Chapter 2
TWO
December 12 2011
Fort Bragg, California
“It’s just a phase, Lilly. All teenage girls go through it. I know I did.”
There was a clinking of frosted nails against glass, the brush of silk upon waxed flesh, the gentle hum of laughter as both women crossed their legs simultaneously. They were wealthy women with wealthy fathers, and had never understood the harrowing disability of poverty. Even now, as evening settled down over their home, they wore heels and pearls. Their boudoirs packed with diamonds and Dolce and Cabana. They had no idea of the darkness lurking outside their doors. Their idea of evil was a dog running around without a tutu strapped to its waist, split ends and a daughter who’d rather paddle out to sea than earn a doctorate.
A bottle of pink champagne and cookies sat between them, twin glasses spun from crystal suspended in their hands as if they were poising for a magazine spread. Both were from the bakery near the water. Every holiday Lillian would stroll down the boardwalk with oversized sunglasses hiding her face, a basket weaved from heavy cords of straw hanging from the crease in her elbow, and would gather an assortment of baked goods to claim as her own. Mallow drops and rugelach thick with chocolate, ropes of sourdough, a single bottle of champagne that she hid between the fabric softener and detergent in the laundry room. Liquor was a condemnable vice, but a sin she confessed every Sunday. These were paper women living their paper lives in a dollhouse that had been built around them with their husbands’ checkbooks.
Charlotte hovered near the dining room entryway and watched them as they conversed. It was mesmerizing to see the way her mother wore her masks, and how quickly she could change between them. Here, with her younger sister, she sat with her back fully taut against her chair, one knee carefully crossed over the other. The one hand that wasn’t occupied with alcohol became entangled in a loose thread on the edge of her pleated skirt. Charlotte could see the twitch in her jawline, the slight tremble in her full lips when she spoke, both of which only happened when she was upset. Nervous. She’d seen that a lot in her mother lately, but as her gaze flickered back to the front door and the footprints trailing away from it, she didn’t need to wonder why.
They’d decorated for Christmas. Snakes of holly followed the perimeters of every room, Hallmark snowmen and elves perched over the wine cabinet. Snowflakes cut from paper and dribbled with white glitter dangled from the ceiling. The smell of pine and peppermint wafted in from where a Douglas fir had been placed in front of the living room window. She’d seen it when coming up from the driveway. The curtains had been slightly pulled back, and cream-colored lights warmed the glass. They had strung it with popcorn and glass doves, balls of white and red candy hidden in-between the needles.
But Charlotte’s interest didn’t lay in the holiday frivolities strewn about the home. Only the things it represented. Her gaze bored into the dining room just above her mother’s head. There was a delicate, wooden cross that had been given to her parents on their wedding day, and it hung just above the partition that separated the kitchen from the banqueting area. It made her eyes swim with tears every time she looked at it, and the voice slithering inside her head kept growing louder the longer she stood.
Take it off the wall. Take it off and throw it into the fireplace. You’ll feel so much better when it’s gone, I promise.
“No.” Charlotte’s voice was meek with protest, and that singular word was barely audible as the turntable propped against the china cabinet switched records. Bing Crosby’s voice filled the room with an accompaniment of bells and piano, and Charlotte felt herself shrink inward. Said the night wind to the little lamb; do you see what I see? Way up in the sky little lamb, do you see what I see?
She took a step back and pressed herself against the wall, clasping her hands together at the small of her back. She could feel that little voice in her head grow angry, restless. She’d begun to lose count of the days she couldn’t remember, the hours spent in the company of an invisible man. He was loud. Demanding. And it was becoming increasingly difficult to sort his voice from her own. He was manic when she was disobedient, disappearing for several days on end when she was less so. It was those days that she questioned her own sanity, if the acts of ungodliness were her way of rebelling against her upbringing. But here she was, barefoot and covered in dirt and blood, standing in the darkened archway of her childhood home with a genderless voice sounding inside the caverns of her mind. This wasn’t rebellion.
Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king; do you know what I know? In your palace wall mighty king. Do you know what I know? A child, a child shivers in the cold.
You know what happens when you don’t do as you’re told, Charlotte.
I know you hear me.
I know you feel me.
Take it off the fucking wall, girl.
“I don’t think it is.” Lillian’s gaze hesitated on a corner of the table where the covering had begun to wrinkle, a small bit of stubborn lace that never fully folded over. “She never calls anymore, and when she does, she doesn’t make sense. She’ll go on about…” She trailed off, frown lines gathering around the pivots of her mouth. She scooted her chair closer to her sister, leaning over the plate of untouched cookies. As if what she was about to say was something secret and just as equally foul. “…she says that she hears voices. Scratching in the walls, and sometimes there’s someone banging on the other side of her dorm but no-one else hears it. I…I shouldn’t have sent her to that damn school.” There was a pause where her voice hitched, but she quickly stifled it with liqueur. “Dylan insisted on Notre Dame and its done nothing but distance her from us.”
“She’s just adjusting to life on her own, hon. She’s a bright girl. You’ve raised her right, and whatever she can’t handle, God will. Just have faith.” Rachel closed the distance between the two of them and patted her sister’s hand with an air of confident reassurance. “I’ll help you make a care package for her. A sunshine box with her favorite things. She’s probably stressed. Homesick, and that’ll help.”
Lillian nodded half-heartedly as Rachel stood and grasped the champagne bottle, leaning slightly to refill both of their glasses. Her heels clicked loudly on the wood flooring, the tap-tap echoing across the hall. “And who knows. Maybe she’ll find a boy. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
The rain outside howled.
There was a sudden buzzing that started in the back of Charlotte’s scalp that started low, but steadily began to increase in volume. She didn’t know how long she had been standing there in that parlor entrance watching her mother and aunt, didn’t know why she kept herself hidden to the dark hallway leading up to the break in flooring. Her fingers flexed over the doorframe, and she took a step forward as Rachel capped the wine bottle and moved back to her chair. The floor groaned under her weight, and Lillian’s head lifted at the sound, thinking that her husband had finally returned home early from his business trip.
“Charlotte? Good God, Char—” Lillian pushed herself up from where she sat and began moving towards her daughter. Without thinking. Without wondering why Charlotte was barefoot and her nails chipped all the way to the quick, or why the white t-shirt cutting off at her knees was smeared with dark trails of something unnamed. She would soon learn that the price of motherhood wasn’t the white chalk marks roving across her belly, but the unconditional naivety that befalls them when in contact with the true nature of their children.
An invisible force knocked her mother back and into the table when she hovered only a few feet from her offspring, the champagne glasses shattering like falling stars beneath her. In her peripherals, she could see Lillian’s trembling hands paused upon shards of crystal, pinpricks of blood blooming upon her palms. Her aunt merely froze, her mouth contorted into a silent “oh”. Crosby continued to sing in the background as both women stared up at the blonde girl in fear. Charlotte’s eyes had rolled back into her head and her throat opened to the ceiling. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe. And as suddenly as it all started, the atmosphere around her plane of vision suddenly went black, veins of lightening throbbing behind dark swirls of cloud. Her arms opened on either side of her body, fingers crookedly arced towards her palms. Like old tombstones leaning in towards greener grass but never quite reaching.
Said the king to the people everywhere. Listen to what I say. Pray for peace people everywhere. Listen to what I say. The child, the child, sleeping in the night.
Take it off the fucking wall.
Throw it in the fireplace, sink it in the pool.
Bury it in the snow like your mother did her dead babies.
I am your father. Your mother. Your lover. Your Alpha and Omega. I am the blood in your veins, the bruises on your thighs, the air you breathe. YOU WILL DO AS I SAY.
She could feel something slithering up from the tips of her toes. It was long and black, touring through the pit of her stomach and taking harbor just behind her ribcage. It hissed when it moved, a language that was dead and burned at the edges. The words grew faster and more agitated as she stood there, back arced to the heavens and lips pulled back against her teeth. Syllables and vowels ran together like water before they began spilling from her own tongue. They were guttural, pushing up from her abdomen and spitting from between her teeth. Her body quaked violently.
“Charlotte, baby, look at me. Please, just stop. Tell me—” Tears rolled down Lillian’s cheeks, but her pleads were quickly stifled by the sound of the crucifix on the wall flying across the room, the bottle of champagne rupturing in on itself, the stray glass embedding into the soft flesh of her aunt’s midsection. Strings of Latin and Arabic tumbled from her lips like stones, each word more aggressive than the last. A low, discordant groan rose from the floorboards, folding in on the women from the very tips of the rafters and back down again, tumbling, suffocating. Falling. It felt like falling, like the first leaf of autumn from a sun kissed sky. Weightless and without sense of cause. Her eyes blinked but did not see, fingers moved but could not touch. She was nothing more than a broken doll strung up by a ventriloquist’s molding hands. She felt the floor disappear from beneath her feet and it was then she felt something snap inside her. Something went wrong in this No Man’s Land where she lived but didn’t live. As if the thin veil that had been keeping Charlotte disassociated from the voices in her head all this time had finally torn.
The kitchen lights shuddered as if enduring a storm. They flickered once, twice, and then the house fell to black and the only illumination was the pale milk of moonlight staining the front doorway. A subtle click and the hissing of static emanated from the record player in the corner before everything went deathly still. Like the entire world had been put to sleep. Tucked in and left behind for the darkness to eat her children whole. Charlotte could taste gasoline on her lips and somewhere in the back of her mind she thought she should feel cold, but she supposed the cold only contested the living and she had died a long time ago. Surrendered her body to this thing of many names inside her. The tension in her hands fell lax and head fell forward, curls of muddied gold falling alongside her face as she collapsed to her knees. Glass crunched beneath her mother’s knees as she moved like a frightened animal towards her daughter. Murmurs of pain whispered somewhere from her aunt, but she couldn’t place the location.
“Charlie—” Lillian’s hand ghosted towards Charlotte. She could almost taste her fear. It was bittersweet, a new kind of terror that the wolves inside the girl hungered for; she could feel their maws snap as her mother grew closer, could feel them paw at the fragile bone of her ribcage. “C-can you hear me? Can you—”
The steady hum of the turntable switching back on caused the older woman to jump back as if she had just run her fingers across a hot stove. The music started out as hardly more than a whisper, a hushed assembly of bells and baritone crooning, but as each second passed, each syllable grew in volume until Charlotte had to clasp her palms over the shells of her ears. The house shook with a succession of what sounded like pots and pans banging against the walls. Ringing through the sky, shepherd boy. Do you hear what I hear? A song, a song high above the trees with a voice as big as the sea.
Then just as suddenly as everything began, it all came to a still as red and blue patrol lights washed across the bay window, followed by heavy footfalls of men and their bullets. The pounding stopped. Power returned to the twinkling gems scattered across the Christmas tree and the chandelier dripping diamonds from the vaulted ceiling yawning above their heads. Everything after that became a blur. She felt hand hands on her shoulders, metal on her wrists, and heard the droning salt and pepper static of radios being called in.
“We found her. Yeah. Just a few miles down.”
“Gonna need an ambulance.”
The Child, the Child sleeping in the night. He will bring us goodness and light. He will bring us goodness and light.
“Charlotte, can you hear me? Have you taken any kind of—ma’am, I’m going to need you to step away and let us—” Light in her eyes. Blinding. They were looking for her in this body, but she was already gone. The murmuring in her head fell to a dull roar and she could suddenly feel winter on her legs, the lesions across the soles of her feet, the fire in her throat. All of it hit her at once, a punch to the stomach. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her body collapsed against pools of champagne and glass. Somewhere in the background she could hear her mother screaming her name and the chatter of codes and medical terminology from the men opening her eyes and probing around the pink flesh of her gums. But all of it was far away, underwater, garbled. All that rang clear was his voice. Smooth like wine and it was the last thing she heard before what little of her consciousness remained fell to black.
Time to go, Charlie girl.