by A. L. Tyler
Lena turned the ignition, and gave him a long glance. “You never know. Now, I guess we have a decision to make here. North or south?”
Devin shrugged. Lena stared into the wheel. North or south? They had to move quickly, because someone—possibly the wrong person—could have access to when and where she was making withdrawals from her account and credit card. Howard had said to stay away from the itinerary, which people would naturally expect her to do. From their current position, north was away from South Carolina, the answers, and the itinerary.
“South it is, then.” She pulled out of the lot and found her way to Interstate 75, southbound.
They spent several of the next few weeks bunking around Tennessee and North Carolina, as Lena watched the death toll rise via Howard’s emails. Several families that had gone unknown to Lena in Europe and Asia had suffered heavy losses; one or two entire family lines had been wiped out, including the surviving Lintons and their close cousins, the Marcelluses. Jasper Barton had died of a heart attack that several people had deemed convenient and suspicious. Martin Colburn and Serafina Perry’s marriage had evidently resulted in one child thus far, a boy, who had been kidnapped in transit as they attempted to make it to Council that year. Sad though it was, he was only one on a list of seven children under the age of ten who had gone missing, presumably with the intent of blackmail, extortion, or ransom, since the start of the debacle.
When the money ran out, they moved; they never stayed in one place more than three days, and were constantly seeking new towns and cities after using the local ATMs. Every time someone looked at Lena or Devin for too long or in the wrong way, they dyed their hair and moved again. Lena had long ago ditched the old grey sedan and bought a blue two door economy vehicle they had come across; she’d had to pay the owner twice the asking value to make the transition go faster. She eventually received an email from Kelsey, who was extremely relieved they were alright; she had told Lena details about her life near a lake in Saskatchewan before being warned not to share any more that might reveal her location. Apparently she was doing well with her father, though she still missed Waldgrave dearly.
The scheduled Council date came and went; less than a quarter of the usual Representatives showed up, and they were forced to bump it back to the following spring. Howard hoped things might have settled down by then, but Lena wasn’t as hopeful; there were no clean cut winners unless Griffin stepped back in and miraculously regained his standing. And he wasn’t going to do it.
She sent him an email around Council time, asking him if he was there. He had responded two weeks later that he hadn’t bothered, because “for reasons they both knew” he didn’t feel obliged anymore. December arrived, and Lena found that Devin liked to celebrate Christmas; having never taken more than a slight interest in any holiday because she had moved so much and through so many cultures, she found the experience quite nice. They bought a small plastic tree that they could travel with, tiny little ornaments, and Devin taught her how to make s’mores using the heat from a motel coffee maker. There were even presents on Christmas morning.
It was January already; Lena had been away from Waldgrave for four months. Despite the fact that she had regained her capacity to travel whenever and wherever she wanted, she was beginning to get edgy about the whole ordeal. She was just floating in the ether of the world, staying out of the way while Howard tried to fix everything; it felt like she wasn’t making any progress. She wanted to go home and assist, but knew Howard wouldn’t allow it. His emails had slowed considerably, and one day, after a particularly prolonged silence, she knew she couldn’t go much longer without contact with her family.
So she settled for the next best thing.
One day in early January, just when the charms of Christmas and New Year’s had started to wear off, Lena suggested they try to hunt down her “family” in South Carolina. It was long passed the time anyone would have expected to find her there, she reasoned, and if they had managed to stay hidden this well for so long, they could probably do it again. Devin consented, and within the week they had arrived at a larger off shore island in South Carolina. It was a much smaller place than Lena had imagined it to be—it was much greener, and mere minutes from the beach. There was Spanish moss hanging from a lot of the trees, and everything smelled like ocean. There weren’t many stores or neighborhoods, and even though it was an island, she had the feeling that they were far out in the country.
Lena had printed directions to the address Doctor Evans had given her online from a motel manager’s office, and she drove as Devin referenced the sheet of paper and directed her. They drove out through several dirt roads, and finally turned a corner through the dense foliage that caused Lena to break very suddenly.
It was amazing. It was something from a dream, but it was right there in front of her. It was still winter, and they had been driving through densely treed areas for what felt like miles, and yet here they were in a vast field filled with sapphire blue irises, thousands upon thousands of them, crowding over the edges and into the roadway. The entire field was nothing but flowers, right up to the edges where the forest began again. Each bloom so perfect, the exact same shade as the clear afternoon sky above, and there in the middle of the field was a tall, skinny, yellow house, settled up on flood stilts. It had blue shutters, and what looked like a shed or a very tiny barn settled off to the side.
Lena finally managed to drag her eyes away from the picturesque scene and looked over at Devin. She had stopped the car; Devin was still transfixed by the landscape that had so suddenly and shockingly surrounded them. The sheet of directions hung loose and forgotten from his hand as he gazed out the windshield.
“Lena,” he whispered, “Are we dead?”
“No.” She responded simply, trying to convince herself more than him. She took her foot off the brake and proceeded toward the house. It seemed to take forever to get there, but when she finally arrived at the end of the long dirt road, she saw that it was nothing but a house. There was a broken down truck out in the front next to a rusted out tractor, and about a hundred multi-colored cats living in the stilted up area underneath the house. There was a sign out front that read, in worn letters:
But the address matched, and Lena soon found herself standing out in the thick, sweet smelling air of a million blue irises, climbing a rickety staircase and knocking on the front door. There was no answer.
She peeked in the windows, and things looked maintained; the place wasn’t abandoned. She walked back down the stairs.
“No luck?” Devin called from out the passenger side window.
Lena shrugged. She walked over toward the utility shed, which was looked to have been in disrepair for some time; most of the paint had peeled off, and it housed a number of odd trinkets ranging from ancient bicycles to old metal school desks.
“Hello?” She called into the mess. There was no response.
She had just turned to go back to the car when she thought she heard something. Music? No—humming.
She walked to the side of the barn just in time to see the tallest woman she had ever seen walk out from behind the old farm building. She was wearing an immense pair of muck splattered overalls, too large even for her tall frame, and carrying a metal bucket loaded with oysters in each hand. Her hair was a deep brown, graying in places, and cut almost as short as a man’s. She was humming “The Star Spangled Banner” as she trudged along in her mud-caked boots, until she hit some high notes and kicked each one free from her bare, dirty feet.
“Hello?” Lena called again. The woman stopped and looked directly at her with watery, wrinkled eyes. She had a slightly pushed up nose and overly thin eyebrows. “I’m—I’m here looking for…well, I’m not sure who, really, I’m looking for someone who I guess might have lived here a long time ago. Olesia Daray? My name is—“
“Avalon? Are you Avalon?” The woman said very suddenly in a crinkly voice, taking several steps in Lena’s direction but then stopping short, as though she were afraid Len
a might strike out at her.
“No.” Lena said, almost crossly. “No, I’m…Avalon is my mother. I’m Lena.”
The woman frowned, buckets still in hand. She readjusted the weight, pursed her lips, and then said something Lena was sure she would never forget.
“I guess you found me. I’m Olesia. Well, you’re going to have questions, then. Come on in and set a while.” And she strode off toward the house, the buckets swaying dangerously. Lena stood still as any piece of equipment in the old shed until Olesia called after her. “You might want to bring your friend in too. This’ll take a good while.”
*****
Lena gestured to Devin as she scampered up the steps after the spry old woman. They walked in through a living room straight out of the fifties, complete with doilies and a theme in pink and powder blue. There were black and white pictures set up on every available surface except one shelf on the wall, which held only a green teapot.
“Hank, this is my granddaughter, Lena Daray.” Olesia said to the teapot as she stripped her muddy overalls off, revealing a pair of cleaner straight-legged jeans and a tee-shirt underneath.
“Collins. Lena Collins.” Lena said, trying not to seem too worried by the fact that Olesia was talking to a teapot.
“Congratulations.” Olesia said briefly to her before tossing her jeans around a corner, presumably to a laundry room, and turning back to the teapot. “My mistake, Hank, this is my granddaughter Lena Collins.”
And then she went off to the kitchen, where she set the buckets of oysters into the sink with a banging noise, washed her hands, and then pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket. She turned and looked Lena over as the screen door slammed shut again, indicating that Devin had just come in.
“You’re staying over.” Olesia called out to him. “So be a good boy and fetch the bags. The room upstairs on the left—the blue one—is yours. The green one further down the hall across from mine is for Lena. Try not to bang around too much, and we’ll be in the sitting room back here.”
Olesia turned on her heel, pack of cigarettes in hand, and indicated that Lena should follow her to the sitting room in the back, which was very much like the living room in the front except that the color palette was a muted and more tolerable brown. Olesia sat down in an armchair, and Lena stationed herself on the couch next to it. Olesia took out a lighter from a drawer in a nearby dresser, lit a cigarette, and took a long draw.
“So, how’s Jack?” She said, savoring the question as the way the smoke rolled out of her mouth.
“I’m sorry.” Lena said, still bewildered by the sudden change of events that had brought her here, to this house in a field of irises. “But that’s part of the reason why I’m here. You’re Olesia? I mean, you’re Olesia? Who’s Jack?”
Olesia took another long draw on the cigarette and then licked her top lip as she glanced off into a ceiling corner of the room. “He always hated when I called him that. He preferred his chosen name, but I never got a chosen name, so let me ask you again—how is that bastard, Jack Durand? My husband?”
Lena stared at Olesia cautiously. The elderly woman was positively seething. “You mean…I mean, was his, um, ‘chosen name,’ was it Pyrallis?”
Olesia raised her eyebrows and closed her eyes. She nodded slightly.
Lena paused. “He died. Not too long ago.”
Still with her eyes shut, Olesia took a deep breath in, and then let it out slowly. “Did he suffer?”
Lena wasn’t sure if she should lie or not, and so she defaulted to the truth. “Extremely. The doctor—Doctor Evans—said it was very painful. He suffered for years before going.”
“Mmm.” Olesia sat back in her chair, gently puffing away on her cigarette, the smell of burning tar and tobacco filling the room. “The bastard deserved it.”
“So Jack and Pyrallis were the same person.” Lena said quietly. Then a moment later she added, “He really was my grandfather.”
Olesia cocked her head, and looked around the brown room, searching for the right words. “Disappointing, isn’t it? At least he suffered.”
Lena thought. There were so many questions in her head—she hadn’t actually ever thought that she would meet Olesia, and now here she was. And she was here specifically to answer all of the questions. “He was Jack Durand. Would that make you…?”
“Olesia Daray.” Olesia said back to her, leveling her gaze. “Or, more recently Olesia Spinkle. Mrs. Hank Spinkle. How is my daughter?”
“Oh…” Lena faltered.
Olesia’s eyes filled with sadness. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
Lena could only nod. She looked down at the floor, trying to give Olesia some privacy. It was never an easy thing to lose a child or a parent—especially when neither was ever actually lost. Ava had gone her whole life believing that her mother was dead. Now it was the mother’s turn to grieve the loss of her daughter.
When Lena looked back up, Olesia was smothering out her first cigarette and lighting a second. She was looking out a window. “All these years I’ve expected her to come after me. That’s the one thing I regret most, was leaving her there. So what did Jack tell you?”
“Not much.” Lena tried to smile to lighten the mood, then thought better of it. She let her face fall back into a solemn frown. “He had everyone believing he was a Daray, and that you married in. And then, I don’t know anything about…how are you here? You’ve been here all of these years, and he told everyone that you died in the fire. He said it was lit by a zealot who tried to kill all of you.”
Olesia nodded frantically as Lena spoke. “Now, that sounds exactly like the kind of bull Jack would spit out.”
She went quiet for a while, sucking on her cigarette as Lena waited patiently. Devin came to the door once, but Lena shook her head and he wandered away again. Eventually, Olesia started to talk.
“I guess the beginning’s the best place to start at.” She said, still fidgeting with her cigarette as she avoided eye contact. “Well, Jack was never a Daray. I was. My father and mother were Edward and Melinda Daray. I was their only child because the doctors couldn’t save my mother’s womb, and my father wanted a boy. My mother wanted a lady, and that I most surely wasn’t, either. My mother was a perfect woman, so delicate, well groomed, and strong in her abilities, and I wasn’t any of it. I think she must have cried herself to sleep so many times for the failure I was to her—I was her daughter, and I was supposed to be this perfect, beautiful little child. She always remarked on how strange and plain I was, and how I might as well have been human for all the Silenti abilities I had. My father said I was an unlucky draw, because I wasn’t even a boy. He told me over and over how he wished I had been a boy, because now he was going to have to deal with suitors and allegiances, and believe you me, that was a time of enough political strife. We were clinging at straws to keep our power and our lives, and picking one family over the other would have pushed the whole thing off the deep end, or so my father always told me. I was such an embarrassment that they kept me locked up. I never had friends. I never even saw the outside of the house—I just kept to myself, reading all the books that there were and occasionally asking for more. And then there was the day Jack came.”
Here Olesia took a long pause, her eyes darting back and forth as if she could see the story unfolding before her. “Jack Durand. A human-born. My father had hired him on as a work hand for some of the lighter outdoor maintenance. But it wasn’t long before he was indoors; my father was amazed by him. Enamored. He was so good at everything—better than any human-born should have been. I never found a reason why. My father said it was fate—fate had cursed him with me, and then sent him Jack to balance everything. Jack was supposed to have been his child. Jack moved in. Jack got to live in one of the better bedrooms. Jack started spending all hours of the day and night, discussing politics and looking over the books with my father. Jack was always sick, but unlike the other human-borns, my father had him treated.”
Olesia lo
oked sharply at Lena. “Jack was also a pain in the ass. He was always traipsing around like he owned the place, giving orders and pushing me around. He was the son of a whore from New York—I bet he never told you that. His mother was a human and a prostitute. She always told him his father’s name was Pyrallis Durand…low and behold, my father looked it up in the records books one time, and there was an old Silenti family named Durand. Lived in Kansas. Well, Molly Bell—that’s who he said his mother was—got knocked up by a Durand and named the brat after her brother Jack, or so Jack’s story went. He detested his mother for the way she made her money and the company she kept. He spent the first ten years of his life in a drug infested whore house before he got to burning it down with a stack of newspapers and a bottle of whiskey while everyone was asleep inside. Then he moved out west looking for work, and my father had the luck to run into him in town one day. He never told me any of this, as you might guess—my father pieced it all together and wrote it down in his journal, where I went snooping and found it. Reading all the books was the only thing I had in the house. This information was the one thing I had to hold against him, those things his parents did, and I clung to it for dear life. But anyways, after he murdered his mother and the others and went out looking for work, well, that’s when the pile of shit landed in my path.
“Jack took my books away because he said it wasn’t a woman’s place. I think he did it because I wouldn’t stop calling him a son of a human whore, and he knew where I must have gotten it from—I didn’t stop even after the books were gone, though. Or maybe he was jealous because he couldn’t read them himself. Anyways. One day my father removed all of the servants from the house. I think he had them killed but I never found out—he said he did. He said he would kill me if I didn’t go along with all of it. Looking back now I know it was an idle threat, but I was just a child then. Then he legally designated the two of us as married. I was twelve—twelve! For Christ’s sake! Jack wasn’t much older. My father took on a new staff and introduced Jack as his son, Pyrallis. I watched the day he burned all of his personal records up to that point. He tried very hard to rid himself of any record that I was his daughter, and Jack wasn’t his son. Jack didn’t like that very much, that he was burning all of his old diaries. I found a collection once; I think he saved them. He was always funny about the family heritage, and near obsessive. He saved things, like those diaries, obsessively.” Olesia paused, and a slight smile crept onto her face. “That’s how you knew, isn’t it? You found one of his collections. Things my father tried to bury and destroy, but Jack saved them.”