Circle of Animals, page 22
“Sunshine, go now, get her a clean robe.” Sunshine nodded and met Sky’s eyes one more time and smiled. Sky admired how she was wasn’t afraid of this cantankerous older woman, who was maybe in her fifties.
“You. Give me the towel.”
Sky wanted to hesitate, but she didn’t want to show any weakness. So she handed it over and pretended it didn’t bother her at all to stand there naked. The woman tipped the oil bottle into her hand, and a clear oil ran into her palm. She stepped toward Sky, and it was all she could do not to step back.
The woman rubbed her hands together and then touched Sky’s shoulders. Vigorously rubbing her shoulders, down her arms, across her collarbone. She got more oil and turned Sky around, rubbing it over her back, across her buttocks, down her legs, crouching to her heels, reaching then around front to get her shin, up her thighs, belly, and Sky sucked in as the woman’s hands reached around her and roughly rubbed her breasts then down again to her ankles. The woman worked brusquely, like Sky was a child or an animal.
“There,” she said, standing up. Then she turned to the door to wait for Sunshine in silence. Sky did not say anything. That was the second time in a week someone had touched her body without her permission. But it was nothing like when Ned had grabbed her, forced his mouth on hers. This woman’s actions had been almost clinical. Completely void of desire.
Safety, Sky realized, was a relative term. She would tell Sunshine that if she got the chance.
After a minute or so of silence, during which Sky held her naked body rigid, Sunshine came back in the door carrying something white.
“Sunshine asked me to bring this.” She handed a white cotton garment to the older woman. Sky did a double take. This was a different young woman, but one that looked almost exactly like Sunshine. The same long auburn hair, the same dreamy smile when she looked up at Sky.
“Arms up,” said the older woman, taking the white tunic and pulling it over Sky’s head. It was a soft, light material, an all but shapeless dress until the older woman pulled a white belt around her waist and tied it. Sky took a breath in when she cinched it tight. “All right, follow me.”
Sky stepped outside. The dirt felt warm on her feet. The light of the day was bright, and she watched the tableau before her. The commune was more populated now, a few women sat on the step of the largest yurt. She saw three more young women, walking arm in arm and laughing, and a fourth woman sitting in the shade of a tree, playing with a young man’s long hair. She saw one man carrying a child on his shoulders. They no longer stopped to stare at her. With her wet long hair drying in waves, her oiled skin, her white clothing, Sky realized that anyone that came to rescue her wouldn’t be able to tell her apart from these others. The cult members. She realized that was, perhaps, the point. Hiding in plain sight.
The older woman walked quickly, and Sky tried to keep up with her even though she wanted to take small and careful steps to avoid small rocks. She was unaccustomed to walking barefoot outside. It’s not like you leave an apartment building without shoes on. Ever.
She followed the woman as she wove around little outbuildings. Sky had seen a clearing which seemed to take the brunt of the foot traffic and now she wondered if the older woman, Grouchy, as Sky began to think of her, was keeping her out of sight. How did news travel here? What would news of her arrival mean to these people? They walked between patches of oak shade, and Sky’s oiled feet and shins quickly became the same curry color as everyone else’s feet.
In not much more than a minute, they’d reached a small house, nicer than the yurts but not as nice as the bigger house behind it. The house was a simple white stucco, its base stained yellow from rainstorms, its door a heavy oak. The corners of the house were rounded off. There were no windows on the front of the house, and while it was taller than a ranch house, Sky would be surprised if it had more than one story inside.
The woman gave three distinct knocks. Paced evenly. One. Two. Three. Then she looked back at Sky and nodded. The scorn seemed, for the first time, to have disappeared from her face and to be replaced by something else. Fear? She couldn’t be sure and didn’t have time to look at her again as Grouchy opened the door and led Sky into a dark room. Her eyes adjusted from the bright light outside and she saw what looked like a woman sitting with her back to them in front of a large plate glass window, its purple velvet curtains mainly drawn despite one small sliver which revealed a strip of sky, oak, earth. The woman’s silhouette revealed long, wavy hair and a certain stillness, as if two people had not just entered the room. The house smelled like lavender, had old wood floors, and there was a small gurgling sound of water coming from what Sky would guess was a plug-in indoor water feature. The kind Jerry detested, and that she had also come to see as a bad combination between New Age and bourgeois, even though that exact mélange could be used to describe her own upbringing.
Jerry. Another life, and another world compared to where she was now. What would he say if he saw her? She felt a strange pang, a physical realization that she needed help. That she was in over her head. She swallowed hard and looked at Grouchy.
Grouchy kept her eyes on the sitting woman. There was small dining table between them and her, and on the table sat a stack of blank paper and a large feather. There was also a glossy gray box of condoms. Trojan brand. Sky looked at them for a moment before the box’s strange presence fully sunk in. Her shoulders involuntarily stiffened and she did another quick glance around the room to see if there were other oddities, signs of orgies or anything else she should be wary of.
Grouchy wrung her hands and stepped forward just as the woman spoke, causing Grouchy to start.
“Leave her . . .”
“But . . .”
“Thank you.”
Sky didn’t turn her head to take pleasure in the flustered face of Grouchy. She could sense it, but her eyes were too riveted on the voice she’d just heard.
She kept her eyes on the woman even when she heard Grouchy snort, Yes, Mother, then turn and exit the room, pulling the heavy door behind her quietly closed.
When Sky was a child, her mother read to her from a thick book of fairy tales, the red cover faded and the corners softened. Sky’s favorite story, which now came to her like a sudden rush of blood in her veins, was the one about the Snow Queen. A little boy, Kay, gets fragments of glass from an evil mirror in his heart, in his eye. He becomes cruel to his best friend Gerda and then disappears, taken by the Snow Queen in her sled. Gerda travels long and far, with bleeding feet, to find him in spite of his cruelty and when she does, he does not recognize her at first.
His heart is a raw lump of ice, his skin powder blue; he has become fully entrapped in the world of the Snow Queen.
Now Sky thought of that moment—when Kay is lost to Gerda, before he is regained, his hoar heart, his skin of death a note held—and she felt a chord strike in her own body as three simultaneous notes: the memory of that story; her eyes adjusting and bringing into focus that hair, same as her own; and that voice.
That voice that echoed in her head and then spoke once more.
“You shouldn’t have . . .” The woman turned and stopped mid-sentence.
Sky had last seen her mother only two weeks before, but it felt like it had been years. Between them was a hard floor, a table, and five feet of empty space, but to Sky it was a chasm, a space where the air vibrated between life and death, between truth and lie, between every version of her life. She was afraid that if she blinked, or even took a breath in, the specter of her mother would flicker and fade.
The two stood looking at each other. A minute might have passed, or maybe ten. There was very little movement in Sky’s body, at least that she was aware of, but as she watched her mother’s face, held her gaze, she saw bewilderment, anger, and love pass quickly through it. There was a time in her life when that kind of emotional reaction from her mother would have given her visceral pleasure. To shock the woman that had no rules, that loved to shock others.
Finally, Edi drew a quick breath in.
“Sky . . .” Her voice was a whisper. “Oh, Sky, what have you done?” Then she stepped around the table and embraced Sky. She buried her face in Sky’s hair and exhaled a quivering breath. Almost as if she was on the verge of crying, though Sky knew better.
“I thought . . .” Sky pulled back. The last week slammed into her in one quick force of memory and almost knocked the wind out of her. She took in a desperate breath, the kind you take after having been underwater for too long. “I thought you were dead.”
“I know, I know—I am supposed to be,” Edi whispered and pulled Sky close to her again, and this time Sky let her hold her. Her whole body felt like fighting, but also like completely giving in to her mother’s tight embrace. Her petite frame, all muscle, now clinging to Sky. “It was so hard, I’ve been in so much pain, thinking of you . . . it was so hard to leave you, Sky. So much harder than I thought . . .”
Edi, never the queen of foresight. She pulled away from Sky but kept Sky’s elbows cupped in her hands, and Sky saw her face up close in the sliver of light coming from the window. She’d aged in those two weeks. She looked thinner, and the skin on her face was etched with new wrinkles. Sky imagined that she also wore the last week on her own face. Edi ran her hands from Sky’s elbows to her hands and clasped them together as she pulled her to the window, to the flattened and worn meditation cushions where she’d been sitting.
“What the fuck is going on, Edi? Why are you here?” Sky pulled her hands out of her mother’s grip and folded her arms. Edi sat down and motioned for Sky to do the same. But she wanted answers before she sat.
“Do you know your purse was left in your house like you’d been grabbed or something, and there was some bloodstain up in my room, by my window, which was open, by the way.”
“What? Jesus, they told me they would stage it like something might have happened to me but that seems a little dramatic.”
“What? Who told you? Who is they?” Sky threw up her hands.
“Sssshh, we shouldn’t talk too loud. There’s always someone close by here, though no one else is in this house. We haven’t got a lot of time. I’m supposed to vet you and take you to Jake. We’ve got fifteen minutes at most. And sit down.”
“Well.” Sky sat but moved her own cushion a little away from Edi so she could turn and face her head on. “You better start talking.”
Edi nodded and bit her lower lip. It was the look she gave when she knew she’d done something wrong. She’d given the same look to Sky both when she told Sky she had adopted a dog the year before and when a week later she told Sky she’d taken it back to the shelter because of her severe allergy to dogs.
“It’s hard to know where to begin . . . Please.” Edi motioned for Sky to scoot a little closer, her voice low.
“I met Marguerite, so I know I was born here. But that’s about all I know.” Sky stayed put.
“You met Marguerite? Jesus, I haven’t even been gone that long . . . what did she tell you?” Edi scooted her own cushion, a faded burgundy, to Sky.
“Mom, Edi, just tell me what’s going on—if we don’t have much time, you owe me an explanation first.”
Edi nodded and bit her lip again, looking down at her hands. She pulled her cushion forward again so that her knees were almost touching Sky’s. “I joined the Ashram when I was nineteen. I was here five years. You were born here, and I left when you were two. I left because it became clear to me that Jake was, well, a predator. I should have seen it earlier. But the sex just seemed a part of the beautiful life and community we were creating, at first. But then he wanted younger and younger girls, and he started to . . . Well, then I got pregnant. And it was a girl, you. It changed the way I saw things, being a mother. And Jake turned on me. I had been his goddess, before, his number one favorite. But after, he acted like I was filthy. It was humiliating. He still does it—that woman who brought you in, you should see the way he treats her now. Even after he picked her up at seventeen, doted on her, kept her in his bed for a full year. I know because it wasn’t long after you were born.”
Her mother sucked her bottom lip in and looked away before taking a sharp breath in and meeting Sky’s eyes again. “I left and never looked back. Except to get Deb, Deb was here too, so she can tell you more stories . . .”
“I know, she told me.” Sky watched her mother’s face twist.
“Good lord, I really haven’t been gone that long. I thought it would take years for this shit to come out . . .” Edi sucked her breath in.
“Keep talking—is Jake my father?” Sky felt that hardness within her again, even though much of her wanted to soften around her mother, around her relief that Edi was alive.
Edi looked up suddenly. Her face seemed to go visibly white. Outside somewhere they could hear a couple of women laughing, a child squealing. Sky watched her mother look again at her hands, saw them shaking. She reached forward and took one.
“I’m a big girl, Mom . . .”
“Sky, you have to get out of here. It’s not safe here. If Jake was your father, then maybe it would be safe, but . . . Oh god, oh god,” Edi’s face tightened, and her green eyes wet and began to shine in the light from the window. She leaned her face just inches away from Sky’s.
“Why did you come here?” she whispered, and her hands again cupped Sky’s elbows.
Sky had almost never seen her mother cry. She opened her mouth and closed it. “I was looking for you. And if you were gone, I was looking for . . . for him, too, I guess.”
“Jake?”
“My father.”
Edi drew a sharp breath in, “He’s gone, sweetheart, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I never told you. It was all for your safety, good lord, there’s so much to explain. I’ll tell you what I can and then”—Edi sat up straight suddenly—“Where the hell’s Orion?”
“Ryan? You . . .”
“Yes, he can explain it all to you. He’s one of us, of them, of . . . he was born here too, Sky.”
Outside, they heard a child laugh, and they both started before they turned back and stared at one another.
“Brother,” Sky said the word to no one, to the air around Edi. She no longer felt like she was in her body.
Her body was back in her car sitting outside of her work, dreading going inside. Last Thursday morning. Before Ned touched her. When her body belonged fully to her.
Edi tightened her grip a little on Sky’s elbows. “No, Sky, not your brother.”
Sky looked at her mother, wishing they both could melt away from this place. This place they had come to, come from. Be back at her mother’s house. The window closed. The chair upright. She closed her eyes for a moment to picture it.
“Not your brother. But he was here when you were younger, knows this place in and out. Knows all of the ugly truths, and when I’m gone, you go to him . . .”
“Gone?”
Edi’s chin quivered and she brought a fist to her mouth. “I didn’t want to have to say goodbye. I wasn’t supposed to, even.”
“Mom. Mother. Edi, you aren’t making sense. Why don’t you come home with me? Why did you come back if it’s not safe?”
“Sky, listen to me.” Edi moved her hands to Sky’s shoulders and leaned in to speak into her ear. Her mother’s breath hot on her cheek in a way that reminded her of stifled sick nights, Edi singing to her fever.
“It won’t be long before someone comes through that door to take us to Jake. You need to tell him that you came to visit me, that you knew I’d be here because I could never stop talking about this place. That you had to see it, but—Sky, listen, this is important—tell him too that you have to return home soon. That your boyfriend is expecting you. That should keep him at bay.” Edi’s breath caught and Sky realized she was still trying not to cry. “And then tonight, you’ll sleep in my yurt, and if he doesn’t allow it and this is the last time we get to talk then you have to promise me you’ll get out. Tonight. Follow the road to the fork and then take the middle one . . .”
“Back to Ryan?” Sky pulled from Edi’s grip. Saw a tear on Edi’s cheek.
“Yes, yes! Is he here?”
“He kidnapped me.” She folded her arms; she could feel the coconut oil greasing her palms.
“What?”
“He told me he was a cop. He was supposed to be helping me . . .” Sky trailed off, suddenly overwhelmed with shame. She’d been so stupid to believe him. A brief flash of Ned’s hands on her. Her face reddened.
“He is helping you; you have to let him explain. Tell him he has to or I’m out and there’s no deal.” Edi grasped Sky’s folded arms, her fingers inching them apart.
“What deal? What are you going to do?”
Edi leaned again into Sky’s ear. “I’m going to destroy him.” She pulled back then and wiped her nose and cheek, and nodded, looking Sky straight in the eye. “I’m going to destroy Jake.”
Sky watched her mother’s face for a moment, waiting for her to continue. But her mother just nodded resolutely again, and Sky saw something there she hadn’t seen before. It was a determination, which fit Edi’s personality, but with it something new. Sky opened her mouth to speak when three distinct knocks came at the door. One. Two. Three.
Edi looked at Sky, still nodding. “Okay?” she whispered.
Sky hesitated and nodded slowly back as light flooded the room and a new young woman appeared. Beautiful, dark-haired, blue-eyed. Sky wasn’t sure if her mind was playing tricks on her, but she would swear this woman could be Ryan’s younger sister. Or perhaps it was that everyone there, since the flicker of the child she’d seen in the oaks, had looked somehow familiar to her.
“He’s ready.” The woman spoke with pride, and as she turned and Edi motioned that they were to follow, she watched how the woman seemed to glide rather than walk. Liz would certainly mock this woman. Liz. Another pain. The Phil situation, another question her mother might not have time to answer. Her breath hurt to draw at this point.
As they followed the woman out into the lurid sun, this time right into the clearing, Sky could feel eyes on her. She could see visions of figures in white in her periphery, moving in and out. She wondered if she should feel afraid. But she couldn’t summon fear, exactly. She felt like she was in a play she was watching. Or perhaps one that she was performing. But one where she could definitely yell “Cut” at any moment and be returned to her apartment. But she didn’t think Edi could get out so easily, and if she felt fear it was for her. Her. Mother.
