Kiss Kill: A gripping psychological thriller with a brilliant twist (The Girl In The Book Series)

by Dan Noble

  Instead of giving in, I concentrated: these words of Mother’s about reality and grounding books into the real world have come to mean a great deal to me, because they were among her last. After the second time she tried to kill herself, eighteen years ago, Mother stopped speaking. This followed the first suicide attempt, when Mother swallowed her Prozac supply and nodded off reading her favorite Lorrie Moore short fiction. I remember my fifteen-year-old self thinking bravo, how well you’ve grounded that book forever in our lives. How could I ever top that? Didn’t I spend time trying to come up with an answer. Again, we can’t help what really gets to us, though Lord knows I’ve tried.

  Leading to that first time, she’d spent days of her life trying to work out how a writer could be so articulate, could get everything so beautifully, painfully, right. And then there she was, the print transferred onto her face where she’d let the book rest, her vomit adhering the words to her in a whole new way. If my marvelous friend Angie, who was always troublingly attached to Mother, and I had found her—our mouths agape, our constant attentions evidently failures—even seconds later, she’d have died then and there. As it stood, the vomit had blocked most of her airway.

  “You saved her life, girls,” the EMT with the immaculately groomed goatee had said to us as we rode along to the hospital; he called her puking emesis and patted our backs hard in a reassuring way I wasn’t used to. Still, my best friend and I weren’t convinced. We thought our schemes at enlivening post-divorce Mother had not only been a failure, but perhaps had landed her here. How many times had she asked, “Just leave me alone girls, please”?

  After the divorce and before the first suicide, when I spent hours hovering over her, drinking ginger ale through bending straws and trying to beg her off the sofa, she’d say, “Millie, show, don’t tell.” I already knew the basics of fiction craft, though I probably couldn’t name off the full fifty states. Mother had a book in her. I grew up knowledgeable of that fact. “If only we could medically remove it,” my father would say to me in confidence sometimes, after he let me pull the ring on his Budweiser for that satisfying carbon discharge.

  But in those days she spent lying in bed or watching reruns of The Love Boat, it was as if I couldn’t hear Mother at all. I saw what I wanted her to be and I’d just rant, ticking off items on my own agenda, in order to get her there. “Why don’t you just get up and do something?” I’d yell. “And how about drinking some juice instead of ginger ale for a change (what an example I was setting sliding my own Canada Dry can behind my back)? Remember fruit? You used to be Mrs. Fruit—”

  “Ms.”

  “Oranges and mangos, and people even juice strawberries now, I hear you can do bananas with the right attachment.” We didn’t have any of the attachments and we both knew it. We had a juicer, but it was buried in the basement with the other wedding gifts Mother had been granted in the divorce. I used to look at them so differently than I do now—as artifacts that could tell the story of what went wrong. I was a natural optimist, always looking to solve the problem. If only we could medically remove it.

  “I’m just not that kinda girl anymore,” Mother said without a shred of nostalgia.

  But I was hungry for the old days, in awe of the way meaning changes over time; all those hopeful countertop appliances. We weren’t those people now; I was starting to wonder if we ever were. I didn’t think Mother did ever have a book in her. Ms. Fruit didn’t have much to say at all.

  But I didn’t say that—it would’ve just been more telling, likely; instead, what I’d do to show Mother was get up and dance the tango while sipping cranberry juice out of one of the Star Wars glasses from Burger King—usually the Princess Lea—and Mother would actually laugh. More satisfying than the Budweiser carbon discharge. God, I loved to hear her shocking cackle.

  “I’ll say one thing for you, you’ve got a wonderful sense of humor,” she said once, as if it were a magnificent gift. Sometimes she’d cry a little after and say, “Get your old mom a tissue, would you?” My shoulders would go rigid with her compliment, I’d carry the tissue like a knight’s sword, but I’d wonder why my humor, if it was so wonderful, wasn’t enough. Was there anything I could ever show that would be enough?

  True to the EMT’s words, Mother lived, but no longer was she the woman who’d fallen asleep reading of a faded starlet in a Midwestern motel who somehow touched the tender spot of Mother’s own troubles. This personality byte had gone the way of the juicer. Somewhere in the transaction—the reading, the pills, the vomit, the crossing over, the crossing back—Mother had abandoned her depression somewhere, like a left duffle bag on a train platform.

  I should have been thrilled to leave all that behind. But without it, I had to get to know her all over again. And not in the way Angie and I had hoped during all those years plying her with outlandish proposals for physical activity.

  It wasn’t that she’d become happy, only flat. Perhaps the worst surprise of all though, was that she didn’t seem to need me in the way she had. I could stay in my room all day, smoking cigarettes I pretended to want and like, and she wouldn’t notice my absence—never mind the smoke; I think she ignored that on purpose—until she was off to bed herself.

  Suddenly my father’s catchphrase from my childhood took on a new sense: “Beware a well-read woman,” he used to say whenever Mother said the thing about carrying a book. I’d never understood this comment—and to overcompensate, laughed each time I’d heard it; surely a woman and a book could be nothing but harmless; just look at all those men with their guns, Mother used to say. And that made sense to me. Now she was gone, the words rolled through my head like a ticker.

  After the second botched suicide, she’d been transferred to New Jersey General Hospital’s psychiatric wing, far from our Long Island home, but where she’d spent time twice before—after the divorce, and then after the first suicide. Thirty days later, stumped by her loss of speech, and threatened by me for the questionable ethics of their treatments, the doctors released to my custody a silent Mother. I’ll never forget the way she looked sitting in my passenger seat, her hands folded on her lap, waiting for me to strap her in, as if this type of thing—an ordinary car ride—was no longer a part of her world. I couldn’t help myself, and kissed her on the cheek after I’d leaned through the open door to click the belt. She looked at me and smiled. It was the last time she’d do so.

  At first it was nerve-wracking, the silence. There were days so quiet I would forget I could speak myself. Every sound became a feature: the crunch of a chip, the tinkle of a fork. When I turned on the hi-fi, I had to dial the sound real low, volume had become unbearable. I wanted to hate her. What the fuck was she doing to our lives? But I’d catch a glimpse of her through her office door, after the second suicide, so studious with her blackboards and her books, and I felt overwhelmingly that she was being the only person she could be. I didn’t hate her, despite Dr. Weiner my therapist advising me it was okay to do so. You don’t know her, I’d say. But eventually, the ways in which I, as witness, might translate this experience engorged my senses. For the first time, I felt I wielded some power.

  Unlike the inertia following the first suicide, she now had me drive her to rare bookshops, whose addresses she’d rip out of the Yellow Pages and circle in runny black pen. She’d schlep a tote bag to the library in some of her old Parisian getups—all this action, so different from her years on the sofa—but this time as I watched her purposefully scanning the card catalogs, I was thinking that surely her speech would return at any moment, this woman so fond of words. What book was she looking for? Whatever it was, she didn’t seem to find it. Always, she’d come out deflated and empty-handed. After such a trip, I once drove to The Olde Ice Cream Parlor—the one with the old Singer sewing machine tables, where you could pump the iron foot pedal while you waited for your root beer float.

  When I pulled the car to a stop in front, I thought I’d done something right. She smiled. But when I turned the car off, she w
ouldn’t budge. “Wuthering Heights,” I said. In the gloaming, the outlines of the naked trees terrifying and beautiful in the foreground over the old town shop fronts, Mother spoke her single, last words. “Yes. You’ve got it. Finally.”

  “What? What did I get?”

  Nothing.

  “I read that here, yes. But so what? What could that possibly matter now?”

  I couldn’t decide if she was an asshole or the smartest woman in the world. It was a bold statement, her lack of statement, but she weathered ‘mutism’ as if it were common sense, certainly nothing out of the ordinary. Often, I found myself feeling uncomfortably chatty with others. I thought I spoke too much, so many wasted words. With so many unknowns soon enough I became obsessed with teasing the meanings out of everything Mother was doing, even if I wasn’t sure why I cared, or what this pursuit might have said about my sanity.

  Looking back with what I know now, I’m not sure I could even label either of those acts suicide, and that’s the problem isn’t it? This reductionist obsession with summing it all up: this story is about this. In fact, when I’m quite honest with myself—in a way I have come to believe she meant to teach me to be—I don’t know what my life would have been without Mother’s all-engrossing mystery to solve. And so, despite the medical spin the doctors put on her mutism after the second time, I was convinced her silence was not only a choice; it was part of her plan. I was right, though it would take me years to understand in what way.

  As the story goes, God had created his world in seven days, beginning with light and then supplementing that with birds, sea creatures, and man; now I pictured Mother creating hers—the way she’d relied upon the best stories to do for her before. But instead of putting into words her experience of reality, she was making from the words through which she’d always experienced reality, an entirely new reality. My mother was a genius none of us could deal with, who’d discovered a wormhole in the universe through which books were the entry. Haha. I know. Believe me, disbelief is natural. I’m not going to try to dissuade you just yet. But that’s why I need to show you what happened, show you what happened before she disappeared, so you’ll understand how she did it.

  Of course I didn’t know this was literally true at the time. She was into books, yes. She was studying something, had clearly dedicated her life to it. But could I have made the leap in belief that putting it all together would have required? Unlikely. Even if I had, I’d have worked out a way to block it out. Instead, as a teenager, I knew reckless attention seeking and intimacy with every Bad Element in town, forging notes and permission slips Mother couldn’t be fussed about, long walks to the grocery store with her wallet and a fake note permitting me to use her credit card. But I hadn’t the slightest clue what the fuck Mother—the woman I’d spent every day I could remember in awe of—was doing, and my presence didn’t seem to make the slightest difference to whatever it was. I was gutted, and she wasn’t even gone yet, though she certainly wasn’t the Mother she’d been. But she’d changed after the first suicide attempt, too. Why would I pin anything unusual on this subsequent alteration?

  It’s a big ask to believe in a point where fiction and fact overlap unless you witness it for yourself. It’s a ridiculous amount to take in—especially when we’re programmed to develop precisely along the opposite logic route: give up make-believe for the real world. But take solace in this: Believers most often begin as disbelievers. I might say it takes one to know one. That’s why the experience is so important. If I merely told the facts of this story, you’d never believe it. Show, don’t tell. Yes, Mother. For Christ’s sake, I get it.

  Back then, when it all began, Angie and I lived it, becoming more like sisters than friends, holed up in Mother’s giant house crouched over all those books in the secret stairway, behind a false wall off the kitchen, that went nowhere as far as we could tell, and still I couldn’t deal with believing it. Plenty of people were there and still couldn’t see it. And so, it makes sense that with something like this, in times like these, only the most dramatic methods of proof will do. I believe this is why Mother did what she did.

  But after all those years of shredding tissues in the cheap halogen light of the very expensive, very unclaimable, behavioral therapy office, trying to tamp my hope of her return, I told myself I’d never go back to believing. Imagine your worst fear’s come true and live with that, is the survival skill I learned those thousands of dollars later—the way to concentrate on the bits of life that allow you to go on living. It’s far more difficult than it sounds. And often, dangerous—living each moment as if it not only may be, but is in fact, your last.

  Later, as a mother myself, I swore I’d never risk losing myself in the obsession of false hope again. I wouldn’t do that to my daughter. But we never quite know what we’ll do until we’re shoved right up against that brick wall.

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  About the Author

  Dan Noble is a pseudonym for Daniella Brodsky, the Australian/American author of novels across a number of genres, including general fiction, women’s fiction, contemporary romance, romantic comedy, chick lit, and YA. When you see the name Dan Noble, you know you’re getting a gripping psychological thriller with a brilliant twist.

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  @daniellabrodsky

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  KISS KILL

  Copyright © 2016 by Daniella Brodsky

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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