balls of her feet into the roof of the trunk, anything…
Nothing gives. She is stuck here. And the trunk is getting fucking hot with the sun beating down right on it.
She gives up. She decides conserving her energy is the wisest thing possible. Because she is going to go fucking wild when she gets out.
If she ever gets out.
So she waits. And there, in the dark, with all the world hot and close and still, the truth of what Mr. First told her becomes inescapable.
Mother.
Mother, Mother, what am I?
And as she wonders this, she remembers something.
All her life, Mona’s family was moving. Her father’s job required it: he had to keep up with the drills, with the oil, and move from place to place, always new homes and apartments, almost always rentals.
And though Mona’s mother was never really happy in her life, she was always happiest when they moved. “It’s a fresh start,” she would say each time. “A new chance. We can do it right this time.” And Earl, being Earl, would simply grunt.
Mona was never quite sure what her mother meant by this. What had they been doing wrong before? And what was it they had to do right?
She had only asked her mother this once. The answer was simple: “Everything.”
Yet these dizzying, anticipatory highs never lasted. When they would arrive at the new house, and actually walk through it—seeing, in almost every case, the awful carpet, the Pergo walls, the dim, dreary living room—her mother would go silent, and fall into a deep depression that would last for days.
Mona was never sure why this was, but it troubled her. She did not want her mother to feel so hurt, so injured, by something as simple as a house. Which, of course, would change eventually, when they moved again.
She tried to cheer her mother up, but it never worked. Her mother would simply say, “It’s not worth it. Not worth doing anything to it.”
And Mona would say—“Why not?”
“It’s supposed to be perfect. Everything’s supposed to be perfect. It can be, so it should be. But I can’t make this perfect. Not this house. It’s not even worth trying.”
Mona asked her mother to please forget that, to please try to be happy anyway.
“I can’t. Things must be arranged a certain way. Things must be beautiful, my dear.”
When they moved once more, just days before that afternoon with the shotgun and the bathtub, it seemed the same as all the other times: there was the ecstatic joy leading up to their arrival, a million plans dreamed up, a million possibilities; and, upon arriving, the crushing, complete disappointment, thorough and abysmal.
But this time it was a little different. Her mother, weeping, said, “I can’t stay here. Things can’t be perfect here, not like this. I have to go back. I have to go back and get everyone else. And then we’ll come and make a place where everyone can be perfect and happy, forever.” She looked up at Mona then, and there was something alien in the way her eyes looked out at the world: they seemed strangely glassy and shallow, like the eyes of a doll.
Her mother said, “And I will come back for you. I promise.”
And now Mona understands. Whoever said those words was not Laura Alvarez. And possibly that desire for newness, and perfection… perhaps that had no earthly origin, either.
Give up, says a voice. Just give up.
And she does. She is all too happy to give up.
But as she gives up something awakens inside her, unfolding with the gruesome delicacy of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis: it’s as if the release of all that energy has prodded open the third eye in her mind, that black, merciless shark eye she just discovered. And now that she knows that it’s there, it seems so much easier to use it.
She sees…
So much. Too much. Far, far too much.
“No,” she whispers. “No. No, God…”
But one thing she’s learned during her time here in Wink is how to control what she sees, and how she sees it. She must have been using this undiscovered eye of hers all along. So though her body is limp and her eyes stare blindly into the roof of the trunk, she focuses, and sees…
Something. A light in the dark.
A room.
A rounded stone chamber, a bit like a crypt. There is a pile of tiny skulls in the center. And beside it, sitting Indian-style on the floor and staring into the ground, is a man