The girl looked at them with eyes as opaque as candle wax.
“I have it,” she said. “What you’re looking for. I’ll get it.” She disappeared.
Roman looked at Peter. “Sorry,” he said.
Peter said nothing.
The girl returned moments later with a blank black envelope.
“I wanted to borrow a pair of socks and I found this,” she said. “I wanted to come along, but she wouldn’t take me. I … had an, I don’t know, a flash. Maybe at the time it wasn’t really a flash of anything, it just feels like it looking back. But you know how it is when you’re mad at someone when they’re leaving and part of you thinks, What if something happens and I never see her again and what I say now is the last thing I ever say? And I looked at her and she was always so fucking pretty and I said I hope she ends up left in a Dumpster.”
She handed the envelope to Peter.
“I showed it to my parents, but they just got pissed,” she said. “They think it was just an animal. They think it was just me trying to get attention.”
Peter opened the envelope and pulled out a card of black construction paper with lettering of glitter and glue and read it. He looked at Roman.
“You’re Roman Godfrey, aren’t you?” said the girl.
“How do you know who I am?” said Roman.
“You’re a Godfrey,” said the girl.
“What is that?” said Roman. “What does that say?”
“I thought you might be here for me too,” said the girl.
Peter handed the card to him. Roman looked at it and was quiet.
“I guess you’re not,” said the girl, morose.
The card was an invitation to a party. The party was INVITATION ONLY and you were not to tell another LIVING SOUL. SHHHHHHH, it said. The party was being held at Castle Godfrey the night of the full moon.
“Do you have any idea who might have sent her that?” said Peter.
“No, I don’t. She didn’t have any friends from Hemlock Grove that I knew of. But someone did steal her wallet out of her purse at a Starbucks there a couple of weeks ago. I figured you guys might have it.”
Roman didn’t respond or seem to be paying that much attention anymore. He held the invitation with his name on it as he would a sacred text.
“Thank you,” said Peter. “This is a lot of help.”
“Why are you looking for him?” said the girl. “The one who did this?”
“Because he’s going to be joining Gary,” said Roman.
* * *
Olivia took Shelley on a trip to the library. They branched out to different sections, Shelley physics and Olivia periodicals. Shelley passed the children’s section. A woman in a rocking chair was reading to a semicircle of children on the rug. “Not by the hairs of my chinny-chin-chin,” she said. Then she stopped as Shelley passed and the children turned. Shelley was immobilized—all those little eyes Lilliputian stakes. A little girl slid out and touched one of Shelley’s cubes with an expression of awe. The right side of Shelley’s face curled into a smile. A dark stain formed in the lap of a quivering boy and he began to cry. The storyteller knelt forward and shushed the boy but his tears began to spread from child to child like match heads flaring too quickly for the storyteller to contain. Shelley moved on.
Olivia heard the dim chorus of terror and hummed quietly to herself, selecting a wooden-spooled Wall Street Journal. It is commonly expected that wealthy families go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, and JR, being of the fourth and solely responsible for saving the Godfrey fortune from certain ruin, believed this could be forestalled largely by the concerned parties being able to make hide or hair of the financial page without the assistance of flunkies. Early in his education of his wife she had balked—the only figure she could be expected to be overly troubled with was her own—but surprisingly got the hang of it upon realizing its relationship to her own art: once decoded, the market, like the stage or the heart, was simply another arena in which desire went to war. An elderly man of the sort that can be found at libraries with a preference for print periodicals, sitting at a nearby table, said, “At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I’m always damn impressed to see a lady with a nose for business.”
She turned to him, and seeing that the nose in question was connected to Olivia Godfrey, the affability drained from his face and his mouth spread wide in a death grin.
“Why, thank you,” she said, herself old-fashioned enough to receive a man’s compliment in the spirit it was intended.
Olivia and Shelley convened at two armchairs upstairs overlooking the windows. The springs in Shelley’s chair sagged nearly to the floor as she opened her book. Olivia craned her neck, reading aloud over her daughter’s shoulder:
“‘Of course, minute as its impact may be in our physical universe, the fact of quantum entanglement is this: If one logically inexplicable thing is known to exist, then this permits the existence of all logically inexplicable things. A thing may be of deeper impossibility than another, in the sense that you can be more deeply underwater—but whether you are five feet or five fathoms from the surface you are still all wet.’”
Shelley clapped the book shut and folded her arms in a pout. But then her eyes lit (not a turn of phrase) and she rose, waving vigorously. Olivia looked over. The object of her daughter’s enthusiasm was a girl of approximately her own age accompanying an old woman with a stack of trashy detective thrillers, a small girl with a black raven’s nest bramble of hair and one glaring lock of white bang that to Olivia’s authoritative eye was not a dye job. The girl, if she was not mistaken, who had found Lisa Willoughby.
Christina responded to her classmate’s cheer in seeing her out and in good spirits with a smile of her own, but it faltered under the refracting blackness of Olivia’s sunglasses. She hurried on with her grandmother.
Disappointed, Shelley sat, and in so doing the afternoon light glinting off cars in the parking lot caught Olivia’s eye. Olivia tried to look away but could not. Suddenly and irreversibly at its mercy. The light transfixing her, the shadow closing in. The shadow just waiting for her to get distracted by the light shimmering gold like a field of—
Shelley looked up as her mother braced one hand on the arm of the chair and drew the fingertips of the other softly down her own her face and her eyelids fluttered and she said, “The sunflowers…”
And with that crashed to the floor.
* * *
“It’s just an empty, out-of-the-way place,” said Peter as he exited the car. “It doesn’t mean anything for all we know.”
Roman looked off to a patch of bare rockface in the hillside where a tree grew outward in the shape of a J.
“Do you know what that’s called?” said Roman. “When the root system is right there in the rock. Do they have a name for that?”
“I don’t know,” said Peter. “A lot of things have names.”
They agreed to convene later in the evening and Peter went inside where Lynda was watching TV and putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a commonly reproduced Monet.
Lynda told Peter Lisa had stopped by.
“‘Lisa’?” said Peter.
* * *
From the archives of Norman Godfrey:
NG: I spoke with Dr. Pryce.
FP: …
NG: Do you know who Dr. Pryce is, Francis?
FP: Yeah. I know him.
NG: He says you participated in a medical experiment at the Godfrey Institute. Is that true?
FP: So what?
NG: Is there a reason you didn’t mention that before?
FP: I did tell you. They killed us.
NG: According to Dr. Pryce, you took a highly experimental barbiturate.
FP: I’m not a fucking liar.
NG: No one’s saying that. I just wanted to get a better sense of what you’re going through.
FP: They fucking gave us something, all right. They killed us and brought us back.
NG: Francis, can y
ou possibly help me understand the … mechanics of that?
FP: Today I have seen the Dragon …
NG: Can you elaborate on the things you see?
FP: Things … come in my head.
NG: What kinds of things?
FP: Baby in a blood pouch. River glowing red. Dog hatching from a big black egg. Needle the size of a sword. Demon with a crown of light.
NG: This needle—was it some kind of drug?
FP: This is not about goddamn drugs! This is some evil, unnatural shit that has no business happening. You think this is just some junkie bullshit, talk to one of the other guys, see how they’re sleeping. I even got a name for you, saw it on the chart by mine. Varga, H. You talk to H. fucking Varga before you start looking at me like I’m making this shit up.
NG: Francis, please calm down. I’m not jumping to any conclusions.
FP: Yeah. Godfrey’s your fucking name. I bet it’d be real nice for you to come to the fucking conclusion this was all just some old nigger junkie bullshit.
NG: Francis, please, I’m here to help you. I’m a doctor, I just want to help … someone.
FP: …
NG: …
FP: Then make it stop.
(Nurse Kotar enters.)
NK: Doctor, I’m sorry to interrupt, but you have an urgent phone call.
Wouldn’t You Love to Think So
Olivia was sitting under a tree, wearing her sunglasses, with her legs crossed at the ankles, plucking petals from a dandelion. Shelley diligently standing over her—shade. Olivia looked up and tugged at Shelley’s hand.
“Look at the sour apple pretending he’s not happy to see us,” she said.
“What happened?” said Dr. Godfrey.
“Took a bit of a spill. I’m feeling rather light-headed.”
“Why didn’t you call an ambulance?”
She waved her hand at the idea of such a fuss. “And who would get Shelley home?” she said.
“Why didn’t you call your son?”
“I tried. No luck.”
“I think you should go to the hospital.”
She wrinkled her nose as though he had proposed she wear rhinestones before sunset—the idea of attending to something so precious as your health in the horror show of a hospital. “I’ll be as healthy as a horse after a nap,” she said.
Godfrey rubbed his chin, appraising. She plucked the last petal and discarded the stem, regarding him over the top of her Jackie Os.
He turned to Shelley. “Care to give me a hand with the patient, nurse?”
Shelley grinned.
Godfrey drove them home in Olivia’s truck. Olivia inquired into Letha’s health.
“What if we don’t talk about our kids,” said Godfrey.
“Well, that sounds goddamn divine,” she said.
She slid off her shoes and put her feet on the dash.
“Objections if I smoke?” she said.
“Yes.”
She depressed the dashboard lighter.
At Godfrey House, once Olivia had been safely installed in bed, Shelley hovered in the doorway but was dismissed for Mummy to restore her energy.
Shelley looked reluctantly from Olivia to Dr. Godfrey, longing for some way for this adventure to continue.
“Mummy’s very tired, darling.”
Shelley turned dejectedly and went upstairs.
Godfrey stood at the foot of the bed, arms akimbo.
“Sleep,” he said. “Eat something. If this happens again, I strongly urge you to consult a physician.”
“Come here,” said Olivia.
“There’s no reason for me to go over there.”
“Norman, please, you can give me a kiss good-bye like a grown person.”
Godfrey hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and gave her his long-perfected shenanigans look.
“Olivia—was this staged?”
She laughed. “Wouldn’t you love to think so? No, actually, I would leverage neither my goddamn health nor my daughter’s safekeeping as a snare for your attention. I simply needed a hand and it was lovely of you to extend one.”
“Have you been taking the pills?”
“You’ve made your position on that subject clear enough.”
“That’s not the same thing as yes.”
“Yes,” she said. “Believe it or not, I don’t hold your medical opinion lightly. Even if you’ve got the bedside manner of a mongoloid. Now stop being boorish and give me a kiss good-bye.”
Godfrey looked at his watch without consulting the time. Then he went to the bedroom door and closed it.
* * *
“Your office, this bed. We are making the rounds, aren’t we. Shall we sneak off to the mill some night?”
Godfrey shifted away from her and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his rumpled pants on the floor like shed snakeskin.
“This isn’t then,” he said.
“God knows. Then that goddamn moose head JR was so pleased with himself over would still be over the mantel.”
He said nothing. She hooked like a question mark toward him and laid her head in his lap. She could smell herself on him. She smiled but he looked ahead.
“Norman, look at me.”
He looked ahead.
“Norman, look at me.”
He looked down and met her eyes.
“The institute is one of the most advanced medical centers in the world,” she said. “The only thing that matters is the safety of the baby.”
Out the window, a doe had appeared from the tree line, stopping at a salt lick on a stump. It was as boringly mystical as all deer. He was not sure if he had been watching it for a few moments or a day.
She drew his hand backwards and guided it between her legs.
“You still make me as wet, you always have,” she said.
He stood, feeling a swell of pity. He didn’t know if it was for her for that to prove anything, or for himself because it did.
* * *
Roman walked back up Indian Creek toward his car. He threw Lisa Willoughby’s bunny tail panties into the water and wiped his hands on his pants. There was a discarded beer can in his path and he kicked it, banking off a rock and into the mouth of a drainage pipe.
“Goal!” he said.
He removed his phone from his pocket and turned it back on. There were eleven missed calls.
“Shit,” he said and jogged for his car.
When he arrived home, Dr. Godfrey was sitting at the dining room table with a glass in his hand.
“Your mom’s upstairs sleeping,” he said. “She’s fine.” Then, in response to a question that wasn’t asked, “I’m just waiting for a cab.”
“I can take you home,” said Roman.
Godfrey waved away the suggestion. “Thanks, he’s on his way.”
“It’s no problem. I’m right here.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Roman shrugged and continued to pass through, the foregoing exchange the most words that had passed between them in months. Godfrey sipped and held the drink on his tongue and swallowed.
“After this drink,” he said.
As the Jaguar crept out of the drive, neither noticed the crackling umbrage of the silhouette observing from the attic window.
“How is she doing?” said Godfrey on the road. “Your mother. Overall.”
“Psychotic,” said Roman. “So, more or less status quo.”
Godfrey chuckled and looked out the window. They were passing a strip mall in front of which was a bus stop where a young, overweight black boy in a Ninja Turtles T-shirt riding up the folds of his belly sat with a push-up ice cream that he was not eating, just staring blankly as he pushed the ice cream from the tube and pulled it back in and pushed it back out as though it had been a task assigned him in the underworld.
Roman looked at him. “How are you?” he said.
Godfrey was surprised by the question. But why should he be? The boy shared his blood and his name; why should it be surprising that the
offspring of two of the closest people in their own ways in Godfrey’s life was also a human? He was not sure how to respond and realized he cherished the confusion: in this moment he was neither father nor doctor nor in any meaningful way uncle and in fact had no clearly defined role or expectation whatever.
“Do you know who knocked up my daughter?” he said.
“No,” said Roman. “If I did, he’d be at the bottom of the river right now.”
It astounded Godfrey that he had missed what a charming young man his nephew had become.
Roman, wanting as only the mother-raised can to get the most of the older man’s approval, tried to think of something useful to add.
“If I knew more than you did, I’d tell you,” Roman said. “If that’s what you’re asking. But all I can say is that she seems … happy. I don’t know if that’s a red flag or not.”
They passed an open manhole cover with a rope feeding into it that a line of men in hard hats were hauling up from the inner dark.
“Neither do I,” said Godfrey.
* * *
Letha informed Peter he was just in time to escort her to get frozen yogurt, so they went to the Twist and she brought him up-to-date on the other half of the reconnaissance she had done with her father.
“So Aunt Olivia isn’t one of his favorite subjects, but I did learn a little. Still not sure where she’s from; I guess JR just fell for her when he saw her onstage. Which, I mean, of course he did. (Man, I don’t know how many goats you have to slaughter for your butt to look like that at her age…) But when she was Dad’s patient I got the sense she had some pretty serious problems, before Roman was born. But it was JR who totally lost his grip in the end. Apparently he made some pretty wild accusations about her.”
Peter picked up a straw and flattened it.
“Like what?” he said casually.
“He wouldn’t tell me anything specific, but it must have been some serious crazy person stuff; Dad was still pretty obviously upset by it. And it turns out there was a suicide letter that came in the mail … the day after. He never showed it to anyone. I was going to ask him what it said, but I could see in his face it was time to change the subject.”
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