Oblivion, page 24
“Watch your mouth.”
“You go out of your way to help her! You don’t help me! When do you ever help me? Why is she even here?”
“Sit down.”
Defiantly, Lindsey slams back onto her chair.
Mr. Hutch draws in a measured breath. “I got a call from a dean at Carmel last week. You’ve spread some pretty nasty rumors about an honor student. And now all this … with Callie. Why are you doing this?”
“I want to win,” Lindsey says. “Just once, I want to win. I want to be important. Just once. And then Callie comes to Carmel, and she ruins it all, and I can’t win anymore.”
“I’m not trying to win,” I say. “I’m just trying to survive. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“You didn’t mean to be a whore.”
“Lindsey!” Mr. Hutch interjects.
“You just were.” A sly grin threatens to spread over Lindsey’s face.
My head is in my hands now, the flush of embarrassment rushing up the back of my neck, and over my cheeks, like flames. I hear, in the recesses of my memory, Palmer’s voice, rising from the confessional: honor thy father.
Words fly between Lindsey and her dad, but I can’t hear them, can’t concentrate on what they’re saying because the words are gnawing at my brain, itching in my fingertips: something in the breeze, something in the breeze.
“I need …” I need another notebook. Guidry took mine. “I need a pen.”
But they can’t hear me. They aren’t paying attention until I push back from the table, the legs of the chair scraping against the hardwood floor.
“Callie?”
I’m tearing through my backpack, yanking out a pen. Nothing to write on, nothing to write on. Nothing to write on!
Lindsey’s class ring sparkles as she withdraws the plate before me and replaces it with a sheet of paper.
I hear my mother’s voice, echoing from the confessional: I’m remembering. Something in the breeze reminded me. I’ve forgotten where I came from. I don’t know where I came from, don’t know where I came from …
My cell phone buzzes, jarring me from the memory.
I study the words I’ve just written:
Something in the breeze freed lakeshore memories inside me beside beside beside me abiding like the tide abiding like the tide abiding like the tide.
“Are you okay?” This is the first time I’ve graphed out in front of Mr. Hutch. He’s leaning over me, a hand on my back. “Is she breathing?”
I draw in a sharp inhale. “Yes.”
Lindsey’s fingers are wrapped around my wrist.
Through my tears, I see her turquoise eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say.
The corners of her lips threaten to turn upward. “Me, too.”
A sigh escapes my foster father.
“I need to lie down,” I say. “May I be excused?”
“We’ll talk in the morning,” Mr. Hutch suggests. “Get some rest. Lindsey, stay put. You’re not going anywhere.”
I shove the latest poetic splattering of my brain waves into my bag and walk up the stairs.
Once I’m safe in my room, I pull out my phone to see a message from John: harbor. midnight.
Must sleep. I don’t think I should be going out tonight. But I text back: chaos here … confirm later.
I dry my tears on the crocheted scarf my mother made for me when I was little, and I reach for my deck of Tarot.
Just feeling the cards in my hands brings me closer to my mother. I don’t believe in the cards, but I do believe in her. I close my eyes and breathe in her essence. No matter what the doctors at the Meadows tell me she is, I know she’s my mom beneath it all.
I lay the cards on my heart and pray for the answers to come.
Tattered sheets. I first hear the scream in the back of my mind, but it soon shrills in my ears, like a sharp whistle blown for two-second intervals, and stirs me from a deep sleep. My heart is beating like mad, and my head is pounding in time. I try to reach for the lamp switch, but my fingers are numb.
I’m in my bedroom at Lindsey’s house, but I feel as if I’m on a boat, rocking in the moor.
I want to write the words etching into my brain, but I feel paralyzed, as if I have to concentrate on each individual muscle motion in order to move even a smidgen. I throw all my energy into getting another notebook from my nightstand drawer.
I’m panicked. What if I’m tied? What if I can’t move, no matter what I do to try?
When my fingers touch the drawer of the nightstand, the screaming in my head stops. Tarot cards, abandoned on my mattress, bend beneath my elbow. I yank on the glass knob and open the drawer.
My hand, damp with sweat, meets first with the edge of a notebook, which I pull out before grabbing a felt-tip pen from my surplus supplies.
I bite off the cap and scrawl tattered sheets the ties that bind.
The light on my ceiling illuminates the space, although I thought I’d turned it off.
I’m hyperventilating, my head resting on my notebook, my eyes pinched shut to ward off the unwelcome, bright light. I hear footsteps in a distant hallway.
“Callie?”
Yeah.
“Callie?”
Lindsey?
I try to focus on my foster sister, but she’s fuzzy, just an outline of a person.
She fades away, but the light doesn’t. It blinds me. Everything turns white: the square of shag carpeting like a polar bear hide, the sheers billowing in from the white-framed windows, the caps on the waves in the distance.
And across the miles, a crew of men is digging up the cobblestone walk. There’s a body beneath the stones.
“Dude.”
I hear Lindsey’s voice in the periphery of my mind. Smell raspberry Tootsie Pops, which I assume she’s eating. Feel the cold white gold of the rosary against my chest.
“Wake up,” she says. “You’re having crazy dreams.”
I feel her pulling the notebook from my lap.
Without opening my eyes, I lift the covers, and into my bed she climbs.
She rests her head against mine; we’re sharing a pillow.
I want to drift back to sleep, but when her feet begin to swish against the covers, I concentrate on the motion, on the sound, and commit it to memory.
“Are you up now?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“What do you dream about, when you start thrashing around like that?”
“Hannah, mostly. My mom. My father.”
“Life’s pretty fucked up sometimes, huh?”
“Lately, it’s like someone took everything I knew as normal and put it in a confetti cannon.”
“Your normal wasn’t too normal to begin with,” she says.
And now, I have all these little pieces, all these clues, and I don’t know what to do with them. “I don’t even know what’s real anymore,” I confess.
“I’m real,” Lindsey offers.
I open my eyes, meet her gaze. “You hate me.” I listen to the swishing of her feet against the linens. “And I don’t blame you.”
Swish, swish, swish, swish.
Finally, she responds: “Do you love him?”
My every muscle stills. “I don’t know.”
She slurps on her candy. “If you love him, I’ll back off.”
“We don’t really talk about that sort of thing, you know?” I focus on the little green light on the smoke detector. It’s blinking at me. Needs a new battery. “Lindsey, do you believe in serendipity?”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore.” I feel the shrug of her shoulders. “I can’t rely on anyone. Not even you, and I used to think you were my rock.”
“I didn’t think someone like you needed a rock.”
“Everyone needs a rock.”
I digest this for a moment, think about what Ewing said: Lindsey has her own share of problems. “This thing with John … it isn’t just a fling designed to get back at Elijah. It’s sort of … he’s helping me deal. I’m remembering things. I’m getting better.”
“Seems like you’re getting worse, no offense.” Swish, swish, swish. “You think you’ll ever stop writing like that?”
I think about this for a minute. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
“And you think John’s helping?”
“Look, this thing with John … It sort of just … happened, you know?”
“Oh, I know ‘just happened,’ all right.”
“He met my mom, before she went away. On Fortune Night at the Vagabond. She knew about his watch … and it turns out this watch used to be his cousin’s, but his cousin’s been missing most of our lives.”
Her feet stop moving for a few seconds, but then resume.
“He knows things. Has information I need. And I know this must sound cliché to you, but I tried not to do this. It just sort of …”
She finishes my sentence: “Happened.”
“Yeah.”
“So … you love him?”
“There’s too much going on right now to think about it. But I think I could. Maybe. Someday.”
“Why’d you take the heat for me tonight? After everything I said about you? I’ve been a royal bitch, and—”
“Yes. You have.”
“—and you still tried to cover for me. Why?”
“You’re my sister.”
A few silent seconds pass before she replies: “Just like that. You’re over it.”
“No. It hurts. But”—I came here six months ago with nothing—“you’re all I have.”
She hesitates for a moment before saying, “You’re all I have, too, now.”
This isn’t even remotely true, but it illustrates the vast differences between us. I don’t expect everything is going to turn out okay, I don’t think some guy is going to fall under my spell just because I’ve given him a glance, and I don’t think I deserve the moon every time I bat my pretty lashes. “I’m just a girl, okay? Just trying to survive. I don’t expect anyone to make it easy for me. But you … You have different expectations about this world, so you react differently. This thing with John … if I’d been with him solely so you couldn’t have him, it’d be one thing, but it didn’t happen that way.”
“You still kept it from me.”
“Do you think it would’ve made a difference, if I’d told you?”
“Do you think it would’ve made a difference, if I’d told you what happened at that party last spring? How Jon and I just sort of … ended up together? I mean, I didn’t plan on hooking up with him that night, to tell you the truth. It just sort of …”
My turn: “Happened.”
“Yeah.”
“You know, just ending up with someone doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, even if you don’t make anything of it. So you hooked up. You learned something, even if all you learned was that you didn’t like hooking up with him. Doesn’t make you a whore.”
At the mention of the word, her feet still. “I’m sorry about calling you that.”
I don’t know what to say. It isn’t okay.
“I can tell people what I said wasn’t true.” Lindsey tilts her head to touch mine.
After a few moments, she presses a kiss onto my cheek. Lays her head on my shoulder. Begins to move her feet again.
The water can be a cruel and unpredictable lover. Sedate on the surface, but with an undercurrent, raging when we least expect it. I’ve lived here my entire life, and I’ve always found serenity in the wandering waterways of northern Illinois. The water is passionate, and I’m fervent when I’m near it.
It’s almost midnight.
John’s watch is in my hand. I’m going to give it back to him tonight. Not because I don’t love him, not because I don’t want to try to make things work, but because I want to know I’m deciding to be with him not because of some crazy memories about a guitar, or because he dug up a rosary, or because my mom remembers his watch, but because I feel connected to him now. I want to make choices for a change, instead of taking chances.
I lean on the rickety rails of the pier and gaze again over the dark waves. With only a sliver of moon in the sky, I won’t enjoy the view tonight, but I can conjure the image with my eyes closed. That’s the way it is, when you belong somewhere.
Sounds of a gypsy guitar and whispered murmurs filter through the dirty windows of the Vagabond, and drift to my ears on misty fingers. This is home. This is where I want to stay.
From behind, a hand winds around me, rests on my belly.
Johnny.
I smile and spin to face him, but halfway there, a musty glove covers my mouth.
My eyes widen when I meet the gaze of Reverend Palmer Prescott. I scream, but his hand muffles the sound. I struggle to get away, but lose my footing. I’m falling into an abyss of starry night and …
I hear the splash in distant hallways of my mind, as if this isn’t happening to me, as if I’m watching it happen on television, despite the chill of cold, cold water seeping through my clothing, dripping down my face, drenching my hair and flesh. I grasp for the edge of the pier, but he’s shoving down hard on my head.
Another attempt at a scream awards me only a mouthful of Lake Nippersink.
He’s too strong. No sooner do I surface than he shoves me back under. I take in another mouthful of lake.
Everything fades to nothingness.
I can’t move my feet, can’t move my arms, but they ache and burn with fatigue. My eyes itch, sting, and render only a blurry halo of light, when I try to open them.
Must be another dream, another torment of my memory … another sleight of consciousness—or lack thereof. I wait for the words to bounce inside my brain. Wait.
Listen.
Listen.
Listen. To the buzz of proverbial crickets in my mind. Silence.
Feel the rise and fall of the waves.
I’m on a boat. I must be.
The words are gone.
Johnny?
My tongue forms his name, but I can’t take breath enough to voice it. I know he isn’t here. I don’t feel him near me.
But I feel a presence hovering … like a demon.
When the scent of anointing oil registers in my nostrils, I beg myself to scream, but still no sound comes. My ears fill with the sound of my rapidly beating heart, and no matter how I try to wiggle life into my hands and feet, they prickle, as if they’re still asleep.
Oil. That’s why it’s hard to see.
An image emerges before me, all bulk and few details. It’s the scent of the oil on his fingers that identifies him, more than his shape:
Palmer.
I jolt, but still can’t move, and something pinches my forehead at the temples.
I concentrate on minuscule muscles, twitch my toes.
“Father,” I manage.
I feel the pad of his thumb on my forehead, marking me with the sign of the cross, the way he did when I was twelve and I’d chosen, before the entire congregation, Jesus Christ as my Savior.
No matter how I thrash, no matter how my limbs break out of their numbness, I’m immobile, bound on a bed, tied with strips of sheets. My legs are crossed, the right over the left, with one foot atop the other. However desperately I need to rub the oil from my eyes, my attempts are futile, as my wrists are tethered to the corners of the bed frame.
When I blink, and a few details come into focus, I wonder if it would’ve been better not to see anything at all:
I can tell by the way the room moves to the whims of the water, by the scent of the buoys and old wood, by the slush of waves against the hull that I’m definitely aboard a boat.
I’m freezing, and my clothes stick to my flesh like a wet blanket. My teeth chatter, but not only with the cold. I know what’s about to happen.
Across the room, a match strikes. In the glow of the flame, I see the man with whom the state placed me, the man who—if my dreams and nightmares are real—kidnaps and rapes girls … and swears God tells him to do it. His hair, usually meticulously groomed, has grown wild and scraggly, and his beard, longer, like Jesus Christ’s.
“It’s time for you”—the flame ignites a pillar candle—“to honor thy father.”
There’s a rubbing noise on the right side of the hull where the vessel bumps against the buoy. I turn my head to see if I can tell which boats are docked near, but the stabbing sensation at my temples halts the movement. I feel a trickle. Smell blood. I’m dizzy. I think there’s something surrounding the crown of my head, stopping me from moving.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a staircase. At the foot of it is a box, and peeking from the corrugated cardboard is a leg of torn denim.
I listen harder, but can’t hear the guitar usually emanating from within the Vagabond. I must be in a remote slip at the harbor.
“Are you a good girl?”
I’m trying to be.
“Or are you the work of the devil? Put on this earth to tempt me, and you’re good at what you do. But there’s still a chance for you. If you pay penance for all those before you, God will save you in the end. After all, we’re all forgiven, thanks to Jesus Christ.”
I recognize the symbolism of my position. I’m bound to the bed, much in the same way Jesus was bound to His cross.
I pinch my eyes shut and pretend I’m at home, in bed. I wiggle my feet to emulate the sound of Lindsey’s swishing. Maybe it’ll bring me back to reality. Maybe I’ll be able to wake up from this horrible nightmare, if I concentrate, if I listen for the swish, swish, swish of my sister’s feet down the hall.
“God gave the ultimate sacrifice for His people,” Palmer says. “It’s time I do the same.”
The flame of the candle glints off the blur of an object in his hand—the knife my mother once used to stab him.
“Honor thy father?” he asks.
My tears mix with the blood dripping from my forehead, and wash a measure of chrism from my eyes. I wiggle my feet faster, but to no avail.
“Honor thy father?”
A sniffle escapes me.
“Honor thy father!”
“Yes! Yes, I do!”
The pain at my temples intensifies. The blade of the knife skates over my abdomen in a laceration.
