Scott Nicholson - Disintegration

"She loves me, she loves me not," Renee heard herself saying, and the smell of plucked grass sent her to a fantasy playground where Mattie and Christine ran together, hand in hand. But the image made no sense, even for a daydream, because Christine had never even crawled, let alone walked.

"She loves me," Renee said, then changed to "Hail Mary, full of grace." Instead of rosary beads, she clutched the dirty pink rattle she'd found in the forest behind their burned-down house. Several priests had warned her in sermons that all the great and wondrous gifts of God could be stripped away in the blink of an eye, but that even the deepest sorrow could be tempered through abiding faith. She'd always thought those sermons had been addressed to other people, those whose sinful and cluttered lives invited disaster. Bad things didn't happen to good people in a just world guided by a merciful God.

She was praying over Christine's body because Mattie had no fixed location, no single point at which to hurl grief. Jacob's belief in a unifying, universal energy seemed terribly large and empty to her. Such an afterlife was the spiritual equivalent of ashes tossed onto the cosmic winds. She didn't want Mattie spending eternity in such a place. That's why she'd pressed Jacob to allow the children to be christened and baptized as Catholics. For all the good it did.

Renee finished her run through the cycle of sorrowful mysteries and stood. The grass had stained the knees of her pants. She would have to throw them away. Her apartment didn't have a washer and dryer, and she hated the dank, dim laundry room beside the property management office. She wasn't sure when she'd be returning to the apartment, anyway.

The money was in her jacket pocket in a crumpled paper sack, like something out of a crime movie. Twenty-seven one hundred dollar bills. All that was left. The profit of Christine's death.

A million in insurance coverage had been nothing. That barely replenished what Jacob had swiped from the M amp; W accounts, the bad real estate deals, foolish donations to charity that had become an obligation because of his name. Now they had another million coming, and all it cost was Mattie.

She wiped her eyes and turned. Someone stood at the far edge of the cemetery, cloaked in the morning shadows. She thought at first it was a caretaker, one of those hunched and reclusive figures prone to working in memorial parks. Then she remembered the whispered taunts from the woods the night before.

Renee put her hand in her pocket, searching for her key. Her car was by the gate fifty yards away. But she didn't need to run. She was in no danger. If her stalker had wanted to harm her, last night provided the perfect opportunity.

She headed toward the trees that clustered in the older part of the graveyard. The figure slipped back into the laurel undergrowth. The park had only one entrance, so the person would have to climb over the wall to avoid being seen. Renee fought the urge to hurry. She veered toward the wall, which bordered the rear of a strip mall. The buildings were brick, masonry oozing from the cracks as if a messy kindergartner had been in charge of construction. Jack vines, kudzu, and poison sumac climbed the wall and thorny locusts grew on the slope of the drop-off leading to the strip mall. No one in his right mind would scale the wall and scramble down that hazardous and itchy embankment.

She was nearly to the undergrowth when she heard the voice. Small and childlike, but not the same recorded voice from the night before.

"Wish me," the voice said.

The words came like one-two punches, one deep in the hollow of her stomach and the other flush against her forehead.

Jacob had taught Mattie the game. Wish Me usually came into play on long car trips, when fast-food stops and the occasional bathroom break weren't enough to drive away a child's boredom. Wish Me was usually a giggle game, descending into silliness such as "Wish me a zebra and paint the stripes like a rainbow." Or, "Wish me a million dollars and let's go to the candy store."

"Come out, Jacob," Renee said, surprised she could still issue breaths from behind her clenched rib cage.

The voice came again. "Wish me."

"I don't want to wish," she said, recalling Rheinsfeldt's summary of dissociative behavior. It was possible Jacob didn't realize he was stalking her. "I want to know why you're hiding."

"Follow me," the voice said. A branch snapped.

"We already played that game."

"Wish me your deepest wish."

"I don't have any wishes left."

"Except to know."

The laurel was tangled and dense, and the disarray of the branches filled Renee with a deep dread. She required order, and this organic chaos was beyond her control. This patch of forest lived for itself, grasping for the sky and rain, pushing up out of the earth like a corpse seeking a refund. Last night, the darkness had allowed her to block out the discordant surroundings as she gave chase to the person who had eluded her. But here in the warm glare of a perfect spring day, she couldn't deceive herself.

Disorder. All was disorder.

She glanced back at her car parked by the gate, at the highway below the cemetery where trucks hauled frozen turkeys and Coca-Cola, venting black diesel exhaust into the air. All she had to do was get in her car and drive away, leave all this madness behind.

"I can't follow you, Jacob," she said.

"Wish me." A monotone, as if from a talking doll whose microchips stole souls, a Rock Star Barbie whose plastic had become flesh and who now went by the name of Wells.

She took a tentative step into the laurel thicket. The branches crisscrossed like the arms of stunted witches, a coven of crazed and grasping creatures. "Where are we going?"

"To the door that swings both ways."

The same riddle as the night before. It must have been Jacob that had lured her away from the charred remains of their house.

"What do you want?" Renee asked again, expecting another riddle or taunt.

"Mattie sent me."

Renee's fear downshifted into helpless anger. "She's dead, Jacob."

Three ravens swooped across the cemetery, their wings steady. Almost simultaneously, they lit on separate gravestones. One landed on Christine's marker, a blue-gray slab of marble that had been shaped and etched by a professional sculptor rather than a monument company. She fought an urge to rush toward the bird, waving her arms and shouting, before its droppings could spoil the luster of the marble. Jacob had commissioned the monument complete with a lamb on top, and though he'd never mentioned a price, she suspected it was at least $10,000.

"Do you have the mirror?"

"I told you last night, I don't know what you're talking about."

"Who's the fairest of them all?"

"Mattie."

"Mattie. Not Christine."

The silver-plated mirror was heavy in her jacket pocket, covered by the brown bag.

She looked back at Christine's grave. The ravens were hopping along the ground, searching the grass for insects and worms. Nasty birds. But at least they were moving away from her baby.

A truck pulling a small flat-bed trailer stopped at the gate. On the trailer sat a stand-behind lawn mower and several gas-powered Weed Eaters. A man got out of the truck and pushed the gate wide. He waved to Renee.

"He sees you," Renee said.

"He thinks you're talking to yourself."

"Wish me, then," came the voice. "Wish me the money."

"Why can't you face me?" She glanced back at the groundskeeper, who was ignoring her, busy checking the fuel levels in his machines.

A shuffle of leaves came from within the thick stand of vegetation, the sound moving away from Renee and closer to the vine-clotted wall. Renee stooped and surveyed the ground beneath the lower branches. A worn path appeared to run just inside the perimeter of the wall. Cigarette butts and two crushed and dirty beer cans lay in the weeds. She took a deep breath, wondering if she could force herself to crawl through the narrow opening, where bugs and spider webs and dirt and thorns awaited.