“What happened to him, Mommy?” Glenn had asked.
She was five years old and standing on their front porch.
Hopkins’s little body lay battered before her. “Was it a car?”
“No,” her mother said. “It was no car. Come on, Glenny.”
Mom wrapped Hopkins up in a towel and swept him into her
arms. After the local vet had done what he could, Glenn and her mother devoted weeks of near constant attention to nursing him back to health.
They kept his wounds clean and handfed him antibiotics and morsels of fish and chicken. Glenn held a medicine dropper over his mouth until his tongue emerged and he’d take water one drop at a time. She’d sneak down into the basement with her blanket and pillows and lie by his side, running her hand over his soft fur until he began to purr and they both fell asleep.
When he was strong enough to stand on his own, Glenn’s mom
bought him a blue ceramic food dish and placed it just beyond his bed of rumpled towels. Each night she would move the bowl a little farther away: across the room, out the door, down the hall. It broke Glenn’s heart to watch him struggle for it, but she knew he was getting stronger each time he moved away from his bed and bent his long neck to eat on his own. Finally the bowl ended up in Glenn’s room, and once he found it, he rarely left her side. He slept with his nose pressed against her cheek and his paws kneading her chest, his deep purr surrounding them like another blanket.
Once he had recovered, Glenn saw the name Gerard Manley
Hopkins printed on the spine of a book on her mother’s nightstand and liked the way it sounded in her head, musical and precise.
“You are Gerard Manley Hopkins,” she decreed, touching the tip of her finger to his small pink nose, as if she was knighting him.
It was the morning of her sixth birthday.
Ten years ago.
Glenn tried to resist what came next, but the memories had the quality of water — the harder she pushed away, the stronger they rushed back.
After Hopkins’s knighting, Mom had made Glenn’s favorite -
mushroom lasagna and garlic bread with a salad made of greens she had pulled from their garden that morning. Glenn sat across from her parents at the kitchen table, wearing a new bright yellow dress and blue sneakers that didn’t match but were her favorite that week.
Mom and Dad held hands under the table and kept up a steady chatter. Dad listened more than he talked, greedy for her mother’s every word.
Mom wore blue. It perfectly set off her ink-dark hair and pale skin, which were so like Glenn’s own.
“Daddy,” the younger Glenn said as they sat around the remains of her birthday dinner. “What did Gramma Kate and Grampa Joe do for you on your sixth birthday?”
“Well,” Dad said. “I worked in the coal mines all day — ”
“Dad!”
“- and then I was whipped soundly, given a bike, and sent to bed without supper.”
“Mom, why does Dad have to be so silly?” Glenn said in her very serious six-year-old way.
“I don’t think he can help it, dear. He’s what we adults call incorrigible.”
“What did you do on your sixth birthday?”
“I had a party,” Mom said brightly. “Just like yours.”
“Mom, why don’t we ever see your mom and dad like we see
Gramma Kate and Grampa Joe?”
Mom glanced across the table at Dad. “Because they live very far away,” she said.
“Will I ever go see them?”
Her mother’s hand, spread out on the white napkin by her plate, tensed slightly, then relaxed again. “Maybe,” she said, retreating from her chair to get more salad from the kitchen. “Maybe one day.”
Later that night, Mom lifted Glenn into her arms and glided up the stairs and down the hall, Hopkins following dutifully behind. Glenn dropped her head onto her mom’s shoulder and listened as she sang her familiar lullaby, a lilting song made up of nonsense words that rolled off her tongue.
She slipped Glenn into her bed and then her face hung over
Glenn’s, for one quiet moment, like a moon.
“Meera doe branagh, Glennora Morgan.”
The strange words drifted down from her mother’s lips,
whispered as light as falling snow.
“What does it mean, Mommy?”
Fingertips grazed Glenn’s cheek. “It means I love you. It means I’ll always love you.” She kissed Glenn softly on the forehead, then backed away. “No matter what.”
She stepped into the bright hallway and closed the door.
When Glenn woke the next morning, her mother was gone.
Glenn remembered the time as being like tumbling out of control down a long hill as images of the world assaulted her in disconnected jolts. The red of the Authority agents. Her father’s grief-stricken face.
The awful quiet of their house. Hopkins standing guard at the foot of her bed.
The search effort was called off after six months. And it was another six before Glenn and her father began to emerge from their grief, quiet and shaken, like newborns. It was years until Glenn realized that she had always sensed a distance in her mother, a vast expanse at her center that reached down to dark and unknowable depths. There were times when she laughed, chimelike and beautiful, followed by great stretches of gray silence. Glenn remembered all the times she found her staring blankly out into the forest with the haunted look of someone walking alone on a dark road, aching to glance behind her but terrified of what she might see.
Glenn knew that whatever had hold of her in those moments was what finally drove her away.
Was it possible, Glenn wondered, that the same madness had
returned to devour her father as well? And if that was true, was it crouched somewhere deep in Glenn’s genes too, biding its time?
After all, there were signs, weren’t there?
Ever since her mother had disappeared, Glenn had felt something stalking her, a shadow circling her in the darkness. From time to time it would draw close, testing her boundaries. Sitting in class, she’d feel a chill and hear a chorus of whispering voices. Or she’d step up onto a train platform and swear she saw some dark figure, huge and amorphous, moving just at the edge of her vision. How many times had she closed her eyes only to see the image of a woman in white turning to face her, her eyes like that of some awful bird of prey?
Glenn had never told Dr. Kapoor about any of this — he would have medicated her immediately, a black mark her DSS application never would have withstood — and for years she had been able to push those hauntings out of her mind, convincing herself that they were nothing but the bits and pieces of some old dream.
But what was harder to shake was the feeling that there was a message buried somewhere in those whispering voices and snatches of movement. And that if she were to surrender to them, if she invited them in, she would be able to unravel its meaning.
Glenn reached for her tablet, almost dropping it before she managed to turn the starlight projectors on. The night sky appeared above her, a winking lid of stars. She could isolate 813 with the computer, but sometimes, she thought, it was better to do it yourself.
She located Orion, then traced a path to the three blue-white stars that huddled together in a tight line to make up his belt. Alnitak.
Alnilam. Mintaka. From them she went up to Betelgeuse and down to Rigel. Found Taurus and Gemini. And then there it was. 813.
5
Glenn breathed in, then out.
The pounding inside her dulled. The whispering voices faded away. Her mother was gone. That had been true for ten years and had no more bearing on what was happening now than anything else that happened when she was six did.