Ashes of Another Life (12 page)

“But I’m taking the girl home… where she belongs. To salvation,” said Randall. His voice shook. He didn’t say it loud enough for the other man to hear, and Tara Jane wondered who he was trying to convince—the cop, the captive, or himself.

And there it was again—all this talk about “home.” She was tired of hearing about “home.” The last time Tara Jane had felt at home was in the arms of her mother, or cuddled beside her sleeping siblings in bed.

Mother was beside herself now, floating at the edge of the yard. She threw herself against the invisible force field which separated her from her children. Tara Jane couldn’t see it, but she could feel it—an unseen rift between her pious father and her outcast mother. It was an emptiness, a mote of sorrow around the woman that imprisoned her this way, and she was powerless to do anything but weep. Weep for all eternity.

Jackson and Susie watched the fire spread as concern twisted their faces into something much sadder.

It was hard to tell with so much of their muscle tissue melted and disfigured, but they
did
seem concerned, their ashy eyebrows drawn together, their backs hunched and sunken eyes downcast.

Jackson grabbed Susie’s hand and scooted back, tugging her away from the flames. It was the same way he’d held her hand on long walks to the market when they were playful and healthy and
alive
. Susie lowered her head, staring at her feet like the shy church girl she was—or used to be. The wispy remains of a burned piggy tail fell over her eyes, ashy lips set in a frown.

A familiar feeling tugged at Tara Jane’s heart, the feeling that she would never know happiness until her brother and sister found peace. They hadn’t deserved Father’s rage, not in life and especially not in death, eternal. Held hostage by Father and trapped in his fiery unrest, they trembled, fearful to relive their agonizing last moments.

Tara Jane scowled. She wouldn’t stand by and watch Father toy with them. It was more than she could handle. Father’s smug expression came in and out of focus within the fire as if he knew how she felt, and she could swear he was smiling through that flickering orange mask, daring her to disobey him and destroy her own salvation.

She looked at her mother, then back to her siblings, and it dawned on Tara Jane in that moment: There was only one way to get home.

“Put down the gun and no one gets hurt,” Bob McKelvey yelled across the yard. “All three of us can walk away from this!”

Tara Jane felt Randall’s hot breath against her ear as he panted and licked his lips, perhaps considering a response. But she didn’t wait to hear it. She raised her leg and stomped down on his foot. She ground her heel into the arch of it, crushing the tiny bones. Randall cried out in pain. He loosened his grip long enough for Tara Jane to dive headlong into the grass and tumble away. She sprang to her feet and took off running as a shot rang out behind her.

She flinched. Her heart missed a beat. Her ears rang from the gun shot. She looked and saw Mr. McKelvey standing with his legs still spread, gun raised, a remorseful look on his face. He glanced at her, then turned his attention to their assailant, who lay motionless in the grass.

Tara Jane turned to face the family she’d not seen in a year. Most of them were huddled behind Father as his fire burned so hot it warped the starry night. Some of them were no longer standing, but kneeling, slumped over, hiding their faces with ragged arms as fire lapped at their bodies for a second time. They didn’t scream. They didn’t fight. They didn’t try to escape. They stayed within the crackling flames and faithfully endured it.

Tara Jane trembled as she approached.

“Good girl,” said Father, but his voice held a sinister tone which made the opposite seem true. “Come home, Tara Jane. Come home.”

She scrunched her face in irritation. She walked up to Jackson and Susie and offered them both a hand. Jackson looked at her, and Susie looked at Jackson. “Come with me,” she said, voice cracking.

“What are you doing?” Father demanded. “Kneel down and join us!”

She stared through the flames straight into his empty, black eyes. “I
am
going home,” she said. She grabbed their tiny hands and urged them forward. They felt heavy and sluggish despite the desperate way they clung to her, letting her lead. It was as if they were bound to Father by an intangible force, a magnetic pull that kept them glued to him for eternity.

Flames spread over her sleeve as she cupped their red-hot hands. She didn’t flail around or attempt to extinguish it. There was no escaping Father’s vengeance, and either way she was going to burn, so she pressed on, clutching their tiny hands, palms blistered from their smoldering touch.

It was a struggle but she managed to pull them away from the fire as family members reached for them with ghastly arms, black stick figures silhouetted by the fiery backdrop. She was heading toward the plum tree when Father’s voice boomed, “Susie!” The fire grew hotter. It spread wider, consuming half the lawn. It sizzled her shirt and seared into her back. It caught the collar of her shirt and climbed her neck, singeing her hair.

“Jackson! Susie! She’ll lead you astray. Straight into the arms of perdition!”

The anger in Father’s dark eyes made Tara Jane gasp. Her pajama pants caught fire. Jackson and Susie looked up at her with hollow, expressionless eyes, but she could sense their fear. She fought the pain and limped on, the thin fabric of her pants disintegrating into orange embers which floated, weightless, in the blustery air.

Mother had stopped weeping and was reaching out for Tara Jane, unable to cross some sort of invisible divide but desperately trying. The concern in her eyes made Tara Jane realize these might be her mother’s final moments.

Flames were everywhere, searing into Tara Jane’s back and all over her legs. She was burning from shoulder to fingertip. It inched up her face, and she could smell her own lips roasting.

She didn’t know if she could walk another step, and in that moment, she heard a song. It played in her mind exactly how it used to sound coming from the speakers of the old cassette player, all treble and full of static.

Hey, where did we go

Days when the rains came?

Down in the hollow

Playing a new game,

Laughin’ and a-runnin,’ hey, hey,

Skippin’ and a-jumpin’

In the misty morning fog with

Our, our hearts a-thumping

And you, my brown-eyed girl,

You, my brown-eyed girl.

Tara Jane remembered the good times with her mother, and her grief propelled her forward. She gripped the hands of her brother and sister and pulled them the rest of the way to their mother, but just as the children reached a hand for the mournful blue ghost, huge flames burst from the ground and knocked them back.

Father came at her, so fast, like a fireball from Hell. All she could do was attempt to crawl away, but the fire hurt so bad she could barely think. She was vaguely aware of Mr. McKelvey yelling into his car radio, “I need back up at 307 Dunn Lane!”

Father fell on top of her. All she could see were his flames. All she could feel was his heat and his heavy weight atop her and his hands reaching for her neck, squeezing, burning her face. All she could feel was his rage, and then nothing.

Chapter Seventeen

The pain was gone when Tara Jane came to, cheek pressed against the cold, gritty earth. She was surrounded by tall weeds, which for a moment seemed like yellow flames dancing in the wind. She gasped. She could still feel Father atop her, pinning her, ready to finish the job, but as the world came back into focus, she realized he wasn’t there.

That’s when she noticed the grass didn’t
smell
like grass. It smelled like burned flesh. She lifted her head and glanced around and saw no sign of her family, or Randall Sykes or the McKelveys. Just her, the night breeze, and an off-key symphony of nocturnal critters.

Something was wrong. The crickets sounded wrong. Their chirping had a pressing monotony which hit her ear drums with an unpleasant sense of urgency. She sat up and realized why. She was in the place of her nightmares. Tara Jane had finally come “home.”

She stood, brushed the dust from her clothes and frowned to see that her comfortable jeans had been replaced by the long underwear, pantyhose, and prairie dress of her past. Hand-sewn from a carnation pink cotton, the dress was the nicest one she had owned back in Sweet Springs. Now it felt like prison attire. She was itching to take it off, but somehow she knew she needed to play along. She wasn’t sure if she was dreaming, dead, or crazy, but one thing was for sure: They were playing by Father’s rules, not her own.

The blackened husk of a house stood several yards away. The lawn was overrun by weeds and dotted with trees that—once upon a time—had offered shady comfort on hot summer days. Now their shadows seemed to reach, like greedy beggars, for the narrow stretch of a path lit by the moon.

Through the roof’s many holes, moonbeams lit the windows. She focused on those as she took a few timid steps forward, wondering if she might catch a glimpse of anyone inside. Broken glass glistened in the fire-ravaged frames, like the drool-covered teeth of a carnivore.

The front door was gone, mixed with the other rubble on the porch, dark, broken pieces of unrecognizable things. A gust of wind stirred the sooty remains of the patio furniture. The shadowy opening called to her—not aloud, but silently. She felt it tugging her, pulling her home.

A chilling wind swirled around her as she walked toward the house. Her skin was riddled with goosebumps, but she forced herself to keep moving. She heard weeping in the distance and spotted someone near the back of the house, watching her from the garden. She saw a hazy blue light glowing from behind the withered vines. It shined brighter with each passing sob.

A flash of lightning streaked the sky. Thunder rattled. Tara Jane longed to catch the scent of rain, to smell
anything
but the stench of burned flesh, a sickly odor which grew thick at the back of her mouth, morphing from a scent into a flavor. She hated to swallow, hated to breathe, hated to let such a repulsive thing into her body. But more than that, she hated watching the ashes on the breeze and wondering if they belonged to her family.

She took a cautious step onto the sagging porch and peered into the darkness. Her loafers kicked up rubble as she gulped and crossed the threshold, entering the front room. She knew the space well. It had been the family room. A large black lump lay where the sectional couch used to be. The ruins of a sewing table formed a small pile in the corner.

Pictures hung on the wall to her right, and as she approached them, she found them eerily spotless, untouched by the fire or debris. In the photos, which dated back to her great grandfather’s family, generations of Brewers beamed at the camera with empty smiles. Dozens of faces crowded each scene, too many for Tara Jane to count, and at the center of each picture was a man, surrounded by his wives and children.

The newer photos had black X’s over some of the faces, and she recalled how Father had taken a pen and crossed some of his older children out as they were excommunicated from the church. It hadn’t been easy on him, to shun his own children for their sins, but standing here, observing the lineage of Brewer history preserved in these photos, it all made sense to her for the first time.

The night I found him crying… that was after Matthew got sent away. It must have pained him, deep down.

She remembered well, though she hadn’t thought about it in a long time. She’d come outside for a breath of fresh air after a long day of breathing in the smell of old diapers and dirty laundry, which she’d have to wash in the morning. He hadn’t noticed her standing there at first, lost in his own sobs, sitting in his rocker in the moonlight with his hands over his face.

His shoulders had stiffened as if suddenly aware of her presence, hands dropping from his face but head still hanging low.

“I’ll go,” Tara Jane had said, reaching for the door to go back inside.

But Father had only wiped his cheeks with a rag from his pocket, leaned back in his chair and said, “No, stay,” nodding towards the full moon in a black, cloudless sky. “It’s a nice night.” He had stopped his tears just like that, and Tara Jane had almost forgotten she’d seen them at all.

Now, she looked at the photos, and saw him clearly for the first time, an outsider looking in. She saw Father as a boy, surrounded by his forty-something siblings, four mothers, and proud father. He had been a small boy once, lost in a sea of so many faces, it had taken Tara Jane a moment to pick him out in the photo. His whole life, that’s all Father had wanted—to live up to this picture-perfect image; to emulate his own father and make him proud; to be god-fearing, to have an obedient family to adore him and populate his kingdom.

She pictured him in his porch rocker, shamefully hiding the tears he cried for his son. He couldn’t help what he’d become in the end, or the mania that had grown in his brain. This lifestyle, this obsession with perfection, it was a recipe for disaster. He’d once been a boy, just as Tara Jane was a girl. All he’d wanted was a picture-perfect family, but of course, that had never been the case.