The Cult of Rohesia: Emilie (3/3)

I'm in my room, and so is Uncle David, but he's acting like he's alone.

On closer inspection, my room isn't quite right. The comforter is different. It's the one from when I was little that started fading and pilling and opening at the seams. I still have it, but I keep it in the closet for when it's particularly cold or we have guests. And it doesn't look nearly as vibrant as it does right now. There are dolls missing from the top of my bookcase, too, but no spaces where they should be sitting.

This is my room before I received them. And Uncle David is carefully plucking hairs from his scalp. He has chin-length hair and stubble, like he did when I was little.

"This is for you, Emilie," he says, even though he can't see me, as he puts the hair in a little plastic bag. He flattens the air out of it, presses the closure shut, and places it in an envelope but doesn't seal it. Then he hides the envelope under the sheet of floral-print wallpaper that lines the bottom drawer of my dresser.

"I think I know what your mother's doing, not telling anyone who your father is." He's whispering. "She doesn't want to risk you losing two parents at once. I can't say that it's me. Or that it isn't. But I can give you the means to find out, one way or another. Only if you want to." The envelope is unmarked. If I'd found it before now, I wouldn't have known what it was. "I saw you looking for it, you know. You and Mark, or maybe his brother. This house is funny that way."

And then I see a man with short blonde hair and a mustache, in his thirties or so, sitting at a table in Emma's Café. My mom named it after Emma Goldman. It's another one of her co-ops, and it includes some of the few remaining local farmers, who supply a lot of the food. Still open to this day.

She's there, too, across from him. My mom, not Emma Goldman. No one else is there, except me, but like Uncle David, they don't see me. The front curtains are pulled. The only light comes from inside. I can see the "open" side of the sign hanging on the glass front door.

There's something familiar about the blonde man, but I can't say what it is. At any rate, he's staring at Maman with wide, angry eyes. Maman is staring back intently, but with less emotion. She reminds me of an owl, or maybe a cat. Predatory.

"No," the man says. He looks away and shakes his head. "No. Not my son. Not happening."

"He'll be an adult when the time comes. There won't be much you can to do stop him," Maman says.

"I think you'll find I can do plenty." Then he stands up and heads for the back door.

Maman smiles victoriously after he leaves, but her nose is wrinkled in disgust.

Another scene change. This time it's Nicolas, with hair past his shoulders again. He's wearing a very old wool jacket of Auntie Ronnie's, with patched elbows, gloriously mismatched buttons, and years of mending at the threadbare edges of the cuffs and lapels. In fact, I only recall one of the buttons being a mismatch the last time I saw it. I look again at the buttons to memorize them: they're an alteration that hasn't happened yet. Judging by the length of Nicolas's hair, this is taking place at least a couple years from now.

He's sitting on the couch with a piece of paper in his hands. Michelle is nestled against his side with her feet on the couch cushions, reading over his shoulder. It takes me a second to recognize her. She's lost weight, and she has a pageboy haircut that curls immaculately under at the edges.

"Not surprising," he says after handing it back to me.

"Did you know?" I ask. I'm not exactly me, though. I'm older. But I remember my nineteen-year-old self is with me. It's why I've waited so long to have this conversation.

"It's a small town, and it's been shrinking since well before you were born. There weren't many unmarried men of the right age around. Sure, we weren't far from Ottawa, Jeanne could have found a boyfriend or several there. That was her plausible deniability. But she also knew she was getting close to the end of her life, and I'm sure she remembered what it was like to be left behind. And when you started shooting up when you were a kid, tall as her by the time you were ten? It all pointed toward one person. Especially since he was the one who saw you in this cohort in the first place. Before you were born."

"What do you know about our dad, Nicolas?" Mark asks. He's sitting on the arm of the couch next to Michelle, facing her and Nicolas. He's filled out a bit, but otherwise he looks the same. And he sounds like he knows more than he does now.

"Your father? What am I supposed to know?" Nicolas sounds genuinely surprised, unlike the way he's responded to questions through the past months.

And then I'm back in the basement. The ritual is over. Mark is running toward the stairs. I follow. Michael follows close behind me.

We stop outside when Mark climbs the side of the house like a giant, four-legged spider. Michael has a wide-eyed look on his face like the blonde man from my vision, but without the anger. He looks more shocked than anything. I take his arm in my hand to try and comfort him.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

"Yeah," he whispers. "I'm worried about him, though.”

Auntie Cathy and Auntie Ronnie did what he just did hundreds of times, and they always seemed fine. "He has to come down sometime."

"Ha. Hopefully without injuring himself."

Did Michael not see Mark's real body still on the basement floor? He can do anything he wants now. But maybe he's ignoring that because he's scared of the implications. And I don't know that I'm right, either. Maybe they're both real. Maybe the one in the basement was an illusion. There's a way to find out. It might also be a way to follow Mark onto the roof.

We head inside, and Nicolas is saying something, but I don't care what it is. Anything important he has to say these days is something you have to drag out of him, anyway. And if it becomes relevant, someone else can tell me. I go straight upstairs to change, then to the window behind the couch.

I've never taken the screen off before, but I know it can be done. I've seen Maman do it to air out the house before. After a few minutes, Michael comes up behind me and asks what I'm doing, as if it isn't obvious. I tell him anyway. And then the screen comes off in my hands.

I think the best way to go about this would be to sit in the window. Then I'll have an easier time climbing up if I have to. "Mark!" I yell. "Can you pull me up?"

A pair of pale hands reach past the edge of the roof. I have to stretch to get to them even though it makes me feel like I could fall, but Mark gets his fingers around my wrists before that can happen. I knew he would.

His grip is mechanically tight. When he pulls, I wonder for a second if he'll pull my arms clean off, or at least dislocate the bones. There's no chance of him dropping me. I shuffle my way out of the window, and when I'm all the way out and my chest is touching the gutter, I wiggle the rest of the way up. To his credit, Michael follows me. Mark has no trouble lifting him up, either.

So this Mark is definitely real. Or at least physically exists. I'm tempted to go back to the basement and see if I even remembered the other body correctly, but then I'd have to get off the roof, and I don't want to. I've always wanted to get up here.

Once, when the siding on the upper part of the house was being re-painted, I even climbed up one of the painter's ladders. It felt like one wrong move could turn it on its side and send me crashing to the ground, but still, I climbed. Only when I was standing on top of it did I realize it was too short for my purpose.

Then Maman noticed what I was doing and screamed. I was too scared to come down by then, but Auntie Ronnie talked to me until I wasn't, then grabbed me off the ladder from the middle step. I wasn't allowed outside again until the painting was finished.

I think Mark must be the only one of the three of us who doesn't feel like he'll fall. Michael and I are both holding onto him, and he's holding on to us, and he feels realer than ever. Maybe that's only because we don't hug often anymore.

None of us spoils the silence. We listen to the faint rustling of the woods instead, and look up at the stars. Time passes.

And then, so suddenly I just about fling myself off the roof in surprise, Mark disappears.

After a moment, Michael overcomes his shock. "I sure fucking hope the others are still awake," he says.

I dare to move a little closer to the edge of the roof—just enough over the edge so I can kick the walls as we shout for help. Just when I start to think they're all sound asleep, or gone, Michelle, Dora, and Nicolas come to our rescue and pull us back through the window.

"By the way, since you're all still here, the next ritual's gonna be December first," Michael tells them after we've all caught our breath.

"See you then, I guess," Dora says. Then she rolls her eyes when he raises his eyebrows suggestively at her.

"You've got a longer drive back to Ottawa than I do to my house. Why don't you take Jeanne's bed and I'll go home?" Nicolas says.

She and Michelle take his suggestion. Michael and I sleep in my room for a few hours before the sunlight wakes me up. I remember my vision and get up to check the drawer.

"Michael. Come look at this."

He yawns. "Can't it wait?"

It cannot. We can go right back to bed once I've satisfied my curiosity. Michael gets up after another minute and stands behind me, peering over my shoulders as I move things out of the drawer.

I can't find it at first, but then I move everything still in the drawer to the other side and check again. And in the very back, my fingers finally brush against the folded edge of the envelope. Just like in the vision, it's unmarked. Inside is a plastic bag.

The hairs are only noticeable upon closer inspection. But they're there.

Michael looks mildly intrigued. "Whose is it?"

"David's. He showed me in last night's vision."

Michael raises his eyebrows questioningly. I wait for him to figure it out since I've given him all the context he needs. A second later, I can see the understanding reach his eyes. "You think he was your father?"

"Only one way to find out." It certainly sounded like it was him in the vision, but technically he was never named. I look up at Michael's face in search of the blonde man from my vision. Their faces are really quite similar once you get past their hair. "Was your father blonde?"

Michael raises his eyebrows again. "Yeah. Why?"

This is getting complicated. "I don't know how much to tell you. There were a lot of pieces, and one of them was in the future. I don't want to mess it up."

He sits on the floor next to me and takes a closer look at the hair in the envelope. "Tell me everything. I won't mess up the timing. I promise."

I tell him the first and last things I saw. They make sense together.

"And the middle?" Michael asks.

"That was Maman and a blonde man with a mustache who looked like you and Mark. They were talking at Emma's after closing time." I paraphrase what I heard as well as I can. "What does that sound like to you?" I'd hate to jump to conclusions and put the wrong idea in his head.

"It sounds like she told him what me and Mark would be up to in this house, and that was why he took—" Michael pauses, then snickers. "No, you know what? It sounds like she only mentioned me. Otherwise, why wouldn't he have taken Mark, too?"

"We're missing a lot of information. It might not be as simple as it looks," I say.

"Hence the need to keep quiet about it for a while." Michael sighs. "I saw some things, too. Cathy saw me and Mark meeting up at the bus station and told your mom about it. I don't know what Ronnie saw, but she didn't like it. She wanted to change it, but Jeanne—I don't know. She wouldn't look Ronnie in the eye.”

We sit for a few more minutes without talking. I assume he's as lost in thought as me.

“How do you think Mark will react?” he finally asks. “We don't keep secrets from him, right?"

Is that "we" Mark's doing? It's the best thing anyone has said to me all week. "Right. Let's see how he feels today, though. Maybe give him a few days. He sounded like he knew something in the vision."

Michael nods and looks back at my bed, then leans against my side. I reach up to rub his hair—it's just the right length to feel perfect between my fingers.

"Why do you think your mom did that?" he asks. "Was it because of the house?"

My cheek brushes the top of his head as I nod. "I do. But I don't know enough to say more than that. Maybe there isn't more than that. Maybe it's just a web of interconnecting visions, existing for their own sake and being as unhelpful as they are useful."

Michael points at the dolls on my bookshelf. "It's playing with us. We're like those dolls to it. That was the vibe I got when I woke up from being dead, but I forgot until now."