The Diviner's Tale (32 page)

— I don't want anything.

— You need to eat some bread at least. Even convicts get bread and water.

— Maybe I'll have a piece of bread.

— What happened to your shoe?

— Lost it.

— I can break into your parents' house and bring you another pair.

— No, don't, I said.

He sat beside me on the rock and observed me with the same open curiosity a cat might show a cornered mouse.

— How'd you know where this place is? I asked.

— Chris showed me, he claimed, but I knew he wasn't telling me the truth. —So now only you and me are the ones that know. You're safe here.

I remembered what the stone said about me not being safe, but Roy wasn't unkind or threatening in any way. Instead, he was nice and thoughtful and didn't do what I expected the first person who found me would do. That is, order me to come home this instant. He didn't shame me by saying my mother and father were half out of their minds with worry. All he did was offer to help me survive a little better until I decided on my own what to do. This is what I told both Millicent and the stone, after Roy heeled the hound and left, saying he'd be back tomorrow, promising not to tell a soul he had found me. —You'll be wanting more supplies. I'll take care of everything.

When I asked the stone what she made of all this, she demurred. I thought she might have been a little jealous, but the stone didn't care for Roy.

— We'll see, she said.

For all my stubborn abstinence, my martyr's will to fast, to starve myself until I was as pure as the stone in my hand, I couldn't help but eat some of the food Roy had brought. I fingered peanut butter from the half-full jar and ate one of the apples. When I hiked down to the stream to drink some more water and wash my face, I sensed I was being watched. I hid myself behind a hemlock and trained my eyes, sharp as a fox's, back up the hill and across its cragged ridge. Sunlight danced everywhere, near and far, in puddles and flashes where the thick leaves parted to let it in, then closed and playfully parted again, projecting what looked like a million fat blinking stars against a green sky. Nothing moved but light and leaves. No one was there. The stone suggested I was afraid because a person had broken in on my fragile, desperate peace. She was right, I was sure.

That third night was the worst, crowded by nightmares. No sooner would I fall asleep than wake again, feverish from dreamed scenarios with Nep laughing at me, then baring fangs like some hairless wolf, and my mother giving all my clothes away to some girls I never saw before, saying that if they didn't fit go ahead and burn them because I never was much of a daughter, and another in which a man with no face was trying to push the stone into my mouth. The sun rose on an exhausted runaway, my fourth and last day in the cave. Whether from exposure or malnutrition, my skin felt every bit as on fire as the phantasmagoric clothes the dream girls were meant to burn.

— You all right? I asked the stone. —I'm not.

The stone was as mute as Millicent this morning. Maybe she had said everything a stone was able to say. Who knows, I thought, maybe she had died during the night.

— I agree. You don't look too good, Roy said, instead.

— How long you been here? glancing up in shock at hearing his voice again.

— All your life, he answered. —You were sleeping. I didn't want to wake you up. Look, I brought you a blanket.

He knelt beside me and wrapped the blanket around my shoulders. While the first part of his answer hadn't made any sense, he'd spoken with such unwavering conviction that I didn't argue.

— That's better, isn't it? he said.

I was shivering too much to speak but nodded my head yes.

— I'll make a fire, warm you up.

— No, I said, looking at the stone for guidance. The stone blankly stared back.

— But you're shaking like a stick. Here, let me—

— No, leave me alone, I cried out.

— That's nice, he said. —Here's the thanks I get for helping you.

— I'm sorry.

— You just don't know what's good for you, he said, and took my hair into his hand, knotting it like he had that time when the gang was last together. —I'm trying to warm you up, is all. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

— No, I said, trying and failing to move away from him.

— See, that's better already, he hissed, snaking his arm around my waist and pressing his face against the side of my head. I felt too sick and afraid to tell him, No, it wasn't better. I wanted to flee, but he had my hands caught behind my back and forced me down against the rock where I'd been lying and dreaming terrible sleeping dreams only a few minutes before this waking nightmare began. Time twisted and broke, and what transpired was in a single, interminable gesture rather than several angry, awkward, violent ones. He had my mouth clamped under the weight of his palm. My jeans were forced below my knees, one leg off my kicking shoeless foot, searing pain, and I blacked out and remembered nothing more until I woke up a second time that morning being carried by Roy, cradled in his arms as if he were my savior, with his smiling dog, innocently full of life, bounding ahead of us. When he brought me back to the house, a transient hero for finding and saving me, it was he who lifted me across the doorsill, like some valiant groom bringing home his semiconscious bride. The police asked questions, mostly regarding where he'd located me and why I ran away. Since he obfuscated and postured with confident brilliance and I wasn't willing or able to say much to them, they left, reasonably concluding that the poor girl clinging to her dirty little doll was traumatized by the violent death of her beloved brother and had bought some time to grieve by herself at everyone's expense. No matter, she was home now. The doctor, who did little more than take my temperature, advised bed rest and nourishment. His patient made no noises of complaint because whatever had happened was already beginning to cloak itself in a mist of unreality. The episode slid into a deviation far out of the stream that was my life. It became over time an irrelevancy, without real cause or, I thought hopefully, when I thought about it at all, any ultimate effect.

I went back to the cave once, hoping to find my sister stone. To see if she still had a voice to speak with and, if so, what she might say. But, like Chris and Roy Skoler and my mother for a time, she was gone.

T
HE TWINS AND I
picked up Nep and headed out in his station wagon past Callicoon, crossing the span into Pennsylvania in search of fireworks, which were still legal there. My mother gave me some money to help with the purchase, which I could ill afford alone, but refused to come along with us on this, our shady annual expedition. We weren't allowed to transport fireworks back across the border into New York and weren't sanctioned to light them up at our Independence Day celebration. But a number of people in these rural reaches, where municipal fireworks displays were even more amateur than ours, went ahead with their own shows, and Niles both watched and looked the other way. A form of social protest, was how Nep saw it. One that the Founding Fathers would have applauded. The right to bear fireworks should be in the Constitution, he used to joke.

"You look wrong today," Nep said to me when we pulled out on the road.

"I didn't sleep that well last night."

"She's wearing lipstick in case she sees Charley again," said Morgan.

"What's Charley?"

"I'm not wearing lipstick. You remember Charley, Nep. He was one of Christopher's friends. You always liked him."

"Well, if it's not lipstick, what is it?" Morgan goaded.

"Lip gloss. There's a difference."

"Don't remember," said Nep.

"Lip glue more like. Think of all the dust that's going to get stuck there."

"Point for Morgan," said Jonah.

"Point for nobody." Today of all days, on this Nep adventure I always looked forward to, I should have been in a livelier, lighter mood. But seeing Roy Skoler changed all that. I felt as if my life had been a jigsaw puzzle spilled on the floor, and a part of me longed to put it together to see what the picture looked like, while another part had grown used to it being unsolved and preferred it that way.

"You're unhappy," said Nep.

"I'm fine."

"You're unhappy."

"Well, look, I'm already doing a lot better with my three men here headed out to spend good money on bad contraband. How's that?"

"That's the bomb" and "Rock on," the boys exclaimed at the same time.

Which made Nep laugh, which made me try to smile.

And damned if we didn't shoot the works. Roman candles and strobing fountains. Vampire rockets that came in their own gaudy coffins. Ones that promised to send up silver whistling tails. Ones that crackled into chrysanthemums and Man-o'-Wars. Bottle rockets of every variety our under-the-counter dealer, a fellow Nep had dowsed a well for, had in his inventory. Several boxes of the hardware were loaded into the back of the wagon and hidden under blankets. The return drives from Pennsylvania always elicited the same kind of crisp trepidation one might feel if walking across live coals on a dare. I had a sense this could be our last such run. The laws were getting stricter and it wasn't fair to ask Niles to compromise himself any longer. Besides, there was the matter of Nep.

Early on during our venture he was bright as a sparkler. Yes, he voiced his opinion in his personal language of cobbled words sometimes—he told Morgan to get a haircut, saying he ought to cut off his hat—but when we crossed the river, he told the boys with perfect clarity about water boils and how dangerous they can be.

"A vacuum of air stirs under the water and can rise up and pull a boat right under, like that," snapping his fingers.

Yet once we had finished with the fireworks dealer, he seemed to slip into a passing coma. A transient death of sorts, asleep with his eyes and mouth open.

"Jonah, give him a nudge on the shoulder. Real gentle."

He did, and my father came awake. Said something incomprehensible. Then drifted off again. At one point when we were recognizably close to the house he had lived in his whole life, he asked why we were going back to Covey.

"Everything all right?" Morgan asked him.

"Right as ruin," he misspoke, craning to look at his grandson as if he didn't quite know who the boy was.

Once home, we hauled our cache into Nep's workshop, where his old cronies Joe Karp, Billy Mecham, and Sam Briscoll—the three wise men, as they were known, though their wisdom was suspect over the years—were waiting to help sort through the munitions. Seeing them recentered Nep, grounded him back into his life. Their routine was sacrosanct. They drank a few beers, parsed the weather forecast for the hallowed event, decided on what order the birds would fly. Jonah and Morgan had been allowed to join this exclusive club when they turned seven. Same age Christopher was let in. Same age I was. We children of both generations weren't really asked to offer our opinions. Our role was more like that of a Greek chorus. When one of the wise men had a good idea, we sang its praises. In some ways, the half an hour of live fireworks after the barbecue was incidental to these more intimate preludes.

As I entered the kitchen to help Rosalie set out a late lunch, she was sitting at the round oak clawfoot table, holding a wet tea bag over her cup, watching it swing from side to side like a dowser's pendulum. Her chin perched on a folded hand as she studied the bag swaying on its short string.

"Self-hypnosis?" I asked.

"I didn't hear you come in," flushed like quarry out of her reverie.

"What were you divining just now?"

She laid the tea bag on a saucer and drank. No steam rose off the cup, so I had to wonder how long she had been there. It never ceased to amaze me that a woman whose life was so closely driven by a belief in the holy divine always recoiled when she heard the word used as a human verb instead of an ecclesiastic noun.

"Charley Granger called looking for you. Haven't seen him in years."

"He left Corinth a long time ago."

"A good guy, wasn't he?"

"I always liked Charley," I agreed, hoping she wouldn't divine me and my girlhood crush in retrospect. I told her where he lived now, what brought him back to Little Eddy, and asked if it would be all right to invite him and his mother to the holiday gathering.

"Of course," she said, and after a pause, "How'd he look? His eye, I mean."

"Looked like it was shut, is all," I told her, wanting to change the subject. "Speaking of which, have you seen Nep sleeping with his eyes open?"

"I don't like to talk about it. Did you get all your bombs and firecrackers?"

"Enough for four Fourth of Julys."

"He married?"

"Charley?" I asked, disingenuous, wishing for all the world I could open up with my mother about Roy Skoler and the forevisioner's intuitions I had begun to have about him, all the while knowing a lifetime of unspoken rage and humiliation over what he did made any thoughts I might have about his current activities wildly suspect. "We didn't talk about it one way or the other."

She picked up her spoon, stared blinking at it as one might a hand mirror whose face was tarnished, then startled me with words as plain and frank as I had ever heard from her. "I just don't know what I'm going to do with myself when your father goes," and looked up at me, her face as stoic as my long-lost river stone's, but her eyes damp.

As surely as she knew me, I knew my mother. She would not want me to break down in tears with her. Early on after Nep and I bonded in the wake of Christopher's death, Rosalie had conceived of the two of us as suffering from some sort of
folie à deux
—a mutually shared or stimulated psychotic disorder—whereas I had often thought she was afflicted by a
folie à dieu.
She always considered herself the sanest of our tribe, and as a matter of fact her position wasn't easily assailable, although she too had her faults and demons. Though Christ took over where Christopher left off, I know that my mother had passed many of those years much more lonely and bereft than Nep and I had been, and no prayer group or Bible circle had been able to rectify that. They wouldn't now, fully, either.