Diana had seen the images so many times, and she knew them so well, that describing them made her realize how inadequate words were for the task she had at hand. She felt like her words would fail, and the only way to truly convey the meaning of what she saw would be to take Jason there.
But she knew that was impossible. She couldn't find the place, didn't even know if it existed.
But it had to. If it didn't, if it were all in her head then...Vienna Woods, here I come.
"What happens there?" Jason said.
"I dig."
"Dig?"
Diana nodded. "I see something on the ground in the moonlight. Something white. It's a human bone, and I drop to my knees and I dig and I dig until I pull the bone out of the ground." She swallowed. "It's Rachel. It's Rachel's skull, and I pull it out of the ground."
"Jesus." Jason's eyes were wide, full of sympathy. "It sounds like a nightmare."
"But it's not. It only comes to me—or it used to come to me—when I was awake."
"Used to?"
"It mostly stopped a few years ago, before I moved here. It's only happened a few times since then. I can still remember it vividly, but it doesn't come upon me that way anymore."
"You want another one?" Jason said, pointing at the empty bottles. He didn't wait for Diana to answer before he went to the refrigerator and brought back two more. He sat down, took a drink from his, and let out a soft belch. "I guess you're lucky. You moved on, time passed, and these...visions...stopped. It's not surprising, really. Time heals, I suppose."
"It's supposed to," Diana said.
"If you believe fortune cookies and greeting cards."
"But seeing that woman yesterday, talking to her, that brought it all back again." Diana held the cold beer bottle between her two hands on the tabletop. "I used to go looking for that place, that clearing in the woods. I thought that if I could find it, if I could find that spot, I'd find out what happened to Rachel."
"You thought she was buried there."
"Yes. But it wasn't that simple. I just thought I would know something, that some part of the mystery would be put to rest."
Jason scratched the top of his head. "You know, Diana, you're telling me all of this stuff, and I get the feeling you think it all makes you crazy or odd or different in some way. But I have to be honest, nothing you're telling me seems that unusual. You lost a member of your family, and you're trying to get over it. That could take a lifetime."
"You make it sound so logical, so...normal."
"I think it is."
"Except I didn't always go looking for that place by choice."
"What do you mean?" Jason said.
"Sometimes I'd go there...to the middle of the woods. But I wouldn't know how I got there. And a couple of times, I didn't wake up. People found me, digging in the woods with my bare hands, and they'd have to call an ambulance or bring me back to town, and I wouldn't remember any of it, and I wouldn't tell anyone why I was there. Except I knew what I was looking for. I always knew."
Jason nodded slowly. Diana could imagine the wheels turning in his brain, the reassessment of everything he thought about her.
"It's bad, isn't it?"
"It doesn't sound like a walk in the park on a sunny day."
Diana sighed. "There's more."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"I've never told you the full story of how Rachel disappeared, have I?" Diana said.
"The full story? Tonight is the most I've ever heard."
"I really don't like to talk about it."
"You don't have to now if you don't want to."
"I want to," Diana said. "I need to."
Jason shrugged. "I have a fridge full of beer."
Diana felt half of a smile form on her face. She took a deep breath.
"My dad left the family when I was twelve and Rachel was nine. Just up and left one day. Packed his shit and told Mom he was moving to Colorado. I think he still lives there, but we stopped hearing from him after a while. He was supposed to get remarried."
"So more than one person in your family has disappeared, I guess."
Diana nodded. "Right. Anyway, after he flew the coop, my mother went into a deep spiral. She's never really come out of it. That's why she's in the hospital."
"Alzheimer's, right?"
"Yeah." Fifty-fifty chance. "But when she went to ground after my dad left, she didn't leave Rachel and me much choice. We had to raise ourselves, you know? There would be weeks at a time when my mom wouldn't even come out of the bedroom. We wouldn't even see her. She didn't bathe. She didn't get dressed. She barely ate. She just..."
"Disappeared?"
Diana nodded again.
"It must have been shitty."
"We did what we had to. We didn't have any choice."
"Weren't there any relatives you could have called?"
"Not many. And I felt sorry for my mother. I wanted to protect her. I kept thinking that if I kept things going at home, she would eventually come around and be okay."
Someone started singing out in the street, and soon they were joined by two more voices, ridiculously out of tune and loud.
"Somebody's having fun," Diana said.
"I ought to go run them in," Jason said. "Disturbing the peace and general obnoxiousness." He scratched his jaw. "Go ahead."