It takes Natalie’s brain a split second to comprehend what’s happening. That’s the hand holding the pipe, it tells her. don’t you get it? And then she does. “Watch out!” she cries, but too late, just that fraction of a second too late. Sara starts to turn but the pipe comes smashing down on her. When it hits, there’s a wet, crushing sound, and her body flops to the ground like a puppet whose wires have been brutally cut.
“Oh my God!” screams the woman across from Natalie. “He killed her! He killed Sara!”
* * *
Natalie stares in horror at Sara’s crumpled form, silently pleading with her to get up: Please don’t stay down there. Stand up. Or just roll over and shoot him. That’s it—shoot Peter before he takes the gun from you! Quickly, do it now! Before it’s too late!
But Sara doesn’t move. Natalie suspects she never will again.
She yanks against her handcuff, pulling so hard it burns her skin and the metal digs into her flesh. But it won’t give. There’s nothing she can do but watch as Peter, his face a mixture of surprise and triumph, retrieves the pistol. He seems uncomfortable with it, as though he’s not familiar with firearms, but he slips it easily enough inside his belt when he rises back to his feet.
“Well,” he says happily. “So.”
Yes, Natalie thinks, so. So much for affecting the quality of the day. So much for thinking she could change history. She wishes she had killed Peter when she had the chance, wishes she could have that moment with the pickaxe back again, if only because Sara would have shot her then and her part in this tragedy would already be over.
Around her, Peter’s comrades are whimpering and sobbing; a few absently tug at the chains on their handcuffs. “Why?” one of them asks. “Why’d you have to go and do that, Peter? You killed her!”
“I didn’t kill her,” he answers impassively. “She’s still alive.”
His eyes have a faraway look. He seems to be peering not so much inside the van as past it. It’s a look Natalie recognizes—the intense, unfocused gaze of a man who’s not really here anymore, who no longer sees his surroundings as anything but a gauzy curtain onto someplace else, someplace much more real and wonderful.
“But you hit her so hard.”
“Not really. Just enough to knock her out. She was making a terrible mistake, you know. Someone had to stop her. it wasn’t fair, what she was doing—to the girl or me. I’m sure you understand. You do, don’t you?”
It’s obvious to Natalie, if not to him, that none of them does. But no one challenges him, either, which doesn’t surprise her. Having willingly chained themselves inside this van in the hopes of soon drowning in it, they are unlikely to turn rebellious now. Absent Sara, Peter is their last remaining authority figure, and these are people who need an authority figure. They need someone to reassure them that everything will turn out all right, that their sacred bridge to the paradise they have so eagerly embraced is still intact. Peter might scare them right now, he might have shaken their confidence, he might have robbed them of the leader they trust more, but all of that only serves to reinforce their need for him.
He motions for Bret to help him lift Sara up off the ground. “We need to put her in the passenger seat up front,” he explains. “Normally, she drives—looks like I’ll have to do it now.”
Bret is all smiles again. “Man, Peter,” he says, his words an excited tumble, ‘‘I’m sorry you had to do that but thanks. Thanks for standing up for me. You don’t know how grateful I am. I thought I was a goner there. I don’t know what I would have done if—”
“Just shut up about it okay?” Peter says.
“Sure. Fine.”
The two men lift Sara’s limp form by the shoulders. Her arms dangle lifelessly from her sides as they drag her slowly around the side of the van. “Man, she’s heavy,” Bret grunts.
Natalie can hear them wrestling with the weight of her as they try to hoist her body up onto the front seat. It takes them several attempts, but after a few minutes Peter declares victory. He handcuffs her right wrist to the handle above her door, which Natalie thinks is the ultimate in gratuitous precautions. She doubts that Sara will experience her drowning as anything but a redundancy.
Peter comes around to the back of the van again, this time to retrieve Selena. He lifts her up in his arms and tries to hug her, the way a father might when returning home to the waiting arms of his expectant child. But she remains curled up in an impervious little ball. With a pained sigh, he carries her over to Natalie and says, “Here, you hold her. I would, but I have to drive.”
Natalie, surprised, cradles the warm ball lovingly in her lap. “Does this mean you’re going to let me stay with her?” she asks hopefully.
At least that, she thinks. If her sister has to die a second time, at least this time let her go, too.
Peter shakes his head impatiently. “I can’t think about that right now. At the lake. I’ll decide there.”
“Tethys wants me to go.”
“I said I’d decide at the lake!”
Bret, ever the fool, chooses that moment to stick his head inside the van.
“Hey,” he says, “what about me? Where am I going to sit?”
Peter closes one of the cargo area doors. leaving the one on Natalie’s side open. She’s the only one inside with an unobstructed view of what happens next.
“Do me a favor.” Peter tells him. “Go stack those shovels we knocked down back up against the wall.”
“Why?” Bret gives him a puzzled look. “What difference does that make?”
“Just do it. Okay? We should leave the place neat.”
“Okay,” he shrugs. “Fine. Whatever.”
He’s a good six feet away and turning around to pick up one of the rakes when Peter reaches into his belt, pulls out the gun and aims it at him. Bret looks up, his eyes widening. “Wha—” he starts to say, but his words are cut off by the sharp roar of the stubby barrel. The bullet slams him back against the wall, and he slides down it to the floor, leaving a trail of dirty wet blood that streaks up from behind him like an exclamation mark.
“You shot me!” he screams, clutching his shoulder. “Jesus, you shot me!”
Natalie closes her eyes, trying to shut out the suffering of yet another person she can’t help, can’t save. She tells herself it doesn’t matter, he wanted to die anyway, his death was unavoidable and she had known it from the moment she met him. But she knows he didn’t want this death, and the horrible insanity of the moment overwhelms her. She huddles over the girl, pulling her head in tight against her chest.
“I won’t let you go,” she whispers. “He’ll have to kill me first.”
How reassuring is that, she wonders? Then she realizes it’s herself she’s trying to reassure. She can’t let Peter pull her out of the van again and leave her to watch from shore while it sinks with Selena still inside. She can’t let that happen.
“I’m sorry, Bret,” Peter’s voice is clinical, indifferent. “Sara was right. You can’t go with us.”
“But why? I don’t understand. Why?”
“We don’t have enough room, just like she said.”
“We could leave Sara behind. She’s a bitch anyway.”
“And get me in more trouble with Tethys? No way. I may not like Sara much, but she’s one of us. Tethys would never forgive me if I left her behind.”
“But I’m bleeding! You can’t leave me here, I’ll die.”
“I can’t worry about that.”
“Please!”
“You’re just not part of the plan, Bret, I’m sorry. Tethys will be angry enough without me bringing along someone she isn’t expecting.”
“Peter!” Bret rolls onto his back and tries to sit up. His left shoulder is covered in blood. “Oh God,” he pleads. “Not here, not like this. I don’t want to die, Peter. Take me to the water with you, at least do that much. That way, at least I’ll have a chance. Please, I want to be with Alima. Please?”
“Sorry.” Peter sla
ms the other cargo door shut and the van’s interior becomes a dim tunnel of trembling shadow. A second later he takes his position behind the wheel.
“I know you probably all think I’m kind of out of line,” he says calmly to the group cowering in his rearview mirror, “but sometimes that’s what you have to do when you know something is right. You may not agree with me, but there it is. I had to do what’s right.”
There’s silence for a moment and then a young woman—Natalie guesses she’s eighteen, maybe twenty—clears her throat. “You’re not really going to leave him there like that are you?” she asks. “We can’t just leave him there, he won’t have a chance.”
Peter smiles at her in a way Natalie can only describe as cruel. “Okay, Tracy, you’re right. How about we give him your spot?”
Do it, Natalie thinks. Call his bluff, tell him you’II trade. Be the smart one and decide to live.
But Tracy’s eyes fill with fear and she says nothing.
“Is that what you want?” Peter presses.
She responds with an ever-so-slight shake of the head.
“I didn’t think so.” At that his voice turns chipper, as if they were all going out for a short jaunt to the mall. “All right, then. Let’s rumble.”
Slowly, almost ceremoniously, he backs the van out of the barn. Bret begins to shriek, so loudly his words can be heard clearly inside the van: “—the water, Peter I Oh God, just to the water!”
Peter acts as though he hears nothing.
The windshield seems a long way from where Natalie’s sitting, but through it she gets one last glimpse of the barn, of the colorless moths swirling in the artificial light like crazed spirits. Spirits of the dead, she thinks, frantic to return home.
22
How Jackie Kennedy Must Have Felt
For what seems like the longest time, no one says a word. Chains clink against the ridged floor, a slow dirge, metal against metal, and occasionally someone clears his throat or groans at a jarring bounce as the van plows through the night. But mostly there is silence, an almost breathless hush that hovers over them like a presence.
From her position in the back, Natalie can vaguely see Peter against the faint light rising from the dashboard. Staring straight ahead into the night and whatever he thinks lies beyond it, he reminds Natalie of how she must have looked during her trip up here—fixated, obsessed, oblivious.
A thick object lolls and bounces in the space between the front seats. Natalie wonders what it is at first, then realizes with a start that it’s Sara’s head, loose and flopsy like one of those bouncing-head troll dolls you see from time to time smiling out the back window of a passing car. Natalie always hated those dolls. She hates them even more now.
She hates the thought that, very soon, Selena’s head will look like that—a lifeless appendage flopping around at the end of a corpse.
And she hates the thought that she would just let it happen.
Her insides begin to seethe with anger again, but this time it’s a rage directed at herself, a furious loathing over what she’s allowed herself to become. A woman who’s given up, who gave up a long time ago. A woman who puts up a mild resistance but, in the end, always succumbs to the dictates of madmen. Who lets her life be controlled by freaks and lunatics, by the insane, demented, self-serving wishes of others. This whole thing, this whole search, has been a colossal exercise in self-deception. It was never about Selena; it was always about herself, about escaping her own past by fleeing back into it. It was always about finding a good enough excuse to give up, to die.
Fine, she thinks with disgust, have that. But at least fight for the girl.
Sure, she could just sit here and quietly hope that Peter will let her accompany Selena into the afterlife. She could make that her tiny, pathetic battle.
Or, she could decide to really fight, to make one last, earnest attempt to affect the quality of the day. And that, she suddenly knows, is the right choice. In her misery over the past she has been forgetting one simple truth: Selena is real. She is not Stephanie, not a surrogate. She is herself, a child in her own right. Not a death to be atoned for, but a life to be saved.
What Selena needs most right now isn’t a companion to accompany her into death; she needs a defender. She deserves to live. More than anyone in this van, perhaps even alone in it, she deserves to live, and for Natalie to give up on her now, to abandon her in the name of accompanying her, would be the worst kind of sin.
She holds up her manacled wrist in front of her face. She will not play this game anymore. She will not just hand Peter what he wants, not without a struggle.
Not without a game of nerves.
“She really is dead, you know,” she says aloud, almost without thinking.
No one answers.
She raises her voice. “I said, you know Sara really is dead. don’t you?”
Peter glances over his shoulder in her direction. “Are you talking to me?”
“Yes.”
“I already told you, she’s fine.”
“People’s heads don’t roll like that when they’re alive.”
Peter looks down and, keeping one hand on the steering wheel, shoves Sara’s body upright in her seat. Natalie waits for him to say something but he doesn’t.
“Dying in the water is important for you, isn’t it?” she asks, remembering Abby Wible.
Again, no answer.
“What happens if you don’t die in the water?”
Peter glares into the rearview mirror. She can just make out his eyes peering back into the darkness. “I think it would be best if you just kept quiet. This is a sacred time, and you’re disturbing it. No one wants to answer your questions right now.”
“You don’t make it to Atlantis, is that it? That’s why Bret wanted you to take him to the water. If you die in the water, maybe you can find your way to Atlantis. Even if it’s not a portal, there’s always that hope. But if you die on land, that’s it, the end, you’re done. No Atlantis, no paradise, nothing.”
“I said, be quiet!”
“So if Sara is already dead, she can’t go to Atlantis with you. It’s too late for her because she died on land.”
“Shut up!”
“Aunt Ka – Tethys . . . she liked Sara, didn’t she?”
Icy silence.
“What do you think Tethys’ll say when you show up without her?”
“She isn’t dead!”
“Sure looks like it to me. She was special to Tethys, wasn’t she? Was she her favorite?”
Peter hits the brakes so hard it’s like the van hit something big. Its tires squeal across the pavement and the passengers in the cargo bed are pitched forward, sliding along the unforgiving metal floor, then yanked back into place by their shackled wrists. They howl in pain and surprise. Natalie slams into the man sitting next to her so hard she nearly loses her hold on Selena, who peeks out long enough to release a tiny yelp and then disappears back inside her ball. An instant later, blinding light fills the van, and through half-shut eyes Natalie sees Peter twist around in his seat and point his gun at her face.
“What part of shut-the-fuck-up don’t you understand?” he screams. “I said shut the fuck up, and I meant shut the fuck up. One more word out of you, one more word, and I’ll pull this trigger and you can find out for yourself what happens when you die on land.”
He spins back in his seat and the van accelerates in another squealing of angry tires. Bodies slam backward, then struggle back into their places. The symphony of the chains begins again, and Natalie struggles not to lose herself in its tired lament.
* * *
Up front Peter struggles to regain his composure. He doesn’t understand how it came to this. Him, shooting someone.
The others, being so scared. Not trusting him anymore. Not liking him.
And the girl, his precious Selena, thinking she hates him. After all he’s done for her, actually hitting him, making him hit her.
God, he despises it that he did t
hat.
And what he did to Bret, just leaving him to die like that. He did the right thing in shooting him, he’s sure of that. There really wasn’t any room for him, and Bret wasn’t likely to take no for an answer. But he thinks that maybe Tracy was right, that he should have at least left him with a hose or something. Some water, to give him a chance.
But he was so confused, so damn confused.
He still is. This isn’t how it was supposed to go.
Why did he have to hit Sara so hard? He can’t remember why he did that, what he was thinking. He was just so angry. He panicked. She was really going to make him leave the girl behind. It was evil of her, just evil, and when he hit her it wasn’t just to knock her out—it was to wipe out the evil. To smash it out of her.
But not to kill her. Oh no, not to kill her. He would never do that. Tethys would never forgive him for doing that.
He glances down at the crumpled heap in the seat next to him. His hand is sticky from where he touched her head. Why would it be sticky? He nudges her a couple of times to see if maybe she’ll groan, but it’s like tapping putty, a lump of cold clay.
Still, she must be alive. He tells himself she just has to be. She can’t not be.
He tries to concentrate on the road. It isn’t much farther now. He doesn’t like driving. He doesn’t mind it, but it’s not something he enjoys. He would much rather Sara were behind the wheel right now and that he was sitting where she is, holding the girl in his lap like when they followed Tethys to her portal.
He wishes they were all back in that moment again.
When did this all go so wrong?
Actually. he knows what started it all. He glances up at the rear-view mirror, trying to pick her face out of the gloom.
Her.
She’s to blame.
If it hadn’t been for her, Tethys would never have had a secret to keep from him. And Sara wouldn’t have had it to lord over him.
If it hadn’t been for her, Bret would never have found them again, and he wouldn’t have had to shoot him.
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