Shantallow by Cara Martin

Author:Cara Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Cormorant Books Inc.
Published: 2019-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

13

SITTING ON THE FLOOR next to Cal with my hands still untied, I watch John and Luke hover in the living room doorway, their faces strained and their voices trampling each other’s sentences. The finer points of their argument remain indecipherable, sinking into the shadows. John makes sure of that, subduing Luke time and again.

Luke motions repeatedly in the general vicinity of the staircase, John’s gaze flickering intermittently in my direction.

“One of them is dead,” I whisper, Cal staring straight ahead, pretending my lips haven’t moved. “The other’s missing.”

Cal’s eyes bulge, teeming with questions I don’t have answers for. His gaze flies to Tanvi. She stares back at us with the concentration of a hawk, trying to tune in to our wavelength from across a physical divide. Seeing her sitting cross-legged, with Lauren’s feet nestled in her lap as Lauren sleeps on peacefully — more peacefully than you’d expect would be possible in a place like this — I notice one of Tanvi’s knees is skinned. Her long hair is knotting at the back.

I shift my stare to John and Luke, their arms jerking and spines held taut, their guns skittish extensions of their right hands. Their control over the situation is fading fast, and they know it.

“Something’s wrong with this house,” I continue, careful not to look at Cal. “Upstairs.”

It hurts to talk, and I don’t know how to explain without sounding like a straitjacket candidate. I need more tramadol. I need to lie down. Rest. Just for a few minutes. Until I can regain some of my strength. Slowly, I ease my back nearer to the floor, straightening my legs out in front of me. An old memory I didn’t realize I’d forgotten washes to the surface as pain bullets through me like a tearing seam, my spine meeting solid ground.

My grandmother and her white candles. Years ago, she used to suffer from migraines. Her prescription would dull the pain, but never annihilate it. For that she used a white candle, letting it burn down to nothing as she chanted:

Pain take flight and disappear,

Sickness lay down misery and hear,

My plea to energy and light,

Vigor and wholeness hold me high,

Turn my eyes to the endless sky,

In the light, love’s strength revealed,

In the light, let me be healed.

My grandmother’s honeyed voice flows through the folds of my gray matter, rhythmic and soothing like an old radio song played low. Smooth as water. Steady as stone.

I swim motionlessly toward the sound, where the pain is milder and more distant. From that place John and Luke are far away too, their disagreement of no real consequence.

It’s a trick of the mind, but I need it.

Only for a little while, I promise myself, eyelids sealing me away from the world.

Under a graying sky littered with storm clouds, my father leans over my body, watching for a cue that I don’t know how to give. My arms and legs are brown from the sun and pudgy with baby fat, my father’s face unlined like when I was a kid.

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