by Keary Taylor
“About a year ago,” I breathe, studying the image. “This would have been about…a month before Dad died. Over a month before I met Jack.”
“And this one?” Sully holds up another image.
This one is of me laughing, walking down the street with Viola and her friends, headed to the theater.
Another tear leaks out onto my cheek. My hands tremble as I reach for this one. “Probably, two, maybe three weeks before Dad died.”
The first time I met Jack was at my father’s funeral. He came to pay his condolences, along with the rest of the town because of the role my father played in protecting the people of Ander.
“He’d been watching you,” Sully says. He shuffles through the rest of the pages in his hands. And produces a few pieces of lined papers, all filled with Jack’s careful handwriting. “He’d been… Iona, I think he’d been studying you before he introduced himself at your father’s funeral.”
I cover my mouth with my hand, dropping the box of things from the medicine cabinet. I pull the last picture closer to my eyes, looking close.
And there, in the reflection of the ice cream parlor’s windows, I can see Jack. Camera out, pointed in my direction.
“Iona Faye is the middle child of Mason and Willa Faye. She is looked down upon by her older sister, Cressida,” Sully reads from the pages. “And seems to help take care of her younger sister. She has all the classic symptoms of a middle child, keeping a level head, but also craving loving attention.”
“Please stop,” I beg him, letting my eyes slide closed.
My heart is fracturing inside my chest.
Lies.
Lies.
Everything, everything about the past nearly year has been nothing but lies.
Sully folds the pages up and stuffs them into his back pocket. He reaches out for me, to pull me into his arms again, but I step away, wrapping my arms around my waist.
So many lies.
So much darkness.
I sink to the floor, my arms folded over my knees, my forehead resting against them. And I cry.
Jack never really fell in love.
He studied me. Probably studied other women, as well.
He picked me. As his most likely option.
What does that say about me?
That I’m weak?
That I have no backbone?
Do I even have my own personality? Or am I just a moldable doll he knew was weak enough he could get inside of and use like a puppet?
“Iona,” Sully says. He takes a step forward.
“Please just leave me alone,” I half sob, half bite out.
A moment of deliberation, and hesitantly, he opens the bathroom door again, and steps outside to leave me be.
Jack.
Jack.
Jack, who took me ice-skating and held my hand the entire time.
Jack, who made love to me.
Jack, who would draw little patterns over my back and make me fall asleep.
Jack, who whispered he loved me, every chance he got.
He did this.
All of it.
My chest hurts.
I can’t pull in any oxygen.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t…
Chapter Forty-Nine
SULLY
I didn’t move more than an inch from the door. I sat there with my ear pressed against the door.
And I worried when I didn’t hear any breathing coming from Iona after she took a slightly deeper breath in than normal.
She was holding it.
But I wasn’t sure, until I heard her slump against the side of the tub.
“Iona!” I yell, yanking the door back open.
She lies on the floor, as if she’s just sleeping. Once more, she’s breathing.
“Iona?” I question softly.
She doesn’t stir, but I watch for a moment, and she’s breathing evenly. Her chest rises and falls, looking normal.
I bite my knuckle, just watching her.
Did she hold her breath? Forget to breathe, and pass out?
Just when I think things have gotten better, just when I think she’s maybe moved past this, she goes and does something insane and dangerous again.
For five minutes I watch her, quietly saying her name every now and then to see if she will rouse. And I debate with myself if I need to take her in to the hospital.
But what would I tell them? That’s she’s randomly doing dangerous things? That she’s on a path to hurt herself, that very likely will lead to her taking her own life soon? They would put her on suicide watch, and then send her home.
I look around the apartment, my eyes sweeping outside the door to the bathroom. And find Iona’s purse.
Is Jack’s pocket watch still inside?
It’s been there, ever present at the back of my mind. I’ve been the one dealing with most of Jack’s belongings, touching them, moving them, destroying them. But this echo’s the truth of how often Jack moved, how little he valued in possessions. Nothing I have touched has threatened to bring Jack through the gate.
I’m also sure that he isn’t too anxious to come back. Some of the dead race back to see the living, like the three fiancées. Others must be searched after, drug back, like Jack was the first time I opened the gate.
But as I stare at Iona’s purse, I begin to realize there is no other option at this point.
I’m going to have to go to the source of all of this if we’re going to get any real answers.
I’m going to have to speak to Jack again.
I take Iona back home. She rouses just before ten, and she’s still out of it and confused, but she wakes enough to somewhat walk back to her apartment. With each step, with the frigid air outside, she wakes, blinking hard and fast.
By the time we get to the front doors of her building, she’s coherent enough for me to explain what I think happened.
“I…” she stumbles over her words. “I think you’re right. I only remember my thoughts racing, feeling so…betrayed. And then my chest hurt, and my head was spinning.”
She shakes her head as she pulls her keys out of the purse I carried for her. Like there was a hot iron inside, I know Jack’s pocket watch is within its depths.
She opens the door, and the both of us step inside.
I set to making us some food, even though the hour is late, but neither of us has eaten dinner, and my stomach is ravenous.
“This isn’t going away, is it?” Iona says. She sits at the table, watching me as I work on making us sandwiches.
“No,” I answer plainly. “I suspect it is only going to get worse.”
She rises from her seat and goes to a closet. A moment later she returns with a pad of paper and a pen.
“It sounds like all four of us went through stages,” she says. I turn, placing the sandwiches at the table. “We’ve determined, as best we can, what those stages were.”
She writes down the words; obsessive love, loss of appetite, dangerous behavior, and then, death.
“They didn’t all happen at once,” she says, looking up, tapping the pen against her chin. “For all of us, it seemed to happen in stages. There…there had to be something that triggered them.”
I chew my sandwich, swallowing, and push Iona’s closer to her. She doesn’t even look down at it. She’s in full research mode, so I don’t force her to eat for the moment.
“Let’s figure out the timeline of when things started,” I say. “Maybe that will help you figure out what triggered each of them.”
She taps the pen on the first step down into chaos; obsessive love.
“It’s hard to know when this really snapped into place,” she says. “Like I told you, our first real encounter was a little rocky and I wasn’t even sure if I should agree to that date with him. But after the date, things were going well. Every week we spent more and more time with each other.”
“When did you first tell him you loved him?” I ask, and it makes my stomach knot. I
t makes the hand on my knee ball into a fist.
“About a month after we first started dating,” she says, and she actually looks over her shoulder, back toward the bedroom. “We…” She hesitates, looking back at me, but not quite meeting my eye. “We’d just made love, for the first time. I’d fallen asleep after, but when I woke up, I told him.”
“You said it first?” I ask. This is not a recounting I want to be witness to.
She hesitates, her gaze growing hazy as she tries to recall. “I…I think so. Jack always had sweet things to say, but I do think I was the first to say it.”
“So that wasn’t it, then,” I say, finishing off my meal. “It wasn’t triggered by him saying it. So maybe…” I sigh, for a moment, wishing I never got involved in this complicated web. “Maybe it was the sex? You said you’d…done it before you told him. Would you say you were in obsessive love with him before that day?”
She pauses a moment, considering. “I…I’m really not sure. I was certainly falling for him. I wanted to spend my time with him. But…maybe the obsession didn’t really kick in until after. I guess I still wanted to see other people, my family I mean, before then. So maybe that is when it kicked in.”
She writes that down on the same line as obsessive love—made love for the first time.
“What about the loss of appetite?” I question, ready to move on to a different subject.
Iona stands and walks over to the bookshelf. She produces a familiar photo album. The one she brought to Roselock, to show me the images of Jack so I would more easily be able to find him.
She sits back down and opens it up.
Page after page of images of her. She and Jack.
I look to Iona’s face as she flips through pages, and am sickened when a faint smile curls on her lips.
Will it ever really go away? That deep down, manipulated, implanted love she has for Jack Caraway?
I look back down, and find she’s flipped to the very back, and slowly she flips pages, back in time.
Iona shakes her head, and her expression transforms to disgust. “I hate that I didn’t even realize it, how unhealthy I was becoming.” And it’s there, in her rail thin arms. Her fragile-looking fingers. “I used to have curves. A figure. I…I want those back.”
And there, sometime between the spring and summer, is where I begin to see the transformation happen.
“Here,” I say, pointing to a picture of Iona at what looks to be a Fourth of July party. “You look thinner here than in this one.” I touch an image of her and Jack standing on a beach in bathing suits.
“That was in Florida, that trip we took,” Iona says. “That would have been in May, for Jack’s birthday. I remember well because everyone was so mad that I missed Mom’s birthday.”
She looks back and forth between the two images. “I…” she shakes her head. “I don’t know what would have triggered this one. Like I said, I didn’t even realize it was happening.”
Her distress is rising. The confusion. The anger. The burning desire for answers.
I reach out and place a hand on her back, rubbing small circles.
“Write it down at least,” I say. “It happened sometime between spring and summer.”
She lets out a frustrated sigh, but does it.
“Dangerous behavior,” she moves on. She taps the pen to the words just once. “I know exactly when this one happened.”
She looks up at me, and I see it there: she may still have moments when the love and desire still rises up for Jack, but she also hates him. With a burning, fiery passion.
“I wasn’t acting like this before I came to see you,” she says it flatly. “Something got triggered when we spoke to Jack during one of those three times. I didn’t realize it at first, but when I left Roselock that first time, I tore out of there like a maniac. I could have killed myself with the way I was driving home. It was during that trip that some kind of switch was flipped.”
I sit back, just studying her face. The wheels are turning in my head, a thousand miles per minute.
“Jack is dead, yet he moved you on to the next stage.”
Iona purses her lips together, her face pale, and nods.
“This isn’t going to end,” I say. I curl my hands into fists. “We’ve seen that. And we have no idea how he’s doing this, how it really works. But we know it’s just going to continue. I don’t know that there is any other choice, Iona. I have to go back to Roselock and talk to Jack again. Alone.”
If Iona was pale before, it’s nothing to her whiteness now.
Chapter Fifty
IONA
Am I going to kill myself?
Has it already been triggered? Is it just a matter of time, now? Or did I get lucky, and somehow Jack wasn’t able to put that last step into motion?
He’s come this far. Done this so many times. I don’t know that there’s any chance that he gave up and isn’t going to finish this final experiment.
These are the thoughts that plague my head all through the next day at work. The thoughts that cause me to mess up not once, twice, but four times at work. What gets me dragged into a meeting with my boss, telling me to pull it together or I can go find work somewhere else.
But I hardly even hear him. This is my life, my death that’s on my mind.
The moment the clock hits five, I grab my bag and I’m out the door.
The air is warmer today than it has been in months. The sidewalks are completely dry, the very last remains of snow from the storm, gone. More people are out and about than there have been since fall.
But I can’t even enjoy the sunshine.
Because it’s my death that I’m consumed by.
It’s my very own mind that I’m scared of. Because it keeps blanking out on me. It keeps telling me to do these insane things.
Sully hauls out the last of Jack’s furniture when I get to the office. I look around, the space almost totally empty.
“Anything?” I ask, going for a box on the floor to gather the last few little things.
“No,” Sully says.
No.
Nothing.
No answers.
My entire body tightens. Tenses. Wants to fight, to rage. To have something physical to hit.
I turn, finding Jack’s diploma on the wall. Gritting my teeth hard, I yank it from the wall, and hurtle it across the room. Glass shatters and wood splinters against the wall and I cringe away, avoiding being cut as debris clatter around the room.
Sully darts inside, his eyes wide and questioning.
“That was me,” I promise, holding up my hands. “I swear, I did that on purpose.”
He looks at me for a long moment, as if trying to decide if he believes me. And he must, because he turns again, and finishes hauling things out.
Internally cursing myself, I walk over to the broken debris and begin carefully picking up the glass and broken shards of wood.
It seems a shame, to throw out the one piece of solid evidence that Jack spent six years of his life earning this degree, this piece of paper. But it deserves to burn in hell with him.
I grab it to throw it in the box as well, only it slides apart, two individual pieces of paper, one placed behind the other.
The first is his diploma from NYU, his Master’s degree in psychology.
And directly behind it, is another certificate. From the New York Hypnosis Training Center.
“Holy shit,” I breathe. I hold the piece of paper, my hands trembling. My eyes run over the words, over and over, but only three of them stand out: Jack Caraway, New York, Hypnosis.
“What is it?” Sully asks, crossing the room. He stands over my shoulder, reaching to touch the paper and pull it into his view.
“Hypnosis?” Sully says. I look up into his face to see his brows narrow. “I thought that stuff was all for show. That…that can’t really work, can it?”
I step away, leaving Sully with the certificate. I pull my purse from the corner, digging through it, until I yan
k something cold and hard from its depths.
“Jack always had his pocket watch with him,” I say, holding it up by the chain, letting it swing. “Always.”
Sully watches Jack’s most prized belonging swing back and forth, the item that nearly killed him a week ago.
“That’s how he did it,” Sully says, not sounding fully convinced of his own words, but starting to fear them. “That’s how he got into each of your heads.”
“Could he really make us forget the act of doing it?” I ask, studying the watch.
“He made you fall in love with him,” Sully says, taking half a step back. “He made you lose your appetite permanently. He made you put yourself in danger. He made those women take their own lives. I’m sure making you forget wasn’t too difficult.”
I throw the watch. Down. Away from me. Making it crash to the ground with a crushing force.
But it’s made of metal. It doesn’t bend.
But I do hear something fracture inside.
“I hate him,” the words come out over my lips immediately. “I hate Jack. I hate every minute we stayed together. I hate every time I told him I loved him. I hate every time I let him into my body. I hate him.”
The words come out as sobs now and I feel my knees weaken. I sink to the ground, resting back on my heels, letting the fury and betrayal wash over me.
Sully walks toward me, but he doesn’t reach out to embrace or comfort me. He only places a hand on my shoulder. “At least he’s dead now. May he rot in hell.”
Chapter Fifty-One
SULLY
Iona sits silently in the passenger seat, holding the hypnotism certificate and Jack’s diploma in her hands. She stares out the window, not looking at anything.
Through the darkening night, I drive the truck to the dump. With only twenty minutes until it closes, I drive faster than I should. We get there just five minutes before it closes, and three of the employees come over to help me clear it out so they can close up and head home for the day.
I hate it that Iona has to pay for everything. She pulls out her wallet and pays the fee, and my manhood is twisted just a little.