by C. V. Hunt
I stopped behind him. “I think we need to pull the—”
He flinched and spun to face me. “Jesus! Could you not sneak up on me like that?”
“Sorry. Would’ve thought you could hear me climbing the creaky ass steps.” I pointed to the stairs behind me. “The carpet in the bathroom needs to go. It’s all moldy. Do you think the landlord would mind?”
He frowned and turned back to look at the ceiling. I wanted to repeat that we needed to pull the carpet from the bathroom but I knew it was pointless, as he’d either ignore me or brush it off until I did it myself. So I decided to go with what I knew he’d be more concerned with.
“We need to unpack the car so we can get a bed.”
He sighed and muttered something I didn’t catch. I was certain it was a snarky remark asking why I hadn’t already unloaded the car myself. Getting him to do anything today would be impossible and repeatedly asking him to help would end badly, with him accusing me of nagging him. I left him in the hallway and took it upon myself to unload everything into the kitchen since that’s where the majority of it would be anyway. I was sweaty and exhausted when I was done but knew I had to keep moving because the moment I sat down was the moment I would feel every muscle in my body protesting.
My thighs ached as I climbed the stairs to find Brent again. The attic ladder had been let down and I could make out a light shuffling sound coming from the opening in the ceiling.
As I approached the wooden ladder I thought I heard someone whispering. I stepped on the first rung and the whole contraption felt as if it might break away from the ceiling. It made me feel uneasy and even though there wasn’t much distance from the floor to the attic I had a terrible fear of heights, even five or six feet up on a ladder would make my stomach hurt and cause my palms to sweat. I thought better of ascending any farther.
“Brent,” I called up into the dark opening in the ceiling.
No answer. For some reason this raised the hair on the back of my neck.
Out of fear I called out sharply, “Brent!”
From behind me came an aggravated answer. “What?”
I started. I gripped the precarious rails of the ladder and the wood groaned in protest. The first fold of the ladder began to buckle in the opposite direction. But stopped abruptly.
“Jesus, Laura, don’t break the fucking ladder!”
I regained my balance and stepped down. My heart was racing when I spun to Brent. “I thought you were in the attic. I heard you shuffling through things up there.”
“I was in the bedroom.” He paused and assessed me as if he couldn’t believe I could be so stupid. “You probably heard mice fucking around up there.”
“I guess we should add mice traps to the list,” I said. “The car is unpacked. We should get going before the stores close.”
He nodded and headed toward the stairs for the first floor. I turned back to the attic ladder and swore I heard someone whispering again.
THREE
NOTHING MAKES YOU feel poor and unwanted like haggling over the price of a used mattress. I hated it. I spent most of my time distancing myself from Brent as he tried to get the manager—a heavyset man with greasy hair and an equally greasy face—to drop the price fifty dollars. Fifty dollars for most people wasn’t a big deal but our funds were extremely limited. I could only hope to find a job by the end of the month or I wasn’t sure what we were going to do. Maybe Brent could ask for an advance on his advance. Was that even possible?
The publisher was taking care of the basic utilities and the house but that didn’t cover food or the prepaid cell phone. We’d bit the bullet and paid for one more month of data and talk time to navigate here and have a source of contact for research. Brent had previously decided to take his laptop to the library if he needed. He hadn’t asked about an internet connection and didn’t want to assume they’d provide one so he was prepared to leave the house occasionally and go to whatever coffee shop that would let him hang around all day without buying anything if he had to.
I pretended to look at some ugly drapes I was certain were at least fifty years old while Brent switched tactics and went for the old heartstrings. The manager looked like those had been broken by life several decades ago. I knew that dead inside blank stare anywhere. I wasn’t sure about anyone else who struggled with the same affliction but I knew my own ilk when I saw them.
Brent spoke in a gentle and pleading tone so unlike him I had to double-check and make sure it was still him talking to the greasy manager. “I know it’s asking a lot but we just moved here and my wife is pregnant.” He gestured in my direction.
The manager turned his cow-like gaze on me. I tried to smile but I’d never been a good bullshitter. I hated to lie.
The words ‘wife’ and ‘pregnant’ were laughable. I sure as fuck wouldn’t marry Brent if he begged me and my chances of having a kid went with my uterus after a horrendous case of endometriosis in my twenties before I met Brent. The thought of marriage made me feel more trapped than I already was and made my chest feel tight whenever I even briefly considered it. The thought of signing a binding contract attaching myself to another human being that would be impossible to sever due to a lack of financial means wasn’t something I had ever pondered. And I would need a lot of money to leave Brent since I didn’t have any friends or family to really speak of. Friends consisted of coworkers who didn’t get on my nerves and make me feel like shit. But I wasn’t really sure I could consider them friends as there wasn’t any tears shed between myself or them when I told them on short notice I was quitting and we were relocating, unsure if we’d ever return.
Brent addressed the manager, “Please don’t make me tell her she has to sleep on the floor tonight.”
The manager never took his eyes from me and spoke in a monotone. “She don’t look pregnant.”
I slipped behind the rack of drapes and heard Brent tell him I was only twelve weeks along before the manager agreed to drop the price. Brent also managed to get the guy to call on a couple of the employees to tie the mattress to the roof of the car. I thought this was more out of Brent’s insatiable ability to wiggle out of doing anything physical than to keep up the ruse that I was pregnant. We knew we’d pushed our luck at that point and moved on to the next store and managed to get a pretty beat-up breakfast table and chair set for two.
By the time we’d secured a bed and some place to sit and eat, it was growing late. I searched on the cell and found a Dollar General nearby. When we pulled into the lot I spotted a man in dirty clothing digging through the dumpster peeking out from behind the building. He had the handle of a baby stroller tied to the back of a rusted Huffy bicycle. The stroller was loaded with various pieces of metal. Someone had spray painted ‘It will make you difrent’ on the brick exterior of the store. I expected Brent to say something about this typo this time but he seemed too preoccupied as we hurried into the store.
The aisles were crammed with unopened and spilled boxes of merchandise the hard and worn looking employees had chosen to dump there instead of placing the items on the shelves. It made it difficult to find anything. We finally found a flashlight, batteries, and some wooden mouse traps. I made sure to get a couple of cans of disinfectant spray and some food. Although we had a mattress it had some questionable stains. I’d checked it thoroughly for any signs of bedbugs but knew everything purchased secondhand was a crapshoot. Used clothes you could throw in the wash. With furniture, you were kind of fucked.
Brent was quiet on the way home. The car windows were down and I welcomed the breeze. I was sweaty and exhausted and watched the fireflies rising up and blinking. The locusts and katydids were in full swing and filled the evening air with their screams. I was too tired to carry on a conversation even if I wanted to.
When we got home it took the last bit of energy to drag the mattress in the house. We decided the living room was good enough for the moment. I sprayed the mattress with disinfectant and put the sheets on it. We both chugged water
from the tap, which tasted off, before I returned to the mattress and collapsed on it. I vaguely recalled Brent plugging in a box fan and scavenging through the store bags for a granola bar. I remembered thinking I should get up and get something to eat and shower but I was asleep before I could complete the thought.
FOUR
I WOKE IN the middle of the night from a horrible nightmare. I was sweating and tried desperately to grasp at whatever terrible thing that happened in the dream but the only thing I could recollect upon waking was that there was something invading my body, controlling my every move no matter how hard I fought it.
The light above the kitchen sink was on and cast a strangled light into the living area. My heart leapt again as I spotted the faint outline of a naked man standing in front of the open basement door. I reached beside me to wake Brent as the surge of fear and adrenaline cleared the sleep from my brain and I realized as I touched the cool empty mattress beside me it was Brent standing nude, staring down into the darkened void of the basement. I could smell the dank and dusty concrete of the basement and thought I could detect a slight, cool breeze pulsing from the depths as if it were a living and breathing thing.
“Brent,” I croaked. My vocal cords were heavy with sleep.
Brent didn’t move or make any acknowledgment he’d heard me.
“What are you doing?” I said.
No response. The hairs on the back of my neck came to attention. I rose from the mattress and approached him. Once I reached him, I simultaneously said his name and touched his shoulder. He sucked in a deep breath as if emerging from water and spun toward me. His eyes were open wide and the light from the kitchen made them appear glassy. He looked crazed.
“What are you doing?” he barked. He looked around wildly as if he wasn’t aware of where he was. “What’s going on?” He looked down and, I believe, realized for the first time he was naked.
His confusion confused me. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think you’re sleep walking?”
He blinked rapidly. “Then you’re not supposed to wake me.”
“Sorry. I was worried about you. You didn’t answer me. It was creepy and freaked me out.”
He’d lost interest in anything I was saying and looked beyond me. He stepped around me and retrieved something from the floor. He bent and lifted his leg. I realized the something on the floor was a pile of clothing. He quickly pulled on his underwear.
I found the phone by my pillow and checked the time. It was four in the morning and the battery on the phone was nearly dead. Brent went to the bathroom to relieve himself and I dug around in one of the boxes and retrieved the phone’s charging cord and plugged it in by the kitchen sink.
I stripped down to my underwear. I’d fallen asleep fully clothed and the sweat had made my clothes damp.
Brent returned to the mattress and lay down, facing away from me.
“That was weird,” I said. I wanted him to at least talk to me for a minute to calm my nerves but he only grunted in return.
As much as I tried, I couldn’t fall back asleep. Every faint noise the house produced sounded ominous and alive. It was only a few moments before Brent’s snores drowned it all out and I spent the rest of the night staring at the open basement door and the darkness beyond. I was too frightened to get up and close it.
FIVE
AFTER BREAKFAST BRENT took up residence at the kitchen table and began writing. My day was going to be filled with the clicking of his keyboard and his frustrated sighs as he worked. I was glad I’d tackled the kitchen counters previously and all that was left to do in there was the floor. I’d wait until he moved before attempting it if I didn’t want to be the target of pointed sighs and half-muttered curses.
My first task was to find the hammer and screwdriver, the only two tools we owned, and remove the plywood covering the first-floor windows so they could be opened. Once that was done I covered my face with a shirt and dug into the bathroom carpet. Nothing could be done to keep my eyes from burning as I worked. Landlord be damned, the carpet was a safety hazard.
Removing the carpet revealed a dark stain on the moldy wood beneath. I scrubbed for what felt like hours and even though the mold—which was most likely toxic or deadly—came up easily enough, the dark stain didn’t budge.
Brent appeared in the bathroom doorway and stared at the floor as I scrubbed.
I pulled the shirt off my nose and mouth and said, “The floor is stained to hell but I think I got the mold.”
“That’s probably a blood stain,” he said.
I made a disgusted sound and tossed the scrub brush in the bucket as if the brush itself was a turd. I tried to jump up quickly. The thought of a dead body lying in the exact spot gave me the creeps, but forty years hadn’t been kind to my joints. I gripped the sink and pulled myself up.
“Gross,” I said. I made more disgusted sounds.
Brent’s eyelids twitched. He fought an eyeroll. “We’re staying in a murder house. The whole thing is saturated in death. You might want to get used to it.”
“I didn’t think anyone was killed in the bathroom.”
“Carol Dobos.”
He paused as if he was allowing me to realize who he was referring to but I didn’t and I hadn’t read up on any of the murders. The less I knew, the better I felt about the situation. Ignorance was bliss.
He said, “Can I get in here? I need to defecate.”
I stepped out of the bathroom and made my way to the kitchen. I flopped down on a kitchen chair and retrieved the phone from my pocket and searched ‘Carol Dobos murder Detroit.’ Nothing came up immediately so I clicked on images.
The first photo was a grainy black and white photo someone had poorly positioned on a scanner and uploaded. In the photo a toddler lay on the floor of our bathroom. The sink was the same but the tub was an old claw foot tub. Someone had changed the tub at one point or another. The toddler was wearing an oversized plastic Halloween smock and one of those old plastic masks with the stapled elastic bands to hold it in place. I wasn’t able to tell exactly what the costume was as the smock was ripped, her internal organs scattered on the floor, and she was covered in a dark substance I knew was blood.
Without warning, my stomach began to churn and I bolted to the sink and managed to make it in time to lose the contents of my stomach. This was why the less I knew about the murders the better.
SIX
SOMETHING SHIFTS IN your mind after certain life events. It’s almost a physical thing. The movement of a fetus as it swims in its mother’s womb. You can never be sure if it’s something good or bad. If it’s the twitch of something new growing and about to be born or the death throes of a former you. A light switch. There one second and gone the next, never to be regained. Like losing your virginity. An insight into something new or possibly a curse. A pane of glass cracking. It can never be repaired, only replaced.
It’s something that happens. You can’t stop it. And it happens in a split second. You can try to explain it to the people around you but unless you’ve been through it yourself you can never really grasp the finality of it. For most people it comes after a realization. It hits you one morning when you wake up, step into the bathroom, and take a good long look at yourself. This usually happens in your early thirties. You gaze into the mirror and you realize you’ve gotten old. You see the beginnings of the fine lines which will deepen and spread as each day passes. There’s no turning back unless you have the time and money to dump into a plastic surgery addiction. In which case you’ll end up looking like an even bigger monster. One that has been scrubbed of any detail or true identity. Something smooth as a newborn but unnatural since you’re more than halfway into the grave and full of silicone.
You see those awful and offending lines reflected in the mirror. The ones screaming your youth is dead. You’re old and getting older and you haven’t done a damn thing with your life. They’re the same lines you watched crawl across your father’s face when you were a teen and thought,
God, I hope I never get old. Or you start to see the reformation of your jawline. The softening of the jowls. The sagging of the neck skin. The image in the mirror says, “Fuck. I’m turning into my mother/father,” in sync with your own proclamation.
For others the break comes after the death of a parent. Or both parents. The graduation of a child. The birth of a grandchild. A divorce. Becoming a widow(er). Some people can tell you the exact minute they came face to face with their mortality. Others, it happens gradually.
Mine came when I realized I wasn’t in love with Brent anymore. Or maybe it was when I realized he wasn’t in love with me anymore. If he ever really had been in love with me. It felt like I was a convenience for him. Someone who tolerated his mood swings and paid the bills. I wasn’t really sure if I was resentful because he’d taken the best years of my youth or because I’d essentially become his mother and a work horse. It didn’t help that I couldn’t talk to him about it. Every time I attempted to talk about my feelings he shut down and I could tell he didn’t give a fuck. He was waiting for his turn to talk about what he wanted to talk about or for me to shut up so he could get back to his keyboard.
Eventually I shut down. I felt things in my brain slipping. Like a grain of sand in an hour glass. Inevitably, it would fall through the crack and be buried by the other thousands of pieces of sand and forgotten. Just a number. Just a cog in the machine. My thoughts grew increasingly foggy and my ability to remember things completely shit out. I became increasingly confused during conversations. So much that Brent grew angry with me and made me see a doctor, convinced I had early onset dementia. Turns out depression can really fuck with your head. Dysthymia is what the doctor called it. A low-grade persistent depression I’d been struggling with since puberty. But a person can also experience an onset of major depression superimposed on their dysthymic disorder and then you’re diagnosed with what the doctor referred to as double depression. It all sounded like something completely made up to me but I took the medication as prescribed and I was pretty sure it had knocked the major depression some. But I knew something still wasn’t right with my head. I could feel it. But I went through the motions every day. Took my meds. Put on a smile. And pretended everything was okay.