‘It’s lucky she found you,’ Riley says. She remembers the cold up there, the way the white whirling air seemed both inside her and out, as if she hadn’t been there at all.
‘Noon sends someone to walk the trails every few days. There’s almost always something on the highest part of the road through the pass. Pets, usually. Dogs. A frozen sack of kittens. Why do people always leave them just there? Maybe if the snow kills them, the owners feel like it’s not their fault. So far I think I’m the only human being who’s been dumped.’ She clears her throat. ‘Midnight found me on the road,’ she says. ‘But it was Nowhere that sent her there – to bring me home, where I belong.’ A second later her grin is back. She squints up the sky.
‘Nearly sundown,’ she says. ‘Time for worship.’
Riley nods.
Dawn looks at her for a moment. ‘Noon told me that you don’t want to worship – but it’s not god, you know. It’s more … it’s our own stuff.’
‘Sometimes that’s even worse,’ Riley says.
Things with their mother had been bad for a while so when Riley walked into the kitchen and saw her bent over Oliver, she was glad, at first. She thought,oh, good, they’re bonding. Mom was ok with Riley but she had always been a little – puzzled by Oliver. Like she couldn’t remember ordering him and it was too late to send him back. Lately, Riley often caught her looking at him in silence. There were things in that look which Riley didn’t like. So she was glad to see Mom and Oliver together like this. The sun lit them in a halo against the picture window.
Riley saw the board laid out on the Formica table. The letters and numbers, waiting for the dead to speak through them. That wasn’t unusual. She had been spending more and more time with the Ouija board recently. Later Riley wonders if it wasn’t the first step – her mother prying open the gate to death just a crack, which she would soon open fully and walk straight through.
A sound from Oliver made all of Riley alert. She saw something gleam in her mother’s hand. It was a pin. Her mother was piercing Oliver’s little thumb. A crimson bulb swelled up where it sank in. Mom wanted Oliver’s blood for the board. She had begun to speak about this recently – how theboardwanted blood. Oliver’s face was all squeezed up, but he wasn’t crying, he was trying to be brave.
‘You can’t use family blood,’ Mom said brightly to Riley. ‘If I want to talk to your father I need someone unrelated. Otherwise I would have asked you.’ She said this as if Riley was correctly disappointed at the loss of this opportunity.
In this moment Riley understood the expression ‘blind with rage’. It would be easy to assume it’s a metaphor or whatever. Riley saw that it wasn’t because her world went black. Everything stopped existing for a second.
The next thing she was aware of was her own hard breath and someone else’s close by, hot and upset in her ear. There was flesh between her hands. Mom’s shiny chestnut head filled Riley’s vision, she smelled coconut shampoo.
Her mother hacked and wheezed, clawing at Riley’s grip on her throat.
‘Don’t you hurt him,’ Riley said. ‘Not ever.’
Her mother waved an urgent hand, a rattle in her throat. Riley slowly unclenched her hands from her mother’s neck. There were little dark ghosts of Riley’s fingers on her skin. Her mother got up and went from the room. She wore her hair down for a week, though neither she nor Riley ever mentioned what happened. Riley watched her all the time after that. She tried to never leave her mother alone with her brother. Her mother had problems. It was difficult to be her child, her daughter. Sometimes Riley feels those problems stirring in her own mind. She gets a dark tightness inside that makes her do things. Riley looks back on her mother’s sorrow and anger and thinks,yes, I get that. I understand why.Sometimes when Riley looks in the mirror she sees her mother looking back – the same vague, unfocused gaze she fixed on Oliver as she put the pin into his thumb.
Riley doesn’t like the old man in the sky but she likes the other stuff even less. These are the reasons why, probably.
Dawn takes them up through the orchard, away from the stables. The others are already gathered, Riley can hear voices ahead.
The path weaves behind a fold of red rock into a clearing in theorchard. The Nowhere children are sitting and standing on the grass. There’s talk and laughter. It’s like a picnic.
Behind them there is something metal, rusted and broken like the remains of a burnt-out star. A couple of cabs are still attached to it, lying on the grass. Their chains swing and chink in the wind. It’s not possible grounded as it is, but the great metal circle seems to turn slightly as she watches. Crows sit along its bars, cawing.
‘It’s a Ferris wheel,’ Riley says, blank. Beside her, Oliver squeaks with excitement. He must have some dim memory of a fair. Riley has it too, though she can’t recall exactly when – a vague impression of being allowed to stay up late, of funnel cake and cotton candy. Of Mom.
‘Careful of your leg,’ Riley says. ‘Don’t jump around like that. You can’t go on that wheel. Look, it’s old and broken.’ The more Riley looks at the wheel the less she likes it. It’s like skeletal remains.
It’s so unexpected that Riley can’t escape the impression that it has been hiding all this time.
The late afternoon air is still warm but the kids have got blankets and comforters. Riley sees newspaper peeking from waistbands and out of the collars of sweaters. Insulation. One small red-headed child, a boy she thinks, toddles unsteadily across the grass, wrapped in an electric blanket. The cord trails after, the plug leaving a line in the soft dirt floor. He points a tiny finger at Riley.
‘Hi,’ Riley says.
The little kid smiles, bright. ‘Mommy,’ he says.
‘No.’ Riley is shaken, she doesn’t know why. ‘Go find your real mommy.’
‘Come here, Rufus,’ calls Noon from across the clearing. Rufus smiles and wanders away.
There are five little children, including Midnight’s baby. The oldest looks about nine. Riley worries, again, about that. She’s uneasy because there don’t seem to be any grownups here. Riley and Oliverneed lots of working adults so Nowhere can support two new arrivals. The kids are happy and dirty. One of them grabs a cushion from another one and they both cry, pointing at each other. Midnight comes over and scolds them. Her baby’s eyes go round and startled at her raised voice and Riley can’t help laughing, it looks so surprised. There’s another feeling in her, a painful-sweet pull. It’s the first time she’s been around a family in a while.
She sees it in Oliver’s face too. ‘Can I go play with them, Riley?’
Riley’s smile suddenly feels thin and brittle. ‘Not right …’
