‘Ezra believes this?’
She nodded. ‘And so do I. Tania, I saw him do it – out at Turner Lake. He made the clouds roll down from Black Rock and rain over the water. It was the best rain, so clean and pure. And then he sent it away again, down the valley, and the sun was shining and there was a perfect rainbow!’
‘I remember Ezra at the party,’ I said, keeping my voice under control while I desperately wondered how should deal with this. ‘His shaman costume, the dreamcatcher thing was stunning. I see the attraction.’
‘I’m not talking about appearances and surface stuff – this is spiritual.’ Once more Grace drifted around the room, humming Zoran’s music. Her eyes shone with the wonder of it all. ‘That’s what I mean by clearing your mind and opening yourself to new possibilities. You wouldn’t know about that, Tania, unless you were actually prepared to do it. The same with poor Jude.’
‘You have to talk to him.’ I needed help here so I took my phone from my pocket. ‘Let me call him for you.’
‘No!’ Her mood changed quickly to irritation. She snatched my phone and threw it to the floor. ‘Listen to me. You people don’t realize what they’re offering you – all this knowledge and power. I can’t really blame Jude for that because he wasn’t there, but you and Holly were, yet you still choose not to see it.’
‘Who are we talking about? Who’s “they”?’
‘Them! Ezra, Daniel, Cristal. And there are others who you didn’t see, living at the lodge. They’re all so beautiful on the outside because their spirits are pure – pure on the inside and incredibly beautiful on the outside, every one of them.’
‘How many?’
‘Twenty-five, thirty, including the musicians from Zoran’s band, plus Lewis and the medic who checked you were OK after you passed out. They’re all young, like us. And they believe in a wonderful life, living in harmony, worshipping in chapel and turning their backs on stuff that isn’t important – money, jobs, all the boring things.’
‘It’s a cult,’ I murmured, suddenly finding the word that fitted. ‘Zoran is the head of a weird sect.’
Grace threw me a patient, pitying glance. ‘It’s more than that, honestly. This is totally different.’
‘And how many times have you been there?’ I was shaking my head, not wanting to fall for what I was hearing, yet not totally closing the door on what Grace was describing. A tiny part of me – the part connected with my feelings for Daniel – even wished it was true.
‘Three times,’ she told me. ‘Each visit is more perfect than the last. I promise you, Tania, it’s heaven up there on Black Rock. You have to believe me.’
I didn’t, of course. But what I read next day in school made Grace seem either less crazy or more – couldn’t decide.
It was Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Leo Douglas was acting the part of Puck, coming to the place in the text where he drops flower juice on to Titania’s eyelids to make her fall in love with the next thing he sees. The small purple flower is called love-in-idleness.
‘The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.’
Leo paused while the teacher explained the word ‘dote’. To dote = to love beyond reason. I looked at Jude, sitting beside me and he understood what my covert glance was saying. That’s it – that’s Grace we’re talking about. She madly dotes on Ezra.
According to Shakespeare, the fairy queen might fall in love with a lion, a bear, wolf … you name it.
‘And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes,
And make her full of hateful fantasies.’
A drug can do that in Shakespeare’s world, and maybe in modern-day America too.
The drama is about love and confusion. People elope by moonlight, they grow jealous. All you need to throw into the mix is a flower called love-in-idleness, smear it on the wrong person’s eyes and you get a whole lot of heartache. So I sat in class wondering was it a mind-altering drug after all? And was Grace being given a fresh dose every time she visited Black Eagle Lodge?
Grace missed school on Monday and again Tuesday, and you just had to look at Jude to see how much he was struggling.
‘She still won’t talk to you?’ I asked as a gang of us took the elevator from the car park into the mall after class. Orlando was there, along with Holly and Aaron holding hands (Cristal, please note), plus Leo and his girl, Tarsha.
‘I spoke with her mom after your visit on Sunday. They really want to take Grace to the Bitterroot Clinic to see James Morel. He’s a guy who specializes in bipolar disorder.’
‘But she won’t go?’
‘They think she’s manic. It’s the way she won’t sleep or eat or even sit still for more than thirty seconds, and she plays her music twenty-four seven. Then she dips right down, won’t even get out of bed. Mrs Montrose read up on the symptoms.’
‘Can that happen out of nowhere?’ I wanted to know. ‘Wouldn’t there be warning signs before the full-blown bipolar thing hits?’
‘I’m no expert,’ Jude confessed, lagging behind the others as Holly headed into a Starbucks. ‘Hey, Tania, if you don’t mind, I’m going to call a rain check.’
‘You don’t want a coffee?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m just not in the mood.’
‘But you’re cool?’ I checked, thinking that his breathing seemed fast and shallow. ‘You’ve got your inhaler?’
‘Yeah, I’m good. Tell the others I said bye.’ He smiled lifelessly and peeled off towards the exit.
‘Bye,’ I told him. I felt so sad for him as he walked off alone, head down and hands in pockets, that I almost had tears in my eyes.
‘Hey,’ Orlando whispered when I went into the coffee shop and he saw how down I looked. Finally forgetting to be jealous of my Europe trip, he said, ‘Come and sit here, Tania. Did I tell you lately how much I love you?’
Early summer and the mountain meadows are a riot of hot-red, rich-purple and golden flowers. The wind runs through the feathery grass, wave after green wave.
Orlando and I stayed until after dark and made love under a starry sky.
‘Come to Dallas with me,’ he murmured, his lips against my cheek, the full weight of his body on mine.
I heard aspen leaves rustle. The lake water lapped against the pebble shore.
‘How would that work?’ I whispered. I would have been happy never to have moved from that special place, with Orlando’s smooth, warm skin against mine and the moon looking down.
‘Forget Europe,’ he urged. ‘We’ll find an apartment close to the campus. You can paint, I can study.’
‘And we pay the bills how?’
‘We take jobs in a bar, in Walmart. You sell some paintings.’
‘Keep talking,’ I pleaded. I closed my eyes, held him and dreamed. He only had to whisper promises to rouse me to make love again – his husky voice, those honeyed words. Our bodies entwined.
But I didn’t give up on Europe. I never made that promise.
‘Art is more important to you than I am,’ Orlando complained. The school week was finished and we were sitting in my room with the TV playing an old romantic comedy in the background. ‘Rome and Leonardo da Vinci, Florence and Michelangelo.’
‘Why does it have to be one or the other?’
With an impatient flick of his hand he stopped me from stroking the back of his neck.
That flick felt like a major slap. ‘Honestly, Orlando – why are you making me choose?’
‘Because that’s life. Every step of the way we make choices.’
‘So you get to study in Dallas but I don’t get to travel. How is that fair?’
‘You think getting on to the course will be a breeze for me? It won’t.’ He thought for a while, and when he spoke again his voice was soft, almost pleading. ‘This is a competitive field, Tania. Kids from all over the country have applied. I have to focus on getting together my por
tfolio, not fight with you over our future together.’
I shook my head. ‘How did you suddenly turn that around and make it my fault? Who brought up this topic in the first place?’
I was surprised when Orlando lost the will to argue, dropped his head and covered his face with his hand. ‘Forget it.’
‘No. This is serious. I want to understand. I want us to agree.’
‘Forget it,’ he sighed, standing up and grabbing his jacket from the back of the couch. ‘We just hit a wall every time we talk.’
He looked so beaten by it, so sad that I had to put my arms around him and hold him tight. The only sound that broke the silence was the theme tune on TV as the credits rolled.
I woke early next morning to an unread message from Grace. It had been sent at midnight and said Did u ever dare 2 believe?
Where r u? I texted back but didn’t get a reply. What did she mean, did I ever dare to believe? I thought she must be somewhere on planet Ezra and I was immediately scared for her so I called her house.
‘Grace isn’t here,’ Mike Montrose confirmed. ‘She slept over at Tarsha’s house.’
I told him thanks and simultaneously thought this was odd. Since when had Tarsha and Grace been close buddies? Also, the last I heard from Jude was that Grace hadn’t left her house for days. I got this indirectly through Jude’s sister, Mia, who also told me that Jude’s asthma was bad again and that their parents blamed Grace.
‘Grace finally ditched my brother by text message,’ Mia had said when I ran into her on the Thursday. ‘Can you believe that?’
‘He took it badly?’ Of course he had – stupid question.
Mia was thirteen, sometimes wore her hair in corn rows and hero-worshipped her big brother. ‘We never thought Grace was the right girl for him,’ she’d said, aping her parents’ opinion. ‘We tried to tell him she was a total egotist but he wouldn’t listen.’
‘No way,’ I’d protested then stopped. Right now that was exactly how Grace came across, I realized.
So all week Jude had been on his high-dosage inhaler and Grace had been pleading sickness to stay off school.
‘It’s because she can’t face Jude after the way she treated him,’ Mia had declared.
I’d nodded but I knew it was way more than that. Now I went next door to Holly and showed her the dare-to-believe text.
‘Oh my God!’ Holly groaned. ‘When did she send this? What planet was she on?’
‘Exactly.’ And I told her about the so-called sleepover at Tarsha’s.
‘No way. Call her right now. Do it.’
‘I texted. Grace didn’t reply.’
‘Don’t text – call! And if her phone is switched off, call Tarsha.’
‘Wait.’ I sighed and sat down at Holly’s kitchen table. ‘I want to try and figure this out. Grace doesn’t come to school and she officially breaks off with Jude. She’s fixated on this guy Ezra.’
‘So far, so normal.’ Holly sat down opposite me. ‘It happens all the time. Let’s keep this in proportion.’
‘Except that it’s Grace we’re talking about, and Grace is the sweetest, kindest girl we know, right?’
‘Occasionally wacky,’ Holly pointed out. ‘Her head can be a little vague sometimes.’
‘But still sweet and kind,’ I insisted. ‘So where did this monster version of Grace suddenly come from? Why the lies, the delusions about flying and daring to believe?’
‘And ditching Jude by text message.’ Holly tapped the table, got up, walked away and came back again. ‘Even I don’t treat Aaron that bad.’
‘Ezra!’ we both agreed.
I waited a while before I shared the theory that had been lurking in my head ever since the party. ‘It’s like they set a trap for her.’
‘They?’ Holly narrowed her eyes and got ready to argue against one of my overimaginative interpretations.
‘Ezra and Zoran – everybody out there at the lodge. The whole thing – the heavenly bodies theme, the invite to the special gathering inside the house, the way we later forgot everything that happened; it was a trap.’
‘A conspiracy.’ Irony is what Holly turns to when she disagrees. She used it now.
‘Yes. Somehow they’re drawing Grace into their world. You know they have a commune up there – did Grace tell you?’
‘Wait. Rock legend builds house on Black Rock, sets up happy hippy commune, invites people from neighbourhood to join them. Am I getting this right?’
‘The way you say it you make it sound less sinister. But it’s bad, I’m telling you.’
‘Because it’s a cult and they laid some kind of trap?’ Holly considered the last word forensically.
‘Listen.’ I persisted like a little terrier gnawing at Holly’s ankle. ‘One day Grace is normal. She’s happy, she’s looking out for other people, noticing that I’m down and persuading me to go to Zoran’s party without Orlando, the whole deal. Then she meets Ezra and is sucked into something she can’t control. Next day, her whole life starts to fall apart.’
‘And you’re saying Ezra deliberately did something to her. We don’t know what, but it wasn’t legal and it triggered off this weird behaviour?’
I nodded and murmured a line that came whizzing into my head. ‘“So quick bright things come to confusion.”’
Holly recognized the quote. ‘Whoa! Now Ezra is some kind of woodland spirit dropping poison on Grace’s eyelids and Zoran is the Oberon figure orchestrating it all?’
‘Kind of. Only there are no laughs in this. I think it’s more serious.’
Holly had heard enough. She got up from the table with an ‘Oh jeez!’ groan.
‘I do!’ I insisted. ‘And I think they targeted Grace because of her and Jude. They chose her because the two of them were crazy for each other.’
It turned out that Grace didn’t sleep over at Tarsha’s house, had never planned to, had never even been in touch.
‘She can’t just vanish,’ Orlando said over the phone when I told him the latest.
‘I spoke with Tarsha. Grace lied to her parents,’ I pointed out.
‘Yeah, we all do that.’
True – the useful little white lie to stop them stressing. But it wasn’t just this. ‘She missed a week of school,’ I reminded him.
‘Still not a major crime.’
‘I know. Holly already told me I was overreacting. I just came away from her place.’
‘She’s right. Where are you now?’
‘I’m in the car park at the mall. Where are you?’
‘At my computer. I got an email from Mimi Rossi at the college. She invited me to make a full application.’
‘Cool.’ I absorbed the fact and its implications, hoped my voice sounded sincere when I said, ‘Excellent! You need to work on that.’
‘You’re sure you don’t want me to come to town?’
‘No, I’m fine. Write your application. That’s such great news, Orlando. I’m so happy for you.’
‘I love you,’ he told me.
Oh, my heart sang out! Tell me again, say it louder. But I didn’t have chance to reply. Either he clicked off his phone or the signal cut out, I don’t know which.
I got out of my car and walked between the rows of parked vehicles, stepped over a big black oil stain in the shape of a giant moth.
I see the stain ignite, flare up orange out of the shadows. The curious flames lick at me then a wind fans them and makes a fireball that blasts all the way to the far end of car park level B.
‘Aimee!’ a woman’s voice whispers, as if she’s sighing over the cradle of an adored child.
There’s a western equipment store in Bitterroot, the Black Horse Country Store, geared mainly toward tourists and visitors. You can see it as you exit the mall and make a left turn on to Main Street, which I did because, after the illusory fireball experience in the multi-storey, I needed to walk and clear my head.
There was no fire, I told myself. There was no voice, no Aimee. But what happens
inside my head often feels more real than what I can actually see, touch and smell all around. It always has and most likely always will.
‘That’s the way creative people experience life. It’s why you paint,’ Mom tells me whenever I try to explain.
Anyhow, I’ve never in my life walked through the door of the Black Horse store, but today for some reason I did. I walked slowly down the rows of pointy-toed, Cuban-heeled, tooled leather boots towards the Stetsons.
‘I’m looking for silver spurs,’ a familiar voice told a sales person and when I rounded the corner I came face to face with Daniel.
‘How much do you want to spend?’ the sales guy asked him, reaching for the fanciest pair.
‘Later,’ Daniel told him. He smiled at me without surprise, took my arm and walked me back down the boots aisle. ‘Hey, Tania, you look like someone who needs a coffee.’
‘I’m good,’ I protested feebly. Daniel’s hold on my arm was firm but not too forceful. I let him steer me out of the store on to the sidewalk.
‘Zoran wants me to buy all the equipment we need to train and ride the mustangs,’ he explained. ‘Everything has to be high quality, as usual; to hell with the cost.’
‘Lucky Zoran,’ I murmured. I’d felt my day slip further out of control the second I set eyes on Daniel and now my mouth disconnected itself from my brain to run in random directions. ‘You looked like you’d always worked with horses when I saw you in the arena.’
‘My uncle runs a spread in Montana. We vacationed there when I was a kid.’
‘Lucky you.’
‘I guess.’ He was still smiling, still steering me back towards the mall. Before I knew it, we were sitting in Starbucks. ‘Training these mustangs is a big ask. They’ve been out on the Californian desert all their lives. This is the first time they ever saw the inside of an arena.’