Audrey’s Door

by Sarah Langan

  Packing and unpacking. Twice a year. Three times. Four. After a while, the drifting frayed Audrey’s nerves. She got the idea that with every ditched motel or trailer, she left a tiny part of herself behind and became more like a ghost. Was it so strange that she began scrubbing bathroom tiles, patting her own thighs, and running her fingers along hard objects, just to reassure herself that she was real?

  At twelve, Audrey started sleepwalking. Every time they moved to a new place, she pissed the corners of the room like a dog marking its territory, then marched right back to bed, like she’d un-potty trained. When Betty would tell her about it the next morning, Audrey would always wonder if it was true, or a story her mother had invented to shift the blame from herself.

  At thirteen, she developed a rash across her entire body, itchy and throbbing, as if in sympathy with Betty’s red ants. She spent fourteen high or drunk. Sneaked out and traded sips with the neighbors, who thought a boozy kid was cute, or found another street urchin, and together they scored what they could from panhandling. She cut her wrists, but chickened out once the water in the tub turned pink. If Betty noticed the scabs that became scars that Audrey had to this day, she’d never mentioned it.

  At fourteen, Audrey gave up hurting herself for attention because she knew she wouldn’t get any. At fifteen, she passed the tenth-grade equivalency, and enrolled in high school, then kept up classes, or at least the schoolwork, wherever they moved. By then, she’d wised up, and had finally started to wonder if indeed, they were alike at all, or if Betty’d only told her a story that last day in Wilmette, so someone would follow her from town to town, and clean up her messes. She’d started to plot her escape.

  Briefly, she got out. Through perfect math ACT scores and a lot of begging, she landed a work-study scholarship to the University of Nebraska. That fall, before her freshman year, she sneaked out with a packed bag, just like Roman, and was free. But three years later, Betty knocked on her dorm door carrying a stale box of Russell Stover cherry-filled chocolates. In that short time, without Audrey to come home to, the woman had contracted a full-blown case of hepatitis C, and grown old. Her blond hair had gone wiry, old-lady gray, and she’d pinned it from her eyes with pink barrettes, like she’d mistaken herself for a little girl.

  Caring for her after that had been inevitable. Giving up on graduate school in architecture had been inevitable, too. So she got that job at IHOP, rented that little tomb-sized studio, painted its walls black, then set Betty up on disability in the outpatient community residence down the road. Betty’d lost steam by then and finally agreed to take her lithium, which had coincided nicely with Audrey’s newfound hash habit. They spent ten years in Omaha before Betty had to be committed. During that time, Audrey had watched the days go by, grateful that at least, now that she was the one paying the bills, they weren’t running anymore.

  And here she was, dreaming of Hinton, Iowa—1992. Long before college and Omaha. Long after the slits in her wrists had healed into narrow white lines. Smack in the middle, when things had been bleakest. The man in the three-piece suit scritch-scratched against the closet she’d locked him in. The theatre seats below were dark, but she could see the audience’s glassy black eyes. The hole in the kitchen floor was broken faux linoleum and plywood, whose edges could have been teeth. Yes, she remembered this. It all came back.

  As she watched, the show began. Starring characters reprised their roles like a movie on repeat that had always happened, would always happen, forever and ever.

  Suddenly, Betty Lucas was kneeling in front of the hole. Blond still, and surprisingly young. She grunted as she pressed the knife against the tile and broke open more plywood. The hole widened. She cut her fingers as she worked, but the blood didn’t slow her down.

  Audrey watched from the fold-out chair at the kitchen table. Hand cupped over her mouth, knees pulled under her butt, chin tucked close to her chest, she tried her best to make herself small.

  Outside, an early frost. A cold walk home from school. The girl, sixteen years old, opened the double-wide screen door. The hole over the crotch of her tan, Salvation Army coveralls was closed by a row of safely pins, and her hair was so greasy it looked wet.

  “What are you doing, Momma?” the girl asked.

  Audrey cringed. The girl was dirty, wretched, ignorant. What would the admissions director at Columbia, or the head of human resources at Vesuvius say, if they knew that Audrey Lucas came from this?

  Betty looked up from the floor and bared her cigarette-stained teeth. “Who are you?”

  “Momma? It’s me,” the girl said. Her voice cracked. She wiped her eyes, then took a breath to stifle the sobs. The cuts in the floor were sloppy, irregular angles that made the white tile stickers jagged, and Audrey felt a sudden fury, that Betty Lucas had allowed her daughter to dress in rags while she’d always made sure to buy her own clothes new.

  Betty shoved the knife into another chunk of floor. It sounded like slashing a tire, the way the air whooshes as it rushes out. “See what you made me do?” she asked. Her manic words came fast: “Seewhatyoumademedo!!!!”

  “There are doctors. There’s medicine you can take,” the girl said. Only, she was so frightened, defeated, that she whispered, and Betty didn’t hear.

  When she’d dug deep enough, Betty dropped the knife and tore open the subfloor with her hands. The dirt underneath came out in blood-mud fistfuls. She threw it against the girl’s legs, where it splatted. “IseeyouwatchingmeYoucan’thaveher!” she shouted into the hole.

  “Momma, stop it!” the girl cried.

  “You hear them?” Betty asked. “They climb through holes, Lamb. That’s how they get inside us. We’ve got to kill them. You’d do murder for me, wouldn’t you?”

  Scritch-scratch! The man scraped the door, and in the dark down below, the audience murmured.

  The girl patted her thighs. Once. Twice. Grown Audrey, watching from the table, did the same: pat! pat!

  Suddenly, Betty jerked to her feet. She teetered for a moment, like the unbalance in her mind had also unbalanced her body. Then she charged. Fast as lightning, she spun the girl into a half nelson, and wedged the knife against her throat. “Who are you really?” she asked. “And what have you done with my daughter?”

  The girl didn’t struggle. Instead, she mirrored grown Audrey and tried to make herself small.

  This had happened before. It had already happened. And yet tears came to Audrey’s eyes. Why didn’t the girl run? Why didn’t she scream? Didn’t she want to live?

  Betty drew a light line along the girl’s neck with the knife. Blood beaded against her pale skin like tiny red pearls. The girl bit her lip, squeezed her hands into fists, closed her eyes as if counting backward, but never once budged, or even whimpered.

  Audrey flinched. She knew what would happen next. She remembered. Betty would see the blood, and regret. She’d let Audrey go, and a little while after that, she’d run out the door, and ashamed, stayed AWOL, living in bars and with strange men for six weeks. The cut would heal in less than a day, and the on-duty cop who showed up on a noise complaint would look her up and down, then snicker, and tell her that with a mother like Betty, she ought to wear turtlenecks.

  But none of that was so terrible. People survived worse. No, the terrible part was the lesson Hinton taught her that she’d forgotten until now. Always, before Hinton, Betty’s red ants had raged outward, at boyfriends and bosses and imaginary conspiracies. But this time, they’d attacked Audrey, and she’d finally understood that the pact they’d made long ago had been a lie. There was no one Betty loved, not even her daughter, and that second-grade photo of her favorite little girl had met the bottom of a garbage can long ago.

  Betty’s grip on the knife loosened. The girl’s chest heaved. Blood gathered along the neck of the T-shirt under her coveralls. The effect was a macabre red-and-white carnation.

  Poor girl, Audrey thought. Time slowed. Audrey unfolded her legs and arms and sat straight in her chair. Sat lar
ger. She wanted to be a good influence. Wanted the girl to glimpse the possibility of a better future.

  The girl peered at her from the corner of her eyes, and Audrey thought they saw each other. Had somehow reached out across the void that divided past and present.

  The girl nodded very slightly, as if to say, Yes, I see you. I know you, too. Something inside Audrey cracked open. A wall she hadn’t guessed existed. She remembered being that girl. The pain, the shame, the bravery of every tiny revolt against Betty, that had been so hard to commit. Those revolts had laid the groundwork for all the other battles she would fight in her adult life, and win. She realized now that she’d left one good thing behind in Omaha, and she could still claim it, if she wanted: herself.

  “Help me,” the girl mouthed. Audrey’s resolve returned. She leaped from the folding kitchen chair, and charged. “Get out of this! You don’t need her…. RUN!” she shouted at the girl.

  The girl (little Audrey!) hesitated. Betty did not hear. Only held the knife, and her daughter, too tight. Behind the closet door, the man scritch-scratched against the plywood.

  “GO!” Audrey shouted as she ran, as if to tackle Betty.

  The girl heard. Her lips turned up. Only slightly. Only if you were looking. She smiled, then jerked away from her mother in one fast motion. The knife cut deeper. Blood streamed as she spun, but the wound didn’t slow her down. She raced out the screen door and down the dirt road without looking back.

  Audrey watched her go. Dirty, inconsequential girl. Wretch destined for a career in early motherhood and crystal meth. Audrey was so overjoyed by her escape that she shook with relief. “Good girl. Smart girl. I love you,” she said, because even if Betty and Saraub were inconstant, at least she would always have herself. And this girl she’d been, it turned out, was worth something, after all.

  In the audience, the crowd oohed and aahed. The lights got brighter, and she could see their faces. There were about fifty of them, and they were all old, in their seventies at least, but their skin was pulled preternaturally smooth and tight. “You see!” Audrey cried out at them. “Don’t screw with me. I’ll fight. I’ll win!”

  She expected to wake up, or to enter another dream, but instead the lights got dark again. Scritch-scratch. That sound remained. Only it carried more of a hollow echo, like the man was close to breaking free from the closet. The kitchen brightened like a stage set. So did the hole in the floor, and Betty’s wild blue eyes. In front of and behind her, letters briefly lit up the stage:

  Audrey Lucas: thiS is YOur Life.

  Audrey felt a breeze. She looked down, and saw that she was now wearing those same coveralls as the girl, only the safety pins had come undone. No panties. Her nakedness, exposed. She covered herself with her hands. A thick tuft of dark woman hair.

  Betty turned and looked straight at her. Saw her. The feeling was like a stab in the chest. Audrey’s blood pooled at her feet. “Who are you?” Betty asked.

  Scritch-scratch! Audrey could hear the wood shavings as they fell from the plywood closet. The man had almost dug his way out.

  “This is a dream,” Audrey said. “You’re my subconscious. You’re not even Betty. I’m not your daughter. It’s just me, talking to me, because I’m upset about Saraub.”

  “Really?” Betty asked as she cleaned the girl’s blood from the knife with her hands, then licked her fingers, so that the corners of her lips got bloody. Betty nodded at the screen door. “Little girl won’t get far. Only a few years. Twenty on the outside. Wounds like that bleed slow, but they’re fatal.”

  “She’ll make it,” Audrey said.

  Betty shook her head. “No, she’s damaged goods. Now come with me. Come see the floor.”

  (Scritch-scratch!)

  The audience got very quiet, and Audrey understood that something bad was coming. She and Betty stood on either side of the broken faux linoleum. Audrey’s coveralls flapped. “We’re the same, Lamb,” Betty said, as they both peered down. The hole was deep, and at its bottom lay a mirror. The two women’s black-eyed images were indistinguishable, because both were riddled with squirming red ants.

  Scritch-scratch. The sound was very close. The man in the three-piece suit was almost out.

  “Please wake me up, I don’t like this game anymore,” Audrey begged. Flap-flap, went her pants. So exposed. The red ants wound between mother’s and daughter’s reflections, then mounted the sides of the hole and climbed out.

  Betty grinned. Her silken hair and dewy skin channeled an old Hollywood movie, where the people were charming, and nothing bad ever happened.

  Scritch-scratch!

  In a quick, jerking movement, Betty reached across the void. She squeezed the hole in Audrey’s coveralls. So shameful. So exposed. “You come from me. I own you,” Betty said.

  The hole pulsed wider, its jagged sticker linoleum like teeth, and the ants a red tide bubbling up from its depths. “It wants to live inside us, Lamb. It smells our weakness. It climbs through our holes. Don’t you hear it?”

  Scritch-scratch.

  The hole got bigger. So did Betty’s frozen grin. “Get out while you can, Lamb,” she said as she squeezed. Only her fingers were red with blood, and now, so was Audrey’s crotch.

  “No. It’s not after me, only you,” Audrey tried to say, but her words got garbled. Her throat hurt. Bad. Something wet. She felt her neck with her fingers. Red.

  Still bleeding, she broke down and began to cry. In her dream, and in real life, too. The sound carried through 14B’s air shafts, and halls, and even the elevator. Through the vibrations in the walls, it roused sleeping and vigilant tenants alike. A weeping, desperate sound that made their hearts flutter in carnal delight. Down below, in the theatre, the black-eyed audience grinned.

  Scritch-scratch! The sound was close. A tiny hole in the closet door near the eyehook appeared, and a long, pale finger reached through it. The latch came undone.

  The ants swarmed Audrey’s ankles. Pins and needles on fire. “I’m thirsty. Someone cut my throat,” she gasped as she cried.

  Betty loosened her hold on Audrey’s crotch. A red, broken thing. “Better run, Lamb. It’s a bad place, where you live.”

  Audrey traced the curving, open wound on her throat. “It never healed,” she said. I’m still bleeding.”

  “Better run, Lamb.”

  Audrey backed away from the hole. Betty stayed. The man burst from the closet. Betty lurched as the red army riddled her skin from the inside out. She didn’t scream, though the sound was high-pitched and hysterical. Even as the insects bit, and her face swelled unrecognizably like a dry thing left too long in water, Betty Lucas laughed. The audience laughed, too.

  Audrey turned to run. The man in the three-piece suit caught her by the shoulders.

  “You’re stuck to something, my dear,” he told her. “A tumor. Let me get that for you,” he said. Then he raised his finger, which he’d whittled to a sharp bone point, and sliced her throat open.

  She jerked in her sleep, and stopped breathing. Everything got quiet, except the television in 14B, which turned on and off and on again, like the fluttering eyes of a large animal. Across the screen the late-night movie read:

  Audrey Lucas: thiS is YOur Life.

  7

  Home Keeps Changing

  Great to finally talk to you, too, Bob!” Saraub Ramesh enthused into the mouthpiece of his cell phone. Reception was terrible, but at least he sounded less nervous than he felt, due mostly to a serious hangover. Thread-sized sparks of lightning flickered across his eyeballs, like he could see his own blood circulating there. He’d been dry-heaving half the night, and only remembered fragments of what had happened before that: a pole dancer, somebody sucking on his ear and making it sticky. God, he really hoped that meant she’d been gnawing on a mouthful of taffy. After that, there’d been a piano, and an apartment building with slanted floors and cockeyed windows. He remembered Audrey looking out from a crooked doorway, seeming small and alone, like the first time
he’d met her in front of the Film Forum.

  She’d been pacing beneath the marquee that day, and he’d noticed that she looked both prettier and older than the online photo she’d posted. High, chiseled cheekbones, and heavy circles under her eyes from either drugs or an obsessive personality. After he got to know her, he’d learned: both.

  He’d loitered near the side of the building before approaching, because it was his nature to watch. She’d worn flats and wool trousers instead of belly jeans and sparkling eye glitter, which had made him wonder if she was the last woman in New York who dressed like a grown-up. She’d held her arms crossed around her chest and taken deep breaths, as if reminding herself to remain calm.

  From the second he’d clicked on her profile, he’d understood that there was a story in her, the girl from the Midwest who’d started her life fresh after thirty years. Left her family and friends behind, to worship the glittering man-eater called Manhattan. From her hunched shoulders and the pinched guardedness of her expression, he’d understood that she was a wounded person. But still standing. Still carrying on. He’d never lived much, except through the eyes of a camera, and he admired people who had.

  Seeing her there, he’d known that if he started talking to her, he’d never stop. Good-bye to Tonia, who’d never read a book for pleasure, and expected him to start working for the family business as soon as they got hitched, and build her a mansion in Jersey. Good-bye to his family, too, and the life they’d planned for him. But he also knew that if he walked away, she’d wait under the Strangers on a Train sign for at least an hour before going home. And it was cold out there.