sedona files - books one to three

by Christine Pope

  I heard muffled voices, and then the shop girl returned, followed by a tall, slender woman with pale hair pulled back in a simple ponytail, turquoise drops hanging from her ears and a stylized silver cross studded with turquoise at her throat. She had to be in her fifties, but her face bore hardly any lines. The blue eyes that met mine were the same deep forget-me-not color as Kara’s.

  For a minute we just stood there, staring at each other, and then she seemed to gather herself and say, quite normally, “Hello, Kiki.”

  “Kirsten,” I said, my tone sounding abrupt even to me.

  “Oh — of course.” And then silence fell again.

  This was going well. Probably my brain hadn’t gotten quite caught up to the fact that she was about the farthest from the meth-raddled, used-up woman of my imagination than she could possibly be. Mindful of the shop girl watching us, I said quietly, “Could we talk somewhere? I know you’re probably busy, but — ”

  “Of course.” Just a repetition of her previous words, as if she couldn’t quite figure out what other phrase to use. Then she looked over at her assistant and said, “Carla, can you watch the store for me for a while? I need to go out for a bit.”

  “Sure, Mrs. Engle.”

  Mrs. Engle. Well, what else had I expected? I’d seen the name on the card for myself.

  I waited while Marybeth — my mother — went into the back room again and came out wearing a very chic brown suede coat, a teal scarf around her throat. She moved past me, and I caught a whiff of some soft scent. Not floral. Sandalwood, maybe?

  She opened the door for me, and I went out into the bright morning sunshine. We took a few steps so we were out of view of her store’s windows, and then she stopped and asked, “Why are you here?”

  Not the greatest welcome in the world, but I hadn’t expected one. I stared back at her, at a face that was half-familiar to me, as if something remembered from a dream. “Someone told me I had to talk to you. He hinted you knew something about me, something that could help me fight the aliens in the base outside Sedona.”

  I’d almost expected her to burst out laughing at that. After all, if you tell most people that you’re trying to defeat a bunch of aliens in a secret base, they’ll either sniff your breath for alcohol or call up the men with the straitjackets. Laughter was a pretty distant second to those possibilities when it came to a bad response to my statement.

  But Marybeth didn’t laugh, or start calling for help. No, her mouth tightened, and her gaze shifted away from me. Then she seemed to nod, and straighten her shoulders, as if gathering herself for a confrontation she’d half dreaded and half expected. “We shouldn’t talk here. I’d thought we could go for some coffee, but now…now I think you’d better come back to the house.”

  “Where’s that?” I asked. Somehow I didn’t quite like the idea of going with her to her house. Surely we could just go back to my hotel room if a diner or coffee house wasn’t private enough.

  “A few miles up the road.” I must have looked suspicious, because she added, “Don’t worry. I’ve been an upstanding member of society for quite a few years now.”

  There being nothing I could say to that without sounding petty or grudging — although I had every reason to be, frankly — I only nodded. “Okay. But maybe I should go back and get my car and follow you — ”

  “It’s really okay,” she cut in. “My car’s just parked around back.”

  I decided not to protest anymore. If she wanted it her way, fine. But I was going to make a careful note of the route we took, just in case I ended up having to walk back.

  She led me to a parking area behind the row of businesses, and over to a shining white Range Rover. My eyes bugged out a little at the sight of that vehicle. Not that I knew everything there was to know about cars, but I did know that a Range Rover — especially a new model like the one she was unlocking now — cost the equivalent of a small condo. Business must have been going really well for her, or she’d found herself one hell of a sugar daddy.

  I climbed in and buckled my seatbelt while she did the same. Then she backed out of her spot and pointed the big SUV back to the main route, and took us northward out of the heart of town.

  It was like riding on silk, despite the recently plowed roads. As she drove, I stole a quick look at the rock on her left hand. Two carats? Three? I wasn’t educated enough on such matters to be sure. The ring seemed to go with Range Rover, with the quietly expensive coat she wore. I couldn’t begin to piece together how my mother, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking woman who could barely scrape the rent together, could end up living in apparently the lap of luxury.

  To cover my confusion, I stared out the window, watched the white-blanketed landscape flash by. We crossed a river, then turned onto a road that seemed to be heading up toward one of the ski areas in the mountains. But then she took a hard left, and we wound down a narrow lane that could barely accommodate the Range Rover. I sucked in my breath and hoped we wouldn’t meet anyone coming the other way. I noticed that she engaged the four-wheel drive with a simple push of a button, and the SUV locked on to the shifting terrain of rock-strewn street and half-melted snow.

  A minute or two later, we inched our way down a sleep drive and into the center bay of a three-car garage. I didn’t get a good look at the house, but the one glimpse I did have was of a large lodge-style residence, more imposing than I wanted to admit.

  Marybeth stopped the car and said, unnecessarily, “Here we are.” Maybe she hadn’t been too thrilled with my silence on the way over, but really, what was I supposed to say?

  I got out and followed her through a door that led into a kitchen like something out of House Beautiful or Architectural Digest — high-beamed ceilings of natural wood, granite counters, stainless-steel appliances. Despite myself, I couldn’t help contrasting the luxury around me with my own small apartment with its patched-together garage-sale finds, or even with Kara’s house, which, while nice, was still a modest ranch-style home built in the mid-’60s, not someplace that looked as if it should be in a magazine.

  Marybeth went through the kitchen without a second look and brought me to what appeared to be the family room. Saying, “Go ahead and make yourself comfortable,” she went over to a huge slate fireplace, added some wood to the grate, and touched off a couple of those waxy little starter blocks to get things going. I wanted to call this affectation, a way of stalling me, but it was cold in the house, even though I guessed the heat must be on.

  So I sat on a plump brown leather couch and looked around, at the Navajo rugs on the floor, the polished juniper coffee table, the paintings of local landscapes on the walls, which were tinted a soft burnt-biscuit shade. The air smelled of wood smoke. It should have been homey, comforting…but of course it wasn’t. This wasn’t my home. Maybe it was the home that should have been mine, if things had been different…but they weren’t.

  “Coffee?” my mother asked.

  I shook my head. “I’m not much of a coffee drinker. Do you have any green tea?”

  “Sure,” she said, and went out. I heard her busying herself in the kitchen and realized it wasn’t just hospitality driving her — the longer she rattled around with those sorts of tasks, the longer she could put off actually talking to me.

  So I sat there and watched the fire grow, eventually filling the room with warmth. About five minutes later, Marybeth came back into the room and handed me a sturdy mug with a deep red-brown gaze. I noticed she had gotten coffee for herself. It smelled wonderful, but, in my humble opinion, coffee only tasted about a tenth as good as it smelled.

  She sat herself down on the couch opposite mine and wrapped her fingers around her own mug, as if she needed its warmth, despite the room being quite comfortable now. “So…” she said at last.

  “So,” I said. A deep breath, then another. “Look, I know it sounds crazy, and I wouldn’t have come here to bug you if it weren’t really important, but — ”

  “Bug me?” she repeated. “Kirsten, d
on’t ever think that you’re bothering me. I’ve dreamed of this day — ” She broke off and shook her head. “That is, I hoped maybe one day you’d forgive me, come see me. Seeing you now, seeing what a lovely young woman you’ve become — ” Again she stopped herself. “I suppose I never stopped to think you’d come asking questions I didn’t want to answer.”

  I couldn’t think of what to say in reply, so I only hung on to my own mug like a lifeline, not drinking from it, but merely reassuring myself with its solidity. “So you do know what Agent Jones was talking about.”

  “Agent Jones?”

  “He’s — well, I guess he’s what you’d call a Man in Black. So he knows things that other people don’t know. But he wouldn’t tell me what was so important. He only said I needed to hear it from you.”

  She still had a light tan, despite the season, or maybe it was just a careful application of bronzer. Beneath it, though, she seemed to pale. Almost under her breath, she said, “He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.”

  “Huh?”

  A hint of a tight smile before she glanced away, seeming unable to meet my eyes. “Your father.”

  “My father?”

  “Yes.” Deliberately she took a large swallow of her coffee, as if she needed the caffeine to brace her for what was about to come next. “I know there’s no way of excusing my behavior back then, so I won’t even try. It’s one thing to be free with yourself — that’s your own business — but the drinking, the drugs…” She shook her head. “I had no business dragging you girls into that.”

  Damn straight. But I only asked softly, “How long have you been sober?”

  “Seven years,” she said, pride in her tone. “And I wanted to make it up to you two, make amends, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. He told me I’d burned my bridges, and that was it. So I backed off, and then he was gone, and I just sort of let it go. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, considering…” The word trailed away into nothingness. “Anyway, I can’t fix that now. And you deserve to hear the truth. Kara knew her father, if only for a little while, but you didn’t even have that.”

  I sat quietly, hardly daring to breathe. Maybe I was afraid that if I interrupted her, I would break the flow of her thoughts, destroy the air of quiet introspection that seemed to have surrounded her.

  “My best friend back then was Josie Hendricks. We had some good times, Josie and I. Too good, a lot of people would probably say. Anyway, one night we went to this club in Scottsdale that had just opened. Very upscale, not really our kind of scene, you might say. But Josie thought it was time to give classy guys a try.” A rueful smile. “Sometimes the booze makes you a little less than discriminating. But I’m guessing you don’t know too much about that, thank God.”

  No, I’d definitely swung that pendulum far in the other direction. I managed a small shake of the head.

  “So there we were, having guys with Rolexes buy us Cosmos, and then this man came up to me and asked me to dance. Of course I said yes — he was amazingly good-looking. Tall, blond hair, blue eyes. Looked like a Norse god or something. He said his name was Gabriel. He stuck by my side for the rest of the night as we drank and laughed and talked about nothing much in particular.” Marybeth paused for a moment, staring past me, as if seeing in her mind’s eye that night so many years ago. “Of course I brought him home with me — I think Josie took a cab home, but things were a little fuzzy after that. And Kara was staying at a friend’s house that night, so I knew I’d have the apartment to myself. No need to go into details, of course, but he stayed the night, and in the morning he was gone.”

  “And that’s unusual how?” I asked, and then wished I’d kept my mouth shut. Not the most politic thing to say, even if it wasn’t anything more than the truth.

  She didn’t look angry, though. Her mouth pursed a little, and I realized I’d seen that exact expression on Kara’s face when a jab got through to her and she didn’t want to respond. But then Marybeth shrugged and replied, “It’s not unusual at all, actually. What was strange was how he got out.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My apartment had one of those deadbolts that you had to lock with a key from the inside. Pain in the rear, but it was supposed to be more secure or something. And after having one or two of my ‘dates’ let himself out before I’d slept it off, I’d taken to hiding the keys when I got home — in my lingerie drawer, in my makeup bag in the bathroom. You’d have to do some serious rummaging to find it.”

  “But he must have found it if he was gone.”

  She shook her head and drank from her coffee again. “No. When I got up the next morning and he wasn’t in bed, at first I thought he was in the bathroom or out in the living room or kitchen or something. But no — he was gone. The door was still locked, and my keys were still hidden in the top drawer of my dresser, underneath a pile of bras. If he’d gone in there to get the keys out, things would have been disturbed. I would have noticed — by then I’d sobered up. It was as if he’d never been there.”

  I wanted to say that maybe she’d just imagined it, that she’d been so wasted she couldn’t remember what she was doing, but I held my tongue. After all, my existence was pretty obvious proof that something had happened with somebody. Whether or not it was this mythical “Gabriel” was another matter.

  It was hard to tell how Marybeth interpreted my silence. She paused for a moment, then said, “Even stranger, Josie had no memory of him at all, even though she’d kept telling me all night how hot he was, how I’d really scored a classy guy this time. And yes, you could say she was too drunk herself to remember anything clearly, but Josie wasn’t like that. She never forgot anything…but she forgot Gabriel. It was almost as if those memories had just been…erased.”

  That sort of thing was common enough in UFO circles, but I’d never heard of aliens using the technique to erase the memory of a one-night stand. Then again, most aliens weren’t the type you’d really want to be hopping into bed with, although I’d heard that Persephone’s spirit guide Otto, when he was in his true form, wasn’t exactly the type you’d kick out of bed for eating crackers.

  “So…what are you saying?” I asked, not sure I really wanted to hear the answer.

  “I think you know,” she said steadily, meeting my eyes for the first time since she’d begun her narrative. “When you were born, the nurses were amazed, because you didn’t cry. Just looked at everything as if you were analyzing it. And you didn’t cry when I brought you home. I actually did sober up for you, for a while. But it was too hard — and I didn’t know what to do with you. I thought I knew what to expect. I’d had Kara, after all. I thought another daughter would be easy enough. But then you didn’t talk until you were almost two, and everyone was worried something was wrong with you. When you did start talking, it was in complete sentences, as if you’d spent all that time absorbing everything, processing it, so that when you did begin to speak you’d get everything right. Again, okay, not conclusive. And I suppose it wasn’t conclusive that I got pregnant with you even though I was on the pill at the time.”

  Just like Kara, I thought. Maybe I had more in common with my half-alien niece than I really wanted to admit.

  Marybeth said, “And tell me this, Kirsten — have you ever been sick? Even one day? Because you weren’t as a child. Ever.”

  I didn’t want to tell her. I’d listened to all this with mounting dread in my heart, not wanting to hear the truth in her words, not wanting to admit to myself that there just might be something very strange about my origins. Probably you could explain one or two of those things away, but when all of them were taken in aggregate —

  Somehow I made myself answer. “No,” I said, staring down into my now-cold mug of green tea. “Never missed one day of school. It kind of sucked, actually.”

  At that she gave a nervous little laugh. “I can imagine. Then one day you came into the kitchen and asked me out of the blue if I was sad because I’d had the dream about Uncle
Steve again, the one where the people in the bushes shot him, and I…lost it. Because I’d had that dream the night before, Kirsten, that same nightmare I couldn’t seem to get rid of, no matter how much I drank, no matter how many pills I took. That’s the night I left.”

  Her words shook me more than anything else she had yet said. In barely a whisper, I retorted, “I am not psychic.”

  “Maybe you’re not now. Maybe what happened to you when I left was so traumatic that you repressed it. I have no idea — I’m not an expert in that sort of thing.” Her hand shook as she drained the rest of her coffee. Something in her face told me she wished the mug had held something a little stronger. From what I’d heard, it wasn’t as if the urge to drink really went away. People just got better at managing it.

  I didn’t feel any pity for her, though. “So, rather than trying to figure it out like a normal person, you just took off? And what about Kara? Okay, maybe I was a little Damien freak or something, but Kara didn’t deserve what you did to her.”

  “Neither of you did,” Marybeth said, again looking away from me. “I knew Kara, knew she was a smart girl and would call her grandparents. I knew things would get taken care of eventually.”

  Eventually. In that moment I hated her. I hated that she somehow managed to look like one of those older models in a Ralph Lauren magazine ad, the ones with the perfect cheekbones and flawless silvery hair, who all looked like they’d gone to Vassar or something, instead of a woman who’d spent a good decade and a half drinking like a fish and not caring about anyone other than herself. When the going got tough…Marybeth Swenson sure got going. Right out the door.

  But I couldn’t give in to any of that resentment right now. Maybe later I could scream and yell and throw things, but in the meantime there were aliens to be defeated and not a whole lot of time to do it in. Michael’s words came back to me: Be strong enough to recognize the truth when you hear it.