“I don’t know.” Her daughter wipes some of the dirt off her jeans and tentatively touches the Mirage. “I don’t trust my eyes. I don’t understand what I see.”
“What do you think you saw?” She curls her grip around the steering wheel so tightly the rubber squeaks. “Hannah? You can tell me anything. You know that, don’t you? Did that man do something to you? Thank god I came when I did. I feel sick. I feel sick all over just thinking about it. What did he do to you? You can tell me. It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. Was he one of those perverts?”
“No.”
“He wasn’t about to . . .”
“No. He was talking about Lela. He wanted to know where she was, when we had last seen her.”
“Lela? Lela. What do you mean, Lela?” Cheryl can’t process this and swings her head back and forth, trying to split her attention between the road and her daughter and nearly rear-ends the semi in front of them. She stomps on the brake and the car rocks, and Cheryl throws out an arm to catch Hannah. It’s instinctive. She does it all the time. And Hannah can’t stand it. Says that if she wants to keep her safe, she should keep both hands on the wheel.
“I’m sorry,” Cheryl says. “I’m just so scared. I’m just so glad you’re all right. But what’s this about Lela? Is that what he meant when he called me the sister?” Her tone shifts from scared and uncertain to accusatory. “This is her fault, then. She never thinks about anyone but herself. And now she’s made yet another bad decision—pissing off the wrong people—and it’s affecting us all. I could kill her. I really could.”
Her daughter is quiet a long time before she says, “I’m seeing things I shouldn’t see. I don’t know if they’re real or not. They look real.”
“What?” It takes Cheryl a moment to follow. She’s too focused on Lela, her stupid, reckless, selfish asshole of a sister. “What are you talking about? What did you see?”
Hannah’s hands twist in her lap as if she’s worrying an invisible rosary. “When I looked at the man, I saw something. It was like a shawl. Like a black shawl. And when he came near me, when the shawl touched me, I felt sick.” She wraps her arms around her stomach and leans forward. “I still feel sick.”
?
God is punishing Cheryl. She knows she shouldn’t feel this way, but she can’t help it. She didn’t grow up in a religious family, but when their parents slammed head-on into a logging truck coming over the Santiam Pass, she found God at the same time Lela rejected Him. She was twenty at the time, her sister sixteen. They lived with an aunt and then with each other until Lela graduated high school. There must have been a time—when they were younger, just girls playing dress-up and house—that they got along, but she can’t recall it.
And then she got together with Joe, and they found themselves drawn to a church, though the congregation met in a vacant store in a strip mall. Cheryl wouldn’t recognize it as a cult until years later, when the headlines in the newspapers referred to it as such.
They were called the Light of the World, and her ex-husband, Joe, soon became one of the deacons. Theirs was one of many congregations nationwide, all under the leadership of a woman named Katherine Prophet, to whom they tithed 50 percent of their income. Prophet would travel from congregation to congregation, giving sermons and leading workshops. She wore silken robes, striped purple like the evening sky, and carried a staff and wore an oily arnica-based perfume.
The Light of the World had its own bible—printed up at Kinko’s—that read like a combination of Catholic mysticism and new age spirituality. In the final year of the church, Prophet’s sermons became more and more apocalyptic, and everyone was directed to sell their possessions and travel to Wyoming, to an elaborate cave system where they would weather the end of days. There were air filters piped in and thousands of gallons of water and lockers full of dried goods and an armory of assault rifles and ammunition. Cheryl remembers the shoes especially. Getting to pick out twenty pairs of shoes for Hannah, in ascending size, that would supposedly last her through the years. She isn’t sure how many people crushed into the cave altogether, maybe five hundred, but after a few weeks, the apocalypse failed to arrive and everyone wandered away, and soon Prophet was facing charges of gunrunning and money laundering and embezzlement.
The months that followed were difficult for Cheryl, mostly a blur. She can remember a lot of crying and yelling. Joe headed to Alaska, looking for work at a cannery, and never came home. She moved in with Lela for a few months, and when her sister called her an empty-headed dumbass who preferred fantasy over reality because it inflated her sense of worth, Cheryl slapped her and said, “Don’t you dare talk about me like that. Don’t you dare.” She went back to school and became a case manager at a social services agency on the east side, walking distance from her home. This felt like a kind of penance, helping the beaten wives and neglected children, the strung-out, the diseased, the disabled, the poor and helpless. She had become her own church, a congregation of one.
These days, God is no longer present in Cheryl’s life. Except when she is at her highest and lowest—moments like this one—and suffers from paroxysms of faith. As she drives her daughter home, she whispers, “St. Michael, St. Michael, let blue flames surround me,” one of the prayers of her old church meant to stave off evil. “St. Michael, St. Michael, let blue flames surround me.”
?
They live in a rented bungalow off Hawthorne, and on its front stoop they find a bouquet of balloons—left by a neighbor, along with a card congratulating Hannah on her newfound vision. “We’re so happy for you,” the script inside reads. “What a miracle and what a gift.” Cheryl felt the same until now, as her daughter speaks of auras.
There is a black balloon tied among the dozen. It looks wrong, the opposite of festive, but Cheryl barely registers its presence as she collects them from the stoop and hurries inside to set them on the kitchen table.
Hannah is already in the bathroom, the door half-closed. She has complained of feeling ill the whole ride home, and now Cheryl can hear her heaving, again and again, until it sounds as though she might turn inside out. She knocks tentatively and her daughter says, “Get this thing off me,” and so she helps remove the Mirage and wash Hannah’s face and brush her teeth before ushering her to bed, pale-skinned and shivering.