by Rio Youers
“And ultimately caused him to snap,” Wolf added.
“It’s more sinister than that,” Dr. Brisk said. “These aren’t the actions of a weak-willed man who was pushed over the edge. Something—or somebody—got into his head and radically reshaped his way of thinking.”
“Are you suggesting he was brainwashed?” Wolf asked.
“Yes,” Dr. Brisk replied without hesitation. “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”
3
“We might have stopped it,” Laura said.
“Don’t say that.”
“I think we had enough information. Yes, it was haphazard. Yes, it was—”
“Illogical.”
“Yes, but we could have—should have—put the pieces together.” Laura stood up from the kitchen table. She made a frantic gesture with her hands, as if she wanted to grab something but couldn’t, then exhaled and shook her head. “Jesus, I haven’t slept much these past few nights.”
Martin went to her. He circled her waist with one arm, stroked her hair, the same color—honey gold—as the day they’d met, just as full of body and bounce, and not a shimmer of gray. She looked at him with what he called her flashlight expression: illuminating, but searching. It didn’t ask, How can you make this right? but rather, How can we make this right? We. Together. Every knot they’d untangled in their seventeen years of marriage, they’d untangled together.
“This isn’t ours to carry,” Martin said firmly. “It’s not like we had credible intel and chose to ignore it. We’re talking about an implausible event—a possible psychic occurrence.”
“Possible?”
“What can I say? I’m a rational man.” Martin tapped one finger off his skull. “I’m still struggling to make sense of this.”
“You saw it with your own eyes,” Laura said. “Forget the premonition, or possible premonition. Something happened between Edith and Shirley. A connection. A communication. And honey, it wasn’t normal.”
“We thought it was coincidence.” He took her hand and steadied it; she was making grabbing motions again. “We thought they’d watched the same shit on YouTube, or wherever, and it caused Shirley to have a seizure, and Edith to have a night terror. We could never have known it was more than that.”
“A paranormal event.”
“Yeah. Sure. Call it what you want.” Martin brought Laura’s trembling hand to his lips and kissed her fingers. “It was crazy shit, and it went beyond rational thinking.”
“Yes, but—”
“We can’t beat ourselves up for what happened, Laura.” Martin’s expression was more lead blanket than flashlight: serious and unwavering. “That way lies madness.”
* * *
Laura had gone to Edith’s room after making sure that Shirley was okay—that the seizure, or whatever it was, had passed. She’d bolted upstairs like Martin before her and found Martin on his knees with Edith in his arms. Their youngest daughter appeared on the cusp of sleep, mumbling something, drenched with sweat. Martin stroked her brow and soothed her.
“Jesus Christ,” Laura gasped. She started across the room, then noticed the wild scrawling on the wall and stopped dead. “What the hell?”
“That’s the whoop-whoop,” Martin said, gesturing at one of the strange symbols—a diamond with sunrays shooting from it. He looked at her with huge, questioning eyes. “I don’t know what’s going on here.”
They’d dressed Edith in fresh pajamas and put her in their bed for the night. She slept soundly, barely moving. Laura used her phone to take pictures of Edith’s bedroom wall. Then they talked to Shirley. “You told us she was screaming inside,” Martin said. “How could you know that?” Shirley shrugged and said she couldn’t remember, but they knew she wasn’t being entirely truthful. They’d pressed, but gently. Shirley admitted that she sometimes got a “feeling” from Edith. “I’ve read that some identical twins can feel each other’s pain,” she said, and shrugged again. “Maybe it’s like that.”
“Do these mean anything to you?” Laura asked, showing Shirley the symbols on her phone. “Something you saw on TV, or online, perhaps?”
“They’re kinda creepy,” Shirley replied. She shook her head quickly. “No. I’ve never seen them before.”
Later that night, Martin told Laura about the string of letters and emojis that Shirley had tapped into her phone. He might have dismissed it, he said, only the nonsense had been punctuated by several full words.
“Like what?” Laura asked.
“Chippewa,” Martin replied. “That’s the only one I remember for certain. And bottle-something. Bottlecap, maybe?”
Edith remembered very little of the incident, which lent credence to Martin’s theory that she’d suffered a night terror after watching something violent online—something that she and Shirley wouldn’t admit to having watched. It was a theory that Laura, reluctantly, accepted.
She checked Shirley’s phone, looking for the string of nonsense that Martin had told her about (she wasn’t a bit surprised to find it had been erased), and then perusing the browsing history. There was nothing of a violent nature. Same with the iPad, the laptop, and the “Recently Watched” list on Netflix.
“So they deleted it,” Martin said. “Must’ve. Or maybe they watched it on a friend’s phone. Claudette’s, I bet. Her parents are nuts.”
Edith wasn’t able to explain her impromptu artwork, either. She stared at her bedroom wall with a flavorless expression. “I know why I did it,” she said. “To get the bad things out of my head. I just don’t remember what any of them mean.”
Martin scrubbed the wall, but the ghosts of the symbols remained. He rolled over them with a fresh lick of paint and put the posters back up.
“If only we could paint over it in our minds so easily,” Laura had said. “Shit, Martin, maybe we need to talk to someone about this.”
“Let’s not sign up for the family shrink package just yet,” Martin replied. “We can file this under ‘freak coincidence’ and move on.”
And they tried. For the next two days they acted as if life was just peachy, and then everything spiraled.
2:37 a.m. The ungodly hours of Sunday morning. Laura had given up on sleep. Not even two glasses of wine and some brief, tussle-like lovemaking could help. She got out of bed and went downstairs, made herself an herbal tea, and sat drinking it in the silence of her living room. The iPad was on the arm of the sofa, its screen smeared with greasy finger tracks. Unconsciously—like every twenty-first century automaton—she grabbed it and logged into her social media. She saw the hashtags #buffalostrong and #prayforbuffalo, scrolled through her feed, saw photographs of burning buildings and cars, of firefighters and police, of victims and body bags.
“Jesus Christ,” Laura said. As with every large-scale disaster from the past seventeen years, she envisioned a passenger plane hitting the World Trade Center and her mind punched out two words. Simple words, but filled with fear and pleading: Not again.
* * *
Western NY Alerts @WestNYAlerts
100s feared dead as car bomb explodes in downtown Buffalo. Entire buildings wiped off the map. Blast was heard up to forty miles away.
* * *
Kate Jacobs @kissieroo
Pls #pray for my daughter Queenie Jacobs celebrating job promotion with friends in #Buffalo. Not answering cell. Call me Queenie please call Mommy.
* * *
NewsForce New York @newsforceny
W. Chippewa St. “heartbeat” of Buffalo nightlife. Authorities say death toll could reach 500. #prayforbuffalo
* * *
Laura turned off the iPad. She grabbed the remote control and flicked on the TV. The story had hijacked scheduled programming; BREAKING NEWS adorned the lower third of every station she flipped to. CNN declared the death toll was at 120. CBS News had it at 150. Any degree of tiredness had vacated Laura’s system. She watched with massive, unblinking eyes and a loose jaw.
“—terrible scenes from downtown Buffalo as
firefighters struggle to—”
“—advising people to stay in their homes—”
“—conflicting reports. Some say the vehicle was parked—”
“—hallmark of a terrorist attack, but as yet no—”
Aerial footage showed the scale of the devastation: a burning hole in the city, buildings ablaze, the damage extending several blocks. More intimate camera work offered the efforts of rescue workers digging through smoldering rubble; a triage nurse wiping ash and blood from a young man’s forehead; a high-heeled shoe abandoned on the sidewalk.
Laura covered her mouth. Tears pricked her eyes. The ticker announced PRESIDENT CALLS BOMBING “COWARDLY AND DESPICABLE.” A shot of a firefighter rolling a flattened hose across Franklin Street switched to footage of an ambulance bolting north on Main. Its lightbar cut through the smoky darkness. Its siren howled.
Laura imagined a diamond with sunrays beaming from it.
“Whoop-whoop,” she said.
She stiffened in her seat, a deep chill rising from the small of her back to her skull. With tears rolling down her face, she flipped channels until she found what she was looking for.
The ticker: POLICE CONFIRM VEHICLE DRIVEN THROUGH FRONT WINDOW OF CROWDED DOWNTOWN BAR BEFORE BOMB WAS DETONATED. A map of the area filled the screen, with a small red circle drawn around the Bottletop bar on West Chippewa Street, and a larger circle indicating the blast radius.
Chippewa, Martin had said the other night, referring to one of the few legible words that Shirley had keyed into her phone during her seizure. That’s the only one I remember for certain. And bottle-something. Bottlecap, maybe?
“Bottletop,” Laura said. She wanted to scream.
Instead she stood up and walked out of the living room, appearing oh-so-calm on the outside, while on the inside she was cold and shrieking. She went upstairs and shook Martin awake.
“Martin, hey…” She nudged him gently. She wanted to blast ice into his face and drag him from between the sheets. “Martin—”
“’Sup?” He blinked groggily.
“Get up. You need to see this.”
“Huh? What time—”
“You need to see this.”
He’d risen from bed with his hair erected in quills and his ass-crack popping from the top of his boxers. Moments later he was alert and bug-eyed, clutching Laura’s hand as they sat on the sofa and watched the news unfold. “Can’t be,” he kept saying. “It’s wild coincidence. Has to be.” His denial faltered when the Fox 29 news anchor somberly intoned, “The following report contains scenes of a graphic nature. Viewer discretion is advised,” and the screen displayed footage of a young man with no hands being loaded into the back of an ambulance. He was bandaged and sedated—one of the lucky ones, apparently, although the tears rolling down his face suggested he thought otherwise.
“Fuck.” Martin sprung off the sofa—nearly taking Laura with him—and glared at the TV. “The man with no hands is crying.”
Laura shook her head once and looked at him. She was almost too fractured to respond. Within the hour she would down a jigger of whiskey and go back to bed, sleep until late afternoon. For now she took a breath that rolled all the way to her toes, and on the exhale asked Martin to elaborate.
“Something Edith said.” Martin closed his eyes and touched his forehead, honing the memory. “One of her symbols. The man with no hands is crying.”
“She said that?”
“Yeah, but I figured it was just, you know … randomness.” He shrugged and sighed at the same time. “I’d pretty much forgotten about it. Until now.”
“Right,” Laura said, looking at the TV—at a photograph of Garrett Riley. THE FACE OF EVIL, according to the caption. She jabbed the red button on the remote and the screen went dark. It was heavenly. “And you still think this is all a coincidence?”
“It’s just … I don’t—”
“Martin. Come on, baby. Coffee beans—smell them.” She inhaled robustly. Her teeth flashed. “Edith didn’t have a night terror. It was a premonition.”
“Jesus Christ, Laura.”
“A fucking premonition.” Laura stood up, her hands balled into fists. She looked like she wanted to let loose—to punch the walls and throw shit. Instead she sunk to her knees and lowered her face into her hands, not crying, but exhausted. She didn’t move for a long time, and when she did it was to get the whiskey. Martin did nothing—said nothing—to comfort her, but she could tell he wanted to; they’d been together twenty years, married for seventeen. She knew his heart as well as her own. He just stood in his own void, though, looking sad and boyish in yesterday’s boxers.
* * *
“So what do we do?” Laura asked, still with the flashlight expression, although she’d stopped making the grabbing motions with her hands.
“We continue as normal,” Martin replied. “We try, at least.”
“Bullshit,” Laura said. “There is no normal. I admit that we couldn’t have assumed anything supernatural, but we can’t just plunge our heads in the sand. We need to talk to someone. If Edith has a condition—extrasensory or psychological—she needs to find a way to manage it, and that means getting expert help.”
“We took her to that hypnotherapist before,” Martin said. He removed his arm from around Laura’s waist, returned to the kitchen table, and dropped into his seat with a tired thump. “The Star Wars guy. He seemed to help.”
“Maybe,” Laura said. She crossed to the other counter, slid a half-full bottle of Merlot toward her. “I was thinking of someone more … sensitive to the paranormal angle.” She held up the bottle of wine. “Am I turning into an alcoholic?”
“This would be a good week to start.”
“Hmm. You want?”
“Yeah.”
Laura plucked two glasses from the cupboard, emptied the bottle into them, and joined Martin at the kitchen table. They drank and licked their lips at the same time, then Martin said:
“Sensitive?”
“What if all Edith’s night terrors were actually premonitions? It sounds crazy, but given what we know, we should consider it a possibility.”
“It would explain all the wild shit she came up with,” Martin admitted. “Things she could never know.”
“Right.”
“But she’s never drawn the symbols before.”
“True, but the bombing was on a different scale. It might have been too much for her mind to take.”
“So the drawings were overflow? Mental spillage?”
“Or some kind of release. She said she had to get the bad things out of her head, right?” Laura drank from her glass—not a sip but a glug, splashing wine on the table. She mopped it up with her sleeve. “Listen, when I was researching my dissertation, I remember reading about this psychiatrist who’d drawn comparisons between psychic ability and mental illness. He claimed that a small percentage of psychiatric patients had been misdiagnosed—that they actually had some form of extrasensory energy they couldn’t align with. He called it a paranormal coil or a psychic coil. Something like that.”
“A unique take,” Martin said. “I’m sure that went down well with the American Psychiatric Association.”
“I’m not saying I believe it,” Laura added. “But it suggests a gray area—a lack of knowledge. I think we’d be smart to err on the side of caution. This is our daughter. I don’t want her analyzed, prodded, and labeled. And I for damn sure don’t want her institutionalized just because some shrink can’t think outside the box.”
“Agreed.”
“Good.” Laura reached across the table and clasped Martin’s hand. “So you don’t mind if I make some inquiries—see if I can find someone more … sympathetic?”
“Sure,” Martin said. “Let’s give it a shot.”
“Thank you,” Laura said, and found a smile. “Something else: I think we should all talk to someone. We’re going to need help carrying the load.”
“Therapy?”
“Let’s call
it nonjudgmental conversation,” Laura said. “I’ve already booked an appointment with a spiritual advisor. You can take a more conventional route, of course. As John Lennon said: ‘Whatever gets you through the night.’”
“Okay,” Martin said. He’d barely touched his wine, but now he lifted the glass and drained two thirds. “Okay. Yeah. I can do that.”
“You’re a good man.”
He winked and tugged Laura’s hand, urging her across the table. And she obliged, shimmying on her stomach like a woman half her age, feet off the floor, lips red with wine. He leaned close and they kissed. Her honey-gold hair was the same as the day they’d met, and so was her mouth—her kiss. The love had changed, though. It was sky-broad and still growing. It was entwined with his. Not a her thing but a them thing.
“We’re going to get through this,” he said.
And she said, “You bet.”
* * *
Shirley stood up from the top stair, where she’d sat for the last fifteen minutes listening to her parents’ conversation. She didn’t have to strain her ears, either; when Mom and Dad had one of their powwows in the kitchen, their voices—even if they whispered—carried into the hallway and swirled around the ceiling above the stairway. A cool acoustic quirk. Her music teacher once told her there was an area inside Grand Central Station where you could whisper into a corner, and no matter how much noise and kerfuffle there was around (and Shirley figured there was always a good deal of noise and kerfuffle at Grand Central Station), the person standing in the opposite corner would hear your voice like you were standing next to them. This was similar to the way Edith sometimes communicated with her—a direct, secret method, bypassing traditional routes. It was fun to begin with, but it wasn’t normal, and Shirley knew it had to stop.
No good could come from it.
Shirley eavesdropped on her parents until they started smooching—totally gross—then snuck along the landing to Edith’s room. She inched the door open and crept inside.