Graveyard Child

by M. L. N. Hanover

  I’d left of my own free will. It had been a choice—my choice—and I’d made it. Mom had been at the whim of Eric and the riders and God only knew what else. I wondered, if I’d been in my father’s position, if I’d have done the same. Raised a kid that wasn’t mine and kept a spouse who wouldn’t even tell me whose cuckoo I was supporting. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d have done it.

  “He came back, though. Eric. He came back and he told Gary himself. Do you remember that? Your father came home and made each of us swear never to speak to Eric. Never to have anything to do with him again. He was so angry. With himself. With me. It was the only time he wouldn’t pray with me. That was how I knew.”

  “I figured Eric was gay,” I said.

  “You were young,” my mother said. Her voice was dry and brittle as slate. “You didn’t know much.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, even though I wasn’t. It was the right thing to say, and my mother nodded once in reply. “The angel? Sonnenrad? What happened to her?”

  “She left me,” Mom said. “No bonds could hold her forever. But she’s in you. Isn’t she?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “Something like her. I have a friend who’d call her a daughter organism. Did Eric ever tell anyone why he did it? What it was all about?”

  “You must get rid of it. You have to cast it out of your body.”

  “I thought it was an angel.”

  “It is my sin. It’s poisoned you because of me, but you can still be clean. You can put her back in me. I can be your sacrifice. I can carry it for you. I’ll do that for you, because you are my child and I love you.”

  Now she was the one to reach for my hand, and I tried to pull back. Her fingers were stronger than I’d expected. Her eyes locked on mine. At the front of the restaurant, Chogyi Jake shifted in his chair, pushing back a few inches from his table in case he needed to come to my rescue. I didn’t give him any signal, and he waited.

  I tried to put the woman across the table from me together with the mother I knew. The mousy, quiet, subservient woman who accepted my father’s anger. The meek one who told us all to make peace, to do as my father said. To obey and be good and be quiet. She looked the same. Older, but the same. And that was where the similarity stopped, because everything else about her was different.

  “I think I need to go,” I said, my voice shaking less than I expected it to.

  “No,” she said, loudly enough that the waitress turned to stare. There’s a limit to how much privacy you can buy in a public space, and we’d reached it. “I am not Mary. I am not without sin. What you carry in you is corrupting you because of what I did. Give it back to me, and be pure. Let me help you. Let me make you pure.”

  I stood up.

  “Thank you,” I said, the words empty and automatic. I took a few light-headed steps toward the door, and Chogyi Jake rose in my peripheral vision. My mother’s sobs rang through the place as I reached the door, pushed out into the cold air. The wind was like being slapped, and I welcomed it. Chogyi Jake put a hand on my shoulder, turning me gently, and I realized that the SUV I was staring at was mine. Ex was behind the wheel. I tottered over to the front passenger’s-side door and lifted myself in.

  “Back to the hotel?” he asked as I shut the door. Chogyi Jake trotted to a side lot where his rental was parked, nose out for a fast getaway. “Jayné?”

  “Hmm? Oh. Right. Yes, back to the hotel.”

  Ex slid out into traffic, and I craned my neck. Mom was still in the restaurant. Still at our table. Her head was in her hands. The urge to go back to her was powerful and doomed.

  “You all right?” Ex asked.

  I’m fine fought with Hell no. The streets slid away under the tires, and I didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask again. All I could remember was my mother’s face as she asked me to put the rider back into her; all I could see was the hunger there.

  chapter seven

  “I mean, I knew my family was screwed-up.” I sat on the edge of my bed, one leg folded under me. The mattress made a soft huffing sound under my weight. Like an exhalation. “But oh my God. That was . . .”

  “Kind of reframes your whole childhood?” Ex said.

  “Does.”

  Chogyi Jake stood beside the little in-room coffeemaker, a black coffee cup in one hand and a tea bag in the other. The machine gurgled and spat heated water into a pot. Chogyi Jake’s stubble was getting long again, his scalp fading into a dark halo. He’d shave it again soon. Ex’s smile would have looked cruel and a little judgmental if I hadn’t known that most of his judgments were on himself or the world. I knew these men well enough to read the way they held their bodies, the way they spoke, and dressed. We’d been in almost constant company since I’d arrived in Denver. Since I’d begun this chapter in my life. It was the kind of intimacy that you got with family. Small indications that grew into a larger whole, that drew along a whole cloud of implications behind it.

  Except that apparently family could still surprise me. I could live with someone for years—live my whole life with them and know how to read their moods like a sailor reading the weather in a sunrise—and miss the huge, defining, central fact of their whole damn life. I thought of my father, even if he wasn’t exactly my father, and his sullen anger. I thought about the times he’d yelled at my mother that I hadn’t understood why. That made more sense now. But there were other things.

  When I was eight, the whole family got the flu at the same time. The whole house was sick for a week and a half, and it was my father, suffering and weak, who brought me bowls of soup to eat in bed and medicine for the fever. Another time, when I was ten or eleven, I lost control of my bike and scraped a patch of skin the size of my palm off my left hip. Dad tended to the wound, and afterward he got his own bike out of the garage and showed me how to ride with my center of gravity lower.

  If he wasn’t really my father, if I was the cuckoo in the nest, and, more to the point, if he knew that, then all the little moments of caring—the Band-Aids and the kiss-it-and-make-it-betters and the birthday presents and the sticks of gum for a good grade on a test—changed too. They weren’t the bare minimum.

  If I had been the constant reminder of his wife’s betrayal—if he’d swallowed the humiliation of raising another man’s daughter not even knowing who the other guy was—then all of those moments of kindness, of love, became deeper and stranger and more profound than I had known. And my ignorance had been part of his gift to me. I was his daughter. His viciously controlled, better-damn-well-do-what-he-said, in-by-curfew, and sixteen’s-too-young-to-date daughter, yeah. But his. And I’d never questioned that he was my father.

  Even now, even knowing that Eric had provided the sperm donation that led to me, Dad was still my dad. I couldn’t change that. And I couldn’t change the resentment I felt toward him either. I could only know intellectually that it might not be as justified as I’d thought, and the dissonance was profound.

  “Earth to Doris,” Ex said.

  “What?” I snapped.

  “I asked if you wanted a cup of tea,” Chogyi Jake said. “Several times.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Yes.”

  “Green?”

  “Nasty-ass Lipton,” I said, “if you’ve got it.”

  “Nasty-ass Lipton it is,” Chogyi Jake said.

  “So the question is what Eric was up to,” Ex said, scratching Ozzie’s ears and looking at her like she might know the answer. “It sounds like the Mark of Salim al-Assad. Binding different riders into the same host body until he got the one he was looking for. Only, instead of a goat, he was using a woman.”

  “That’s possible. Having a host that had been ridden several times would make subsequent possessions easier,” Chogyi Jake said. He handed me a coffee cup with the thin white string of the tea bag looped around the handle. “But that she was naked left me wondering about rites of Inanna.”

  “I just figured it was Eric getting his rocks off,” Ex said with a shrug.

  “Okay. Talkin
g about my mother here,” I said. “I’m feeling pretty freaked out already. It’s not helping to imagine her as Eric’s . . .” I waved my hand.

  “Mind-controlled, sexually exploited lab hamster?” Ex offered.

  “Yes, that. Not helping.”

  “But it’s what she was,” Ex said. “We knew that Eric was capable of atrocities. Looking away from it now doesn’t win us anything. You aren’t responsible for any of this. None of this is your fault. But you exist because Eric was willing to go to great lengths to make a child that would be possessed by the Black Sun from the moment of conception. He put a lot of effort into making that happen, and when he’d managed it, he moved on to whatever was next on his to-do list. There has to be a reason.”

  “That isn’t what he’s done, though,” Chogyi Jake said. “Jayné isn’t simply ridden by the Black Sun. Eric engineered the creation of a new rider. A daughter not only for the woman but for the mature Black Sun as well.”

  “Good point,” Ex said.

  I stood up and scooped the leather leash and my oversize sunglasses off the dresser. Ozzie’s ears turned toward me, and she hopped on her front legs.

  “I just took her out,” Ex said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “This time she’s taking me.”

  “Be careful. We didn’t see the Invisible College following you today, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there.”

  Ozzie and I walked down the corridor to the lobby. I had the leash in one hand and my coffee cup in the other. A television was set to FOX, where a woman in a pale blue dress was looking earnestly into the camera and talking about preparations being made for the New Year’s Eve celebrations and wondering aloud whether three days would be enough time to get ready. Red and silver tinsel and fake holly clung to the front desk, and the man behind it nodded to me as I passed. I smiled back reflexively.

  Outside, the world was getting colder. High, thin clouds scudded across the vast blue like they were in a hurry to get someplace. Or at least away from here. From the smell, I guessed there was snow coming. I led Ozzie out to the edge of the parking lot, and she trotted amiably along beside me. The traffic on the highway buzzed, the individual cars and trucks and semis all blending together in a single constant sound. I sat on the concrete curb, my elbows resting on my knees. Ozzie looked at me, chuffed once, and sat at my side. I counted windows, found where my room was, and then the one Chogyi Jake and Ex were sharing. I wondered what would have happened if I’d checked in with one of them. I’d heard more than one story of an unmarried man and woman being required to get separate rooms. Not corporate policy, just my little town.

  There was something lonely about the hotel. It wasn’t just that there was so little city built up around it, or the sparse scattering of cars in the lot. It seemed more basic. This was a building especially designed for people who weren’t home, a place for being passed through. I’d lived a lot of places in the last few years—my dorm, a house I’d tried unsuccessfully to share with my college friends, and then easily a dozen condominiums and apartments and houses that I’d inherited from Eric. Probably as many hotels. Maybe more.

  I hadn’t had a real home since I’d left here. And now I found myself wondering if I’d had one then.

  “You there?” I said to the rider. The Black Sun. My other self. “You have any idea what to make of all this?”

  If it did, it didn’t speak. Ozzie sighed, her breath a plume of white.

  “You know,” I said to her, “I was staying in much fancier places before I had a dog with me. There’s a perspective why all this is your fault.”

  She wagged once and I put a hand on her back, scratching slowly.

  I felt more than tired. I felt stretched thin, and I wanted it to be because of my father and my mother and the Invisible College. But the truth was I could hardly remember not feeling like this. I’d dropped into the middle of Eric’s world after he died, spending months trying to inventory all of his belongings, find all of his places. I’d managed to build up a massive pile of information that I still hadn’t really had time to digest. And then Grace Memorial, and the things I’d done there that I still didn’t want to think about. And then the rider and New Mexico and now . . . now here. Being worn-out wasn’t a response to the problems of the moment. It was a lifestyle choice that I’d made somewhere along the way, and that I didn’t know how to change.

  My telephone buzzed. I pulled it out of my pocket. It was the same number I’d had since I first learned what a phone number was. Home calling. I almost let it drop to voice mail; then, just before it did, I thumbed the green button and held the phone to my ear.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Fucking Christ, sis,” Curtis whispered. “What did you do?”

  “Oh, a lot of shit, one time and another,” I said. “Which one do you mean this time?”

  “This place has been a zoo all day long. Dad’s massively over the top. There was a bunch of money that showed up this morning? He burned it on the stove. Set off the fire alarm in the kitchen. And now he dug Grandma’s Bible out and he’s been yelling about how there’s a curse on his family. And Mom looks like she’s drunk or something. Jay came by with Carla to do some wedding stuff, and seriously, he came in, looked around, and just walked back out. Didn’t even say anything.”

  I felt a stab of guilt. I’d almost forgotten about Jay’s wedding and the effect my return was having on it.

  “Yeah, kind of crap timing, I guess,” I said.

  “What’s going on?” Curtis said, and I could hear the need in his voice. The confusion. Or maybe I was hearing myself in him. I didn’t know what to say. There was no peace he was going to get from hearing about this, about me and Mom and Eric and the supernatural ecosystem of things that crept in from Next Door. But he was living in the middle of it. I couldn’t shut him off, and I couldn’t bring myself to lie.

  “I tracked Mom down and asked her some questions about Uncle Eric,” I said. “And it turns out there was a bunch of stuff that was connected to, and it all kind of got out of hand.”

  “And the guys with guns?”

  “They’re sort of connected to it too.”

  “Wow,” he said. “I mean, just wow.”

  “I know, right? Look, all this time I’ve been sort of under the radar? Uncle Eric died a few years back, and he left me everything, and it got pretty complicated pretty fast.”

  “Holy shit. Uncle Eric’s dead? What happened?”

  I squeezed my eyes closed. This was going to be worse than I’d thought.

  “Yeah, the guys with the tattoos and the shotguns? They killed him. And the more I look at it, the more it seems like he probably had it coming, only I didn’t know that at the time, and I may have sort of gotten them pissed off at me too.”

  The silence on the line was profound. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten into this, but it was too late to pour the cream back out of that coffee.

  “Was he selling drugs?” Curt whispered. I had to fight not to laugh. Drugs would have been so much easier. If it had all just been organized crime and corrupt DEA agents and a few million dollars’ worth of heroin, my life would actually have been more comprehensible.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, I wouldn’t put it past him. It turns out Eric was kind of a bastard, but the more I try to get the details of how it all was back then, the worse things seem to get.”

  “Are they going to come back? The gang guys?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I don’t think they’re after you.”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “I’m sure enough going to try,” I said.

  “Look, if you need some money, I’ve got a couple thousand in my account. I’ve been working at—” An angry sound came from behind him. I couldn’t make out the words, but I didn’t need to. My childhood had grown up around sounds like it the way a vine climbs a trellis. “Nothing, Dad,” Curt said. “I was just—”

  The connection dropped. I hefted my phone f
or a couple seconds, then stuffed it back in my pocket. My mug of tea, abandoned on the pavement at my side, was already cold. I poured it out on the winter-killed weeds at the roadside and stood up. Ozzie creaked up too.

  On one hand, I could hardly imagine how weird and awful things were for Curtis. On the other, I knew because I’d been there too. I wondered if I could swoop in and get him out of there. Maybe send him to school in Europe someplace on my dime. I had enough money to do it. The only thing standing in the way was that I was his sister, not his mom. And if Dad had burned the check I’d sent to cover new windows, I couldn’t see him letting Curt have anything to do with me. From where my dad stood, I was as bad as Eric. And the truth was I’d committed some atrocities of my own along the way. So maybe he had a point.

  I let myself back into my hotel room, the electronic lock cycling and the LED glowing green when I passed my card through. Chogyi Jake was by the window, looking out, and Ex was nowhere to be seen. Ozzie levered herself onto the bed, tucked her nose under her tail, and sighed.

  “Where’s Ex?” I asked, dropping into the desk chair.

  “The other room. I think he was going to take a shower. He doesn’t mean ill, you know.”

  “By taking a shower?”

  Chogyi Jake sat on the edge of the bed. “He’s been blunt with you. Sometimes cruel. But it’s coming from a place of concern. And from his own anger with himself.”

  “Honest to God? I didn’t notice. I mean, I guess when you say it out loud, the lab hamster line was maybe a little rough. But I don’t think I have the spare cycles to care about it, you know? I know Ex cares about me. I trust him, even if that only means trusting him to be himself, right?”

  “Right,” Chogyi Jake said. “I wondered when you left if you were trying to make some space between the two of you.”

  “I wasn’t. I was just trying to make some space. Coming home’s weirder than I thought. I mean, check. You can’t go home again. Message received. But the ways I can’t go home again aren’t the ones I was expecting.”