Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

“Hi, babe!”

“Hello there, Darlin’ Dixie.”

“Sorry I didn’t come over after work…”

“No worries.”

“I could see you through the drapes but you were on the couch, all lost in detective-like thought. I didn’t want to disturb.”

“Saw me when?”

“An hour ago?”

“Go back in the house,” he said, drawing his gun.

She did as she was told.

As he got closer, he saw that his front door was ajar.

He slowly pushed it open.

From the sofa, wrapped in darkness much like Elaine was, Annie said, “I’m running out of time—we both are. Soon all will be lost.”

Annie invited him to her Skid Row SRO. He didn’t want to go; he didn’t want any part of this phantom that had invaded his untidily tidy life. She looked ill and her frailty laid siege to Willow’s defenses—but that wasn’t what compelled him to obey. As they drove in silence, he remembered something from an AA meeting at a church in downtown Wickenburg, during his stay at the Meadows. A woman shared that a normie asked her why she drank. She surprised herself by answering, “Because I have to.”

Willow accepted the invitation because he had to.

Since their “official” meet-and-greet at Early World he’d done a lot of integrating, like it or not. During his workday, the conversation at the diner (hers, anyway, because she’d done all the talking) played nonstop in his head like esoteric Muzak; by night, it became a babble that disrupted his dreams. She’d had the audacity to announce to him his destiny—that he was to become midwife to wayward souls who returned, like so many pint-sized samurai, to dole out bloody, high-toned “moments of balance”! Apart from the complete, unfettered lunacy of it, the scenario sounded like nothing more than straight-up old-school revenge. He resisted succumbing to her bizarro entreaties and explanations, not wanting to sign up for her or anyone’s folie à deux.

Yet as days went by the mysterious world she spoke of became less far-fetched and the messenger took on indisputable gravitas. It wasn’t only that she spoke of the train he rode in his dreams night after night (he could actually remember her bringing snacks and Tom Collinses to his cabin); no, it went deeper. Annie told him secret things no one else in the world could have known. She knew everything about his experience as a boy at the time of his grandmother’s passing. All his life Willow had been hearing voices and communing with the dead. She told him that he possessed “powerful gifts,” and he couldn’t help getting puffed up when she said he’d been chosen to enlist in a strange mythology, one that would force him to swap the role of cowardly spectator for some kind of Joseph Campbell–sized uber-hero.

As batshit as it sounded, he couldn’t deny his excitation.

I invited you to my home because that’s what my mentor did. His name was Jasper—Jasper Kendrick Sebastian—and he ran a kind of boardinghouse for people like me. Like us. A place where Porters trained under one roof. I’m not sure such a thing exists anymore; that was a different time. But it’s always a different time, isn’t it? One day Jasper took me to his room . I thought he was up to something nefarious! See, I was still having all sorts of doubts, just like you. But when I sat at the edge of his bed—the place where he slept and dreamed—all those doubts left me, just drifted away. I finally stopped fighting, stopped trying to understand. We say ‘more shall be revealed,’ not ‘more shall be understood,’ no? We’re funny creatures. We buy a ticket on the train but don’t think to ask where the paper for the ticket came from. We don’t ask who set the price or how the engine operates or if the conductor will come to work. We never ask ‘Why?’—we don’t even want to know how it is that we awakened on that particular day and decided to take the train and not the bus—though we usually took the bus… all the dumb little things we never ask that come together to form ‘consensus reality.’ But aren’t there a multitude of other realities? Ones we never notice? Doesn’t that stand to reason? You see, we come to accept the world we live in, this world, and all of its phantasmagoric mysteries… but when presented with a new world, suddenly we’re afraid. And we foolishly go about trying to ‘understand’ it, to make sense of it. That’s how we adapt. When Jasper opened that new world to me, the world of the children, I became obsessed with understanding what it was all about. Which didn’t work out so well! So finally, in spite of myself, I surrendered. I stopped trying to ‘understand’—stopped wondering about my place in it. I stopped asking why the train existed and where it came from. How it ‘worked,’ why I’d been chosen …

“Those questions will fall away, Willow, I promise. You’ll come to see there are no answers, not to why the dance began or when it will end or who made the steps. You’ll stop asking why you have a certain partner—and when another dancer cuts in you won’t protest. You’ll just dance.”

He felt a preternatural sense of calm as she spoke and for a moment contrasted the stillness of the room with the sounds of the street, with the known world’s busy, beguiling banality.

“I didn’t have your strength, Willow. I didn’t have your special gifts. I certainly didn’t have your life experience! You were able to push away the voices you heard by sheer will—I know the booze and drugs helped—but I couldn’t, and the voices led me to Swarthmore, where I thank God Jasper found me. Once he took me in, I flourished. And there I was, released and rescued—saved!—but still I kept wondering, ‘What exactly is this strange man asking of me?’ Mind you, he’d been clear about the nature of my duties from the beginning: to orient and stabilize the children, to prepare them for their moment of balance . Nothing more, nothing less. But that wasn’t good enough! We are funny creatures, Willow. Mad, arrogant creatures. Even from my dingy, forgotten room at the hospital, I was arrogant.

“The day he invited me to his room, I surrendered. The most poignant thing”—she dabbed the wetness in her eyes—“the most poignant thing was that in an instant I became a mother. I couldn’t have children in this world but I became a fertile queen in that one, a mother to the lost boys and girls. And my heart rejoiced.”

Without warning, her demeanor became grave and her expression hardened. While she was speaking, Annie managed to summon a girlish youthfulness; now she looked sickly again, deathly so. Her features grew taut, the face floating before him like a memento mori. Her jaw began to clench and tic.

“But something has gone terribly wrong… Jasper warned it would happen when my Portership was ending. He said that was a dangerous time—when things would go ‘haywire.’ He was reluctant to say more but I saw in his face that he’d been through such a time himself. It was the only thing he couldn’t teach me and now I see why: it’s up to the Porter to set things right. The battle is his or hers alone and no one else can fight it.”

She leaned in close. He smelled her warm breath, fragrant with the spice of desperation.

“We need to move quickly! The train is about to derail—I worry that it already has. Only you can help the children already here. And the ones who are coming.”

“But what has gone terribly wrong?” said Willow, in alarm.

All of his doubts had dissolved and he was fully inside Annie’s dream.

“A brother and sister returned together , which has never happened… and one of my boys, Dabba Doo, has been here far too long—three times longer than he should, and that too has never occurred.” Willow flickered in and out. One moment he was all in; the next, he saw her as if through the wrong end of a telescope. “And worst of all,” she said, “I’ve begun asking myself those same useless questions again, the ones I had early in my apprenticeship. I know it’s the fault of ‘haywire’ but knowing doesn’t seem to make a whit of difference… I fear that I’m losing my faith, and I cannot afford for that to happen! I will not betray my mentor in such a way, nor will I betray you or the children under my care.” She took a deep breath that he imagined being her last. “You see, Willow, I’m not well—the truth is, I’m dying. That’s why you’ve come to me, to us. That’s why you’re here—”