The Diviner's Tale (27 page)

"I don't know."

"And what about your amnesia at the child welfare place, was that acting?"

"Are you sure you're not just here to get more information for the police?"

"The police are done with both of us. I'm here for myself, and for you, if you'll let me. I honestly don't understand what happened to me any more than you seem to understand what happened to you. Maybe if we work together a little—"

"I can try."

"So if you didn't run away and you weren't kidnapped, can you tell me what did happen? I won't let another soul in on it if you don't want me to. I don't really have anybody to tell, anyway."

"Aren't you some kind of prophet who shouldn't have to ask questions like that? That's what they told me."

"I'm no prophet, just ask my mother. She's a walking Bible and I'm not in it."

"If you say so." The slightest hint of a smile.

"You know what else I say," encouraged by her response. "Not that you did, but I hope you know running away is a dangerous business. It doesn't take a prophet to know that."

"The world's dangerous everywhere," she said. "You want to see my room?"

"All right," peering out the windows to where Jonah stood with Laura's mother beneath the voluminous oak whose trunk was studded with slat steps that led up to the tree house aloft in the leaves. Julia was talking and pointing at where it was built, supported by a pair of heavy branches that pronged out from the trunk. I followed Laura upstairs.

"This is my new tree house," she said.

Her room was so bare it seemed more a cell than a childhood sanctuary. Rock band posters—His Name Is Alive and the Cocteau Twins—were taped to the wall by her bed. A hooked rug, a ladder-back chair by the window, which looked out over a side yard and the neighbor's house beyond. On a small table sat an old typewriter, unusual for her computer generation, and a stack of poetry books—Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Bob Dylan's
Tarantula,
along with Emerson's essays. Pretty mature reading for someone her age. On the quilted bed, sitting against the pillows, was a teddy bear with black button eyes not unlike Millicent's. Its stitched mouth was meant to form a smile, but the wavering line gave off an air of unsettled caprice.

"I see you like to read."

"Some."

"Me, too. What are you reading now?"

"I haven't been able to read much lately."

"Don't have the time?"

"Just don't feel like it."

She sat on the edge of her bed and I took a seat on the chair.

"I ran away once," I said.

The words came out before I'd had a chance to measure what their impact might be, without considering where they could lead our tentative, faltering talk. She didn't respond in so many words, but the look on her face wasn't difficult to interpret. Go on, it proposed. "Were you unhappy, is why you ran away?"

"I was upset by things that happened, sure."

"What were you upset about?"

How neatly Laura had managed to turn the tables so that she was discovering who I was rather than the other way around. Still, this seemed my only path to the girl, so it made sense to follow it further. "My brother died and I couldn't figure out how to deal with his being gone."

"How did he die?"

"Car accident."

"But you weren't driving," she said.

"No, of course not. I was very young."

"Sounds to me like you blamed it on yourself."

I hadn't said anything of the kind, but Laura easily intuited it, which made me wonder about her own brother's disappearance. "You're probably right. Even though it wasn't my fault, I felt guilty for not being able to stop it. Did anything like that happen to you?"

"And you still feel guilty about it, seems like."

"Sometimes. But it's more that I feel helpless when it comes to things like death, illness, the big issues that come at us in life. I don't need to feel powerful, but I hate feeling powerless. You know what I mean?"

Laura pondered this, examining her chewed fingernails, then looked out the window. "I know what you mean," she said, finally. "Life seems to have a nasty habit of making promises it can't keep. Of not listening to you when you need to be heard. I even told my mother I didn't want to go pick up my father at the station. I knew I wasn't supposed to be there. I just knew it."

"What do you mean, you knew it?"

"You're the diviner," she shot back, her hands closing into fists on her lap. "You understand."

"You seem pretty angry, I hope you don't mind me saying so. Is that something you're working with your counselor about?"

"Him? He doesn't know blow. I just do it because my parents are making me. We talk for forty-five minutes about zero, zilch, zip.
Ska pop, sa pum, sa po.
Then I leave and my mother drives me back home. It's all stupid, but we've both got to do it to make people think we're doing something. Besides, if I try anything else, he'll know."

"The therapist?"

"The man."

"The man who took you away at the station, is that what you're saying?"

"Something like that," she said, eyes welling with tears I could easily see she didn't want to shed.

"So if you weren't lying, why did you change your story?"

"You say you want to be my friend, for me to trust you. Don't make me answer that question. You know, Cassandra, he doesn't like you any better than he must like me now. He said I'd be fine if I stayed, but if I left I'd wish I wasn't ever born."

"He said my name, knew who I was?"

"He never said your name, but I'm sure he knows it now."

I glanced out the window and saw that Jonah had climbed up the wooden ladder and was now in the tree house. He had both hands on what looked like a rickety railing that reminded me of the lighthouse gallery railing and was leaning over the edge, talking with Julia Bryant in the yard below.

"Jonah seems to like the tree house," Laura said, trying to shift the subject. "You know, I didn't really build it myself."

"Your brother helped you?"

"No, that's just the way my mother likes to remember things. He built it himself and I was only allowed up there by invitation. It was our private, secret world for a while."

Like my blindfolded walks to Christopher's cave, I thought.

It was close in the room and I was about to ask Laura if she wouldn't mind opening the window, as a little fresh air would have been welcome. Also, I wanted to warn Jonah to be careful, when I saw another boy up there with him. A young man, rather. He was thin, hollow-cheeked, with dark hair cropped tight across his tall forehead, pale lips and skin, and the faintest hint of a youthful beard. Unmoving and paying no attention to Jonah who stood right next to him, he was staring at me. The expression on his face was a combination of apprehension and arrogance, a diabolic, threatening look. Jonah didn't seem to be aware he was there. I glanced at Laura, who was still talking though now I couldn't make out what she was saying, and again peered out the window to where he stood, insouciant, his brow-shadowed eyes still fixed on mine.

"Who's that boy up in the tree with Jonah?" I asked, my voice dry as dust.

The young man moved farther back away from Jonah, was partially obscured by the rustling leaves.

"Cassandra? Mrs. Brooks?" Laura was asking.

"That boy there, see him?"

Laura looked out the window to where I was pointing. "What boy?"

"Right there, plain as day, hiding behind Jonah."

Laura said, "I don't think—" just as he turned his back on us and, in the trembling play of shade and light, dissipated and vanished.

I knew what had happened. This time there was no question about it.

"I'm sorry, Laura," I said, forcing a small, apologetic smile. "My mistake."

She shrugged. "That's all right."

How foolish I felt in my disconcertment. Here I had come to Cold Spring, self-cast as a concerned adult wanting to check on the health of a distant ward fate had laid in her path, and in the hope of trying to understand the mystery of the harassing stranger. But now look. More monster, more madness.

"I think it's time we go join up with your mother and Jonah. I'm sure she wouldn't mind having him taken off her hands."

"He didn't seem the annoying type to me," Laura countered, perhaps feeling a little sorry for me. My face must have been pale as the white sunlight outside. "I think you've done a good job bringing him up, if you want to know."

"Thanks for saying so, Laura," now regaining my composure. What I saw, after all, hadn't been there, of course. "I notice you have a book of Emerson's there on your table. You know his line
My cow milks me?
"

"I don't think so."

"Sometimes I think my boys raise me rather than the other way around."

"Well, they've done a good job, too."

Nice of her, but right then I felt shattered to the core. I wanted to finish, as best I could manage, whatever it was I came here to do and leave this place quickly, never to come back. Before we walked to her door, I said, in a small impulsive voice, a whisper between confidantes, "You going to be all right, Laura?"

"Sure, probably, why not?" she answered, as assuringly as she could manage.

Roles reversed again, she put her arm around my waist and vowed she was fine, not to worry. I couldn't think of anything more to say. I wanted to go home, huddle with myself, regroup, and decide how to approach what I sensed was a great crossroads in my life.

Mother and daughter walked me and Jonah under the pendant trees to the truck. I kept my eyes on the ground as much as possible so as not to see the uninvited guest again. When we reached the curb, I embraced Laura, who finally offered me the same half-smile, half-frown as the Covey girl, before walking beside her mother back up the path. I felt my face drain, felt what could only be characterized as supreme defeat.

Driving back across the Hudson, I came to the unavoidable conclusion that much of what was happening to me was a function of a rampant, chaotic imagination. Some kind of lucid dreaming, unbridled and festering. Very real, more real than real, were the counterparts to these imaginings. The man, the cigarettes, the card, the doll. Living at the nexus of real and unreal was becoming all but impossible. In the silent cab of the truck, while Jonah napped, I began to wonder if Niles's therapist hadn't been right. Maybe I had begun to manipulate my world without meaning to, altering it into something unrecognizable. Just what kind of fantasy film had I been directing for much of my life? Maybe I was way out of sync with the objective universe.

That night, after Jonah had tramped off to bed, our house on Mendes Road seemed perplexed. I was projecting, I realized. But I couldn't remember the last time the three of us weren't together. Morgan had called in the early evening to say his team won their afternoon game, and that he had batted in three of the five runs in their shutout victory. It made me happy to hear the jubilance in his voice.

"Good going, dude," I said.

"How was your thing?" he asked.

"All right."

"That bad."

"I can't say we had as excellent a day as you."

"I wish you could be at the game tonight," Morgan said, trying hard not to be wistful or homesick. Just a star who missed his fans.

"We're there in spirit. They feeding you all right?"

We signed off after making arrangements about when I would pick him up at the bus station. A mob scene of moms and diffident young ballplayers who really would prefer it if their teammates weren't there to witness all the hugs and kisses. I promised to be discreet.

"Thanks, Cassandra," he said.

"Hit a homer for me, hear?"

On the porch, I watched a dogtooth-yellow moon rise through battalions of clouds. I needed to think clearly, but my mind was as gauzy as those clouds, and any bright ideas I had seemed as obscured as the moon behind them. Questions and more questions pressed in on me. How was it my long-standing covenant to leave visions to visionaries, to hew to the everyday, had been broken that afternoon at Henderson's? How long had I been interacting with things not wholly there, and what was my relationship to the threatening things that truly were? I knew I must be a real diviner, had proof over and over again that I was, but what did my sense of being either genuine or a fraud actually mean if my waking truths were so far removed from what others understood as true?

The Greeks invented the word
character.
But to them it meant quite the opposite of what it means to us now. For us, character is what makes us individual, unique. We have
characteristics.
We're fearful or courageous. We're loving or cold. Our defining character sets us apart from every other man and woman. For the Greeks, however, character was about what traits each person shares with all people. Our commonality with others was the mark of character. Each person was part of the whole, and all the more so depending on the quality of his or her character. No surprise, I preferred the Greek view of things, wished I could be like everybody else.

My last question now, indeed the only question that really mattered to me, was this. Could I, as a diviner, one damned with the gift of forevisioning, function in the world well enough to avoid the same tyranny of treatment Laura so wisely was sidestepping, the same useless treatment my mother and even Niles would have me undergo? Jonah and Morgan were what counted most. I couldn't take care of them if I was locked inside the prison of professional help, I knew, but neither did it seem possible to be a diviner, a witch, and not bring trouble into their lives. My twins were eleven, healthy and humorous. They were socially adept, more or less. They had grandparents who loved them. No, I decided, all might be well with an undivining Cassandra. Or, that is, well enough. Surely I could recast myself so as to negotiate everyday life the same as anybody. After all, wasn't I finally just another person who needed to get on with life?

Who knows, maybe now everything had come full circle. Ouroborus the serpent caught its tail in its teeth, why not I? What happened today may have been good, I decided, against all odds. Today marked a step away from the abyss, not a fall into it. Yes. My life needed to be taken fully in hand. And by none other than myself. A new Cassandra, as new as I could redraft her from the raw materials I had to work with, would face the morning. The sun would rise. I would see it. And it would be the same damn sun as everybody else's.