Dark Rivers of the Heart

woman, "because it's best that you don't know my name."
        Harris considered keeping his silence, but he had no talent for deception. "I'm afraid that I recognize you, and I'm sure that my wife does as well."
        "Yes," Jessica confirmed.
        "We've eaten in your restaurant several times," Harris said, "up in West Hollywood. On most of those occasions, either you or your husband was greeting guests at the front door."
        She nodded and smiled. "I'm flattered that you would recognize me out of… shall we say, out of context."
        "You and your husband are so charming," Jessica said. "Not easy to forget."
        "How was dinner when you had it with us?"
        "Always wonderful."
        "Thank you. So kind of you to say so. We do try. But now I haven't had the pleasure of meeting your lovely daughters," said the restaurateur. She reached across the table to take each girl's hand.
        "Ondine, "'illa, my name is Mae Lee. It's a pleasure to meet you both, and I want you to be unafraid. You are in good hands now."
        The motor home pulled out of the restaurant parking lot, into the street, and away.
        "Where are we going?" Willa asked.
        "First, out of California," said Mae Lee. "To Las Vegas. Many motor homes crowd the highway between here and Vegas. We're just one more.
        At that point, I leave you, and you go on with someone else. Your father's picture will be all over the news for a time, and while they're telling their lies about him, you will all be in a safe and quiet place.
        You will change your looks as much as possible and learn what you will be able to do to help others like yourselves. You will have new names, first and middle and last. New hairstyles. Mr. Descoteaux, you might grow a beard, and you will certainly work with a good voice coach to lose your Caribbean accent, pleasant as it is to the ear. Oh, there will be many changes, and more fun than you imagine there could be now.
        And meaningful work. The world has not ended, Ondine. It has not ended, Willa. It's only passing through one edge of a dark cloud. There are things to be done to be sure that the cloud does not swallow us entirely. Which, I promise you, it will not.
        Now, before we begin, may I serve anyone tea, coffee, wine, beer, or a soft drink perhaps?" … bare-chested and barefoot, colder even than I was in the hot July night, I stand in the room of blue light, past the green chair and purple table, before the open door, determined to abandon this strange place, quit and race back up into the summer night, where a boy might become a boy again, where the truth which I don't know that I know can remain unknown forever Between one blink and another, however, as though transported by the power Of a magical incantation, I've left the blue room and have arrived in what must be the basement of an earlier barn that stood on a site adjacent to that which the current barn occupies.
        While the old barn above ground was torn down and the land was smoothed over and planted with grass, the cellars were left intact and were connected to the deepest chamber of the new barn.
        I'm again being drawn forward against my will. Or think that I am. But although I shudder in fear of some dark force that draws me, it's my own deeper need to know, my true will, that draws me. I've repressed it since the night my mother died.
        I'm in a curving corridor, six feet wide. A looping electrical cord runs along the center of the rounded ceiling. Low-wattage bulbs, like those on a Christmas tree are spaced a foot apart. The walls are rough red-black brick, sloppily mortared. The bricks are overlaid in places with patches and veins of stained white plaster as smooth and greasy as the marbling fat in a slab of meat.
        I pace in the curved passage, listening to my rampaging hart, listening to the unseen rooms ahead for a clue as to what might lie in wait for me, listening to the rooms behind for a voice to call me back to the safe world above. But there's no sound ahead or behind, only my heart, and even though I don't want to listen to the things it tells me, I sense that my heart has all the answers. In my heal, I know that the truth about my precious mother lies ahead and that what lies behind is a world which will never be the same for me again, a world which changed forever and for the worse when I walked out of it.
        The floor is stone. It might as