When she said no to him, Rosie said he got a look on his face that was unlike anything she’d ever seen. She sensed a pressure drop in the room, and got up to try to bolt to the door. But Aries grabbed her by her braid and yanked her to him. She tried to resist, but he smashed her head against the floor until she lay still. She thought she might not survive if she tried to fight back.
No, no. Jesus, Dana. I don’t need a hug. Just give me a second to collect myself. It still makes me so angry I could spit.
The only upside to the assault was that Aries’s spell on Rosie was broken. She knew she had to get out of there, and she spent a few weeks plotting her escape. She observed the night patrol schedule and figured out which nights a certain guy was working. She calculated that he could be persuaded to let her go, and she was right. Once she was past the borders of the commune, she ran through the woods all night until she reached a highway. She hitchhiked back to San Francisco the next day and set up camp in Golden Gate Park. I met her a few weeks after her return.
I guess Rosie’s escape wasn’t the only upside to the assault. There was one more blessing: Ethan.
Rosie suspected she was pregnant when she left Mendocino. The pregnancy kept her from returning. Leaving was so hard—she had only a high school education and she had no way to support herself. Those first nights when she was shivering in Golden Gate Park, she had moments when she thought things would be easier if she just went back to the life she’d known with Aries. But she couldn’t bear the thought of raising a child there.
Aries made mothers separate from their children forty-eight hours after birth, because he said parental attachments were damaging to spiritual development. You couldn’t become your own being if you were overly influenced by your biological forebears. New mothers would come in and nurse a different baby every day in the nursery, because Aries thought that was a way to break individual bonds. Rosie was assigned to nursery duty sometimes, and the kids seemed happy enough.
But after Aries assaulted her, Rosie was able to see his dictums for what they were—just a way to control his female followers. The paternity of the children was often in question, so fathers weren’t attached to individual children as a rule. But Aries knew that devoted mothers would be more concerned with their children’s well-being than with his wants, and he couldn’t allow that to happen.
Yes, you can ask a rude question.
No, she never considered getting an abortion. It was legal then, but Rosie felt the life growing inside her had given her a strength that she otherwise would not have had. Even though she knew that the origins of the child were less than ideal, she was not going to let Aries take something else away from her.
It didn’t bother me that she was carrying someone else’s child. I loved her with all my heart, and I wanted kids myself. By the time Ethan was born, Rosie had fallen fully in love with me, too, and she wanted to settle down and start our family. And the first time I saw Ethan’s face, I knew he was my son. He barely cried when he came out; he was such a peaceful little man, even from the first moment.
We got moved to housing in Diaper Gulch just after Ethan was born. I loved living there, surrounded by California poppies and happy young couples. Rosie liked it for a week or two, but then she started to get angry. She loved Ethan with all her body and soul, and she started thinking about the other women and children stuck back in Mendocino, separated from their newborns. It drove her mad. I’d come home after a day of work and see her pacing the kitchen floor, wild with rage, with Ethan strapped to her chest in a Snugli.
I encouraged her to report the rape and file charges against Aries as a way to get closure. Rosie was wary; she still had Aries’s distrust of the police. And she was scared. She didn’t want to have to see Aries ever again, and she knew she’d have to face him in court. But I convinced her that filing charges was the only way to help the children who were still up at the compound without their mothers caring for them.
The prosecutor was all set to take Rosie’s case. She was a great victim, he said: a young, beautiful mother who was married to an army man. These guru-grifter types were so common in the Bay Area in the sixties and seventies, and the D.A.’s office was desperate to nab at least one of them and make an example out of him. Because of an earlier statutory rape charge against John Brooks, the prosecutor could make it look like all the sex Rosie had was coerced, even though Rosie told him it wasn’t.
But then, no one could find Aries. Rosie got word from another female follower who fled to San Francisco that the compound had disbanded and John Brooks had disappeared into thin air. That’s when she stopped being angry and started being terrified. Aries—John Brooks—could do the math and realize that Ethan was his son, and Rosie was convinced he’d try to take Ethan away from her.
Months went by and Aries did not reappear. My commitment to the army was over, and Rosie and I decided together that I would not re-up this time. She wanted to get the hell out of California, and she wanted us to have more control over our lives. So we decided to move to Montana, which has long been a place where people go when they don’t want to be found. Right, like the Unabomber.
Once we were settled in here, Rosie made me swear that we would never, ever speak about the past. It wasn’t as hard as you might think. Aries had no bearing on our daily lives—the changing of diapers, the commute to work, the clearing of dinner plates. It really is possible to start over.
That doesn’t mean that Rosie didn’t carry some baggage with her to Montana. Sometimes we’d be at a store, and Rosie would just hightail it outside without even saying anything to me because she thought she caught a glimpse of someone from Aries’ Children and wasn’t about to stick around to make sure. She still woke up in the middle of the night sometimes, screaming Aries’s name. Rosie had the same nightmare over and over, about a monkey chasing her through the California woods with Aries’s face.
What? No, no Greenwich Rag reporter ever contacted us. What is the Greenwich Rag?
Christ. I didn’t realize parts of her story were told in a newspaper. Did they have her name? No? That’s good.
No reporters and no one from Rosie’s past ever found us, as far as I know. You’re the first one to put it together. It was much more difficult to find people and information before the Internet, obviously. Rosie took my last name when we got married, and none of the commune people knew who I was. Besides, Aries—Yoni—John Brooks, whatever you want to call him, was on the run from those California charges.
Yes, I get that he harassed that reporter from the Rag, but there was no incentive for him to find and then harass her. Rosie knew all his old secrets, so why would he disturb that hornets’ nest? When she died, I swore to myself that the secret would die with her. I just didn’t think that it was relevant to any of our lives.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Dana! Of course I don’t think Rosie’s death had anything to do with John Brooks. She was in a car accident during the middle of the winter. She was driving back from visiting a friend who had moved to Missoula, and she hit a patch of black ice. Her car spun out of control and flipped over. The cops said she must have been driving pretty fast because of the skid marks her car left.
No! No one was following her that day. C’mon. It had been more than a decade since she saw anyone from Aries’ Children, and as we both know now, John Brooks had reestablished himself in New York. Why would he bother tracking Rosie down? It just doesn’t make any sense.
I didn’t know anything about the Zuni Retreat or John Brooks’s involvement with it until after Ethan’s death. When he came up here a few months back, all I knew was that he was living in New Mexico with Amaya, teaching at a yoga spa.
I mean, I was wary of his talk of spirituality. It sounded like some of the stuff Rosie had encountered, and obviously that put me on edge. I tried to speak to Ethan about it when he first moved to New Mexico, but he waved me off and stopped mentioning it in our phone calls. I told myself that that New Age stuff is lots of places now. There’s
yoga in even the most one-horse town in Montana, and one of the guys I go hunting with meditates. It’s not as fringe as it used to be.
Ethan did seem a little disturbed when I saw him. I asked him if anything was wrong, and he said no. I hadn’t seen him in the flesh since you two split up, but he did call me once a month or so to see how I was and catch up. He told me he was visiting because he wanted to reconnect with his old self a bit. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but he did seem like he was working through something big. I would look at his face over dinner and see his eyes cloud over.
We did get along when he was here, though, and for that I’m grateful. You know, Ethan and I didn’t always see eye to eye on things, but I loved him with all my heart. I didn’t think of it this way until after he died, but in some ways, he was my last piece of Rosie in the flesh. Of course, I have Travis, but Travis has always been more like me. Ethan took after his mother. In more ways than I appreciated at the time.
Dana
At the end of his story, Ray seemed wrung out. I didn’t really know what to do. I had never seen him look as happy as he did when he was talking about his and Rosemary’s first days together, or as crushed as when he described how Ethan took after his mother.
I waited for him to say something, and when he didn’t, I asked gently, “How did the sheriff react when you told him all this?”
Ray shrugged. “He didn’t seem to react much one way or t’other. He asked me if I had any documents that proved what happened in California really happened, and I said no. Rosie and I tried to leave all that stuff behind.”
“Did he seem to know any of it before you told him?” I asked.
“Couldn’t say.”
“Did he know about the Greenwich Rag article? About Yoni’s past?” What sounded like mild questions in my head came out of my mouth like aggressive interrogations, but I couldn’t help myself.
Ray shrugged again. “Couldn’t say. I didn’t know about that article until you just told me. Gurus, communes, and speed freaks were a dime a dozen in the Bay Area in the seventies. It wasn’t necessarily newsworthy.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands up. “I’m sorry to be so intense.”
“Let me make us some breakfast,” Ray said, standing up. He looked over at the clock, “Jesus, it’s almost nine A.M. We’ve been talking for two hours straight.”
“You really don’t have to go to all that trouble,” I said. “I don’t usually eat much breakfast.”
Ray waved me away. “Nonsense. It’s important to have a square meal to start the day.” I thought back to the solo dinners I made for myself after Ethan left. There was certainly something soothing about routine; about going through the same motions every day.
I got a glass of water and sat back down while I watched Ray crack eggs into a ceramic bowl. “Can I just ask you one more question about everything?” I asked.
“Shoot.”
“Why did Rosie keep that necklace? I thought she never wanted to speak or hear or think about her past again.”
Ray turned to face me. “Just because Rosie didn’t want to talk about her past doesn’t mean she didn’t want to take some lessons from it. She couldn’t erase her memory bank even if she wanted to. She kept the necklace as a reminder, like a rubber band on her wrist. Every time she looked at it, she’d remember to keep her own counsel. She was determined that no one else would ever tell her how to live her life.”
I opened my mouth to say something else, but then closed it. I couldn’t formulate a coherent thought. Exhaustion washed over me. “Do you mind if I go rest before breakfast is ready? That was a lot to take in.”
“Suit yourself,” Ray said, taking out a green pepper and a cutting board and not looking up. “I’ll knock on your door when it’s on the table.”
“Thank you.” I walked back to Ethan’s room and flopped down on the plaid comforter. I looked at my phone to distract myself from the thoughts and emotions churning in my head. I had two bars of service—the first reception I’d gotten since arriving at Ray’s—and seventeen missed calls and twelve voice mails.
The first voice mail was from Katie. She was managing my desk while I was away, and she left a detailed message about all the tasks that awaited me on my return. I could hear an edge to her voice. She thought that climbing the ladder at the firm was the apotheosis of making it in New York. She couldn’t understand why I would take a leave and potentially jeopardize my progress (and hers—she knew that her ascent at the firm was tied to mine). I texted her to say thank-you and that I’d be back soon enough, raring to go.
The next ten messages were from Beth. She sounded increasingly hysterical with each one. “Dana, it’s me,” she said in the first message. “Please call me back. I just want to talk. I promise I won’t yell at you.” An hour after that, she called back, the pretense of niceness already gone. “What the fuck, Dana? I called your work, and Katie said you took a leave of absence? Call me now. I am really scared for you.” I didn’t even bother listening to the next eight messages from her. I just deleted them.
The final message was from a 575 number, I assumed Sheriff Lewis. I touched Play, but before I could listen to the message, Ray knocked at the door. “Dana, soup’s on.”
“Just a minute!” I paused the 575 message, then thought about the two voice mails Beth had left that I actually listened to. It was unfair to leave her upset. I hastily texted In Montana visiting Ethan’s dad. Everything is OK. Will call you soon.
When I came back to the kitchen, I found that Ray had set the table just as he had the evening before, cleanly and elegantly. A vegetable-and-sausage scramble was already portioned onto two plates. Looking at the meal, I realized how rare it was for someone to do me such a simple but meaningful kindness.
After breakfast, I retreated to Ethan’s room. I’m not sure whether it was colder in that part of the house or it was a kind of existential chill, but I was very cold. The light wool sweaters I had packed felt too scratchy and harsh against my skin.
I went over to Ethan’s closet to see if there was anything in there I could wear. I found a fuzzy bright-blue poncho that looked like it was part of a Cookie Monster Halloween costume folded on a shelf at the top of the closet, and some dress shirts with Sears labels that also looked like artifacts of Ethan’s high school days. Then there was a tie rack with a few polyester novelty ties that I hoped Ethan hadn’t worn after the age of eighteen: one had Bart Simpson’s face on it; another was purple and printed with tiny yellow Minnesota Vikings.
And then I found a long-sleeved waffle-knit shirt that looked like it had been purchased in this century. I rubbed the fabric between my fingers. It was soft, bordering on luxurious. I took the shirt off its hanger, pressed it to my face, and breathed into it. It had a particular spicy musk that pricked my nose and lit up years of sense memories. It smelled like Ethan.
I put on the shirt, turned off the overhead light, closed the blinds to keep the sun from streaming in, and crawled under Ethan’s flannel comforter. I just wanted to shut off for a little while—to get a respite from everything I had learned. I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t even stay in one position for more than a few seconds. I kept turning from side to side and kicking the blanket up with my restless legs.
Finally I stopped pretending that I was going to get to sleep, and sat up and looked around. My eyes fell on the only light in the room, coming from my phone. I picked it up and saw a text back from Beth: xoxoxox.
I planned to call her back, but I wanted to listen to the rest of my messages first while I still had two bars. I went right to the 575 message. Maybe Sheriff Lewis had found some remarkable break in the case and was calling to tell me about it. More likely he just wanted some elaboration on something I had told him.
But Sheriff Lewis hadn’t left the message. Instead, an unfamiliar woman said, “This message is for Dana Morrison. We’re calling to invite you to an exclusive event at the Zuni Retreat’s homestead.
This invitation is for superlative students only. You were recommended by your instructor Lo. If you’re interested in attending, please call 575-555-1982 for further information.”
This must be the “next-level retreat” Lo had told me about. I put the phone down and got back under the covers, pulling the long sleeves of Ethan’s shirt down over my cold hands to warm them. The warmth traveled through my body quickly and ended up in my chest, and even though I knew it was crazy, I felt Ethan’s presence with me, like I was goddamn Demi Moore throwing a pot in Ghost.
It was suddenly very clear what I had to do. I had to go to the next level. If I could get some more alone time with Lo, I could get information from her about Yoni’s past that might be helpful to the investigation. And I could also ask her more about Ethan, and find some kind of answer for myself.
I called the 575 number that had been left by that unfamiliar female voice. On the third ring, someone picked up. “Hello,” said the voice that had left the message. Hearing it the second time, I noticed it had a lazy, drawn-out Southern California quality.
“Hi, this is Dana Morrison. You called me about a special retreat?”
“Oh yeah. We’ve been waiting on your call.”
“I’m interested in coming,” I said.
“My name is Aspen. I want to tell you a little bit more about the experience. You’ve been specially chosen for the Homestead, Dana. This is an advanced-level retreat that we only offer to students who have been recommended to us by our teachers. We advise that you come for the length of an entire moon cycle in order to create new spiritual habits that will stay with you when you leave.”
I was a little hesitant to agree—a whole month? That would be pretty much my entire leave of absence. Did I want to waste my one moment away from work dwelling on my fucked-up life? Also, knowing how much a week cost, a month must be astronomical. And why were they offering me an advanced-placement class when I’d only been at Zuni for a few days? Wasn’t I a beginner in their spiritual terms? Did I trust someone named after a tony ski resort and/or tree to give me the full story?
Soulmates Page 15
