The Darkest Evening of the Year

fading. They are going away awhile to do something, she doesn’t know what, but she can tell.
    When Mother comes back, she will have the knife. The knife is going to be with her from now on. Until she uses it.
    All things work out for the best, hard as that is to believe.
    That’s what Bear said. And Bear knew things. Bear wasn’t dumb like Piggy. But Bear is dead.

 
    PART THREE

    “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep.”
    —R OBERT F ROST
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

 
    Chapter
51
    T he first one out of bed, at a quarter to six, Amy showered and dressed. She fed Nickie and took her for a walk while Brian prepared for the day.
    The sun hadn’t appeared with the dawn. Gray clouds smeared the sky. They looked greasy.
    In the oceanside park, the immense old palm trees barely stirred in a breeze as languid as the ocean off which it came. As if wounded, colorless waves crawled to shore and expired on sand ribboned with rotting seaweed.
    When you believe life has meaning and can glimpse patterns that seem to suggest design, you risk seeking signs instead of waiting to receive them as a grace. Omens seem to be scattered as extravagantly as litter in the wake of a wind storm, and in the rain of reckless imagination, portents spring up in mushroom clusters.
    After the telephone call from Sister Jacinta, Amy did not trust herself, for the time being, to recognize the difference between a true pattern and a fancy, between a significance and an iffiness. The coincidence of Nickie’s name, her behavior, the business with the slippers, Theresa’s reference to wind and chimes—all of that had been peculiar, suggestive, but not clearly evidence of otherworldly forces at work. A phone call from a dead nun, however, qualified as a higher order of the fantastic, and you tended thereafter to see portentous messages in every face that Nature turned toward you.
    Movement drew her eye to a rat that scurried up the bole of a great phoenix palm and disappeared into the fringe of folded dead fronds beneath the green crown.
    A rat was a symbol of filth, decay, death.
    Here, on the sidewalk, a large black beetle lay on its back, legs stiff, and swarming ants fed on the leakage from it.
    And here, beside a trash can with a gated top so loose that it creaked even in the sea’s faint exhalation, lay an empty bottle of hot sauce with a skull and crossbones on the label.
    On the other hand, three white doves arrowed across the sky, and seven pennies were arranged on the rim of a drinking fountain, and on a bench lay a discarded paperback titled Your Bright Future.
    She decided to let Nickie’s instincts guide her. The dog sniffed everything, fixated on nothing, and exhibited no suspicion. By the golden’s example, Amy found her way to a less fevered interpretation of every shape and shadow, and then to a disinterest in signs.
    In fact, skepticism crept over her, and she began to question whether the conversation with Sister Jacinta had actually occurred. She could have dreamed it.
    She thought she had awakened from a nightmare of wings moments before the phone rang, but maybe she only moved from a dream of Connecticut to a dream of a dialogue with a ghost.
    After the call, she had faced Nickie, put her arm around the dog, and had gone to sleep again. They had awakened together in that cuddle. If the call only happened in a dream, she had merely turned to Nickie in her sleep.
    By the time Amy returned to the motel room, she had decided not to tell Brian about Sister Mouse. At least not yet. Maybe when they were on the road.
    Before he had gone to bed the previous night, Brian had sent an e-mail to Vanessa. While Amy had been walking Nickie, Vanessa sent a reply.
    She gave the address of a restaurant in Monterey at which she wanted Amy and Brian to have lunch.
    They grabbed breakfast at a fast-food joint and ate on the move again, northbound on Highway 101. They should be in Monterey by noon.
    For the first three hours, Brian drove. He said little, and most of the time he stared at the road ahead with a grim expression.
    Although he was eager to gain custody of his daughter, he must be worried about the condition in which he would find her and about how much she might hold him responsible for her suffering.
    Amy tried more than once to lure him out of the glum currents of his thoughts, but he rose to the conversation only briefly