by Isla Morley
THE LIZARD IS back. I never see him coming. One minute the place on the wall is only an empty place on the wall, the next, it is a reminder that I am still alive. One lizard eye looking at me is all it takes for me to know I am still here. It is both a great relief and an unbearable burden.
A ladybug caught a ride down here on Dobbs’s shirt once. I kept it hidden in a tin. When Dobbs was gone, I would take it out to play with it. It would just sit there after a while, not moving. I didn’t know what to feed it. I tried everything, but it still died. I cried for that ladybug like I still sometimes cry for Mama. Another time it was a trail of ants that came down the wall where Dobbs sat reading in his recliner. I wish they’d come in some other way. He sprayed the entire place, top to bottom, said he couldn’t be having an infestation eating up his archives.
He hasn’t seen the lizard, and it’s been weeks.
The lizard keeps his head still, the glassy ball of his eye fixed. I’ve learned moving isn’t the answer—how quickly companionship can become once again an empty place on the wall. Blinking he understands. We’ve established our own kind of Morse code of the eyelids. I send him a series of slow, long blinks. He responds with push-ups.
What is to become of me, I blink.
Down, up, down.
Is there a way out?
Up.
It’s getting hard to remember what conversation sounds like. I cannot hear my family’s voices in my head anymore. If I try real hard, I can feel them. Suzie’s irritation a slap; Gerhard’s alto a stiff indifference; Theo’s baby gibberish a tickle. Mama’s words are sometimes as warm as a heavy quilt, sometimes the abrasive side of a scouring pad. Just about anything Daddy says is a cool compress. Dobbs’s words have their way, mostly. Even when he is not here, I feel the hook of what he has to say, some ragged barb dragging itself across my softest bits.
Two long blinks, one short: Am I ever going to get out of here? Am I ever going to be free?
The lizard doesn’t reply. A hard question. Not a straight up-and-down question.
He scurries off as Dobbs enters the room.
In huge ways I’ve forgotten about the way things used to be, but in the small ways, too. Like round chocolate cakes. The one Dobbs plunks on the table has nuts all over it. In the middle is a white candle.
“What’s this?”
He laughs. “What does it look like?”
A trick, I’m tempted to say. A bribe.
He fishes out a cigarette lighter from his jeans pocket. “February second ring a bell?”
I run over to the wall calendar, alarmed. I haven’t turned the page. We’re still in January. Two days have slipped by my attention.
“Blow,” he says, when I come back.
I let the flame dance between us.
It’s my fifth birthday. We’re in the backyard, where Mama has set up the card table and covered it with her pretty lace tablecloth, the one she uses only when company comes to visit. On top of it is a tray of orange slices, a bowl of hard candy, and a chocolate cake with my name spelled out in goopy pink icing. Mama has to swat Gerhard’s finger from making more telltale swirls on it. Everyone gathers around the table: grandparents, Uncle Vernon and his girlfriend with the gap between her teeth, the twin cousins from Idaho who only ever play with each other.
Mama leans over to me. “Got your wish ready?” but I can’t answer her because I’ve just sucked in a great big breath. She lights the candles, and everyone sings. I begin to panic. I suddenly can’t think what I want more than anything in the whole world, and it’s coming to that part, and my lungs are bursting. Finally, a wish comes and hovers just in front of my nose. I am in the process of choreographing wish and breath, when a gust of wind whips through the crowd and across the table, and snuffs out my candles.
The grown-ups all laugh, but I start to cry. Someone laughs even louder.
“Oh, now, Blythe,” Daddy says, but he’s on their side, trying to keep himself from laughing, too. He relights the candles, and I take another deep breath, but it’s not the same this time. It is hard to find my wish, even with the wind hushed and the faces bulging with smiles. “Hurry, Punkin.”
I look at Suzie. She mouths the word goofball and makes her eyes go squint.
“Blow, quickly!” Grandma says.
Mama leans in, the grin on her face so hard you could file your nails on it. Through her teeth, she whispers, “This is not the time for one of your hissy fits.”
I make a wish. It goes like this, “Go away, all of you. I wish you’d all go away!”
I got my wish, didn’t I? I did this. It’s my fault.
Dobbs is getting impatient. “You want me to blow it out for you?
“Fine.” Dobbs extinguishes the candle, takes it off the cake and sucks the icing at the bottom of it. “Sometimes, there’s just no making you happy, is there?”
He dishes out cake on two paper plates. He sits down, tucks his napkin into his collar, and forks a huge piece into his mouth.
“How old am I?”
He stops chewing to stare at me.
What, have I sprouted hair?
“Seventeen,” he says, as though it were an accusation.
He’s mistaken. I am turning into an old hag. The skin on my hands is papery, like Grandma’s. A tooth has started to rot, and the pages in books are already starting to blur. I’m getting a crooked back, and my legs are so used to being folded they complain when they’re upright too long. I can’t be seventeen and this old, not after six and a half months in this hole.
“No cake for me.” I push the plate aside.
I know that look, so I explain. “I’m allergic to almonds.”
Oh God. He doesn’t believe me. Knowing full well he will employ the feeding tube if he has to, I take a small bite. It doesn’t satisfy him, so I take another bite.
“I brought you a present.”
In front of me is a gift. It’s wrapped in pearl-white paper and has a bow on it. The paper is not easy to tear. It’s the expensive kind, like the ones they sell in the school fund-raiser.
“You’re like my mother,” he says. “She always had to save the gift wrap.”
Aren’t we a happy family?
“Do you like it?”
It’s a mirror, an oval one in a fake gold frame. It takes me a moment to realize who the stranger in it is.
“Well? Is that a yes?”
I look like a cancer patient. I touch my scalp. It is pocked with red bumps and tiny scabs. He permits me to shave my own head, but keeps forgetting to bring a sharp razor—either that, or he doesn’t trust me with one. Running across my forehead are deep lines, and my jawbone looks as though it could slice through a T-bone steak. Follow the hollows and ridges, and there are two deep green wells where eyes used to be. No water down there. I frighten myself. This is me turned witch.
“Pretty as ever,” Dobbs says.
I put the mirror down.
He goes to the bathroom to prop it up on the narrow shelf. “Every lady needs a mirror. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“Got you something else.” From a paper sack he pulls a red wig. “It’s not like the other one; this one’s real hair.” The jet-black wig Dobbs brought me months ago, which looks like it came from a Halloween store, is still in the brown paper sack under the sink. “Go on, try it out.”
“I’m not feeling very well.”
“Do you need some castor oil?” For Dobbs, there isn’t an ailment that castor oil won’t cure.
My throat starts to constrict. My lips start tingling.
“Here, it’ll make you feel better.” Before I can stop him, he puts the wig on my head. I feel like I’m wearing someone else’s scalp.
“Goodness! What’s going on with your face?”
I can feel it swelling. My lips about ready to burst. My tongue thickens. My gums start to itch. Then, everything starts to itch—the inside of my nose, my eyes, my skin. I start gasping.
&
nbsp; “The nuts!” he yells, jumping up. He races over to the shelf with the cubbies and pulls out the first-aid box. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Dobbs like this. He tosses everything on the floor and finally finds what he’s looking for.
The EpiPen. He jabs it in my thigh. “I’m so sorry! I should’ve believed you.”
The effect is immediate.
He watches me closely, repeating over and over again how sorry he is. As soon as I can, I say, “I’d like to be alone, if you don’t mind.”
“But . . .” He’s taken aback.
“I want to be alone.” I look over at my cot. It has never looked quite so inviting.
He scoots his chair closer, puts his hand on my knee. “I can’t leave you like this.”
I push his hand away. In all the time I’ve been here, Dobbs has been careful about where he puts his hands. When he takes me for a walk to the entrapment vestibule or to the utility tunnel, he might fold his palm into the small of my back. If he brings me a book, he might lay his hand casually on my shoulder when I sit down and open it. But never this, such a show of affection.
“I’m really tired.”
There is a freshness to the silence, a clean margin around it.
Dobbs shrugs his giving-up. “Okay, then. You’ll probably fall asleep now anyway. I’ll drop by before I go to work tomorrow to see how you’re doing.”
He leaves. For the first time since I’ve been brought here, I’ve made him do something. A tiny piece of freedom. Now, that’s a birthday gift!
Instead of lying down on the bed, I go to the bathroom and pick up the mirror. Cancer girl is gone. A redheaded stranger is in her place. She fluffs her bangs, pulls a tendril of hair across her cheek.
“Hello,” I greet her.
“Hello,” she replies. She smiles. “I hear it’s your birthday.”
I nod, and she nods, like she knows all about it.
“Do you think my family remembers?”
“Oh, sure.”
I talk to the lady, even though the drugs have made me quite drowsy. I think my visitor just might keep the loneliness at bay.
“Will I ever see them again?” I eventually ask her.
She tucks her hair behind her ears. For some reason, she starts trying to braid it. I am about to tell her she’s going to need both hands for that when the mirror slips. It crashes to the floor. Come back! I bend down. The lady with the pretty red hair is gone. But she has left me a gift: a shard of glass in the shape of a dagger.
THERE IS ONLY one way to get out.
Dobbs has been on the lower level ever since we finished dinner. Through the gap between the floor and the outer wall, I hear him ferreting about in his filing cabinets. I stand at just the right angle by the center column and catch a glimpse of him. “Dobbs, can I come down?”
Not a minute later, Dobbs unlocks the door and leads me to the control center. He is so pleased.
It’s only the second time I’ve been here. Upstairs, the room is open-plan except for the toilet, the supply closet, bookshelves and those two partitions, but this space is cut up into triangular little offices. We go into the first office, the one with the cabinets and the specimen jars. I remember this room being neat, but it is now a mess. Stacks of paper are strewn about. Filing cabinet drawers are too full to close, and boxes are stacked on top of one another so high they almost touch the ceiling.
“I’m looking for some papers I edited a few years back. I need to update them.”
“I can help.”
He studies my face for a minute. I pretend to be that nice lady from the mirror. So that he will not be suspect anything, I’m wearing a belted dress and a cardigan rather than my going-home clothes. The dagger I’ve made with the mirror shard and duct tape fits snug against my back.
“I didn’t think you cared about preparedness.”
“It’s better than sitting up there by myself.”
Dobbs has me look for his Famine and Survival tract in files categorized under the John Birch Society. When that turns up nothing, he suggests it might have been misplaced with his father’s documents. I go through the drawer and spot an old black-and-white photo: a woman in an apron cooking over a propane tank and a little boy in the background holding up a toy train.
“My dad took that picture of us.”
“Where are you?”
“In our bunker.” He has spoken very little of his family before, but now he tells me all about States Hordin and how he came back from the Korean War with a missing leg only to realize he had a war to fight on the home front, too. I hear about the fallout shelter he built with his own two hands and how he supervised his family’s evacuation drills. Rather than taking camping trips, Dobbs says they’d spend vacations in their bunker preparing for a nuclear disaster.
“I was just like you, in the beginning.” Dobbs stares at the photo. “I hated being underground. We’d be playing dominoes, and all of a sudden I’d start hyperventilating. Tomfoolery is what Pa called it. Said the only cure was for me to spend some time down there by myself. He left me there a whole week. And guess what? I survived. Next time, I spent the entire summer in the shelter.”
“You didn’t get lonely?”
“Nope. I had all the companionship I needed in the Bible. The people in there, why, they just come to life in the dark.”
He digs out a photo album and shows me a picture of a towheaded boy with freckles and a missing front tooth, holding a jar. Dobbs explains how he’d sit for hours watching those tadpoles, hoping to catch the moment they’d change into frogs. “I kept all sorts of critters. Snapping turtles, cottontails, one time a catfish that got caught upstream when the crick dried up.” And now me.
I must get him to turn his back to me, get him bent over his files, distracted—quit talking about the boy. “What else do you keep in these files? Do you have any of those government pamphlets from the old days?”
Dobbs does a double take and then grins. He opens a different drawer. I slip my hand around to my back and under the sweater. I grab the dagger.
He swings around. “Would you like to see the blueprints of this place?”
My hand stays behind me. “Sure.”
He rolls them out on the floor and has me crouch down next to him. “This shows the crib suspension system. To launch the missile, the hydraulic system had to deliver three thousand pounds per square inch of pressure. These are the two silo doors. Each weighs one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. If it didn’t take a boatload of money, I’d see about getting them operational again.”
I make all the right noises so he will keep talking. “Knees,” I say, so he won’t find anything suspicious about me getting into a standing position. I keep my hand behind my back, my grip tight. No hesitating this time. Straight between the shoulder blades.
“This is where I spent all my money.” He points to the level I live on, to a square with a long L-shape that goes straight up to the surface. “The ventilation system. One of these days, I’m going to have to get up in that pipe and change the filter. Miserable job.”
Did he just say, get in that pipe? I bend over the diagram again while he goes on about having had both the intake and exhaust vents modified because the original duct had been clogged with debris.
You can fit a person in there?
“What do you have behind your back?”
Dobbs isn’t looking at the blueprints any more. He’s staring at me.
“Nothing.”
He rises. I fumble with the dagger, try to wedge it back in the belt.
“You want something, you don’t have to steal it. You only need to ask.”
I can’t think of what to say. I wish I had stolen something from his precious collection.
He grabs my hand. It’s empty.
He swings me around, lifts up the sweater. Slowly, he slides the dagger out from the belt. “This?” He holds the dagger. “This is what you’ve become?”
* * *
He puts on his coat and picks up t
he duffel bag, which has the dagger in it. I hand him the supply list, but he doesn’t take it.
“I won’t be back for a while.” He means to punish me, to remind me he doesn’t have to come here at all if he doesn’t want to. A while doesn’t scare me. I’ve got plans of my own.
* * *
I drag the kitchen table till it stands directly below the ventilation panel. I put a chair on top of it and then climb up. Still too short. The emptied supply cabinet and the kitchen chair do the job. The ventilation panel of the duct comes off easily. I stick my head and as much as my body inside, find a place to anchor my arms, and then spring up.
I’m in!
But there isn’t an inch of free space. I wedge myself farther into the duct and bang into a chilly blast of air. I worm my way forward. Only a few yards into the duct, the darkness becomes an assault. In retaliation, I crack the fluorescent stick. I’ve also had the presence of mind to bring the serving spoon for digging and a backup instrument in the form of a fondue fork.
The shaft is unbearably narrow. The sound of my shuffle runs ahead of me while my breath turns tail and runs the other way. I am afraid to make a noise. Dobbs might hear. What if he’s had a change of heart and is on his way back here to accept my apology? But there is something else that keeps me tight-lipped. The something with its wings folded around itself, hanging upside down from the I-beams, the something that slinks around in that tunnel. Sound is sure to rouse it. I keep my fear barred behind my ribs and my breathing behind sealed lips, and inch ahead.
It is a huge relief when I come to the vertical part of the shaft. I was beginning to think I’d gotten into the wrong tube. Reaching into the space, my hand locates a rusting pipe. It’s damp. I draw my fingers away, put them to my lips. Tastes like Suzie’s hair spray. The vent is twice as big as the duct. It is a space big enough for two people. The only snag is that it goes straight up. No grade, no ladder, no footholds. I yank on the pipe. Unsure whether it will hold my weight, I pull myself up anyway. Three feet into this exercise, my arms about pop out of their sockets. There is only one other thing to try.