Now, I can see that my poor Grace is heading down the same path. Nowadays, of course, we’d never say she was fat. We use other terms like ‘unhealthy’ or ‘past her ideal BMI’. But already, I can see she has a little gut overhanging the top of her jeans. Don’t get me wrong – I love her the way she is. But when I recall those days from elementary school when my classmates called me ‘Jiggle Belly’, I know that I have to save poor Grace from all of that.
Hence rule number three of the Straight Ten Commandments: no junk food.
But that afternoon, only twenty minutes before coming face-to-grill with the white Volvo, I was standing in line waiting to get my double Bates burger, large fry and a large Coke. A real Coke, that is. Diet is for wimps and diabetics. After I’d paid, and the girl at the cash register placed the greasy, white bag on the counter, I grabbed my food with the enthusiasm of a junkie plunging a needle into her vein. I was in fast food heaven.
Stopping for the Bates burger also made me late for my appointment, which also meant I’d broken rule number six (thou shalt not be late.) And after I saw the SALE sign hanging in the boutique window across the street, I probably would have broken number seven (thou shalt not spend money frivolously), but I died before I had the chance.
Breaking these rules isn’t what sent me to hell, of course, but it certainly entered into the equation. Because if I been paying more attention to where I was walking instead of fiddling with my cell phone, I probably would have seen the car before it hit me. In fact, I might have even changed my destiny. Who’s to say? But one thing’s for sure. If I hadn’t been trying to text my sister, I wouldn’t have broken the biggest rule of them all: number ten. Thou shalt not upload or download porn from the Internet.
But then again, whether or not I actually broke number ten is a matter of opinion. After all, I think everyone agrees that the definition of porn is subjective. What’s pornographic to me, probably isn’t so bad for you. If, for example, you think that using your cell phone to snap a picture of an enormous dildo that is peeking up at you from over the top of a middle-aged woman’s shopping bag and then e-mailing said picture to your stepsister because you want to prove to her that you are not a prude is pornographic, then so be it.
But it probably says a lot more about you than it does me.
The truth is, the sight of that ridiculously huge vibrator gave me the giggles. The owner – a fifty-something, bleached-blonde, leather coat wearing woman – had just come out of a store called the Love Nest. The Love Nest was a porn shop, but a classy porn shop. Classy, because everything in that neighborhood, even the Bates Burgers, was upscale. The woman’s paper shopping bag, unbeknownst to her, had a large rip in the side and the dildo was leaning out of it like it was thinking of escaping. It kept wagging up and down in time to her stride as if trying to make up its mind. This struck me as hilarious.
So, thinking quickly, I took out my cell phone. And the moment I had snapped my picture and sent it to Jas, I looked up in time to see the oncoming car. I caught a glimpse of the vehicle, a white Volvo, and the driver, a man in a white suit, before I felt a terrible jolt as if the hand of God had suddenly jerked me upwards by the back of my collar and hoisted me into the heavens.
It was only later that I understood I hadn’t gone up at all. In fact, I’d gone in the exact opposite direction. The express elevator, as it were, straight to the very bottom.
Hell.
Chapter Two
I don’t think I lost consciousness, but my vision blurred and there were a few, terrifying moments of darkness. Then things slowly faded back in, like the change of scenes in an old movie. Objects took shape: a bookshelf, an end table, a painting. And a hulking woman with cropped, black hair who sat on a couch and stared at the floor.
So this was a waiting room of some kind. Dazed, I put my hand to my head, trying to remember how I’d gotten there. Had I walked in myself? Had a passerby seen the accident and helped me here? I glanced at the woman on the couch, hoping for answers, but she continued to glare at her shoes, giving nothing away.
When I looked around hoping to find a doctor, a nurse, or even a receptionist, I discovered that one entire wall of the room was made up of prison bars. Panicked, I looked for another way out of the room, but there wasn’t one. Those bars were as thick as broom handles, cold and unforgiving under my clutching fingers. I tried to rattle them, but it was like trying to shake a bus. My heart beat in double time. “Hey,” I cried out. “Hey!” Beyond the bars was nothing but an empty hallway. “I was just hit by a car! Hello? I need medical attention!”
Sweat oiled my fingers, and my cell phone slipped from my hand. I hadn’t even realized that I was still holding it. Confused, I picked it up, thinking to dial someone, possibly even 9-1-1, as absurd as that sounds. But as my fingers stumbled over the keys, the phone told me there was no service. Furious, I shoved the thing back into my pocket. Then it occurred to me that, even if my cell didn’t work, I was at least entitled to one call.
That thought steadied me. Yes, I was entitled to a phone call. That and a lawyer, too. And Miranda rights! I had been jailed without having been read my rights! My fear sloughed off, and I grew outraged. I’d just been in a car accident, and instead of being taken to a hospital, I’d been carted off to prison. This was Detroit, for God’s sake, not Stalinist Russia. I glared at the hallway beyond the bars. When the guard came, I’d let him have it! Though I was no longer married to Dr. Ted Dempsey, orthodontist to the stars, I still knew people. Lawyers by the dozens, of course. As well as judges and even the county sheriff who had once slipped me some tongue at a New Year’s Eve party. Just watch and see who’s career went into the toilet because they arrested Lilith Straight!
I smoothed my sweater, then combed my fingers through my hair, dislodging a myriad of tiny pebbles that rattled onto the floor. Stunned, I picked one up. It was a fragment of glass, probably from the windshield of the car that had hit me. But if I’d been struck that hard, how on earth was I standing upright now?
Once more unnerved, I closely examined my surroundings. Yes, there were prison bars here, but there was also an expensive leather couch. Not to mention an oil painting hanging above it. Not one of those cheesy ‘starving artist’ sale things, but what looked like a genuine work of art. There were brass lamps and rugs and a bookcase full of leather-bound books. In the corner stood a water dispenser alongside a coffee maker. Three sides of the space looked like a waiting room in a plastic surgeon’s office, yet the fourth had the steel bars of a prison.
But while the books and coffee maker seemed out of place in this jail, my cellmate did not. She sat on the couch with her legs apart, and her elbows braced on her knees. She had the shoulders of a linebacker, and her feet were clad in boots with thick, crepe soles. Looking at her gave me much the same shiver as the steel bars had done. This woman could eat me in two bites. She was a bruiser who would make me her bitch.
As if hearing my thoughts, the woman lifted her head and looked at me. I pressed my back to the bars, not meeting her eyes. Instead, I took in the white t-shirt with the cut-off sleeves and the ratty jeans and the thick leather wristband and the enormous chain that went from her front belt loop to her back pocket.
But when a full thirty seconds had passed and she said nothing, I finally risked a look at her eyes. What I saw stunned me. Here was a face of such loneliness and desperation that I let go of the bars and took a step closer to her.
Seeing that I was watching, she said, “If I would have known this was gonna happen to me, I never would have said those things to my brother.” Her lower lip trembled. “I wish I would have kept my big mouth shut. You know?” Her brown eyes looked into mine, pleading.
She looked so miserable that I couldn’t bear it. “I think your brother understands,” I said, wanting to console her.
But instead of looking relieved, she sadly shook her head.
“It will be okay,” I told her. “Really.” I came a little closer and reached out to pat her
shoulder, then thought better of it. “He’s got to know you care about him.”
She pressed her lips tightly together. “I sure as hell hope so.”
“Straight!”
I jumped as if I’d been goosed by a shank. Standing at the cell door was a small woman with a clipboard whose iron-gray hair matched her uniform. “Get over here,” she demanded.
Relieved to be going, I hurried over to the door which slid open with a metallic clank. “Follow me,” the woman in the uniform said.
“So I’m free to leave?”
The woman gave me a strange look. “No.”
“No?” I stopped walking. “I demand to know what I’m being arrested for.” I folded my arms over my chest and gave her a level look.
“And I’m taking you to someone who can explain all of that.” Her patronizing tone infuriated me, but I followed her out of the cell. Just before the door closed, she looked over at my cellmate. “Hey, hon,” her voice softened so that she sounded more like a nurse than a prison matron. “You want to leave now?”
The woman on the couch shook her head sadly.
A little bit of high school English crept back into my mind. Hawthorne, I think. The saddest prison of all, he’d said, the human heart. Looking at my former cellmate, I knew exactly what he meant.
But my concerns for my former cellmate lasted only as far as the first set of security doors. As I followed the prison matron down the long, windowless hall, the reality of my situation began to leak in. Like expert witnesses in a trial, the facts began to present themselves one-by-one, leading me to a verdict that I couldn’t bear to think about.
First, there was my body. I could still feel myself inhabiting it, but the pains I’d been feeling up until then (the shoes that pinched my feet – the sick, bloated feeling in my gut from the Bates burger) had vanished. And other than the glass in my hair, there was no other evidence that I’d been hit by a car.
“Keep moving,” the prison matron said.
I obliged, though I moved slowly as I continued to ponder the evidence. Besides my physical proof, there was the strange jail cell and the fact that I’d been allowed to keep my cell phone when, in a real prison, I was pretty sure I would have had to give up my personal possessions. Lastly, there was the hallway I was now walking. Not only was it the longest hallway I’d ever seen, but my tired legs made me realize that I was going steadily downhill.
This place I was in, this anonymous bureaucratic building, was nothing like the terrifying images of damnation that the nuns had conjured up for me when I was in Catholic school, but I sure as hell wasn’t in heaven.
Panic suddenly gripped me. I stopped walking again, fear locking my joints like rigor mortis. I pressed myself against the wall and started to cry.
I was in hell. That final place of punishment for the damned. It would be worse than the strange jail cell with the bruiser cellmate. Far worse. I swore I could already feel the Devil’s pitchforks under my fingernails, and his fire blistering the soles of my feet.
“Please,” I begged my guard. It’s a good thing the hamburger was no longer making me sick because, if it had, I would have thrown up all over that polished linoleum floor. “Don’t make me go.” I was shaking now, violently. My teeth rattled together in my mouth. “I can’t do this,” I whimpered.
The guard stood looking at me, slack-jawed with amazement. “What is wrong with you?”
Beyond shame, I dropped to my knees and grabbed her around the legs. “Please, take me back.”
A door opened. “What’s going on out there,” a woman’s voice asked.
“She says she doesn’t want to go.” The guard tried to pry me off her legs, but I clung to her like a toddler who’s had a nightmare.
“Lilith Straight, get in here. Right now!” It was a voice that brooked no disobedience. “We don’t have time for your silliness.” The owner of the voice stepped into the hallway. She was older than me by about three decades, but her forties-era film star elegance would still have turned a lot of heads. She was like Katherine Hepburn, maybe. Or Grace Kelly. The kind of woman who could wear pearls with a cardigan and look elegant, not prissy. Her hair and makeup were old school – short, permed curls, deep red lipstick and heavy eyebrows – but it worked for her. She was graceful and poised and sexy and chic. In short, she was not the Devil’s torturer.
I let go of the guard’s legs.
“That’s better,” the older woman said. “I’m Miss Spry, your supervisor. Now come along, and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.” She held out a be-ringed hand which I took. She may have looked sixty-something, but her firm grip marked her as a younger woman.
She led me to the door, but I balked, still not convinced that I wasn’t heading for the iron maiden or the rack.
“Come along, Lilith.” She tugged on my hand.
Bracing myself, I stepped through. But instead of finding myself amid the fiery pits of hell, I was in an office. Not a government bureaucrat type office with filing cabinets and computers, but a gentlewoman’s study. A delicate writing desk faced a pair of French doors that looked over a well-manicured garden. An enormous, potted palm sat near a painted silk screen. A Persian carpet covered most of the wooden floor. It was like something a well-educated English lady might inhabit. It made me think of outdated phrases like ‘penning missives’.
Miss Spry indicated that I sit in a chintz-covered chair while she sat behind her desk and put on a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses. “Ms. Straight, I will get right to the point. You may have been hit by a car earlier, but you are not dead. Not quite.”
I felt my mood lift the tiniest bit. Not dead? Was I just in a coma? Or, better yet, drugged up and dreaming? I held my breath, waiting.
“You’re, let us say, in-between realms right now.” She pushed a sheet of monogrammed note paper towards me and drew three dots. “This,” she said, pointing to one, “is where you came from. Call it ‘life’ if you want. This,” she pointed to another, “is where you would have ended up if I hadn’t prevented it. You can think of it as ‘death’.” She drew a line connecting all three dots, making a triangle. “Right now, you’re in the middle.”
“What’s that third one?” I pointed to the dot she hadn’t named.
“Don’t worry about that.”
Not worrying was the last thing I was capable of right now. I had to know. “But what is it?”
Her eyes went hot. That’s the only word I can think of to describe it. An enraged fire blazed behind them, making it perfectly clear that no matter how much this Miss Spry looked like Katherine Hepburn, she was not. She had a rage that was unearthly, making all of my fears about demons and pitchforks and hellfire return in an instant. The room, despite its French doors and view of the garden, was not a safe place. I shrank back in my chair.
“We don’t talk about that one,” she said, clearly annunciating each word. I nodded quickly, eager to show her that I did understand.
“Now you are in the center of all this.” She put a little X in the middle of the triangle. Her temper had blown over in an instant, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Not living, not dead. Right.” So what am I, I wondered. A zombie? A vampire?
Miss Spry smiled slightly, as if guessing my thoughts. “My dear, you are a succubus.”
I gaped at her, speechless. A succubus?
There was a knock at the door, then the prison guard entered pushing a tea tray. Miss Spry thanked her and began pouring tea from a china pot. She offered me a cookie from a silver tray.
A succubus? In college, I’d taken a course on mythology and remembered that a succubus was a female demon with insatiable sexual desires who slept with men before sucking out their souls. Was she kidding me? “I’m an elementary school teacher,” I said.
“I know,” she assured me as she handed me a cup.
“I haven’t had sex in over a year.”
She pursed her lips. “Let’s just keep that to ourselves, shall we?”
&nbs
p; “Look at me,” I insisted. I stood up to give her the full view. I’d put on a little weight since my divorce. Okay, a lot of weight.
“And I only have a B cup. I’m not a super model.” I had a thought. “Maybe you’re confusing me with my stepsister Jasmine?”
“No, you’re the one.” I must have still looked confused because she said, “My dear, it’s what’s in here that counts.” She tapped the side of her head.
“What’s in here?” My voice was climbing up octaves, making me shrill. “What’s in here is trying to make sure that my daughter has clean underwear every day, and that she’s done her homework. And that my niece, Ariel, isn’t trying to burn down the house again. And that my sister doesn’t get a hold of my credit cards. And that there’s enough cat litter in the house so that the cat won’t start peeing in the plants…”
“Ms. Straight.”
“And then there’s my ex-husband. Don’t even get me started on him…”
“Ms. Straight!”
I was pacing now, too aggravated to sit still. “And my job. My stupid job. You’d think the school district would want to hire a woman with a master’s degree in women’s studies, but no! So now I’m languishing as a substitute teacher…”
“Sit down!” Miss Spry’s evil look had returned. The eyes behind her steel-rimmed glasses glowed hotly.
I sat.
“Now drink your tea, and listen to what I have to say.”
I took the cup with a trembling hand and tasted it. After years of living with my father, the tea expert, I consider myself quite an authority, yet I’d never tasted a tea like this one. It was strong but not bitter. It had a rich flavor that reminded me somehow of fall leaves and the smell of the first frost and honey.
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