by Tyler King
The difference, however, between my mother and me is that I don’t need to be happy to be happy. I can settle for being free.
“Come up to the house sometime,” she says, knowing that on this point we are at an impasse. “I’ll make you dinner.”
“Talk to you soon, Mom. Bye.”
* * *
For the last five years, since about the time I started college, my mother has lived inside a rural Pennsylvania commune. The town of Aster is infamous as a curiosity that attracts tourists and devotees alike. It is known as a psychic haven for its dense population of mediums, fortune tellers, palm readers, and the like. They are the New Agers, if you will, who set up shop in the “haunted” hotel and entertain visitors with mystic insights. But across the street is the more orthodox clan. The Aster Spiritualist Camp, where true believers have gone since 1884 to engage in a “personal experience with God.” In whatever form He/She/They/It might take. So now my mom “talks” to dead people. In one form or another, she’s been born again and again and again, and she’ll keep trying until she gets it right.
I won’t set foot within the camp boundaries.
Not because I take issue with their faith or the form in which they practice it. Not because I suspect some sort of nefarious activities are being carried out within the decaying buildings that sit beneath sagging bows clothed in moss. I won’t go in there because, for all its friendly trappings and honest convictions, I can’t help but see it as just another incarnation of the place where I was born and raised. A place from which my mother and I escaped the night my father murdered eleven people before attempting to take his own life. Too bad he missed, the bullet went through his cheek.
Anyway, the place gives me the creeps. And I have work to do. So I pull out my laptop, put on my headphones to drown out Kumi’s screeching Alanis Morissette at the top of her lungs, and dive into a blog post on the value of saltwater pools over chlorinated. Add one more to the Yes column.
* * *
By afternoon, I’ve moved on to writing a white paper explaining the benefits and drawbacks to homeowners’ associations. Right about the time I decide owning a home is way too much hassle, I get a text message from a number I don’t recognize.
Unknown
12:17 PM
It occurred to me that I might have been a bit abrupt with you the other day. Don’t let my bad manners scare you off.
E.A.
I suppose that is something like an apology, though no apology is necessary. Abrupt is just another word for honest, and honesty goes a long way with me. I could tell him that; assure him my decision on this job is solely about me and not a reaction to anyone else…But his book is lying on the floor next to my desk. I haven’t decided yet what to do about it. Leaving it on the train seemed wrong somehow. Like throwing it away. A book in a garbage can is a damn tragedy. Besides, Trilby had spent his hard-foraged dollars on it and gifted it to me in what he must have felt was an act of compassion. Perhaps he believed he’d sniped that copy from me at the counter. That I’d pined over it during our train ride home. Throw the girl a bone, you know?
Unknown
12:20 PM
For what it’s worth, today’s Thai Thursday.
If you worked here, you’d be eating spring rolls right now.
Yes column.
* * *
A few hours later, I am wrapping up a chat session with a client, sending them revised drafts for approval, when it occurs to me that I haven’t heard much sound coming from Kumi’s room for the last hour. While the silence is appreciated, I’m somewhat concerned that stillness is a warning sign. It’s after five, I haven’t eaten yet, and after two days I think it’s about time for Kumi to get out of her pajamas and take a shower. So I knock on her bedroom door to invite her out to dinner. We could both use a distraction.
“Kumi?” I say through the door when she doesn’t answer. “Want to get something to eat?” Nothing. No movement on the other side. “My treat. You can get loaded on cocktails and—”
The door whips open. Kumi is holding a pair of eight-inch scissors in one hand, the fingers of her other hand combing through what’s left of her hair.
“What do you think?” she asks. Her eyes are bright and expectant, a smile on her face that is a little excited and a lot terrified. It’s a look that means if I’m not careful, she might stab me or herself. Either way, someone goes to the hospital if I screw this up.
But for fuck’s sake, she’s left six inches of black hair on the carpet. Kumi has the face for a severe bob, just not the skill to cut in a straight line.
“How about I order delivery and help you even out the back?”
“Oh, please, yes,” she says, and yanks me to the bathroom.
By the time I’ve got her head sorted and she’s moved on to the bargaining phase of her post-breakup grief—I threatened to throw her phone in the toilet if I saw her texting her ex—I notice I have a missed text from Ethan.
Ethan Ash
5:27 PM
Do you like karaoke?
This is important.
I sweep up the clippings from the bathroom floor while Kumi searches Netflix for a proper Girls’ Night selection. And I smile, because I can’t take that message seriously.
Avery Avalon
5:44 PM
I’m judging you right now.
Ethan Ash
5:44 PM
Answer the question.
This is IMPORTANT.
Avery Avalon
5:45 PM
No one likes karaoke.
Ethan Ash
5:45 PM
Blasphemy.
This was a test. You failed.
Avery Avalon
5:45 PM
Oh well. If you change your mind…
I’ll be at the cool kids’ table.
Ethan Ash
5:46 PM
Do they have spring rolls?
My table has spring rolls.
“Avery, food’s here,” Kumi calls from the kitchen.
I dump the clippings in the trash can and put Ethan in a drawer.
Avery Avalon
5:48 PM
I’ll take that into consideration.
In the kitchen, Kumi is unpacking our orange chicken and fried rice. I still don’t quite recognize her, but the new look does make her appear taller, thinner. It didn’t turn out half-bad for a sudden, scorched-earth approach to hair styling. Sometimes a girl just needs a change and the immediate gratification that hacking off a few inches can provide.
“What are you smiling at?” she asks, turning to hand me a paper plate.
“Nothing. What?”
Her eyes narrow and I have that run-or-be-stabbed feeling again. “You were talking to a boy.”
“No,” I say, and take my plate to the living room.
“Boys are shits, Avery. Horrible little shits.”
* * *
After dinner we finally tackle the last of the packing we’ve been avoiding. The movers her dad hired are showing up at eight in the morning, and I’ve warned Kumi that anything not packed by then is getting left behind. Rushing around and last-minute chaos always give me anxiety.
In the living room, we box up her DVD collection, vinyl records from my short-lived vintage phase, and the shelving unit overflowing with books two rows deep. Kumi must have forgotten it was there, The Cult of Silence slotted spine-in next to the old textbooks we couldn’t sell back to the campus bookstore. When I pull it off the shelf to stack in a box, she turns that nervous shade of red like a kid whose parents found her box of secrets under the bed.
“Busted,” I say, tossing it in her lap.
She sits on the carpet, elbow-deep in her collection of true-crime novels. Almost afraid to touch it, as if doing so would claim it and thus admit guilt, she pushes it away.
“Must have picked it up by accident,” she says. “One of those bargain-bin buys. I probably didn’t recognize it at the time.”
So I snatch it bac
k and flip open the cover. Scrawled across the title page in black marker is Ethan’s signature.
“You went to his book signing?”
But I can’t keep a straight face, and my repressed laughter assures Kumi she doesn’t need to find a new roommate.
“I couldn’t help myself,” she says, all desperate puppy eyes full of regret. “It really isn’t as bad as you think.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Kumi tops off the box she’s working on and tapes it shut. I feel her staring at me.
“You should give it a chance,” she says. “It might help you make up your mind about him.”
“Pass. Thanks.” I get up to pull another armful of books from the shelf. She’s still staring. “What?”
“What’s he like?”
“You met him.” When I glance over, Kumi’s giving me her exasperated face. Fine. “He’s pushy.”
She rolls her eyes. “That all?”
“He’s taller in person.”
“Oh, well...” Her hands dance between us in a sort of magician’s reveal. A very sarcastic magician. “Say no more.”
“I don’t know. He’s…”
She picks up her phone off the coffee table and starts playing with it. “What?”
“Noticeable.”
“How so?”
“It’s hard to explain.” My attention drifts to a scuff on the wall from the day we first moved into this apartment. “Like when he walks into a room, it shrinks. Everything feels smaller around him.”
There are those people, the ones born separate from the rest of us. Gifted with an ineffable quality as easily recognized as it is difficult to explain. Some become rock stars or go into politics. Maybe start a cult in the mountains. Most, though, they’re the unicorn next door. The charismatic mechanic. The charming shop clerk. Singular personalities who bend the world around them and pervade through the clutter of time and memory.
Kumi stares at me with one raised eyebrow. “You’ve given this some thought.”
“No.”
“You know…” There is a perceptible shift in her demeanor. Something almost predatory emerges from behind her eyes. She holds out her phone to show me the photo of him from his Riot Street profile. “He’s not hard to look at, huh?”
Like I haven’t noticed.
“I see what you’re doing.”
“What?” Kumi applies her contrite face with an octave jump in her voice.
“I know how your mind works.”
Feigning wounded by my accusation, she looks away. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Uh-huh.” I get up to hunt for ice cream in the freezer. Because there’s always room for ice cream. And because Kumi is a ruthless interrogator when she brings her considerable coercive talents to bear. “You’re trying to make this a thing. It isn’t a thing.”
“Sure, okay.”
We still have some chocolate and coffee ice cream left. It shows restraint she didn’t clean us out during her hibernation.
“I mean it.”
“Yeah.” An annoyed clip to her voice. “I heard you.”
I pull out two paper bowls and peel open the carton lids. “Okay. Just so we’re clear.”
Since we met junior year of college, Kumi has had these wild sexual aspirations for me. In her eyes, I’m some stricken, oppressed woman liberated from a convent and in desperate need of fornication. But I think she longs for the days when sex was still exciting and everything was a first time for something. I’m merely an avatar for her vicarious fantasies.
“I’m just saying…” She pauses, and I decide three scoops of each flavor is not unreasonable. Because I’m an adult. “You should totally hit that.”
“And now you’re not getting any ice cream.”
4
The Other Woman
In the pages of Ethan’s book, my alter ego is Enderly Atwood, a spunky eighteen-year-old with curly rose hair and peridot eyes. My fictional doppelgänger. Like other young women her age, she’s energetic and inquisitive, traits her father warns must be managed lest they get her into trouble. But unlike most, Enderly’s entire world is confined inside the boundaries of Camp Indigo, the secretive commune on the rural outskirts of Doser, Pennsylvania. It isn’t until an intrepid journalist infiltrates Indigo that Enderly learns the unsettling truth beneath the empire of ashes she’s called home, and must help the journalist reveal the cult’s founder, her father, for the dangerous tyrant he is—before it’s too late. A work of fiction loosely based on Massasauga and Ethan’s interviews with my father, the Times called The Cult of Silence, “A suspenseful departure from the rational world into a disquieting realm of ego and manipulation, revealing the limits of the human psyche.”
But it was upstate New York where we called two hundred acres of the Adirondack region home. I was only twelve when it all came to an end. And it wasn’t an undercover journalist who drove my father to murder eleven of his followers, just his own metastasizing paranoia. Though Ethan does nail my father’s tendency toward self-aggrandizing speeches that appeared mid-conversation as if ejected from a passing aircraft. Ethan captures the essence of his natural charisma and the dark shadow of intimidation he cast over us.
Until today, I had never been tempted to pick up Ethan’s book. I had convinced myself nothing good could come of it. Now it’s after midnight, I’m three chapters in, and more conflicted than when I began.
Sitting in bed, my phone buzzes.
Ethan Ash
12:09 AM
I want to preface this. I’m not drunk.
I put a scrap of paper between the pages to save my place.
Avery Avalon
12:10 AM
Okay…
Ethan Ash
12:10 AM
What are you doing right now?
Avery Avalon
12:11 AM
Is this a test, too?
Ethan Ash
12:11 AM
Yes.
Avery Avalon
12:12 AM
As it happens, I’ve got a bone to pick with you.
Ethan Ash
12:13 AM
Is that so?
Avery Avalon
12:13 AM
It is.
Ethan Ash
12:14 AM
Go on then.
So far, there’s nothing about his book I find offensive, exactly. His writing is clever and thoughtful. But I already knew that. I’m sure Ethan has no shortage of sycophants lining up to kiss his ass. I won’t be one of them. And there’s just one question that I’ve been dying to ask for more than a year.
Avery Avalon
12:15 AM
So, how long have you been obsessed with me?
Ethan Ash
12:16 AM
Whoa, ok, shots fired.
Where did this come from?
Avery Avalon
12:16 AM
I’m reading your book.
Ethan Ash
12:16 AM
I see.
Avery Avalon
12:17 AM
And I’m wondering how a 12-yr-old girl you’d never met
became the heroine of your novel.
Ethan Ash
12:18 AM
She’s 18 in the book.
Avery Avalon
12:18 AM
Didn’t answer my question.
Ethan Ash
12:18 AM
You’re putting me on the spot here.
Avery Avalon
12:18 AM
That’s the idea.
You’re the one texting me in the middle of the night.
Ethan Ash
12:19 AM
I keep late hours.
Avery Avalon
12:19 AM
You’re avoiding the question.
Ethan Ash
12:23 AM
Well, Enderly didn’t sign up for Indigo.
She was born into it, never given a choice.
She’s in
nocent, less complicit than the others.
That makes her more sympathetic to the reader.
Avery Avalon
12:24 AM
I suppose that’s true.
Ethan Ash
12:25 AM
But I tried not to write her as hapless or naïve.
She doesn’t have a great breadth of experience,
but she survives on strong intuition.
She’s a good judge of character.
I’ll give him that. Some male writers seem to suffer from a kind of creative paralysis when writing about women. Depicting hollow renditions of the same female tropes regurgitated ad nauseam. But Enderly has dimension. She’s complex and at times contradictory—a woman at odds with herself. That much, at least, I can relate to.
Avery Avalon
12:26 AM
I don’t hate her.
If we met in real life, I might be her friend.
Ethan Ash
12:26 AM
I consider that a glowing review.
Avery Avalon
12:27 AM
Don’t get too excited.
I’m only on the 3rd chapter.
Ethan Ash
12:29 AM
Fair enough.
Any other notes you’d like to share?
Avery Avalon
12:30 AM
Why, working on a sequel?
Ethan Ash
12:31 AM
I’m in a unique position as a writer.
Have to take advantage of the opportunity presented.
Avery Avalon
12:32 AM
You’re just burning with questions, aren’t you?
Ethan Ash
12:33 AM
