The Sight (12 page)

Frances-Kendall shows me the layout. The bedrooms are at both ends of the long room. The girls all sleep together in beds lined up like a dormitory. There are no windows, but there is a projection of a Webcam shot of the Sound.

“He checks on us,” she says. “Sometimes five times a night. With a flashlight. So be here.”

I remember the light in my vision, sweeping the bed, Emily shrinking from it, pretending to be asleep. The darkness, and then the light. I hadn’t seen a lighthouse at all.

“If you’re awake, he hates it,” she says.

“Thank you, Kendall,” I say.

She starts. “How did you know my name?”

“Your parents miss you,” I say. “They found a girl who looks like you in San Diego, but it wasn’t you, and they were crushed.”

She works her mouth, sucking in her lip, biting it, letting it out. “Don’t talk to me about my parents. Don’t ever talk to me about them again,” she hisses, and walks away.

Dinner. We line up on benches. Jonah has a chair. The girls had prepared the meal, me included. Jonah had brought fresh supplies from Seattle, and I recognize some of the stores, thanks to Shay. Fresh ravioli. Big loaves of bread from a designer bakery in Ballard. A chunk of parmesan that we grate over the ravioli. Bags of green beans so fresh they snap. It’s easy for four of us to make the meal because the kitchen is huge. There are two ovens and a professional stove and every size pot you could want.

I think of how Shay would love this kitchen and feel something so new I can’t identify it at first. I’m homesick.

Jonah takes a bite and pronounces it delicious. We all start to eat.

“We’re finally all together,” he says, looking around. “Now that Lizbet has joined us, the family is complete. Lizbet is our poet. Nell is our soul. Just like Frances is our voice, or Ruthanna makes us laugh.”

Ruthanna keeps looking down at her plate and shoveling in ravioli. A less likely candidate for a laugh I’ve never seen. She’s probably about thirteen. She doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

I see her suddenly, in the backseat of a black car, pulling away down a road. She’s younger. I see gravestones behind her. Her mother is dead, but
she can’t understand why they’re leaving her. I can feel her grief as keenly as I can feel mine.

She doesn’t care what happens to her here. She is glad that the food is good.

Jonah smiles. His sleeves are rolled up, and he looks like any dad at a kitchen table.

“This is what my father believed, and I believe it, too,” he says, and I realize that he’s directing his remarks to me. “That the family can be a self-sufficient unit. Each of you has your own skill. We can entertain each other. We have artists and musicians and scientists here.”

This gives me my opening. I need to unsettle him. I need to see what happens when I do.

“What we need is a cook,” I say.

The rest of the kids freeze. Jonah blinks at me, as if my words are taking a long time to register.

He smiles tightly. “There is something wrong with the food?”

Torie gives me a murderous look.

“Well,” I say, “it could be better.”

His smile wobbles, then freezes. “I got this ravioli from the best place in Seattle.”

“Really.” I poke at my dish. “It tastes like glue.”

Across the table, Torie mouths something at me.
You die.

Jonah stands up. He is shaking with fury. Emily closes her eyes. “I bring you the best! I take care
of you! You know that, Lizbet!” he shouts, his face red.

“My name is Gracie,” I say.

“I know that!” he snaps. “Everyone else likes their new names!”

Torie gets up quickly. She removes my plate and takes it to the kitchen. As she moves, she jabs against me, hard, with her elbow.

Jonah’s hand grips his fork. “Well. Supper is not about food. It is about communication and love. We love each other.”

“We love each other,” Jeff echoes. He shoots me a look that eloquently says,
shut up, idiot.

Kendall bites her lip and pushes her food around. She is afraid and wants me to stop. She casts a quick look at Jeff, then looks away.

She’s afraid of Jonah, yes. But she’s also afraid of Torie and Jeff.

“Yes, Edwin. Let’s eat.” Jonah takes a bite of his dinner. Everyone starts to eat again.

I take a sip of my water. When Jonah stood up, I noticed something. In his front left pocket, I saw the tip of his swipe card. Of course, he probably keeps it on him at all times. The card works on the locks, but didn’t he also say that he can control everything? Music, heating, security. There has to be a central control. It has to be in his wing of the house.

“This is all new to you,” Jonah says suddenly, turning to me. His anger is gone. “You’ll understand things in time. I was too harsh. I’m never harsh.”

I see his father standing over a young Jonah, shouting,
This is what I do for you! I do this for you! Do you understand?

“You do this for me,” I say.

He shakes his head rapidly as if shaking out a mop full of dust. “Exactly.”

I smell smoke suddenly. It is acrid, strong. Yet I don’t cough, it doesn’t fill my lungs, and I can’t see it in the air. I look around, but everyone else is eating.

“I do this for all of you,” Jonah mumbles.

I realize that the smoke is not in the air. It’s in my head. And for the first time I wonder—what happened to the original house?

Jonah said that now we were complete. What came next? There was an end to this, and the only one who knows the ending is Jonah.

I wake up in the middle of the night. I hear the even breathing of the other girls. Jonah could come by at any time; I know he’s already checked us at least once. His visits are random, so there is no way to avoid them.

But I can’t wait any longer. I’ll have to take a chance.

I slip out of bed. Emily’s bed is right next to mine. I put my hand over her mouth. She tries to bolt up, terror in her eyes, but I speak quietly, rapidly, in her ear.

“It’s Gracie. Don’t worry. I just want to talk to you.”

She shakes her head, her eyes fearful.

“Just for a minute.”

“He’ll come.”

“I’m going to get you out of here.”

She shakes her head. “No. Don’t say that. It’s dangerous.”

“Why? Has he done anything to you?”

She turns away. “No, nothing. It’s just that…he pays attention to me. Special attention. He watches me, all the time.”

“I came to find you, Emily. Your mom, your dad…they’re frantic. They miss you.”

Emily starts to cry. I feel her shudders as she tries to keep her sobs inside. I’m actually glad to see her cry. It’s so much better than that blankness.

“It’s okay,” I say, even though it’s so obviously not.

I can see tears on her cheeks from the light cast from the watery reflection on the wall. “I’m glad you’re here. But Gracie…”

“What?”

“Don’t do it. Don’t try to get away. Promise me.” Her eyes are frantic.

“Shhh,” I say, as if Emily were a little girl. “Go back to sleep.”

Torie approaches me the next morning as I’m looking through the bookshelves. I can’t imagine having enough concentration to read, but I don’t know what else to do.

She stands a little too close for my personal comfort.

“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear,” she says. “Keep your mouth shut and you’ll do okay here.”

I shrug. Her gaze is so hostile. Why should I give her ammunition?

Her face is in my face. “Don’t say your real name to him,” she warns, spitting the words out. “Don’t
ever
do it again.”

Just what I need—to get snatched by a madman and then get bossed around by another girl. “Look,” I say, exasperated, “I’ve been kidnapped by a psycho who makes up crazy rules according to some insane scenario in his head. I’ve got enough problems without having to listen to you, too. Don’t you want to get out of here?”

“Listen up,” she says. “This is a sweet spot compared to where I came from. Most of us here are the same. This is
better
than home. You’re not going to take it away from us. One of these days, I’ll figure out a way to leave, but until then, I have everything I want here. Just what do you want to send us back to? Our families?” She snorts. “The streets? Keep quiet and don’t make him crack up.”

I’m listening, but I’m also seeing her. Smoking a cigarette on a street corner. Crouching down in the cold. She had been homeless.

I see that things that have happened to her have made her capable of anything. Kendall is right to be afraid of her.

But I also know one thing. I can’t show her my fear. “And what do you think will happen if he
does
crack up?” I ask. “It’s scary inside his head.”

“It’s scary inside
my
head. Don’t forget that.”

I see a man, sitting in an armchair, smiling up at Torie. Her hair is shorter and blonder. Her smile is strained. He reaches up and, with his foot, rubs her leg.

The vision derails me for a moment.

“Look,” I say to her, “There’s no telling what he could do to us.”

Torie snorts. “He’s a millionaire. He’s famous. What’s he going to do?”

“He’s kidnapped kids,” I say. I can’t believe that she is this stupid. “He committed about a thousand felonies. They can put him away for life. Do you know what that means? He has nothing left to lose.”

Torie looks at me as though I’m the one who’s stupid. “Rich people don’t go to prison. Don’t you know that?”

Jonah approaches us, his hands in his pockets, smiling. “I’m glad to see you’re getting along already.” He looks at me. “You know, there’s a garden. We all planted it. Tomatoes, herbs, lettuce.”

I don’t know what he expects me to say, so I say the conventional thing. “That’s nice.”

“So we have fresh produce sometimes,” he says. “I just wanted you to know that. Sometimes I overreact. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

A small boy lies in a bed, crying.

Sometimes I hurt you. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you. When you do bad things, that hurts me, too. But you still love me, right, Jonah?

“When I do bad things, that hurts you, too,” I say.

Jonah blinks. “Exactly,” he says. “Come and help me pick lettuce.”

I follow Jonah out the kitchen door. It’s good to be outside. The fog has lifted, and it’s a bright summer day, warm enough to be in a T-shirt. I could almost feel hopeful on a day like this. If I weren’t stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere with no way to get off.

Still, the sun is warm on the skin of my arms and my face, and it drains some of the anxiety from my muscles. We walk along the back of the house, and Jonah strikes off on a path between the trees. From here, you can’t see the wall. Strangely, I am not afraid to be alone with him. Not now, anyway. Somehow I know he won’t hurt me…at least, not yet.

“The garden is this way. I sited it so that it gets the most sun. Had to truck in some super-duper soil. You know, Lizbet was the sister I was closest to.” He says this last part quickly, running into the discussion about topsoil, stripped of any emotion, just matter-of-fact.

“I mean, Nell was the special one. The rest of us…we didn’t protect each other. We told on each other, as a matter of fact. But we all protected Nell. I was closest to Lizbet, though.”

“Where is Lizbet now?”

“My father wasn’t a monster.” Jonah stops. We are in the middle of a glade, and it’s cooler here. He picks up a pine branch and begins to strip the needles. “I don’t want you to think that. He and my
mother left San Francisco because they didn’t like the atmosphere there. Everyone thought they were weird for having twelve kids. So they moved to the foothills of the Sierras for a while. I remember that. I was ten when we moved here. He said the family was the core of society, and if we made the perfect family, we could show the world how to live. He really believed that. Perfection was everything to him. He encouraged all of us to reach our potential. He shipped in my computer stuff. It wasn’t like he didn’t want us to succeed. He just wanted us to be special.”

“Is your dad still alive?” I ask.

He looks around vaguely. He scratches his arm with the tree branch. His skin is pale, as if he never goes outside in the summer. He has a face people wouldn’t remember. He’s not handsome, but he’s not bad-looking. There’s no distinguishing feature in his face. Everything is in proportion, everything makes sense. But his eyes don’t focus on the world.

“I don’t see any of them now,” he says.

Jonah is speaking to me now as an adult. I realize that this is why I felt such a disconnect with him. I remember him on the boat.
It’s solar-powered! I’m glad you can come over!
Sometimes he speaks like a teenager. And sometimes he speaks like he is, like a man. He slips from one to the other.

“I just want you to have a nice meal,” he says to me, with such simple directness I suddenly wonder if I’m the one who’s crazy, and he’s completely sane.

“You said you’d bring me back if I didn’t want to stay.” I figure I can at least try this when he seems so reasonable.

He cocks his head and smiles. “But you haven’t given us a chance.”

“I’m not Dora,” I tell him. “I don’t have an alcoholic mother. I’m not looking to be saved.”

He nods. “But you belong here anyway. Don’t you?” He takes a step closer to me, and I step back. “There’s a hole in you,” he says. He touches my collarbone, and I try to control my instinct, which is to shudder. But the touch is light and fleeting. “Here. Inside you. I can see it. You’re like me. All of you, you’re all like me.”

“There’s a lot of pain here,” I say.

“That’s why this will work. All it takes is time.”

He starts walking again, and I follow as if tethered to him on a string. We break through the trees into a clearing.

The garden hasn’t been weeded or watered. Some of the tomatoes have fallen off the vine and lie on the ground, split and rotten. Flies buzz over the pulp. Jonah stands, hands on his hips, looking at it. He begins to slap his thigh rhythmically.

“They were supposed to take care of this.”

“It’s not so bad,” I say.

“We’re all supposed to work together for each other.”

“There’s some nice tomatoes left.”

“We’re supposed to
help
each other.”

His voice is strained and cracking. He is slapping his thigh harder now, slapping it with the branch he still holds in his hand. I start to back up.

“We’re supposed to work
together!”
he screams. “How is this going to work if they don’t
listen!
It’s all their fault, and they won’t try hard enough, and it’s all about that, isn’t it? We have to share. If only they could see that. How much harder can I try? They make me sick, they make me so mad!”

I have heard this voice before. I have heard this rant in my vision. I have seen this dark energy spill over in a torrent, and it is scarier in person.

He throws down the branch and picks up the hoe. He begins to hack at the garden, the tomato plants, the lettuces, the herbs, slamming the hoe into the ground, into the plants, over and over. Tears are running down his face. The hoe is flying in the air, a weapon now.

The rage came on so fast. How could I have not realized how dangerous he was? The danger was there, beneath the surface, beneath the khakis and the glasses and the smile.

I turn and run. I run through the forest, afraid
he is following me, but I am alone with the whispering trees. I hear my breathing, frantic, and my footsteps on the hard ground. My footsteps pound out what I already know:

I have to find a way out.