CHRIS BOHJALIAN
Chris Bohjalian is the author of nineteen books. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and three of his novels have become movies. His newest full-length novel, The Sleepwalker, will be released on January 10, 2017.
www.chrisbohjalian.com
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ALSO BY CHRIS BOHJALIAN
Novels
The Guest Room
Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands
The Light in the Ruins
The Sandcastle Girls
The Night Strangers
Secrets of Eden
Skeletons at the Feast
The Double Bind
Before You Know Kindness
The Buffalo Soldier
Trans-Sister Radio
The Law of Similars
Midwives
Water Witches
Past the Bleachers
Hangman
A Killing in the Real World
Essay Collection
Idyll Banter
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Chris Bohjalian
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Ebook ISBN 9781524732936
Cover design by John Fontana
Cover photograph by Lario Tus / Shutterstock
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Contents
Cover
Chris Bohjalian
Also by Chris Bohjalian
Title Page
Copyright
The Premonition
It wasn’t a premonition. That was too strong a word.
But as I stood by the side of the road and watched the power line buffeted by the great, persistent gusts from the south, I had a sense—a distinct sense—that the line was going to snap. It was going to whip high above the wooden poles, then fall to the earth, surrounded by the sparks from the nearby transformer. There it would electrify the ground. I was seventeen that afternoon and I saw it all in my mind: the black thunderclouds rising up above the fields behind the line, the corn tasseled, two Morgan horses looking wary as they walked in small circles in the fenced-in meadow at the edge of the road, and the sparks as they pinwheeled like fireflies above the pavement.
In my imagination, the line would hit the oncoming blue Pathfinder—my mother’s brand-new car and the only vehicle within sight—electrocuting her.
But it didn’t.
The automobile was beyond the line when it was ripped from the top of the pole by a particular whoosh of wind, first jerking high into the air, then curlicuing to the ground almost gently amid its pyrotechnics: garish, sparkling yellow and blue palm fronds.
“Hi, sweetie,” my mother said, unaware that the bang behind her was not thunder but something considerably more ominous. Something legitimately dangerous.
“Oh, my God, did you see that?” I cried out when I opened the passenger door. I didn’t climb in, but leaned in instead. I realized as soon as the sentence had escaped my mouth that my mother had not seen it. She would have been staring behind her if she had. She would be astonished at how close she had come, perhaps, to being killed. And so I continued, my voice a little frantic, “The wind just took out that power line!” I pointed and my mother put the car into park, stepped on the emergency brake, and emerged from the driver’s side of the vehicle. The two of us, a statuesque forty-three-year-old and her still-adolescent daughter, stood on opposite sides of the car on the otherwise deserted two-lane Vermont road for easily ten seconds, neither speaking, as the line twitched once and then twice like a dying snake.
We both felt the first drops of rain at the same time, whipped into our faces as if sprayed by a fan, and it was my mother who spoke next.
“Get in the car, Lianna. Now,” she commanded, and I did just that. My mother accelerated fast, peeling out much the same way that my more idiotic male friends did in the weeks after they got their driver’s licenses. But in this case it made sense: that night we would hear on the news from Vermont Public Radio that a pair of horses had been electrocuted when the sudden storm had blown in and taken down that power line a few miles from the village of Bartlett. The rain had spread the current like a wildfire across the wet grass, the charge executing the animals as they stood near the fence.
*
The year was 1996 and I was weeks away from starting my senior year of high school. The afternoon the power line snapped I’d been waiting at the end of my friend Heather Prescott’s long driveway a few miles from my family’s own red Victorian in the village. My mother was picking me up on the way home from Middlebury. She was supposed to meet me at the Prescotts’ house—the house itself, not at the end of their three-hundred-yard driveway—but I was so pleasantly stoned that I had walked out the front door and started following the clouds as the storm raced east across the Champlain Valley. The air was charged and I just started to stroll. Before I knew it, I was at the road, watching the clouds in the sky and the horses in the field across the street.
The horses were new, which was part of the attraction for me. The people who lived there were new. They’d just moved in the week before. Neither Heather nor I knew anything about the family except the fact they had these two beautiful Morgan horses.
In hindsight, I don’t believe that I would have attached such supernatural significance to the premonition if I hadn’t been baked. If Heather and I hadn’t fired up the banana-yellow bong with the very serious weed that Heather’s older brother had brought back from Boston, I presume that I would have understood as the power line was bucking that what I was experiencing was something far more likely and far more common than a premonition: dread. It was like watching a car swerving on an icy hill and knowing that it was going to slide into the banks the snowplows had created along the sides of the switchbacks. It was just common sense, that’s all.
And yet I couldn’t shake my belief that I had experienced something more dramatic than that. I was confident that even if my mother hadn’t known that the road, once wet, was going to conduct the current and demanded that I get in the car, I would have felt this was more than common sense. And then when we heard on the news that Heather’s neighbor’s horses had been electrocuted? I was particularly unnerved.
But the whole summer had been a little unnerving after my mother’s two sleepwalking events. The whole year had felt off-kilter. Hence the dread. Two times my father, an English professor at the college, had been out of town, and each time my mother had gone sleepwalking in the smallest hours of the morning. Moreover, she didn’t merely sleepwalk downstairs from their bedroom or cook up an omelet in the kitchen. She did far stranger things. The first time she had gone cross-country skiing in our backyard. The second time she had coated the magnificent hydrangea outside our bay window with silver spray paint. We discussed it as a family and my parents had discussed it on their own, and we told ourselves we would be vigilant. We also told ourselves that it wouldn’t happen again, though I know none of us believed that.
Nevertheless, I kept my belief that I’d had a premonition about the power line to myself. I didn’t dare tell my kid sister, because Paige was still wee
ks shy of the third grade and I didn’t want to frighten her. Paige, of course, might also have been merely incredulous. A gift of prophecy? Please. Paige was young, but she was still precocious enough to call me out for having the arrogance to believe that I may have forecasted the future.
I took comfort in the fact that at least I hadn’t been wearing my harem pants when I had seen the power line snap. Had I been in my magician’s garb—had I just done a children’s birthday party—I might have been seriously creeped out.
*
Two days later, one of those steamy Saturdays in the middle of August, I had a job performing a magic show at one of those children’s parties.
I painted my toenails with glitter polish and donned the purple harem pants and paisley vest I had found at a vintage clothing store in Burlington. This was my first summer as Lianna the Enchantress, a new, more adult persona. (At least I thought it was more adult. Both Paige and my father—who was forty-five and well versed in both popular culture and the classics—presumed I was channeling a Disney princess named Jasmine.)
In any case, this afternoon I was taking my mother’s car and driving my trunk full of illusions to Ethan Gollner’s home. Ethan was in Paige’s class at school: he, too, was about to start the third grade. Paige was going to be at the party, which actually made me a little nervous. Paige would never undermine me publicly—she saved her barbs for the privacy of our home—but I had never done a show where she was in the audience. I would be driving her to and from the party, too. She warned me what I was in for.
“Ethan is a mess,” she said. “He’s smart, but he’s always hitting kids and last year he was always in trouble with Ms. Furchgott. He wet his pants one time when he was playing kickball and made an out.” Ms. Furchgott was the second-grade teacher at the school.
“Will it be mostly boys at the party?”
Paige nodded. “Mostly,” she answered, but she did name two girls who she believed might be there in addition to herself.
When I was nearing the Gollners’ house—a red saltbox with an addition to the east and a connector that looked like a clapboard jet bridge to the barn they used for a garage to the west—I noted that the sky had grown from overcast to a threatening, gunmetal gray. It was going to rain and it was going to rain soon. It was probably going to thunder.
As I was pulling the black-and-silver trunk with my act from the car and setting it on the ground so I could roll it into the house, my stomach lurched and I felt a wave of the queasiness and anxiety that seemed to mark that summer. I wished it was just stage fright, but I knew in my heart that it wasn’t. In this case, it was that awful, endless dark sky.
*
“As you can see, it’s just a cup of sugar,” I was saying, holding what my grandmother called a highball glass in my hand. There were eleven boys and girls—and as Paige had predicted, there were only three girls, including her—on the living room floor before me. Already the kids were pretty hopped up, and I could see the mothers standing behind their kids looking a little apprehensive: they weren’t thrilled by the idea that I might be giving nearly a dozen soon-to-be third-graders a highball glass full of sugar. The fact I had called the trick the Candy Factory only had them further on alert.
Outside, it was pouring now, the rain whipping against the glass windows almost like hail, and sometimes when it thundered the children’s heads turned reflexively and they would scream or squeal at the proximity of the house-rattling bangs.
Now I reached into the cup and rubbed some of the crystals between two of my fingers.
“I want some!” yelled Ethan, the birthday boy, not in a bratty voice, but in the tone of a kid who was just having a little fun at my expense. I had been performing for forty-five minutes now, and managed to convince myself that Paige had exaggerated how difficult the child was. Nevertheless, one of the mothers standing behind the children was begging me with her eyes not to give the child any of that sugar straight. In her opinion, the glass might just as well have been filled with cocaine.
“Well, it’s your big day,” I reassured him. “But we can do better than boring old sugar.”
In all fairness, the mother was right to be worried, and I understood that. The trick was about transformation: changing the sugar into something else. In this case, I was going to change it into a highball glass full of M&M’s. If only out of self-preservation, I saved this trick for the end—it was the second-to-last illusion before my finale—because there was no way I was going to amp these kids up any more than they already were while I was still onstage. Still, I understood that what I did was indeed a little subversive: I was giving the kids a cupful of candy and a few minutes later I would drop the proverbial mic and be out the front door.
“We can do much, much better,” I repeated. Then I took the fire-engine-red cylinder that fit over the glass, first demonstrating to my audience that it was hollow. One child, a lanky girl with a Barbie headband in her hair, jumped up and peered in to be sure, but I was ready. I held tight to the cylinder. From the corner of my eye I saw Paige smirking. She did not know precisely the trick behind the illusion, but she understood that it had something to do with the cylinder.
“Who’s hungry?” I asked, and most of the kids shrieked that they were. But not all. I noticed one little boy was still sitting with his back to the coffee table that had been pushed against the wall, staring at me—through me—but silent. For a brief moment I lost my concentration as I tried to recall if the child had been involved at all in my show, and didn’t believe that he had. He had dark eyes and raven-black hair that hung over his ears and his forehead like a mop. He was the only boy in long pants, a pair of jeans that were cuffed.
I regained my focus and gripped the top of the cylinder with my fingers, placing the glass of sugar in the palm of my other hand. Then I slid the cylinder over the glass, covering it completely, and shook it: not enough to spray the sugar out the top, but enough that the kids and their parents could hear the “factory” at work. It was a clatter, the sound of peanuts rattling in a can, perhaps, or just maybe…M&M’s candies bouncing against the glass.
Abruptly I whisked off the cylinder and put it on the table behind me, revealing for the kids a full glass of colorful M&M’s. The kids cheered and I was about to pour a few into each of their hands, when Ethan’s mother said from the back of the room, “Lianna, I think those would be great on the cake, don’t you? I could put them in the icing.”
I understood the cue. “That’s exactly what the Candy Factory is for, Mrs. Gollner,” I said, and I stepped through the kids, planning to hand Ethan’s mother the glass.
But then Ethan screamed, “No!,” his tone this time very different from his earlier outburst, and I stopped dead in my tracks. This was legitimate rage at the unfairness of his mother and her collusion with Lianna the Enchantress—at the way the two of us were denying him a wish on this, his day of days. “It’s my birthday and I want that candy!”
“Ethan, that’s enough,” said his mother, and she folded her arms across her chest.
Before I could either cross through the audience to hand the cupful of candy to Mrs. Gollner or retreat and place it back behind me on my table, there was another clap of thunder and Ethan leapt at me, a lemur in the guise of a boy. I had children all around me and there was no place to run without stepping on someone, and so reflexively I pulled back my hand and raised my arm, but I moved so quickly that I sent half the candy saucering into the air and onto the living room furniture and floor. It was raining M&M’s and the kids were laughing and diving over one another to get them, and in the madness one of the other boys conked Ethan on the side of the face with his elbow. The child bellowed and the rest of the room went silent. Even his mother was so stunned by the cry that it took her a moment to go to him.
“I’m sorry, Ethan,” the other boy said, pleading. “It was an accident.”
But it was too late. The birthday boy was crying, and already I was inhaling the acidic smell of urine and notic
ing the stain that was spreading along the front of his khaki cargo shorts. I knew instantly that the fact he was crying was the least of the child’s problems today and, alas, probably for years to come. Ethan Gollner was now the Boy Who Had Peed His Pants at His Own Birthday Party. The children noticed it, too, of course, and were hollering and gagging histrionically, pointing at him as his mother knelt in front of him, examining his cheek, kissing it, and then murmuring that she would get some ice. From her spot on the floor Paige nodded knowingly at me: she had picked this one.
At some point the boy’s father had appeared and was leading him from the room. “Let’s get you some new pants, champ,” he said. “Not the end of the world. Your mom can bring the ice upstairs.”
“I didn’t mean to do it,” wailed the other boy, his voice choked with his own sobs.
Almost everyone else, however, was making fun of Ethan or heading off to the basement to play, including my sister. The only child or grown-up who remained was the boy with the dark eyes and the blue jeans with the cuffs. He was still in his spot on the floor with his back to the coffee table. He was still watching me.
“Hi,” I said to him.
“Hi,” he said.
“What’s your name?”
“Eric.”
His tone was neutral, utterly without emotion.
“Are you in Ethan’s class?”
Instead of answering my question, he said, “You’re not really an alchemist. I know what real alchemists can and can’t do. You put the cylinder behind you. Inside it is the fake glass.”
That wasn’t precisely the secret, but it was pretty close. I considered seeing if there was a way I could remove the evidence from inside the cylinder before showing it to him, but there probably wasn’t. Before I even had to make that decision, however, he continued, “I waited until everyone left to tell you. I’m not a know-it-all who wrecks things. I appreciate wizardry.” His tone was completely sincere.