by Joey Comeau
And every night, sitting in the dark with the wood stove giving the room just the smallest bit of light, their mother would sing to them. Ann hasn’t heard that song in years. She’d forgotten it.
Margaret is downstairs, singing it now, to calm their mother down.
But the screaming begins again. “Taste, taste, taste, taste, taste, taste, taste!” The word sounds wrong, because the shape of their mother’s mouth has been changing.
I
12
They want to take her fingerprints. But Jackie knows how that works. They take her picture and her fingerprints and they put all that information about her inside a computer. Strangers will know things.
“Oh, we knew just where to find you because of computer science! You were on file and in our database so we caught you really easily.”
No thank you, Jackie thinks. So she tells the cop that she has to go to the bathroom, and she uses her little girl voice. He waits right outside the door with his gun, so that Jackie can’t escape, but she’s going to escape anyway.
Inside the bathroom, Jackie climbs up on the gray counter beside the sink and sits with her back up against the corner. The paint on the walls here is a mustard yellow. Once, her mom told her that hospitals paint the walls yellow because it calms people down. Jackie pulls her knees to her chest and for a few seconds she feels stupid and scared. But there is no other way to escape. Outside that door there is only a computer waiting for the cops to put Jackie inside it. There are no windows in here.
She always forgets this part, how gross it feels, how hard it is to make herself do it. All she can think about now is how awful it will be. But there are no windows in here. They thought of that. Maybe there used to be windows, but too many people escaped. The yellow paint didn’t calm them down enough. This is a police station, and there is only one way out. Jackie hugs her legs tighter, and she feels a bit sick. Outside, the cop knocks.
“Come on,” he says. “Hurry up.”
This is her own fault. She should have run away when the cops pulled up to the house instead of just telling stupid jokes. Now she has no choice. The inside of her face tastes like blood again. The cop pounds on the door again, and turns the knob. The door starts to swing inward.
“Mom,” Jackie says, under her breath. This is her magic word.
She is a computer shutting down. Her senses all go quiet like programs closing one by one. This part is fine. This is the good part. She can’t hear the buzz of the lights anymore. The room isn’t hot anymore. Jackie is not really there. She’s in a secret place, and from that secret place she can see the cop step into the bathroom, but can’t hear what he is saying. He looks behind the bathroom door, then closes it. He says something else. She can see his lips moving. He looks around. He looks right through her.
Jackie doesn’t really know where she is. She’s on the counter, but she’s not on the counter. This is like tv. Her father works in tv, and at the studio they have a big room that is a bedroom and a kitchen and a living room and a basement with a pool table all lined up. People stand in one part and pretend there are walls, and on camera it looks separate. But it isn’t really. Jackie is sitting right on the couch, but the cameras are all pointed at the dining room table. Nobody can see her.
The cop is pushing open the doors to the stalls, one by one. She’s not behind the doors, though. She’s behind the camera. She’s invisible.
He kneels down and looks for her sneakers under the stall. Then he opens the door. Door number one, no Jackie. Door number two, no Jackie. There’s only one more door. Jackie can hear the scratching already. Her mother’s breathing sounds like scratching. It’s the only thing Jackie can hear in the whole bathroom.
The floor is shiny. Under the door Jackie sees wet blue light. When the cop opens the stall door, it floods into the room. He doesn’t see anything. He says something Jackie can’t hear into his radio and he runs out.
Jackie can see her, though. It is her mother’s ghost, in a stained hospital gown, kneeling in front of the toilet, waiting for more vomit to come, head down. Her shoulders jerk up, and she makes a sound in her throat, but she doesn’t vomit.
“Jackie,” she says, “go to bed.” The ghost dry heaves. Then dry heaves again. She will vomit, though. She’ll be up all night. There is always more vomit.
“Jackie, I am okay.”
The bathroom tiles look cold in the blue light. Jackie can step outside of things, some kind of magic that makes her invisible, but it’s never easy. It isn’t like waving a wand. It costs.
“I didn’t mean to wake you, baby.” Somewhere the police run around the building trying to find Jackie. She’s escaped! They don’t know how, but she’s escaped. Jackie sits down on the floor next to her mother, and she rubs the ghost’s back through the gown. Her mother doesn’t look up from the toilet. She squeezes the rim with her fingers. “Go back to sleep, Jackie,” she says. “I’m okay.”
miss
13
Jackie’s father is still at work when she gets home. Her mouth tastes like hospitals. Jackie has a map in her room, showing all of her trees. It’s huge on the wall. There is a green pin for each tree. She pulls the pin out of Number 10 Osborne Street. There is no tree there now. The first-kiss tree. Goodbye Carl. Goodbye Carl’s mom and Carl’s dog. She puts the pin back in the box where it came from and she picks out a black one. It is the first black pin on the map.
Tomorrow will be different. Jackie won’t let her worries overwhelm her. She knows what to say to Ann. And this time she’ll say it: “Would you like to go on a date with me?”
Jackie puts the box of pins back in the drawer, and sits on her bed. She pushes the pillow aside and lies flat on her back.
Maybe she could tell Ann about her mother’s ghost. Jackie hasn’t told anyone. She hasn’t wanted to tell anyone. But maybe it would help Ann understand her. Help them get closer. Probably, though, it would just freak her out.
Outside the window, the leaves are moving a bit in the wind. No. Keep it simple: “Will you go out on a date with me, Ann?”
her
14
This is their daily ritual. The ghost leads Charlie and Mitchie down the long hallway. The hallways on this floor are more quaint than the ones upstairs. There’s a potted plant on the table there. The tablecloth is cream-colored lace. The ghost stops in front of Mrs. Richards’ door and waits. Room 135. Every day. Charlie knocks. The door opens, and here comes Mrs. Richards, laundry basket in hand.
“Charles,” Mrs. Richards says, “that dog of yours was barking again last night.”
The ghost is staring up at her, its face expressionless. It lifts its head under one arm, and raises its other hand to point. Now, what does that mean? Every day. Knock on Mrs. Richards’ door, and then what? The ghost just stands there, pointing, drooling black blood on the carpet. Charlie wants to help her, but he has no idea how. What does she want?
And Mrs. Richards is always accusing Mitchie of barking, even though it’s been years since he’s been able to make a sound. Charlie doesn’t mind, though. She’s not so bad. Some people just like to complain. At least she’s got some spark left in her, not like the other people in this place. No, Mrs. Richards is fine. Let her complain about Mitchie. It doesn’t faze Mitchie, so why should Charlie care?
The ghost is a different story. The ghost won’t leave him alone. Does she want him to tell Mrs. Richards something? Does she have some spooky missive from beyond the grave?
“Do you know anyone who got their head cut off, Mrs. Richards?”
“If you don’t keep him quiet, I’ll have to make a formal complaint, Charles,” she says. “Honestly. The dog barks all night, and then you come knocking on my door. Oh hello Charles. How are you today? Can I help you? Oh, you just want to talk more about a headless ghost that follows you and that stupid dog of yours around? I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. Well, you know what,
Charles? I would prefer if I didn’t see you tomorrow. Knock on somebody else’s door tomorrow with your idiot dog.”
“My dog is not an idiot,” Charlie says. But when he looks down Mitchie is standing with his face pressed against the wall again. “Turn around and defend yourself, Mitchie, for the love of Christ.”
The ghost is still pointing a bloody finger in Mrs. Richards’ face. Its lips are sounding out empty words. What does it want? Who has time for this nonsense?
Every stupid day.
too.
15
The wood under Jackie’s feet is slippery. She moves forward, trying to get a better grip with her sneakers, but that isn’t going to be enough. She needs to reach out a free hand and steady herself, except Ann would think less of her. Ann has her black hair clipped up. Even in the pouring rain it looks good.
“You can give up, if you’d like,” Jackie says. “There’s only a little shame in defeat.” Their hands are lashed together with a bandana. This is a fight to the death, Jackie thinks. They are standing on top of this playground equipment in the rain like they don’t have the sense they were born with. The broken-arm tree is wide above them, but Ann doesn’t know that. She thinks this is just a straightforward fight to the death, without symbolism. Jackie’s foot slides again. Don’t look down, she thinks. But looking at Ann makes her dizzy, too.
“Give up,” she says again.
“No,” Ann tells her.
“I’m just saying,” Jackie says, “it’ll probably hurt less. Have you noticed how high up we are?” But Ann isn’t scared. “If you give up now,” Jackie says, “nobody needs to know you were scared. We can tell people you had female problems.”
It wasn’t raining when they’d got on the streetcar to come out here, but it sure is raining now. They’d climbed up the hill to the playground anyway.
Jackie fell out of that tree up there, years ago, when there was no playground equipment here. She was hanging upside down, with her arms and hair reaching for the ground. She had long hair, then. She had skinny arms. But she didn’t have much in the way of common sense.
She was up there, flipping around on the branch like Jackie the little gymnast, way up in a tree with no one around. She could have snapped her neck and died. Instead she broke her arm and walked home.
Their neighbor Carol came running down her lawn when Jackie walked past. Jackie’s arm was just hanging dead. She couldn’t hear anything Carol was saying. She thought she had gone deaf. Carol thought she was deaf, too. She kept snapping her fingers in front of Jackie’s face. Clapping her hands. But when Jackie got home, and her mother opened the door, the sound came rushing back.
Ann doesn’t know about the trees. She’s seen the map in her friend’s room, though. She comes over once in a while. Jackie told her it belonged to her mother. People stop asking questions when you bring up your dead mom.
Now, under the tree, Jackie squeezes Ann’s hand and twists both their arms. Her fingers are wet and cold. Ann puts her other arm out for balance, but it isn’t enough.
“Too little, too late, beautiful,” Jackie says. She shouldn’t have said that. Beautiful. Oh god. Her foot slips. Jackie can see exactly what’s about to happen before it happens. The problem with fighting someone when you have your hands lashed to theirs is that when the loser falls, the winner falls, too.
They hit the gravel hard. Nothing breaks. Ann rolls over on her back, and Jackie does too, resting her head on Ann. They stay on the wet gravel, Jackie’s head on Ann’s stomach, both of them looking up at the tree.
Jackie and her mother came here on a picnic, after the hurricane. Her mother brought an old-fashioned wicker basket and lined it with a white sheet, like they were pretending to be a proper family in an old movie. They sat up on the hill over there. The city hadn’t cleaned up the trees, yet. They sat near a huge fallen tree, laid out on its side, roots up into the air. All down the hill, trees were torn up and broken in half. People were wandering through the park with cameras, stopping to take pictures of each other standing by the biggest broken trees.
Her mother was wearing a dress. She never wore a dress, but that day she wore a dress and she packed a picnic basket and they sat up on the hill and watched everyone taking pictures.
“Your father brought me here on our first date,” Jackie’s mom said. Then she said, “I guess it wasn’t really a date. But we came here, drunk, after the bars closed.”
Down the hill, a man and a woman started yelling and fighting, and Jackie’s mother spilled a bit of juice on the front of the dress.
“This would have been a better picnic with the trees,” she said. “Do you ever wish that we’d lived out in the country? Did you like growing up in the city, Jackie?”
“I don’t know,” Jackie told her.
“I could have raised you out in the country. Maybe you would have been happier.” She was quiet for a while, looking down at the tree roots and the dirt and the bright, exposed wood. Jackie just kept thinking about her mother and father, sitting here in the park, falling in love in the moonlight. How old were they? When was this?
Her mother took another drink of her juice.
“You have to go live with your father for a while,” she said. “I’m sick.”
But Jackie didn’t go live with her father. She stayed with her mother.
Ann’s stomach is making noises under her head, like she’s hungry, and Jackie wants to reach up and touch Ann’s face and her lips.
Ann doesn’t say much at all. She’s been quiet, today.
“Do you want to go on a date with me tonight, Ann?”
“What?” Ann doesn’t sit up, at least. Jackie was worried that she would sit up. Or just walk away.
“We can do anything! This whole city is ours,” Jackie says. “We can go to the carnival, or up the tower. We can find the old abandoned subway lines underneath the city. Don’t go home. Come out on a date with me!”
Ann doesn’t say anything for a long time, lying with Jackie’s head resting warm on her stomach.
“I don’t want to go home,” Ann says.
16
The roller coaster creaks while it pulls them slowly up into the sky. There’s a chain under their seats. You can hear it clicking. Click click click. Almost everything is wood when it ought to be metal. Wood cracks and breaks and splinters and warps, and Jackie can think of a hundred ways that wood will kill them. Ann and Jackie.
People die on these rides every year but they don’t shut them down. They have a sign out front. Use at your own risk. Jackie squeezes Ann’s hand.
“If we die,” Jackie says, “I bet they don’t even close the ride for a day.”
This was Ann’s choice for their date. Jackie still isn’t even sure it is a date. Ann had to be talked into it. That’s not how dates should be. She had to be talked into it, and Jackie should have just said, “Never mind.”
Now Jackie can hear the attendants laughing about something. Greasy bastards. She can smell their cigarettes. They don’t care what happens.
“If we die up here,” Jackie says. “I am going to terrorize these people from beyond the grave.”
17
“I bet you killed her,” Charlie says. “I bet when you were younger you murdered this poor woman and cut off her head, and now she’s come back to expose you for the murderess you are.”
“Oh, you caught me,” Mrs. Richards says, shifting the laundry basket to her other hip. “You go call the police, and I’ll try to get my laundry done and my affairs in order. I’m sure any minute they’ll come to lock me up and throw away the key, based on the testimony of your pointing, headless ghost.”
Mitchie was still facing the wall.
“Isn’t she funny, Mitchie?” Charlie says. “Maybe we were wrong about old Mrs. Richards here. Maybe it was an accident about the girl dying. Maybe the poor girl heard one of Mrs. Richards�
�� jokes, and she laughed her head off.”
“Goodbye Charles.” Mrs. Richards closes the door.
Charlie feels pretty good. Usually the old woman says something smart about Mitchie and slams the door before he can get a word in edgewise. Laughed her head off. He’ll use that one again. Charlie reaches down to give his friend a scratch.
“A small victory, eh, Mitchie?”
The ghost follows them to the elevator, and it stands there while they wait. The dead girl isn’t pretty. She probably wasn’t pretty when her head was attached, either. She has a weird face, which looks even weirder because she keeps it completely expressionless. They wait for the elevator and she keeps talking the whole time, her lips moving soundlessly, dark with blood. Charlie closes his eyes to wait.
The elevator dings and Mitchie starts forward, tottering along. Inside, Charlie pushes the button to close the doors.
“No room, sorry,” he says to the bloody, silent specter. She speaks again, moving her silent lips, and Charlie has a sick feeling in his stomach, watching the blood dribble out of her mouth. There are chunks of something in the dark blood, and her eyes roll back in her head.
Every goddamned day.
“Oh, walk it off,” Charlie says to the ghost. The elevator doors slide closed.
18
Click click click. They’re reaching the top. Right here they can unbuckle their seats and just keep rising. Jackie can feel it. She’s dizzy. The sun is shining off the ocean. The air is cool. The clicking has stopped. Then the roller coaster is pulling them down and someone is yelling, “You assholes!” at the top of her lungs. “You assholes! You assholes!” Someone is laughing and yelling at the same time. Jackie is holding on to Ann.