by Joshua Furst
Each time the scene played in Cheryl's mind, she asked herself this question, and each time, she chose to answer it no. She knew what came next too. She couldn't turn it off. She couldn't switch channels with a blink of her eyes. It kept going, there, beneath the lids, a continuous loop, varying slightly, sometimes graphic, now lyrical, now from the dog's sad black-and-white point of view. All she could do was wait for a distraction—Devin's shout for help carrying a street find, the plaintive life story of some new kid on the scene, best of all, though, hardest to come across, a drug powerful enough to knock her out.
Whatever trick allowed her to escape, these thoughts weren't gone for long. They always came back in some new variation. One thing remained consistent: the excitement in Trent's voice and her refusal to recognize it.
There are ways, I've discovered, that the things you imagine cling longer and dig deeper and cause more damage than those you've actually experienced. The lines begin to blur. You begin to have difficulty distinguishing between what's fantasy and what's real.
For a while there, I saw them every night, Trent and Devin, stabbing and stabbing and stabbing. Sometimes they noticed me and then they'd wink before going back to their gruesome game. Sometimes it wasn't the dog but my daughter tied up and bloodied beneath them. Sometimes, in my lunacy, I think it was me.
THEY WERE ON THE ROOF AGAIN, Cheryl and Trent, pawing and teasing each other on, when the humidity broke and a warm rain flooded down like sudden bathwater. The drainage pipe was slick, a thrill to rappel, but back in the squat they felt hemmed in by the old oppression, by Devin's found trash and Mike's bad vibes. One look and they knew they couldn't take it tonight. They raced downstairs, and out onto the street, broke the taboo and made for the space where Cap's stuff was stored: the café itself. Cheryl had never set foot inside, never asked, never wanted to, somehow fearing it contained traces of me, dust that glowed green and was better left undisturbed.
The doors were boarded shut, so they tried a window. In the three weeks since he and his friends were last here, it had bloated and no matter how Trent pushed and pried, it wouldn't budge. While Cheryl danced behind him, her arm around his waist, fingers on his belly, then down his pants, tracing his pelvic bone, probing his damp pubic hair, he tried again. “Fuck this.” He shook her off him, found an empty bottle in the alley, and warding her back, smashed it through the window. “Kick ass,” he said, and then he kissed her, rough and sloppy, his saliva gushing into her mouth. Knocking the shards from the pane, he urged her to enter.
The thing that hit her first was the pull of heat, like the inside of a car left naked in the sun. Then she tasted the dry chalky grit of the air and the smell sank in, a scent with mass and weight and propulsion; it was a physical force, sweet and putrid, clinging to her like a spiderweb.
“Fucking A!” She tried to back out into the rain, but Trent was behind her, blocking her way. “This is that smell, the one I told you about.”
She knew what it was—she'd known weeks ago when she'd caught the first whiff, when it had been just a trace, a fold of air in the kitchen, but still, even now, she refused to believe it.
Hands on her hips, Trent walked her backward through the room. He tried to talk the smell away—it's nothing, some dead rat, some shit like that, it'll go away, you'll see, in just a second, come here— and she heard lust in his voice, a breathy, conspiratorial excitement. He pecked at her face like a belligerent bird, palmed her ass, pulled her close. He didn't seem to be gagging like she was.
They waddled around the cavernous space, Cheryl holding her breath, gulping air through her mouth. Everything was too close— Trent, the rain, everything.
The back of her ankle caught on something. It was stiff and slick, squishy in places. Something wrapped in a plastic bag. Her foot became tangled and it gave underneath her. She could feel two frail rods jutting out from the bulk of the thing in the bag. “Trent,” she said, “hold up, hold up, I'm gonna fall,” but he wouldn't stop pressing, stop pulling and grabbing, he wouldn't stop manhandling her is what it was.
Her other ankle hit. She twisted. She fell. Her shoulder took the impact, but it still hurt. Trent tumbled over her, his body crushing her, sharp elbows jabbing, knees pounding her thigh, her groin.
He was kissing her. His lips were on her neck, one hand up her shirt, kneading her breast like clay. He thought she was into it, she could tell, and why wouldn't he—they'd had rougher sex than this a dozen times before. But never in a place so saturated with death.
That's what it was, the smell. It was the dog, the carcass of the dog. They'd left it there to rot. She couldn't pretend not to know anymore.
“I can't breathe,” she said. “I think I'm gonna throw up.”
Trent wasn't listening. Or he didn't care. He was fumbling with belts, yanking at her soaked shorts, pressing the nub of himself into her.
“It's dry,” she said. “I'm sorry.”
“Fuck, you want to stop?”
“No, finish.” She couldn't disappoint him, not even now. “Just finish.”
She lay there, every muscle in her body tense, breathing through her mouth, trying not to breathe at all. She swallowed back the stomach acid in her throat, she swallowed back the sound of her tears, and she took it.
She believed she had no choice.
And when he finally came and asked if she was pissed, she lied and she told him no.
FEBRUARY EIGHTEENTH. A Wednesday. Over three months before Cheryl ran away.
It was going to be a dangerous year. She was coming up on her birthday turning sixteen, the same age my sister had been when she died. Certain essential parts of Sarah had made their way through me into Cheryl, but I still worried that the wrong ancestor was watching over her. The ancient relative of Robert's whose name we'd taken had lived in a vastly different time; she knew nothing about the trouble Cheryl would face.
I'd been operating in a low-grade panic, trying and failing day after day to stop the fear from spreading. Knowing I shouldn't, but having no choice, really, I finally broke down and mentioned my fears to Robert, who pretty much responded just like I'd thought he would.
“Yup,” he said. “She's reaching the magic age. Watch out! The whole house is going to turn into a pumpkin. We're all gonna go up in a puff of smoke.”
He was trying to mollify me with sarcasm. It had worked before, popping my logic into cackles of laughter. This time, though, I wasn't in the mood. We'd been at it for almost an hour, and that look I loathe, the one that says I'm his toy, says no matter how loud or long I talk, he still won't hear a word I've said, was strung like an electric fence across his face.
“Go ahead. Gloat. But when Cheryl ends up …” The word was dead, but I couldn't bring myself to say it. “We'll see how much you'll be gloating then.”
“Just relax, Julia. Remember where you are.”
It was after eight. We were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. I wanted to smack him. Instead I stood up and turned my back. My reflection in the sliding glass door confronted me. Splinters of frost cut across the reflection's face, and for a second I forgot they were on the exterior of the glass and thought they were actually part of my body. I reached up. My hand came between the frost on the glass and the face outside. My perceptions corrected themselves. But the slip terrified me. I had to remind myself: Stop.
“You relax,” I said, spinning around to look at Robert.
He must have seen the change. His smirk fell away. “Just take a step back, Julia. Slow down.”
“No. She's going to be sixteen,” I said. “Don't you have any idea what that means?”
“Yes, I know what it means.” I was giving him a headache. His finger was pressing at his eye.
“So …”
“Do we really have to go through all this again? What happened to sticking to things we can prove?”
“I CAN PROVE THIS!”
“Okay,” he said. His hands flipped out in front of him like streamers. “Do.”<
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The details all fit together in my head, the way Cheryl and Sarah and I were connected, but when I tried to explain them in a coherent argument, they peeled apart from each other and fragmented. “Not everything can be proven just like that,” I said. “Some things you just know.”
“Try.”
Something moved, a quick vibration at the edge of the room.
There. A bulb of flesh. A fleck of black nail polish. I was dizzy. It was getting harder for me to breathe. I opened my mouth. I tried to be coherent, but the only word I could get out was “Sarah.”
As I rushed from the room, Robert grabbed my wrist, and to get him off of me I had to bite him. Then, in the hallway, I smacked into Cheryl.
“What's wrong?” she asked. She was terrified. She'd never seen me like this before.
I pushed right past her, reeled down the hall toward the bathroom and slammed the door. After turning the lever in the tub to the right and pulling the shower valve, I settled onto the toilet seat to wait for the steam to fill up the room.
I understood exactly what was happening, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. It wasn't all just a trick of my mind. It wasn't completely psychosomatic. Some of it was real. My blood wasn't flowing. There was a pinch, like a cramp, at the base of my neck, an unstable prickle fluttering up and down my arm. When I tried to breathe, the air could get in, but something was stopping it from getting out.
This had happened before, but usually I was able to suppress it, to push through it by slowing myself down and regulating my body's malfunctions. Those previous scares had been rehearsal drills, preparing me for a severe attack. Now here it was. Cheryl was turning sixteen. Nobody was going to protect us.
The fist rapping at the door was too confident, too intolerant to be Cheryl's.
“Open up, Julia.”
But Cheryl was there too. I could hear her behind him, trying to reach me. “What happened, Mom? What's wrong?”
He snapped at her. “Go to your room.”
“But—”
There was rustling, more pounding. “Julia?”
“But, Dad—”
“Now. She's just upset, okay?”
Robert's voice dropped away and all I could hear was the water from the shower pummeling the tub. The steam twirled in slow pin-wheels across the room, dusting the mirrors, tumbling into the two scalloped sink basins and folding in on itself, spilling up and out like a witch's brew. The air was growing heavy and my reflection in the shower door blurred.
“I swear, if you don't open up, Julia, I'm gonna break the door down.”
He didn't realize the door was unlocked. He hadn't checked. Even in his rage, he had decorum, that small-town courtesy, bred into him by his mother; thinking about barging in on my privacy in the bathroom made him squeamish.
“You're making this harder than it has to be,” he said, and the knob turned. The door opened a crack and paused there. Then he shoved it wide. He cut through the steam. Swiftly, stridently, he ducked into the tub and shut off the water.
When he turned on me, one arm of his pale-blue button-down shirt was soaked to the shoulder. The terror on his face enraged me.
“Happy now?” he said.
A sharp pain shot through my heart and when I tried to speak, all that came out was a hoarse whisper.
Robert sank onto the lip of the tub. He thought I was faking it, I could tell. He had no compassion.
I fished out the book of crossword puzzles Robert kept in the wicker basket next to the toilet, and unclipping the ballpoint pen he'd tucked inside as a placeholder, I performed a quick diagnosis on myself. I flipped the book open and scrawled my situation onto a page of newsprint. I'M HAVING A HEART ATTAC K, I wrote.
“No you're not.”
CALL 911.
“You're not having a heart attack.”
CALL 911.
“What are your symptoms?”
ARM TINGLES. SHOOTING PAIN.
“How about we take some deep breaths.” He reached for my hand, but I jabbed the pen at him, warding him off.
CAN'T BREATHE. HEART …
My hands were shaking so badly I could barely form the words on the page. I kept stabbing holes in the paper. It was hopeless and Robert didn't care anyway.
My throat felt like it was going to rip apart, but I had to push through the pain and force out a sound. I didn't want to die. “Cheryl?!”
She didn't come running.
I stared at her father until he left the room in exasperation.
Then I flipped to the back cover of the crossword book—it was less fragile, slick, heavy card stock—and wrote down the things she needed to know.
CHERYL,
CALL 911. I'M HAVING A HEART ATTAC K. I HAVE TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL. DON'T WO RRY. EVERYTHING WI LL BE OKAY. WE'LL GET THROUGH THIS. BUT HURRY PLEASE. THE SITUATION IS URGENT.
VERY IMPORTANT: DO NOT DISCUSS AN Y OF THIS WITH YOUR FAT HER. WE CAN'T TRUST HIM. HE DOESN'T UNDERSTAND.
I LOVE YOU.
MOM
The note in my lap, I waited for her to come to me.
It took her a while, but eventually, she did.
“What's up?” she mumbled, her voice a dull monotone.
I handed her the note. As she scanned the words I'd written there, her hands shook so badly that she had to use both of them to hold the crossword book still. But she kept her composure. She refused to cry. I was proud of her.
“I just have to say, Mom.” She scrutinized me, and I caught a trace of her father's intolerance curling around the edges of her mouth. “You're not acting like you're having a heart attack.”
The pain spiked up my arm.
BUT I AM.
“Wouldn't you be, like, rolling around on the ground? I mean, wouldn't your face be turning blue or something?”
I AM HAVING A HEART ATTACK!! I wrote.
“Mom?”
DIFFERENT PEOPLE HAVE HEART ATTACKS IN DIFFERENT WAYS.
That was as far as I was willing to go. Even in my distressed state, I was still her mother. Even incapacitated. And there was no way I was going to debate her on the things taking place within my own body.
“This is crazy!” she said.
I was done talking. There was nothing left to discuss. If she didn't call the ambulance soon, something terrible was going to happen.
She must have intuited the severity of my position. Her face puckered with the effort to hold back her fear. She was at an age when her reality had yet to harden—the rules of her world were still permeable—but she understood that this, now, this was real. I wasn't playing games with her perception. I was as frightened as she was, and she was the only one who could do anything about it. If this angered her, she had a right to that anger. I understood. She wasn't mad at me, she was mad at the situation, at the impossibility of fixing the situation, at her own childish urge to run away and hide, pull the covers over her head while she waited for everything to end. The circumstances demanded she take on responsibilities that, as my daughter, my child, she never should have had to shoulder. I wasn't supposed to be the helpless one. We both understood this. But understanding did us no good. The facts wouldn't change. Reality refused to be altered. I was slumped on the toilet, halfway to collapse, with no one to save me but her.
I squeezed her hand, a quick, furtive pulse. Thank you, it said. You're my whole life. And when my hand dropped from hers, she pulled out her cell phone, punched in the numbers and left the room.
Later, while trying to block out the murmur of Robert and Cheryl's conversation, which was floating through the house like distant gunfire, I got it in my head that, if I were outside in the brisk air, my blood would flow a tiny bit more fluidly, my heart would beat just a tad more regularly, and I'd be able to persist and survive until the ambulance came to my rescue.
My breath was short again. The house was thick with signals I couldn't decipher.
I pulled myself to my feet, and lurching, staggering, made my way slowly out of the bathroom.
Every few steps, I lost my breath completely and had to stop until it came back to me. Braced against the wall, heaving, I waited for the pain to end. Then I pushed on.
Down the hallway.
Past the bedrooms.
The whispers halted abruptly.
I made it to the kitchen, and Cheryl and Robert were staring at me.
For a moment I watched them. They looked exhausted, nervous, like they'd been struggling to trap a skittish cat. Without taking his eyes off me, Robert reached over and patted Cheryl's arm. It was like they were in some corny support group.
“Don't forget,” he told her, “two plus two.”
I could surmise what had come before: him filling her up with resentment toward me, saying, Don't trust her, don't listen to a word she says, when she speaks, look her in the eye and show no emotion, saying, Listen to the song playing in your head, anything just so long as it's not her; she'll try to catch you in her sticky logic and you'll want to believe her delusions could be real; they can't, though, remember this, they can't, and somewhere inside that brain she knows it too; she's more scared than you are; all she wants is sympathy, sympathy and control, but don't give it to her, make her work for your love; she's stronger than she's pretending to be and if you're tough, if you refuse to play along with her, you'll see, she'll pull herself right back together again. Oh, when he was in the mood, he knew how to argue. He could persuade anybody of anything. Never mind that the person he was describing looked a lot more like him than like me.
I refused to let him spook me. There was too much to do. Cheryl had been crying, and I'm sure, he'd found a way to blame that on me as well. But her survival was too important for me to waste energy on managing their misconceptions. I picked up one of the ladder-back chairs stationed around the table, lifted it with two hands and turned toward the living room.
“Mom?” Panic, not love, is what her voice contained. “Where are you going? What are you doing now?”
Focus on the door. Just make it to the door. That's what I told myself. Don't let them distract you. One step and two steps and three steps and four steps. Don't let them confuse you.