by Ronald Malfi
And then his brothers and the gym socks are gone.
And then so is the stranger’s hand.
Carlos manages to look down at his shorts—they are soaked with root beer—and then glances over at the stranger from the corner of his eye, not wanting it known that he is actually looking in the man’s direction. Petey holds the empty soda bottle on his lap. He is scraping at the bottle’s label with a curled yellow thumbnail.
“Done messed yourself, Carlos-Carlos. We should clean you up. Where you goin’ to, boy?”
Blessedly, he feels his throat sear open, feels a rush of air enter his windpipe—then tighten again as the man leans over him and kisses the top of his head.
The sound of hissing air-brakes and the bus jerks to a stop. In that same instant, the man—Petey—dislodges himself from the bus seat and bunches his long coat up in front of him as he makes his way down the aisle toward the bus’s doors. Though Carlos suspects he might, the old man does not turn to look back.
Once the bus starts moving again, Carlos pulls his legs up to his chest, rests his head against the window, and stares at the traffic below. Ashamed, he cries.
There was a surge of warm air at his face followed by the sensation of something large shifting directly in front of him, and Carlos Mendes opened his eyes and jerked away from Nellie Worthridge. It took several seconds for his thoughts to properly regroup, finding their appropriate niches, and the world swam back to him in one great rush.
“I…”
He was anxious to speak (though he had no idea what he wanted to say) yet he found himself too busy searching for breath. It was as if the wind had just been knocked out of him. And he was sweaty and shaking all over. His mouth was pasty and dry.
Like some medieval witch, Nellie sat perched on her chair in the darkness in front of him, her face unchanged and without expression. Well, almost—her eyes had narrowed and her crooked lips appeared to be working over the beginnings of words. The congruity of her form, slated in darkness, suggested the gnarled and mangled rudiments of an ancient tree. She looked very near death, Mendes noted. Only her eyes proposed any implication of life: they remained narrow and grating, nearly allowing him to feel the full force of their stare scraping along his flesh.
“I…” was all he could manage.
“Some good people, some bad,” Nellie interjected. Again, it looked as if she were trying to smile. “But I guess you know that, don’t you, Doctor?”
Even now, even here, the doctor could almost smell the stranger from that bus—Petey, his name had been—and remembered the terror that had welled up inside him as he sat there in that seat, helpless. He clearly recalled the heat from the sun amplified against the bus window, hot to the touch, and the panels of light that spread in great lunging rectangles across the green vinyl seat in front of him.
“That happened…” he tried again. Then: “I was just a kid. So long ago. I never…I couldn’t tell anyone about that and I was scared, I…I didn’t know what…” He paused, gaining control of his thoughts. “I haven’t thought of that in forever,” he managed finally. “I…I’d forgotten…”
Nellie offered a weak smile. “You may forget the past, but the past don’t forget you. It clings.”
“Okay,” he said, “okay, you…see things, know things…but what about my son? Nellie, you may not remember, but I need to know what’s going on. I need to know why you said what you said.”
“I tried,” she said. Her pale face appeared to regress into the shadows of the apartment. “I felt nothing.”
“Felt nothing?”
“I searched your mind, Doctor, your soul. I dipped in for as long as I could, for as deep as I could, but there was nothing there.”
“How can that be? Nellie, you knew about my son back at the hospital. You even called me Carlito. My wife calls me that. How did you know that?”
“There aren’t definitive answers for everything, I’m afraid. Sometimes I just pick up things—there and then gone, like an old ham radio scooping up signals from Japan. Sometimes I remember them. Sometimes I don’t.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “no, that can’t be it. There’s got to be more to it, got to be some way…”
“I know of no other way.”
“How is it you see inside my head yet you can also see things that haven’t happened yet, can see my son?”
“It all comes from the same place,” she said. “Everything’s connected in some way. I don’t fully understand it—I don’t think anyone does, really, nor are they supposed to—but I know that’s just the way it is. Your memories and thoughts and emotions are what I am able to read. Also, your future. Sometimes.”
“How?”
“Because to some degree, we all know our future. There is a predestination mapped out for all of us. It’s there at birth. We know who we are, who we will become, and when we will die. We also know this about those closest to us.”
“You picked up my son through me?” he said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Your son is you,” she said. “You are the closest thing to your son, you are made up of the same elements. There is only one other person who is closer.”
“Marie.” And he’d known this; somehow, deep within the recesses of his own confused brain, he’d known this all along. Perhaps Marie felt it even stronger than he did, she just didn’t have the confirmation of someone telling her the outcome, telling her the truth. Marie didn’t have Nellie Worthridge’s verification.
“Your wife,” Nellie said.
“So what more can we do? What is it? Tell me. Anything.”
“You don’t have it in you because you don’t have your son’s soul in you. Your wife does.”
And like a flash he pictured Marie stretched out in the faded blue recliner in the living room, the dull glow of the television set washing over her soft features in the dark, the almost timid swell of her pregnancy perched on her lap like a child with her favorite toy. The image was so clear, so lucid, that he was suddenly confident that he was actually seeing his wife, seeing her as she was right at that moment, despite the impossibility of such certainty.
The world is full of impossibilities, he thought then. The world is apparently teeming with them. And they’re all very, very real.
“You can do this with Marie?” he said. “You can—what is it? Get inside her memories like that?”
“The truth,” the old woman corrected. “I can get inside the truth of a person.”
“And find out things…”
“Sometimes I can find out things. But there are no promises, you understand. There are things simply beyond the control of us mortals.”
“But sometimes—”
“You have hope,” she said. “And that’s good.”
“We have to help my son.”
“We can try. Your wife is…?”
“Is what?”
“She knows your feelings? Your concerns?”
He hadn’t thought of that. “No,” he said.
“Then you will tell her.”
He started. Considered. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what to say. And does it even make sense to have her worry?”
“You’ve been worrying by yourself for too long,” Nellie said.
You’re talking almost perfect now, Nellie, he thought. And I bet you can move your left arm right now, too, if you wanted. Sure, why not? You know things you have no right knowing, so why couldn’t you move things you have no right moving? Why be bothered by limitations when all you have to do is will yourself to do it?
Mendes said, “I have.”
“Yes. Your wife may be able to tell me things you cannot.”
“Yes.”
“She may not know it. But her connection to your son is stronger. I need to see her. You need to bring her to me. That’s the only way.”
“I’ll figure out a way,” he said.
And thought of his wife.
Chapter Seventeen
Pilote
d by fever, Kelly wove in and out of dreams.
At one point, she found herself standing by a gurgling brook in the middle of a dense forest, the landscape green and full in every direction. Something wet ran down her forehead and stung her eyes. Bringing a hand up to her face, pulling it away, she saw it wet with blood. Panicked, she dropped to her knees and gaped at her reflection in the running water—and glimpsed a pale, fleeting figure moving behind her. She felt her insides freeze up, her stomach knot. Her small hands—still the hands of a child—knotted at the edge of the brook, clawing at the earth. A phantom wave of near-recollection shook her, like something from some ancient nightmare dreamt when she was a different person, inhabiting a different body…
She stood quickly, frightened, and turned around—
—to find herself the centerpiece in some abstract pantomime version of Earth, where the trees swiveled and twisted at impossible angles and the leaves—grotesquely green—defied gravity, growing straight up. Rattles of flowers exploded at her feet in a myriad of hues. Colors were horribly brighter. Smells were sharp and acidic. Behind her, the sound of the gurgling brook now shook like a waterfall; she could feel its strength reverberating in the ground. Instantly, she was aware of every molecule in her body—every sinew and blood vessel and follicle of hair; every organ pumping or contracting or secreting. With each exaggerated inhalation she could feel the icy burst of air rush into her lungs, fill and expand multiple pockets of flesh deep inside her chest, could feel oxygen being absorbed by each individual blood cell.
She saw the pale figure again, blurred and indistinct amidst a mine of firs, darting toward a darkness without source. And then she was running. Each step against the ground was purely reflexive. In a spontaneous impression of human articulation, she forced out a guttural laugh—or something akin to a laugh—and felt it rise up in her throat and explode out her mouth. The forest closed tight around her, whipping her with tine-like fingers and inflexible arms as she ran. And strewn almost functionally among the foliage: empty bottles and cans; broken plastic forks; a torn piece of clothing; a moldy bowler hat; a discarded automobile tire bursting with steel tread; a mud-soaked ball of socks; half of a NO TRESPASSING sign. She streaked past these items like mile-markers on a freeway, their presence hardly registering.
And there—a ramshackle structure tucked between a stand of trees, half-cloaked in shadow. A house. And was it real? Clapboard siding and iced shingles, perfect octagonal windows, empty of pane, with a steepled roof and a solid white door: to taste this house, she understood immediately, would be to taste saffron and ginger and spiraled cinnamon quills. It was the accumulation of dreams and prayers and whispered childhood fairy tales. She paused to stare at it and discovered that prolonged scrutiny caused the structure to yield and waver, to swim in and out of existence, out of reality. At one point she could make out the trees behind the house, could see straight through it. It wavered, like an image veiled by waves of heat. And with that dissipation came the true smell around her—not of spice and sugar but of rot and decay. She closed her eyes on it. She blocked it out.
Out!
And when she opened her eyes she was in a bland white room furnished only with a single bed and a window cased in wire mesh. A sweat broke across her face and her arms sprouted fleshy knobs. The woods and the house and even the fleeting figure had been only a dream; she was here now, here—the institution. The floor was dull and scuffed, cold beneath her bare feet. She could see her toes, pale and like giant grubs, beneath the hem of her nightdress. The room itself was stiflingly small. She could see her distorted reflection in the brass doorknob. She went to the knob. The door was locked.
I can unlock it, she thought.
She willed it to unlock and stepped into the narrow corridor outside her room.
The familiar tang of antibacterial soap and detergent accosted her. And beneath such pungency lingered the faint aroma of vomit, sour bodies, and bug spray. Above her head the tracks of sodium lights flickered and buzzed. The hallway was spotless and lined with closed doors. Behind each closed door she passed while moving down the corridor, Kelly could hear the muffled shuffle of feet, the soft moans and sobs of young girls. Some of them sounded in pain; others simply sounded lost inside their own heads, the sounds they created only human sounds by the farthest stretch of the imagination. A frail Asian girl shambled past her in a pink robe, seeming to materialize out of nowhere, and whispered, “Electrical tongue.”
There was a workable recreation room at the end of the corridor, dressed in stiff blue carpet and a row of ping pong tables. A multitude of television sets lined the far wall before a row of pebbled windows like soldiers in a line-up. Cross-legged on the carpet before a worn and tattered sofa, two teenage girls sat playing cards. They stared up at Kelly in unison as she passed by, a twin expression of disinterest on their faces. Beside them, a portable radio volleyed between intermittent bursts of static and a Dean Martin number.
“You move very slow,” a female voice said to her left. She turned and saw a tall, pale woman in a nurse’s uniform carrying a stack of books. The nurse looked angry. “Don’t you understand that these boots can’t hold up all this cedar?”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Damn you,” said the nurse…and it was suddenly the pinched and bitter face of her mother. “How could you have forgotten? What kind of games are these? You get me so angry sometimes, Kelly. How could you forget about him?”
“Who?”
“Some godforsaken nursery rhyme.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s no use lying to them. It doesn’t do your sister any good.”
“Becky…”
“Damn you, girl,” the nurse-mom said and turned sharply down the hall.
A pushcart appeared beside Kelly, laden with medication and Dixie Cups with floral designs. A clutch of plastic forks lay on a stack of napkins and she reached out and grabbed the forks, not quite understanding why. She just needed them, she knew, needed to…to take them somewhere, bring them somewhere…to someone…
“Mouse,” she muttered. And yes—Mouse. An image surfaced in her head: a spray of lusterless hair; sallow skin and wan eyes; lips chapped and bruised, indented with half-moon bite-marks from her crooked teeth. Mouse. Mouse had shown her breasts. Mouse had talked about dead girls in the closet on the third floor. Mouse had stuffed rolls of ham into her bra to save for later. Mouse.
Mouse…
“She’s in the closet,” said one of the card-playing girls on the floor. “You’re looking for Mouse?”
She hadn’t realized she’d spoken the words out loud. “Why is she in the closet?”
“That’s where the dead girls go,” said the other girl. “Two of them, a long time ago. They loved each other and touched each other in special places. They did it in the closet where no one could see.”
“No one could see,” repeated her friend.
“They died because they got locked in and no one heard them. They were in love.”
“In love,” parroted the friend.
“Why is Mouse in the closet?” Kelly asked. She was aware that she was squeezing the plastic forks very hard, could hear them snapping in her fist. Almost abruptly she became aware of some encroaching horror looming above her, all around her, like a malignant and starving force desiring satiation.
With almost bitter resolve, the first girl said, “Tell her to stop sneaking food. We all get in trouble when she sneaks food.”
“I hate her,” spat the other girl. “She’s nasty and dirty and I hate her.”
Frightened, Kelly turned and moved quickly down the corridor. Hearing her footsteps, some of the girls peeked their heads out of their rooms. One girl had a black eye and a busted lip. Another girl appeared perpetually frightened. Another still broke out into a fit of maniac laughter, her mouth impossibly wide, her gums fitted with countless rows of teeth.
“Nasty!” someone shouted.
The third floor was va
cant. No patients roomed up here. There was a tiny workstation at the end of the hall but it was empty. Even the nurses avoided the third floor. It was a wasteland of broken pushcarts and empty cardboard boxes, a graveyard for defeated television sets and damaged furniture. The tile floor was streaked from a recent mopping. Spilled iodine was dried in places on the walls. No lights came on when Kelly tried the switch and the windowpanes had been painted over long ago. Gloomy and depressing. To keep girls away.
Girls died up here.
It had been Mouse who originally told her about the two dead girls. Mouse enjoyed the story, and Kelly had always assumed it was for a variety of reasons: the homoerotic references; the rebellion; the sheer notion of death. They were young lesbians (or perhaps turned lesbian due to their confinement, Mouse had explained) and they would creep from their rooms at night and love each other in the big closet on the third floor. That’s what they did, according to Mouse—they loved each other. And although the reasons for their deaths changed from time to time whenever Mouse told the story, Kelly had always believed it. She understood how bad things could get, sometimes. The story of the two dead girls was a perfect example.
They came up here one night just like they always did, only this time they couldn’t leave. It was like some power forcing the door to stay shut. Like some ghost. And they began to cry and then they began to scream, to scream and slam their fists against the inside of the closet door, but it did no good because no one ever came up to the third floor. No one ever heard them. And they eventually died.
She could see the closet door half-open at the end of the hall. Something moved within. Mouse, she thought, still confused as to what the girl was doing in the forbidden closet on the third floor in the first place. Had she really been caught with ham in her bra? And even if that part were true, would the nurses have really sentenced her to confinement in the closet on the third floor?
“Mouse!” she called in a half-whisper.
Another flicker of movement inside the closet.