“I know you’re not supposed to,” I said. “Talk to me anyway.”
“Your father is a good man,” she said. “He’s a good man.”
“Except he’s not my father,” I said. Her gaze snapped to me. To me, not the rider, not the air beside my head. Not even the story she’d told herself about me ever since I left. For the first time in years, my mother was looking at me. Ever since a girl with the Sight had told me that my mother had had an affair, I’d had the suspicion take root, but I’d never said it. Not even to myself. “Dad. He’s not my father. Is he?”
“Your father is . . . your father is . . .” she said, and it had the same intonation that she’d used before, except it broke. The sentence stuck there in her throat like a bone. For a moment her attention swam. “Your father was the devil.”
It felt like a punch in the stomach. Or like victory. Or both.
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “Tell me about that.”
chapter six
It wasn’t a restaurant I’d been to before. I’d let Mom drive us there, trusting Chogyi Jake and Ex to figure out what was up and follow as best they could. I paid the girl at the front an extra hundred dollars for a booth away from everyone else and not to come over to us unless I called for her. Her eyebrows had tried to crawl up into her hair, but she took the money. Red plastic benches curved under us. The Formica table was an artist’s interpretation of wood grain, recognizable but unconvincing. The radio in the kitchen was playing a country station. I didn’t recognize the song, but the guitar work was good. The air was thick with the smell of grease and hot metal. I sat facing toward the front so that I’d see any assaults coming from the street and Mom wouldn’t be distracted if someone we knew came in. I hadn’t considered any of that consciously. Thinking that way was who I’d become.
She had a glass of iced tea clutched in her hand the way a desperate alcoholic might hold a glass of bourbon, and she poured packets of artificial sweetener in it one after the other until I was pretty sure she’d lost count. Her face was blank as a mask, and she was back to not looking at me directly. All animation was gone. Even her movements had a clockwork-like rigidity. I tried to connect all this with the woman I’d known as my mother, with her uncertainty and subservience, and at first I couldn’t. And then I could. I didn’t talk, didn’t touch her. I let the moment have its own time, afraid that if I pushed, she’d jump up and leave. Even the air between us seemed fragile. I tried not to breathe too hard.
When she spoke, her voice was careful, slow, and emotionless. She sounded like someone being deposed by the police.
“God put Gary Heller into my life when I was eighteen years old. I knew the first time I saw him that we were meant for each other. Everyone at church knew him. They liked him. When he asked me to marry him, I felt truly blessed. I never had any doubt that I was supposed to be with him. Never for one minute, and I never have. Gary has been a true man to me. He’s been better than I deserved.”
She took a sip of the tea, opened another packet of sweetener and poured the white powder over the ice. Some sank to the sludge at the bottom of the glass and some hung suspended in the tea, gritty and cold.
“I didn’t meet Eric until just before the wedding. He was the black sheep of the family. All I knew was he was a businessman, but he came to church like the rest of us, and he prayed as loud as anyone, and he spoke the name of the Lord with a smile on his face. I liked him. I did. He was funny and he was sweet. And he was a little better looking than Gary, though I was grateful to have the man I did. I love Gary, and I bless the day he found me. I bless it. I didn’t understand what Eric was.”
My belly was a little tighter.
“What was he?”
My mother opened her mouth, closed it, and brought a corner of her mouth up in a half smile that was as much cruelty as amusement.
“He said it was a surprise for Gary. He said not to tell him, and I believed. I went to his house. If it had been at night, I think I wouldn’t have gone, but it was in the afternoon . . .”
She shrugged and drank a mouthful of tea through her teeth.
“There were candles everywhere, and smoke. The whole house was like someone breathing in my face, but someone with the sweetest breath. I made some sort of joke about it. I remember that I did that. I said something about making the whole place into a birthday cake. And he said no. That he was catching angels. I wanted to leave, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. He took me to his back room. The bed was tipped up against the wall, and there were . . . drawings on the floor. Symbols. He asked me to take my clothes off, and I did.”
“Jesus,” I said.
I’d thought I was ready to hear this. Really, even as we’d driven over from the Save-A-Lot, I was sure that I wanted to know everything she had to say to me. I’d been wrong, but there was no way to stop it now. No way to tell her to keep all this crap to herself. This was my mother and Uncle Eric, and I felt a little dizzy already.
“He anointed me with . . . oils?” she said, her intonation making it a question. “And he called forth an angel. He called an angel into me. It was like being in a dream. I was filled with her, and I was lifted up by her, and I saw the face of God. And when she left, I felt certain. I felt full of grace and love, like I had never felt before. He told me not to tell anyone. Not to tell Gary or Father Ryan. He said that the angels were called to me for a reason.”
Her eyes were bright now, alive with the memory.
“Every few weeks he would call me, and I would go to him. And they would come into me. And their names. Malphas. Wotan Irisi. Hadraniel. Onibaba. Each one would lift me up. They exalted me. I walked in the depths of the abyss and was not lost. I swam in a sea with no bottom and no surface with the angels of the infinite waters. My soul journeyed to places I had never imagined. I even found the beauty in death. I walked with the souls of the damned and found forgiveness in them. It was beautiful. And then I would come home to your father, and everything would be sharper and deeper and full of meaning for days. Maybe weeks. And then it would fade a little, and a little more, and before long I was a housewife again. Until Eric called me back and I felt the angels within me.
“I couldn’t tell Gary about any of it. He wouldn’t have understood. He only saw me as his wife, and I was the vessel of the angels.”
There it was, then. For months at least, maybe years, Eric had used my mother as a testing ground to invoke riders, pull them into her body. Maybe he’d used magic to control her the way he had with Kim in Denver. And my mother had accepted it. Had loved it. Had put a frame around the experience that made it something good. At least at the time.
My throat felt thick, but I tried to keep my expression relaxed and calm. I wanted her to keep telling the story, even while I wanted it to stop.
“I grew apart from Gary,” she said. “We sat with Father Ryan and prayed together every evening for a month. We had blessings on our marriage. He didn’t understand why I was different. It was hard for me too, watching his hurt and confusion and not being able to reach out to him. But the work was so important. God had a plan for me just the way he did for Mary, and he was my Joseph. His faith restored me when the angels left me weak. But I was afraid he wouldn’t be strong enough. I didn’t tell him about my angels. Or about Eric. It was a secret, and I would have let myself be killed before I revealed it. Not until it was time.”