by David Nickle
“What is it? It sounds like hypnotherapy or something.”
“How do you know what hypnotherapy is?”
“My Aunt Eva is into all that stuff,” he said. “She’s a little nuts for it. Your parents make you do that too?”
Ann sat down on the bed, picked up the headphones. She held it to her ear for a second: a sound like the ocean; the voice of Dr. Sunderland, counting up the alphabet. She set them down and pressed the stop button; the machinery clicked and the ocean stopped.
“It’s just something I do,” she said. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
Ryan shrugged. “Why would I?”
“I dunno. You could tell everybody I was a bed-wetter and needed hypnotherapy . . .”
“You a bed-wetter?”
Ann made a show of sniffing. “Not last night,” she said, and Ryan, laughing, said “Good one.”
She nodded, face hung in a half-grin, and Ryan sat down on the bed beside her. The room was east-facing, so the afternoon light left the room grey and shadowy as the rest of the house. In certain lights, the bare walls were a light pink; the uncluttered floor a deep cherry. An old clock radio blinked 4:56 on the otherwise clear dresser top.
“Love what you’ve done with the place,” said Ryan.
“I don’t need a lot of stuff,” said Ann. She felt like she was apologizing.
“Well it’s not because your dad’s poor,” said Ryan. He looked at her. “What’s that tape for?”
“It’s, um . . .”
Ryan waited a moment. “Don’t feel bad,” he finally said. “Aunt Eva has a whole handbag full of cassettes. And crystals, too. Every time she comes over, she’s exorcising the evil spirits and opening up the gateways to the divine. Nothing you can tell me will surprise me.”
“When I was younger,” said Ann finally, “we had . . . some problems. The tapes help with that. I’m supposed to listen to them every night as I go to sleep.”
Ryan nodded sagely. “So it is bed-wetting.” Ann punched him in the arm and told him to shut up.
“All right,” she said finally. “You want to know?”
“I’m asking.”
She leaned close to him and whispered: “I used to be possessed by the Devil. Things would fly around the house. Knives. Nail guns.” She grabbed his arm, hard. “Axes,” she said aloud, and made a chk-kk! sound at the back of her throat—like an axe might make, embedding itself in a skull. “That’s why I can’t have any axes or other sharp things in the room.”
“Yeah, right.”
“No foolin’,” said Ann.
“Well whatever gets you through the night,” he said. “I hope this guy didn’t charge you too much for it, though.”
“Don’t know how much, don’t care.”
“Yeah, your dad’s not poor.”
“Stiiinkiiing riiich.”
“Well the main thing is that you feel better,” said Ryan. “That’s what all this is about. The placebo effect. That’s what mom says about Aunt Eva. She helps people trick themselves into getting better.”
Ann took a breath—opened her mouth, to shoot something back. But she couldn’t crack wise this time. She felt her face flush. It scarcely would have been worse if she was listening to tapes to stop her from bed-wetting. She met Ryan’s eye. Ryan leaned back and smirked at her. Then his head tilted, and his eyes narrowed with terrible purpose, and he came in close.
He was aiming for her mouth. But Ann was too quick. His lips brushed her cheek, and before he could do anything else, she scooted to the foot of the bed and got up.
“Come on,” she said. “They’ll be going through my notes by now.”
Ryan shrugged and followed her downstairs. They’d been gone awhile. By the time they were back at the table, Leah’s back-up cleric was all finished, and the furnace had done its work. Even the basement was toasty warm.
ii
When Ann was very small, there were a couple of Christmases that they spent in Long Island, New York, where Ann’s mother’s family came from. But in recent years, they tended to keep closer to home. Ann was not sure why that was. Her parents just said they didn’t want to travel much, but it was pretty clear to both Ann and Philip that something had changed between their mother and her parents. Their grandmother Mavis would phone on Christmas Eve, but it was always their father who would take the call.
This Christmas, she called during dinner. Their mom craned her neck, checked the call-display on the credenza phone, and looked to their dad. “Them,” she said, and her dad pushed out his chair and picked up the phone
“Hello, Mavis,” he said. “Merry Christmas to you too.” He leaned against the door jamb. “It’s pretty cold here, too. A bit worse than last year, I’d say.” Their mother scooped out a spoonful of mashed potatoes and plopped it next to the capon’s left thigh on her plate. “They’re fine,” he said, looking first at Ann, then Philip. And, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Pause, as the phone squawked. “We’ve talked about this.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. I will. Merry Christmas, Mavis.”
And he hung up, and went through to the kitchen to get another bottle of wine. Their mother’s glass, just filled before the phone rang, was empty.
Things were better with Nan.
It was just Nan; Granddad had passed on when Ann was five. But it had been good with Granddad too. He was a giant of a man, with a full head of grey hair and a thin white beard—like Santa Claus with a subscription to GQ. That was Nan’s joke. She had a lot of jokes; she even found a way to laugh at Granddad’s funeral.
Now she lived by herself in a big ranch house outside Barrie, just a couple of hours from the Lake House. There was usually a Christmas Eve call from her, too, but it was a little longer, everyone talked on the phone, even as the purpose was to figure out the timing of their visit for late lunch on Christmas Day.
Lunch being loosely defined in this case, in that they wouldn’t generally get there until two o’clock, and food wouldn’t be out until four.
Philip explained the drill as they pulled away from Laurie’s house in town. Laurie sat in the back seat with him, her red hair tied in a ponytail, otherwise garbed in a pair of black tights and a short-cut ski jacket that wasn’t really warm enough for the day. So she bundled under his arm, nodding and listening, watching the houses go by as they pulled out. This was to be her first time at a LeSage family Christmas, and Philip wanted to make sure she knew what to expect.
“Same every year,” he said. “We get there at two. Nan’s been cooking since, like, six in the morning. She is a demon in the kitchen, seriously. Don’t get between her and her Dutch oven.” Laurie laughed, and Ann, on her own in the middle seat of the minivan, grinned and thought: Seriously. Buuuuull-Shit. Philip was laying it on thick.
“So there’s no prayers or anything, like your folks do. Nan’s not really Christian.”
“That’s okay,” said Laurie. She and her family were Baptist or something, some fundamentalist thing, and they prayed a lot. Philip did not, but he tried to be nice about it. Ann privately thought this would be the end of them, which was okay by her. But on the other hand, Philip had managed to steal her away from her family on this, the afternoon of the birth of her Lord and Saviour. Maybe it was true love.
“Nan likes singing, though. She has a guitar, an old classical guitar, and there will be singing. She likes Bob Dylan and the Beatles. After dinner, you’re going to have to sing along. You up for that, West?”
“Yes sir,” said Laurie.
The houses were gone now; they’d hit the traffic light at Highway 89, which was barely a highway so much as it was a two-lane blacktop weaving through the woodlots and fields of southern Ontario farm country. Ann found herself humming along with Laurie, as she dutifully joined Philip in an off-key rendition of
“If I Had a Million Dollars.” When their dad called over his shoulder that Barenaked Ladies was a lon
g way from John Lennon, Philip shouted back, “I’d buy you a stress tab,” and everybody
cracked up.
“What’s a stress tab?” asked Laurie.
“Nan always says that,” Ann explained. “‘Take a stress tab,’ whenever anybody gets too tense.”
“So what—it’s like Prozac?”
“I think it’s a vitamin pill. From the Seventies,” said Philip. “So y’know . . . mushrooms . . . speed . . . caffeine.”
“Goofballs,” said Ann. “Staples.”
“That’s pretty close,” said their dad, who was either in on the gag or hadn’t heard over the road noise. “I think it’s vitamin B complex.”
“Got it,” said Laurie, and Philip said, “Good.”
“So Laurie,” said their mom over her shoulder, “you’re graduating this year too?”
“That’s right, Mrs. LeSage.”
“What comes after that?”
Philip cut in. “Foreign Legion,” he said, and Laurie hit him in the arm.
“I’m deciding,” she said. “I’ve got applications in to Queen’s, and McMaster, and Western.”
“She’s a wizard at math,” said Philip.
Their mother turned around. “Will you let the girl speak, Philip?”
“Don’t make me come back there,” said their dad.
“I can take care of myself,” said Laurie, and punched Philip again.
“Now it’ll never heal!” Philip grabbed his arm and gritted his teeth. He pressed his forehead against the windshield, making a halo of condensation on the glass. The sun had gone behind some cloud, and it seemed like a shadow fell across his face with it.
“I think I’d like to go into medicine,” said Laurie. “Have to keep my grades up for that, but that’s the plan. Probably Queen’s is my first—” she paused. “Wow. Look at that.”
“What?” said Ann’s mom, but Ann could see, looking at the road past her mom. It had been a pretty dry December so far—there’d just been two snowfalls earlier in the month, and both had melted. It looked as though they were driving into the third.
It was a wall of white, maybe a half a kilometre ahead. They had crested a hill, and were heading down into it; a translucent veil of snow, blowing across the road, through the field to their right and between the trees of the woods to their left.
“A white Christmas,” said Philip. Their dad switched on the headlights and the wipers, and their mom looked into it. Her shoulders clenched.
Laurie said, “Cool,” and shivered.
“Could you turn up the heat please, Dad?” said Ann. She was feeling it too. A chill was creeping up her arms.
“Sure,” said her dad. He turned the dial beside the radio and the fan kicked on. A blast of icy air came out of the vents.
“Aw, shit,” said her dad. “That’s just perfect.”
“What?” said her mom.
“Radiator. When the heat goes off, that’s usually what it means. The radiator’s leaking.”
He slowed the van down and put on his hazards. “We’re going to have to stop somewhere.”
“Where? There’s nothing.”
Her mother had a point. The snow was coming hard now—from where Ann was sitting, she couldn’t even see a bit of the road.
“Why do we have to stop?” asked Laurie.
“The radiator is what provides heat in the car—it’s the heat off the engine,” said Philip. “If there’s no heat, it means the radiator’s not working. And that means the engine could overheat.”
“Yeah,” said their dad, “that’s right. But I don’t want to stop right now—bad visibility—too easy to get hit by another car coming up behind. Too—”
There was a sickening lurch then, and Ann felt the seatbelt bite into her shoulder, as the van fishtailed. Laurie gasped and Philip shouted, “Whoa.”
Good.
Ann clutched the shoulder strap of her seatbelt as their dad pulled the steering wheel. Underneath them, the tires slid and screamed, and outside, a car horn dopplered in and out. And then there was sunlight, and the air blasting through the vents was suddenly hot.
Ann looked out the window.
The van was in the middle of the road, bisected by the yellow no-passing lane. On either side, farmers’ fields stretched and rolled up to lines of trees at the edge of vision. The snow had stopped; the sky was clear. The radiator, given the sudden heat, was on.
“Shit!” Their dad shook his head, turned on the ignition, and pulled around and back into his lane, gunned the motor and got up to speed. Ann hadn’t noticed the car coming down the gentle slope until it sped past them.
“Wow,” said Laurie. “Wow.”
Ann felt Philip’s hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “you okay?” She nodded, and he leaned forward and whispered, “We okay?”
Ann bent forward, held her arms tight around herself. She felt as though she might shake apart. Her mother was looking back at her over the seat.
“Annie,” she said, “remember your words.”
Ann nodded. She began to recite them. Belaim, foredawned, sheepmorne, overwind . . . Not speaking aloud, but listening for them, letting them bubble up. Belaim, foredawned . . .
Laurie was asking what was going on, and Philip was explaining that it was just a thing to help Ann with her stress, and her mom was saying “good, good,” when her dad said, “shit” again, and Ann opened her eyes.
The snow had returned. It wasn’t enveloping them this time; but to their left, and their right, and yes, behind, it was keeping pace—a great white pincer, that rolled across the fields, overtaking the van by degrees. The sun yellowed through it, as it rose higher and farther.
Good.
“We need to go back,” said Ann. “This isn’t—this isn’t the radiator.”
Ann’s mother twisted around and touched Ann’s arm. “Annie,” she said, “your words.”
And Ann thought about those words, as she listened for them again, and thought about that other snowy day—by the lake, in a room just as white as the snow outside, with Dr. Sunderland, sitting in that black office chair while she curled on a couch, repeating, “belaim”—which wasn’t even a word—and “foredawned”—could be a word, but wasn’t—and the rest, as a light flashed irregularly in the corner of her eye. And she thought about the time she’d become impatient—that she’d “had it!” And got up and tried to open the door, as Dr. Sunderland watched, and nodded, and in that way he had, begun to recite the alphabet, A and B and C and so on . . . And Ann thought about the new word, the one she’d heard in her room coming from Ryan’s lips. . . .
Placebo.
She looked it up on Yahoo after he left that night. A substance with no medical ingredients, but which tricked a patient into believing that it provided a cure. Enabling the patient to provide the cure to herself.
Good.
Behind her, Laurie was using her own words, about the valley of the shadow of death, and Philip was saying “Easy, easy,” and her mother twisted around and reached and held Ann’s hand tight as the sky became a deathly yellow, like flypaper, and the pincer closed, and the van became black and the vents blew hard, lashing snow, and gravity shifted.
It’s all right. You’re safe. Shh. Hush. You’re safe with me.
Ann was cold.
She couldn’t breathe. Not at first. She coughed, and she drew a great wheezing breath so hard it seemed to crack her ribs. She was cold. And wet.
She sat up. Her ears were ringing, and she was dizzy. She was at the bottom of a ditch. She had cracked through ice and was sitting in swift, running water. She got up, a sloshy, muddy job, but not impossible. Her arms and legs all worked, and although she was dizzy, she wasn’t blacking out. Three years ago, she’d fallen down the short flight of steps from the deck, and those were the questions her dad has asked her: Do your arms and legs work? Are you dizzy? Does it seem like th
ings are getting darker? How many fingers am I holding up?
There was no one nearby to ask her that last question. But Ann thought she could get the answer right if anyone did ask her.
She was cold. Colder than it had gotten in the van—when she’d fallen against the seatbelt, and the air had filled with the moaning sound of metal tearing, and the yowling of tires slid sideways, and a cracking sound . . .
And, as the seatbelt released her—
Ann leaned forward to climb the edge of the ditch. It was sunny again, and the heat of the sun felt good on the back of her hands, her shoulders. Her thighs stung under her sodden jeans. She slipped on the icy mud, and fell. “Help,” she murmured, reaching up.
Her fingers found a hand. It was warm, and she reached up with her free hand and grabbed it too. “Thank you,” she said, and found purchase in the muck. Three pushes, and she was over the top—alone, on the side of the highway.
Ann hugged herself and shivered as a bright red SUV crested the hill ahead of her, sped past. She couldn’t even tell which way it was going.
“Help!” she said as its taillights vanished around the bend in the other direction. “Help!” She started to run after it, stumbled, and fell into gravel.
She remembered sky, first that awful yellow, then blue—and then rotating, and looking down. The van rolled across the highway like a toy underneath her. She had thought it was a toy, hadn’t had time to put it together as she turned again.
And saw someone.
A tall figure—standing at the crest of the hill, from where the car had come.
Help! Ann didn’t articulate it this time, as the figure turned towards her, and raised two arms, and then two more, longer than those two, beneath that.
Ann let herself go. She felt the gravel, sharp against her face, and although it hurt, she pressed it there. And waited.
The next car that came by announced itself by its siren. The hands that helped her up were warm, and brought with them a blanket.
And when they crossed the crest of the hill moments later, the figure was gone.