And finds it almost immediately. She feels someone’s foot and next to it, barely noticeable, a small bump inside one of the ridges. Carefully, she pries it from the floor and pulls herself upright.
“Selena!” she cries. “Selena, where are you?”
No answer.
Holding up her handcuff so that it’s steady against her body. Natalie searches for the keyhole. Inserting a key in total darkness is hard under any conditions, but this is a little key and she’s shivering and constantly being jostled by people and now Selena’s missing and—
Miraculously, the key finds its home. She twists it and her handcuff springs open.
“Selena!” she cries again. “Please answer me, honey.”
There’s a slight whimpering off to her right, more child-like than the other noises. She holds out her arms, bumps into a little figure and feels the girl shrink back. “It’s okay,” she says as calmly as she can. “It’s me.”
“It’s so cold,” Selena says. “So cold.”
“Try not to think about it. Hold onto me.”
The little girl’s shivering arms wrap around her neck again, which is about where the water has risen to. Natalie reaches underwater and searches for the handles to the rear doors. That’s when she remembers: this is a cargo van, and they’ve doctored it; there is no inside latch.
“Come on,” she tells Selena, “we’ll have to go up front.”
They are working now with only about ten inches of air. Natalie’s limbs are beginning to go numb from the cold water, and her body is telling her to slow down, to rest. She refuses to listen.
Their only path is up the center of the van, but first she has to push Peter’s meandering body down and then tread over it, following its course through a forest of outstretched arms that wave frantically like kelp in an angry sea. She can hear them but not see them—the tethered Guardians crying, moaning, rasping their frightened, final breaths.
Hands grasp at them as they pass, clutching and letting go, searching for purchase and just as quickly abandoning it. Someone grabs Natalie’s wrist and begins to pull, like a drowning swimmer latching onto the lifeguard who has come to save him. “Save me,” a voice pleads, and Natalie recognizes it as the young woman’s—Tracy’s. She thinks guiltily of the key she left in the handcuff but knows she can’t go back to retrieve it now.
“Let me go,” she says.
“I don’t want to die,” Tracy cries.
There is no room for sympathy now. Aiming toward the voice, Natalie hurls a vicious punch into the darkness. Her fist cracks against bone and cartilage and Tracy yelps. A sharp pain shoots up Natalie’s arm, but the grip on her other wrist loosens and she pulls away.
“Please!” Tracy cries, but Natalie ignores her.
Their noses are pressing toward the ceiling now. “Get ready to hold your breath,” she tells Selena, trying not to swallow water as she speaks.
Nearby, Bret’s song has become an eerie screech: “—yes, Tethys loves me, yes, Tethys loves me, because Peter tells me so.” His voice splutters. “Get ready, babe,” he screams, ‘‘I’m coming for you.”
And suddenly, everything’s quiet. Everything’s gone. No light, no noise, and just like that, no air. All swallowed up in the blinding, deafening, smothering liquid darkness.
Trying not to panic, Natalie reaches out in front of her and finds the back of Sara’s seat. Moving by touch, she half climbs, half swims over and slightly to the left of it trying to stay clear of the other seat where Bret is sitting. She imagines his hand shooting out at them, a last act of vengeance, but the only obstacle she encounters is Sara, her arm still handcuffed over the door.
Natalie pulls on the latch but can’t get enough leverage to push the door open. Fortunately, though, this is a working man’s van, built in the days before that meant power everything. The windows are the type that actually have to be rolled down manually. For one heart-stopping moment she can’t find the handle, but then she does and, as fast as the water will let her, cranks it down.
When it won’t go any further, she pushes Selena through the opening, holding onto her as she goes, and follows her out past Sara’s arm into the great, directionless void. Her lungs are burning and all she wants to do is open her mouth and breathe, breathe in anything, even if it’s water. She can feel Selena kicking wildly, the final act of a body trying to resist the urge to inhale.
Hold out, she prays. Please, just a little bit longer.
For a split-second she hesitates over which way to go. They are in a world where up and down hold no meaning—and yet mean everything. The entire difference between life and death.
A vague light beckons from a direction that appears to be sideways. Feels sideways. She resists it for a moment, wondering what it might be, thinking that maybe it’s going to lure her deeper into the lake. For a brief second, she actually thinks of Atlantis, that maybe all this nonsense is real and what she’s seeing is the glimmer of that place through the open portal. Just as quickly, she dismisses that as stupid and kicks maniacally toward the light because she can’t think of any other way to go. Almost immediately, she breaks through the surface, gasping, into the glorious, open air.
* * *
Overhead, the moon peeks out through streaks of meandering cloud. She eyes it gratefully. So much for Atlantis.
Treading water furiously, she pulls Selena close. “We did it, baby,” she whispers. “We really did it.”
But Selena doesn’t react. With a shock Natalie realizes how much she’s struggling with the girl’s weight. She holds her out so she can see her face and immediately groans. Selena’s mouth is open, unmoving, and water is lapping over her lips.
“No!” Natalie cries, shaking her. “Don’t die now. You can’t.”
The lake seems impossibly large. Across the expanse of black water, she can see trees and, some distance away, even the scattered lights of homes, but everything seems so far. The nearest point on the shoreline is back the way they came, where the ramp of pale concrete slips into the lapping water.
Swimming with all the strength she has left she struggles back to shore, back up the ramp, pulling Selena along behind her, counting the seconds, every second precious, every second one more the girl’s brain goes without oxygen. When the water is shallow enough to stand, she lifts the girl’s limp body in her arms and slogs up the rough concrete onto the bank, settling her down in a patch of grass beside the ramp.
“Come on, come back,” she says, then adds: “Please.”
She took a course in CPR once—something Maureen made her do, in case one of her “clients” suffered a heart attack. Natalie didn’t pay much attention because she had no intention of saving the lives of any of the men she met through work. Struggling to remember anything of what she learned, she regrets that now. Her brain is foggy with fatigue and panic. Mostly what comes to mind are scenes from TV shows, and that’s what she goes with, alternately trying to pump Selena’s chest and breathing air into her young lungs, stopping every few seconds to check for a pulse or a sign of breathing. Each time she detects nothing.
The thought of Selena dying now makes her insane. She starts screaming hysterically, losing herself in the madness of it—“No, no! Selena, no!”—and then it’s not Selena’s name she’s screaming anymore, but Stephanie’s, and she’s begging her not to go, not to leave her again, all the while pushing on her chest, breathing into her mouth.
A stray memory intrudes. She remembers reading somewhere—it was after the CPR class—that the guy who invented the Heimlich maneuver was arguing that it should be used for drowning victims too. Immediately, she flips Selena over on her stomach and wraps her arms around her chest, then squeezes tight in a series of rapid pulls. Water drains out of the girl’s small mouth.
In her frenzy, Natalie doesn’t notice the whirring of helicopter blades, or even the explosion of light as a single craft skims out over the tree tops and hovers overhead. She doesn’t hear the whine of sirens in the distance. She i
s in another place, imagining herself chasing Selena up a long tunnel with a bright light at the end.
“It’s too soon,” she says, her voice hoarse with the effort of trying to breathe for two. “You’re not ready.”
Flipping Selena over on her back, she joins their mouths together, pushing air into her lungs, turning away, inhaling, and doing it again and again. Cold air in, warm air out, rough lips on clammy skin, praying for something, a sign, a tiny push of breath, a flutter of the chest, but nothing, nothing happens—
And then suddenly, there’s water being spit into her mouth. A thrill shoots through her. She pulls away, and Selena coughs, arches her back slightly, coughs again.
“Yes!” Natalie shouts, voice cracking. “That’s it, cough it up, come on!”
But the girl falls silent, unmoving. No more coughing, no sharp intake of air, no gasping for breath. Natalie can’t detect a pulse.
Despairing, exhausted, shaking from the cold, she collapses next to Selena—a little girl in her own right, yes, but also her sister, her Stephanie—and stares vacantly up into the light. In her delirious state she wonders why the moon has gotten so big and noisy until she realizes it’s not the moon at all; it’s God. Waiting at the end of his tunnel, offering a raucous welcome to his latest young recruit.
“Me, too, take me too,” she sobs, as the light cold and pitiless, descends on her, swallowing the night.
23
Awakening
“Can’t beat the ring, Natalie. Surely you knew that. You can’t beat the ring, the holy ring, the ring of years. Ring around the rosy, pocket full of poesies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Everyone dies, just like before. Everyone but you, that is. And Father. Father never dies. Just you and him, forever. What goes around, comes around, that’s how it works. New shoots in old wounds. You know what time is, Natalie? Time is a joke, a total joke. Just an illusion to keep folks from realizing how we keep doing the same shit over and over again, year after year, generation after generation. And you actually thought you could break the cycle? Man, that’s rich!”
In the dream, Natalie is floating in a dark. undefined place. There are no walls or even the sense of walls. Facing her is Bret Hartlow, high as a kite and giggling hysterically as he lectures her.
“Know what I like about you, Natalie?”
This time he seems to expect an answer. “No,” she answers coldly.
“You always try to do the right thing and then screw it up. Majorly screw it up. That’s what’s so cool about you. It’s your thing, your particular part of the ring.”
She tries to turn away, but wherever she looks, his face, shrouded in darkness as though emerging from depths, is still floating in front of her. “Leave me alone.”
“Can’t,” He seems gleeful about that. “You know, your exploits are legend down here. I mean, there’s me, of course, who wouldn’t have found my way home if it weren’t for you. But I’m insane, so you can’t feel too badly about that. But then there’s Stephanie, your sister, remember her?”
Suddenly Stephanie’s face is floating where Hartlow’s was. “Natalie!” she cries in a pained voice. Natalie reaches out for her, but just as she touches her face, its features rearrange into Bret’s and her hand recoils.
“Uh, uh, uh,” he admonishes, waving his finger in front of her nose. “No touching. Did you really think you could undo what you did to Stephanie? I love that! It’s so naïve.”
His face transforms again and Natalie finds herself staring into Aunt Emily’s eyes. “The cigarette, Natalie,” Aunt Emily says. “I wasn’t ready to die yet. Why didn’t you pick up the cigarette?”
“Aunt Emily, I —.”
Aunt Emily becomes Bret again. “Don’t even try,” he says dismissively. “No excuses down here. You are what you are, we accept that. Nothing any of us can do about it. But it would be a lot easier on us all if you would just come to grips with it. Stop fighting it. You know what they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.”
Bret becomes Tracy. “You didn’t have to punch me,” she says. “You could have given me the key.”
“I didn’t have time,” Natalie protests. “I needed to get out, to save Selena.”
Briefly the face is Bret again. “Ooo, and that worked out so well.”
And then he’s Selena. “You said you’d save me,” she says in her little girl voice. “You promised.”
“But that’s what I was trying to do!”
Bret reappears. “Trying?” He laughs. “Could you be any more pathetic? That’s the whole point, stop trying. Just go with the flow, get with the program. It’s the ring of years, baby. Learn to enjoy it!”
His face blows away like sand in a strong wind and out of the cold void Natalie hears another voice, much deeper, much more resonant, and it sends a chill down her spine. “Who were you really trying to save?” it asks.
In the distance she sees a small dot of white. and as she watches it grows, coming closer and closer until she can make out the features of the face. “Father,” she says.
“The one and only.” He is wearing a somber expression, the same expression he was wearing when he shot her sister. “I asked you a question, Natalie. Who were you really trying to save?”
She tries to turn away from him but can’t. “What do you want from me?”
“An answer to my question.”
“You already know the answer.”
“But I want to hear it from you.”
“Go to hell.”
“Been, there, done that.”
“Myself. Okay? Is that what you want me to say? I was trying to save myself!”
“Good girl,” he says tenderly. “The queen of the ring should know these things. Didn’t you know? That’s what you are. Queen of the ring, along with me, master of all that you survey. Well. Mistress.”
In a bout of grim laughter. he disappears and Natalie is left alone in the void. Alone, floating, for eternity.
* * *
Another awakening.
Even without opening her eyes, Natalie can tell that she’s in a hospital. The faintly toxic odor of disinfectants and antiseptics, distant voices muffled by their passage down long corridors, the low hum and insistent beeping of sophisticated machinery, the other-worldly laughter of a TV sitcom in a nearby room—all remind her of that other awakening thirteen years ago.
That time, from fire; this time, from water.
And yet she thinks, bitterly remembering her dream—was it just a dream?—with the identical outcome: she lives, everyone else dies. The ring of years. Nothing changes, just the names.
“God,” she groans. “Why?”
God ... memories of God. She remembers the tunnel, Selena running ahead, the light consuming her. Natalie wanted so badly to stop her. And failing that, to wake with her in the gentle embrace of God, somewhere out there beyond the light.
But this isn’t that, she knows it immediately. This is hell. This is her, alone again.
And she remembers every detail, every excruciating detail, with a clarity that eluded her in the panic of the moment. The salt-vomit taste of the brackish water Selena’s dying body instinctively spit into her mouth. The rubbery feel of the girl’s skin. The hollowness of her face.
A sob wracks her body, and leaving it calls Selena’s name.
“Natalie?”
A voice she recognizes instantly. Maureen. She opens her eyes to a dimly lit room—beige walls, beige curtains, like being inside an egg. Her friend is sitting next to her in one of those hospital chairs designed for both sitting and sleeping that’s suitable for neither. She smells of sweat and smoke and worry.
Natalie rolls over, hiding her face, and just the effort to do that exhausts her. She thinks of asking what time it is, what day, how long she’s been unconscious, but realizes she doesn’t really care anymore. In the end she just says, “Hi.”
Maureen lays a tender hand on her shoulder. “Hey.”
Natalie thinks of the light at the
lake, of God hovering overhead. Not God, she realizes sadly, just a machine. “You called Scopes, didn’t you?”
“Right after you left. I lost some time actually getting to her, and we lost some more getting to your father and finding out where his damn cabin was. Just a few extra minutes and maybe we would have made it before you guys hit the water.”
“Just a few extra minutes,” Natalie repeats. Isn’t that how it always is, she thinks? Life as a game of inches. And the fact is, they probably could have had those inches, those precious few minutes, if she had only told Scopes herself where she was going.
If, if, if.
Her hand hurts and as she tries to rub it she realizes that it’s been bandaged. For a second, she wonders when she injured it and then remembers with a groan.
“What was it like in there?” Maureen asks.
“Wet.”
“I understand. I shouldn’t have asked.” After a minute or two of silence, Maureen clears her throat and continues in a surprisingly emotional voice,
“Natalie, you know I’m not normally much on the feelings front, especially when it comes to expressing them. But I just want you to know, well, I can’t imagine what it took to go down in that van with those loons, and then to actually get out—incredible, it’s just incredible. I’m proud of you, that’s all. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say, what I want you to know. I’m proud of you. I think your sister would be, too.”
Natalie is at once mystified and angry. “Proud of me?” she demands. Could there be anything stupider? Rolling over, she raises her bandaged hand.
“See this?”
“Sure.”
“Know how I hurt it?”
“No.”
“I broke it on a girl’s face. Her name was Tracy, and—”
“Natalie,” Maureen interjects, “you don’t have to explain.”
Ring of Years Page 34