by Nick Lake
I go down on one knee, and she’s right in front of me, her face right there, her big brown eyes, her curly hair, and my hands are holding hers like they never could in my dream—it’s the end, the end I never got to, where I’m able to pick her up.
And that’s exactly what I do.
I put my arms around her, somehow I know exactly how to do it, like it’s written into my body, how to hold a child. I cradle her with one arm, under her legs, and hoist her until she sits on my hip and throws her hands around my neck and holds on tight.
She is crying again, but lightly, in a slowing rhythm, the sound of someone who has been hysterical but is calming now, calming.
I squeeze her tight.
It’s okay, I say, over and over. It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m here. I’m here. I’ve got you now. You’re safe. You’re safe.
Her sobs become a snuffle.
Become long, deep breaths.
Go quiet.
And then …
And then something very strange happens.
Chapter 82
I see it before I feel it.
The Child’s leg begins to—there is no way to say this that isn’t going to sound crazy—it begins to sink into me, into my stomach, and then her face, which is pressed into my chest, is really pressing into my chest, I mean as if my body has gone soft, has turned to something almost liquid, and the Child is being absorbed into it, into me …
I recoil, staggering back, breath catching in my lungs.
Then I start to feel it.
It doesn’t feel painful.
It feels like the most beautiful feeling in the world, like a long time ago I was split in two and now I am being sewn back together, merged back into one.
I blink, and the Child is gone.
Disappeared into me.
I stand there and I stare at the stars above me, reeling. Coyote told me to kill the Crone. To save the Child. As if it was some quest outside myself, some duty I had to face.
But.
But PLOT TWIST:
The Child was me. It was me, all along. Me, crying in a hospital for someone who was never going to come, who could never come, because I had been taken away.
But now I had come back, for myself.
I can’t move. My head is spinning, obviously not my actual head, but my thoughts, going round and round in circles, so fast, whoosh whoosh whoosh, full-on vertigo.
Then I sense something shift, something change. At first I think it’s a sound, but then I realize it isn’t. It’s … something I can smell on the air. A tang of ozone, of moisture in the atmosphere.
It’s like …
Like water is gathering, all around me. Reaching out, the molecules, to other molecules, reaching out to merge into one another.
Gathering strength.
I wait, and I watch.
Gray clouds amass overhead; lightning flickers over the woods on the horizon. And then the water comes down—hard, pouring rain. I don’t think I have ever seen rain like this before—showers, yeah, in Phoenix. But never anything like this.
I stand and stare.
It’s amazing.
And then I realize something, or rather I remember something.
I remember:
It is given to Coyote to control the rain.
I gaze at the fat drops of moisture falling all around me, and the message that is written inside each one is that Coyote is still alive, or alive again, Mark is alive. I read it, I didn’t know if it was really true, if he could come back from falling down a ravine that high, but the hissing of the rain on the ground, the wetness of it on my skin, the shimmering, almost continuous haze of it in the air all tell me that he did.
I smile.
And as I smile, I hear a howl, the beautiful sound ringing in my ears, resonating there, as sounds do in the Dreaming, and I turn to where it came from, and I look out over the ravine and there’s the form of a coyote, standing on the other side, looking right at me. Eyes glinting, lit by lightning.
The coyote seems to nod at me.
Coyote seems to nod at me.
Hey, I shout, but it’s way too far to hear. And anyway he doesn’t stay; he turns and leaps, and flows into the forest, and disappears.
I laugh, and as I laugh, I step farther over the grass and I just stand there and let the rain bless me.
People talk about rain falling through the air, like air is the default state, even in places where it rains more often than not, like the water is just passing through. But that doesn’t seem correct to me right now—right now, there’s more water than air around me, touching me, blessing me; it reveals water as the aspect of the atmosphere it always has been, liquid replacing space. The water seems to hang in suspension rather than falling: there’s so much of it, like gold flakes in tequila.
People shouldn’t talk about rain in the air, I think. Better to say: sometimes we live in air, and sometimes we live in water. It is just that it’s falling water, and we can breathe in it.
I raise my face, feeling the drops on my skin, in my hair. It’s cold, and feels as if it is entering me, changing the molecules of my body, melting something inside me, not just landing on me. Soon my T-shirt and sweatpants are soaked through.
I listen to it too, of course. Because somehow I know this is the end for me, in the Dreaming, and I want to hold this sound in my ears for as long as I can. I listen to the rain, fizzing and pattering, a glorious percussion all around me, knowing that when I leave here, I will never hear again. I savor the sound: the million little taps and splashes.
Then there is a louder noise from behind me, a crash, as of falling masonry. I turn around and see a wall of the castle collapse, tumbling in on itself, dust puffing up like an old cushion, punched. A tower curls over for a moment, seems to hover, and then falls like bombardment, divided now into separate bricks, pouring down on the mass, as more walls and roofs fall in.
In a moment, the castle is reduced to a pile of rubble, shivering with the energy of its destruction, motes and particles of it hanging in the air above the broken pieces, like the structure’s own ghost, haunting it for a moment.
At first I’m scared, I think it’s the Dreaming collapsing, coming to an end, that something has gone wrong. But then I hear Coyote howl again, and it’s a happy howl, full of freedom, full of the feel of running over open prairie, in the rain, and I realize that I was wrong.
It’s just my Dreaming that is ending.
Because I don’t need it anymore.
Then I start to see the very grass beneath my feet dissolving into nothingness, patches of darkness, like the night sky, begin to appear in the ground and the canyon and the forest over on the other side, like threadbare holes in tapestry but coming into being very quickly and spreading, dismantling the whole fabric of the Dreaming—the whole world that I’ve been living in just melting away like thin snow in sunlight.
I shrug. I feel like I’ve been slashed, all over, but it’s a slashing that makes me stronger, like pruning.
I close my eyes, and concentrate.
And the Dreaming dissolves entirely, and I’m back in the Cadillac, eating up highway, surrounded by the deep blackness of the rolling desert.
Chapter 83
It’s flagstaff.
They take me to Flagstaff, to a halfway house. I’m not from Flagstaff, but it’s because the Flagstaff CART team was running the case, that’s what they told me.
I don’t need to say anything about the halfway house. It was an in-between time, an outside-myself time.
A margin, in the story of my life.
A blank page.
Like This.
Chapter 84
But, you know, life goes on. The blank page is turned, and there is writing on the other side. And so I kept on breathing and eating and stuff, and things happened to me. I learned things.
For example:
This is the lesson of the batting cage. I thought I knew it, before, but I didn’t.
Here it is.
Something can be moving in one direction, smoothly, swiftly, something like a ball, or, oh, say, A LIFE, and then a bat swings, at the perfect moment, swings true, and hits that something, and it constricts.
Like this:
And its energy is reversed, and it fires off in the opposite direction, completely the other way to what has been, to what seems meant to be. It’s like something is doing this:
and then there’s a great shock, an explosion, an impact, and it goes like this instead:
But here’s the lesson:
The ball—the life, whatever—is STILL THERE. The energy hasn’t destroyed it, the impact, the explosion, hasn’t erased it from the world. It still exists, it’s just in a different place altogether.
A place it didn’t expect to end up in.
Or, you know, there is a different way to put this. You could say:
There was an order, a routine, a way in which things were arranged. Then along came something. Coyote, fate, whatever. And it takes the order and the routine, on every day the same, apart from Fridays, which are always the same as each other anyway, and it blows that routine into tiny pieces, scatters it across the skies like the chaos of the stars, and makes it into something totally new.
But here’s the thing:
The something new, it isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, in some ways, maybe it’s better.
All the time, when I batted, I felt like it was meditation, like it was control. Like, swinging the bat at the perfect time, before you even see the ball—like that was a metaphor for something, for some kind of Zen peacefulness.
What I didn’t realize was:
I got the metaphor wrong.
I was not the bat.
I was the ball.
That—that is the lesson of the batting cage.
1…
I get out of the cab and walk toward FCI Phoenix, then get ready to cross the street for the low-security women’s prison that is one half of the facility. The sun is low in the sky—Phoenix is about to close its eye. But that’s okay, because somewhere over the rim of the world, it’s dawn—somewhere, the sun is always rising.
We’re north of the city, not in the city at all anymore; the suburbs are way behind us, just a few houses left a couple of miles back that I guess go for peanuts what with, oh, the PRISON just down the road. The desert is closing in now, around the multistory federal concrete buildings, and the guard towers, and the barbed-wire fences. When you see a group of white buildings like this, black windows, even just the architecture would be enough to tell you it was institutional—even without the towers and the wire.
They’ve made an effort, I have to admit, with the entrance—there are palm trees planted in front, and there’s a glass lobby, like some kind of a hotel; all low brown walls. The incongruity only makes it more sinister; I guess they just do it for press photos.
As I cross toward it, I see movement.
A shadow flows along a wall, then lowers itself inkily, onto graceful paws.
It’s a coyote, standing there right by the prison, looking at me. I can’t see its eyes.
Then there’s a voice in my head, or maybe it’s just my imagination.
Nothing dies in the Dreaming, it says. Not even Crones.
I smile, because this is something I know. I nod at the coyote. At Coyote. It begins to turn; he begins to turn, to leave me behind.
Wait, I say.
He pauses.
I think I understand some things now, I say. I think I understand why you came. That whole thing, in the Dreaming, the Crone in her cottage … it was the same as the motel, and the gun. It was like … preparation. You made me live it, before, in the Dreaming. Otherwise Shaylene might have killed herself. Might have killed me.
Yes, he says.
So you did help me, like you said.
Yes.
I take a breath. But there’s something I still don’t get, I say.
He just looks at me, eyes shining.
You said, at the beginning … You said why I had to kill the Crone and save the Child. You said that otherwise the world would end.
Yes, he says again. It seems to be all he says now.
But that wasn’t true, was it? I persist. I mean, you said you played tricks but you didn’t lie … Only, it wasn’t the world that was ever going to end. If Shaylene had killed herself, if she had killed me … It would have destroyed me. But it wouldn’t have ended the world.
The coyote holds my eyes for a long, long moment.
Then:
Doesn’t it amount to the same thing? he says.
And that’s it.
He turns.
For a second I sense something, on the other side of the air, like a word on the tip of the tongue. Then it’s gone. And the coyote is suddenly just a coyote again, or it always was, and it panics and runs skittishly back into the shadows, and down a culvert or a gap between buildings, and is gone.
The first security booth is by a barrier for cars—no one walks or takes cabs in Phoenix. No one apart from me. And now I have to check the traffic myself when I cross the road, double-check it, because I’m on my own. Shaylene’s case probably won’t make it to court—her attorney’s offering a plea bargain and I think the prosecutors are going to take it. But she’s pretty much never getting out of here.
I go up to the glass and it slides open.
Name? says the woman behind the desk.
I slide over my ID. The name on it is not my real name, but no name is my real name, until I choose one. And I can take my time with that, I have realized; it is another of the things I have learned. Because my name doesn’t matter so much, anymore. The thing that matters is:
I feel … I feel …whole, for the first time in I don’t know how long. Maybe in forever. I feel like a full person.
Visiting? says the security woman.
Shaylene Cooper, I say with my mouth. Still feels weird but I’m getting used to it.
Check your bag? says the woman lazily. She has short white hair, fat earrings, and she’s wearing sunglasses. She looks like she’s been processing visitors for 4,845 years and it’s starting to get her down.
I hand my bag over and she flicks through the book I’m reading, a hat, my makeup. She pulls out the cross-stitch pattern in its shiny plastic wallet.
Ben Nevis by Moonlight, she reads, and she kind of makes it a question. There’s a garish picture of it on the packet, to illustrate her words.
Cross-stitch, I say. She asked for it. It’s a hobby.
She does it in there? With needles?
I shrug. In the rec room, I think, I say. With supervision.
Right, says the woman. But this is just the pattern? She takes it out to check.
And the thread, I say.
She is still looking at me.
Oh, I mean, yeah, no needles, I add when I realize what she means.
Fine, she says. Go ahead. You’ve been here before, yes?
Yes, I say. Yes, I’ve been here before.
2…
I put the chicken in the oven. I haven’t cooked for people before, and I’m nervous. I haven’t spent time with kids before either—I have bought some toys, and put them in the living room, but they are probably the wrong things. The kids will probably ask for guns. Or meth! Or something.
I don’t know.
I look around, checking for dirt, trying to see the place with a critical eye, like someone would see it who had never been here before. I spot one of my sweaters on a chair, and move it to the bedroom.
There’s a textbook on the table—I pick that up too, and put it on a shelf. It’s The Golden Bough, for my module on folktales. I’m at Arizona State now—full scholarship, majoring in English lit. Mark was right—they gave me someone to take notes for me in class. Cindy. She’s sweet, not much older than me. Has a deaf brother. Sometimes we hang out—watch DVDs, eat pizza. Classic girl stuff, like on TV. It’s amazing how awesome the most normal stuff can feel when you have had a life tha
t is the opposite of normal.
I see a counselor twice a week too, but even that isn’t so unusual for a college student.
At the university, I’m Mary-Lee Saunders. The FBI arranged it—victim protection, they call it. I don’t know why the name: I guess maybe they had ID for a Mary-Lee Saunders on file. It never got out, in the media, about me being deaf either, Luke never did say anything, so no one has guessed who I am. I’m hoping no one ever does. Actually the whole thing is starting to disappear now anyway—the country has moved on to the new story; an insurance salesman in Atlanta who had three young boys imprisoned in his basement.
The apartment is a gift from my parents, which Carla advised I would not be compromising myself by accepting, so I still have most of the money in my bank account too, most of the money from Shaylene. Carla also advised that I sue the city attorney’s office of Flagstaff and the FBI for, she says, detaining me after they picked me up outside the cabin. But I think: What were they supposed to do? Take me to a hotel to tell me that my mother wasn’t my mother?
Anyway, I have had to make depositions and statements; I am constantly in the courthouse, even though Shaylene’s case won’t go to trial. I don’t want to spend any more time there than I have to.
The Watsons have rented a place in Phoenix, now, to be close to me. I’m eighteen—they kind of have to do things around me, and I have made it clear that I want a relationship with them but I don’t know them yet, and that’s the first step.
I apologized to them, of course. For running away. For giving them something—me—and then taking it away.
I know what it feels like when someone takes a life from you.
I also told them I wasn’t moving to Alaska, not even for the month till my eighteenth birthday, and they were surprisingly cool with that. I realized something, when I was in Flagstaff, or maybe when I came back from Flagstaff—I like the way it doesn’t rain. I like the way it’s either night or day.
I like that I might see Coyote again.