The Accidental Siren

9.5 Night Terrors and the Flooded Confessional

The water tower loomed dark and terrible above our heads. Brambles tugged at our skin and branches hunted our vulnerable eyes. The storm was on top of us now, wailing like a hundred dying cats, splitting the sky with silver streaks and threatening to finish us off.

Mara led me south, along the base of the hill instead of up. Minutes later we were out of the woods and hiking the naked side of the dune.

Our shoes filled with sand in seconds. Mara kicked hers off without stopping. I had to kneel, untie my laces, heave them from my sticky feet, and run to catch up.

I was ten steps away from a heart attack when we finally reached the mesa. Dots of blood formed a neat row along my thigh. Somehow, sand was crusted between my underwear band and skin.

Mara battled the tempest and circled the water tower. A fence surrounded the perimeter but seemed useless considering the graffiti encasing the lower half of the monolith. I scanned the spray-painted inscriptions and knew where I was. This was a skater hangout. A concrete path (it couldn’t be called a road) descended the back side of the hill and skateboarders used it to show off their skills. Rumor was, the metal tower was electrified. If you threw rocks at it, they’d explode.

But Mara didn’t care about the water tower. She kicked around wet pebbles, squished mud through her bare toes, searching for the patch of holy ground where a miracle would happen.

She found her spot in a shuddering patch of Purple Loosetrife; weeds as tall as she was, red and violet flowers in symmetrical clumps, holding fast despite the wind.

Mara bent her neck and searched the sky.

I ran to her side but she held up her hand. “Stay back, James!” she shouted over the gale.

Sand pummeled my arms and stung my cheeks. “Is it here?” I yelled.

Her eyes twitched in the blistering sand, but she didn’t blink. “Make the best movie you can!” she said.

“Is it time?” I screamed.

“Tell Whitney he's a good kid! Tell him that someday, he'll find his soul mate!”

Lightning struck the tip of the tower and surged like a ball of tinfoil in my chest. I dropped to the mud. I closed my eyes but could still see the bolt.

Mara stretched her arms to the clouds. I scrambled backward as the tempest overtook my girlfriend.

Her fists clenched. Her heels lifted. The veins in her neck tightened like the roots of a tree.

The storm climaxed with Mara Lynn at its center.

And then we waited.

*  *  *

For nine hours, Mara stood.

I recalled the drawings of the stick-figure girl, sometimes alone, sometimes with a companion, but never sitting down.

The storm tapered minutes after the lightning hit the tower. It rained on and off for the remainder of the day, but never achieved the morning's ferocity.

I tried to persuade Mara to follow me home, but she wouldn't budge. After the tenth time, I stopped trying.

Graffiti; I memorized it all. “DANCE, LOVE, SING, LIVE,” it said between a cartoon skull and a drawing of a penis with balls the size of beanbags. Near the top, so high it probably required a ladder to paint: “I heart Richard Dean Anderson.”

I half expected a run-in with skateboard punks, but Mara and I were the only kids foolish enough to brave a dune in a thunderstorm.

For nine hours, we were alone. And nothing came to take her away.

She gave up at five PM. We didn't speak. There was nothing to say. But as she trudged beside me on the way to the woods, I noticed blood in her left eye. Not around her eye, in her eye, blossoming from her iris like the center of a crushed rose.

*  *  *

Several months ago I took a trip to the castle to prepare for this book. It was the same trip that I dug up my old screenplay from the secret passage.

I ventured up the spiral staircase to the tower and ran my finger along the iron rail. By the time I reached the top, I had accumulated a sizable dust bunny on the tip. I flicked it to the ground and stepped inside the miniature room.

I remembered my father’s six-month obsession. I remembered the eagles. I remembered the day Mara played dress-up.

The lake glistened before me like a landscape of cobalt gemstones. I turned slowly to view three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of panoramic nostalgia, and stopped short when I faced the woods.

I noticed something new.

No... it wasn’t new...

But something had changed.

In the distance--just over the pine-tree rim--I could see the top of the water tower.

On a hunch, I stooped down to the height of a twelve-year-old boy and watched as the tower sunk beneath the trees. The world didn’t changed. I did.

I recalled the day Mara danced on the dress-up chest. It was that morning that an image was planted in her subconscious; an image that would work its way through her desperate imagination; an image that would merge with her secret desires and manifest itself again and again in her midnight terrors. It wasn’t God or aliens that called Mara to the tower. It was hope.