Right now there are thousands of transmissions streaming through everyone. Emails, phone calls, text messages, Wi-Fi and radio and television signals. Right now there are billions of particles of dark matter swirling through this very room, millions of bacteria creeping across her hand, and she can’t see any of it. Right now there are thousands of smells that her dog perceives and she does not. Is it that much of a reach to believe that other forces might surround her? Not anymore. Not after what she has witnessed.
This isn’t about chasing a story anymore. The story has found her. She is living the story. She is the story. Letters on a page don’t matter. Deadlines mean nothing. For the first time in a long time, she feels a singularity of focus. She isn’t researching old files and she isn’t dreaming up future headlines. She is firmly lodged in the blurred-edge present, where she is being hunted and her sister and niece are in danger because of it.
Hannah is calling for her mother, but her mother isn’t answering. Cheryl’s eyes are closed and her fingers are sewn together as she mutters a prayer. “St. Michael, St. Michael, let blue flames surround me. St. Michael, St. Michael, let blue flames surround me.”
Lela stands and grabs her sister by the shoulders and squeezes her fingernails into the flesh, and Cheryl’s prayer trails off as a stare seals between them. “Your daughter needs you. And I need you. Okay?”
Cheryl doesn’t complain or scold, doesn’t make any bullying demands. Instead she looks at Lela needily and wilts before her as if she were the big sister. “What are we going to do?”
“Get your shit under control. Pack a bag for you and Hannah.”
“Where are we going? The police?”
“I think we need a different kind of help.”
By the time Lela washes Hemingway’s face off with a wet washcloth, her sister and niece are ready. She shoulders her purse, weighted with the skull. “Give me the keys,” she says, and snaps her fingers.
Cheryl says, “I can drive,” and Lela says, “You drive like an old lady.”
“Well, you drive like a crazy person.”
“A night like this, the crazy people are in charge.”
Cheryl looks like she might fight her, but Hannah utters a sick whimper and she attends to her instead. Lela snatches the keys, swings open the door, and says, “Let’s go.”
Cheryl doesn’t have a garage, her Chevy Malibu parked in a weed-choked spit of gravel alongside the house. Lela hurries there. Hemingway limps beside her. She looks up and down the block, where the night swells around the pools of streetlamps, before hoisting Hemingway into the passenger seat and cranking the key. “Come on,” she yells at her sister.
But Cheryl lingers in the yard, hovering near Hannah, who looks as pale as a mushroom. One of Hannah’s knees buckles. She wobbles in place. Then leans forward and pukes between her feet. It takes a minute for her to get it all out, and then her mother ushers her into the backseat and belts her in and says, “It’s like she’s got some darkness in her.”
Lela shifts into reverse and stomps on the accelerator. The driveway’s entry is so steep that the rear carriage strikes the street with a screech. “Sorry,” she says, and then drives randomly for a few blocks, left, left, right, left, left, right, keeping her eyes on her rearview mirror, making sure they aren’t followed.
Chapter 16
THROWING UP HELPS. It helped earlier too. Hannah knows the feeling won’t last, but for the moment her balance feels more stable and she can think her way through the pain rather than being owned by it. Her head pulses. Her bones might be rotten chalk, and her muscles might be wet clay. The bite marks and scratch marks burn. If she were a color, she would be some shade of yellow veined with green, the color of infection.
Her mother dabs at her cheek with her sleeve and says, “It’s going to be all right,” and her aunt Lela crushes the gas and cranks the wheel one way, then another, making Hannah lean so hard at one intersection that her head hits the window.
“Lela!” her mother says. “Please. You’re going to get us killed.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid.”
“Slow down. For Hannah’s sake.”
Their speed ebbs slightly, but their direction keeps changing and the engine still whines like a strained lawnmower. Hannah feels another twinge of nausea and thinks it might help if she could see. Mazing through darkness bewilders and dizzies her. Her hands find her backpack, the zipper, the Mirage. Cool and slippery in her hands. “Can you help me?” she says to her mother, who seems relieved by the question. A simple task, a way to serve.
“Of course,” her mother says, “but are you sure you want to wear it?”
“I don’t want to be in the dark right now.”
Her mother fits the visor into place and lifts the hair behind her ear and tucks the plug into the lightning port there. Then Hannah takes a deep breath and presses the power button on the stem. It takes a minute, but gradually her mind makes sense of the sensory data flooding through it. It’s like growing a new hand, she supposes, and trying to figure out how to peel an orange, sign your name.
In the front seat sits a woman. Her aunt. Lela. That is Lela. She strangles the wheel with her hands while they fall down what looks like a lighted tunnel, a nighttime street. Lela’s eyes jog between the road and the rearview. She’s watching Hannah. Their speed decreases further, and the car slides briefly into the other lane before she corrects their course. “Wow,” Lela says. “Cool. They’re like Jetsons’ sunglasses.” She’s trying to make her voice sound happy, joking, Hannah can tell, and she’s mostly succeeding. “Can you see me?”
Hannah studies her aunt for a long moment. “I can see you.”
“Well?” Lela says. “Come on—what do you think? Is this how you imagined your crazy aunt Lela? How do I look?” She twists her head around and gives her a quick, goofy expression before returning her eyes to the road.
Hannah can’t help but smile. “You look . . . like one of my favorite people.”
Over the next few minutes, her mother prays and her aunt babbles. She talks about all the movies they’re going to watch—“Hearing Star Wars isn’t exactly the same as seeing it”—and all the sports they’re going to play—“I can throw you a baseball and not knock your teeth out”—and all the volcanic sunsets they’re going to enjoy.
But Hannah only half hears her aunt’s voice. In part because the sickness is rising in her again, making her nerves feel haywire, her skin cold, her stomach sloshy and acidic. And in part because she’s distracted by the nighttime city. The marquee of the Laurelhurst Theater, which flares upward like an electric peacock feather. The yellow squares that stack into the windows of a high-rise apartment. The neon smears of a bar, pizza parlor, Chinese takeout. The clusters of crowds, the streams of bicyclists, so many bicyclists, their wheels spinning with reflectors and their handlebar lights flashing a warning. It’s kaleidoscopic.
And then they start over the Burnside Bridge, and the downtown rises before them, pillars and tiers of light that range the sky and slur their reflection across the river. Above the city, clouds gather and sop up the yellow-green glow. But something cuts through them. Something darker than anything else in the night. Hannah leans so close to the window, her breath fogs it. “What’s that?” she says.