Her palm grazed something cold. The fog muffled her scream. Tentatively she ran her fingers over the smooth surface, tracing a familiar pattern.

  She was in the forest of cairns. The monoliths were perched along the crater’s rim. If she had gone any further, she would’ve tumbled in. She imagined herself standing by the mama cairn, the formation towering over her with its massive blue-red boulder anchoring it to the earth. Please let this be right, she thought. Blindly she turned herself around.

  In her head she could still hear the shrieks of the skua as they dive-bombed the hot spring. Some of the birds swooping and rising with hunks of steaming meat in their beaks, scorching their gullets, others miscalculating and skimming the frothy surface of the boiling water, their dying shrieks ricocheting off the landscape.

  The terrible scene had reminded her of an astronaut movie she’d scouted for years ago. One of the researchers had shown the team slides of the carbonized body of the Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, his remains just a handful of shiny rocks. How the shoddily built capsule he was flying in had burned up upon reentry. The worst part of the story was that it was an open secret. Everyone knew he would never make it back alive though nobody breathed a word about the ship’s slipshod construction, afraid of what the party bosses would say. That was the true nature of horror. It needed your full participation. You climbing in the capsule and pulling the hatch shut of your own free will. Why had any of them ever come down here to the ass of the world voluntarily—the Robert Scotts, the Shackletons, happily signing themselves up for dehydration and hunger, bodies blackened by unimaginable cold, the madness of a single night six months long.

  Those boys are like the chicken that crossed the road. They gotta know for themselves what’s on the other side.

  So why am I here, she wondered as she stumbled through the mist.

  Maybe you ready to cross over.

  Under her feet the earth seemed to rumble in agreement.

  Finally the cabin emerged through the haze. Striker had to stand back. Hot air poured out between its loose boards, the day wavy with heat. She didn’t want to think about it but there was nothing else to think about. Had Anders, Sarah, and Jane been cooked to death inside the hut just like the Baron, their skin falling off the bone?

  Then just as suddenly as it had appeared, the cabin was gone. In a flash, the hut exploded. A fiery blast filled her vision. The dense fog smothered the noise of the explosion. A wave of superheated air swept her off her feet. Check me out, Striker thought as she went sailing through the haze in a rain of debris. I’m flying. She had all the time in the world. The moment stretched on and on.

  Midair she tried to recollect how the stuntmen did it, throwing themselves down flights of stairs or out of speeding cars for multiple takes. She remembered one old dog she’d bedded once or twice, the guy a legend in the industry and crazy sexy in a vintage leather kind of way. He constantly referred to the numerous scars snaking over his body as the Interstate, was always urging her to ride it south. One night after a particularly circuitous tryst, he told her the ultimate stuntman secret.

  “Resistance is what kills you,” he growled. “It’s why the drunk driver survives the crash but the person he hit dies.”

  “How do you not resist?” she’d asked.

  He grinned at her, one of his front teeth missing. “Very carefully,” he said, patting his stomach as if their sex had been a feast.

  Just before she hit the earth, she gripped Ama’s gold cross in her—

  << Striker is lying in bed. Her head is ringing as she opens her eyes. Gently she taps the god’s eye hanging from the ceiling, watches it twirl. Trish’s mother lovingly crafted each of its seven panels. It has only ever needed the lightest touch to set it going. Nights as a child Striker would often fall asleep under the small blue-and-white vortex.

  The wooden toy chest with a lion carved on the lid still sits under the double windows. Were she to open it, the toys would be long gone, the chest crammed with the trappings that mark her teenaged years. Clothes, old issues of Seventeen, a Mötley Crüe CD, boxes of Dark and Lovely, half-full packs of Marlboro Lights, a few Magic Eyes, their pages dog-eared, each book’s visions circled in pen. The first time she sees a unicorn emerge from a sea of blue and red squiggles, it feels like solving a great mystery. “See, there’s its horn,” she tells her sister, and Ama nods vigorously then points at a nonsensical place where the unicorn doesn’t appear, pretending to be in on the secret.

  As a teenager Striker never asked Trish if she could replace the toy chest with something less childish. Standing on it makes you tall enough to reach through the windows and grab onto the hundred-year-old oak that grows beside the house. From there it’s an easy climb down to the ground. How many times have she and her sister crawled out that very window? Toward the end Ama making her descent practically nightly.

  Next door in her sister’s room, clothes and shoes and handbags lie scattered on every surface along with Ebony magazines, tools to twist and rip dreads, candy wrappers, a CD of Bob Marley’s Legend, Ama’s stash of loose condoms left out on her desk. As always, her sister’s bed is stuffed with an old sleeping bag crammed full of towels. In these final months Striker suspects Trish and Doug know Ama isn’t sleeping in her room but are too tired to fight anymore.

  For old time’s sake she lies down on Ama’s bed and gazes out the window. Even from Zinnia Trace, she can see Our Lady’s steeple with the copper cross. Above it a gibbous moon hangs on the verge of impalement. She gets up and glances through the titles on her sister’s mostly empty shelves. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon Maybe; Catcher in the Rye; It; Beloved. She can still hear Ama’s bewilderment when she learned that the same author had written both Philip Hall Likes Me and also Summer of My German Soldier. But I thought she was like me, Ama complained. You can still like the story, Trish said, but Ama never picked up the book again.

  Striker leaves the room and heads down the curved staircase, turning on every light the way Doug does. Doug always claiming he likes how the house looks from the street when fully illuminated, the home even more imposing and regal. She secretly suspects he is afraid of the dark as he will turn on each light in the pantry even if just popping in for a bag of popcorn.

  It’s crazy how much space there is. The den, the family room, Doug’s office, Trish’s hobby room, the TV space off the kitchen, the formal and informal dining rooms. It goes on and on, the sweet scent of amaryllis lacing the air. The family only ever uses a quarter of the house, maybe less. The fifteen-foot Scottish fir stands in the everyday living room, not the one used for entertaining, which has its own twenty-foot tree. During this, their last Christmas together, the four of them will open each gilded box tucked under the fir before heading out to midnight mass. Doug will even gift Striker a camera that doesn’t need film. After what happens, the three of them will never touch their presents. Trish softly weeping anytime she stumbles across the scarf Ama gave her in her scarf rack, the silk printed with tropical fish.

  In the portico the grandfather clock chimes the hour. Striker will have to hurry if she doesn’t want to be late. Her first night on Zinnia Trace, Doug had to stop the clock so that her sister could sleep, Ama convinced the house was haunted.

  Outside the air smells pristine. The cypresses lining the drive glitter in the moonlight. A languid snow falls. She almost forgot how each year Trish and Doug set up a holiday crèche on the expansive front lawn. The thing tasteful and modern, the figures of the Holy Family abstracted rather than lifelike, the barnyard animals mere silhouettes and gestures.

  Doug bought this crèche to replace the one that got vandalized two years after she and Ama moved in. One morning as he left for work, Doug discovered that someone had spray-painted the face of the Baby Jesus black, the paint as though they’d carelessly scribbled on it. By that afternoon, the whole crèche had been replaced, surveillance cameras conspicuously positioned. Doug never mentioned it to the family, telling Trish he thought the crèche needed an update, but Ama and Striker knew. They heard about it on the playground from the younger siblings of the vandals but only after they promised not to tell. The story spreading that at a house party someone dared someone else to do it, said they even had the paint in their car. Ama was pleased. “Somebody wanted to make the Baby Jesus look like us,” she said happily as the sisters walked home. Years later Striker learned the truth. The teens lied, looking to take credit for someone else’s work. A grown man had done it. One of the dads from the girls’ under-ten soccer team. The man always volunteering to substitute coach when needed.

  It doesn’t take long to walk the half mile to the intersection of Main and Birch. The downtown like something out of a Norman Rockwell, the streetlamps draped with icicle lights. Several famous movies have been shot in the gazebo, the productions hungry to capture the town’s distinct air of Americana.

  At Our Lady of the Annunciation, every shade of light pours through the stained-glass windows, the church like a prism. Once inside, Striker dips her fingers in the font. Nobody sees her as she glides like a bride up the center aisle, the parishioners evenly parted. These are the people she has seen every Sunday since childhood. The Phillips, the Flynns, the Castronovos, Mrs. Hagerty at the head of her ten-person brood. Striker knows Trish and Doug will be sitting on the end in the second pew on the left. They are such creatures of habit.

  She passes her adoptive parents without looking as the first pangs of fear sound in her chest. After all this time she is afraid she has misremembered. In her mind Trish and Doug are forever young and hopeful and a lot naive. She doesn’t blame them for what is to come in a few short hours. But now if she were to gaze at them directly, all that could change. Perhaps on this, her sister’s last night on earth, she will find their pale faces haggard and drawn with the strain of loving her and Ama. It’s a foundational part of the story, that Trish and Doug Ostriker were just two hapless dreamers who got in over their heads. She needs to believe this, otherwise it’s too much to bear. The thought that someone tried to love you and that it ruined every good thing in them.

  At the front of the church, Father Chester stands at the altar holding the chalice aloft. Of all the priests who cycle through the diocese, he is the one she likes best. At the close of each service, he reminds them, “The mass is never-ending. Go in peace.” She has always wanted to believe that the sign of peace the congregants wish each other spills over into the world. Thankfully the children’s choir is floating up the stairs and filling the risers behind Father Chester with the rustling of their wings. Silently she slips through the exit behind the chapel and trots down the stairs, leaving Doug and Trish and the entire congregation safely ensconced in their dream that love is omnipotent.

  In the basement of Our Lady of the Annunciation, the air is hot. An army of dehumidifiers are doing their best though several of their pans need emptying. Why the room should be equatorial in the middle of winter is only one of several mysteries. The tables are riddled with little coats and bags, wet boots, a tray of sugar cookies, half-full cups of juice. In the classroom to the left, Striker sees where she and Ama used to sit when they were sent here to learn about this puzzling religion with its preternatural happenings—a basket of bread feeding thousands, the dead coming back to life, an innocent woman giving birth to no one’s baby, a man on the brink of killing his own son until the boy is replaced with a ram.

  Then begins the Christmas pageant she has come through hell and highest water to play her part in. The organist hits the opening chords. The music is breathy, a pointed reminder that an organ is essentially a wind instrument. Striker finds her mark. There was never really any possibility she’d be late. She is the star of this show. Tonight the windowless bathroom under the stairs in the basement of Our Lady of the Annunciation is where the true Nativity is taking place. She has traveled through twenty-five years of darkness to stand in this very spot.

  On the floor drops of red sparkle like garnets. She follows them to the bathroom door, the wood tatted with the carvings of generations of bored children. She raps on the door with her knuckles. Two long, two short knocks. It’s the way she and Ama let the other know it’s them.

  Upstairs the children have started to sing. Their song reminds her to be quiet, to keep her mouth shut no matter what lies behind this door. To bear it all as she and Ama have always borne it. Silently, grace optional. And so she twists the knob and enters the most transformative night of her life. The sisters remain oblivious to her presence. Neither speaks. Tonight she is the specter.

  In this room there is so much love. So much fear. Endless pain. Striker is surprised and saddened by how young these sisters are. The only sound is of distant children singing along to the reedy breath of an organ.

  Silent night, holy night

  Son of God, love’s pure light

  Radiant beams from thy holy face

  With the dawn of redeeming grace

  Jesus Lord at Thy birth

  Jesus Lord at Thy birth

  Finally it’s done. The sisters sit marveling at this being their silence has created. Its pinched face dark as a heart, its sides heaving in and out like bellows. Their grandmother Mabel used to say true looking is a kind of love.

  “See,” whispers Ama, her face streaked with blood. “It’s blue and red all at once,” but all Striker can see is the strange film covering its pupils, its eyes gray, almost salt >>

  Ama’s gold cross slipped out of Striker’s hand.

  “It’s you,” said a small voice. “I knew you’d be back.”

  The teen was curled up on a stack of crates. The grotto looked the same as ever. Cast-off junk, rags, shelves lined with jars, the floor studded with combs, pocket watches, rings, strange white knobs frozen in the ice.

  Sarah stood next to her child wearing a T-shirt she’d made by ripping the sleeves off her own thermal. Striker tried to hide her revulsion. All the way up to her shoulders, the good doctor’s arms just bones wrapped in skin, her upper arms as thin as her wrists.

  “See? She didn’t forget us,” Anders mumbled.

  Striker’s first thoughts were of the aftermath of war, refugees streaming across borders, each gaunt face plastered with a thousand-­mile stare. Bruised hollows gleamed under the teen’s eyes, their head seemingly too big for their body. Striker wondered if they could even still walk. In the time she traveled to the sailboat and back, the teen had become skeletal.

  “Find any food?” Anders whispered.

  “How long have I been gone?” Striker asked. She put her fingers on her own face, tried to feel if the skin around her eyes was loose.

  Sarah began moving a chair from one wall of the grotto to the other. Once she’d reach the opposite side, she’d put it down, then pick it up again and head back. “You went somewhere?” she said.

  Striker couldn’t help but think of her again as Bobbi Sue, her uterus loose, mind quietly turning to mush.

  “We should go,” she said. “The island’s heating up. It won’t be long before this place caves in.” Already she could hear the ceiling cracking.

  “They kept eating it,” Anders blurted out.

  “What?”

  “I only ate it because we’re already damned,” offered Bobbi Sue listlessly. She put the chair down. “Plus I have to stay alive. For them.” In the gloom, a pair of figures seemed to shimmer by her side, the air sparkling. “What would my babies do without me?” she said, but when Striker looked again, the glimmers were gone.

  “You and your highfalutin principles,” sneered Jane at the teen. The old woman was still fiddling with the unopened bottle of wine she’d been gifted for Christmas. “Like a goddam newborn. Can’t even hold up your own head.”

  “Robert won’t eat it,” the teen shot back.

  Jane stopped clawing at the cork. “Say, where is Robert?”

  Striker tried to keep her voice steady. “He wouldn’t get out of the water,” she said, and left it at that.

  Something flashed in the old woman’s eyes. Her whole face winched into a single grievous point. But then she sighed and the pain was gone, a cloud passing over the sun.

  “He was hoping to die down here.” She went back to clawing at the cork. “Lucky bastard.”

  That ain’t your friend Jane talking.

  It was true. La Grande Dame was back. Compared to Bobbi Sue and Anders, the Dame was the least emaciated but ravaged all the same. Her face drawn, skin sallow, cheekbones sharp as blades. Her once-luscious hair hung limp. Each time she spoke, her gums flashed, the flesh inflamed, the two titanium posts barely visible in the swelling.

  Striker swallowed a scream.

  The edge of the old woman’s hairline was bordered by one long, continuous gash. Slowly the incision was widening. Blood trickled down her neck. It was the goriest of scurvy’s symptoms. The reappearance of old wounds. The Dame’s face was coming apart where once it had been razored open and nipped and stitched back together. Striker wondered what other injuries were resurfacing. A dreadful aura flickered about the old girl. The air around her body shimmered as if her soul had come loose. Striker imagined an army of spirits swarming the old woman, mosquitoes looking to feed.

  “What did you guys eat?” she whispered.

  “And whose fault was it?” said the Dame.

  “I didn’t know,” cried Anders.

  “Know what?” said Striker, the unease building in her chest.