The Mark (22 page)

“Your mother believed she was a direct descendant of Lachesis, one of the Fates. The one who determines the length of a human life. She had constructed a whole world of facts to fit her beliefs. Dr. Wells only uncovered parts of it, even in their years of therapy. She was certain Georgia’s delusions ran deep. Some of the things she spoke about went way back.”

“Like what?”

Petra paused and I could hear more pages shuffling. “Remember how she said she’d known before when someone was going to die? There was a friend of hers in high school …” I heard Petra flipping pages again, but saved her the time, my whole body numb.

“Roberta.” The reason she’d run away. The bee sting. I could hardly think, unable to believe it hadn’t occurred to me before and unwilling to imagine it was true.

“Right! Roberta Bikakis. How did you know?”

“Just heard her name before, I guess.”

“Yeah. Anyway, she was a friend of your mother’s who died when she was sixteen. Your mother claimed she knew before it happened.” Petra paused. “Your family’s Greek, right?”

“Right.”

“People don’t usually pick these things out of thin air,” Petra said. “There’s always a source of the delusions. Your mom probably drew on the things she heard, or was taught at church.” I could picture Petra shaking her head in a sorry admiration. “Dr. Wells had to research the mythology to understand what Georgia was talking about. Your mother certainly knew her stuff. She constructed a very solid fantasy world.”

If only that were it, I thought. “What else did she … do the notes say about it?”

“Not much,” Petra answered. “Georgia was pretty tight-lipped, only dropping bits and pieces. In one session, Dr. Wells was questioning her about why she felt responsible for your father’s accident and she answered, ‘I am fate.’ That was it. Then it’s another two months before Georgia let the name Lachesis slip. The thing that struck Dr. Wells was how firmly Georgia held to her beliefs. Her facts never changed, never conflicted. Though Dr. Wells never got the full story, she was sure there was a whole construct beneath the surface that Georgia held tight to.”

“Uh-huh.” It came out like a punch in the gut, which was pretty much how I felt.

“The other thing,” Petra continued, “and this is what made me think she got the ideas from something she was taught, was that Georgia mentioned a book.”

There were goose bumps on my arms. “What book?”

“Hold on. I’ve got it in the notes somewhere.” More pages shuffling. “Here it is,” Petra said. “It was late in their sessions, only a month or two before your mom died. Dr. Wells was trying to get her to share more of her beliefs about her ability to predict death.” Petra paused, reading. “… and also about her being a descendant of this Lachesis.

“ ‘How can you be sure of this?’ Dr. Wells says.

“ ‘It’s in the book,’ Georgia answered.

“ ‘What book?’

“Georgia only shook her head.

“ ‘What book, Georgia?’

“ ‘I can’t tell.’

“ ‘Why not?’

“ ‘My mother told me not to.’

“ ‘Was it one of her books?’

“ ‘It’s ours. Meant for us alone, until she’s sixteen.’

“ ‘Until who’s sixteen, Georgia?’

“ ‘I’m not sure I’ll give it to her. I’m supposed to, but I don’t think I will. I wish it hadn’t been given to me.’

“And that’s it,” Petra said.

“That’s it?”

“Yeah. Dr. Wells notes that Georgia was unresponsive to further questions. At first I thought the book might be one of your father’s. He was a history professor, right?”

“Ancient history.” He’d have known the myths, the stories of the gods and godesses. Could have helped a scared sixteen-year-old sort things out, maybe better than her own mother.

“When I reread the notes, though, it seemed pretty clear the book belonged to your grandmother Nan. And Georgia was probably talking about you, right? With the whole ‘until she’s sixteen’?”

“I guess.”

“That’s what Dr. Wells assumed. She tried to bring it up with Georgia at their next session and after that too, but she never got any further. And then … it ended.”

It ended. My mother checked out. Decided it was all too much.

“Was there anything more?” I asked Petra. “Anything about her … ability? Specifics, like what she thought she could do or see?”

“No. You know, Cassandra, your mother was pretty heavily medicated throughout. Dr. Wells tried getting her to talk about the delusions so they could work through them, she tried focusing on the positives—on you—to encourage Georgia to work toward reality, but truthfully there wasn’t a lot of progress in the three or four years she was at Barrow.”

Petra was silent, thoughtful for a minute, then added, “I’m sorry, Cassie. I know this must be hard to hear, even if you never really knew her.”

So much harder than Petra could ever know. “Thanks. For everything, Petra.”

“No problem. Keep your promise, Cass. Stay in touch.”

chapter 28

I hung around Bering for a day or two after that, but I had no job, no school, didn’t dare go out for fear of seeing the woman with the baby or Lucas or anyone from class.

I desperately wished I could rewind back to the day I decided to visit my parents’ grave and stay safely tucked in the apartment instead. To make things right, though, I’d need to rewind further, back to when I saw the mark on Lucas. Or maybe to the rainy day I followed Mr. McKenzie. But there’s never a way to go back, so I did the only thing I could. Go forward.

Drea and I had talked when she got home from her business trip. Yeah, she’d known my mother survived the accident, assumed I’d known too. She’d visited her once at Barrow.

“I didn’t live here, but I was back for my mom’s funeral,” she said. “I knew Mom would have wanted me to check in on Georgia. She always liked your mother, the daughter I should have been maybe.” Drea looked away. “I don’t even know if she recognized me, Cassie. She didn’t say a word the whole time, and she looked …” She caught herself, remembering that this was my mother; what she said would be some of the only real memories I’d have of her. “Well, not herself. I never went back. Ashamed to say I didn’t even come for her funeral.” Drea shook her head and, for once, seemed truly remorseful. “I guess I’m just not that great at keeping in touch. Maybe just not that great … with people, in general. I know I’ve been kind of a lousy guardian.”

“It’s okay, Drea,” I told her. “You were just what I needed.” It was more or less the truth.

We parted amicably. I had a few days left with her, but I was ready to go and she said she wouldn’t stand in my way. We left with hollow promises to keep in touch, but who knew? Maybe we would. She was family, after all.

Agnes’s nephew John met me at the Ashville airport.

“You look tired, Cassie,” he said.

I nodded. “I am.”

The apartment was exactly as I remembered: throw blanket on the sofa, boxes in the hallway, mail tossed haphazardly on the foyer table, Nan’s door firmly closed. Everything just as I’d left it three months before.

My overnight bag slid from my shoulder and, out of habit, I tossed it toward my room. It landed with a thud in the uneven nook by my door, where I’d always kept my backpack. The sight and feel of so much familiar still hurt. Slowly I walked into the living room and to the window, looking out at Miller’s Pond, as rippled and shimmery as the one in Bering had been.

I stood there for a while, staring, thinking of nothing and everything. Then I went to my room and slept for the next nineteen hours.

After I’d rested, I searched the bookshelves. The book Nan had given me eight months before, on my sixteenth birthday, was there, waiting, just as I’d remembered. It was smaller than today’s paperbacks, yellowed and handwritten in Greek letters, like the ones on the fraternity houses at Lennox. It had to be the one my mother had mentioned. Too coincidental that Nan had given it to me, a book I couldn’t read, with no explanation, on my sixteenth birthday. I thought about throwing it away, maybe lighting it on fire and tossing it in the tub or sink to burn. But I’d come too far, knew too much already not to put the final pieces together.

I called around a couple places. Finding a Greek scholar in Ashville, Pennsylvania, isn’t the easiest thing, but I finally came up with a professor at the local college who was willing to take a look at it.

I met him at his office an hour later.

“It’s old,” Professor Laukaitis told me. “And not well preserved. I’ll do my best, but it’ll take at least a few days. Maybe a week.”

“Fine.” I gave him my number and went back to the apartment to wait.

On my third day home, I went into Nan’s room. I could still catch the faintest hint of her smell—fresh grass and lilies—and imagine her sitting cross-legged on the bed, hunched over a book or crossword.

I was angry at her. Almost numb with fury. I’d been disappointed hearing things from Drea that Nan had never shared, but I understood. I could even forgive her, I thought, for lying about my mother’s death and the mental hospital. But this I couldn’t get past—that she had known about the mark, what it meant and why I saw it, and never told, never tried to help.

I went through her boxes, thinking I might find something to explain it. There were pictures of me as a little girl: in a sandbox, at Christmas, holding tightly to Nan’s hand. There were letters she’d saved, cards I’d given her through the years. There was little about my mother and father, nothing I hadn’t already discovered. The boxes were mostly our memories, hers and mine. Nothing useful.

I spent the rest of the day packing, filling box after box that I’d picked up on my way home from Professor Laukaitis’s office. I started in the kitchen, feverishly piling pots, pans, dishes, towels, working as hard as I could to keep my mind blank and make my body tired enough for sleep.

Sorting the things of our life into bags for Goodwill and boxes to keep took the better part of two days. I was almost done when Professor Laukaitis called.

Two hours later I was back in the apartment, an envelope of neatly typed pages held tightly in my hand. He’d wanted me to stay, read them there so we could talk. I escaped with a promise to call another day. A promise I knew I would break.

I’d been desperate to look at the translation on the bus ride home, but too fearful of what it would say to risk doing so in such a public place. Now, in the quiet of the apartment, I sat on the chair in our half-packed living room and closed my eyes. I took a deep breath and held it, clearing my mind, knowing that the next minutes would change my life forever. Then I exhaled and began to read.

Daughter,

On the eve of my sixteenth year my own dear mother shared the history of our family with me. It is this that I wish to share in kind with you, as my mother instructed.

In ancient times our people believed that the course of a man’s life was decided by rule of the Moirae—Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. These sisters—the three Fates—wed and had children who carried with them the gifts of their lineage.

We are of that lineage, descended from the Fate Lachesis, responsible for deciding the length of the thread of life.

I cannot say how our gift will manifest itself in you or whether it will at all. It is likely you will know yourself, have been aware of it long before you read these words or hear them from my own lips. All I can tell you is that, if you are given the power, you will know the day of a man’s death and may choose to share that knowledge, changing the course of what might be.

As in ancient times, the balance of man and days must be maintained. For every life granted, another is denied. For every soul extended days, another is cut short. We must decide when to shift the course of events, but with the utmost care and deliberation and full acceptance of responsibility and limitation.

There are others, those with the blood of Clotho, Atropos, their brother Thanatos, and perhaps more of the ancient ones, so said my mother. I have yet to encounter one, though I have watched, waited, even searched as much as my limited circumstances could allow. Still, I believe they must exist. I long to find one with which to share this burden, not just in words, but in action. Separated, our abilities to choose wisely are, by nature, limited, as each ancient Fate relied upon another to augment and inform her work.

You, my beloved daughter, hold in the palm of your hand the gift and curse of granting another day, another year, another lifetime. This responsibility troubles my mind ceaselessly. I continue to try to fulfill our duties, though I worry it will be the very death of me.

Though you are but ten, I commit these words, our story, to these pages so that should I not be here to hold your hand and look into your dark eyes on your sixteenth birthday as my mother did, you will still know what you have inherited, gift and responsibility.