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"Come to me, Kate."
(it starts as a whisper in her ear when she wakes. she doesn't think anything of it; leftover remnants from a dream she can't remember. the more she tries to recall the exact words, the harder it becomes. they scatter with the rest of the strange thoughts that plague her sleep.)
-
Mexico.
Something about Mexico doesn't sit right. The moment her dad tells her that's where they're going - But where in Mexico? she pushes; Wherever the Lord leads us, is all she gets - her insides twist and writhe, as if her belly is full of snakes.
Bethel is home. Bethel is friends and school and church and Kyle and all that's left of Momma.
Mexico is...distance. Isolation.
"Come to me," rings in her ears, a bothersome sense of deja vu that she tries to pass off as her brain playing tricks on her. Kate does not want to remember that dream (or was it a nightmare?).
-
"I need you."
(it comes to her again, the first time she dozes off in the back of the RV; it lingers this time, the words and the images that heat her cheeks more than the sweltering sun could. she tells herself it’s outside influences causing her to dream of someone touching her, kissing her, feeling her everywhere; tells herself it’s those outside influences making her dream of being with a woman. she tells herself she doesn't really see women that way, but it's not easy ignoring the ache between her legs.)
"Come to me, Kate."
-
When Kate was fifteen her friend Emily confessed that she had been having inappropriate thoughts about other girls. Kate had held her friend while Emily sobbed and begged Kate not to judge her, not to tell anyone.
Begged for forgiveness because it was Kate she thought of most often.
They had prayed together that day. But Kate stopped texting Emily, stopped hanging out with her. She put up an invisible, nearly tangible barrier between herself and her friend, and she'd prayed for the Lord's forgiveness that she wasn't able to overcome her own weakness.
It was better for them both that she keep her distance. It was better that she focus on her crush on Kyle Winthrop, ignore the strange feelings she got when she met Emily's eyes and knew Emily desired her.
Ignored the fact that part of her, the same weak flesh that Emily struggled with, desired Emily, too.
-
Mexico is calling.
Maybe that's why Kate doesn't want to go. Maybe that's why she tries to run, asks Kyle to take her home, back to Bethel where everything is familiar and safe. Maybe that's how she convinces herself that if she goes back, she can ignore the dreams - are they even dreams if she sees them when she's wide awake? - once she's home, safe and sound.
But Mexico is calling, whispering to her; every time she looks out at the horizon ahead, it pulls at her. Like the voice inside her head, telling her she's needed. Like fingers stroking her hair and red lips against her temple, promising her the wrong kind of acceptance.
Kate prays and reads the verses Kyle sends her. Tries to focus on the solace they're meant to provide. She deletes them not long after she sends him away - after he snaps, after he scares her, attacks her dad. Kate doesn't understand what's going on anymore, so she prays - Just make it stop, help me to know how to fight it, she begs. Just let it be a test, Lord.
"Kate."
It's not real, she tells herself.
"He isn't what you truly want, Kate. What you need."
It's her.
The nameless woman that calls to her, infiltrates her sleep, her prayers; dark eyes are staring back at her from the mirror in the cramped bathroom of the RV. She's more than the dulled beauty of Kate's sleep-blurred recollection - she's stunning. Striking. The vision of her takes Kate's breath away and flushes her face bright red with shame and desire.
Kate feels sick.
"Don't be scared. I can help you." The woman places her hands against the glass, as if it was a window and not a mirror, a barrier keeping her trapped on the other side. "Find me, and I will make everything clear again."
No, Kate tries but can't manage to speak. She doesn't like these words; they feel like hooks, trying to drag her from all she believes in.
"Set me free, Kate. Set me free, and I will do the same for you."
Kate recoils from the mirror and closes her eyes, sits on the toilet and clasps her hands together, and prays more, prays harder, tries to block out all her doubts and confusion. She frantically whispers the Lord's Prayer. When she looks back at the mirror, it's still not her reflection looking back.
The woman smiles at her; it's almost pitying.
-
Please, if these images are a sign, make them clearer, Lord.
-
(the visions are sporadic, unwanted guests showing up whenever they please, whenever she pleases. sometimes it's just her - calling to Kate and making her feel that awful confusion. sometimes it's a flood of images flashing through her mind; blood, snakes, a screaming girl, walls closing in around her, sunlight searing her skin. she always thought as a true believer she was safe from being invaded by demons, but now Kate isn't so sure.)
"I will welcome you into my arms, Kate. No more confusion."
(she prays. consoles herself with the thought that she can still hold her Bible, still wear her cross. it's weakness is all this is; it's sin; it's confusion and grief and anger. it's all her questions being shot down. it's the rifts between her and Daddy and Scott, the gaping hole left by Momma. it's being torn from home, it's her growing bond with Kyle and the remnants of what she felt for Emily. it's hormones and the devil; this isn't her, she tells herself. this isn't really her.)
"You cannot deny your true self and still find happiness. Come to me. Set me free - and I will give you what you need."
(she remembers the old saying, 'Suffering brings us closer to God,' but she's never felt this far away)
-
Please, if these images are a sign, make them clearer, Lord.
She keeps repeating that plea and reminding herself of the people in the Bible who had visions, who the Lord spoke to in so many different ways. She thinks of Joan of Arc, and wonders if this is how confusing it was for her at first - or was it always clear, was she always certain it was God?
Please, if these images are a sign, make them clearer.
-
Mom was always good at listening without preaching; it might have been why Scott was closer to her than to Kate or their dad. Sometimes Kate needed that, too - needed to confide without being judged, needed advice without a sermon.
She never told her mother about Emily though, never told another human soul, only God.
But she went to her mother not long after and talked about confusion, struggling with temptation, and how much harder it felt sometimes as she got older. She had sat on the bed while her mom brushed her hair and listened, and then Momma had smiled while Kate had talked herself out, and told her that life was hard for everyone.
Kate remembers how Momma looked like she wanted to cry when she said that, remembers thinking of how much her mother struggled with her migraines, and Kate had hugged her mother then, saying thank you and promising, 'I'll always remember you in my prayers.'
(Kate sees her mother curled on the bed that night, sobbing and calling herself a coward - 'I lied. I lied right to my own daughter's face.' - and Kate wants to scream because this isn't real, it isn't real!)
"You cannot ignore illness, Kate. You cannot cover wounds with pages of a book, no matter how holy."
-
She needs to go home. The farther they drive from Bethel, the farther she feels from God. She had thought...she had thought after her crisis of faith when she was fifteen, after renewing her belief and coming to realize it was okay that she and Daddy didn't always see eye to eye, after the epiphany that God loved her, even if she stumbled and faltered, that she would never be far from Him again. She had thought her connection to Him unshakable.
But it almost feels like He went back to Bethel with Kyle. She wants to scream at Daddy - 'Is this what you wanted? For all of us to lose faith?' - but she doesn't, because she hasn't lost faith. As long as she doesn't say it out loud.
She hasn't lost faith.
-
She's stopped trying to tell herself the messages are from Him. No matter how fluid her own spirituality has grown in comparison to Daddy's strict, binding preachings, these are not coming from Heaven. That woman is not an angel, and Kate never really believed she was.
(it would be so much easier if she had.)
-
"I'm going to help you, Kate."
Fingers stroke her hair, caress her neck. That voice is nothing but sin, invading her, filling her up.
"Your father is a liar. You want answers? Want to know what he's running from? Remember the words from your God's book - seek."
Kate glances at Scott, horrified to find he doesn't notice the woman beside her. She doesn't know when the woman broke through the barrier of mirrors and glass and visions inside Kate's mind, but she can feel breath on her skin and a body against hers.
"Seek, and ye shall find."
Like exhaling a lungful of smoke, the woman and everything she inspires in Kate is gone.
"I need air. I need to check on Dad," she mutters and rushes out of the RV, pacing briskly towards the bar. God, please see me through, she pleads, because she doesn't have any answers for what's going on, no verses come to mind that offer any comfort - though she's thought of some that sound like damnation.
"Look in the luggage compartment, Kate."
She whirls, expecting the woman to be standing behind her. There's no one, just Scott sitting inside the RV.
"You'll find some answers there. Ones you won't get from your father or from prayers."
Kate wants to scream - 'Shut the fuck up!' - but she won't, she can't. That isn't her. She's slipped before, said curse words, minor ones. But she won't, she can't give this...this demon the satisfaction. Can't give into temptation like that.
Even so, she stares at the luggage compartment door.
-
Words are powerful - this is something Kate knows intimately, more than she even realizes. Words can be weapons, and when she reads the report, reads the truth - or at least fragments of - those words become sand, pouring down on her and burying her under confusion, anger, grief, unanswered questions that are heavy as a loaded gun in her hands.
And she sees her mother coming undone, and she sees her father behind the wheel, and she hears the crash - and then it's gone, it's not that night anymore. It's just her standing outside the RV holding a piece of paper that cut her open like a dagger.
-
(she wants to reach out to Scott, wants to tell him what she found out, what's been happening to her. but like the disconnect with her faith, she feels an ever expanding gap between them that is unwanted, yet feels uncontrollable. withdrawing from Daddy is a conscious decision, but not Scott.)
"Can you risk their rejection, Kate?"
(she tries to convince herself that Scott wouldn't; Daddy might, but Scott wouldn't. Scott would understand. maybe it would bring them closer.)
"Or maybe it will drive you further apart. Maybe it will drive him away completely, if he knew what your father was hiding, about all the things you're seeing. About me."
(she just wants it all to go away, but she stares out into the distance and sees nothing but withering bodies and snakes slithering over them. she chokes back a scream when they reach for her, calling her name, and she could swear one of them is her mother.)
"Something is coming, little one. Your father, your brother, your prayers cannot protect you. I can."
-
"You okay?"
That it isn't her voice is perhaps what startles Kate the most.
He's just standing there, staring. In a suit. In this heat, by the pool. He's handsome and a little creepy, and Kate suddenly feels far too exposed.
"I'm fine."
It's a lie. She isn't fine. Hasn't been for...she can't remember how long now. She isn't even sure she was ever fine to begin with. Not with the word manslaughter branded forever in her memory; not with the visions and the woman chasing after her, never letting her go.
Rising from the pool, she feels his eyes on her the whole time - but when she sets foot on the concrete patio and turns towards him, she has to stare blank-faced as the woman drapes her arms over him.
She looks at Kate and smiles.
"He will bring you to me."
Kate quickly grabs her towel and holds the panic down. She's not going to freak out, she's not going to crack - she's going back to the room, even though she can barely stand to look at her father right now, it's better than this, better than being around some creepy stranger in a suit that her vision likes.
"Don't be afraid, Kate," she murmurs, now next to Kate. "He will bring you to me, and then you will have all your answers. No more confusion."
The strong smell of cigarette smoke drags her out of her daze, and Kate glances, tempted to ask, wanting to just be a little normal - don't normal teenage girls smoke even when they shouldn't? Aren't normal teenage girls a little rebellious? She's sometimes a little rebellious, only a little. She remembers the first time she tried one of those, how it was awful but exciting, though she'd later prayed that God wouldn't hold it against her. She remembers her friends saying it helped with stress - but now she's so scared, so confused. Kate bows her head, away from his gaze and the harsh sun; she isn't sure a little rebellion is something she needs.
"Sure you're ok?" Now he's standing closer, though she didn't notice him approaching - for a moment she wonders if this is really just another vision. And she should be scared, but something about him feels not familiar - just, similar. Like a kindred spirit.
"Do you ever feel like, your life and everything in it is just, slowly turning upside down, like a ship flipping over in the ocean?" she finds herself asking as she sits, as though compelled by some other will than her own. Or maybe it's all her, maybe this similarity she somehow feels with this stranger is making thoughts come tumbling out because despite all the things she keeps to herself her quota of secrets is becoming overwhelming.
"You've no idea." He smiles, and it's a charming, and she likes his voice. He sits next to her, a little awkward in the black suit on a bleached white plastic lounge chair. "When I saw you floating, it was like you were bleeding. Like you were hurting on the inside. So, you sure you're okay?"
She almost asks him if he's a Mormon, he looks like one. Or maybe a traveling preacher, or a Bible salesman, a missionary in the US - and she wishes so much that was the case, because she could use some guidance from an outside source, from someone who doesn't know her or her daddy or her family history. But somehow she knows that it isn't.
He's none of those things, not even close.
"How could you know?"
"I see things. I see a lot of things. And I think I see the truth."
Truth. Kate could use a little truth. Truth and clarity. She doesn't believe in psychics - before she didn't believe in visions in this day and age, not ones that meant anything, that weren't the result of drugs or maybe serious devil worship - but she wants to ask him what else he sees when he sees her. She starts to, the question on the tip of her tongue.
But the woman is there, her face beside his, and she smiles. "Trust him, Kate. Let him bring you to me, and I will give you all the truth and clarity you need."
"I have to go." She all but jumps from her chair and rushes back towards her room.
She doesn't hear him following.
-
Please, God, let this be a test.
(if it's a test, it’s one hell of a test, and she isn't sure why she has to take it.)
-
Richie scares her. Both of these men scare her. But the way Richie looks at her - through her - like he can see the woman she can't escape. He said he could see things. Is that what he sees when he looks at her? The woman always with her, inside her head, bleeding her faith out like a wound that's only on the inside?
"Don't be afraid."
There are hands on her shoulders, gentle, comforting. Everyone acts as though she isn't in the room, isn't sitting behind Kate. If Richie notices, he doesn't say a word, but his eyes are flickering, and Kate wonders; maybe he has noticed.
It almost scares her more than the thought that the woman is only in her head. If they both see her - doesn't that make her real?
"Be calm, Kate. They are going to bring you to me. And then no more confusion." Her mouth is at Kate's ear; everything inside is writhing like snakes. "We will be together."
Kate stares at her hands, freaked out to the point of anger, and recites any and all Bible verses that come to mind, trying to put up a barrier, trying to reconnect with her Savior. She doesn't feel those hands on her anymore, but she isn't certain it was the verses that drove them away or if it's to let her hear Seth explain the plan.
-
Everything feels like it's happening around her, not to her; it's like watching her life unfold as a play. She's merely going through the motions. She feels like a puppet, someone - something - else in control of it all.
Despite all the Bible verses her mind's going through right now, Kate feels shame form a knot in her stomach. She's not sure she can believe it's Him behind all of this anymore.
-
"Can you really see things?"
"Only when I look."
There's a wail lodged in her throat; she hasn't been looking, it's not her fault, it can't be her fault.
-
(every time she closes her eyes now the world goes black and silent, and she can feel the cool scales of snakes slithering over and around her body. they're hissing, tongues flicking against her skin. there's something long moving down her throat, she can't breathe, she can't breathe, she can't -)
"That was a cruel and ugly thing to do to an innocent girl."
-
"Kate."
Richie is watching them, gun on the table. A silent, visual threat.
The woman wants her to trust him, stay with him, let him lead her away from all she knows, all she believes - and Kate wonders if she should have gone with Kyle even after what he did.
"Kate!" It's Scott whispering her name now, not some imaginary voice in her head, dragging her out of the dark places filling up her mind. He puts a hand over hers. "You look like you're gonna be sick."
Kate stares at her brother and wants to nod and shout, 'Yes! I feel sick! I feel sick and wrong and like I'm losing my mind!' but she doesn't, can't. She has to keep it together. Has to be calm, grounded, can't do anything to make either of these guys snap. She can't lose her brother or her dad, not now.
It might be worse if that happened now, when everything is so messed up, than if they were happy and connected again.
"I'm just...overwhelmed," she says instead - at least it isn't a lie. Keeps her voice steady and manages a tiny, half-hearted smile.
Scott studies her - but there's something in his eyes, something strong, angry, caged. Her brother feels like he's nothing but barely contained energy, on the verge of snapping. His eyes go red when they shift towards Richie, and his hand begins to move from hers to his bag between them.
(gunshots ring in her ears, and someone - she thinks it's herself - is screaming as blood covers her, as the RV flips, as she wakes crushed under its weight, and Momma is there with her, smiling.)
She clutches Scott's hand tightly with both of hers.
Richie is looking at something that isn't there - maybe he's seeing, maybe he's seeing her. Maybe he'll keep her attention away from Kate, maybe she will keep his attention away from them.
Don't.
"Don't, Scott," she pleads with him, quiet as a church mouse.
Do as they say, and you will be safe.
"If we just, do as they say, we'll be safe."
He will kill you if you try.
"He'll kill you if you try anything."
Scott wants to argue - she sees it in the way he tries to pull his hand from her but leans over to whisper, the hard stare he's fixed on her, the anger tightening his features. "We can't let them get away with this."
Is it worth the risk?
"Is it really worth the risk?" Kate glances at Richie, watches his eyes move in their direction, head turning after, as if delayed. "We'll be okay." She smiles at Scott, silently pleads with her brother, tries to reform the severed connection - and she knows it's partly her fault, knows she hasn't been there, knows that she's been retreating deeper inside herself.
"Whatever." He glares at Richie, leaning back - and away from her. It's momentary defeat, not surrender. He leaves his hand in her grip.
The rift is still there. Kate doesn't know how to bridge it.
-
(it's too crowded in the tiny bathroom, Richie and Seth are too close, Scott and Daddy too far away in the front seats. it's too easy to close her eyes and let long arms, too slender and careful to be either of the brothers, wrap around her.)
"You're almost home, Kate."
(it isn't real, but she feels like she's somewhere dark and winding and never ending; she feels those arms cradle her, that mouth kiss her cheek - she doesn't open her eyes.)
"I know you're scared. I know you feel lost, but I will help you. Come to me, Kate. Help me, and I will help you."
(and it's so easy - it hasn't been easy until now, but Kate feels worn down and stretched thin and far from her Savior - to just let go, fall back into those arms and pretend this is where she really is. wouldn't it be so much better if it were. maybe instead of going back to Bethel she could have run away to start over, shed good, devout Kate who was only a little rebellious and only a little naughty, give into some temptations, taste what the other side is like. maybe go back to Emily and kiss her like she'd told herself she never really wanted to. maybe it's best that she didn't go with Kyle, maybe this move was a good idea, maybe this new start is what she needs.)
"So close, Kate. You're so close to me."
(part of her resents Seth dragging her out of those arms, that dark corridor, out of the bathroom.)
-
Mexico.
It's screaming her name.
Guilt and shame are crawling all over her skin, underneath it, like thousands of tiny insects, centering on her chest just below her collarbone, where her cross hangs like a noose.
Please, Lord, let this be a test. Give me the strength to pass it.
They're in Mexico.
Seth and Richie are thrilled, and Scott and Daddy are silent, forlorn, and Kate - Kate is nothing but weakness and want and all the nastiness that comes with doubts and second guesses, wanting to run back into the bathroom and hoping she's there waiting, wanting to drop to her knees and beg for forgiveness.
Praying isn't making anything clearer.
Scripture isn't offering any illuminations.
And everything is screaming her name, calling out to her, telling her to keep going, she's almost there. Everything is whispering now, hissing to her a language she doesn't know yet somehow understands.
Santanico is waiting.