A small wooden disc rested on the ground near an empty beer can. Even from where she stood the cross etched into the coin was visible. The carver’s knife had left serrations around the coin’s edge, a sign of lazy work her father never would have accepted.
Clare felt herself move forward and bend over, though she hadn’t meant to. Her arm reached out and it was like watching a movie, one familiar and with a horrible ending, yet something she couldn’t look away from.
Gravel and sand slipped beneath her fingernails as she grasped the coin and straightened. All hope and assurances that the coin wasn’t what it was faded away.
And so did the parking lot along with the crash of waves and screaming gulls.
It’s cold in the workroom, even with the woodstove heating the space. Clare looks across the table as Shanna’s friend Abigail sits down on a stool. She is around the same height as Shanna and fair-skinned as well. The two are inseparable and even now they giggle together over some implied joke Clare missed.
“Quiet,” Mrs. Mason snaps. The woman is probably the oldest in camp. Ancient. At least forty-five. Her position as midwife gives her dominion over the children since she’s assisted most of their entrances into the world. Her mouth is a shriveled thing in the bottom of her face and her eyes are flints of cold steel. “Heads down. Focus.”
They follow her command. A dozen children, all of them under fourteen, lined up and down the long table. Clare is the oldest at thirteen, looked up to in an almost motherly way by some of the littlest ones. Without drawing Mrs. Mason’s attention, Clare nods at Shanna and Abigail, glancing downward at the piles of wood before them. Both start carving again, their small fingers adept with the short but razor-sharp knives they use.
Clare examines her own coin. The shape is good, almost perfectly round, the cross in its center upraised beneath the pad of her thumb. Done. She sets it in the growing pile to her right and grasps a new piece of poplar, starting the whole process over again. She likes the wooden charms they carve much better than the coins. She’s good at making crosses and beads to thread on necklaces and bracelets they sell to several Christian stores in the towns she’s never seen. She imagines the people who purchase one of the trinkets she’s made and it gives her a warm feeling to imagine their lives and the places they travel to wearing something she’s made.
The workroom’s door swings out and Clare’s father is framed in its opening. All hands pause, then set down their work and become clasped before them. Heads lower.
Simon Kinley is a tall man with wide shoulders without brawn to fill them out. He resembles a bird of prey, with sharpened features and a quick, flitting gaze Clare imagines would suit a hawk searching fields far below for something to feast upon.
He wears his usual dark pants and shirt beneath a black winter jacket dusted with snow. He steps inside and shuts the door, running his eyes down the table. Clare lowers her head a second before he looks at her and she swallows, studying the piles of wooden coins.
Simon walks the length of the room and stops behind Shanna and Abby. Shanna’s pile is the smallest of any, the few finished coins slightly misshapen. Simon gathers a handful from her pile and lets them drop one by one back to the tabletop.
“What is toil but love?” he says, letting the last of the wooden discs fall. “Willingness to work is a promise. And promises are sacred.” He sets his hands on Shanna’s shoulders, and to the girl’s credit, she doesn’t flinch. Clare returns her eyes to the tabletop as Simon glances her way. “Our toiling will not be in vain. Soon, very soon, the reckoning will come and we will be a gateway for a new world. A holy rebirth that will sweep sin from the land, and give passage for his return. Do you see?”
“We see.” Their voices mingle in the expected response.
“We see.”
“We see.”
“We see,” Clare whispered, vision coming into focus.
For a horrifying second she was completely adrift in her consciousness, unmoored from who she was. She didn’t recognize her surroundings, didn’t know how she’d gotten there.
It came rushing back at once.
Everything, her entire life up to that point, in an instant.
She swayed as if standing thigh deep in a rushing tide. The urge to be sick was strong but she bit it back, slowly centering herself. Rubbing bits of sand between her fingers. Smelling the salt and heady odors of the beach. Here and now. Here and now.
When she tried recalling the prior moments of reality outside the memory, there was nothing. Just a blankness in her mind. Instead she saw the workroom from her childhood where they’d carved knickknacks and wooden jewelry to sell for the cult. Where they carved Charon’s obols.
She froze. How long had it been since she’d thought of that particular phrase? Years. Decades. And her father. His rhetoric still echoing in her mind.
We see.
Clare sucked in a deep breath, letting it out slowly, then did it four more times. An intrusive memory. The strongest she’d had in a long, long time. It hadn’t threatened to wash over her like one of the waves still crashing on the beach, it had swept her away completely. And the thing that had spurred it—
The coin lay a few feet from her SUV’s front bumper. She must’ve dropped it while enveloped by the past.
A part of her denied its existence. It couldn’t be. But another part, a more rational part, forced her to reach down and pluck it from the ground again. She braced herself for another attack and looked at what she held.
It was the coin. No doubt.
A thousand explanations clamored in her head and just as quickly fell silent. There was no rationalization for this. A piece of her past had broken free and found her here, eighteen years later and seventeen hundred miles away.
Her head snapped around, eyes scanning the parking lot and its borders. The old truck hadn’t moved and there was no one else in sight. She was alone.
A sense of vertigo enveloped her. The sky suddenly seemed too close. Like she would begin to drift upward and float away. Clare clenched the wooden disc in her hand, as if squeezing it would somehow diminish its hold on her, then deposited it in her jacket pocket. She climbed behind the wheel of the SUV and backed out of the space, accelerating so quickly the tires threw loose gravel in a spray behind her.
Chapter Seven
A few kids on bikes rode past in the opposite direction as Clare pulled onto their street, several of them waving at her cheerily.
She managed to raise a hand in return but couldn’t summon a smile. The coin was a thousand-pound weight in her pocket, her thoughts a radio scanner unable to settle on a station.
Even though she knew Eric wouldn’t have returned yet, disappointment still sank through her at the sight of their empty driveway. She parked and got out and stood looking up at their house. The windows were dark and the wind had blown some dead leaves onto the first two steps. If she hadn’t known better she would’ve said the place was unlived in. Abandoned.
Clare blinked. No. She wasn’t doing this—giving in to the illness in her mind. She needed to stay focused, think critically, and keep herself rooted in the present.
As she started up the walk she noticed the same sensation she’d felt early that morning and turned her head to the left.
A man stood on the sidewalk in front of their neighbor’s home. He was dressed raggedly, an amalgam of clothing decrying “homeless.” He was of average height, or at least she thought so since his posture was canted to one side, his right shoulder jutting much higher than his left, neck cranked at a painful-looking angle. His hair was gray-streaked and lank. An athletic bag hung from one bony hand.