She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“They knew I was out of breath.”
“Oh, Lauren, they were just having fun.”
“Then their sense of fun is warped.”
She didn’t get it — she seemed amused. “The guys were teasing you. It’s how they flirt.”
I turned to Nick, but he said nothing. I wondered what he would have done if they had “teased” Nora like that. “I’m going in.”
“You’re coming back, aren’t you?” Holly asked.
“No.” The dog was still by my side. “Nick, I want to take Rocky with me. I’ll let him out later, okay?”
“He’s going to smell awful,” Holly reminded me.
“Fine,” Nick said with a shrug.
When I got to the kitchen, I gave Rocky a bowl of water and a piece of turkey. “Sorry I don’t have any waterfowl to offer you.” I found an old towel and dried him off as best I could. “I don’t know what I would have done without you, big guy,” I whispered.
Holding on to his tags so they wouldn’t jingle, I led Rocky upstairs. I heard Aunt Jule’s television and tiptoed past her bedroom. When I was a child, I told my godmother everything. It hurt not to trust her now, but I could guess what she’d say if I recounted the incident in the river. At best, she’d dismiss it, seeing it as Holly did; at worst, she’d say I was obsessed with my mother’s drowning.
Nora’s door was closed as usual. So was mine, though I didn’t remember shutting it. I opened the door and flicked on the overhead light. Rocky trotted in happily. I stood frozen in the doorway, surveying my room in disbelief.
The curtains hung half off the rod, as if someone had yanked on them furiously, each panel tied in a knot. The sheets were pulled off the bed and twisted grotesquely, their corners in knots. My bedside lamp lay on its side, its shade bent, its cord knotted. My heart necklace, muddy stockings, and the bras in my laundry hamper were all tied in knots.
Now I knew how my mother had felt — this attack was personal.
I pulled open bureau drawers. My clothes were a mess, rolled up on themselves as if someone had tried tying their clumsy shapes. In the closet, the arms of my long-sleeved shirts were knotted.
Just touching the knots made me feel creepy, but I had to get rid of them. As I untied my things, I reviewed the events of the last three days, trying to determine what was truly a threat and cause for fear. The water in the boathouse was probably stirred by a wake. The note left in my car and the brick thrown at my windshield could have been done by or for Nora, but they also could have been random pranks. It seemed likely that the harassment in the river was revenge for decking Jason at the prom. Setting aside those events, the strangest ones remained: the swing incident, the nighttime experience in the greenhouse, and these knots.
I thought about showing some of the knots to Holly, then I kept on untying. Like me, Holly saw that Nora had serious problems and she wanted those problems fixed, but the incident with Jason’s friends had made it clear — Holly read only the surface of things. I was convinced there was a lot going on beneath it. As for Frank, I didn’t see how I could talk to him about things that sounded so crazy.
I had untied everything but my heart necklace. I stared down at its tiny knots, thinking about the way the chain had crept along my neck, the way the jade plant moved on its own, and the swing rope snapped and knotted. What power was at work here? The power of my own imagination and fear — or something stranger — an invisible, dangerous thing?
I pulled out the card with Dr. Parker’s number and reached for my cell phone. I was finally scared to the point of desperate. My mother had seen things knotted in the weeks before she died. Now I was.
Dr. Parker’s pink glasses looked like magic spectacles in the lava-lamp interior of Wayne’s Bar. When he’d asked me to meet him there at eleven P.M., I’d wondered what I was getting myself into, but Wayne’s turned out to be a health bar serving various flavors of springwater, herbal teas, and vegetable dishes, some of which looked suspiciously like cooked bay grass.
I was sipping my raspberry water and staring at Dr.
Parker’s glasses, as if an answer might suddenly rise to the surface of them the way it does on a Magic 8 Ball. He had listened without interrupting while I recounted some of the events of seven years ago and the strange things that had been happening recently. Now he was either thinking or asleep.
“An interesting image,” he murmured, then opened his eyes. “Tell me, Lauren, tell me all about knots. What do they mean?”
I stared at him blankly. “I don’t want to be rude, but I thought you were going to explain them.”
“If you were writing a poem,” he said, “and used a knot as a symbol, an image, what might it stand for?”
I gazed down at my hands, twisting my fingers around one another.
“Think of all the different kinds of knots you have seen,” he prompted, “not just the recent ones — others. What do they do? How do they work?”
“Well, there are nautical knots,” I began. “You could use one to tie a boat to a dock or make fast a sail.”
“So a knot can link things and hold them steady,” he said.
“Yes, like a knot that ties a plant to a trellis and gives it the support it needs.”
“Good. Keep going.”
I traced a shape on the table with my finger. “I’ve seen jewelry, silver and gold wires, that has been twisted into shapes called love knots. I guess they symbolize the linking of two people.”
I drew the shape again, as if it were dangling from a chain, then thought of the heart necklace pulling against my neck. “There are knots that can be tied and tightened until they hurt you, even kill you. Like a hangman’s noose.”
“Keep going.”
“You can be bound and gagged, kept prisoner by knots.”
“Yes. Keep going.”
“Knots can be hard to untangle, so they could be a symbol of confusion. Sometimes a person will say her stomach is in knots — like before an exam.”
“And what does that mean?”
“That she’s anxious, scared, worried.”
“Keep going.”
“That’s all I can think of.”
Dr. Parker sat silently, chewing his sprout sandwich, sipping his tea.
“So,” he said at last, “knots can be positive and negative symbols. They can represent a whole spectrum of feelings, and even those that seem opposite aren’t really. For example, sometimes our ties with people support us and allow us to grow. But those same ties can restrict us, strangle us.”
It was like that with my mother, I thought, but I would never tell him that. “So you’re saying that Nora can be feeling any of these things and this is how she expresses it?”
“If she’s the one tying the knots,” he replied.
“But the strange thing is — I probably didn’t make this clear-she’s not always — that is, I haven’t seen her — I mean sometimes things seem to move when—” I broke off.
“She’s not touching them?” The psychologist picked up a honey scoop and slowly twirled the golden liquid off the stick and into his tea. “Lauren, do you know what RSPK isrecurrent spontaneous psychokinesis?”
I tried to string together the meanings of the words. “No.”