Story by Thomas French – Photographs by Cherie Diez
Laura waters her roses, ponders the forces of darkness and talks with God.
Just before dawn, and a mockingbird already calling from the woods beyond the house. The smell of coffee, very strong, tons of cream, drifting upward from the cup in her hand. No sign yet, thank God, of the demented billy goat from next door.
Laura, seven months pregnant and feeling it, walked slowly through her garden. She was soaking up the early morning stillness, waiting for the sun, talking to her roses.
“Hello,” she was saying to them now, speaking in her most gentle and soothing voice. “Did you miss me?”
Laura treasured these moments in her garden. Her husband, Lewis Martin, was busy getting ready for his job at the sawmill. Her four older children were still asleep in the house; her fifth was swimming quietly inside her womb. As for the neighbor’s goat, a four-legged terrorist with huge horns and bloodshot eyes and a fondness for butting anything in his path, he usually waited until well after sunrise before launching one of his sneak attacks.
All of which meant that daybreak was Laura’s best chance for grabbing a few moments to herself. So every morning, she would rouse herself at 5:30 or so and slip outside to tend the flowers, sip her coffee and think.
It was the summer of 1989. Laura was living with her family outside Hudson, in a rural area not far from the house where she’d climbed into the tree as a little girl. She was 37 now, with penetrating green eyes, thick brown hair that almost fell to her waist and an open face that seemed to be perpetually searching for something more. She did not know what she was searching for exactly. All she knew was that she felt a desperate need inside her to understand, the same curiosity that had driven her as a little girl. Only now it was accompanied by an emptiness she could not name, a vague sense that something was not right in her life.
After years of marriage, Laura was sometimes plagued with a feeling that Lewis was not the one she was supposed to spend her life with, that there was someone else out there waiting for her. She told herself these feelings were ridiculous, the romantic fantasies of a schoolgirl. But the feelings persisted, nagging at her.
Laura was excited about the child growing inside her. It made her think that perhaps things would be all right after all. She told herself that she was not just pregnant with a baby. She was pregnant with a chance for a new life of her own.
So much had already happened to Laura. She grew up in Tampa and on her grandparents’ farm, the one with the tree. Her father, who worked at a family drugstore, left before she was born, and her mother, a bookkeeper, did the best she could for Laura and her older brother. After the divorce the family moved around, sometimes staying with Laura’s mother’s parents or other members of the family; in the years that followed, her mother married and divorced four more times.
Laura struggled to find her place. She was precocious — her mother says Laura could read and write at age 3 — and did well in school. If anything, Laura thought school was too easy. With all her outside reading, she excelled academically without bothering to do a minute of homework. But as she grew up, she had trouble fitting in. Other kids her age were focused on football games and pep rallies; her idea of a stimulating afternoon was plowing through a history book. They wanted to find a date for Saturday night; she wanted to understand the fundamentals of biochemistry.
Alice Knight, Laura’s mother, was worried about her. So she took Laura to a psychiatrist. He met with her several times, gave her some tests, then delivered his conclusion to Laura, her mother and a counselor from Laura’s school.
“She’s not the problem,” Laura and her mother remember him saying. “The fact of the matter is that she’s smarter than all of us in this room and smarter than all her teachers.”
But there was more to it than that. From the time she was a little girl, Laura had felt that she was fundamentally different. She was sure she knew things she had no way of knowing. She could see inside people, feel the essence of them, read the patterns of energy playing out in their lives. She had strange dreams that seemed to come true; driving through neighborhoods, she sensed that she was seeing and hearing and smelling snippets of whatever was happening inside each house she passed.
Her mother, asked later about these things, would confirm that her daughter had a gift.
“She had what we called the premonitions,” remembers Mrs. Knight. “She understood things about people.”
This was overwhelming enough for Laura and her mother. Other episodes were far more frightening. Once, at age 3, Laura woke from a nap with a sensation that something was about to happen. She heard footsteps approaching on the gravel outside the house and wondered if she should run to the closet or crawl under the bed. Before she could move, a strange face appeared at the bedroom window, a face similar to that of a large lizard. In her mind, she heard the face talking to her.
“There’s no point in thinking about hiding,” it told her. “When the time comes, we will find you, no matter where you go or what you do.”
Similar incidents followed during Laura’s childhood. Once, she saw her bedroom window opening, as though something was trying to get her. Another time, she woke with a start and saw a vision in which frightening creatures — lizard creatures, just like the face at the window — took her into the woods and showed her a shallow grave holding the corpse of a baby, with its hands and feet severed. The creatures warned her that she could easily end up the same way.
When she talked with her mother about these things, her mother said she was being foolish.
“You’re just imagining it,” Mrs. Knight said.
Laura wanted to believe that herself. As she grew older, she told herself that these moments were all just waking dreams, fantastic products of her imagination. She learned to stop talking about the incidents to anyone else, especially adults. But the episodes did not stop. They continued as she took classes at Hillsborough Community College, then met Lewis, married him and began raising a family.
She was doing her best to be ordinary. She was having her babies, first two daughters, then a son, then another daughter, and working off and on at various jobs to help pay the bills. She was going to church — although Laura had been raised Methodist, she and Lewis now attended a Pentecostal church — and tending to her garden, and buying groceries, and worrying about the family finances, just like everyone else.
No matter how hard she tried, though, Laura simply could not fit in. She still saw the world as differently as she did when she was a child; still read reams and reams on every subject from mythology to astronomy, looking for answers; was still haunted by mysterious, inexplicable experiences.
There were nights when Laura would wake in her bed and sense something there in the room with her and Lewis. Often, she would get sick after these incidents, developing ear infections and other ailments. Sometimes part of the house would grow strangely cold. Glass objects would break around her. They would break when she was upset or startled, and always when she wasn’t touching them. Drinking glasses, a lamp, a window over her bed, even the window of a friend’s brand-new BMW.
Then came the night when she woke beside her husband to find the house bathed in white light. Still half asleep, she told herself it was nothing, just some people outside with pickup trucks, shining their headlights through the windows. She went back to sleep. But when she woke up, she was turned around, with her head at the foot of the bed and her feet up by the pillows. The bottom of her nightgown was soaking wet and soiled with weeds, as though she’d been walking outside.
Laura finally began to accept that she would never be anything remotely close to ordinary. Life would be so much simpler if she were like everyone else, but now she realized that such a wish was impossible. That was when she opened herself up to new directions, when she began performing the spirit detachments and the exorcisms. . . .
“Oh, is that a nasty bug on you?” Laura was saying now, peering at the leaves on another rose bush in her garden. “Let’s get that off right away.”
She liked being out here at dawn, when the glow of the new day was spreading through the trees and the dew was still on the grass and she could lose herself among the flowers. She would hear the bees zooming by and watch the hummingbirds poised in midair above the blossoms, and she would remember that there was balance in the world. She adored her lilies — lilies of the valley, day lilies, cups and saucers — and the marigolds that exploded in a stunning wall of yellow. But the roses were her favorites. They were so delicate, so demanding of her care and time, that she thought of them as her children. She grew them on the east side of the house, just outside her bedroom. At night, she would drift asleep to their scent.
Laura loved living in this house, surrounded by woods. Not long ago, though, she had received a surprising prediction. She had gotten out a Ouija board and was fooling around with it, asking questions about what to do with her grandparents’ nearby farm, now that they had died. She would rest her fingers on the planchette, a small piece of plastic with felt slides under it, and then ask her questions and watch the planchette glide back and forth, moving through the letters of the alphabet laid out before her on the board. Letter by letter, the board would give her answers. Now it was telling her to sell her grandparents’ property; also to prepare for another change in her life. She and her family were moving, the board said. They were going to Montana.
Laura didn’t understand. She had lived virtually her whole life in Florida. But the board was insistent.
“M-O-N-T-A-N-A,” it spelled.
Laura wasn’t necessarily opposed to the idea. Maybe Montana would be good. But she couldn’t think about making such a drastic move at this point in her life, especially with a fifth child on the way. She walked through the garden, and felt the baby inside her, and thought about all that had happened to her, and tried to understand what it meant. She thought about all the things that lay ahead of her. There were so many possibilities, probabilities, ghost realities fighting their way into being.
Repeatedly she was struck with a sense that there was something more she was supposed to be doing. Since childhood, she had felt there was a hidden meaning to everything that had happened to her, a plan that had been kept out of her view. Now she was sure of it. Inside, she felt a growing certainty that all her studies and all her experiences, even the frightening ones, had laid the groundwork for a role waiting to be fulfilled.
But what was that role? Not knowing was excruciating.
She tried to wheedle some answers out of God. Morning after morning, there among the roses, she asked God to please let her in on the plan. She promised not to let him down. If he would just give her some answers, she would make the most of it. She swore it. But she had to understand why she had been made the way she was made. Why was she so driven to learn? What exactly was she supposed to do with all of these things careening around inside of her? Why did she feel so empty? Was it her marriage? Or was there something wrong with her?
Tell me, she would say. If you exist, and if there’s a reason I am here, tell me what it is. Show me the path. Tell me where to place my foot next. Please.
Laura listened to Wolfgang all the time now. She’d made a tape of her favorite pieces — A Little Night Music, excerpts from The Magic Flute — and she’d put it on the stereo in the afternoons while she worked, humming and singing as she made the beds, did the dishes, nursed her baby daughter.
Arielle, she was called.
Only a few months after the conversations with God in the garden, Laura was deliriously happy. The ghost realities were no longer ghosts. Now they were alive.
The first thing that happened was that Laura had reached an understanding with God. She had decided that there was no point in trying to pry answers out of him. Whatever God planned for her, he would show her when the time was right.
In the meantime, she had more than enough to keep her busy, caring for the new baby. Arielle had made a dramatic entrance into the world. Laura had gone into labor early one August evening and then struggled until just after midnight, when the doctor performed a C-section. But it had all been worth it. Her daughter was beautiful, and Laura was holding her at last.
There was other work to do as well. With the arrival of a fifth child, Laura and Lewis had decided they needed a bigger house. Laura had found one in New Port Richey, not far from downtown. It was a wreck inside — “a handyman’s special,” the real estate ad had called it — but it had a big yard and five bedrooms.
Laura was thrilled. She had an intuition about the new house.
This was where she was supposed to be, she told herself. This was where whatever was meant to happen to her would begin. She could feel it.
There was just one thing. Something that did not even register with Laura when she first found the house. Something she didn’t even think about until after she and Lewis had bought it.
The house was on Montana Avenue.
Photo by: CHERIE DIEZ
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