Authors: Alex Adams
When the Swiss turns, he’s holding her insides in his hands. I don’t know what a uterus looks like except as a line drawing in an anatomy book, but I think that’s what he’s dumping into a metal basin.
He swings around, his eyes wild and blue and stark inside his painted face.
“It should be here,” he mutters. “It should be.”
“What did you do to her?” My throat is numb, my lips feel flabby; it’s a wonder the words come out in any order that makes sense.
He picks through the Lisa-meat with the edge of a scalpel, then looks up at me. “It should be here.”
“What?”
“The fetus!” he screams. He hurls the bowl at the wall. It ricochets and lands at my feet, where the contents spill in a grisly mess. “She was pregnant. There should be a fetus. Where did it go?” He’s still screaming. With every syllable he stabs her, then he drags the scalpel to him, vivisecting her from the waist down. “It is in here and I will find it.” He reaches inside her with both hands until he’s up to his elbows in viscera.
“You killed her,” I say simply.
He shakes his head so vigorously, his drenched hair flicks dots on the wall. “No, no, no. She killed herself. She laid down for the father. She got pregnant. She sucked my cock while pregnant with another man’s child. She came willingly while you slept. ‘Help me,’ she begged. Who am I to refuse aid? I have assisted many such women.”
“You killed her.”
“I … did … not … kill … her!” he roars. His body shakes with the anger but he does not look at me. “Where is it? Where did she hide it?” He whirls around. “You took it, didn’t you?”
I don’t understand. Lisa was pregnant. He said she was. All that morning sickness, no evidence of White Horse. If not that … then what?
Tears roll down my face. I wipe them away with the back of my hand.
“Look what you did to her, you monster,” I say. “She was a human being. Just a girl. What’s wrong with you, you crazy fuck? You’re like one of those insane women in the newspapers, the ones who cut open a pregnant woman and steal her child. You’re a crazy
woman
, not a man.”
This enrages him. Between the blood and the twisting of his face, he’s a portrait of insanity and he’s racing toward me, scalpel in his hand, covered in more blood than I’ve ever seen in my life. He is a ruby gleaming under the dead fluorescent bulb.
I run. He follows. We slip and slide down the hall on Lisa’s blood.
Two stooges. The Swiss lunges for me, but I jump right while he keeps going straight. I snatch up one of the plastic chairs. The symmetry isn’t lost on me. I’ve done this before: used a chair to save myself.
When he realizes he’s missed, that I’m not in front of him, he turns. That’s when I smash him in the face.
Oh
, I think.
That stings
. I can’t figure out why I’m the one who hurts when I hit
him
.
Then I look down and see the correlation between the pain and the scalpel jutting from my arm.
Holding his face with one hand, the Swiss staggers toward me as though his soles were dipped in molasses.
“I will cut you.” His voice is thickened by broken lips. “And I will show you.”
My baby. Please, not my baby
.
A switch flips inside my brain. I will never let that happen. He’s killed Lisa and that’s as much as he will ever take from me. He’s got it all wrong. If he kills me, I’m taking him, too. I dredge up as much spit as I can and launch it at his face.
I imagine my father’s look of disapproval, but he’s dead. I can hear my mother’s lecture about things ladies should never do. But she’s dead, too. It’s just me and him, and I figure my folks would be okay under the circumstances.
“I am going to cut you.” His voice crackles like wrapping paper.
I run.
DATE: THEN
“Come with me,” Jenny says
one Thursday afternoon when we meet on the library steps. She’s in her red coat, a camel scarf wound around her neck. My outfit is similar, but black.
“To see my therapist, I mean.”
I look at her like she’s lost her mind, which makes it a very lucky thing that she’s in therapy. When I tell her that, she laughs.
“You’d like her. Lena is fantastic.”
My shoulders slump slightly. Somewhere at the back of my mind the possibility lurked that Nick was her therapist.
“I don’t think so.”
“It would help me.”
“How?”
“Lena says I have unresolved issues about abandonment that stem from childhood. She feels that meeting you will paint a better picture. So?”
“No. When were you abandoned, anyway?”
She’s huffy when we go inside, her shoulders tense, her chin high. She doesn’t look at me save for the occasional glare delivered sideways.
We follow the drill. Inch our way forward. Try to steel ourselves when we hear the inevitable anguished bursting of battered hearts.
Our turn arrives too soon and not soon enough. I see it before Jenny. Mark’s name leaps off the page. My arm goes around her, I try to steer her out of there before she sees.
“Jenny, let’s go.”
But it’s too late, she’s seen his name. Mark D. Nugent. There’s no way for her to unsee. She’ll lie in bed, close her eyes, and that string of letters will come at her out of the darkness. Tonight. Tomorrow. All the days after. The pain strikes me, too —less of course, but there’s no time for me to feel it; I need to get Jenny out of here.
She sags against me, moans.
I walk her to her car, drive her to the only place I know to go: home. When I pull into our parents’ driveway, the pitted lawn and the ragged garden that our parents normally keep so beautifully don’t register. Times are anomalous, so unusual things no longer surprise me as they once did. Our mother is slow to come to the door.
We are portraits of the same woman: grief, determination, and, thirty years later, surprise.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, but the answer comes to her as quickly as the question forms. She presses a hand to her chest. “It’s Mark, isn’t it? Oh my.” She’s in her nightie, the latest in a long line of floor-length garments designed to
prevent me from having a good time
, our father used to joke. She closes the door behind us and seals us in the furnace. It has to be eighty-five degrees in here, easy.
“Mom, is everything okay?”
“Fine, fine,” she says, and I know that means it’s not. She takes over,
doing the things a mom always does. She steers Jenny to the cabbage rose sofa, sits her down like she’s a small child again, and pulls my sister into her arms and rocks her.
Jenny needs her mother now. No, Jenny needs Mark, but he can’t be here. He won’t be here ever again. We’re all just meat puppets with an invisible hand inside us, making us dance and live. When that hand slips off the glove, we collapse and that is the end of everything.
I go into the kitchen, fill the electric kettle, then go in search of Dad. From room to room I wander. I check the garage. It’s the same as it always is. There’s a table set up in the center with a half-finished project taking shape. The pile of wood pieces look like they’ll grow up to be a clock.
Then I make for the basement. You won’t find it behind a door in the hall. There’s no rickety staircase descending into darkness, with a bare swinging bulb to light the way. The way to this basement is through a cupboard in the bathroom. It’s a trapdoor in the floor with a ladder attached. Usually it’s open unless company comes over. No one likes to imagine a head popping up through that hole while they’re flipping through the magazine rack beside the toilet.
Today it’s closed. But that’s not what worries me. What makes my heart thump so hard my mother’s cooing in the other room dims to a whisper is the brass bolt locking the wood flap to the floor. There are new hinges, too. They’re the same shiny metal as the bolt. That shouldn’t worry me, either, except the trapdoor used to lie flush with the floor all the way around, and now the hinges jut at perfect right angles. Outside.
“Hiya, Pumpernickel.”
I slip right out of my body, crash into the ceiling, then glide right back in, sliding on a spiritual banana peel. My father is here, not down in the basement locked in like—
A monster
.
—a prisoner. And he looks great. His eyes sparkle with suppressed punch lines.
“You scared the crap out of me, Dad.”
“Then you’re in the right room, aren’t you?”
We hug.
“What’s wrong with your sister?” he says into my hair.
My eyes are rapid-filling cisterns.
“Mark,” he says in a voice too jovial for this conversation.
He marches into the living room, pulling me in his wake even though I don’t want to hear what comes next, because I know something isn’t right; Dad doesn’t look great, he looks
young
. He’s ten years older than Mom but now he’s fifteen years her junior.
“Jenny, my girl,” he says. “Let’s celebrate. He was never any good for you anyway. So he’s dead, so what? Now you can find another one. One with a real job. A man’s job. Not that sissy sit-behind-a-computer shit he liked so much.” On and on he rambles while Jenny stares at him in horror. I’m wearing the same expression. But Mom isn’t.
Her gaze meets mine, weary with resignation. She knows this isn’t right, that something’s seriously wrong with Dad, and yet she doesn’t intervene.
“Turn up the heat, would you?” Dad thunders, and she scurries to accommodate him.
The air thickens. The heat isn’t flowing just from the vents but also from him. There’s a fire raging inside his body. I can almost see the steam rising from his pores. The air around him shimmers. He’s a sidewalk in summer.
“Dad,” I say. “That’s not—”
“Zoe,” Mom says.
“Why’s the basement locked?” I ask her.
Dad doesn’t stop the flow.
“He was worthless. I never wanted you to marry him, if you remember. ‘Jenny,’ I said—remember this?—‘are you sure you want to do this?’ You were so young, only twenty-two, a baby. You should have lived your life first, done some things, then settled down. Trust me, it’s a good thing Mark is dead, because now you can live.”
I press on. “What’s in the basement, Mom?”
“Nothing,” she says. “We’ve had raccoons.”
“Bullshit. This is the city. We don’t have raccoons.”
Dad wheels around. “Don’t talk to your mother like that!” he screams.
I recoil. One hand—that’s all I’d need to count the number of times he’s snapped at me. He loved Mark. Treated him like a son. This is not my father.
“It’s good that he’s dead!” he shrieks at Jenny. “It’s good.”
He flops on the ground, body shaking like James did. Only James’s body wasn’t a griddle.
“Get ice,” I bark at my mother. She runs in that nightie, hand at her throat clutching the ruffles closed, not to the kitchen like I expect, but to the basement. Jenny sits on the couch, eyes the size of dinner plates. First her husband, now her father. I slap her. Her eyes focus.
“Call 911.”
She hurries for the phone, dials, waits. “They’re not answering.” Not even a tin lady.
“Keep trying.”
Mom rushes in with a plastic bucket, shoves me aside, upends the contents onto Dad’s chest. Ice cubes. Some sizzle on contact, the steam rising off him in a dense, wet cloud. A one-man sauna. She takes the phone from Jenny’s hands, gently places it back in its cradle.
“They won’t come. They never do. They don’t bother answering anymore.”
My father starts to moan. His eyelids flutter. The seizing stops and soon the ice cubes melt no more.
Jenny stares at him in horror. “What’s wrong with him?”
I look at my mother. See her fate in her resignation.
“Has he been sick? Have you?”
“Yes,” she whispers. “You girls have to go. As a mother, that’s the best I can do for you both.” She kisses my sister’s forehead. “I’m sorry about Mark. We loved him very much.”
I can’t leave without knowing. “What’s in the basement?”
Her voice drops so Jenny doesn’t hear. “That’s where we’ll go. When it’s too late. We have a pact with some of the neighbors, to … to help each other.”
I hold her tight, tell her I love her, and repeat the exercise for my father.
To my old room is where I want to run, not out into the cold with my grieving, shell-shocked sister. To my room where the covers have powers to protect me from the bogeyman. To my old room, where my
parents are young and whole and my sister is a pain in my ass. To my old room, where
death
was just a word in my Merriam-Webster dictionary.
DATE: NOW
The streets of Athens limp
by. I wish the sidewalks were filled with people who’d conceal me with their bodies and banter, and yet I can move more freely with empty streets; I am divided by my loyalties. The scalpel is rooted in my arm, and I can’t remember if I’m supposed to pull a blade or leave it until help comes. But help isn’t coming—only the Swiss. So I tug it free and hide it in my pocket like a dirty little secret. A red carpet rolls the length of my arm. I need a place; I need a place now to stop it unraveling further.
Refuge is a warehouse. Gallon cans of olive oil stacked ten feet high create a shield from the world. And still he finds me like I knew he would.
“I know you are there, America. I see your blood. Is the scalpel still inside you? I believe it is. Are you bleeding faster now? I know how to hurt a person, America. I know how to kill. Can you say the same?” His voice lowers, and I know he has crouched or sat on the other side of the cans. His voice comes from my level. “There was no baby in her. I believed there was, but I was wrong. But I found something. Do you want to know what I found? Maybe it’s inside you, too. Do you want to know? You are a curious person; I sense all your questions. Even now you are burning to know:
What did he find inside the stupid girl?
”
Black spots mar my vision like a fungus as I slide the belt from my hips and yank it tight around my arm. They sprawl, contract, disappear, and new replace the old. My eyes are a kaleidoscope through which I can barely see. Is this what dying looks like?