Little Miss Scare-All

Hanging on one wall of Emmeline’s bedroom (as it would for all her life, in whatever room was hers, in whatever place she dwelled), was a fabric picture, a landscape, which her mother had sewn during her pregnancy. It was meant to depict sunrise in their particular part of the world, upon the lowlands just over a ridge separating their town from both the highway and the coastline.

Daymar was a viticulture town: not large enough to sustain a major winery, but there were several vintners who cultivated heirloom grapes, very idiosyncratic, whose palettes were apt to change from year to year, depending on the weather, growing conditions, and time of harvest. Because the town was close to the shore, but also in a valley, the fog would collect in the basin in the early afternoon and not dissipate often until late morning the next day. Marissa’s picture attempted to portray the sun burning through the layers of mist, each a little thinner as the water was evaporated. The sky above was nearly colorless, but suffused with a golden glow. The ground below a deep brown, the brown of fecund mud, interwoven with layers of green: emerald, and sage, and forest, and spring; meant to represent the abundant vegetation which covered their yard, looking out onto a vista of fallow land, an abandoned vineyard.

The layer closest to the ground was a glittery deep gray, with iridescent threads meant to portray how the light would flash against the droplets suspended in the air. The layer just below the ornate halo of the sun moved from a blankness known as “ghostwhite” to a kind of blue, the threads worked within a pale azure.

In daydreaming moods, Emmeline would lay upon her bed and stare at the weaving, attempting to perceive every color separately, to distinguish from her mother’s carefully combined mélange the distinct threads which comprised the vision; the same vision which greeted them every morning, save when the clouds overhead dashed all hopes of a sighting of sunshine. She was reminded always of the power of creativity, for she was hard-pressed to discern which came first: the event occurring beyond the bounds of their home, or the weaving which portrayed it so skillfully. Wasn’t Nature a weaving of all elements together, the world its’ cloth from the unseen loom?

And in the corner, just a slight figure composed from periwinkle and indigo, a bit of linen meant to be a face framed by a swatch of dark honey, tilted up towards the sky.

“That’s you, my love,” her mother told her, “I knew you ere you were born. You would visit me in dreams, the way you are now, so we would know each other better when you came out. And you did, you knew me from the moment you saw me.”

In adolescent years, the inner skeptic surfacing, Emmeline would tout, “But babies can’t actually see when they’re born, everything is a blob. Black and white blobs. I bet I knew you by smell instead.”

“But you smiled.”

“Gas.”

“Ah, scoff all you will,” her mother countered, across the kitchen table “but ours is a special bond. I know it’s a prejudice of your age, the belief that nothing is special.”

“I’m not special, Mom.”

“You used to think so. You used to believe in yourself. Sometimes I wonder what happened, but then again, I know.”

“I grew up,” Emmeline said, after a moment of silence, carefully cutting up an apple, refusing to meet her mother’s eyes.


The years of carefully planned cloaking began to unravel when Emmeline turned ten. Ten-year-old girls are an inquisitive lot, their maturity progressing in a quantum leap compared to the boys at that particular age, and it was around that time Emmeline began to stand out again. Some of the girls had come to the former farmhouse for sleepovers, enjoying the delicious bounty of Marissa’s cooking, and the way she devised fun arts and crafts activities for the girls; but cocking a jaundiced eye towards the cold wooden floors, the silence of the house’s relatively remote location, the fact that Marissa did not own a television. And then there were the ghost stories. While the other girls relied on tried-but-true favorites such as Bloody Mary, and The Lovers’ Lane killer (”He had a hook for a hand!”), Emmeline concocted far more frightening narratives involving young girls who always seemed to be rescued at the last minute from terrible fates by monsters, which turned out to be merely enchanted lost souls who had traded their humanity for powers which made them hideous on the outside. But of course, the power of true love made all things possible, including marrying a monstrosity.

“Ugh, she did not kiss him at the end!” Mandy, the girl who sat next to her in homeroom, protested.

“But she loved him!” Emmeline replied, believing the denouement made perfect sense.

“You can’t love something that’s all hunched over with horns growing out of its’ head!” Janelle, another classmate interjected.

“But everyone has someone who loves them! Don’t they?”

“Other monsters, maybe” answered Mandy, “but not people.”

These late-night palavers also served as confession sessions, the girls sharing their secrets, which normally only amounted to whom had a crush on whom and did not want anyone to know, or who was in trouble with their parents, or who had cheated on the last math quiz but without getting caught.

For Emmeline, however, the questions asked inclined more towards the immediately personal.

“Hey Emmy, where’s your dad? Is he dead or something?” Janelle asked upon her first visit to the farmhouse. Mandy, who was also in attendance, looked aghast at their friend’s impertinence.

“Jan-elle!”

“Well everyone has a dad, c’mon!”

“Oh I have a dad,” Emmeline said, with the practiced nonchalance she had first employed at age six, “he just doesn’t live here.”

“But where is he?”

“Out in the desert, somewhere.”

Mandy’s curiosity got the better of her. “What does he do out there?”

“My mom says he teaches people to be better.”

“Better how?”

“I asked her that, and she said she didn’t know, since he never made her any better.”


The summer after Emmeline turned 13, an opportunity presented itself. Normally she spent the summers helping out at her mother’s craft store, dealing with the increased traffic due to the tourist trade. People who came to the shore for the summer often occupied the bed and breakfast establishments in Daymar, as it was cheaper than the beach towns. Fall brought another class of visitors: those wanting to try the new wine, as the local vintners rushed to harvest before the frost set in; not to mention the orchard on the hill, known for growing the best Gravenstein apples outside of Sebastopol.

One morning she rose as dawn faintly glinted above the tops of the trees and seated herself at the kitchen table, shivering in the damp she knew would soon be replaced by another scorching day of clear skies and little wind. Summer was often oppressive in Daymar, as the town’s placement was not conducive to gentle weather: the wind from the sea would roar through the canyons, only to be cut off by the slope of the picturesque foothills. The fog was the only thing not subject to changes of season.

Her bowl of oatmeal and glass of apple juice were waiting, as usual. She breathed in the warm steam, smiling, and proceeded to add a layer of brown sugar to the top, then stirred it in. She added another layer and let it adorn the top, melting slightly.

“Mom, can I have some cocoa, it’s cold this morning,” she asked.

Her mother put on a saucepan of milk to heat on the stove, and removed a tin of Dutch cocoa from a nearby cupboard.

“You know, you could remedy being cold by putting some clothes on.”

“I am wearing clothes.”

“You’re wearing underwear. I mean a sweater, some sweat pants, socks even.”

“Mom, not everyone has to dress like they live in Alaska.”

As Emmeline razzed her playfully she retrieved a mug from a rack on the wall above the sideboard. Her mother had thrown and glazed it for her, as a birthday gift. Painted carefully in a kind of mannered cursive, against a creamy background of ivory shot through with threads of gold, it read: Emmeline Is Enchanting! Below her mother had painted a small caricature, the girl with dark honey hair bore a wand which trailed stardust. She measured cocoa powder into it, keeping an eye on the milk so it wouldn’t burn.

After returning to the table with her beverage, she frowned to see an envelope lying next to her bowl of oatmeal, addressed to her in an unfamiliar hand.

“What’s this?” she asked.

Marissa came to the table and sat down across from her, her hands around another mug, this one painted by Emmeline: Moms Are Magical! In the new day’s light, the daughter thought she saw more lines around her mother’s eyes and mouth, more than she remembered. Though perhaps it was just that they were concealed better by candlelight. Marissa cleared her throat after a sip of scalding tea, taken more out of nervousness than need.

“Your father has written to me, and he included a letter for you. I am honoring his request to allow you to read it, and decide for yourself if you would accept his invitation.”

“Invitation?”

“I’m not going to say anything about that, read his letter. Your father understands that although I do not wish to associate with him, I wouldn’t hold you to the same prohibitions.”

The envelope was thick cream-colored parchment, and her name inscribed in fancy calligraphy on the front. She frowned, remembering her mother’s prejudice for such things she felt were “cheesy.” The handwriting on the letter itself was a loose scrawl, punctuated with sharp capitals, those letters rendered larger than the others, at times.

My dear Emmeline –

I imagine you’re quite shocked, at this moment, as I would be, if I were you. Your mother and I felt it best, when you were younger, to keep the disruptions of my life and work out of your life. To be a child, grow as a child, without the added pressure of being my daughter, in the public sense.

This, naturally, causes you also to wonder, what I am, other than your father. And that is what I wish to show you, if you’ll do me the honor of visiting, for the summer. I want to know the girl I was privileged enough to conceive in the willing vessel of your mother, one August full-moon night. And I want you to know me, someone who loves you even though he does not know you, someone you may grow to love if you will allow yourself to do so.

She dropped the letter onto the table, a faint queasy look upon her face.

“What it is?” Marissa asked, preparing herself for the worst.

“Ugh, he talks about how you guys conceived me! What is wrong with him?!”

“Your father,” Marissa began, then paused to take another sip of tea and clear her throat, “doesn’t always have a sense of what is appropriate. But he’s never had to, running his own society and whatnot.”

Emmeline’s response was to be expected.

”WHAT?!”

Her mother, someone who was always depended upon to have the right advice for the occasion, was clearly at a loss to explain.

“What are you talking about?” Emmeline asked her.

“I’ve never really told you anything about your father because, frankly, I wasn’t sure exactly how to explain.”

“Explain what?”

“Your father possesses special abilities. Abilities I think you also may have. That is probably why he’s contacting you now.”

“What, he’s a witch, just like all the kids at school say you are? Do you know how many times I’ve had to make excuses for you?”

Marissa looked appalled. “Emmeline Evangelina, I’ve never given you any cause to be ashamed of me!”

“That’s not what I mean – it’s just that they don’t understand – I hate having to defend myself, to defend you!”

She took a large swig of juice, seeing Marissa’s face turn placid again. She knew the look.

“If you weren’t so craving of acceptance, then you wouldn’t have to defend anything.”

The response to that platitude, often given, was accompanied by the sound of a glass slamming against the table. Luckily, the table was solid wood, used to passionate actions of all kinds. Marissa vaguely recalled other activities related to passionate response, somewhat surreally contrasting with the debate of the moment.

“There is nothing wrong with wanting to be normal!”

The mother murmured to herself, a calming mantra, you are the adult, and gave a measured response, trying not to sound too condescending.

“Of course there’s nothing wrong with being normal. But there is something wrong with being in denial of who you are, where you come from. I’m sorry you don’t have normal parents, like the parents around here, who are farmers, and pay their taxes on time, and watch television, and pray for all sorts of things to a god they don’t really know exists, but they’ve been taught that he does. I’m sorry you feel like a circus sideshow exhibit. But even though I cannot give you normality, I can give you love. Unconditional love. You don’t know it now, but when you’re a grown-up, and you’re trying to connect with someone who has a deep-seated fear of intimacy because of neglect, or a fear of failure due to unrealistic expectations, all the gifts which dysfunctional families give to their children, then you’re finally going to say: I’m so glad I’m not normal!”

At this she was suddenly bereft of energy, collapsing onto the table, weeping, her coffee mug swept off. Emmeline gasped, and as she did so, it stopped, in mid-air. Marissa brought her head up from the table, tears forgotten, and glanced to her right, looking interested.

“Hmm, you haven’t done anything like that since you made the overhead light go out in your room when you started menstruating.”

“Aaaaggghhhh!” Emmeline exclaimed, and the cup completed its’ fall, smashing beyond recognition.

“Do you feel better now? Can we talk about this without tantrums?” her mother asked.

“Not right now,” she replied, picking up her bowl of oatmeal. “My breakfast is cold, and I’m hungry, and I’m going to eat, then I’m going to go for a long walk and think of five reasons why I shouldn’t kill myself.”

Marissa knew better than to chide her, call her “Sarah” due to her inherent adolescent dramatic tendencies, but felt she had to say something in response.

“Can I give you one? The first reason? Then you’ve only got four to think of.”

“I know what it is.”

“You think you do, but I’ll tell you what it really is. You’re the only evidence I have that I was who I was, and that I was loved, or believed I was. If you were to die, then there would be no reason for me to live, having lost my greatest accomplishment.”

Emmeline said nothing as she spooned her oatmeal back into the pot on the stove to reheat.

Marissa carefully pushed her chair away from the table and went to get the broom and dustpan.


Emmeline walked out in the dead vineyard, in the early heat, until she reached the point where her mother's property ended and the next farm began. At the property line was a wooden split-rail fence, weather-worn but still standing. On the other side were carefully tended rows of vines, riotous with early-summer growth, the bees darting among the grapes and berries which grew intertwined. Closing her eyes, she heard the humming of insect industry, and the soft roar of far-off traffic and wind, smelled the mineral tang of the soil warming up, the green of the plants, the sugar of the fruit, accentuated by the sun, illuminating all from its’ vaulted ceiling of blue sky. She turned her face upwards, assuming the attitude in the artwork, her future self come full circle to the moment portrayed, only the fog had burned away. She understood that now.

She had not meant what she said, about killing herself. Though the thought of living in a place where she would not only be accepted but exalted was tempting. Sometimes it was just too much work to smile. But she didn’t want to be one of those kids she sometimes saw on television at the houses of friends, either. When did she know there was something peculiar about herself? Taking a moment to stare over the land, towards the hills, she believed it was the same year she first had to ask about her father. For none of the adults in her world ever made reference to him, as if they had all entered a pact of silence, to pretend it was normal (oh that word again) for every child in Daymar to have a father except for Emmeline. And she could tell other kids wanted to ask, but no one did until Janelle, who had only lived in the town a mere two months before being invited over, and spoke without knowing.

What does everyone else know that I don’t?

Then, the next day, while making dinner, taking a deep breath and using the practiced nonchalance which had never fooled Marissa.

“Mom, why doesn’t Dad ever call me?”

And she, in her turn, striving for neutrality in her reply.

“He probably doesn’t have a phone, love. He lives out in the desert where it’s very primitive.”

“Why did you say he never helped you?”

Marissa paused a split-second in her task of cutting potatoes, then resumed.

“I suppose that’s not true. He helped me create you. But I guess it’s that I never helped him. I didn’t want what he wanted.”

That night, Emmeline had cried in her bed, in self-pity for something she never knew to miss. In the morning, she found every one of the delicate blown-glass figurines her mother had made for her over the years were all in pieces upon their special hand-painted shelf. The fragments, sparkling in a beam of light falling upon the wall, looked much like tears themselves.


In the afternoon, Marissa asked Emmeline to accompany her across town to her friend Joanne’s house. When she asked why, Marissa held up a videotape and said, “You need to see this.”

Upon their arrival, Marissa’s friend greeted them with a certain consoling attitude, hugging Emmeline a little too hard. Smiling politely till she thought her face would crack, the girl sat on Joanne’s scratchy horsehair couch, a red velvet upholstered Victorian eyesore with carved cherubs in the arms and legs which looked better suited to a brothel than a living room. She fiddled with one of the throw pillows, counting eyelets in the lace trim, till the women had seated themselves in chairs across from her, armed with tea and sympathy.

“One thing you should know,” Marissa began, “is that Joanne is here because she knows your father as well as I do. We grew up together, here, and decided when we were eighteen that we were going to San Francisco because that’s what you did when you were young and rebellious.”

“It was 1968,” Joanne rhapsodized, her eyes shining with nostalgia, “everything was happening!”

“We met your father during a concert at Golden Gate Park. He and some friends were sharing a house on Van Ness, and he offered us a place to crash. We’d been sleeping in the park, trying to get jobs, any kind of jobs, so we probably looked fairly bedraggled by then.”

“Michael had a kind of vibe, that guru vibe, which people were drawn to. Even the celebrities - the musicians, the artists, the writers – they all knew there was something about him.”

“Something like. . .what?” Emmeline queried.

“Everyone has an energy, I’ve taught you that,” Marissa explained, placing a hand over her chest for emphasis, ‘but the energy of some people is really present, and powerful. That’s what your father has, a power. But not negative, like some people.”

Marissa and Joanne exchanged a significant look between them. As Emmeline began to interject, Joanne cut her off.

“Best not to ask about that,” she said, “your father had a goodness about him, then. People liked him because he made them feel good about themselves. And there were a lot of kids there who were messed up: not happy, not whole.”

“In a few years,” Marissa continued, “everything kind of fell apart. People were getting burnt out on too much Dionysus, on just existing in the margins. The city cracked down, too, it was harder to be young and free there. I convinced Michael to come back with me to Daymar. My father had passed away the previous year, and my mother was desperate for me to come back and take over the vineyard. He agreed it was a good idea, as he had always been eager to start an agrarian commune. He thought it was an honest way to live.”

“Oh great,” Emmeline snorted, “so our house used to be a hippie love commune?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. But we were completely self-sufficient, very successful from a business perspective. Your father made the best wine in the region. His energy produced wonderful fruit.”

“He made things grow,” Emmeline stated, haltingly, putting a stress on the word “made” which lay outside of the traditional definition.

“Yes.”

She looked at both of them, in silence. Her expression, they could see, was a collision of incredulity and ambiguity.

“Like a green thumb, you mean.”

“No,” Marissa countered, her voice growing quiet, “your father was like the Green Man. The god of the woods, the essence of the eternal flowering of nature, in service to the Goddess.”

“Your farm,” Joanne added, “used to be as beautiful and abundant as any in town.”

“Then why is it dead now?”

“Because your father is gone.” Marissa answered, as if that explained everything.


Emmeline was bereft of further questions, and after some whispering between the two women, Joanne took the videotape and put it into her VCR. Marissa spoke again, by way of explanation.

“This is a tape of a story aired on 60 Minutes in 1983. It’s about the commune your father started in Death Valley. Now, you probably know, it’s all desert out there, settlers died in that area on their way to the coast, the conditions are so harsh. I think your father went out there because he had the best chance of being left alone, to do what he wanted to do. But what he did attracted some attention, and CBS sent reporters out to talk to him. What surprised me was that he agreed to talk to them. One of the members of the commune called me from Stovepipe Wells and told me I should watch it, said I should make sure you watched it so you would know what a great man your father is.”

“I don’t understand, nobody ever said anything about this.”

“And that is because your mother went to everyone in town and asked them to ignore it,” Joanne chimed in. “Luckily, they all understood and sympathized with her, and so that night, no one watched the program. But I taped it, because I knew at some point you would need to see it.”

Joanne pressed the ‘play’ button on her remote, and after a brief flurry of static, the kindly, patriarchal face of Ed Bradley filled the screen, speaking about a farm in the desert which seemed too good to be true. The name of the story, as shown on the placard behind him, was Aura Agriculture?

It opened with a long, wide establishing shot of what is now Death Valley National Park, in the area known as Zabriskie Point. The viewpoint swung up to the klieg light of the sun, then back down to the long stretches of sand and rock, where landmarks seem so close, but distances compress under the lens of the desert to encompass literally hundreds of miles. Bradley’s voice broke the relative silence of the soundtrack, which had only played wind and the occasional cries of a hawk at that point.

“Death Valley. It’s a land of extremes out in the Mojave Desert – one of the most dangerous places in the United States. The daily median temperature in the summer can reach one hundred and twenty-five degrees. Hardly a place one would consider conducive to agriculture of any kind. But Michael Aschead begs to differ.”

The film then cut to a medium shot of a man, tall and lanky, squinting at the camera as he stood, hatless, under the broiling midday sun. Emmeline heard her mother gasp, softly, and realized Marissa had also never seen the video until this moment. Her first impression was that her father was thin, almost painfully so: an assemblage of long limbs and an equally hollow face, the cheekbones protruding so sharply his pale blue eyes seemed almost sunken into his face. They also made his mouth protrude in a perpetual pout, the lips bearing signs of chapping from the wind.

Hearing the journalist mispronounce the name, she cringed slightly. Her mother had taught her you say “a shade” but slur it together. Bradley’s misplaced emphasis made the ch hard rather than soft.

During her reverie the scene had shifted again, this time Bradley and her father were standing out in the middle of a field of lettuce. There was no wire to prevent rabbits from nibbling at the newly-sprouted plants, no netting to shade the plants from the unmerciful heat of the day.

“So I see this lettuce, just growing out in the middle of the desert, apparently thriving,” Bradley remarked.

“Yes,” her father said, and Emmeline startled again to hear his voice, deep and resonate with calm. Looking at his hair, shoulder-length and blowing away from his face in the wind, she saw it was nearly the color of her own at the roots, but was bleached from the sun to an ash blond at the ends. His face was mostly unlined, surprising if he spent much of his time unprotected in such severe conditions. They squatted down in front of a plant, Michael lifting a leaf with his long fingers.

“The energy which all things possess is focused, here in this plant, to protect itself. Anything can grow anywhere as long as conditions are favorable. The Sanctuary is devoted to learning to focus and harness our individual energies towards a collective goal. And we hope to propagate the knowledge so that others may also find what we have found.”

“And that is?”

“Sustenance from within.” His accompanying smile was serene, a little eerie, in that it was truly sublime, yet also vacuous. Emmeline was reminded of watching some televangelist show with her friends, mocking the preacher when he extolled about being filled with The Grace of God. In that moment she also had the thought, why don’t I look more like him? Because surely if she did, she would not be on the outside with anyone. It was obvious that although his energy was the reason he attracted people to his cause (and the story was filled with testimony from those willing many, eking out an existence in the desert, devoted to being as their master was: placid and powerful), his outward appearance did not hurt matters in the least.

“He’s beautiful,” she finally said, inwardly realized such a thing to say about one’s own father was entirely inappropriate, but her detachment prevailed. She was his unknown daughter, after all.

“Yes,” her mother replied, after a time, when the tape was finished and the static silenced by Joanne. They sat in a bubble of quiet, in which dust motes danced, and the wind murmured outside the house, and somewhere a clock chimed. “For all his faults and follies, for all the ways in which he could harm as well as help, no one could dispute that your father was, and still is, no doubt, beautiful.”

“So are you going to go to him?” Joanne chimed in, almost a little too fast, though it was true it was the question on all their minds.

“No,” Emmeline answered, her voice an almost perfect duplicate of her father’s modulation.

“Why?” her mother asked, though without surprise.

Emmeline’s response was tinged with pure adolescent exasperation. “What? And acknowledge that he’s, I dunno, a cult leader? Like I don’t have enough problems in my life? So he can teach me to ‘focus my power?’ So I can sit out there in the sand with him and make lettuce grow? How is that going to help anyone?”

“He can help you come to terms with what you are.”

“What I am is a girl, okay? I’m just a human being. Even if I do have some kind of freaky power I don’t give a shit!”

Joanne’s hand flew to her mouth in surprise, but Marissa held her arm as if to prevent her from further interjection.

“I can’t tell you what to do, but I will tell you that you may never hear from him again. If you care about knowing him, knowing who you are, other than half of me, then you should take the opportunity. Though I’m inclined to agree that you’re not ready. But you are unhappy, more unhappy than your present development allows for, and it hurts me, Emmeline. It hurts me because I love you more than life itself and my only wish has ever been that you be happy.”

Her daughter pursed her lips and looked down at the rug: another rococo fancy with cupids and flowers galore. “Everyone would know. Everyone does know anyway, don’t they?”

“But they don’t really believe. Not many do, even in the face of evidence like that,” Marissa gestured, towards the television. “That’s the funny thing about most people – the more you show them, the less they understand – or they refuse to allow the seemingly impossible into their daily lives. He’s not going to change anything on a large scale. But maybe you will.”

Tears sprung to Emmeline’s eyes. “No,” she whispered, feeling them fall onto her chest. “No.”

Marissa took her home, wondering on the drive how she was going to tell Michael his daughter did not want to assume what he referred to in his letter to her as “her rightful destiny as a jewel of humanity.”