by Zoje Stage
“I’m trying to figure something out.”
Hadn’t Shaw said something similar? In the days before his fear overtook him?
Orla decided then: she couldn’t let her daughter do it alone. It was time to get real, stop pretending the rules that had once governed their reality still existed. “Can we figure it out together? Can we talk about it?”
Eleanor Queen took a backward half step out of the room, then hesitated. Finally, she looked up at her mother and nodded. They settled in on the sofa, facing each other with their feet curled beneath them, bookends of mismatched size. Orla’s heart twisted and pain radiated throughout her torso; this was how she and Shaw had always sat for intimate conversations and apologies. Her eyes stung and she quickly swiped at them so no tears would fall. Eleanor Queen watched her, her mood somber and studious. She’d always been a contemplative child, but she’d changed in ways Orla still struggled to understand. Part of it might have been a cloak of sorrow at the loss of her father—but the changes preceded his death. Orla wasn’t sure how to ask the questions, how to even line up words that made sense. But she had to try; fear clung to her daughter like a second skin.
“Eleanor Queen…Bean…” She took the girl’s limp fingers and rubbed them with her thumb. “I know it’s been so hard, and I’ve made some mistakes—with your papa, and you. I didn’t understand what you were both…please know I’m trying to figure this out.”
“I believe you.”
“I thought at first…everything was just so foreign to me, and maybe I didn’t understand how this sort of land, climate…I thought it was me, unprepared—”
Eleanor Queen shook her head. “It’s not you. There’s something here.”
“You’re right. I know that now.” Orla held her breath. She curled her fingers around her daughter’s, and Eleanor Queen responded. They hung on like that, like something might pull them apart and they were ready to resist. Maybe everything about her daughter’s behavior should have worried her sooner; the girl had never had the excuse of a muse or work to do when she was distracted or distant. But Orla had been preoccupied in a silent tug-of-war with her thoughts too, inching toward the muddy impossible, falling back on reason, desperate to understand why nothing felt quite right.
A shiver crept across Orla’s shoulder blades. “Do you know what It is? What It wants?”
Eleanor Queen’s face went blank again. She turned her head, looking, listening. She sighed with the same frustration Orla saw in her when she couldn’t figure out a math problem.
“It’s something…I don’t know, I keep trying…it’s here, but I can’t…it’s trying, and I feel it—just sometimes, at first. But now more and more and I don’t know what it is.”
Orla hadn’t wanted to influence Eleanor Queen’s impressions, but maybe it would help her if she knew about the local history and its intersection with their land. “Do you sense…there were people here. Women, near here, a long time ago. And they came to get better from a disease that didn’t have a cure then. Tuberculosis. It affected the lungs. Your papa found…we considered that it might be part of what’s happening now. The restless souls who died here. Do you sense anything like that?”
Eleanor Queen took her words very seriously and concentrated even harder, squinting her eyes, even closing them. But she shook her head. “I try to ask it questions. I try so hard!”
Orla scooted closer to her, but Eleanor Queen didn’t want to be held.
“Mama, you don’t understand!” She got to her feet and angrily pulled back the curtains, made all the living-room windows squares of glass that looked out to the foreboding night, the foreboding land Orla had been desperate to make disappear. “It’s out there.”
“What is—”
“I don’t know what it is! It’s not…it’s not weather. It’s not snow, it’s not…it’s more than that. But it shows us what we know, or what it knows, or…but it’s not shaped like a person or a thing.” She nearly screamed in frustration. “It’s trying to understand us, me, so we can…” She stood at the window nearest the wood-burning stove, lingered there, her eyes fixed on something beyond the pane.
“Is it something bad? Eleanor Queen, does it want to hurt us?” Orla again took up a position behind her daughter, but this time didn’t try to distract her with physical affection. She tried to see what her daughter felt out there in the antipodal world of white snow, black trees.
“I don’t think it’s…it doesn’t think about bad, good. It thinks about…living.”
Orla could relate to that. Though maybe, until recently, she hadn’t thought about it in stark or practical terms, the imperative of staying alive when doing so felt more and more perilous.
“Are we just in the way, then? Of…something? Would it happen anyway, even if we weren’t here?” But Shaw was summoned. She was thinking aloud, still in search of a solid thing that made sense, a rock climber looking for a handhold or a place to set her foot that wouldn’t crumble.
The nonreligious part of her still struggled with the concept of an aware greater force, an intentional greater force. A god that demanded weekly attendance or daily utterance of its name seemed like a trickster to her. Surely something of infinite power possessed a consciousness bigger than one moment in one mortal creature’s life. She didn’t, in any way, want what was happening to be personal, a thing being done to them. Because that might mean It had wanted Shaw dead—and wanted Orla to kill him—and she’d never come to terms with being a pawn on some omniscient monster’s board game.
“We’re…we’re part of why it’s happening,” said Eleanor Queen. “It wanted us here; I feel something wanting us. But I don’t understand…”
It was not what Orla wanted to hear.
“Does It…” She turned Eleanor Queen away from the window but resisted the impulse to restore the curtain. “It had a connection with Papa, and you—”
“It likes that we were aware, could sense it. But…I felt it growing unhappy with Papa.” Eleanor Queen held her hand out toward the stove, but nothing was burning within. She trailed a finger along the cast-iron surface. Orla saw it in her face, her daughter’s search for the right words, her desire to find the explanation. “I think, Mama…I feel a sense of wanting…of hoping that I’ll understand it. Better than Papa did. And I’m trying, I’m trying so hard. But then I messed up with what it was saying about Papa—” She burst into tears and clutched her mother around the waist.
“No, no love, remember what I told you? You are innocent in this. None of this is your fault.”
“But I feel it trying and wanting, and if I’d understood—”
“No.” She held her daughter’s head against her chest, kissing her hair. “It was my fault, for getting out the gun. And Papa’s fault, for having the gun. And no one’s fault because none of us knew…we didn’t know this would happen.”
But.
It would never be Eleanor Queen’s fault, but maybe she was the key to understanding. As much as Orla would prefer to protect her from the mess they were in, maybe she needed Eleanor Queen’s insight to get them all out. “I’m going to help you, okay?” She pulled away from the tight embrace and dried her daughter’s tears.
“How?”
“When you sense something, don’t be scared—tell me. Tell me, and try to describe it, so I can help you figure it out. It’s like it’s a language, but you don’t speak the same way. But we need to learn. You’re not alone. I’m here, and I believe you. And we’ll figure this out. It doesn’t want us to leave, right?” Eleanor Queen nodded. “So we’ll figure it out together. Okay?”
Hope blossomed on the girl’s face for the first time all day. She tightened her arms around Orla again.
“I love you, Mama.”
“I love you more than anything. And we’re gonna be okay now.”
Later, as her sleeping children lay beside her, warm bundles and throaty, open-mouthed breaths, Orla whispered aloud to the only spirit she could name.
“
Shaw?” It didn’t matter what other people called their God. Jesus or Buddha or Allah. Gaia or Mary or Isis. There was only one spirit out there in the universe who really mattered to her. “Look after us? If you can?”
It was a comfort to think of him here, everywhere, watching them. And for a moment she understood faith in a way she never had. Hope lived on an invisible plane that radiated outward from the person who needed it. Maybe, after all, it wasn’t so very strange to give it a name.
Weariness dragged her down into a darkness that flickered with stars.
28
Orla lay in bed, half asleep. The half-aware part of her was attuned to a peaceful vibe she hadn’t felt in a long time. The house was quiet. Dreamlike. A few bird trills and crow caws outside the window. She flexed her feet, then slowly pointed them. She inhaled through her nose and let her breath spread throughout her body. She focused on the breath, followed its journey down her limbs. Let her mind go blank. When she exhaled, her muscles melted into the sheets. Sun played at the edges of her closed eyes, the edges of the closed blinds. The urge to dance made her lie perfectly still, her mind at work. Dance had been a meditation, a full body-mind transformation to another way of being. A symphony played in her head and she saw herself moving, telling the story of her adult life.
It was buoyant at first, the excitement of a new arrival. Petite jumps, a youthful animal investigating an unknown place. Exaggerated head movements as she looked outward, onward, searching for a familiar horizon, finding only a strange and wild landscape. And then the music grew more chaotic. Other dancers took the stage. She reached out for them but they spun away as if they were attached to ropes that reeled them in, tugged them off their feet. Orla was supposed to take their hands, form a connected chain, and after much lurching and chasing, they were finally able to dance in a line, in unison. But soon they began separating, drifting into the dark wings, and a new creature stood in a spotlight.
Softer moments followed, a pas de deux of two lovers nuzzling. A pair of wobbly-legged fawns ventured in, darting everywhere, exploring everything. The family’s play was ruptured by a bolt of frenzied music—the dancers leapt and fell to the ground, rose and beseeched and raced. Reached and collapsed and extended one leg, then the other. And finally the music became elegiac as the remaining dancers, one by one, were absorbed by the spreading shadows, leaving Orla alone in a harsh pool of light. She beat her breast with choreographed grace.
Orla shifted in the bed, a jerked reaction as her body tried to fix the dream, summon the dancers who’d vanished in the dark. Suddenly conscious, she winced. Her muscles ached; it all came back. The nightmare of her existence. Too long in the snow the previous day, on her knees with Shaw’s head on her lap. She opened her eyes.
In real life, the Empire City Contemporary Ballet would never have given her the principal role of Survivor. But here she was, and it was worse than when her little brother had died; then she’d been confused in a different way, but her parents were there. Now she was utterly without a partner, tasked with saving her children and ignorant of every move that would lead their dance to a triumphant conclusion.
The children weren’t in bed beside her. Where were they? She tossed back the covers and angled her sore self upward. Groaned as she swung her legs over the edge of the mattress. If Shaw were there, she could ask him to rub her lower back. If Shaw were there, she’d take a hot bath in the claw-foot tub and let him fix breakfast for the kids. If Shaw were there…
But he wasn’t. The house felt empty. Where were the kids? She bolted from the bed, still in yesterday’s clothes, and shuffled into her slippers.
“Bean? Tigger?” They weren’t in their rooms. A moment later, she confirmed they weren’t in the living room. Her body felt hungover, abused. They weren’t in the kitchen. She poked her head into Shaw’s studio, hoping to see Eleanor Queen with a guitar on her knee and Tycho on the floor with paper and crayons. “Eleanor Queen?”
A match whisked to life in her gut, set her insides alight. She’d hoped they were playing in their new fantasy world. But they weren’t there. Or here.
“Tycho? Eleanor Queen?” She called loudly enough for her voice to carry throughout the house. When they didn’t answer, she had one more idea; she sprinted into the kitchen and whipped open the basement door. They might have guessed where their Christmas presents were hidden. “Are you down there?”
The silence mocked her. If she tumbled down the stairs, she’d land in its mouth and it would swallow her.
It had taken the children. It came for her children in the night and now she was alone and would be alone forever. Was it a punishment? What had she done?
She spotted the boot tray by the front door. Some old shoes and one pair of boots. Hers. That meant—
“Shit!” She kicked off her slippers and stuffed her feet into her boots. Shaw had died wearing his. But the children’s should have been there. She couldn’t imagine why Eleanor Queen would have allowed her brother to go outside, not after they’d discussed lying low, keeping indoors to see if It tired of them or made Its intentions more clear.
Orla pulled on her coat and hurried outside, her soul ill equipped for another horrible, panic-filled morning. “Eleanor Queen! Tycho!”
Fresh snow crunched beneath her feet as she stepped off the porch and followed two pairs of small prints. There must have been a brief spell of freezing rain; the new snow was coated with a thin layer of glittery ice. It was beautiful with the sun splashing across the expanse, reminding her of the rainbow prisms she’d seen reflected through the bathroom window. She forged her own path, oddly satisfied by each step of her boot cracking through the shimmering shell. If only she could crush everything with her feet so easily, just as she’d once demolished the two-headed mutant in the snow. Crush a trail back to the Chelsea co-op, ambush the new owners—“Surprise!”—and then chuck them out on their asses. How she longed to see her children race to the safety of their cramped old room.
Her mood eclipsed further as she neared the garage; it was all too obvious where the small footprints led. She feared what she would see when she reached the far side: her wise daughter and her fragile boy, mouths smeared with blood as they devoured their father’s remains.
When she came upon them, they looked only startled and guilty. They knelt beside Shaw in the snow, pajamas beneath their coats, one corner of the tarp pulled back. Orla fought down a horrible fit of laughter. He looked like a flag—red, white, and blue. White skin tinged blue. Even from afar, his flesh looked unyielding, solid as ice. Ghastly. And the red blood had frozen, like spiked icing on a messed-up, gory cake.
Eleanor Queen had the wounded eyes of a child expecting punishment. But Orla couldn’t possibly yell at her. Instead, her own culpability was a stinging gash, made worse by the cold—her children were gazing at what she’d done, and what if they deemed her unforgivable?
“What are you doing here?” Orla went around them and dropped to her knees to secure the tarp.
“He wanted to know. He kept asking, Where’s Papa?”
“You shouldn’t have shown him this.” She tucked Shaw in and tried to hide her face behind her own shoulder so the children couldn’t see it. She felt their eyes on her, watching her. Murderer. Monster. “It was a terrible accident.”
“I told him that, Mama.”
Tycho pushed himself out of the snow and onto his feet. He held out his arms for Orla to carry him. “We said a little prayer so Papa knows we love him and maybe he’ll still play with us sometimes.”
Orla rose to her feet and hoisted him onto her hip. As much as she didn’t want her children to condemn her for what she’d done to their father, Tycho’s easy acceptance made her throat tighten. Someday she’d have to give a more formal explanation to a less loving authority. The thought of losing her children, by any means, made her hug him tightly. “I’m glad. I’m glad you said goodbye. But I don’t want you to remember him like this. Remember him full of life, okay? Come on.”
A tear trickled down Eleanor Queen’s cheek as she got up, taking her mother’s outstretched hand. “You aren’t mad?”
“I was worried. I thought we’d decided to stay inside for a few days.”
“It was so nice out,” said Eleanor Queen.
They headed back to the house. Orla flashed furtive glances at the blue sky, the sparkling, untrampled snow, the pair of crows alighting like talkative old friends on an overhanging branch. She didn’t trust any of it. And…were the trees even closer than they’d been before? Their branches outstretched like gnarled goblin arms, lunging for the sturdy walls of her home? She ushered the children indoors and glared at the beauty one last time before retreating inside.
“You will not get us.”
29
Within two days, Orla had to concede she was losing the battle. Boredom, when fueled by whining children, became a stronger force than fear.
They spent the first day in Shaw’s studio, in lieu of a memorial service. Both Eleanor Queen and Tycho tried playing the guitars. With their tentative strumming, the strings sounded muted, ghostly. Orla looked through Shaw’s finished paintings and the sketches he’d made for future work. She saw it all with new eyes: a human element had manifested in his flora and fauna because of his awareness of something out there, trying in its foreign way to connect with him. But Shaw’s essence, his skill, was just as present. Perhaps his effort to silence what he was hearing forced him to concentrate even more on his own ideas. There were so many layers, details found in surprising places—a single leaf that, upon closer inspection, looked like a sea creature; a tangle of bushes that hid a nest of children.
It had scared her before, but now she read her husband’s secrets. His heart spoke to compassion, to nurturing, to finding a safe place for every lost and frightened soul. Orla wished, how she wished, that she’d seen it before—not only the thing that was encroaching on him, but the brilliance of his work. In hindsight, her praise had been hollow. He’d deserved more. She longed to lavish him with…everything. How was it possible that she would never again cook him a special meal, or scrub paint from his chin as they showered, or make love to him—the love he deserved, where she gave herself over to the power of their union. They’d been working toward that, regaining the unfettered thing they’d had before time marched away with the special colors of their early days. Now she understood—that’s how a marriage became beige, gray.