Crossroads (13 page)

Sheila blinked. "You’re not going?"

For the life of her she didn’t understand why she cared, but having her mother-even her mother’s ghost or her own hallucination of her ghost-on the opposite coast with another lunatic...
She’d
feel like the mother of a retarded child who had run away into the woods. At least here she could keep an eye on her mother, try to keep her out of trouble. Out there...

"That’s crazy," she blurted, wishing the words had never left her mouth.

For the first time her mother frowned. "No, it’s not."

"Are you seriously thinking about it? How does a ghost travel cross country? You don’t get bonus miles."

Her mother shrugged. "There’s not much for me here, anymore."

Sheila knew she should say something. She even knew what it was. She just couldn’t spit out the words. The silence dragged.

"Well," said her mother, at last. "I haven’t made any final decision, yet."

Sheila glared at her cup again, the thin golden liquid rippled, and for just an instant she wished that she could dive into it and disappear.

"Would you like a sugar cookie?" asked her mother, starting to rise.

"No," said Sheila, shaking her head. "I really have to be going."

"But you just got here," said her mother, sitting again.

"I just wanted to make sure you were okay."

"Why wouldn’t I be okay?"

"I heard about Vern and I-"

"And you what? I’m dead, Sheila. There’s really nothing that can happen to me now."

"Are you sure?"

"Well, I certainly think so, and besides that all happened day before yesterday. If you were worried you could have come by-"

Realization dawned in her mother’s eyes, and guilt clutched at Sheila’s heart.

"Oh," said her mother. "I thought
I saw you drive by, but since you didn’t stop I assumed... my old eyes."

Sheila took a sip of tea, not all that surprised that she could actually taste the cold, sweet, weak concoction, forcing her hand not to rattle the cup as she replaced it in the saucer.

"Why do you hate me?" asked her mother, quietly.  

"I don’t hate you," Sheila insisted, still unable to look her in the eye.

"But you were always ashamed of me."

Sheila sighed.

"I’m not a crazy, old witch, Sheila. Just because I don’t see the world in black and white the way you do. Because I know that there is more to reality than what you can touch and smell and hear. You know it, too. So you blame me for bearing a child with special talents that made her different, that set her apart."

"Then why did the world always think you were crazy?" asked Sheila, feebly, finally able to raise her eyes from the table top again. "Didn’t that ever bother you?"

Her mother smiled sadly. "You can’t get past that, can you? Do you really think I cared what the world thought of me? No. You know better. It’s you who worries what it thinks of you because you have a crazy mother. You think that doesn’t hurt me?"

Sheila shook her head. She didn’t think that. She knew there was plenty of hurt to go around. She just couldn’t seem to find any way to sweep aside the giant pile of pain that always lay between them.

"You don’t know what it was like," she said, wishing she didn’t sound like a whining ten-year-old. But that was how she felt.

"I know it was hard on you. Kids can be cruel."

"Not just kids."

"Hasn’t it finally occurred to you that the rest of the world was wrong? I’m here, Sheila. You’re talking to me. If you really believe I’m an hallucination then why come out here once a month to visit your lonely old mother?"

"I just wish... I wish we’d been normal."

"I have to be true to myself, Sheila. You should try it."

She glared at her mother. "What’s that supposed to mean?"

Her mother shrugged, smiling that enigmatic, infuriating smile. "What it sounds like it means. You deny things you know because people tell you to. You’re ashamed of your own mother because they tell you you should be. You live in a world filled with beauty and wonder, and you deny its existence because they tell you it’s tawdry and evil
.
You deny your own gifts because they don’t fit your cookie cutter ideas of what life should be like."

Sheila sighed, shaking her head. "You need to wake up. If you owned a television you’d know that the world is tawdry and evil. Vern Billings wasn’t in some carnival shooting gallery. He was in his own living room when he gunned down his entire family then killed himself. Charlie could tell you what the world has become. Mothers leaving day-old babies in dumpsters to die, teenagers exploding bombs in school, terrorists beheading people for fun and profit, men stalking women like big game hunters. Do you want me to go on?"

"No... I can’t deny what you say, but that isn’t all the world, Sheila. There’s still something out there to grab onto-"

"What? What in the whole world is there worth grabbing?"

"Hope."

Sheila let out a hollow laugh that sounded more like a gasp, but the problem was she wanted to believe what her mother said-or alternatively what her own subconscious was telling her. She wanted to think there was hope for the world, for herself, for her mother, for all the dysfunctional people out there. She wanted to take hold of her life and pull herself up by her own psychic bootstraps. She just couldn’t seem to find them.

"Please don’t go," she whispered, jerking the words out of her throat like poisoned barbs.

Her mother’s forehead wrinkled, and she angled her head, studying Sheila.

"It means that much to you?"

Sheila nodded, slowly.

"All right," said her mother at last. "We don’t have to talk about it now."       

"No," said Sheila. "We do need to talk about it now. I can’t go home wondering if you’re gonna stick out your thumb and take off to some Hippy enclave."

Her mother chuckled. "Stick out my thumb? And who would pick me up, Ghost Rider? And hippy enclave? Sheila, where do you get this stuff?"

"Commune, New Age Ashram, Cult Temple. Do any of those ring a bell?"

Her mother frowned. "I never belonged to a cult."

"Sisters of the Holy Order of the Golden Bough?"

"It wasn’t a cult, and I quit corresponding with them long before my accident."

"Right after their founder was arrested for mail fraud?"

"Bad people join good organizations. Don’t judge everyone by the actions of the minority."

"Did you become like this because of my father?" asked Sheila, quietly.

"I was like this when we met. That’s why we fell in love."

"He left you."

Her mother nodded, sadly. "Burney was a rolling stone. I’m sorry he wasn’t there for you. I think you would have loved him as much as I did. As I do. What we had was real. I’ve always cherished it."

"He deserted us," said Sheila, feeling more than ever that her words were only being heard by herself.

But her mother answered, anyway. "It wasn’t like that. He hated to go. He just thought it was for the best. We argued. I cried. You cried. He cried. I’ve spent the rest of my life wishing I’d found the words to keep him with us, but it wasn’t to be."

Sheila shoved the saucer away and rose to her feet. "Promise you won’t leave?"

"Not without talking to you."

Sheila supposed that was the best she could expect for the moment. Her mother followed her to the front door, wafting along like a mist. When she rested a hand on Sheila’s shoulders Sheila had to concentrate to keep from cringing, but this time when her mother squeezed, Sheila almost felt it, and she blinked back tears, feeling like a small child again, knowing that her mother would die for her if she could. Why couldn’t she just let her be who she was?

"I love you, Sheila," said her mother, and Sheila could have sworn she felt a slight tug on her shoulder.

It would have been so nice to turn and fall into Marguerite’s embrace, to hug her, to break into tears. Instead Sheila shoved open the door.

"I love you, too, Mom," she whispered, hurrying down the steps to the car.

When she glanced over her shoulder the candle flame in the window faded away like smoke on the wind.

Chapter 17

It seemed odd to Kira that in all their miles of hiking only one or two drivers had pulled over to ask if they needed a ride-other than Bullet and his memory kept her from accepting each of the following offers. Several times they were passed by police cruisers before they had time to spot the cars and hide, but it was summer and school was out, and Kira suspected that Jen might be somehow shielding them from the cop’s view.

Now, once again, Kira was reaching the point of exhaustion, but even with night long fallen she was reluctant to stop. There was no shelter in the rolling foothills, only sparse copses of oaks dotting the fields all around and distant lights of farmhouses where normal people were preparing for bed. When they turned off the highway onto yet another back road she saw Jen eying her curiously by the dim starlight, but Kira couldn’t even understand her own snap decision. She had just suddenly known that this was the direction they had to travel. Whether she was being guided by angel hands, or pulled inexorably into the maw of the place the
Empty-eyed-man
ruled she had no idea. So, with every step, she grew more restless and worried.

The vision of the dead or dying boys, the raped and bloodied girl, the other boy’s terrified expression as he stared at her as though
she
were the monster, bashed at her conscience. Was she a monster? Was it possible that she belonged with the
Empty-eyed-man
? She didn’t even want to think about that possibility. She wasn’t that kind of person. She didn’t want people to be hurt or die. She had only been trying to help. Instead two boys were dead or nearly so, and the girl was certainly terrorized into near insanity.

Her mother’s voice echoed softly in her head.

Sometimes we owe a penance for things we didn’t do.
         

Only this time she had done something. Just as Jen had done something in the bank. Jen hadn’t been responsible for anyone dying, only for not being able to stop the killing. Now Kira had tried to stop a rape, and people were dead. Which was worse? She stared down the road, wondering why she carried this strange curse within her.

What am I?

She recalled a winter night in the trailer-long before Jen came-when the wind cried through the tent wires like screeching birds, fluttering their lusty wings against the tin walls, and the little kerosene space heater was the only light in her sleeping area. Her mother sat beside her on the mattress, brushing her hair, and trying to explain to her what she had accidently done that day and why she should not do it again.

"Never in front of a towner," her mother said quietly.

The boy had been heckling her, as towners sometimes did, calling her a low-life carney, and then a thief. Kira had no idea why he thought the term carney might be insulting, but she could tell by the way he said it that he did. When he accused her of being a rotten thief that was something else altogether. Anger had flared, and when she found that she had no more insults to hurl back that could bust through his thick head, without thinking she held out her hand and flung a wad of dollar bills in the boy’s shocked face.

"Why would I need to be a thief?" she shouted, as the boy dropped to his knees and began stuffing the money into his jeans pockets. "You’re the one who’s stealing!" she shouted after him as he shoved the last bill into his pants and ran.

Her mother had seen her and rushed over, guiding her away through a suddenly milling crowd.

"I didn’t mean to do that," insisted Kira, who had been as shocked as the boy when the bills appeared out of nowhere. "How did I?"

"You are a
creator,
" said her mother, quietly.

Kira thought she heard something like pride in her mother’s voice, but there was a hint of fear as well, as though being a
creator
were not necessarily a good thing.

"What’s that?" Kira asked.

"There are some who can make things from nothing, just as you just did."

"The money was real?"

It had certainly looked real. She had felt it fluttering in her hand. The boy certainly thought it was real as well. But how could it be? Where had it come from?

Her mother shrugged. "It is real on some level that is hard to explain. It is more than just a hallucination, but less than the reality of a rock. Does that make sense?"

"No."

Her mother chuckled softly. "I guess it doesn’t, but that’s the way it is.
Creators
can only approximate reality. They can’t create something that lasts. Only one creator has ever done that and... but never mind."

That was the first time that Kira realized she had a talent that no one else in the carnival did, and she’d felt the same pride she heard in her mother’s voice. But just as she started to glow her mother frowned.

"You must never do anything like that again in front of a towner. Not even in front of the other show people. Do you understand?"

"Why not?"

Her mother sighed, placing the brush on the bed. "Because it isn’t good to be noticed. To call attention to yourself."

Kira frowned. The barkers, the girls in the hooch show, everyone in the carnival, even the roustabouts wanted to be noticed.

"You’re different, Kira," said her mother. "Even more different than your father and me."

"You see the future" said Kira.

Her mother smiled. "That is my gift."

She sounded as though she was both proud of that fact and somehow ashamed of it, and that was the first time that Kira had realized that outsiders might never know that what her mother and father did was real.

Now, looking back on that night, Kira sensed that she was more than her mother had suspected. She turned to look up into Jen’s good eye.

"Why can I do what I do?" she asked, her voice insisting upon an answer.