Hannah licks the syrup off her lips. “Does she think I’m special because I see dark things?”
His eyebrows are thick black bands that raise now. “Your mother told me about what happened. In the woods.”
“It’s because of my glasses. The Mirage.”
He still has hold of her hand, a warm rough pocket. “Says who?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who says it’s your glasses? Your eyes are just your eyes. Some people can see better up close or far away or at night, but your eyes are just a biological apparatus, nothing special. We’re talking about a different kind of seeing here. The aperture is inside you. Do you know what that word means? Aperture?”
“Like in a camera?”
He nods. “Like in a camera.” He holds up a glass between them so that his face appears warped and magnified before setting it back down. “And sometimes it’s not until puberty when those who are tuned in—extrasensory, touched, on the spectrum, whatever you want to call it—start to encounter the world differently. Just about everyone guesses that there’s more to our lives than sight, sound, smell, taste, touch.”
“Do you mean like Joan of Arc hearing the voice of God?”
His big shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. “Everybody’s got a different way of explaining it.”
“Are you—what did you call it—on the spectrum?”
“Yes,” he says. “The outer edge of it. Or the lower rung of it.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know those cell towers you see on the hillsides?”
“Yes.”
“Sarin’s like that. And maybe you’re like that. Whereas I’ve got more in common with a bent antenna on an old truck.”
“What if I never wore the Mirage?”
“I suspect you’d find other ways to see, sense darkness all the same.” He digs his mobile out of his pocket and holds it up. “Lots of people have the same device, but would you believe they all weigh a different amount? Depending on how many emails or songs or photos or books might be on them. Digital information has mass, because everything has a charge. Everything is energy. Everything is a balance of positive and negative. And I can’t sense the difference between my phone and another, but the most sensitive scale might be able to. There are all sorts of things out there that I can’t sense, that most can’t sense. But you’re different. More than different. Yes, you’re high on the spectrum, but you’re somehow upgraded by the Mirage, and that makes you extraordinary, the next level of spiritual warfare. And that’s a good thing. That’s a very good thing.”
“But I can tell from your voice it’s also a bad thing.”
“You could say that.” His forehead creases with worry. “Earlier, at the restaurant, when the man came for you? I think he just wanted you as bait. A way of getting to Lela. But I think you surprised him. He must have sensed you were a threat to put a hitchhiker on you. If you’re a threat, you’re a target.”
“They want to kill me.”
“Or worse.”
“What’s worse than killing?”
“Believe me. There’s worse.”
“Am I old too? Inside, I mean.”
“That I don’t know.”
“Aunt Lela is always saying so. She calls me an old fuddy-duddy sometimes, but other times she calls me an old soul.”
Juniper looks at Lela, who gives him a pinched smile. “Maybe that’s so. I couldn’t tell you. All I know is, you’re part of the light, which means you’re part of this fight.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” Hannah says.
He leans back in his chair and settles his hands over his knees and cranes his neck toward her mother and aunt. “In the long run, I don’t know. But tonight, you’re stuck with me.”
Chapter 17
HANNAH IS TUCKED into bed and Cheryl wishes she could join her daughter there, but she can’t seem to settle down. She is a parade of nervous tics, jittering her leg, chewing the inside of her cheek, squeezing the bridge of her nose, picking at her fingernails. She paces Juniper’s office while he sits at his desk, his eyes small but watchful beneath the ledge of his forehead. She knots and unknots the belt of her cardigan, pushes her hair out of her face. She doesn’t speak for a long time—and when she does, her voice comes in a skittish rush, saying the same things repeatedly with different words: “I don’t understand” and “Why would God let this happen to us?”
Juniper lets her speak without interruption until now. “There’s no such thing as God.”
This quiets and stills her, and she stares with a gaping mouth. “How can you say that? After what’s happened tonight?”
“I’ve gone through the Christian thresher. I know all the Sunday school songs.” Earlier he filled a glass, all the way to the lip, with Scotch and ice. He’s drained it now, but fishes out a cube to suck. “It’s comforting, I know. The idea that Space Dad is watching out for us. And if you appeal to him earnestly enough, he’ll parachute down and grant you wishes. But I’m sorry to say that’s not the way it works.” He looks a little sad, and she thinks he must be drunk.
Of course, this isn’t the first time she’s heard such a claim. She’s thought it herself, especially in the years since her church, the Light of the World, dissolved into an FBI investigation and tabloid news story. But at a time like this, the possibility of a godless world makes her feel as though the floor beneath her has suddenly revealed itself to be a rope strung hundreds of feet in the air. She can’t abide that kind of vulnerability. “Don’t say that,” she says, and goes to a bookshelf, pulls a leather-bound Bible off the shelf, hurls it at him. “You’re just going to make things worse!”
The book opens up in the air, its pages fluttering violently. He holds up an arm to try to catch it, but it falls open-faced on the floor. “Maybe we should talk again in the morning,” he says.
“God is going to take care of me and my daughter!” Her volume doesn’t make it sound any truer, but she feels like she needs to make the appeal regardless.
His voice is gentler when he speaks again. “I’m not trying to be an asshole, okay? There’s hope. There’s plenty of hope. Believe, but believe differently.” He takes more ice into his mouth and crunches it down. “Believe in light.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means there’s plenty of good in the world to offset all the ugliness. But you can’t just sit back and expect someone to take care of you. You’ve got to fight for it.”
But that’s exactly why she stuck with the cult even when it asked her to hand over all her money and wear a tinfoil pyramid on her head and hide in a cave system. That’s why she kept saying she was married a year after her husband took off for Alaska. She wants someone to look after her, damn it. She hates the whimpering defeat in her voice when she says, “You’re going to help us?”