Me, I fold the culling spell from Helen and tuck it in my back pocket. I take a step closer to Mona. I look at Helen, and she nods.
Still with her back to us, Mona says, "I'll bring Patrick back." She says, "I'll bring back all the little children."
And I grab her around the waist from behind and lift. Mona's screaming, kicking her heels into my shins and twisting from side to side, still holding the book, and I work my hands up under her arms until I'm touching it, touching dead human skin. The dead nipple. Mona's nipples. Mona's screaming, and her fingernails dig into my hands, the soft skin between my fingers. She digs into the skin on the back of my hands until I get her around the wrists and twist her arms up and away from her sides. The book falls, and her kicking legs knock it away, and in the dark parking lot, with the distant screams, nobody notices.
This is the life I got. This is the daughter I knew I'd lose someday. Over a boyfriend. Over bad grades. Drugs. Somehow this break always happens. This power struggle. No matter how great a father you think you'll make, at some time you'll find yourself here.
There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them.
The book lands in a spray of dust and gravel.
And I yell for Helen to get it.
The moment Mona is free, Helen and I step back. Helen holding the book, I'm looking to see if anybody's around.
Her hands in fists, Mona leans toward us, her red and black hair hanging in her face. Her silver chains and charms are tangled in her hair. Her orange dress is twisted tight around her body, the neckline torn on one side so her shoulder shows, bare. She's kicked off her sandals so she's barefoot. Her eyes behind the dark snarls of her hair, her eyes reflecting the carnival lights, the screams in the distance could be the echo of her screams going on and on, forever.
How she looks is wicked. A wicked witch. A sorceress. Twisted. She's no longer my daughter. Now she's someone I may never understand. A stranger.
And through her teeth, she says, "I could kill you. I could."
And I finger-comb my hair. I straighten my tie and tuck the front of my shirt smooth. I'm counting 1, counting 2, counting 5, and I tell her, no, but we could kill her. I tell her she owes Mrs. Boyle an apology.
This is what passes as tough love.
Helen stands, holding the book in her white-gloved hands, looking at Mona.
Mona says nothing.
The smoke from the diesel generators, the screams and rock music and colored lights, do their best to fill the silence. The stars in the night sky don't say a word.
Helen turns to me and says, "I'm okay. Let's just get going." She gets out her car keys and gives them to me. Helen and I, we turn away and start walking. But looking back, I see Mona laughing into her hands.
She's laughing.
Mona stops laughing when I see, but her smile is still there.
And I tell her to wipe the smirk off her face. I ask, what the hell does she have to smirk about?
Chapter 35
With me driving, Mona sits in the backseat with her arms folded. Helen sits in the front seat next to me, the gri-moire open in her lap, lifting each page against her window so she can see sunlight through it. On the front seat between us, her cell phone rings.
At home, Helen says, she still has all the reference books from Basil Frankie's estate. These include translation dictionaries for Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. There are books on ancient cuneiform writing. All the dead languages. Something in one of these books will let her translate the grimoire. Using the culling spell as a sort of code key, a Rosetta stone, she might be able to translate them all.
And Helen's cell phone rings.
In the rearview mirror, Mona picks her nose and rolls the booger against the leg of her jeans until it's a hard dark lump. She looks up from her lap, her eyes rolling up, slow, until she's looking at the back of Helen's head.
Helen's cell phone rings.
And Mona flicks her booger into the back of Helen's pink hair.
And Helen's cell phone rings. Her eyes still in the grimoire, Helen pushes the phone across the seat until it presses my thigh, saying, "Tell them I'm busy."
It could be the State Department with her next hit assignment. It could be some other government, some cloak-and-dagger business to conduct. A drug kingpin to rub out. Or a career criminal to retire.
Mona opens her green brocade Mirror Book, her witch's diary, in her lap and starts scribbling in it with colored pens.
On the phone is a woman.
It's a client of hers, I tell Helen. Holding the phone against my chest, I say, the woman says a severed head bounced down her front stairway last night.
Still reading the grimoire, Helen says, "That would be the five-bedroom Dutch Colonial on Feeney Drive." She says, "Did it disappear before it landed in the foyer?"
I ask.
To Helen, I say, yes, it disappeared about halfway down the stairway. A hideous bloody head with a leering smile.
The woman on the phone says something.
And broken teeth, I say. She sounds very upset.
Mona's scribbling so hard the colored pens squeak against the paper.
And still reading the grimoire, Helen says, "It disappeared. End of problem."
The woman on the phone says, it happens every night.
"So call an exterminator," Helen says. She holds another page against the sunlight and says, "Tell her I'm not here."
The picture that Mona's drawing in her Mirror Book, it's a man and woman being struck by lightning, then being run over by a tank, then bleeding to death through their eyes. Their brains spray out their ears. The woman wears a tailored suit and a lot of jewelry. The man, a blue tie.
I'm counting 1, counting 2, counting 3 ...
Mona takes the man and woman and tears them into thin strips.
The phone rings again, and I answer it.
I hold the phone against my chest and tell Helen, it's some guy. He says his shower sprays blood.
Still holding the grimoire against the window, Helen says, "The six-bedroom on Pender Court."
And Mona says, "Pender Place. Pender Court has the severed hand that crawls out of the garbage disposal." She opens the car window a little and starts feeding the shredded man and woman out through the crack.
"You're thinking of the severed hand at Palm Corners," Helen says. "Pender Place has the biting phantom Doberman."
The man on the phone, I ask him to please hold. I press the red HOLD button.
Mona rolls her eyes and says, "The biting ghost is in the Spanish house just off Millstone Boulevard." She starts writing something with a red felt-tip pen, writing so the words spiral out from the center of the page.
I'm counting 9, counting 10, counting 11 ...
Squinting at the lines of faint writing on the page she has spread against the window, Helen says, "Tell them I'm out of the real estate business." Trailing her finger along under each faint word, she says, "The people at Pender Court, they have teenagers, right?"
I ask, and the man on the phone says yes.
And Helen turns to look at Mona in the backseat, Mona flicking another rolled booger, and Helen says, "Then tell him a bathtub full of human blood is the least of his problems."
I say, how about we just keep driving? We could hit a few more libraries. See some sights. Another carnival, maybe. A national monument. We could have some laughs, loosen up a little. We were a family once, we could be one again. We still love each other, hypothetically speaking. I say, how about it?
Mona leans forward and yanks a few strands of hair out of my head. She leans and yanks a few pink strands from Helen.
And Helen ducks forward over the grimoire, saying, "Mona, that hurt."
In my family, I say, my parents and I, we could settle almost any squabble over a rousing game of Parcheesi.