter because this,” she says, punctuating every few words with another forceful jab, “Is not a clue, Natalie. It’s a fantasy, pure and simple. The kind of fantasy that’s born of desperation and grief. You need to understand that.”

  “You’re wrong. I—”

  “Don’t.” Her eyes fixed on Natalie’s, Maureen lowers herself into the adjacent chair and exhales. “I know you want to believe in this,” she continues. “I know you want to believe you can save that little girl. But you’re kidding yourself, and it’s time you faced up to it. if that really is the lake, what are the odds of you finding that photograph? You leave your meeting with Ralston where he supposedly delivers you this oblique secret message and at your very next stop you find it, like some kind of magic decoder ring, just sitting there waiting for you. How likely is that?”

  Natalie turns away, wishing she could just block out the sound of her friend’s voice. “Coincidences happen.”

  “To you? Are you that lucky?”

  No, she’s not, a mordant little fact they both appreciate all too well. Still, Natalie hates Maureen for raising it this way, invoking the obvious to dissuade her. She hates her and wants to leave. Right now.

  But her body won’t move. Her legs dangle uselessly in front of her, her muscles thrumming with exhaustion.

  “Why would Ralston even bother?” Maureen presses. “If you were right and he really was holding Selena near this lake, why would he tell you?”

  Natalie thinks again of Guess. For all her worldliness, Maureen doesn’t know everything, doesn’t know about Guess, doesn’t know about the insidious games a man like Ralston can play, a man not so much interested in sex as in power, in the precise nuances of control and manipulation.

  “Think of it from his point of view,” she says, not wanting to explain but at the point where explaining is easier than not. “You’ve spent all this time in prison and you’re finally granted a new trial. There’s only one thing standing between you and freedom—me—so you have Selena kidnapped as barter. Now at that point there are only two outcomes you consider probable. One is that I’m too obtuse to understand the deal I’m being offered or, worse, that I get it but refuse to play. In either case, you have to punish me, because you’re Father and no one ever crosses you. Merely having the girl killed in some random and distant place wouldn’t be enough. You want to bring the pain home, to make absolutely certain that this ingrate who defied you will suffer for the rest of her life. You want to crush me. So you have Selena murdered in a place that I know, so there’s no way I can ever again kid myself into believing this wasn’t about me or that I couldn’t have stopped it.”

  She pauses to collect her thoughts. Maureen starts to say something but Natalie cuts her off. “Let me finish. The other possibility is that I get it and agree to play. But maybe I’m confused and not sure about the rules. Maybe I come to you and ask for clarification. What’s the one safe way you can give it to me? By pointing me to something that will be meaningless to anyone who’s listening, but that eventually, because it’s about me, I’ll understand. You figure I’ll call my father, maybe tell him about Selena, and we’ll start talking about lakes and one of us—most likely him—will remember the lake in Wisconsin. You have confidence in that kind of thing because you’re Father and you control fate, not the other way around.” She laughs bitterly. “You know, I honestly thought when I went to see him today that I was doing the one thing he hadn’t expected. But I was wrong. He wasn’t surprised—he was expecting me. He was expecting me all along.”

  Maureen waits several seconds before responding. “Are you done?” she asks.

  Natalie nods.

  “Do you have any idea how utterly tortured that is? Talk about a long shot. How many times did you visit that lake?”

  Natalie guesses it was just that once.

  “Not much of a connection,” Maureen points out. “A man as controlling as you say Ralston is wouldn’t be likely to go for something as tenuous as that, would he? I mean, that’s hardly bringing it home, as you say. Hell, you didn’t even remember the place until you found that photograph. It’s horrible to say, Natalie, but I’m betting they could have dragged Selena’s dead body from that lake and, absent that photo, you would never have made the connection. I’m right, aren’t I?”

  Natalie doesn’t answer because she doesn’t want to. She knows Maureen is right, but at the same time she clings to the hope—no, more: the belief—that she’s wrong.

  Her gaze wanders around the room, avoiding Maureen’s penetrating stare, and finally settles on the table in front of her. Strewn across the other side are brochures and packets with glossy photos of burnished caskets and elegant cemeteries. An orange sheet of paper listing prices for burial plots catches her eye.

  “What’s up with this?” she asks.

  Maureen glances across the table. “You asked me to help with your aunt’s arrangements.”

  “I meant with this.” Natalie pulls the price list across the table.

  “Oh, that. Your aunt doesn’t have a plot.”

  “Of course she does, next to my uncle. Didn’t you check?”

  “Yes, and she doesn’t. Apparently when she bought his, she didn’t buy one for herself.”

  “But that’s crazy. That’s where she belongs.”

  “Apparently she didn’t think so. Or she couldn’t afford it, who knows? Whatever the reason why, she can’t go there now—the space isn’t available. If you want her to be buried in the same cemetery as him, it’ll have to be in a completely different section.”

  “By herself?”

  Maureen nods.
r />   “We can’t even get nearby?”

  “Nothing.”

  Natalie feels a hollow pain deep inside. She wonders if her aunt’s failure to buy herself a plot had anything to do with her infatuation for her brother-In-law. Did she feel unworthy of the man she had betrayed? Or did she worry that reserving space next to her dead husband would be a betrayal of the living man she secretly still loved?

  Either way, Natalie can’t help but be saddened at the thought of Emily spending an eternity surrounded by strangers on some desolate hillside. Loneliness plagued her enough in life; it doesn’t seem right that it should follow her still in death.

  It makes her think of Selena somehow. She figures loneliness must be the connection, loneliness and death.

  A thought that restores at least enough of her resolve to lift her to her feet. “I have to go,” she declares, lifting her bag from the floor. Small and almost empty, it nonetheless seems heavy to her.

  Maureen grabs her wrist in a tight painful grasp. Natalie tries to pull away but can’t. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?” she asks, her eyes filling with angry tears.

  Tired and weak, she thinks. I feel so tired and weak.

  “Because I don’t want you to die, Natalie.! don’t want you to kill yourself chasing false hopes like this. I understand, I really do, but you’ve become obsessed and it’s destroying you. You don’t see it but it is. The reality is you’re never going to be able to save that little girl. Probably nobody is. You need to accept that and move on. There’s only one life you can save at this point. And that’s yours. That’s who you should be trying to save right now, Natalie, that woman you see when you look in the mirror.”

  Natalie glares at her friend and is surprised by the venom, the sheer bilious hatred, she feels building up inside of her. Who is Maureen to be lecturing her about this? She doesn’t understand, no one does. No one sees what Natalie sees, feels what she feels. No one understands the secret language that she and Ralston speak. She is alone, incomprehensibly alone, and this woman holding her is no longer a friend but an impediment, just another person yammering on about a future that doesn’t exist and never will.

  We are just rings, she thinks. There is no such thing as the future, just the thin layer of the present, a miniscule pulse forever being pushed farther out on the fringe of history. If she has a mission. If life has a point it is to keep new scars from being formed in the dead tissue of the old, to prevent new wounds that will define the shape of the next layer and the next and the next. It is, she thinks, to prevent the defining mistakes of the past.

  With sudden strength. she yanks her wrist free and turns to go. “It isn’t about me.”

  At just that moment the phone rings and almost immediately Maureen’s answering machine picks up. Moments later, they hear a man begin to respond to the recorded message: “Uh, hi. I hope I have the right number. This is George Fesco, and Natalie Krill asked me to call her here.”

  * * *

  Natalie pounces on the phone.

  “Hello. this is Natalie.”

  “Oh. Oh, hi,” the man who must be Cousin George stammers in a startled voice. “I thought you were out.”

  “Just leaving.” Natalie glances at Maureen, who in a gesture of resignation leans across the table and begins glancing absently through the death industry’s marketing paraphernalia. “Thanks for calling me back so quickly.”

  “No problem. It was nice to hear from you. How’s your dad doing?”

  Her dad. Of course he would ask about him, Natalie thinks. George is a friendly, Midwestern guy, concerned about family relationships, the ties that bind. “Fine,” she says. “Just fine.”

  “I don’t hear from him much these days,” George continues, a hint of recrimination in his voice. “It’s been years, in fact. Called him a couple of times but never heard back.”

  “He’s kind of busy.” Natalie is surprised to find herself making excuses for her father. But what else can she do? Tell Cousin George that he’s not alone? Reveal all the family secrets in one great tumble of compulsive disclosure? Not likely. “Always on the go,” she adds.

  “I gathered.” George’s words are filled with a kind of good-natured knowing, as if to say he understands the situation but doesn’t want to embarrass her by pressing the point. “You said in your message that it was urgent.”

  “Yeah. Listen, I have a strange question. But it’s kind of important.”

  “No need to explain. Shoot.”

  She asks him about the visit to the lake. To her surprise, he remembers it immediately.

  “Oh, yeah, I remember that day. Boy, were you ever hepped up on going swimming. You had a good time, I think. Didn’t like the water, but a lot of kids don’t at that age.”

  The memory seems to amuse him, and Natalie can’t help but note how much the tenor of his recollection differs from her father’s.

  “I had fun?”

  “Loads,” he chuckles. “Except for the actual learning to swim part like I said. The water was kind of cold.”

  Cold. Natalie remembers that—goosebumps on wet skin. “What’s the lake’s name?”

  “Well, it used to be called New Lake.”

  “What’s it called now?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  George laughs. “Gone.”

  The way he pronounces it sounds like gown, which strikes Natalie as an odd name. “I’m sorry?”

  “Gone,” he repeats. “The lake’s not there anymore. it was man-made. They drained it a few years back, tore down the dam. All that’s left now is the original river.”

  “Oh.” Natalie doesn’t know what to say at first. The lake’s gone . . . how could that be? Selena is there, the Guardians are there, the lake must be there.

  “That all you wanted to know?” George asks.

  Natalie shakes her head firmly, as if he were there to see her. “No, you must be mistaken. The lake I’m talking about can’t be gone. You must be thinking of a different lake.”

  “Nope.” George says without hesitation. “Sorry, but that was the one. New Lake. that’s where we went.”

  Natalie can’t believe what she’s hearing, doesn’t want to believe it. Four days of madness, that’s what this has been, catacombs of days filled with indecipherable evil. Her aunt’s death. thoughts of suicide, dreams of ghosts, sleeping on graves, plaintive conversations with the dead—and the only reply Aunt Katie’s snide cameo in her head. But through it all there was this one hope, almost dashed several times, never strong but always there, of Selena, of redemption, of light after the years of darkness.

  But for the light to be real, there has to be the lake, and now this man, this relative from a childhood she has forgotten, vestige of a family that has forgotten her, is telling her as if it’s no big deal that there is no lake, the lake is gone, the lake is history. And if he’s right, if the lake is gone, Stephanie dies all over again—call her Selena, call her what you will; new shoot in an old wound, it’s all the same—and Natalie goes on as she has so long, so very long, alone and unpardoned, in the horrible dark.

  So he must be mistaken.

  She starts shouting, slowly at first then more quickly, “You’re wrong, you’re wrong! The lake’s still there, you’ve got the wrong lake, you’re wrong!” And at first, she can hear him protesting so she shouts louder until she drowns him out and all she hears is the reassuring mantra that he’s wrong, that she’ll find the lake on her own, the right lake, the lake in the photo.

  And then suddenly Maureen has her by the shoulders and she’s shouting, too. “Natalie, Natalie, what is it? Stop it!” But Natalie doesn’t want to stop it, because her words are keeping the lies at bay, the lies and the darkness. She imagines Selena being snuffed out of existence the moment she stops shouting.

  Maureen grabs the phone from her hand and hangs it up, then without warning slaps her hard across the face. The sting takes the scream from her voice but she keeps repeating the mantra in softer, mum
bled tones: “He’s wrong, he’s wrong.”

  Maureen leads her back to her chair and kneels down in front of her.

  “Why is he wrong?” she demands. “About what?”

  Natalie knits her reply neatly into the mantra. “He says the lake’s not there anymore, but he’s mistaken. He has the wrong lake. He’s wrong.”

  Maureen looks at her consolingly. “No, he’s not, honey, it just means you were wrong about the photograph.”

  “I wasn’t!” Natalie shouts. “It’s the same lake. the only lake I have a connection with because it’s the only lake my father ever took me to. He said it was like the one near his hunting lodge, he said –.”

  And then she stops talking, stops moving altogether.

  The screaming black void inside of her dissipates slowly, like thick smoke blown on a gentle wind, and what replaces it is a memory:

  The hunting lodge. The place where she caught butterflies.

  19

  The Wishing Space

  Downstairs, someone laughs, and she knows.

  Selena stares out the window, watches the moths play in the light and she knows.

  It’s time.

  The Guardians are going home.

  She is still sitting in the room where Peter carried her after the men shot at her. In their hushed conversations, the adults who take turns watching her call her comatose because she won’t speak to them or look at them or move. They talk about her as if she isn’t there, as if she has already left them. But it’s not that she’s comatose. She simply has no interest in moving or speaking, no interest in knowing who’s in the room with her or what they’re doing. All she wants is to be left alone to sit and gaze and in the tight little wishing space deep inside of her hold onto the image of her mother standing outside their pink house, her arms wide, ready to embrace her.

  Hold onto that. That’s all she wants.

  Sara knows she’s not comatose. Whenever she’s in the room, she talks to Selena the way she would to anyone—directly, bluntly, knowingly. And what she has to say isn’t nice. Warnings, mostly. Warnings to behave, or next time the men won’t miss.