The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  Waves leap silver in the inlet, crashing against a rocky protrusion. The juniper grow sparse here, making it an easy place to jump—or to push someone. Where an oval of yellow caution tape pens in a scuffle of footprints, I recognize the crisscrossed soles of Converse sneakers.

  “They took lots of photos there,” Lazuli says, following my eyes. “Those are her Chucks, but the rest—who can tell?”

  Ellis takes a step beyond me, to the edge, and raises his head to the fuzzy blue horizon. “It happened on impact, they said?”

  “Yes. I wish I could say she looked peaceful when I found her, but… well, who would look peaceful, really?” Lazuli clears her throat, clearly doubting her qualifications as a grief counselor. “Anyway, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

  After she leaves, Ellis stands looking out to where the sun, bloated and scarlet, has just touched the ocean. He doesn’t speak.

  I sit down cross-legged and trace circles in the dirt outside the yellow tape. Inside it, around the juniper’s gnarled trunk, it’s too sandy and dry for firm impressions; I see one deep heel print, larger than the Chucks, but nothing else.

  I imagine Caroline standing here last night in the dark, listening to high tide crunch on the pebbled shore. Was she alone? Did someone surprise her? Did Lazuli make the larger print weeks or months earlier on one of her morning constitutionals?

  From this angle, the sun sets Ellis’s face on fire. Until his shoulders quiver, I don’t realize he’s crying.

  I go to him and touch his shoulder, warmth seeping through the thin T-shirt. He says, “This sucks,” his voice fractured like the pebbles on the beach.

  “I know.”

  He leans slightly into me, rubbing his face with both hands. “I keep thinking of that day when you were writing on the wall with the Sharpie. I felt so lost. You were my only real friend, and I couldn’t help you, and I couldn’t help Anil today. And now my sister’s gone, really gone, and I keep thinking about that server, and I think it hurt her, too, Hedda. I think she was a victim.”

  I slip my arm tentatively around him until our fingers clasp, the sea breeze shearing past us as the sun sinks. “I think so, too.” I want to believe it.

  His silhouette is black and solid against the pool of flame on the horizon, and the closeness of his shoulder blades and hips to my body is palpable. “We need to find Mireya. No, first we need to go back to that cabin and look for clues—anything.”

  “Your parents should know, though. So they can make… arrangements.”

  Ellis turns to face me. Blinded by the sun behind him, I feel his hair tickle my cheek as he says, “That can wait.”

  He straightens to take something from his backpack—the flask. Unscrews it.

  I draw in my breath, and he says, “Don’t worry, I know I’m driving,” then smiles blindingly for an instant, mocking us both, and takes a pull. “That should hold me for a few hours. Or another five minutes. You go back and start searching the cabin. I want to stay here for a bit.”

  The sun reddens the side of his face—slipping, slipping toward its own bloody reflection in the Pacific—as I give him space to say goodbye to his sister.

  Now that the sun has set, the pines around Caroline’s cabin blend into purple pools of shadow. As I pass the henhouse, where Lazuli is busy shooing the chickens in for the night, the ocean wind goose pimples my skin. Smells of dung and mealworms bring me back to the ranch.

  Simple tasks, iron-clad routines. If I were still there, those skulls might have come to different people, in Texas or New York or Brazil, and never touched the coastal enclave of San Rafael. Rory, Anil, and Emily would be going out tonight, looking forward to the long Labor Day weekend.

  A hand on my arm makes me jump—Lazuli. Is she going to tell me to stay away from Caroline’s possessions?

  “Ellis is coming,” I explain, feeling the energy for politeness slipping away from me. “We’re going to have one last look, if it’s okay—we won’t touch anything.”

  Lazuli has released me, but her eyes stay on mine. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Did you know Cl—Caroline very well?”

  Something about that gaze makes me go stock-still. She knows something. “She babysat me when I was little.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt her?”

  My head shakes of its own accord. “No. But she did… well, she hurt herself, when she was younger.”

  “There’s something I didn’t want to mention to Ellis just now, but I’m not sure I want him to hear it first from the sheriff, either. That man doesn’t have the best bedside manner. Maybe you can tell him when he’s ready.”

  My vision blurs with the effort it takes not to look eager. Breathe. Just nod.

  “When I first went in there, after I found her, I did open the laptop,” Lazuli says. “I don’t know what I was expecting—maybe a note. The first thing I saw was an e-mail with a picture attached. The sender was weird—no name, just something with the word ‘survivor’ in it. But it wasn’t in the spam folder.”

  She wets her lips, her eyes darting up the lawn, where a flash of coppery hair tells me Ellis is approaching. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. I really shouldn’t be.”

  “You’re telling me,” I say, “because the picture was a skull.”

  Her eyes go mild with shock. “How did you know?”

  Caroline got a skull. Caroline stepped (ran? fell?) off a cliff. We’re back at the beginning, and things still make no more sense than they did weeks ago, because we still can’t find the server.

  I wait to walk the rest of the way with Ellis, while Lazuli returns to her chickens. My stammered explanation didn’t make much sense, but she let it ride with the polite unflappability of rich people, and I can’t afford to worry about whether she thinks I’m in cahoots with whoever caused Caroline’s death.

  Someone sent her a skull. Someone is still running the server.

  On the steps of the cabin, Ellis pauses to offer me the sweater he’s knotted over his shoulders.

  “I’m okay. You need it.” I fetch my hoodie from the pack, my fingers grazing the smooth, eyeless face of Raggedy Ann. Her presence is weirdly reassuring, but God knows how I’d explain her to Ellis, who’s holding the door for me.

  Stepping inside, I smell his breath, minty mouthwash and whiskey, and my cheeks flush. There’s an almost formal space between us now.

  Inside, it’s too dark to see much. Ellis finds a lamp, and Caroline’s wall of photos appears again, the real setting of the game springing to life. I run my eyes down the row of pictures, looking for anything I’ve missed, while he wakes his phone and snaps a photo. “I’ll image-search that tower. It’s weird enough to be a landmark.”

  “It’s not actually a tower.” How do I know? “It’s a furnace, I think. The hole in the roof is a smokestack.”

  “So maybe they were smelting something? Like a mine?”

  “I guess.” While Ellis works on his phone, I bend closer to a photo of the log cabin, my whole body going still with the effort of focusing. Why do that spindly porch, those spiny logs, look familiar? The cabin’s not part of the game.

  Below the photo, barely attached by a yellowed piece of tape, hangs a sheet of notebook paper. I peel it from the wall and find small, crabbed handwriting:

  Fear = concentration. Induces hypnotic state. Addictive.

  Runes on safe trees = conditioning. Rewards for playing. Locks in hypnotic state.

  Level 13 kills player. Vulnerability. Depression. Secondary hallucinations link game death to real trauma.

  Skull = hypnotic trigger. Returns player to game. Randoms, keening, rustling = game transfer phenomena.

  Could Caroline have experienced it, too—the sounds, the visions? Was this her blueprint for the Glare, or was she struggling to understand it, just like I am?

  I show the paper to Ellis. “It’s how the Glare works, I think. But what are game transfer phenomena?”

  He leans in, frowns. �
��It’s like when you play Tetris so much you start seeing the blocks everywhere—on the highway, in the grocery store. Or like that guy who thought Grand Theft Auto was telling him to steal cars in real life.”

  “So the game hypnotizes you. It addicts you. It isolates you. And then, when you can’t play anymore, it starts invading your reality. But only when you’re triggered.” There are no puzzle pieces snapping neatly into place in my mind, only rugged cloudbanks pushed by a desert gale, their meeting points edged with lightning.

  “The triggers come from somewhere,” Ellis says.

  The photo of the cabin draws my eyes like a magnet. As I focus on it again, a second image flashes behind my eyes: my parents arm in arm in front of a rugged dwelling.

  It was one of the pics I saw when I first explored my online history, the Encyclopedia of Me. Maybe I’m grasping at straws.

  Still, my legs go shaky, and I sit down in Caroline’s desk chair. “Ellis, could you find an old photo in my mom’s Facebook feed? She never bothered to delete her account.”

  It takes forever and less than a minute for Ellis to hand me his phone.

  “Do you mean this one?”

  My parents stand entwined in front of a log cabin, her head resting on his shoulder, a mischievous smile on her lips. Blast from the past! the caption reads. Back when we were dating, Mike brought me to this remote corner of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest preserve for some wilderness living. Pure, unadulterated Nature!

  I compare the images side by side. The logs with bark clinging to them; the low-hanging, mossy roof on flimsy posts—it all matches. The only difference is that one image has my parents in it, and the other doesn’t.

  They vacationed in the Glare, or the inspiration for the Glare. They were there, not Caroline.

  Mom told Dad the game was Caroline’s idea, but Mom has a little habit of censoring her past. Mom designed games. Mom mentored Caroline and gave her games to test. Mom visited the black tower.

  Her face in the photo is young and impish, with a hint of something withheld in its expression. What else did she hide from me?

  I don’t want to say what I’m thinking, don’t even want to think it. Maybe Ellis isn’t the one who has the most trouble being objective here.

  But we’ll never know if we don’t check it out. Facebook’s location tag says Twin Hills Mine, Shasta County, California. “Look up Twin Hills Mine on your map,” I say.

  Ellis has sharp-pointed questions in his eyes, but he lowers his head and starts tapping his phone. “You gonna tell me why?”

  “I think it’s the place in these photos. When Caroline e-mailed me, she said she thought the server was there.”

  After staring at the screen for a moment, Ellis reaches for my hand and places the phone in it. There’s a new tension in his body, an excitement, and his fingers linger on mine as I gaze at the map.

  “Five hours,” he says. “We can go tonight.”

  When Erika answers the phone, I can tell she’s struggling to keep her voice level. “Where are you?”

  Outside, the forests and farms of inland Marin zip past, the foliage clotted with charcoal dusk and only the sky still alight. We’re headed for the I-5, which will take us up to Shasta County. Ellis stares straight ahead, his hands steady on the wheel, his long legs drawn up in the small car, and I try not to remember his hand holding mine.

  “We’re still looking for Mireya.” It hurts to lie to her, but we are looking for a way to help Mireya. I wouldn’t have called if I didn’t need to ask what I do next: “She hasn’t come home, has she?”

  “No. Her mom says she disabled her phone, so they’re trying to get in touch with her boyfriend.”

  Disabled is one word for it. I hope fervently that Mireya is holed up with Anthony, and that she’s made him turn his phone off. I try not to remember the blood on her forehead, the whites of her eyes.

  “And Dad? Is he home?” I don’t look forward to telling him what I suspect about Mom.

  “No. He has a last-minute meeting with venture capitalists in San Diego.” Erika’s voice is rising now, worse than this morning. “I told him I’d look out for you, Hedda. I need you to tell me where you are, and then to come back. It’s practically dark out!”

  “I can’t do that.” The quaver in her voice paints the whole picture: her white knuckles as she clutches the phone, the way she blinks a little too fast when she’s upset. I should just hang up now, because nothing I say will reassure her, but I can’t. “I’m with Ellis, and I swear we’ll be back tomorrow. Please just trust me, okay?”

  I glance at Ellis as I speak, wondering if he’s put things together like I have. My grip tightens on the phone, that treacherous glassy portal to the rest of the world.

  “You said you trusted me this morning.” She’s got her voice back under control. Maybe Clint is nearby and she doesn’t want to scare him. “So why can’t you just tell me?”

  Because you won’t believe me. “I’m sorry. See you soon, I promise.” As I hit the end button and turn off the phone again, something clenches inside me.

  “Was that your dad?” Ellis asks.

  I shake my head and almost laugh, feeling tears come to my eyes. “No way. That was my stepmom. If it were my dad or mom, I could lie to them, no problem,” I go on, something driving me inexorably toward the thing I don’t want to talk about, “but with Erika it’s different. She doesn’t lie to me.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. I never totally forgave my folks for not talking straight to me about Caroline.”

  “My mom…” And now the thing is between us, immovable as a boulder. “I used to think she was straight with me. But she never told me about that place. The national forest.”

  I’m not explaining myself very well, but Ellis has seen the same clues I have. “Do you think she could have created the Glare?” he asks in a neutral voice. “Maybe you didn’t get it from Caroline, after all. Maybe you found it at home.”

  Staring at the glowing yellow lines in the gathering dark, I remember his reasoning for why Caroline couldn’t have been running the server, and relief washes through me. “Mom’s been out in Arizona with me for the past ten years. We haven’t been apart even a night in all that time. She hasn’t been making stealth trips to California.”

  Unless the server isn’t in California. Unless Mom has it stashed somewhere on the ranch along with her secret cell phone. It shouldn’t be possible, because I know every inch of that place, but the mother I’ve seen reflected in Dad’s stories isn’t the one I know. So many of the things she told him about Caroline may actually have described herself. She could have been someone who liked using games to modify people’s behavior. Control yourself—it was always about control, wasn’t it? She brought me out to the desert to remold me, and when I tried to take control back, her game sucked me in again.

  Even now, I taste the craving for the Glare on my tongue, bitter and tangy and wild. The part of me that loved playing is still in there.

  Could Mom have created the Glare to punish kids for being glued to their screens? Or created it and then felt so guilty she wanted nothing to do with the internet for the rest of her life?

  “Maybe no one’s running the server anymore,” Ellis says. “Maybe it’s running itself.”

  “Could it do that?”

  “Not without maintenance, if it’s out in the middle of nowhere. And I think it is there. Caroline told you to find the place in the picture for a reason.”

  He sounds so confident, so certain, as if he believes things will fall into logical alignment as soon as we reach that cabin. As if there’s a mystery we can solve, a culprit we can drag to the police. And I want to believe he’s right, want to feel his fingers clasp mine again, want to stop seeing Anil’s terror and the whites of Mireya’s eyes.

  But more than that, I don’t want my mother to be the real monster.

  At about midnight, when it feels like we’ve been on the freeway forever, I close my eyes and drift into blackness.<
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  I wake to find the car parked, the dashboard display dark. Outside, a tepid greenish floodlight illuminates a gas station canopy. Beyond, the darkness is a plunge into deep space.

  Ellis’s face appears in the open window. “I just realized I’ll kill us both if I don’t get coffee. Want anything inside?”

  I open the door and stand up, working out kinks in cramped muscles. “I’m coming.”

  When I woke, for a second, I didn’t remember. Not just this impossibly long day—Caroline, Mireya, Anil, Cheyenne’s taunting voice—and not just yesterday—blood caked in the ridges of a vinyl seat—but everything since I came here. For an instant, I was on a trip with Mom through the desert, returning from a birthday dinner in Phoenix. Back when I believed in her.

  Now, standing under the fluorescents of a twenty-four-hour mini-mart, choosing between Hazelnut Crème and Burnt Vanilla, I miss the morning slant of light on the desert. I miss the sandy soil under my heels. I miss the manic clucking of the hens and the strange caterpillar pupils of the goats and the routine of chores and the good kind of tired you feel after a day of bending and pushing and hauling.

  I miss the librarian and the bank teller and the county fair, and, most of all, I miss Mom. Her tireless presence beside me, weeding or milking or reading aloud. Her steadfastness, her tenderness, her anger, even her exaggerations and unfairness.

  How could she? It’s a dark web I’m not ready to untangle.

  I grab a few stale muffins, pay, and follow Ellis back across the light-smeared asphalt. The air is night cool, spiked with gasoline. A minivan is refueling in the bay beside ours, the others empty.

  Something burbles and snaps in my right ear. On a screen attached to the gas pump, a ghostly image of a girl in a striped top cavorts to a pop song. The camera zooms in on the Pepsi in her hand.

  I glance away. To my left hovers the faint glow of the interstate; to my right, the stars shine fiercely above a horizon of shaggy pines.