Merkaba, a supernatural suspense series (Walk the Right Road, Book 3) (5 page)

Before she dug in, Diane said, “Alecia, have you thought about going home?”

She shook her head. “No, I can’t, not yet.”

“I’ve got say this, then. I’m not comfortable with you staying alone at that motel. If Brian wants to get to you, he will. You’re a smart lady; I think you already know that.”

Alecia picked up her fork. “My mom and dad are on their way, so I won’t be alone.”

Diane let out a heavy sigh that seemed a lot like relief, which was a little odd, considering they had just met.

Alecia paused with the fork in her food before saying, “So, who was it for you?”

“My mother,” Diane answered.

Chapter 12

“Dad, I’m not going home. Mom, can you please explain to Dad?”

Harriet sat on the sofa in the motel room with her hands folded in her lap. She was staring at her husband and daughter, who looked like two bulls about to ram heads.

Patrick Moran was tall, with broad shoulders. His thick, silver hair had once been jet black. His deep blue eyes flashed with the fire only an Irishman could have. He paced dramatically in his tan work boots and blue jeans, fitted with a heavy belt. He waved his large hands in the air. “Now, you listen to me, my girl. You’ve had your fun. Whatever it is you need to do here, I respect it, and I told your mother that, but when it comes to your safety, that’s when I draw the line. You’re coming home, where I can keep you safe and protect you. And, by God, when I find this Brian, I will break every bloody bone in his body. You mark my words, darling.”

Alecia rolled her eyes but stopped when she was rewarded with a sharp pain in her head. The dull throb that had been there the night before had finally eased, but she still felt lightheaded.

“Patrick, sit down. You’re wearing a hole in the carpet, and the people next door are going to start complaining.” Harriet was calm when she spoke. Her brown hair was shoulder length and wavy, she had big brown eyes, and her skin was lightly tanned. She patted the seat beside her until Patrick stomped over and sat, but not before letting her and Alecia know he was still furious.

Unfortunately, with one look in the mirror before she opened the door to her parents, who’d just arrived from the airport, Alecia had expected his reaction. Her dad had raged and yelled and hugged her a little too hard. Her mother had said nothing, but her dark eyes flashed with fire before they calmed. Between the two of them, Brian should have been terrified.

“Mom, I’d like to go back out to the medicine wheel this morning, if you feel up to it. Or would you like to rest for a bit?” Alecia ignored her father, whose eyes were darting between her and her mother and who was about to launch into another tirade.

“I think it’s a fine idea to go to the medicine wheel. Your father will drive.” Her mom smiled and winked encouragingly.

Her dad shook his head but then jumped just as quickly, snatching Alecia’s keys. “Breakfast first.” He jabbed his long finger at Alecia. “And I know you haven’t eaten yet.”

***

Alecia sat through breakfast with her parents at a family restaurant around the corner, again wearing the ball cap and dark glasses. Her mother, of course, had given her one of her looks, and her father had tensed again, reminded that his daughter had been beaten up. Now, as she rode in the back of her Jeep as her father drove out to the parkland and the empty lot close to the trailhead, she felt much like a child again, told where to sit, to order a bigger breakfast as she wasn’t eating enough, and not being allowed to drive her own car.

Her mother stretched her arms up and looped her own beaded leather pouch over her head so it hung across her body. “Come on, Alecia, show me the medicine wheel. I think we have some work to do.”

But Alecia was frowning at her father, who had his back to both Alecia and her mother, standing behind the Jeep as though he was their bodyguard. She recognized the stiffness in his broad shoulders, his arms held out just away from his body, fisting his hands. No one was getting anywhere near her. She realized then that the nervousness that had plagued her and left her shaken since Brian attacked her had retreated. This should have made her happy, but Alecia’s hard-won independence had also gone south, and that made her very unhappy. She was a grown woman, for God’s sake. Her father shouldn’t have had to come to her rescue.

Her mother must have known, as she took Alecia’s hand in hers and started walking with her. Alecia guided her parents to the open field where she’d built the wheel. Her dad, of course, saw it and stared with interest, but she knew he didn’t understand its importance, so he walked over to the large boulder just behind them and sat, out of the way.

Harriet strode around the circle and stopped at the eastern door. “Alecia, burn some sage. We need to cleanse it. She did as her mother asked and then tucked the burning bundle of sage in between the rocks at the eastern line. Her mother was sitting on the ground, cross legged, and she’d pulled out colorful square cloths, a handful of embroidery ties, and a packet of tobacco.

“Come sit.” Harriet set a handful of red cloths on the ground in front of Alecia and gestured to the tobacco. She didn’t need to utter one word. Alecia picked up a cloth using her left hand, pinched tobacco and set it in the cloth, and tied the bundle.

“The line of rocks connecting east to south runs from your childhood and my youth, the hurts that were imbedded there from events we have no control over. When I was a child, the church people came with the law. That was what the sheriff did then. The government’s war with the Indian continued. Their objective was to kill the Indian in the child, to transform us inside and out. However, it was also to control us in the most wicked sense. They always started with the leaders’ children, you know. They were holding the children hostage in a school far away to control the community, as if saying, ‘Ah, yes, you will do as we say because we have your children.’ Children were ripped away from their mothers’ arms. My mother had tried to hide me and my brother.”

Alecia stared at her mother, and she felt a heaviness in her heart. “I didn’t know you have a brother. Where is he?”

“Had a brother, dear Alecia. He’s dead.”

Chapter 13

Her mother had never spoken of her family and what she had gone through as a child. She had tears in her eyes when she smiled at Alecia. “Little Sikwai, which means
sparrow
. He was only five years old. I remember his screams because they were my own. But nothing would come from my mouth. I trembled when men in uniforms grabbed me by the collar and put me on a bus, and my brother was screaming for our mother before they dumped him in my lap. I remember the bus pulling away and seeing my mother through the dirty window, stumbling in the mud after us. A policeman was hitting her and knocking her down, and when she was on the ground, he hit her with a club, over and over.

Harriet got up and placed a pebble on the wheel between the east and west. “The school wasn’t about teaching us or giving us an education. Girls were separated from the boys and taught how to clean to be a housekeeper, while boys were taught a trade, menial labor. Our hair was hacked off on the first day, and we were given scratchy white-man clothes to wear. Ours were burned. One of the teachers there had this triangle-shaped face, these icy blue eyes, and her hair was always pulled tightly back. She walked around with a long yardstick and would beat us with it, our heads, backs, arms. It didn’t matter where she put the welts. It was anger so deep that she carried, and she was given the power to hurt us. And she got off on it—she’d become stronger, more powerful. She gave us our new names. Mine was now Harriet. We weren’t allowed to speak one word of our native tongues or be those dirty Indians again, she said over and over. There comes a point where you begin to believe you’re worthless, you’re nothing. And it wasn’t long before Wayah died, and there was only Harriet.”

“Wayah means
wolf
. You never told me that was your name.” Alecia waited, knowing she couldn’t push her mother. She was surprised she’d shared this much. She knew what she’d survived was horrible, but Alecia didn’t know the details.

“The school’s basic foundation was to destroy the Indian, and what it did was destroy each of us physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. I can remember standing in darkness for hours in line without being allowed to move, scrubbing the floor on my hands and knees until my fingers were raw and my knees ached to the point that I didn’t think I could stand. I remember watching as the other girls were raped, beaten with a strap by the men who wore the coats of God. And it was then that I saw into the face of pure evil. I would recognize that evil now if it walked down the street. You can never forget it.” As her mother spoke in a voice free of emotion, she circled the wheel, seeking rocks and placing them all in the same place between the east and the south. “My brother was sent to the boy’s school, so I never saw him again, but I learned later that he had been beaten so severely that his head was busted open, and he was left to lie dying alone. The other boys were forced to stand and watch and had to lie to the authorities when his tiny body was carted away. They had to say that he fell.”

There was an eerie silence that fell over Harriet and Alecia as she watched her mother staring out into the trees. Harriet sighed, and something softened in her as she slouched a little and did something she hadn’t done in a while. She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply before blowing out that poison. Her hand was shaking.

“When I was there, it was the sixties, and it was said the schools were now civilized, that we now had rights. But we didn’t. We were supposed to see our families in the summer, but I wasn’t allowed. The others, I don’t know. I was sent to be a servant to the wealthy farmhands in the area. The reason, I was told, was that I needed to learn civility. I was ten. I never saw my mother again. I’ve never been back here because as soon as I was freed, I fled and went east with a one-way ticket as far as I could go, and that was Boston. I buried everything and locked it away inside my heart—in this metal box, I like to call it—and kept it there. It was easier to pretend it never happened, but you can’t bury it. That kind of darkness, it shapes you into who you are, finds a way out in dreams, in the people in your life, in every breath you take. So I drank to drown it out, drank enough every night that I passed out and didn’t dream. I avoided it for so long. I don’t know how you were spared, because I drank while I was pregnant with you. I hid it from your dad.” She glanced over to Patrick, who sat perched, scanning the area, very much a watchman.

“He was right to keep me from you. You may not believe that, but I was dangerous, and until I chose to get help, to face my demons, I couldn’t be around you.”

Alecia felt her own heart swell with a loss and hurt that she’d never openly admitted to anyone. “You left me,” she said. “You chose booze over me.”

“I loved you so much that I chose life over booze. It took me just five years to walk it off. For others, it takes a lifetime.”

Alecia really looked at her mother, because she had never once thought about it that way. She just assumed it had been a simple choice. Now she realized that walking through hell, filled with tricks and dead ends and brick walls, would have been anything but easy. And God, if she drank to keep out those nightmares … then what were those nightmares doing to her now?

“Mom, can I ask you something?”

Harriet sat beside her daughter, crossed legged on the ground.

“How do you get through the nights now? What about the nightmares?”

Harriet squinted over at Patrick and back down at Alecia. “By doing what we’re doing now, we’re healing generations of hurt. But we’re not alone. What you’re doing here, you may have thought it was for me, for our people, but it’s also for you—for everyone, because when we have peace in ourselves, in our homes, then the world will be at peace.” Harriet jerked her head toward the path and stood up, blocking her daughter. “The mist is coming, something bad and wicked. Do you know what you face, daughter?”

Chapter 14

Alecia jumped up beside her mother, and Patrick was instantly alert.

“Who’s coming?” Patrick took deep, heavy steps and stopped beside Alecia.

Dan stood in the shadows and then shoved his hands in his pockets as he strode toward them.

“Who is that, Alecia?” Her mother never turned to face her.

“That’s Dan McKenzie. He’s the one who got Brian off me.”

Alecia watched as Dan strode to her and stumbled, almost hesitant, as if unsure of his footing. She could feel her mother’s gaze burning into her, and it was filled with uneasiness, as if she thought Alecia had lost her mind.

“Maybe you had better start at the beginning, daughter, because I don’t remember hearing that someone got Brian off you,” Patrick said. “You left me with the impression that the police scared him away.”

She realized then that she had done just that, and, to her father, it was the same as lying. He’d forgiven her before when she omitted the number of times Brian had hit her—abused her. She knew her father would have seen it, and that was why she’d avoided her parents when she was bruised, because they would have known.

“Dan, this is my mother, Harriet, and my father, Patrick.” Alecia felt both parents step closer to her side, as if to bolster her. It was comforting.

Nobody said anything, but everyone stared at each other as the tension notched up a degree.