08 Illusion

by Frank Peretti

  But besides there being so few jobs available, there was one nagging little hitch she couldn’t get around, and she ran smack into it every time she was handed a job application: that little blank space on the application that required her Social Security number. Mandy, born in 1951, thought she had one, but of course Mandy born in 1951 thought a lot of things that weren’t necessarily so and were best not talked about. Eloise, born in 1991, did not have a Social Security number, and since she had no ID, driver’s license, or even a birth certificate, she had no way of getting one. Too bad—bummer!—because it would have to be Eloise who got hired.

  Too bad the Gypsy Girl idea didn’t work out. She didn’t need an application or a Social Security number for that, just a can with TIPS written on it.

  Who was that guy? What if he was right about everything?

  She cleaned up the shower, put her towel in the laundry basket, gathered up her toiletries—courtesy of the Durhams, God bless them!—and went to her bedroom, a nice room with two beds for two girls, but occupied by only herself at the moment. Her deck of cards was lying on the dresser, banished from her life for, oh, forty minutes or so, at least until she reached for the box once again, pulled out the cards, and started shuffling them from her right hand to her left in an overhand shuffle and a three-way cut; reviewing how to do a double undercut, left hand to right; controlling the top card, controlling the bottom card, retaining the top stock—all the things Daddy first showed her and she knew since she was in junior high …

  Now, what did the man on the sidewalk show her? Cover the break. Be more subtle. Watch that right side, don’t look at the cards so much when you shuffle them …

  She sat on the bed and went through that card trick again. And again. And again. Her hands were warm and fluid, and the cards were so obedient… .

  “No way!” Darci, a lanky blonde fresh out of jail for drug possession, had the best expression on her face a magician could hope for: eyes wide with the white showing, mouth dropped so far open you could see her fillings. She was holding the deck of cards in her hand and had just discovered her selection, the three of hearts, faceup in the middle of the deck.

  “How did you do that?” squealed Rhea, a cute and hefty Hispanic who’d just fled from an abusive husband. She was the hairdresser who cut and colored Eloise’s hair for free.

  Ah, what a feeling! Eloise smiled, receiving her cards back, lithely shuffling them and doing a waterfall, just milking the moment. That trick had gone so well.

  So the guy on the street was right. Now she wanted to remember the other things he told her.

  “Okay,” said Sally, still applauding. “Let’s get going on dinner.”

  Sally and her husband, Micah, had been youth pastors at the same church that ran the thrift store, but they saw the need for a halfway house and mentor home for young women and opened up their place. Micah went to work for a graphics firm to keep everything afloat; Sally spent the days counseling and loving the girls back to wholeness.

  The house had its daily routines, rules, and requirements, and each girl took her turn with every chore according to the rotation chart on the kitchen wall. All three helped prepare dinner, but two—tonight it was Darci and Eloise—branched off each night to set and clear the table and do the dishes.

  Usually Eloise preferred to do the cooking, but this evening something happened with the silverware and … forget about the cooking! It started innocently enough with the worship music playing on the stereo—uh, the home entertainment system. Like much of the worship music at the church and in this house, it was a catchy tune she’d not heard before, and it got her dancing a little, which spread to her hands as she set the first knife on the table with a graceful little flick of her wrist. The knife slid on the tablecloth and came to rest perfectly aligned beside the plate and, she noticed, right on the beat of the music. Freaky coincidence. Wild.

  She moved on with jazzy grace to the next place setting and set the next knife with the same jazzy flourish of her wrist. Sliiiide … ding! That knife lay down even and straight as if she’d trained it to do so, and once again, on the beat of the music. Was there something about the music? Maybe it was giving her just the right rhythm and moves to plant the silverware. She started singing along with it, feeling it out, mostly ta-da-da-da-dee-ing because she didn’t know the words, and pitched the other three knives.

  Sliiiiide … ding!

  Sliiiide … ding!

  Sliiide … ding!

  Darci had been around Eloise long enough. She didn’t find such behavior unusual. She just kept setting out the plates, salad bowls, and glasses.

  What about the spoons?

  On the next circuit around the table, Eloise tried something much chancier: sliding the spoons in against the knives from a sideways direction.

  The first spoon tumbled and went crooked. All right, it’s a normal world, the expected happened: it didn’t work. She straightened it, then addressed the four other spoons in her left hand. “Okay, guys. See how he’s lying there? Just for grins, let’s see you do it.”

  She dropped the next spoon slightly to the right of where it should be, no more than an inch above the table, and with a musically motivated rotation of her wrist.

  The spoon skittered along the cloth and came to rest perfectly aligned with the knife. Eloise let out a squeak.

  Darci looked at her.

  “Sorry.”

  She tried the next spoon. Plunk, skitter, ding! She almost made another noise, but held it in.

  By the time she was setting out the forks she was really getting the hang of … something. The last fork slid about four inches sideways and was crooked, but straightened out as it came to a stop beside the plate.

  Now, this was heavy.

  chapter

  * * *

  12

  Nine-thirty. Dane sat in his four-for-sixty-while-they-last patio chair, his computer glowing at him from the super-sale patio table with the hole in the middle, and let his thoughts and fingers amble where they would. This was it, he figured, the grieving process. As he thought it, he wrote it, and he found it helped.

  She was still beautiful, I kid you not. Yes, she was fifty-nine. Her eyes kept the crinkle that smiling had put there; her hair was mostly blond from a bottle; the sun had deepened her freckles and coarsened her arms and back.

  But there was nothing like seeing her sitting at breakfast with the morning sun at her back and her hair a corona about her head; nothing like the curve of her hips, as smooth as a classical phrase whenever she draped them with a dress, framed herself in a doorway, even pushed a grocery cart. There was nothing like the pleasant roundness of her breasts under a sweater or her body against mine, that close to no other for forty years.

  Was I happy? You bet I was happy.

  Nine forty-five. Eloise sat on her bed in the soft light of her bedside lamp, flipping a quarter, part of that day’s earnings.

  “Heads,” she called in midflip. She caught the coin, slapped it on the back of her hand, uncovered it …

  Heads.

  She flipped it again. “Heads.”

  Heads.

  “Heads.”

  Heads.

  “Heads.”

  Heads. She put her hand over her mouth to keep it quiet.

  Pretty lucky.

  No, extremely lucky. Her last toss made fifteen heads in a row.

  She didn’t know how she did it other than just wanting it to happen, like touching the coin without really touching it.

  And I suppose I should be honest with myself while I try to understand what happened in Coeur d’Alene today. A part of being lonely, I suppose, or perhaps needing to be needed, or perhaps for no particular reason other than her being a fledgling magician and my being … what? The wise old mentor? I just couldn’t stay out of it, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

  Dane had to pause a moment, sit, think, and try to make sense of himself. He thought of calling Dr. Kessler but put that thought aside. What happ
ened to him that day could have happened to anybody, trauma or no trauma, and he’d ended his pain medication days ago. It had to happen. She was a magician and …

  It could be what Dr. Kessler was talking about.

  Oh, come on!

  He decided to pour himself another cup of decaf from a little coffeemaker he bought just to buy some time. When he sat down and faced his computer again, his thoughts hadn’t changed.

  All right, I’ll admit it: She reminded me of Mandy. Her shtick was silly, ill-timed, ill-located, poorly done; her outfit was hodgepodge, the makeup was stagey, and I could tell she didn’t believe it herself… .

  But how many people, young or old, would have taken such a chance, gone out on such a narrow limb, just put it all out there the way she did? Mandy was one of the few I’ve ever known.

  Maybe he should call Dr. Kessler.

  Oh, it was over now. He’d probably never see her again. It was an interesting phenomenon, looking into that girl’s eyes and … he must have subconsciously loaded his own memories into what he was seeing. That’s why the eyes looked so much like Mandy’s used to look when she was troubled, when she was trying to figure something out, when she was fascinated. The voice, too, so much like Mandy’s when she was goofing around, trying to do a stagey accent …

  So what’s Kessler going to do if I do call her, charge me by the hour and send me a bill?

  Forget it. Today’s over, she’s gone, it was a unique grieving experience, something to remember with interest, maybe write about, maybe share with another widower someday to compare notes.

  I wonder … what if … ?

  Eloise tried it. She set the quarter to spinning on the top of the dresser and then watched it … and watched it … and watched it … and as long as she stayed with it, somehow connected with it, it never slowed, it never wobbled. When she “let go,” the spin decayed and the quarter wah-wah-wobbled down to a stop. She stood it on edge, flicked it with her finger to set it spinning again, and this time, with her eyes and will locked on it and her body unconsciously leaning along, she made the spinning quarter move toward the rear of the dresser and back to the front, then back and forth again, then in a circle, then in a square. Upon her command—or whatever it was she felt or did, she wasn’t sure what it was—the quarter wah-wah-wobbled down and settled—ker-plink!—on the dresser.

  She rubbed the side of her face, thinking, trying to deal with this. Was it really happening, or was it from the same bag of insanity as thinking Nixon was president and the war in Vietnam was still going on?

  The last girl to use this room left a tennis ball on the dresser. Eloise grabbed it. What to do?

  The room was carpeted, not a great place to roll a tennis ball. All the better.

  She placed it on the carpet and watched it.

  Hmm.

  Maybe if she watched from the other side …

  Ehh …

  Well, maybe if she watched it and gave it a nudge …

  It rolled slightly, bumping on the nap of the carpet until it came to rest looking tired and discouraged.

  She got down on her elbows and knees, her nose inches away from it. “Come on now, Burt. Look at all that wonderful open space in front of you. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  She tapped the ball with her finger and it rolled, bumping against the nap …

  “Come onnn!”

  It bumped against the nap, bumped again, rotated a few degrees more … and kept rolling. She crawled and followed it, her nose inches away, willing, commanding, feeling, whatever might work. “That’s it, Burt, that’s it! Keep goin’!”

  It kept rolling, faster now, until it bumped into the wall and started coming back.

  She backpedaled, drawing it after her, making it roll, and it followed her like a baby chick after its mother. Wow, if that guy I met in town could see this!

  What was that on the wall?

  She stopped and looked. The tennis ball bumped against her knee and stayed there, forgotten.

  The white paddock fence. She could see it projected on the wall … no, she could see it through the wall. The wall was thinning as if turning to glass, and just beyond it, just outside the house, was the white paddock fence, dimly visible in the night. Beyond that, the green pasture stretched like a dark expanse, and in that expanse stood the three aspens, fragmented shadows against the starry sky, leaves trembling.

  Eloise froze right then and there, still on her knees, enraptured, not taking her eyes off it. She did not want to lose this.

  The vision widened and clarified before her and beside her as the other walls of the room dissolved and she was no longer in a bedroom but outside on a clear night on a two-lane country road that vanished over a rise in one direction and dipped into an expansive, restful valley in the other. She stood slowly, turning, taking it all in. The stars above were brilliant, like diamonds on black velvet; she could recognize Perseus, Cassiopeia, Aquila, Hercules, and the Big Dipper, and all around her the forested hills traced a black, sawtoothed bite out of the sky. Here and there on the hillsides were the nighttime stars people had put there: mercury vapor lamps burning blue over driveways and barnyards, bare little bulbs on back porches, and the orange glow from the sleepy-eyed windows of ranch and farm houses. The night was so quiet; no town noise. A dog barked; another replied. The birds had all turned in.

  Just off the road from where she stood, a mercury vapor lamp illuminated a heavy wooden gate spanning a driveway. The driveway went up a hill between two white-fenced pastures, and at the top of the hill, nestled among charcoal evergreens, were the glowing cathedral windows of a house. She could just make out the angular roof, gables, and stoney facade, but the sight drew her in as if she were seeing a memory, something from a beautiful dream. It looked—it felt—so much like home, only … better.

  Was this heaven?

  Of course I have to wonder how this house would feel, how real, how complete the dream would be, if Mandy were here to grace the rooms with her spirit, her charm, her tasteful touch. She would know where everything should go, how the living room should be arranged, how the walls should be adorned, and …

  Dane paused to savor the feeling: a sweet and gentle joy he knew from mornings with Mandy, sitting at breakfast with Bibles and coffee; the sense of completeness whenever she returned home from shopping, getting her hair done, running three miles; the way he felt when he would sit beside her in church and she would place her hand on his hand …

  How home, any home, used to feel when she was there.

  He looked around the empty kitchen, and just now, in this one special moment, it didn’t feel empty. It felt … right, so right that time stopped and he fell silent and motionless, listening, sensing, almost expecting her to come through the archway into the kitchen with a little item on her mind: news of the day, who’d called, whether she liked the cut of her new costume, where the camera might be so she could capture the fall colors.

  Slowly, as if approaching a timid animal, he rose from his chair and moved by careful steps toward the kitchen, wanting to walk into that sense of her presence, that deep and wondrous something that had settled in the room. Mandy?

  She wanted to go through that gate and up that driveway. She wanted to go inside that big, beautiful house. Maybe it was heaven. Maybe the answers to all that had befallen her would fall together if she could only go there.

  She smelled something smoky, like burning leaves on the slow, cool breeze.

  The telephone rang, and against the silence of the house its warble was jarringly loud and obnoxious. Dane instantly resented the interruption … but wait. The rings came in pairs. It was the phone down at the gate.

  What if it was she?

  Mandy?

  No! The, the girl, you know, the girl I met today … the …

  Maybe you should call Kessler …

  He stopped in midthought, hand on his face. Oh, brother. Not only was he being ridiculous, he was also arguing with himself.

  And th
e phone was still ringing.

  He picked it up. “Hello?”

  She was back in her room, so suddenly she stumbled and dropped against the bed. The walls were back, the warmth of the house enveloped her, the light from the bedside lamp made her squint.

  “Hello?”

  He could hear the sound of the outdoors coming through the phone from the gate intercom, but nobody answered.

  “Hello?”

  He hung up. Weird coincidence. If it happened again, he’d have to have the gate system checked. But who would he call to do that? Shirley would know, he’d have to tell her if he remembered, maybe he should write it down, maybe he should call Kessler, but the moving van was coming tomorrow so maybe he’d better open that gate and leave it open. Was there a way to get a truck down to the barn to stash all that magic stuff? Should he worry about protecting the floors? Did he want any more coffee? …

  A zillion little realities tore him away from the moment, whatever it was. He sat once again at the table in the big, dead-quiet, empty kitchen and stared at the words on his computer. Maybe he should make a list of everything that needed to be done. Good idea. He opened a new file and tapped in the heading: Things to Do.

  Yes, everything felt normal again. Whoopee.

  Hallucinations, Eloise thought. That was something Bernadette and Karla asked her about. Did she ever have any hallucinations or delusions?