Oblivion (4 page)

“I think my father’s dead,” I say.

“You can’t know that.” Lindsey doesn’t know that my father’s death wouldn’t devastate me. She views the situation through her own lens, and because she’d be lost without her dad—or rather without that which he provides for her—she assumes everyone would be. She’s too sheltered to know that some men deserve to die, and for all the hell my father put Mom and me through—and for whatever purpose he took Hannah,
if
he took Hannah—my father is one of them.

My father, Reverend Palmer Prescott, founded the Church of the Holy Promise. I spent hours of my childhood Sundays in his second-floor rectory, gazing out the window at the labyrinth below, while he stole my mother away to the room he perversely called the confessional. Some days I’d wander, if they took their time about things. It was a great pleasure to ring the bells in the tower, for their cacophony drowned the sounds of my parents having sex. I’d stand in the belfry, spying on the teenagers in the maze of hedges, watching them lock hands, lips, bodies. Forbidden energy abounded on that hallowed ground, but I didn’t understand the dichotomy of such a thing back then. I simply yanked on the bellpulls so I didn’t have to stand witness to the sounds coming from the confessional.

I can’t pinpoint, exactly, the day I noticed that their
meetings in the confessional were less about getting off than control. But one day I noticed my mother’s expression as she closed the door lingered somewhere between dread and hopelessness. It was then I’d realized Palmer had broken her spirit, but I couldn’t understand why she returned to him day to day, week to week, year to year.

A man of God. A reverend. His congregation adores him still. They don’t know him like I do. They don’t know he abuses his position of power to manipulate, to control. They don’t know, like I do, that he’s capable of taking Hannah—and breaking her the way he broke my mother.

The day the police found me at the Vagabond, I provided evidence that Palmer Prescott was not what his public assumed. I think Detective Guidry believes me, even if he can’t prove it.

I didn’t know until Palmer sent my mother away that he was my father. She never told me, she gave me her last name, and he never treated me with any privilege, or unfair expectation, to set me apart from any other children of the congregation. In my mind, I scan the crowd amassed for one of Reverend Palmer’s sermons. I search for faces like mine. I wonder if I have brothers and sisters, I wonder if he treated other women the way he’d treated Mom. And often, I’d wished I weren’t an only child, when Mom would fade away for a few hours, when she’d morph from a vibrant, artistic nurturer to a sobbing mess for seemingly no reason.

I feel the stones beneath my feet, take in a deep breath of night air. Sometimes it’s surreal to consider that I made it out of the chaos. Sometimes I have to remind myself that life with Palmer is over—at least for me. And sometimes, despite the concrete evidence surrounding me—Lindsey, the house behind me, the Catholic high school uniform hanging in my closet—I still can’t believe it.

Lindsey unlocks the shed and flings herself into one of the vinyl beanbag chairs resting on the indoor-outdoor carpeting within. “Dude, I talked to Jon tonight.”

I sink into a chair opposite her, near the leak in the roof, and toss her
The Little Mermaid
. “Really.”

“Yeah. Marta and I ran into him at Caribou.”

“What did he have to say?”

“Well, I mean, we didn’t exactly have a meaningful conversation. Just bullshit, you know.” She pulls out her bowl, a colorful contraption of iridescent greens and purples, and packs a few pinches of pot into it. “Talked about school and stuff. He says Mr. Willis must’ve been cracked for assigning a twelve-page essay on a novel, even if it did win a Pulitzer. Says we should revolt and crucify him. So glad I have Hayhurst for Lit.”

Crucify, crucify, crucify
.

“Crucify?” I shift uneasily. “That’s the word he used?”

“Yeah.” She shrugs, as she tests the flame on her lighter and lowers it. “He was pretty stressed out and worked up about it.”

“Interesting choice of words.” Considering, of course, that it’s been spinning in my head all day.

“Guess you were right about the bookish thing.” She brings her lighter to her bowl.

I pull this week’s well-worn notebook from my backpack.

“Great idea.” The crackling of leaves under flame meets my ears. She holds in her smoke. “Let’s get started.”

I flip to a semi-blank page. My glance trips over the nonsensical meters of words I jotted a few hours ago, and the pulsating in my brain begins.

“Print, so I don’t have to rewrite it.”

Soon after I landed here at
la Maison d’Hutch
, Lindsey and I discovered that our printing is virtually identical, so close in style that I can take short-answer quizzes for her in Russian history. If we can fool Ms. Hines, we can surely fool John Fogel. I nod. I want to tell her I’ll print, but my tongue can’t formulate the words.

“Something vague, but intriguing.”

Already, Lindsey’s voice echoes in the caverns of my mind, as if she’s far away.

“Listening, Callie?”

“Crucify,” I mutter. A flash of pain stabs me between the eyes, and a queasy feeling turns my gut. Breathe. Don’t throw up.

I can’t pull the cap off my pen. My fingers are too numb, or maybe my palm is too sweaty. I yank, yank, yank. The
words are coming closer now. Threatening to devour my every thought. Threatening to overtake me, overpower me, engulf me like waves over a sand castle.

Crucify.

Crucify, quarter, and stone her.

Stone her, stone her, stoneherstoneherstoneher.

“You can give it to him tomorrow at chapel,” Lindsey’s saying.

What?

I exhale.

The ringing in my ears begins to fade.

“Hell-o?”

I wipe the tears from my eyes and offer Lindsey a glance.

The grass in her bowl is smoldering. “Did you get any of that?”

“Give it to him at chapel. Got it.”

She rolls her eyes—“I don’t know why you don’t just medicate the fuck out of yourself”—and brings the bowl to her lips for another hit.

Sometimes I wonder the same thing, but I feel so detached on the meds, so distant, so cloudy. And I can’t afford any more clouds in my brain. “I got it,” I say, as if proving to her that I’m functioning just fine without the Ativan. “Give it to him at chapel, right?”

I’m sure I’m leaving out a slew of Lindsey’s other instructions, but she nods. “Right.”

This makes sense. He sits in front of me in chapel, a
fact that recently has wrapped Lindsey in a playful sort of envy.

“And don’t forget—”

My voice joins hers for the next demand: “No h. Got it.”

I put my pen down on the bench and reread what I wrote while Lindsey was babbling.

Crucify, quarter, and stone her.

I don’t know what it means.

But it scares the bejesus out of me.

We’re in the same bed again, and Lindsey’s asleep. But my mind is too active to allow me to rest.

Every time Lindsey sighs in her sleep, the stench of marijuana wafts from between her lips. It’s a wonder her parents and our teachers don’t know about her fondness of cannabis. It’s woven into the threads of her being some days. Or maybe they do know, but choose to ignore it. There are plenty of parents who live in denial of their kids’ extracurricular habits. My parents—the sane, as well as the insane—were never among them. They watched me constantly. Always questioned my decisions, my actions. Until I hit County, I didn’t have a chance to screw up.

My fingers travel to the scar on my right shoulder. I push away the memory of how it came to be there.

Elijah did look different tonight, and he acted differently, too. Is it possible that Elijah, the supposed soccer god of Lakes High School, has found his way onto an
upward-moving path? I wonder if it really is possible for someone to reform.

If so, maybe I should actually mail in some college applications.

The Hutches send Lindsey and me to Our Lady of Carmel Catholic, which means that my pre-SATs, cumulative GPA, and IQ are worthy of such a place. My eyes must’ve been like saucers when the Hutches told me the board had approved my application. I would’ve accused the Hutches of buying my admission—after all, Lindsey often proclaims they’d bought hers—but that didn’t make sense. Why would complete strangers pay not only my tuition, but put up a bribe for my entry, when they could just as easily use the money to go to Hawaii … again?

Still, however I got in, it’s no big secret that Carmel students have a leg up when it comes to securing grants and scholarships for college, and after a month into my first year there, I already see the difference. When the Hutches sprung me from County last March, they had no choice but to send me to Nippersink High to finish off my sophomore year. If Carmel is a country club compared to Nippersink, my old high school near Holy Promise is a joke, not that I’d often attended. Mom preferred to home-school me—and she used the term loosely. Most of my education comes from my own informal curiosities. I read. I wrote. I studied, but only when subjects interested me.

Things are different now. Maybe I should take Elijah’s
lead and do something with the opportunity the Hutches have given me.

Burn her in an urn. Crucify, quarter, and stone her
.

Images of my dream flash in my mind in conjunction with the disturbing words spinning through my brain.

Suddenly, I’m there again: knee-deep in a hole I’m digging.

Crucify, quarter, and stone her. Buried alive, buried alive, buried alive …

I close my eyes, and allow myself to absorb the image. I hear the clink of the shovel hitting the dirt, smell the rich soil and taste it as it grinds in my molars. Chills dart through me, as rain pelts the back of my neck.

I awaken with a start.

My right hand aches, and so does my head, to the point of nausea.

When I stretch my fingers, I feel my pen slip from my grasp.

In the darkness, I see my notebook sprawled across my belly. It’s getting worse. I’d been writing. In my sleep.

Carefully, so as not to disturb Lindsey, who’s still basking in her marijuana-induced slumber, I shift and hold my notebook up, so that a slant of moonlight illuminates the page.

I gasp when I read the same words I’d written on the walls of the apartment above the Vagabond:
I killed him, I killed him, I killed him.

T
his is all so 1960’s. Writing notes by hand. Passing them in chapel. But cell phone usage isn’t allowed in school, and garnering John Fogel’s attention is a matter of some urgency, at least to Lindsey. So e-mailing and waiting hours for an answer is out of the question.

“John.”

Either he’s ignoring me, or he can’t hear me, amongst the bustle of our classmates taking their seats, scrambling before Father Bernard begins his procession. If it’s the former, I won’t hold it against him. Morning chapel is no time to foster an acquaintance. I caught him looking in my direction on my first day at Carmel Catholic last month. He didn’t look away, even when our gazes met, until our physics teacher
walked the path between us. That same day, he brushed past me on his way out of the classroom, and while he offered a small smile, he didn’t say much of anything.

I’ve heard him speak, of course—just never to me.

I’ve heard him laugh.

I’ve heard him sing.

But hearing someone and listening to him are two totally different things. Just as he’s never turned more than a smoldering gaze to me, I haven’t exactly paid much attention to him, either—if only because Lindsey’s constantly crushing on him puts him on my off-limits list.

He’s so close—sitting in the pew in front of me—that I could breathe a whisper on the back of his neck and disturb the straight, Carmel-approved cut of his sandy blond hair. I lean forward. “John.”

This time he turns toward me, an expression somewhere between annoyance and surprise playing on his face. Quickly, the look mellows to indifference. He gives me a nod and strikes me with a steady navy-blue-eyed stare. I’m not used to seeing this sort of thing in high school guys, who often lack confidence, if not the political correctness and grace of holding a gaze for more than half a moment. My mother taught me at a young age always to look someone in the eye; most of my privileged peers, John Fogel obviously not included, missed this lesson. It’s refreshing to see a guy who hasn’t.

“From Lindsey,” I say, pressing the note into his palm. My
fingers linger a moment too long against his thicker ones.

His eyes widen for a split second when our fingers touch over the back of the pew. “Thanks.” Promptly, he looks away and taps the corner of the note atop his calc text, but he doesn’t open it.

I settle against the back of the pew.

If John takes the bait, he’ll e-mail his reply to Lindsey, or maybe he’ll text it, and I’ll be out of the loop. My work here was essentially done once I pressed the tightly folded square of paper into his hand.