Slowly, ever so painfully, we’re opening Simone’s proverbial casket one creak at a time as the foul stench of the past permeates everything good about my life and smothers me once again in those dark, inescapable days that I’m forever trapped in.
My God, let me be wrong. Let this all be a mindfuck of a coincidence. Let there be nothing to see. Let us move on.
But deep down in my gut, I know better than that.
Ree
Email from [email protected]:
Bram Woodley is one supreme specimen. Are you sure you can hold onto a man like that?
I’ve felt anger in my life. I’ve felt outright rage, but this bitch, this monster, whoever they are, has just taken my emotions to an entirely different plane. How dare they! How dare they tunnel into my life so abrasively, tucking their nose into my existence—opining about things they have no business in. Simply put, I have a psychotic on my hands.
My phone buzzes, and I’m momentarily pulled from my dizzying trance. It’s a text from Lena. Scones, hot coffee. Come over. It’s time.
My blood boils hotter than the armpit of hell. Adrenaline rockets through me once again, twice in the span of five minutes. It’s enough to kill anyone, really. My body goes numb, and my cheeks flush with heat. I know what Lena is saying, but deep down, I cannot comprehend why. What devil in hell has gotten ahold of her sanity? Never mind that. I already know the answer.
The kids are in school. Afternoon has just crested. Bram is at work. His own temperament has been off-kilter these last few days, but nothing like my own. No sooner did that text infiltrate my inbox from the same demon who’s been prying into my windows, but now I’ve got a bigger problem to contend with. That emailing witch thinks she can ruin my life? And I do believe it’s a woman trying to ruin my sanity—but sadly, my mother just said hold my beer.
Without permission, my feet shuffle me to the door and across the street to Lena’s clapboard wonder painted a bright turquoise in a row of neat and tidy white stucco homes all hoping to be more unassuming than the next.
Voices emanate from inside as I head up the porch. They sound jovial as outright laughter vibrates through the screen. I don’t bother knocking. Instead, I head on inside. The living room is dark, the curtains still drawn behind the sofa. But the voices rise like happy helium balloons, coming from the kitchen. The din of dainty dishes tapping fills the air like a cymbal, teacups to saucers, fine china no doubt. My God, Lena has pulled out the finery as if the Queen of England had landed.
And then I hear her, clear and defined. My mother’s voice as she talks fast-paced, high-pitched, laughter bursting through her words, and the room lights up again with cackles. Three voices intermarrying to create one raucous cry that pierces through the membrane I’ve been cocooned in for so long. My mother had torn any barriers that I might have put in place and stomped her way back into my world like Godzilla thrashing his way through Percy Bay.
I step lightly to the end of the room and peer into the kitchenette to find three bodies, Lena, Astrid with that poor hen she holds captive, and—my God, my eyes cannot comprehend what they’re seeing.
My mother has always been a large woman, with a shock of dark hair that was mercilessly teased and rising above her head like a necrotic crown. Her eyes, a pale shade of blue, so ice cold could shear the skin off your bones and set your teeth on edge without so much of a word. Her form, her very being had the power to instill a sure level of fear in anyone, and just as ferocious as she was, she was far more manipulative. It was her charm and questionable wit that garnered her fistfuls of dollars on behalf of her contrived sickly daughters. Mommy, as she had us trained to call her far longer than would have been thought acceptable. Here she is, Mommy in the flesh. The beauty of her demented plan was that she had not only convinced the world that my sister and I were suffering immeasurably, she managed to convince us as well. Not an entirely impossible feat when you’re being fed steady doses of sedatives, muscle relaxers, laxatives, on top of being nutritionally and sleep-deprived. She had molded us into exactly what she needed us to be. We were so close to that brass ring, the Make-A-Wish trip for Lena to Disneyworld. It was the one place my mother dreamed of. Other women lusted after men. My mother lusted after a mouse. Makes sense in retrospect. She was a rat to begin with.
But this—this startling new version of her has caught me off guard. They prattle on with their conversation without notice of my presence, but their words swim around me like slippery fish I cannot grasp.
It’s her face, that new body, the hair. It cannot be. My mother has morphed from a beast into something somewhat respectable. Gone are the spare three hundred plus pounds she was hauling around and in its place is a svelte woman, a waist that is cinched a little tighter than my own. She’s donned a pair of white jeans—white jeans, something that in my mother’s muumuu heyday would have been sacrilegious for anyone to wear. A peach blouse shows off her tanned shoulders and makes my stomach drop. My mother looks like some hipster grandmother I might encounter at the pick-up line down at Richard E. Moss.
That rat’s nest that once stood on her head like a warning to the rest of the society, beaconing out the fact that she was not stable, do not trust her, do not give her two hundred dollars so she can pass proverbial go has all but disappeared. Her hair is tame, longer in the back, a smooth silky dark chocolate, not the bat wing black she was saturating her mane with in those tortured days gone by. It softens her features, makes her almost amicable, a kinder, gentler version of the monster she once was. Her face looks younger, so much more youthful than she has ever been. Her eyes are pulled back a notch. Plastic surgery? Who would have thought my mother would bow to the god of vanity. There’s a smattering of cosmetics enhancing her eyes, her cheeks neatly contoured and that hateful mouth of hers carefully blushed and glossed.
Her head turns my way as if her antennae had finally picked up on me.
“Aubree Loraine Van Lullen?” Her voice chimes out like a horrible rusted gong that hasn’t stopped resonating for years. “Is that you?”
Astrid and Lena cease with their trembling cackles as all eyes feast on me, but my gaze never wavers from my mother’s. She is very much like a rabid dog. You need to stare it down. Let it know who is boss lest it eat you when you least expect it.
I was wrong. My mother’s greatest deception hadn’t yet taken place. No. Not by a long shot. This right here, this prized and painted version of her, is her greatest deception by far. Her reinvention, the reincarnation of the beast she is has first and foremost fooled my sister.
“Ree?” Lena calls out like the traitor she is. “I have some coffee for you.” My sister offers a frenetic nod. “Come.” She calls to me like a stray dog she’s trying to get to do the bidding. A monster luring a little girl into the van by way of candy.
I find myself floating into the kitchen, oblivious of my feet moving, oblivious to the fact I’m still breathing, and quite frankly shocked as hell that I haven’t wrapped my fingers around my mother’s neck and killed her for the hell of it.
Astrid bucks as if she just came to and found herself in a den of wolves, and she might have. “Ree, you never mentioned the fact you have an amazing mother. My own mother is nothing but a Negative Nelly. I would sell her for a dollar. That woman has never spoken a kind word about me. Can you believe it? Her own daughter. But from what I can see, your mother is certainly something special.” She rises as if to leave.
“No, stay.” I grip her by the arm and push her back into her seat with force without meaning to. My heart beats rabid as I take in my own mother in this close proximity. There’s something jarring about it, unnatural, and I’m afraid I might pass out. It’s that feeling you get when you see a corpse for the first time. In theory, you can’t imagine you’d be horrified. Especially if you knew and loved them. But upon closer inspection, you realize that there is something morbidly wrong. That our bodies are nothing more than a casing and we are so far from who we think we are. It changes your per
spective on living until you forget about it. Until you see the next corpse, and you’re jarred at the sight once again because humans are hardwired by nature to never get used to some things. It’s an innate fear utilized by a careful craftsmanship of the mind to alert us to the fact a corpse isn’t something you would ever want to keep around, much like my mother.
“You must stay.” My voice brightens a notch. I might be speaking to Astrid, the asshole who I am almost certain is out to destroy my sanity via those ridiculous emails. But at this odd juncture, she’s become a life raft. “Finish your coffee, please.” My mother’s blood-let of a mouth twitches, and a thought hits me like a brick to the chest. What if my mother has put her up to this? What if my mother has woven her spell around Astrid far before this fateful day and she seeded her mind with creative ways to torment her daughter?
“Yes, my mother is something.” I couldn’t bring myself to echo the word special. A quick montage of all those years suffering at her hands plays through my mind like a black and white horror film, Lena and I force-fed spoonfuls of that horrible poison as children. First, the meds arrived in their liquid form. We were relieved to graduate to pills once we were older, the hunger pains we suffered through, the gnawing feeling that there was a cat trying to claw its way out of my belly. I will never forget the horror of being told there is nothing that you can eat that wouldn’t kill you. The waifs we had become, victims of Auschwitz in our own home. My mother the Nazi who ran the concentration camp. The outings as she called them—my mother gleefully paraded us at her office parties, at the park during company picnics. We were on full display for all to see, our frail frames a prison cell. But how we watched those other children play, run on healthy legs, and indulge in their fast-food lunches that smelled divine. We were fed a steady diet of paste, some cheap dollar store oatmeal, plain as paper, whose sole purpose was to keep us just this side of death. One day when my mother went to work, Lena picked the lock on the pantry and made us each a cup of ramen as she had seen our mother do for herself a hundred times. We didn’t eat half of a single serving, splitting it between ourselves before we were full beyond measure. I vomited it into the toilet, and it tasted just as good coming back up. Lena and I partook in our little pantry heist for a solid month before my mother caught on. We had worked our way up to a single cup each, no vomiting, and it was our greed, our out-of-the-blue weight gain that was our undoing.
That bird in Astrid’s arms lets out a howling cry and bats its wings as if its feet were on fire, and Astrid hops out of her seat, screaming and cursing up a storm.
That hairy chicken lunges for Lena as it hops right out of Astrid’s arms, bouncing off my sister before ping-ponging through the room, landing on the table just shy of my mother.
My mother squawks, an angry primal beastly cry, and suddenly, I’m rooting for the bird.
“Get that thing the hell away from me,” my mother’s cries reverberate off the ceiling, and yet the bird is relentless in its pursuit.
Astrid dives over my mother in a full-bodied attempt to capture it, and the bird flaps its useless wings floating just enough to dig its talons into my mother’s shoulder, then in another magnificent hop landing itself square on her head.
My mother freezes, as does all of time for one brief glorious moment, and I burst into laughter, a deep resonating cry of relief that permeates the infrastructure of this building and rides past the sky and into the stratosphere.
Astrid snatches the filthy bird off my mother, and both women look angrily toward me as if I had orchestrated the event.
Cosmic justice had allowed me to be here at just the right moment to witness the comical scene.
Astrid’s entire chest caves in with a sigh. “I’d best get Rocky home. He’s had a big day.”
Lena nods to me and mouths the words Big day?
I can’t help but scowl back at her. How dare she do something that would have been so private and normal for us just a moment before my mother crawled back into our lives? How dare she try to pretend that none of this happened? The grievance of reintroducing our mother back into the fold was far too much. We can never go back. It’s impossible from my end.
Astrid takes off without a word from any of us, and it’s just the original three in the room. Together again in a confined space just the way my mother liked it all those years ago. We never belonged to the world. We were her possessions to do with as she pleased.
She waddles toward me, her gait too ingrained in her cellular code to change with the mere drop of a dress size, her eyes set in a daze dead to mine. “You laughed at me.”
I take a moment to marvel at the fact she still walks as if she weighs four hundred pounds. Old habits die hard, as does my hatred for her.
“I laughed at you.” I nod, my own gaze just as hypnotic as it sits over hers. Her icy stare, that cold veneer, the evil percolating just beneath the surface—it’s all there, palpable as ever. “I’m still laughing at you. The weight loss, the hair, the new face. None of it is an improvement. You are a walking, talking lie. And whatever you’ve told Lena is merely a manipulation to get back in our lives. To get back in control. It’s not happening. Not with me. Not with Lena. You may have her fooled for now, but it won’t last long. You are a danger to yourself and others. I know what you are capable of. I know what you are doing—what you’re still doing.” I needle hard into her with those words. A part of me didn’t want to come out and say anything about those emails. It would only enable her the right to deny them, strip me of my superiority of knowing she’s behind them no matter who is actually pushing send. If I suspected it before I saw her, I can be certain of it now that she’s here.
“I’m not just here for you, Aubree. I’m not just here for Lena. I’ve changed my life.” Her left eye comes shy of winking, and a dull laugh pumps from me. Not even her own body could go along with the lie. “I’m here for my grandchildren.”
A primal cry sails from my throat as I lunge at her, knocking her back to the pantry as my hands dig into her flimsy flesh, my fingernails carving right in soft as bread dough.
“Ree!” Lena snatches at my shirt to drag me away, her own fingernails clawing at skin, at the belt loop of my jeans until she manages to pluck me off her and I stagger backwards a few steps, panting as I struggle to catch my breath. “She means it. She’s not the same. You need to give her a chance.”
I look to my sister, who stands there exasperated, frustrated, at her wits’ end with me of all people.
“What made you change your mind about her?” There has to be a valid reason. There is something at play other than my mother’s goodwill, her bullshit excuse of an I’m sorry. Lena is no idiot. I know deep down she shares the same hatred for our mother as I do.
Lena’s eyes round out as if she were plotting the words to put together and came up short.
“You don’t have any good reason, Lena. Throw her back on the street and we can be sisters again. This is your moment. It’s her or me.”
The three of us pant relentlessly as the sound of our breathing clots up the space around us.
Sometimes you don’t need any words at all to hear the remainder of the story.
“Oh. Lena,” it comes out sorrowful, full of grief. I glance back to the beast who bore me. “Stay away from my children or I’ll initiate a restraining order.” I look to Lena. “Same goes for you.”
I head out and don’t look back.
Bram
Erwin Wilson is a sad looking creature who once had the ability to frighten innocent people with his menacing tall frame, his natural muscular build. He was a homeless vagrant for years in the downtown district of Kaswell, a mere hop, skip, and hammer’s blow from my former residence. But prison life, one might say, agrees with him. Gone is the layered grime that gave him an otherworldly glow of despair. His trash can meals have been replaced with powdered eggs and potatoes made fresh and hot daily. Chemically subdued are the inner voices and active hallucinations. In place of his scraggly mane, his
hair has been shorn a tame two inches off his scalp. The holey scraps he once wore, layered like armor, an entire closet of despair all at once had vanished, and in its place a bright blue jumpsuit that brings out the cerulean hue in his eyes. Yes, you might say the three hots and a cot life is agreeing with Erwin Wilson very, very much.
It was Mason who garnered us clearance to visit Erwin on such short notice. Mason is a licensed private detective in New York and now in Maine and has been for as long as my life has warranted the effort. It’s an odd thing to have shaped your brother’s future by way of your own screwed-up existence, but that is what has landed this man, the one I called a monster for many, many years before us.
Erwin folds and refolds his hands. His eyes flit from Mason to me, unsure of what this visit entails. He’s been briefed on who we are, and he offered a prolonged nod my way as if he understood my intimate relation to the woman he’s doing time for killing. He should know me well. I sat in that courtroom like a dutiful husband. I had patted myself on the back for helping to put him away. Mason bought me a beer afterwards to celebrate.
“How are you?” I go with something benign. An icebreaker that works in most every situation but this one, I suppose. If I were in prison, doing fifty to life, the answer would always be shitty.
He lifts his chin, a move that almost looks scholarly on him. “I’m good, Peter. And you?”
Something inside of me flinches when he says my name so boldly. But it came out frank and honest, and suddenly, it feels as if we’re visiting a long-forgotten uncle instead of the man who slaughtered my wife. And that is the primary reason for our visit. One last turning of the stone to see if we’ve left anything undiscovered. My gut has been churning for the last few days because I am certain as hell we have left a lot of damned things undiscovered.
I glance to Mason, unsure of how to dive in. I’m positive Erwin Wilson does not care how I am doing. He maintained his innocence all through the trial. But the fact he was covered in my wife’s DNA, the murder weapon tucked hastily in his jacket, did not bode well for him.
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