Empty of all there is, there is. Empty of all there is.
Empty of all there is, there is. Empty of all there is.
Into the stillness came the unmistakable cry of an eagle. Following hard upon it came the raucous calling of crows. It was a mass of them from the sound of it. And what was a mass of crows called? You had a gaggle of geese, a pride of lions, a congress of . . . something? Not crows, though. Not a congress of—
“Damn,” Becca muttered.
“What is it?”
“I hate it when you’re right.” She shoved herself out of the chair and turned it to face the fireplace. “I got caught up in the crows. What’s it called when there’s a bunch of them, anyway?”
Diana, sitting in the other chair, smiled. “A murder.”
“A murder of crows?” Becca plopped back down, this time with her gaze on the flames of the gas fire. “I would’ve gone a long time without figuring that one out.”
“Shall we start again?”
And so they did. Back to the blood coursing, back to the breathing, back to the mantra.
There was nothing else. Absolutely nothing beyond the mantra came into Becca’s mind. After a few minutes, she heard Diana murmur, “Now let it go,” which was the signal to cease the mantra. Still, there was nothing.
This wasn’t unusual. Diana Kinsale was the only person whose thoughts Becca had never been able to hear in the form of what she’d long ago learned to call whispers. At first, Becca had believed it was because Diana possessed an unearthly ability far beyond her own. But she’d learned it was simply because Diana was able to control her thoughts when she wasn’t speaking, and because her thoughts exactly matched her words when she did speak.
In this practice that the two of them engaged in, however, Diana allowed her mind to wander, and it was Becca’s job to learn to block Diana’s thoughts without the aid of the AUD box. At first they’d used the mantra to do this. Now they were moving on to the ability to empty the mind first and to lock it off from invasion second.
Becca breathed deeply and maintained control. The moments passed. Each second ticked off an entire eternity and then, down to my soul here Clarence comes was as loud as the crows had been.
“Damn it!” Becca cried. “This is hopeless. What was it, five seconds?”
Diana rose. Her warm hand came down on Becca’s shoulder. “What did you hear?”
“I don’t know. Something about my soul and Clarence.”
“That’s all?”
“Is it another mantra? Not that it matters because it invaded my brain in like . . . I don’t know . . . like I said, five seconds.”
“You went nearly two minutes if you heard nothing else,” Diana said. “‘Dive, thoughts, down to my soul. Here Clarence comes.’”
“Yeah. That’s it. I held it off for a while but then . . . there it was.”
“Did you hear more?”
“Was there more?”
Diana came around to the front of Becca’s chair. She crossed her arms and observed Becca solemnly. “There was indeed. I was thinking the opening soliloquy of Richard the Third. It’s two pages long.”
“Richard the who?”
“Shakespeare,” Diana said. “A very fine play. You must read it sometime.”
“Shakespeare?” Becca groused. “No wonder I couldn’t hold it off.”
Diana shook her head. “I don’t believe you understand. As I said, the soliloquy is two pages long. You held it off until the last line.”
“So you were thinking, like, the whole soliloquy?”
“From the moment you let the mantra go. It might have seemed like five seconds to you, my dear. But the soliloquy—done well—takes more than a minute and closer to two.”
Becca’s eyes widened as she took this in, along with its implications. Nearly two minutes of holding a mental barrier against the invasion of people’s thoughts? It felt like a miracle to her.
3
Holy Redeemer Pentecostal Church had no windows. The reason for this was that it had long ago been decided that nothing from the external world should distract the church’s congregants from worship. So the windows that had existed in the storefront where services took place every Sunday and Bible study occurred every Wednesday night had been boarded up with plywood. The look at first had suggested a hurricane was imminent, and because of this, a committee with marginal talent had painted scenes from the Old Testament upon the wood. Jenn McDaniels thought the place looked like a preschool now, one where the finger painting had gotten badly out of control.
She was inside, along with her mom. Her little brothers were in the children’s group that met in an airless walled-off section of the former shop. It had once been a hair salon, and the kids’ section was within the storage and color-mixing part of the place. Jenn remembered it only too well. She’d spent her formative years there learning Bible stories while outside in the regular church, the congregation sang, listened to Mr. Sawyer banging the pulpit and preaching his head off, and waited for the Holy Spirit to descend upon them and gift them with tongues.
Her mom had already received this gift. Nearly every Sunday, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she began to babble. It didn’t matter which part of the service was going on, either. Mr. Sawyer could work himself into a lather about Samson, Delilah, and the scissors, and what all that meant (like get a regular haircut, Jenn thought), and Kate McDaniels would rise, sway, and begin using nonsense words that came out as a murmur and then as a moan and finally a loud exclamation. To Jenn, it was an excruciating spectacle, and when people fell into silent awe, Jenn wanted to sink into the ground and disappear. She had never been able to figure out why anyone would want the Holy Spirit to “bless” them this way. It was her intention never to come close to having Him or Her or It anywhere near her.
Kate’s ambition for Jenn was the opposite. Having tongues was the pinnacle. She meant Jenn to reach it. So she’d started her out as a five-year-old in the storage and color room of the former salon where Jenn learned that the earth was not billions of years old but rather a creation that took God six days: from the dinosaurs right to Adam and Eve. She’d believed this at first because as a five-year-old that was what you did: you believed adults. She got over that when she went to school and sat in the science class that first mentioned Charles Darwin.
Now, she squirmed in her seat. Right outside on the island highway, traffic from over town was coming off the ferry. She could hear the grinding of gears from a big tractor trailer climbing the steep slope through the little commercial area that was Clinton. She wished she was on it. Or in one of the cars. In fact, she wished she was anywhere but in this airless room where, she knew, at any moment her mom was going to demonstrate just what the Holy Spirit could do for you if you only waited and prayed enough.
Kate’s lips had started to move. Her body had started to sway. Liftoff had begun to occur, and there was no way Jenn wanted to witness another display of her mom’s religious fervor.
So she rose from her chair. She could tell that the people closest to her thought that she was about to declare herself for Jesus. She heard murmurs of “Praise Him” and the like, and she knew that if she didn’t get out of there ASAP, she would be surrounded by the joyful who believed their prayers on her behalf had been answered.
She stepped over legs. She excused herself. She tromped on two purses and nearly tripped on a stack of hymnals. Behind her, she sensed that her mom was on her feet, and she thought that Kate was coming after her. But when she heard the sound of a deep-throated moan, she knew that she didn’t have to worry.
Jenn whispered, “Sorry, sorry. Need a bathroom,” and hoped that would be enough. The faithful allowed her to pass to the aisle and from there to dash to the door. She burst outside just as someone behind her shouted, “Come unto me, I pray you.” Jenn shut the door. She breathed in relief. Another Sunday and sh
e’d made her escape.
It was raining outside. At this time of year, it was usually raining. Or it was gray with clouds or soupy with fog. Sometimes it was white with snow, but that wasn’t often. Mostly it was damp and cold and you had to get used to it or you’d off yourself sometime in the middle of January.
Jenn was used to it. She’d lived all her life on Whidbey Island, and although her ambition was to live the rest of her life off Whidbey Island, she wasn’t going to be able to do that unless and until she managed a college scholarship that got her far away from this dismal place. But that was more than two years in the future, and in the meantime she had to put up with Holy Redeemer, her mom’s religious fervor, and a degree of poverty that sent the family to the thrift store for clothes and to the food bank for meals.
It didn’t have to be this way, she told herself. If she had a father with a normal job and a mother who made money doing anything other than driving the Whidbey Island taxi, they wouldn’t have to live at the edge of the water, selling bait to fishermen during the season and illegally selling growlers to the local beer lovers the rest of the time. They would live in one of the three towns at the south end of the island: Freeland, which spread out along enormous Holmes Harbor; Langley, which sat above the waters of Saratoga Passage; or even Clinton, where she stood now in front of one of the strip of shops and empty storefronts and bars that defined the place.
She wanted a cigarette. She wished she hadn’t given them up. She knew she’d needed to, because of soccer, but at the moment it would have felt so good to be lighting up. Part of the good feeling would have been the satisfaction of a need. The other part would have been the statement that she’d be making, a fine moment of rebellion that she wanted people to see as they came out of the Sunday service.
But she had no cigarettes and there was no place close by to purchase them. There was just the rain. That and the cars coming off the ferry with their headlights piercing the gloom. They were heading north without stopping, which was poor Clinton’s curse. People opened businesses here and then closed them after a year or two. No one slowed long enough to glance at the windows of the few shops that managed to stay in business. It was a miracle, Jenn thought, that there was anything left in the place at all.
Behind her she heard voices swelling in song, accompanied by piano music that tried to keep up with them. The piano was played by Reverend Sawyer’s twelve-year-old daughter. She had no talent, but she’d been given tongues when she was eight, so she was much admired.
“Just look at her, Jennifer,” Kate McDaniels would whisper when the girl made her way to the folding chair that served as piano stool. “Think how deeply God loves her to have sent His Holy Spirit.”
Jenn would look at her dutifully. The poor kid had absolutely no ankles. Her legs dropped down from her knees like vertical tree limbs, and the knee socks she wore in winter made them look like poles decorated by the anonymous knitters who went around Langley putting sweaters on the street lights.
Now the girl was pounding the piano enthusiastically. When she missed a note, no one cared.
At the conclusion of this, Jenn readied herself to face her mom. Kate was going to be furious with her for ducking out.
Her brothers managed to get out first. Petey was carrying a picture he’d drawn. Andy was carrying three crayons that he’d stolen. Petey’s picture was a stick figure with a sword held high over his head. Andy’s crayons were red, black, and green.
“It’s Abraham,” Petey announced, holding the picture up proudly. “See, he’s going to kill his kid only the angel’ll stop ’im just before he chops his head off.”
Jenn examined it. “Where’s the angel?”
“Not there yet,” Petey said.
“Where’s the kid?”
“He was too smart. He ran away.”
Jenn guffawed, saying, “Don’t tell Mom that. And, Andy, put away the crayons if you got hopes of keeping ’em. Shove ’em in your pocket or something.”
“But I wanted to show you—” he began.
She cut him off with, “If you want to keep ’em, you do what I say. Else Mom sees and someone’s gonna get a swat on the butt.”
“’Kay,” Andy said, and the crayons went into his pocket.
The congregation began piling out of the church. Jenn was glad that Mr. Sawyer wasn’t the type of preacher who had to greet every single person at the door as they left. Along with her mom, he’d have had something to say about Jenn’s ducking out. For she’d caught his expression as she’d made her way down the row of chairs to the aisle, and he hadn’t looked like someone who thought she was on her way to the nearest toilet.
“Let’s go,” were Kate McDaniels’s first words. Her tone told Jenn that she wasn’t going to believe any excuse Jenn came up with. “Get in the car,” she said to the boys. “Back seat, please. Jenn and I need to have words in the front.”
Jenn plodded behind her mother’s slim back to the island taxi. Kate acknowledged the greetings of her fellow congregants and pressed her hand to her chest to receive their awed respect. She was truly humble, and Jenn admired this in her mom. With other people, she never made a big deal about the level of her relationship with God. It was only with Jenn that she became fire, brimstone, and determination.
They drove up the highway. Kate said nothing till they made the left turn at Deer Lake Road, which would take them in the direction of Possession Point. She said patiently, “Jennifer, this has to stop. You’re not an adult yet, free to make your own decisions. You’re going to have to get with the program as I define it.”
Jenn looked out the window. They were cruising past farmland that the rain had made into a succession of ponds. “What about Dad?” she protested. “He doesn’t go to church.”
“Your father is an adult,” Kate said. “His relationship with God is in his own hands. Your relationship with God is not.”
“I don’t want—”
“Don’t say you don’t want a relationship with God. You can’t allow that thought in your head. It’s a simple thing for the devil to possess someone your age, and this is how is all begins. Stubborn refusal first and then derision.”
“Why don’t you ever listen to me?” Jenn fumed.
“Because your words don’t come from you. They come from the temptations of the outer world and it’s the inner world that matters. That’s the world sanctified by the Holy Spirit.”
“Mom, I got no intention of ever babbling a bunch of dumb words in front of a crowd of people,” Jenn said. “If that’s what the Holy Spirit has to offer, then no thank you. I really mean it.”
Kate’s hand was swift. It didn’t hit her. It grasped her by the back of the neck, though, and her grip was so firm that Jenn shouted, “Ow!” although more dramatically than was completely necessary.
Kate held on, never taking her eyes off the road. She said, “Do not speak of tongues in that way. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Do you?” Jenn demanded. “Mom, you’re hurting me!”
“How much hurt do you think you’ll feel if you go to hell?” Kate countered.
“So if I learn how to moan and shout oohba gooba ully watsie yango doobie doo, I go to heaven? Do you really believe that?”
“What I believe is that the condition of your soul is my responsibility until you leave my house and are out on your own. So you will obey me on Sunday and every other day of the week.”
Kate released her grip. Jenn rubbed her neck. She said, “You don’t get me at all, do you?”
Kate said, “It’s not important that I ‘get’ you. It’s important that I save you. Do you understand?”
Jenn understood, all right. But the difference between herself and her mother was that while Jenn wanted to save herself, too, the way she had in mind to accomplish this had nothing to do with religion.
4
It
was nearly a week after monitoring what went for his grandfather’s recovery progress that Seth and his father, Rich, stood on the front porch of Ralph Darrow’s house along with Becca King. The house was cedar shingled in the manner of the Pacific Northwest, and like many homes and cabins in the area, it was unpainted and had been allowed to weather naturally. Small but perfectly constructed by Ralph’s own hands, the house sat at the base of and behind a modest hill up which the driveway ran from Newman Road. A lawn and a prize-winning garden of specimen trees and massive rhododendrons fronted it. To one side at a distance, a pond spread out. Behind this and behind the house itself, a great forest loomed.
Seth, his dad, and Becca were examining Ralph’s garden from the porch. The distance allowed them to take it all in. The distance also allowed them to take in the enormous amount of work that needed to be done. Winter in the Pacific Northwest involved a mind-boggling exercise in raking, digging, dividing, transplanting, pruning, hauling, and mulching. And that was just in the garden. The forest needed to be seen to as well. Storms downed trees that required removal, and trails that wound through Ralph’s acreage had to be maintained. Left to their own devices, the trails would be overgrown within a few months as spring brought a burgeoning in the greenery that made it akin to a woods in a fairy tale. Creepers creeped, holly shot up, and yellow archangel and English ivy did their best to choke the daylights out of everything. Winter blow-down from strong storm winds cluttered the landscape. It was a job for a team and not for anyone who didn’t know exactly what to do and how to do it.
None of them were gardeners. None of them were foresters. Yet something had to be done to maintain the place, and Seth was the one to voice the problem with a mere two words. “It’s epic.”
“I’ve got no idea how he’s managed to do it,” was his father’s reply.
“It’s his passion,” Becca noted.
A movement from near the pond caught their attention. Seth’s golden lab came bounding toward them. Gus had dived into the forest the moment Seth had opened the car door upon his arrival with his father. Some critter, Seth decided, had caught the dog’s attention, and when Gus’s attention was caught, everything related to obedience training went out the window. Now he was feet-to-dog-elbows in mud as he happily loped toward them.