Again, Rebecca felt herself leaning forward. And again, she couldn’t resist the silence. She needed to know. And this woman needed to tell her. “Yeah?”
“If my legs had mouths,” Sophie said, all but whispering, “you’d be running. Because they can’t do anything about it, but they are hungry.” Then she burst out laughing. Grabbing the cassette again, she waved it over her stumps like a lamp or a wand. “That-a-girl, Nat Queen Cold. Scowl.”
Nat. Queen Cold. Old.
Rebecca stared anew at the cables, the laptop on the blankets, the little black box connected via USB cable, the headset microphone on Sophie’s pillow.
Buh—… cat-dah. TONGUE.
“It’s you,” Rebecca said. “That voice. That Internet radio station. It’s—
“See, here’s what I don’t get.” Sophie looked up, hands in her lap, hair a wild nimbus of yellow around her too-pale, almost childlike face. Her eyes drank Rebecca in.
Like Miss Havisham, Rebecca thought, only young. Not young Miss Havisham of the doomed, blind love, but old, vengeful Miss Havisham, younger.
“What I don’t get,” Sophie said, “is what you just did.”
“What? You mean, figure out that—”
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad about it. I like you, I mean it. And anyway, it’s kind of intriguing for me, too. Also, honestly, when I jumped up at you back there? And when I said that about my legs? I was just playing. Really. So maybe that’s it? Although I really am hungry; it definitely is getting near that time. Maybe that’s why, and it has nothing to do with you at all.” Somehow, Sophie’s gaze, which had never quite left Rebecca’s, seized her fully now. She lifted a finger, waved it in the air between them, and her voice dropped back into its almost-whisper. “But I don’t think so. I’m new to all this, I admit it. And I’m a little beat up just now. And pretty fucking confused, or sad, or something. But still. I’m pretty certain you shouldn’t have been able to do that.”
For a baffling, then frightening second, Rebecca couldn’t remember how to speak. She literally couldn’t locate her voice. Then, somehow, she did. “Do what?”
“Jump back. Get yourself away from me.” Sophie stopped whispering. “Not that it would have mattered, if I’d really wanted you. I know, I know what you’re thinking, my legs. But you will be surprised.”
“You will,” Rebecca noted, somehow controlling a shiver of her own. Not, “you would.” She forced her eyes away from Sophie’s—which wasn’t hard this time, she let me go—and back to the cassettes and the headset microphone. “You’re the girl on the radio. The voice.”
Surprised again, Sophie grinned. “You’ve heard my show! Do you like it?”
“I … What’s it…”
“Well”—Sophie patted the cassette cases—“that’s Nat.”
“Nat.”
“-alie.”
“Natalie. Your best friend.”
“Would you cut that out? Wound, salt, wound, salt. I thought Jess said you worked at some kind of crisis center or something, and knew how to be sensitive to people in pain.”
“But you … said she was dead.”
Sophie’s grin hardened. Her head swung to the window. She pulled back the blanket curtain an inch or two, letting in just a little of the gathering dark out there. “That isn’t the right question. But the answer is, with great care. With fucking painstaking labor, actually. See, Jess—you wouldn’t peg her as sentimental, would you, but she’s a goddamn baseball fan, if that tells you anything—when she fled Charlotte? When the thought of ever seeing her daughter or me again chased her clean out of town? Practically all she brought with her was this bag of cassettes. Tapes and tapes and tapes of Natalie talking, at all different ages. God knows what she thought she was going to do with them. But I’m sure glad she has them, because I’ve had three weeks of ten thousand hours each of nothing better to do. So I’ve been … cataloging. Grabbing snippets. Conjuring up my Nat.” Once more, she lifted her eyes to Rebecca’s. “Baiting my hook.”
“Baiting. For what?”
Sophie sighed. “Again, with the wrong ques—”
“You’re just keeping yourself company.”
Even before the blonde rocked upright again, leaned out over the space between them—which wasn’t nearly space enough—Rebecca wanted that comment back. Her feet edged backward, felt for the top step, the opening of the trapdoor. But she already knew Sophie was right: there was no way she’d be fast enough.
Sophie didn’t leap at her, though. She seemed, instead, to push herself back into herself, as though stuffing one of those spring-coil snakes back into a can. Abruptly—amazingly—she smiled, not her nasty grin but the smile from the picture in Jess’s drawer downstairs. Exactly that smile, just for a second. A sweet and shimmering thing.
“You really do remind me of her. Actually, you completely don’t. But I’m serious, and it’s a compliment: Natalie would have dug you. Probably a lot more than she dug me, in the end.” And Sophie laughed, but not the laugh of the girl in the photograph.
How did Rebecca know that? She just did. Even so, there was something so close to gentle in Sophie’s expression, something so much like affection without being that, that Rebecca heard herself say, “Thank you.” Even though she had no idea what she meant.
“There are ironies,” Sophie said. “Like this one: if I was the one gone, and Natalie had wound up stashed forever in this attic? She would have been just fine. She’d have had her baby to be with, her music to play, silences to fill, or actually, not fill, Jesus Christ, that girl could not talk when she wanted not to.”
Yet again, Rebecca had an opening. And yet again, her curiosity, her sense of the creature in the bed’s barely acknowledged desperation, and her nagging sense that there was something else, something more, kept her where she was. What came out of her mouth was a Crisis Center question, a conversation extender. “Natalie didn’t like people?”
Sophie shrugged, petting the tape in her hands. “I liked people. And I don’t even get to have my son.”
Every question Rebecca could think of next seemed cruel, suicidal, or both. Except, just maybe, the most important one.
“Do you still like people, Sophie?”
It took a long time. But in the end, Sophie laid the tape in her lap, resting her palms atop it. “I guess we’ll find out when the time comes. When he comes.”
“When—”
“The whistling asshole. I told you, you keep asking the wrong questions. I said, baiting. What you should have asked is, ‘Baiting what, Sophie?’ And my answer, thank you for asking, is, my trap. Because I am betting my boredom—which is all I have left, it is all that motherfucking fucker left me—that whatever he decided he felt for my dead best friend Natalie, his motherfuckedup ‘Destiny,’ he still feels it. And he’s a social-networking, music-obsessed, whistling, wanking fuckball. And sooner or later, I don’t know how or when but I’m betting sooner, he’s going to hear my radio show. He’s going to hear these songs. He’s going to hear his Destiny’s voice. And when he does … I don’t know what he’s going to do. But I know he’ll come for her. And when he comes, you and anyone you’ve ever loved better get out of the way, unless you have a bazooka handy. Because you can’t stop him. You have no chance.
“But me? Do you see? He doesn’t know I’m still here. I’m sure he hasn’t expended a single thought on me since the moment he ripped me in half. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t expending any thought on me, then, any more than he does on stairs he climbs or roads he crosses.
“And that means he won’t be expecting me. And I’m thinking it’s just possible that I’m just enough like him that if I get a jump, catch him by surprise…”
At no point, Rebecca realized, through her own swelling panic, the voices echoing in her head—the one voice, now, that had crept, in the middle of last night, out of the Crisis Center receiver and straight down her eustachian tube into her brain, murmuring, ‘My Destiny killed my mother’ and ‘My Destiny’
s mother killed her’—had she seen Sophie breathe. She certainly wasn’t breathing now.
But she did stop talking long enough for Rebecca to ask one last question. It was the one, she realized, she’d been waiting all this time to ask. The one on which so much hinged:
“Are you sure you’re still enough like us to want to?” she said.
This time, when Sophie’s eyes grabbed Rebecca’s, they snagged her completely. Rebecca tried turning her head, lowering her lids, forcing a shudder. Then she gave up, gave in, gazed back.
“If you stick around long enough,” Sophie murmured, “I think I might even decide I like you.”
“I hope so,” Rebecca said as her phone went off in her pocket and goose bumps erupted all at once, all over her skin, as though she were a lake bombarded by a rainstorm. “Because he’s already here.”
19
In an ordinary month—any other month—Caribou would never have done it. Not consciously. He had, in fact, spent the past forty years avoiding precisely this action, burying even the possibility of this action.
Forty years.
Most of those years he’d whiled away by candlelight at this cherrywood desk in this tent, while the rest of the monsters, whoever was in camp, did whatever they did to waste their decades: whittle or whistle or recount slights or swap hunting stories; play card games, board games; fuck, smoke, dance, vanish; talk or sing so convincingly about missing someone or other, you’d almost believe they were capable of it, that anyone or anything on this planet was truly capable of feeling another’s absence.
Sometimes, working here in the desktop candlelight, Caribou thought that that was the world’s cruelest trick of all, and its greatest gift: the longing for longing. For those fleeting, heart-hurt moments when life had taste.
These were his thoughts now as he sat at the desk Aunt Sally had somehow caused to appear right here, one miraculous night, so long ago. For reasons he had never fully understood, she had chosen him—lanky Caribou of the long, long hands—out of so many others, and so he considered this desk the symbol of his Office and the significance of his duties. When he sat here, with the others down the bank or in their tents or gone and Aunt Sally in her rocking chair outside or in her own tent, dreaming her unimaginable dreams, Caribou sometimes imagined himself her greatest vassal, her Walter Raleigh, mapping the world for the woman he knew would one day behead him. And sometimes—just occasionally, on star-soaked, tingling, dangerous nights like this one—he felt like an artist, a monster-Faulkner, drunk and driven, not just mapping the world but creating it.
Only, Caribou was never drunk. And instead of a Yoknapatawpha County, he made charts.
Here they all were, cataloged and coded in their labeled folders in his cherrywood drawers. Some of them were nothing more than hand-drawn maps. Some were lists, some sketches. But all were constantly updated, their details and demarcations shaded and sharpened. Mother’s Whistling fool could keep his iPhone and laptop, his GPS and Google Earth. No program and no satellite would ever see the few thousand square miles of his world—the haunted, disappearing Delta, which Aunt Sally had dreamed and Policy had purposed—in the way Caribou could. In the sheer variety of ways he could.
And so tonight, for a single moment, as he prepared to do what he had never once, in forty years, done, Caribou leaned out of his chair, in the sticky summer night that never, even on the hottest days, made him warm, held his candle over the open drawer, and marveled at what he had accomplished. Here was his own contribution to Aunt Sally’s Creation: the jacket folders, numbered and lettered; the unlined papers inside those folders covered with notations and sketches but free of flourish or calligraphic design, smooth in their vellum sleeves, clean and flat as test pressings. They really were like record albums, every one, ready to sing as soon as he dropped his eyes into their grooves.
The monster’s Mississippi, Mother had once scoffed, but in admiration. Even she had admired this: the whole of the territory they roamed and hunted, cataloged (and, more importantly, counted) by freeway exit, by distance (miles), by distance (travel time), by number of streets and alphabetical order of street names, family names, businesses, by numbers of magnolia trees or junipers, by address and phone prefix, by births and deaths (current year), births and deaths (historical), by town and county, by times any of Aunt Sally’s denizens had passed through or set foot near or in them. A thousand charts, all compiled and rigorously maintained for the sole and express purpose of keeping Aunt Sally’s children’s actions un-chartable, even by the children themselves, thus ensuring that their orbit—for orbit it was and must inevitably stay, Aunt Sally too great and massive a star ever to release them, fully—remained as elliptical and mysterious as a comet’s.
Even more, the charts were meant to ensure that no one, not one of them, ever did what Caribou was going to do tonight. He’d known he must from the moment Aunt Sally had told him what she needed. Even now, he could barely calm himself enough to hear, again, that word in her voice, which sent a shudder through him so bone-deep, so pleasurable and painful, it seemed to emanate from his very center, thundering down the dead, echoing arteries of his entire being like a heartbeat.
Children.
For just a moment, in his excitement and unease, he tried to pretend that he wasn’t doing what he knew he must, knew he was. What violation, after all, was he actually committing? Aunt Sally had tasked him, and him alone, with selecting and procuring the guests for this special, special Party. The numbers he had used to guide the selection of the file in his drawer, then the chart in that file, then the entry on that chart, were precisely the numbers Aunt Sally had suggested his dreams indicated, and she had arrived at those numbers by using the ever-growing, interpretive key she had devised long before there had ever been a Caribou.
In other words, she’d gotten the numbers from Policy, same as always. All he had done was shuffle the order in which the numbers would be applied. He’d had to skip one, it was true, but he often had to skip, even on ordinary nights, if a particular digit in a sequence proved inapplicable to the section or chart the previous number had directed him to consult. He wasn’t changing or subverting Policy, just applying it. And that had always been his job.
He wasn’t altering the formula by which they had all agreed, for so very long, to make these particular choices. He was simply shaping it, so that when his hands slid into the drawer, gliding over the tops of the files like birds in formation, they alighted atop the 117th file, then held there, as though settling on a branch. A hum buzzed in his throat. A shiver rocked him, almost as if he were surprised, as if his very skin were playing along, maintaining the illusion that this was just another Policy decision. Chance, not Caribou.
As if he didn’t already know which chart he was going to pull, and what the 28th entry on it would be, and where he would be getting their guests for this momentous night.
He withdrew the file, staring as if in amazement at the neat heading across the top: INSTITUTIONAL, ISSAQUENA, SHILOH VALE, WASHINGON, EAST. Below the heading was just another brief list: schools and civic centers, two libraries, a YMCA camp center, long abandoned.
An orphanage.
He allowed himself a single sigh so deep, it felt like breath, or like he remembered breath feeling. Was this Policy guiding him, after all? Or Aunt Sally? Was he guiding Policy (and there it was again, that tiny tremor of unease)? But even if he was—if they were, he and Sally together—she had made Policy, after all. She had given it to Caribou, to all of the others, like God giving his Commandments to Moses.
Which made him Moses?
He was actually laughing as he slid into Aunt Sally’s blue LeSabre and started down the muddy track out of camp. No one, as far as he knew, had used this car in months, but Aunt Sally always made him keep it gassed and primed and ready, even though she never went anywhere. When, Caribou wondered, was the last time he had driven? He’d forgotten how much he liked it, and he laughed again, watching his reflection in the windshield gli
ding along the edge of the river like an otter. Then the river was gone, and he angled the LeSabre through the bottomlands, past soybean fields rimmed far to the east by that miles-long furrow of wildflowers that blossomed blue out of the buckshot soil every single summer, appearing all together, overnight, as though they’d fallen from the sky more than sprung from the earth. Then came the cotton rows where Aunt Sally’s shyer monsters sometimes liked to lead their Party guests, on the nights of Aunt Sally’s Parties, when the tent got loud and the music rumbled in the ground and rippled the river. Next, the swamp where one night, not too long ago—the night, Caribou realized, that Mother had finally left for good, chasing her Whistling fool—Aunt Sally had let him canoe her, mile after slow mile, through snarls of reeds that always crept closer yet somehow never reached them, pods of sleeping alligators that stirred as they passed like the scaled skin of the swamp itself, clouds so low and heavy that they clung to the earth like wet cotton, and, close on to morning, lightened just a little as the moon settled in behind them. Aunt Sally hadn’t said anything about going back, and then it was too late to go back, so they’d sheltered in the crisscross shade of a sycamore grove, and she’d started to allow him to make love to her and then sung to him instead, cradling him like the roots of a tree, rocking him—and herself, it seemed, for that one, magical night—like a baby. Lay down, Sally.
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