Seed

by Ania Ahlborn

  Aimee had learned to embrace her less-than-perfect life as a direct affront to her parents. It was a giant fuck you to the both of them: she hadn’t starved to death like they had expected her to, and she hadn’t crawled back to them for help either. It gave her satisfaction to know her parents were irked by this. They had fully expected her to fail and run back home, begging them to take her back.

  In fact, Patricia Riley still hoped for this to happen. She was waiting patiently for Aimee to announce the dissolution of their marriage. If Pat Riley was a gambling woman, she’d have a ladies’ wager on it.

  “It’s just the whole thing with the accident,” Jack said. “And now Charlotte is sick. And we’re being forced to use Aimee’s old man’s car until we come up with the money to buy a new one. Aimee’s on edge.”

  “So what do you want me to do? Cancel?” Reagan shook his head. “You know that’s going to make us look like shit.”

  “I know,” Jack murmured. “We can’t cancel.”

  “Then what?” Reagan asked. He paused a moment, then continued: “I mean, if we have to cancel, we’ll cancel. I’m just saying it’s going to look bad. It’s going to piss Max off. And I’m not really sure if it’s a good idea to piss off the owner of the only club we play, you know? I mean, you get what I’m saying here, right? I’m not trying to be a dick or anything. I’m being realistic. Realism, man.”

  “I get what you’re saying.”

  “I don’t want to be the bad guy,” Reagan insisted.

  “I know.”

  “Seriously, it’s like not my intention to make waves between you and Aimee. I’ll even tell her myself. I love her like a sister,” he continued.

  “Reagan…”

  “Like an incredibly hot half-sister.”

  Jack pressed his elbows against the weather-warped wood of the picnic table and put his head in his hands.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered into his palms. “You’re so fucking weird sometimes, you know that?”

  “I know,” Reagan agreed.

  “Like just… off.”

  “Oh, I know, dude. Seriously, I’m a psychopath.”

  “I’ll just deal with it,” Jack said. “She’ll just have to understand. It was already scheduled.”

  “Sure, she’ll understand. And then she’ll rip your balls off.”

  Jack smirked and patted Reagan on the shoulder. “That’s all a part of marriage, my friend.”

  “And you enjoy this?” Reagan asked, truly curious.

  “Love is pain.”

  “Write a song about it.”

  “Good idea,” Jack said. “I’ll do that. I’ll have plenty of time while sleeping on the couch.”

  Chapter Three

  When Abby came home from school there was a lump on Charlie’s bed. Buried beneath a set of Spongebob sheets and matching comforter, Charlie had taken up her favorite position of sleeping with her butt in the air. She’d done it since she was a baby; elbows pulled into her chest, her knees pressed into the mattress, her rear end flying high and her thumb stuck in her mouth. Abby didn’t have to see her to know that was her sister’s exact position.

  She dropped her backpack next to the leg of the desk she and her sister shared. Most days, if Charlie had homework, she’d do it at the kitchen table with Aimee and Abby would have the room all to herself. Then there were days like these, where Charlie refused to leave the bedroom and Abby would have to do her best to ignore the six-year-old monster on the opposite side of the room.

  Squatting next to her bag, Abby began to rifle through Lisa Frank folders—her favorite was the one with a unicorn on the front—searching for her homework.

  The lump on Charlie’s bed shifted.

  Abby waited for her sister to pop her head out from beneath the sheets. When it didn’t happen, she shrugged to herself and continued to search for the right notebook—the one with Hello Kitty stickers all over it. She was sure she brought it home.

  The lump shifted again.

  Abby blinked. “Char?”

  Getting no response, Abby rolled her eyes and looked back to her bag, ignoring the next fumbling shift atop Charlie’s mattress. She had learned from her mother: if Charlie didn’t get a response, she’d get bored and stop. But when the lump began to convulse, as though the person beneath it was suddenly unable to breathe, Abby stared at it with a startled expression. It was moving in a nearly mechanical way—oddly jerky, like a gyro in need of grease.

  Charlie had been diagnosed with asthma after an attack at a local park. Abby remembered how her sister’s face had turned blue, how she had clawed at her neck with wide, desperate eyes. Kneeling on the bedroom floor, the memory conjured in Abby’s mind and anchored, forcing her heart to flutter as she pictured her sister beneath those sheets, suffocating while she watched.

  “Charlie?” Abby got to her feet and swallowed against the lump in her throat, taking a few dawdling steps toward the bed. Hesitating, she was afraid to pull those sheets back, afraid of what she’d see. What if she was too late? What if she’d pull the blanket away and Charlie would be dead and blue and it was all her fault?

  “Charlie, are you okay?” Her question was strained with worry. The closer she stepped toward the bed, the faster the lump panted, as if sensing Abby’s approach. She stopped short, her eyes wide, sure her sister was having another attack. All at once she realized that her mother was home; that all she had to do was yell and Mom would come running.

  She opened her mouth to call for help.

  Charlie appeared in the doorway.

  Abby’s heart shot into her throat. Suddenly she was the one who couldn’t catch her breath. Charlie, on the other hand, peered sleepily at her sister while clutching a juice box to her chest.

  “I’m not okay,” Charlie said. “Didn’t Momma tell you I’m dying?”

  Stepping around Abby, Charlie crawled onto her bed, that lump of sheets now nothing more than exactly that.

  Abby shook her head, backing away from Spongebob’s smiling face and crazy eyes. What had always been a pleasant character now looked positively evil.

  Charlie shot her sister a skeptical look. “Are you okay?” she asked, looking suspicious.

  “I’m fine,” Abby said quietly. “I just… have a lot of homework.” She turned away, sank to her knees, and pulled her backpack to her chest, desperate not to cry.

  Dinner that evening was tense. Jack picked at his pasta while trying to figure out how to break the weekend news, Aimee watched Charlie from across the table with matronly concern, Abigail couldn’t stop thinking about what she had seen in the bedroom, and Charlie was sure someone was living in the closet.

  “There’s someone living in the closet,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m pretty sure because today I saw him and when I went to check the door closed by itself.”

  Jack and Aimee looked at one another, then looked to their daughter.

  Abigail listened with shallow breaths, sitting as still as she could, listening for noises—for the subtle creak of the closet door to assure her Charlie was telling the truth.

  “I think he’s the guy who’s making all those scratchy noises. You know the noises?”

  “What noises?” Jack asked, glancing over to Aimee.

  “Just some scratching noises,” Aimee said with a dismissive shrug. “Probably a raccoon or something. We should set up traps.”

  Jack pursed his lips, then looked down to his plate and poked at his pasta.

  Aimee exhaled an annoyed sigh.

  “Alright, what’s wrong? Is it no good? Why isn’t anyone eating?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Abby said softly.

  “I’m sick,” Charlie whined.

  “Reagan scheduled a gig,” Jack mumbled.

  The room went silent.

  Of the fights the girls had witnessed, the biggest ones always started with that very phrase. Their arguments were always about the band, about how much time Jack spent away from the girls on weekends, which was the only tim
e they really got to see their dad at all. Abby chewed on her bottom lip and rolled a piece of Penne back and forth with the prongs of her fork. Charlie put her fork down and put her hands in her lap, which she stared at silently, waiting for the bomb to drop.

  “I didn’t know,” Jack said quietly. “He only told me today.”

  Aimee said nothing.

  “I told him it was bad timing. I told him Charlie is sick.”

  “Dying,” Charlie whispered.

  “And?” Aimee raised an eyebrow, waiting for the grand announcement she knew would never come.

  “And if we cancel on Max it’ll look bad, Aimes. He already put us on the schedule. The lineup is posted all over the Quarter by now.”

  “Oh.” Aimee calmly pushed her chair away from the table and gathered up her plate.

  “I didn’t know. If he had said something sooner…”

  “Then what?” Aimee asked, snatching Jack’s plate off the table.

  “Then I could have kept it from ending up on the schedule.”

  “Really? Because you’ve kept so many gigs off the schedule.”

  Lamb never missed a gig. Rain or shine, the show went on. They had even made the journey out just before Katrina. Jack had made it out of town a mere four hours before the first levy broke.

  “What do you want me to say?” Jack asked, desperate for a little leeway. “I didn’t know this week was going to end up like this. I didn’t know we were going to have an accident or that Charlie was going to end up sick. How was I supposed to know?”

  “You just know,” Aimee snapped, dropping the plates into the sink with a clang. “It shouldn’t be your priority.”

  “Can I be excused?” Abby asked. Her request went unheard.

  “It brings in money,” Jack reminded her.

  “Well we both know we wouldn’t need it,” Aimee countered.

  “Right.” Jack smirked. “We wouldn’t need it if I’d just grow up, right? We wouldn’t need it if I’d screw this whole ‘dream’ thing and get a real job.”

  “You have a real job, Daddy,” Charlie piped in. “You fix boats!”

  “Can I be excused?” Abby repeated. Again, she got no reply.

  “Fixing boats isn’t going to get us out of this house,” Aimee said. “Fixing boats isn’t going to fill up our savings account. Fixing boats isn’t going to get us anything but this life, over and over again, forever.”

  Jack’s tone became bitter. “You chose this life.”

  Stepping back to the table, Aimee grabbed the girls’ plates and marched them to the sink.

  “Once upon a time, you liked this life,” Jack said. “Or maybe you just liked being secretly outraged.”

  “Maybe,” Aimee smirked. “And maybe I should have listened to my mother.”

  Jack went silent. He bit his tongue and stared down at the grain of the table, refraining from saying anything he’d later regret.

  There was a tense pause. Aimee finally broke it: “Whatever,” she said, turning on the faucet. “You just do whatever you want to do, Jack. I’ll hold the family together while you’re out playing your little songs.”

  Jack’s nostril’s flared. He felt his jaw go rigid.

  “Daddy?” Charlie stretched a scrawny arm across the table.

  “What is it?” Jack asked almost inaudibly.

  “Will you play us a song tonight, for bedtime?”

  He gave Charlie a weak smile and nodded once in agreement.

  “That sounds like a great idea,” he said. “Abby?”

  Abby looked up from her empty place setting and, after a moment, nodded as well.

  “As long as it’s one of yours,” Abby said.

  “Maybe ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ just once,” Charlie added. It was her favorite song.

  With her back turned, Aimee inhaled a shaky breath. She used to ask him to play her lullabies when they had first met. Now she couldn’t help but to wonder what had changed, what made her resent him for the thing she loved about him the most. Jack was the same Jack he’d always been.

  It was Aimee who had changed.

  Charlie knew all the words to Journey’s biggest hit, and she sang it at the top of her lungs while using her bed as a stage. Despite Abby’s slow-growing apprehension, she laughed as her little sister bounced around like a monkey, using a toilet tube clutched in front of her mouth like a microphone. After Charlie’s performance, Jack tucked them in, played a lullaby on his guitar, and left the door open a crack. The light from the hall slashed through the darkness of the girls’ room like a beam of hope.

  As soon as her dad left, Abby’s attention shifted to Charlie’s bed, remembering what she had seen when she had come home from school. She wondered how she’d ever sleep again.

  Aimee was already in bed when Jack returned from entertaining the girls. Reading Les Misérables for what seemed like the eighteenth time since they had met, it was her favorite book—a miserable, poverty stricken romance; a story she could see herself in if Louisiana was somehow magically transformed into France.

  Aimee didn’t look up when Jack entered the room. She was still determined to be angry about their argument and the upcoming weekend. But after a few minutes she lowered her book and allowed her head to fall against her pillow.

  “You know,” she said after a moment, “if I wasn’t big on the whole idea of you running around with a band for the rest of your life, I probably shouldn’t have married a musician.”

  Standing at the closet door, Jack paused when she spoke, then peeled off his shirt and tossed it into a wicker hamper in the corner of the room. Jack’s tattoos were all in places that could easily be hidden. The most pronounced was the one emblazoned across his back—a tattoo he had gotten long before he had met Aimee. Across his shoulder blades and down most of his spine, the devil played against his skin. When Aimee saw it for the first time, he played it off as nothing more than rock and roll—a stupid decision made under the influence. But it had taken months of repeat visits to a parlor to complete the design. Jack had spent hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours beneath the needle, etching the image of his childhood nightmares into his skin, all without a clear understanding of why he was doing it at all.

  “You probably should have listened to your mother,” he said.

  Aimee stuck her bookmark between Victor Hugo’s pages and smirked.

  “I probably should have,” she agreed. “But it was either endure the pain of marrying you, or wait for my darling mother to arrange a marriage for me.”

  “Well, there is one good thing about your darling mother,” Jack said.

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?” Aimee tried to bite back a smile, but the corners of her mouth betrayed her.

  “She married an Oldsmobile man.”

  Aimee exhaled a laugh.

  “The guy has excellent taste,” Jack insisted.

  “Mm, he does, doesn’t he?”

  “Velveteen upholstery. A tan paint job…”

  “Beige,” she corrected.

  “It’s tan.” Jack moved to the bed. “And you know, I’m not knocking tan.” He crawled onto the mattress, slinking toward his grinning wife.

  “You’re not?” she asked.

  “Why should I?” he asked, his palms pressing into the mattress on either side of her shoulders. “Tan is my favorite color.”

  “It’s a sexy color,” she whispered, her fingers walking up his chest.

  “My sentiment exactly,” Jack murmured against her neck.

  Aimee’s eyes fluttered closed as his hands moved down to her waist, catching the hem of her sleep shirt between his fingers. The fabric dragged against her skin as he pulled it upward. The room grew hot. The sheets were kicked to the side.

  And then there was a scream.

  It was amazing how quickly they could go from foreplay to running down the hall. The screaming continued as they raced toward the girls’ room, desperate to outrun one another, as though getting there first would prove who the better parent w
as.

  Jack was the winner. He skidded to a stop in front of the door and stared into the darkness. Aimee wasn’t much farther behind, covering her mouth as soon as she saw it.

  Abby was the one who had screamed. Still in her bed, she sat stick-straight and terrified, surrounded by a veritable lake of vomit. It was everywhere—Abby’s bed, the floor, the desk, dripping off of a stack of glossy Lisa Frank folders.

  Charlie stood in the corner of the room. Her chin against her chest, her hands at her sides. Unmoving. Staring at what she’s done through a blank set of eyes.

  In spite of its cheerful wallpaper, the doctor’s office felt nothing but cold. Aimee sat beside Jack in the waiting room, flipping through an old copy of Good Housekeeping, while Charlie sat on the floor, sliding beads up and down brightly colored metal rods. The beads hissed as they slid up and tumbled down with each hill and valley, eventually smacking the wooden baseboard. Jack wondered just how many children had played with that thing; just how many tiny hands had grasped those beads, and how many of them—like his daughter—weren’t actually sick yet still here, still in need of a diagnosis.

  Jack hadn’t been able to sleep after he and Aimee had cleaned up Charlie’s mess the night before. Every time he closed his eyes he saw her standing in the corner of her room, shaded by the dark; he watched himself approach, ready to pull her from the shadows, only to catch sight of her eyes—soulless and abysmally empty.

  He shuddered.

  Aimee raised an eyebrow; flipped a page of the magazine.

  “Chill out,” she told him. “You look more uncomfortable than all of these rugrats combined.”

  Across the room, a little boy sat next to his mother, flipping thick cardboard pages of a Thomas the Train storybook; another kid pushed a bright red Tonka truck across the carpet, repeatedly smacking it into the leg of his grandfather’s chair. A girl on the other side of the waiting room pressed her mouth against the glass of a fish tank. Her mother hardly noticed, busy conducting business via cell phone.