“I can’t talk to you,” she said.
“Meaning Dad won’t let you,” I said. It wasn’t what I’d meant to say. I could already feel this starting to fishtail out from under me. I took a breath and tried again. “It’s been a really hard few years. There are some things I need to know that only you can tell me.”
“I can’t,” she said, lifting her chin. Her gaze was set about five degrees off to my right, as if looking at me straight on would be dangerous. “I understand you don’t respect our family or our God, so I wouldn’t expect you to understand why I would choose to honor your father’s wishes, but—”
“Yeah, I really don’t.”
“But. Your father is a good man.”
“Is he?”
That seemed to strike home. Two bright spots of color appeared on her cheeks, red underneath the paleness of her makeup.
“You have no idea what sacrifices he has made for this family,” she said. “You have no idea the troubles that the Lord has put on his shoulders.”
I shrugged.
“Maybe someone could tell me,” I said. “Know anybody who’d be up for that?”
“I will not speak to you,” my mother said. Her scowl could have shamed stones. She set her shoulders and turned away, marching toward the grocery store.
“Please,” my body said without me. It was always strange when it did that. Before I knew I had a rider, I figured it was just my subconscious taking action without bothering to alert my frontal lobes. I figured everyone worked like this. How could I have known otherwise?
My mother stopped like I’d yanked on her leash. I stood still, and the rider in me didn’t do anything else. My mother turned back slowly, as if unwilling to but without the power to stop herself. She came back slowly. There were tears in her eyes, which was a first since I’d come back to town. And something else. Looking at her, it was like seeing a kid on Christmas day coming downstairs to find a pony standing by the tree. It wasn’t happiness. It wasn’t delight. It was what came before that. Wonder, maybe. Disbelief.
“What did you say?” she asked, and her voice sounded like someone shouting from a long way off. “What did you say to me?”
“Please,” the Black Sun said with my mouth. It reached out and took my mother’s hand. She stepped close, her eyes locked on mine now, staring into me like she was looking for something. Like she’d lost something important and thought she might find it written on the back of my skull.
“You?” she whispered. “It is you? Are you there?”
When I answered, it was really me.
“I don’t know. Help me find out.”
Her hand dropped back to her side. A thickset black man pushed a cart out from the doors behind her, nodded to us as he passed, and pressed out into the parking lot with a metallic crash. He might as well not have been there. My mother’s attention was locked on nothing, her lips moving in a conversation I had no part in. My nose had started running, and the cold hurt my earlobes. I ignored the discomfort. My heart was beating faster. I felt the gap between us growing thin. I could feel myself almost reaching her. Almost.
“I know you’re not supposed to,” I said. “Talk to me anyway.”
“Your father is a good man,” she said. “He’s a good man.”
“Except he’s not my father,” I said. Her gaze snapped to me. To me, not the rider, not the air beside my head. Not even the story she’d told herself about me ever since I left. For the first time in years, my mother was looking at me. Ever since a girl with the Sight had told me that my mother had had an affair, I’d had the suspicion take root, but I’d never said it. Not even to myself. “Dad. He’s not my father. Is he?”
“Your father is . . . your father is . . .” she said, and it had the same intonation that she’d used before, except it broke. The sentence stuck there in her throat like a bone. For a moment her attention swam. “Your father was the devil.”
It felt like a punch in the stomach. Or like victory. Or both.
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “Tell me about that.”
chapter six
It wasn’t a restaurant I’d been to before. I’d let Mom drive us there, trusting Chogyi Jake and Ex to figure out what was up and follow as best they could. I paid the girl at the front an extra hundred dollars for a booth away from everyone else and not to come over to us unless I called for her. Her eyebrows had tried to crawl up into her hair, but she took the money. Red plastic benches curved under us. The Formica table was an artist’s interpretation of wood grain, recognizable but unconvincing. The radio in the kitchen was playing a country station. I didn’t recognize the song, but the guitar work was good. The air was thick with the smell of grease and hot metal. I sat facing toward the front so that I’d see any assaults coming from the street and Mom wouldn’t be distracted if someone we knew came in. I hadn’t considered any of that consciously. Thinking that way was who I’d become.
She had a glass of iced tea clutched in her hand the way a desperate alcoholic might hold a glass of bourbon, and she poured packets of artificial sweetener in it one after the other until I was pretty sure she’d lost count. Her face was blank as a mask, and she was back to not looking at me directly. All animation was gone. Even her movements had a clockwork-like rigidity. I tried to connect all this with the woman I’d known as my mother, with her uncertainty and subservience, and at first I couldn’t. And then I could. I didn’t talk, didn’t touch her. I let the moment have its own time, afraid that if I pushed, she’d jump up and leave. Even the air between us seemed fragile. I tried not to breathe too hard.
When she spoke, her voice was careful, slow, and emotionless. She sounded like someone being deposed by the police.
“God put Gary Heller into my life when I was eighteen years old. I knew the first time I saw him that we were meant for each other. Everyone at church knew him. They liked him. When he asked me to marry him, I felt truly blessed. I never had any doubt that I was supposed to be with him. Never for one minute, and I never have. Gary has been a true man to me. He’s been better than I deserved.”
She took a sip of the tea, opened another packet of sweetener and poured the white powder over the ice. Some sank to the sludge at the bottom of the glass and some hung suspended in the tea, gritty and cold.
“I didn’t meet Eric until just before the wedding. He was the black sheep of the family. All I knew was he was a businessman, but he came to church like the rest of us, and he prayed as loud as anyone, and he spoke the name of the Lord with a smile on his face. I liked him. I did. He was funny and he was sweet. And he was a little better looking than Gary, though I was grateful to have the man I did. I love Gary, and I bless the day he found me. I bless it. I didn’t understand what Eric was.”
My belly was a little tighter.
“What was he?”
My mother opened her mouth, closed it, and brought a corner of her mouth up in a half smile that was as much cruelty as amusement.
“He said it was a surprise for Gary. He said not to tell him, and I believed. I went to his house. If it had been at night, I think I wouldn’t have gone, but it was in the afternoon . . .”
She shrugged and drank a mouthful of tea through her teeth.
“There were candles everywhere, and smoke. The whole house was like someone breathing in my face, but someone with the sweetest breath. I made some sort of joke about it. I remember that I did that. I said something about making the whole place into a birthday cake. And he said no. That he was catching angels. I wanted to leave, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. He took me to his back room. The bed was tipped up against the wall, and there were . . . drawings on the floor. Symbols. He asked me to take my clothes off, and I did.”
“Jesus,” I said.
I’d thought I was ready to hear this. Really, even as we’d driven over from the Save-A-Lot, I was sure that I wanted to know everything she had to say to me. I’d been wrong, but there was no way to stop it now. No way to tell her to keep all this crap to h
erself. This was my mother and Uncle Eric, and I felt a little dizzy already.
“He anointed me with . . . oils?” she said, her intonation making it a question. “And he called forth an angel. He called an angel into me. It was like being in a dream. I was filled with her, and I was lifted up by her, and I saw the face of God. And when she left, I felt certain. I felt full of grace and love, like I had never felt before. He told me not to tell anyone. Not to tell Gary or Father Ryan. He said that the angels were called to me for a reason.”
Her eyes were bright now, alive with the memory.
“Every few weeks he would call me, and I would go to him. And they would come into me. And their names. Malphas. Wotan Irisi. Hadraniel. Onibaba. Each one would lift me up. They exalted me. I walked in the depths of the abyss and was not lost. I swam in a sea with no bottom and no surface with the angels of the infinite waters. My soul journeyed to places I had never imagined. I even found the beauty in death. I walked with the souls of the damned and found forgiveness in them. It was beautiful. And then I would come home to your father, and everything would be sharper and deeper and full of meaning for days. Maybe weeks. And then it would fade a little, and a little more, and before long I was a housewife again. Until Eric called me back and I felt the angels within me.
“I couldn’t tell Gary about any of it. He wouldn’t have understood. He only saw me as his wife, and I was the vessel of the angels.”
There it was, then. For months at least, maybe years, Eric had used my mother as a testing ground to invoke riders, pull them into her body. Maybe he’d used magic to control her the way he had with Kim in Denver. And my mother had accepted it. Had loved it. Had put a frame around the experience that made it something good. At least at the time.
My throat felt thick, but I tried to keep my expression relaxed and calm. I wanted her to keep telling the story, even while I wanted it to stop.
“I grew apart from Gary,” she said. “We sat with Father Ryan and prayed together every evening for a month. We had blessings on our marriage. He didn’t understand why I was different. It was hard for me too, watching his hurt and confusion and not being able to reach out to him. But the work was so important. God had a plan for me just the way he did for Mary, and he was my Joseph. His faith restored me when the angels left me weak. But I was afraid he wouldn’t be strong enough. I didn’t tell him about my angels. Or about Eric. It was a secret, and I would have let myself be killed before I revealed it. Not until it was time.”
“Time for what? Did he tell you what all this was for?”
“Time for revelation,” she said, and her beatific expression faltered for a second. Her eyes shifted down to the table and she pushed her glass of tea away, the condensation leaving a wet track on the table. “I loved Eric. I thought I had married the wrong brother. That he would have been my perfect husband, but he insisted that this was all the way God intended. How could I disagree with him? He spoke the tongues of angels. Only . . .”
“Only?”
“Only he was the devil. Eric Heller was the devil made flesh, and he seduced me with his magics and his vice. He ruined me.”
“All right,” I said. “How did that happen?”
My mother sighed.
“He found the angel he’d sought. She was magnificent. She took me to the desert, and I saw God as a pale sun in a vast sky, raining his blessings down over us all. He purified me. And she was there. She had wings as wide as the sky, with feathers like someone had plucked them out of the night sky. And sharp edged. Her face was beautiful. I wept when I saw her. Her beauty and her power. She filled me like none of the others ever had. I thought she must be the angel of the apocalypse, waiting for the trumpet to free her. And her name was Sonnenrad.
“When I returned to the world, Eric was so happy. He was so very happy. I lay with him then, with the angel inside me, even though I hadn’t been with your father in months. Almost a year. And . . .”
“And me,” I said.
She smiled. Her lips were thin. Bloodless. Her eyes seemed shallow and bright.
“And you,” she said. “You were the fruit of my sin, and of his.”
Eric Heller hadn’t been my uncle. He’d been my dad. That alone would have left me dizzy. But there was also the Black Sun.
In the years we’d spent together, Aubrey had taught me a lot about parasites and the logic of parasitism just by hanging around and talking. The rider had been in my mother’s body. I wasn’t sure, but I was willing to bet that was what brought the daughter organism into me. I’d been conceived by a possessed women, and the thing that lived in my body had been riding along from the time I’d been a zygote. It had always been with me.
“Gary found out, of course,” my mother said, but I was only half listening. “He knew the baby couldn’t have been his. I tried to explain to him that he was my Joseph. I tried to tell him that it was God’s plan, and about the angels, and that I carried a child and an angel both within me. I believed then that I was without sin, and I told him that. I told him all of that.”
“Can’t imagine that went well,” I said. It was more glib than I would have chosen if I’d been stable.
“His rage was justified. I’d broken my vows to him.”
“What did he do to Eric?”
“Nothing. He didn’t know.”
“You didn’t tell him?”
“Of course not,” my mother said, waving the question away like it was silly. “I was the vessel of angels. I suffered and I endured. But I had her within me. And I had you. He couldn’t kill me, and anything less than that, I could stand.”
The door to the restaurant opened, and Chogyi Jake stepped inside. He looked over toward me, his smile as calm as always, then nodded and went to a table near the front where he could see me and my mother and the front windows too. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, so I figured the Invisible College wasn’t about to attack. And if they weren’t actively going to pull the trigger, I didn’t have time for them. Not right now.
“Gary is a good man. We prayed together for a long time, and I came to see that I had wronged him. That Eric and I had both wronged him.”
“And where was Eric while that was going on?”
“Gone,” she said, her eyebrows lifting in a mask of wistfulness. “He vanished, and I never knew where to. Gary said that Eric had always been like that. Solid as stone one day, and gone the next. I’d heard that before, but I thought he would stay with me. I’d thought . . . Gary could have turned me out into the street. He could have asked for a divorce, and who would have told him no? After what I’d done.”
A tear slipped down her cheek, tracking makeup along with it. I put my hand on hers, thinking a little comfort, a little contact, might make things better. She flinched back like I’d stung her.
“My husband is a good man. He forgave me my sins, and he took me back into his arms. And you. He took you as his daughter. He raised you as his own. He did everything to protect you. And you repaid him with cruelty. I have never been so ashamed as I was the day you abandoned us.”
Not even when you were screwing Eric, I almost said. I swallowed it. There was no point. For her, my leaving was an unforgivable sin. The choices she’d made didn’t signify, because they were God’s work. Beyond her control. And if Eric had been using the magic I was almost certain he had, then there was even some truth in it.
I’d left of my own free will. It had been a choice—my choice—and I’d made it. Mom had been at the whim of Eric and the riders and God only knew what else. I wondered, if I’d been in my father’s position, if I’d have done the same. Raised a kid that wasn’t mine and kept a spouse who wouldn’t even tell me whose cuckoo I was supporting. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d have done it.
“He came back, though. Eric. He came back and he told Gary himself. Do you remember that? Your father came home and made each of us swear never to speak to Eric. Never to have anything to do with him again. He was so angry. With himself. With me. It was the on
ly time he wouldn’t pray with me. That was how I knew.”
“I figured Eric was gay,” I said.
“You were young,” my mother said. Her voice was dry and brittle as slate. “You didn’t know much.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, even though I wasn’t. It was the right thing to say, and my mother nodded once in reply. “The angel? Sonnenrad? What happened to her?”
“She left me,” Mom said. “No bonds could hold her forever. But she’s in you. Isn’t she?”
“Sort of,” I said. “Something like her. I have a friend who’d call her a daughter organism. Did Eric ever tell anyone why he did it? What it was all about?”
“You must get rid of it. You have to cast it out of your body.”
“I thought it was an angel.”
“It is my sin. It’s poisoned you because of me, but you can still be clean. You can put her back in me. I can be your sacrifice. I can carry it for you. I’ll do that for you, because you are my child and I love you.”
Now she was the one to reach for my hand, and I tried to pull back. Her fingers were stronger than I’d expected. Her eyes locked on mine. At the front of the restaurant, Chogyi Jake shifted in his chair, pushing back a few inches from his table in case he needed to come to my rescue. I didn’t give him any signal, and he waited.
I tried to put the woman across the table from me together with the mother I knew. The mousy, quiet, subservient woman who accepted my father’s anger. The meek one who told us all to make peace, to do as my father said. To obey and be good and be quiet. She looked the same. Older, but the same. And that was where the similarity stopped, because everything else about her was different.
“I think I need to go,” I said, my voice shaking less than I expected it to.
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