Graveyard Child

chapter two

In the morning I took Ozzie for a walk in the freezing brown of December, the leash in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. The steam from the coffee was like my breath. The chill left my face feeling tight and expressionless. I wasn’t looking forward to the day. Ozzie did her best to ignore the leash, pulling me along when there was something interesting to sniff at, and standing like a rock when I was trying to move her along. I couldn’t complain about it too much. She’d lived a long time without anyone telling her what to do, and in her place I probably would have done the same.

When I got back to the hotel, Ex and Chogyi Jake were at the Country Kitchen. Ex was on his way through a plate of bacon and eggs with a cup of acid-smelling coffee. Chogyi Jake was eating yoghurt and drinking tea. I plopped down beside Ex and caught the waiter’s eye. He nodded that he’d bring me a menu in just a second. It was a lot of information in a small gesture, and I wondered if it was a local idiom, or something I’d been seeing and doing all across the world. It was so small, so automatic, that I couldn’t remember.

“Where’s Ozzie?” Ex asked.

“I put her in the room.”

“Not the car?”

“Cold,” I said. “Besides, Mom doesn’t like dogs in the house. They shed.”

The waiter swung by, dropping off the promised menu. It took only a couple seconds to realize I didn’t want anything. I folded my hands on the table and quietly willed the guys to finish. A vague nausea floated at the back of my throat, and the smell of bacon wasn’t helping.

“So what’s the plan?” Ex asked.

“Go home,” I said. “Talk. See what we can find out about Eric. Jay’s going to be doing some wedding preparations still, and I’m hoping that we can use that to put people at ease.”

“You sure you want us horning in?”

“I don’t see an option. Besides, they’re going to be pretty damn curious about all of us. Won’t be hard to start conversations.”

“I think what Ex is asking is whether this is a private moment, or if you want us there with you?” Chogyi Jake said, then ate the last of his yoghurt. I coughed out something close to a laugh.

“Are you kidding? I can’t do this alone.”

“Just thought we should check,” Ex said. He sounded a little petulant. I had the momentary urge to put my hand on his, to reassure him. I’d spent weeks traveling with him, just the two of us together. I didn’t know if the distance I felt in him now was from being back with other people or if he was still grieving for Father Chapin, his old mentor who’d died in my arms less than a month before. Or if he still thought of me as an innocent woman possessed by a demonic force from which he had to save me. Whatever it was, I didn’t put my hand on his, and if he noticed, I couldn’t tell.

The waiter came, and I settled the bill. Twenty minutes later I was turning the SUV down the familiar streets, my breath shallow and my brain spinning. There was Mr. and Mrs. Mogen’s place, but the old green truck he’d driven had been replaced by a red Impala. A younger man’s car. I wondered what had happened. We passed Carol McKee’s house, where I’d gone for Wednesday Bible study from the time I was twelve until I was sixteen. I was driving down two different streets; the one I saw with single-story houses with no fences to divide the yards, one-car garages built back when cars must have been about a foot thinner, and then I was also going down my street where I’d always been. Where I belonged.

There’s a way things are supposed to be, and it’s how it was the first time. A city was supposed to be like this. I’d been to Denver, Chicago, New York, New Orleans. I’d traveled through the winter desert of northern New Mexico. I hadn’t thought about the ways they were exotic for me. Now, for the first time, I could see. They were strange and rich and uncanny because they weren’t Wichita. Until I saw it all, I didn’t know how much I’d missed it, and after about three minutes I wanted to get the hell away.

I turned right, went two more blocks, then left. The houses got a little closer in. More had another story, or half story. And then there it was. A green house with blue trim, a small covered porch with a swing, tight-mowed buffalo grass. The tree I’d climbed in the summers to get away from Jay and Curt. Over on the side, the window I’d gone out of. Home. The driveway had a white Nissan I didn’t recognize, and my dad’s truck was on the street. There were about half a dozen other cars parked by the curbs too, so I had to go down three houses before I found a space big enough to swing the SUV up to the low curb.

“Are you all right?” Ex asked.

“Right as rain,” I said. “Spiffy.”

“Because you’re looking a little pale.”

I killed the engine and sat for a few seconds, listening to the car click as it cooled.

“This is usually where you put in some inappropriate humor,” Ex said. I couldn’t tell if he was making fun of me or being gentle. Maybe both.

“Why didn’t the chicken cross the road?” I said.

“I’ll bite.”

“Because it was too chicken,” I said, and opened my door. “Everyone out. Let’s get our travesty on.”

I stood on the doorstep for ten or fifteen seconds. It felt like forever. The house was smaller than I remembered it. Like going back to a grade school classroom. Like walking into a recurring dream. I pressed the doorbell.

It wasn’t a breath before my mother opened the door. The smells of pinesap and woodsmoke mixed with the generic soap she always bought wafted over me. She looked older, her hair more white than not, her skin thinner. She looked like an older version of my mother. Not the same woman.

“Well,” she said through a tight little smile. “I suppose you should come in. Cold out there.”

“Thank you,” I said, but not in much more than a whisper. I ducked my head as I stepped in, like I was sixteen and late for curfew. I hated that I was doing it, and I could no more stop than I could fly through the air like a sparrow. “This is . . . Jake. And Ex. They’re my friends. They’ve been helping me.”

Mom nodded to them both as they stepped into the atrium.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you both,” she said. “Can I take your coats for you?”

As Ex and Chogyi Jake made their mixed chorus of yeses and thank you ma’ams, it hit me just how lost I was. I’d come here to grill this nice, polite, brittle brick of a woman about screwing around on her husband over two decades ago. I didn’t have any idea how I’d even start a conversation like that. So I heard from this psychic kid in New Orleans that you were knocking boots with someone besides Dad. How’d that happen? My God, the woman had barely been able to tell me how tampons worked. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come.

“Who is it?” Jay called from the kitchen.

My mother’s eyes locked on mine; hers were the same brown as the woman I saw in the mirror every morning. She didn’t turn her head when she shouted back.

“It’s your sister.”

I stepped into the living room. The Christmas tree was still up and bright with tinsel, even if all the strands of colored lights were dark. Jay stepped into the doorway from the kitchen at the same time a long-limbed, lanky boy with a ghost of a mustache came around the corner from the dining room. Jay’s alarm and astonishment looking at me couldn’t have been more than mine on looking at my baby brother, Curtis.

“Jayné?” he said, and the voice was deeper, but it was him.

“Hey,” I said, and put up my arms. We hugged like it meant something, and for the first time in a long time I felt my anxiety ratchet down a notch. I might be wasting my time looking for answers. My parents might think I was the Whore of Babylon. But I’d gotten to hug my little brother, so no matter what, the trip couldn’t be a total loss. And then I felt Jay’s arms around us both. We stood there for a few seconds, the three of us, like old veterans who’d shared the same foxhole.

“Jaybird?”

The brown-skinned woman in the kitchen doorway was maybe two years older than me, with a round, pretty face and a baby bump. Jay stepped to the woman’s side, his hand on her shoulder.

“Jayné, this is Carla. Carla, this is my sister, Jayné.”

The woman seemed hesitant about taking my hand, but my brother damn near crushed me.

“You came for the wedding,” she said.

“I . . . ah. Did,” I said. “I came for the wedding.”

I introduced Chogyi Jake and Ex all around. They were greeted with the friendly confusion that came from being at a family gathering without being family. Normally in situations like this I called them my employees, which was technically true and made people look at me differently, but I knew the next question would be what I employed them for. I didn’t know yet how I wanted to bring in the whole demon-hunting thing, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t it.

They’d been sitting in the kitchen, all except for Curtis, who had his laptop open on the dining room table with three flavors of social media connecting him, I figured, to other bored teenagers trapped at home for the holidays. The things that jumped out at me were the changes: the old white fridge that I’d stuck notes and kid art on had been replaced by a brushed-steel model. The chairs around the kitchen table had new pads on the seats. Looking down the three steps into the TV room, they’d invested in a massive flat-screen on the back wall. The couch was the same one I’d napped on. The table had the scratch where I’d failed to successfully carve a jack-o’-lantern.

“Can I get you and your friends something to drink?” Mom asked as we filed in.

“That would be great,” I said.

“Just water,” Ex said, with a smile.

“Ex,” Carla said. Her smile seemed forced, and her gaze kept cutting back to me. “That’s an interesting name.” The way she said it made it a question. Ex smiled.

“Short for Xavier,” he said. “Some friends made it into a nickname, and it stuck. Not the worst thing they’ve called me.”

“How interesting,” my mother said. “I hope you’ll be coming to the wedding too?”

“We wouldn’t want to intrude,” Chogyi Jake said.

“Of course not,” she said in a way that could have meant You wouldn’t be intruding or Of course you wouldn’t want that with equal facility. Chogyi Jake’s smile was warm and open as always. What I knew of his life pretty much precluded caring much about whether my mother approved of him, but he wasn’t going to be rude about any of it. He was good that way. Still, I felt the warring urges to sweep my friends away from her impeccably polite disapproval or to stand up for them. I hadn’t been in the house five minutes, and I had already reverted to eighteen.

“Where’ve you been?” Curtis asked, curiosity and enthusiasm blinding him to every uncomfortable nuance and subtext.

“Santa Fe,” I said. “And parts of northern New Mexico, but we spent Christmas in Santa Fe.”

“You have friends there?” Beside him, Carla was checking something on her cell phone.

“Sort of,” I said.

“Well, you know the wedding’s the third,” Curtis said, flopping onto a kitchen chair. “A bunch of Carla’s family’s coming in. They’re having it at the church.”

The way he said it made it seem impressive, like that wasn’t the normal place for a wedding. And then I imagined Pastor Michael with his carefully combed hair and constant chummy grin welcoming a pregnant girl up to the altar, and it got a little impressive for me too.

“It’s good to see you,” Jay said. “We’ve been worried.”

“No reason to be,” I said. “Sorry I’ve been scarce.”

Jay smiled.

“It’s just good to see you again. I’m glad you came for this.”

Mom finished serving water to Chogyi Jake and Ex, and turned to me.

“Well? Sit down, sit down. No point us all standing around like straws. How’s college treating you, dear? Have you picked a major?”

Ex’s eyebrows rose. His glance at me said You really have been out of touch, haven’t you?

“Is . . . is Dad . . . ?”

“He’s in the garage,” Mom said, nodding toward the door at the side of the TV room. As if I might have forgotten how to get there. “He’s working in there.”

“I’m just . . .” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

The garage was his space. The side wall was covered in Peg-Board, with the outlines of his tools to mark where each of them should hang. A few nuggets of cat litter crunched under my feet, escapees from the pile he kept under the car to soak up dripping engine oil. He sat at his workbench, his back to me. The directional lamp lit his hands, the white sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms. He was organizing a can of mixed screws, plucking them into piles by thickness, dividing them into Phillips and flathead. It was like watching a kid playing jacks. The kind of thing people always meant to do but never got around to. Unless there was something else that they particularly didn’t want to do.

“So,” I said. “I guess you knew I was coming.”

“Your mother said so,” he replied. His voice was low. In another man I would have called it sullen, but this was my father, so all I could really hear was disapproval. “You here to borrow money?”

“I don’t need money,” I said, chuckling. Nothing I had bought—houses, cars, tickets to Europe, stays in expensive hotels—could even make a dent in the fortune Eric had left me.

He turned to face me. I’d been prepared for a lot of things. Anger, dismissal, the empty coldness that came when he withheld his affections as punishment. There was more than that in him. There was hatred. And also sorrow.

“Well,” he said. “I guess that answers that, then, doesn’t it?” He turned his back to me, his fingers shifting the little bits of metal. The scraping sound was like claws against stone.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Look, I understand that you’re angry with me. And I understand why. But I need to ask you some questions.”

“Why would I be angry with you? What you do with your own’s got nothing to do with me. You just leave me and my family out of it.”

It felt like a slap. I actually had to fight to catch my breath.

“Your family?” I said. “They’re yours, are they?”

“They are,” he said.

“And I’m not.”

“Not anymore,” he said. “Not like you are. You made your choices. I made mine.”

It was like being hollowed. If he’d turned and struck me, I’d have rung like a bell. There was that much nothing in me. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to say it. When I did speak, I almost expected it to be her—my rider—taking control, but the voice was all me.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said, pulling the obscenity out in slow, deliberate syllables. His shoulders bunched, but he didn’t turn back. Didn’t rise to the bait. I was crying now, the tears actually stung. “I mean, goddamn it.”

“I won’t have that kind of language in my house,” he said. His voice sounded thick. Whether it was rage or tears of his own, I didn’t know and it didn’t matter.

“Yeah, because language is what’s important to you. Saying the right words. Actually being a good man? Actually treating me with respect or listening to me or even being in the house to say hello to me when I show up would be wildly un-Christlike. No, hiding in your garage so that I have to come back out here, and then treating me like shit, and telling me I’m not your family anymore—that’s way better than cursing.”

I had my hand halfway to his shoulder. I’d intended to shake him, or turn him around to face me, or something. I don’t know what. The invisible wave hit me like the shock of a bomb without the explosion.

Chi. Raw will. Magic. Whatever you wanted to call it, I’d felt it enough times to recognize it. Someone—or something—had just released a lot of power. Too much power to have come from a human.

Inside the house, glass shattered and my mother screamed.

Dad pulled a drawer open and took out a pistol. The barrel gleamed in the light, clean and freshly oiled. His glance at me was fear and vicious anger. Whatever was in there, whatever had happened, he was going to head in like he could handle it.

He was going to get himself killed.

“No. Stay back,” I said, jumping for the door. “I’ll take care of this.”

“Fuck you,” my father said.