by Gin Phillips
Daniel. For months and months she had thought that she was happy with him. She realized now that she had not been. That seemed as if it would be an obvious thing: happy or unhappy. But it had not been obvious at all. She had not been happy with Daniel. She had not been happy with other men, either, although she had not been unhappy. They could not have made her unhappy because her happiness was unrelated to them, independent of them. They had been peripheral.
She watched Silas’s face. The moon was bright and cast a light through the shutters. Eyelashes and soft lips and angled jaw and three eyebrow hairs that broke formation and pointed skyward.
She had done this with her mother once upon a time. Her mother tended to fall asleep early on the couch, while her father was still watching Johnny Carson. If Ren stayed quiet, sometimes her father would forget she was in the room and not send her to bed. She would sit with her back to the sofa—she was usually sitting on the floor, using furniture only as a backrest—and she would twist her head around and watch her mother sleep. Her mother’s eyes never completely closed, and Ren could see the white slits of her eyeballs. Her mother had three freckles on her right cheek and a red birthmark just behind her earlobe. She had the silver shine of cavities in the left side of her mouth, bottom and top, but no silver at all on the right side. Ren had cataloged every line and curve of her face. Maybe that was some marker of love—a hunger for a person’s smallest details, a compulsion to memorize the bits and pieces that came together to make the whole. How long since she had seen her mother’s face? She couldn’t remember, couldn’t call up a clear image of her face, but she could see the cavities exactly, perfectly, and those freckles and the shape of her ear.
There must be a reason this girl was following her.
She was becoming more and more aware of a terror other than the nightmares. It was Lynay’s fault. Lynay’s red hands had clarified the parrot woman’s words, and now the words were sharper things. Ren could no longer pretend she didn’t understand the puzzle. While she lay in their bed, she would run the pads of her fingers over the curve of Silas’s shoulder, pressing herself against him so she would feel the rise and fall of his chest. She loved the sound of his breathing. Sometimes she would position her face where she could feel his breath hit her forehead: She would register every inhale and exhale and try to lull herself to sleep by the rhythm.
He was a new and inexplicable thing, and there must be a price for having found him. She had been with him for nearly three months now, three months of long days and nights together. She had wondered if the down-a-rabbit-hole quality of the canyon had worked some sort of spell on them, made this connection seem stronger than it was. But they were out of the rabbit hole now. And even in the canyon, the early mornings and manual labor, the monotony and sore backs, the disagreements over explanations and evidence and which way to smooth out a wall did not lend themselves to facile relationships. He was a new and inexplicable thing.
The fear, also, was new. At first she had slept more deeply with Silas than she had since she was a child. For nights on end she had slept without waking once to the cry of an owl or the snap of a branch or the brief snatch of a song. Then the parrot woman spoke, and since her warning, sleep had ebbed and the fear had grown. At night it pulled at Ren, tugging at her thoughts when she closed her eyes. Her need for Silas pressed on her chest, and she kept one hand on him. She could not stop confirming his heartbeat. She lay staring at his face or the ceiling or the shadowed topography of the sheets, and prayed. Please live forever. Please be next to me, forever and ever without end, amen.
She was not used to these twists and turns her mind took without her consent. Scott used to tell her she had a mind like a moth, stopping for a second at one idea and then flying off again—“hither, thither and yon,” he had said, which was ridiculous because what teenage boy used a phrase like that? (“Hither, thither and your face,” she had answered.) But that was before she had trained her mind to be straight and tidy. She was normally very good now at keeping her mind on track—moving forward, never back. No tangents. Thinking only the thoughts that should be thought. Suddenly that had changed. Her mind was letting in all sorts of unwanted visitors. It was as if Silas had worked his way inside her head, and he’d left the door wide open behind him. Now Scott and her mother and Lynay and Non and anything else wandered in and took up residence.
Was Non’s message a warning? Was that the same reason Lynay had paint-blood on her hands? Would something happen to Silas at the site? Or was it a threat? Did these spirits have a power that Ren had not suspected? Could they hurt someone? They’d never seemed like anything more than tricks of the light, shadows flashing across the wall. They were memories without substance. But maybe they were stronger than she had realized.
She had lost Scott, and that loss had burned out her circuits. His disappearance had been incomprehensible. At twelve years old, she could not compute it and had never anticipated it. But now she knew, lying warm next to Silas, that one day he would be gone, whether because of some young thing or because of a crash of metal and glass or because of bedsores and bony hands that struggled to hold a glass of water. He would be gone, and she would be broken beyond repair. She knew this after only months.
You will lose him.
It was the fear that made her know it was true. She recognized it and could not run from it. She would lose him. And she could piece herself together—she knew after Scott that no matter what happened, she could piece herself back together—but the cracks would be there, spidery and endless, all her pieces glued back in the right shape but never whole again.
She watched his face, and he wrinkled his forehead.
Someone was singing. A wordless hum, sweet and soft.
Lynay was standing on the rounded footboard of the bed, the balls of her feet balanced on the polished wood as if she were climbing a tree and pausing before leaping for the next branch. Her hands were stretched toward Ren, palms up, and they were pale in the moonlight, no longer covered in red.
Ren sat up, turning herself so that she partially blocked Silas. The small of her back was against his.
“I’m tired of this,” she said, whispering, and part of her hoped that she was crazy, that this was a dream and not a thousand-year-old girl pantomiming in her bedroom.
“Ren?” asked Silas, smacking his lips.
“Go back to sleep,” she said, trying to keep her voice light while she kept a careful watch on Lynay.
Silas rolled over without opening his eyes.
“Well?” asked Ren, still quiet. Lynay was looking at her with something like pity, something that could have been kindness or knowledge or judgment, depending on how the shadows from the moonlight fell.
Lynay looked to Silas, lying on his back. She stepped from the footboard to the floor, landing too easily, as if gravity had forgotten her. She was next to Silas now, his body separating her from Ren. She was so close to him that her stomach brushed against the mattress, or, at least, appeared to.
“Stay away from him,” Ren warned.
Lynay did not stay away. She leaned down toward Silas’s face. For the first time since Ren had seen her, the girl’s hair was loose around her face. It was matted and very long, past her waist, like shallow waves falling. She raised her hand to Silas’s face and did not touch him, traced the lines of his face in the air, the outline of his jaw and ears and nose and eyebrows.
Ren placed her own hand over Silas’s chest, reaching through Lynay’s dark hair and feeling nothing but air. Instead she felt Silas’s breathing and his heart, still steady.
Lynay looked at Ren, and there was a raw longing in her eyes, but it did not seem to be longing for Silas in particular. It was not lust but something more general. There was envy as well. And there was pain. Her eyes shone, wet.
Silas stirred, muttering under his breath.
Lynay pressed her wrist to hi
s forehead and held it there, skin touching skin, closer to a mother checking for fever than a lover showing affection. She leaned closer, and Ren knew the girl was about to kiss Silas. She would have been jealous if the girl had seemed more solid. Instead she thought of a succubus stealing life with a touch of her lips. Then, as Lynay tilted her head, her hair fell across Silas’s face. He frowned and swiped at his nose, sniffing. The sound echoed through the room.
When Silas spoke, his voice was clear and alert.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Immediately after Scott’s accident, her parents treated Ren as if she had nearly died herself, as if she had woken up in a hospital room bruised and swollen and asked for ice chips through cracked lips. As if they had hugged each other and wiped tears from their faces and had brought her home carefully wrapped in blankets and bandages and helped her from the car with their arms around her waist.
They were everywhere—sitting on the edge of her bed to tell her good night, handing her orange juice when she came downstairs in the morning, opening the front door just as her hand touched the knob on her way in from school. They wanted to talk. No, they wanted her to talk. For weeks, they would ask her precise and thoughtful questions about school and homework, gymnastics and friends and television. They would listen for as long as she could talk, and when she stopped, they would lean forward slightly, encouraging more.
She felt that she could not talk enough, could not fill up enough space with her words. The one thing they never asked her about was Scott. She did not want to talk about him, about the accident or about his absence. She deeply appreciated her parents’ evasion.
Her first birthday after the accident, her thirteenth, fell in the midst of the attention and evasion. Ren’s mother insisted on a dance-party theme. Anna had found a disco ball that actually worked and hung it from the den ceiling, so the dozen or so girls attending stood in clumps and swayed their shoulders to Michael Jackson. It was a small room, and the lights from the disco ball flashed large and frantic across the furniture and bodies and the backs of heads.
Normally mothers would stay in the kitchen, getting cake ready, stacking up presents, staying out of the way. Ren could not tell her mother that it was embarrassing to have her there, standing with all the girls, asking them where they got their earrings and if they watched Miami Vice, which she knew Ren loved. It did not reflect well on Ren that her mother did not know how parties worked. But it seemed to be okay. She apologized to Allison Shum and Betsy Sapp for her mother, and they both shrugged. “Don’t worry about it,” Allison said, whispering. “It’s been a really tough time for her. We totally understand.”
The girls were extremely nice to her mother and extremely nice to Ren. It was the first time she realized that Scott’s death had made her somehow glamorous. There was some part of these girls that envied her.
At one moment during the party, her mother stood against the wall. She was not talking to anyone. Ren looked up and saw her standing there while the disco ball’s lights hit her full in the face, her eyes disappearing behind spinning white squares. The light blinded her again and again. She smiled so brightly.
It all began to change.
Once Ren was trying to hang a calendar in her room, and she smashed her thumb with the hammer. The nail turned black with a pretty swath of blue. A few days later, after the novelty of the wound had worn off, she painted her nails with dark red polish. It took only a little time before the damage showed through again—the nail would not hold paint anymore. So the red flaked off, one chip at a time, until the bruise was obvious.
The same thing happened to her parents.
First her father put the coffeepot in the freezer. Ren was alone in the kitchen, staring at the toaster and waiting for the toast to eject. This was January. Her father walked through the kitchen door, straight to the coffeepot, and poured a cup of coffee in his beige mug. He left the coffee cup on the counter, carried the coffeepot to the freezer, put it on the top shelf, and closed the door.
Ren laughed; then her father turned around. His eyes were open but blank.
“Dad?” she asked.
Harold left the room, and she heard him walk up the stairs. He did not come back, did not stick his head around the corner, grinning, did not laugh from the hallway and tell her it was all a joke. She waited for a long time, hoping. Then she opened the freezer and found the pot precariously balanced on a bag of Tater Tots. (Scott had loved Tater Tots, and no one could stand to eat them anymore.) She returned the coffeepot to its burner.
That was the first time she saw her father walk in his sleep. Her mother started locking their bedroom door after Ren found him in the front yard one night. He also started sleeping at odd hours, and sometimes when she got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, she would hear a noise and find him wide awake, eating a sandwich or putting a golf ball on the den floor.
Her mother stopped appearing at supper. Anna would prepare a meal at some point during the day, leave it in the refrigerator or the oven, and put a note on the counter with instructions. Either Ren or her father would get hungry at some point and heat the dinner. They stopped sitting together at the table. Ren would eat in her room or at the kitchen counter, and her father would eat in the green recliner. Both Anna and Harold seemed to be working more and were rarely home before dark.
Later, months and years later, Ren would think that she should have asked questions in those early stages. Just once she should have asked what was happening. But she didn’t. Parts of the day kept being chipped away—no more meals together, no more mother picking her up from school, no more riding in the back of her father’s truck (which was clearly unsafe and he wondered why he had ever allowed it), no more laughter from the kitchen that pulled her downstairs, no more music playing too loud (she had to use headphones because they could not stand music coming from upstairs), no more wrestling. That was the most obvious thing—routines and habits were being taken away. But also parts of her mother were disappearing: the touch of her mother’s hand against Ren’s face in the morning, the way her mother had of biting her lip just before she laughed, the sound of her mother calling her name through the halls of the house, her mother’s excitement over parties. While her father was sleeping, her mother was fading away.
What Ren felt at first was relief. That was why she did not ask questions. She had not liked her parents’ constant attention after the accident. She had felt as if her face might crack and split open while they watched her and something winged might spring from her skull. She felt there was something inside of her, struggling, and her parents were watching for signs of it. And when they sat on the edge of her bed, listening, she felt the something pushing harder at her skin.
But the struggling winged thing did not occupy her thoughts very often. The truth of her life at thirteen was an obvious one. She did not want to spend time with her parents: No one she knew wanted to spend time with their parents. All those girls at her birthday party had wanted to be more grown-up, more independent, and Ren was the most independent thirteen-year-old she knew. There had been those months—during her parents’ constant-attention phase—when she wasn’t allowed to go anywhere or do anything. They wouldn’t let her ride in a car with anyone but them. But then, one by one, the restrictions lifted entirely, without a word being said. She could stay up as late as she liked, and they did not ask if she had finished her homework. They no longer asked how her day went as soon as she walked through the door. She could go to the mall or to a sleepover any night she liked. Her parents always gave permission. Some days she would walk in from school and not see either of them until the next morning. Harold and Anna drifted through the house, insubstantial, as if they could walk through walls.
The old routine shifted into a new one day by day. She never had an awareness that fundamental changes were happening—only, looking back, that they had happened. By the time she understo
od the depth of the loss, it was too late. She had not seen the whole of the thing, only bits and pieces, and she had been trying so hard not to see anything at all.
She did eventually want the things she had been relieved to see slip away. But they seemed impossible to retrieve. As a small child, she had loved beach trips, which required enough planning and time that they did not happen often. She would lie awake in her bed after one of those trips, missing the sand and the salt and the lovely monstrous sound of the waves. But the memories were removed by more than time and distance: They were removed by complete foreignness. The strange perfection of the beach could not be anchored to her normal life by a single detail—even the color of the sky was different—so the beach floated away from her. After a day or two, it was hard to imagine it had been real, that water thick with salt could swell against you and send you flying—the sounds, the textures, the colors were so disconnected from Ren’s bedroom that it seemed impossible the two experiences could exist in the same world, much less the same life.
Her memories were blurry, with large chunks—like most of her fourteenth year—missing entirely. She never knew whether she remembered blurrily or she had lived that blurrily. But there were some clear images.
Her fourteenth birthday. She was not sure that her parents would remember it. In the weeks leading up to the date, they had not said a word. She considered reminding them, but she wasn’t sure she wanted them to invite anyone over. There was the potential for this to be much worse than the previous year’s party. For one thing, she did not know how her mother might act. Anna’s eyes were always swollen and tired, and Ren had almost started to believe her when she said her allergies were giving her trouble. She was often quiet, often absent, but sometimes aggressively sad. There was a good chance her mother might actually spend an entire birthday party in her bedroom or in the kitchen, but there was also the chance that she might burst into tears or sit silently in the middle of the room without speaking to anyone.