Sophie murmured a prayer of peace. She had little else, she drove on by. She tried to feel grief, at least some fragmentary tincture of remorse, but her reserves were gutted. There was nothing there. I’ve nothing left to give, she thought. I am emptied.
Driving the last of Hill Street before Kersey was behind her, she looked to the north and discerned that the traffic-wrecks which had been clustered at 1st and 34 were thinning out. She off-roaded over a narrow strip of sandy field, forcing the H4 over the fractured remnants of a telephone pole, and looked out beyond the clearer highway, into the fading haze of sand-worn smog and sunset.
And there, perhaps two miles farther north, or three, stood a wind-dancing line of great oaks. Silhouetted beyond them, almost impossible to discern, was a bleached Victorian mansion of the Gilded Age.
It’s real! It is!
It was not a mirage. There it stood, the forlorn palace, the only of its kind. Auntie Jemm’s house.
Sophie whooped in elation, victory, a wild cry which turned almost into a scream. She caught her breath, stilled her trembling hands, maneuvered down 34 East until she found the nameless dirt turnoff with its rusted cattle grid and swinging gate. She banged into the gate at a little over five miles an hour, shunting it aside with a hollow, tolling clang.
The rutted road beyond led through tall, unburned grasses toward the eleven oaks, first straight on but then tortuously lingering away in a descending curve off to the left, past the mud-baked hollow of a scorched-away pond, then through higher grasses and back again. The oaks of the old mansion’s windbreak line grew into massive and solemn meshes of branch and shedding bark, screening the house from the highway which was now glowing in the day’s last light. The house was only a smear of blackening haze. Three of the great trees behind it had been felled, two with their trunks in splinters and another with its blighted roots touching up into the fading sky. Before they swept over the gingerbread porch of the house itself, the H4’s headlights caught upon a half-collapsed picket fence, a stubbornly standing mailbox with its flag still up, and a hand-painted porcelain plaque which bore a blessed pattern of flowing sigils upon its scoured face:
VI-5
The House upon the Borderland
Heart pounding, shivering, Sophie drove nearer to the house and around into the wind-spun shadows of the enormous trees. There beneath one of the fallen oak trunks was an old ’77 Vega, just like the one Mitch used to drive.
Is it? It had to be. Whatever had happened, Mitch had at least made it this far. And he had Lacie with him! Sophie wanted to honk the horn, run out, scream and wave her arms. But the house appeared to be abandoned, bearded in strings of dust, striped with tired last-of-sun reflections in every window. What if someone had killed Mitch, or driven him away, or had taken over this place entirely?
The Vega had been impaled by the tree, crushed and cratered with its wheel remnants splattered out in a ring with only a pathetic twist of axle still standing high. Rains had pelted into the ashen dunes around the oaks, and the heat flash of distant thermonuclear impacts had re-baked and hardened the mud until the Vega’s ruin had sunk all the way down to its bumpers. Sophie had one more terrible thought: What if Mitch is still inside his car…
But no. That didn’t make any sense.
Sophie decided she would drive as far around the house as she could, park in the back, and go in through the rear door if she could not find anything else to give her a safer sign. Perhaps there was a storm shelter door in the back down into a cellar, or a barn. She could not remember.
She four-wheeled through the ash around the corner, and there were no such promising signs of any shelter or habitation. But her headlights’ glare caught on something at the opposite back corner of the house, a frail cross fashioned from two white fence pickets and some awkwardly knotted bundles of frittered twine. The left side of the cross was hand-painted ANNABEL, and the right, as BROCKAWAY.
Sophie’s maiden name. Mama? Of course, yes. The story of Mitch’s own journey to Kersey began to decrypt itself from the house’s bleak surroundings. Sophie’s mother had made it this far, she must have been riding with Mitch and Lacie in the Vega. And she was buried here.
Sophie did not feel anything decipherable at first, no shock, nor grief, nor even comprehension. There was only an innate physical sensation, a tingling numbness, which began in her pained fingers, coursed up through the fine hairs upon her forearms, up over her back, around onto her belly. And there, the tingling pierced its way inside of her and she began to sob.
Mother had almost never spoken, not ever again, to high and mighty Miss Sophia, not after Miss Patrice had passed and mother had gone to the morgue to identify the pallid and bloodless cleaned remains of her youngest, her hollowed, her shattered and cherished one whom she had failed to nurture into a woman’s life. She had failed, Patrice had died in horror and in agony. And after her eternal beloved, youngest daughter, had gone unto her glory, high into the silent and halcyon halls of those unknowable and angel-shadowed pillars which carve away an unseen firmament from God’s own opalescent sky, what then? Mother’s own beloved spouse, Sophia’s father, had gone away as well, embraced into a reaping of his own. He left her all alone.
When only mother and elder daughter remained, two drained and shattered pallid women too alike and unlike one another to ever share of anything but the coldest and politest of familial bond, there had been nothing true left to say. Mother lived alone.
But then in later years, Sophie had actually managed at last to have a child, a daughter of her own who did not die in the scarlet blossom of the womb, who emerged and was so beautiful oh this daughter she Became, oh, Lacie Anna, so much like Patrice, how lovely you are to me, Sophia, can you see? Can you see the miracle of her face? That smile, those dimples. Our Patrice, she is returned to us, her spirit inhabits the innocent flesh remade by the love of Tom for you, in you, of you. Emergence, blossoming. Oh, she is a miracle. An omen.
Yes, mother always longed to babysit precious, precocious Lacie. Lacie and grandmamma, they shared whispered secrets every time Miss Sophia had a social sciences conference to attend in Boston or in San Francisco, or when Sophia suffered a breakdown (Honestly answer me, daughter, why do you insist on driving him away?), or when Sophia failed utterly and invited another incident with those emerald poison pills, Lucifer’s pills each with the hollow letter V drilled through their powdery cores. Always, grandmamma was there to catch the fall of Lacie.
Grandmamma always ushered Lacie into that cocoon of an old house in Colorado Springs, at Del Norte and Alamo (wasn’t it?), where father had crawled out over the lawn with a burst heart and blood foaming from his jaws, but that was another life, my daughter, was it not? Always ushered Lacie in, one of the few places left in the elder world where black licorice and horehound lozenges and other antiquated bittersweets still sat in sea-green mason jars, time-imprisoned family heirlooms which Sophie had never desired to inherit. Whenever Sophie dropped Lacie off in that claustrophobic, slightly-tilted house, it was always dark yet bright with candle flame, always smelled of that disturbingly entrancing mixture of lilac perfume, old woman’s hair, potpourri and singed gingerbread, an overwhelming fragrance, a sorceress melange of twined and unmentionable spice.