AT BENEDIKT’S, CHERYL WAITS as long as she can—finishing her coffee, listening to the polka band, paying the bill—but still her daughter doesn’t return from the woods out back. She hates to be such a worrier. Hannah once told her it was a chronic condition. “When we go to the beach, you warn me about sharks and sneaker waves. When we put up the Christmas tree, you double-check for bugs and fuss over the stand because you’re sure it will tip over. Doesn’t matter what the situation is, you imagine the worst-case scenario.” Hannah’s right. It’s the way Cheryl’s hard-wired. It’s the reason she’s been on a steady diet of Zoloft the past few years. Ever since Hannah’s eyes started to fail, both their ways of seeing changed, though they know a different kind of darkness.
Cheryl forces herself to walk, not run, after twenty minutes have passed, to the restaurant’s entrance. The hostess thanks her for coming and Cheryl says, “My pleasure!” with too much enthusiasm. The music and the laughter from the beer garden fade as she crosses the parking lot, passes the Dumpsters, and enters the tall stand of firs. The air instantly cools and thickens with blue shade.
She almost calls out for Hannah, then doesn’t. There’s no need to worry. That’s what Hannah would tell her. I’m fine, Mom. Quit hovering, Mom. Stop making such a fuss, Mom. Give me space, Mom. But it’s hard. Even now. Her daughter might not be blind, but she’s certainly disoriented. What if she tripped and hurt herself? What if she—
No, she’s fine. She’s playing a game in the woods. That’s all. And good for her, pushing boundaries. The guts her girl has. The grit. It should make Cheryl proud. It does make her proud. She’ll say as much when she finds her daughter—and then, when Hannah shrugs off the attention, Cheryl will ask if she’s found any of the hidden goat heads and whether she wants to go home.
But that’s not what happens. Cheryl rounds a blackberry thicket to find a man in a wolf mask bent over her daughter. It is an image out of a fairy tale: the shadowy woods, the gray-muzzled wolf kneeling over the girl, appearing to feed. And so it takes a moment for the reality to sink in, for her to cry out, “What are you doing?”—her voice not a scream, but almost there. “What’s happened?”
The man whirls around, still in a crouch, and for a moment it appears he might lunge. It’s the man. The one Hannah said she didn’t like in the restaurant. He stands, his body thickly set, and lifts the mask to reveal the face of a man with a beard so black it appears like iron shavings. “You are the sister,” he says.
“I’m her mother. Get away from her!”
But he doesn’t. Instead he seizes Hannah by the arm and drags her from the ground, her legs limp beneath her. “Both of you will come with me.” His teeth are long and yellow, visible when he speaks in flashes beneath his beard.
Lela has always accused her of being weak, a bore. But right now, with her daughter in danger, Cheryl feels like she could hurl a car, kick over a tree. She jams her hand in her purse until she finds what she’s looking for: the pepper spray Lela gave her. She flips the cap, thumbs the button, extends her arm—and lets loose a poisonous stream.
It splatters his face—his eyes and mouth—sheeting his skin and clouding the air all around. He lets go of Hannah and drops to the forest floor and shoves his fists into his eyes. His body convulses with pain.
Hannah lies on her side, the ferns mashed and spiked all around her in a green splash. Bits of moss and dirt stick to her clothes when Cheryl goes to her and hoists her into a seated position. “Come on, sweetie. Come on. Can you stand for me? Can you do that, love?”
Her daughter doesn’t say anything at first. Only nods. Cheryl can see her own frightened expression reflected in the visor of the Mirage.
The man continues to writhe when Cheryl helps her daughter stand and leads her out of the woods and into the parking lot. She knows she should go into the restaurant, ask for help, call the police, get words on paper. But something tells her to flee and she panics—and now here they are, a mile away, locked in traffic, edging forward a few feet at a time. Her nose runs and her eyes weep, maybe from the pepper spray, maybe from fear.
NPR plays on the radio, some news about millions of passwords hacked from a large corporation. She snaps it off and wipes her eyes. “What happened, Hannah?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”
“I don’t know.” Her daughter wipes some of the dirt off her jeans and tentatively touches the Mirage. “I don’t trust my eyes. I don’t understand what I see.”
“What do you think you saw?” She curls her grip around the steering wheel so tightly the rubber squeaks. “Hannah? You can tell me anything. You know that, don’t you? Did that man do something to you? Thank god I came when I did. I feel sick. I feel sick all over just thinking about it. What did he do to you? You can tell me. It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. Was he one of those perverts?”
“No.”
“He wasn’t about to . . .”
“No. He was talking about Lela. He wanted to know where she was, when we had last seen her.”
“Lela? Lela. What do you mean, Lela?” Cheryl can’t process this and swings her head back and forth, trying to split her attention between the road and her daughter and nearly rear-ends the semi in front of them. She stomps on the brake and the car rocks, and Cheryl throws out an arm to catch Hannah. It’s instinctive. She does it all the time. And Hannah can’t stand it. Says that if she wants to keep her safe, she should keep both hands on the wheel.
“I’m sorry,” Cheryl says. “I’m just so scared. I’m just so glad you’re all right. But what’s this about Lela? Is that what he meant when he called me the sister?” Her tone shifts from scared and uncertain to accusatory. “This is her fault, then. She never thinks about anyone but herself. And now she’s made yet another bad decision—pissing off the wrong people—and it’s affecting us all. I could kill her. I really could.”
Her daughter is quiet a long time before she says, “I’m seeing things I shouldn’t see. I don’t know if they’re real or not. They look real.”
“What?” It takes Cheryl a moment to follow. She’s too focused on Lela, her stupid, reckless, selfish asshole of a sister. “What are you talking about? What did you see?”
Hannah’s hands twist in her lap as if she’s worrying an invisible rosary. “When I looked at the man, I saw something. It was like a shawl. Like a black shawl. And when he came near me, when the shawl touched me, I felt sick.” She wraps her arms around her stomach and leans forward. “I still feel sick.”
❖
God is punishing Cheryl. She knows she shouldn’t feel this way, but she can’t help it. She didn’t grow up in a religious family, but when their parents slammed head-on into a logging truck coming over the Santiam Pass, she found God at the same time Lela rejected Him. She was twenty at the time, her sister sixteen. They lived with an aunt and then with each other until Lela graduated high school. There must have been a time—when they were younger, just girls playing dress-up and house—that they got along, but she can’t recall it.
And then she got together with Joe, and they found themselves drawn to a church, though the congregation met in a vacant store in a strip mall. Cheryl wouldn’t recognize it as a cult until years later, when the headlines in the newspapers referred to it as such.
They were called the Light of the World, and her ex-husband, Joe, soon became one of the deacons. Theirs was one of many congregations nationwide, all under the leadership of a woman named Katherine Prophet, to whom they tithed 50 percent of their income. Prophet would travel from congregation to congregation, giving sermons and leading workshops. She wore silken robes, striped purple like the evening sky, and carried a staff and wore an oily arnica-based perfume.
The Light of the World had its own bible—printed up at Kinko’s—that read like a combination of Catholic mysticism and new age spirituality. In the final year of the church, Prophet’s sermons became more and more apocalyptic, and everyone was directed to
sell their possessions and travel to Wyoming, to an elaborate cave system where they would weather the end of days. There were air filters piped in and thousands of gallons of water and lockers full of dried goods and an armory of assault rifles and ammunition. Cheryl remembers the shoes especially. Getting to pick out twenty pairs of shoes for Hannah, in ascending size, that would supposedly last her through the years. She isn’t sure how many people crushed into the cave altogether, maybe five hundred, but after a few weeks, the apocalypse failed to arrive and everyone wandered away, and soon Prophet was facing charges of gunrunning and money laundering and embezzlement.
The months that followed were difficult for Cheryl, mostly a blur. She can remember a lot of crying and yelling. Joe headed to Alaska, looking for work at a cannery, and never came home. She moved in with Lela for a few months, and when her sister called her an empty-headed dumbass who preferred fantasy over reality because it inflated her sense of worth, Cheryl slapped her and said, “Don’t you dare talk about me like that. Don’t you dare.” She went back to school and became a case manager at a social services agency on the east side, walking distance from her home. This felt like a kind of penance, helping the beaten wives and neglected children, the strung-out, the diseased, the disabled, the poor and helpless. She had become her own church, a congregation of one.
These days, God is no longer present in Cheryl’s life. Except when she is at her highest and lowest—moments like this one—and suffers from paroxysms of faith. As she drives her daughter home, she whispers, “St. Michael, St. Michael, let blue flames surround me,” one of the prayers of her old church meant to stave off evil. “St. Michael, St. Michael, let blue flames surround me.”
❖
They live in a rented bungalow off Hawthorne, and on its front stoop they find a bouquet of balloons—left by a neighbor, along with a card congratulating Hannah on her newfound vision. “We’re so happy for you,” the script inside reads. “What a miracle and what a gift.” Cheryl felt the same until now, as her daughter speaks of auras.
There is a black balloon tied among the dozen. It looks wrong, the opposite of festive, but Cheryl barely registers its presence as she collects them from the stoop and hurries inside to set them on the kitchen table.
Hannah is already in the bathroom, the door half-closed. She has complained of feeling ill the whole ride home, and now Cheryl can hear her heaving, again and again, until it sounds as though she might turn inside out. She knocks tentatively and her daughter says, “Get this thing off me,” and so she helps remove the Mirage and wash Hannah’s face and brush her teeth before ushering her to bed, pale-skinned and shivering.
Cheryl tries to stop herself from praying, but she can’t. She falls to the hardwood floor with a bang of her knees and knits together her fingers and asks for God to give her guidance and watch after her dear, dear daughter. Then she trembles her way through twenty or so Our Fathers and feels a little calmer. The singsong orderliness of the words always does that to her.
She tries calling her sister, but it goes straight to voicemail, and she tries leaving a message, but the storage is full. She tries to tidy up the house and she tries to watch TV and she tries to read the newspaper—hunting for her sister’s byline, where she’ll maybe find some clue as to what’s going on—but nothing works. Her attention keeps looping back to the wolf in the woods hunched over her daughter as though to feast.
Then Hannah screams and Cheryl hurries to her room and snaps on the light and discovers the black balloon. It has somehow separated from the others and bumbled down the hall, where it now hovers at the foot of her daughter’s bed.
Hannah sits upright. She is no longer screaming, but it looks as though she is, her mouth a hole and her body shuddering. Her eyes are open and staring so fixedly at the balloon that Cheryl could swear she sees even without the Mirage.
Hannah does not respond when Cheryl calls her name, not until she grabs her daughter by the shoulders and gives her a little shake. “Mom?” she says, lost in her own private darkness, and they embrace.
It is only then that Cheryl notices the abrasions. On Hannah’s neck, her cheek, her wrist and forearm. What look like bite marks. Cheryl asks her what happened.
Her voice is so brittle when she says, “They came for me in my dreams. They came for me.”
“Who?”
“Them. The shadows.”
Cheryl pulls up Hannah’s shirt to discover her belly, too, is reddened with bites—and across her back run five bloody lines, like the slash of a long-nailed hand.
❖
The doorbell chimes—a long, drawn-out, two-toned note. This is immediately followed by a hurried knocking.
Cheryl checks the window before unlocking the door, letting her sister inside. Lela barges in, because that’s the way she enters any room, aggressively kinetic. Her face is flushed and she seems even more keyed up than usual. “So sorry! I’m so sorry. I totally forgot and I’m a terrible person who should be stabbed with hot pokers for the rest of eternity. But something is going on. Something weird. Something scary. Something I don’t totally understand and—”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Cheryl says. Yes, she’s so annoyed with her sister right now. But Cheryl loves her, and right now she can’t do anything but drag her worried sister into a hug.
Lela usually goes board-stiff at any contact, but this time she allows the hug and blasts out a sigh. “Thanks, sis. I really feel like a piece of shit.”
Hemingway is with her—ears perked, eyes bright—and the German shepherd gives Cheryl an inquisitive sniff before clacking across the hardwood and heading to the bathroom and slurping loudly from the toilet.
The front door remains open, and Cheryl sees no sign of the Volvo out front. “Where’s your car?”
“Long story.” Lela’s purse is always stuffed, but today it looks like she’s smuggling a bowling ball in it. She sets it down on the counter with a clunk. Then she turns around and closes the door and twists the deadbolt and leans against the frame as though to brace it. “Okay. I have so much to tell you, but first I want you to tell me about Hannah. You see what I’m doing? Trying to be better? Thinking about others? That’s what’s happening right now. So tell me—it worked? The Mirage actually worked? Is she stoked? Are you stoked? I am. I want to see this thing. It’s sounds so sci-fi. Where is she? I want to see her. Are you okay? Are you still pissed at me? I apologized, you know.”
Cheryl realizes that her arms are crossed, her back is slouched, as if she’s been gut-punched. “Hannah’s on the couch.”
“What’s the matter?” Lela says. “Is something the matter?”
But Cheryl only motions her forward, out of the entryway, into the living room, where Hannah is curled up beneath a Navajo-patterned blanket. The TV is off. A table lamp throws an orb of light. The dog has found her and nudges her arm with his wet muzzle, begging for love. She gives him a scratch behind the ears and says, “Good boy.”
“Hey, kid,” Lela says, and kneels by Hannah and combs her hair back from her forehead. “So sorry I missed lunch. What’s wrong? You get in a fight?”
“No.”
“You sick?”
“A little.”
“But I came here to party.”
Hannah gives her a smile. Her eyes are open but faraway.
“Where’s the thing? The Mirage? I’ve got to see it.”
Hannah doesn’t respond except to scrunch shut her eyes—and Lela looks at her and then at Cheryl with questioning concern.
“Whatever trouble you’ve gotten yourself into,” Cheryl says, “we’re all being punished for it now.”
Chapter 14
LELA AND HER SISTER fight often about God. Lela will accuse her sister of magical thinking and lay out her own atheistic principles as flatly as possible. Such as when she told Cheryl this story about a guy named Bob. Bob’s wife goes to pick the kids up at school. It’s sleeting. It’s 4 p.m., then it’s 5 p.m., then it’s 6 p.m. Bob starts to worry but wo
nders if maybe his wife told him about some errand or playdate and he simply forgot. He calls her cell, no answer. Then immediately he gets a call back. “I was getting worried,” he says, but it’s not his wife on the other end of the line. It’s a man. An EMT, it turns out. His wife is dead. His son is dead. His daughter is in serious condition. Bob drives like hell to the hospital, and the car skids out on the ice, pinwheels into oncoming traffic, gets crushed. Bob dies. Then, a few days later, so does his daughter.
That’s an article Lela had to write last February. There was no moral, she told Cheryl. There was no right or wrong. Just randomness. The cold fucking indifference of the world. You write for a newspaper long enough, this becomes paralyzingly clear. Your parents drive their minivan into a logging truck when you’re sixteen, this becomes paralyzingly clear. The universe has been around for a long time before us—and it will go on without us. We’re the merest speck in the unfathomable reach of its timeline and geography.
Lela has devoted her life to facts, truth. Not telling people the stories they want to hear but the stories they need to hear. But now she doesn’t have a reasonable explanation for what’s going on. And she doesn’t want to excite her sister’s praise Jesus sensibility. So she offers up the quick version. “I’m investigating some illegal activity connected to real estate development in the Pearl District.” That’s what she says. “The bad guys are pissed.”
They’re in Cheryl’s room, talking in hushed voices, not wanting to upset Hannah any further. The wallpaper is floral-patterned. Precious Moments ceramic figurines line the bureau. The alarm clock is islanded by a white doily centered on her nightstand. The carpet is striped from its daily vacuuming and the bed is neatly made with a country quilt and throw pillows stitched with nauseating affirmations like I Believe in Myself and Live, Love, Laugh!
Lela resists the urge to mess the place up. And she resists, too, the want to discount everything that Cheryl then tells her. Maybe the red marks on Hannah’s body came from the man in the woods and Cheryl simply didn’t see them before? And maybe she misheard him? Maybe he wasn’t actually using them to get at Lela? Maybe the shadow glitch on the Mirage is a beta problem, no different than a CD skipping or a DVD occasionally banding the screen with black lines? Is there an explanation here that isn’t Ouija? Maybe.
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