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"May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve."
~ Sappho
Nobody judges Lisa when she packs Ben and herself up and moves them back to Illinois. Her neighbors aren't sure whether they themselves want to stay in a neighborhood where such a violent break-in has occurred.
Her poor boyfriend, they say. Killed when trying to protect his girlfriend's home from burglars, had his spine broken and snapped, and all because he'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And so Lisa packs what the cops allow her to take from the crime scene, leaves her contact information, and drives back home to Illinois. She parks the car in front of a motel in the town where her sister lives, kills the engine, and has to focus on her breathing before waking Ben up and getting a room for the both of them.
"It's not for long," she tells Ben. "Just until we find a new place to live."
Ben's eyes have this haunted look in them that Lisa wishes she could take away. She wishes she could wipe the events of the past few days so that nothing had happened. Not only did he have to watch her get hit by a car, but the new home he'd only started to get used to had turned into a murder scene. While Ben might not have liked Matt, he hadn't disliked him enough to wish him dead.
Lisa bends and kisses the top of his head, then rests her chin against it. "Everything's going to be all right, you'll see," she says and tries to keep her own voice upbeat. She can't see his eyes from her position, but she doesn't think he believes her.
*
They find a place that's ten minutes by foot from her sister. It's a nice place: two floors, three bedrooms. It's closer to Debby than Lisa prefers, but considering the last place Lisa had chosen to live in, she doesn't think that being close to her sister is such a bad idea.
The cops release most of her property when they're done with the preliminary examination of the house in Michigan, so Lisa drives up there to take care of it.
She makes an interesting discovery when she's stripping her bedroom, putting clothes away in cardboard boxes and emptying her closet. At the back of it, somewhere behind her jackets and dresses and out of sight unless you knew it's there, she finds a shotgun.
She can't remember having put it there.
Lisa hesitates for quite some time before daring to touch it, but even then she only does so with the pads of her fingers and very far away from either the trigger or the muzzle; it's cold under her skin. When she pulls her hand away, it's covered with dust.
A moment later she touches it again -- this time reaching for the barrel and picking it with both her hands -- and stares. Eventually, once she's certain she doesn't know how it's gotten into her closet, she sets it on the bed with the muzzle pointing away from her.
The shotgun had been laid on top of a couple of shoeboxes. There are words written on the lids in a blocky print that's unfamiliar to her; the first one reads 'lead'. The other, 'rocksalt'.
She doesn't get it.
She cranes her neck so she has the bed in her sight with the shotgun lying on top of it, and then turns back to the shoebox labelled rocksalt. Having lead shells makes sense, and they really are lead: when she opens it and takes one of the shells apart, she finds the pellets to be a lead-like silvery gray. But the shells from the other shoebox are indeed filled with rocksalt: she licks some of the whitish material she finds in it - it's definitely salt.
Why would anybody fill shotgun shells with rocksalt?
It's the rocksalt that decides for her what she'll do with the shotgun. She never could resist a mystery.
*
Lisa gets a call from the cops who are working the break-in two days later, while she's in the middle of making dinner. She holds the phone between her ear and shoulder as she handles a skillet, and she wonders if it's about the shotgun. She shouldn't have taken it, should've given it to the police along with the shells she'd found, she shouldn't have taken it home with her like a stray pet she'd found in the street.
Jesus. She doesn't even know how to tell if it's loaded.
At least she's had the presence of mind to put the shotgun where Ben can't get to it.
"There are a few questions we'd like to ask you, ma'am," the speaker says after the introductions and pleasantries are done.
Her mouth is dry. "Yes?"
On the other side of the line, the officer hesitates before exhaling loudly. "Ma'am, are you in a cult?"
A heartbeat later, Lisa says, "I'm sorry?"
"We've come across some possible evidence in your house, and we need to know if you're the source for it--"
"What could possibly make you think I belonged to a cult?" she asks, dumbfounded.
"Like I've said, we've found some things in your house that--" but the officer doesn't manage to finish her sentence, because Lisa cuts her off, says, "I am not in any cult. I have never been in a cult and I never will. What did you find that makes you think I'm in a cult?", and the officer says at the same time, "Ma'am, please let me finish," and they both stop talking to draw in air at the same time, and so the only thing Lisa hears is the rush of blood in her ears.
She knows she's overreacting. She forces herself to draw in as much air as she can, to let it back out, to get her heart rate back under control. Every breath she takes, every muscle she unclenches -- they're all a struggle, a concentrated effort to not give the police any reason to suspect she's taken an illegal firearm that isn't hers from a murder scene.
"I'm sorry," she finally says. "No, I'm not in any cult. Can you tell me why you're asking?"
*
Once she's shooed Ben off to bed, Lisa hits the search engines. She's looking for any information about pentagrams and satanic cults, and if she thought Google could come up with an answer, she'd ask it how come a pentagram had ended up under her rug.
She comes across a bunch of articles about murder, animal abuse and blood drinking, some videos she'd have preferred not to have known existed, and a couple of sites that talked about demons and their weaknesses.
Both of them mention salt.
*
Ben doesn't know about the shotgun. She doesn't tell him about the pentagrams either, or about her increasingly bizarre browser history.
They both pick up on their old routines. Ben goes to school, comes back home, hangs out with friends and plays video games and does his homework. Lisa doesn't make a big deal when she finds out that his grades are slipping, but rather sits him down for a talk that if he needs help, she'll do anything in her power to give it.
Lisa gets a job at a new sports center and teaches both morning and evening classes. The students are all right, for the most part, but they keep their distance once class ends and don't try to draw Lisa into conversation.
At home it's cooking and cleaning and hanging out with Ben when he has the time for her, and every few days she spends the afternoon gossiping with her sister and cooing at her niece. Then it's back home, to the computer and TV and magazines, and she's never felt quite this lonely before.
*
"Mom, do you believe in God?"
Ben has been distracted the past few days. He'd been twitchy, talkative and quiet in turns. Lisa had known it would come out, eventually, and so she's been waiting. But she hasn't been expecting this.
She motions for Ben to take a seat next to her on the sofa, pats the fabric until he sits down, facing her. She turns to him in return, leans back into the corner between the arm- and backrest, and hugs her knees.
"What brought this on?" she asks once they're both settled comfortably. She remembers that he's asked her that once before, after he'd almost gotten caught in a fire in an abandoned house that he had been hanging around.
Ben shrugs. "I was just thinking."
Before Michigan, Lisa would've said that she didn't know what she believed in. She would've said that sometimes she thinks she does, but other times, she doesn't. She would've said that she has doubts. But that was then, and now is now, and she's got a different answer this time.
"Yes," she says. "I do." This time, she thinks she does. And this time she thinks it will stick.
*
Lisa's sister decides that enough is enough and that Lisa needs to get out of the house and relax. "I know Ben's at a friend's this weekend. I'm leaving Kate with George. You have fifteen minutes before I'm coming over and taking you out."
Lisa opens her mouth to protest, but clicks it shut again when her sister hangs up without waiting for her response. She glances at the clock and grimaces, because she has an idea where Debby is taking her, and fifteen minutes is pushing it.
Seventeen minutes later, Debby is honking for Lisa to come down. Lisa's putting the final touches on her makeup, and she's surprised that she remembers the steps and motions for using it.
"Been a while since we've done this," Debby says and starts the car. Lisa hums her agreement and leans her head against the headrest. Debby glances at her from the corner of her eye. "You don't seem too happy about going."
"No," Lisa says. "You're right. I need to get out. It's just--" Her throat tightens around the words.
Debby finishes for her. "Since Matt."
"Since Matt," Lisa agrees. She still finds it painful to think about him, about his enthusiasm and his kindness, how he hadn't minded Ben. His patience, his hugs, his smiles. "I miss him," she says.
There's an ache in her heart that pulses, a hole so acute that she sometimes forgets it's there. But every once in a while it flares up, squeezes until she finds it hard to breathe. Whenever that happens, she climbs up a stool to the shelf where she keeps her whiskey and pours herself a couple of fingers, and she sits by herself at the kitchen table and nurses it for however many hours it takes for the pain to abate.
*
The bar Debby takes her to is the one they'd always gone to when they were younger. Mostly before Lisa had had Ben and Debby had met George and had her own baby, but even after, the place has proved itself to be where they can wind down.
The lighting is soft, and the music is loud enough for some dancing but low enough for speaking. The place is small, and Lisa remembers the days that it didn't even have a bathroom, but that was a long time ago. There are two large television screens in the place, each showing a different channel, and both are muted.
Lisa and Debby head for the bar and snag two vacant chairs. They drape their jackets over the backrests, and they both already know what the other will order. (Lisa will go with a beer from the tap. Debby will order rum and diet coke, and will drink less than half of it, because she's going to have to drive them both back.) Their silence, overcast by the beat of the music, is familiar and soothing for Lisa, and she's already starting to feel the weight slide off her shoulders.
In less than five minutes they fall back into the pattern of bantering that they've perfected over the years. Lisa is smiling, and she can see the men looking at her, and her smile's becoming wider. She's not ready, not yet, but it feels so good to know that if she let herself, she could still be wanted.
She can't pinpoint the moment the atmosphere changes, but one by one, the people on the dance floor stop moving. They're congregated around one of the TVs, gaping, and eventually one of them says loudly enough to reach them over the music, "Christ."
Lisa glances at Debby and then at the bartender, and her mouth falls open as she sees the other TV, right behind the bartender, and there's text scrolling at the bottom of it. "Oh my God," she shakily lets out.
The music stops abruptly, and in its place is the careful intonation of a newscaster, saying, "Dozens of religious leaders have been murdered by a man claiming to be God, some of them in front of their own congregations. Witnesses say the priests have literally keeled over without the man ever touching him. We have one of the the eyewitnesses here with us, a Ms. Garner, who describes a white man in a trenchcoat--"
Lisa shoots off the barstool and gets out of the bar. Debby is hot on her heels, holding both their jackets over one hand and their purses in the other, and she's calling out for Lisa to stop and wait.
Lisa stops half a block away from the bar. She does that because her heels hurt, she's short of breath, and she's found a street bench she can sit on. She's cold: her breath is clouding around her. She doesn't know what's just happened, but she's scared.
She's scared.
Lisa doesn't do scared. She's always felt in control of her life, had always known that things will work out. She knows that she's got a sister who loves her and wants to help her, and a son who feels the same, and she knows she loves them more than anything. Her life used to make sense, and now it's all ghosts and demons and people just falling over dead.
Not so much sense in that, anymore.
*
The first thing Lisa does when she gets home is take her shoes off. The second thing she does is limp upstairs and take the shotgun out of where she's hidden it in her current closet. Her hold on it is still hesitant and unsure, but she forces herself to not let go.
Under it are the two shoeboxes with the shells. She stares at them. One says 'lead'. The other, 'rocksalt'. She thinks she understands the rocksalt now. She still doesn't know what the shotgun was doing in her closet and how it had gotten there, but it means something. She's been doing enough reading to get a hint of what's out there.
Lisa deliberates for a very short time before making her decision and tightening her hold on the shotgun.
She used to have Matt. she still has her son, and her sister, and her sister's family. And she intends to keep them.