by Ryan Schow
Reaching out, my tentacles find her. She’s at home. It’s a short drive from here. Ten or so minutes later I’m walking up the sidewalk to her imperial home. Inside, however, all I feel is sadness. I ring the doorbell and a gorgeous woman answers the door, which totally confuses me.
“Yes?” she says. It’s the beautiful woman I saw at my father’s house.
“Holy shit,” I say, the words falling out of my mouth in a sort of strangled whisper.
She looks around, like she’s worried she’s being punked or something. I crawl her mind, see what she sees, land squarely on all the love she let herself feel for Abby and realize I cannot break her heart. Not now.
“Holy shit, what?” she asks.
“Do you love Christian’s daughter, Abby?” I ask.
“Yes.”
She doesn’t ask why, or who I am. It is just a definitive yes she gives me, like that’s the long and short of it. If I would’ve asked the same question when she was Margaret and Christian was Atticus, the answer would be the same, only not as convincing. There was little love for her fat, disfigured daughter. After all, who could love such a beastly child?
“She loves you too, Orianna,” I say.
“You know me?”
“I do now.”
“Who are you?”
Inside, I want her to hurt like I hurt. But she has already been hurting. This isn’t about retribution, or even payback, I think. I realize for the first time in my life that I am beyond that. We are beyond that. Margaret went and transformed herself. She became this perfect looking woman, but not to be prettier, or have less scarring, or eliminate the need for more Botox. No. She did this because she loves me and knew I could never love Margaret. So I can’t break her. Not now. Not ever again.
“Abigail Swann is not Christian’s daughter, but deep down, I know you suspect as much, and you’re just trying to make your physical transformation worth something more than a whole body makeover. I know you didn’t do this—become this woman—for the sake of your vanity.”
She’s looking at me, startled by my words, her brain scrambling for answers, desperate to know if I mean her harm.
“Why are you here?” she asks, her nerves betraying her. She wants to know how I know the things I know and it’s making her a little dizzy. “Who are you?”
“You know who I am, Margaret,” I say, looking deep into her eyes. “You are seeing it in my eyes right now, and not just because they’re purple, like once before, but because you see me in here. You see me in the way that I’m looking at you. You see me in how my face reflects my need for your love.”
Her breath breaks, a quick intake, then a liquid shimmering in her eyes. “Abby?”
“Not Abby, not Savannah. Not anymore.”
She wipes her eyes, realizes she’s being overly dramatic, then more earnestly asks, “If Abigail is not Abby and you’re not Abby, then who are you?”
“I am none of those girls, yet I am. Beneath the body, behind the eyes, I’m simply your daughter.”
“You?” she asks, breathless once more. I shake my head, feel my own tears building. “I don’t understand. How?”
“It’s a long story.”
“How did you know that I’m…me?”
“I see you, even though you’re not you. It’s the same way you’ll one day see me, even though this isn’t the me you remember. I do love that you changed yourself to save what could be our relationship. That means the world to me. All I ever wanted was your love.”
She pulls me into a fierce hug, hangs on for dear life. “Is…is it really…you?” she asks. I nod my head against her, and the sob that escapes her nearly crushes my heart. I never let myself believe she loved me. Now I see. Maybe these powers of mine aren’t that bad. If they can bring me to my mother, let me feel and know her love for me, if they can make us whole as mother and daughter, then they truly are special powers.
Powers worth having.
4
“Does your father know?” Orianna asks. I shake my head, tell her what I’ve done. How I’m going to let him suffer through this. “He really should know.”
“He will,” I say, “eventually.”
“Are you hungry?” she finally asks.
“Starved.”
My mother and I go to dinner at Steakhouse on El Camino Real. She gets the Sundance Cobb and I order the filet, going for the extra two ounce option. The lighting is deliciously dark and there are guys sitting at the bar, drinking, trying to think of someway to approach the two of us. We’re completely intimidating, though. So these guys who are too old for me and too young for my mother, they just sit and drink and work on the courage they know isn’t there to approach us, all the while knowing they won’t do it because they are total pussies. At least that’s what all five of them are thinking in one way or another.
That’s guys for you.
When dinner is over and dessert becomes an option, we both look at each other, smile, then pass. “Dinner was enough,” she says.
“I’m full, too.”
Orianna drove, so she drives us back and I’m exhausted. So tired I fall asleep in the car on the way home. The dream is short but powerful.
We’re in bed, me and the dream man who is not Jake and certainly not Tavares, and he’s on me, in me, and it feels amazing, like we’ve known each other forever, like we’re the perfect fit. Which we are. The blankets are wadded at our ankles, our bodies slicked with sweat. He’s rocking into me, back and forth, and it feels so hot and sensuous I can hardly stand it. My body shudders with every moan. Working toward something. Aching for it.
As my eyes adjust to the light, I realize we’re in my dorm room; as my eyes adjust to the light, the tattoo on his right shoulder becomes perfectly clear and mesmerizing. The angel at war with herself, is what I think. The lightness of this inked angel is beauty, innocence and kindness; the dark side, however, is the part of her who’d beat you to death simply because she could if her mood called for that.
There is a sexy, wickedness about the tattoo I have to say I quite enjoy. The darker side of her speaks to me, which has me wondering what that means. Am I darkness with some light? Or am I still lightness able to summon the dark?
Just then, as I’m about to climax, I reach over to my nightstand, grab a razor blade sitting flat on the wooden surface and drag it hard and deep across my lover’s neck. A faucet of blood opens up, leaking his life everywhere, washing me with thick, viscous fluid. I don’t want this. I don’t! Yet it’s necessary, is what I think.
Why am I thinking this? How am I even halfway rational?! What am I doing???
He’s sitting up, still inside me…he’s sitting up cupping a hand over the geysering artery, but blood is splashing all over my face and I can’t see him clearly. As horrified as I am, what I have become is anger. To the question of light and dark, with this murder, I realize I’m darkness with moments of lightness, and not the other way around.
“Honey?” a voice from far away says. I feel a nudge, jolt out of my sleep. “You were having a nightmare,” my mother says. “I think you should stay here tonight.”
“I appreciate that Marg—, mom, but I have to get back. I can’t flake on Janice. She needs me.”
“I need you, too,” she says, placing a loving hand on my cheek.
I don’t know how to respond to her affection, so I just place my hand over hers and lean into her touch. “Thank you for doing everything you’ve been doing to be a better mother.”
“Is it working?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“I like your new look,” she says, and I know she does.
At her house, she kisses me and I get into my car and head back to Astor. When I reach my dorm room, I see Tavares Baldridge waiting out front and I’m like, Jesus God, can’t I please have a break?
“You flaked on me,” he says as I’m walking up.
“I did.”
“So is that it?” he asks.
“No,” I say, still warm
from the dream, still disturbed. “Come on in.” The freaking door isn’t even closed and already I’m pulling off his shirt, grabbing his hair, kissing him. What can I say? I’m a girl with needs and he’s so f*cking sexy and untouched I can hardly stand it. Plus, after these last few days, what I need most is to throw myself into something that won’t bite back. That something is a someone, and that someone is seventeen year old Tavares Baldridge.
5
I break away from his kiss, which is rushed, but tender and warm. I put on my favorite Pandora station, turn down the lights. Then I’m back on him. His touch, his lips, this is my version of heaven. This boy I hardly know, he’s somehow inside me. He gets me. His hands move over my body. He lifts my shirt over my head, unseats my bra. He takes my breasts in his hands, in his mouth, and I hear myself moaning.
Is this really happening? I wonder. You deserve this, I tell myself. Especially after Jake, that moron, and Damien—moron numero dos.
Tavares’s pants come off; my pants come off. The music changes to Lounge music. No, I say to myself. This isn’t the dream. I drag my hands through his longish hair, draw him to my mouth, bite his lip, grab a fistful of his dirty blonde hair. It smells like sand, like beach.
My mouth is on his neck and it smells like sunscreen, like summer.
Uh, oh. WTF?
He pulls me to the bed. He kicks out of his underwear and I pull mine off, dropping them on the floor beside the bed. My insides are swimming right now. Is this lust? Dread?
“Do you know how badly I want you?” he says.
“Then fuck me like you mean it,” I hear myself say.
This is nothing I have ever said before, and it’s nothing I’ll ever want to say again, but he doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, I think it gets him going.
Suddenly he’s working himself inside me and it’s every bit as sensuous as the dream. He needs me, wants me; I’m dying for him. My fingernails are raking down his back; he’s thrusting inside me, doing to me what Jake did, except better. My head rocks back as he finds his rhythm. Then it shoots forward, my mouth caught in the space between a moan and cries of ecstasy.
That delicious in-between.
My eyes adjust to the light, and that’s when I see it: the tattoo. Half an angel of light with half an angel in black. I’m the angel in black.
On Pandora, a psychedelic song comes on the radio that shouldn’t come on. This isn’t a psychedelic station. But the song…it’s exactly that. It’s White Rabbit, and it takes me to other worlds entirely. I feel myself being sucked down inside myself. My connection with Tavares is lost and I’m scared. It’s like I’m watching everything through a window, seeing my body doing things it shouldn’t be doing yet unable to control myself. Unable to do anything but scream into a hundred feet of pillows.
The entity slides to the surface of me, takes the body. And what it does is grab a straight razor off the nightstand, one I don’t remember leaving there, or even having for that matter. How did it get there? Then, my body sits up into Tavares’s glorious, seventeen year old body, and trenches open his carotid artery.
Blood rockets out everywhere. Suddenly I’m in control of my body, feeling everything, crying, screaming “No” over and over again as I try to staunch the blood that’s gushing endless. It’s flooding against my hand, pouring out between my fingers, draining down our bodies. His eyes are wide and terrified and I’m lost, unable to make sense of what just happened, of what I did. Why did I do this? Who just took me over?!
I can’t control the bleeding. In his eyes, I see things fading. I keep saying I’m sorry over and over again, and I’m wailing against the anguish. For all the ways I’ve changed, for all of the power I have attained, I am helpless to use my powers. They’re not closing his wounds. It’s not helping. He’s…he’s dying.
Dying.
“No, no, no. Please, Tavares, please don’t leave me.” His body slumps over and he falls sideways, coming out of me, his eyelids fluttering, the pain all but gone. Then his eyes fall shut and his body stops moving.
I sit next to him for a long time, crying, aching to make sense of what happened, of why I killed him.
I have no answers.
My mind lashes out, but it doesn’t have an enemy. I’m the enemy. The something inside me without a name. My mind eventually finds still waters and I can think again.
Closing my eyes, I reach out and find him, the strange doctor at Dulce who is not a man and not an alien. I grab his brain and scream into it. I scream: I NEED YOU NOW! and that’s when I’m struck with the most righteous headache I’ve ever had. My skull is pressure-cracked in half. My hands shoot to the sides of my head and I can’t stop the screaming coming from my mouth. Blood drains thick from my nose and ears, from my eyes and mouth. Then it just stops.
And he’s here.
“You cannot do such things, child.” He doesn’t look happy. Standing nearly seven feet tall in my room, he looks downright pissed.
“What…happened to me?”
He looks around, sees the carnage. His gaze softens. He then turns his eyes on me and it feels like a million fingers slipping through the folds in my brain, opening them up, turning them inside out and over. These invisible fingers sift through the layers of my mind with greed, with haste. They penetrate my mind, then they just stop. And his eyes? They turn to vertical slits for a moment, clear, and then he says, “Something was done to you. At Dulce.”
“I know. But I got rid of it. Holland made me new. Cleared out the implants.”
“Those were hard implants. The psychological programming, it didn’t leave your mind when your mind was made new. It’s called psychic driving, an effective way of implanting subconscious instructions inside you to be followed at a later date.”
“Delgado,” my mouth says like it’s the f-word, or the c-word.
“Yes.”
“But why him?” I ask, looking at the dead boy on my bed, and all his blood drying on my chest and in between my fingers.
“There’s a reason. A need to fulfill. You were simply the conduit. The asset.”
“I didn’t do this, though. I mean, I did, but I didn’t either.”
“Whatever I activated in you, you have become the perfect asset. A weapon. You can’t be killed, or reasoned with. And you can’t be caught by anyone under any circumstances. To a man like Delgado, you have tangible monetary value. Which means everything to him since he has gone rogue.”
I feel parts of my mind peeling apart. With this…thing…standing before me, I scratch and claw my way back to the teachings of my sensei, grasping like I’m dying for some measure of peace, some place in my mind where chaos isn’t running rampant. I slow my breathing, try aligning my mind, body and soul even though all of them seem wildly disjointed.
“Do you know where he is?” I ask, my need to exact revenge on Frederick Delgado the most consistent emotion. I scrape all my other emotions away, but these eyes find Tavares and inside I feel like I’m going to be sick.
“If you want to know for yourself, simply close your eyes and find him. You’ve become proficient at that, have you not?”
“I have.”
My eyes close against the carnage. My mind is like a million overturned garbage bins sucked into a tornado, just spinning and twisting and rolling, but without sound. This peace I find, it’s just an illusion. The chaos is constant. Using Sensei’s meditation techniques, I work slowly but constantly to declutter myself of thought and want and hatred.
It takes time—I’m not sure how much—but I break apart the insanity, wipe it from my mind until the gates inside me unite: soul aligns with mind, body aligns with soul, mind aligns with body.
Dr. Delgado is staying in a farmhouse in upstate New York. He’s gone off the grid. In hiding. He can’t hide from me. My eyes flash open and I start to speak, but the creepy doctor from Dulce, he’s gone. He’s the Ghost of Christmas Past and he’s just freaking…gone.
It’s only me and Tavares.
Tava
res…
How can he be underage and still have a tattoo? With a sickening roll of nausea coursing through me with earthquake-like power, I wiggle into his brain, search the folds for something. I find nothing. In his pocket, there is an ID. In my mind’s eye, I turn it over, then I read it. It’s a fake. It says he’s 21. He isn’t. The way I wanted a fake ID to get in clubs to meet boys was the way he wanted a fake ID to get a tattoo. It’s such a human thing to do.
Tears well in my eyes.
He’s just a boy, the same as I’m just a girl. We’re two dumb kids who’ve been abused by our elders. Changed by strangers. Something is building inside me, a wild, sinister rage fueled by injustice. The familiarity of it scares me. But not before it catches fire and pumps me full of acid once more.
Closing my eyes, vengeance my only emotion, I return to Frederick Delgado, slither into his unsuspecting mind, extract the reasons for his treachery. The doctor who was neither human nor alien, he/it was right. What Delgado did to me, what he made me do to Tavares, it was about money. Like a growl, baleful and low, seething with animosity, my voice barely tempered with a fury that is fast rising inside me, I spit these words into his brain: It’s done. Tavares Baldridge is dead.
Dead.
The thing Dr. Delgado feels first is relief. What he wonders next is, why does the voice sound so mad? And how is it in my head? Is that…Abby? Is she still alive?
After I escaped Dulce, when he lost sight of me, he leaned on my hardwiring. But then I had Holland change me, remake me. If there was any hardwiring left inside me, it went offline, disintegrated in the pink tube. He feared the Senator would kill him.
The Senator? I’m wondering if the Senator is the client, and why. Now that Tavares is dead, Delgado is feeling anxious to call her and tell her the contract has been fulfilled.
This is…a contract? I’m an assassin?
Into his joyous mind, in a more rancorous tone than before, I say, “I’m not done with you yet, Delgado,” and he startles. He’s reclining in a chair in the loft of an old farm house and it is the middle of the night, but he’s up looking at porn. Pictures of girls with other girls. Videos of nuns smacking girls’ bare bottoms with yard sticks. His attention is drawn from the low budget production of smut, and now he’s freaking out about me being in his head.