The Eye Unseen

by Cynthia Tottleben

  What I would have given for that to happen.

  Six days. I could last that long. Even if he came back and shredded me, I could linger through that pain. Just to make sure. Just to know you could do no harm.

  And what would I do when it was over? Find Brandy? How would I ever explain the truth to her? That I sent her away to spare her this wrath? That I had loved her with all my heart, her life a blossoming memory of what should have been shared with her father?

  No. When you were gone, I would be as well. One day Brandy would return to this house and find nothing but cinders.

  Ashes to ashes.

  Dust to dust.

  Chapter 44

  Lucy

  The Great Wall of China. The Grand Canyon. Niagara Falls.

  Places I would never see.

  Fly to the moon. Win a million dollars playing the lottery. Hold my newborn in my arms, right after delivery.

  Things I would never do.

  I thought of Brandy, alone in the world, and hoped that she would have all the opportunities I would not. That she would fall in love, travel the globe, have a fancy career if that suited her. Maybe she would pop out a bunch of babies and name one after me, once she heard that I was gone.

  Dead.

  Starved to death in my own bedroom.

  The pretzels were a life saver. Scraping the salt off the sides practically killed me, as I had no energy left. But then I thought about the survivors of the Holocaust, forced to perform excruciating labor in the freezing cold with maybe a piece of bread to keep them going every day.

  Removing salt became much easier after that.

  Hours ticked away while I tried to stay alert. Boredom and hunger cavorted around my room, holding hands; I had no desire to play with them.

  I contented myself with the book. Although I must admit, even it had a hard time capturing my attention. The killings became mundane. The sex, another story. One I couldn’t begin to imagine. God, who brutalized Evelyn. Angels He brought along to share in the fun. Six men, two men, five dozen over the course of a week. God demanded and Evelyn performed.

  Not what I had ever expected.

  My energy level waned to nothing. To the point that turning pages became exhausting. Keeping the flashlight poised so I could read a physical feat on par with an Olympic event.

  Skiing. Ice skating. Riding a horse.

  Things I would never do.

  Scotland. Hawaii. Amsterdam.

  Places I would never see.

  * * *

  I couldn’t move when He came back.

  “I had to check up on you, Lucy. You holding together okay?”

  God curled up behind me. His contact made me yearn for Tippy, to have my cuddle-buddy back in bed with me.

  Instead, I was stuck with this creature.

  “Don’t hold back anything, Lucy. I know what you think of me.”

  I was glad we didn’t have to converse. My lips had lost all desire to move. My voice seemed decades away, lost in waves of time that I couldn’t even comprehend.

  His hands, now familiar, coursed my body.

  “She wanted to kill your mother, you know. Evelyn.”

  My curiosity tilted its head. But I did not move.

  “She was jealous of her. Of a little girl. Can you believe that? We had a good thing going, the two of us. She just wanted more than I could give her. Typical woman.”

  Not worth my effort to respond.

  “But the old broad really crossed the line when she told your grandmother to murder Joan. Pissed me off! I killed her right then and there. In front of your mother, so she’d know how much I needed to keep her around. I wrapped my hand around Evelyn’s heart so tightly the organ nearly burst. She was toast in seconds.”

  His words overwhelmed me. I tried sifting through them, sorting them into patterns, digesting them raw. Nothing worked. I was too tired to understand.

  “You really are in bad shape. Are you hungry?”

  He laid a plate of food on my nightstand. A baked potato, prime rib, green beans. Not my absolute favorite, but not chicken, either.

  This time I didn’t hesitate. I figured I knew God well enough to eat His offering. After all, He had been groping me for weeks now, and I deserved something for my trouble.

  Behind me, He laughed.

  “Is that how you justify it? Well then, here….”

  God tossed me flat on my back, just as I was reaching for a bean. I had nothing left but complacence. Whatever He wanted, He could have. Just to get it over with. Just to push it further toward the end.

  Was this, perhaps, a ritual I had to complete in order to have access beyond His gates?

  He radiated heat. Where I had imagined love and passion, God was about dirtiness and His own greed. I gasped when His teeth bit me. Thought of the nice stories people told in church about Him while He ripped my clothes and parted my body.

  “Would you please quit calling me God? It really ruins the moment, you know. I am not THE father, Lucy. I am YOUR father. Get it straight!”

  And then it hit.

  My anger. My energy. My defense.

  I rose from beneath him, flung the red-headed man across the room. My thoughts were primal. My instincts on high alert. My motivation back in the saddle.

  “Get the fuck off me, you pig!”

  “Woo-hoo! Now, that’s the way I like ‘em. Hot and feisty. Not limp and pathetic.”

  The man whistled and came back at me.

  I felt myself expand. Became a tree, a whale, a typhoon. My attacker was unable to touch my skin.

  “Ok. Battle over. You win this time.” He put his hands up in defeat, but I did not back down. I was on high alert; this might be a ruse.

  “Ask your mommy sometime how much she likes it. Boy, did we have fun making you, my treat. Bet she’s never even told you about it.”

  The questions that popped in my head made him chuckle.

  “Oh, Lucy. You are so blind to everything. I’ll be back, soon. You can just lay there and starve yourself, I don’t care.”

  Chapter 45

  Evelyn

  Stupid, mindless little vixen.

  Joan, Joan, Joan. Sticking a pair of scissors straight into my ear canal seemed preferable compared to his obsession with my great-niece. What did she have that I didn’t? What did he see in her?

  We stopped everything. He had minions to do his work, spreading hatred throughout the world, causing pain and misfortune. We didn’t need to do that anymore. He was bored with his same routine, even with the wars that flourished in the east and the discord he had planted on our hottest continents. The only action he liked was watching me, punishing me for not being her, for lacking the magnetism that made him ready to sow his seed.

  I was tired of our routine as well. Where I longed to laugh and savor our time together over fresh meat straight from the prison yards or pluck some young thing from the filth of less-developed countries and help her find the freedom her soul desired, we instead watched the youngest woman in my family sing at her Christmas pageant or go door to door selling baked goods for her school fundraiser.

  I saw no end.

  When I couldn’t take it anymore, I acted. Never let the thoughts settle in my head, knowing he would read them. Just let them skittle across the periphery of my brain, a water bug on the move, barely discernible except for the slight ripple of its wake.

  My sister requested my presence at the annual family get together. Who knows why she carried out the ritual of inviting me, since we rarely spoke and I had not attended one of those catastrophes since Father passed away.

  Imagine her surprise when I showed at her doorstep. Suitcase in hand. A changed woman from the one I had been years before, when I had returned home shortly before Mother’s death.

  Did I need to look dowdy to keep up the ruse? My hair remained braided, a heavy rope that coursed the length of my back, but it was now woven with gray. I stood before her and ran a mental list of places I had been, atrocities I
had created, beasts I had known and let ravage my body.

  What was left of my soul.

  She shrieked, and I feigned joy at the sight of her. My sister, the weakling. Had Dad ever caused a ruckus among the cattle while defiling her in the barn during the morning milking? Had he darkened her backside with whips he fashioned from the tender branches of trees?

  All these years later, and this was the first place my mind went, to the questions I could never ask in polite society. But in my heart I knew he wouldn’t have touched her. My sister was about simplicity, girliness, divine purity.

  Things I had never known.

  I acted befuddled by political trends, divulged the secrets of the great cultures where I had spent some of my better years, reminded them of my high integrity and intellectual pursuits. My sister, so silly, let me prattle on, as she was wont to do. Our entire relationship a hoax. Knowing, somehow, that we would never set eyes on each other again.

  Which was fine with me. I couldn’t believe we had spawned from the same union. Her fingernails, long and painted, her hair coiffed and so full of spray that I could barely inhale around her…my sister was definitely my mother’s child.

  I wore boots. Plodded when I walked. Paraded around in the britches that had startled the world when I gave up the skirts Dad liked for their easy access to my more favorable parts.

  Did she know, my sister? Could she hear us in the barn, the field, even in the back of his truck? Did he know what it was like to have her stare up at him from her spot on the floor, on her knees like he had taught me?

  She handed me my tea, remembered how I liked it. Introduced me to neighbors, even drove me to the plot where Mother had become one with the soil, the scene at the cemetery one only my sister could create, with a small bench and angel statuary all around.

  Dad would have gotten such a kick out of that. I wondered if eternity next to his much-despised wife was more than he could handle, or if he enjoyed his position, whispering tales of our debauchery to her, year after year repeating stories of our times together. Once even in church. In the basement, in the room where we stored the choir robes.

  My moment came when the girl-child joined us in the kitchen. While the entire family was crammed inside my sister’s house, the rain keeping everyone from croquet or kickball. My tea had grown cold. My brain parched from day after day of this fraud.

  I crawled onto my high horse. Put on my best routine. Reminded them all of the reasons I had spent my life traveling the globe, tracking down all the women who had been here before.

  Then I pointed fingers. Spelled out the future. Joan would bear his child.

  Joan would bring the beast into this world. She was destined, the one he wanted for her future fruit. The past two thousand years had led us to this day, here in this kitchen, where the family must decide what to do with the one who would live out the curse and bear the horror that would rule the darkest parts of creation until the end of time.

  Joan needed to die.

  Her death would end our responsibility. Her blood would pay our due. She could not be allowed to grow fertile, to open her womb to his seed.

  But before I could lead the charge, he heard me. My time was a passing fog, the click of a pen, the cluck of a hen.

  Across the room, he stood and waved at me. Walked past Joan, patted her head.

  Strode right up to me and yanked me out of my chair. Put his teeth against my neck. Reached through my rib cage and grasped my heart.

  Squeezed.

  I could have screamed with terror, but I knew it was coming. My plan had but one flaw.

  The creature I thought I was deceiving was the devil.

  The man who crushed my heart was my father.

  I collapsed the moment he touched me. Not out of fear. Not out of any clause of weakness, like my sister would have subscribed.

  What brought me to my knees was love.

  I was finally in his arms again.

  Chapter 46

  Lucy

  The floor sweltered. When my toe touched wood, the sizzling sound alone made me pull back. The blistering was instantaneous and viciously painful, as if the wound was full of razor blades.

  Sweat pooled on my skin, soaked into my sheets. For a second my mind flashed on the fact that they had barely dried after my accident the last time God had visited.

  Or Godless, as I now liked to call him.

  Even the bed frame seemed afire. I tried to sit up by grabbing a post, but my hand jerked back, and I had to shake it to dissipate the heat.

  Not knowing what to do, I curled my knees into my chest and lay the day away. My eyes had adapted to the dark, but my time was lonesome all the same.

  The dresser exploded. Like a bag of microwave popcorn, it banged and expanded, banged and expanded, until it was a complete and utter mess.

  I didn’t become hysterical until flames crept from the base, rolling up the sides. My brain was too sluggish to connect the dots. But when the top drawer slid out, fire coursing over my entire stash of food, I jumped off my bed and made a sad attempt to salvage it.

  Deep-fried foot.

  I screamed, more out of desperation as I watched my few last morsels turn to ash before my eyes, although the pain on the sole of my foot indicated that this wasn’t going to be an insubstantial wound. A series of popping sounds came from under the bed, startling me. At first I thought they were gunshots, but as I watched the steam pour from the floor, I realized that he had destroyed my water bottles as well.

  My life-force boiled on the hardwood floor.

  Above me, he laughed.

  Disgusting, yellow-toothed, child-molester hysterics that crept up my spine and set my teeth on edge.

  But this time they didn’t fade. As though he had produced his own album of insane giggling and put it on a loop for me to endure.

  No knives. No food. No sanity.

  * * *

  No one had ever come.

  The darkness deepened as I realized this.

  Not Mrs. Winchell, from church, who had often hinted about my home life as she saw the bruises on my arms and face. I could remember her softness, the bosom that entered a room ten steps before her, the teddy-bear sweetness of her eyes. Her concern. The reminders that I could always stop by, talk to her about anything.

  In the months I’d been locked away, she’d not dropped by. Had she asked Mom for my address in France?

  None of my teachers. Not that they were busting down the door before I ‘moved,’ but why hadn’t the principal at least come to verify my whereabouts? Why had a phone call declaring I’d suddenly packed up and moved been acceptable?

  What about the neighbors? Did they gossip about my family but stay on the outskirts so as not to interfere with our problems?

  The kids at school? By now I was old news. My name crossed few lips when I was a full-time student. Why would anyone notice me? Be interested in my life?

  My death?

  Because that was all I had left. No food. No water. No strength.

  I wondered what would happen when they discovered my body. Mom would never pay for a funeral, a casket, even a headstone. I’d be lucky if she cared enough to leave the clothes on my body when she dumped my corpse in the lake by the landfill.

  One of the coolest funerals I had ever seen, back when we still had television, was in New Orleans. Hundreds of people, walking down the city streets, playing jazz, the procession intensely personal and celebratory. Women wailing. Raising their arms, as in prayer, or just a heated discussion with those in Heaven. You could tell they loved the man who had died. He was revered. Honored.

  Missed.

  I was no one. Had always been a loner, a loser, a tag-along for Brandy. No one had come to check up on me. No one would notice when my last breath passed.

  Tears I couldn’t afford to waste came down hard. My heart strained. The prospect of my own death was something I’d only noticed peripherally, the thoughts of how it would occur almost romanticized with my populari
ty at school. If I contracted a deadly disease, like leukemia, would people swarm to me out of sympathy, be my friends as my spirit waned? Would Brandy and I make headlines across the nation if we went to Mr. Wyckoli’s and he had snapped? Met us at the door with a hatchet and cut us into tiny pieces?

  Would people care about me after the fact? When they realized how sweet I was? How quiet? Would Velvet Bradshaw weep because she knew too late that we could have been the best of friends, and now we’d never have that opportunity?

  Death had always been elusive.

  But now I had to stare at it face-on.

  And all I saw was Brandy. My sweet sister. My best friend. I longed to run into her arms, feel her strength, her love. Was I such a horrible person that I had to be denied the simplest of things, her camaraderie, her chuckle, the kiss she always planted on my forehead when we went to our separate rooms at night?

  I wouldn’t miss Mother. Not much, anyway. When it came right down to it, Brandy was my mother. Had been as long as I could remember. She was my only source of love, until I found Tippy.

  One of my most cherished memories was my tenth birthday. How fabulous to reach double digits! I could barely contain my excitement. Other girls my age celebrated with slumber parties or had their parents book the big room at the pizza parlor, even took groups roller skating or to the zoo.

  Not me.

  My mother forgot.

  When I awoke that morning, Brandy slopped together some oatmeal. Tippy and I went outside for her morning stroll. Mom slept in.

  I kept waiting. For something small. A card. A spontaneous trip to the book store. A good wish or two.

  Mom said nothing.

  Brandy took the hint. Asked for money. Told Mom she wanted to take me on a field trip for my birthday. I could see Mom’s eyebrows rise and felt my shoulders wilt. My big day, and she hadn’t done a thing. No gifts. No cake. No big banners across the dining room door frame.