Lullaby

Chapter 35

With me driving, Mona sits in the backseat with her arms folded. Helen sits in the front seat next to me, the grimoire open in her lap, lifting each page against her window so she can see sunlight through it. On the front seat between us, her cell phone rings.

At home, Helen says, she still has all the reference books from Basil Frankie's estate. These include translation dictionaries for Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. There are books on ancient cuneiform writing. All the dead languages. Something in one of these books will let her translate the grimoire. Using the culling spell as a sort of code key, a Rosetta stone, she might be able to translate them all.

And Helen's cell phone rings.

In the rearview mirror, Mona picks her nose and rolls the booger against the leg of her jeans until it's a hard dark lump. She looks up from her lap, her eyes rolling up, slow, until she's looking at the back of Helen's head.

Helen's cell phone rings.

And Mona flicks her booger into the back of Helen's pink hair.

And Helen's cell phone rings. Her eyes still in the grimoire, Helen pushes the phone across the seat until it presses my thigh, saying, «Tell them I'm busy.»

It could be the State Department with her next hit assignment. It could be some other government, some cloak-and-dagger business to conduct. A drug kingpin to rub out. Or a career criminal to retire.

Mona opens her green brocade Mirror Book, her witch's diary, in her lap and starts scribbling in it with colored pens.

On the phone is a woman.

It's a client of hers, I tell Helen. Holding the phone against my chest, I say, the woman says a severed head bounced down her front stairway last night.

Still reading the grimoire, Helen says, «That would be the five-bedroom Dutch Colonial on Feeney Drive.» She says, «Did it disappear before it landed in the foyer?»

I ask.

To Helen, I say, yes, it disappeared about halfway down the stairway. A hideous bloody head with a leering smile.

The woman on the phone says something.

And broken teeth, I say. She sounds very upset.

Mona's scribbling so hard the colored pens squeak against the paper.

And still reading the grimoire, Helen says, «It disappeared. End of problem.»

The woman on the phone says, it happens every night.

«So call an exterminator,» Helen says. She holds another page against the sunlight and says, «Tell her I'm not here.»

The picture that Mona's drawing in her Mirror Book, it's a man and woman being struck by lightning, then being run over by a tank, then bleeding to death through their eyes. Their brains spray out their ears. The woman wears a tailored suit and a lot of jewelry. The man, a blue tie.

I'm counting 1, counting 2, counting 3 …

Mona takes the man and woman and tears them into thin strips.

The phone rings again, and I answer it.

I hold the phone against my chest and tell Helen, it's some guy. He says his shower sprays blood.

Still holding the grimoire against the window, Helen says, «The six-bedroom on Pender Court.»

And Mona says, «Pender Place. Pender Court has the severed hand that crawls out of the garbage disposal.» She opens the car window a little and starts feeding the shredded man and woman out through the crack.

«You're thinking of the severed hand at Palm Corners,» Helen says. «Pender Place has the biting phantom Doberman.»

The man on the phone, I ask him to please hold. I press the redHOLD button.

Mona rolls her eyes and says, «The biting ghost is in the Spanish house just off Millstone Boulevard.» She starts writing something with a red felt-tip pen, writing so the words spiral out from the center of the page.

I'm counting 9, counting 10, counting 11 …

Squinting at the lines of faint writing on the page she has spread against the window, Helen says, «Tell them I'm out of the real estate business.» Trailing her finger along under each faint word, she says, «The people at Pender Court, they have teenagers, right?»

I ask, and the man on the phone says yes.

And Helen turns to look at Mona in the backseat, Mona flicking another rolled booger, and Helen says, «Then tell him a bathtub full of human blood is the least of his problems.»

I say, how about we just keep driving? We could hit a few more libraries. See some sights. Another carnival, maybe. A national monument. We could have some laughs, loosen up a little. We were a family once, we could be one again. We still love each other, hypothetically speaking. I say, how about it?

Mona leans forward and yanks a few strands of hair out of my head. She leans and yanks a few pink strands from Helen.

And Helen ducks forward over the grimoire, saying, «Mona, that hurt.»

In my family, I say, my parents and I, we could settle almost any squabble over a rousing game of Parcheesi.

The strands of pink and brown hair, Mona folds them inside the page of spiral writing.

And I tell Mona, I just don't want her to make the same mistakes I made. Looking at her in the rearview mirror, I say, when I was about her age, I stopped talking to my parents. I haven't talked to them in almost twenty years.

And Mona sticks a baby pin through the page folded with our hair inside.

Helen's phone rings again, and this time it's a man. A young man.

It's Oyster. And before I can hang up, he says, «Hey, Dad, you'll want to make sure and read tomorrow's newspaper.» He says, «I put a little surprise in it for you.»

He says, «Now, let me talk to Mulberry.»

I say her name's Mona. Mona Sabbat.

«It's Mona Steinner,» Helen says, still holding a page of the grimoire to the window, trying to read the secret writing.

And Mona says, «Is that Oyster?» From the backseat, she reaches around both sides of my head, grabbing for the phone and saying, «Let me talk.» She shouts, «Oyster! Oyster, they have the grimoire!»

And me trying to steer the car, the car veering all over the highway, I flip the phone shut.