Dawn of Revelation

by A N Sandra

  “Well, so what? It doesn’t taste bad and it’s probably super healthy. Bursting with antioxidants.”

  “Don’t you find it suspicious that things you can’t identify are bursting with antioxidants?” Peter asked. “Have you ever seen an acai plant?”

  “No, but Tawna had me do an acai facial last week and it worked really well,” Helena told him.

  “It’s psychosomatic.”

  After lunch, which Ray didn’t eat, Lourdes and Peter and Helena sat on deck chairs and read books they had chosen from the bookshelf below. The ocean breeze blew across their faces and the occasional commercial fishing vessel caused them to put their books down and wave like fiends at the people on the other boat.

  “Isn’t it funny that being on a boat makes you friends with everyone else on another boat?” Lourdes asked.

  “Yeah,” Helena agreed with her.

  “Except pirates,” Peter said. “We’re not friends with pirates.”

  “Maybe we are the pirates,” Helena said. “Or fugitives, at least.”

  Tawna came by; she had nibbled on her lunch, washed it down with some white wine, and was holding a martini glass with another manic grin in place.

  “Enjoy today, children, tomorrow holds more surprises!”

  Because Lourdes was there Helena refrained from telling Peter what she thought of Tawna’s surprises.

  But the surprises came. Twenty-four hours later, the boat pulled up to a deserted dock.

  “Is this still Mexico?” Lourdes wanted to know.

  “See if you can figure it out!” Tawna told them with what was clearly forced cheerfulness. She had continued imbibing a shockingly steady flow of adult beverages every waking moment she was on the boat. Helena wished there was a responsible grownup to call but she had no phone. Also, it was entirely possible that no responsible grownups existed at their current location. Helena was a little afraid she was the most responsible person anyone on the boat knew, and she had no power at all in the situation.

  “This whole thing gets more scary all the time,” Peter said quietly to Helena, who completely agreed.

  There was a small amount of chaos pulling Ray away from the Playstation; Helena couldn’t remember his saying more than a few words since he had gotten on the boat. Eventually the staff of the yacht was able to turn off the machine and remove him during the meltdown. Tawna settled all of them into a charter van.

  “I think we’re sneaking into another country,” Helena whispered to Peter. Peter shrugged helplessly.

  Lourdes and Ray looked concerned as the van drove off an unpaved road from the dock into a dense jungle. The heat was overwhelming and humid air pressed all of them mercilessly. If the van was air conditioned, none of the cold air made it past the front seat.

  “Here we are!” Tawna chirped as the van pulled up next to a dilapidated riverboat docked at a large slow-moving river.

  They all got out of the van and stood silently as it left them.

  “Mom, I seriously need my phone. You can’t make me go on a trip without my phone,” Ray complained. He planted his feet in the stance of someone who will simply not go further until they get what they want.

  “Drop it!” Tawna snarled. Her lovely face became feral instantly.

  Ray’s face fell, Lourdes’s green eyes got huge, and Peter and Helena looked at each other in shock. Tawna never spoke to Ray in any way other than completely indulgently. Neither of them could believe what had just happened.

  “I’m not going anywhere without my phone!” Ray argued. He stood still, his slightly chubby young frame opposing everyone else in the group.

  “Your phone is in Cancun and it will stay there!” Tawna told him fiercely. “I’m not kidding. I will drag you on the next boat if I have to.”

  “I already was on a boat!” Ray continued to whine. “I’m not getting on another one! That one looks like it’s held together with duct tape-”

  “Like fucking hell—” Tawna took several huge steps toward Ray and grabbed him by the hair and pulled him toward the boat.

  “Oh, dear Lord,” Helena murmured to Peter. This moment should be pleasurable, and yet she was too tense to take the pleasure. “I never thought this day would come. And I’m too stressed out to properly enjoy it.”

  “Did you count how many drinks she had?” Peter wanted to know.

  “Over the last two days? Hell no, who could count that high?”

  “Well then, we’ll never know how many drinks it takes to get to the real Tawna,” Peter said.

  Lourdes kept looking at her mother as if she didn’t know her. In the three years that Helena had known Tawna, this breach of emotion was something Helena had never seen before. Previously, when Helena had accused Tawna of being so manipulative that she never showed emotion, her father had simply told her that Tawna was “guarded.” But Tawna was more than guarded; she’d always worn an invisible mask over her emotions that was impenetrable. Today had begun the penetration.

  They walked toward a river boat that was ready to take them further away from wherever they were. The riverboat was much older than the beautiful luxury yacht they had just left. It was also not clean or comfortably furnished. There were plastic chairs on the deck that looked like they had come from a grubby yard sale in a bad neighborhood.

  Tawna held Ray firmly by the hair until he was on the next boat. If Ray hadn’t spent all his spare time playing video games he might have had skills to defend himself, but instead he was simply at the mercy of his mother, who was out of mercy.

  “When we’re done with the boat ride we’re going to do something fun and then take a plane ride!” Tawna told everyone as they sat on the boat watching tropical rainforest whiz by. For the first time since they had left Cancun she wasn’t holding a cocktail, and Helena didn’t know if she was relieved or more worried.

  “Super,” Peter answered her, sitting calmly. Helena thought that Peter would make a great professional poker player when he grew up.

  Lourdes and Ray said nothing. Helena and Peter sat next to each other as the boat carried them upriver, with huge trees, vines, colorful birds, and occasional monkeys for scenery. There were no staff on the boat, just a captain who was driving and an assistant of some kind who was clearly not there to serve the Harris family. There were noises from the jungle around them, but not enough noise to mask personal discussion. Jungle heat caused everyone to breathe slowly. Helena sighed. Peter sighed.

  “I’m hungry,” Ray complained.

  Personally, Helena was not hungry enough to eat anything prepared by the people running this boat, but she refrained from saying anything. Tawna didn’t answer Ray either, Helena noted with a smirk that she was careful to keep from displaying. Without her cell phone, Helena didn’t know what time it was. Maddening.

  Almost three hours after they got on the boat it stopped at a deserted-looking dock with a small ticket counter.

  “Oh, we’re at the zipline!” Tawna almost screeched. Her voice was high and a little shaky even though she was trying to sound excited.

  “You can do whatever the hell you want to me, but I’m not getting on a zipline,” Helena broke out. “I’m just not.”

  “I know you’re afraid of heights. I got you a little something to take to help you get over it.”

  “OMG, you want to drug me and put me on top of the world?”

  Helena looked wildly around for someplace to escape to. The riverboat was pulling away. There was someone at the rickety ticket booth, but other than that there was jungle as far as she could see. Even if they had been in a city, she had no money, and no cell phone—and she wasn’t completely certain they were still in Mexico. They might be in Belize, or even Costa Rica, or any other Central American country. They had been on the yacht for two days and she had no idea how fast it could travel on the open sea.

  “I will get even with you for this if it is the last thing I do.” Bitterness coated Helena’s words. She felt as if she had eaten something so rotten that she
couldn’t remove the taste from her mouth.

  Tawna appeared to be unconcerned by Helena’s threat and marched up to the ticket booth. Before long all four of them and Tawna were buckled into canvas harnesses and being readied for the zip line. Helena felt a deep hatred of Tawna that transcended her fear, but just barely. Her fear of heights was something she’d struggled with her whole life. She had never looked outside one of the penthouse windows in the day when she could see streets below.

  “It really is going to be fine,” Peter told her. “I know lots of people who go on ziplines.”

  “Really? In the middle of the jungle? With a stepparent who probably wants them dead anyway?”

  “Well, these are extenuating circumstances,” Peter admitted. “But I came to the conclusion a long time ago that if Tawna wants me dead she is going to get away with it.” He was trying to sound tough, but the truth was that Tawna got away with whatever she wanted, and there was no recourse for Peter and Helena.

  Helena gave Peter a very small smile to acknowledge the truth of what he had said.

  “I wouldn’t mind dying today, I really wouldn’t. But I don’t want to die on her terms.”

  “You are going right before Ray. She isn’t going to let Ray watch you die. It would scar him too much. He’s very sensitive.”

  “Oh, you’re funny. You really are.” But Helena did feel a little better. Tawna offered her a white pill with a dixie cup of water and Helena took it without fuss. If it was poison, she would die without going on the zip line. If it wasn’t poison, it might help her feel better.

  The operator of the zip line helped Helena put on a complicated harness. Helena felt like a toddler at an amusement park, tied up and attached to a leash, but she felt a curious detachment over the situation. The pill made her feel like a spectator of her own life.

  “I’m going to throw up,” Helena predicted to Peter. It did seem to Helena that someone had taken her insides, pureed them in a Cuisinart, and poured them back inside her, where they sloshed around. Oddly, she was not in a panic over the idea of getting sick, she was merely observing herself.

  “Could you do it on Tawna?”

  “I wish!” Helena brightened as she pictured that possible event.

  The initial drop of the zip line after she pushed off was the worst moment Helena had ever experienced in her life, even though she had taken the pill Tawna offered. But as the ride went on she looked down over the top of a jungle she could not identify, and a sense of Zen overtook her. She began to feel that it didn’t matter if she died today, she would enjoy her last moments. So she watched the birds and trees below her with a sudden sharp attention she had not known before. The colors of the jungle popped out in vivid jewel tones. Everything was so mesmerizing that Helena was able to focus on the scene below her.

  “You didn’t die!” Peter greeted Helena when her harness was off, and she was gathering her thoughts.

  “I didn’t die but I’m still mad as hell,” Helena scowled. The oppressive jungle heat didn’t help her temper. She was soaking wet from sweat and drops of sweat ran into her eyes.

  Tawna got a drink from a little grass hut bar at the end of the zipline. There were bottles of water in an ancient cooler and the teens each took one in an effort to cool off.

  There was a minivan in an otherwise empty parking lot and Helena was sure that when Tawna finished her beverage they would all climb into it. She wondered if it would be possible to trick the van driver into revealing where they were. She did speak decent Spanish, after all.

  Tawna was pretending to talk to the bartender about something important, but Helena knew she was just avoiding the kids. Helena sauntered over to the van, offering the driver a bottle of water.

  “Where exactly are we?” Helena asked the van driver politely in Spanish.

  “Right here,” he said in English and rolled his eyes. Clearly, he had not been hired for his customer service skills. He actually managed to look through her rather than at her. Helena slunk back to Peter.

  “This whole situation is out of hand,” she complained. Together they watched Ray, Lourdes, and Tawna standing at the bar while Tawna had another drink.

  “Oh, I agree. Dad is going to get an earful when I finally see him,” Peter said with an edge to his voice that Helena hadn’t heard before. Normally Peter was the kind of person who could be content anywhere, doing anything, but the uncertainty of this vacation had clearly pushed his limits.

  “He better listen,” Helena said. “When I think that having her in our lives is my fault I could scream.”

  “I don’t think it’s your fault,” Peter said. “Dad isn’t a good chooser of women. We talked about it when we read Madame Bovary last year. Some people never choose well. If Dad hadn’t married Tawna he might have married someone worse.”

  “Like that’s possible.”

  “It might be,” Peter said seriously. “He could have married a twenty-two-year-old like Tawna who wanted to have her own kids.”

  “Oh, and they would have put those kids ahead of us and that would be worse than putting Ray and Lourdes ahead of us?” Helena said sarcastically. “At least they would be related to us. They put Lourdes’s dog ahead of us.”

  “Ray and Lourdes need the help,” Peter smirked. “Ray is a loser; this is the longest I’ve seen him go without his online games. Lourdes is dependent on her animals.”

  “People could say stuff like that about us,” Helena said just to avoid sounding self-righteous.

  “Well, we’re not perfect, but I don’t think anyone would say we’re as dysfunctional as Ray and Lourdes.”

  “No offense, ‘cause I really like what you’re saying, but you’re thirteen. You’re not fourteen until November. I’m pretty sure you’re not old enough to judge whose dysfunctional or not.”

  “Well, I skipped two grades at the hardest private school in Dallas, so I’m not stupid.”

  “One of those grades was because you had a late birthday.”

  “Are you seriously arguing with me when you want to agree anyway?”

  “You’re right.” Helena smiled a little. “We need to stick together.”

  “True that,” Peter agreed. The two of them bounced as the van hit a huge bump. “Do you think this van has any shocks?”

  “I would be surprised,” Helena told him.

  The van ride was long and filled with high-spirited Latino music. Tawna sat in the front seat next to the driver and enjoyed one Corona beer from the bottle after another the whole trip. Evidently there was a magic cooler on the floor of the van that supplied them. Behind the driver and Tawna, Ray and Lourdes sat stiff as boards in the first bench seat. Neither of them spoke to each other or anyone else. Peter and Helena sat in the back seat, not speaking either.

  Helena remembered the horrible day that her father and Tawna had become an item. As a sixth grader, she had been unprepared for middle school. The tough academic schedule combined with the reality that her best friend had moved away had resulted in Helena becoming a target for the mean girls in her class. With no mother to stand up for her, the school was unresponsive to her complaints about the fiendish girls who were making her miserable.

  Tawna had worked for the school, managing the after-school recreational program. She’d assessed the situation and took on the mothers of the offending girls until the problems were resolved. To say thank you, Helena’s father, Joel Harris, had taken Tawna out to an expensive dinner. The two of them had returned from dinner a couple and were married less than six months later. Helena blamed herself for complaining about the bad treatment she had received. If she had sucked it up, her father never would have felt he owed Tawna a favor or been under the illusion that she was a good person who would look out for his children.

  Peter said he didn’t blame Helena, but maybe he really did. He should. She had been weak. Because of her weakness their father had been taken in by an evil witch. In the last two years Helena had made great strides not to show feelings that made
her vulnerable.

  “We should be having fun,” Peter leaned over and whispered to Helena. “It would tick them off.”

  After observing the rest of the unhappy Harris family, Helena could see that her happiness would indeed tick them off. She leaned over and told Peter a silly joke.

  “Two Martians and a Texan sit down at a bar—”

  Before the joke was over, Peter was laughing. He told her a joke back. Helena was proud of their strength. Tawna could not ruin their vacation no matter how hard she tried. The two of them traded jokes and funny stories as the van bumped through the jungle. Things became extra funny due to the stress they were under and the lack of good sleep. Tawna rolled her eyes, and Ray and Lourdes slumped and scowled, the desired effect of the joking good time.

  The van turned onto a red dirt road that was bumpier than the one they had been on, but it was short and opened into a lovely meadow. Careful examination of the meadow showed it was an airstrip. There was no one visible working there, although there was a plane that appeared ready to take off. Tawna got the van driver to load their luggage onto it.

  “Mother of—”

  “No way, we’re not really getting on a plane way out here—”

  “We don’t even know where we are!” Helena and Peter talked over each other in panic mode.

  Lourdes and Ray looked at each other with obvious concern, but when Tawna waved them over to the plane they got out of the van.

  “We shouldn’t get on that plane.” Helena bit her lip.

  “We shouldn’t,” Peter agreed. “This whole trip is out of hand. Can you even guess where we are at all?”

  “There’s the trouble,” Helena answered with her jaw clenched in frustration. “We don’t know where we are, so we can’t safely stay here.”

  “It’s surreal.” Peter looked around as if just maybe he would see something that would prove the experience was a bad dream.

  “Well, we can get on the plane or stay in the jungle,” Helena said sarcastically. “My jungle survival skills are a little rusty, and I have no money, but at least I can’t be robbed.”