Angie took a good swig of the water and replaced the bottle next to the flashlight, then slipped out of bed. On her way back from the bathroom, she passed by Evan’s room and in the haze of her thoughts, noticed that the door was closed all the way. She trudged over to it, wondering if the wind had blown it closed, wondering if she’d even left the window in Evan’s room up. She turned the knob and gently pushed open the door.
The closet doors were wide open, as they had been in her dream, and it startled her. She plunged into the room and hurried over to them, not nearly ready to confront anything but clothes. Her breath caught in her chest.
Evan’s t-shirts and jeans hung along the cross-bar as they always had. Of course they did. Had she really expected a gaping chasm of nothingness to greet her in the light of day?
She shut the doors with a little more force than she had intended, suddenly angry – at the nightmare, at herself, at cancer. Not angry at Evan, though. But she was mad as hell that he had been taken away from her.
Angie turned around to face the foot of his bed, studying the bands of gray morning light that fell across his comforter through the blind from his nearby window, and fought the urge to cry. She had done enough of that yesterday, and her eyes still felt heavy and dry. Being in his room, though, was making her feel overwhelmed, suffocated beneath the unnatural quietness and hollowness that always seems to linger when a child’s room is empty. It took all of her will to keep from tearing off the comforter and flinging it or attacking the blinds so that she didn’t have to look at reminders seeping in from the outside that life was going on, indifferent to her. She couldn’t stomach those bands of light nor those in-between shadows with their sharp-angled ends, like long, grasping fingers.
She ran to the bathroom and threw up in the toilet, then left a message on her boss’s voice mail that she was calling in sick and went back to bed.
* * * * *
That night, she and the little shadow made rocket ships, a small one and a larger one, and Angie told Evan all about the moon and the stars and the planets, everything she knew, everything she could think of. She told him how it would be cool if she had glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling like he had in his room, and how she wondered if aliens had cures for things like cancers. She wondered aloud if they had given the cure for cancer to the American government, like the conspiracy theorists said. And all the while that she talked, the shadow rockets explored the universe. Then her head began to hurt and she told the little shadow she needed to sleep. It waved good-bye before melding with the darkness.
And in her dreams, it dripped down the back of her wall and over the headboard of her bed like blood, seeping into her pillow and streaming upward through her hair toward her ear, into her head, to give her nightmares. She dreamed of hospitals with no staff and no doctors, just rooms full of final little whisper-breaths and cold air. She dreamed of a coffin full of broken toys and video games being towed behind a school bus full of dead first-graders. She dreamed her hair was falling out and her very life was bleeding away from a head wound where doctors had tried to remove a tumor and failed. The blood found further outlets in her eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. She bled between her teeth and the places where bald patches lay like little wastelands amid clumps of her hair. And in every dream, every single one, that shadow creature from the closet was lurking in the background, sometimes pulling marionette strings with its long, spiking fingers or pushing them into the soft rot of hairless heads, or sometimes just making chirping sounds that reminded Angie of hospital machines.
In the last dream, it spoke to her, and its voice was that of a child’s. Not Evan’s, not quite, but close.
“Bleed, Angie,” it told her. “Bleed from the inside out.” Then it showed her noose shapes, gun shapes, knife shapes. It showed her people-shapes jumping in front of trains. And somewhere, beneath the horror of its message, she was amazed by its creativity, its profound talent for making shadow puppets.
* * * * *
“No,” she whispered into the darkness eight nights later. She’d held on for eight more nights of terrible dreams, just to make shadow puppets with Evan. She knew better. She knew the truth, but she just missed him so goddamn much, so much it took her breath away, and so she had let it pretend to be her son, and she had pretended right along with it, desperate to hold on, wishing sometimes her fingers had been long enough to grasp and hold on and never let go....
But then it stopped wanting to pretend. It didn’t want to make rocket ships and dinosaurs, or hear about Minecraft and Zelda or Iron Man or Spider-man. It wanted to show her dead and dying things, the latter more unbearable than the former. It wanted to show her what it had shown Evan in nightmares, the horrible things which had caused that black, devouring thing to grow in his brain. It wanted to show her why the closet doors always had to be all-the-way closed and the bedroom door cracked open just enough to escape, if need be. It wanted to show her what lay at the pit of the closet’s throat – the closet’s gut, she guessed – and what lay beyond that. The hell it showed her was neither blinding fire nor eternal darkness, but a terrifying mix of both, creating and absorbing the most monstrous of beings, the fabric of children’s nightmares, growing thick and dark and tumorous on their imaginations until they ate away at everything in a person that mattered. There were no excisions, no survivors. It wanted to show her all this, and she couldn’t look away from its twisting and contortions; she didn’t need Evan’s help to interpret those shadow puppets. She knew exactly what they meant.
“Not tonight,” she told it, and put the flashlight back on the night table. She turned over on her side and found the flashlight lying next to her, where Evan would have been.
“No,” she told it again, and put the flashlight back on the night table. A sharp twinge in her head served as the voice of its displeasure. It didn’t like resistance.
She turned on her other side and there was the flashlight again. She took out the batteries and tossed the flashlight across the room, satisfied by the heavy thump and crunch of it hitting the wall, its handle casing or lens likely cracked. She threw the batteries on the floor.
From Evan’s room she heard a muffled roar and what sounded like tapping across his ceiling. The tapping continued down the ceiling of the hallway and grew louder as it moved over the top of the doorframe and entered her bedroom. She could almost imagine the long, jointed shadow-claws making the sounds as it crossed her ceiling and stopped directly above her. She felt cold all over. Her limbs felt heavy. She turned slowly over onto her back. The blind on her window shot up like a frightened cat and moonlight streamed in. It fell everywhere across the ceiling except where the closet thing stood. A split in the head part of it showed teeth like the closet in her dream, and although the mouth worked up and down, no sound came out.
She almost giggled. Of course there was no sound. It was a shadow puppet, after all, wasn’t it?
It peeled a set of splayed claw-fingers off the ceiling, and they took on a third dimension. One reached down to her, stopping just inches from her mouth. It made her think of Evan’s feeding tube. Instead of forcing its way down her throat, it caressed the side of her face. She couldn’t feel anything more than a breeze lifting the tiniest strands of her hairline, but she closed her eyes and leaned into it anyway. Mamma shadow and baby shadow.
When it pulled back, the flashlight, reassembled and intact, lay on the pillow beside her, but she was already asleep.
* * * * *
His birthday was a week later, and on a Sunday. She waited until then; it seemed appropriate to her. As darkness fell, she went to the basement and turned off the circuit breaker. Had she known anything about what was under the metal panel where all the switches were, she would have cut wires, melted things, torn them out and torn them up. She didn’t, and she didn’t want to do anything stupid out of panic, anything that might get her suddenly killed. She had other plans.
When fear got a hold of people, it either killed them outright, a sudden
, unexpected thing, or it killed them slowly. The trick was to stave off the symptoms for as long as she could.
She climbed the stairs back up to the second floor, got the flashlight from her night table, and made her way to Evan’s room.
The closet doors were already open, waiting for her.
It seemed to take a long time to cross the room. As she did, she memorized his toys, his books, the worn spots on his video game control where his fingers had rubbed all the color away, the scent of his clothes and sheets. She smiled as her shadow fell across the wall in a patch of moonlight, and whispered love and a hundred little kisses to the smaller shadow that came up behind her and took her free hand.
When she turned to the closet, she saw with some grim amusement that a noose hung from the cross-bar, but the back of the closet and most of his clothes were gone. The glistening darkness lay before her, and from below, the voices of children that were not and never had been children.
But they could pretend. For a while, just until she could be with him, they would pretend. And she thought that wherever Evan was, he understood. In fact, she thought as she glanced back to the moonlit wall, from the way the baby shadow and mamma shadow were cuddling against the wall, she knew for certain he did.
She turned back to the closet, flicked on the flashlight and stepped through.
BABY TEETH
“Change is the constant, the signal of rebirth, the egg of the phoenix.”
– Christina Baldwin
Ella tasted the blood in her mouth rather incidentally, as she was waiting for the cell phone to ring. She’d been waiting about two, two and a half hours, and although a disgusted voice in her head told her to shut off the ringer on her cell, take a hot bath, and call it a night, she still found herself checking the messages window on the front for his name, checking the call log for missed calls, checking the in-box of her text messages for unopened envelopes every four or five minutes.
There was nothing.
She willed herself to wait longer, setting a new time limit, giving him a new deadline to disappoint her by. To be honest with herself, though, she hadn’t had much faith in his coming around again anyway. What was done was done, simply, and what was lost was gone.
It was now 9:38 p.m. Closer to ten than nine, at this point. No time for a (not pregnant, not anymore) thirty-something with a full-time job to be going anywhere, even if it was Friday night. The whole thing was stupid. She didn’t (need to get out, Ella) need him, couldn’t count on him anyway. He hadn’t (been there when it happened) been the kind of guy that weathers the tough stuff – she’d suspected as much going in. And truth be told, it wasn’t just that Greg had changed. She had, too – mind, soul, and body. Whatever easy, carefree thing they’d had before had become something a little more serious when that stick’s little window returned two pink lines. And when the hot cramping and the wet stickiness and the nausea took away the best thing they’d ever had between them, that growing seriousness had changed again, this time to awkward, helpless silence and avoidance.
She frowned, fidgeted, checked the cell again, clicked her tongue in disappointment.
And tasted blood.
It wasn’t gushing but a thin, steady drip, warm in her mouth. She frowned, running her tongue over her lips and the front of her teeth, checking by feeling for pain. There was none, nor anything she could identify by sensation alone as a reason for the bleeding. She got up from the couch in the living room, hesitated a moment, pocketed the cell phone, and headed toward the bathroom.
Bearing her teeth at the reflection in the mirror, she made another quick pass of her mouth with her tongue. Most spots held up to inspection – no evident cause for alarm, except...except that bottom tooth there, on the left. Blood welled up from her gums, cupping the incisor in a swag of crimson. She licked at it and blood speckled the tip of her tongue. The blood receded for just a second before rushing tidally back around the tooth. She swallowed, and following the blood, there was a faint aftertaste of something meaty and organic but not quite right. Old, maybe...stale. Her tongue darted out at the tooth again.
A moment of pressure and then a tiny pop startled her, and something that felt like a pebble rolled between her cheek and molars. With two fingers, she reached in and pinched the small, hard object, aware both by taste and sensation that the blood flow had picked up a little.
Ella pulled out the tooth, ivory and shiny, by all accounts healthy and cavity-free, its jagged little roots tipped with dark red. Peering into the mirror, she frowned. There was a gap where that lower left tooth had been. A small flare of panic ignited in her midsection, and that feeling of wrongness, like the off-center taste of her blood, came back again. Since losing the baby, she’d grown wary of any blood that made its presence known without forewarning and good cause.
She supposed she’d have to call the dentist and leave a message for Monday morning. Ella looked at herself again, still unable to believe –
It wasn’t her in the mirror, but some pale-faced thing bearing long, jagged teeth glaring back at her – a bald thing whose eyes sank and resurfaced in the fluid plane that was its face. The gap in its teeth matched hers. She jumped, stumbling backward, her mouth open to cry out, but the sound died in her throat.
Because in the next moment, it was her in the mirror – of course it was.
She glanced down at the tooth in her hand, then back up – just to be sure – at her reflection. It was her face that looked back, tired and dejected, a small drool of blood at the corner of her mouth.
The cell phone rang and she jumped again, this time crying out with a small echo in the bathroom. A hand flew to her chest, the other digging into her pocket for the cell.
“Yes,” she said into the phone. “No, I’m fine. Where’ve you been all night? What? Fine. Okay, yeah, fine. Apology accepted. Sure. No, really, I’d like you to. Come over now.”
She held the tooth in her hand, closing it up in a fist as if she could squeeze it out of existence, then absently dropped it into a nearby Dixie cup, shut the light, and went out to wait for Greg.
* * * * *
An empty mirror, an empty, hollow copy-world, looked out into the darkness of Ella’s reality. From beyond the peripheral limit of the narrow bathroom mirror frame, a pale hand wrapped long fingers around the cup’s reflection, and the tooth became its keepsake.
* * * * *
Ella felt Greg’s eyes on her face. They felt like a stranger’s eyes. They shouldn’t have, considering how he and she had spent the night. He seemed different, though. They’d stumbled through sex (she could hardly call it lovemaking, though she wished it had been) as if they’d forgotten how to touch each other, as if their bodies were new again, and the secrets between their flesh had been forgotten. The condom had slipped, spilling some of his liquid heat inside her, and a vaguely formed question about whether it had been two nights or three since she’d taken her birth control pill nagged the edge of her thoughts. And now, the way he was looking at her made her feel naked inside as well as out. It was not like him to be so attentive – so piercing.
“What?”
“Just wondering what you were thinking.” His voice had a strange flat quality in the bedroom darkness.
“You’re wondering...what, if I’m mad? If I want to talk about what happened?”
“With us?”
“With the baby.”
“Do you want to talk about that?” Greg touched her shoulder.
“No,” she said, and turned away from him, on her side. He pulled his hand away.
“Do you want to talk about us, then?”
She thought a moment. She wanted to say, Is there even an us to talk about? but she didn’t. She didn’t think she’d be able to say anything at all that wouldn’t sound bitter or desperate.
“Ella?”
“I lost a tooth today.”
“What?” The bed creaked as he tented himself up on one arm.
“It just...fell out.
It’s in the bathroom.”
“Let me see.”
She turned around and drew back her lower lip.
“Geezus, baby, what happened? Did you fall or something? Does it hurt?”
“No,” she said, rubbing her stomach. It was an old distracted gesture, like pushing up glasses on her nose even after she got contacts – no longer necessary, but a tiny security, all the same. “Not at all. I just...I don’t know, it just fell out.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go to the dentist, I guess.” She turned away from him again, suddenly nettled, and wished he’d just shut up and go to sleep. He’d lost the right – that’s the way it felt to her – to ask her such intrusive questions. And since when did he get all concerned about her anyway? It wasn’t like him to help her handle problems.
“Ella?”
She half-turned back to him.
“Are things really that different now, with us? Do they have to be?”
“Everything changes,” she whispered. He didn’t answer and she didn’t have anything else to say.
* * * * *
I remember when I first saw you. I think part of me knew even then we’d be together. I didn’t know how to get close to you at first. It took me a while to understand you – to understand your world, and the others in it, and their places in your life. But I was crazy about you right away, right from that first moment. I have never met anyone like you before. The intensity of what I feel for you scares me. I want to tell you, but I don’t know how. I want to understand you, inside and out. I want to be a part of you, and you a part of me. I want to love you. But I’m afraid....
* * * * *
By Monday, it had become a new nervous, distracted gesture to dip her tongue in the empty socket where her tooth had been. Barely aware of it anymore, it seemed almost compulsive. So it startled her, then, when her tongue tripped over the tip of something sharp in what should have been an empty groove.
Night Movies Page 6