Dwelling Places (23 page)

After dessert and helping Mom clean up, Kenzie hides out in her room. Young Taylor is in his as well, burning incense, from the smell of it. Kenzie trips past the door and shuts her own, turning on her desk lamp, the one in the shape of a cream-colored stallion, a light-bulb and fringed shade sprouting up from the wild mane. She has had this lamp since she was nine. The horse's name is Pallie, for Palomino. Pallie lights her darkness when she awakens in the middle of the night afraid of demons and the coming apocalypse. Pallie has glowed over her for the duration of the mumps and the flu, has made it possible for Mom to read a thermometer while half-asleep. Right now Pallie looks like a toy that a grown-up girl would have given away by now. Kenzie pushes him to the side and gets out her journal.

 

Dear Jesus,

My heart is full of so many things. I just want my whole family to know the peace I've found. I want to put my hands on each and every person and claim Jesus' healing over that life. I want to cast out demons and pronounce the truth about everything that's hurting Mom, Dad, Grandma Rita, and Young Taylor. I want, want, want! This desire is about to kill me, Jesus. Something's got to happen soon. Something has to be made right.

When I see how Mom and Dad still don't talk much, it makes me want to scream. When I see the darkness in Young Taylor's life, I just want to shake all the bad things right out of him. And I see Grandma worry and I want to hold her and calm her down. I want to know Aunt Linda a lot better than I do—I need some help in this never-ending war.

I'm tired of the war. I'm tired of wondering if they'll be okay, and hoping that I'm doing everything I can. Jesus, you have to help me see the truth. I can't wander in darkness. I have to be sure of your presence and your promise. I'm not as strong as I should be, so you have to help me be strong and wise. You have to show me what to do. I feel like there's hardly any time left. I know it's not your will that I be afraid or full of panic.

 

She writes in Pallie's light for more than an hour. She stops a couple of times to read from Revelation and then from Psalms. She says the verses as her prayers. She inserts the name of her loved ones where the Psalmist wrote “I” or “we.” She kneels by the bed and reads Revelation 21:5–8 about six times, memorizing as much as she can. When the end comes, all she will have are the words here, the ones she has stored in her heart.

Her meditation is interrupted by sounds downstairs. It's Grandma Rita coughing. It sounds worse than usual. Then she hears murmurings from her parents and finally hears Dad say, “That's it, Mom. I'm taking you to the hospital.” Kenzie rushes downstairs to see Mom and Aunt Linda helping Grandma into her coat. Grandma's face is pale, and she looks so weary that Kenzie is afraid she's dying.

“Mom? What do you want me to do?”

“You stay here with Aunt Linda. Dad and I will take Grandma to the hospital.” Mom looks at Kenzie then and says quickly, “She'll be fine, but I'm sure she needs some antibiotics.”

They bundle Grandma Rita into the car. She is too overcome by the coughing and shortness of breath to argue. Kenzie turns on the yard light that's closest to the sidewalk. She watches the car go toward town, then turns to see Aunt Linda standing there, concern on her face. She looks tired.

“I think she has pneumonia,” says Aunt Linda. “All that congestion—it must be in her lungs.”

“I don't think she's ever had it before.”

“They'll fix her up just fine. Do you have hot chocolate?”

The mention of hot chocolate makes Kenzie long for Mitchell. That's where she needs to be right now. But she can't leave Aunt Linda.

“Yes. I'll fix some for us.”

Young Taylor appears then, in the doorway.

“Mom and Dad taking Grandma home?”

“No, to the hospital. Her coughing got really bad.”

Young Taylor looks as if he's about to swear, but maybe because Aunt Linda is standing there, he turns away and sits on the couch.

“You want hot chocolate? Aunt Linda and I are having some.”

“Sure. Any pie left?”

“I don't know. Look for yourself.”

The three of them sit in front of
Miracle on 34th Street
and sip hot chocolate. During the climactic scene, Mom comes in the back door. They can hear the car leaving the drive again.

“How's Grandma?” Kenzie hops off the couch.

“She has pneumonia. She'll be there a couple of days.”

“Where's Dad?”

“He's staying there tonight.”

“She's really bad?”

“Mainly she's upset because they won't let her go home. Dad will stay there until she gets to sleep and then stay at her house. Then he can go check on her in the morning.”

Kenzie's glad that Dad won't be at the stone house tonight. She had dreaded the moment when he would leave them all and go out into the cold and aloneness.

At nine-thirty, Mom is in the dining room, putting away the good dishes. Aunt Linda is tucked away in the guest room. She will stay until Sunday, when Dad will take her back to Iowa City. There's a knock on the door, and Dale is standing there. He follows Young Taylor upstairs, and they disappear into his bedroom. This is how Young Taylor gets around being grounded: his friends just camp out upstairs for hours at a time.

Kenzie sits in the family room and tries to figure out how to get to Mitchell's house without anyone knowing. At ten o'clock she stands in the doorway to the dining room.

“Mom, I'm going to bed. You need me to do anything?”

“No.” Mom turns to her briefly. She is at the dining room table, putting the good silver back into its velvet case that will in turn go to its place in the dining room cupboard. “Night, honey.”

“Night.” She goes upstairs and does what she always does before bed, taking her normal time in the bathroom. Then she goes to her bedroom and fluffs up the blankets and pillows. She puts on her sweats and her jacket. Then she closes the bedroom door and slips downstairs, skipping the three steps that squeak. She ducks around the corner into the front room of the house. With the television still on, Mom won't hear the sucking sound of the front door opening. Kenzie leaves the house, hops off the front porch, and goes to the road the long way around, behind the garage and away from the yard light.

The sky is swollen with clouds and filled with a heavy darkness, the air so chilly that Kenzie coughs once or twice, getting used to it. She smells wood smoke from somewhere, probably the Timmonses' place over south. As she comes up the rise, within a quarter-mile of Mitchell's place, her gaze reaches and reaches for that speck of light that means he's awake. Finally she sees a dim point of yellow, the light above the kitchen sink. It is then that she runs, feeling that something evil is right at her heels.

Mitchell looks startled when he opens the door to her wild knocking. “Kenzie.” His voice is flat. Kenzie goes inside. She hugs him, and only after a moment does he return the hug.

“You shouldn't be out here now.” His eyes are dull.

“You don't want me here?”

“Sure, I want you here. But what about your folks?”

She tells him the events of her day, working backwards from Grandma being at the hospital and Dad in town. She is ready to unleash all the wants that she wrote about in her journal, but the look on Mitchell's face stops her.

“Are you okay?” she says.

He winces a little. “It's been a bad day, Kenzie.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened.”

She waits for an explanation. He slumps at the kitchen table and looks at her tiredly.

“Nothing?” she asks.

“Nothing.” His expression tells her that he considers this answer significant. Then he leans toward her a little. “That's it. Nothing. Nothing happened today. Nothing came. I couldn't work on anything. I couldn't think anything. It's like my system is shutting down.”

She doesn't know what to say. She thinks that maybe the world will just end tonight. That would be convenient. It would spare her figuring out what to do about all the people in her life. She is totally disappointed at the reception she has received.

“I've got to get out of here, Kenzie.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I need to leave. The oppression is coming. Maybe it's here already. I can't live through another siege like this. I can't go through days and days of nothing.”

It is quiet, and Kenzie notices how cold the house is. She wonders why he hasn't turned up the heat.

“I'm going to Reverend Francis's retreat center. I know I'll be better there. The demons can't get me there. I'm not strong enough here.”

“When will you go?” It feels as if her life is just leaking away.

“Soon. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week.”

“I want to come with you.”

He looks at her, and his eyes clear for a moment. “Oh, no. I can't take you there.”

“Why not?”

“You're fourteen.” He says it as if he despises her suddenly.

“That's never mattered to you before. I thought you said we're meant to be together.”

“We are, but I can't take you with me, not now.”

She is too tired to fight the tears. Her hands on the table blur in front of her. She was expecting comfort, not this. She has come to this safe room, but it's as dark as the rooms she just left.

“Mitchell, I need you. You're my only real friend.” She can barely talk for crying. To her surprise, she hears not sympathy but a frustrated sigh from across the table.

“Go home. This isn't good, you being here now. Just go.” He gets up and lifts her out of the chair. She tries to hang on to him, but he twists her around to face the door. He pulls her jacket around her.

“Don't leave, Mitchell! I need you here. I can't fight the battle by myself!”

She is standing on his porch and listening to the door shut behind her.

She stumbles down the road to home in the pitch dark. She doesn't care, because her tears keep her from seeing anyway. She sobs and she shouts. “Jesus! What are you doing to me? Why are you taking my friend away from me?” She huddles behind the garage to finish crying. Then she sneaks around the house and sees that Mom's bedroom light is on. The front door has been locked; for some reason Mom locks that door but not the back one. Every night before bed she turns out the kitchen light, then locks the front door. Kenzie steps in the back and up to her room.

She undresses in the dark, and the tears start again. In the pale reflection of the yard light, she sees her journal on the desk, next to Pallie.
Her first impulse is to turn on the light and write this fresh, pain-filled prayer to Jesus. But it hits her that she is so tired she can barely stand. She puts on her nightgown and cries into her pillow for possibly five minutes before falling asleep.

Mack

He debates with himself the whole drive to see George. He trusts the man, but how much should he tell him? What's important to tell?

Well, hearing voices would probably be significant. But that really just happened a couple of times, and there could be lots of explanations—a radio from a passing car or something.

The other things are probably coincidences too. The memory of Pop coming through so clearly the other day, so clear it was like having Pop there in the truck with him. The day he happened to look up as he passed a sign on the highway that read: LIFE BEGINS TODAY. It was put there as some sort of pro-life message, but what's troublesome is that earlier that morning Mack had gotten out of bed feeling too weary and sad to go to work. And out of the blue he'd said those very words to himself, a little pep talk as he drank his coffee. Of course, he must have seen the sign sometime before but not thought of it consciously, and it came out of him that morning, and then he noticed the sign for the first time half an hour later. There's always an explanation for these things.

The sky has that hard, white look of snow waiting to fall. It will likely storm tonight. Maybe it isn't such a good idea to travel forty miles from home. He can go back now and call George and postpone at least until next week.

That would be a whole week for him to try to reason with himself about voices and coincidences. He ignores every feeling he has, ignores the sky, and grips the wheel.

“Well, I've finally gone round the bend.” He sits in his spot and looks straight at George. May as well get right to it.

“Round the bend? As in going crazy?”

“Yep.”

They look at each other, George's eyebrows at attention.

“I'm hearing voices.”

George nods slowly, as if he understands, has been expecting this. But his face remains a blank.

“I didn't used to hear voices—even in the worst times, even when I was playing with guns out in the barn. There were never voices.”

“But there are now. When did they start?”

“A few days ago.”

“What was happening prior to your hearing these voices?”

“Nothing. I was driving home from work.”

“And the voices came then? What did they say?”

Mack looks at him. “Does it matter? Seems to me that the main thing is that I'm hearing anything at all.”

“Well, I'm interested to know the content, the message.”

“‘Everything is working out,' or something to that effect.”

George looks at him, presses his lips together, and grunts, “Hmm.”

“And another time I was in the parking lot loading up groceries, and somebody said, ‘Love is always the last thing standing.' I'm sure somebody must have said it, but I couldn't see anybody close by.”

“That's quite a statement. ‘Love is always the last thing standing.' I like that.” George pauses. “Anything else?”

Mack is trapped. He started this mess, and it doesn't make sense to hold back now. “I'm just…noticing things. Coincidences…but they feel like they have purpose behind them.”