Winter, page 4
He put an arm around her shoulders and drew her into the house. His breath reeked of alcohol. “Call off the Coast Guard, Betty!” he called. “Look what the cat dragged in!”
Aunt Betty emerged from the kitchen carrying a dishtowel and a china plate, which dropped from her hand the instant she saw Kerry standing in the entryway. It hit the ground and smashed into a hundred pieces. “Kerry!” she cried, and ran toward her niece.
Standing there, enveloped by her closest living relatives, Kerry had a moment of wondering why she had ever left this house. But that only lasted for a few moments. Aunt Betty was weeping openly and clinging to her, repeating, “We were so worried about you,” over and over. Uncle Marsh knuckled Kerry lightly on the chin and said, “I was just joking about the Coast Guard. We figured if you’d wanted us to know where you were, you’d have told us.”
And then it all came flooding back. Uncle Marsh was a drunk, a harsh man who had taken every tenderness ever offered him and turned it away, using a crude sense of humor like a shield against the blades of kindness. Aunt Betty gave new meaning to the term codependent, and the worse Uncle Marsh behaved toward her—or anyone else, for that matter, within earshot of her—the more she decided he needed to be protected. From what, Kerry was never really sure. But she became his one-woman security squad, running interference, keeping him safe from his own worst instincts. She wept openly and often, which drove him mad. The madder he got, the more she decided that he was being persecuted, and the more she wept.
Kerry hadn’t been inside for ten minutes before she realized that coming back here was one of the biggest mistakes she had ever made. She would have been better off letting them think she was dead. At least then they could have continued driving each other crazy without dragging her back into it.
The next morning she sat at the table having breakfast with Aunt Betty. Uncle Marsh was still asleep—sleeping off the effects of the previous night’s alcohol intake, Kerry guessed, although Aunt Betty insisted that he had been “working awfully hard lately.” Kerry had managed to forestall the inquisition last night by claiming exhaustion, but she knew it couldn’t be dodged forever.
“I called the police last night and told them to stop looking for you, Kerry,” Aunt Betty said over the rim of a bone china teacup. She was a birdlike woman, thin and frail, with bad eyes for which she wore glasses whose lenses were nearly as big as her entire head, a pointed beak of a nose protruding from between them. Her hair was brown, but from a bottle, because it should have been gray years before. She held her cup in two bony hands. “We really were terribly worried about you when you just disappeared. The college called, and that girl you shared a room with, Sophia—”
“Sonya,” Kerry corrected. She pushed runny scrambled eggs around on her plate with her fork. There were many ways to describe Aunt Betty, but “skilled chef” would never be one of them.
“Right, Sonya. She was no help at all. She said you were antisocial—which Marsh and I, of course, knew wasn’t true—and that you had probably gone to live in a cave somewhere. Well, I said that was just the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard, that my niece wasn’t the kind of girl who would live in a cave, and that you were perfectly nice and very reliable, and if you were gone, then obviously something had happened to you. You were kidnapped, or murdered, or something like that.”
“Well, I’m fine,” Kerry said. She bit into some rubbery bacon.
“I can see that, and I’m so glad to hear it. I told the police that, of course, after I saw you. The detective who’s had your case, a young man, Pembroke or something like that, he called back first thing this morning while you were sleeping, and said that he’ll be by this afternoon to talk to you. He’d like to know where you’ve been, of course, and he’d like to know whatever happened to you.
“We all would like to know that, of course. I’m sure it was something just dreadful.”
She continued yammering on, speaking words that Kerry was no longer listening to, without seeming to notice that Kerry hadn’t replied. What could she tell the police? “Sorry, detective, but I was off learning magic so I can kill the witch who killed my boyfriend. Next time, I’ll call more often.”
Yeah, that’ll fly.
She had managed to convince herself that Uncle Marsh and Aunt Betty would be glad she had disappeared. They no longer bore any financial burden on her behalf, if they ever had—an insurance settlement, after her mother’s death, had paid for Kerry’s college, and even though there wasn’t much of an estate left after all her mom’s medical bills, the sale of the house they had lived in had netted some money for her aunt and uncle.
And Uncle Marsh had wasted no time—as soon as she left for school, not even waiting for her to vanish completely—in turning “her” room back into the den it had been before she had come to live in their house. She had spent the night on a foldaway couch in there, with Marsh’s big-screen TV and wet bar. She always thought their house looked like something decorated from a thrift store, except that the reverse was true: Their furnishings were the kind that ended up at thrift stores, but they were the original owners. There were lots of items that looked like carefully tooled wood, except that they were really molded woodgrain plastic, lots of veneers, lots of composition board. Everything except real wood, it seemed.
Given her uncle’s speed at eliminating every trace of Kerry from the house, the fact that they’d called the police at all was a little staggering. The idea that she would have to explain her whereabouts to the authorities was terrifying. How thoroughly would they check her story out, if at all? If she claimed to have run away to San Francisco, or Sweden, would they ask for addresses? Known associates? Would they expect some kind of verification of her statement? If she turned out to simply be a runaway, instead of a kidnap victim, would they want to be repaid for the expense of their investigation?
She doubted that, but on the rest of it she was completely in the dark. She hadn’t anticipated anything like this when she came back here.
“Aunt Betty,” she said, interrupting whatever her aunt was going on about now. “I’m not sure I’m really … you know, up to talking to the police today. Can’t we just tell them that I’m fine, and let it go at that? I mean, don’t they have better things to do than investigate people who aren’t missing anymore?”
“Well, but they’ll want to try to find whoever took you,” Aunt Betty said.
“No one took me, Aunt Betty. I … had something I needed to do. I went to where I could do it. I … well, I didn’t do it all, not really. Not yet. But I did some of it, and then I came back.”
Aunt Betty regarded her, the teacup cradled in both hands again like something rare and precious. “You just … left?”
“I’m almost eighteen, Aunt Betty. I’m capable of making my own decisions. It was something very important.”
“It must have been,” the older woman said. “Aren’t you going to tell me what it was?”
Kerry looked at her plate. “I can’t.”
“I see.” A long pause, and then the teacup clattered in its saucer. Aunt Betty’s hands were trembling, and when Kerry looked up, she saw tears welling in her aunt’s eyes. “Noreen trusted us,” she said. She almost never used her sister’s name, it was always “your mother.” “I’m sorry you can’t.”
“It isn’t that, Aunt Betty,” Kerry said, already knowing the conversation had veered from difficult to hopeless. “It’s just … it’s hard to explain. I can’t explain. Not without telling you … telling you everything. And I can’t do that. I guess I’m asking you to trust me, this time.”
“I see.” Again with that. She always said that when, of course, she didn’t see—when she couldn’t see at all. Soon the tears would be flowing, and the sacrifices they had made would be drawn into the discussion—sacrifices which were real, Kerry had no doubt about that. She appreciated completely the fact that they had opened their house to a child who was not their daughter, whom they had never asked for.
“I’m so sorry, Aunt Betty,” Kerry said, hoping to head all that off at the pass. “I really … I wish it hadn’t happened the way it did. I wish I could tell you the whole story. I honestly do. But … it’s something you’re better off not knowing, you’ve got to believe that.”
“Yes, well …” Tears ran down Aunt Betty’s cheeks now, and she dabbed at them with a paper napkin. At least she hadn’t started sobbing. That was the worst.
“Haven’t you ever known something you wish you didn’t, Aunt Betty?” Kerry pressed. She blinked, feeling tears of her own coming on now. “Something that you couldn’t tell another soul about, something that was just too huge and too terrible to share? That’s what I have, what I know. I can’t tell you what it is, and you wouldn’t believe me, probably, if I did. And if by some miracle I could convince you, it still wouldn’t do you any good to know it. It would only make you miserable, in fact. So why share it? Why work so hard to persuade you of something that you can’t do anything about and that will only make you hurt? I can’t do it to you and Uncle Marsh. I’m sorry that it’s this way, but it is. There’s nothing I can do about that now. No way I can undo it. The best I can do is try to make it right, and even if I do that, you’ll never know about it…. But I will.
“So that’s what I have to try to do. And you—you’ll just have to try to understand that I love you, and you’ll have to either trust me, or—or not trust me, I guess. I hope it’s trust, but it really doesn’t make much difference, either way, in the long run.”
Kerry snatched her napkin from her lap and blew her nose. Aunt Betty was sobbing now, long looping sobs that Kerry had always thought must have been a real hit at funerals. And Kerry was crying too, tears falling from her cheeks and splashing into the watery eggs and rubbery bacon she hadn’t eaten. Tears that came from knowing that she had somehow stepped off the path her life was supposed to have taken onto a different one, a road that was dark and frightening, for which there was no map and no guide. Tears for her mother, who couldn’t be around to try to deal with this new and sinister aspect of her life, and tears for her aunt, who was but could never understand it. Tears, too, for Daniel, whom she had known for so short a span and loved so hard, who had both set her on this path and tried to protect her from it.
Both women cried now, sitting at the breakfast table, each consumed by her own private grief that Kerry suspected had litde, if anything, to do with the other’s.
Which was when Uncle Marsh wandered in, unshaven, his white hair askew, in a sleeveless white T-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms, scratching his belly under the shirt.
“Who died?” he asked.
And Kerry started to laugh through her tears.
4
Kerry hadn’t unpacked her bag yet, so it didn’t take her long to get ready to move on again. Aunt Betty called the police detective she had been talking to and told him that the whole affair had been a misunderstanding, that Kerry had left school of her own free will and now was back. The detective peppered her with questions for a few minutes, but agreed to close the books on the case. Kerry was still a little surprised that there had been a case with open books in the first place.
She found herself oddly touched by it, and by Aunt Betty’s willingness to help. Uncle Marsh remained his typical grumpy self, and Kerry tried to limit her interaction with him to just the right amount so that she might actually miss him when she left.
Even though she had barely arrived, there was still a lot to get done. Aunt Betty drove her downtown to a branch of her bank, where she withdrew a few thousand more dollars from her insurance money to cover expenses wherever her new course took her. When they got back home, Aunt Betty suggested that Kerry take a look inside some boxes she had stored in the attic—things that had belonged to Kerry’s parents, as well as some of Kerry’s childhood items—while she made lunch.
The attic was close and musty, and even though the air outside was near freezing, Kerry found it uncomfortably warm up there. Aunt Betty had separated out the boxes that had come from Kerry’s parents’ house, so Kerry knew just which ones to look at. Each box was taped across the top. Kerry took a knife up with her and sliced through the tape carefully so she wouldn’t damage any of the contents.
She had no memory of this stuff being packed up, even though she must have been around. Her mother’s death had been hard on her, but in a way—after nursing her through illness for more than a year, alone because her father had died a couple of years before that—it had been both a heartbreak and a relief. Her mother’s long suffering had finally come to an end, and Kerry, having been pressed into service at too young an age, could have what was left of her teen years.
Well, we know how that worked out, Kerry thought grimly. Her first summer out of high school had been spent in San Diego for a summer resort job. That had ended when Daniel Blessing had stumbled, injured, into her life, and she and her housemates had been swept up into his world—a world of dangerous witchcraft and intrigue.
Not so much the teenage dream, she knew. It was okay, though. She had learned long ago that adaptability was one of her strong points—a key to survival, really. Go where the river takes you.
But during that period, right after her mother’s death, she had been an emotional basket case, she remembered. Aunt Betty and Uncle Marsh had packed up the house and sold most of the furnishings and the property. They had been named Kerry’s guardians and the executors of her mom’s will. Which made it not especially shocking that she would have been unaware of precisely what had been saved and stored up here.
Some of the things she found were expected, but they still brought a lump to her throat. Her parents’ wedding album and a couple of additional albums of family photos, including shots of Kerry as a little girl, dark haired, wide eyed, and skinny. Her dad had called her string bean until she was twelve, when she declared that he was never to use that term around her again. Old documents: tax information, birth and death certificates, medical records. A few objects that probably could have been sold or that Aunt Betty herself could have used—some jewelry, an antique music box with intricate gold filigree, a set of fine silverware that had been a wedding present from Kerry’s grandmother and that had always remained inside its cherrywood box, “for company.”
Then there were the boxes that had come from Kerry’s room, where less stuff had been disposed of. Kerry found old school papers, mosdy forgotten, including some that made her smile with fond memories of certain teachers and friends. Books she’d liked over the years, going back to Where the Wild Things Are and Dr. Seuss, all the way up through her poetry phase in high school, including such diverse poets as Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and Pablo Neruda. A small selection of mysteries, including Nancy Drews and Agatha Christies. Mosdy, after about the sixth grade, she had read books from school libraries or Cairo’s public library system and from her parents’ library, so her own collection was limited. But she found herself glad that Aunt Betty had saved these, and she hoped that one of these days she’d be able to settle in one place so that she could have them again.
She found old toys, locked diaries, drawings she had made, yearbooks friends had signed for her. Nothing earth-shattering, but looking through the boxes somehow crystallized things for her. Her life had been one thing, now it was another. The past was part of her; there was no denying its influence. But it didn’t define her by itself, and it didn’t control her direction from here. She found that she could remember it with a sense of pleasant nostalgia without feeling that she had to be dragged back into the life she had left behind.
Her life, Kerry decided, was like these boxes. The part of it that was her childhood, that included her parents, could be wrapped up in paper and sealed inside one box. It would never change; it was what it was. The precious part spent with Daniel could go into a second box. The third box had to remain open—it included everything since Daniel’s death, and it was an unfinished project. There would come a time, she believed, when it could be wrapped and stored as well, but she didn’t know what the shape of it would be at that time.
Whether she’d be alive to do the wrapping was anybody’s guess.
Kerry spent one more night under Aunt Betty and Uncle Marsh’s roof. The next day they drove her to the airport. Aunt Betty welled up again; Uncle Marsh was gruff and offhand about the whole thing. Kerry figured he was just glad to get his house back, while Aunt Betty had seen her as a kind of reinforcement in her ongoing struggle with his drinking, his temper, and his generally unpleasant attitude. But she would never leave him, Kerry knew, never even force the issue of him changing his ways, because the worse he got the more she protected him from himself and others.
As she walked through the terminal, past the point where only ticketed passengers could go, she found herself glad for the short time she had spent with them—happy she had been able to spend it, but also happy that it had been so brief. She had an hour to wait for her flight, so she sat in the waiting area and studied every blond head she saw, just in case one might be Season. Not seeing her, she took one of Daniel’s journals from her duffel and started to flip through it, looking for a section she hadn’t read yet.
There comes a time in the life of every young man when he must leave the home of his parents and make his own way in the world, for good or ill. In my case, this time was doubly complicated. First, I have a twin, Abraham, so there are two of us, not one, striking out to find our fortunes. And second, our father has been gone for our entire life, so when we left, that meant Mother Blessing would truly be alone for the first time in a very long while.
Perhaps triply complicated would be more apt, for there was yet another matter to consider. We were not leaving simply to start families and households of our own. We were leaving with a very particular purpose in mind—one that has been instilled in us from our earliest days.
Mother Blessing had trained us and instructed us. We were ready, we were equipped, and we were anxious to go forth into the world to find and destroy Season Howe. As we have learned since infancy, she killed our father, demolished our town, and drove our mother into hiding in the swamp. Mother Blessing alone knows the truth of that day, so long ago in Slocumb, and Season will likely not rest until she has murdered the last surviving witness of her crime. Abe and I are to locate her and make sure she can never accomplish that sordid goal.
