And it occurred to me that the person that I wished could help me solve the current mystery was Ilona. I could picture her there next to me, her high-heeled boots and lack of proper clothing not bothering her as she crossed her legs on the front steps and breathed in on a cigarette as she contemplated what had happened. She would see something that Jack and I didn't, and chide us for overlooking what was so clear to her while carrying on about how we should have asked her for her help in the first place, and then she would unstick us from whatever mess we had gotten ourselves into and make some offhanded comment about how we had needed her after all.
I shut my eyes and pressed my palms into the sockets, blurring out the image until it retreated into the back of my mind. It felt as though she had replaced something in me only to leave much too soon, and it was a waste to think of her now. She had gone where all the others had – off into the nothingness of death, never to be seen again – and even if I could have followed her and pulled her back, I wouldn't have. Not when I knew that life was unfulfilling and vacant, and not when I knew who I was and what I had caused. I wished that she had never crouched down beside me beneath the red lights, and never come back after I had tried to drown her in the hotel room, and never followed us to Bardom Island after my offer.
I wished that I had never emerged from the ocean water after falling from the cliffs, and had never let Beringer come to the island after my father had initially sent him. I wished that I had never let him give me any sense of regard, or any sense of relief, or any indication that I was anything worthwhile or worth fixing the way that I had somehow tricked him into believing that I was. And I wished that my mother had never told me the riddles that had started it all, and that she had never played the opera music that had alighted the same obsessions in me as it had her, and that she had never been who she was so that she would have never gone to the bridge and ruined it all.
And there were so many things that I wished weren't so, and yet so few that I wished would be the same or would ever happen for me. There was nothing to become, and nothing to become of me. And it was meaningless, and yet still I convinced myself that there was meaning hidden behind it all, and I allowed Jack to convince me of as much time and time again, and I couldn't shake it the way that I couldn't shake him, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why.
But if life was meaningless, I reasoned, slowly lifting my head again, then death would be meaningless, too, and then it wouldn't have hurt me in the way that it had when it had come, and nothing would have mattered, including sitting there on the dark, cold porch now. We would go somewhere after this, I decided. I would initiate it this time, and he would follow me along into some place better, and we would each replace in the other what we had hoped to, and it wouldn't be like this anymore.
I stood and brushed the snow from my pants, realizing that I would get no further with finding out what had happened to the dead Perenna children until he returned, and instead wandered through the town numbly as a multitude of eyes followed me. I felt as though I had taken several steps backwards after speaking with the family and needed to right myself again before going further, and consented that I would have to speak to Karl so that he could drill some sense of sanity back into my mind.
Mrs. Coffey was in her shop feeding several customers, but she offered me no smile when I entered. I wished with a hollow, weighted heaviness that Jack was still there: Kipling was like a ghost-town without him, and even the dead seemed to want me gone.
“Could I … Is it alright to use the phone?” I asked her quietly, leaning over the counter as I did so.
Her mouth was thin and her eyes bore into mine, but she finally gave a firm nod and took it off the hook for me.
I dialed Karl's number and waited a moment for him to pick up, unsure of how I could possibly explain myself this time but knowing that he, at least, would know how to proceed from there. As the other line clicked as he picked up, I bowed my head to hide behind my hand to prevent anyone who was watching from seeing my expression. Schizophrenic, I thought. I should have never so much as uttered the diagnosis aloud.
“Enim.” His voice was hoarse and scratchy, and I wondered whether the land-lines had been affected by the weather, as well. “I've been trying to call you.”
“There's no reception,” I told him, running my hand through my hair in annoyance. “Listen, Karl, I have to talk to you about something –”
“Do you? So she got through?”
I blinked as I tried to understand his meaning, wondering if I had misheard him.
“What? Who?”
There was a definite pause as he waited for something that wasn't coming, and I shook my head and continued on.
“No, I have to talk to you about something that happened up here –”
“So she didn't get through?” he said, overriding me. “You haven't – did you speak to her or not?”
“Speak to who?” I said, searching my mind for whom he might have been referring to. The only 'her' that he and I had ever had in common was my mother, and as I knew very well that he wasn't talking about her, I was more than a bit lost.
Karl was silent for a long moment.
“I've had a call,” he said at last, his voice still hoarse and unlike himself. “It was from – it was from your stepmother.”
“My what?” I said, blinking. “You mean – not Melinda?”
It occurred to me the moment that I said it what the call was about, and all at once the hot, sticky feeling that had overwhelmed my skin at the knowledge of being watched by the surrounding patrons vanished to be replaced by an utter feeling of cold. As my stomach clenched within me, my voice faltered on its own accord, and I couldn't begin to think of what to say.
“Your father's dead, Enim.”
I couldn't place the emotion in his voice, and certainly not the one that struck me in the center of the chest. It wasn't the same voice that he had used when he had told me about my mother, and it wasn't anything close to how I had grown accustomed to hearing him for the past few years. There was an anger unlike any that I had heard underlying his tone, and the rage seeped through the line and dug at my skin, readying to peel away my flesh and claw through to my bones.
“He … he ...”
I couldn't quite register it, though I had had to have known that it was coming. He had told me that he hadn't had much time, and I had seen for myself how weakened and sickly he had become, and yet still some part of me had imagined – had hoped – that if I didn't think about it, or if I distanced myself enough from it, that it wouldn't come to be.
“He died,” Karl repeated, and his voice was so low that it rivaled the whispers of things that I only ever heard haunting me late at night. “And you knew, she said – you had gone to visit him. And you didn't tell me.”
I swallowed and licked my lips, thinking that the action might somehow make it easier to respond, but I was more lost for words than ever.
“My brother, Enim,” he whispered. “My only brother – my only family – and you didn't have the decency to tell me so that I could see him – so that I could speak to him – before he died?”
“I … I ...” It hadn't been what I had intended to talk about with him, and though the thought of telling him about the fire at the church and Mr. Perenna's insistence that I would be held accountable had seemed the utmost of dire conversations, I would have spoken about it for years rather than to have the one that we were sharing now. “I didn't ...”
“You didn't what?” Karl asked, his voice cut with harshness. “You didn't think to tell me? You didn't think that I'd want to know? You didn't think – you couldn't possibly think – that I wouldn't care?”
“No, that's not –” I shook my head, though I knew that he couldn't see me. The reasons for keeping it from him were suddenly all-too visibly nonsensical, and I couldn't explain even to myself why I had kept it from him.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he asked, and his voice was shaking in a way tha
t I knew only came as the result of tears, and I couldn't picture him there in his immaculate kitchen with his neat dress-shirt and flattened tie, finally not composed and utterly and entirely broken. In all the years that I had known him, I had somehow never realized that he was anyone else but the person who had watched over my mother, and who had consented to watch over me, and the knowledge that he was every bit as real as I had never felt shocked me in a way that I couldn't get past, and it ruined what I had thought that I had planned out so perfectly, so deliberately, and it wasn't a mistake that I could blame on the hallucinations or delusions, but one that rested entirely with me. “Why are you punishing me after I – after I tried so hard to be good to you?”
“I wasn't … I didn't mean ...” I continued to shake my head, unable to explain myself. “I was – I wanted to punish him – for leaving. I didn't – I wasn't trying to punish you.”
“I didn't get to say goodbye. I didn't … I didn't get to apologize.”
I was aware that he was speaking out loud rather than to me, and I couldn't decide if I should let him talk into the silence or break it with my useless, dead words.
“I'm sorry, Karl.”
“You don't even know what that means – to be sorry,” he said, choking against the words. “You never took responsibility for anything that you did – you always let someone else take care of it for you, and you've never once known what it was like to pick up after everything that you've put the people around you through!”
“I'm sorry,” I said again, my voice so low that I wondered if he could hear me at all. Mrs. Coffey was eyeing me from behind the counter, and for a moment I wished that I was every bit as unreal as the music that I heard or the hallucinations of Cabail Ibbot if only so that I couldn't be seen and couldn't be heard anywhere outside of my own ruined head.
“I don't want you to ever come back here again,” he said, finally steadying his voice enough to bring the firmness back to his tone. “Stay up there with Jack: don't come home.”
“No, Karl, that's – that's not what I want –”
“That's what I want, Enim: me! This isn't about you anymore!” he said, his voice rising to ricochet around his empty room. As it melted into the walls, he heaved a breath and added in a calmer tone, “I've done everything that I could for you, Enim. Everything. But I can't take care of you because you think that you need me, or because I think that I need you. We're not good for one another. We never were.”
“We were getting along fine,” I tried, pulling at the phone cord as it tangled around my arm. “This was just – I made a mistake. I'll never – I'll be better, Karl. I won't mess up again.”
He was silent for a long moment, and I was certain that he had shut his eyes to shake his head, and the finality of it all weighed so heavily on me that I could feel the ribs crushing beneath my chest.
“I don't think that you and I were ever meant to be together, Enim,” he said heavily. “If we were anyone else – not related or connected in any way – then no one would have ever thought that this would work, and no one would have tried to make it so. Least of all us.”
“But it could – it will –”
“What you said before struck me,” he said, ignoring the babbling that had taken over my voice. “Something about how we just replace people that we've lost, hoping that they'll bring some part of us back to life.” He paused, suddenly unsure. “I'm well aware that you loved your mother more than me, and your father, and Beringer, even. And I – I'm also aware that no matter what I do for you, or because of you, I'll never be able to be the people that they were to you. And you won't be them for me, either.”
He cleared his throat and undoubtedly straightened; I could picture him smoothing down his tie over his perfectly-pressed shirt.
“Stay with Jack. That's how things – this is the way that it was supposed to be. I – Goodbye, Enim. Goodbye.”
He hung up before I could stop him, and the dial tone was so conclusive that I swatted at my ear as though I might be able to clear it away. Moving hastily around the counter, I pressed against the hook to hang it up briefly before dialing his number again. It rang several times before going to his voicemail.
I continued to dial and redial his number, both the home phone and his cell, and even trying his work, without caring that I had become some sort of specimen for the customers in the bakery to eye with interest. He had to pick up again, I told myself. He would forgive me – he always forgave me – and this time wouldn't, and couldn't, be any different.
“If it's not working, it might've been knocked out.”
Mrs. Coffey had come up behind me and placed a hand on my arm as I made to dial the number for what must have been the hundredth time, and her voice was kind again even though we both knew that there was no problem with the connection.
As I turned to her just slightly, though, she pulled her hand back and stepped away. And I couldn't blame her, I realized – and I didn't. Even if she couldn't bring herself to touch me out of a fear for the diagnosis that she had undoubtedly heard by now, I knew that she shouldn't for the same reason that no one ever should have: I poisoned people with every bit of my very being.
“How about a cup of coffee?” she asked, seeing that I had finally consented and hung up the phone for good.
I shook my head.
“Something to eat, then? Some pie? Or just some dry toast, maybe, and a bit of jam?”
“No.” My voice was hollow and I kept my eyes downcast on the floor. “I don't need anything.”
“There's nothing at all that I can get for you?” she persisted.
“No. There's nothing.”
I thanked her for her time and stepped outside, uncertain of where I was expected to go from there. The town didn't want me, Karl didn't want me, and the churchyard was just an empty pile of ruin for which I would have to take the blame. The emptiness of it all was overwhelming, and I was certain that the world had either left me or I had left it, but I couldn't place where I was or where I could go to find out.
I made a wrong turn and ended up on the back street outside of Zapatero's store again, but this time only stood outside of the iced-over window instead of going in. I could see the old man inside sweeping away at the minimal floor space that had not been taken up by his pets, and as I looked around at the dead, stuffed creatures whose glassy eyes stared so piercingly yet so unseeingly, I wondered if he was capable of skinning me the way that he had the animals, and scooping out my insides to dispose of in a bucket of Lyme before filling me up with the soft, lifeless material that he had them, and if then, maybe, I could look every bit as real and still as I had always wanted to, and feign life and truth the way that I had supposed would make people see me in the way that I wanted them to, and if then, at last, I would be happy.
I found myself back at the church before I could register it, only pausing once on the way to look up at the gruesome-looking angel who gave the request that had burrowed itself into my mind along with the rest of the pitiful, torturous laments that I ought not to have thought about so often or for so long: Memento Mori. But it couldn't have meant what Father Taggart supposed that it did, and I wouldn't think of how to live before death came, because the entirety of the idea was ridiculous and too hard to believe. There was no way to consider how to live – there was no map, and no direction, and no clearly stated words telling me what to do and who to be, and without them I was every bit as lost as my mother must have been, and Albertson was when the cancer took over his brain, and Anna was thought to have been to prevent her from warranting any sort of sorrow for passing so young. I was lost and indeterminately wandering, and this time, I knew, there was no one and no place to be found.
The church was nothing more than rubble that had been overtaken by ice, but I stepped through it anyhow. Something in the decrepit, forsakenness of the place made it feel like home, or the home that I deserved: some iced-over place that my mother had plunged into where I ought to have followed her before it all
got so out of hand.
And I had thought that if I did enough things right, that they might override the wrongs that I had created time and time again. I had thought that if I was a good person, or just less of a person, maybe, that it would be alright to continue on. And I had thought, even though I didn't believe in anything that the ruined church had wanted me to, that if I was sorry enough, and remorseful enough, that I might be forgiven in the way that I had hoped to hold onto after imagining Beringer telling me that it would all be so. But he hadn't forgiven me, I realized, and he wouldn't forgive me, because he was dead. They were all dead, and life meant nothing when it was lived all alone.
A hint of ivory came into view, though it was almost entirely covered by blackened ashes. Stepping over to it, I could just make out the remains of the organ that had sat in the front end of the church. It was still standing, through barely, and the bench on which to sit had crumbled into the bare ground. Laying my hands over the keys, I gently pressed upon them to play the song from Dido and Aeneas, and I wished that I had thanked Karl more profusely for taking me to see it, but I wished even more that I had told him about my father, and I wished that I had been able to split myself into two so that I could have stayed both with him and gone with Jack, because still neither seemed more right than the other, and yet neither seemed wrong, either.
“It's a nice song,” said a voice behind me.
It wasn't nice, though – not in the way it would have been on a working instrument – and the notes were all sharp and out of key. I turned around to find Father Taggart standing behind me in the ruin, and I had the distinct impression that he had followed me there after seeing me depart the Perennas'.
“Jim told me his thoughts about the fire,” he said, his voice low. “I know that neither you nor Jack caused this – and I told him as much, as well.”
“It doesn't matter,” I said, turning away and giving a shrug. “He wants me gone anyhow. So does the rest of the town.”
When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3) Page 21