by Chuck Wendig
"What a beautiful tale!" Miriam finally says. "So heartwarming. Nice twist ending, too. I give it five-stars, two thumbs up, and a bunch of wiggly toes. I'm sure the movie version will star Sandra Bullock and, I dunno, Billy Bob Thornton as Big Bad Carl Keener. But here I am thinking, gosh, this story isn't done. Can't possibly be done. A great big gulf lies betwixt 'and then my brain-damaged rapist and I got married in a greenhouse' and 'now he kills eighteen-year-old girls dressed like a monstrous bird-man'."
"Yes," Eleanor says, knitting her hands together. "The story takes a curious turn. For that, I suspect we should walk. I'm sure you want to see Lauren, make sure she's well. She's in the greenhouse, on the far side of the house."
Miriam's throat tightens.
You could just stab her now.
No. Not yet.
"Is Wren okay? She'd better be okay, because so help me–"
"As I said, she is well. And she can continue to be well if we all play well together. I can show you."
"Yes. Show me."
"First," Eleanor holds out her hand. "The knife."
"Mother," Beck says, stepping into the room, snapping quick into an alarm state. Eleanor offers only the gentlest of head nods and he freezes.
"It's fine, Beckett. Miriam understands that the knife isn't going to do much good. It's just for show."
Shit. Does she know?
She can't.
Miriam eases the knife forward. Blade first. Watches Beck watching her – a falcon atop a telephone pole watching a mouse cross the road beneath. She's not sure who's who, here – which of us is the falcon, which of us is the mouse?
She sees Eleanor smiling. It wouldn't take much to punch this knife into her throat. But then what? Beck's the bigger problem.
Besides, this affords Miriam an opportunity.
Miriam doesn't just drop the knife into Eleanor's hand.
She places it there.
Palm touches palm, fingertips touch fingertips, skin on skin, and–
Darkness, howling darkness, cold waters, mud and silt and screaming. Everything is breaking glass and a radio dial turned to a dead station, bad sounds in an empty void, like sleeping at the heart of a tornado or falling to the bottom of a rushing river at night. Everything is nothing and nothing is everything and–
–Miriam gasps, tries to breathe, can't. Her throat feels closed. Her lungs feel pancaked. Her eyes water as tears push at their edges.
"Yes, I thought so," Eleanor says. Calm. Cool. As though this is expected. "Give it a moment."
And then, she's right – all it takes is a moment. Miriam's lungs inflate like a balloon against the nozzle of an oxygen tank. A great heaving wheezing breath – cold and bright and powerful – enters her body.
"What did you see?" Eleanor asks. Genuinely curious. Leaning forward in her chair as one might do when watching a scary movie.
"I saw…" She thinks to lie. Thinks, Tell her she dies by your hand, chopped in half by a fire axe and thrown into a wood chipper. But the truth comes out. "I saw nothing. I heard sounds. Awful sounds. But I saw absolutely nothing."
"That troubles you, doesn't it? You're used to seeing things. Things well beyond the purview of others."
"You don't know me."
"But I do. I have the gift, too."
"It's not a gift."
"Oh, but it is. Sometimes to fix something you must first break it. Power and wisdom are born of trauma and – well. I'm getting ahead of myself. Walk with me and my son. I'll tell you the rest."
FIFTY-TWO
To the Greenhouse
As they walk through the house, Eleanor moves beside Miriam. The woman has a kind of resplendent, queenof-the-castle vibe – she seems to glide along, a swan atop a placid lake aware of both her beauty and her authority. Nothing like the nurse Miriam had seen back at the school. There she seemed small. Servile. A part of the whole.
But this is her place. Her rules. Her family.
Beck walks behind. Miriam can feel his eyes on her shoulder blades, searing in like two cigarette burns. Any move she makes, he'll be there.
Miriam doesn't waste time. "You're psychic, then."
"Yes. As are you."
"Not like me." Miriam chews on the inside of her cheek. "How'd you know?"
They stand at the top of steps twisting downward to the foyer. Where the Caldecott School is all about its Victorian trappings, the house instead carries a distinct retro vibe. Mid-century modern is in full effect.
Everything with clean lines, rounded corners. Lots of windows, gray light streaming in through the rain-battered glass. Frugal arrangements of ferns and orchids – by the sidebar in the foyer, by the pair of vintage easy chairs, by the door, in the corners.
"I was left with something that night Carl and I found each other in the supply closet," Eleanor says.
Found each other, Miriam thinks. What a delicate understatement.
"I discovered that night that I could touch people and see not only who they'd become but also the chain of consequence and causality cascading outward – as though each person's life was a stone thrown into a pond. I could see the ripples. For every choice, a new ripple, a new disturbance of the water. It was fascinating. And horrible. All at the same time."
"And with me you saw nothing."
"Just darkness and clamor and the sounds of churning dark waters."
That sounds about right.
They descend the steps, Beck only a few behind. Miriam thinks to make her move but – no. She needs to see Wren first.
At the bottom of the steps, a familiar face meets them.
Edwin. The Headmaster of the Caldecott School.
It's now that she sees: He reminds Miriam of her own mother. Small, pinched, buttoned up so tight. He's got a cup of coffee. Steam rises from it like ghosts from a grave of dark earth.
"Ah," he says. "The disruptor."
"So, you're part of this, too," Miriam says.
"Family must stick together."
"That makes you a killer."
His eyes smile, though his mouth stays a sneering line. "What is it the girls sometimes say? Takes one to know one. Isn't that it?"
"I hope someone poured drain cleaner in that coffee."
He takes a long sip. "Always a pleasure. Must get to school and tend to the mess you left behind. Naughty girl, killing that security guard. Found him dead in the gymnasium." His eyes twinkle suddenly, as though he's hiding something and loving every moment of it. "If you'll excuse me?"
Then he walks away.
Images of the guard's body flash in Miriam's head along with the lightning outside.
Eleanor pulls her along. "Don't fret about him. For now, let's talk about Annie Valentine."
Miriam's body tightens. "The dead girl."
"Yes." They walk down a hall into what must be another wing of the house. Miriam sees a drafting room with an old architectural table. Across from it is a library two stories high, the only way to get at all the books being a ladder against the shelves, a ladder with wheels for feet. "Can I tell you what I saw when I met Annie Valentine five years ago?"
"Can I stop you?"
Eleanor stops. Faces Miriam. "Miss Black, you can stop this conversation any time you'd like. Just say the word and we can conclude our business and I will reluctantly bid you farewell."
"Bid me farewell. A euphemism. For chopping off my head like you're a fucking Al Qaeda operative. Do I have that right?"
Eleanor says nothing.
Beck tenses.
Miriam's hand itches, fingers tucking into a fist.
But she lets it go. "Yeah. Great. Tell me all about that poor dead girl."
FIFTY-THREE
If Annie Were Alive
At age eighteen, Annie Valentine is a drug addict. Methamphetamines. A boyfriend gets her hooked on it a year before she graduates from the Caldecott School.
At age nineteen, Annie finds that she's pregnant. The father could be one of several men. The pregnancy is a troubled one, be
cause Annie chooses not to give up or even mitigate her addiction. When the baby is born ten weeks early, the child has a low fetal heart rate and has to be kept in the hospital – but eventually the child, who Annie names Alicia, stabilizes and can go home with her mother.
At age twenty, Annie decides she needs a man in her life. She chooses a weak man ten years her senior, a man desperate for love and the need to do anything for it. He is himself not addicted to crystal meth, but he does have too much to drink on occasion. His name is Byron, and he believes – like many in bad relationships do – that he can fix Annie, that he can rescue her from her own worst inclinations. After six months with her, Byron becomes addicted to methamphetamines.
At age twenty-one, Annie is with Byron at a local motel, looking to score. Alicia, not quite two years old, is at home alone. Alicia has not yet learned to walk as she is slow in her development, but she can most certainly crawl. And crawl she does: over to the cabinet beneath the sink where she finds a bottle of old drain cleaner. She opens it. She drinks it. She dies in pain on the kitchen floor. Annie and Byron don't find her for a full day because they forget to come home and check on her.
At age twenty-two – on her twenty-second birthday, as a matter of fact – Annie is in the hospital. Byron, now clean of crystal meth but sodden with alcohol, beats her. He breaks her jaw. Shatters part of her eye socket. She leaves him.
At age twenty-three, Annie gets clean.
At age twenty-five, Annie relapses.
At age twenty-six, Annie incorrectly believes she has been cheated by her dealer, a woman named Hypatia. Annie's mind can no longer produce the chemicals that stimulate pleasure in the human brain, and all sense has gone from her. She believes Hypatia stole her money and did not give Annie the drugs, but the truth is Annie received the drugs and consumed them already. The delusion persists, and Annie breaks a mirror hanging over Hypatia's couch. She slits the woman's throat with a shard of mirror. Annie goes to jail for a very long time.
At age twenty-eight, Annie beats another inmate to death with a lunch tray.
At age twenty-nine, Annie gets hooked on a new drug invading American life – starting first at the prisons. Krokodil, a derivative of morphine. Called that – Krokodil, or "crocodile" – because of the way it ruins the skin of the user, giving it a scaly appearance.
At age thirty, Annie suffers gangrene from Krokodil use. They have to amputate her left leg to the knee. Complications arise during surgery. Annie dies in great pain at the prison. Only her mother misses her.
FIFTY-FOUR
Atropos in the Garden
By now they've come to the greenhouse, though they have not yet entered.
They left the house by a side door and walked beneath a trellis verdant with wisteria, the vines gone dry in autumn.
Before they exit, Eleanor nods to Beck, who pulls an umbrella from a nearby stand and holds it above their heads as they cross the ten yards to the greenhouse door.
They pause there as Eleanor finishes her story. The tale of Annie Valentine, drug addict, bad mother, and, one way or another, dead girl.
"You can see all that," Miriam says – not a question – as she stands there, fidgeting. "You can see how her life unfolds."
"It is my gift."
"I thought you couldn't see how they die."
Eleanor sighs. "Not always. Not often. In this case I was able to see the consequence through the mother. She dies a year later, you see."
"Let me guess: of a broken heart?"
"A broken liver, actually. Overdose of medication. Lipitor. It shuts down her liver and her kidneys and that is that. Another broken doll and shattered teacup in the wake of Annie Valentine. And that is why I see it."
Miriam shivers against the cold. Out beyond the trellis she sees the gray nothing of pounding rain. The smudge of distant trees. Above her head, water filters down through the old vines and the trellis top, forming puddles at her feet.
She doesn't want to talk about this anymore.
"I want to see Wren."
She moves toward the greenhouse. Eleanor touches her arm.
"It's through her that I saw you, Miriam. You are a part of her life. You are just one more piece of her wreckage. Because of her, a piece of you will one day go missing." Eleanor's voice grows quiet. "We're not so different, you and I."
Beck shifts closer. Water thumps dully against the umbrella.
The old woman's grip on her arm tightens.
"We're very different." Miriam says, but she doesn't want to think about it. Don't look at this one too close. You may not like the answer.
"Are we? Fate has a path. You step in. You change lives by ending lives. Don't you? That's what I do. What we do. As a family. We see those girls twisting in the wind – poisoned girls, damaged girls, ruined girls. Girls who will themselves become ruiners. Their lives are hurricanes and tornados, sweeping up everything in their paths and throwing them back to earth so hard they shatter."
"Get your hand off me. I said I want to see Wren."
But Eleanor continues, eyes wide with the fervor of her beliefs. "Annie Valentine's death is a pure thing. A good thing. And good things, truly good things, don't come without sacrifice. Hers is a garden of hate: Leave the ground barren and only barren things grow. A dead child. A dead mother. So many others. Remove her from the timeline–" Eleanor forms scissors with her two fingers – clip clip clip. "–and the garden grows."
Miriam tries to pull away, but the old woman has a grip like pliers. Eleanor's breath is fragrant with rose hips.
Burning roses and carnation, wisps of smoke from the mask's noseholes.
Eleanor's eyelids flutter, almost as though she's caught in the throes of an ecstatic revelation. "It's like cancer, you see? Sometimes to save the body you must cut out the disease. Remove an organ. Sever a limb. Annie Valentine and all the others – all the others – were malignant. Tumors deserving the knife."
"Or the axe."
At this, Eleanor smiles.
Then she turns and, with a small brass key, unlocks the greenhouse door. From inside Miriam smells a hothouse breath of turned earth, fertilizer, and the heady scent of wet leaves. Sees the splash of green punctuated by pockets of bright flowers. Orchids and tea roses and birds-of-paradise.
In the center of the long hothouse is a tree – a ficus tree with three separate tapering trunks winding together into the branches.
Wren sits next to the tree. Her hands are bound in polished cuffs. Another chain links those cuffs to a rusted eyebolt in the greenhouse floor.
Her chin dips. Eyes half-lidded. Bottom lip wet with saliva.
"You drugged her," Miriam says.
"To keep her quiet," Beck answers. "She's… a bit mouthy."
Miriam hurries to Wren, kneels next to her. The girl's eyes try to focus on Miriam, but the pin-prick pupils wander the empty space around her. Like Wren's seeing more than one. Two Miriams? Three? An infinity of her?
The scariest thought of all.
"Shh," Miriam says, pulling the girl close. She's not good with affection but the girl needs something. As the heavy rains pummel the windows above their heads, Miriam continues to shush her and rub circles in the girl's back. Her shoulder grows wet from the girl's drool.
"Mom," Wren mumbles.
Miriam shivers. It's like she can feel her ovaries tighten, breaking off a decade's worth of ice and snow. It's a terrible feeling. It takes everything she has to swallow back a pained cry and to dam up the tears that want to fall.
She eases Wren back against the tree and stands.
"What do you want from me?"
Eleanor eases toward her. The beneficent smile on her face gives her an eerie, grandmotherly glow. All around her, the verdant plants – life spilling out of pots and boxes and over table edges – call to mind the Garden of Eden. A place where a woman made a choice, a choice predicated on a lie.
"I want you to join our family," Eleanor says.
"You've gone off your meds. You're
monsters."
"We're healers. Aggressive as excision. As radiation or chemotherapy. Aggressive as bloodletting leeches. But healers just the same."
"That's what it's about, isn't it? The whole… ritual. The Medieval doctor's get-up. The mythic underpinnings. The table. The fact you're a nurse. You've fallen in love with the idea. You're huffing your own crazy vapors like all the old oracles. Except you've taken the oracular thing one step further. You get your hands dirty. You make things true."
