Torment (14 page)

Shelby shook her head. “Daniel I don’t know about. But
if
we can summon and then glimpse an Announcer, then it
will
have to do with you. They’re supposed to be summoner-specific—though you won’t always be interested in what they have to say. Like how you get junk mail mixed with your important mail, but it’s still addressed to you.”

“How can they be … summoner-specific? That would mean Francesca and Steven were at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Well, yeah. They
have
been around forever. Rumor has it their résumés are pretty impressive.” Shelby stared oddly at Luce. “Put your bug eyes back in your head. How else do you think they scored jobs at Shoreline? This is a really good school.”

Something dark and slippery moved over them: a heavy cloak of an Announcer stretching sleepily in the lengthening shadows from the limb of a redwood tree.

“There.” Luce pointed, not wasting any time. She swung herself up onto a low branch that stretched behind Shelby. Luce had to balance on one foot and lean out all the way to the left just to graze the Announcer with her fingertips. “I can’t reach it.”

Shelby picked up a pinecone and pitched it at the center of the shadow where it draped down from the branch.

“Don’t!” Luce whispered. “You’ll piss it off.”

“It’s pissing
me
off, being so coy. Just hold out your hand.”

Grimacing, Luce did as she was told.

She watched the pinecone ricochet off the shadow’s exposed side, then heard the soft swishing sound that used to fill her ears with dread. One side of the shadow was sliding, very slowly, away from the branch. It slipped off and landed across Luce’s shaking extended arm. She pinched its edges with her fingers.

Luce hopped off the branch where she’d been standing and approached Shelby, her cold, musty offering in her hands.

“Here,” Shelby said. “I’ll take half and you take half, just like we saw in class. Ew, it’s squishy. Okay … loosen your grip, he’s not going anywhere. Let him just kind of chill and take shape.”

It seemed like a long time passed before the shadow did anything at all. Luce felt almost like she was playing with the old Ouija board she’d had as a kid. An inexplicable energy on the tips of her fingers. The feeling of slight, continual movement before she could see any difference in the Announcer’s shape.

Then there was a
whoosh:
It was contracting, folding slowly in on its dark self. Soon the whole thing had taken on the size and shape of a large box. It hovered just above their fingertips.

“Do you see that?” Shelby gasped. Her voice was almost inaudible over the whooshing sound of the shadow. “Look, there in the middle.”

As had happened during class, a dark veil seemed to lift off the Announcer, revealing a shocking burst of color. Luce shielded her eyes, watching as the bright light seemed to settle back inside the shadow screen, into a foggy out-of-focus image. Then, finally, into distinct shapes in muted colors.

They were looking at a living room. The back of a blue plaid recliner with the footrest kicked up and a badly fraying bottom corner. An old wood-paneled television airing a rerun of
Mork & Mindy
with the volume off. A fat Jack Russell terrier curled on a round patchwork rug.

Luce watched a swinging door push open from what looked like a kitchen. A woman, older than Luce’s grandmother had been when she died, walked through. She was wearing a pink-and-white patterned dress, heavy white tennis shoes, and thick glasses on a string around her neck. She was carrying a tray of cut fruit.

“Who are these people?” Luce wondered aloud.

When the old woman put down the tray on the coffee table, a liver-spotted hand extended from around the chair and selected a chunk of banana.

Luce leaned in to see more clearly, and the focus of the image shifted with her. Like a 3-D panorama. She hadn’t even noticed the old man sitting in the recliner. He was frail, with a few thin patches of white hair and age spots all over his forehead. His mouth was moving, but Luce couldn’t hear a thing. A row of framed pictures lined the mantel of the fireplace.

The whooshing in Luce’s ears got louder, so loud it made her wince. Without her doing anything other than wonder about those pictures, the Announcer’s image zoomed in. It left Luce with a feeling of whiplash—and an extreme close-up of one framed photograph.

A thin gold-plated frame around a smudged glass plate. Inside, the small photograph had a fine scalloped border around a yellowing black-and-white image. Two faces in the photograph: Hers and Daniel’s.

Holding her breath, she studied her own face, which looked just a little younger than it did now. Dark shoulder-length hair set in pincurls. A white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. A wide A-line skirt brushing the middles of her calves. White-gloved hands, holding Daniel’s. He was looking directly at her, smiling.

The Announcer started vibrating, then quaking; then the image inside started to flicker and fade away.

“No,” Luce called, ready to lunge inside. Her shoulders connected with the edge of the Announcer, but that was as far as she got. A brush of bitter cold pushed her back and left her skin feeling damp. A hand clamped around her wrist.

“Don’t get any wild ideas,” Shelby warned.

Too late.

The screen went black and the Announcer dropped from their hands onto the forest floor, shattering into pieces like broken black glass. Luce suppressed a whimper. Her chest heaved. She felt like a part of her had died.

Lowering herself to all fours, she pressed her forehead to the ground and rolled onto her side. It was colder, murkier than it had been when they’d started. The watch on her wrist said it was after two o’clock, but it had been morning when they came into the forest. Looking west, toward the edge of the woods, Luce could see the difference in the light hitting the dorm. The Announcers swallowed time.

Shelby lay down next to her. “You okay?”

“I’m so confused. Those people—” Luce cupped her forehead. “I have no idea who they are.”

Shelby cleared her throat and looked uncomfortable. “Don’t you think, um, maybe you used to know them? Like, a long time ago. Like, maybe they were your …”

Luce waited for her to finish. “My what?”

“It really hasn’t occurred to you that those were your parents from another life? That this is what they look like now?”

Luce’s jaw dropped open. “No. Wait—you mean, I’ve had totally different parents in each of my past lives? I thought Harry and Doreen … I just assumed they would have been with me the whole time.”

Suddenly she remembered something Daniel had said, about her mother making bad boiled cabbage in that past life. At the time, she hadn’t dwelled on it, but now it made a little bit more sense. Doreen was an amazing cook. Everyone in east Georgia knew that.

Which meant Shelby must be right. Luce probably had a whole nation of past families she couldn’t even remember.

“I’m so stupid,” she said. Why hadn’t she paid more attention to the way the man and woman looked? Why hadn’t she felt the slightest connection to them? She felt like she’d lived her whole life and only now found out she was adopted. How many times had she been handed off to different parents? “This is—This is—”

“Totally messed up,” Shelby said. “I know. On the bright side, you could probably save yourself a lot of money for therapy if you could look back at all your other families, see all the problems you had with hundreds of mothers before this one.”

Luce buried her face in her hands.

“That is, if you need family therapy.” Shelby sighed. “Sorry, who’s talking about themselves again?” She raised her right hand, then slowly put it down. “You know, Shasta’s not that far from here.”

“What’s Shasta?”

“Mount Shasta, California. It’s just a few hours that-away.” Shelby jerked her thumb toward the north.

“But the announcers only show the past. What would be the point of going there now? They’re probably—”

Shelby shook her head. “ ‘The past’ is a broad term. Announcers show the distant past right up to the events happening seconds ago, and everything in between. I saw a laptop on the desk in the corner, so there’s a good chance … you know …”

“But we don’t know where they live.”

“Maybe you don’t. Me, I zoomed in on a piece of their mail and got the address. Committed it to memory. 1291 Shasta Shire Circle, apartment 34.” Shelby shrugged. “So, if you wanted to go visit them, we could totally drive there and back in a day.”

“Right.” Luce snorted. She desperately wanted to go visit them, but it just didn’t seem possible. “In whose car?”

Shelby laughed a faux-sinister little laugh. “There was only one thing that wasn’t sorry-ass about my sorry-ass ex-boyfriend.” She dug into the pocket of her sweatshirt, pulling out a long key chain. “And that was his very sweet Mercedes, parked right here in the student lot. Lucky for you, I forgot to give him back the extra key.”

They tore down the road before anyone could stop them.

Luce found a map in the glove compartment and traced the line up to Shasta with her finger. She called out some directions to Shelby, who drove like a bat out of Hell, but the maroon Mercedes almost seemed to like the abuse.

Luce wondered how Shelby was staying so calm. If Luce had just broken up with Daniel and “borrowed” his car for the afternoon, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from remembering road trips they’d taken, or arguments they’d gotten into while driving to a movie, or what they’d done in the backseat that one time with all the windows rolled down. Surely Shelby was thinking about her ex. Luce wanted to ask, but Shelby had been clear that the topic was off-limits.

“Are you going to change your hair?” Luce asked finally, remembering what Shelby had said about getting over breakups. “I could help you, if you are.”

Shelby’s face pinched into a scowl. “That freak’s not even worth it.” After a long pause, she added, “But thank you.”

The drive took most of the rest of the afternoon, and Shelby spent it working herself up, bickering with the radio, scanning the channels for the craziest nutjobs she could find. The air got colder, the trees thinned out, and the elevation of the landscape rose steadily the whole time. Luce focused on staying calm, imagining a hundred scenarios about meeting these parents. She tried to avoid thinking about what Daniel would say if he knew where she was going.

“There it is.” Shelby pointed when a massive snow-capped mountain came into view directly in front of the road. “The town sits right in those foothills. We should be there just after sunset.”

Luce didn’t know how to thank Shelby for hauling her all the way up here on a whim. Whatever was behind Shelby’s shift in attitude, Luce was grateful—she wouldn’t have been able to do this on her own.

The town of Shasta was wacky and artistic, with a good number of elderly people walking leisurely down the wide avenues. Shelby rolled down the windows and let in the brisk early-evening air. It helped settle Luce’s stomach, which was knotting up at the prospect of actually having to talk to the people she’d seen in the Announcer.

“What am I supposed to say to them? Surprise, I’m your daughter back from the dead,” Luce practiced aloud as they were sitting at a stoplight.

“Unless you want to totally freak out a sweet old couple, we’re going to have to work on that,” Shelby said. “Why don’t you pretend you’re a solicitor, just to get in the door and feel them out?”

Luce looked down at her jeans, beat-up tennis shoes, and purple backpack. She didn’t look like a very impressive salesperson. “What would I sell?”

Shelby started to drive again. “Hawk car washes or something cheesy like that. You can say you’ve got vouchers in your bag. I did that one summer, door to door. Almost got shot.” She shuddered, then looked at Luce’s white face. “Come on, your own mom and dad are not going to shoot you. Oh, hey, look, here we are!”

“Shelby, can we just sit in silence for a little while? I think I need to breathe.”

“Sorry.” Shelby pulled into a large parking lot facing a compound of small, single-story connected bungalow-style buildings. “Breathing I can do.”

Through her nerves, Luce had to admit it was a pretty nice place. A series of the bungalows stood in a semicircle around a pond. There was a main lobby building with a row of wheelchairs lined up outside the doors. A big banner read
WELCOME TO SHASTA SHIRE RETIREMENT COMMUNITY
.

Her throat felt so dry it hurt to swallow. She didn’t know if she even had it in her to say two words to these people. Maybe it was one of those things you just couldn’t think about too much. Maybe she needed to get up there and force her hand down on that knocker and then figure out how to act.

“Apartment thirty-four.” Shelby squinted at a square stucco building with a red Spanish-tile roof. “That looks like it over there. If you want me to—”

“Wait in the car till I get back? That would be great, thanks so much. I won’t be long!”

Before Luce could lose her nerve, she was out the car door and jogging up the winding sidewalk toward the building. The air was warm and filled with a heady scent of roses. Cute old people were everywhere. Split into teams on the shuffleboard court near the entrance, taking an evening stroll through a neatly pruned flower garden next to the pool. In the early-evening light, Luce’s eyes strained as she tried to locate the couple somewhere in this crowd, but no one looked familiar. She would have to go straight to their house.