The Big Dark Sky (2)
Electrified, Jojo slid forward in the armchair, and the blanket slipped off her shoulders.
Mother said, “Before you, it was terribly lonely here, and I had little hope. For so very long, I had little hope.”
Jojo rose, the blanket puddling around her feet. “Mommy?”
“One day I may be ready to do what I was born to do,” Mother said. “And then I may need you at my side.”
Jojo was shaking uncontrollably. Her mother was dead and gone, yet was somehow here now. Her mom would never hurt her. There was no threat in the words just spoken, but Jojo was shaking as much with fright as with wonder, gripped by a weirdly exhilarating anxiety.
The frozen video image thawed. On the TV, Jojo said, “Promise what?” Her mom said, “That you’ll never change,” and the recording proceeded as it had the first two times that the girl watched it.
With the remote control, she rewound and then pressed PLAY, watched and waited. But if a haunting had occurred the third time that she’d viewed the piece, if a message had come through from the Other Side, it didn’t repeat during the fourth viewing. Or during the fifth, the sixth.
Jojo knew that what happened was real. She hadn’t imagined it because of lack of sleep or because grief had made her crazy. She would tell no one, as if the visitation was too sacred to share.
You will soon be going away, Jojo, going away to grow up elsewhere.
Four days later, she was taken to Santa Fe to live with her aunt Katherine, her mother’s sister.
I might reach out to you many years from now and ask you to come home.
The years passed, and the vividness of that episode on a moonless night in Montana inevitably faded. She didn’t forget it altogether, but eventually she came to believe that it wasn’t what it seemed to be at the time, that it was most likely a fantasy spawned by desperate grief. She had always possessed a rich imagination.
One day I may be ready to do what I was born to do. And then I may need you at my side.
That made no sense. Her mother had been born twice, once into the world of the living and once into the world of the dead, from which she would never return and would never have reason to call her daughter to her side.
So the years passed, and the years passed . . .
2
Eventually, Joanna Chase would realize that the madness had begun on Monday evening, the thirteenth day of July.
As she’d been preparing dinner—hearts of palm salad, buttered pasta with pine nuts and peas—she thought she heard her car start with a roar of the engine.
Because she lived in a safe neighborhood of a peaceful city, because she was self-reliant and not given to paranoia, and because her security system was currently set in the at-home mode, she had no concern that someone could have gotten into the garage to steal the vehicle. Besides, both electronic keys were hanging from a pegboard in the laundry room, and the car would unlock itself only for someone in possession of a key.
More puzzled than worried, certainly not fearful, Joanna went through the laundry room and opened the door to the garage. Her black Lincoln Continental was idling, its running lights aglow, headlamps splashing across utility cabinets. The car was unoccupied.
Beyond the sedan stood her SUV, a white Lincoln Aviator, as quiet and dark as it ought to be.
She had previously owned a Lexus that had problems with its electrical wiring. Her Lincolns were superb machines that never gave her trouble—until perhaps now.
“What the hell?” she wondered.
She went behind the Continental, around to the port side, opened the front door, and settled into the driver’s seat. The navigation-system map had loaded. On the screen, an orange square and the word START invited her touch, as if an address had been entered.
Although she didn’t respond to that prompt, the car’s mellow female voice advised her to obey all traffic laws and to follow vocal instructions to her destination.
“My destination is dinner, honey, and I can walk there,” she said as she pushed the ignition button.
The engine fell silent, and the screen went dark after the car said goodbye with its programmed sign-off video and audio.
She got out and returned to the connecting door between the garage and the house. She stood there, watching, until the running lights and headlamps self-extinguished. She waited a minute or so, dreading that the Continental had caught the Lexus virus and would mock her by starting up again.
When the sedan remained quiet and dark, she returned to the kitchen, where she opened a bottle of good cabernet. She didn’t indulge in wine every night, but the prospect of having bought another lemon on four wheels made a glass or two necessary. Maybe three.
As she ate, she listened to Rubinstein playing Mozart, and she read from Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov. He had spent seventeen years slowly starving in a Soviet death camp deep in Siberia and, though released in 1951, had lived another thirty years under the jackboot of Communism. The music lifted her heart, and the stories made her grateful for the food before her.
Most nights, she slept well, and on this occasion, the wine drew her into a deeper slumber than usual. She hadn’t dozed off with the TV on, but the gray light of a dead and silent channel filled the screen when she opened her eyes at 2:00 a.m. She fumbled with the remote and switched off the set. Sleep-sodden, hardly awake, she couldn’t be sure if the distant sound of a racing engine was real or part of a lingering dream. She drifted off again before curiosity could motivate her to throw aside the covers and get out of bed.