The Killing Jar

  “What place?” Blake asked, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.

  My mom drew in a long breath and released it. “No,” she said, and looked at her hands in her lap. “I’m taking you where I should have taken you a long time ago. I made a mistake, Kenna.” She rubbed her eyes and then stopped rubbing and left her hands there, covering her face. “I thought if you didn’t know about them you would never become one of them. But I was wrong. I was wrong about so many things.”

  I stared at her, mouth parted, my heartbeat frantic. “I don’t understand.”

  She took another deep breath, lowered her hands, and looked at me. “You will. Soon enough, you’ll understand everything.”

  Blake’s car crested the summit. At the top of the mountain, we had a view of the bucolic valley on the other side of the Cross Pine range, all verdant forest and rippling fields of tall grass, no cities or towns or even a gas station in sight. From this vantage point, the rest of the world might as well not exist.

  The volume on Blake’s stereo was turned down low, but I heard the faint strains of the band that had been playing last night when we arrived at the festival. Long Way Home.

  As we started down the other side of the mountain, I had the distinct feeling it would be a very long way home, and I had no idea who I would be when I returned.

  * * *

  “Pull over here,” Mom said when we reached the base of the mountain.

  Blake slowed and veered onto the shoulder of the highway. I was about to ask why we’d stopped when I saw the narrow, rutted dirt road—barely a road, more of a path—leading off through a field and then disappearing into another row of mountains.

  My mom put her hand on Blake’s shoulder. “Blake, I hate to ask but … would it be all right if you waited here while we took your car the rest of the way?”

  “Mom!” I said, shocked that she would even consider such a thing. “You can’t ask him to just sit on the side of the road until we get back!”

  “The people I’m taking you to see are extremely private,” she said, and opened the door as though the decision were already made.

  For a moment, Blake and I were alone in the car. He sat facing forward, hands clenched on the steering wheel. He loved his 4Runner. He’d saved up and bought it himself, and he cared for it like it was a prized Bentley, washing it every weekend and using special cloths on the paint.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll stay behind.”

  “Blake, no. Just no. You won’t even let me drive your car.”

  “I don’t care about the car,” he said quietly. “I care about you. I want to help, and it seems like this is the only way I can.” He twisted in his seat to face me, and for a moment we looked at each other and said nothing, but I could read the frustration in his eyes and in his furrowed brow. He looked older than he had yesterday. I guessed I probably did, too.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” he said.

  “That makes two of us.”

  “I hope your mom knows what she’s doing.” The protective edge to his voice told me he didn’t trust my mom as much as he pretended to.

  Still, when Mom knocked on Blake’s window he opened the door and got out, leaving his keys in the ignition and the car running. Mom climbed into his seat, and I got out and dragged myself reluctantly to the passenger side and got in.

  “I’ll be back before nightfall,” my mom told Blake.

  I couldn’t help but notice she said “I,” not “we,” but just then a lightning bolt of pain lanced through my guts and I decided not to question her.

  Blake shoved his hands in his pockets. “No problem.” He looked at the ground and kicked at a clump of grass with the toe of his sneaker. I wished I could kiss him goodbye, hug him, something. Anything.

  Nothing changes, he had said last night after our kiss.

  Or everything does. That had been my response, but I had no idea how possible that was.

  Blake opened his mouth to say something more to me, but he never got the chance. My mom put the car in Drive and pulled onto the dirt road. In the rearview mirror, I watched Blake until he disappeared, my throat swollen with sadness. I managed not to cry, but only because the grinding pain in my guts and the ache in my bones was a handy distraction from my overwhelming emotions.

  “He’ll be okay,” Mom said after we’d been bouncing and lurching down the overgrown dirt road for a few minutes in silence. She glanced over at me. “You really like him, huh?”

  “Can we talk about something else, like where we’re going? I assume you didn’t want to tell me in front of Blake.”

  She was silent a moment before nodding. “It’s better that no one knows.” She took a breath and exhaled the answer: “I’m taking you to Eclipse.”

  “Eclipse,” I repeated, assuming for a moment that I’d heard her wrong. Eclipse was a place everyone who’d grown up in Rushing was aware of, but no one I knew had ever actually been there. I had seen people from Eclipse in town before, but only a few times, when they made runs to the post office or the hardware store or the gas station. They rarely left their isolated commune tucked away in the mountains, and were, as far as I knew, almost entirely self-sufficient and off the grid, and had been for several decades.

  “Why?” I asked after this announcement had sunk in. The last thing I needed was to be around people, and I doubted the residents of Eclipse wanted anything to do with me.

  “Because…” Her grip on the wheel tightened. I could see the strain all the way up to her neck. “I think they can help you. I hope they can. Or will.”

  “Why would they be able to help me?”

  My mom chewed her lip.

  “Mom, please,” I said sharply, holding myself to control a sudden bout of fever chills. “Don’t make me beg for every answer.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry.” She looked at me with her eyes swimming, and I knew she meant it. “It’s hard to talk about after all these years. There’s so much I never told you about where I came from. About the Kalyptra. That’s what they call themselves, the people who live at Eclipse.”

  “Kalyptra?” I repeated. I was fairly certain I’d never heard the word before, but that wasn’t surprising. Pretty much the only thing people in Rushing knew about those who lived at Eclipse was that they existed. “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Nothing. It’s just a word.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her, trying to decide if she was lying to me, but I couldn’t be sure either way.

  We hit a pothole and both of us jolted forward in our seats.

  “It’s a good thing Blake has an SUV,” Mom said. “I forgot how rough this road is.”

  “So you’ve been to Eclipse?” I had a thousand more questions, but before I could ask the next in line Mom began to slow the 4Runner. We had reached something man-made: a gated fence made of barbed wire and two-by-fours, closing off the narrow road wedged between two jutting hills.

  I blinked in surprise when I caught sight of a man sitting on the other side of the fence, lounging against the trunk of a maple tree and picking lazily at the strings of a banjo. He wore a faded chambray shirt tucked into jeans, and his dark, tousled hair grew wild over his neck and ears.

  As Mom rolled toward the gate, the man set his instrument aside, rose, and approached the fence, his air of relaxed indifference slipping away. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to his elbows, and as he folded his arms over his chest I saw his tan, muscled forearms flex. Even from yards away, I could gauge the intensity of his blue eyes, sapphires fringed by inky lashes.

  Mom braked in front of the gate, which was closed and secured with a softball-sized padlock. Several large wooden signs were propped against the fence, making declarative statements like, “Absolutely NO trespassers allowed,” and “Unwelcome visitors will be treated as such.”

  “Is he one of the Kalyptra?” I asked. He didn’t look much older than me, probably in his early twenties.

  “Yes. His name is Cyrus.”


  I glanced at her, wondering how often she came to Eclipse that she recognized this man on sight.

  “He doesn’t look very friendly,” I observed.

  “I told you, the Kalyptra don’t like visitors,” Mom said. “But don’t worry. I’ll handle him.”

  She was out the door before I could argue. I watched her approach the fence. When he saw who she was, his lips parted and for a moment he only stared at her. But he recovered quickly from whatever shock she’d delivered, shook his head, and pointed back up the road. I figured he had just told her to go back where she came from, or something of that nature. His expression was stony, unaffected, but then Mom said something that took him aback. His eyes widened, and he looked directly at me. My heart began to pound, and the back of my neck grew hot under his stare.

  Then he reached into his shirt and pulled out a long, leather thong, on the end of which hung a key.

  As he unlocked the padlock and opened the gate, Mom climbed back into the 4Runner. Her hands shook as she shifted into Drive.

  “What did you tell him?” I asked.

  “That I needed to see Rebekah.”

  “Who’s Rebekah?”

  My mom eased her foot down on the gas pedal and we proceeded through the open gate. I locked eyes with Cyrus for a moment as we passed him, and I felt my temperature rise again.

  “Rebekah is the person who founded Eclipse,” Mom said, glancing at me before adding, “She’s also your grandmother.”

  ECLIPSE

  I gaped at my mom, forgetting momentarily about the torment my body was in. Then the questions piled out of me, one after another. “I have a grandmother and you never told me? Does she know about Erin and me? Why hasn’t she ever come to see us? What’s she like?” I paused to catch my breath, and another realization hit me. “You’re from Eclipse, aren’t you? That’s why you never talk about your past. You didn’t want us to know.”

  She simply nodded, keeping her eyes trained on the road.

  “But why?”

  Her face pinched, as though she were recalling a painful memory. “Rebekah—my mother—and I are not on good terms. She never forgave me for choosing a normal life over life with the Kalyptra.”

  “But it’s not like you went far. You’re just on the other side of the mountain.”

  “To Rebekah, that might as well be the other side of the world. As far as she’s concerned, I died the day I left.”

  “That’s extreme.”

  “That’s Rebekah.” Her eyes flicked toward me, troubled. “You and she are a lot alike, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know. You’ll have to actually tell me since I’ve never met her.”

  Mom sighed. “The way you take everything to extremes. The way you obsess. You can never do anything in moderation. It’s all or nothing with both of you.”

  I sat back heavily in my seat. This was the most honest conversation I’d had with her in years, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. Not that she was telling me anything I didn’t already know, but it still bothered me to hear myself assessed this way.

  “Well, you’re not perfect either,” I told her.

  She nodded. “I know that.”

  “You’re sad all the time, and you’re secretive, and … and I feel like I don’t even know you.”

  She sighed and deflated, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. I was lashing out at her because it was the only thing I could do.

  Ahead, the mountains opened into fields. The road wound through an orchard and then past rows of grapevines clinging to posts. I spotted a few people—women with long, intricate braids and shaggy-haired men in tunics—picking fruit from trees and vines. As we drove past, their eyes followed us, stunned and apprehensive. I craned around in my seat to see what they’d do, and glimpsed Cyrus trotting along behind us on the road, the banjo slung onto his back. He waved to the people in the orchard, signaling that we were okay. I exhaled a pent-up breath, wondering what those people would have done if Cyrus hadn’t waved them off. I remembered the sign by the fence. “Unwelcome visitors will be treated as such.”

  After what Mom had just told me, I wasn’t sure what kind of visitors that made us. Would Rebekah, my surprise grandmother, turn us away? Maybe she would take one look at my mom and decide all had been forgiven.

  I felt a thrill of wary excitement at the prospect of meeting a family member who hadn’t existed to me until minutes ago, but the aching emptiness inside me sucked it away and left me feeling hollow.

  The deeper into Eclipse territory we drove, the more attention we attracted, until we had a dozen Kalyptra following us. We passed a smattering of stone-cobbled outbuildings, greenhouses, gardens, storage sheds, a large A-frame barn, and an elaborate, patchwork yurt. There were fenced animal paddocks enclosing horses, cows, sheep, and goats, and several large chicken coops. Mom had to progress slowly because chickens and wild turkeys waddled into the road, unmindful of the tires about to flatten them.

  Then we crested a grassy hillock, and I sucked in a breath as the house depicted in ink on my mom’s lower back appeared before us: a sprawling, three-story chalet, like something you’d find high in the Alps. At the very top of the chalet, a broad balcony looked out across the valley. A woman with thigh-length blond hair, wearing a long, lavender dress, stood on the balcony alone. She stared down at us a moment before turning and disappearing through the balcony door.

  “That was her, wasn’t it?” I said. “That was Rebekah.”

  “Yes,” Mom said softly. “That was my mother.”

  We pulled up alongside an old pickup truck parked next to a shed. Mom killed the engine and we sat in silent awe for a moment as we gazed out the windshield at the wooden castle bursting from the middle of this remote valley, walled in by mountains on all sides.

  “I forgot how big it is,” Mom said, sounding breathless.

  As soon as we stepped out of the car, we were surrounded. The people who’d been following the 4Runner converged on us, more heading in our direction from across the yard. With their proximity, the shuddering in my ears increased, and my fever ramped up several degrees. Sweat trickled down my back, and I went stiff. I could feel their energy, their life, like I was standing next to a bonfire. It was as palpable as steam in the air.

  “It’s all right,” Mom said, sensing my tension. “They won’t hurt us.”

  “That’s not what I’m worried about,” I muttered, my jaw aching from clenching my teeth.

  My mom looked at me, her expression calmer than I expected. “You can’t hurt them, Kenna. They’re like you. Or you’re like them, I suppose. You are Kalyptra.”

  My lips parted and a breath escaped. My eyes darted to the assembled people and then back to my mom. I licked my lips nervously. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But stay in control a little longer. You can still hurt me.”

  I blinked at her, confused, but my mom turned away, offering no explanation. Questions reeled through my head. My mom had lived here, and her mother was Kalyptra. So how was my mom not like me?

  I surveyed the assembled. The Kalyptra represented a gamut of ethnicities—Asian, Latino, Indian, African-American—and ranged in age from early twenties to middle age, although they all possessed an ageless quality. The longer I looked at them, the more difficult it was to estimate their ages. But I didn’t see a single child among them. Their clothing was somewhere between rustic and bohemian. Loose linen tunics with jeans. Peasant skirts and camisoles. Long dresses with bell sleeves. Cargo pants, brown boots, chambray and plaid flannel shirts. The women, for the most part, sported hair that draped to their waists, the men’s to their shoulders. I remembered the droves of colorfully dressed, faux hippies who’d gathered en masse at Folk Yeah! Fest. At the time, I’d thought them stylish and reasonably authentic, but compared to the Kalyptra they seemed more like children playing dress-up.

  What struck me most about the Kalyptra, though, was the glow of vitality they exuded, which I could not only see, but feel. T
hey were otherworldly in their bright-eyed loveliness, like flowers picked at their zenith of perfection. Their skin was flawless and natural, their hair glossy, and their bodies lean and athletic in a way that even people who spent their lives at the gym could rarely achieve. Whatever naturalistic lifestyle they were living out here, it was working for them.

  “Anya, is that you?” A man with thick golden hair, a pointy beard, and the physique of Thor shouldered his way to the front. I shrank from him and hid behind my mom. He looked like he could have picked both of us up by the backs of our necks, one in each hand, and tossed us like kittens.

  “Stig,” Mom said, smiling uncertainly and nodding. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “It is you,” the big man, Stig (pronounced “Steeg”), said in a tone of wonder, looking my mom up and down while the other Kalyptra gasped and whispered behind their hands. “I hardly recognize you. Velkommen hjem,” Stig said in what sounded like a Scandinavian dialect, Norwegian or Danish. I had no idea what his words translated to, but I hoped not, Get the hell out before we throw you out.

  Then he threw his arms around my mom in a hug and lifted her off her feet. “I knew you’d come back one of these days.”

  There was a singsong quality to his voice that made him sound like a cheerful bird. He released my mom and put his hands on his hips, still grinning. I released the breath I was holding, relieved that he wasn’t about to toss us off Eclipse property. But when his eyes turned to me, the smile dissolved.

  “You bring a stranger into our midst,” Stig said, his musical voice going flat. “Why?”

  “This is my daughter, Kenna,” Mom said, her chin tilting up defiantly. “She may be a stranger, but she’s still Kalyptra.” Mom lowered her voice so only Stig could hear. “I need to see Rebekah. It’s urgent.”

  She nodded to indicate me, and added, her voice barely audible, “She’s culled the forbidden anima. She’s going through catharsis.”

  “Catharsis?” I blinked at my mom, wanting to ask what she was talking about, but before I could open my mouth Stig clapped so loudly the sound stung my ears. “All right, everyone. Back to work. Plenty to do before sundown.”