by Joey Ruff
I thought about London, Portsmouth, being a cop. Being married. All that fucking talk about relationships and Lorelei made me vulnerable, fucking soft. As those white dividing lines on the road blurred by me, the rain turned to crystal in the headlights, and nothing but blackness swelled around me as the speedometer clocked me going close to ninety.
And all I felt was fucking lonely.
I thought about my wife, Alara, and the Lit class we shared at Highbury College. I sat behind her and imagined I could smell her shampoo every time she tossed her hair. She was smarter than I was, always read the stories, always had the answers.
I cheated with her. Not on her – never on her. She was the only girl in my world. But to talk to her, I cut a few corners, used my ability to see things about her, learned who she was long before she knew my name. That’s how I fell in love with her.
When the semester ended I still hadn’t talked to her. It wasn’t until a party a few months later that I saw her again and struck up a conversation using the Lit class and the things I’d learned in secret. I already knew she was deep, insightful, and intelligent. I didn’t know she was so spontaneous, funny. Over time, she fell for me, too.
She was the first person I ever told about my ability.
Not long after, Alara was pregnant. She dropped out of school and moved back with her parents, who hated me. I couldn’t stand being away from her, and dropped out, too, got a job, and took her as my wife. I took care of her. It was what I wanted.
She was always daddy’s girl, and he had high hopes for her. She was going to be a doctor or member of Parliament, maybe Prime Minister. That all fell apart when she married me. Her family never forgave me, never forgave her. They didn’t even invite us to Christmas dinner. We had each other, and that was enough. Until Anna was born.
I watched the rain as I drove. Felt my heart beating in time with the wipers.
I thought of a rainy afternoon where we stared out at the sea and the dock and the Channel, all encased like stilllife fruit just beyond the window, and except for our heartbeats, the drumming static of the rain, the whole world was still. Then a boat would start its crawl to the sea or the lighthouse would twirl its glow into the fog, and life would resume. But we kept staring, and her heartbeat danced with the rain. She took a deep breath and said, “John, do you ever wonder what the rain forest is like?”
“Not really.”
“You don’t? Sometimes I just like to listen to the rain on the roof and think what it must be like in the rainforest, where all the animals must go when it rains like this.”
“I think the trees are so thick most of the animals stay dry below.” I didn’t listen to the words so much as the way they were said.
“John, let’s go there.”
“To the rainforest?”
“Yeah. One day, why not? I don’t want to stay in Portsmouth my whole life.”
That’s where we met. Where we grew up. Where our love began. It was a quaint port town, known for its fishing. I was the son of a fisherman. God, we were young – the innocent side of seventeen. We had dreams of bigger things then, the way kids do, back when life was full of promise, back before I saw the darkness and my heart grew harder…heavy.
When we lived in London, she was pregnant with Anna. We sat there one night, after she had a nightmare, woke in cold sweat and shook me ‘til I woke too. She laid her head on my chest. I played with her hair as she cradled her belly with an arm.
Outside the window of our little flat we saw the lights of the city, the glow on the river in the moonlight, the slowly passing freighters. In the distance, you could just make out the tower of Big Ben. She watched it all and said, “Remember Peter Pan?”
“I do remember it. I love that story.”
“Will you read it to our daughter?”
“How do you know it’s a girl?”
“I just do, John. Will you read her that story?”
“Of course.”
“You have to promise.”
“I do. I promise. Why? I didn’t think you liked the story that much.”
“I’m gonna be a mom. I’m not gonna be a kid anymore. Sometimes I think about that and get scared. I like to think that there’s a way we never have to grow up.”
“Is that what the nightmares are about? Growing up?”
“Well…that and the baby. That she’s born wrong or ugly or something happens to her.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to her. She’s going to be beautiful and lovely and perfect. Just like her mom.”
“Do you promise?”
“I do. I promise. Nothing will ever happen to her.”
Moments passed between us in silence, but I always knew what she was thinking, always about the baby, always about how she wanted to believe me but there was so much uncertainty. She turned to me, an excited smile in her eyes, and said, “I thought of a name for our daughter. Anna.”
“Anna.” I didn’t have to look down at her to see the anticipation in her eyes. “I love it,” I told her. “It’s beautiful. It’s perfect.” And she hugged me tighter and began to hum something that made her feel farther away.
“You read Anna that story, John. So she knows about Neverland. So she knows that she doesn’t have to make the same mistakes we did. So she knows she doesn’t have to grow up.”
“Maybe we can go there one day. To Neverland.”
She giggled a little. “Yes. Let’s. Let’s really go there.”
Things changed when Anna was born. They changed again when she got sick. So many doctor’s visits. So many hopes dashed against the rocks. So many dreams left by the wayside in favor of some madder pursuit. There was no cure for Anna, that quickly became apparent, and when we lost the house for medical bills, we moved back to Portsmouth, back to my parent’s house on the bay, and waited for Anna to die. Hopes were weak, and all we had were our dreams and each other, but even then, I felt Alara slipping from me. I would take hold of her, hold her close to me, and we would lay there and watch the sea and we would dream. We were so young then, maybe twenty-one, but it felt like we had each lived several lifetimes.
In the moments she would allow herself to be still, Alara would sit on a bench on the dock and stare off at the sea. When I was brave enough to look for her, when I found her there, she would tell me, “In stories they say that Atlantis was an island not too far from here, and it sank beneath the waves because of their own folly. The things they could do with energy, John. With medicine. If we could just find Atlantis…”
“There is no cure for her, Lara.”
“Fuck you, John.”
“Lara…”
“You don’t give up on her like that. There’s gotta be something. There’s just GOT to be…”
I sat on the cold wood beside her, the smell of salt and fish in the air, the gray skies around us foretelling some ominous storm could soon be upon us. Somewhere a fog horn blew. I put an arm around her and she started to cry. She buried her head in my shoulder and I felt her warmth and her hurt and anger. I felt just as powerless. And in a desperate attempt to untie my hands, I whispered to her, “Maybe in Atlantis they could cure her, Lara. Maybe we can find it. Maybe we can make things right again.”
She continued to sob and shake in my arms and through the muffling pain, I felt her words more than I heard them. “Let’s go, John. Let’s really, really go.”
I tried so hard to be strong for both of them. Maybe I grew up, and maybe Alara didn’t, and that’s why we grew apart. But in the end, she was so weak and selfish. Or maybe I was….
I remember when I found her, not even a week after the funeral, alone, in our bedroom. She was sprawled out on the floor, a bottle of pills in one hand. It was empty, some of the bi-colored tablets scattered on the rug. She got so sad in Anna’s last days; she started seeing a doctor and they gave her some pills to make her feel better. She never got happy, though, just numb. But I guess that’s better than sad.
I remember taking her in my arms, cradli
ng her head, the way she hung limp, like heavy rubber tubing, that fucking empty bottle rolling across the hardwood. I couldn’t take it. Not this much; not this soon after. A heart needs time to recover. And I just broke.
The sudden cold rush that swept through my body was overwhelming. I’d been walking on a frozen lake for months, maybe years, but holding her there, the ice gave one final crack and I was completely submerged. Even my hair hurt, my teeth, my fingernails. I struggled to hold her, but shook too badly, and screamed. Then I collapsed.
I’d been strong for too long because I knew I had to be, but I wasn’t being strong for myself and now I was alone. Now, there was no one to be strong for. I couldn’t keep the tears back: there were so many and they’d been building up for so long. I buried my head into her the way she had done to me so many times. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
My mother screamed somewhere behind me and started crying. I felt my father’s hands on my shoulders, trying to pull me back, trying to comfort. And I cried out.
After that, I didn’t need pills to go numb. It took a long time before I felt anything again. For so long I blamed myself, went to her therapist, but none of it helped, and months passed with me in my Grey Country of apathy.
One day I woke and realized that no, I didn’t fail her. She failed me. And after that…I hated her. I hated her for every fucking time I’d been there for her, that the onetime I needed her, she abandoned me forever. The Grey turned to Black and apathy turned to anger. Therapist turned to priest, and finally, after six months of being alone, of shutting everything else out, my parents, my friends, my emotions, I was able to pick myself up again.
It was the late 1980s, and I discovered my only hope, if I had any left, was in something greater than myself. I’d never been a God-person, never had any faith, but goddammit, it couldn’t hurt. I moved back to London and joined the Seminary. I did the fucking exorcism thing for a bit before I quit that shit too and ended up with the Hand where everything else just fell apart. That’s how I came to Seattle.
My fucking city.
And then as though they’d been summoned, I saw the lights on the Space Needle in the distance, saw the silhouette of the skyline materialize like a ghost out of the night air.
I blinked the tears out of my eyes and focused on the road, took a deep breath to stabilize myself but shook involuntarily as I exhaled.
The streets were quiet as I drove them, and I had the thought to stop back by my office and check the messages, but was tired. I stopped just long enough to grab a coffee and then, finally, headed home.
9
I pulled around behind the house, parked in my usual space, and glanced at the clock. It was late. All the windows were dark. Everyone had gone to sleep, probably hours before, which was fine for me. After the drive I’d had, the mood I was in, I didn’t feel much like talking.
I stopped in the kitchen to grab a quick bite and a cold brew. An abandoned dust mop sat on the counter beside an empty saucer of milk, proof that Chess was on the prowl, but apparently he wanted as much company as I did.
Chess was Cheshire, a type of Spritely house spirit called a Brownie. He worked at night, preferably while we slept, and didn’t like to be seen. He stocked our groceries, did our dishes, cobbled our shoes, prepared our meals, and cleaned the lint out of the dryer. He never accepted payment, just a saucer of milk every day, maybe a little biscuit with honey, and Ape swore if we ever considered it payment, Chess was likely to disappear.
As far as I know, he came with the house, but I’d only met him once, when I first moved in – something about him needing to get used to my scent.
From the kitchen, I wound my way through the house and crept up the stairs to Nadia’s room. Cracked the door open slowly. No lights were on, but a lone candle flickered on a side table.
“Nadia?” I whispered, but she didn’t answer.
I stole into the room, removed the box with Huxley’s amulet from my pocket, and set it down next to the candle, blew out the little flame as I did.
I turned to leave but stopped, looked back at her wrapped up in those plain white sheets, the comforter that looked like it belonged in some random hotel room somewhere. Her entire room was like that: off, borrowed. Apart from her clothes that hung in the closet, nothing in her room betrayed anything about her.
Because of my work, I’d been around young girls. I’d been in their rooms, looking for clues on cases, saw the dollies or the posters or the painted walls. She was a young lady, yet the drab paint job, the perfectly boring decorations on the shelves, the horrible painting of a farmhouse and cornfield could have belonged anywhere.
There was the chair she loved, though, in the corner. The old brown wicker frame and over-sized padded cushion that was cradled in it would’ve looked better in a college dorm – which is where it had come from, bartered from some frat boys who thought their dorm was haunted. When I first quit the Hand, I had nowhere to go, so I crashed at the office. Nadia, who was only eight at the time, slept in that chair. When Ape took us in, she asked to keep it.
It was the story of her life, and why, I knew, her room was so, well, not her. Like me, she didn’t feel she had a home. She hadn’t for years. Homes are like that. Suddenly yours can be torn from you, and it can take years, decades maybe, before you find another – if you find another.
My thoughts drifted back to Alara; when she and Anna had gone, it’s like any hope I had of a home died with them. Whether the seminary, the Hand, my office, Ape’s place, I was just leasing space. All I needed was a bed to lay my head and a pot to piss in.
With Nadia, she hadn’t had a home since her mom died when she was six. From there, she was taken in by her dad, and while Huxley tried to provide, he was no family man, didn’t know how to be. There wasn’t a spell for that. She was only with him two years before I got her. Nothing seemed permanent, so she never established roots, never attached a claim to anything she couldn’t pack and take with her.
That was Nadia. She was an orphan, daughter of a black Haitian voodoo man and a poor, white, trailer-trash mama from Alabama, born out of wedlock and raised by the hapless bastard who got her father killed.
Sometimes I’d tell myself I kept her around because I owed it to her old man, and maybe that used to be true, but these days, I kept her around because I liked her. Because in a way, she reminded me of me, the way she was a fighter, the way she didn’t give a damn, the way her ability made her a freak.
Unlike me, she wasn’t born with her ability. She’d had an accident, woke violently, shaking and screaming, and that’s when it happened: the room lit up like a damn traffic light.
After extensive testing, Ape determined that the colored energy discs she created altered the inertia of an object, changing its willingness to move. Red discs caused an object in motion to stop. Green discs made a stationary object go.
We set up some tin cans in the backyard, and she sat out there for months, hours at a time, hurling disc after disc like sodding ninja stars until she could hit a target forty yards away, perfectly, every time. Yet, despite her training, she lacked the experience in battle that Ape and I won the hard way: years of discipline and experience and fucking truck-fulls of luck.
So we didn’t let her help as much as she’d like, she was still a young girl, and I was dead-set on not disappointing her father again. Huxley trusted me with his life, and then for some reason I’ll never understand, when I failed him, he trusted me with the life of his only daughter. Hell, it was his dying wish I raise her, tell her about him, and give her the amulet.
She was eighteen in a few days.
As I left her room, I closed the door gently behind me and moved quickly and silently back through the kitchen and down another hallway and descended more stairs.
I think at its inception, the basement had been slave quarters or maybe just one of those mother-in-law suites, because it was designed as a living space, though not a very cozy one. I had it softened up a bit, a few
coats of paint on the walls, some new insulation, some fresh carpeting. I had my own bathroom and a nice four-poster bed.
When I reached my room, my legs tingled. Sirens were great at fixing backs, no doubt about it. Had I been left in the care of hobs or selkies, for instance, we’d be installing a handicap elevator. As long as I could still walk – and run when needed – I could deal with a little numbness time and again.
I grabbed a quick shower, not really washing, just letting the hot water steam against me, scalding the dirt and dried blood off. I didn’t feel clean, just sterile, like the white feeding room at the Siren’s Song.
After that, legs still tingling, my naked body wrapped in a towel, I collapsed on top of my covers and drifted into restless sleep.
10
When I woke, it was dark in my room, and I lay still for a few minutes, my head pounding steadily.
I got up slowly, still in my bath towel, and took a step. Pain shot up my left leg and set fire to my lower back. I winced, stumbled, and caught myself on the dresser, leaned there a moment until I caught my bearings before stumbling the rest of the way to the bathroom. With some difficulty, I got dressed and shambled upstairs.
At the top of the stairs, I realized two things at once. The first was that it was indeed morning. The entire kitchen was aglow with brilliant sunlight that came unimpeded through the large picture window that overlooked the rear of the estate. The second was that while I slept, Chess had been baking – something apple-cinnamon from the smell of it.
Nadia sat at one of the stools on the island, sipped slowly from a cup of coffee and flipped idly through a newspaper. She nodded to me when I entered and continued reading. She didn’t seem to notice my walk had turned to a hobble overnight, or if she did, injury must have become so common place with me that she paid it no mind.
“Coffee?” I asked.
She didn’t say anything, but motioned to the coffee pot. “Chess made a spice cake,” she said, and the plate next to her bore what looked like two thick slices of a small bread.