Above

by Isla Morley

  * * *

  We spend a lot of time discussing the Hundred Acre Wood. He tells me Eeyore is his favorite character.

  “But he’s always so sad.”

  “That’s because the others don’t play with him. Everyone’s always forgetting him.”

  I can’t help but wonder if he’s talking about himself. “Mine’s Owl.”

  “Because he can fly?”

  “Yes.”

  “My daddy was going to take me flying in his airplane, but he can’t anymore because he died in the war and he’s in heaven now.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Mama says we’re all headed for heaven, some are lucky and get there first.”

  Some headed for hell, too, if I get in any deeper with this kid. “You must miss him very much.”

  “I miss home.”

  Me, too.

  “Here. It’s not Winnie the Pooh, but I think you’ll like it.” I move to the shelves and select Kipling. After three chapters of The Jungle Book, he is asleep once again. We’ve made it through the day. When I get up, my knees creak and his eyes flutter open.

  “Miss Blythe?”

  “Ssh, go to sleep.”

  “I miss my mommy.”

  “I know. You’re going to see her soon, real soon.”

  “Miss Blythe?”

  “The Sleepy Man’s not going to come as long as you keep talking.”

  “My name is Charlie.”

  “Well, howdy-do, Charlie. Glad to make your acquaintance.”

  He falls asleep during our handshake.

  * * *

  Stuck by myself like a chicken bone in Father Time’s throat is better than this, having the boy in here with me. This is worse because I am starting to think of him as my boy, like he did just tumble out of my dreams. It is worse because I am going to love him. If I’m not careful, I am about to sin something terrible, loving someone else’s child. I can picture Reverend Caldwell at the beechnut-wood pulpit, sweating up his favorite gray suit. One hand has a firm grip on the Bible, the other churns the air like the paddle on Mama’s cake mixer. From the way his body bucks, you can’t help thinking it would like to break free of its restraints and go galloping off. “It starts with coveting, brothers and sisters. It starts with desiring what you don’t have, eyeing what belongs to your neighbor. The tempter snares you the minute you desire what is not rightfully yours. Desiring leads to acquiring, and acquiring leads to pride, and pride, dearly beloved, is a long and deep well the devil aims to push you down.”

  Often on the way home from church, Daddy would tell us not to take Reverend Caldwell’s words to heart. “You have to remember the man’s up to his waist in muck, day in and day out,” he’d say, as though saving souls were akin to slopping hogs. Daddy would remind us: “There’s goodness in the world, too. You remember that.”

  I look at this boy, goodness all right. I cannot go sullying it with my loving. Sullying it with sin, because he is not mine to love. It is only fooling myself to think he is mine. Madness to think I conjured him. Even though he can’t get farther than a dozen yards from me, rightfully, I can claim not one inch of him.

  * * *

  Each time the boy wakes up, he seems a little less startled. It is a terrible thing, how hell is already becoming so familiar to him.

  * * *

  We have established a routine. Once Charlie is awake, we eat breakfast—or rather, I eat breakfast and he pushes his food around his plate. Then he helps me with the chores—making beds, washing clothes, compacting the trash. After that, we color pictures and make up stories to go with them. To keep myself from sitting and watching him when he sleeps, I think up more activities for the next time he wakes. I try to think, too, of ways to get him to eat. Dobbs says I shouldn’t go making a melodrama out of every mealtime. When I tried to reason with him about how malnourished Charlie looks, he thanked me for proving his point. He expects Charlie to shake his hand one day and thank him for his kindness. For all his convincing, I still see Charlie headed downhill.

  * * *

  I am afraid to go to sleep. Ever since Charlie arrived, the sounds in the night have come back. I’ll wake up in the dark to panting. Even if I turn on the flashlight, I can hear it: sometimes it gasps; sometimes it chokes. It doesn’t help to tell myself this is just me being a crazy person. Insanity is no match for how frightened I am for this child. Until I have found a way to set this boy free, my mind will not let me rest, especially now that it has figured out how to climb out of my body. It will just sit and pant beside me, waiting for me to do something. It’s easier not to go to sleep than to wake up and have it beg-beg beside me.

  * * *

  I can’t imagine how we can keep this up much longer. Clearly, Charlie is sick. Now, maybe Dobbs is right in saying the cause of Charlie’s ailments are to do with malnourishment and having an addict for a mother, but instead of getting better down here, he is getting worse. As am I. My symptoms, though, are quite the opposite of his. I cannot sleep, I cannot sit still, I am about to scream from the constant ringing in my ears. Alarm bells, is what they are. I tell Dobbs as much the moment he walks in.

  “You have to take him back with you. He can’t stay here anymore. Something bad’s going to happen!”

  Along with groceries, Dobbs has brought more clothes for the boy. “It’s just a matter of adjusting, is all. He’ll come around, soon as he quits being so picky about food.”

  “It’s not that, Dobbs. You have to get him out of here.”

  It amazes me that Charlie sleeps through this.

  “Don’t be stupid. The whole county’s looking for him. What do you think? I can just walk him up to the nearest police station and say, ‘Here we go, Officer, I believe you’re looking for this.’ ”

  “You could take him now, while he’s still sleeping. You could drop him off someplace where nobody will see. The Baptist church or the school or in the park—it wouldn’t be long before someone found him.”

  He shakes his head at me. “And they are going to ask him, ‘Son, who took you and where did he hide you?’ What do you suppose the kid’s answer’s going to be? ‘Santa Claus took me to the North Pole to meet his elves’?”

  “He’s four, Dobbs. He’s not going to draw an Identi-Kit of you. He’s not going to draw them a street map. Besides, we could fool him, we could tell him stuff to get his facts all mixed up. I’ve given this a lot of thought and I—”

  Dobbs walks over to where the boy lies and then returns to the table where he sits down. “You say all this stuff, but I can tell you want him. It’s written all over your face.”

  Of course I want him. Partly because I want him so much is why he must go. “He’s not some pet, some hobby to occupy my time.”

  “You’re right. He’s not a pet. Which means there’s a no-return policy.”

  We go over the issue and cover the same territory once again, until Dobbs slams his hand on the table. The boy startles but doesn’t wake up.

  “Look. He’s here to stay. Deal with it.”

  Dobbs gets out his notes and doodles for a while before putting them aside and opening up his newspaper. He spends less time than usual working on The Manifesto. He complains he can’t concentrate with me staring at him. He suggests I work on my embroidery. Knit the boy some mittens, he suggests, as though we might all go sledding in the morning. Eventually, he gives up reading and announces it’s Married Time. Because my cot has Charlie in it, Dobbs orders me to sit on his lap. He tells me to quit looking at him like that. When he still can’t get his equipment to cooperate, he shoves me aside and zips up his pants.

  Before Dobbs leaves, he fishes from the bag several boxes of toys.

  He walks toward the door. I stop him.

  “I’m not well,” I tell him.

  He tries shaking off my grip. “Get some sleep. Want me to set the timer so the lights come on later?”

  “I’m trying to tell you something. My head—it’s not working right. I’ve started hea
ring those voices again.”

  “You’re fine,” he says. “You’ve never looked happier.”

  He doesn’t give me a chance to say it’s an act; it’s magic. It’s not real.

  * * *

  The boy wakes up to a remote control car. He looks over at me without touching it. “Can I go home now?”

  The toys don’t help. You can’t call what Charlie and I do with them play. We treat them delicately. We watch them. We watch them like they might hatch.

  * * *

  When Charlie is awake, I smile constantly. Pop-Tart smiles, fresh and ready in seconds. When he sleeps, I make sure to cry softly. I wonder if this is what motherhood is. My mother cried only one time that I can remember. When her best friend, Livvy, was killed by a drunk driver. It was the most disturbing thing I’d ever witnessed. In place of my mother—my calm, reasonable mother—was some sort of wild animal. It didn’t help to stand in front of her saying, “Mama? Ma?” I was too afraid to touch her. Afraid she might suddenly whip around and bite me, like Daddy rescuing that German shepherd and getting a bloodied hand for his troubles.

  Fall had come early that year. Beginning in the trees, the season had a way of bronzing everything. The forest resembled a rusty junkyard, and the sun, too weak to climb the sky, set long shadows on the ground like oil stains. Not long into our walk, Daddy and I came upon the stray. It kept yanking its back leg, which was mangled in steel jaws. Worrying at the chain had made its gums bloody. We got close enough to see how it had about chewed off its leg, but it still had the cheek to give us a big show of teeth.

  After Daddy used a stick to release the trap, he reached out to pick up the dog and got bit awful bad. Still, he wrapped the dog in his windbreaker and carried it home and explained that trapped animals couldn’t be blamed for the hurt they caused.

  Doc Caul came by to look at it on his way home. He said the dog had been on the road a long time before it got itself snared. He inspected the leg and said the dog had to be put down.

  “Can’t you amputate?” Daddy asked.

  “We can try that. Odds aren’t in its favor, though. What say you we put this guy out of his misery?”

  Daddy was quiet for a long time. Under my breath, I prayed the words over to him. Daddy was going to say, “Appreciate your advice, Doc, but if it’s all the same, I think we’ll go ahead and see about those odds.”

  In the end, Daddy didn’t say anything.

  It seemed cruel to have gotten that poor dog’s hopes up only to have them dashed once and for all. I was the one to beg the vet to spare the dog. He patted my arm. “Sometimes you got to be cruel to be kind.”

  I can’t get his words out of my head. I can’t help but look at this darling boy and see him bound up in a trap. Cruel to be kind. Cruel to be kind. You have to be cruel to be kind.

  * * *

  Each time Dobbs comes and goes and does not take the boy, boulders roll down my gut a little farther. Soon, my intestines will have enough rocks to build a dam. Maybe it won’t be such a bad thing. Maybe it’ll stop the sick from coming up all the time, stop all these bad memories and tangled thoughts from floating up to the surface. Heaven only knows how it is possible that when I speak to the boy out of my mouth comes light and hope. Catch the drift and fly up beyond the ceiling past the earthworms is my tone of voice. Hot air.

  It’s lack of sleep or too little food or too much worry that’s causing everything to get muddled in my head. If only there were a way to take off my head and put it on the shelf, I’d do better. I’d do better without eyes, eyes that mark a child wasting away before me. I’d do better if I didn’t have a pitchfork smile goading him all the time. If my mouth were up where the books are kept, it wouldn’t keep putting two sentences together that make absolutely no sense. My ears, next to the coffee mugs, wouldn’t keep eavesdropping on his thoughts about how afraid he has become of me. We could sit across from each other, headless me and vanishing boy, and draw pictures of bunnies and trucks and things from the lost world.

  Everything about him used to remind me of the good things about home, but now I only remember the bad things: a dead dog, a missing kitten.

  When No-Good Cat was getting ready to deliver her kittens in Grandpa’s barn, Daddy drove me over to see them being born. Grandpa and I sat with her as she labored. One tiny pink pellet came out, and then another, and between births the cat licked and cleaned her babies. By suppertime, she’d delivered six. After dinner, I ran back to the barn with a flashlight. This time, I counted only five. I looked behind the cat and under her tail, and still came up one short. I ran in to tell the grown-ups. Grandpa came out to look. He said, “Yup, there’s five all right.” And then he told me the most hideous thing.

  “That mama cat has gone and ate it.”

  I was appalled. She’d always seemed like a good cat.

  “It’s nature’s way. A mama knows if any of her youngins ain’t right. She spared it a life of suffering.”

  Spared it a life of suffering. Cruel to be kind.

  I have to help the boy. Have to quit him, too. I just have to figure out how. If there were a way to get him out of here and back into my head. He came from my head, didn’t he? I dreamed him up. All of this is my doing. Undoing is what I must now be about. It isn’t cruel to undo him. It’s kind.

  * * *

  Whereas before Charlie made some attempt at eating, he now refuses everything. Already the bones are poking out of his sheet-white skin. He won’t talk about anything anymore, not even the good things. Not his favorite TV shows, not about Eeyore or even his grandma, who always has a penny for him to toss in her fountain, even though it doesn’t have any water in it. No longer does he mention his preschool teacher and her puppet, Gloria, with the yellow yarn hair. He has never talked about his mama, and there are times when I think she doesn’t really exist. I have to remind myself that I don’t tell him about my own mama. The things most precious we keep to ourselves.

  Everything about the boy seems rolled up in a great big ache, an ache so bad he can’t complain about it. He’s given up asking when he can go home, and I no longer have to find different ways of saying, Soon. What little trust he had in me has eroded over the past few weeks. He knows I mean to say, Never. If I can tell a lie that big, why bother listening to all the other little lies?

  “He’s fading away,” I tell Dobbs, hoping Charlie isn’t just pretending to be asleep.

  “He’s doing fine. Not crying like he used to, that’s for sure.”

  “Look at him. Does that look to you like a child who is doing fine?” Even buried under a quilt, you can smell death coming off him.

  “You sure you’re feeding him enough? Kids need to eat every couple of hours.”

  “Strap him down and shove it down his throat, you mean?”

  “I’ve never seen you like this. You’re being hysterical.”

  The boy wakes up when Dobbs, cussing a blue streak, struggles to free my hands from around his throat.

  “Miss Blythe?”

  “It’s okay, sweet boy, everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.” But I keep my fingers knotted around the man’s gullet, a rotten core if ever there was one.

  “Are you hurting Mister?”

  I drop my hands only when Charlie comes over.

  Dobbs rubs his throat, gives a stage cough, and dusts the front of his shirt. “What in God’s name is the matter with you!”

  “Why were you hurting Mister?”

  “I wasn’t, sweetie. We’re just playing a game, is all.” I usher Charlie back to bed, tuck the quilt around him. I sincerely hope my face is doing what it’s supposed to and not giving off that mad look again. “The Sleepy Man will be here soon.”

  He shakes his head. “The Sleepy Man doesn’t want to come here anymore.”

  “Yes, he does.” There it is again, that weather-vane voice. What kind of crazy storm is going on that it can’t pick a direction and stick with it?

  When I return to the kitchen table, Dobbs lifts
his palms, as if to say, See, what did I tell you? He’s fine.

  * * *

  Each time Charlie wakes up in here, it’s with more agony inside him. Used to be I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him; now, I can’t stand to see him suffering through the waking hours. I do such a remarkable job staring at the spot on the kitchen table, and Charlie does such a remarkable job of keeping still that he does disappear. For great big chunks of time. In my head, he is strong, like before he came here. He runs in figure-eight formations, airplane arms catching the updraft and lips making propeller noises.

  The only time Charlie smiles is in his sleep. He’s free only when he dreams. Fact is, he’s not even free when he’s in my head. He shouldn’t have to be in this place one more day. He shouldn’t have to go through what I go through. Any mother worth her salt can see what has to be done. Has to be done. Cruel to be kind, is what Doc Caul said. Spared a life of suffering, Grandpa said.

  I get the pillow slip. I’ve washed it by hand many times over the last few days. It smells of hand soap. I stuff my pillow in it and press it against my face. So soft.

  It would be fitting to say a prayer. If only I knew how.

  “Sleep, little one. I will keep watch and chase the demons away. You go on ahead and dream your big dreams and throw your pennies into the wishing well and see how they are all going to come true. No more waiting. They are all about to come true.”