“My mother is very strange, Sweeney.” I started to laugh again, but Dylan’s expression was grim. “I’m not kidding. It’s not that she thinks marriage is sacred—she doesn’t. I still don’t know why she married my father. I’m pretty sure she didn’t love him. Not the way you’re supposed to love someone. Not the way—”
He leaned over and let his lips graze mine. His hair fell across my eyes for a moment, and I felt dizzy, breathing in his scent; but then he drew back.
“Not the way I feel about you,” he said in a soft voice, and any thought of laughing went right out of my head. He sat up again and sighed. “But she has this thing, about some sacred marriage—it’s got to do with her goddamn cult. All those women…”
“You mean like Sun Myoung Moon, marrying off his followers in Madison Square Garden or something?”
“I don’t know. It’s a secret, to me at least. Maybe they’re all going to marry each other. But I doubt it.” He picked up his wineglass and stared into it. “Hey, look—a bug.”
He tipped the glass toward the window, and I watched as a honeybee crawled out. Dylan blew on it; the bee somersaulted drunkenly across the windowsill, then disappeared outside.
“I know just how it feels,” I said, and poured him the rest of the wine. “Listen, you don’t have to talk about your mother if it—well, if it’s weird for you.”
“It’s not weird for me.” His voice took on an edgy, aloof tone, and for a moment I felt the same sharp panic that had seized me before.
Because crazy as it was—and it was crazy! I was twice this kid’s age, I’d gone to school with his parents, if things had gone differently I might have been one of his parents, on top of which I’d only known him for twenty-four hours, during which we’d fucked six times and I had called in sick to work!—crazy as all this was, I knew I was falling for him. Had fallen for him. Me, Katherine Sweeney Cassidy, who’d spent almost twenty years in an emotional coma—
I. Was. In. Love.
“…do you understand?”
I started. “Huh? I’m sorry, Dylan—”
He traced the line of my calf. “I was just saying that it’s not weird for me to talk about my mother. It’s that she’s weird—really weird. I love her, I really do; but I don’t really know her. I was always away at boarding schools, and she’d be off on all her digs, and even when she took me along there was always someone she paid to take care of me—tutors and stuff. She was always nice to me, it’s not like she was mean or something, it’s just—”
He stopped and sighed. I wanted to put my arms around him, I wanted to tell him I understood—that I knew what Angelica was like, that it was okay—but I was afraid to. I was afraid I’d seem too quick to comfort him, afraid I’d seem too maternal. So I just sat beside him on the bed and waited for him to go on.
“It’s just that she’s so fucking intense,” he said finally. Against his tan face his eyes burned like midnight blue flames. “She has all these bizarre ideas, these mad prophecies; but a lot of them come true.”
“Like—what?” I asked guardedly.
“Like earthquakes. Remember that big quake in L.A.? Well, two days before it hits, out of nowhere she calls me at school and tells me that she’s taking me with her to Minneapolis for a few days. Minneapolis! But I thought, okay, I’ll check out the music scene there, which I did.
“But meanwhile, everything back in L.A. goes fwooom—”
He slapped the bed with his open palms, with such vehemence that I jumped.
“All our neighbors’ houses slide into the canyon, but our house—Mom’s house—it doesn’t even move. Now you’d think my mother would be upset when she heard about this earthquake, right? That she’d be on the first plane back there to make sure everything’s okay. But no—she takes her time, which is a good thing, considering how violent all those aftershocks were. And when we finally get back to L.A., and get to the house—nothing has moved. I mean, nothing. All these rare statuettes and icons she brought from Crete and Italy, they haven’t even shifted on their shelves. The books haven’t moved. The dishes haven’t moved. Nada. I asked her, I thought maybe she’d paid someone to come in and clean it up before she got back, but no. An earthquake has leveled the entire West Coast, except for my mother’s house.”
He fell silent, and stared fiercely out to where the wisteria leaves hung limply from their woody vines. I waited before saying anything. My mouth was dry, I felt chilled in spite of the torrid heat; but if it killed me I wasn’t going to let Angelica and her weirdness into my carriage house.
“So she had a premonition,” I said at last. “Well, thank god she did, or you might have been hurt, right?”
“Oh, sure,” Dylan said bitterly. He shook his head, his long hair spilling across his shoulders. “A premonition! My mother has nothing but premonitions! Hurricane Andrew, Mount Pinatubo, some mudslide in Bangladesh—she’s always got an inside track on natural disasters. This woman told me once that my mother had told some scientists—women scientists—to leave Finland, because there was going to be some kind of disaster, and it turned out she was right: it turned out she was talking about Chernobyl. Her and her followers, they’re always on the first train out of town, a good twenty-four hours before the storm hits.”
I took a deep breath. “So—what are you telling me, Dylan? Do you really think Angelica knew about all those things before they happened?”
Dylan turned those burning blue eyes on me. I saw a sort of desperation in him: that I didn’t believe him, that I thought he was crazy. For the first time I could see how it might have been hard for him—despite his beauty, despite the gold earrings and Doc Martens and all the other trappings of flaming youth—to find a girlfriend. Hard maybe to make any friends at all.
“Yes,” he said, daring me to argue. “She did.”
I waited. Then, “I believe you, Dylan,” I said softly. I reached to touch him on the shoulder, half-expecting him to flinch or turn away. But he didn’t. He turned and took me in his arms. I could feel him trembling as he whispered, “She scares me sometimes, Sweeney. I know she’s my mother, but she scares me…”
“Me too,” I murmured, and stroked his tangled hair, the two of us holding each other so tightly that not even the golden air could slide between us.
“The way she talks,” he went on in a low voice, like a child comforting himself. “All this crazy goddess stuff, but the way she goes on about it in her books and all, it almost makes sense. You can really see how these women fall for it. It’s not just that she knows about these things. I can believe that. I mean, animals know when there’s going to be an earthquake, right? But some of the people who’re into all her New Age stuff, they think she makes it happen! Like in Hawaii they think there’s this goddess Pele who makes the volcanoes blow up—these people think my mother can actually do that!”
He rubbed his forehead as though it pained him. “Sometimes, I think my mother believes it herself.”
“Oh, she does, Dylan,” I whispered, but he didn’t hear me.
“You know what she’s like?” he said at last. “This picture I saw when I was at Lawrenceville. An X ray of the inside of a nuclear blast, taken out at White Sands. Have you ever see that? Outside you can see all this smoke, this huge mushroom cloud and flames everywhere. But inside it’s just all this fire, and then in the very middle, there’s a black hollow core. Like there’s all this destruction around it, but in the middle there’s nothing there at all.”