Cheryl tries to stop herself from praying, but she can’t. She falls to the hardwood floor with a bang of her knees and knits together her fingers and asks for God to give her guidance and watch after her dear, dear daughter. Then she trembles her way through twenty or so Our Fathers and feels a little calmer. The singsong orderliness of the words always does that to her.
She tries calling her sister, but it goes straight to voicemail, and she tries leaving a message, but the storage is full. She tries to tidy up the house and she tries to watch TV and she tries to read the newspaper—hunting for her sister’s byline, where she’ll maybe find some clue as to what’s going on—but nothing works. Her attention keeps looping back to the wolf in the woods hunched over her daughter as though to feast.
Then Hannah screams and Cheryl hurries to her room and snaps on the light and discovers the black balloon. It has somehow separated from the others and bumbled down the hall, where it now hovers at the foot of her daughter’s bed.
Hannah sits upright. She is no longer screaming, but it looks as though she is, her mouth a hole and her body shuddering. Her eyes are open and staring so fixedly at the balloon that Cheryl could swear she sees even without the Mirage.
Hannah does not respond when Cheryl calls her name, not until she grabs her daughter by the shoulders and gives her a little shake. “Mom?” she says, lost in her own private darkness, and they embrace.
It is only then that Cheryl notices the abrasions. On Hannah’s neck, her cheek, her wrist and forearm. What look like bite marks. Cheryl asks her what happened.
Her voice is so brittle when she says, “They came for me in my dreams. They came for me.”
“Who?”
“Them. The shadows.”
Cheryl pulls up Hannah’s shirt to discover her belly, too, is reddened with bites—and across her back run five bloody lines, like the slash of a long-nailed hand.
?
The doorbell chimes—a long, drawn-out, two-toned note. This is immediately followed by a hurried knocking.
Cheryl checks the window before unlocking the door, letting her sister inside. Lela barges in, because that’s the way she enters any room, aggressively kinetic. Her face is flushed and she seems even more keyed up than usual. “So sorry! I’m so sorry. I totally forgot and I’m a terrible person who should be stabbed with hot pokers for the rest of eternity. But something is going on. Something weird. Something scary. Something I don’t totally understand and—”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Cheryl says. Yes, she’s so annoyed with her sister right now. But Cheryl loves her, and right now she can’t do anything but drag her worried sister into a hug.
Lela usually goes board-stiff at any contact, but this time she allows the hug and blasts out a sigh. “Thanks, sis. I really feel like a piece of shit.”
Hemingway is with her—ears perked, eyes bright—and the German shepherd gives Cheryl an inquisitive sniff before clacking across the hardwood and heading to the bathroom and slurping loudly from the toilet.
The front door remains open, and Cheryl sees no sign of the Volvo out front. “Where’s your car?”
“Long story.” Lela’s purse is always stuffed, but today it looks like she’s smuggling a bowling ball in it. She sets it down on the counter with a clunk. Then she turns around and closes the door and twists the deadbolt and leans against the frame as though to brace it. “Okay. I have so much to tell you, but first I want you to tell me about Hannah. You see what I’m doing? Trying to be better? Thinking about others? That’s what’s happening right now. So tell me—it worked? The Mirage actually worked? Is she stoked? Are you stoked? I am. I want to see this thing. It’s sounds so sci-fi. Where is she? I want to see her. Are you okay? Are you still pissed at me? I apologized, you know.”
Cheryl realizes that her arms are crossed, her back is slouched, as if she’s been gut-punched. “Hannah’s on the couch.”
“What’s the matter?” Lela says. “Is something the matter?”
But Cheryl only motions her forward, out of the entryway, into the living room, where Hannah is curled up beneath a Navajo-patterned blanket. The TV is off. A table lamp throws an orb of light. The dog has found her and nudges her arm with his wet muzzle, begging for love. She gives him a scratch behind the ears and says, “Good boy.”
“Hey, kid,” Lela says, and kneels by Hannah and combs her hair back from her forehead. “So sorry I missed lunch. What’s wrong? You get in a fight?”
“No.”
“You sick?”
“A little.”
“But I came here to party.”
Hannah gives her a smile. Her eyes are open but faraway.
“Where’s the thing? The Mirage? I’ve got to see it.”
Hannah doesn’t respond except to scrunch shut her eyes—and Lela looks at her and then at Cheryl with questioning concern.
“Whatever trouble you’ve gotten yourself into,” Cheryl says, “we’re all being punished for it now.”
Chapter 14
LELA AND HER SISTER fight often about God. Lela will accuse her sister of magical thinking and lay out her own atheistic principles as flatly as possible. Such as when she told Cheryl this story about a guy named Bob. Bob’s wife goes to pick the kids up at school. It’s sleeting. It’s 4 p.m., then it’s 5 p.m., then it’s 6 p.m. Bob starts to worry but wonders if maybe his wife told him about some errand or playdate and he simply forgot. He calls her cell, no answer. Then immediately he gets a call back. “I was getting worried,” he says, but it’s not his wife on the other end of the line. It’s a man. An EMT, it turns out. His wife is dead. His son is dead. His daughter is in serious condition. Bob drives like hell to the hospital, and the car skids out on the ice, pinwheels into oncoming traffic, gets crushed. Bob dies. Then, a few days later, so does his daughter.
That’s an article Lela had to write last February. There was no moral, she told Cheryl. There was no right or wrong. Just randomness. The cold fucking indifference of the world. You write for a newspaper long enough, this becomes paralyzingly clear. Your parents drive their minivan into a logging truck when you’re sixteen, this becomes paralyzingly clear. The universe has been around for a long time before us—and it will go on without us. We’re the merest speck in the unfathomable reach of its timeline and geography.
Lela has devoted her life to facts, truth. Not telling people the stories they want to hear but the stories they need to hear. But now she doesn’t have a reasonable explanation for what’s going on. And she doesn’t want to excite her sister’s praise Jesus sensibility. So she offers up the quick version. “I’m investigating some illegal activity connected to real estate development in the Pearl District.” That’s what she says. “The bad guys are pissed.”