by Pamela Crane
“You evil creature!” she spat through hot tears. “You bit me, and you liked it.”
Josef chuckled with glee, and at that moment she knew it wasn’t superstition, or postpartum depression, or first-time motherhood that besieged her with these haunting thoughts. Indeed, she had birthed evil incarnate … and nothing could be done about it.
Or was there something? Something drastic … but necessary.
Decades of superstitions trickled down the lines of her family—fabricated stories of punishments for sins woven into the folds of time. Sins of lust, theft, lies … murder. Rosalita was only privy to a handful of those secrets, each passed down from mother to daughter, generation after generation. Whether truth or fiction, Rosalita didn’t know. But she did know one thing. Josef was the culmination of God’s retribution for her own sin, a sin only she knew about. A sin she kept hidden in her bosom, tucked away until her last breath.
The only way to stop this curse that she knew would forever revisit her family was to kill baby Josef Alvarez.
End the cycle.
She rested on the corner of the sofa cushion, dirty white stuffing spilling out of the ripped seams. Gazing at her son, she pondered the finality of what she was about to do. Yet sadness—there was none. Fear—aborted. Only hope for a better tomorrow.
A dull gray pillow was crushed between her back and the sofa. She pried it loose, held it.
Breathe, she commanded herself. You must do this. It’s the only way.
She placed the drab pillow on her lap and ran the pad of her index finger along its frayed seam.
“Do it!” The words slipped out unbidden, giving voice to her thoughts.
She grabbed the pillow firmly with both hands, lowering it with infinitesimal slowness. If her hands trembled, she didn’t notice.
She rested it on his plump face at first, gently, almost motherly. She leaned forward, giving weight behind it. The little sausage fingers clawed the air, legs kicked in protest. She increased her mild pressure. The squirming came in spasms now.
1 … 2 … 3 … The seconds passed. 4 … 5 … 6 …
Then a muffled sob shattered the deviant silence—but not an infant’s wail.
Startled, Rosalita looked up to find little Juanita Juarez, a neighborhood kid, standing in the doorway, struck dumb from shock. Her big doe-eyes, wide with fear, filled with tears.
As terror sent Juanita running in a panic, Rosalita’s mind cleared, jolted to sudden awareness of the lifeless silence. Had she actually killed her own child? Tossing the pillow aside, she pulled the baby to her chest, but he hung limply in her arms.
“Please, Josef …” she pleaded to his pale blue form. Pressing her mouth to his, she forced air into his tiny lungs.
Nothing. Deadness.
Another breath.
Then cries shook the little bungalow—from Josef’s blue face, and from Rosalita as she wept for forgiveness in a crumpled heap on the floor.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” she yelled, stomping the tile. When her fury exhausted itself, she hung her head in shame. “For my sins I must pay.”
Although her punishment was yet to be revealed, Josef’s piercing gaze caught hers, as if he knew something she didn’t. As if he sensed the darkness clouding her, or had created it.
Perhaps Josef Alvarez would be that retribution after all.
Chapter 2
Ari
Durham, North Carolina
April 8, 2016
I dipped tentacled fingers into my soul, searching for my humanity, but nothing was there. A hollow had swept clean the place where my heart should have been. I didn’t mind the vacancy. Nothingness is freedom. The heart-shaped void is liberation. The weightiness of pain just wasn’t worth feeling anymore. Most normal people would disagree—the whole “better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all” syndrome people were too attached to. But I was being logical. Grief hurts, period. Why not escape if you can?
Anniversaries always brought out the raging cynic in me. Wedded bliss—screw you, because single life is the only life. Twenty years on the job—why celebrate a daily grind that gets you nothing but a corny watch? But the death of my sister … that was an anniversary I couldn’t escape. It blindsided me year after year, its arrival disentombing the old anguish from the day she died. Died. The word was too prosaic. I always preferred the term murder, but that was the sadomasochist in me talking. After all, since I was the one who killed her, didn’t that earn me the right to name it?
Mottled sunlight dappled the acres upon acres of tombstones jutting up from the earth around me. But I was only here for one.
My eyes glazed over as I read the words at my feet for easily the hundredth time:
Carli Lily Wilburn
February 21, 1994 – April 8, 2002
Beautiful daughter, beloved friend of all who knew her, now God’s angel
Her headstone sat aged and naked before me, littered with grass trimmings from a recent mow. Somehow I never made it into the inscription; nothing to acknowledge our sisterly bond. But I suppose I lost that right when I snuffed her too-young life from this earth exactly fourteen years ago today.
Sunlight fingered the edges of the marker, slick from the morning’s dew, spattering pinpricks of light across the marbled hues of crimson and gray. While my sister lay buried beneath tons of wet earth, my own soul lay buried beneath swells of guilt. Session after session, therapists had tried to excavate my id, but it remained as lifeless as Carli’s crumbling bones.
An icy dawn breeze aroused an eruption of goose bumps on my bare arms, a stark reminder that I’d overstayed my graveyard visit. Mom and Dad would soon arrive, and it was best they not see me. Our last interaction a couple years ago only resulted in a terse exchange of non-pleasantries:
Ari, what are you doing here? Mom in her hushed-yet-stern voice, like she was reprimanding a child while pressing her palm over a phone receiver.
I’m visiting my sister’s grave. What does it look like I’m doing? My defiant reply that sounded more argumentative than I had intended.
You shouldn’t be here. She acted as if I had never been a part of the family. As if I hadn’t spent my life loving Carli, adoring Daddy, obliging Mommy.
I need to be here, Mom. I loved her too.
But one thing I realized hadn’t changed about Mom—her superhuman ability to be unreasonably unyielding. Please, I’m asking nicely, Ari, for you to leave. Don’t disgrace your sister by being here. Mom’s insistent urging rose with her tone. Her voice reached a dog whistle pitch when she was upset.
You’re not the only one who misses her.
Oh, that’s rich, coming from the one who killed her!
Screw you! I have just as much right to visit her as you do.
Mom gave an embittered haha intended to wound. Oh really? A loving sister wouldn’t have done what you did, Ari. Then she turned to Dad for support in sledgehammering my will. Burt, do something! She shouldn’t be here. Make her leave, Mom’s plea, to which Dad contemplatively stroked his mustache, then shook his head at me in apology. I muttered cuss words at their backs as he firmly guided Mom away by her shoulders, whispering consoling words in her ear.
I wasn’t ready for round two and stalked away in the opposite direction.
I had just hit my twenties at the time, and I hadn’t seen them since.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. We weren’t a family anymore, just surly acquaintances bound together by tragedy.
Pushing the sour memory aside, I gently placed a thick cluster of summer-sun-yellow dandelions on Carli’s grave. As kids, the eye-catching weeds had grown in abundance in our yard and became our favorite flower, dotting our hair, peeking from our pockets, and enchanting our bedroom décor. Grownups considered it the peskiest of weeds, the bane of the suburbanite’s perfect lawn, but we adored them unconditionally. I knew that wherever Carli was watching me from right now, she laughed at the irony. Always laughing … up until her very last breath.
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It was a moment I would never—could never—forget.
While the before and after evaporated into a foggy haze, a memory slipping away like sand through my fingers, our final moments together burned like a brand.
Blood pooling in the grass, trickling between the blades like a tiny red snake in flight. Carli sprawled out, spread eagle, unblinkingly staring up at me, a subtle smile lingering on her lips. Now you can have your own room, Sissy. A sardonic laugh later she was gone. Eyes an empty pond of algae-green, glassy and still. Sunlight kissing her pale face goodbye as her life drained into earth’s carpet beneath. And me, ever watching from above, frozen stiff with shock as she left me—her killer.
It was that horrific moment that would turn me against myself. Little by little my self-loathing stripped me down to nothing. No one was laughing now. No one would ever laugh again in my little world.
Staring blindly at Carli’s gravestone never got any easier over the years. As my eyes glazed over with salty tears, I could feel my heart quickening as the angst—not that third cup of coffee—fermented in my gut. Cheeks and neck flushing, palms sweating. The air swirled around me, threatening to hurl me onto the ground face-first.
I recognized the face of this monster inside me clawing to get out. Anxiety—a constant companion that, over the years, had made my life a living hell.
Breathe, I reminded myself. Slow breaths. In. Out. In. Out. I’d eventually get through this one, but I’d never shed this prickly skin altogether. It was Death’s brand on me. Killing had a way of scarring you permanently. Old wounds heal slowly, but the most scab-resistant are the ones we inflict on ourselves and pick at until the blood flows freely.
Chapter 3
Josef
April 7, 2016
One day earlier
A picture-snap moment back to childhood flung Josef Alvarez into the nether regions of his subconscious where the serrated blade of the cheap steak knife no longer ripped apart his vulnerable flesh. While the pulsing jab to his abdomen leaked lifeblood, his eyes fluttered closed … allowing ancient history to whisk him away.
A hazy summer afternoon. A seesaw of gigglers creaking up and down. A screaming knot of daredevils trying to stay aboard the merry-go-round before centrifugal force flung them off like rag dolls. Here Josef was, just a kid on his neighborhood playground, jostling the girl ahead of him to be first on the slide. It was a day of reclaimed innocence.
Dust shrouded Josef as he clambered up the rungs and whizzed down with a wheeee, the breeze rippling his black hair, the hot metal scorching the naked thighs in his cut-off jean shorts.
A momentary peace … before the torment of impending death.
As his scruffy Chuck Taylor sneakers slammed against the packed dirt at the foot of the slide, Josef was jarred back to reality, the reality where his assailant was prepping for the kill. Bleeding away his awareness, Josef backed up against the sofa behind him for support. His attacker stood before him, eyes squinting with hot anger, kitchen steak knife in hand, lunging at him, but Josef held up his hands, pushing the knife aside before it rounded back at him.
But his drugged state turned his world into a dizzying amusement park ride, twisting the double images into a helter-skelter reality his mind and body couldn’t track. A hand gripped his wrist, yet his resolve to fight surrendered. A knife slid through the air, caught his arm, then chewed its way down the skin toward his hand before releasing him. The jagged slice was an act of vengeance for Josef’s sins—and there were many—a final accounting, and Josef rang up short.
With his unscathed hand Josef gripped his stomach, attempting to herd the gore back inside him but instead only sopping his shirt with the blood. Wooziness swept over him again, consciousness wobbling unsteadily, until a tidal wave of nausea fetched the bile to his throat. His legs quivered like two sticks of string cheese, his palm gripped the arm of the sofa, but slipped—a buttery sensation that sent him crumbling into the cushion. The fall gave him a temporary distance from his killer, a moment to whimper for mercy.
“Please, please …” he wept. “Please don’t kill me. I’ll do anything. Please.”
His heart beat a voodoo drum tattoo, and his head was filled with a strange whooshing sound, like when he’d held a conch shell to his ear as a kid. Blood seeping—his—drowning out his words. But his attacker heard. Josef could see it in the unclenching jaw, the sympathetic stare, the lax arm still holding the knife.
“Forgive me, please. Let me live. Let me make it up to you.”
But it was too late for I’m sorry. Too much blood. Darkness was already settling in.
His tangle of limbs drooped lazily from the cream pleather sofa that over the years had flaked plastic peelings all over the ragged beige carpet. A lake of metallic red pooled in the gauzy fabric, staining it with his essence.
Heavy eyelids drooped up and down, Josef fighting the urge for sleep. Feeling an obscure cool emptiness around him, he pried his eyes open, searching the living room. No one. He was alone … for now. Possibly forever. His vision lurched in and out of focus. An outdated plasma TV sat nobly on a card table he had borrowed from a cousin several Super Bowl parties ago but never returned. A mismatched La-Z-Boy sat permanently open next to him, the wreckage of a drunken-stupor temper and misguided kick. Other than the sepia-striped wallpaper, the two-bedroom house was a shithole even worse than the ones in the barrio. He fled Mexico hoping for a second chance here in Dunn, North Carolina—a colorless Podunk of pig farmers and tobacco cultivators. But the past that he ran from had eventually caught up to him. And here he was, playing tug-o-war with death, with no apology sufficient to turn back time.
Wondering where his visitor was, he listened. Past the sound of his ragged wheezing. Past the adrenalin forcing him to cling stubbornly to life. Water rushing. The bathtub?
Light footsteps approached. His last sight, through the narrowing slits of his eyes, was two near-drained el caballito shot glasses of Jose Cuervo Clasico Silver tequila, neat. The drink of champions. And then it made sense—the why. He should have seen it coming.
As his slumped body exhaled its last, panicked thoughts seized him. What will happen to my corpse? Will anyone care that I’m gone? Can I reach that last sip of tequila? I hope they bury me in my good suit … Odd, random thoughts for a dying man. And then somewhere in the void between living and dead he felt it …
Fingers probing.
A tender pat on his cheek, then a quick slap. Almost a love tap, but it stung.
A killer’s final good-bye. A nonverbal I’m sorry for taking your life this way, but it had to be done.
Is this forgiveness? he wondered. For Josef Alvarez, absolution didn’t come cheap.
Chapter 4
Ari
Fifteen days until dead
A warped circle of foggy faces searched me—each yearning for something different, like children startled from nightmares and seeking tender hugs. I didn’t know them, their needs. Only that they all came here for a reason. Help. Advice. Freedom. I didn’t have all the answers, but I hoped I could at least offer a fresh start for the downtrodden and beaten, the victims and sufferers. For broken people like me.
Welcome to the Triad Suicide Support Group.
I had regretted the name after I already printed dozens of flyers. Coming up with a clever name without sounding positively Kevorkian was impossible, so in a hazy midnight oil moment, the group made its informal debut, artless Snakes on a Plane-type title and all.
We were a group of misfits, executives, druggies, model citizens—a mishmash of success and failure, sweet and salty. While our stories diverged into crooked highways and byways of suffering, we all shared one thing in common. We had all at one time faced suicide—either an attempt of our own, or of one we loved.
That’s us, flaws and blemishes bared, but still walking among the living. The little things of life hadn’t killed us yet.
I exhaled, stood up, and faced my audience, pivoting in a crescent so that I could me
et each attendee’s eyes. They were a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors, some sitting stiffly, others stretched as comfortably as one could on a cold metal folding chair. The table of Kroger brand glazed donuts and lukewarm coffee rested against one wall, untouched. On the other wall was a row of windows overlooking faded concrete parking spots sprinkled with a dozen cars. I wondered if I should have invited everyone to help themselves to the food before we began.
Christian Assembly Church, hugging the outskirts of Durham, North Carolina, was an elegant church in the modern style, with a simple cross on the broad triangular frontispiece in lieu of a steeple. The pastor had granted me the use of their fellowship hall.
A demure cough drew my gaze. A woman of unguessable age with alligator skin and long, honey-blond hair that may or may not have been a wig smiled from her seat, warmly handing me the courage to begin.
“Thanks for coming, everyone,” I began, doing my best to stifle the pulsating anxiety that followed me daily, hourly, sickening me with its grip. It was my cruel companion, my shadow. Anxiety was the puppeteer and I was its puppet. But living by it meant not living at all. So here I was, facing it, feeling it quicken my pulse and delivering a punch to the gut that tasted sour in the back of my throat.
“I’m new at this, so bear with me. My name is Ari, and I’m a suicide survivor. I started this group so that those of us who have attempted suicide, experience suicidal thoughts, or know someone who committed suicide can share our stories and our pain, shouldering the burden together. I hope y’all benefit from our group.” Despite my best efforts, the Southern drawl dribbled out at the end.
Mom and Dad hailed from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but me having grown up in the culturally diverse town of Durham—not the Deep South, but proudly and colorfully Southern just the same—it wasn’t without its influence on my dialect. Though my western Pennsylvania roots slipped out on occasion, such as when I drank a pop instead of a Coke, or ate an Italian hoagie rather than a sub sandwich.