Seed

by Ania Ahlborn

  “Heavens,” she said. “Everyone was alright?”

  “It seemed so. We all walked away without a scratch, which seems almost impossible for how bad the car was beaten up. The next day Charlie was sick, and now she’s acting out.”

  Mabel nodded thoughtfully, sipping her tea as she mulled over the news.

  “Well, children have mysterious ways of dealing with crises,” she said. “She might have something pent up, something that was a result of the accident. Trauma.”

  “I’ve considered that.”

  “Well there you have it,” Mabel said cheerfully, lifting her cup as though toasting the revelation. “Simple as that.”

  “Simple,” Aimee echoed, but she didn’t believe it.

  “Sugar.” Mabel leaned in and lowered her voice, like two girlfriends sharing a secret. “You take that little girl to one of them psychologists, have her talk it out with someone other than her own momma; she’ll be right as rain.”

  With each passing incident, Aimee was starting to suspect her youngest was possibly disturbed. A psychologist wasn’t a bad idea.

  “Either way, you never know until you try,” Mabel assured her. “And you’ll never try until old Mabel tells you so.”

  Jack sat next to his momma in a waiting room fancier than any he’d seen in all his life. The walls were covered in striped wallpaper, soothing tones of muted grey and blue, perfect for lulling the deranged into a calm and peaceful state. A glass coffee table sat in the center of the room, covered with the latest magazines: Time, Newsweek, even National Geographic, which Jack had begged his parents to buy him but still hadn’t received. Potted plants flanked the walls; wispy palms with delicate fronds that swayed whenever someone walked by, others bearing waxy leaves that seemed too flawless to be real. Pictures hung in perfect order, projecting images of glasslike lakes and peaceful forests.

  It was a wonder the woman at the front desk hadn’t called the police after Gilda’s outburst. They may have had mercy for the good of a little boy; or it may have been that the waiting room was completely empty. It was just Jack and Gilda, and an instrumental version of Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’ that was pumped into the room like auditory Xanax.

  Jack was drawn to the National Geographic. He grabbed a handful of issues and flipped through them with speed that would suggest he wasn’t really interested, but it couldn’t have been further from the truth. Had there been people waiting to be seen before them, Jack would have been more confident in taking his time. But they were the only ones there. His timeframe was unclear; he was like a greedy time-pressed tourist in a new and brilliant city, desperate to see everything in far too little time, visiting sites with reckless abandon, never giving himself enough time to truly take any of it in.

  A door at the far end of the room opened and an older gentleman filled the frame with his doughy girth. He was impossibly fat, and had he ever been thin, the shadow of that man had been wiped from every curve and every feature he possessed. His face was round, and his eyes had been pressed into its fleshy softness. His mouth was droll and puckered, as if the fullness of his cheeks had squished his lips together from the outside in. He looked like John Candy if John Candy had been twice as heavy and starting to go bald.

  “Hi there, folks,” he said. “Come on in.”

  The man’s name was Copeland, and he had gotten his degree in the far away land of California. Jack found himself staring at the framed PhD hanging above Copeland’s desk, the outline of California’s shape embossed in a gold seal that somehow made the diploma official. He assumed getting that seal on a diploma was like getting a gold star on homework—it must have been a good thing, which probably meant Copeland was a good doctor.

  “Thank you for seeing us, doctor. I…” Gilda hesitated, her hands wringing the top of her purse. “I really made a scene downstairs. I’m real sorry about all that. You’re real gracious.”

  Doctor Copeland lifted a puffy hand. No apology was necessary.

  “Sometimes we do things we wouldn’t normally do during times of stress,” he said. Even at Jack’s ten years of age, he knew that was true—and if Copeland knew it too, he probably deserved that gold seal after all.

  “Now…” Copeland leaned forward in his chair, which groaned beneath his weight every time he moved. He looked down to a blank file. “You’ll have to work with me here, Mrs. …”

  “Winter,” Gilda said. “Gilda Winter, and this is my son Jack.”

  Copeland glanced at Jack and puckered his lips into a smile.

  “Alright, then,” he said, scribbling down their names. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well…” Gilda hesitated. She hadn’t realized that storming into that office meant admitting she suspected something was wrong with her son—severely wrong—in front of her son. She knew Jack was struggling with something, but hadn’t considered how hard it would be to say it out loud. It meant admitting defeat. She had failed as a parent. In her mind, it was the only reason for sitting in a strange office, preparing to reveal her shortcomings to a man she’d never met.

  “Jack?” Doctor Copeland turned his attention from Gilda, seeing her struggle with a way to word her answer. “Do you know why you’re here?”

  Jack straightened in his chair, suddenly in the spotlight. He sucked his bottom lip into his mouth and bit down on it before lifting his shoulders up to his ears in a shrug.

  Copeland furrowed his eyebrows at the odd duo. He scribbled something on a notepad, then tapped his pen against his desk before making an admission.

  “Well, folks, I can’t exactly help if I don’t know what’s going on. Mrs. Winter, maybe it would be best if you came to see me on your own.”

  Gilda continued to wring her purse, unable to look the doctor in the eye. The fire that burned inside her chest had gotten her into that office, but now it was gone. She couldn’t bear the idea of telling the doctor that there was something wrong with her boy, Jack listening to his mother tell a stranger that he wasn’t right, that he was broken. Jack watched his mother’s face tense in something that, to him, looked like a bad stomach ache.

  “Do you think that would be alright?” Doctor Copeland asked. “I’m pretty booked tomorrow, but I can squeeze you in. This is an urgent matter, is that right?”

  Gilda managed a faint nod.

  There was more scribbling, then the jarring sound of paper being torn from the adhesive spine of a prescription pad. The chair beneath Copeland creaked when he reached over his desk, handing her an appointment time.

  “Tomorrow at ten,” he said.

  Gilda stuffed the square of paper into her purse. She stood, dared to look at Copeland for the first time since she entered his office, and exhaled a few breathy words.

  “Thank you, doctor. Thanks very much.”

  Gilda Winter wasn’t one for appreciation. It had been one of the few times Jack had ever heard her say thank you and actually mean it. That was enough to reassure him: this failed visit was more serious than he had initially thought.

  Chapter Seven

  When Jack came home from work, he found Aimee on the couch with a glass of red held between her palms. She could have easily been unwinding from a rough day, but her posture deceived her. She’d spent all day mulling over the happenings of that morning. It had followed her to Mable’s like a ghost, haunting her every thought. Now Aimee had had enough; it was time to stop pretending and talk it out.

  “I think there’s something wrong with Charlotte.” The words scared her. The moment they hit the air she felt liberated and terrified all at once.

  Jack hadn’t set more than a few steps inside the house when he stopped dead. Dirty from welding, his clothes smelled faintly of iron—a man who had crawled out of the pits of Hell, the scent of brimstone following him home.

  “Well?” She peered at her glass as she waited for him to say something.

  “Well what?” Jack asked, not sure what she expected. He knew it would come to this; he just hadn’t expected
it to happen so fast. Standing in his own living room, he was no longer Jack Winter. He was his own father, watching his mother begin to crack.

  “You don’t see it?” Aimee asked. “I don’t believe that. I know you see it.”

  Jack’s attention shifted. The house was too quiet.

  “They’re at my mother’s,” she said. “You should have seen her this morning. It’s like she’d lost her mind. She refused to get out of bed, so I finally yanked her out and she started screaming about being tired and being touched and how stupid I am.”

  Jack took a seat on the edge of his armchair.

  “Being touched?”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  He didn’t reply. He kept his eyes fixed to the floor instead.

  “She called me stupid, Jack. That’s not my daughter.”

  Jack pressed his lips together in a tight line, not sure what to say. In the back of his mind he wanted to ask what the big deal was, wanted to suggest all the ways it could have been worse. She could have grabbed a knife and cut out Aimee’s heart; could have sat in the center of her room, playing in her mother’s blood.

  “And it wasn’t just that,” Aimee continued.

  Jack blinked out of his daze.

  “It was the way she said it.” Aimee tugged at her lip, trying to find the right words for the look that had slid across Charlie’s face. “There was this weird darkness to it, like she was making some unspoken promise.”

  Because she was, Jack thought. She’s getting hungry.

  “What about the being touched thing?” Jack asked.

  Aimee shook her head and raised a hand as if to dismiss it altogether. “She said it was rats.”

  Jack was familiar with the feeling of something crawling across the skin—like a spider or a beetle. He’d lost countless nights of sleep to it as a kid. Every time he dozed off, something would scramble across his arm or slither down his back. His eyes would dart open and he’d slingshot his head around, hoping to catch the shadow that was tormenting him. But try as he might, he never saw a damn thing: nothing but his room bathed in moonlight. He told himself he was crazy, that he was imagining things—but as soon as he’d start to fall asleep he’d feel it again. Whatever was doing it would wait until he was on the brink of sleep, then skitter gently across his skin and force him back to alertness once more.

  “I’ll have to check the walls,” Jack murmured to himself. “Maybe there’s a hole in the girls’ room.”

  “Jack.” Aimee shot him a look. “There are no rats.”

  “How do you know? You were ready to jump on top of the dinner table last night.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said, then sighed. “Please, please let’s not fight right now. I can’t take it.”

  Jack chewed the inside of his cheek. He clasped his hands together as if in prayer.

  “I want to take her to see a doctor,” Aimee confessed.

  “A shrink.” It wasn’t a question.

  “A psychologist. I think the accident might have done something to her—sent her into some sort of trauma—and now she’s acting out.”

  Jack said nothing.

  “First she got sick. Maybe the stress compromised her immune system. Then it was the thing at the ice cream place, which I thought was all Abigail…”

  And she would have still thought it was Abigail had Jack not told her differently. He was starting to regret ever having said a thing about it. His repentance burned hot; one slip-up was forgivable, but a second wouldn’t be tolerated. That jagged-toothed shadow assured him of that.

  “Now there’s this outburst. I feel like she’s veering out of control. What are we going to do if it keeps getting worse?”

  We’re going to kill ourselves, he thought.

  “Worse how?” Jack asked. “You think she’s going to take a gun to kindergarten?”

  The gunshot echoed in his ears. Charlie stood over the body of a classmate, her smile a bright red, misted in blood.

  “Are you telling me that you’d let it come to that? You’d rather avoid the problem than address it early? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Pressing his fingers hard against his temples, his face hung toward the floor. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to make the entire conversation disappear. All he needed to do was convince her everything was fine. There was nothing wrong here. This was all completely normal.

  “Jack,” Aimee snapped.

  He looked up, met her eyes. “What?” he said with matching force. “You want to take her to a shrink? Fine, we’ll take her to a shrink. If you think it’ll fix the problem, great. Problem fixed. Halle-fuckin-lujah.”

  Aimee blinked at his hostility.

  “Do you have any other ideas?” she finally asked, determined to keep her composure.

  Again, Jack was silent.

  “What, you suddenly don’t believe in psychology?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her head,” Jack murmured.

  “Then what is wrong with her?” Aimee asked. “She’s possessed by the Devil?”

  It would have been so easy to tell her everything; the discovery of that hidden cemetery at the end of the lot; the set of eyes that stared at him from beyond the trees; the cat strung up for his mother to find; his own visits to Copeland’s office. He could have told her everything, and instead of being horrified at him she would have been horrified at history repeating itself, at their youngest daughter being the victim of a genetic deformity—a curse. But Aimee didn’t believe in things like that. She was the girl who rolled her eyes whenever a new movie about demonic possession was released, insisting it was all a bunch of crap because religion was just a figment of everyone’s imagination—something someone made to get people to conform.

  To a point, Jack agreed. But he also knew that if demons could exist, it meant there was real evil in the world, and if you believed in the Devil, somewhere in the deepest fibers of your being you had to believe in God. He knew the Devil was real; he’d seen it with his own two eyes. But he’d never seen God. He’d never felt God. He’d never been helped by God. For all he knew, wickedness was strong enough to exist in a world without good.

  “Jack.” Aimee was tired. She rubbed at her eyes, drained, but still insistent. “If it isn’t her head, what is it?”

  “I don’t know.” He heard the words, felt them vibrate in his throat, but the voice didn’t belong to him. That was when he knew he would never tell Aimee about his past, and he would never tell her that she was right about Charlie. He would never tell her because he’d never be allowed.

  Jack had been amazed when Abby was born. It was inconceivable to think that some part of him had created something so perfect—a tiny, flawless human being, born into the world with wide eyes and staggering innocence. But it hadn’t taken him long to veer off the course of fascination straight toward a sense of foreboding.

  For the first year of Abigail’s life, Jack watched her every gurgle and burp with the intensity of an artist studying his muse, and this study of his baby daughter wasn’t an open affair. Jack came to this disturbing realization of secrecy when, bent over Abby’s crib, searching for signs of malevolence in those big eyes, Aimee stepped into the nursery only to send him reeling back. After almost being caught searching Abby’s face for wickedness, he made his study a private pastime.

  By the time Abby turned two, his secret observations started to bore him. Abigail was a happy, silly, giggly little girl who—if there was anything wrong with her whatsoever—was overly good-natured. It was ironic, then, that after spending so much time worrying about Abigail, he hadn’t spent a single minute thinking about whether his second daughter would be ‘normal’ as well.

  But that was how the Devil worked, making his appearance when you least expected it.

  Sitting outside the Riley house in Arnold’s Oldsmobile, Jack chewed on the pad of his thumb while the engine ran. His stomach was tied in knots and his heart felt like it was somersaulting inside h
is chest. He’d even stopped to check his own pulse, suddenly worried about dropping dead. The idea of reliving the disintegration of his parents’ marriage through Aimee, reliving his disturbed childhood through the girls, was enough to push the most ridiculous ideas into his head. He considered packing a bag and driving until he hit water, considered forgetting who he was and settling down in the town that ran his gas tank dry; start a new life and forget the old. But he’d already done that once before, and all it afforded him was a history of secrets nobody but a gullible priest would believe.

  Aimee, much like his mother, would eventually lose her mind. Abigail would be scapegoated and scarred by the things she’d see and hear. And then there was Charlie—the six-year-old who loved to sing Cheap Trick’s Cherry Pie into a hairbrush, the little girl who loved classic rock and wanted to dress up as Ace Frehley for Halloween. Somehow he had managed to get away from the evil that had tried to consume him as a kid, only to have it take his own child away.

  He shuddered.

  Eventually finding his way up Pat and Arnold’s front steps, he was greeted by Charlie vaulting herself into his arms as soon as he rang the bell. Jack hid his face in Charlie’s hair and squeezed her tight while Pat looked on with silent alarm.

  “Daddy,” Charlie squeaked out after a moment. “You’re squishing my guts.” Wriggling out of his grasp, she ran to the Olds, where Abby was already waiting in the back seat.

  Patricia stared at Jack for a long while. She had always sensed something ‘off’ with him, and now she felt it more than ever. The hand that held her screen door pulled back. The screen whined on old springs and slapped closed, shuddering against the door jamb.

  “Arnold wants his car back,” Pat told him.

  Jack searched for an appropriate response, but he wasn’t given much time. Before he could form a reply, Pat cut in.

  “Get off my porch, Jack,” she said. “I’d quite appreciate it if you’d keep away.”

  Aimee noticed Jack’s baffled expression as soon as he returned home with the girls.