The Fall of Never

by Ronald Malfi

  The image of this disfigured fairytale ungulate was what awoke him in the middle of the night now. Breathing heavy, afraid he’d made some sort of noise in his sleep and awakened Marie, he sat up and looked over at her. Peaceful and dreaming, his wife lay on her side, her dark hair curled beneath her chin. She had the thumb of her left hand stuck between her lips—a childhood habit she’d never been able to break.

  Sometimes stealing children, he thought and climbed out of bed.

  Downstairs, the lights were off and it was still dark. He listened and heard an owl hooting somewhere in the distance, and thought it peculiar that there would be an owl around this time of year, particularly so close to the city.

  Now what? his mind scolded. Are you going to start jumping at every shadow? It’s only an owl, for Christ’s sake.

  And Nellie Worthridge was only an old woman.

  His medical bag was on the counter in the kitchen, his unread newspaper draped over top of it. Clicking on the kitchen light and with one eye open, he went to it, unzipped it, and peered inside. After a moment’s hesitation, he produced a small hand-held tape recorder. He stared at it for a long time. For some reason, he thought of his mother telling him he works too much and that he shouldn’t smoke, that smoking would kill him. We’re all going to die at some point, was his classic response. We’re all going to die at some point. And does it really matter when?

  He pressed first the REWIND button and then the PLAY button on the little machine. A static whir hissed through the speaker…and then he could hear the old woman’s strained and slurred voice, and pictured her speaking those words inside his head as he listened…

  “Kellow…Kellow…Kellow…”

  Then his own voice on the tape: “Miss Worthridge? Can you hear me?”

  The old woman: “Kellow…”

  “Miss Worthridge?” The sound of rustling paper. “Nell?”

  On the tape, the old woman continued to repeat the name for some time. Several long minutes, in fact. And though it was the same thing over and over again, Carlos Mendes did not fast-forward the cassette. And then, after some time, there was a choked, coughing sound, then something else—something that sounded oddly like someone passing gas (blowing sugar, as his brother Michael would have put it)—and then the old woman’s voice again, only much stronger, and so much more than he’d been able to bring himself to tell Joshua Cavey at the hospital: “Julian will be born dead! Your son will be born dead, Carlito! Your son will be born dead!” Then something that sounded like sheets being upset on the old woman’s bed. And in a higher, almost child-like voice, the woman cried, “We almost killed that fucking dog!”

  Footsteps behind him and he clicked the tape recorder off.

  “What are you doing?” It was Marie. She stood wincing in the sharp light of the kitchen, a terry cloth robe about her body. “Carlos?”

  He just shook his head, trembling. Miraculously, he managed to slip the tape recorder back into his bag without dropping it on his foot.

  She came to him quickly. “Baby, what is it? What’s the matter? Don’t you feel all right?”

  “I…” He cleared his throat. “I feel fine.”

  “Can’t you sleep? I can make you something…”

  “No, no.”

  “What?”

  “I just need…”

  “What is it?”

  “Bad dream,” he said finally.

  “A nightmare?” He could almost taste her relief in the air. “It woke you?”

  “I’m all right now.”

  “What was it about?”

  “The baby.” The words were out of his mouth before he could think of anything else to say.

  “You had a nightmare about the baby? What about?”

  “Nothing,” he said, forcing a grin. He suddenly felt very, very old. “It was stupid. Just so stupid.”

  “Was it?”

  “Yes.” Then he thought. “But I would maybe feel better if we scheduled an appointment with Doctor Chalmers for some time this week.”

  “I have a check-up next month…”

  “I know,” he said, “but I would just rather clear my mind, okay? Is that okay?”

  She smiled wearily and hugged his neck with one arm, kissed the tasseled springs of his hair. “It’s okay,” she told him. “I will call tomorrow.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “Good,” she repeated. “Now will you come to bed, my Carlito?”

  He smiled at her, trying to erase the sickening image of Aunt Tet’s devil-child from his head.

  They went to bed.

  Chapter Ten

  After coming in from the woods, Kelly rushed upstairs and quickly changed out of her urine-saturated jeans, both frightened and disgusted. For the first time since her homecoming she thought of Josh, and of Josh’s concern for her. For the past month or so she’d been acting peculiar and for that same period of time she knew Josh could sense it. He was a stranger, really—a twenty-eight-year-old sometimes-musician stumbling through a relay of his own hidden problems—but he was also the closest thing to a true friend she had in the city. She’d never been personable, never really understood what was involved in talking with people, laughing at all their around-the-buffet-table dinner jokes. Collin had pursued her (and she’d allowed herself to be caught because she understood no other way and merely assumed that she loved him, which she genuinely did for a period) and had maintained the role as her social buffer throughout their cursory marriage. And it had taken a lot to finally leave him when she did, but then she was Out There again, and there was no more buffer Out There, there was just her and the world. And it was a hungry fucking world.

  Josh was not a buffer, not like Collin had been. No—Josh was a friend. She made a mental note to phone him as she’d promised as soon as she got her senses about her.

  Naked from the waist down, she hurried into the adjoining bathroom, turned on the shower, and stripped out of the rest of her clothes. And stood there, looking at herself in the mirror over the sink.

  She was thin. Her eyes were naturally dark, but a thick swipe of mascara over each lid darkened them to morbidity. Her hair—also dark—was unkempt and partially pulled off to the side of her head, held in place with an imitation leather strap. Lips chapped and peeling. Her fingernails were also black, only with grime. She was all nipple and no breast, with drying urine staining her thighs.

  What the hell is wrong with me? This is obviously not something that is going to go away. This is obviously a serious problem, perhaps a serious medical condition. I haven’t pissed my pants since I was a toddler. It can’t be healthy for me to start doing it again now.

  Steam from the running shower began to fog up the mirror. She reached out and swiped the moisture away.

  You look like you’ve been through the wringer, a small voice spoke up in her head. She thought it sounded very much like old Nellie Worthridge. And it isn’t just from today, isn’t just from being back here in Spires, or even back here in this house. This is something different and unrelated, something you’re going to wish you took care of once some quack in a white lab coat gives you his second opinion.

  But she didn’t want to think about that now. Besides, there was Becky to worry about, the poor thing. Becky was her reason for being here, her reason for coming back to this foul little village.

  And just why do you hate this place so much, anyway? Nellie’s voice again. What is it that’s been sitting so quietly inside you for so long that it’s just now creeping out of the darkness? If you can’t even remember this place or what happened to you here that put you in that institution for three years of your life, what the hell are you so goddamn frightened about?

  And that was just it: she was frightened.

  But of what?

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”

  To every castle, there is a king.

  Gordon Kellow was a large man. His hands were rough and huge, like two worn catcher’s mitts. His fa
ce was full and round like the moon, his skin tanned the color of rawhide, his eyes like two seabed stones, polished to eerie luminescence. When he walked, he did so slowly, as if to respectfully warn others of his approach. His presence alone was enough to fill one hundred rooms. His voice was a thunderous applause.

  Despite the dark veil that clouded over certain years of her childhood, Kelly managed to maintain two distinct images of her father. One was of him in his study, observed in every direction by the countless trophy animal heads that populated the walls—deer, antelope, buffalo, moose, bobcat, and so many others. He’d been meticulous about keeping his study a hideous shade of purple—velvet drapes; plum-colored Oriental carpeting; monochromatic oil paintings (donning the sections of wall that were not already occupied by glassy, sightless eyes and racks of antlers). The vision was of him standing in this study, his broad chest puffed out, a glass of brandy in his hand. He never spoke, just admired the decapitated heads the way an arrogant baseball player might watch his home-run ball go over the outfield fence. He’d spend hours at a time in this room, usually with the great oak double-doors closed, though sometimes not. And just stare and grin. The proudest damned father of bodiless heads anyone had ever seen.

  The second image she had of her father was of the great, hulking man curled into a ball on the stairwell that wound down from the second floor landing, crying like a small child. Though he made no noise, she recalled his sobs coming in tremendous quaking waves, his moon-shaped face buried into his catcher’s mitt hands. She’d caught him doing this one time as a child, and was naïve enough to make her presence known to him. When he finally realized she was there, he’d jerked as if he’d just been prodded with the business end of a stun-gun. And he’d said something to her then too…although his words had long become the feast of whatever monster lived inside her head and fed off her memories.

  She was never really afraid of him, exactly. His commanding eyes, arms like pillars, and booming voice notwithstanding, she never truly feared him.

  Years later, when attending a party thrown by one of Collin’s coworkers, she saw a painting on one of the walls in the main hallway of the house. It was of a great behemoth crouched by the side of a pastel river, his head bent in sorrow, the fingers of one hand combing through the motionless river water.

  “Maccinetti,” a woman had said from behind her, some trim number in a red party dress.

  “Is it?” she’d responded, though she knew next to nothing about painters.

  “Fabulous piece,” the woman said, and not without sarcasm. “I hear Phil actually attended an auction in Concord to bid on the original, but inevitably lost out. He’s a freak when it comes to Maccinetti. All of them: Nina MacDonald, John Parrish—if it’s been painted by some dull, neoconservative philanthropist, it’s probably hanging on one of these walls.”

  But Kelly had blocked the woman out; she could only stare at the painting—at the giant impression of a man crouching beside a river—and think of one thing. That’s my father, she thought, the notion materializing from nothing. I haven’t thought about him or even seen him in so long, but I know that the man in this painting is my father. And he’s all bent over and sobbing the way he was that night on the dark winding stairs, when he thought I couldn’t see him…

  In the end, that was really all she had: two images of the man whom had initiated her creation—the Proud Hunter and the Weeping Behemoth.

  After showering and closing her sister’s bedroom window, Kelly came downstairs and walked along the downstairs hallway in search of either her mother or Glenda to complain about the window being opened. She could find neither of them (in such a large house, no matter how many people occupied it, the damnable thing always felt empty).

  A noise from the other end of the hallway gathered her attention, and she went to the end of it, pausing outside what had once been her father’s purple room. The two oak double-doors were not completely closed and there was a light on inside, so she came up to the crack between the two doors and peered in.

  She saw her father standing in the middle of the room, his back facing the doors. With only a moment’s hesitation, she pushed the doors open and took one step inside.

  “Daddy,” she said.

  The room was no longer purple. In fact, it was no longer anything. The hardwood floor was carpetless and caked with dust. The grandiose oil paintings had been removed, the only indication of their existence the darkened rectangles of wood paneling left in their stead. The purple velvet drapes were gone too, having been replaced by functional white blinds. And all those staring animal heads were gone now as well.

  He turned to the sound of her voice, and she half-expected him to look just the way he did in her memories, maybe even caressing a tumbler of brandy. But when he turned and faced her, she saw that he was now only the rudimentary caricature of that man, with pieces long lost and too forgotten to be remembered.

  “Kelly,” he said. His eyes had dulled over the years and he’d lost too much weight. “This is good.”

  She went to him and hugged him awkwardly with one arm. He reciprocated, his movements stiff and confused. He smelled faintly of powder and sleep.

  “I was beginning to think I wouldn’t see you,” she said.

  “Everything is all right? The trip in—it was fine?”

  “Fine.”

  “All right.”

  She wanted to ask him what happened to his room, what happened to the crushed velvet drapes and the stupid stares of the bodiless wildlife, but didn’t.

  “You look well,” he told her. “You’re healthy?”

  “I’m good, Dad.”

  “That’s good.” He smiled the slightest bit. “And married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Did he hit you?” he asked. “Hurt you?”

  It was an abrupt question, one she hadn’t anticipated. After a brief hesitation, she said, “No, of course not. It just wasn’t right.”

  “But you’re happy now?”

  “I’m good,” she said again.

  “It’s unfortunate,” he said, his words coming slow, “that it had to be under these circumstances…”

  “I’d like to stay until Becky wakes up.”

  He nodded. “That’s good. The police explained things to you, then?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No one did. Not mother, not the police. Glenda started to, but…”

  “You shouldn’t have to hear such things from Glenda.”

  I shouldn’t have to get phone calls in the middle of the night from a stranger telling me my sister’s been beaten half to death, either, she thought.

  “Why isn’t she in a hospital where there are doctors and they can keep an eye on her?”

  “Because this is where she belongs,” he said.

  “That makes no sense.”

  “This is her home, Kelly. It was yours once too, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “There should be doctors watching her.”

  “Doctors come here,” he said. “There’s nothing they can do in a hospital that they can’t do here.”

  “Why is she still unconscious?”

  “Why?” mulled her father. He turned away from her and stared at the white blinds over the windows. Outside, it was falling dark. “Why do people do things that hurt other people? Can you answer that question for me? Why did your sister almost die that night? Why did she even leave the house? I don’t know the answers, Kelly, do you? If you know, I’d like you to tell me. Tell me what you know.”

  She was at a loss. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “So you don’t know then too.” Then he turned back to face her, and his eyes were more alive. “You’ve hated us for a long time,” he said. It was not a question. “It was because we sent you to that hospital.”

  “Hospital?” Barred windows, straps on the bedposts. “It was a goddamn asylum. I was fifteen years old.”

  “It was a place for you to get better, to get well, and your mother
and I didn’t want to see you going through any more pain.”

  “Pain,” she repeated, beginning to tremble.

  “We didn’t know what else to do. How could we watch you fall apart like that without doing anything about it? You were fifteen, yes, but you had some sort of nervous breakdown. You shut down, shut everyone out. You wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t move, for Christ’s sake. A parent doesn’t just watch that happen—”

  But those were just excuses. “You never came to see me in three years. You could’ve at least done that.”

  He just stared at her. For one reeling moment, she thought he was about to agree with her and admit his fault. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything. Just stood there staring at her, as if trying to see past the woman she had become to the small and frightened child she had once been.

  Finally, he said, “Did they at least help you?” His voice had taken on a hushed quality. “Did they at least get you beyond whatever you needed to pass over?”

  “I…” And what was she about to say? The truth: “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know,” her father mumbled.

  Yet maybe she did know, at least a little bit. During her time at the institution, she did not cooperate with the doctors and nurses, did not try to weed out her fears and the reason for her emotional breakdown. Instead, she focused all that anger on her parents—the parents who had locked her in such a hell hole, the parents who did not come to visit in the three years she’d remained caged up like some psychopath, like some animal. There was no getting better at the institution; rather, she just got angrier.

  No, she thought, that’s not completely true. I did get better, in a sense. I got better at forgetting.

  Forgetting.

  The cloudy veil.

  “The police mentioned something about a diary,” she said to him. “It seems Becky mentioned something about me, about having been in some sort of contact with me.”