Pill-popping, comatose Mom. “Yeah,” Tyler said.
“She got weird. That’s the only way to explain it. She spent hours on-line looking at these sites about witchcraft and voodoo and ancient African curses and who knows what else. One day, I scrolled through her Internet history and found a site about raising the dead.”
Tyler almost asked for the URL. Raising the dead could come in really handy right about now.
“Then she was going to meetings with other people who believed, that’s what she said—they believed. I told her she was nuts more than a million times but … I had to stop.”
“Why?”
“We had an argument one night last year about all her meetings and her Internet searches. She created that altar in our downstairs. You saw it. I flipped out. Said she was out of her fucking mind and that I’d wish she’d of died instead of Dad.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. So, she sliced her wrists.”
“Jesus.”
“Not too deep, but deep enough. Took me a few days to get the blood out of the carpet. I destroyed her altar, kicked it into pieces. She was in the hospital for three weeks. They did a psych evaluation.”
“And?”
“My mother may be crazy but she can play sane with the best of them. She answered their questions, admitted to some stress and some depression from my dad’s death, and calmed everybody’s fears. I even started to believe she was better. Until she came back home and reconstructed the altar. She apologized for what happened and then went on with her ceremonies or whatever.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone? A guidance counselor. Somebody.”
“So I could be alone? Go into foster care? When I’m eighteen and can be on my own, I will tell someone, I’ll get her some help. But right now, I need to just ride it out.”
“My mother has a doctor. He gives her a lot of pills. She’s asleep most of the day, but she’s not worshipping any evil gods or anything.”
“Neither is mine. She’s just confused, like everybody.”
“I’m just saying …”
“I’m not drugging my mother.”
“What if she slices her wrists again?”
“She won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because she thinks I believe the witchcraft stuff, too.”
“You willingly got naked and … laid before me?”
Another pause. When she spoke again she was defensive. “I’m not proud of it, Tyler, but I did what I had to, to make my mother think she was helping.”
“You tricked me into coming to your house so she could throw blood on me? Does that sound like help?”
“She got the blood from a farmer. It’s not poisonous or anything.”
“You’re just going to make excuses for her?”
“She’s my mother!”
Tyler let the vibrating cords of her shout dissipate. Though he felt more awake than he had only a few minutes ago, his eyes were beginning to cash it in for the night. Beneath him, in the garage, the faint strains of music tickled at the floor like the slight vibrations bugs make on a puddle of water. What was Dad doing?
“Look,” he said, “what do you want from me?”
“To understand, to not hate me, to not be scared.”
“Scared? Your mother throws blood in my face, raises a knife over your naked body and you don’t want me to be scared?”
“It’s all for show.”
“I don’t want to be involved in any more of this show, okay?”
“My mother is not a real witch. She thinks she is and she thinks she can help, that’s all. What’s so wrong about that?”
He laughed, unable to find the words to explain why it was so wrong.
“My mother is harmless.”
“Slicing her wrists is harmless?”
“She did that to herself. It only happened once.”
“What a relief.”
“Please don’t be like this.”
“Like what, a rational fucking person?”
“I know I should have told you this sooner but I started to, I don’t know, believe what my mother was doing might actually work.”
“You’re a witch, too?”
“No, but … She believes so strongly and it started to give me hope, you know? I went along with it and … here we are.”
“Yeah, here we are—nowhere.”
“Tyler, please.”
He saw himself throwing the cellphone across the room, saw it shatter into a million pieces. If all this witchcraft stuff was for show, like make-believe, then there never was any curse, and Delaney’s death was just some freak accident. That idea only fueled his anger.
“Don’t please me, Sasha. I’m the victim here, okay. Maybe you’re mother is crazy and she’s doing all that witchcraft shit because she’s delusional but maybe there’s something to it, too. You just said you started to believe it. My sister is dead. The day after you claimed I raped you, my sister is killed. Maybe that’s coincidence and maybe it’s not. I don’t know what to think, but I’ll tell you this: if your mother put a curse on me and my family in some pathetic attempt to punish me or help you win me back, she better take it off now or there will be some really bad shit going down. You understand?”
She said nothing.
“Go ahead, play dumb. I don’t ever want to see you again. Stop spreading lies about us at school. I don’t like you. I don’t want anything to do with you. Fuck it, I hate you. You got that? Now, go tell your psycho-bitch of a mother that if she managed, somehow managed, to actually cast a spell against me, she better reverse it now.”
He expected tears and pleading but got only silence. Until, that was, she opened her mouth and ruined everything.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
8
Anthony barely paid attention to the words the priest offered or the hymns the congregation sang or the string of sobbing teenage girls who spoke fondly of Delaney and then kissed her coffin. He wasn’t in shock the way most of the mourners believed when they saw him sitting frozen in the front pew, his unconscious wife next to him sleeping against her sister’s neck. Anthony was in the middle of a vast emptiness and a million miles before him sparkled the glimmer of a sunrise. That glimmer was hope.
The flier from the First Church of Jesus Christ the Empowered was tucked into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He had read it over more times than was probably healthy (though health issues ceased to matter much at all these days) and had even Mapquested the address. The church was right where he figured it would be on Broadway in Newburgh, though he still couldn’t believe it. He had not, up until last Saturday, heard of any Church of Jesus Christ the Empowered and he a found it difficult to accept that an organization open enough to knock on doors seeking parishioners could exist so surreptitiously. Still, there was the address, confirmed by the trustworthy people of wherever who ran MapQuest.
A rundown building, no doubt. Even so, he was still going to check it out. He had to. After the incident in his car (That was for you Dad), he needed to know if he was losing his mind, as likely a possibility as any, or had actually experienced a genuine otherworldly encounter. He could accept the former, but he wanted to believe the latter. Insanity might eventually bring comfort, yet only a true religious experience could offer succor for his ailing heart.
Throughout the service, Anthony reached inside his jacket and touched the flier as if it were a talisman that might ease his grief or even transport him far from this place where people cried over his dead daughter. This was not where he wanted to be—no parent would ever want to be in this place, either. He needed to be in a place that offered answers and hope, hope most of all. Without hope, what was the point of continuing? Not to put too fine a point on it, he could die this minute and everything would be fine. Tyler would look after Brendan; Stephanie, her sister. There was a Twilight Zone episode about a librarian who had become obsolete, and a futuristic ruling council declared it over and over again: Obsolete! Obsolete! That image had stuck with him perhaps for this very moment.