Follow Me Down

by Sherri Smith

  I wondered if apartment 45 was really agoraphobic. How did that work with groceries and laundry? A flash of black fur. Edgar was behind the dryer.

  “Here.” I doled out a treat.

  Slowly I drew him out, picked him up. He bit my hand. I dropped him, got him again. “I gotcha,” I said out loud, more than once as I walked the cat back upstairs. “I got him, I have Edgar!” I said this through the door, absurdly triumphant sounding. My eyes tearing and dripping onto the top of Edgar’s slick black head.

  The door cracked open. “Shhh. No one can know. Cats aren’t allowed.” Edgar jumped from my arms and disappeared inside.

  I was about to say, I think the caretaker already knows, and explain why, but the door snapped shut. “Put a chair under your doorknob.” I pressed my forehead against the door. “You’re welcome.”

  * * *

  At some point, in a near coma with the golden assistance of a dangerous amount of downers, I felt someone take both of my hands and unroll the fists I’d made in my sleep. I could hear the squirting sound of a tube. A cool touch. Someone’s hot breathing on the inside of my arm.

  Small slippery circles were thumbed in my palm, then a greasy rubdown worked over each of my knuckles. Someone’s fingers slithered in between my own, slow and methodical.

  Unrushed. Not at all worried I’d come to. Like they’d watched me swallow a handful of pills.

  I tried like hell to wake up, to snatch my hands away, but couldn’t. I just kept sliding back down into sleep like a trapped frog inside a bucket. I couldn’t judder a single finger. I couldn’t lift an eyelid. I’d lost control of my body (that was the point of all those downers). I was in full sleep paralysis. Even my heart rate stayed at a slow, steady thump, thump, thump while inside somewhere, I was screaming in terror.

  22

  DAY 9

  THURSDAY

  When I finally woke up, the sun was coming in through the vertical blinds, casting its prison-bar shadows across the blanket. My hair was damp with sweat. I would have written last night off as a hallucinogenic episode or, at best, a really deep dream if I hadn’t pressed the back of my hand to my nose and caught a sharp whiff of vanilla. I staggered up and grabbed my phone.

  “Can you please check if Miranda Haas is in her room?”

  “Of course she is.”

  “I need you to check; this is her daughter, Mia Haas.”

  The nurse brought the phone with her. I could hear her climbing the stairs. She breathed heavy into the phone. It couldn’t have been Russ who’d lotioned up my hands, because I seriously doubted he would have stopped at my hands. Maybe if it’d been my breasts that were kneaded and smelled like vanilla, or worse, I would think it was Russ. Or if there were more bottles of booze missing. No. It had to be Mimi. It had that mother’s loving touch. Maybe it had been Mimi the whole time; she was the one taking Lucas’s things. Maybe she knew where he was.

  “Did she get out again last night?” I walked around the apartment, checking the closets, behind the recliner, under the bed, sure my mother was about to pop out.

  “No. We’ve taken better precautionary measures since she ran off. We’ve put a lock on her door at night. I realize that might sound extreme—”

  “No, that’s fine. Good.”

  “I am unlocking her room now.” I heard a jangle of keys, the nurse cursing lightly under her breath. “Wrong key, hold on.” Then the sound of Mimi shouting in the background What’d ya want at the nurse. “She’s right here, Miss Haas.”

  “I heard. But there’s a window in her room, right? Could she get out that way?”

  “Well, of course there’s a window. It would be against the building’s fire code not to have one but Mimi’s room is on the second story,” and here the nurse paused, so I’d clue in that I should know this about my mother’s living arrangements, “but she couldn’t drop out from the window without injury. There’s just no way she could have gotten out, Miss Haas.”

  No, but maybe someone else was letting her out. Could it be Kathy? Maybe she was whispering vicious things into my mother’s ear while pressing Lucas’s apartment key into her hand. Setting Mimi up to do her dirty work and get rid of me. And what? Instead Mimi slathered my hands with lotion? My mind went swirly, and I started to sweat again. There was always the chance I was still hallucinating, that I hadn’t smelled what I thought I had. I pressed my nose to my knuckles again and nearly started retching. No. Someone lotioned my hands, while I slept. Back in the bathroom, I washed my hands, scrubbed until they were raw and I couldn’t smell the faintest trace of vanilla.

  I slumped down on the couch again, still coated with pixie pill dust from the night before. I felt violated. I felt crazy. I felt like the apartment, the TV, the bookshelves, the cowhide rug, a yellow Post-it note stuck to the bottom of the recliner, another day without knowing what had happened to my brother, were all a watery surface, and if I could just reach out and touch the air with my finger, everything would ripple.

  A yellow Post-it? I reached down, teeth grinding, and pulled it off the recliner. It was full of inky numbers in Lucas’s handwriting. An address.

  * * *

  I headed south toward a tiny touristy town on a marshy lake surrounded by oversized cottages referred to as summer properties and lake houses by those in Wayoata who could afford one. The town felt like a movie set, full of old-style storefronts with striped awnings. I followed Google’s directions past a Dairy Queen with a horde of people surrounding it, past a farmers’ market with a jazzy band playing up on a platform, past a patio full of midday drinkers. Lake life.

  I almost missed it twice. The lake house was set so far back off the road, and its front lot was heavily treed. I knew it was the lake house from Joanna Wilkes’s journal. I knew that before I even left the apartment. The Post-it must have been in the envelope I ripped from the back of Lucas’s bookshelf, and somehow it fell loose and stuck to the chair. Was this where they met, Joanna and Lucas, for their secret sexual rendezvous? Did Lucas put a sweaty hand on the girl’s knee as they drove out here after last period, saying things like No one would ever understand us, as one corner of his mouth twitched?

  It looked like it had been closed down for a few seasons. The windows were boarded up, and an overall look of neglect hung over it. I turned the car off, listened to it tick as I tried the front door. Locked of course. But there was a tear in the screen. I reached inside, tried the entry door, but it was also locked. I walked around to the back, stepping up onto a tiered deck with stairs that led down to the dock and a boathouse. An animal was skittering around in the dead leaves under my feet. Tried the back door, also locked.

  Down the steps, to a dilapidated boathouse. Water grass was spiking out at the shore here and around the dock. The lake itself shimmered with oil rainbows. I tried the door to the boathouse—locked. I used my car keys to tear a hole in the screen, a sort of miniature gnawing hacksaw. I slipped my hand through the scratchy opening and turned the little tab on the knob.

  There was no boat here. I stepped carefully around the edges of the open water. There were missing boards, and the remaining dock was rotted. I was afraid the whole thing might give out. An old life jacket hung from a nail, a canoe was tilted and leaning on its side. A rusty jerry can sat under a workbench. Everything was covered in webs with raisin-like insects speckled throughout.

  I don’t know why I did it, but I crouched down and felt behind one of the oars. An image of a golden key flashed in my mind, and there it was, a key. Somehow I’d known it would be there. This startled me. My hands shook, and I dropped the key on a worn-out board near the water.

  A sort of déjà vu had been lingering around the back of my neck since I got there. The first whisper of it was when I walked up the front steps. Like a callused finger tapping on the nape of my neck, which only became stronger as I went down to the dock, it was clawing at me now. I knew déjà vu could be a symptom of heightened dopamine caused by certain stimulative medications, and so maybe
this wasn’t a sensation I should pay much attention to, but how had I known exactly where to find the spare key? How had I even known there was a spare key?

  Down on one knee, I snatched the key back up but not before peering into the water, thinking maybe if the Wilkeses had killed Lucas, he could be there, weighed down by something, his face bloated with terror, mouth opened. Drowning on his last screams. His now sodden features all running away from each other.

  A cold panic swept through me. For a hideous moment, I saw my own face and mistook it for Lucas’s. I jolted back; jagged wood dug into my palms. Dread took my breath away. I felt like I was being swallowed up. The sound of blood sputtered in my ears. I squeezed my eyes shut, listened to a boat whizzing by in the distance. Took careful, calming breaths though my nose. My teeth hooked on to my bottom lip.

  Get it together. Fall apart later. But now get it together.

  * * *

  Outside as I turned to go back up to the lake house, I saw something out on the water. A formation of rocks sticking out of the lake, like the spiny back of some sea creature. Something about it jarred me. Again the déjà vu, but stronger, almost a memory, but not quite. It darted around my head like a hummingbird on methamphetamine, never staying still long enough that I could get anything more than an echo of its presence.

  Back up the steps. The key slid into the back door, and I stepped inside a large mudroom, with a drift of dead leaves. The place smelled musty and oddly like rotten apples. I went to my right first, and before I went into the kitchen, I knew that it was where the kitchen would be. I’d been here. We were here. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but somehow I knew the whole floor plan of the house. I could clearly picture the furniture that was hiding under the dusty sheets.

  I turned down a long hallway that led to five bedrooms and a bathroom, ending with what I knew was once called the big bedroom. I followed a set of stairs to the attic. Here was the circular skylight that Joanna wrote about in her journal. Now the feeling was almost visceral. Lucas and I had been here, running around this strange, angular room. Hiding inside an old steamer trunk, shadowboxing with that mannequin torso, and sitting there too in the orb of light shining in through the roof.

  I heard the crunch of gravel. Someone was driving up. I looked through one of the wavy glass windows. Ben’s warhead of a truck was parked tight behind my toy car. He dropped out of the driver’s seat and started to head up the driveway. I shot back from the window, knocked into the mannequin torso, nearly tipping it over. Instinctively, I grabbed it. Leaned it against the wall and ran across the attic, then stumbled halfway down the stairs. A loud bang. The storm door. I froze midstep. What should I do? Should I make a run for the front door and hope that I could head him off and make it to my boxed-in car? Then what? No, I’d have to get to a neighbor’s house, a neighbor who was home and willing to help me (assaulter of grieving mothers) over Ben Wilkes. I could feel my throat closing again, under Kathy’s arm pressure.

  I crept back up the stairs into the attic. I tried pulling up one of windows, my road rash splitting open from the strain, but it was painted shut, or nailed shut, or else it was never meant to open. Fuck, fuck.

  I had my phone. I could call Garrett. But what would he do? I was trespassing again, and clearly his “stern” warnings had had no effect on Ben, who was still following me. And I couldn’t be sure how deep Garrett was in with the Wilkeses. And even if, if, he did flick on his siren and buzz over there, it’d take too long. I’d be dead by the time he got there. Ben would roll me up in a tarp and drop me into the lake.

  I looked around for something I could use—a weapon—but everything was boxed up.

  I descended the steps again, quiet and light. Listened. I knew the layout of this house. I could use that to somehow go around him. A rustling, like someone was taking the sheets off the furniture. He was in the living room, and I needed to pass the living room to get to the front door. I ducked into the first bedroom right of the stairs, full of little-girl furniture. White wrought-iron bed frame, the bed stripped of sheets. White furniture and a white hope chest. I stepped into a half-empty closet and waited. The stinging smell of mothballs made my eyes water.

  I pushed myself farther back into the closet. It hit me then: I’d been here before. Just like this. In this closet, inside this room. This was my bedroom. Somewhere buried in my memory, I knew that I’d claimed this as my room. I hid inside this closet, but it was Lucas coming to find me.

  A slow, sort of loping sound drew closer. I inched off something from a hanger, a dress, and tried to hide under it. A floorboard creaked in the hallway. A hinge squeaked; he was checking the closet in the room next to mine. My room. My room? What the hell was going on?

  I stood up. Could I make it if I bolted right now? The hinge squeaked again. No. He was in the hallway again. I crouched back down, expecting at any moment a shadow to snuff out the sliver of light coming into the cracked closet door. Expecting Ben to fling open the closet doors and drag me out by my legs.

  I pulled out my car key, slid it between my index and middle finger.

  I’d plunge it into his eyes, at least carve a couple of good scratches on his pampered cheeks. He entered the room. I stopped breathing. Leaned forward, peeked through the crack. He dropped down onto his stomach and looked under the bed. A push-up and he was standing again. The way he was moving, slow and unworried, going room to room … he knew he had me.

  He started toward the closet, and I curled into myself. Snapped into the fetal position like I was a human lawn chair. Key ready. His hand was on the knob, the hinges started to move—ohmygodohmygodohmygod—and then a thump in the attic. The mannequin had fallen over. It had to be the mannequin. Ben let go of the closet door and stalked down the hallway toward the stairs.

  I bolted. Flung open the closet and ran toward the front door. I was on the front lawn and could hear Ben running up behind me. I dove into the PT. Hit the door locks. Ben ambled around my car like Cujo. I started the car and slammed it backward into his truck, then forward, back, then forward. I probably would have shattered my back window if I’d still had one. His front bumper popped off.

  I lurched the PT forward again, went too far, and skittered into what was once a flower bed. My front wheel was hooked on brick edging. The wheels turned, and I panicked. My hands shaking, I shifted into neutral instead of reverse. Exhaust filled the backseat and then Ben stuck his arm in through the missing back window.

  “Fuck off, leave me alone, get away,” I screamed.

  In reverse again, the car lurched, and Ben staggered back and half rolled off the driveway.

  I wrenched the steering wheel all the way to the right, and scraping the front of his truck, I was able to cut across the front lawn. The ground dropped out, and I dipped into a shallow ditch that I doubted the car could climb out of, but somehow it did. I was back on the road. I glanced in the rearview at Ben, flailing his arms at me.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until I passed the Dairy Queen that I could breathe again. My body started going from braced and rigid to all loose and rubbery. Spaghetti-limbed. My hands kept sliding off the steering wheel, and my foot felt like deadweight on the gas pedal. Lead foot. All I could smell was car exhaust and mothballs. I kept looking over my shoulder, thinking I’d see Ben’s truck hurtling up behind me, but he wasn’t there. What was he going to do to me? Duct tape me to a chair in the living room? The living room where I’d been before. Wait for Kathy, who’d circle around me, smacking her yardstick in her hand as she decided exactly how to dispose of me? Would I get a long, nefarious speech? Would they tell me what they did to Lucas before that last crack to my skull? The murderer’s soliloquy with all the answers? No. Kathy would be all business, she’d hack me up in the same detached way she’d carve a turkey. The thought of Ben’s icy cold eyes and Kathy’s hot breath in my ear closed in on me again, and my heart started to power up in my chest. I veered out of my lane; someone honked and shot me the finger out their w
indow. Breathe.

  Why did I remember being there as a little girl? Sleeping in that same room with a canopy bed, hiding in that same closet where Ben had me cornered.

  I sucked in my bottom lip. Something clicked. I knew what was so familiar about the lake. The painting in Lucas’s living room. Mimi’s painting. That was it, the view from the dock.

  So what? Mimi dated a Wilkes or, really, a Russo? Kathy’s maiden name was Russo. One of them took us out there? I couldn’t think of any other reason that I would remember that place. I knew Kathy was at least ten years older than me. She had two brothers, but both were younger than her and significantly younger than Mimi. Then again, when had that ever stopped her? It all seemed too date-y, though, for one of them to bring her and her kids to the family lake house. Mimi was definitely too old to be brought home to meet Mom.

  Kathy’s husband was older than she was. Or at least he looked older. His hair was mostly thinned out and gray, but I doubted he was old enough for Mimi to have preyed on. Or maybe he was older than he looked. It would explain Kathy bringing up my slutty mother, who’d been “inactive” for several years, during our tussle on her front lawn if Mimi had initiated her husband into sex at some point. It made sense when Carolyn did it, because she was grappling for ways to insult me, but why would Kathy bring up Mimi?

  There was something else, something I was starting to know, but I couldn’t quite let it settle. Not yet. Not before I talked to Mimi.

  * * *

  Mimi was napping when I got there. All the residents had a daily afternoon nap like it was kindergarten. I pushed her door open, and there she was, on her back, her hair splayed out on her pillow like a gray-and-yellow corona around her face. Like this, her resting face was still beautiful. I remembered that when I was little, I would watch my mother sleep. Coming up close to her, studying her features when they were still, because she never was. Sometimes I wasn’t sure I really knew what she even looked like. I stared at her until I couldn’t bear to anymore.