The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  Aoife and I had our problems, right from the start; the usual first-marriage kid/step-whatever bullshit. “You’re not my mother!” “I wouldn’t want to be!” All that.

  But the last time I saw her, before “The Jacaranda Smile”—saw them—things were fine. We were all adults. Did the guided tour, hit the old, familiar places . . . and that was a bit weird, actually. Because wherever we went, I saw each place with the past overlaid upon it like some peeling decal, tinting it retroactively: Ah, here’s where I felt sad, where I felt bad, where I felt mad. Where I wanted to kill—

  (myself, him, you)

  But it was okay overall, and I was glad I’d come. I had a good time, took a lot of notes, went home. And then, eventually, the way I always do . . .

  . . . I used them as mulch, kindling, classic grist. And I wrote myself a story.

  The house at Wychwood was dry, stinking of Vaseline Intensive Care and mold. I spent my weekends in the enclosed “airlock” between our outside and inside doors, reading Tintin books and dreaming about the day when Dad would come back. I tried to tell myself stories, but I hadn’t quite gotten the knack of it yet. Images possessed me, there in the fading light—so real, so immediate, that to negotiate them through a mundane gauntlet of things like spelling or punctuation seemed superfluous at best.

  At school, I read everything I could get my hands on (aside from the assigned texts). One day, I discovered Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff chasing Cathy’s ghost down the moors, freezing to death on her grave. That night, I couldn’t sleep, paralyzed by the horrid idea of mortality made palpable. The next night was the same, only worse.

  Mom brought in a radio, which lulled me to the brink, where I’d shut my eyes—and the ghosts would rear up again as a wave of dread, all around me.

  Another yell, more comforting: Mom held my hand, told me to visualize a bright green world, take it from lava-lump to fresh new continents, let it suck me in. When it wore off, so did her patience: “Count your blessings, for a change,” she snapped, and stomped off to her own bed. I lay awake until my heartbeat drowned me at last, forcing me down in a spray of purest terror.

  The best thing about my childhood is that I didn’t know any better; it certainly made it easier to forgive, if not forget. The worst thing about my childhood is that my parents didn’t know any better, either . . . not her, not him. Though Mom at least knew enough to be there.

  So I learned to keep my mouth shut at night, slowly memorizing the angles of my ceiling. Taking Mom’s advice, I made myself think of something else.

  And “something else” became, at last, a story.

  One story, then another, then another. None of them were bedtime material. I told them at school—not to my friends, since I had none. To everybody else. They didn’t get me love, but then again, I didn’t want any. What they got me was left the hell alone, which was more than good enough, at the time.

  Still is.

  “The Jacaranda Smile” takes place in Dad and Aoife’s home, an edifice as far from Wychwood as humanly imaginable: A 1920s Art Deco building located in the middle of Melbourne’s South Yarra neighborhood, with a jacaranda tree in its yard so large that if you glanced out the front windows, you’d find yourself staring straight into a haze of bright lavender-blue, harebell-shaped flower clusters. Dad told me when they shed they all fell at once like confetti, leaving the snaky branches bare. Granted, I was never around for that, but if I screw my mental eyes up in just the right way, I think I can conjure a pretty good idea of what it looked like. Benefits of a vivid imagination.

  The roof was all brick-colored tiles, humped to provide guttering. Inside, the rooms stood high-ceilinged, shrouded from the glare of the Australian sky by thick, white, all-but-impenetrable curtains. The dark wood paneling was banded like a coffin’s, and a deliberate crack had been left at the top of every wall, to allow for expansion (or shrinkage) of the plaster under seasonal shifts of heat and cold.

  Much of the original interior design had been preserved intact, detailing so impressively specific I can still reel off bits of it: A frosted glass window incised with the figure of a peacock half-rampant, next to the living-room fireplace; a dining room with sliding doors, like the galley of some long-sunk ocean liner; a “sun room” bulging straight out from the front of the building, overhanging the main doors, which viewed the tree on one side and looked back into the master bedroom on the other. Heated towel-racks in the bathroom, built-in shoe racks in the bedroom closets . . . all the “everyday” amenities of a very different age, as though you’d rented space in some unregistered hotel. My first impulse, most mornings, was to check my pillow for mints.

  On the landing, coming up to take the initial tour, we passed a glass light fixture built to look like some frosted Cubist rose that hung heavy with dust, its base stacked with 365 days’ worth of dried-out bug-corpses. I can still remember the first time I saw Dad turn it on—how it sparked, and smoked; stank, too. Like—

  (something dead)

  As I already said, Aoife and I had been getting along. Which is probably why she told me a secret she’d been carrying around with her since the previous Christmas: Though he’d checked into the hospital after telling everyone he had pneumonia, Dad had actually been there for triple bypass surgery.

  “Look, Ellie,” she explained, sheepish yet defensive, “I know it sounds barking, but it’s the Industry—they’ve got this collective allergy to wrinklies. Look old, you’re out of it for life.”

  (What Aoife and Dad did for a living, back then, was produce industrial films, which is not even a quarter as glamorous as you might expect something involving the words “produce” and “films” to be. But reasonably lucrative, when the going was good.)

  For an otherwise tiny adventure in cardiac attack, Dad’s “episode” was still fairly traumatic: Chest pains at the gym led to blackout, then a quick trip to emergency. He kept telling Aoife it was just acid reflux . . . right up until his doctor burst back in, sonograms in hand, to inform him that his arteries were already so plaque-clogged his heart had begun pumping its necessary daily dose of blood backwards throughout his body, just to compensate.

  After which, hey presto: Crack your breastbone open, do a scrape, sew you back up and Bob’s your uncle.

  I remember Aoife topping this up with an equally disquieting anecdote about them almost immediately having to go visit an older male friend who’d just had a similar operation—Dad pretending to be awake, sympathetic, amusing, “normal,” a mere week after having exited a different wing of the same ward himself. Laughing, as she did so: No, but really—got to admit, it’s pretty bloody funny. Don’t you?

  For me, though, the truly relevant part was how I’d to hear all this from her, rather than from him . . . and how completely normal that seemed, at the time.

  But back to the story.

  “The Jacaranda Smile” begins with Dad and Aoife—their fictional analogues “Graham” and “Eve,” rather—dealing with much the same situation: A shocking near-miss with death followed by recovery in a vacuum, aggravated by “necessary” secrecy about “Eve’s” true condition (I decided to give her the bypass, not him, thus pretending I wasn’t telling tales out of school). Lard in some exposition stressing the hidden financial pressures behind their move, the deadly serious truths behind this whole ridiculous charade . . . and the real action begins.

  Immediately after moving in, “Eve” begins to see and hear things. She finds a word (CONCEPTION) written at the very top of a closet while she’s cleaning it, and can’t figure out how someone might have reached high enough to be able to write it there. She has a persistent feeling of being watched, especially while reading in the sunroom. Waking in the middle of the night because her scar itches, she gets up to put Vitamin E cream on it, and feels a deliberate, cold finger being laid along the rucked tissue, skimming it slowly, horridly gentle. Like when you caress your lover’s zipper, just before pulling it down.

  As all this is going on, “Ally
” (my avatar) arrives from Canada to stay with them while looking for a part-time job and registering with the Victoria Cinematic Academy, preparing for her Screenwriting Program entrance interview. She’s seldom there, and when she is, she sure isn’t thinking about what might or might not be going on with Graham and Eve. Of course, Eve being who she is, she hasn’t told anybody what’s happening, either; she’s busy being sensible, fighting unreasonable fear with logic and silence. And it never really changes, not even after a celebratory Ally-welcoming dinner out ends with Eve feeling her throat contract, which sends her back to hospital.

  But then, Ally begins to see stuff too.

  A girl—maybe nine years old, her features blurred by distance—sits in the heart of the jacaranda tree, perfectly placed to stare into the sunroom window. She wears unseasonable polyester clothing and has limp, bleached hair. The girl hunches over a book, only glancing up when she senses Ally looking; a predatory profile gives way to three-quarters of a secretive smile, as if she recognizes Ally—but Ally doesn’t recognize her. A neighbor kid, a trespasser? A truly elaborate trick of the Antipodean light? And then . . .

  . . . she’s gone.

  So we speed on, tension mounting quietly, exacerbated by the occasional flare-up between Graham and Ally, or Eve and Ally, or Graham, Eve, and Ally. The girl hangs over it all carrion crow-style, a constant background presence, human embodiment of Ally’s continual underlying melancholy over her own past actions. All the stuff she wishes she could deny or dispense of, knowing she must take responsibility for what she did, even if her dad will never do the same—

  Until: A day when Graham’s off doing something, leaving Eve and Ally alone in the apartment together: Ally in the sunroom, Eve in the kitchen. Suddenly, Ally feels “the stare” Eve’s told her about, and turns her head to see the kid from the tree looking back at her from inside the master bedroom—hidden behind its drawn curtain, visible to Ally, but not to whoever might enter the room. Not smiling, for once, just . . . empty-looking. And for some reason, this makes Ally desperately afraid, especially so because she can hear Eve’s hand on the bedroom doorknob . . .

  She runs, pausing in the doorway. Eve’s over by the closet, right next to the window, and Ally can see the girl’s humped shadow lurking behind the curtain. Eve looks up at Ally’s entrance, surprised. Behind her, the curtain slips away and the girl steps forward. She lays one hand lightly between Eve’s shoulder blades—just behind where Eve’s heart would be, were their positions reversed. She looks at Ally over Eve’s shoulder, smiles—and disappears, as Graham’s key rattles in the lock downstairs.

  Eve crumples, has another heart attack, dies between them in the ambulance. And when Ally comes back to the apartment, she discovers the jacaranda tree has shed completely, leaving its limbs naked and empty.

  A week later, just before she leaves—all plans for Australian higher education abandoned—Ally finds a recent photo of Eve (taken at the welcome-back dinner), its face carefully cut out, buried under the sofa cushions. Not wanting to upset Graham further, Ally hides it in her suitcase. And a month after that, at home in Canada, when she and her mom are cleaning out closets, they find a shoebox—dating to the 1970s—full of similarly mutilated snaps of Graham, Eve, Ally. Plus one picture of Ally alone, from the same period: Up in a tree in Australia, wearing her usual unseasonal polyester Canadian clothes, scowling down at the lens over a book about witchcraft.

  Because that’s what the “ghost” has been all along, of course: Ally’s bile and rage from her child-becoming-teenager years, concentrated into some sort of fetch—a doppelganger boomerang arcing back around, long after she’s forgotten she threw it in the first place. All those evil spells she once worked against Aoife—

  (“Eve,” I mean)

  —finally brought to term when Ally doesn’t even remember exactly why she wanted any of it done anymore, let alone with such passionate, single-minded, lizard-brain intensity. Ignorant art, aimless craft, but working still, even now she’s no longer angry—not at Eve, anyway. Not at anything much, but herself.

  The writing on the wall: CONCEPTION. A malign birth, out of one world and into another. As you conceive it, so it occurs. As I will, so mote it be.

  Magic.

  It took years for me to understand what I’d done to myself at Wychwood, all in the name of not being “weak.” Eventually, I was sent to my first psychiatrist; these days, I think I’m about as “cured” as I’m ever going to get. But I haven’t really been afraid since Wychwood, not in the same innocent way. I bred it out of myself, along with a lot of other things—things like sorrow, empathy. The recognition (for a very long time) that anyone besides me was capable of feeling pain, as well as inflicting it.

  Though people liked “The Jacaranda Smile,” almost universally, I certainly never expected it to take me back to Australia that last time. Naturally, I stayed with Dad and Aoife until the Terror Incognita awards dinner. Dad didn’t say much about the story overall, aside from the predictable well done, good luck, good on ya’; Aoife was positively gushing, which surprised me just a tad, given the context.

  So I wore my vertically patterned dress and I got my plaque: A bunyip rampant, Best New Fiction of 2008, with my name inscribed beneath. I told Dad and Aoife thanks for the inspiration, no hard feelings, goodbye. I got ready to go home.

  And the very same day I was finally all set to leave, Dad found Aoife lying on their bedroom floor, eyes wide open, the left pupil dilated and unresponsive.

  I went back to Wychwood again, once. I was two years into my therapy then, walking up to Dr. Spring’s office past the St. Clair West subway station, the same Loblaw’s Mom and I used to shop at, the little park where I once went skating with no gloves on, and watched my hands slowly turn white. The tree was still there. I stood at its foot and looked up into its halo of leaves, so like any one of the trees I’d sat in over a lifetime, here or in Australia.

  It was the height of summer, smell of fresh-cut grass filtering over from and adjacent lawn. In the distance, through an open window, somebody was playing early Gary Numan at full blast: Down in the park where the mech-men meet the machines and play kill by numbers/Down in the park with a friend named Five . . .

  There, under deceptive cover of green, the witch leered impassively back down at me. I felt light-headed, oddly naked from the eyes up, as though my thoughts had suddenly become big enough for any random passer-by to read them in an uncensored wave: all that guilt, and rage, and hatred. Everything a nine-year-old whose parents have just broken up can never express, especially out loud.

  Everything so ugly it can’t be voiced, for fear of making the only person you have left turn away and leave you alone in the dark, with only the ghost of your own dead self for company.

  The doctors said it was a stroke, brought on by a blood-clot; yes, Aoife’d been on the usual so-now-you’re-past-fifty! thinners, gone to all her regular check-ups, ate right, exercised. But things change. Stuff just . . . happens.

  I’d like, if only for the sake of closure, to tell you that Dad eventually got drunk one night, called up and accused me of somehow stage-managing Aoife’s death—not least because then I could tell you how I told him, calmly: But that’s just crazy-talk, Grayson.

  He never did, though—mostly because it would be crazy-talk, and he’s never liked looking crazy.

  But man, that would’ve really been something, huh? I would’ve really been something, then . . . to touch him like that, so deeply, so directly. Like that apocryphal story about the old Jewish guy who supposedly read Mein Kampf whenever he got depressed, because it always cheered him up to be told just how powerful he actually was.

  There’s only one place I have that kind of power: On paper. On my home computer’s screen, between cursor-blinks, for the mere microsecond it takes to lay a synaptic mine into the dead space between pixels. If I can write, I’m the most powerful person alive; if I can’t write, I waver. And if nobody reads what I write, after enough time goes
by . . .

  . . . I disappear completely.

  And so we return to the bird in the fountain, that dancing toy of dust-in-progress. A cheap image, like most of the ones I cobble my tales together from: The Underneath risen up, as it always will—the dark in every crack, the bone under every stone.

  If word is bond and in the beginning was the word, then the word really is the deed, after all; I sinned in my heart, and now it’s come home to roost—all my pretty chickens, in one fell swoop. My unremembered musings made karma.

  But there are no jacaranda trees in Canada, that I know of.

  Let’s put it like this, then: Back when, on some level, my Dad killed my heart . . . but two months ago, on some whole other level, I “killed” his. Which probably—at long last—makes us even.

  And I want to run from that idea, even as it forms. I want to run half the whole wide world away, in the other direction, as far from Toronto as from Melbourne—and stay there, forever. Never come back.

  I consider all my uncaught thoughts, my misplaced impulses, my unspoken hatreds flocking like crows, swarming, sent out beyond recall. All the many times, over the years, I wished death on my mother, my lovers, my bosses, myself.

  And I think: I’ll see that girl again, sometime.

  Thinking, at the same dislocated moment: But I see her already, every day.

  In the mirror, in old photos, out the window, in the passing crowd. Down the block, around the corner, at the very outer edge of where my eyes don’t see. Everywhere.

  Thinking how ridiculous it is to be almost forty years old and still care so very much about something which happened oh so long ago, something I had absolutely nothing to do with. Something I’ll never be able to change, no matter how many stories I write.

  I wanted Aoife dead, and she is.

  I wanted Dad dead, and he will be. Soon enough.

  I wanted to die myself, more times than once; don’t anymore, of course. Not for years.