The Other Side

by Daniel Willcocks

  Mom walks out, stepping around me in the same way that she steps around the toilet and the trash. The door slams. “What can I do?” I ask, shaking and shaking, watching my few fingers wobble in mid-air, then looking at my glossy mess on the tiles, knees bent to my heart.

  “Leave,” Alison says.

  So, I go, and I still don’t breathe.

  And I don’t stop thinking of Grandpa. Mom hates me for taking his death so lightly, for never shedding a tear or cracking my voice for as much as a syllable. The real reason she cried was for the guilt of never mending things, and if I didn’t have that to regret, what reason was there to cry for someone you couldn’t feel safe being alone with? Mom could only share a room with her father if we were around, or they’d start a boxing match.

  Last Halloween, a little over three months ago, she hit me for buying a costume, as if life dare to make a joke of sick things, or just move on. My glow-in-the-dark skull mask was covered in the blood, lit up like a lava lamp. Mom cried until I calmed her myself, and then she went to the room above the stairs an hour early, and I finally got a minute to wrap my nose in gauze from the kit I hide in the trunk of my Nascar bed, which I outgrew before we’d even moved in.

  I don’t blame her. After years of tax fraud and gambling, Grandpa had left some debt, and Mom and Dad couldn’t afford their therapist anymore, and they don’t see her even now, regardless of being able to afford it. All relationships eventually pass the point of no return.

  One time at dinner, no more than a week after Mom told us the news—however she’d heard it, cause Grandpa lived alone—she tried giving some sort of commemorative speech, as if to make up for never having a eulogy, about how her childhood wasn’t so bad after all, how Grandpa had, in fact, taken her on vacations after Grandma’s death, when Mom was an infant, how he hadn’t instead stayed home and scarred her with leather whips, strung her to the wall by chains, beat her after she’d passed out, how that wasn’t Grandpa’s favorite part, to play with things that looked undone. He hadn’t cut the Child Services lady upon first meeting her, and she hadn’t blamed Grandpa for years and years, letting the hate fester to blooming infection. “Dirt’s a powerful force,” Mom said, stretching her mouth wide, but not smiling, and that was when I laughed, coughed my Campbells across the hardwood, appalled at her audacity to attempt amends with a monster. She fumed.

  That evening, Mom hid my blankets and pillows in her closet. I eventually got everything back as my birthday gift that spring. Dad wrote the card; To Michael and From, Us. In the meantime, Alison, the only person I could trust, making for the only healthy tie of loyalty this semblance of a family possessed, gave me a torn green horse from the bottom of her toy chest. It was all she could do with Mom locking us in our rooms by ten o’clock. She didn’t just work from home, where no one could count the anxiety pills she prescribed herself, but snooped from home too, so I kept the horse in my schoolbag. Classmates were too polite to snicker or point. Instead, they talked, and that mattered more in the long run of having friends.

  Nowadays, Mom forgets to lock us in our rooms, but we no longer have the interest to leave.

  “I won’t be taming him anymore,” Mom says, setting down the knives, which haven’t been washed, haven’t been used. “Not after last night. He’s too angry, now, with All Hallow’s Eve so close. I’ve come to seeing that our ghost is trying to help. He’s told me if we don’t start acting good, there’ll be repercussions. He’s never been this angry. I couldn’t tame him if I wanted to.” All of us look to keep her going, as much as we hate it. “No more secrets, or else he’ll use my body to fix our mess. We’re more similar than not, he says. Possession would be easy.”

  Dad laughs so loudly despite his hangover that he needs to leave the kitchen, and I think of how that’s the only way ‘like father, like son’ applies to us, and I expect he won’t return. Maybe it would have been easier if Dad didn’t live with us at all, and maybe that was the way we lived already, and maybe he was the real ghost of our house. How unromantic, how anticlimactic of the afterlife, to offer us the disposable snore in the corner, the guy we knew we’d be better off, more coherent and comprehensible, without.

  Alison sits up straight. Mom nods to nothing, washes her pills down with milk. “We must do whatever it takes to make this house clean. Before our dirt spread up to our brains.” We’re far beyond that, I know.

  “We could just move,” I offer.

  “The dirt’s inside of us, Michael. It follows.” So, Alison and I nod along forever until sunset, and I end up being right about Dad.

  That night, finally able to sleep again, I’m gnawed by dreams of Emma’s fur. She’d come to us from the pound, a gift on the recommendation of the school psychologist to keep Alison distracted. It was clear then that this dense specialist would never pick apart what Alison (and I) had been trained to hide, and a big part of the meaning of hope was lost to me from that point on.

  The decision to get the pup came easier than expected. I wouldn’t be surprised if my parents’ therapist had, at some point prior, unaware of Mom’s hatred for meek creatures, suggested they get a pet to refresh their intimacy through the feeling of something newly born. And how pointless it all was, because now there was just the atmosphere of something newly dead. But I can hardly blame that on Emma.

  Alison wakes me up again, but not all the way from the bathtub. She sneaks into my room, sits on my bed. I fold into a ball beneath the quilt to cover my groin. My underwear is on the frigid radiator, where I tossed it hours ago, given that it’s 4 a.m.

  “You need to tell Mom you’re gay,” she says, and I feel struck dead. “No more secrets.”

  “I don’t know how to get you to believe that ghosts aren’t real.”

  “Since when did you start thinking that? I know we hardly talk anymore, but—”

  “I grew up. So should you. Besides, if professing our secrets is what saves us from the wrath of hell or whatever, then you’ve got to come clean about the reasons you cut yourself.”

  She slaps me, thinking it could possibly hurt a kid raised in this house, and she stands up, folding her arms tightly across her abdomen. “Let me deal with my own issues, alright?”

  “Then how could you think it was your place to stroll on into my room and say what you said?” I ask. “You’re dumb to be afraid. Of ghosts, at least. We’re not being haunted.”

  “You’re right; our ghost doesn’t haunt us. He makes us haunt ourselves and watches from the room above the stairs.” I clench my teeth. “Don’t you ever want to get clean?”

  And that does it for me. “I actually thought you were better than that. I thought Mom’s bullshit sermons on dirt had nothing on you. What kind of fucked up life is that, anyway, huh? Thinking you’re stuffed with mud? We ought to be orphans.”

  I try and try to find something in Mom that makes her sympathetic to a stranger. That’s what I dream of on the loneliest nights, and I know that’s what she deserves as much as anyone. But the cold and stubborn truth is that, in my eyes, there is nothing sympathetic there. I owe her no sympathy, nor a depiction of it. There is only the nihilist one-side, the black and white of my inability to see anything soft behind the milk glass of her soul. And I have no apologies for that.

  Instead of slapping me again, Alison walks out and shuts the door cleanly behind her, cutting off more than the hallway light.

  In middle school, Allison tutored younger girls in math and history every weekend. She ordered drinks without ice. Red before hot pink, scooters over bikes, and an allergy to latex. She was prepared to beat down anyone who dare speak against her family, be it school counselor or High Judge. I have always loved my sister. But I know nothing about her anymore.

  I take out my phone and earbuds, and a part of me is wondering if maybe there is something like dirt around my lungs, between my ribs, in other places that pound hardest with each heartbeat.

  By the time I’m out of breath and closing my eyes, I try to think if dirt is a
lways dark like soil, and I toss my wet tissue, but it can’t go very far when you’ve only got two fingers and a thumb.

  The nightmare resumes, and I recall the time five weeks ago when Dad found Emma frozen to the spiral stairs, hind paws down a step from the front two, half her head chewed off. Not that I know this is true. I didn’t see for myself, and Dad gave no more details after that first one, because I’d thrown up burnt pie on the potted flowers, thinking, too, of Grandpa in the ocean. Alison blamed the ghost. Dad blamed an eagle. I thought, He’s not telling the truth. But why lie for a ghost? Back then was when I still believed in such an easy, childish form of monster.

  I’m woken once more, but not by Alison. Someone is chanting through the door, and I run out to the hall. Mom’s a few yards off, her figure blurred by shadow, the boning knife in her hand reflecting the moon’s alkaline glow from the window behind me. She turns to the stairs, nearly falls as she descends, and shouts, “He said he’d take me to the island for my birthday. I can’t tame my secrets anymore. I hate him. I’ve tried and tried to hold them in, tried to make excuses for him, for me. Taking out your dirt is hard, Michael. It hurts. Wake your sister, Michael. You’re stronger. She woke me up screaming again. Father made promises. I’ve made excuses. Lies. Wake your sister. She broke dams this time. Mommy made promises. He said we’d see the top of the island.”

  I almost follow her down, almost say, “Let me hold you, alright? That always helps,” but I don’t want to this time because of that tear in the nightgown, and maybe she’d make me hold her anyway, but hadn’t I offered to? And I can’t say what strange desires she’d request of me once in my arms, and me held to her tenderness.

  That’s the last image of tenderness I will ever have of Mom, and it only ever existed in my head.

  When I go into Alison’s room instead, she isn’t in bed, so I check our bathroom across the hall, next to Mom and Dad’s open bedroom door, the cave inside stuffed with shadows, but here’s where she is, inside the tub of course, and the water’s so thick that I can’t see her legs. And I grab her shoulders and shake them, and they’re oiled dough. “Was it what I said?” I say, my breath surely gone for good this time. “Mom!” In her silence, I run downstairs, where Dad’s headlights are rolling across the walls from the windows.

  “I tried to wake her,” Mom says, rounding the corner in a flash, her nightgown whooshing open at the tear. “But it was too difficult. I thought you’d be stronger. Our ghost will be so angry. He’ll want to see me now, to do things his way. It’s time. His.”

  My eyes see nothing, as am I—numb, numb, numb. Dad busts in the front door, lurching to the left, his eyes half-closed, his keys slipping and cracking on the ground, and Mom is still running around aimlessly, her knife out like a sword, her eyes on everything. “He said he’d take us to the very top, to the lighthouse. Father made promises. I made excuses. I made up stories. I brought him to the top of the island, in a way, in my head, and pushed him off. It was a better death. I built him a eulogy made of lies.” Dad is rubbing his nostrils, moaning.

  I go to the phone and peck the numbers for the police, number, number, number, tell them that my sister is dead, and that’s when Mom’s in the living room, tearing her paperbacks from the shelf, slashing at the ancient pages, tossing them into a monochrome cloud, and Dad has noticed, has begun to growl in his drunken delirium. Mom twirls around, shoots through the back door, Dad following, angry mumble, mumble, mumbles.

  I go, too, and when I’m on the porch, shivering, Mom is ascending the stairs, meeting each preserved snow print perfectly, by memory. “You ole bitch,” Dad slurs. “You come down or fall. I dare you.” He starts his way up, swinging back and forth against the railings to keep his balance, hands up to block the floodlights from his eyes. “Tell me what you did.” I think of how hard he holds his liquor to hold her secrets, the heavier sedative, and then I think of tonic clearing the six senses, bubbling over. “Tell me, girlie, or I’ll throw you down.” She does.

  “I let him back into my life. I made excuses. I thought past meant dead.” How sober she is, I see, though my eyes are pointy with spots and quivers.

  Dad reaches the window, still swaying violently, like he’s pouring his anger out on those iron stairs. The metal cries against his striking thunder. “Come back down, both of you!” I call up, my chest and throat so tight that I’m not sure I’m making any noise, and I wouldn’t ever know for sure, because my ears are off, aren’t they, because my parents’ words can’t be real.

  “They put me in an orphanage. He tried to find me. I was a teenage girl. I wanted to die. Our ghost is mad. The past can’t die. The world is mad, mad. Time’s run out. Mad, mad, mad.”

  Dad is still not moving, but the steps are popping, crackling, the sounds of small explosions where the metal meets the house. But Dad is moving then, backwards, his mouth agape, his eyes transfixed by what’s inside the room above the stairs. “Don’t tell them what I’ve done,” Mom’s saying, her voice furthering itself. “I’m full of dirt and darker things. I tried to kill myself. I was just a girl. She was just a girl. You are just a boy.” It’s almost mute by now, and maybe her words are mine, because that’s how well I know her now. “Father broke our promises. I made excuses. I wanted to die. My body is his. Here is Heaven. Finally, the lighthouse. Goodbye, goodbye.”

  Then the black room behind the window is silent, and the staircase exhales a raspy, fiery series of snaps and groans, and all the Earth leans forward, the stairs and Dad stuck still. I jump to the sliding doors, close my eyes, feel the air and the great falling thing. Dad is wailing, passing through the air as the stairs toss him off, or Mom is moaning, or everyone’s been fast asleep, and I’ll wake up to Alison apologizing soon, and I’ll say sorry, too.

  The ground shakes once, sure of itself. A cold, sandy ring, quickly halted. Mom is whispering to the wind, but I can no longer make out words, for they aren’t really there anymore, though I wish they were. I open my eyes and look up. She’s entirely gone, the window closed, everything quiet and still. Across the deck and onto the yard is where the iron staircase lies, half concealed and still, stabbing the snow that glitters with the start of things, unwarm fire in the sky. Stabbing the dark stuff underneath, too.

  Dad must be half in the yard, half without, the derisive picket fence between all things, and he is too drunk to cry out his final cry, dragon’s dying flame, and he hangs, a plane in Pentax, balanced for once in his life, above all, still. At least the way I picture it in my head.

  I can’t move anymore, not so much as eyes, and I hinge on breaths alone, alone.

  When the ambulance arrives, it doesn’t drive away with one body bag, or two. They set a ladder against the house, and when they find Mom inside, when I’ve climbed up behind them, both policemen shaken off my shoulders, I see she’s taken after Alison, hacked into her own motherly place, so deeply that everything inside’s been tugged out, the muddled berries of the sky. Somehow, she’s fished up to her metal rib, yanked it loose, wrenched it all the way out. I must be imagining. She couldn’t have lived through that. All I can do is hope that she was happy getting clean of her faux bone, and I wonder, if I’d been given faux fingers, would I now take up the knife and debone my own dirt, perhaps excavate even further?

  Grandpa’s bulging luggage is by the door, and seashells scatter the bedside table, surrounding the grimy chef’s knife we’ve been missing, and the back wall is lined with stacks of paperbacks, their boxes barely broken down, set aside. I can’t see the covers in the dark, but I doubt they’d be Mom’s taste, because Grandpa hated horror. He’d always say that nothing was scarier than real life, and there was no point in trying to outdo it.

  The ambulance doesn’t drive away with three body bags, either. I sit at the curb, the gentleman with the notepad asking questions, my mind in the past, as it’s always been.

  One of the authorities had grabbed me, tried to pull me from the window, and I know that this is when I see the other body—t
he thing that’s hardly a body anymore—the furry set of bones strung to the wall by oxidized chains, the green ooze soaked into the stiff carpet beneath, the ivory hairs and teeny tiny framing nails mixed in, half-dissolved from tens of sad years, the stiff pieces on top that must be cartilage, the flies and maggots and fungus and putrescence.

  I also see the worn whips on the bed, and the stained rubber gloves, and the rusted handsaw, and the mallet with shallow, bite-like dents on top, and I think of all the time Mom’s spent up here, taming our ghost. There aren’t handcuffs or blindfolds or rags for gagging. There is no sign of struggle or beaten life, but only of the deathless dirt that follows. And I think of deathless things for the rest of the day and night, be it waiting on the greyed curb or laying under heartrate monitors, and then for years, for all those that must so stubbornly come, my mind undone, but never not numb, my tongue and nostrils stale, even now still stale, within their cruelest pores lying dormant evermore, the remnants of blood and spoiled meat.

  I find myself reading Shirley Jackson too much. Maybe it’s that Halloween is drawing near again. They’ve got so many more books here than Mom ever did, and none of them are sorted into a hierarchy, but only by doctor’s warnings.

  I curl up on the sill, look out through the bars at the city below, imagine Alison’s in the bed across the room, bandages on her wrist and other places, where they should’ve been all along, and I read my hours away, and the nurses don’t mind, and it somehow makes me feel like dirt is trickling out of each and every one of my sore crannies, from my bruised ear drums to the stubs where my fingers should be, so that when I’m out of here, either in the shadow of some lonely middle-aged pair or more suitably on my own, a requisite birthday card from the staff in my back pocket, who as my only points of social interaction feel obligated to bring me cake and let me throw it up too, indeed when I’m out, maybe I’ll be clean of what was born inside of me, from the foul rib of Eve, and I just hope that when this happens, I’ll feel clean of what I used to be, and what used to be done to me, and I’ll never cry when I ejaculate or feel the sun set too fast, and I’ll never see Mom where she bleeds whenever I blink or wake from dreams of chains and leather whips.