WHEN DID MOM STARTgoing crazy?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“Huh?” Ben said. “It’s, like, six thirty in the morning here, Ali.”
I was in the living room. The girls were at school and Mark was at work. My mother was in her room with a cup of tea and a bowl of oatmeal. I was waiting for Janice to arrive for her morning shift.
When I’d gotten home yesterday, I’d done an online search and easily found contact information for Paul’s nephew, Jack: his Facebook page, his LinkedIn profile, and his physical address and phone number. It never ceased to amaze me how easy it was to find anyone these days. I’d called, explained who I was and what had happened. He’d seemed shocked, but stated that he and his uncle were not close. He was surprised to learn he was the executor of the will. Paul had had little contact with anyone in his family in years. Jack said he would tell the rest of the family and get in touch with the funeral home and make arrangements. He’d let me know when the service would be, and he and I would arrange a time for him to come and go through the carriage house. In the meantime, I gave him the name and number of the lawyer Paul had used to draw up his will—surely he’d have a copy on file. I also told him I’d overnight the copy I had along with Paul’s other paperwork.
After dealing with Jack, having dinner with my family, and getting the girls up to bed, I’d gone out to my studio and stayed up late looking through the demon books I’d ordered; learning about dark entities, cursed objects, possession, exorcism, talismans, sigils.
I’d looked through my mother’s journal, studying each passage, rereading her chronicle of losing herself to the demon.
There was a photocopied page glued into the diary—something from a book on Mesopotamian art she’d found at the library.
The caption she’d cut out and underlined read:Azha, a demonic goddess with the head of a bird and the body of a snake, was said to have a tremendous hunger for human souls.
Beside it was a photo of an image of Azha carved into a small cylindrical stone vessel.
She was said to be able not only to easily change form but to store her essence within a vessel or object, such as this pyxis circa 1500 BC.
Pyxis. The word Paul had written down on his notepad.
I felt like I had all the dots in front of me, I just needed to figure out how they connected.
“She wasn’t always that way,” I said to my brother now. “Don’t you remember? Back before Dad died?”
“I don’t know, Alison.”
I blew out an exasperated breath. I wasn’t in the mood for his selective amnesia.
“She was happy. I know you remember. She’d play games with us. Do those scavenger hunts. Sing silly songs. All the adventures she’d take us on—going to the aquarium in Boston, the drive-in in our pajamas. The time we went to Cape Cod just so we could have the best fried shrimp on the planet.”
“I don’t remember,” Ben said, but I knew he was lying.
I shook my head, disgusted, which was silly; my brother couldn’t see me.
“I went to Woodstock yesterday,” I told Ben. “To the house.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Was it the same?”
“Eerily so.” I remembered the feeling I’d gotten walking throughthe house like a ghost of my own childhood self, expecting my mother to pop out at any minute and demand to know what I was doing there. “It was like I stepped back in time. All of our things were still there. Like in our bedrooms and stuff. It was very strange.” I paused. “I found other stuff too. Weird shit.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“She had these boxes with our names on them.”
“Like keepsake boxes?”
“Kind of. But full of freaky shit. Bits of our hair, baby teeth, scraps of clothes.”
“Don’t lots of parents save that kind of stuff?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “But not like that.”
He was quiet.
