by Cathy Lamb
The red car was coming straight at me.
The sunlight behind it momentarily blinded me. It was a tight road, one lane, mountain to my right, the cliff to my left. I hit the brakes. The other driver was looking away; she didn’t see me at first.
I pulled my truck as far to the right as I could go, but it was too late. The other driver’s car fishtailed as she hit the brakes, but it still barreled toward me.
The impact was fast and hard, my air bag exploded, my body jerked back. The metal crunched, the windshield split and shattered, and smoke spilled from the engine. The premonition had changed again, fluid, versatile, confusing.
At the end, as usual, things were fuzzy.
One of us died. I don’t know if it was me or the other driver but I could see death . . . although death seemed to shift in and out.
It was terrifying.
And there was something else. Something about the other driver. I could not figure it out. I had never been able to figure it out. I shut my eyes and went through every inch of the premonition. What was the mystery here? What was I not getting?
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I didn’t want to die. But I’m sure she didn’t, either.
I could only see my hands on the steering wheel. They were shadowed here and there, and it was only quick flashes, but my hands looked like my hands about now. Not older, no more age spots, no more wrinkles or lines.
Would the event in this premonition happen soon?
And if it did, what could I do to save myself . . . and save her?
Jules sent us, by e-mail, three different invitations for her wedding. “Which one do you like most?” she asked my mother and aunts and me.
One of them had a photo of her and Mack, together, on his motorcycle. Orange and yellow flames were Photoshopped behind them. They were in full leathers, but Mack wore a black bow tie and Jules had a lacy white veil attached to her helmet.
The text: “Come Celebrate With Us as We Take the Ultimate Ride!”
“Ooo!” my mother said. “I like that one.”
A second photo was of Jules and Mack in jeans and matching black leather vests, black knitted hats, and black sunglasses.
They were flexing their biceps, Jules in front of Mack, showing off their matching tattoos of each other’s face. The text: “We Have the Tattoos, Now We’re Getting Hitched.”
“Their inner-twined souls are coming through keenly here,”
Aunt Camellia said. “You can feel the love.”
The third photo was of Jules and Mack, both naked, from the back, standing on a beach during sunset, their motorcycles nearby. They were holding hands, my sister’s long blonde hair flying in the wind, Mack looking huge next to her. The text, scrawling across their rear ends: “Don’t Be a Beach Bum, Come to Our Wedding!”
“This one,” Aunt Iris said, tapping it. “I think it’s modern.
We all need to embrace our individual bodies and stop being so critical, so shocked, by nakedness. Plus, the message is clear and I like clear and practical messages.”
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“Which one do you like, Evie?” my mother asked, as my aunts turned to me.
I studied all three. “I like all of them, but I think I’d go with the tattoos of each other’s faces. They’re getting married, it’s permanent, like the tattoos. Plus, they look tough, and inside we all know they are two of the mushiest people on the planet Earth, so it adds to that underlying humor.”
We Skyped Jules, told her our thoughts, and she decided on the tattoo invitation. “Tattoo invitation it is. We’re going to hire a woman to paint fake tattoos on anyone who wants one. Plus, the invitations to our friends will tell them to wear their leathers!
What do you think?”
“I think it’s going to be a tough wedding,” I drawled. “Bunch of tough guys and gals.”
She looked confused, then she laughed. “Oh! I get it, Evie!
Because leather is tough.”
“You got it.”
“Mom, you’re going to remember to wrap black leather ribbons around the vases of the flowers for the tables, right?”
“Yes, I got your message! We’ll wrap the vases in black leather.”
“Aunt Iris, did you get our motorcycle photo?”
“I did!” Aunt Iris said. “And I juxtaposed it against crazy-looking orchids bent this way and that. The orchids look like they’re talking to each other. We’ll have that picture in each floral centerpiece.”
“Thank you!” Jules grinned. “And Aunt Camellia, you’re still making the lotions as the wedding gifts, right?”
“The lotion will be pink with a black label,” Aunt Camellia said, “and it’ll smell like roses. I’m going to call it Motorcycle Grease.”
“I love it!” Jules gushed. “Wait ’til I show you my wedding dress! My wedding dress designer—her name’s June and she’s on the Oregon coast—is almost done. But don’t ask about it! It’s a surprise!”
“What’s Mack going to wear?” Aunt Iris asked.
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Jules was confused. “His leathers. Of course. Plus!” She put a finger up in the air. “A bow tie. Like in the invitation that lost.”
I smiled at Jules, and she smiled back. “Hello, maid of honor sister-love! You look beautiful as always. When are you going to buy a motorcycle?”
“When my alpacas start to talk. When my butt gets smaller.
When the goats stop escaping. When I start to want to run instead of only running when I have to. When my boobs get bigger.
So your answer is: Never. I am never getting on a motorcycle.” I had enough scary things going on in my life. I limit my life to safe pastimes only. A little blue house in the country by the ocean. A bookstore. Tea. Cake with thick icing. Reading at night on my porch. Caring for my animals. Having a nutritional slice of pie each night.
“I wanted you to ride in on a motorcycle down the aisle, gunning it, soooo loud. Growling.”
“Oh, hell, no.” Jules wasn’t kidding.
“You could learn to ride for the wedding,” Aunt Iris said. “I could help you. You would only need to know how to ride for twenty feet. Until you arrived at the gazebo.”
“No.”
“Maybe we could get her a fake motorcycle?” my mom
asked. “Like a kid motorcycle?”
“No.”
“Evie has enough going on without getting on a motorcycle,”
Aunt Camellia said.
“Yep,” I said.
“Okay,” Jules said. She brightened. “How about if Mack rides you in on a wheelie?”
“No. Double no. Hear me quiver with fear.”
We talked about the wedding, the plans, and hung up, but not before Jules told us all she loved us. “Especially you, Evie!”
She grinned.
“Especially you, Jules!” I said back.
Which is what we had said to each other our wholes lives, starting when we were little.
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“I’m coming over to the island soon to help with the rest of the details!”
We waved and blew kisses.
“We can’t wait to see you!” Aunt Camellia called out. “May blessings follow you always.”
“Always remember we love you!” my mother said. “Be safe on your bike. Don’t go too fast. Remember that a happy body eats vegetables.”
“On a practical note, start making lists of everything you need to do for the wedding, and scratch them off when you’re done,” Aunt Iris said. “Don’t let wedding details slip through the cracks, or you’ll want to crack a week before the wedding like the other brides we’re dealing with now. They’re all crack-pots.”
Jules and I are different.
She is ebullient. Funny. Loud. Outgoing. Brave.
I am quiet. Reserved. Thinking all the time. Waiting in fear or trepidation for the next premonition or disaster.
Jules rides motorcycles too fast. She skydives. She hang glides.
> She likes to run, and will even run when a bear is not chasing her, which is about the only time I can imagine running and liking the ability to run.
I would get on a motorcycle only if there was a tsunami behind me and for no other reason. One is supposed to stay in one’s seat on a plane, not jump out of it with a parachute. I would never hang glide for any reason.
Jules loves parties and social gatherings.
I don’t love parties or social gatherings except on rare occasions.
Jules like wine and beer and hard liquor. She does not mind getting buzzed or drunk now and then. I will never get buzzed or drunk. I need to be completely in control of my mind as much as possible.
Jules travels whenever she gets the chance on her motorcycle, meeting new people, seeing new things.
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I like my quiet life on the island, my beloved animals, my bookstore and my books, and probably will not leave it again, or leave only rarely. I protect my sanity as best I can.
And that is probably why we are so close. We are different, but we adore each other.
If for some inexplicable cosmic reason Jules is in the red car coming straight toward me in my premonition, trust me when I tell you that I will send my truck straight over that cliff before a hair on my sister’s blonde head is harmed.
C h a p t e r 1 1
Betsy Baturra
Multnomah County Jail
Portland, Oregon
1975
Jail, Betsy decided, is actually hell.
It’s a hell wrapped in concrete, wire, and steel bars that has landed on Earth, dangerous and suffocating. She had a metal plank and a sinking, stained, skinny mattress for a bed. She had bars keeping her trapped like an animal; a toilet within her cell with no privacy; and a small, battered sink. She was told what to do and when to do it. The food was horrible, the lack of sunlight graying to life, the lack of freedom deadly to her mind and soul.
Betsy heard the crying at night, sometimes wailing when someone was having a particularly bad time. She heard the swearing and the shrieking fights, the yelling at each other and the heated arguing with the guards. She heard the orders being barked, and she saw prisoners, some of whom were mentally ill, or who had become mentally ill in prison, dragged out by guards for the slightest infractions.
Her roommate, Rainbow, whose real name was Margaret Cholo, was back. She had to go to isolation when she hit the guard with three fingers who finally came to check on Betsy when Betsy was dying from blood loss after giving birth. But
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Rainbow was different now. She was scared. She muttered to herself one color after another, rocking back and forth.
Apricot.
Indigo.
Magenta.
Plum.
Sienna.
Violet.
Rainbow hid under her bed whenever she could. She wrapped her arms around herself and whimpered and shook in the corner.
Rainbow was dirty, her hair a wreck. She had refused to shower because she thought she would be dragged out of the shower and put in isolation again, only this time she would be
“naked and white and in a beige cell alone with steel gray guards staring at me, touching me with yucky pink fingers.”
Betsy tried to comfort Rainbow as best she could, their tears blending together.
The abject loneliness and the hopelessness was a gaping wound within Betsy. She could hardly eat, hardly sleep, her mind crumbling from losing Baby Rose and Johnny. She worried about Tilly, too, sweet Tilly, Johnny’s little sister, who was now in foster care according to her attorney. There was no one to take care of her.
Betsy thought of her own mother, of her own father. They had never come to see her, and they never would, she knew that.
She was gone to them, a humiliation, a curse from the devil.
They had undoubtedly wrapped their arms around themselves in their fundamentalism and moved on. She wrapped her arms around herself, cold and alone.
When Betsy was younger, she got into trouble many times.
Her father, Hansen, was a religious, hypocritical fundamentalist and her mother was weak, cowed and went along with everything he said. Now and then he would rage at her mother, insist that she obey, submit, behave. “Woman, do not break God’s law! I am the head of the household. You are my helpmate. You
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are one of my ribs. You are steeped in the sins of Eve. Do not question me.”
Her mother rarely questioned her father, but when he was in a bad mood, and he found her not obedient “enough,” he would sometimes slap her, Mary’s black hair flying out of her bun. “I am doing this for your own good! May Jesus forgive you for your insolence!”
Mary would tilt her head down in defeat and submission, her golden eyes closed.
When Betsy told them, when she was five, of her first premonitions, of someone getting hurt or drowning or, twice, ministers being arrested, and when those premonitions came true, her father had many consequences for her after he overcame his shocked anger. First, he called her a liar. Then, when the premonitions came through, he hit her with a Bible, he made her memorize long passages, he performed a séance on her, and he taped her mouth shut “so the devil inside of you will die.”
He then told people at their small church, a church that did not like outsiders, to pray for his daughter, as she was “possessed” by demons and they had to “pull the demons out.”
She was then, as a little girl, ostracized by the parents and the children of that church because no one wanted their children near a demonic little girl.
Betsy was scared of her premonitions but more scared of her father, who was a menacing, yelling figure who called her, a young child, “evil” and “possessed by the devil.” That the devil possessed her made her wet her pants every time she thought of it.
Soon she knew not to tell her parents what she saw in the future, but when she was older she also knew she had to take action to save the people she loved. She let the air out of a tire on Miss Jane’s car next door when she was seven. She knew how to do that because her mother’s uncle showed her how to change a tire. “Your father is clueless and lazy, Betsy, so you’re going to have to know how to do it,” Uncle Jacko told her.
Betsy knew that Miss Jane was going to help her friend Dixon on his farm that day, based on the clothes she was wear-
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ing, the same clothes as in the premonition, and her arm was going to be ripped off by some sort of farm equipment. She could not have Miss Jane losing an arm. Miss Jane was only twenty-five and baked the best chocolate chip cookies, and she snuck them to Betsy through a hole in their fence. By letting out the air in Jane’s tire, Betsy ensured that Jane couldn’t go to the farm, and she avoided having her arm ripped off.
Miss Jane did not like her father. She sprayed him with her hose when he was yelling at Betsy one day in the front yard after church. Her father was telling Betsy that she was not “a good Christian. Not prayerful, not obedient, an embarrassment to the family!” He was soaked through from Miss Jane’s hose. When Hansen charged her, his face mottled and red, Miss Jane sprayed him right in the head, then told him, “If you take one step onto my property, Hillbilly Hansen, I will shoot you.”
Her father was livid, but he backed off and yanked Betsy inside, her feet dragging across the lawn. The next day Children’s Services came out to talk to her dad and mom and to her. The lady was nice to her, but Betsy was petrified because her father whispered to her, “Don’t say anything bad about me or you will go to hell and I will spank you there.”
Betsy also knew that her dad would hit her with the Bible again or lock her in the closet in the basement and tell her to copy a book out of the Bible if she opened her mouth. While she was locked up, he would give her only bread and water, as if she were Paul in one of the jail cells in the Bible. She hated that because when she became super hungry her whole body shook and she became dizzy. She told the
Children’s Services lady that everything was “happy at home.”
The next time Miss Jane saw her father, she called him “Mr.
Monster Father” to his face. She was fearless! Betsy tried not to laugh, but Hansen heard her and she spent an afternoon in the closet.
Betsy knew exactly where three teenagers were lost when she was twelve because she saw one of them falling off the path and into a ravine. The three lost teenagers were on the news, and everyone was talking about them. “The news is grim, folks,” a
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newscaster said. “The temperature is expected to drop below freezing tonight.” Betsy knew what that meant: The boys would freeze to death.
When her father left for men’s Bible study, she called her friend Collette, from school, and asked to speak to Collette’s mother. Aurelia was a police officer. She told her everything, knowing what her father would do if he found out. But they were kids, too! Like her. They shouldn’t freeze to death. Aurelia and a police lieutenant came to her home only a minute after her father arrived home. Her father tried to prevent her from speaking. “She is possessed,” he told the police. “She knows nothing.”
The lieutenant, whose nephew was one of the three lost teenagers, insisted that she be allowed to speak. Aurelia had to haul her father, screeching Bible verses, spittle flying, away from her. Hansen was doubly embarrassed that a woman was stronger than he was and that she was able to wrestle him to the floor, his head in a head lock. Betsy told the lieutenant what she saw, her body trembling, as she knew she was in so much trouble. As usual, her mother stood by, a weak mouse.
“I see a huge rock. Flat. Like how a rock would look if you sliced it in half, but it’s on a mountain. It goes way up in the sky.
There are pine trees and a river way below, and the river looks like a snake. All three of the boys are down by the river where there’s an island in the middle of it.”
“That sounds like the south side of Bald Peek,” Aurelia said, her hand still on Hansen’s head, squished into the carpet. “Off the Mahoney Trail.”
Hansen screeched a prayer of punishment and penance.
Calls were made. A search in a whole new direction began.
