by Alan Russell
“Sisters,” said Lachesis.
An arm moved, probing the darkness, reaching in and out of the shadows. A snipping was heard. “His cutting hand,” Atropos rasped, “has all along been a part of my plan. To everything, and everyone, a time and a place; with one snip hell, with the other grace.”
The snipping stopped. Other hands took over, diligently spinning. “I wonder,” Clotho said, “who strings whom. He tried to kill the doctor today.”
“So what?” spat Atropos. “All mortals are puppets, and all puppets have strings, one way or other angels get wings.”
“And devils?” asked Clotho.
“They earn the fate of their revels.”
“Sissss-terssss!” Lachesis, the middle sister, looked to her right and to her left. She always sat between the creator and the cutter. She measured. She was measuring now. Her hands moved back and forth, testing a particularly tangled thread. At last she seemed to be satisfied.
“I have a plan,” Lachesis said.
In the darkness there were movements, the sounds of bodies coming together to huddle.
“It has always been my place to measure lots. I determine the length of the thread. I hand over the measure to be cut. In my hands I hold our three joined threads. I think it is time I passed them over to Atropos.”
There was the sound of thread being wildly pulled, of fishing line being pulled by a leviathan. Clotho said, “What you propose...”
The snapping of shears filled the room. Atropos said, “Is for us...”
The background noises quieted. But there was another chorus, one note loud, the other low, “...to be dead.”
“Yessss,” said Lachesis.
“Why?” Clotho asked.
“For Helen, for us.”
Atropos mocked, “For us to be dust?”
“Yes.”
“But we are the ones,” said Clotho, “who know what was, what is, and what will be.”
“If we truly know the last,” said Lachesis, “then surely you can see.”
Clotho shook her head. “She needs us to guide her.”
“Sister is right,” rasped Atropos. “She needs us inside of her.”
“No,” said Lachesis, “she doesn’t.”
Her hands reached out, a ballet of motion. The disposer of lots ran her fingers along their existence. There was a certain melancholy to her tracing, but there was enough light from the glow-worm to show her resigned face.
“We have run our course,” Lachesis said.
There was a sharp intake of breath, and then the sound of line being drawn out. Or was that in? “But we are the Daughters of Night,” Clotho said.
“It is our time to make way for the dawn, then,” said Lachesis.
“We can escape,” said Clotho. “We can run and hide.”
Lachesis shook her head. “Part of what we’d be running from is us. That is a race we could not win.”
“Talk to her, Atropos,” said Clotho. “Tell her that she is wrong.”
In the room, the sound of scissors was heard. Cutting, cutting. Atropos was there, but she didn’t say anything. She couldn’t argue. Then the room grew silent. Even the cutting stopped. The Sisters of Night faced their own destiny.
Slowly, painstakingly, another thread was pulled from the loom. Clotho whispered, “There’s something to be said about taking the time to reason.”
“Your suggestion,” said Lachesis, “is treason.”
“Against the state?” asked Clotho.
“Against that which is called a state of reason. We have already had our season.”
“But why do we have to die?” asked Clotho, her voice shrill.
“For Helen.”
“Are you sure that this will help her?”
“It will force her from this shelter,” said Lachesis. “And it will embolden her to what will be. We can leave her with that prophecy.”
Atropos laughed. It sounded like a rusty gate opening and closing. “Scant consolation that.”
“No. She will know we loved her more than we loved ourselves. We are her teachers.”
Clotho offered her final argument: “But we are the Fates.”
“Fated to show her the way. Are we agreed?”
Of the three voices, not one answered. There was only heavy breathing. But then arms started to move and fingers twisted. Three strings were twined as one, and then that string was measured. A single word found its way out of three voices, “Yes.”
The voices raised themselves, almost to a scream, only to be silenced by the final snipping. Cords were cut. Vocal. Umbilical. Gordian knots. All was quiet.
A breeze blew in through an opened window and rattled some papers. It was a good breeze, the kind that takes kites aflight, some never to be seen again.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
They lay in the aftermath of good sex, bodies glowing, weights seemingly lifted from them. Naked, their hands kept taking the measure of the other, touching hair and arms and faces and curves, and then finding the other’s hand and holding it, only to ultimately disentangle and start the tactile process again.
Had she been too loud? Rachel wondered. Sex and guilt, she thought, an inevitable link. We program ourselves to not feel that good, to not let go. She felt a certain pride, though. Her passions were still there, still strong. They’d just been asleep for a time, just been waiting for the right kiss to wake them and her.
Her untethered mind drifted until it found something else to be guilty about. Helen. Maybe she had heard their lovemaking. Or maybe she needed something. Rachel chided herself for not having looked in on her before going to bed.
She started to get up, explaining, “I’m going to check on Helen,” but Cheever reached over and put a light but insistent hand on her shoulder that stayed her leaving.
“Wait,” he said.
She looked at him expectantly. He considered what to say and knew that every second he delayed speaking condemned him that much more. But there was no easy beginning.
“You should know something,” he said.
Another delay.
“When Helen’s consciousness came back tonight, she returned with a new personality.”
Rachel knew that some multiples had hundreds of alters. She was acquainted with therapists who encountered new personalities weekly and had read about alters that appeared for a short time and then disappeared for years, or forever. Helen’s chorus had been amazingly consistent compared to most of those with dissociative identity disorder. The emergence of a new personality didn’t trouble Rachel nearly as much as Cheever’s tentativeness.
“I thought you were with Caitlin...”
He shook his head. “Another five-year-old,” he said. “I think Caitlin’s gone now.”
“Tell me from the beginning,” she said. It didn’t matter that she was naked and had just made love with this man. Her voice was firm, professional. It was her cop voice.
“After I relieved the nurse,” he said, “I talked to Helen for a long time. I sort of babbled, said anything that came to mind. I told her how she was a fighter, and how I admired her for having never given up. I told her that I’d looked at her paintings and statues, and how they had told me things that she hadn’t, or couldn’t. I told her how we had discussed the name of Caitlin, and let her hear our guesswork at its origins. At first she didn’t react. I thought my words had fallen on deaf ears. For a few minutes I just sat next to her on the sofa, saying nothing, just thinking. Then, suddenly, she screamed.
“I tried to comfort her. It took her a while to calm down. Then she started speaking in a little girl’s voice, but it wasn’t Caitlin’s. She told me her name was Diane.”
Rachel worked on keeping her breathing steady and her face expressionless. “Diane?” she asked.
“My daughter.”
“What did you do?”
“I spent the evening with her.”
“Doing what?”
“We ate dinner. We played games. We t
alked.”
“And you were the daddy, and she was Diane?”
Though she asked the question in a neutral voice, he responded defiantly. “Yes.”
It explained a lot. His behavior that night. His questions. “I see.”
Rachel wished she were behind her desk, wished she had her glasses on and her Evan Picone suit. She wished the sudden pain in her stomach didn’t hurt her so much.
“What the hell do you see?”
“At the moment,” she said, “I see misdirected anger.”
She was right, Cheever realized. He took a deep breath, and then tried to explain what he knew he couldn’t. “You think that what we did is wrong,” he said. “You don’t see any good in it.”
“You’re right.”
“But it’s like a miracle. It’s as if I’ve been given back my little girl.”
“Go on.”
“She sounds just like Diane. She acts just like her. I can close my eyes and swear she’s alive again. I know what you’re thinking. You think that what we have is wrong. But what’s so terrible about loving a little girl? My little girl. It could be good for her. Nurturing. And good for me too. I’ve needed her in my life. There was this void there. It was so large I wasn’t sure if there was any me or if it was all void. And then this resurrection happened. That’s what it feels like to me, Diane’s alive again. It doesn’t feel wrong.”
Her eyes were soft and understanding, but she didn’t allow that luxury with her words: “I’ve heard pedophiles say the same thing.”
Cheever looked shocked. He moved his head away from her as if she had slapped him.
“What we have couldn’t be further from that,” he said. “You make it sound ugly. It’s not.”
She offered more hard love: “That’s another remark popular with pedophiles.”
Cheever’s hands beseeched. “You don’t understand—”
“I’m trying to.”
“If I hadn’t experienced it, I wouldn’t have believed it either. But I’m telling you, Diane’s come back. I don’t know how. I know it doesn’t make sense. But she’s just like her. She is her.”
“Cheever,” she said, her tone pleading, “Helen is a twenty-five-year-old woman.”
“Not when she’s Diane.”
“Diane’s been dead,” she whispered, “for twenty years.”
His loud voice contrasted with her soft. “Don’t you think I know that?”
“I’m not sure if you do,” Rachel said. “I’ve lived with her death...”
A hurried interjection: “But have you really ever let her go?”
“...for all this time.”
“In your head,” Rachel said, reaching for his head, but not quite touching it, “you know that what you’re doing is wrong. Very wrong.”
Cheever shook that head. “I never believed in the supernatural,” he said. “I’ve experienced enough terrible things on the job to not count on any happy endings in life. But when I was given this gift—”
“Gift?”
“...this miracle, I accepted it.”
“Did you believe,” asked Rachel, “in the miracle of Graciela Fernandez’s spirit appearing on the billboard?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“When they pulled the plug on the spotlights, little Grace’s image disappeared. That doesn’t sound like any miracle to me.”
“Helen still believed. And so did many others.”
“What’s your point?”
“They wanted to believe.”
“Do you believe in miracles?” he asked.
“I believe in working toward the miraculous,” she said.
“That’s a clever way of saying no. I guess I’ve never been a believer either, but this thing with Helen and you and me seems more than coincidence. My Diane died just before Katie Dwyer. And the little girl that was Helen somehow died in childhood. There are people who believe in wandering souls resting and nesting again. Maybe they know something we don’t.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But short of that metaphysical answer, Cheever, we have to look at what we do know. Helen has dissociative identity disorder. You’ve witnessed some of its manifestations and understood they were a part of her illness. But you never actually believed Helen became a Greek god when one of those alters emerged, did you?”
“Of course not.”
She willed her eyes to remain dry, but the waver in Rachel’s voice gave her away. “So why is it that you’re willing to believe your long dead daughter is somehow now embodied in Helen?”
“There was this...connection. It overwhelmed me. After a time I didn’t even see Helen’s body.”
Rachel didn’t comment. She knew how persuasive Helen’s personalities could be. Sometimes even she, with all of her years of training, was briefly seduced by the personas of Helen’s alters.
Cheever looked down at the bed covers. As a cop, he was sure he had seen and heard everything. You go out in the field, he thought, and you see more aberrant behavior in a month than the average psych major studies about in four years of college. But now he was the one acting as if his deck were a few cards short. Like maybe fifty-one.
“I didn’t ask for this to happen, you know,” he said. “This wasn’t what I was looking for.”
“I know,” she said, her voice as sad as his.
“She never got to be a little girl,” Cheever said.
Rachel wondered whether he was talking about Helen or Diane, or both of them.
“So what do I do?” he asked, his voice desperate.
“The next time she emerges you tell her that your daughter is dead. You say that you want to speak with Helen.”
“Simple, huh?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “But necessary.”
“If you asked anyone who knows me,” he said, “if you had asked me this afternoon, I would have told you that I couldn’t have acted that way.”
“I believe you.”
“I hope you do. I’m stronger than that.”
“What occurred doesn’t have anything to do with strength.”
“But I’m willing to bet it makes you wonder what kind of a man I am. How I could have done that.”
“No.”
“I didn’t know how far I would go for a single yesterday,” he said. “Now I do.”
“You won’t do it again.”
He didn’t answer directly, just repeated his words, “For a single yesterday,” then said, “I think about that a lot, you know. I’d give anything to go back to the day she died and tell her that I loved her. I’d be there in the end.”
Rachel didn’t say anything. Platitudes would have been inadequate; analysis would have been inappropriate. Her silence frightened him.
“I haven’t scared you away, have I?”
She shook her head, then offered her hand. For several seconds they squeezed each other’s hand.
“One of these days,” he said, “we’re going to run out of wounds to show each other.”
“Probably not any time soon,” she said.
His laughter sounded a little less strained.
“I’m going to check on Helen now,” she said.
At least this time he didn’t have to call her back to explain. Cheever wasn’t sure if he felt better for having talked with Rachel, but he was glad that there were no more secrets between them.
“Cheever!”
The alarm in her voice brought him running. Cheever didn’t even stop to grab his gun. Rachel was at the front door. She was trying, unsuccessfully, not to tremble. “Helen’s gone,” she said, then pointed to the alarm box. “And the alarm’s been turned off. Do you think that he...?”
Cheever examined the front door. It was still locked, but the dead bolt was no longer in place. “Activate the alarm again,” he said, “and stay here.”
Picking up his department-issue Ruger, Cheever conducted his own search of the house. He examined sliding glass doors and windows, making his way around
the house until he returned to the front door.
“No sign of entry,” Cheever said, “forced or otherwise. I suspect Helen turned off the alarm.”
“But why?” Rachel asked. “And where did she go?”
“I’ll call the police,” he said.
I am the police, he thought. But that wasn’t what it felt like at the moment. Before making that call, Cheever analyzed his motives and behavior. He wanted to be sure he was doing the right thing. He needed to know he wasn’t acting like a hysterical father afraid for his missing little girl.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
She knew there were fewer voices to her Greek chorus, but kept having trouble remembering why that was so. The Fates had vanished, and so had Caitlin. She felt scared. Vying thoughts and impulses kept pulling at her, each trying to direct her to a different purpose. She tried to hold onto one or two things while this civil war raged, but everything kept slipping away from her.
Instinct kept her walking. In a moment of clarity she wondered whether she would end up like a man she had once seen walking along a highway. He had been leaning over a shopping cart, looked as if he were attached to its frame. He moved forward like an empty-eyed automaton. It was clear he didn’t know where he was going. He was just moving. That’s what she was doing.
The image vanished, replaced by another and then another, a kaleidoscopic offering of the past and present. She couldn’t be sure what was real and what wasn’t. At times she felt she was floating instead of walking along the residential streets. The way was dark, clouds getting in the way of the mostly full moon. She noticed lights approaching. A car, she initially thought, but as it came closer she saw it was a truck. Headlights picked her out, then the brights were turned on her. She stopped walking, couldn’t move, felt like a blinded deer. The pickup slowed down, then came to a stop.
A window opened. Over a rumbling engine a voice asked, “You need help?”
She was blinded and couldn’t see who was doing the asking. There was only his voice. It sounded friendly.
He spoke again: “You need a ride?”
“Yes,” she said, suddenly decided.
“Where you going?”
“Downtown,” she said, not pausing to think.
