“Aunt Sam told you,” he said, his voice robotic and insincere. “I hadn’t eaten.”
“She wasn’t telling the truth,” I said, my voice low. “Gigi told me the inn is haunted.” I wasn’t sure why that mattered or how it was connected to Luca. Somehow it was; I could feel it.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Luca said, peering out past the pond.
I watched him. He was lying, the same as Sam was. “You don’t believe that.”
He turned with a sorrowful expression. “But you do.”
There was pain in his voice that made me want to cry.
“I did,” I acknowledged.
“And now?” he said stoically.
I turned my eyes from his. “I’m not sure,” I said. “My grandmother can be a little odd sometimes. She never lies, but—”
“You don’t believe she’s as sane as you are.”
“I’m not sure what I believe.”
I picked up a twig, rolled its rough bark between my fingers, and tossed it into the pond. The ripples it made were no bigger than the ripples the leaf had created. The ripples gently pushed their way to the edge of the pond near where I sat.
I straightened my back. “I don’t want to believe her,” I said, acknowledging the truth.
Luca pulled his left foot toward his body, resting his elbow on the bent knee. “No,” he said, “I suppose if I had a choice, I’d choose not to believe her.”
“You don’t have a choice?”
He raised the corner of his mouth, making every part of me feel his sorrow.
“No,” he said, “I don’t have a choice.”
Twelve
The clouds came across the sky and blocked the sun, turning the bright spring water of the pond a dark shade of brown; it was merely an illusion. The water beneath the clouds was as clear as it always was.
“Evil is real to me,” Luca said calmly. “As real as you or this rock or this pond. I can’t deny its existence any more than I can deny my own.”
The hair on my arms went up as a surge of an emotion I couldn’t name rushed through me. “What do you mean, it’s real to you?” I asked, my voice trembling slightly.
“I mean, it’s real to me. I can feel it, smell it, taste it … see it. It’s real to me in every sense of the word.” He stared down at me as if daring me to stay, daring me not to run like the coward I was.
My mind spun but I did not move. I turned back to the pond. A bullfrog was cautiously making its way onto the muddy bank.
I believed in God, I believed in angels, I believed in evil in the theoretical sense, and certainly knew evil things happened. My mother and Luca’s mother were dead because of it. Jesus railed against evil and he won. In the end, evil is defeated. All these things I believed and even knew to be true. Did that mean evil existed in a tangible way? Could a place be haunted, as Gigi said? Could a place or maybe even a person actually contain evil? This is what I did not know; this is what I did not believe.
“Is that how you and your mom and Sam are the same?” I asked. “You can all feel evil?” I felt his eyes on me, but didn’t turn to face him. “I heard Sam tell Gigi you two and your mom were all the same.”
He turned from me. “Sam believes that,” he said.
I ran my fingers across the rock, small pebbles rolling beneath my touch.
“And maybe she’s right,” Luca said. “Maybe we all started out the same. Or maybe she and I are the same and my mom was different. My mom, in the end, wasn’t like us.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, watching him closely.
He inhaled audibly. “Evil repels me, and Sam says it does the same to her. It makes me sick. It’s like an invisible force fighting against every cell in my body. It didn’t do that to my mom.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
He turned to me and then away. “Because by the end, I couldn’t sit at the same table with her without fighting the urge to vomit,” he said, blinking away tears.
The wind brushed my cheeks and caused the leaves to release the drops of rain they were holding on to. The edges of the pond awoke with ripples as the raindrops fell into the water.
The bullfrog jumped into the pond. Swirls of mud came to the surface as he buried himself into the soft silt that would protect him from the pretend threat of raindrops.
Luca and I weren’t true friends. If he chose to never speak to me again, my life would not be all that different. If anything, it might be calmer. So I asked the question Sam said she’d never answer.
“Sam told Gigi your mom didn’t use her gifts the right way.” I paused, waiting for an angry response. None came.
Instead, his body slumped forward a little, as if he was too tired to hold his back straight. “No, she didn’t.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
He stared down at the pond for a long while. We were both so still that birds came to the edge of the pond, picking bugs and seed from the mud.
He shifted his body, the birds flew, startled we were not statues. “I think I might tell you someday, but not today.”
“You don’t trust me,” I said, not blaming him for his decision to keep things about his mother private.
“It’s more complicated than that, Siena. There’s a lot I don’t understand. A lot I don’t think my mom understood.”
The clouds moved, and the sun’s rays fell on us and the pond. Its bright light warmed my pale arms.
“What about your dad?” I asked, while feeling slightly bad for bringing him up.
Luca shrugged. “I’m not sure if he can sense it or not.”
“I meant, could you be near him?”
“I haven’t been around him in years. Being near him didn’t bother me. He was a selfish, narcissistic jerk, not a demon,” he said.
I looked up at him. “A demon? You think there are actual demons?”
“That’s what evil is, right?” Luca said. “Demons.”
The wind rushed against my bare skin, I shivered. Luca actually thought there were demons in the inn? This was too twisted and bizarre, far too bizarre to accept.
“I better be getting back,” I said, coming to my feet and brushing the dirt from my pants.
“You think I’m crazy,” he said, copying my movements.
I inhaled. I would not lie to him, but I would be kind. “I think you’ve had different life experiences than me, and so, things which appear possible to you seem completely impossible to me. Besides all of that, I need to get back. My grandmother will wonder where I am.”
“Is it okay if I walk you back?” he said.
“If you want to, you can, but I’m very safe here,” I said kindly. He meant well, that much was clear. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t completely sane.
“It would make me feel better,” he said as we started forward, doing our best to avoid the muddiest parts of the trail.
The only sound was that of our feet and the birds singing in the trees. I was thinking of Luca and the inn. I couldn’t help myself. “Why did you get so close?” I asked.
“So close?”
“If there is evil in the inn, and if evil makes you sick, why did you get so close to it?”
He walked a few more feet before stopping. I stared up at him, his eyes on mine.
“Because you don’t know,” he said, his hands in his pockets.
“Don’t know what?”
“You don’t know evil and if you don’t know, you can’t defend yourself. You live in this idyllic place surrounded by a family who has never hurt you, in a beautiful forest where strawberries and blueberries grow wild, in an enchanted castle filled with love. It’s like you stepped out of a Disney movie. You don’t know how to protect yourself.”
“That’s not true,” I said, offended that he thought of me as some naïve princess.
“You don’t even have poisonous snakes in Maine,” he said. “Your life is a fairytale.”
“My mom is dead,” I said with hurt, hoping to stop th
is conversation that was becoming as strange as the boy in front of me.
It didn’t stop him. “A parent being killed is not uncommon in fairytales, and from what Aunt Sam said, your mother was killed by evil.”
“What?” I said in confusion, as if he were speaking a different language. I’d heard his words but they made no sense.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “I don’t think your idyllic life has magically happened. I think your dad and grandmother have worked really hard to protect you and your sisters. It’s clear, to me at least, evil is hunting you.”
I stared at him in complete confusion. “Evil … is … hunting … me?” I repeated his words slowly to understand what he was saying.
“I’m not trying to freak you out,” he said.
“I’m not—I mean you’re making no sense,” I said. My yard was close, so I walked faster, ready to be done with my creepy neighbor.
Still he did not stop. “Sometimes, we choose evil and sometimes evil chooses us. When we choose it, we welcome it in. When it chooses us, it finds ways to get to us, or tries to, anyway. I think it’s been trying to get to you and your family since before you were born. I’m not sure what happened in the inn, but whatever happened has connected your family to a darkness that is more than I have ever felt.”
“And you think that killed my mom?” I said, beginning to understand he was playing a cruel joke on me. He must be. What else could this be?
He nodded.
In a loud and forceful voice, I said, “It’s one thing for you to say whatever you want about the inn or my so-called idyllic life, but it’s a whole different thing to talk about my mom.”
“I understand that,” he said, withdrawing a step, my anger finally making him back down.
“Do you? Because none of this is funny!”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny,” he said. Now his face showed confusion.
“Then what are you trying to say? People die every day. People are murdered every day,” I said, my voice rising. “That has nothing to do with demons and everything to do with messed-up people.”
“It-it’s true,” he replied. “People die every day by accidents, car crashes, drownings, war, domestic violence, old age. But that’s not what happened to your mom. In her case, the demons whispered ‘Kill’ and the man who took her life killed.”
“You believe that?” I said with disgust.
Distress came over him. “Yes,” he said.
“You’re crazy,” I said, my tone biting.
I felt the hurt, but he didn’t ease up.
“You must know as much as Sam does,” Luca said. “You must know of the murderer’s life, of his obsessive focus on porn, of his desires to hurt in every way, of his pure hatred for God and all churches—the Catholic church in particular. He gave himself to Satan and so when the word ‘Kill’ was whispered, he followed the command. Later, when the word ‘Kill’ was whispered, he killed himself.”
My stomach whirled as the wind increased. The trail was now behind us. I didn’t say a word; I never wanted to speak to him again. I ran up the hill.
I didn’t talk about my mother’s murder. I thought of her often; her memories didn’t hurt me. But her murder was more than I could handle. I never thought of it and I never, ever thought of her murderer.
Luca was wrong. I did not know as much as Sam.
My mind spun, making me dizzy, my stomach threatening to force up its contents. I pulled open the kitchen door and slammed it closed.
I ran up the stairs. Behind me, Gigi called my name. I didn’t respond. I entered my room, my body shaking.
I paced from one end of the room to the other. Why did he speak of her murder? He had no right—no right to know more than me and no right to tell me what I chose not to know.
There was a knock.
“Siena, are you okay?” My father’s voice sounded scared and small. I felt sadness at his fear on my behalf. I went to the door and opened it.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice so kind and timid. He loved me so much it was overwhelming. I fell into his open arms and cried like a young child.
“What’s going on?” Gigi’s concerned voice was behind him.
I couldn’t keep them so scared. “Luca told me things about Mom’s … killer. It was too much for me to hear.”
My dad’s body became rigid. “He did what?” he asked, his voice no longer timid.
“Luca said he was trying to protect me from the inn because evil was hunting us. He used Mom’s murder as an example. He said demons told that man to kill Mom.”
“He’s insane,” Dad said, his eyes furious.
“He has a gift, Paul,” Gigi said quietly.
“A gift for being crazy!” Dad said.
“He can sense evil. Sam is the same, and so was Luca’s mom,” Gigi said.
“You believe that?” Dad asked, incredulous, questioning his mother’s sanity.
Gigi said, “I believe it’s possible. I also trust Sam. She’s never lied to me.”
“I don’t doubt she believes it,” Dad said, “but I doubt she knows what she’s talking about.”
“Because she isn’t Catholic?” Gigi said, arms crossed, daring her son to disagree.
“No, because it disregards reality,” Dad said in exasperation.
Gigi said, “Why are you like this, Paul? Your dad and I raised you to recognize spiritual warfare.”
“Spiritual warfare is spiritual, Mom. This boy is telling my daughter that my wife was killed by demons. What is that? Who in their right mind could ever believe that?” He was close to yelling now.
“I do,” she said in defiance.
“Ugh,” he groaned in furious frustration.
“Your dad and I didn’t raise you to be so close-minded,” she said.
His face flushed. “No! No, Dad raised me to be open-minded”—his voice rose—“you raised me to see demons at every turn.”
“They exist, Paul, and you, of all people, know it,” Gigi said.
Dad took a deep breath and then said, “What I know, Mom, is the fools in D.C. can’t agree on anything. Trade wars are looming. Global conflict is rising. People don’t feel safe. There are in-groups and out-groups, and our country is fighting itself over what, I have no idea. These are the things I’m concerned about, not demons hunting us down.”
“You’re a coward,” she stated. “Rebecca never would’ve handled this by avoiding the truth. She wasn’t afraid to accept the reality of life, even when she didn’t want to.”
He turned toward her, eyes glaring. “Yes, she was the better person, the better parent, the better child, and the better spouse. But she was my wife, the mother of my children, and I refuse to fill their minds with the sort of nonsense you filled mine with,” he said, his tone so harsh I drew back out of fear.
Gigi didn’t stop. “You truly don’t remember, do you? Your dad and I wondered if you were simply pretending to forget. Your way of not talking about it. It’s clear to me now, you truly don’t remember.”
“Remember what?” he snapped.
“It wouldn’t matter,” she replied, matching his tone. “I could tell you the most basic of truths right now, and you wouldn’t believe me. It’s not wrong that Luca spoke to Siena about Rebecca’s killer, it’s wrong that we haven’t.”
“No, Mom, it’s wrong to fill people’s minds with nonsense!” Dad shouted. “I told you I never liked the idea of him coming here. His father abandoned him, his mother killed herself, and he says he can feel evil. Give me a break!”
“It’s not his fault his parents left him,” I said, my voice quivering.
Dad turned to me, his eyes softening as they recognized the fear in mine. “You’re right,” he said, forcing his voice back to normal. “I shouldn’t have said those things. It’s just … Luca isn’t like us. He hasn’t been raised like you and your sisters. That isn’t his fault. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that the upbringing he has had is going to affect him, just as
your upbringing is going to affect you.”
“You’re judging him for things he has no control over,” I said.
Dad took a step toward me and placed a hand on my shoulder. “I’m talking about the differences between families. I’m not judging Luca for how he was raised. That wasn’t his fault.”
“You may not be judging him, but you don’t want him here,” I said, aware of the truth, the truth Luca always felt. No matter where he was, he wasn’t wanted.
“I don’t want you or your sisters hurt,” Dad said, lifting my chin so he could see my eyes. “And my concern from the beginning has always been about you three.”
“He isn’t a bad person,” I said.
Dad smiled. “Weren’t you the one who stormed up here a moment ago because of what he told you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Siena, I spent my childhood hearing about demons, darkness, and evil—it wasn’t healthy.”
At this, Gigi spun on her heel and stomped from the room.
Dad lowered his head in defeat. “I didn’t want to hurt her, but the way she raised me … it wasn’t right.”
“We do believe in evil,” I said. “The church teaches that.”
“Yes, and I believe it truly does exist, but the manifestation of evil in the form of demons or hauntings or whatever you want to call it—I can’t believe that.”
“Mom did,” I said softly.
He sucked in his breath as if trying to decide how much to tell me. “Your mom loved Gigi. She respected her immensely. Most of the time, that was a good thing, but in this area … I believe it was not beneficial.”
His watch lit up, signaling he’d received a call or message of some sort. “It’s late,” he said, “and I suspect Gigi isn’t too focused on dinner at the moment.”
“Avi will be happy,” I said, with a forced lightness to my voice.
Dad smirked. “Yes, mac ’n’ cheese and pizza from the freezer. Her favorites.”
He kissed the top of my head. “I love you, sweetie.”
“I love you too,” I said as he released me and went silently from my room.
A few minutes later, I heard Dad call my sisters to dinner. Avi shrieked in delight when he told her we were having her favorite meal.
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