Under My Skin

by Lisa Unger

  It comes from nowhere, the blow to my side, and I am flying, landing hard on the ground. Struggling for orientation, the world in a hard tumble—what happened? I tripped. It must be. Then another blow, hard to the ribs. The air leaves me, pain flooding my senses. No. No. A weight on top of me, then a hard knock to the jaw, a bottle rocket through the crown of my head, down my spine. My arms are butterfly wings, flapping powerless. Hands on my body. Grabbing. Feeling. I writhe, try to slink away. A prey animal, terrified, helpless.

  Money. I. Have. Money.

  My mother drilled it into my head, never leave the house without cash in your pocket. You never know. Hand it over. If you get mugged, give them everything. It doesn’t matter. Only your life matters.

  My rings. Take them.

  But the blows keep coming, my stomach, my face again. I taste blood, metallic and strange. I feel myself lift, go elsewhere.

  I can’t see him. He’s wearing a hood or a mask. His face is just a shadow, as the blows keep coming. A rain of pain.

  And then I’m floating, outside myself. I look down as he rises, a hooded figure. He stands over the broken version of myself. Not me. Someone else. She is very still, arms out, palms up, legs askew. A deep black pool spreads out from beneath her. He’s panting, shoulders heaving with his effort. The stranger, the golem, the monster who waits in the shadows to destroy, to change everything you think you know about the world and your place in it. I watch as the scene gets more and more distant, until it is gone, until I am gone.

  * * *

  I wish. I wish it had been me.

  23

  “Can I see you home?” Rick. Rick in finance.

  We’re on the street. Our awkward date, if you can even call it that, about to draw to a merciful close. The world tilts on its axis, sidewalk askance beneath my feet. I shouldn’t have come here. What was I thinking?

  “You okay?” he asks.

  His concern seems exaggerated, almost as if he’s mocking me. There are other people on the street, a couple laughing, intimate, close, a kid with his headphones on, a homeless guy sitting on the stoop.

  “I’m fine,” I say again, feeling defensive. I didn’t have that much to drink.

  But then he has his arm looped through mine, too tight, and I find myself tipping into him. I try to pull away from him. But he doesn’t allow it. He’s strong and I can’t free my arm.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” he says, a nasty little mimic. “You’re okay.”

  Of course I’m okay, I want to snap. But the words won’t come. There’s just this bone-crushing fatigue, this wobbly, foggy, vague feeling. Something’s not right. The world starts to brown around the edges. Oh, no. Not now.

  “She’s okay,” he says, laughing. His voice sounds distant and strange. “Just one too many I guess.”

  Who’s he talking to?

  “Let go of me,” I manage.

  He laughs; it’s echoing and strange. “Take it easy, sweetie.”

  He’s moving me too fast up the street, his grip too tight. I stumble and he roughly keeps me from falling.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I ask.

  Fear claws at the back of my throat. I can’t wait get away from this guy. He pulls me onto a side street; there’s no one around.

  “Hey.” A voice behind us. He spins, taking me with him. There’s someone standing there. He looks distantly familiar as the world tips. Somewhere inside me there’s a jangle of alarm. He has a dark hood on, his face not visible.

  It’s him.

  He’s big, bigger than—what’s his name? Reg, or something. Rex? The big man blocks our path up the sidewalk.

  “Hey, seriously, dude,” says Rick. Yes, Rick, that was it. “Step aside. I’ve got this.”

  But things are fading fast, going soft and blurry. There’s a flash, quick-fire movement. Then a girlish scream of pain, one that touches all my nerve endings, a river of blood. Black red on lavender. The sidewalk rises hard and unforgiving.

  * * *

  Arms on me. Very strong.

  He lifts me and begins to carry me down the street. I can still hear Rick from finance keening, a swell of other voices, but the hooded man moves swiftly and the noise fades. He’s impossibly powerful.

  “Hey, hey!” a voice calls after us. But it fades away. We are moving so fast, and then it’s dark. Disoriented; nothing makes sense.

  “What did you do to him?” I ask. But my voice is weak, too soft. “Where are you taking me?”

  I try to writhe away from him, but I’m a rag doll. Am I dreaming again?

  Then all I hear are his footfalls on concrete, things pass by in an unpleasant blur—parked cars, concrete pillars, the metal of elevator doors. We’re inside, gray walls all around. Silence. The opening of a car door. He lays me into a deep leather seat, leans in close to fasten my seat belt.

  “Where are we going?” I can’t seem to focus, on him, on anything.

  The interior of the car is warm, the leather buttery. The soft glow of the dash, the red and blue of the controls, the dark outside, the quiet hum of the engine. We are flying into space.

  * * *

  I don’t know how much time has passed, or where we are. I sit up and look outside, but there is only darkness.

  “What did you do to him?” I ask.

  No moon in the sky, stars obscured by trees like sentries on the side of the road. I am not bound, just strapped in to the seat. I turn, look at him. It’s him. Did I know it all along? Maybe.

  “I kept him from taking advantage of you,” he says.

  “And what are you doing?”

  “I’m taking you someplace safe,” he says. “You’ve been there before. Do you remember?”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t remember.”

  He slows the car, pulls onto the shoulder and comes to a stop.

  He turns to watch me. His hands reach for mine. My fingers find his face instead. I look at all the lines, the shine and intensity of his eyes, touch the shadowy places where the darkness pools. His face is open and honest. Desire, I see it. But I see kindness too, the face of hard lessons learned, pain and loss.

  I remember him. I met him on the dance floor of Morpheus—I was alone and he joined me. What drove me to a nightclub on the Lower East Side, I have no idea. The throb of the music, how it moved through me, how I lost myself—it all comes back. We danced. He looked so much like Jack, I just closed my eyes and let him be Jack.

  I remember his kiss, how he led me out into the street, asked me if I wanted to go home with him to his house in the country. I was weak with grief, brain addled. I said yes. It all comes back, a rush of memory—just like Dr. Nash said it might.

  “Let me see your purse,” he says.

  I hand it to him. He digs through and pulls out that last bottle of pills.

  “What is this?” he asks. “Have you been taking these?”

  I tell him that I have, and more than that, and mixing pills with alcohol. Anything to numb the pain, to sleep, to forget. I knew it was dangerous, the risks. Maybe the truth is that I didn’t care.

  “Are you ready to be done with this?” he asks. The vial sits in the wide palm of his hand. “Are you ready to wake up, Poppy, and face whatever it is you’re running from? It has to be you. It has to be your decision.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m ready.”

  He rolls down the window and throws the bottle out onto the road. The cold air, the wind rushes into the car, and then he slides the window up. For a second I’m terrified; I want to run out onto the road and gather them all up.

  “Come with me? Or go back?” he says. “The choice is yours. Right now, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

  I still have my hands on him, now resting on his forearm, his hand on my leg, leaning in. Staring into the deep of his gaze, there’s on
ly us, this moment. My life, outside the confines of this car, is a chaotic swirl.

  “Do you want to wake up or go back to sleep?”

  “I want to wake up.”

  He lifts my chin and forces me to meet his eyes.

  “Call someone and tell them you’re okay, so that they’re not worried.”

  I make the strange decision to call my mother.

  “Poppy,” she whispers, her voice heavy with relief. “Where are you?”

  “Mom,” I say. “I’m okay. I just need some time to understand what’s happening to me. Tell them—Layla, Mac, Tom—that I’m fine. That I just need some space.”

  I can hear Layla in the background. Let me talk to her.

  “Sweetie, please,” Mom says. Her voice cracks with emotion. “Just come back and let us help you.”

  Let us help you.

  “Mom,” I say. “This is something I have to do alone.”

  “Where are you going, honey? Tell me that at least.”

  “I’ll call you,” I say. “I promise.”

  I end the call and turn off the phone. He puts the car in gear and starts to drive.

  I leave everything, everyone behind.

  * * *

  Then I am nothing but pain. I am grief. I am rage. The days pass in a rushing river of physical illness; I am as sick as if I have been poisoned, head throbbing, body rejecting food and water. Detox at its ugliest.

  The nights are impossibly long, endless twisting tunnels of misery, where I piece together all the missing fragments of my memory. The nights are filled with ghosts. In my journal, I write and write—my last year with Jack, the miscarriages, the terrible fights, my unhappiness without my art. The truth, all of it, not just the story I told myself and others about my life.

  You’re a fucking liar.

  The voice I heard was my own.

  And then the grief of losing him, losing us, in a violent and totally random way. How angry I was at the injustice of it. That all the things between us would never be resolved; that the story of us had no ending. We didn’t come through our challenges stronger than we were before. We didn’t choose to end our marriage, both of us finding another, better path. He just died. Wrong place. Wrong time. All issues unresolved. No time to say goodbye. A story with an end we didn’t choose.

  Slowly, the pills, the chemicals flooding my system begin to recede like a tide. And my mind clears. He’s there.

  Listening, holding on, offering the things he’s learned. Lying beside my bed on the floor while I writhe, or standing outside of the bathroom.

  “Think of it as a purge, a releasing,” he says helpfully through the door.

  “Shut up,” I wail. “Stop talking.”

  “Yep,” he says. “Gotcha.”

  And then, one night, I sleep. A deep dreamless slumber from which I wake into a bright, clear morning, my head light with freedom from pain. The ghosts are gone, and I can think again. I feel myself solid in the world. He sleeps in a chair by the fireplace, looking bent and uncomfortable. I rise from the bed and walk over to him.

  “I am awake,” I tell him when he opens his eyes. I take his hand and he rises. He runs his fingers through my hair, rests his hands on my shoulders. His gaze is warm, those faceted hazel eyes glittering.

  “Nice to meet you, Poppy,” he says.

  “Nice to meet you, Noah,” I answer.

  In his arms, I think of Jack, when he found me outside the gallery where I was working then.

  “Did you know that the poppy flower symbolizes sleep and death?”

  “I did know that,” I said. “But my mother just really likes the color red. That’s why she chose that name.”

  “In classical mythology, it represents resurrection.”

  “You’ve done your research.”

  “It also signifies remembrance.” He moved in close and handed me the flowers, their droopy scarlet faces fragrant and cheerful. “Do you remember me?”

  I do. I remember him. I remember myself. I remember everything.

  Those lost days after Jack’s funeral, it all comes back in a rush.

  PART TWO

  Awake

  You are not wrong, who deem

  That my days have been a dream.

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “Dream Within a Dream”

  24

  The days after Jack’s funeral...

  Tap, tap, tap.

  The sound leaks unpleasantly into my consciousness. Tap, tap, tap.

  I bury my head beneath my pillow, sleep holding on tight. Then, the sense that everything around me—the scent on the air, the sounds, the feel of the sheets beneath me—is wrong, off somehow.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  Black winter branches scrape against a windowpane in a pale dove gray and white room. Flecks of snow hit the glass, drift down leaving trails of tears. Milky light washes in and I am alone in a place I’ve never seen. A plush chaise languishes in front of a fireplace where embers still burn. Shelves of books, an abstract oil in blues and silvers hangs on the wall. A red dress drapes over the chair, matching heels askew on the floor.

  My head aches, limbs filled with sand. Beneath there’s a hard pulse of fear—where am I? This is not right. But the fog in my mind is thick and so heavy. It’s an effort to shift to sitting, the world wobbling. Adrenaline starts to pump, a surge of energy gets me from the bed, even as the world tilts. I pull at the drawer in the bedside table, looking for my phone, my wallet. It’s empty, smelling like new wood.

  I’m wearing a big T-shirt, black, worn to softness. It drapes almost to my midthigh. Another door leads to a bathroom. In the mirror, I catch my haggard reflection—hair wild, circles deep and black under my eyes, skin white, void of any color. I lean on the sink, run the water and splash it cold on my face.

  Wake up. Christ. Pull yourself together.

  I stumble back out into the bedroom, lurch for the door and try the knob. Locked. Panic wells, a tide that washes through making everything feel disjointed and strange. I twist and pull at the door, which sticks fast, then I move to the window. It’s just a solid pane of glass in a frame, thick, no mechanism for opening. Outside, just snow and snow and the black twisting branches of dead winter trees reaching into that gray the sky turns when snow falls.

  My panic is silent; I don’t call out. Who would I be calling? Where the hell am I?

  I hear a sound outside the door, footfalls. I watch, nearly paralyzed with fear. It’s quiet for a moment, then the door softly pushes open.

  “Hey,” he says. “You’re up. How are you feeling?”

  Sandy curls, a few days of stubble. Big, broad. I touch my lips. Do I still feel him there? He frowns, concerned. “You okay?”

  “Where?” I manage. “What is this place?”

  He moves closer, which causes me to move back, knocking into the bed and sitting heavily onto the mattress. He lifts his hands—surrender, supplication. He waits, keeping his distance.

  “My place upstate,” he says. “We came last night.”

  I shake my head. There are remnants of myself knocking around, none of them coming together in a whole I can understand.

  “Where’s my phone?”

  “In your purse,” he says. “I put it in the drawer.”

  He opens a drawer and takes out a clutch and hands it to me. Money. My platinum card, my driver’s license. My phone is dead. There’s no charger.

  “I have to go,” I say. “I have to get back to the city.”

  “It’s snowing pretty hard,” he says, pointing to the window where the view outside is quickly whiting out. He sits on the chaise, watching me.

  “Why was the door locked?” I ask.

  He looks back at the way he entered, as though confused by the question.

  “It wasn’t,” he says. “It just sticks sometimes. I
restored this house, but it’s old. The wood swells and shrinks, lots of strange noises.”

  The bed is soft and the room is warm. I know him. I have known him. I find that the panic, the fear—it’s subsiding.

  I have a place upstate. We can get away for a couple of days. You’ll regroup, decide what to do next, decide who you think I am. Those words bounce around the walls of my memory. When did he say them? In the car, when I asked him where we were going.

  “Why don’t you just rest awhile longer?”

  “I need to call someone,” I say. “They’ll be worried. Layla, my mother, Detective Grayson.”

  “There’s no landline,” he says. “I’ll get my cell phone, okay? Just stay here and I’ll be right back with it. And some tea. Are you hungry?”

  I am ravenously hungry suddenly, cored out and empty with it.

  “I’ll leave the door wide open,” he says. There’s an easiness about him, something gentle. “You’re safe, okay?”

  I believe him even though there’s something I know I should remember but don’t. After a while, he brings the phone and puts it beside me. The bedside table is a carved, solid piece of wood, like a piece of a gigantic trunk. I run my fingers along its finished surface where the knots and grains are visible. The phone, slim and modern, looks out of place, almost an insult to the organic lines of the surface beneath it.

  “I made that,” he said.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  He has a tray and rests it on the bed. He hands me a cup of tea, warm in a misshapen ceramic mug.

  “And this mug,” he says, with a smile. “Let’s just say I haven’t mastered the potter’s wheel.”

  His hands are covered with scars, the discoloration of burns, white lines, knuckles swollen, calloused. He sees me looking. “From the metalwork,” he says, regarding his hands as if they’re new to him. “Burns and cuts are part of the territory.”

  That’s right, a sculptor. This place is where he comes to work; he’s told me this. There’s a barn—an isolated property. Sometimes he spends months here alone. It’s in a town called The Hollows. I’ve read about it—an energy vortex some people call it. Bad things happened here—missing children, fires, hauntings.