by Nick Lake
I shout:
Mom!
What happens next happens very quickly, and all at the same time:
The first men hit the top of the stairs—they go down on one knee, their guns aimed at me, or at the door to our room, I don’t know. They’re shouting something, but there’s too much going on—get down, I think?
Then more guys rappel down from the fricking ROOF, and land on the walkway on the other side of me. There are also guns pointing up from below, in the parking lot. I’m, like, in the center of a spider’s web of sightlines, bullets ready to come crashing into the middle of the circle.
The door of Room 22 opens, I was going to say, with a bang, but I don’t hear that—but it opens very suddenly, okay?
Shaylene steps out, and she’s got a shotgun in her hands.
A shotgun?
A fricking shotgun?
Then I think: oh yeah, the tennis bag. I have no idea where she got the gun from, but she had it all along. She’s been planning for this moment.
She swings the shotgun toward the nearest cop, and since she isn’t already dead, shot a hundred times by those assault rifles, I know in that instant that the only thing making it tough for the cops is me—I’m standing right here, maybe three feet from Shaylene, collateral damage. Because I know, for a fact, they wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a woman with a shotgun. A criminal.
I decide to make it harder for them.
I lean closer to her, then hold my hands up, telling them not to shoot, please don’t shoot. There’s a pause of one millionth of a second where I think bullets are going to fly, anyway, but they don’t.
All of this has happened this quickly:
Cops door shotgun move.
Shaylene snakes her left arm around my neck from behind, pulls me back. The shotgun comes up, under my chin. Holy crap she’s using me as a hostage. A shield. I only have time to think that and then she’s pulling me back inside the room, kicking the door shut once we’re in.
Chapter 79
Shaylene lets me go and backs away into the room. She stands by the bed, looks at me for the longest time, or maybe just a fraction of a second, and then says, I’m sorry, Shelby. I’m sorry for everything I did to you.
Then she lifts the shotgun and puts it under her own chin, ready to blow her face off.
Through the dirty curtains, reddish highway glow comes weakly shining.
The Gideon bible sits there, doing nothing. I wonder how many screwed-up things like this it has seen. I wonder how objects cope, when something terrible happens in front of them. How they get past it. How they can ever be the same again.
If she pulls the trigger, I think, this bed and this bible and this nightstand are going to have to witness it.
Maybe that’s what haunting really is: the way violence affects the things around it, the world in which it happens, the objects that can’t look away.
Objects like me.
I can’t look away.
Shaylene’s finger is white on the trigger. She’s looking right at me and there are tears on her cheeks.
Then I realize something: I’m back in the Crone’s cottage, and this is the same moment, come again, only this time I didn’t kick the door down to get here; this time I was dragged. But the heart is there on the plate again for me to eat.
As soon as I see this, anger surges in me; it feels like the color of lightning. She is not the moon, I realize, yanking at the tides, yanking at me. She is a broken window on the plane, pulling me toward the cold outside. I take a step forward. There are probably people shouting things from the other side of the door, cops, but of course I can’t hear so I don’t know for sure.
No, I say. You don’t get out of it that easily.
What? she says. She has to speak with her mouth; her hands are full of gun.
You told me you would die before you let anyone hurt me. When we were at the campsite.
She looks confused. Yes, she says. That’s why. I hurt you. I have to pay.
This is going to hurt me more, I say.
She shakes her head, whole body shivering, a metal bar struck against stone, humming with fear and adrenaline.
You did something terrible, I say. To the Watsons. To me.
I know, she says. That’s why—
I ignore her. As long as I keep talking, I keep her from splattering her nose and eyes and brain all over the ceiling. You stole me, I say. It’s like you killed me. The real me—Angelica Watson. You killed me and you put someone else in my place. Shelby Cooper. Like in those stories where the fairies take a baby away and put a different one in the crib.
Changelings, she says. She is looking at me with something like fear, and something like wonder.
I know what they’re called, I say. That’s what you did to me. And I will never ever forget that.
The tears are really flowing from her eyes now. She’s one trillionth of a second away from pulling that trigger.
But you don’t get to just leave, I say. You don’t get to make it all go away.
I take another step. One foot away from her now.
Don’t come any closer, she says.
No. You’re not pulling that trigger, I say. I am thinking of my body, closing around that dead heart like a tomb, making me a coffin. You kill yourself and I have to carry you around forever. No way.
Back off, she mouths. I’m going to shoot.
No, I say. Drop the gun.
I can’t go to jail, she says. I can’t lose you.
Suddenly she reverses the gun, and points it at me. I stare down the barrel. I can SEE what she’s thinking, on her face, like reading a book. She’s thinking: two cartridges. Take us both out. And then all of this goes away, and she doesn’t have to pay for her crime, and she doesn’t have to be alone.
No, I say, shaking my head. You won’t lose me. That’s too easy.
She blinks. What?
I’ll visit, I say. In prison. I’ll come see you.
She is like a cartoon of shock. Why?
Because that’s the only way to move on, I say. If I don’t, then you’ll always be there, with me, in my mind, wherever I go. What you did will always be there. Unchanging. But if we visit … then what you DID will only be one thing, and the other thing will be what you DO.
I don’t get it, she says, as much with her shoulders and her eyebrows as with her mouth.
You made a mistake, I say. But you have to LIVE with that mistake. No one forgives a dead person. I’d never forgive you if you died.
Then both of us—
No. You don’t really want to kill me. Do you?
I can tell because of the way she’s shaking. I can tell because of the way she’s crying. But I am worried that the gun might go off, accidentally, so I don’t get any closer.
For a moment, there’s stillness, which is like silence, but my version. Light is blazing through the gauze over the window, a spotlight, maybe? But then I notice that it’s shifting and moving, raking the walls, filling the room, making it a vessel of light. A helicopter, then.
Her eyes twitch to the door.
What is it? I say. What did they say?
They say to surrender. To come out. Or they have been authorized to [ ].
I don’t catch what she says there, but I guess it means: kill.
I see a reptilian flicker in her eyes.
They gave an ultimatum, didn’t they? To see if I was alive.
She nods. They said they wanted to hear your voice, or they would come in. You didn’t hear.
Of course I didn’t hear, I think. And you were willing for them to assault the room, to maybe get us both killed. Because you were scared. Scared of being alone. I would pity her, if I didn’t hate her more. I don’t say any of this with my hands though.
But there’s hating someone, and then there’s wanting them to die, or allowing them to die so they get off the hook, and I’m a long way from either of those things.
We still have time, I say. Put down the gun. Let’s open the
door. Hands in the air. You’re descended from warriors. You can’t let prison defeat you.
What?
It’s something someone said to me, when I was afraid.
Another moment of stillness.
I love you, Shaylene says eventually. I love you all—
—the way to Cape Cod and back, I say with my hands. So drop the gun. Drop the gun.
She lowers the shotgun, then throws it down on the bed.
Chapter 80
Shaylene looks wildly toward the door and I see it shake on its hinges—the battering ram. I take that final step toward her.
Lie down on the ground, I say. Put your hands behind your head.
She doesn’t say anything, just does it, and I lie on top of her, my hands on my head too, so they can’t shoot her, so they can’t kill her and then say that they thought she was holding the gun.
I can feel her saying something, feel her ribs expanding, her diaphragm lifting; I don’t know, a prayer or something, a mantra; I don’t hear the words, obviously. I remember when I was about five years old. Shaylene put some music on and turned it up way loud. Then she took my hands and put them on the speakers, so I could feel the beat—the whole room throbbing with it, as if filled with energy; Shaylene too, the pulse of the music moving her limbs, her head.
And then we danced together, me holding on to the speaker, and time spiraled out forever.
For the longest time after that, and this is the bit I don’t remember, Shaylene says I went around touching things, thinking I’d be able to hear them. Like, I put my hands on a horse, at the petting zoo, so that I could know what it was saying. On stones; on trees—feeling for that vibration from within.
Not that it seemed so stupid, when she and I read through a high school physics book years later and learned about electrons, spinning around their neutrons like the earth around the sun, vast subatomic distances between them. Which means that inside a stone, inside a tree, is a whole galaxy, a universe, of spinning things, dancing things, all moving, all making music.
You could hear it if you wanted, only not with your hands; they’re not sensitive enough.
From the corner of my eye, I see the door come off its hinges.
So the door does come down, I think. Just afterward. In the Dreaming, it was all backward.
Something hard and metal and round rolls into the room, spewing white gas. The gas pokes sharp little fingers into my eyes and my nose and my mouth; I cough and maybe I scream, I can’t know.
Then black-clad men burst in, their guns raised, one of them crouching down, another behind him, covering him, then they move quickly when they see us on the ground, surrounding us. One of them secures the shotgun; cracks it and drops the shells on the ground. Rough hands pull me up, hold my arms behind my back.
I see one of the cop’s mouths moving, as he stands over Shaylene. You are under arrest for kidnapping, aggravated assault, and [ ], you have the right to remain silent, you have the right to an attorney, if you cannot …
Then whoever is holding me turns and walks me out of there, as if I were nothing more heavy than a grocery bag. I twist my head as I’m carried out and see them kneeling by Shaylene, grabbing her hands. My eyes are streaming; it feels as if chili peppers have been rubbed in there.
Out on the walkway, I am pushed along, and then toward a black Cadillac with tinted windows.
I say, Wait, with my mouth.
I say, Please.
The guy carrying me pauses. He turns me around and looks at me.
I just want to see her, I say.
A long moment passes.
Then he nods. He lets me stand there and wait for her to come out.
I watch from the parking lot below as they hustle Shaylene out through the door of Room 22. Her hands are cuffed behind her and she’s stumbling, crying, some of it the gas, some of it for real. She doesn’t see me until she’s nearly at the bottom of the stairs. She turns to me, as they start hauling her off toward another vehicle. All around us, men are talking into radios and to one another, but it’s like time doesn’t really exist anymore, there’s just the two of us, looking at each other, standing on tarmac as cars streak by at sixty miles an hour, surrounded by armed men.
Then I see her say something to one of the men escorting her. He shakes his head. But she keeps insisting. There’s a pause. Another guy comes over, someone more in charge, I guess. Shaylene talks to him and he does a sort of slump that involves the shoulders, and which has a very precise meaning, it means I really don’t want to deal with this, but it turns out I’m the one who has to decide right now, and whatever I decide is going to come back on me.
Then he nods.
The first guy, the one who shook his head, takes something from his pocket and sort of presses it to Shaylene’s wrists, which are locked behind her back. I realize he’s releasing her handcuffs.
Then, like it’s in slow motion, she turns to me and lifts her hands.
Very deliberately, she tells me something in sign, a sequence of gestures so obvious it would be understandable even without an interpreter to turn it into spoken words that vibrate through the air; hell, a child could tell you what she says; probably there is a dog walking past that knows.
She points to herself.
She puts her hand over her heart.
Then she points to me.
For a moment, the world hangs in suspension, a ball at the top of its arc. Everything is still—the cars are no longer passing; their trails of red and yellow light are static threads, stretched, caramel drawn out to a taut length, about to snap.
Then I raise my own hands. One of the guys near me flinches but another puts a hand on his shoulder, and he stops.
I say …
No.
I’m not going to tell you what I say. It’s not important. I mean, it’s not important to you. But it’s important to me, and it’s the only thing that is mine in this world and can’t be taken from me, by anyone.
She nods, sodium light making the tears on her face shine, and then they lock her cuffs again and march her away, still nodding, and put a hand on the top of her head, and she disappears into the big black car.
What was that? says the cop beside me, who apparently does need an interpreter, who apparently understands less than a dog. What did you say?
Nothing, I say. Nothing.
Chapter 81
The inside of the Cadillac is washed with brightness, flooded with the glare of the parking lot’s arc lights. We sit there for I don’t know how long, while the cop in front talks on his radio; I don’t know what he’s saying, of course.
No one sits in back with me, this time.
Finally we pull out onto the highway. I wonder which city we’re going to. Phoenix? Flagstaff?
It doesn’t matter, I guess.
We drive past generic urban sprawl, the desert on the horizon. We pass one of those huge Chick-fil-A billboards, the ones with full-size 3-D cows telling you to go eat chicken at Chick-fil-A—which is meant to be funny, but always seems like a big mistake to me, because all it does is remind you, chicken or cow, that you’re eating an animal.
I get a flashback: Shaylene standing there with the shotgun under her chin.
I press my head back into the fabric of the seat and close my eyes.
The vibration of the road runs through me, like electricity.
Streetlights strobe over my eyelids.
My breathing slows and—
I’m Scattered Like the Stars
—And then I’m Slumped again on the ice prison outside the Crone’s castle, the crying of the Child loud in my ears, and I know that the Dreaming is not quite done with me, not yet.
My hands and feet are throbbing, and I gasp, wondering how they got—
Oh, yeah.
I was punching and kicking the ice, trying to break it. And it didn’t work. I look down, through the clear, cold roof, and there’s the Child looking up at me, imploring.
Still crying, still with
arms outstretched—the word that comes into my head is “beseeching.”
Emotion sweeps through me; tidal. Frustration pricks at the corners of my eyes. Why can’t I just break the ice? The Crone is dead. Why can’t I do it? Why can’t I get to her?
Why hasn’t Coyote come back?
And all the time, the sound of sobbing is filling my ears.
Please, I think. Please, I need to pick her up. Coyote, if you’re still there, help me, give me power, help me get her out. I will do anything, sacrifice anything, to save her. I don’t care about me anymore. I don’t care about my (mother), I don’t care about revenge, I don’t care about what has been done to me.
I am my own person, I think, and it doesn’t matter who my mother is, I am enough for myself. I am my own family.
The ice burns my hands, but I don’t care. The skin sizzling, I am half expecting to smell it soon, charring and—
Ice?
Sizzling?
Then I hear more sizzling.
And then I feel something drip onto my foot.
I look down.
My tears are falling from my cheeks and landing on the ice, and when they do they bore through it, straight through it, making holes in the crystal, which are expanding, the roof dissolving like that leaf in Coyote’s fire, what was there a moment ago disappearing; a magic trick.
I watch in amazement as the walls of the ice castle slowly, slowly, melt down, water running in rivulets onto the grass, soaking it. I don’t know if it was my tears, or if Coyote heard me and came to my aid, I don’t suppose I’ll ever know, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The thin wall between our hands fades—no, the right word is “effaces”; it effaces away, something rubbed out.
Until our hands are touching. Her tiny hands, in my big ones. I grip them tightly; they are so hot and so small it makes me feel like my heart might burst in my chest.
For the first time, the Child stops crying. I think it’s the shock.
Then the last of the ice drips away, and I am standing there, bending down to the Child who is looking up at me, clinging to my hands.
