Chapter 34
EIGHT DAYS LEFT
For the next few months, I lost myself in research.
I studied every interview Belle had ever given, every televised performance, every word she’d ever said, for clues. I combed every album line by line, but especially, of course, The Cursed Woman. There was one line in particular from “Mountain Girl” that I kept coming back to:
In the hidden cave where we worship the Lord,
The preacher points and thunders,
Cast out her demon with your sword,
Cast it out, tear her asunder
Could this mean a church in an actual cave? That couldn’t have been common. And yet, all of my searches only returned results from places like Hungary or Bulgaria. Perhaps the cave was only a metaphor.
But sometimes it felt like she was speaking directly to me in these songs, and this was one of those moments—there was something important here, I could feel it.
I looked into the secret songs Hess had mentioned, and I found no reference to them anywhere, not even in the most obscure of the conspiracy feeds.
When I brought them up again to Hess, she said she’d never heard them and didn’t know where they were, but that Clayton would know.
I tried him yet again, and again, he didn’t return my call.
I also delved deeper into the circumstances of the plane crash, and I kept coming back to this notion: Why did she get in that plane? Had she been forced somehow? Or was it her escape plan? Did she think she’d be safer in the air? I still had so many questions and so few answers.
Most nights I only slept for a few hours on the couch in the basement.
Micah was set to have an exhibition at the Corning Museum of Glass in the summer—the highest honor for a glassblower—and he barely left his studio either.
All I had to do to seem normal was make an appearance here and there, put together a simple meal, pretend to have slept in the guest room to “avoid disturbing him,” all while reassuring him that I was fine by myself and happy to support him however he needed.
This was the life we’d agreed to—if we could not have children, we could be people who sometimes lost themselves in their work.
But in the pit of my stomach, I knew I was running out of time. I knew it, and I also didn’t know it, as time had begun to slip away from me. Sometimes weeks would pass, and I couldn’t recall their events.
And then one morning, I went on a rare walk outside. I thought being out in nature would give me the answers, that I’d been ignoring this essential fact by squatting in the basement.
But everywhere I walked, I saw bright, blinding figures in my periphery, disappearing every time I turned to see them. My head ached, as if I’d been staring into the sun.
When I came home, Micah’s car was in the driveway. A strange sight in the daylight. When I walked inside the house, he wasn’t in the kitchen or the bedroom. And then I realized where he must be.
I dashed down the stairs to the basement and found him standing in front of one wall covered in printed pages of song lyrics, each so meticulously noted in my cramped black writing that you could barely read the lyrics themselves.
He turned and looked at me with this expression that I didn’t recognize and couldn’t read, as if I’d replaced my knowledge of him.
He moved unspeaking to another wall, the one that I knew would be most damning.
I had drawn a four-foot-tall image of the tree from my mushroom vision, the one I assumed my grandmother had died in on the side of the road.
I had also drawn the man in the white suit and the white dog, though these were smaller and accompanied by printed sketches I’d found online, of similar men in white suits and white dogs other people had seen and believed to be the devil.
“What is this?” he asked.
I swallowed hard. Maybe this time he would believe me.
Maybe all I needed was to trust him. “Remember when I told you about the memory I recovered about the family curse? Well, I’ve been doing a lot of research, and I think it might be real.
I know it sounds insane, but if you’ll just let me show you—”
His face drained, and I stopped talking. “Oh, Rhea,” he whispered.
My stomach dropped, and I was afraid to speak again for fear of incriminating myself further. No matter what I said, I knew he wouldn’t believe me now.
“How long have you been working on this?” he asked, but I stayed quiet.
He continued to walk around, glancing over my map of the mountains with the tiny towns labeled, documents from the crash, the picture of my mother from Austin with the shadows on her chest blown up to try to make out any detail.
He went upstairs without another word, and I stayed in the basement, shaking, unsure of what to do.
I could hear him on the phone, but the sound was too muffled to make out the words.
I’m not sure how long he was up there, but eventually he came back down, his face now set in an unflinching expression.
“I found you an in-patient facility. It’s very nice. Highest rated in the state. We’ll check in tomorrow morning.”
Here was the man I had loved since I was a child, the man I had built a world with, who had loved me in spite of everything. And he wanted to lock me up. Trap me in a place where I couldn’t escape, with people who wouldn’t believe me. It was a greater nightmare than the curse itself.
“I know it’s not what you want, but I can’t handle this by myself. You need real help.” His voice cracked. “I can’t let what happened to my brother happen to you. I can’t do it, Rhea. I love you too much.”
I could see it in his eyes—I had become what he’d always feared. Another damaged person who would leave him. He no longer saw that person I’d wanted to be for him, the person I’d told myself I was for years. That was all over now.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll be better,” I pleaded.
“No. Not this time. You have to go.”
I imagined being lashed to a hospital bed, completely powerless to stop the curse. I only had eight days before my 33rd birthday. I couldn’t waste another minute researching online and pretending it wasn’t coming. It was time to act now—before it was too late.
“If you won’t go willingly, I will have you committed. I don’t want to do that.” His voice faltered a bit, but he pulled himself together. “But I will. I can’t let this happen again. I won’t survive it.”
It was then that I shut down completely. This was about my survival. Nothing else. I would pretend to go along with Micah’s plan, and I would escape before he had a chance to trap me. I couldn’t think about him or anyone else. I had precious little time left.
I stepped toward him and looked him in the eye. “Okay, I’ll go.”
He exhaled. “Thank you.” He closed the gap between us and wrapped his arms around me. “You are still you. You are still the same person I fell in love with. I can see it. It’s going to be okay.”
If only that could have been true, I would have given up anything. Instead, I squeezed him hard, knowing it might be the last time.
That night, I listened breathlessly outside of his room. When I heard his snoring even out to a rhythmic sawing, I quietly picked up the bag I’d pretended to pack for the treatment center, tiptoed down the stairs, and slipped soundlessly out the front door.
I walked for an hour to a Walmart in the next neighborhood and used their half-broken pay phone to call a taxi from a number I’d scrawled on a piece of paper. I’d left my dead phone at the bottom of a box of cereal Micah hated, and I doubted if anyone would ever find it.
While I waited for the taxi, I went inside and browsed the hair aisle, searching for a wig.
When I found only hairpieces, I went up and down the aisles until I spotted a small costume section near the sewing supplies.
There was one long, voluminous blonde wig and another of the same in brunette.
I selected the blonde, picked up a prepaid phone, paid for both with cash, then locked myself in the bathroom.
I put on the wig and stared at myself in the mirror, the blonde strands glowing under the fluorescents like they were radioactive. I’d selected this shade because it was the furthest from my dark copper as I could get, but now I saw the strangeness of the choice.
Even when I tried to disappear, it somehow came back to her.
Outside, I got into the taxi idling by the entrance and gave him the address to the Amtrak station in Maricopa. I looked in the rearview mirror, searching the driver’s eyes to see if he could be trusted.
But in the dark interior, the glass showed only the outline of a blonde woman sitting in the backseat, haloed in desert neon.