Ring of Years

by Grant Oliphant

  Slow, heavy, sad.

  She remembers when her aunt was beautiful, which she hasn’t been in a long time. Not since it happened. Natalie thinks neither of them has; only in herself, the ugliness has stayed inside. And she wonders for how long.

  The smile Emily gives her expresses the pleasure she thinks she should feel at seeing her niece, her melancholy at the fact of awakening. “Was I sleeping?” she croaks. The same surprised question she asks every night, the same hint of irritation.

  Natalie tells her it’s time for bed and takes the silver saucer and empty glass into the kitchen. As she’s rinsing them. her aunt stumbles in and offers her a cigarette, which Natalie declines. ‘“Oh, that’s right” Emily says, lighting one for herself. “You only smoke professionally.”

  The last word comes out in a sneer, which Natalie knows she doesn’t intend, it’s just the bitterness seeping out again. “I’m just tired, Em,” she says.

  Her aunt snatches away the glass that Natalie is drying and pours herself another drink, scotch this time, a couple of fingers, over ice. “You think you’re so different than me?” she demands in a voice full of phlegm.

  Natalie has been through this before and decides not to take the bait. “I had a visitor today. Tracked me down at school. grabbed me when I came out of class.”

  “Because you’re not you know. Different.”

  “Man from the District Attorney’s office, a prosecutor.” Natalie waits for Emily to comment but her aunt is suddenly preoccupied with the swirls she’s making in her scotch. “Says they’re going to want me to testify. Maybe you, too.”

  The statement seems to have no effect. Her aunt keeps staring into her drink, then sucks hard on her cigarette, puckering the sagging folds of her face, and glances up. “We’re a lot more alike than you realize, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  Emily drains her glass and stubs what’s left of her cigarette into the ice, and the butt dies with a tiny hiss. “You missed quite a show today. Sabina Rust delivered her opening statement. I’m telling you, that is some lady.”

  This is how it always goes when Natalie brings up the past, which is why she can’t remember the lost time she tried. “Who the hell is Sabina Rust?” she asks.

  Her aunt’s eyes flash. “Don’t swear at me, young lady.”

  “Sorry. But who is she?”

  “The prosecutor in the Marti Tillotson case.” Only an idiot wouldn’t know that—that’s how she says it. “Reminds me a bit of Marcia Clark, actually, but I think prettier. And smarter, too.”

  Natalie nods. Of course, Marti Tillotson, famous actress now playing the role of the accused in the so-called “Mommy Dearest” trial. A year ago, the body of her two-year old son Sean was found in a remote corner of her Santa Barbara estate after she had reported him missing. He had been savagely beaten--the work, she insisted, of intruders, who stole him from the house while she slept. But Tillotson, a single mom known for her penchant for cocaine, never seemed able to tell the same story twice, and the cops eventually charged her with the crime.

  “She’s guilty, don’t you think?” Natalie asks.

  This seems to surprise her aunt. “There’s guilt and then there’s guilt,” she answers almost piously. “It’s much too early to decide that now. I think it’s better to wait until we hear all the facts, don’t you?”

  “Sure.” Natalie tries to make it sound like she cares. “I guess that’s why they have juries.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What am I going to tell the prosecutor, Em?”

  Her aunt sets her glass down and starts to shuffle out of the room. When she reaches the doorway, she stops. “Tell him what I tell those reporters who keep calling,” she says, her back still turned. “Tell him that was all a long time ago.”

  Natalie knows she should let it go for now, but can’t. “I won’t let him get off. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  Emily understands her well enough to know she means it. “I’m off to bed. Been a long day.” She glances back over her shoulder. “Are you going back out?”

  “Yes. Would you like me to say hi to them for you?”

  “Lock up when you go. I’ll leave a light on upstairs for you.” With that, she’s gone.

  And Natalie knows the house will be dark when she returns.

  * * *

  The cemetery by moonlight is a gently undulating sea of closely cropped grass. There are no tombstones—the rules don’t allow them—but the occasional wreath mounted on a thin metal frame makes it clear that this is no innocent urban meadow.

  Natalie drives along the narrow winding road that meanders deep into the grounds and parks near the life-sized statue of St. Francis. Beyond it, embedded in the grass up a small rise toward the gnarled maple that keeps lonely vigil under the night sky, is a marker, one of many just like it, easy to miss in the daylight, infinitely more so in the dark.

  Natalie can usually find it without looking, just by counting off her steps and feeling the ground swell beneath her feet. And if that fails her, she can always just close her eyes and listen.

  Eventually, Stephanie will call out to her.

  Tonight, the marker seems to find her. She is wandering, lost in thought, mulling over what it is she wants to say, when her shoe catches on something and she looks down and there it is, nestled patiently between her feet: STEPHANIE KRILL.

  Blades of freshly clipped grass obscure the dates inscribed beneath. Natalie kneels down and brushes away the clippings. Six years old. That’s how she still thinks of her. Thirteen years ago, her little sister stopped getting older and so that’s what she’ll always be, a child of six.

  A few feet to the right there’s another marker half covered in blades of grass. Natalie can make out the letters M-E and farther down I-L-L and she almost laughs it’s so perfect. What an understatement.

  She knows how it really reads: “Megan Krill, Beloved Mother and Sister.”

  Emily’s words.

  Natalie doesn’t really have anything to say to her mother. When she used to lie on her grave years ago, back when she still hoped there might be something there, all she could ever think to ask was why, that was the one word that came to her: Why? And she knows the answer. There’s no great mystery to it, nothing to obscure how mundane it is, no intrigue to ennoble it. People are always looking for something and sometimes they find it in the wrong place.

  To Stephanie’s left lies an empty plot—no marker yet. Natalie glances at it and then away. One day she’ll be here, too.

  Cool grass prickles the back of her neck as she stretches out on her sister’s grave. High above, a gentle breeze tows a wispy cloud slowly across the face of the nearly full moon. Natalie stares at it for a while and wishes she could think it was beautiful again, the way she did when she was a girl.

  But the moon isn’t something she just sees anymore—it’s something she remembers. it’s a trigger that shoots her back through time.

  An image of her aunt floats into her mind. There’s a price for not remembering, too, and she wonders which is worse.

  She rolls over and presses a damp cheek hard against the cold metal plate, as if trying to read its secrets with her skin. “Don’t worry, Steph,” she whispers. “I won’t let you down, not this time. He’s not going to get away with this.”

  * * *

  She lives with her aunt in one of those close-in suburbs that young families moved into thirty years ago and the parents never left. Their children grew up and moved out, and those that stayed in town are raising their own children in the newer suburbs sprawling far to the north. The tide of regeneration has retreated from this place and left in its wake rusting swing sets and carefully manicured yards where grandchildren play during rare visits.

  Natalie swings by the convenience store on her way home. She thinks they lie about changing the coffee every twenty minutes, but it tastes fine and right now it doesn’t really matter. There’s no sleep in her,
not yet; her mind’s still trying to process the day.

  The boy behind the counter who’s maybe eighteen hits a button on his register and, eyes glued to the television on the counter, holds out his hand for her money. The screen isn’t visible, but a chirpy announcer mentions Marti Tillotson, something about an appearance on some talk show, that her attorneys say they didn’t know she was going to do it but it won’t hurt their case. Natalie drops some coins into the cashier’s hand, which he sorts without looking at her, and oddly it’s her who says thanks as she heads out the door with her purchase.

  The phone is ringing insistently when she comes inside from the garage.

  She figures it’s probably another reporter desperate to get an angle on her thoughts and feelings; either that, or a pervert, which under the circumstances she actually might prefer. Worried that the noise will wake her aunt even though she almost certainly has medicated herself beyond the realm of interruption, Natalie stumbles through the dark living room into the kitchen, notes that the number on Caller ID isn’t one she recognizes, and yanks the receiver off the hook. “Hello?” she demands gruffly.

  There’s a pause, and then a woman’s voice, whispery and timid, asks for Natalie Krill. “That’s me,” Natalie replies, scalding her lip on the coffee.

  The woman apologizes for phoning so late and introduces herself as Marida Latham, that’s it, just her name, and then this: “I need to hire you.”

  An amusing notion. The pervert theory occurs to Natalie again, and so does that this is some kind of prank, because after all what could a stranger possibly want to hire her to do? “For what?” she scoffs.

  Marida hesitates again—she seems uncertain of herself. When she finally speaks the words seem to blurt out of her. “To help me find my daughter.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re a detective, aren’t you?”

  The absurdity of it makes Natalie laugh. “God no, just shark chum.”

  “But you work for a detective agency.”

  “Where all we do is nab cheating husbands.” There’s a disappointed silence at the other end. “Look, I don’t know where you got your information, but you need someone who’s qualified.”

  “I need you,” Marida interrupts with sudden vehemence.

  Natalie isn’t in the mood to argue. If this woman refuses to hear the truth, she doesn’t want to spend what’s left of the night trying to convince her of it.

  “My boss has an office. Why don’t we meet there tomorrow and we can discuss it then?”

  “No office!” Marida snaps. “They’d know. Then I’ll never find Selena in time.”

  Natalie takes another, more cautious sip. “Selena is your daughter?”

  “Yes.” There’s a sob at the other end of the line. “My husband has her.“

  This is more than Natalie wants to hear. but it confirms her instinct: this isn’t a game she can play even if she wants to, which she doesn’t. “That’s totally out of my league. Really.”

  “No, it’s not. You know what they’re like.”

  “Actually I don’t know the first thing about—" Natalie’s thinking husbands but then it hits her what Marida really means by “they,” and the words trail off and float down the line. It doesn’t matter what their name is, or who their members are, she knows what they are, what this woman’s husband is. The essential thing about him, the aspect of his life that would make his wife think, however mistakenly, that she needs the services of someone like Natalie.

  You know what they’re like.

  But oh God, she wants no part of that.

  “What do they call themselves?” she hears herself ask.

  “Portal Guardians.· The words hiss across the line as if they burned Marida’s lips just to utter them, which they probably did. “They think they’re going to Atlantis.”

  Atlantis. interesting choice. Natalie thinks of asking how they plan to do it but she doesn’t really want to know. The details don’t matter anyway. The basic procedure is pretty much universal: You get to paradise by dying. Every gullible fool in the world knows that—it’s in the handbook.

  “And you think he wants to take your daughter with him?”

  Another sob. “Exactly.” And then a kind of wail.

  The grandfather clock in the front hall chimes the quarter hour. Natalie thinks of that sculpture the kid from the Art institute was carrying, the woman with the bloody clock where the head should have been. They say time is a river, that it streams by in only one direction, that what’s done is done, but she knows better. Time flows by in clumps, and sometimes they snag onto you, tattered chunks of lives that travel with you through the years, refusing to flow gently into oblivion.

  She could ask Marida to describe her daughter, but in her mind, she would see only Stephanie. That’s her battle. There isn’t room in her life for another. ‘‘I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “Maybe the police . . .”

  “The police!” Marida spits. “They think it’s just a domestic thing, like we had a fight and I’m lying to make him look bad. I can’t give them proof-how do you prove something like this? Can you tell me that?”

  Natalie can’t.

  “I don’t even know where they are, where he’s taken my daughter.”

  A normal person might tell Marida that maybe she’s jumping to conclusions, that maybe the police are right, but Natalie can’t offer consoling words she doubts are true.

  “It’s just not something I can do.”

  “But she’s only eight for God’s sake. Please!”

  Two years older than Stephanie. “She’s young. I’m sorry.”

  After slowly placing the phone back on its cradle, Natalie wanders around the house in the dark, she doesn’t know for how long. The phone doesn’t ring again, even though she half expects it too. Eventually, she ends up in her aunt’s chair, staring at the blank television screen. Over the television was where Emily used to keep the photographs. One of her husband, Uncle Howard, who died the year before it all happened, heart attack; cigarettes and too much butter, they said, but who really knows? A couple of Natalie’s mother, schoolgirl portraits of Natalie, and a family photo, taken at Christmas time, shortly before the family disintegrated, everyone smiling, blissfully clueless about what was coming. The only reliable smile is the one you have in retrospect Natalie thinks.

  Three or four months after it happened, all those photos disappeared, into a box or maybe even the trash, Natalie never did find out. Her aunt offered an explanation only once, that it was time to move on, to stop dwelling on it, and from then on even their names were banished.

  The burnt-hair smell of stale tobacco fills Natalie’s nose. The chair is like a sponge, soaking up the odors of decay.

  Emily’s chair. Auntie Em. We’re not in Kansas anymore. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

  Her coffee is cold but she sips it anyway. Maybe her aunt was right, maybe they aren’t so different after all.

  Selena, she thinks. Selena means moon.

  4

  Goodbye With A Vengeance

  Tethys sits by the window and stares into the quiet darkness. What a ridiculous thing. she thinks, to feel the need to confront the past again at a moment like this. You bid a messy farewell to the old life and endure the pain of separation as you set out to learn who you really are. Then you spend years or even a lifetime discovering your true self, how that differs from what you once thought. And finally, on the verge of becoming who you are meant to be, of taking that final daring leap into the future, you look back again. At what you have left behind.

  Ghosts.

  Psychologists call it closure, placing all the blame on the brain’s need for completion, as if what’s behind us has no power, no stubborn independence, no will of its own. The truth is, the past no more wishes to die than any living thing, and so it struggles; it tries to possess you, to own you, to insinuate itself throughout the whole of your being.

  This much she knows: the solution
isn’t closure, but exorcism. You must look back and grab hold of what you see and purge it. Say good-bye with a vengeance. Only then are you truly ready to move on.

  Tethys inhales as deeply as her rattling lungs will allow and emits an unsteady sigh. The power of ritual.

  Outside her window, the others are taking their places in the vans, each according to plan, just as they rehearsed. Her first children, the ones she bore from her womb, didn’t love her like this, not with this intensity, this devotion. These are her real children. the ones who appreciate her, who adore her—this is their gift to her. And her gift to them is deliverance. They have given her love and loyalty and in exchange she is giving them life.

  Just as she herself is being given life, and a second chance.

  It cheers her to see how precisely her orders are being followed, because they cannot afford to be lax with the details when the stakes are so high. Everything depends on their obedience now, and on the ability of her two most precious disciples to enforce it.

  Sara enters the room first, but Peter is right on her heels. “You’ve done well,” Tethys tells them, waving toward the window.

  They stare awkwardly at their feet and thank her, embarrassed but pleased. She asks Peter to light the slender white candle on her dresser and to hand her the large envelope sitting beside it. Inside are the photographs, which she lays out on her bed, five in all, each a picture of one of her girls, from when they were young. The five Mary’s: Mary Rose, Mary Anne, Mary Beatrice, Mary Patricia, Mary Louise. Names without identity, and she’s sorry now she ever conferred them. But that was a lifetime ago, before her enlightenment, and now the girls have matured into women unable to see past the dogmas imposed on them at birth.

  “Everyone else has written their letters?” she asks.

  “All done,” Sara answers. “They’re in a pile on the kitchen counter.”

  Tethys nods.

  “Have you written something yet?” Peter asks.