by Nick Lake
The city attorney is also standing very still.
Then he turns to the guard, but not so much that I can’t see his lips. We didn’t know she was deaf? he says. Seriously? This wasn’t information anyone thought might be useful?
Chapter 44
The psychiatrist is back—he just gave me a shot of something, and now I’m sitting on the bed all loose, all warm, all cotton-wool headed.
The city attorney is speaking to him, and I guess they don’t know that I read lips, or they don’t care, because they are just standing there talking about me.
It doesn’t make sense, says the city attorney. The Watsons never said she was deaf.
Maybe they didn’t know, says the psychiatrist.
She was two, for god’s sake! They wouldn’t have noticed she wasn’t speaking?
Don’t ask me, says the psychiatrist. Maybe she developed it later. But full deafness … I mean, if she is fully deaf … that’s usually congenital.
We need to get a translator in here, a … you know …
Sign language interpreter?
Yes.
The psychiatrist nods and leaves the room. The city attorney has his head in his hands again; I figure he had other plans for this weekend. Maybe he has a cabin too, I think.
He looks so sad, so vulnerable, that I get up and walk very slowly over to him, or kind of hop, actually, because I don’t want to put weight on my leg. Even moving like this, undignified, it’s like my feet aren’t touching the floor, like there’s a layer of feathers between me and the ground.
I keep walking. He is so far away.
In my mind is moonlight and stars, sunshine and flood. I am a tree, I think. I am rooted to the earth and that is all the mother I need, I move in years not seconds.
He is still a million miles away.
I go through all the seasons in the blink of an eyelid: I am weighed down by apples; I sleep under frozen earth; I burst into green life under warm air.
Then I am there, in front of him, and he flinches away from me, and the guard, who is still there but not important to me, steps forward.
I shape my lips. I can do it—(Mom) taught me, (Mom) would say yes, that’s right, or no, that’s not, here’s how you should tap your teeth, here on the palate is where your tongue goes.
(Mom) spent months on that.
I look at the city attorney—he has kind eyes, one blue, one green, not that this makes either more or less kind. It’s called heterochromia; my (mom) taught me that.
He doesn’t look scared. He still looks sorry for me.
I don’t like doing it, because I know it sounds weird, no matter what (Mom) says, I know it’s freaky. But I say it anyway, I say it with my mouth.
I’ve been having very strange dreams, I say.
I’m scared, I say.
Who am I? I say.
And then I black out.
Blackness
Blackness
Then …
Stars.
Chapter 45
Before my eyes open my ears register the sound of the crying Child, the background resonance of the Dreaming, impossible to ignore now that we are so close to the Crone’s castle.
Then my eyes do open and I see Mark—we’re in the clearing still, with the open cage.
I take a step toward Mark, furious.
Shelby …, he says, hands out in front of him to say calm down.
No, screw you, I say. My name isn’t even Shelby, it’s Angelica.
He shakes his head. Names are unimportant. You are the Maiden.
Oh don’t give me your yoga teacher philosophical bull, I say. My mother is not my mother and you couldn’t have mentioned it? You said you were helping me.
I warned you, he says. His eyes are shiny in the starlight.
Some warning! I say. Like I was supposed to understand a coyote talking in riddles!
I can’t speak directly of your world, he says.
Oh. How handy.
I sit down quite suddenly on the ground. Anger is a wild animal inside me. I think back to the elk, dying. The elk said you played tricks, I say. You didn’t even deny it. I should have listened.
Shelby …
So why should I trust you now? How do I even know you’re telling the truth about this Crone, about the Child? When you won’t fricking tell me anything?
He splays his hands. My tricks are only to help people.
Yeah, right, I say. That’s why the elks were so afraid of you.
I am Coyote, he says. I am a predator. That is why they fear me.
You’re more than that, I say. You are the son of the sky and the earth, you said. You are older than the world.
Yes.
So tell me what I’m supposed to do.
You’re supposed to kill the Crone. You’re supposed to rescue the Child.
Seriously? I say. Do you have any idea what has happened to me?
Yes. That is why you must do these things. Or the world will end.
Oh please, the world is not going to end if I don’t do your stupid quest.
Yes, he says sadly. It will.
I sneer at him. I’m not going any farther with you, I say. The fury is tearing at my insides now—I think of his fear of the iron. If he was so powerful, if he was so old, if he made the fricking moon and the sun, or stole them or whatever, shouldn’t he be able to help some helpless little child, even if it was a trick.
And the Child, the one I can hear crying—if he cares so much then why doesn’t he just go and save it himself, stand up to the Crone? He’s supposedly in charge of the rain or whatever so why is this place so barren, so parched? Why are the elks wasting away?
Even the thorns look wasted, dehydrated.
Suddenly I hate him, and I am dimly aware that some of this hate is not for him, that it’s for the men who plucked me out of the night outside the cabin, and threw me in a cell, who told me that my (mother) stole me as a baby
(like a changeling like a fairy child)
but I don’t care. I throw the hate at Mark, instead, Mark with his fricking infuriating fortune cookie pronouncements.
Go, I say. Leave me here.
I’m not leaving you, he says. I am here to help you in your quest.
GO, I say, not in capitals like that but in a dangerous, low, quiet tone that I can’t reproduce in type.
Mark clearly registers it though because he nods, slowly. All right, he says. If you change your mind, you know which direction to walk in.
Then he sets off, out of the clearing. He doesn’t look back—he moves away from me, and as he moves he melts downward, head and arms folding in, and then he’s a coyote running swiftly through the trees, large and strong, heading forward, farther into the Forest of Thorns, toward the castle.
Then gone.
Oh, I think.
Oh, now I’m on my own.
In the Dreaming.
Then I hear a sound—like a sighing, on the wind. I look up and there’s a huge bird circling above me, a hawk.
No, I think: an eagle.
Its wingspan is easily my body height, and it’s getting lower, gyring down toward me, I can see the white of its head feathers, the brown of its wings, the detail and tracery of its feathers. It opens its beak and emits a piercing cry, Kiiiiiiiii.
The noise of it is unbelievable, like a stabbing in my ears.
Then the eagle folds its wings, and I start to scrabble at the ground with my hands, trying to get up, trying to get my legs under me and to piston myself up into a running—
Too late.
I glance up and the eagle is nearly on me, its talons out, like chef’s knives, its eyes hard and unforgiving as stones, its sharp beak wide open, and the terror must crack the glass of the trance because just like that—
Chapter 46
I wake up, drenched in sweat, in my cell.
Scenes follow, in some order or other.
I don’t really know what’s going on.
Someone comes and hands me
some sheets of paper, an old-ish woman who looks like a librarian. I have to fill in the problems while she watches, and times with a stopwatch. It’s like an IQ test. All the time, I have a feeling like I’m on a train that just stopped.
What I mean: my (mom) took me on a train once. I don’t know when it was. I guess maybe when we moved from Albuquerque to Phoenix. And there’s this thing that happens, when the train stops—because it’s so heavy, because its momentum is so great, the body of it keeps moving forward, just slightly, before settling back onto the wheels; you feel it in your stomach.
That’s what I feel, as I fill in the test, as I do anything right now—like I’ve stopped, in my tracks, but there’s a part of me that’s still moving, still lurching forward, not yet settled.
When I’m done, and she’s looking through it, she frowns.
What’s wrong? I say, with my mouth, because the interpreter has not arrived yet.
The woman doesn’t understand—I can’t hear myself, of course, but I guess it’s not too clear when I speak.
What did I do wrong? I say slowly.
The woman’s eyebrows unknit a little, but she is still looking at me curiously. Nothing, she says. You didn’t get any wrong. That’s not … It means you’re very, very smart.
I want to say, I’m deaf, I’m not a fricking moron. But I don’t, so instead I just glare at her. I want a TV, I say.
A TV? I’m not sure—
I’m not under arrest, am I? I say. So I want a TV. Or some books. Whatever.
She leaves, and a little while later, they bring me a little TV—an old one, three-dimensional instead of flat. Things that are old take up more space than things that are new. Things that are new are flat and thin. Like my life.
A couple of janitor-y type guys set it up and hand me the remote. I flick through the channels for a while. I’m on, like, channel 4,000 when I see Luke standing outside a building, which is all metal and glass and about four stories. The building I’m in, I realize.
Luke is wearing a bandage on his hand, and I feel a pang of guilt. He doesn’t look happy to be talking to these people—there’s someone standing next to him, someone official looking, and I figure he’s been made to give an interview, to at least keep the press happy for a bit.
Because of course, I think. This is big news.
I am big news.
I look at the remote, and work out how to put the closed captions on. There’s a delay, then they come up on the screen, blue against the picture.
And what about your time with this woman and her daughter, did they—
Luke’s face goes still. He leans in close to the mike. The woman interviewing him, she has platinum blond hair and very full red lips, smiles, a predator’s smile, because he’s about to say something serious, something personal, some kind of media gold crap.
I will say this only once, Luke says in blue closed captions. I will not speak about them. That girl deserves her piracy—privacy.
I laugh. My … I stop myself. Shaylene. The woman who … The woman. She would have liked that one. I am a pirate now.
Then I glance back at Luke. He is holding his arm up now.
No comment, he says. No comment.
Then he walks away. The woman, the reporter, is a pro, but even so she can’t stop herself from scowling slightly; she’d been expecting some kind of scoop.
I switch off the TV, feeling kind of surprised. I mean, I thought Luke would love talking about it. The time he got mixed up with a baby stealer and her freaky deaf daughter, and got his hand shish-kebabbed.
Oh well. You never know with people. It’s not like Luke is at the forefront of my mind, anyway.
After that, some guy in a green uniform comes in—he’s got a tray of food: a Coke, a banana, and … mac and cheese.
Mac and fricking cheese.
Worst. Day. Ever.
Chapter 47
When you remember being a young child you don’t remember anything whole—just little bits and pieces, here and there. Like a bill, something printed on thin paper, left in a jacket pocket for a year, more, and then you find it and most of the words are faded, just the odd gray mark spared.
Sunlight slanting through a window, on a day when something clicked inside you, and you knew it was fall—something about the granularity of the light. The feel of a bigger hand holding yours as you walked down the street, jumping over cracks. Splashing in the pool, the light making jewels on the surface.
People say smell is the sense most closely linked to memory, but they’re full of it. Sure, a smell can trigger a memory. But when you look back on your childhood, you don’t think, hey, I remember when I smelled gas for the first time, at that gas station, do you? No. There’s a clue in the phrasing—you LOOK back.
When I look back at my very early childhood, I see parts, little lost moments, like Jeffrey Dahmer has hacked up the past with a saw. But there’s one that’s still whole; one bubble of time, glistening, unpopped.
I walk with my (mom) to a playground, somewhere. Maybe in Albuquerque? I don’t know. I know there are a couple of trees, and the grass is brown and dry, so it must be summer. The playground is pretty much empty; it’s a school day. I’m three, maybe four. I feel very small, next to my (mom); I remember that. I have a feeling like I’m tiny but the whole world is inside me, this contradictory feeling; it’s almost like a dizziness.
I’m not sure what we do first. I guess (Mom) pushes me on the swing, something like that. My memory has decided that the first part is not important. But it has kept the next part, hugging it close, like some sentimental object it doesn’t want to let go of, to let slip into the blackness.
I walk over to the slide. It’s a big one, bigger than I’m used to. It’s set on like a hill, man-made, instead of having steps up to it. I look at it, and I feel like I’m looking at a building or something, it’s so high up. The sun gleams on it, whitely. It’s as if the metal is melting.
Too high, I say, with my hands—I guess (Mom) has already been teaching me sign.
It’s okay, honey, she says. It’s just like any slide, only bigger.
No, I say.
But you love slides, says (Mom).
I look at it again. I shake my head.
You want to go on it with me? says (Mom). She takes my hand. She’s smiling down at me, her head blotting out the sun, like she’s filling the sky.
I nod.
She picks me up and carries me to the top of the little hill of dirt—there are scrubby little clumps of grass on it, the whole thing worn away by kids climbing up it. When we get to the top, she sits down on the slide, then puts me on her lap, and we—
go—
whoosh, down to the bottom, her arms tight around me, and in my memory it’s like dropping through space itself, like being a shooting star, but belonging, at the same time; a shooting star in a family of meteors maybe, drifting through nothingness together; like a safe kind of falling.
This is the lesson of the slide: it’s possible to feel fear, for your stomach to come loose and float up to your throat, but with no real danger.
Anyway.
When we get to the bottom, I look up at (Mom). Again, I say.
And so she carries me up again, and we go down, I don’t know how many times. Over and over. Just the two of us, me on her knees, wrapped around by her, until the sun started to set, pulling long shadows from the swingset and the seesaw. Then she walked me home, her arm holding me, and the moon was full above us and it made me feel lonely to look at it; lonely and cold, which only made the warmth of her around my shoulders even better, even more like home.
The question is:
Knowing what I know now, knowing that my mom was never my mom, is this memory real? I don’t mean, did it happen. Because I’m pretty sure it did.
I mean:
How am I supposed to feel about it? What am I supposed to do with it? Before, it meant certain things in my head, and it was the image that came into my mind when those things were
spoken. Things like: belonging; things like: safety.
Now it means lies.
Chapter 48
I want a lawyer, I say. I am signing, to the interpreter, who is a mousy woman with bad hair, who I bet has a whole load of cats. She isn’t deaf, she told me. But she had a deaf brother, growing up. That’s how come she signs.
Her name is Melany, with a y like that. When you’re deaf, you know how people’s names are written. She made a joke about how her parents couldn’t spell very well, which I guess is a big ice-breaker for her in her job, and I laughed because it seemed like that was what she wanted.
We’re in a bigger room now, with a table and chairs and coffee—maybe they figured the cell was not good for me. It’s, I don’t know, two days later.
The reason I needed Melany is, they—the CART team, the psychologists, everyone—have like a quota of one thousand questions an hour they have to ask me, otherwise there will be untold consequences, or that’s what it feels like anyway. Questions about Shaylene, did she abuse me, did she touch me inappropriately, did she ever, did she sometimes, did she—
So many questions.
But anyway, at least now we’ve moved from my cell to this bigger room, which makes it feel less like an interrogation, and I’m trying to tell myself that instead, they’re just concerned about me and want to make sure I’m not screwed up in some major way. Which of course I am, but not in the way they’re afraid of. I mean it’s not like (Mom) used to batter me with a hot iron or anything.
We walked down a corridor to get here; the whole decor in this place is very neutral, very every-office: white walls, chrome, pine. It’s like having your life turned upside down at an insurance company.
You haven’t committed a crime, says FBI Special Agent Deacon, through the mousy woman. I haven’t seen the city attorney since forever, and I guess maybe he’s in trouble for telling me too suddenly about who I really was. Whatever the reason, it’s Deacon who seems to be in charge now. He has silver hair, but his skin is smooth and his eyes are sharp. Like weapons. Right now, it seems they’re on my side, though, which is good.