Authors: Nick Lake
ME: (head reeling, roiling, a receptacle for liquid, set spinning, detached from my body and sliding around on a smooth
tiled
floor—my mind revolving, finding no purchase on the slippery
tiles
,
and that’s really what it feels like; like my body is gone and I’m just a head, with eyes that for some reason are seeing a static image of the Doc sitting on his chair, the blank walls, the coffee dispenser and the cookies on the table, while my head itself is rolling uncontrollably, unstoppably, on that
tiled
floor)
THE VOICE: (SCREAMING INCOHERENTLY, A KLAXON OF ANGER AND CURSING AND JUST, JUST, JUST AWFULNESS)
I put my hands over my eyes and my head between my knees. I took deep, long breaths. There is an expression—my mind was spinning. Usually it’s just an expression. But that was what was
actually happening
. My mind was a whirligig; I felt sick.
DR. LEWIS: Cass?
I looked up. I wanted this feeling to stop, I wanted to never feel like this again. “What are you … I mean … ,” I said.
Dr. Lewis was looking scared, and at the same time—not
pleased
, but like something he had been suspecting had been confirmed. “The voice is very angry with you, is that right?” he said.
“Tear out your throat,” said the voice. “Tear it out, right now.”
“Oh God,” I said. “Help me.”
“I’m trying to, Cassie,” said the Doc. “It may not feel like it, but I’m trying.”
“It’s not my mother!” I said. “The voice is not my mother!”
“Okay, okay. Take a deep breath.” He paused while I panted, trying to get my heartbeat under control. “We often find that people, especially younger people, respond to trauma with anger. Perhaps they feel angry with a person who abused them. Perhaps they feel angry with someone for dying. But they are taught to hold that anger in, that it is inappropriate to express it. So they turn it on themselves. The voice begins to punish them.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying maybe you are angry with your mother for dying. Maybe the voice is an expression of that.”
“I’m not angry with my mother.”
“Not consciously, no, but it’s possible that—”
THE VOICE: It’s
you
. It’s your fault. It’s all you.
I stood up, quickly. My plastic chair fell, landed on its side, the thin metal legs sticking out like it was a wounded animal.
“It’s ME,” I shouted. “It’s ME, okay? I’m not angry with my mom for dying. I’m angry with me. It was MY FAULT, okay? Don’t you understand? I KILLED HER.”
I killed her.
Me.
Stupid, disgusting me.
In my memory there’s a jump cut.
One moment I’m standing there screaming, and then, without seeming to cross the intervening space, without seeming to operate as a body in a physical universe, requiring time to move from one point to another, the next moment the doctor has his arms around me and is holding me.
Holding me.
Do you know something?
It was the first time someone had held me for three years. Dad had never, Dad had never, Dad had never—
My thoughts were a storm. A maelstrom. A whirlpool. Charybdis.
My dad never—
It was me—
I KILLED HER.
My breath was hitching in my chest; I was not a body but just lungs and a mind, a pounding heart. I was broken into pieces, like Echo, like Orpheus, torn into my constituent organs and pieces.
Sparagmos.
I was all over the floor, scattered.
“It’s going to be okay,” said Dr. Lewis, over and over again. “This is a breakthrough. This is a breakthrough.”
But it didn’t feel like a breakthrough.
It felt like a break.
Like I was broken.
“I have to go,” I said. My whole being felt like a slept-on hand; tingling, filled with pain.
“I don’t think that’s wise. I think you need—”
“
I have to go
.”
“You shouldn’t be alone at this point,” he said. “This is a very sensitive time. Perhaps your dad could pick you up?” He was standing back from me now, one pace, his hands on my arms. The parts of me that had fallen all over the floor had started to knit back together again.
“Are you ******* kidding me?” I asked.
“He’s at work?”
“
No
! He
knows
I killed her! Don’t you see? He
knows
. That’s why he hates me.”
“You think your father hates you?”
“No.”
“Good, because—”
“I know he hates me.”
“Cass …”
“It was
my fault
. Why are you not understanding that? He knows it, the same as me.”
He shook his head. His gray hair rippled. “I know you feel like that, but—”
“But it’s true. Now let me go.”
He withdrew his hands, quickly, like I was burning. “At least call Paris,” he said. “Have her come be with you.”
I opened my mouth to say something angry, then stopped. “Yeah, okay,” I said. I took out my cell and dialed. It rang for a long time, and I was about to hang up when Paris answered.
“Hey,” she said flatly. Distantly. At any other time I would have wondered what was wrong.
“It’s Cass.”
“I know.” Her voice still not quite there. Absent, somehow coming from someone or somewhere else. A ventriloquist’s dummy, talking to me.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just had a bad time doing a party, that’s all.”
I realized I hadn’t even asked her what was wrong; but she’d answered anyway; she’d assumed I’d asked. That was how much of a selfish asshole I was.
“Sorry,” I said.
A sound like a shrug made of air. “It happens,” she said.
“Did they hurt you?”
“No, Cass. No. Not … physically.”
“Good. I know Julie worries that—”
“I’m fine, Cass.”
“Good. That’s good. But I mean, are you sure? Because you sound kind of—”
“Look just ****** leave it, okay, Cass?” Her voice had a sudden coldness in it I had never heard before, like the coldness of stone; sharp-edged, mineral, angry but distant at the same time. Somehow … not human. It’s hard for me to describe. All the time I’d known her I’d never seen her as someone with … issues, you know? Despite what she said about her drugs and her therapy and whatever, she seemed so together.
That was the first time I saw another shape underneath her, the contours of a troubled mind.
A pause.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have called but … but, Paris, I need you,” I said, all in a rush. “Please, I really—”
I
heard
her snap into the real world. Like a penknife closing. “Where are you, Cass?”
“At the bowling—”
“Ten minutes. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” She hung up.
I turned to Dr. Lewis. “She’s coming. I’ll wait for her outside.”
Dwight the cop opened the door as I walked unsteadily toward it—he was always the first to arrive. Dr. Lewis looked torn for a moment, but then finally he nodded. I guess he had heard Paris’s side of the conversation, so he knew I wasn’t lying.
“Hey, Cass,” said Dwight. “You joining group today?”
“Not today, Dwight,” said the Doc.
“Hey, ****, you okay, Cass?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I think I … realized something. About myself.”
Dwight nodded slowly. His big, kind eyes were full of sympathy. “That’s good, Cass,” he said. He always used your name when he was talking to you. I think it was a trick he learned from the cops. “I mean, it doesn’t feel good now. But it’s good.”
I nodded at him. I couldn’t talk.
“I’ll see you next week,” he said. He was wearing a T-shirt that said
NJPD SOFTBALL
on it, under a crest.
I nodded again. Then I walked out of the hall and through the bowling alley, past the glowing lanes, the iridescent balls. And out onto the dusk-lit street. It was raining, softly, the droplets hanging in the air, almost seeming to rise up from the concrete; a cold steam, everywhere.
I started by leaning against the outside wall of the bowling alley, but my legs wouldn’t hold me up.
I slumped down until I was sitting on the damp ground. It soaked through my pants, numbed my butt. I wished the mist would numb me all over.
Around me, the street shimmered. The mattress store on the other side, the 7-Eleven. The cheap hotel with the flashing sign:
VACANCIES.
That was how I felt.
Like a vacancy.
At the same time, there was another scene superimposed on the street, bleeding into it. It was the restaurant, Donato’s. The bar counter was over the bowling alley, the pizza oven was behind me; the tables with their red-and-white-checkered cloths were covering the street, the
tiles
were gleaming where concrete and asphalt should be. Ghost figures came and went; waiters, customers. Dad wasn’t there—Dad was in New York, talking to a new tomato supplier, one who flew the tomatoes over from Tuscany. Mom and I were holding the fort, as he put it, running the Sunday night shift—I was taking orders and she was hosting, greeting people as they came in.
Dad didn’t like leaving us alone. That was one of the worst things, one of the ways his fear and his foreboding ended up getting confirmed, ended up bricking him into the personality he started out with already.
He’d bought Mom a gun. A small pistol, two shots—a Derringer. I don’t think it was legal, but he got it from some gun fair somewhere. The idea of it was that you hid it in a sock or something. Only she didn’t like it, didn’t like carrying it, and she didn’t have it on her that day.
She left it in the restaurant safe, where she always left it.
Anyway. She was so beautiful. Dark hair pinned up, spilling out in wavy strands, a gray dress, no makeup. Everyone who came in was captivated by her; you could see it. I wanted to look like her one day. To move like her. To smile like her.
Then I was shaking Parmesan over a woman’s amatriciana and I heard my mother gasp—you know how you recognize your parents’ voices even when they don’t say anything?
I turned around, and there were two guys standing just inside the door. They both wore ski masks. They were both big. One of them was holding a shotgun and the other a baseball bat. It happened so fast. Faster than your reading this. Faster than my typing it, and I type fast. I took an online course.
“Empty the register,” said shotgun guy to Mom. She moved over to it, moved strangely, jerkily. She pressed the key to make it open but nothing happened; she must have gotten it wrong; her hands were shaking. She banged it with the side of her hand and the tray shot out. She started pulling out money. The guy closest to her, the one with the baseball bat, held out a bag—an ordinary plastic bag from a supermarket—and she stuffed the cash into it.
The other guy handed another bag to the diner closest to him. “Pass it around. Watches. Wallets,” he said.
Everyone in the restaurant took off their watches, took out their wallets.
“And jewelry,” said the guy.
Women started removing their earrings. Mom too. They were emeralds surrounded by diamonds, the only nice jewelry she owned; Dad bought them from Tiffany’s for their ten-year anniversary. She nearly ripped them out of her ears and handed them over to the guy who had taken the cash.
Pretty soon the bag came back to the guys.
They turned, began to leave, took their eyes off Mom for a second.
Mom hit the button under the cash register, the panic button that Dad had insisted on installing, an alarm with a link to the local PD. I don’t know why she did it.
Correction: I do know why she did it. Because times were tough, that’s why. And the restaurant was barely breaking even. We couldn’t afford to lose that money.
The alarm started blaring. The two men stopped, and their heads twisted to look at Mom. They didn’t even say anything; they didn’t shout or curse or anything like that—the one with the baseball bat just took a step toward her, and swung.
The bat struck the rear side of her head with a sound like an ax burying itself in a wooden log. She dropped instantly, as if a magician had removed her legs. She sprawled on the tiles. I started screaming then; I don’t remember this, but it was in a lot of witness statements. I screamed and screamed and screamed. One of the cops we spoke to afterward said a diner had described it as the worst sound he had ever heard. Said he hadn’t known a human being could make that noise.
The two guys left, running.
I moved, suddenly
able
to move.
Mom was lying on the white tiles. There was a halo of dark red blood around her head; her hair was matted. I knelt beside her—her eyes were open and staring, the eyeballs twitching, saccadic, as if she were reading something I couldn’t see, something hanging in the air above her. I could see blood trickling from her nose. I couldn’t see what had happened to the back of her head.
Apparently at this point I was screaming “Mom” over and over. I remember hearing someone dial 911 and ask for an ambulance.
And that’s when I did it. I didn’t realize. I swear I didn’t realize. I just wanted to hold her, I just wanted to make her okay. I lifted her up into a hug, and I held her tight, calling in her ear, calling for her to come back to me.
I lifted her head off the ground.
Do you see?
I lifted her head off the ground.
Because I wanted to hold her.
She died of a massive subdural hematoma. That means her brain bled all over itself, drowned itself.
I know this because I looked up brain injuries, afterward.
That was where I learned that the last thing, the
last thing
you do, if someone suffers a head trauma, is to move them. It can disturb the bleed. Make it worse. Hell, I may even have
started
the bleed.
I never said anything to Dad. I mean, he knew already. He was a goddamn Navy SEAL. He knows all about injuries.
So we both knew I killed her. We just never said anything about it.
They never caught the two guys either. Dad searched for a while. He used his contacts—his cop buddies from the restaurant. But nothing ever came up.