Torment

Shelby marched into the forest ahead of Luce, shoving through the long, clawlike leaves of the vine maple trees among the redwoods and stopping under a giant fern.

It was dark under the redwoods, and Luce was glad of Shelby's company. She thought back to the other day, how quickly time had passed while she was harassing that shadow, getting nowhere. Suddenly she felt overwhelmed.

"If we can nd and catch an Announcer, and if we can even get a glimpsing to work," she said, "what do you think the chances are that the Announcer will have anything to show about me and Daniel? What if we just get another awful Bible scene like we saw in class?"

Shelby shook her head. "Daniel I don't know about. But if we can summon and then glimpse an Announcer, then it will have to do with you. They're supposed to be summoner-speci c--though you won't always be interested in what they have to say. Like how you get junk mail mixed with your important mail, but it's still addressed to you."

"How can they be ... summoner-speci c? That would mean Francesca and Steven were at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah."

"Well, yeah. They have been around forever. Rumor has it their r?sum?s are pretty impressive." Shelby stared oddly at Luce. "Put your bug eyes back in your head. How else do you think they scored jobs at Shoreline? This is a really good school."

Something dark and slippery moved over them: a heavy cloak of an Announcer stretching sleepily in the lengthening shadows from the limb of a redwood tree.

"There." Luce pointed, not wasting any time. She swung herself up onto a low branch that stretched behind Shelby. Luce had to balance on one foot and lean out all the way to the left just to graze the Announcer with her ngertips. "I can't reach it."

Shelby picked up a pinecone and pitched it at the center of the shadow where it draped down from the branch.

"Don't!" Luce whispered. "You'll piss it o ."

"It's pissing me o , being so coy. Just hold out your hand."

Grimacing, Luce did as she was told.

She watched the pinecone ricochet o the shadow's exposed side, then heard the soft swishing sound that used to ll her ears with dread. One side of the shadow was sliding, very slowly, away from the branch. It slipped o and landed across Luce's shaking extended arm. She pinched its edges with her ngers.

Luce hopped o the branch where she'd been standing and approached Shelby, her cold, musty o ering in her hands.

"Here," Shelby said. "I'll take half and you take half, just like we saw in class. Ew, it's squishy. Okay ... loosen your grip, he's not going anywhere. Let him just kind of chill and take shape."

It seemed like a long time passed before the shadow did anything at all. Luce felt almost like she was playing with the old Ouija board she'd had as a kid. An inexplicable energy on the tips of her ngers. The feeling of slight, continual movement before she could see any di erence in the Announcer's shape.

Then there was a whoosh: It was contracting, folding slowly in on its dark self. Soon the whole thing had taken on the size and shape of a large box. It hovered just above their ngertips.

"Do you see that?" Shelby gasped. Her voice was almost inaudible over the whooshing sound of the shadow. "Look, there in the middle."

As had happened during class, a dark veil seemed to lift o the Announcer, revealing a shocking burst of color. Luce shielded her eyes, watching as the bright light seemed to settle back inside the shadow screen, into a foggy out-of-focus image. Then, nally, into distinct shapes in muted colors.

They were looking at a living room. The back of a blue plaid recliner with the footrest kicked up and a badly fraying bottom corner. An old wood-paneled television airing a rerun of Mork & Mindy with the volume o . A fat Jack Russell terrier curled on a round patchwork rug.

Luce watched a swinging door push open from what looked like a kitchen. A woman, older than Luce's grandmother had been when she died, walked through. She was wearing a pink-and-white patterned dress, heavy white tennis shoes, and thick glasses on a string around her neck. She was carrying a tray of cut fruit.

"Who are these people?" Luce wondered aloud.

When the old woman put down the tray on the co ee table, a liver-spotted hand extended from around the chair and selected a chunk of banana.

Luce leaned in to see more clearly, and the focus of the image shifted with her. Like a 3-D panorama. She hadn't even noticed the old man sitting in the recliner. He was frail, with a few thin patches of white hair and age spots all over his forehead. His mouth was moving, but Luce couldn't hear a thing. A row of framed pictures lined the mantel of the replace.

The whooshing in Luce's ears got louder, so loud it made her wince. Without her doing anything other than wonder about those pictures, the Announcer's image zoomed in. It left Luce with a feeling of whiplash--and an extreme close-up of one framed photograph.

A thin gold-plated frame around a smudged glass plate. Inside, the small photograph had a ne scalloped border around a yellowing black-and- white image. Two faces in the photograph: Hers and Daniel's.

Holding her breath, she studied her own face, which looked just a little younger than it did now. Dark shoulder-length hair set in pincurls. A white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. A wide A-line skirt brushing the middles of her calves. White-gloved hands, holding Daniel's. He was looking directly at her, smiling.

The Announcer started vibrating, then quaking; then the image inside started to icker and fade away.

"No," Luce called, ready to lunge inside. Her shoulders connected with the edge of the Announcer, but that was as far as she got. A brush of bitter cold pushed her back and left her skin feeling damp. A hand clamped around her wrist.

"Don't get any wild ideas," Shelby warned. "Don't get any wild ideas," Shelby warned.

Too late.

The screen went black and the Announcer dropped from their hands onto the forest oor, shattering into pieces like broken black glass. Luce suppressed a whimper. Her chest heaved. She felt like a part of her had died.

Lowering herself to all fours, she pressed her forehead to the ground and rolled onto her side. It was colder, murkier than it had been when they'd started. The watch on her wrist said it was after two o'clock, but it had been morning when they came into the forest. Looking west, toward the edge of the woods, Luce could see the di erence in the light hitting the dorm. The Announcers swallowed time.

Shelby lay down next to her. "You okay?"

"I'm so confused. Those people--" Luce cupped her forehead. "I have no idea who they are."

Shelby cleared her throat and looked uncomfortable. "Don't you think, um, maybe you used to know them? Like, a long time ago. Like, maybe they were your ..."

Luce waited for her to nish. "My what?"

"It really hasn't occurred to you that those were your parents from another life? That this is what they look like now?"

Luce's jaw dropped open. "No. Wait--you mean, I've had totally di erent parents in each of my past lives? I thought Harry and Doreen ... I just assumed they would have been with me the whole time."

Suddenly she remembered something Daniel had said, about her mother making bad boiled cabbage in that past life. At the time, she hadn't dwelled on it, but now it made a little bit more sense. Doreen was an amazing cook. Everyone in east Georgia knew that.

Which meant Shelby must be right. Luce probably had a whole nation of past families she couldn't even remember.

"I'm so stupid," she said. Why hadn't she paid more attention to the way the man and woman looked? Why hadn't she felt the slightest connection to them? She felt like she'd lived her whole life and only now found out she was adopted. How many times had she been handed o to di erent parents? "This is--This is--"

"Totally messed up," Shelby said. "I know. On the bright side, you could probably save yourself a lot of money for therapy if you could look back at all your other families, see all the problems you had with hundreds of mothers before this one."

Luce buried her face in her hands.

"That is, if you need family therapy." Shelby sighed. "Sorry, who's talking about themselves again?" She raised her right hand, then slowly put it down. "You know, Shasta's not that far from here."

"What's Shasta?"

"Mount Shasta, California. It's just a few hours that-away." Shelby jerked her thumb toward the north.

"But the announcers only show the past. What would be the point of going there now? They're probably--"

Shelby shook her head. " `The past' is a broad term. Announcers show the distant past right up to the events happening seconds ago, and everything in between. I saw a laptop on the desk in the corner, so there's a good chance ... you know ..."

"But we don't know where they live."

"Maybe you don't. Me, I zoomed in on a piece of their mail and got the address. Committed it to memory. 1291 Shasta Shire Circle, apartment 34." Shelby shrugged. "So, if you wanted to go visit them, we could totally drive there and back in a day."

"Right." Luce snorted. She desperately wanted to go visit them, but it just didn't seem possible. "In whose car?"

Shelby laughed a faux-sinister little laugh. "There was only one thing that wasn't sorry-ass about my sorry-ass ex-boyfriend." She dug into the pocket of her sweatshirt, pulling out a long key chain. "And that was his very sweet Mercedes, parked right here in the student lot. Lucky for you, I forgot to give him back the extra key."

They tore down the road before anyone could stop them.

Luce found a map in the glove compartment and traced the line up to Shasta with her nger. She called out some directions to Shelby, who drove like a bat out of Hell, but the maroon Mercedes almost seemed to like the abuse.

Luce wondered how Shelby was staying so calm. If Luce had just broken up with Daniel and "borrowed" his car for the afternoon, she wouldn't be able to stop herself from remembering road trips they'd taken, or arguments they'd gotten into while driving to a movie, or what they'd done in the backseat that one time with all the windows rolled down. Surely Shelby was thinking about her ex. Luce wanted to ask, but Shelby had been clear that the topic was o -limits.

"Are you going to change your hair?" Luce asked nally, remembering what Shelby had said about getting over breakups. "I could help you, if you are."

Shelby's face pinched into a scowl. "That freak's not even worth it." After a long pause, she added, "But thank you."

The drive took most of the rest of the afternoon, and Shelby spent it working herself up, bickering with the radio, scanning the channels for the craziest nutjobs she could nd. The air got colder, the trees thinned out, and the elevation of the landscape rose steadily the whole time. Luce focused on staying calm, imagining a hundred scenarios about meeting these parents. She tried to avoid thinking about what Daniel would say if he knew where she was going.

"There it is." Shelby pointed when a massive snow-capped mountain came into view directly in front of the road. "The town sits right in those foothills. We should be there just after sunset."

Luce didn't know how to thank Shelby for hauling her all the way up here on a whim. Whatever was behind Shelby's shift in attitude, Luce was grateful--she wouldn't have been able to do this on her own.