Phobic

by Cortney Pearson

  Every step on the sidewalk is like a death sentence, because each one makes me wonder what it was like for my mother. To enter these doors knowing she would probably never leave again.

  Cool air blasts at me once we get inside, and two cops stand to the side of a large desk shielded by a ceiling-length pane of glass. The officer at the desk, a woman with her hair in a ponytail, lifts her brows at me.

  “Can I help you?”

  I’m a topsy-turvy clutter of nerves and flesh, but I somehow manage to speak.

  “I made an appointment. I’m here to see my—” Cotton fills my throat. I struggle to even swallow. “To see Marian Crenshaw?”

  “Do you have a visitor’s pass?” the woman asks in a higher tone than before, as though she’s surprised I happen to know one of the inmates’ names.

  I shuffle and pull the blue paper I got from the guard at the front booth from my pocket. The female officer looks from me, to Todd.

  “Family only,” she says. And from Todd’s black hair and starkly white skin, so opposite from my strawberry blonde hair, it’s clear we’re not family.

  Todd gives my bicep a squeeze. “I’ll wait out here,” he says, gesturing to the cinderblock and glass doors.

  I bite my lip. Go in to a prison alone. I can do this. I can. All the crazies will be behind bars. This is my mother we’re talking about.

  I suck air in slowly through my nostrils, but it does nothing for the blood beating at my skin. My phone buzzes and I nearly jerk when I see Joel’s name on the screen.

  Where are you?

  I stuff it back into my pocket. Nowhere he needs to know.

  That family obligation line earlier may be enough for him, but I have to know the truth. To learn more about myself. My mother. Why she killed someone, and what that has to do with our house. Something is up. Something even worse than just the fixing itself or creaking and wavering the lights in response to my ramblings to it.

  It’s all linked, I’m sure of it.

  A harsh bell croaks from the ceiling in sync with the blink of a red light. An officer with a receding hairline and a thick belt at his hip opens the door made of white bars.

  “Miss Crenshaw?” he says.

  I look back at Todd, who points to his heart. I wet my lips. “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “My name is Officer Drummond. If you’ll follow me.”

  I give a feeble smile and enter.

  Cages line the massive hallway; rows and rows, and then more rows of bars, barricading women, penning them up. Noises come from all sides. Footsteps, sounds of speaking, someone singing. A few arms dangle from the bars, and the sight makes me shudder.

  Officer Drummond leads me through a door at the far end, slides his card through a slider and enters a password. I hardly notice, though. The words on the door scream at me.

  Psych. Ward.

  I’m pretty sure that only means one thing. My feet move forward, but all thoughts disconnect from them. Is my mom crazy?

  The word crazy is way overused now. People say it to name the simplest archaic thing, or even as a synonym for whacked out or silly or something. I wonder if she’s crazy in the real sense of the word. Mentally unhinged. I wonder if Joel knows. Sure, just rack it up there with all the other stuff he’s keeping from me.

  I don’t realize I’ve stopped until Drummond backtracks to me. His bald forehead shines, and he looks me right in the eyes.

  “We’ve made special arrangements for this visit, considering your situation. Are you prepared, Miss Crenshaw?”

  Am I prepared. For what?

  I don’t know if I really want this, but then I stop that thought. Yes, I do. I’m in too far to leave now. If I go now I’ll always wonder.

  I dip my head and say, “Yes,” but the word doesn’t leave my throat.

  He leads me to a room with a single, book-sized window at eye-level. Oh Hades, she’s in a padded cell. Crap, my mom is totally in a padded cell.

  “You won’t—” Major frog in my throat. I try to clear it with an excessively loud sound, considering the silence in the white hallway. “I don’t want to be, you know…”

  Officer Drummond’s eyes are diagnostic. “No one is allowed to be alone with our intensive care inmates.”

  Intensive care. Oh man, what am I doing?

  His card slices through the reader, his fingers torture the keys until they scream out beeping sounds, and the door unlatches with a click.

  I’ve seen my mother in old pictures, mostly from her and dad’s wedding where the scene is all orange because the pictures are faded. But childhood memories are different from older ones. I didn’t register things then the way I do now. I don’t know what she looks like. Not really.

  She wears a blue, full-body suit and paces the room, tapping the fingers of her right hand to her temple. Her head bobbles as she goes, and she pauses every once in a while to sing or mutter.

  “‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?’”

  My chest surges with pity, and a ridiculous desire to understand what happened to her, to bring her to do what she did. I refuse to believe she was a bad person. I can’t even think that, especially seeing her like this.

  “Someone to see you, Marian,” says Drummond’s deep voice. Another officer joins us, a stocky woman with short, blonde hair. Drummond gives me a nod of encouragement.

  At hearing her name, she turns, still singing. “‘How does your garden…grow?’”

  My vision races, trying to beat the speed of my pulse, to take in everything I can about her. My mother.

  Her face looks normal, though her cheeks are a bit sunken in with giant purple circles above them. Scratches cover her arms and neck. But her eyes are blue, like mine. Like they’d been in that picture Sierra’s mom displayed on her News Broadcast from Hell.

  Those eyes expand as if she recognizes me, and she sits on the bed nailed to the wall. Holy sheep, what do I even say? I had questions planned out, but there’s no way I could plan a moment like this. I expected a nice little chat, full of happy mom things and cozy advice to help me figure out just what to do. I never expected to be more the adult than she is.

  Slowly, so slowly, her gaze stills and traps mine. A crease starts at her brow, gentle enough to not seem angry until it deepens to the size of a pothole.

  “Piper,” she mumbles. My heart leaps. She remembers me. She loves me.

  I open my mouth to speak and inch toward her, arms stiff and forward like a robot that can’t bend in the normal places people can. Mom blinks several times and cocks her head to the side. Pulse hammering, I move closer.

  In an instant, Mom springs from her bed.

  “Not supposed to!” she shouts, while I squeal and pull back. “He was number thirteen. In the walls. The walls know. The walls know!”

  The female officer darts for Mom, but not before Mom lashes out at me, sinking her nails in the skin of my arms. Red lines travel behind her nails. The pain sears, but not more than in my heart, which shatters.

  “The walls know. He was number thirteen! Number thirteen!” Mom still claws for me. Officer Drummond cuts in, holding her back with what seems like all of his strength.

  “Get her out of here!” he cries to the female officer, and she drags me from the room. I get a peek at Mom, who twitches one shoulder and mumbles the same phrase. “He was number thirteen,” over and over, while Drummond attempts to settle her down. And I want to puke.

  It’s the same thing she muttered on her way to the police car after her trial, the last time I saw her. After she’d been found guilty and stared back at Joel, Dad, and me from the sidewalk.

  I was seven years old, waiting in the marble hall outside her courtroom. The doors busted open, but I couldn’t see her through the policemen’s blue suits.

  “Let me go! Piper!” She shrieked my name, strumming my existence. Her struggle ignited the fight in me. I hadn’t seen her in a year; I wouldn’t let them keep her from me now.

  “Mom!” I shouted
, sinking to the floor where my father couldn’t reach me. He scaled the marble, but I was too fast. People barricaded my way, but I didn’t care about them. I had to get to her.

  “Piper!” she called again, her white arm jabbing out in the space between two officers like she was already imprisoned and they were her bars. “He was number thirteen, Piper. Number thirteen!”

  My father’s arm trapped my waist, but I stopped fighting. Her voice was no longer the sultry caress I’d once clung to. It was cracked. It was hoarse and desperate. Afraid.

  More shoulders, faces, hands got in the way as I was dragged one direction while my mother was carted in another. Toward the sunlight spearing through the main doors. Toward the police car parked out front.

  Sound is invisible, but at that moment her voice grew edges, sharp and visceral, and left tangible imprints in my subconscious.

  He was number thirteen.

  I asked Dad what this meant a few years later. Hunter Morgan had been our neighbor, and Mom had no real reason to stab him to death—not that my dad, or my brother, or even the jury knew. Dad’s brows formed ridges on his forehead, making his receding hairline more prominent.

  “They thought Mom had killed twelve other people, Peanut,” Dad said in his plain, painful way of telling my then ten-year-old self the answer to the question I’ve still never stopped posing. The thirteenth what?

  Dad leaned back in his chair in his library. The chandeliers were dimmed as he preferred to do while he read in the evenings. His watery glance shifted to the carved door beside his desk, and he mopped his brow.

  “And did she?” I asked as if offering one of my vital organs for him to sever from the rest of me. I held my breath, waiting, dreading the answer.

  A wail came from the door behind him, along with several thumps in succession, like someone pounding from behind it. Each sound smacked the underside of my skin, jerking me.

  Dad adjusted his glasses while I rattled with fear. He crossed the room. His long legs bent at odd angles, and he tugged on one of his suspenders. A nervous habit, like he needed something to hold on to.

  “Bedtime, Peanut,” he said, not giving me an answer.

  I run straight into Todd’s embrace. Relief has never tasted so good, and never been so bitter at the same time. Seeing my mother like that is worse than the kids coughing at me in the halls or sending me nasty messages. I’ll never be able to wipe it from my mind. Never.

  I sob all over Todd’s shoulder. Sob, like a child, like I haven’t remembered crying in my whole life. Moaning cries, embarrassing, real-life, genuine weeping. And Todd holds me tighter than he ever has before.

  He keeps his arms around me as we walk to his truck, both arms, so we’re doing some funky sidestep dance move. He even gets my door and helps me lift my foot in, not saying a word.

  He flips on the radio, then looks at me, opens his mouth, shuts it off. The cab is deadly quiet, and my mother’s wails call to me from inside my head.

  I mull through her number thirteen talk, trying to figure out what it meant. I’m baffled she would shout something like that at me, now, nine years later. I don’t believe she killed twelve other people too, and it’s not only because they never found evidence to support it. Killing one person is bad enough.

  Todd makes odd conversation about football, about the guys on the team, who’s hooking up with who, and I’m so grateful for the mundane subjects that remind me of reality. Because right now reality is on a different continent.

  I barely notice the two-hour drive home. My thoughts are like an intense movie that sucks you in and makes you lose track of all time. I click back into focus when I realize Todd is slowing down in front of our houses. Unlike every other house on Hemlock Avenue, the windows in mine are all dark.

  “Where’s Joel?” Todd asks.

  I squint. “I’m not sure. His car is in the driveway. Maybe he’s out back.”

  We regard each other for a few stretched seconds. He looks guarded and unsure, one hand strumming the steering wheel. I nearly lose my head because his features look so good wearing concern for me. But I’m too exhausted to move or think.

  My house seems to slouch like an old man. Flowering ground cover circles the foundation like a collar. The long white porch wraps like a beard, and the curved windows and their decorative purple eaves return a stare of charming sadness, like the house knows this is something I have to suffer through.

  “Want me to come inside with you?” Todd asks.

  The cab of his truck is the same as it’s always been, the same brownish dashboard and the crack trickling above his radio from the time his brother punched it after his girlfriend dumped him. But for some reason it takes my brain a few extra seconds to connect where I am.

  Todd’s lips spread into a small I-don’t-know-what-else-to-do-so-I’m-smiling smile. He nudges my chin with his thumb and gets out. My hand stays on the silver handle. I don’t have the strength to pull it.

  Todd saves me the trouble. He opens my door and helps me to the sidewalk.

  I’m a roller coaster of emotion inside, up one minute, down the next. She’s in the Psych Ward. Joel must have known—and Dad definitely knew. They should have told me. I’m not some lightweight weakling. In case they didn’t notice, I’ve been living in the same freaky house as they have. I deal with crap at school daily—I could definitely have handled this.

  It’s one thing to be warned your mom is nuts. It’s entirely another to expect to see her healthy, only to have her attack you seconds after seeing you for the first time in years. I shiver. That animalistic blaze in her eyes. It shouldn’t be possible for a human being to look that feral.

  Heat pulses from Todd’s body, warming my left side. His feet move in synch with mine, and we leave the pockmarked driveway behind to scrape along the grass. Only, my steps grow heavier the closer we get to my porch.

  The smell of spent exhaust emits from Joel’s gray Ford Taurus, and the metal ticks in that way cars do when they’ve barely been shut off. If he just got here, he would have turned on a few lights.

  Darkness emanates from the blackened windows of my home, tacking shudders along my skin. The shady feeling breeds; it creeps in through the cracks in my ribs and settles warning over my heart.

  I stop in place, and Todd stumbles into my side. Without any kind of aim, I reach for him and end up with a fistful of his shirt. The house heals itself. Always. There’s no way the siding can be chipped off. But a colossal gash disfigures the gray exterior, revealing a chunk of the skinny lath boards beneath.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  A surge of energy injects through me. I run closer to the side, near the linden tree. Sure enough, the gash is there. It looks like someone took a giant scraper and mauled the siding.

  My mouth goggles open while thoughts bumble around inside my brain like jumping beans. It shouldn’t be there. The walls know. What had she meant—there’s no way she could have known about this.

  “Damage,” Todd says with his hands in his pockets. He shuffles a foot over the grass. Shadows cover his features in the moonlight, so it’s difficult to read him, but his voice sounds careful. Checked. “Probably just somebody vandalizing. We can patch it up. Repaint it, if you want.”

  I shake my head, hands trembling, and for a small moment, the echoes of my mother’s craziness disappear. Something is wrong.

  The door opens for me before I even get my key. Almost like the house is eager to have me back. I check the knob. Though the door swung open, it’s still locked.

  “Joel?” I call to the darkness. The lights flick on of their own accord, teasing the flesh at my neck.

  “Whoa,” Todd says, whirling around, but I ignore him.

  I tread through to the brightened kitchen. The microwave, the bamboo knife block, the stove—all untouched. The basement door pulls my gaze, but I drag my attention away and scurry to the dining room. Stacks of paper create a small city on the table, but the old iron fireplace and the painting above it
are the room’s only inhabitants.

  “Joel!” I run to the stairs and gawk up, but I know I wouldn’t find him up there, either. Blood chugs in my system. He’s not here.

  But his car is, a thought adds to the conversation with myself in my head. Where is my brother?

  I meet Todd in the entryway. He leans against the circular table sitting smack in the center of the opening, directly beneath the chandelier.

  “He’s not in the parlor thing,” he says, gesturing to the open room across from us. “Did he tell you he was going anywhere?”

  “No!” I say, sounding a little too hysterical.

  “Maybe he was here when whoever did that to your house. Maybe he’s just tracking ‘em down.”

  I run my hands through my hair and pace across the floor. My breathing is almost too fast for my lungs to keep up with.

  “Too much is happening, Todd. It’s impossible for anyone to vandalize this house. You know, impossible, that thing you’re such a fan of?”

  “Maybe you should sit down. Are you sure you’re okay? It was probably hard on you, seeing your mo—”

  “You don’t understand. See this spot?” I point to the wall behind the door.

  “Joel and my dad were fighting, and Joel threw a radio at Dad, but it missed and went into the wall. There was a gash there—I saw it. But the house creaked and repaired itself, like it never happened, right in front of our eyes.”

  Todd raises his eyebrows. “The house did? Or your dad?”

  The lights pop and flicker.

  I swallow and drag Todd to the kitchen. I crouch down and stroke the smooth floorboards in front of the china hutch, feet away from the red rug.

  “When I was ten years old I was drawing right here with a permanent marker, something for school. But the marker bled through my paper all over the hardwood floor. I freaked out and ran to get something to wipe it off, clean it up. But the marks were gone when I got back.”

  Todd’s forehead wrinkles with disbelief. “Are you sure this has nothing to do with seeing your mom?”

  Infuriated, I pull him to the living room and point at the stained glass above the entrance. The dyed reds and blues don’t make any particular pattern, but they’re still a nice touch.