“Did you report it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“My heart told me not to. Mr. Victor is in charge but my heart is too.”
I get up and close the door. Enough with the whispering. I sit back down and say, “Now no one can hear us. Regina. Why did your father leave?”
She looks up at me and says, “The night my father went away I saw a witch in the house. I think it was Cosimo’s witch. She was the one who put the note on my kitchen table.”
I half believe her. I don’t know why. But I quickly return to my senses. “What note, Regi?”
“The note that daddy wrote.”
“What did it say.”
“I’m not supposed to tell you. Stori would kill me.”
“I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“Well…Daddy said he’s leaving and never coming back. Oh, but don’t you think you’ll find him and tell him to come home?”
I’ve got my information, but for the first time, I’m sorry for it. I don’t want to know any more. As soon as I get back to the office I’ll have Bill give this to Heather.
“Well, I assure you there’s no such thing as Cosimo or witches. Sometimes, we see things, Regina, when we really don’t. When we’re super scared our minds can play very powerful tricks on us.”
She doesn’t answer and I don’t expect her to. I don’t want to leave abruptly after having made her tell her secret. But I have to get away from her. I pick up my briefcase and place a hand on her shoulder. “I have to go. But please know everything will be alright.”
As my hand turns the doorknob she asks, “Are they sad?”
“Are who sad?”
“The blind kids.”
“No, actually, most of them are very happy.”
“But they can’t see the sunlight.”
“I know.”
“If you don’t see the sunlight you can’t be happy.”
“But I just told you, they are.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She takes some satisfaction in that, then says, “They must have sunlight inside them. We must all have sunlight inside and we don’t even know it.” She’s drifting off into her own thoughts and she likes them. She stares beyond the wall and says, “They must have their own personal sunshine.”
6: Stori
“Tell me a story,” my mother begs ninety-year-old Other Mother, Rose, who stands at her bedside. Rose has just administered a sticky ointment that smells like tree sap and vinegar to my mother’s temples and wrists. She’s one of the best Other Mother’s in the Valley. She once healed my chicken pox overnight by making me drink a tea that looked like soot and tasted like tar.
Prisicilla Van Patten is sitting in the winged back chair in the corner of the room, keeping a respectable distance, yet paying close attention. She knows she overstepped her boundaries by being in here. But my mother allowed it. (I can’t stand Priscilla.)
“Tell me a story about the Braves,” my mother pleads in a weak voice.
Rose tucks the quilt under my mother’s chin as my mother looks longingly up at her. “How they lived. And the Other Mothers.”
Rose gives a defeated sigh, “My mother knew more stories than I can remember. I should have written them down. I can kill myself that I didn’t write them down. So stupid of me.”
“You know some,” Mommy says. “Tell me.”
I spot Priscilla reaching for her purse. She wants to take out her stupid notepad and pen. When she catches me glaring at her she snaps her hand back to her lap. Good. I’ve shamed her. She oughtta know just what an ass she is.
Rose sits on the corner of my mother’s bed. She’s so tiny she doesn’t even make a dent. “The Braves lived off the land in southern Calabria. They migrated there after the Tower of Babel was destroyed. For many many years they made their home by the waters in the Sila Woods.
“They lived as they always had from the beginning of time: all belongings were shared. No man or woman had more food, clothing, or shelter than the next. And their children ran about in happiness and freedom. The adults had different jobs; some hunted, some gathered nuts and herbs and fruits, others tended the animals and the homes. But no matter what the daily profession was, they all shared the common goal of providing for the whole of the tribe, which they called The One. Every day the same toils were performed while the children ran about in happiness and freedom. To tend and grow the togetherness of The One. To feed and shelter, wash and heal and love The One.
“And they never grew tired of this task. Of toiling for togetherness. Of loving one another.
“At the end of each day they would build a great bonfire under the night stars. There they ate and danced and prayed. And the children ran about in happiness and freedom. The mothers gave their little ones the last sucklings before bed. And if one mother was too tired or unwell to suckle her child the closest nursing mother would snatch that baby from her and put him to her breast and that baby would not hesitate to suck from her because when he looked up into her eyes he would see her very soul shining down on him. And she could see his soul, because she loved him just as much as she loved her own child. And inside of that Other Mother’s love he would drink from the fount of indiscriminatory love. And right before he drifted off to sleep she would whisper ‘All is well dear child. Good night.’”
“What if their mother died?” Priscilla’s voice is unexpected and sounds strange when spoken in my mother’s room. I glance over and notice tears welling up in her eyes. “What if both parents were dead?” she asks.
Rose answers in a flash. “There were no such things as orphans. Your mother was the closest woman to you. Your father the nearest man. This is how the Tribe of the Braves lived. And they lived for a very long time. Until the great flood that killed most of us. The flood that sent the rest of us here, to America.”
“Stori,” my mother says. “Come closer.”
I don’t want to go closer. I’m afraid of what she might say. But she’s my mother. And I have to obey.
She wrestles free from the quilt and takes my hand in both of hers. “It’s deep in my bones, the freezing.”
“You have to fight it, Ma. You have to be strong and fight it.”
Even though she’s telling me something, it feels more like she’s asking something unsaid. Like permission. Permission for what?
“Did you ever just feel so tired, Stori? Like you might lie down and never get up again.”
“I’ll make you something. You need nutrients. And Rose’s tea will start working soon, won’t it Rose?”
Rose looks doubtful. “Our remedies are but a shadow of the Great Mysterious and His ways.”
The last person I want to hear about is God. I know enough to know that whenever people start talking about God and His mysterious ways that somebody’s about to die.
“She’ll be fine,” I insist, finding myself looking over to Priscilla for support.
“Of course she will,” Priscilla agrees, nodding. For a fleeting moment, I’m glad she’s sitting there.
“It’s not that kind of tired,” my mother says. “Tea won’t help. It’s the worst kind of tired, Stori. I hope you never have to feel it.”
She can be so dramatic sometimes. Sometimes I think she secretly enjoys her moments of misery, so she can just feel sorry for herself. But life isn’t about feeling sorry for yourself. You can’t just lie there and cry and expect other people to come and save you with their pity. Life is about picking yourself up, wiping your tears away with your own hands and saving yourself. The world is a cruel place that does not care. You can’t wait for other people to come and save you. “What are you trying to tell me, Ma? You wanna just give up?”
“Don’t be mad at me.”
“Daddy’s gone and you’re too tired to care. Don’t be mad at you. Of course not.”
She closes her eyes and says, “I need rest now. Go make something for you and Regi.”
Thankfully, Miss Van Patten
doesn’t put up a fuss when, back in the kitchen, I tell her it’s time for her to go. She slips out of the apartment with Rose, after placing her hand on top of Regina’s head. “It was nice talking with you today, Regina.”
Regina shoots a worried look my way. She better not have.
Since my mom has been in bed for a week there’s not much in the fridge or pantry, so I decide on keeping dinner simple: grilled cheese sandwiches and Ovaltine. The butter starts to hiss in the skillet, telling me it’s time to drop my sandwiches in. Cooked butter smells sweet and it makes me even hungrier than I already am. Regi’s perched atop the radiator staring out the window to the dying sun. “Hi purple. Hi orange. Hi blue. How are you?”
“Who are you talking to?”
“The angels. Do you want to come talk to them with me? There’s one right here on the fire escape.”
“No. There are no such things. But speaking of talking, what did you tell Miss Van Patten today?”
“Huh?”
“What happened?”
Regi gets quiet.
“I really hope you didn’t tell her anything about us. Did you?”
She presses a finger into the glass and makes tracing motions. “Hi purple,” she says to her imaginary friend. “I hope that’s not true. I really like it here.”
I’ve come to the conclusion Regi’s not normal and it occurs to me she might be having visions the way I sometimes do. I don’t want to think about it. Someone like Regi couldn’t handle visions. Will she end up in the nuthouse by the time she’s my age? I get so pissed at her I see myself picking up the skillet and bringing it down over her head.
“I’m gonna eat real quick and then I’m hitting Soda Can,” I announce sternly.
She looks at me with eyes wide open. “Soda Can Alley?”
Good. I’ve distracted her from her fantasies.
“Why are you going there?”
“To see Uncle Joe.”
“Daddy said to stay away from Uncle Joe. Uncle Joe does bad stuff in Soda Can. I heard daddy talking about it. Why would you go there?”
She’s right. Uncle Joe’s shady and a ‘Merigan besides. (He quit the masonry with my dad when he got a job working for the city and moved out of the Valley.) Nevertheless I have a gut feeling he might know something about my father’s disappearance. Regi can tell me not to go all she wants, but she doesn’t get that no one’s looking for Daddy. Yeah the cops came and took a statement and told us they would do their best. But they were just lying. The police don’t care about people like us, and they never will. Next to the Blacks who live in the Hills not far from here, we are last on their list. And Miss Van Patten—even though I’m sure she could pull a few strings with those pretty little legs of hers—she won’t do much to find him either. So I tell Regi, because she needs to grow up a little and start thinking with common sense. “Who else is gonna look for him Reg?”
“The cops are. They said they would.”
“The cops were too busy sniffing mom’s underwear to even care.”
“They did not sniff her underwear!” Somehow this statement has put her on the edge of rage. I almost want to laugh, but I’m too tired for laughter.
“Yes they did, Regina. So don’t talk about the cops with me. Don’t you get it? We don’t live in the Ridges. We don’t have a fancy house like Uncle Joe. We are nobodies to them. If we wanna find Daddy we have to do it ourselves. And we have to stick together and not let anyone get in our way. Get it?”
She sulks. “You’re negative.” She’s still young enough to be an optimist and my words have a crushing effect. I almost feel bad. I don’t want her to grow up too fast, but what else can I do? Hard times call for even harder measures. “The social worker will be back, Regi. Thanks to you, she thinks Daddy left us for good.”
She looks like she wants to say something, but then she changes gears. “Who eats grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner?”
“Girls who talk to social workers do.” I say dropping her sandwich onto her plate at her place setting. “Now come eat.”
She turns from me, gazes out the window again. Her back is so narrow and fragile—her little spine standing out under her shirt. “I’m not hungry.”
I’ve hurt her feelings. I feel like a bully and I hate it. “I’m sorry. Come and eat your food.”
“You would feel better,” she says, still turned away from me, “If you came and talked to the angels with me. They can tell you all about Daddy.”
As I wait for her to come eat my thoughts return to the Other Mothers. It’s hard to envision a time when people lived like that. Everything’s so separate in the 21st Century. Maybe not as much here in the Valley, but in the rest of Redemption it is.
If I had to leave my home, I would really know what it’s like then, I bet. Just how separate everyone is. There’s the rich and the poor, the happy and the starving.
Priscilla keeps saying I can be happy. Just like her. She’s successful and smart. She drives a nice car and has beautiful clothes. She’s pretty too. I bet she’s got a boyfriend. I bet he bought her all that stuff and really loves her.
I bet her father never walked out. I bet the love of her life didn’t diss her for another girl. I bet she never wanted to hit her little sister over the head with a frying pan.
A wave of sorrow almost doubles me over. An unwanted thought worms its way into my mind. We are never going to get out of this. He left us here. He left us behind. I’m so sure of my family’s demise I have to hold myself back from caving in and crying.
I better take a pill right after I eat something. I can feel another vision coming on. But this time I feel a dark one. They don’t come as often as the good visions, but when they do, everybody watch out. Like last week in history class. I was sitting there listening to Miss Wheaton tell us that very soon we wouldn’t be reading history anymore. The Board of Ed was replacing those books with biographies on our current time’s most influential people.
As she was explaining this, rather regretfully, it happened—the seizing of my very soul. Everything went silent. Miss Wheaton was speaking but I no longer heard her. Her mouth was moving but really slow. That’s when I saw her in her death form—the way she will look when she is six feet under and rotting.
Have you ever wondered if there really is a God? Have you ever wondered if this life is but a fantasy or a dream and you are about to wake into the true reality of nothingness? Annihilation. No time. No space. No color. Just vacuum. No past or future. No memory, no light.
I don’t want to scare you because so far you’ve been a good listening friend. But I have witnessed annihilation. I have been to that place where there is nothingness. No God.
If I could have screamed I would have but in that place I myself didn’t exist anymore. No soul, no spirit. Just floating out there in the bottomless pit of what I assume is hell.
People try to say the devil will take you to a fiery place where monsters will take pleasure in playing with your feet. But it’s not even that good—trust me.
Hell—this is what hell is—it’s the dark one leading you away from the world you know and sending you through a door, shoving you straight through it. What’s on the other side is not fire to look upon and the company of monsters. It is absolute nothingness—your whole life snuffed out and you’re left to hang in the absence of all things—a big empty black hole—for the rest of your existence.
I get so scared of hell sometimes it makes me shiver. I don’t want to be having these thoughts. I want so badly to get rid of the darkness in me.
I am that person right now, although I try to fight it. I am full of a shaking, shivering, decaying hatred-fear. I don’t believe there’s hope for my family anymore. I see my sister becoming a nutjob, my mother dying in her bed, my father rotting in a pit somewhere and myself roaming the streets with a hunger to destroy every living thing I see.
I know it’s morbid.
I have to remember my condition. I have to tell myself it comes in waves—
to just ride the wave, get through it, and let it go.
But the anger I feel when I’m inside all this darkness changes me—the way those people in the movies change into werewolves—I’m not me anymore. I’m full of hatred and thankful for nothing. I don’t want to live anymore when I’m in the darkness. Yes. Even though I’ve seen what’s waiting on the other side.
The only thing that saves me from the annihilation is a single thought. Escape.
It wouldn’t take long to pack a bag for me and Regi and hit it. I could take care of us. We’d stow away in one of the freight trains going out West.
Although it doesn’t feel like a possibility, as I’ve never slept a night outside of this house, I make up my mind to formulate plan B.
I pull Regi’s chair out and sit on it sideways. “Reg. Come over here. Now.”
She slides off the radiator sulking and takes heavy steps in my direction.
I pull her close, between my legs. “You and I might have to leave this place.”
She hangs her head. “Not without mommy.”
“Mommy’s not well.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You need to look at me.”
Her eyes come reluctantly to mine.
“If anything happens to us—like we get separated, if you go somewhere you don’t like, or somebody’s not nice to you, just run away okay.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” She hangs her head again.
“Just listen to me. We have to have a meeting place. That only me and you know about. Our own secret place.”
“Our own secret place?”
“Yes. We’ll meet at the dam.”
“Where daddy jumped?”
“Yes. Where daddy jumped.”
“How will I know you’ll meet me?”
I don’t have an answer, but I’m convinced that I love her so much that if she did call me I would somehow know. “When you get there, tell it to the stars. I promise I’ll hear it and I’ll come.”
“But we’re not getting separated, right Stor?”
I kiss her on the forehead. “No. Now eat and then finish your homework. I’ll be back.”
The Book, the Key and the Crown (Secrets of the Emerald Tablet Book 1) Page 7
