by Lydia Netzer
I’m a dreamer, thought Irene. I visit other people in my dreams, and I have a house in my dream that threatens to eat me. Irene suddenly had an uncomfortable feeling, like itchy feet. The psychic’s prediction was stupid but eerily correct. Well, not really. Vague wasn’t correct. Psychic predictions are always vague in the client’s first visit. It was one of her mother’s most important rules. You only need to give the client enough to get them feeling good and coming back. Save the specificity for when they’ve divulged a bit more about themselves.
“I think you are a dreamer,” said George.
“You wish,” Irene murmured. She rolled over and put her arms around him.
“Doesn’t matter,” said George, pushing his face into her neck and holding her close. “The thing is, Irene, she was your mom.”
Irene heard the word “mom” like a clang of metal banging into metal. She pushed him off her so hard his skin made a smacking sound against her hand.
“What?” she barked.
“I saw when we went to pick up Belion that it was the same house—”
“Where did she live?” Irene asked.
“On Bancroft,” said George, his forehead now wrinkled in concern. “I was going to tell you.”
“Shut up,” said Irene. “Shut up, shut up.”
Remember when I told you my mother was an astrologer? Irene wanted to say. Remember when I told you that she was a psychic?
*
Irene pounded up the stairs in her mother’s house. Belion had cleared out, and she was glad. Belion’s scant possessions were gone from the bedroom, no evidence of him in the bathroom. Perhaps Belion and Kate Oakenshield were still out on George’s boat, or had dived down to live with the merpeople at the bottom of Lake Erie. Why should they not? Obviously, they were in love. Simple, uncomplicated love between two people. The simplest thing in the world.
Irene pulled the rope that brought the attic stairs down and began to climb up. There were boxes and boxes up there. Boxes and boxes of everything her mother had touched, every piece of paper that had come through the front door, every session she had ever had, recorded on tape, and dutifully cataloged alphabetically into lettered crates. If her mother ever had repeat customers who left long spaces between their appointments, she would need to listen to the previous session in order not to contradict herself. Her methodology was programmatic, but at times it yielded different results. It wasn’t like she was listening to the stars, and the stars would not remember what she had said. It wasn’t like she was actually psychic. It was a skill, a learned behavior, and the documentation of every session was part of what made the business work. The stealthy documentation. Tapes in the attic.
Irene located the D crate and began to paw through its contents. She felt darkly sure that she would find a tape with the name GEORGE DERMONT on it, and she did. She held it in her hand. George Dermont, and a date that matched the month he said he’d visited her mother. Irene came down the stairs slowly, slowly, thinking, just as she did every time she descended this staircase, about the fall her mother had taken. Which step represented the point of no return? And had her mother been fighting? Or had she just been falling?
A woman on a bridge has two choices: jump or not jump. A woman standing over a tape player has two choices as well: play or not play. Know or not know. A woman falling through the air has no choices. A woman listening to information from a taped recording of something that happened three years ago has no choices either. She already knows. There was no one there to push Irene, no hand on her finger clicking the PLAY button, no encouraging voice saying “Do it!” Was there a hand on the back of her mother, pushing her off that top step, taking all prevarication out of the equation, sending her to her death? Irene sat in her dead mother’s chair and listened to her voice coming out of the machine. She’d clicked on the recorder surreptitiously toward the beginning of the reading; Irene could tell they were just sitting down. And then the words came out: I see her. I love her. She is your true love. I cannot help but love her, too.
What had her mother been on about? The wild, insane hope charged through Irene that maybe her mother was really a psychic. Maybe her mother had tapped into something cosmic, and George was right, and the stars were speaking, and it was possible that the universe could select her to receive love, could identify her as a worthy candidate, could be such a beautiful place.
Irene sat still and listened to the recording as Bernice let George out the door and said good-bye. And then she heard her mother’s voice from very close to the machine. The voice was calm and low.
“Fuck you, Sally,” she said.
22
“I need to talk to my mom,” said George. His head was throbbing again.
“We’d like to speak to Sally Dermont,” said Irene. George stood beside her, his hand on her waist.
“Who may I say is here?” the receptionist said.
“It’s me, Rebecca,” said George.
“But who is she?” Rebecca wanted to know.
“Irene Sparks,” said Irene. “I work with George.”
The words coming out of Irene’s mouth were clipped and taut, like she was angry. The receptionist pushed a button on the phone and said a few quiet words into her headset. They sounded angry, too. George didn’t know what was going on, but he was a little afraid to talk to Irene in her current state. He coughed into his hand and then regretted it. His head felt awful, and coughing seemed to send pain thumping through his skull.
“Come get me,” she had said to him. “We need to go talk to your mother. Immediately.” George had asked why, and Irene had hung up the phone.
“Ms. Dermont will be with you shortly,” Rebecca said.
Irene and George took seats on one of the luxurious chairs in the waiting area. George tried thumbing through his e-mail on his phone, but Irene just sat rigidly beside him, her knee bouncing up and down, her teeth clenched. There was no good e-mail. Some data from the old orbiter on the Gould cluster. Some interdepartmental bullshit.
“What’s wrong,” he tried asking her at one point. But she just shook her head and said, “I don’t even know yet.”
They waited there for a full thirty minutes, and George had resorted to playing chess with his phone, when finally he heard the sound of high heels tapping down the hall, and Sally Dermont emerged in the room.
“Mom,” he said. “Hey.”
Her ice-blond hair was sculpted like a helmet around her head. No more hippie dress today. She was wearing a perfect pantsuit in a muted rose, with an ivory scarf wound around her neck. She carried a piece of paper in her hand.
“Yes?” she said curtly. George felt like he was in trouble here, too.
“I want to talk to you,” said Irene.
“About?” asked Sally.
“About George and,” said Irene. “And about Bernice. Bernice Sparks. My mother.”
“I don’t believe I know you,” said Sally. “Who are you again?”
“Mom, she was at the cottage the other night, on the porch, remember? And also at the banquet at the institute,” George explained. “This is Irene Sparks. We’re dating. You met—”
“I don’t even think the banquet was our first time meeting, actually,” Irene cut in. “I am pretty sure I have seen you before. I don’t know where, but I think that when I figure it out, I will realize that I was not awake when it happened.”
George saw Sally’s jaws clench together, and she turned as if to go directly back down the hallway without responding to Irene at all. Then she turned to look back over her shoulder for a brief second, locked eyes with George, and said, “Come on.”
In Sally’s office, Irene sat down in one of the chairs set up on one side of the desk for consultations, square and low, leather and cool metal. Sally stood behind her desk.
“What can I do for you, now, specifically?” she said. She set the piece of paper down on the desk, facedown. “A friend of George is a friend of mine, I suppose. However odd the circumstances.” S
he forced a smile. “And a bonafide scientist always has my respect. I do remember meeting you now, at the banquet, of course. And on the porch. You are dating my son. I guess.”
He had seen his mother acting like this before. It was the way she behaved to his father sometimes, when he’d been blissed out on pills for three days or had forgotten where he parked yet another car in the city. She’d hate him, she’d rail at him, and then it was as if she’d swallowed a pill that allowed her to tolerate anything. Then she would adopt this horrible, taut politeness. Thinking of pills made George stand up and cross the room so he could rummage in his mother’s cabinet. He located a bottle of painkillers, uncapped it, and knocked two into his palm, slapped them into his mouth. Turning around, he saw his mother and Irene squaring off across the desk.
“I want to know,” said Irene, “if you knew my mother. She seems to have known you. She seems to have known George as well.”
“No,” said Sally. “I don’t know her. I never did know her.” Sally smiled, showing those two rows of perfect teeth. She tapped her fingernails on the desk. “I’m very sorry for the confusion.”
“But you’re lying,” said Irene flatly. George stared at her. Her hair was yanked back into a ponytail, her shirt was buttoned incorrectly, with one extra buttonhole at the collar on the left side. One leg of her jeans was tucked into a white sock. He wanted to take her in his arms, fold her up, press her against his body. Gorgeous creature, how dared she to speak this way to his mother? He was shocked and turned on at the same time.
He went to stand behind her chair, put his hands on her shoulders. And from this position he could see through the windows out onto the balcony. There he saw that the goddess of love, in a beautifully tailored pantsuit, was standing at the railing and looking out over the city.
“Why? Why are you lying?” Irene pressed on.
Sally paused for a long moment with all her fingers spread out on the desk, and then she turned to the window and looked out over all of Toledo. On the outside, on the balcony, George saw the goddess of love tip forward without warning and spill over the balcony. His mother did not see this. She knocked her knuckles against each other and pursed her lips together.
“Mother,” George said. “What’s going on?”
Then Sally finally turned, passing over George and looking straight to Irene.
“I think I know why you’re here,” she said. “But you should know you’re in way over your head with me. I can prove exactly where I was at every minute of the day your mother died. And you don’t want to fuck with me. I’m an attorney. I know what I’m talking about.”
“The day she died? How do you know the day she died?”
Out on the balcony, the goddess of love stood back up at the railing. And she tipped over the edge. Her legs disappeared. Her shoes disappeared. And she stood up again, ready to tip. The balcony was high above the city of Toledo. The goddess of love tipped over the balcony and fell far, far down. And stood up again.
Sally was silent.
“Who are you?” Irene said. “Who were you to my mother? Why was she talking to George as if she knew he was going to fall in love with me? And why was she talking to you on her recording? Was that you in Dark House on the night she died? Were you there, too, looking for my mother?”
“She was nothing to me,” said Sally, but Irene went on.
“How do you know her? What did you do to her? Why should I care where you were on the day she died. On the day she died? Were you THERE?”
“George, you need to leave,” said Sally. “And take that with you.”
“Mother, that is my girlfriend. She is actually … she is my fiancée,” George began.
“No, I’m not,” said Irene.
“Get out!” his mother snapped at Irene. Then she shook her head to George. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.”
“Come on, George,” said Irene. “It’s OK. It’s alright. I’ll figure this out on my own.”
George was distracted. He had a hard time pulling away. He was watching them tipping over the railing, in rows, in columns, the goddesses diving off the balcony again and again, without ever showing a face.
*
I am dreaming but I am not aware. I am riding on my moped between the Akkad site and my experiment site in the collider, and everything feels smooth. Like there’s nothing but pure air, and there’s nothing but cool breezes, and someone has shifted the visible spectrum five nanometers to blue, and the world down below looks cleaner, and brighter, and I don’t even question why and I don’t know I’m asleep.
If I could figure it out, I would rip the lid off that tunnel and float out of there, and I would go back to Pittsburgh, or to the moon, or somewhere, anywhere but where I am headed. But I don’t know anything so I go on.
I get the first sense of foreboding when the lights go dimmer, and then in my dreaming heart I am aware that I am approaching the same old thing that I fear the most. I see wires broken, the ones that feed the magnets. They’re twisted and blackened and broke. Then the tunnel itself begins to fail around the edges—a tile here, chunk of concrete there—and I am afraid. I see the familiar mess ahead of me, fading in from the blackness, the broken floor, the crashed-in piece of the world. It’s whistling and gaping, but instead of being peripheral to me, and instead of creeping in on the edge of what I see, it is straight ahead, and I am heading toward it, and I can’t stop the moped now, because it’s just going on its own. The center of Dark House is here.
I try to wake myself up. I count my fingers clutching the handlebars: four and six. I shut my eyes and will myself into my mother’s house. My mother’s bathroom. My mother’s basement. On my mother’s porch, sitting on the swing. Somewhere across the world from this, but instead I’m on the moped and I’m flying down the tunnel, kilometer by kilometer, toward the broken floor, the twisted pipe, and my fear is that I will go hurtling into it. I’m so afraid that I turn and bite myself on the shoulder but feel nothing. I smash my face down onto the handlebars and do not feel it. I grab at a broken sheet of metal that has sheared off the tunnel beside me, and it slices through my hand but leaves no mark and I feel nothing.
Then I see her, standing in front of me: tall and sure. George’s mother is here. She puts out her hand, and my vehicle stops. She’s suddenly so familiar, but I remember seeing her with long hair and a happy face. I remember her from when I was a little girl, before the fire. I remember her hugging my mother. I shake my head back and forth, and everything gets clearer. I have never been able to remember anything that happened before the fire. I have always assumed that what happened before the fire was too bad to even remember. I don’t mind forgetting bad things, but here she is—part of this thing that I forgot.
Now I am really aware that I am in Dark House. I am standing in a bedroom. My rocking horse is there, charred just enough to remind my mother of the fire, but still able to rock.
“I had to come and see you,” Sally thunders, towering over me. “There are things you should know that I can’t tell you in front of George.”
“What things?” I ask.
“We thought it was a good idea!” she yells.
“Who?”
“Me! And Bernice!” she says. “And it was a good idea. It would have been good for both of you. But she fucked it up. She fucked everything up.”
“My mother? My mother? Where is she?”
“We made you for each other,” she says. “You and George. Everything, everything, everything was made for you and him. We gave birth to you, together. We planned for you to be together.”
“But I don’t know him. I don’t remember. What happened?”
“We were best friends, do you get it? We wanted our kids to be in love, and safe, and for it to be easy. So we made you, together.”
“And you thought that would work?”
“You were never supposed to know! You were supposed to grow up, meet, and fall in love. It would be easy, after everything we had done to make you perfect
for each other. We had a plan, but your mother fell apart,” she says.
It was easy. I fell in love with George as easily as anything that has ever happened to anyone.
“What did you do to my mother?” I ask.
She comes toward me, and she almost looks like she wants to be sweet.
“I didn’t do anything to her but help her, and you too. Don’t you understand?” she says. “I loved you, Irene, from the moment I saw you. And I always meant to keep loving you. But because she made such terrible mistakes—I had to throw you away instead.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She lost her mind. She burned down your house! She was a—drunk!”
“I know that,” I say.
“You are damaged. I made a mistake! You are made from a drunk and a—loser. That is your makeup. It’s unfortunate, but it is real. George is not for you.”
“I’m dreaming,” I say. “You can’t be here.”
“I know it’s hard,” she says. “But you can always say that you are not to blame.”
“Who came first, me or George?” I want to know. It seems important.
“You were born together.” Sally reminds me impatiently.
“Who. Got. Pregnant. First.” Because I know what I mean.
“I did,” Sally snaps. “And then we got her pregnant. Together. With you.”
“What did you do to me? What did you do to her?”
“Don’t you know who your father is?” she says to me. The world around her ripples, as if I am already underwater and sinking toward the bottom of some cold bay. But I concentrate to listen, because this is important. “I’ll tell you now. I know she never would. It’s Uncle Ray. It’s George’s ‘Uncle Ray’—no, he’s not my brother or Dean’s brother. That man who shot himself playing roulette? That’s your father.”
“That’s not true!” I say.
“I chose him for three reasons,” she goes on. She puts up three fingers, and I count them: one, two, three, four. “One, he was available. Two, he was willing to turn his back on you and never look back. Three, he was born in June. There. Your father. The composition of you. I made you for George out of him and her, and I planned it for you to be perfect. But then she turned out so, so bad. It’s not your fault, Irene. You came from two bad things. What could you do? What could you do to help yourself? There is badness inside you. I thought that your mother was good. But she wasn’t.”