by Shannon Kirk
I have nowhere to scoot to, can’t shrink, can’t crouch behind the counter, can’t slink to the bathroom to hide—I’m a jellyfish in a tank, an octo in a pool, Jabo fixed to the ceiling, stuck. Dr. Nathan Vinet has caught my eyes and is walking right up to the circular counter in the center of the store. Mom follows my sight line.
“Well, well, well,” Dr. Nathan says, walking toward me. Thomas meanders down the vintage penny-candy aisle.
I inventory my face, remind myself I have my blue contacts in. I wish Jabo would swoop me in his eight wooden arms and swallow me into the ceiling. My silver jellyfish pendant isn’t transporting me to another dimension, so what good is it to believe in magic.
Fuckkkkkkkk.
“The girl from the lake in Indiana a few months ago, and here we are again. Finally. I tried to ask the last time I saw you. I’ve been trying to find and ask you all summer.” He pauses to snap his fingers. “I remembered who you look like. My son, Thomas—Thomas, come here. Anyway, the resemblance is remarkable. Do you happen to know—”
Mom cuts in. “Lucy, can you come here? Sorry to interrupt your work.” She’s paid the other counter girl and walked backward to stand between the breads and the cheese case.
Nathan and his son, Thomas, are dangling at the edge of the circular counter, the place where we keep all the tourist brochures. Nathan’s mouth is open since Mom interrupted him midsentence. Thomas is standing by his side with a fistful of Pixy Stix. They’re duplicates, father and son. One with a beard, one without.
I motion for my line to move over to the other register, and I exit out the notch farthest from the door, and thus, farthest from the brochures and Dr. Nathan and Thomas. Mom is waiting for me by the cheese case. I wish Dali was watching all this from the deli, but he finished his shift an hour ago so he could pack for college. Some slack-jawed new dude mans the deli, and he’s not paying attention. He’s slicing Dyson’s famous turkey in such a mindless drudgery, I think the guy thinks he’s being tortured. Tough day at the deli.
Yeah, well, New Dude, it is a tough day at the deli, but not for you. For me.
My heart is thumping, and I’m sure I’m about to break out in mind hives. Mom has gone all glassy-eyed. The oxygen in Dyson’s is aerosolized steel.
“Lucy, honey,” she says, with a fake smile and in a low volume so no one can hear, “you didn’t mention you saw the man from the lake again, here. Why?” Her smile is so phony and fake, but nobody would know that watching us.
“Don’t lie, Lucy. I see you reeling around, trying to come up with an excuse. Why would you keep this from me?” Her tone is homicidal.
I don’t dare look back at Nathan and Thomas. And neither does she.
“You know what,” she says. “Never mind. Lucy, you’d be wise to go in the back and take a bathroom break. Until this man and his son leave. Now. Let’s not make a scene.”
A whole week goes by, and Mom doesn’t speak to me. I’ve avoided Gretchen completely by upping my shifts at Dyson’s or hiding in my room with the window locked and the curtains drawn. Mom doesn’t make me any meals or eat any of mine. And I try hard to make her favorites from scratch. She leaves me no notes. No terse comments in passing. She is always in her room and quiet, so she’s plotting.
Sure enough, today, a week later, as I’m strapping on my helmet to go to work for my last evening shift before school starts on Tuesday, she calls me over to the ranch’s front door. I walk the bike toward her, the helmet on tight.
“Lucy, this will be your last day at Dyson’s. We’ll be leaving tomorrow. I trust you will stay away from that man.”
I don’t try to avoid running over her toes when I pop on the bike to pedal off. She jumps back into the doorway just in time.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The sickening anxiety, the nausea, the horrible clotted throat I get, the hives on my skin from worry—all of the dread rushes over me in waves as I continue to work my last shift. She wants us to up and flee again, leave for our twelfth state. But I can’t live like this anymore. I can’t breathe her steel air anymore. I recognize how much I don’t want to run by the fact that I realize I’d rather live in Gretchen’s crazy fortress and stay locked in our Can she make me flinch game than get in that damn brown Volvo with Mom.
I think I must be the reverse of a runaway. Stressed in a situation so bad, I plot to stay, while finding a way to make her run. When I think this, worry hives erupt on my face, and my scalp itches so bad, I have to use all ten fingers to scratch. I’ve had to race to Dyson’s staff bathroom three times this shift. Here comes Sandra.
“Lucy, if yah sick, I’d prefer yah go home,” she says.
“No, no. I’m not sick. Not sick at all. I think I’m just hot with the doors closed tonight,” I rush to say. “Has the wind died down? Can we open the doors?”
For a full week, ever since Dr. Nathan busted me in front of Mom, Milberg has been trapped in a strange, hovering weather pattern of relentless wind. Today the wind is the strongest it’s ever been, and the forecast says tomorrow might be worse.
Sandra looks at me like I’m a lunatic for asking to open the doors. The wind is so loud outside, whenever a customer walks in, the pressure drops and sound swirls in the song of a hundred Dementors sucking air and rattling their breathing, as they swoop in and fly circles within the circular space above the registers up to Jabo, whose eight arms spin as a constant fan around his center head—since that’s how the artist designed him to function. Normally, I’d be intoxicated by this sound and the whirring motion of Jabo. Rocks pin the stacks of tourist brochures so they don’t blow down Penny Candy Lane.
I’m not ready to go home yet. Not ready to force a stay instead of a run.
As I work, I consider how much I’ll miss this rhythmic hypnotism. How I’ll miss my chance to find another real Jenny at Milberg’s high school, which starts on Tuesday, so close I can almost touch Tuesday. I can’t wait for Tuesday. I want to start school so bad and seek out a real Jenny so bad, I find I can’t think of anything else. I’ll put up with anything to not have to run again. Even Gretchen. Even Gretchen and her weirdness I can live with, like she’s a diabolical sister I have to put up with—like in a beach rom-com I’ve read. She’s just weird family is how I’m telling myself to think of her in this untethered and unrealistic fantasy I’m holding of staying while Mom leaves. At least I have some semblance of some real life here in New Hampshire. I have a job. I have a home. I have someone to hang with near my house. A nice field with a fern garden of fairies. Allen is comfortable in all the colorful rooms. The wind plays symphonies for me at night. I’m so close to finding out if there’s a Jenny at my new school. I don’t want to leave.
My anger grows. Grows so high and screaming in my brain, when I pedal home in the dark at the end of my shift, I think I reach speeds as fast as the Tour de France. Riding under the dark canopy on the country road between the village and the dirt road to our rental ranch, I don’t flinch from any noises in the woods along the way. I don’t worry about the fact that there are no streetlights and the only things saving me from a car hitting me are my bike’s reflectors, several reflector stickers on my helmet, and a light I mounted on the handlebar.
I hit the dirt road that leads up to the ranch. I pass through Bottle Brush Forest and over the little creek. I stand on my pedals and arch forward to ride up, up, up the dirt road. The lights are on in the big picture window on the back of our rental, the light throwing an amber cloud over the blueberry and holly bushes below. Wild wind washes out whatever sounds my gnashing teeth are making and the roll of my tires on the gravel.
I throw the bike and my helmet on the ground by the Volvo. My black hair whips all over the place as I take hard, pounding steps to the ranch’s front door. It’s 9:30 p.m.
I note the chains are off the roller doors to the long, low shed, which makes me pause.
Did the old renter come for his tools?
I don’t fucking care if the old renter came for his fucking t
ools.
I storm to the house and slam the front door so hard it hits the kitchen wall and bounces back in my face. I push hard again, step in, and the door crashes closed behind me.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mom shouts. She races in from the dining/living room.
“We are not moving!” I yell.
“Yes the hell we are. And lower your voice.”
“You lower your voice.”
When she sees me, when she looks at me this time, me glowering and standing tall, she winces. She shrinks and takes a step back toward the red stove, like a recoiling snake.
“You look just like . . . ,” she hisses.
She turns quick and storms deeper into the house. The grapes lamp and the red cardinal lamp are lit, creating bubbles of amber that feather the dividing line of houseplants. The giant green paintings hang in shadows. I race after her as she passes the red love seats with no sign of slowing down. When I reach the end and am about to turn to her bedroom, she slams the door in my face. I hear the dead bolt lock.
“Don’t,” she says through the door. “Don’t you dare come closer, Lucy. You go and pack. Go to your room and pack. I’m going to pack, and then I’m driving to get our cash at the place in Connecticut. I’ll be back by eight a.m., and you better be rested and packed.”
“No.”
“Dammit, Lucy, we are leaving in the morning. You better be good and ready. I’m leaving in a half hour for our cash.”
She’s never let me drive with her on the nights she leaves to collect our cash from the multiple places she says she’s stashed it around the country. When we left our tenth state, we didn’t need to get any cash, and I suspect that’s because she’d already planned to leave and had taken off on a day trip while I was in school one day—some cash hiding place in Chicago, I think. She’s always made me stay behind and locked away wherever we’re living when she goes to get cash. If a detective were to ask me for incriminating details, I wouldn’t have one clue where or how she gets our cash. And right now, I give no fucks about any of that business.
I think I stand a good, long, literal five minutes outside her bedroom. I listen to her throwing things. I hear her scraping hangers on closet rods and pulling boxes off shelves.
“No,” I say again. And I think she must be surprised I’ve been standing here so long.
“What?” she shouts through the door.
“You go by yourself this time.” Which I realize is an irrational thing to say, because I can’t afford the rent on my own. I’m just a girl.
I walk back down the hall, turn into the red-turquoise kitchen, and open the front door. I hear her racing toward me.
“Where are you going?” she yells.
But I’ve stopped short, because standing and staring at the front door from the middle of the parking area is Gretchen. Her hands are behind her back. It’s not like I caught her close to the front door about to knock. She’s standing smack-dab in the dark space between the ranch and the low, long shed. She stands still and staring, like she’s been lurking and listening this whole time. Of course she’s in her apple-print sundress, which, in this wind, swishes and swirls around her knobby knees. Her stringy hair slithers around her neck.
An angry train is roaring up on my backside, and creepy Gretchen is ghosting in front. I don’t flinch. I do not flinch. Don’t flinch.
Gretchen waves and offers the goofy, grinning smile she gives whenever she sees Mom.
Poised between the most fucked-up versions of Scylla and Charybdis, I make my choice.
“I’m sleeping over Gretchen’s tonight!” I shout, while jumping out of the doorway. My hair is writhing in the wind.
“Lucy, get over here,” Mom says.
“You’ve got your errand you need to do. I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
Gretchen pivots sideways, watching me and Mom. She says nothing. But then, catching on, says in the sweetest tone, “Ms. Smith, I hope it’s okay for Lucy and me to have a fun sleepover before school starts. I’m sorry if this upsets you. Sorry.”
“Come on, Gretchen,” I say. “Let’s go.”
I. Do. Not. Fucking. Care right now to know why Gretchen was in violation of Rule No. 1 to not creep around the ranch property. I’m already halfway up the dirt road to Gretchen’s brick fortress, and Gretchen’s trotting to me. My black hair flies everywhere in frying strands. In this moment, I like feeling like I look like Medusa, and that fits. Gretchen’s oil portrait of Mad Lucy is tame in comparison to the rage on my face tonight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Gretchen’s bedroom is the first room at the top of the stairs. This is only the third time I’ve been in this house. On the way up, she suggested we go down her weird puzzle halls and into the bone-inferno “dead” (living) room again, but I told her, while stomping mad up the driveway, there was no way I was going down weird halls with her. Things are better between us when I’m frank and blunt and brutally honest. She knows exactly the things she says and does and the items in her life I think are creepy. So I’m not a phony fake with her. And as long as she can take my honesty and boundaries and rules, and keeps coming back regardless, then she and I can continue our kinda-like-tolerate-hate, who-flinches-first relationship.
Whatever.
I’m furious tonight, and I need to find a way to convince Mom we’re staying.
We’re staying!
Gretchen’s bedroom is just as fucked-up as the left wing of her house. Big surprise.
One whole wall of shelves is dedicated to the hundreds of hardcover copies of Grey’s Anatomy Jerry bought her. The Grey’s Anatomy wall serves as a wall-size headboard to her twin bed. I guess I’ll be sleeping on the floor. Although there should be about ten more guest rooms in this joint, so maybe I’ll sleep in one of those. Across from Gretchen’s bed is a wall filled with puzzles of Dante’s Inferno. The exterior wall is filled with puzzles of creep-ass porcelain horror dolls with soulless black eyes. Great. So to sum up, when Gretchen goes to sleep at night, she has human muscular and skeletal systems behind her, hell in front of her, and possessed dolls on her right side. The opposite wall, the interior wall with the door into the upper hall, is the only normal thing—until you look inside the open closet. Hanging on a long rod are twenty-five versions of the same apple-print sundress Gretchen has been wearing since I met her.
Fucking lovely.
Gretchen follows my eyes to the closet of same dresses.
“Einstein and Steve Jobs, and Obama too, said that wearing the same outfit cuts down on decision fatigue. More brainpower for my puzzles and games and painting,” she says.
“Can I take a shower?” I ask.
She directs me across the hall to a bathroom, which, like the one on the first floor, hasn’t been updated since the seventies.
When I finish, I see Gretchen’s left me one of her nightgowns: white cotton and several sizes too small. But I’m a rail with mosquito-bite boobs, so her glorified napkin fits fine enough up top. The length, however, is all wrong; the hem lands between my knees and my crotch, like a minidress. I wear my obligatory bra—which is more like an Ace bandage—because the fabric on this white nightgown is sheer. I’m afraid of running into Jerry.
I scootch across the hall to Gretchen’s room, but she’s not here. I think I hear noises in the belly of the house, maybe the piano playing. I would have figured she’d be up here and in my face all night, excited to have me finally sleep over. She’s been asking me to sleep over all summer. I think she’s asked a thousand times.
There’s a note on Gretchen’s bed.
“Lucy,”
I don’t want you to move.
I hope your mom chills out.
I heard you yelling in the house.
Oh, and p.s. Sorry, but I know who you are.
I figured it out. Do you know who you are?
I think you don’t know who you are.
Come to the “dead room” if you want me to tell you what I know.
I’
m doing a puzzle. We can do a puzzle all night.
Or you can sleep in my bed.
—Gretchen
What?
What?
Do I know who I am? Does she know who I am?
And she’s down there doing a puzzle?
Why did she put my name in quotes? Like Lucy’s not my name.
The silence in this room is weird silence, like the first night I came here. And there is no piano, like I thought I heard. No noise. Nothing.
I can’t breathe in this soundless house.
Wait a minute. What?
I read the note again.
My hands are trembling. This is sinking in.
Does she know who I am?
Who am I?
Aren’t I fake-name Lucy? Mom’s never told me my real birth name.
I never did get the guts to run any more searches on Foulin. What’s that Dickens quote—“We forge the chains we wear in life.” Is that the quote?
What did Gretchen discover?
I sneak down the foyer stairs. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do, where I’m going to go. But I’m walking down Gretchen’s stairs on tiptoes. When I reach the second-to-last stair and am about to step into the fossil foyer, a noise bangs at the end of the hall to the right—the one that’s a normal width. Another bang from within that hall, and I’m pretty sure the noise is from behind the ivory door Gretchen told me not to open on the first night. The piano starts up in the belly of the house to my left.
A haunting echo of her note plays in my mind: “Come to the ‘dead room’ if you want me to tell you what I know.” She wants to bait me down her mazes. She wants to trap me. She wants to make me flinch.
I jump to the foyer, nearly collide with Jerry’s tower of Crock-Pots, which hasn’t moved all summer, pop open the front door, and dash outside in the wind.
Some instinct is pulling me back down the hill to Mom. I suddenly need to find her.
Do I know who I am? Who am I?