by Cathy Lamb
“When my alpacas start to talk. When my butt gets smaller. When the goats stop escaping. When I start to want to run instead of only running when I have to. When my boobs get bigger. So your answer is: Never. I am never getting on a motorcycle.” I had enough scary things going on in my life. I limit my life to safe pastimes only. A little blue house in the country by the ocean. A bookstore. Tea. Cake with thick icing. Reading at night on my porch. Caring for my animals. Having a nutritional slice of pie each night.
“I wanted you to ride in on a motorcycle down the aisle, gunning it, soooo loud. Growling.”
“Oh, hell, no.” Jules wasn’t kidding.
“You could learn to ride for the wedding,” Aunt Iris said. “I could help you. You would only need to know how to ride for twenty feet. Until you arrived at the gazebo.”
“No.”
“Maybe we could get her a fake motorcycle?” my mom asked. “Like a kid motorcycle?”
“No.”
“Evie has enough going on without getting on a motorcycle,” Aunt Camellia said.
“Yep,” I said.
“Okay,” Jules said. She brightened. “How about if Mack rides you in on a wheelie?”
“No. Double no. Hear me quiver with fear.”
We talked about the wedding, the plans, and hung up, but not before Jules told us all she loved us. “Especially you, Evie!” She grinned.
“Especially you, Jules!” I said back.
Which is what we had said to each other our wholes lives, starting when we were little.
“I’m coming over to the island soon to help with the rest of the details!”
We waved and blew kisses.
“We can’t wait to see you!” Aunt Camellia called out. “May blessings follow you always.”
“Always remember we love you!” my mother said. “Be safe on your bike. Don’t go too fast. Remember that a happy body eats vegetables.”
“On a practical note, start making lists of everything you need to do for the wedding, and scratch them off when you’re done,” Aunt Iris said. “Don’t let wedding details slip through the cracks, or you’ll want to crack a week before the wedding like the other brides we’re dealing with now. They’re all crackpots.”
* * *
Jules and I are different.
She is ebullient. Funny. Loud. Outgoing. Brave.
I am quiet. Reserved. Thinking all the time. Waiting in fear or trepidation for the next premonition or disaster.
Jules rides motorcycles too fast. She skydives. She hang glides. She likes to run, and will even run when a bear is not chasing her, which is about the only time I can imagine running and liking the ability to run.
I would get on a motorcycle only if there was a tsunami behind me and for no other reason. One is supposed to stay in one’s seat on a plane, not jump out of it with a parachute. I would never hang glide for any reason.
Jules loves parties and social gatherings.
I don’t love parties or social gatherings except on rare occasions.
Jules like wine and beer and hard liquor. She does not mind getting buzzed or drunk now and then. I will never get buzzed or drunk. I need to be completely in control of my mind as much as possible.
Jules travels whenever she gets the chance on her motorcycle, meeting new people, seeing new things.
I like my quiet life on the island, my beloved animals, my bookstore and my books, and probably will not leave it again, or leave only rarely. I protect my sanity as best I can.
And that is probably why we are so close. We are different, but we adore each other.
If for some inexplicable cosmic reason Jules is in the red car coming straight toward me in my premonition, trust me when I tell you that I will send my truck straight over that cliff before a hair on my sister’s blonde head is harmed.
Chapter 11
Betsy Baturra
Multnomah County Jail
Portland, Oregon
1975
Jail, Betsy decided, is actually hell.
It’s a hell wrapped in concrete, wire, and steel bars that has landed on Earth, dangerous and suffocating. She had a metal plank and a sinking, stained, skinny mattress for a bed. She had bars keeping her trapped like an animal; a toilet within her cell with no privacy; and a small, battered sink. She was told what to do and when to do it. The food was horrible, the lack of sunlight graying to life, the lack of freedom deadly to her mind and soul.
Betsy heard the crying at night, sometimes wailing when someone was having a particularly bad time. She heard the swearing and the shrieking fights, the yelling at each other and the heated arguing with the guards. She heard the orders being barked, and she saw prisoners, some of whom were mentally ill, or who had become mentally ill in prison, dragged out by guards for the slightest infractions.
Her roommate, Rainbow, whose real name was Margaret Cholo, was back. She had to go to isolation when she hit the guard with three fingers who finally came to check on Betsy when Betsy was dying from blood loss after giving birth. But Rainbow was different now. She was scared. She muttered to herself one color after another, rocking back and forth.
Apricot.
Indigo.
Magenta.
Plum.
Sienna.
Violet.
Rainbow hid under her bed whenever she could. She wrapped her arms around herself and whimpered and shook in the corner.
Rainbow was dirty, her hair a wreck. She had refused to shower because she thought she would be dragged out of the shower and put in isolation again, only this time she would be “naked and white and in a beige cell alone with steel gray guards staring at me, touching me with yucky pink fingers.”
Betsy tried to comfort Rainbow as best she could, their tears blending together.
The abject loneliness and the hopelessness was a gaping wound within Betsy. She could hardly eat, hardly sleep, her mind crumbling from losing Baby Rose and Johnny. She worried about Tilly, too, sweet Tilly, Johnny’s little sister, who was now in foster care according to her attorney. There was no one to take care of her.
Betsy thought of her own mother, of her own father. They had never come to see her, and they never would, she knew that. She was gone to them, a humiliation, a curse from the devil. They had undoubtedly wrapped their arms around themselves in their fundamentalism and moved on. She wrapped her arms around herself, cold and alone.
* * *
When Betsy was younger, she got into trouble many times. Her father, Hansen, was a religious, hypocritical fundamentalist and her mother was weak, cowed and went along with everything he said. Now and then he would rage at her mother, insist that she obey, submit, behave. “Woman, do not break God’s law! I am the head of the household. You are my helpmate. You are one of my ribs. You are steeped in the sins of Eve. Do not question me.”
Her mother rarely questioned her father, but when he was in a bad mood, and he found her not obedient “enough,” he would sometimes slap her, Mary’s black hair flying out of her bun. “I am doing this for your own good! May Jesus forgive you for your insolence!”
Mary would tilt her head down in defeat and submission, her golden eyes closed.
When Betsy told them, when she was five, of her first premonitions, of someone getting hurt or drowning or, twice, ministers being arrested, and when those premonitions came true, her father had many consequences for her after he overcame his shocked anger. First, he called her a liar. Then, when the premonitions came through, he hit her with a Bible, he made her memorize long passages, he performed a séance on her, and he taped her mouth shut “so the devil inside of you will die.”
He then told people at their small church, a church that did not like outsiders, to pray for his daughter, as she was “possessed” by demons and they had to “pull the demons out.”
She was then, as a little girl, ostracized by the parents and the children of that church because no one wanted their children near a demonic little girl.
Betsy was
scared of her premonitions but more scared of her father, who was a menacing, yelling figure who called her, a young child, “evil” and “possessed by the devil.” That the devil possessed her made her wet her pants every time she thought of it.
Soon she knew not to tell her parents what she saw in the future, but when she was older she also knew she had to take action to save the people she loved. She let the air out of a tire on Miss Jane’s car next door when she was seven. She knew how to do that because her mother’s uncle showed her how to change a tire. “Your father is clueless and lazy, Betsy, so you’re going to have to know how to do it,” Uncle Jacko told her.
Betsy knew that Miss Jane was going to help her friend Dixon on his farm that day, based on the clothes she was wearing, the same clothes as in the premonition, and her arm was going to be ripped off by some sort of farm equipment. She could not have Miss Jane losing an arm. Miss Jane was only twenty-five and baked the best chocolate chip cookies, and she snuck them to Betsy through a hole in their fence. By letting out the air in Jane’s tire, Betsy ensured that Jane couldn’t go to the farm, and she avoided having her arm ripped off.
Miss Jane did not like her father. She sprayed him with her hose when he was yelling at Betsy one day in the front yard after church. Her father was telling Betsy that she was not “a good Christian. Not prayerful, not obedient, an embarrassment to the family!” He was soaked through from Miss Jane’s hose. When Hansen charged her, his face mottled and red, Miss Jane sprayed him right in the head, then told him, “If you take one step onto my property, Hillbilly Hansen, I will shoot you.”
Her father was livid, but he backed off and yanked Betsy inside, her feet dragging across the lawn. The next day Children’s Services came out to talk to her dad and mom and to her. The lady was nice to her, but Betsy was petrified because her father whispered to her, “Don’t say anything bad about me or you will go to hell and I will spank you there.”
Betsy also knew that her dad would hit her with the Bible again or lock her in the closet in the basement and tell her to copy a book out of the Bible if she opened her mouth. While she was locked up, he would give her only bread and water, as if she were Paul in one of the jail cells in the Bible. She hated that because when she became super hungry her whole body shook and she became dizzy. She told the Children’s Services lady that everything was “happy at home.”
The next time Miss Jane saw her father, she called him “Mr. Monster Father” to his face. She was fearless! Betsy tried not to laugh, but Hansen heard her and she spent an afternoon in the closet.
Betsy knew exactly where three teenagers were lost when she was twelve because she saw one of them falling off the path and into a ravine. The three lost teenagers were on the news, and everyone was talking about them. “The news is grim, folks,” a newscaster said. “The temperature is expected to drop below freezing tonight.” Betsy knew what that meant: The boys would freeze to death.
When her father left for men’s Bible study, she called her friend Collette, from school, and asked to speak to Collette’s mother. Aurelia was a police officer. She told her everything, knowing what her father would do if he found out. But they were kids, too! Like her. They shouldn’t freeze to death. Aurelia and a police lieutenant came to her home only a minute after her father arrived home. Her father tried to prevent her from speaking. “She is possessed,” he told the police. “She knows nothing.”
The lieutenant, whose nephew was one of the three lost teenagers, insisted that she be allowed to speak. Aurelia had to haul her father, screeching Bible verses, spittle flying, away from her. Hansen was doubly embarrassed that a woman was stronger than he was and that she was able to wrestle him to the floor, his head in a head lock. Betsy told the lieutenant what she saw, her body trembling, as she knew she was in so much trouble. As usual, her mother stood by, a weak mouse.
“I see a huge rock. Flat. Like how a rock would look if you sliced it in half, but it’s on a mountain. It goes way up in the sky. There are pine trees and a river way below, and the river looks like a snake. All three of the boys are down by the river where there’s an island in the middle of it.”
“That sounds like the south side of Bald Peek,” Aurelia said, her hand still on Hansen’s head, squished into the carpet. “Off the Mahoney Trail.”
Hansen screeched a prayer of punishment and penance.
Calls were made. A search in a whole new direction began. The kids were helicoptered out and at a hospital within the hour. Two of them were suffering from hypothermia. The one who had fallen had broken both legs. They probably would have died that night had they not been rescued. All three stayed in the hospital for days but would be as good as new soon.
Betsy was not as good as new. As soon as Aurelia and the lieutenant left, her father tore her pants down, leaned her over his lap, and hit her with his belt while her mother cowered.
Another time, when she was fifteen, Betsy pounded a rock into Mr. Zeiber’s sliding glass door until it shattered, and she crawled in only a minute after he had a heart attack in the kitchen. In her premonition she had seen him struggling for air, arching his back, clutching his chest. She had taken particular note of his clothes, as she had learned to do: gray sweater with red trim on the cuffs, blue jeans with a hole on the left knee, black tennis shoes.
She called for an ambulance as Mr. Zeiber, only forty-five years old, gasped for breath on the floor, then she held his hand. Mr. Zeiber lived. Her parents were alerted to where their daughter was only when the police brought her home. The police explained that Betsy had told them that she had “heard” Mr. Zeiber’s cries for help and that’s why she broke the sliding glass door. Mr. Zeiber did not remember screaming, but he figured that he had and knew that Betsy had saved his life.
“Your daughter is a hero,” the police said.
When the police left, Betsy’s enraged father tossed her in the basement closet with the Bible, where she crumpled to the floor. He did not let her out for twelve hours, though she had saved a life. He gave her a can to pee in.
“Pray that God delivers you from the evil spirits within you. No one but God, our holy father, sees the future, except, perhaps, the devil, so you will stay here until the devil leaves you. And never leave the house without our permission again, Betsy! You are a cursed girl and I will save you from yourself!” To make her especially miserable, she was given only two pieces of bread and water, so her body shook and she became dizzy, as usual.
The men in the church performed an exorcism on Betsy at her father’s request after that one. They told her to get naked on a table. She refused. She fought, she hit, she tried to run, she screamed. Finally they agreed she didn’t have to get naked. Clearly two of the more creepy men were disappointed. When she was on the table Betsy sang songs by the Beatles until her dad put his hand over her mouth. She almost passed out from not being able to breathe. “Don’t kill her, Hansen,” one of the men said. “Let me examine her and I’ll see if I can get the demons out.”
Betsy never forgot that “examination.” Her father stood by and watched, the men around her breathing heavily, her father the heaviest of all.
From the time she was young, though, she knew that sometimes she should say something, do something, to prevent something tragic from happening in the future, and sometimes she shouldn’t.
She knew that Mr. Ralph, another neighbor, was going to die soon. He was going to fall out of his wheelchair and drown in his pool. But he was ninety-four years old and he had already told Betsy that he didn’t want to live anymore. He had lost his wife, his brothers and sisters, and his best friend. He was extremely sick and coughed all the time. She didn’t know if he rolled himself in or if it was an accident, but she did nothing to prevent it.
And she knew that her father was going to chop wood in the backyard and get distracted by Miss Jane in a bathing suit next door and bring the ax straight into his leg. The leg would gush blood and he would be in the hospital for a couple of weeks because of a bad in
fection that would almost kill him.
She didn’t tell him what was going to happen, and she did nothing to prevent it. Those two weeks with her mother were the best ever.
No, she let the ax slide straight into her father’s leg, and when he called out in agony, she pretended not to hear.
Later, he beat her for that, too.
* * *
It was bad enough to live in a household of control, reeking with religious fanaticism, and a fundamentalism that actively discouraged rational thought, facts, opinions, freedom, or joy, but it was worse knowing that your own mother, the person who should protect you above all else, would never stand up for you, Betsy thought. Her mother was weak, voiceless. She would not protect her daughter from her husband, no matter what happened to her.
And yet Betsy’s mother, with black hair and golden eyes like Betsy’s, had premonitions, too. She told Betsy she did. Her mother had, too, and her grandmother and great-grandmother. They were all Irish. “The second sight,” she said. “We have it.”
Yes, they had it. The difference was that Betsy tried to help others, while Mary couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help anyone, even her own daughter. Hansen knew—Mary had told him before they married—and he had been kind while they were chastely dating, until their wedding night. Then he had thundered at her for her wickedness, and things had gone downhill from there.
If Betsy had to choose, it was her mother’s inaction that hurt her more than her father’s belt, whipping through the air until it landed and split open her back.
* * *
Betsy thought she might well lose her mind in jail.
But as time went on, she thought that might be preferable to staying sane.
Chapter 12
“Serafina, with her shiny, multicolored rainbow tail, liked to help people.”
“Like me, right?”
“Like you. One day, her brothers got into trouble with an evil merman who used to be king. He was a horrible king. He wouldn’t allow the mermen and mermaids freedoms, so they had a mighty revolution under the sea and chased him out with golden swords and shields. King Koradome was not allowed in the Mermaid Village anymore. He lived miles away in an old black rock home.”