There Will Be Lies (39 page)

They say to surrender. To come out. Or they have been authorised to [             ]
.

I don’t catch what she says there, but I guess it means: kill.

I see a reptilian flicker in her eyes.

They gave an ultimatum, didn’t they? To see if I was alive
.

She nods.
They said they wanted to hear your voice, or they would come in. You didn’t hear
.

Of course I didn’t hear, I think. And you were willing for them to assault the room, to maybe get us both killed. Because you were scared. Scared of being alone. I would pity her, if I didn’t hate her more. I don’t say any of this with my hands though.

But there’s hating someone, and then there’s wanting them to die, or allowing them to die so they get off the hook, and I’m a long way from either of those things.

We still have time
, I say.
Put down the gun. Let’s open the door. Hands in the air. You’re descended from warriors. You can’t let prison defeat you
.

What?

It’s something someone said to me, when I was afraid
.

Another moment of stillness.

I love you
, Shaylene says eventually.
I love you all
–

–
the way to Cape Cod and back
, I say with my hands.
So drop the gun. Drop the gun
.

She lowers the shotgun, then throws it down on the bed.

Shaylene looks wildly towards the door and I see it shake on its hinges – the battering ram. I take that final step towards her.

Lie down on the ground
, I say.
Put your hands behind your head
.

She doesn’t say anything, just does it, and I lie on top of her, my hands on my head too, so they can’t shoot her, so they can’t kill her and then say that they thought she was holding the gun.

I can feel her saying something, feel her ribs expanding, her diaphragm lifting; I don’t know, a prayer or something, a mantra; I don’t hear the words, obviously. I remember when I was about five years old. Shaylene put some music on and turned it up way loud. Then she took my hands and put them on the speakers, so I could feel the beat – the whole room throbbing with it, as if filled with energy; Shaylene too, the pulse of the music moving her limbs, her head.

And then we danced together, me holding on to the speaker, and time spiralled out forever.

For the longest time after that, and this is the bit I don’t remember, Shaylene says I went around touching things, thinking I’d be able to hear them. Like, I put my hands on a horse, at the petting zoo, so that I could know what it was saying. On stones; on trees – feeling for that vibration from within.

Not that it seemed so stupid, when she and I read through a high school physics book years later and learned about electrons, spinning around their neutrons like the earth around the sun, vast subatomic distances between them. Which means that inside a stone, inside a tree, is a whole galaxy, a universe, of spinning things, dancing things, all moving, all making music.

You could hear it if you wanted, only not with your hands; they’re not sensitive enough.

From the corner of my eye, I see the door come off its hinges.

So the door does come down, I think. Just afterwards. In the Dreaming, it was all backwards.

Something hard and metal and round rolls into the room, spewing white gas. The gas pokes sharp little fingers into my eyes and my nose and my mouth; I cough and maybe I scream, I can’t know.

Then black-clad men burst in, their guns raised, one of them crouching down, another behind him, covering him, then they move quickly when they see us on the ground, surrounding us. One of them secures the shotgun; cracks it and drops the shells on the ground. Rough hands pull me up, hold my arms behind my back.

I see one of the cop’s mouths moving, as he stands over Shaylene.
You are under arrest for kidnapping, aggravated assault and [             ], you have the right to remain silent, you have the right to an attorney, if you cannot
…

Then whoever is holding me turns and walks me out of there, as if I were nothing more heavy than a grocery bag. I twist my head as I’m carried out and see them kneeling by Shaylene, grabbing her hands. My eyes are streaming; it feels as if chilli peppers have been rubbed in there.

Out on the walkway, I am pushed along, and then towards a black Cadillac with tinted windows.

I say,
Wait
, with my mouth.

I say,
Please
.

The guy carrying me pauses. He turns me around and looks at me.

I just want to see her
, I say.

A long moment passes.

Then he nods. He lets me stand there and wait for her to come out.

I watch from the parking lot below as they hustle Shaylene out through the door of Room 22. Her hands are cuffed behind her and she’s stumbling, crying, some of it the gas, some of it for real. She doesn’t see me until she’s nearly at the bottom of the stairs. She turns to me, as they start hauling her off towards another vehicle. All around us, men are talking into radios and to one another, but it’s like time doesn’t really exist any more, there’s just the two of us, looking at each other, standing on tarmac as cars streak by at sixty miles an hour, surrounded by armed men.

Then I see her say something to one of the men escorting her. He shakes his head. But she keeps insisting. There’s a pause. Another guy comes over, someone more in charge, I guess. Shaylene talks to him and he does a sort of slump that involves the shoulders, and which has a very precise meaning, it means
I really don’t want to deal with this, but it turns out I’m the one who has to decide right now, and whatever I decide is going to come back on me
.

Then he nods.

The first guy, the one who shook his head, takes something from his pocket and sort of presses it to Shaylene’s wrists, which are locked behind her back. I realise he’s releasing her handcuffs.

Then, like it’s in slow motion, she turns to me and lifts her hands.

Very deliberately, she tells me something in sign, a sequence of
gestures so obvious it would be understandable even without an interpreter to turn it into spoken words that vibrate through the air; hell, a child could tell you what she says; probably there is a dog walking past that knows.

She points to herself.

She puts her hand over her heart.

Then she points to me.

For a moment, the world hangs in suspension, a ball at the top of its arc. Everything is still – the cars are no longer passing; their trails of red and yellow light are static threads, stretched, caramel drawn out to a taut length, about to snap.

Then I raise my own hands. One of the guys near me flinches but another puts a hand on his shoulder, and he stops.

I say …

No.

I’m not going to tell you what I say. It’s not important. I mean, it’s not important to you. But it’s important to me, and it’s the only thing that is mine in this world and can’t be taken from me, by anyone.

She nods, sodium light making the tears on her face shine, and then they lock her cuffs again and march her away, still nodding, and put a hand on the top of her head, and she disappears into the big black car.

What was that?
says the cop beside me, who apparently does need an interpreter, who apparently understands less than a dog.
What did you say?

Nothing
, I say.
Nothing
.

The inside of the Cadillac is washed with brightness, flooded with the glare of the parking lot’s arc lights. We sit there for I don’t know how long, while the cop in front talks on his radio; I don’t know what he’s saying, of course.

No one sits in the back with me, this time.

Finally we pull out on to the highway. I wonder which city we’re going to. Phoenix? Flagstaff?

It doesn’t matter, I guess.

We drive past generic urban sprawl, the desert on the horizon. We pass one of those huge Chick-fil-A billboards, the ones with full-size 3-D cows telling you to go to eat chicken at Chick-fil-A – which is meant to be funny, but always seems like a big mistake to me, because all it does is remind you, chicken or cow, that you’re eating an animal.

I get a flashback: Shaylene standing there with the shotgun under her chin.

I press my head back into the fabric of the seat and close my eyes.

The vibration of the road runs through me, like electricity.

Streetlights strobe over my eyelids.

My breathing slows and –

– And then I’m slumped again on the ice prison outside the Crone’s castle, the crying of the Child loud in my ears, and I know that the Dreaming is not quite done with me, not yet.

My hands and feet are throbbing, and I gasp, wondering how they got –

Oh, yeah.

I was punching and kicking the ice, trying to break it. And it didn’t work. I look down, through the clear, cold roof, and there’s the Child looking up at me, imploring.

Still crying, still with arms outstretched – the word that comes into my head is ‘beseeching’.

Emotion sweeps through me; tidal. Frustration pricks at the corners of my eyes. Why can’t I just break the ice? The Crone is dead. Why can’t I do it? Why can’t I get to her?

Why hasn’t Coyote come back?

And all the time, the sound of sobbing is filling my ears.

Please, I think. Please, I need to pick her up. Coyote, if you’re still there, help me, give me power, help me get her out. I will do anything, sacrifice anything, to save her. I don’t care about me any more. I don’t care about my (mother), I don’t care about revenge, I don’t care about what has been done to me.

I am my own person, I think, and it doesn’t matter who my mother is, I am enough for myself. I am my own family.

The ice burns my hands, but I don’t care. The skin sizzling, I am half expecting to smell it soon, charring and –

Ice?

Sizzling?

Then I hear more sizzling.

And then I feel something drip on to my foot.

I look down.

My tears are falling from my cheeks and landing on the ice, and when they do they bore through it, straight through it, making holes in the crystal, which are expanding, the roof dissolving like that leaf in Coyote’s fire, what was there a moment ago disappearing; a magic trick.

I watch in amazement as the walls of the ice castle slowly, slowly, melt down, water running in rivulets on to the grass, soaking it. I don’t know if it was my tears, or if Coyote heard me and came to my aid, I don’t suppose I’ll ever know, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The thin wall between our hands fades – no, the right word is ‘effaces’; it effaces away, something rubbed out.

Until our hands are touching. Her tiny hands, in my big ones. I grip them tightly; they are so hot and so small it makes me feel like my heart might burst in my chest.

For the first time, the Child stops crying. I think it’s the shock.

Then the last of the ice drips away, and I am standing there, bending down to the Child, who is looking up at me, clinging to my hands.

I go down on one knee, and she’s right in front of me, her face right there, her big brown eyes, her curly hair, and my hands are holding hers like they never could in my dream – it’s the end, the end I never got to, where I’m able to pick her up.

And that’s exactly what I do.

I put my arms around her, somehow I know exactly how to do it, like it’s written into my body, how to hold a child. I cradle her with one arm, under her legs, and hoist her until she sits on my hip and throws her hands around my neck and holds on tight.

She is crying again, but lightly, in a slowing rhythm, the sound of someone who has been hysterical but is calming now, calming.

I squeeze her tight.

It’s OK, I say, over and over. It’s OK, it’s OK, I’m here. I’m here. I’ve got you now. You’re safe. You’re safe.

Her sobs become a snuffle.

Become long, deep breaths.

Go quiet.

And then …

And then something very strange happens.

I see it before I feel it.

The Child’s leg begins to – there is no way to say this that isn’t going to sound crazy – it begins to sink into me, into my stomach, and then her face, which is pressed into my chest, is really pressing into my chest, I mean as if my body has gone soft, has turned to something almost liquid, and the Child is being absorbed into it, into me …

I recoil, staggering back, breath catching in my lungs.

Then I start to feel it.

It doesn’t feel painful.

It feels like the most beautiful feeling in the world, like a long time ago I was split in two and now I am being sewn back together, merged back into one.

I blink, and the Child is gone.

Disappeared into me.

I stand there and I stare at the stars above me, reeling. Coyote told me to kill the Crone. To save the Child. As if it was some quest outside myself, some duty I had to face.

But.

But PLOT TWIST:

The Child was me. It was me, all along. Me, crying in a hospital for someone who was never going to come, who could never come, because I had been taken away.

But now I had come back, for myself.

I can’t move. My head is spinning, obviously not my
actual
head, but my thoughts, going round and round in circles, so fast,
whoosh whoosh whoosh
, full-on vertigo.

Then I sense something shift, something change. At first I think it’s a sound, but then I realise it isn’t. It’s … something I can smell on the air. A tang of ozone, of moisture in the atmosphere.

It’s like …

Like water is gathering, all around me. Reaching out, the molecules, to other molecules, reaching out to merge into one another.

Gathering strength.

I wait, and I watch.

Grey clouds amass overhead; lightning flickers over the woods on the horizon. And then the water comes down – hard, pouring rain. I don’t think I have ever seen rain like this before – showers, yeah, in Phoenix. But never anything like this.