The Atheist's Daughter (8 page)

Gripped by despair, Becky soon began to imagine everyone else felt the same way about her daughter. Her mind clouded with grief, she thought she was the only person who would ever love Kristin.
Could
ever love Kristin.

In reflection, she supposed she’d had a kind of mental breakdown. Since those early days, Kristin had grown into a lovely young woman. She’d found some good friends; not many, admittedly, but some, and that was enough. She had a social life, dated, had gone steady a time or two. She’d even danced at the Junior Prom, something Becky had never done.

In short, her daughter had lived her life. It was a good life if not an exciting one.

Becky felt she’d had enough excitement for a lifetime. She didn’t want any more of it tonight.

She pressed her ear against the bedroom door. From inside, a man spoke, his words maddeningly unintelligible. If her daughter was in the room with him, she was silent.

Forgive me, kiddo
. 
I try to give you your space, I do. I almost never go into your bedroom.

This doesn’t count as snooping. This is legitimate parental concern.

Squeezing the handle, she pushed the door open.

Hallway light spilled into the dark bedroom. Dressed in her jeans and t-shirt, Kristin lay asleep on her bed. One of her sandals dangled perilously from her left foot. The other shoe had fallen to the floor.

From inside the darkness, a man said, “Tell me there are no werewolves, I’ll agree with you. If you don’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster, if you question the existence of Bigfoot, you’ll get no argument from me. But tell me there’s no such thing as ghosts and I’ll call you a fool.”

Entering the room, Becky touched the space bar on the computer’s keyboard. The computer monitor brightened and a dark-haired man glared out at her from the screen. Below the man’s image, subtitles on the screen read:
Dr. Marc Ericks, Liefeld College
.

Ericks said, “These aren’t kindly ghosts, concerned with your well-being. Your beloved Uncle Burt isn’t standing beside you, guiding your step. Your sweet Aunt Claudette isn’t floating below your ceiling, watching over you.”

An overhead light shone down on the professor, accenting the wrinkles under his eyes. From the camera’s view, he came across as tired and alone, sitting by himself in an empty room.

Probably had to set up his own camera and lighting, too,
Becky thought.
The obsessed can rarely afford to fund a production crew.

There were print-outs in the computer’s paper tray. Picking them up, Becky leafed through them. “Wraiths? The invisible man?”

“Nor are these specters simply misguided souls, trying to find their way to heaven,” Ericks continued, tugging at a patch of gray in his beard. “These are creatures without a heart, without a soul. They’re evil incarnate. They hunger  –”

”Oh, please.” Taking the computer’s mouse, she turned the machine off. The deluded professor disappeared in mid-sentence.

A fluttering of curtains told her the bedroom window was open. Moving Kristin’s plastic Tinkerbelle figurine from the bottom sill, Becky grasped the window’s wooden upper rail. She glanced down at the street.

Slight of build and dressed in a woman’s full-length tan coat, a figure waited on the sidewalk. The jacket’s hood obscured its owner’s face. Under Becky’s gaze, the stranger walked away, quickly moving out of the circle of light provided by the boulevard’s solitary street lamp.

Who was that?

Listening closely, she couldn’t hear the stranger’s footsteps as she left.

“Great,” she told the computer. “Now you’ve got me seeing ghosts.”

Shutting the window firmly, she slid its sash lock closed.

Chapter Fourteen

From Kristin’s Diary

What if life is like the old movie, The Matrix?

You take the right pill, you get to believe whatever you want to believe. The same thing everyone else believes. You take the wrong pill and you’re lost in Wonderland forever.

One pill makes you larger. One pill makes you small.

This morning, I didn’t flush Dr. Ron’s pink pill down the toilet. I still have it, safely nestled in the bottom of my jewelry box. My old Disney Mad Hatter pin is lying on top of it, in case Mom decides to take a quick peek through my earrings and necklaces.

Which has never happened, not once in my entire life.

But just because something
hasn’t
happened doesn’t mean it
can’t
happen. Like when I saw the ghost people. Seeing ghost people was definitely a new experience.

Hawk was there, too, and he got angry, mad at the glass asshole, but he didn’t see anything unusual about the guy. But the ghost man realized I could tell something was wrong with him. As if he was aware he was a see-through monstrosity and he knew
I
knew but he also knew I wouldn’t tell anyone. Like, somehow, he’d come across people like me before.

If I’m reading him correctly, then maybe I don’t need to book an immediate return trip to the pastoral grounds of Kendall Sanitarium. Maybe. Because, just when I thought I’d finally figured out all the things that were weird about me, along comes Mr. Glass – sorry, Mr. Locke – to prove me wrong.

Which makes me wonder if I’m wrong about some other things, too. Like taking the pills Dr. Ron ordered.

If I’d been using my medication all along, as my psychiatrist insisted, maybe I’d be normal by now. Because what if there’s a process involved? At first, the medication leaves you feeling all fuzzy and wool-headed but, later, you’re turned into a good, upstanding citizen, a little dull of thought and slow to respond but no longer seeing crazy-ass crap that can’t/shouldn’t/doesn’t exist?

That’s not exactly the life I crave but there are days when I’d settle for it.

Somewhere along the line, I must have taken the wrong pill. But is the pink pill the one I really need?

How do I escape Wonderland?

*

About my Mad Hatter pin: I bought it about three years ago, when the Debate Team traveled to Southern California for the Nationals and everyone went to Disneyland. We all acted like we were too cool for some overcrowded theme park, and we were, truly, but everybody showed up at the front gates, anyway. The Nationals were a total bust, only Cleve Kisner won anything, but it was fun, anyway.

At the gift shop, paying three times what a chain store would charge, I bought the Mad Hatter pin. I stuck it on my t-shirt on my way home and Mom spotted it the instant I stepped off the bus. She had a total meltdown. She acted like I was advertising my past, rather than properly hiding it from the world.

As if everybody in Winterhaven didn’t already know about me.

“The gift shop had to have other pins,” Mom said. “Why didn’t you get Alice? Or the Cheshire Cat?”

Her exact words.

I know this because I wrote everything down the night I came home. It’s maybe the best thing about keeping a diary. If you put in an entry every three or four days, like I do, you can go back and see the things that happened to you. Your memories are right there.

I flip through the pages and I see all of the stuff I wrote about Dr. Ron. The other stuff, too. The paragraphs about melting faces. The dreams I’ve experienced. All of the pills I’ve flushed.

In other words, the complete and total chronicle of my unbalanced life.

This comes to mind because, sitting at my desk, staring out of my bedroom window, I notice Tinkerbelle has somehow moved off of my window sill. Miss Belle, with your wings so pretty, did you somehow fly down to my end table last night?

Or did someone put you on the counter and forget? Was someone in my room?

I don’t remember turning my computer off, either. I’m sure I left the window open. Pretty sure, anyway.

This is supposed to be my personal space. Years ago, Mom promised she wouldn’t enter this room without my permission. Years ago, I believed her.

Fuck.

What use is a journal if you think someone else is going to read what you’ve written? You can’t be totally honest if you suspect someone is spying on you.

I love having a place to share my thoughts, my best and worst, most wonderful and awful memories...because I can’t share them anywhere else. Now I wonder if I dare write another line, another sentence.

There are hundreds of pages here, hundreds of entries, but, if somebody finds my words, none of it will remain secret. The cops will be called, just like at school, and I’ll be back in the embrace of Dr. Ron before I get a chance to have a real life.

I wrote about everything here. My first kiss. My first date, my first boyfriend, my first...

Everything.

Fuck, fuck,
fuck.

*

So what do I do now? Do I hide my diary and hope no one finds it? Do I find a box and lock it up? Or do I destroy it, feeding my memories into the shredder, sheet by sheet?

I’d like another option, please. One that acknowledges my right to a little privacy. But that’s never going to happen, not unless I get my own place.

I can’t wait to leave here. Can’t wait to leave Winterhaven. So that’s what I’m going to do.

But, first, I need to find out who the glass people are. Find out why they’re here. What they’re doing. Because they scare me, more than a little, and I’m the only one who can tell what they are.

Whatever that is.

Unless, of course, none of what I see is real and I’m completely, totally batshit.

I guess that might be good to know, too....

Chapter Fifteen

At daybreak, Kristin walked to the café. The front of the building was closed and its upper windows were dark.

She abandoned the sidewalk for the dirt lane that served as the café’s back alley. A new fence blocked the back of the structure, its wooden slats spaced in six foot sections with a heavy metal post supporting each of the divisions.

This is new,
she realized
. Since when did Piotrowski’s get a fence?

The structure was built from Douglas fir, the same inexpensive wood her mother had once used to build a rabbit hut. Untreated, the rabbit hut had rotted after two hard winters.

This crappy stain job won’t protect the wood for long. Maybe the ghost people don’t care.

Exactly how long do they intend to stay in Winterhaven, anyway?

The double-gate to the fence was open. A truck was parked inside the yard, its sides emblazoned with stylized images of apples and carrots. The truck’s driver wheeled a loaded dolly down a metal ramp. Walking beside him was another one of the crystalline men.

Stepping closer to the fence, Kristin peered between two of the slats. This glass man was bigger than the other ghost people she’d seen. His powerful arms swung easily from a thick barrel chest. His head was square-shaped, with thick lips and a heavy nose. The driver spoke in a low voice to him.

The big man barked a short, loud laugh. “Just like a woman, right?” his voice boomed out.

The receiving door opened. Martin Piotrowski gestured at the driver as the glass man plodded forward, pretending not to see the older man. Drawing closer, he threw his wide left shoulder into Martin. The blow knocked him backwards, causing him to hit the door frame and slide to the ground.

“Careful, old-timer,” the glass man said as the driver pushed his cargo inside.

Martin spoke softly, the bigger man looming over him. Finally, the man extended an arm to help him to his feet. When he stood, the glass man clapped him on his back, a little too roughly.

“My first name?” the glass man said. “It’s Martin. Same as you, eh?”

Schhhct!
Finishing his lie, a clear layer fell over the big man’s mouth. A second layer dropped over it and then a third, falling atop one another like so many glass dominoes.

“I don’t like to use the name much.” The words reverberated strangely, as if the big man was speaking from inside a box. “You hear ‘Martin’, it makes you think of somebody weak and useless. Somebody soft. Every time I say the name, I want to puke in disgust.”

Schhhct!
His mouth reappeared.

“Here’s what I think,” he continued, “my own personal theory if you will.”

He moved closer to Martin, pressing his chest forward until it crowded the smaller man. “Anybody uses your first name, they don’t respect you. When you’re in charge, when you’re feared, people use your last name. They know to call you ‘mister’.” He brought his face down until he was nose-to-nose with the café’s former owner. “You want to keep me happy, call me Mr. Brass.”

Martin blinked at him, speechless.

“Let’s get going, Marty,” Mr. Brass said in his deep voice. “Those cartons of lettuce aren’t going to put themselves into storage.”