Rings Read online

  David lived alone, but in the same building and just down the hall from his brother Joe. The place was usually kept to acceptable levels of cleanliness, if profound levels of disorganization; they stepped over shoes on the way into the kitchen and found Joe clearing empty envelopes and old napkins off the table to make way for takeout.

  “Hi, Dad,” Celia said, plopping into the chair next to her father. “You remember Shula.”

  “Yes,” David agreed.

  “Uh, when Mom called earlier did you talk to her or just uncle Joe?”

  “I haven’t talked to Maureen,” blinked David.

  “Yes you did, Dave,” said Joe, putting down plates and forks. “You were on with her for fifteen, twenty minutes before you handed her over.”

  “That wasn’t Maureen,” said David.

  Joe hesitated in distributing containers of rice. “Dave…”

  David shook his head. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

  “You talked to Maureen for about fifteen minutes, after lunch,” Joe said. “And then you gave me the phone, and I said the girls here could come over for dinner. Remember?”

  “I’m fine,” snapped David, and he took a container of eggdrop soup.

  Joe looked apologetically at Celia, then at Shula.

  “What do you mean, it wasn’t her?” Shula asked.

  “Never mind,” muttered David.

  “Did, um, did she tell you anything interesting,” said Celia. “Or surprising?”

  David frowned at her. “Like what?”

  Shula tapped her toes to Celia’s twice.

  Once was a kiss. Twice was remember we don’t literally kiss, here. In school; under the noses of Shula’s very assimilated but still quite Muslim parents; in front of Celia’s dad, apparently.

  “Nothing,” said Celia.

  They ate Chinese food, subdued. Joe kept looking nervously at his brother, who was staring resolutely at his dinner. Shula was frowning thoughtfully at David too. Celia flicked her eyes from girlfriend to father to uncle, unsure what to do. Sometimes visits with her dad went great. Sometimes this happened. Sometimes Joe could judge when it was a good day and sometimes he couldn’t.

  They opened fortune cookies. Celia’s said You will explore new places.

  And Shula took her home.

  * * *

  It was pitch dark.

  Cait walked through the introduction pattern with Ms. Lister again. This was the second time she’d asked for a meal after asking for light, but apart from a brief back and forth about whether Cait would have poisoned the food, it didn’t seem to change anything about the trajectory of her questions or her answers when he gave her bread and meat and vegetables early in the conversation. It changed nothing if he traded rings with another estate-keeper and spoke in another accent. It changed nothing if he appeared in a female shape instead, or if he moved his class marker from the color of his eyes (which she once remarked upon) to somewhere less conspicuous. He didn’t have many degrees of freedom; the Princess still hadn’t told him exactly what she was up to, so he couldn’t make up particularly sophisticated stories justifying the need to help Lyne impersonate Ms. Lister.

  Ms. Lister declined, again.

  Cait wiped her, again.

  Ms. Lister fell asleep after a few moments’ groggy blinking. It was a reasonable hour for that in the time zone she’d come from. Cait twisted the ring on his thumb, all the way around and then halfway back.

  There was a delay, and:

  “Report.”

  “Princess,” Cait said, “Ms. Lister is still unrepsonsive. Without more information about the situation or leeway on her treatment, I do not believe I can extract her cooperation in a timely manner.”

  “I’ll work around it. You can stop wiping her and just keep her comfortable. If she’ll help later that’s still useful, let me know. Is there anything else?”

  “No, Princess.”

  Cait waited deferentially for five minutes of dead silence on her end and then turned his ring back to its original position. He watched Maureen sleep in the darkness. She’d derived, several times, in bits and pieces that she’d spoken aloud, that the Princess must have kidnapped her because of her desire to move to “Montana”, but Cait was not as well informed of Earthly politics as Lyne. Perhaps Montana was dangerous and the Princess feared for her consort’s safety. Perhaps the Princess’s consort did not wish to go to Montana and Ms. Lister had been planning to abduct her.

  It would have needed to be a fairly serious problem for the Princess to be unable to address it with sufficient selective memory deletion, on her own recognizance. She needed to be limited and discreet with her use of her resources. Even having Lyne away and Cait holding down the Estate was a risk.

  The Princess’s little brothers and sisters might notice that she was struggling.

  * * *

  Celia packed her things.

  Just the important stuff.

  Dad’s apartment was small.

  One box of clothes, one box of books, all her school stuff in her backpack. Pillow, quilt, vine-print bag of toiletries, box marked “Misc.” for her laptop and last-gen Nintendo and two stuffed animals and winter coat and odds-and-ends. Everything else that hadn’t gone into the discard bin was going into a storage unit until Celia had her own place to spread out into. Shula was helping; so was uncle Joe. Maureen was on the phone in another room, voice low, talking to the school authorities or the realtor or her new boss or something.

  “Your dad will like having you around more, really,” Joe told her. “But you’ve got to be patient with him. You’re old enough to be responsible about that, now.”

  Celia nodded. This was her idea, wasn’t it? Sleep on Dad’s couch, make sure he took his pills, do his errands occasionally so uncle Joe could pick up more hours at work, stay in town, stay with Shula. Packing felt weird anyway. She taped “Misc.” shut. Shula nudged their shoes together and picked the box up to go stuff it in the back of Maureen’s station wagon.

  Once everything was loaded up, Shula, who had to be at dinner with her parents and sister and sister’s fiancé, went home; Joe drove Celia to the apartment and they hauled everything up. Celia got to unpacking. It took a couple hours. She shelved her books in the box; she put her clothes in the front closet where her dad had cleared away a couple of shelves.

  Her phone buzzed in her purse. Shula had texted: remember you can sleep over basically whenever you want!

  Celia looked around the apartment and went to take inventory of the kitchen. Uncle Joe was in there, cleaning the microwave.

  “If you ever need to come over to my place for a night -” he began.

  “- then I’ll go to Shula’s instead, because you have cats, uncle Joe,” Celia said. “I’d sneeze myself to death.”

  “I could shut them up in my room overnight, they usually sleep there anyway.”

  “They’ve been all over the apartment, it won’t help. But thanks,” said Celia.

  “Do you want to run out to the grocery store?” Joe asked, as Celia peered into the fridge.

  “That’d be good.” Dad had storebought potato salad and half a premade lasagna and ketchup and a box of questionable strawberries. Wilting lettuce, soy sauce. Sliced cheese, deli turkey, pickles. “Uh, Mom said she gave you some money - or sent Dad the money, I wasn’t totally clear - to cover expenses.”

  “Yep. Don’t worry about it, get whatever you’ll eat. Maybe go easy on the caviar.”

  “Should we wake up Dad and see if he wants to come?”

  Joe shook his head. “Let him nap. Generally. Let him nap.”

  “Okay.”

  Joe took her shopping. She put everything away. Joe left for work. Celia dug into her backpack and found some homework to do.

  This is weird, she thought, mechanically conjugating Spanish verbs. Why did she let me…?

  She’s not okay about the gay thing at all, is she. She’s not kicking me out though. Technically. I asked.

  She’s barely
talked to me since.

  Better not tell Dad. I have nowhere else to live.

  * * *

  David woke up slowly. It was hard to tell from the inside when exactly he woke up. Everything was foggy. His head hurt. The clock said a quarter after five in the afternoon. The sticky note on the clock said in his own handwriting Celia moving in today.

  Right. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, tried to control the shaking in his hands to no avail.

  He looked at the wall. He ran through a sort of checklist in his head. He never believed anything that he didn’t think was true, but if he believed anything that would get him in trouble if he were in a hospital, he could sometimes tell which things those were. And sometimes he could tell Joe about it. And then his psychiatrist could give him more antipsychotics and he could sleep more and shake more and let his brain erode into gray soup, but Celia had moved in, so better to be that little bit more careful.

  His name was David and his daughter Celia had just moved in. Safe.

  It was April. Celia’s birthday was in August. She’d be eighteen. Safe.

  Celia had moved in because she didn’t want to go to Montana with his ex. Safe.

  He hadn’t talked to Maureen. About Celia moving in, or anything, not for weeks. …Questionable. Joe disagreed. But that was David thinking something had not happened, rather than thinking that something had. Joe had never had a psychotic break in his life but he didn’t necessarily have a perfect recall. Probably safe.

  Celia’s friend Shula was an alien with mystical powers who -

  That didn’t make any sense. Shula had a human family. Aliens with mystical powers would only embed themselves into human families to seek mates. Celia didn’t fit the profile, so an alien wouldn’t waste any time on her. David didn’t have any idea why he’d thought that in the first place; it didn’t hold together.

  …Talking about aliens with mystical powers would probably get him in trouble in a hospital. But he didn’t really believe it, because it didn’t make sense in terms of Shula’s motive. And he could dismiss the belief by thinking about it and realizing it didn’t hold together, it wasn’t a sticky delusion. Having identified the flaw in its logical coherence, he wasn’t motivated to do anything about it, let alone endanger his kid. Probably just fine.

  Joe would be at work at this hour. He was a security guard. Safe.

  David tried to smooth his hair, gave up, put his slippers on and went out of his bedroom. Celia was in the kitchen, he could hear her. He ducked into the bathroom and came out again just as she said, “Hi Dad. Do you want some tuna?”

  He smiled at her tiredly. “Love some. Thanks.”

  She gave him a bowlful of tuna with hardboiled eggs and pasta twists in it, and he ate it and it was good. He could do this.

  * * *

  Maureen was getting sort of crazily accustomed to the place.

  Cait was always around; if he slept, he did it whenever she did. Sometimes he spoke into the rings on his fingers, always in a language she couldn’t understand. Sometimes he would leave her alone in a room, but he’d appear at her elbow if she tried to leave; if he was going to be busy for a long enough time she was locked into whatever room she was in at the moment. After she’d been there for several days his accent suddenly went from Scottish to Southern.

  It was always night. The building was warm, there were hot drafts blowing through the vents (too small to cartoonishly crawl through), it was always lit with the fire sconces. There weren’t lightswitches; she had to ask Cait, every time, although he was pretty quick to anticipate her if she got up and moved.

  She’d tried to make a run for it once. The lights had all gone out as soon as she’d bolted, and she’d crashed into a wall; when she’d found the door, it wouldn’t open; and then Cait had come up behind her and asked if she was quite finished.

  She’d attacked him, then, finding him by his voice, and he’d just sort of stood there, immobile, while she beat her fists against his chest. He was like concrete. Her hands ached. She stopped.

  “I do apologize for the necessity,” he’d said.

  “Then let me go home.”

  “I cannot.”

  So she continued to live in the windowless firelit - place. Estate. She mostly stayed in the one room, with the cushy beanbag-esque thing taking up most of the floor; Cait would bring her food there, plain but recognizable and edible. There was an ensuite bathroom with bizarre plumbing but not so bizarre that she was forced to ask for help figuring it out. If she asked for a book or a newspaper there would be a delay but eventually she’d get it. She started asking in batches. He wouldn’t bring her her own clothes, but he’d get her others, so she had changes of outfit available.

  Much of the time she couldn’t force herself to read. Too worried about Celia, about the carefully balanced elements of her life collapsing - what would the realtor think, her boss, what was the date, was she already supposed to be starting? It was always night; Cait didn’t seem to know how to operate a calendar. Maybe it was already May. Maybe Celia had finished school, given up on her mother reappearing, gone to a foster home…? Or her father’s. David meant well, Maureen supposed, but…

  “So Shula’s a princess,” Maureen said to Cait one - night. Always night.

  “Yes,” said Cait.

  “But her parents - I’ve met her parents, once or twice. Inabah’s a doctor, I think Ahamad owns an electrician business, something like that.”

  Cait was silent.

  “And they’re from Yemen. I think Yemen’s got a president. If it technically has kings and queens and princesses too, left over or something, they’re not the kind with spooky magic servants who kidnap people for them.”

  Cait, eyes ink-black from corner to corner, regarded her neutrally.

  “When Celia was - five or six she’d get angry at me and tell me that her real mother was a fairy queen who was going to come get her sooner or later. She was wrong, I would know. Shula…”

  Cait’s head tilted, just a fraction.

  “…was absolutely right. And she knows it. And she can call her goons to kidnap me and hold me for God knows how long if I get in her way. What does she want with my daughter?”

  “You know that I am not at liberty to answer all of your questions,” Cait said.

  “I’ve gotten that impression. How were Inabah and Ahmad convinced, is she a changeling, do you have the real Shula shut up somewhere in another wing…?”

  “Apart from the Princess’s servants, such as myself, you are the only person on the Estate.”

  “Is the real Shula dead?”

  “The royal family does not condone biological murder.”

  “What the hell is biological murder?”

  “Killing a person’s physical body.”

  “As opposed to what other kind of murder?”

  This one Cait didn’t answer.

  Maureen flopped backwards into the beanbag thing. It was really cozy. “Are Shula’s real parents, what, paying the Alis to raise her?”

  Silence.

  “Turn the lights out, I’m going to sleep,” growled Maureen. The fact that he was keeping her prisoner was mildly less grating when he’d respond to even the most brusque orders (within the scope of his other instructions) with smooth obedience. No Zimbardo prison guard was Cait. The sconces went out. The door opened and closed again, leaving Maureen alone.

  She stared into the darkness and rolled over and wondered where she was.

  * * *

  Celia settled into a pattern. She looked after her dad with uncle Joe’s help; she kept up all right in school; she hung out with Shula and slept over a couple times a week. Shula turned eighteen in May. School let out. They spent most of every day together; Shula bought her ice cream, and took her to movies and the water park and - one weekend, with her sister Amrika along but unobservant - to the beach. Shula tutted over her sunburns more than was really warranted so that Celia would let her put sunscreen on her. (Shula didn’t burn. She wasn’t that dark
, but apparently it was enough. Celia put sunscreen on her anyway. “Anyone can get cancer, Shula.”)

  Celia called her mother once a week. The conversations were brief. Celia asked polite questions about how Montana was, but Maureen tended to steer the conversation back to how Celia was doing, so Celia told her about the creepy feeling of seaweed on her leg, the weird flavors of gelato Shula had dared her to try, how rude that one guy in the line for the water slide was. She tried to strike a balance between conspicuously not bringing up Shula and talking about her constantly despite her suspicion that her mother was not, really, comfortable. She couldn’t tell if she was managing.

  The summer wore on. Celia looked at colleges, thought about veterinary medicine or maybe dentistry or something, wrote scholarship essays. Shula didn’t.

  Celia’s birthday rolled around. Shula decided to throw her a party, no ifs ands or buts - though Celia was given the choice of a big party, at Shula’s house, with school friends, where they would have to be in the closet, or a little celebration picnic, just the two of them, out in the woods.

  Celia wanted the picnic. It wasn’t like her dad would want to come to a big crowded party, and her mom was out of state. Everybody else could send her a card.

  So Shula picked her up, the day Celia turned eighteen, and drove her out to the trail, and they hiked to the picnic spot and set up cake and sparkling grape juice.

  The sky was bright and full of puffy, white clouds. Celia shut her eyes and inhaled wind and pine. She licked frosting off her lip.

  When she opened her eyes again Shula was beside her, down on one knee.

  * * *

  “Celia,” said Shula. She scooped Celia’s hand up in her own. “Celia Rhiannon Lister-Altman. Will -”

  “Oh my god,” breathed Celia.

  “- you marry me?” finished Shula, looking up at her hopefully.

  “Oh my God, Shula,” said Celia. She was proposing with one of those gold-and-ruby rings she always wore. “Shula, we can’t.”