by Dan Noble
But I’m completely off. I see that hand wherever I go. I went out three times during the night and the ground looked undisturbed. How can that be? I was digging it up. Putting Dad’s tree in. Or was it the plants I bought at the market? But this morning, none of those were there either. I’m sick. That much is clear. Can’t discern between reality and fantasy. But that doesn’t make me a murderer, does it? Is that what my father was getting at?
None of it means I’m wrong about everything either. But I am off. I forget to rinse Rose’s shampoo and spend ten minutes listening to her best rendition of “Ouch, Mum!” while battling her to let me rake a comb through the hardened hair clumps before I realize my mistake. I forget to eat breakfast, even skip my coffee.
When I notice my blood sugar dropping, I dig through the fridge and pull out a thick slice of expensive fresh turkey with that lovely stringy texture, until Kennedy comes over and bites it off my fingers, grabbing my waist as he does. I’m not imagining it. Our attraction is heightened. The eroticism is palpable. It could be the taste of loss, the feeling of it all slipping through our fingers, or even the idea that neither of us really knows the other, that maybe we never can. Or that we’re in on something secret—together. It feels like in the beginning, when we weren’t ever too tired or hungry or grumpy to want. I tell myself sex is animal. It doesn’t have to do with love or trust or doing what’s right. But that’s bullshit and I know it. This is real drama, real love, real significance. I’m drunk with it, and it’s worth whatever ending I get.
He sucks my finger a second too long and my body reacts. He smiles, like he knows he’s got me. I want to believe relief’s behind that, and not guile. But it’s impossible to say. It is so tempting to bury all the secrets that have come out and continue on. But he’s dying, I remind myself. Even that horrific element feels surmountable—I can fix it. I’m seeing things on a greater continuum. I can feel my mind, and world, expanding. Softening.
Am I maybe enjoying the game a little? I hear my old therapist’s words in my head: It’s the illusion of control you’re drawn to. And now I know I’m a murderer, there is a weight lifted from me, for at least I know the truth, and can free myself from the lost hours of speculation and obsessive reasoning. I don’t feel good, but that’s been my survival tactic all along. Not feeling good I can deal with. Still, it’s doing strange things to my perspective.
“Mmmm, love,” Kennedy says. The kitchen is hot, sticky, weighty with significance. Are we meant to be forgetting about the trouble? Could he really die? As soon as I think it, my mind searches for a solution: if I can’t count on Pinocchio, could I manage to control a page-in on my own? If Kennedy died right now, I’d know I would have wanted to live my life with him, to save him if I could have. Shouldn’t that make it easier for me to forgive him? It’s dense with tangles and hurts and questions and love, of course love.
“You’ve got to try this turkey, Rose,” he says, reaching over me to grab another slice from the deli bag. He seems absolutely unfazed that we were looking at a corpse’s hand in our yard yesterday.
“Nom, nom, nom,” Rose says, chewing the slice with her mouth open, engorged zombie eyes. She loves him. I love him. But he’s lied to us. He’s dying. Or not. Secrets—his, mine. I can’t trust him. I can’t trust myself. The circle goes around. How can he seem so composed?
“More,” she says. I release myself from the cold of the open fridge, select a yellow plastic plate for Rose, which Kennedy palms to the table, pretending to stumble for Rose’s benefit, miming a clumsy waiter while she giggles. I have to steady myself at the sink. Nothing lasts forever, I remembered Mother telling me.
“Wanna come with me, Dadda?” Rose asks. Thank God for her. For unbridled youthful cognition. She normalizes things. You have to keep up the routine for her benefit.
“Come where?” he asks, eyebrows in a furrow.
Rose bites a hole in the center of her de-sandwiched turkey slice, and sticks a finger through, pointing to the garden with one eye shut, sharp shooter style.
“To the skating competition,” she says. Rose’s pupils swell, lashes draw back.
“Sure, grab the book.”
He continues to eat, as if he can ignore what’s just been exploded into the open. Rose can page in. But he doesn’t bat an eye.
The turkey slice collapses, limp, over Rose’s finger. Her brows echo the shape Kennedy’s etched seconds earlier. He runs up to her bedroom. “Can’t catch me,” he says and she squeals and giggles after him. I pretend to ignore them.
I yell out my excuse before Kennedy can say anything about it and leave the house. I feel bad as I close the door without kissing my daughter goodbye, but let’s face it, she’s probably safer without me.
In the car, I nearly doze off twice. I haven’t been this tired since Rose’s first few months. I recall how my exhaustion was deepened by the implication that I would have to get up again at any moment. The shade between sleeping and waking was always half drawn. This thought sends a vibration through my mind. Could this be the way with reality and stories, when you’ve settled properly into the state? A softening. Pinocchio will have the answer. I will show him the box and he will tell me what’s what. He will know. He must.
For most of the ride, I go over what happened with Kennedy, when he presented me with the tacklebox he’d had stashed in his trunk, like some kind of mobster.
We brought it back out to the shed.
“What do you see?” Kennedy asked me, when I pulled back the lid. I described each priceless, beautiful relic of the Book World, in disbelief that I’d buried it without ever looking inside. I’d been so strong in my conclusions then, under Dr. Samuel’s care. I’d written it off as hogwash and never looked back. What I saw now were Illuminated manuscripts, underlined passages of all the books mother had read, hardbacks from the authors and philosophers picked out on her chalkboards.
The scent of turned earth has always made me nauseous, and now I think, it’s probably wrapped up in the memories of whatever terrible thing happened with Mother. The lamp glowed brightly, then dimmed, a warning for my expectations, which I didn’t heed.
Kennedy said, “It’s been safe in this garden all these years. Might as well leave it here.” I couldn’t think of a reason to disagree.
Beneath Mother’s rhododendron scented scarf, the box was full, right up to the top. Perfect, in fact. Thought out. Agonized over. Draped like a liner beneath the scarf was a typed-out page. As soon as I disturb the sheet—the slightest nudge—I smelled Pinocchio’s menthol cigarettes. The back of my neck went hot with significance. I knew everything was leading to him.
I tried to process what I was experiencing: the smell. Dr. P hadn’t smelled this way when I went to his home the other night. He quit. At the hospital, you’d find him fanning smoke away from passersby at the flagging ficus-topped ashtray at the entrance, then one day he’d stopped.
It was such a smooth transition, his quitting, I remember questioning myself in Dr. Samuel’s chair. Had I been mistaken? Had he ever smoked, or was that a delusion of mine? It felt disturbing, how little I really knew for sure. Before, I had taken all these minute changes, all the confusion, as clues in my mingling of alternate realities, signs I was paging-in. But what was I meant to do with the pull of significance then, when I was just meant to believe I was prosaically crazy?
I drive on, shaking my head to keep awake.
This time it isn’t difficult to talk Dr. P into letting me in. Something’s shifted in him. He apologizes, invites me to sit, and listens to me begin my story in fits and starts.
“Oh Millie.”
“You never believed me,” he said. “And they wanted to get rid of me. It was a perfect storm.”
Can I trust him?
“Did I kill Mother?”
He puts his hands on my palms. “You have a lot of problems, Millie. But you are not violent. This is not the way your issues play out.”
“But Kennedy says I killed her.”
“Then where is she?” I say.
He shrugs.
“Don’t fuck with me.”
“Mother disappeared. You know that.”
“You don’t think so.”
My heart races. “What do you know, Dr. P, that you aren’t telling me?”
“Are we showing all our cards now?”
“Your lateral thinking has worked on me.”
I decide to explain it to him exactly as I remembered it, when I allowed myself to. Otherwise, how will I ever know the truth? I started with the end, so I wouldn’t chicken out of confessing. “When I ‘killed’ her, Mother watched me every second—defiant, as if to say, remember this. You will never rid yourself of me. I thought it was a dream. But sometimes I didn’t.
“I was thirteen. Dad had left. Mother was so low. But this one day, she woke me early. She was fully dressed in one of her Parisian getups, scarf tied intricately, hair in a bun, everything.”
“Yes, I remember how lovely she looked,” Pinocchio says.
I go on to relay the whole story for him, which I’d never told anyone. This time, I leave out nothing.
“At first the dream was complete blackness, nothing. Not a sound, sight, smell. Disorientation. I remember being conscious of never having had a dream like that before. My heart raced. But suddenly there were Mother’s arms around me. A voice I could trust. Bit by bit, details emerged—a kind of veiled light, a flower petal, a huge sky. I needed them to, my heart pounded with the urge to settle myself, to know what was what. At the same time, the disorientation was exciting, like a drug. I sensed a tense, gloomy, kind of anticipation. As I saw a sweep of rolling, brilliant green hills, the word moors lodged itself to describe them. It was familiar, this scene. Her scene. The kind she pined over but would never admit to—the kind only I would know she wanted sincerely.
“With every passing second, the view crystalized. And then I realized, wait, I don’t recognize myself. I felt the urge to move my arms to pat my body. But I couldn’t feel my body per se. I had the familiarity of my mind, though I found myself in this strange place, but it was disembodied. And yet, Mother’s arms were still there. I couldn’t feel them so much as sense them. Lovely. I had never experienced them like that before.
“Through her embrace, I sensed a man approaching. Intoxicating. The impression of the air changed around me. I pictured oil-filled stickers, the way your touch could reconfigure them. This was a powerful man. He approached on horseback, the way I imagined approaching horseback to sound: clip-clop, clip-clop. He was to be feared, there was a darkness, but that didn’t overpower the anticipation. It fed it.
Danger. Suddenly, I sensed it. I was meant to remove myself from this man, who I’ve come to realize is Heathcliffe, from Wuthering Heights. Run! I thought. But again, there was no sense of a body with which to do so. I was under the control of some Other. Not total control. It was more of a team effort, but the movements, the decisions seemed not to belong wholly to me. I had a say, but not autonomy. I was being guided, by a more knowledgeable, experienced voice. I was in the book. I was me, and yet I was a character in the book.
“In a way, not having to make my own decisions was a relief. Without the pressure of choice, there was an abundance of feeling, a flood of it. And a reflection and examination of everything that had brought me to such a feeling. I loved it. Life but supercharged. Drenched with sensation. Now, I look back, I believe I remember the halos around objects, the incredible noise. But that could be unreliable memory. Because that is what has been happening to me lately, when I page in, during the times which Kennedy says are blackouts—periods of time I cannot account for.
“Mother was there as herself and a character, too. When she’d tighten her grip, what I could only interpret as Mother’s own experience of these happenings would flood me. This was such a different woman than the one I knew. There was the same presence, the influence, but every nerve ending seemed to be at attention. She was satisfied, more than satisfied. She was in ecstasy.
“The man approached. Clip-clop, clip-clop. Their eyes locked. He slowed but didn’t stop, then galloped over the next hill. I hated her for feeling that way—hot for him. I hated him for not feeling that way about me.”
And then Heathcliffe rode away and Mother grew angry with me. As if it were my fault he’d gone, that everyone had gone—in life, in the story, it was fluid. I’d stood in the way of what she wanted. The anger flooded all the crevices of my hyper-consciousness. The noise intensified, deafening. It was like anger times one thousand. There was no control.
She ran over a hill. I picked up a rock and charged to her. I lost sight of her for a moment. Over the other side of the hill I caught sight, I thought, of not one, but two women in the same dress. But no, I must have been breathing so hard my vision blurred. She was one again, one woman, not two. And she’d fallen, face down, unmoving now. I caught up and threw myself over her, pinned her beneath me.
I was on top of her. I hit her with the stone over and over again. From the first, she’d blacked out, which I remember thinking vaguely disappointing. I wanted to look at her. The blood didn’t come immediately. It was slow to leak at the broken skin of her skull. But once it came, there were great, biblical waves of it.
I awoke, or came to, or whatever one would call it first. Mother was still asleep, or in the book. Had all been a dream, a cruel dream, which shoved in my face all the experiences I would never have? It must have been. But sometimes I wasn’t so sure. I woke and then she was gone.
Was I awake? Had I really done that to my mother? It was the last time I saw her. I’d ask myself this question for years after. While after she’d had her first brush with suicide I told myself she deserved every hateful emotion I’d ever had for her, now she was gone and this gruesome memory, or whatever it was, bombarded me, I wasn’t so sure.
“Why? Everything okay?”
“Just come with me.”
After, when she was gone, I often sat in her office, that place, which was always a wonder to me. The blackboards were jammed with the familiarly inscrutable words, arrows, swipes. I pictured her laying on her daybed, a dozen pillows supporting her. I loved the idea of an office bed, her pillows, the Indian embroidery, the rich velvets, cool silks—a patina of tea stains and pen markings that said so much about her. I still dreamed that one day she’d reach for my hand and pull me onto the bed next to her. How many times had I wished for such attentions? For her to hold me to her and stroke my hair tenderly, look me in the eye unwaveringly? But day after day, it was just me in there alone, in the one place I’d always wanted to and never been allowed to be. “Is it ironic that right after I’d killed her in my mind that this is very thing I’d longed for?”
He looks at me kindly, with sympathy. “No. These are all part of your dissociative episodes. It makes perfect sense to me. Your mother was a creative genius, she had a lot to teach us all. But she was a terrible mother, a narcissist who didn’t have time for you, felt justified in her reasons for that deprivation. But she wouldn’t let your father have you. No, that would be giving up control, and she wasn’t about to do that.”
I am not sure I believe in fully blocking out memories, but this is the closest I can come to describing what had actually happened with that bloody experience with Mother: I was powerless to pick at this memory strand once it happened. “Though I was told repeatedly I did not kill Mother, it felt too neat and tidy that she was gone right after that.”
“No. None of that is real. Millie it breaks my heart, your carrying this around all these years. This is a fantasy. Something you’ve concocted to assign blame and a solution to an unresolved mystery of a woman gone missing, and most of all to find meaning in a senseless loss and incredible stores of hurt and abandonment.”
“But she is not missing. She is dead. I found her hand in the garden. I must have killed her!” I show him the ring.
“No. No!” He drops his head and begins
to cry.
He takes his time gathering himself. When he rises he says, “I have to show you something.”
He shifts through the cardboard file box he’d brought along, rifles through some piles of what look like CD or DVD cases. It’s amazing he can navigate through all these mountains of stuff. But his features shift when he’s clearly got his hands on what he’s been looking for. “You, my dear, are not capable of murder. You are not wired for it. I said as much to you many times when you were on the ward, though you wouldn’t hear it. Kennedy, on the other hand, is a compulsive liar, with sociopathic symptoms besides, and he is capable of murder. He has very different kinds of problems.”
I flinch at the word. I understand its connotations. Can it be true? Then it occurs to me. “Wait. Are you telling me that Kennedy was in the hospital with Mother?” She.
“Yes. And he did not like her.”
“Yes, I know that. It’s because Kennedy is a Universalist—you know, he believes paging-in should only be done for the good of man, while Mother is an individualist.”
“I recognize the words from some of your episodes. And while it’s rather beautiful, and poetic, I’m afraid it’s something you made up.”
“But Kennedy’s famous! He’s been the leader of the Universalists since the early days. It’s why he founded the luggage shop, which is just a front for the Universalist headquarters.”
He shakes his head. “It’s just a luggage shop. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I recall him making up all kinds of nonsense about the exciting secrets he was fronting there. But it really was just a luggage shop. No. Those details are all made up, by you. They seem real to you in your mind, but they aren’t. I saw most of this on your lists.”
My mind is reeling. Kennedy has been boldly, systematically lying to me all these years, going along with some nutso shit I made up in my head. Every day another lie surfaces. Even his admission was a lie. I want to yell and tear my hair out. But I need to play it cool. I need to be rational and systematic despite the fact that I have never been so in my life. How do I know it isn’t Dr. P who’s lying now. I say so.