To Dance with the Devil

with Gran.

The cold wind that marked my sister’s presence blew my hair back from my face and made the fabric of the beach umbrella flap loudly. I held out the photograph. “Do you remember this? It was your birthday.”

The wind stilled, the air around me growing so cold that goose bumps covered my flesh and my breath misted the air. A hint of frost appeared on one corner of the photo. A moment later the cold vanished. Ivy was gone. Where to or why, I had no idea. She’d be back eventually. We were tied to each other until I could figure out a way to free her. In the meantime, I needed to get inside and get cleaned up. Sitting here brooding was not going to make things any better and would only make my mood worse.

3

“So, how have you been sleeping?” Gwen asked.

Gwen Talbot is my psychiatrist. She’s a trauma specialist. I first worked with her when I was a kid, after the kidnapping. I’ve gone back to seeing her because my life has overflowed with trauma in the last few years. Gwen’s the administrator of Birchwoods, a very high-end mental health and addiction treatment facility, so she has limited time available to see patients, but she always manages to fit me in.

We were seated in her office, a large, beautiful space decorated in colors that matched the beach that could be seen through the wide bank of windows: sand browns and the blue-greens of the ocean. As I took in the view, I realized that there were storm clouds gathering on the far horizon. Gwen’s suit was the same gray as the clouds, a color that looked good with her silvering hair and olive complexion.

“Better, but not great,” I admitted. I have recurring nightmares, in part from what happened when I was a kid, in part from my up-close-and-personal meeting with a bat, and more recently from an encounter with a demon who told me he’d see me in my dreams. All of this makes sleep a very tricky proposition.

“Did you have a priest come bless the house as I suggested?”

“Yep.” Matty had been happy to do it. In fact, he did such a good job that it stung me every time I crossed the threshold of my bedroom. I’d also hung dream catchers that had been decorated with crosses and sprayed with holy water: one in the bedroom doorway, in every window, even on the mirror of my dresser. It looked more than a little odd, but the demon hadn’t actually manifested in my dreams in the week since I’d installed them.

“And has it helped?”

“It has,” I answered. “But I’ve been a little stressed out about the whole family therapy thing.”

“Ah. I see. It’s reasonable to feel apprehensive under the circumstances. But our goal is for you to be ready. Is there something in particular that’s bothering you?”

I looked from the windows back to Gwen and seriously considered her question before answering. “Not really.”

“We could reschedule,” she offered.

“No point.” I sighed. “I’m never going to be ready. I’ll just have to do it anyway.”

Never one to let me wallow in self-pity, Gwen grew stern. “That’s not quite true. You don’t have to. You have a choice, Celia. You need to recognize that fact. It is your decision to make. Your mother’s therapist thinks this would be useful for her. But I’m your doctor, my concern is you.”

I smiled at her. “Thanks. I appreciate that.” I did. But it didn’t change anything. No matter what I thought about my mother and whether or not I believed she could get well, I needed to do this if I had any hope of salvaging my relationship with my gran. And I wanted that, badly. Not long ago, the terrorists had tried to kidnap her to use against me. They’d failed, but it was a close enough call to make me realize that we really needed to work on the issues standing between us before it was too late.

I reached into my purse and took out the pair of pictures I’d been carrying around all day, setting them gently onto the desk where Gwen could see them.

Gwen looked at the pictures carefully. She seemed more interested in the one from Ivy’s birthday, so I said, “That was taken about a week before Ivy died.”

She nodded. I watched as she gathered herself, preparing for something. But when she spoke, it was to ask a surprisingly innocuous question. “Is that you in the background?” She pointed a manicured finger at a figure in the background, leaning forward so that I could get a clear view of the image.

I found myself giving her an odd look. Gwen had to know that was me—she’d treated me when I was that age. She knew what I’d looked like. So she must be trying to make a point—leading the horse to water, as it were.

I looked from the picture to her face. Her expression gave nothing away.

“Yes.”

“How much do you think you weighed, looking at this picture?”

I’d been young enough not to have reached my full height and was still pretty skinny. “Probably ninety pounds, less than a hundred, anyway. Why?”

“You’ve recovered all your memories of the kidnapping, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“So tell me, how much do you suppose your attackers weighed?”

I closed my eyes and actually thought about it for a moment. The biggest of the guys had probably been six two, and he’d been heavy, with a beer gut, and muscular, with the kind of calluses you get working construction. If I was describing him to the police, I’d put him at around 250. The others were both smaller, say, five ten and 180 pounds.

“Celia, I want you to look at this picture again. Do you really think that any girl that size, no matter how tough, could fight off three full-grown men?”

I opened my eyes and really looked at the girl in the picture. I knew it was me, but for the first time I looked at the girl in the image as if she were a separate person. Damn, she was tiny. She probably weighed half of the smallest of the three guys who had attacked her and her sister. She was a tough little thing, a fighter—you could see that in her eyes and the slant of her jaw. But there was no way she’d be able to fight off even one of those men, let alone three.

My eyes blurred. I couldn’t breathe. The realization hit me like a club to the brain or a semi doing ninety. It was just so obvious. That little girl hadn’t stood a chance in hell of stopping what happened or protecting her sister. I hadn’t stood a chance.

It wasn’t my fault.

For the first time I really felt that, really believed it.

Gwen moved the tissue box to where I could reach it but remained silent, letting me release the torrent of painful emotions. I’d blamed myself for so long—allowed my mother to blame me. These wounds never healed; the pain was raw, always just beneath the surface. Now I saw everything differently, but the adjustment was agonizing.

It took a fair amount of time, and most of the box of tissues, for me to pull myself together. Eventually, however, I blew my nose noisily a couple of times and began to get my breathing back to normal. As I regained control of myself, I felt the temperature in the room start to drop, a sure sign of a ghostly presence.

“Ivy, is that you?” I whispered. The light flickered once. It was a code we’d worked out the first time she’d manifested after death: once for yes, twice for no. Since ghosts cannot lie, it was Ivy.

I spoke to the air, to the ghost of the baby sister I love and had failed to save. “I tried. I tried so hard. I just couldn’t stop them.” I’d swear I felt small arms holding me, hugging me close.

“I did everything I could. But it wasn’t enough.” I turned to Gwen then, barely seeing her through the blur of the tears that were threatening to start again. “It wasn’t my fault.”

She looked at me, her expression gentle and compassionate, but said nothing.

“Mom blames me. I always blamed myself. But it really wasn’t my fault.” I was repeating myself. Over and over. I had to. It was the only way I could wrap my mind around a concept that was so huge and so fundamental to who I was.