Oblivion (34 page)

She replies: “Serena.”

I flinch.

“He calls me Serena Noel.”

“Do you know where you’ve been?”

“What he always says about the Good Book,” she whispers. “Sift through it as the hours pass.”

She’d recently been in the garden house. She’s the one who wrote on the wall.

A
week has passed since the authorities shot and killed my father, since LCPD rescued Hannah Rynes from her year-long ordeal, since I spent two days at Lake Forest Hospital. Now I’m sitting in a room at the station, ready to close the book on all of it. It’s sort of surreal to think that Palmer’s gone. Every now and then, I play what if.

If John hadn’t been approaching the harbor when he did, he wouldn’t have called the police to report that he’d seen—at a distance—Palmer knocking me into the water. If the police hadn’t gotten there in time, what would’ve happened to Hannah and me?

“Want a stick?” Dr. Ewing extends a pack of gum in my direction.

“Thanks.” I slide out a silver-sheathed stick and unwrap it, fold it into my mouth. Cinnamon. Elijah’s favorite. Not as satisfying as a Tootsie Pop, but it’ll do.

“How you doing?”

“Nervous.”

He tilts his head. “Hmm.”

“I can’t imagine I’m going to like what I see today.”

“Can it be any worse than what you’ve already seen?” He looks at me over his Buddy Hollys. “Worse than what you’ve already survived?”

“I guess not.” The stitched-up laceration on my abdomen burns. It’s going to leave a nasty scar. In time, Ewing says I’ll view the marks Palmer left on my body—the freshest, as well as the ones embedded into my flesh years ago—as proof of my survival, but for now they’re simply evidence of what I endured. I still flinch when I feel someone looking at me, still look over my shoulder because I feel someone following me. Maybe I always will.

My gaze wanders, and not for the first time, to the window in the door, through which I catch glimpses of the room across the hall, where a team of investigators questions my mother. “Why do you think they’re fingerprinting her? I mean, what if something I’ve said implicates her?”

Ewing props his elbow on the metal arm of the chair and rests his chin in his hand. “Do you think you’re responsible for anything your mother may or may not have done?”

“Well, no. But guilty or not, she’s the only mother I have. Crazy or sane, I love her.”

Ewing churns his gum between his teeth and, straightening in his chair, gives my arm a pat. “One step at a time, okay?”

“Yeah.” But I can’t stop looking at her. Her long merlot hair is swept up into a bun, the way she used to wear it when she was working on an art project. Her lashes, naturally thick and full, appear to be rimmed with mascara today, and a touch of lipstick fleshes out her lips. I can’t remember the last time she wore makeup. She’s gorgeous, and although I resemble her—I look nothing at all like Palmer—I can’t help staring at her as if I’m seeing her for the first time.

“Hey, kid.” Detective Guidry glides into the room, a cup of coffee in one hand, a thick file tucked into the other. “How are you feeling?”

I shrug. “You know.”

“Gotta feel better than the last time I saw you.”

I chuckle—“Yeah”—although the last time he saw me, I was in the trauma unit at Lake Forest Hospital, taking about forty stitches. “How’s Hannah?”

He nods. “She’s a survivor. Like you.” Guidry takes a seat, spreads open his file.

“She remembers who she is? She knows what happened to her?” It feels sort of as if I’m intruding in asking about her, as if maybe it’s none of my business how badly Palmer
screwed her up. Maybe she deserves to heal in private. But I can’t forget the way she said my mother’s name, as if it were her own. She didn’t know who she was.

“We showed her pictures for about eight, nine hours,” Guidry says. “It started coming back to her.”

I can imagine it might’ve been horrific to remember. I think that horror is the reason I chose to forget. When I glimpse a stack of photographs clipped to his file, I deduce I’m about to go through my own version of an eight- or nine-hour slide show. The top picture is a shot of the door embedded in the earth.

“No notebook today?” Guidry smiles.

I reach down to the floor to pat my backpack, if only to reassure myself it’s still there. “I always have a notebook. Just not much in this one that concerns you.”

“I love to hear that.”

“No more than I love to say it.”

He grins. “Ready to look at the items my evidence techs found?”

I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready enough, but I’m already looking at the boxes neatly lining the table against the far wall. They’re the fold-up type without tops, and they’re filled with manila envelopes, filed vertically, so one could easily flip through them like files in a drawer. My rosary is in one of those envelopes … along with things I have no desire to see.

My fingers gravitate to the tiny ring strung about my neck.

“If ever you feel like you can’t go on,” Ewing says, “like
you need a break, let me know. You’re not on trial here.”

“For once.” I crack a smile, but the boxes of evidence taunt me from across the room. In many ways, it feels as if each of those envelopes contains a smidgen of Palmer Prescott. And I never want to see any part of him again.

“Anything you say, anything I say, is going to be recorded,” Guidry says. “This is part of an ongoing investigation. If you have questions, go ahead and ask them, but don’t be offended if I can’t answer them.”

“Okay.” Tears rise. Nerves tickle my gut.

Despite how far we’ve come, there’s still a journey ahead of us. We’re only as far as the heart of the labyrinth, in a sense. We’re here to contemplate, to reflect, to reconcile, but we still have to fight the battle awaiting us here. We still have to follow a path out into the rest of the world.

My heart pounds, and my fingers tremble, as Guidry retrieves box number one from the table behind him.

“You okay, Callie?” Ewing asks.

I nod and wipe away tears.

Guidry opens an envelope and empties out plastic-encased pieces of catalogued evidence—things found on the boat, at Holy Promise, in boxes at the Meadows, and in the annals of a history I didn’t understand as I wrote it.

Guidry: “Object one.”

“That looks like the spare key to the garden house.” I study the cross emblem hanging from the key chain. Pewter. I turn it over in my hands.
Holy Promise
is etched onto the back, similarly to the
Lorraine Oh
on the back
of my rosary pendant. “Where’d you find it?”

“In a box under the stairs on the boat.”

A chill races up my spine. “So he had access to the garden house all along.”

“Maybe.”

I’d been in the labyrinth only a handful of times since Hannah disappeared. I wonder if Palmer had seen me there with Elijah, with John. I wonder if he’d been waiting for an opportune time to take me. “Did Andrew Drake know he’d been there?”

“We don’t think so.” Guidry hands me another plastic bag.

It’s a heart-shaped, decoupage box, a tiny one. “Looks like something my mother made. A long time ago.” I sift through memories until I land on one that warms me: Mom and me in the north dormer in the apartment above the Vagabond. Glue and paper cutouts scatter over the floor. Squares of tissue paper flutter around me when the breeze sweeps in off the lake. “You might want to ask her, but I think it’s her work.”

“And this.” He hands over a tiny plastic bag.

At first I don’t know what it is, but on closer scrutiny, I see that it’s a lock of hair, baby-fine. Burgundy-brown. Like mine.

“Do you know whose it is?”

I shake my head. Not definitively. “Could be mine, I guess. Could also be Cleo’s.”

“Cleo.” Guidry states the name, more than raises a question, but I offer explanation:

“My mother talks about Cleo. I have flashes of memories that suggest she was pregnant after she had me. I know we don’t know for sure, but I see Cleo as my baby sister.”

The next envelope sheathes only one item: a pair of jeans, the same pair, I suspect, that I saw in the box under the stairs on the boat.

“Next.” Guidry produces pictures of a small duffel bag, navy blue, embedded in dirt.

Instantly, my eyes gloss with tears, my heart hurts.

“Callie?” Ewing presses a hand to my shoulder. “Do you recognize the items in this picture?”

I nod and wipe a tear from my cheek. “It’s a vague memory. From when I was little. I remember seeing a duffel bag in the rowboat.”

“Do you know what was in it?” Guidry asks.

I don’t, but … “Given it’s photographed where I think it is—under the door John and I found at Highland Point—and you found remains of a baby there, I’d guess you found the baby in the bag.”

Guidry doesn’t confirm or deny, but presents another piece of evidence: a dirty, yellow sundress with pearl buttons down the front of it. I recognize it as the one I was wearing in the rowboat glimpse, the one I deduced Hannah must’ve been wearing once we left the garden house. But it
looks older than I thought it would, and smaller. It looks like it could fit a third grader. “Tiny.”

“Mmm hmm.”

“Do you think, maybe … maybe it was mine when I was little? Or maybe … did Palmer maybe kidnap someone before Hannah?”

“That’s a possibility,” the detective tells me.

“Who?” I think of John’s endless research. I wonder if he could pinpoint a missing girl who might’ve been wearing a yellow dress.

Guidry sips his coffee. Gives me a shrug. He can’t answer my question—maybe because he doesn’t know the answer, or maybe because he does.

When he places before me an encased pair of yellow floral cotton briefs, I stifle a whale of a sob. It’s hard to focus; everything blurs. I pinch my eyes shut, press my hands to my eyes, but the image is still there:

the labyrinth at Holy Promise. White gravel, the type that glimmers when the sun reflects off of it, digs into my back when I collapse at the base of the fountain. I can’t move. My arms and legs are numb. Palmer’s hands register on my cheeks, but I can’t respond.

Everything turns white. It’s a struggle to breathe.

The gravel bruises my skin as he pulls me up from the ground.

I’m floating past juniper, through the creaking gate, into the garden house.

I slump onto the hard floor.

“No. No, no, please, no!”

“God says it must be so.”

I hear the springs on the cot groan and rasp.

I try to open my eyes.

Through a sliver—it’s so bright in here—I see them: yellow floral panties. Discarded on the floor.

I can’t keep my eyes open, can’t stay alert. Can’t move.

“Callie?”

Ewing’s voice jars me.

It’s like a bad dream, I tell myself. It’s over. Over.

I take my hands from my eyes and dare to open them.

The pair of panties is the first thing I see, mangled, wrapped in plastic, memorializing horror: “Hannah’s.” I sniffle and wipe away tears. “They’re Hannah’s.”

My gaze drifts across the hallway to where my mother is nodding, as if listening intently to the three investigators. As if magnetized, she redirects her stare to meet mine. A slow, close-lipped smile spreads onto her face.

I hold her attention, and she holds mine, until Guidry clears his throat—“Do you recognize this photograph?”—and then it’s only for a split second that I look away from my mother.

“Callie?” Ewing hands me a tissue.

My mother gives me a nod.

After a moment, I manage to focus on the photograph before me. It’s me as a toddler. Maybe two years old, not
older than three. I’m wearing a pink nightgown; I’m sleeping on someone’s lap. “It’s me.”

“Who else is in the picture?”

The someone isn’t visible beyond his lap and a hand on my back. I don’t know how anyone would identify him after all this time only from legs clad in denim and an arm feathered with dark blond hair. I turn the picture over, in search of a notation, but it’s blank. “I don’t know.”

I extend the photograph toward Guidry, but at the last second, I draw it in for a closer look.

I glance up at Guidry, but the photograph quickly draws my attention back.

Only you, only you, only you
.

“Callie?” Ewing probes.

“It’s John’s cousin.”

John and I were right—his cousin hadn’t simply run away. Mom knew what was inscribed on the back of John’s watch because she’d seen it before. And she said she gave all young boys the same reading, in hopes one of them would take her seriously, in hopes one would find the rosary and return it to me. She said it would help me go home.

I swallow hard and address the detective. “John said his cousin wanted his family to have the watch before he ran away.”

But he didn’t run. Maybe he meant to steal the girl he loved and her two young daughters away from Reverend Palmer Prescott, but he never found the chance. Maybe
Palmer stopped him. Maybe Palmer made him disappear. It would make sense that his family didn’t know about my mother, if they were planning to disappear together and start over in a place where no one knew them.

My mother’s voice echoes in my mind:
He made me dig the hole
.