by Eliza Grace
He does manage to smile where I have failed. It is a halfhearted thing though and achingly fleeting.
“Nah. I made…a choice. Did what I thought was right, what I’d always been taught. And because of that, because I followed my own sense of rightness, my entire family was slaughtered.”
“Slaughtered?” Slaughtered… murdered? Was his family murdered? What kid says slaughtered?
“Yeah. Murdered, right in front of me.”
“Oh my God, that’s awful, Matthew. That’s… God, there are no words.” Without the buildup that often accompanies intense feeling, I get a burgeoning pillow of connection within my body, an unshakable sort of kinship with this guy with the shadowed blue eyes and similar background.
“I’m still trying to recover from it. Sometimes, I feel like a ghost. Walking around free and well, but no one in the world knows that I exist; no one cares, because all of the people who did care for me are dead.
“But someone has to care for you, Matthew. You live with someone right? Someone in your family?” If not…where was he living? Then an awful thought occurs to me. What if he has no home? If he doesn’t if he’s out here on his own, should I call someone? The cops…social services…Matthew’s voice slices into my uneasy thoughts.
“No, I’m on my own. That’s why it’s easier to lie. When I tell people that I’m homeless, they respond one of two ways—either they call the cops and social services hauls me off or they get that look.” He points at me. “Pity on top of pity. I can’t stand that.”
“I can understand why you lie.” Not once do I get warning bells. I’m confident he’s being honest. Who would make up such a heartbreaking story? Given all the lies in the world, I certainly wouldn’t construct one that involves burning my family alive.
“Yeah, but I’m sorry I lied to ya’ll.”
I realize, when Matthew says “ya’ll” that this is the first time he’s used a southern-esque colloquialism while we’ve talked—a far cry from his first stop at the house when he’d been using them liberally. But, thinking back, I remember him forgetting to act like the quintessential country boy when Jen was drilling him with questions. “So… were you adding the twangy words for effect earlier?”
He looks at me, and I can tell that he’s confused. “You know—the ma’am, the ya’ll, the ain’t, the outta, and I reckon?” When I say the last bit, I snap my fingers and swing my arm—bent elbow—in front of my body in my best Elly May Clampett impression. Mom loved the Beverly Hillbillies.
“Oh,” Matthew laughs and it is warm and viscous, threading through me like that first laugh when I’d fallen to the ground. “Well, if I put on the stupid boy country act, people generally are as nice as possible. I don’t get nearly the same reaction when I show off my tattoo and speak normally.”
“Your accent isn’t very convincing. Might want to work on that.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“Anytime.” I’m beginning to feel at ease with him—Matthew the liar. We’re smiling at each other. I love moments like this—when I’m just being me. I nearly forget that my legs don’t work. “So, how old are you?”
“Old enough.” He shrugs, brushing off the question.
“That’s being vague.”
“At least I’m not lying,” Matthew is quick with the reply, his mouth now drawn into a large, unabashed grin. “I’m older than you I bet.”
“You don’t look like you are.”
“Just an illusion.”
“Right,” I drag out the word dramatically, “like contouring with makeup for sharper cheekbones. Say, did you draw on that five o’clock shadow? Wait… that was just some dust. Hello, baby face.”
“Laugh all you want. You look fourteen and you’re the size of a hobbit.”
“I do not look that young. And if I could stand, you’d see that I’m taller than average.” My brain tells my foot to stamp indigently, but, of course, it cannot. So instead, I take the more mature route and stick out my tongue. Matthew just smiles at me, which infuriates me further. We sit in silence for several minutes and I take a few seconds of that time to look towards the forest—I realize that the desire inside me, the one that is always there urging me to enter the woods, has quieted to a dull and easily resistible hum.
“Do you ever notice all the faces in a tree?” I don’t know why I ask the question; it’s such a stupid thing to ask someone—surely I am the only person in the world that sees the smiles and wrinkle lines etched into the bark.
“Sure. Each face is a trapped witch or fairy or troll, that sort of thing. That’s why when you cut into wood you get the little holes and knots—it’s where their souls were. That’s also why I’m so against lumber companies. Each tree they cut down can release a slew of those meddling creatures.” Matthew says it so matter-of-factly that I do not know whether to laugh or look at him sympathetically, nod, and write him off as a crazy person.
“Umm…” My word trails off listlessly, my mind trying to figure out how to tactfully see if he believes what he is saying.
“I’m joking of course.” He kicks his foot out gently against the left front wheel of my chair.
I force a laugh, because I don’t believe him. What he said has not sounded like a lie—and I now have some experience in how he acts when he is lying. He believes that the faces are mythological creatures trapped within sap and bark. “Well, at least I’ll know what I’m looking at now. I always pictured them more like the grandmother tree in Pocahontas. Have you seen that movie?”
“They made a movie about that? It’s unseemly, a girl that young and a man… and her a savage. We studied that situation when we were—” Matthew stops talking; he is looking towards the forest now. His face is blank, as if the thoughts racing through his brain are so all-consuming that his body cannot handle any exterior emotions or actions.
“Sure, she was pretty savage singing and dancing with a raccoon.” I roll my eyes. “Seriously, get with the program—history tends to get a little warped in the movies. I mean, how many parents would have taken their kids to see a pedophile?”
Matthew doesn’t laugh, move, or give any indication that he has heard me.
“Are you okay?” I roll a bit closer; close enough to reach his body with my left hand. “That was a joke. Feel free to give me a pity chuckle at least. Matthew?”
My fingers brush the shirt he is wearing; beneath my touch it feels like ashes—smooth and chalky and disintegrating. I move even closer, placing my entire hand against his upper arm. “Matthew?” I say again, pushing at him.
As I watch, his body begins to burn, blacken, and crumble. He does not crumble fast enough though. I can see charred flesh beneath the shirt. And then I am seeing Toby.
And then I am screaming.
My screams carry out into the woods, startling the birds which fly upwards in a great arc of billowy, cloud-like movement.
He is gone. Matthew is gone. There is nothing left, not even the smallest pile of ash to prove that what I’ve witnessed is reality and not a daymare. I don’t understand; my brain does not comprehend. When the last echoes of my screams fade, I am plunged into an unsettling quiet that is a million times more oppressive than the empty house. And darkness. A black oblivion. In the center of my body, I feel the chord of calling again—that “it” in the forest that wants me.
Then my eyes open. The fear coils down inside of me like a waiting cobra, ready to strike again whenever opportunity presents. My body is still pressed against cushions. I am still in the window seat. Have I been here the whole time? Was that only a dream?
It is a disquieting reality that I do not know the truth.
Closing my eyes again, I see it all again in rewind. A lucid nightmare replaying in reverse.
Back to Before
Real or unreal, I still see Matthew burning in my mind’s eye the next morning. I don’t even know when Jen got home or when I fell asleep… for the first or second time.
Sitting in the window seat, curled
up against the cushions, I am staring out the window, but superimposed on the rippled glass is his charred skin. I hate the imagery. It makes me want to be blind as well as crippled. It’s late in the morning already and rehab is this afternoon. I don’t feel like struggling today.
“Tilda, phone’s for you! It’s Charlie!” Jen is yelling down the hall at me, too lazy to physically breach the distance between art studio and bedroom. Her voice is chipper—I did not tell her what happened while she was in the city yesterday. I cannot tell her; it could have been a dream anyways. And, if I tell her, she’ll never leave me alone again. And then her art career will be ruined just like her free hippie-inspired single life.
“I’ll call her back!” I should be doing my studies, but I can’t bring myself to open the computer, to log on and access all the mundane learning that is required for me to go anywhere in this life—because that’s all the world cares about now it seems. To live, you need money, to make money you need a job, to get a job, you need an education.
What good is all that in the end?
I hear the murmur of Jen’s voice as she relays my message to Charlotte-Ann Nickels—my best friend. We’d bonded in preschool over how much we hated our names and our friendship had weathered so many things. Except this—except me moving and my parents being dead, because I couldn’t face her and her perfect life with her mother and father and very much alive little brother. I don’t even know if I can stand to hear her voice any more. “She says she won’t be able to talk later.”
“Why not?”
“Tilda, I am not going to stand here and be a middle man between you and Charlie. If you want to know why, then get up and come get the phone.”
“It’ll take me a while!” I yell back. “One dinosaur of a phone in the whole stupid house.” I mutter. “And it’s not even cordless.” It’s my own fault that I have to leave the room to talk to my best friend.
Jen got me a cell phone as soon as I moved in; she’d been so worried that I’d fall while she was out of the house and that I wouldn’t be able to get to the one corded phone in her studio. I haven’t used the phone once or even given the number to anyone. I still have the hot pink cell Mom and Dad got me on my sixteenth birthday. The service has long been cut off. It’s just a dead, useless shell.
My wheelchair is parked right next to the window seat, so it is a quicker-than-usual process to shift my body off of the pillows and onto it. I find that I am actually grateful to roll away from the window and the image of Matthew that has been taunting me. But, as I exit my room, I can smell it—the burned flesh scent that will always be a part of me.
“You know,” huffing as I roll into the studio, “if we had a cordless phone, maybe even one from this decade instead of that ancient thing, you could bring it to me when someone called. You’re the one with the working legs after all.”
“Or—and here’s a brilliant idea—you could use the cell phone I got you. Give that number to your friends and then they wouldn’t be calling on the house phone at all.” Jen volleys one back to my side of the court. “As for a cordless phone from this decade, Dad always said a phone should be sturdy enough to knock someone out with. Ten dollars says I’ll need to use that thing as a weapon someday.”
“You’d choose the phone over Grandpa’s shotgun in the pantry if someone broke in? That’ll scare the pants off a perp, Jen.” I roll next to the small table that is the phone’s resting place. Jen is close enough to push her foot against my chair playfully and roll it back an inch.
“The main point is you need to talk to your friends more, Tilda. Make a real go of being social again. That’s why I got you that cell phone.”
“No, you got me the phone in case I bust my ass and you’re not around.”
“And for talking to your friends.” Jen’s voice is serious now.
“I’m about to talk to Charlie, aren’t I? So there.”
“Right. This is the third time you’ve talked to her in months. You’re really making progress.” Jen rolls her eyes at me and the seriousness melts away. That’s supposed to be my move. I’m the teen after all.
I take the outstretched off-white phone from Jen and then she walks out of her studio. I call after her. “We could at least move the phone into the living room instead of the studio!” The smell of wet acrylics is nearly noxious. The painting Jen is working on now is monochromatic—all blacks and grays and white, like she is playing with shadows on the canvas. I find it oddly unsettling, like I could be—at any moment—transported from the cage of a wheelchair to the cage of shaded colors.
“Umm… hello? Hello?” Charlie’s voice is a whisper as it floats up to me from the hand set of the old rotary phone, which I’ve forgotten about, although it is still loosely grasped in my hand.
“Hi, Charlie.” I say before I’ve even got the phone pressed against my face.
“Hey, Tilda! It feels like it’s been weeks!”
It has been weeks… “I think it has been a while. I’m sorry. I just… well, I haven’t been calling anyone really.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I understand. I know if it were me and my fam—” Charlie clears her throat. I can imagine what she’s doing now, fidgeting with a strand of her hair and trying to figure out what to say. “Anyways, that’s okay. Listen, my mom was asking me what I wanted to do for Thanksgiving break this year. My grandma is having a big to-do upstate, but she said I didn’t have to go if I didn’t want to. Cousin Doug the Dorkface is going to be there and I just can’t stand the thought of him ogling me over the punch. He’s just so skeevy.”
We laugh and I know we are both thinking of the Halloween where Doug, then ten, had offered us both all his candy if we’d flash him. Such a creep even as a little kid! “Ugh. I don’t blame you! I bet he’ll think of a thousand perverted things to say about ham and stuffing.”
“Yeah. He’s so much worse now.” Charlie makes a retching sound on the other end of the phone and I laugh again. “So… well, can I come visit you there?”
“Oh.” Do I want her to come? She’s my best friend, but… everything is different now. “I guess I’d have to ask Jen if it’s okay. This is her house after all and—”
Charlie cuts me off. “She already said it was okay if you wanted me to come!” She sounds triumphant, like she’s thought everything through and made it impossible for me to say no.
I don’t want to be quiet too long and make Charlie think that I don’t want her to come, even though part of me really doesn’t want her to come. What will we do together? Go to the small fashion stores in town so she can push me around and I can try to ignore the looks of sympathy as she goes into dressing rooms and tries on clothes while I sit and play the critic? Yep, that sounds like a freaking blast.
“Your parents don’t mind you traveling here? I mean, it’s pretty far. Are they going to bring you?”
“You’re only about four hours away, Tilda. And I’ve been driving for several months now.”
“You passed the test?”
“Yep, right after you moved away actually. I practiced that stupid parallel parking thing for a million hours, I swear. Hardest thing I’ve ever done! But I did it. Pulled into that spot at the DMV as easy as you please. Of course, I’m avoiding parallel parking like the plague, which is freaking impossible driving in this city! I had a nice tester this time too, not that cranky old woman who kept yelling at me like I was going to run into another car and kill her. Would have served her right if I had.”
“That’s so great!” I try to sound enthusiastic, but I know there’s a note of sullenness in my tone. My gaze flits down to my useless legs. Unless, by some miracle, I walk again, I’m going to need one of those special cars with hand gears. I miss driving. I miss taking Toby to school and picking up milk or eggs for mom.
“Sorry, Tilda. That was jerky of me to be so excited over driving.”
“No, it wasn’t jerky. You’ve waited forever to be able to drive. No more passenger seat for you.”
“I
miss you so much.” Charlie’s voice sounds so sad, the polar opposite of her excitement over driving.
It makes me uncomfortable. I don’t even feel like part of my old life. In some ways, I wish it would fade into memory so I’d never have to think about it again. Then I could stop missing it so badly. “I miss you too, Charlie.” I search my mind for a change of subject. “Anything news-worthy on the high school drama front?”
“Oh, well…” Her voice trails off.
“What is it? Just spit it out.”
“Aaron’s dating again.” She blurts out the words, as if she hates saying them.
Brunet hair and cobalt eyes play inside my brain. Aaron. My first high school boyfriend. My only high school boyfriend. “Oh? That’s nice I guess. We broke up months ago and I want him to be happy.”
“He’s with Zoey.”
“You’re kidding.” My gasp is stunted with disbelief.
“No. Tilda, I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to tell you, but—”
“I can’t believe he’d date Zoey.” Zoey Estrada was a gorgeous, perfectly-proportioned girl who’d mercilessly teased me since middle school for being an overgrown giant with birthing hips. She should have been popular on looks alone, but Aaron was the quarterback and the crappy way she’d treated me had blacklisted her from most of the cliques. Proof that looks really don’t get you everywhere in life.
“Yeah. She’s captain of varsity cheer now and since he’s captain of the football team…”
“So, that’s that then.” I sigh. Aaron moving on felt like such a final piece of the “my life has changed forever” puzzle. “Wait, Zoey made captain? She wasn’t even on the team last year! I really thought that you’d get it.”
“I told the team that I didn’t even want to be nominated and Zoey’s actually been nice since you left and people have just accepted her like she’s God’s gift to humanity and forgotten what an evil, rich jerk she was. She made the team without even trying out and captain was a cinch after her dad bought the team all new uniforms and equipment. I mean, even if I had wanted it, I wouldn’t have won.