Stalking the Moon

by Angel Leigh McCoy

  To his credit, Richard didn’t answer immediately. After a moment, he crossed to sit beside me on the couch. “Colin is gone, Vivi, and he’s not coming back.” He tried to take my hand, but I pulled away.

  I repeated, “Was it Colin’s body in the pictures?”

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Richard exclaimed. “Listen to yourself. You’re obsessed. If this doesn’t prove to you that you’re not ready to leave the Center, then I don’t know what else I can say. I’ll simply have to take matters into my own hands. I’m sorry, Viviane, but you can’t be trusted to make decisions for yourself.”

  He stood, straightened his tie, and returned to his chair across from me.

  I said again, my voice steady and clear, “Was it Colin in the pictures?”

  Angry, he glared at me. He resembled a wild panther, cornered, and ready to strike. “Yes,” he said. “Is that what you want me to say? Yes, it was Colin. Beyond a doubt. He’s gone, and it’s time for you to get on with your life.”

  That sealed it. That was what I needed to move on to Phase Three. Richard had gone too far. That morning, when I’d shown the photo I stole to Lettie and Corona, they’d reacted just as I’d expected. Lettie had confirmed that it was Jaxon in the photo.

  I wondered how many other things Richard had lied about over the years to keep me near him, how many other manipulations he’d performed on my mind to keep me under his control. A volatile mix of sadness and anger at his undeniable betrayal festered. Later, I’d examine it more closely, but at that moment, I didn’t have time.

  I stood. “You’re right. It’s time for me to get on with my life.” I slung my bag over my shoulder and headed for the door. The bag was part of my plan to get Richard off my back.

  With three strides, he was beside me, one hand on the bag, one on my arm.

  “Where are you going?” he demanded.

  “Away from here,” I told him, matter-of-factly, “to get on with my life.”

  “What's in the bag?” He started trying to pry it from my shoulder.

  I fought to hold onto it, but not too hard. Just enough so it seemed convincing.

  He took it away from me and carried it to his desk.

  I protested, as he'd expect me to do. “That’s my stuff. You have no right.”

  “I have every right,” he said. “I’m your doctor. I can look into any nook or cranny I want, if I feel it serves your health.” He opened the bag and began to pull things from it—clothes, toiletries, food bars, a twenty-dollar bill, and a photo of Colin—things I'd need to run away.

  I watched him empty the contents onto his desk.

  He picked up the money and waved it at me. “How far do you think you’d get with twenty dollars? Have you lost your mind?”

  Richard didn’t see the irony in his question, though I did.

  I replied, “Apparently so.” I waited a beat, then commanded, “Give me back my stuff.”

  He put the clothes, toiletries, and food bars back in the bag. The money and photo of Colin, he left on his desk.

  “If I can’t trust you, then I’m going to have to keep these things. It’s for your own good.” Richard offered me the bag. At that moment, I knew I'd won. He thought he was still in charge.

  I ignored the bag and made a grab for the items on the desktop.

  Richard put his body between me and them. “No. You can’t have them.” He shoved the bag at my chest so that I had to take it. “I won’t let you run away from me, Viviane.”

  I glared. “I hate you.” That, I meant.

  He flinched, and for a moment, I thought I saw a shimmer of remorse in his eyes. He turned his back to me. “No, you don’t. You’re just angry.”

  I backed toward the door. “I want my stuff,” I insisted.

  “We can talk about it later,” Richard said. “Once we’ve both calmed down.” He opened a cabinet on the back wall and began putting my things in it.

  By then, I’d reached the bureau by the door, and with one eye on him, I snatched the box holding Jaxon Bellonescu’s urn and quickly slipped it into my bag.

  Richard closed the cabinet, locked it, removed the key, and turned toward me. “I’ll give your things back as soon as you’ve proven you can be trusted.”

  I held the gym bag with both hands behind my back.

  Richard came toward me and entered my personal space. He backed me against the door, took my chin in his hand, and looked me right in the eyes.

  “I want you to remember one thing, Vivi.” His voice was deadly serious. “If you try to run away, I’ll find you, but you’ll have damaged my trust permanently. I don’t see how, after that, I could allow you to see your mother. You’d be too much of a risk. I have to protect her.”

  I shoved aside the acidic response I wanted to give him, and instead said, “No, don’t do that. Please. I’ll be good.”

  “I know you will. You’re a good girl.” He reached behind me, and for a moment, I was afraid he was going for the bag, but he just grabbed the doorknob and turned it. “I’m trusting you to get back to the Women’s Wing on your own,” he said. “We’ll talk at your next session.”

  “I’ll go straight back,” I promised.

  “Good,” he said.

  As I walked away, I held the bag to my belly, but I didn’t hear the door shut, and before long, Richard called after me.

  “Oh, and Viviane,” he said. “Detective Hayward is coming with a warrant tomorrow. He’s going to ask you some questions.”

  I didn’t look back, and when I reached the top of the stairs, his door closed with a firm click.

  ♦♦♦

  CHAPTER 30

  I spent the rest of the day behaving normally. It was a good call. Richard came by several times to check on me, whenever he dropped into the Women’s Wing to pick up one of his patients. He ghosted around my room, looking at things, as if searching for something.

  He found nothing incriminating. I'd hidden my purse in Mom's room and the urn box in Corona's.

  Around five p.m., I started watching out my mom’s window for Richard to leave the building. I saw him go and hid behind the curtain. He drove from the lot as usual.

  After that, it was Nurse Linda on Viviane Watch. She seemed unusually concerned with my mood, and I suspected that Richard had told her I was feeling suicidal.

  We had dinner in the dining room. Women from the other two floors were there as well, creating a chaotic clatter. The usual group sat together at the same long table.

  Polly and Mrs. Dufour were conspicuously missing. Their absence broke the rhythm. The friendly banter was gone. Any attempts to resurrect it ended with a gap that couldn’t be breached, a spot where either Polly or Mrs. Dufour would have chimed in to keep the conversation going.

  It didn’t matter. That night, I had a particular topic I wanted to broach. Once we had all been served, and the staff had moved away to a safe distance, I announced, “I’m going to break out of here.”

  Five pairs of eyes turned to me. Only Una and my mom kept their gazes elsewhere, though I knew Una was listening. She had stopped chasing her food with her spoon.

  “Why?” asked Eun Hee. “In here, you can roll around in the lusty, luscious joy of insanity. Out there, it’s dark and dreary, and they punish you for being different.”

  “I have things I need to do,” I said. “I have to find my fiancé.”

  Dahlia said, “Yeah, I give you a week, assuming you can even get out. You’ll be back.”

  “How are you going to do it?” Calla asked.

  “I’ve got a plan. I’m leaving tonight, but I need your help.”

  Calla’s eyes got big. “My help?”

  I nodded. “Everyone's. I need help from all of you.” I laid out my plan for them and explained their roles. They all agreed. Even big Una, who spent her days standing in corners mumbling to herself, gave me a nod of acknowledgement. It was the first time I’d ever seen her directly communicate with anyone.

  ♦

  I spen
t the rest of the evening with my mom. While she worked on her journal, I went over my plan again and again, looking for holes in it.

  It was always so peaceful around Mom. Unless she was reading to me, she rarely spoke. In the early days, I had done everything I could to engage her in conversation or even just to get her to respond. I failed miserably, month after month, year after year. In the end, I gave that up. I eventually learned to abide in the silence, and I found it healing. It comforted me to be in her presence, as a child should be comforted by the sight and smells of their mother. If she had taught me anything over the years, it was that you didn’t need to talk all the time.

  I sat in front of the mirrored dresser, and she brushed my hair. I had changed since coming to the Center. My face had sunken in on itself, cheeks and eyes shadowed. My hair had grown. It hung a couple inches past my shoulders, thickening and straightening the longer it got.

  I teetered at the edge of a precipice. My life, up to that point, had been so predictable. Jake Lamb was right. I’d been tethered to the Center long before I’d moved in, and I hadn’t experienced much outside that orbit.

  I had resigned myself to a future that involved caring for my mom to the end and marrying a man I’d met on the Center’s lawn. I hadn’t dared dream any bigger for myself or for them.

  More recently, however, I’d begun to dream. Although my escape plan wasn’t going exactly as I’d hoped, it wasn’t failing either. So many things could have gone wrong. I could've ended up incarcerated at the Center for the rest of my life—or worse, Richard could've followed through on his threat, and I might never have seen my mom again. That was a possibility I couldn’t ignore.

  How could I have known that the stakes would get so high? And I had no idea how it would all turn out. What mattered was that I had to try. If I hadn't, then I’d have been living in as dark a catatonic state as Mom was.

  I’d have been lying if I’d said I wasn’t terrified and excited in equal measure.

  ♦

  My hair shone after an hour of brushing, its golden highlights emerging and making it almost pretty in the light from the lamp.

  Mom was the first to move away. She put the hairbrush down and returned to her seat at the desk, where she picked up her journal and thumbed through it.

  I took a magazine to the couch. I didn’t intend to read, but I felt it would look better if Nurse Linda poked her head in again.

  Not five minutes had passed before my mom started reading aloud. “Kypris could feel the life growing inside her.”

  I set aside the magazine and stretched out. I hadn’t heard this before—it was new, maybe even something she’d written that day.

  She read:

  Chance had disappeared as abruptly as he had arrived, never to be seen by Kypris again. In his wake, he left uncertainty and a child. When Kypris told her mother about her lover, it took no time to figure out the child's fate. Kypris’s mother, Moira, knew of the Gehenna realm. She knew more about it than Kypris did, and she knew that if the lord of Gehenna ever discovered there was a child born half of darkness and half of light, he would take it away to where Kypris wouldn't be allowed to follow.

  All the better to hide, Moira became Mirabella, and Kypris took the name Gisèle. Secrets piled upon secrets, cloaking the family from view, until one day, the child made its will known. It was ready to come into the world.

  The baby was born in Mirabella’s sanctuary, upon silk sheets, with pixies in attendance. The child cried her first cry to a wave of applause from tiny fairy hands.

  Those were the best days. Gisèle had given birth to a daughter and watched with eager eyes as the baby awoke to wonder. She named her child Viviane, invoking life itself to protect and guide her, to give her the strength she would need to change the world.

  But they couldn’t stay there forever. Word came that the evil queen of Gehenna was looking for the child. She could track Mirabella and would do so.

  Mirabella and Gisèle had sobbed together that night, for they knew many years would pass before they saw each other again. The pixies sang lullabies and braided their hair, but it could not ease their pain. The next morning, Gisèle packed up the baby and went to live with her father.

  The evil queen would never find Abraham Rose. Abraham had already been hidden for a quarter century. Such was the power of the magick that cocooned him, and so long as Gisèle and Viviane were under his care, the queen could not find them either.

  For seven years, seven months, and seven days, the Rose women lived under Abraham’s roof, and Gisèle watched her daughter grow. They talked for hours and made up stories that they then acted out, stories about kittens, fairies, and flying horses—stories about trolls, demons, and the bones of little children, stories about a prince who rode a giant turtle and kept cupcakes in his pockets, just in case, and stories about an evil queen and the princess who had to stay hidden from her—forever.

  Then, one day, the evil queen’s scouts came calling. Gisèle had let her guard down. She had allowed herself to believe that enough time had passed, but she had forgotten that time did not soften evil.

  When the scouts caught her scent, Gisèle did the only thing she could do. She left her daughter with Abraham and led the dogs away. They followed her trail, baying their hunger, and when they caught up with her, they cornered her in the darkest of woods. There, they kept her prisoner until the queen's son could tumble her off the edge of the world and force her into Gehenna.

  The raven man made one mistake, however. He did not see that Gisèle had anchored herself. She kept one foot on the floor, one hand on the wall, one thought ever touching the ones she loved, and thus, her soul was divided.

  Stretched thin across the barrier, she could shift between realms, though at great cost to herself. The evil queen imprisoned her, but like Rapunzel, Gisèle had a link with the outside. The tether grew from her heart, not from her head. Hers was the love she had for Viviane. It alone, kept her from being lost, completely, forever.

  I didn’t dare make a noise or movement, for fear of startling Mom into stopping. I wanted her to keep going, to tell me more, so much more.

  When it became obvious that Mom was finished reading, I got up off the couch and crossed to sit at her feet. She'd retreated back into herself.

  The journal lay open on the desk. I re-read the words but understood them no better. Eventually, I rested my arms and head upon Mom’s knees. I lifted one of her hands and placed it on the back of my neck. It lay there, still, cool, and heavy.

  I must have fallen asleep, because I awoke to a quiet voice. It was my mom. She whispered, “Viviane. Viviane, wake up, sweetheart. Wake up.”

  I blinked my eyes open and wondered if I were dreaming.

  She said, her voice so quiet that I almost couldn’t hear it, “Wake up. I have to talk to you.” Her fingers wove into my hair.

  I was awake in an instant, wide awake. “Mom?”

  She smiled. “I’m sorry about Polly.”

  I envisioned the whippoorwill girl who would never grow up. “Me too.”

  Mom tilted her head to one side, expression soft and loving. She touched her fingertips to my cheek. “There’s so much I wish I could tell you and so little time. One day, you and I will have all the time in the world.”

  “That would be nice.” My heart hammered. I’d never seen her so lucid.

  She nodded in agreement. “But not tonight. There are gears in motion that you know nothing about, age-old debts and grudges that I’ve tried to keep you safe from.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Shhh,” she whispered. “I don’t have time to explain. You have to trust me. Leave this place. Go to Wyrdwood. You’ll be safer there. And no matter what, stop looking for Colin. His danger will become your danger, compounded.”

  “I don’t understand, Mom.”

  “You will,” she said, then looked over her shoulder at the wall. “I have to go.” She brought her gaze back to mine and whispered quickly, �
��I love you.”

  “Mom!” I pushed up onto my knees and put my hands on her shoulders, but she was already gone. Her eyes shifted and a light went out inside her.

  I sat petting her hand for nearly an hour, waiting, hoping she would come back. I didn’t beg or even coax—I just waited, but she didn’t return.

  When the time came, I helped her into her nightgown. Doubts nagged me. I wasn’t sure that Richard wouldn’t take his anger out on her when he discovered I'd run away. I just hoped that my email to the lawyers would keep him in line.

  Eventually, Corona stuck her head in and asked, “Are you ready? They’ll be checking beds soon.”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t move. I sat there, paralyzed with fear, afraid to leave my mom, afraid that I’d never see her again.

  Moving to my side, Corona said, “It’s going to be okay.” She took my hand.

  “Famous last words,” I replied without thinking. I bent and kissed Mom good-bye, rubbing my cheek against hers.

  I whispered, “I love you,” then accompanied Corona into the hall.

  The door to Mom’s room closed with a click of finality that sent a shiver rocketing down my spine.

  ♦♦♦

  CHAPTER 31

  Corona went to her room, and I to mine. I got into bed, turned out the lights, and pretended to sleep. When someone looked in on me, I didn’t move, and they were appeased.

  Third shift came on duty at 11 p.m., and the staff roster was reduced to a nurse, an orderly, and a couple security personnel who roamed the halls. Every night, like clockwork, tick tock, Nurse Andrea made her rounds and then joined Marsha, the orderly, in the rec room with the TV.

  Nurse Andrea also peeked in at me before moving on to the next room.

  That was my cue. I got quietly out of bed.

  I changed from my pajamas into jeans and several layered shirts for warmth, put my hair in a bun, and strapped my purse to my torso. It held my cell phone, all my photos of Colin, the evidence, and the money Lettie had given me, minus the twenty I'd used to bait Richard.