I must have cried myself to sleep, because it was early morning when I woke. Stiff and cold, still on the floor. I stared around blearily until it all came rushing back.
I got up put more wood in the stove and then, stupidly, searched the house again. Then I went to the back door and I screamed out for my mother. The scream tore from me, unbound, a concentration of grief bursting from my chest, splitting me open down the middle. I screamed out my emptiness, my loneliness.
But there was no answer, except frightened birds taking off from a tree they were roosting in. I gave up and closed the door. My body was stiff from sleeping on the cold floor. I went to the bathroom and started the shower. Watching the water spiral down the drain I felt my sanity dangling on a fraying thread. I was losing myself. Without my mother, without Sabrina, and strangely, without Hugh, I was nothing.
I got into the shower and sunk to my knees, crying again without realizing it. I stared at my wrists, fantasized slashing them. Angrily, I bit into my skin, my sharp teeth easily parting flesh. I tasted my blood. Watery, pinkish, lacking the vibrancy and life of Sabrina’s, but the taste was still soothing to me. Calming. I lay in the bathtub, suckling at my wrist until the water turned cold and the wound stopped bleeding.
Shivering so badly I was doubled over, I shuffled to my room, pulling my drawers out with abandon to find clothes that were warm enough. I found my thermals, put on my jeans over them, and a thin sweater, and over that another sweater—a moth-eaten, heavy fisherman’s sweater. I slid on two pairs of wool socks. I mindlessly wandered down the stairs, and mercifully the living room was warm. I put a few more pieces of wood in the stove, and crawled into my mother’s old chair. Tucking my feet beneath me, I bundled up in her blanket. The smell, once so repellent to me, had become soothing and familiar. It kept the emptiness at bay. I watched the flames dance in the fire and slowly warmed up. My head ached from crying. I sat like that for hours, dozing, empty. Totally alone.
Life was small, and cruel, and meaningless. It soothed me to think about it that way, to embrace the emptiness of it. I thought of the insect kingdoms in my front garden. All striving to survive and breed and die, never stopping to ask why. I thought of big cats, watching herds of gazelles go by, stomachs empty, waiting for a weak one to separate. I didn’t want to play the game of hunter and hunted.
Finally, I built up enough nerve to go down to the basement. I went to the terrible room that held my mother’s deepest secrets. I tested the lock on the outside. It was firm after all these years. This would work, this would be good. I slid my hands along the painted sheetrock, the stained cement. I felt a sense of resolve.
XXXVII.
It was nearly dark, and I was ready. I did a walk-through of the house again, making sure it was as presentable as it could be if someone came by. I wanted it to lie. To show it housed two beloved women, who cared for their home and each other. So I went from room to room, touching things, letting nostalgia flood me. I made the beds, I washed the dishes. I left the window in the kitchen open enough that the cat could get out once he’d eaten all the food I put out for him.
Finally, I felt as ready as I ever would, so I went back down to the basement. I felt the same revulsion as the first time I’d gone in. I laid out the blanket on the dingy, horrible sofa. It was too grotesque for me to let my skin touch directly. It smelled of sweat and old blood even now, all these years later. I set out my supplies on the floor before me.
I had a bottle of my mother’s sleeping pills and a jug of water. I let my hand fiddle with the knob before taking a resigned breath and slamming the door shut. Locked. There was no way for me to lock the deadbolt on the outside, but the doorknob lock was firm. Once closed in, I was overcome with the finality of my choice.
The small room was miserable, the stains peeping out through the clumsy, manic whitewash.
My face felt hot, my hands icy and numb. I eased down onto the sofa, and with little to do and the small window blacked out years ago, I committed to taking the pills and going to sleep, forever.
The store brand sleeping pills were difficult to swallow, even after flooding my mouth with water. They hit my empty stomach with a splash. I took them all. Then I sat and waited.
From the low angle on the floor, I could see the carved words peeping from behind the sofa: hidden words, prayers, pleas, ghosting through the walls. My victims’ words.
Eventually the pills took effect, the creeping drowsiness pulling at my hands and feet, then my eyelids. Before I went under, I dragged out my grandfather’s straight razor. This was the very one that my mother used to stare at and contemplate her own death. There was something poetic in that. With a clarity of purpose, I put the blade to my wrist and dragged it up to the crook in my elbow, as deep as I could. Pain, hot and immediate. The skin slid open with ease and blood welled up, thick and dark. Teeth gritted, and with my stomach threatening to purge the pills, I did the same to the other arm. Moments later, I was pulled beneath the undertow.
XXXVIII.
“I’m sorry you had to die for me,” I said aloud, startling myself out of sleep. I sat up, woozy and surprised I was still alive. My head was screaming, my heart beating erratically. Blearily, I looked around my tomb. I was covered in blood, my arms raw and horrible.
I moaned, a piteous sound. I picked up the razor and slashed again and again, above and across the other wounds until my hands were too slick with blood to grip the blade. I screamed aloud as the pain lit my body on fire. I dropped the knife and it fell with a clunk to the cement. I lay back down, curled up, the smell of blood everywhere maddening. The blood loss acting fast, numbing my limbs, turning my vision soft and furry. With little protest, I succumbed. My last thought was more of a prayer: I never want to wake again.
My prayers went unanswered. Eyes crusted, I woke again, crawling through cobwebs and blurry vision, staring disoriented around the cell. My shoulders were stiff from sleeping on the cold dirty floor and my gut was pinched with hunger. How was I still alive? My forearms were a tracery of deep horrible slices, skin bloodless and waxy. My stomach felt like it was filled with barbed wire, the pain so intense I couldn’t take a deep breath. The floor around me was covered in congealed blood, encircling me like a vile red island.
I woke. I woke. I woke. I don’t know how much later.
I could feel the flesh burning off me, my body ravenously stealing what energy it could still find. I saw it in my skeletal wrists, carved and scarred by the blade. I lifted myself from the ground and every joint creaked. I felt delirious. Had I been sleeping and starving for days? Mere hours? Time ticked away differently down here in my cell, or maybe it never moved at all, maybe I was forever trapped in a circular moment. Or maybe I was dead and this was limbo. Forever and ever.
Strange dreams, red skies, fat goldfish with hard bodies, writhing against my legs, nibbling my skin, gnawing holes. Things getting inside, moving underneath my skin like a cat under a sheet. I scream and they crawl out my mouth, choking off my cries.
I woke to find myself clawing at the door. My fingernails were jagged and bloody. Splinters of different sizes protruded cactus-like from my hands. The door was covered in gory furrows. My sleeping self was trying to get out. It was no surprise. My inner monster had been keeping me alive all these years. My hands throbbed and I slowly dragged myself back to the couch to pick out all the slivers.
Each jagged piece a reminder that regardless of my efforts, I lived on.
XXXIX.
Sleep was becoming easier as time passed, though the more I slept, the more I tried to escape. I found myself precariously balanced, clawing at the sealed window, trying to dig out a hole in the sheetrock. My fingers were sprained and broken. I had gashes from nails and electrical wire that were bloodless and ugly. I didn’t want to be awake, but I feared my sleeping self and its survivalist autopilot.
I was floating, weightless. Bodiless in a velvet blackness. It was neither warm nor cool in that middle place. It was utterly silent and peac
eful. I was dangling on the precipice of non-being, fraying at the edges.
Wait.
Something called to me. It was so far away, all the way back down in my body, in that world of pain. I didn’t want to return, I begged to be released, but my wishes went ignored and instantly I was in my pain-wracked, crumpled form again.
I heard something.
I felt the pass of air under the door. Heard the knob turning. My eyes wheeled around in my stiff skull, searching the cell for a place to hide, but there was nowhere, and I was too weak. I remained there, prone. By the time the door whooshed open, I had nearly passed out from anticipation.
XL.
The basement doorway was dark, and the gust of cold, mildewed air strangely refreshing. I took a deep breath without realizing it, and there was more to the smell than old laundry soap and mold. There was life in that air. The figure stepped in and gasped. As soon as she crossed the boundary into the light, I moaned.
My mother. My mother who couldn’t go down stairs on her own, my mother who wandered into the woods to sleep. My mother, the horrible old crone who only swooped in to torture me. The mother shape stepped farther in and clasped her hand over her mouth. She was dressed in real clothes: jeans, a coat. And she had tears in her eyes.
Don’t cry for me, Mother, I don’t deserve it.
She came to me. I tried to roll away from her, but all I could manage was to raise one of my crooked and mutilated hands to halt her.
“Oh, God . . .” She reached out to me, touched my cheek. I flailed then, using my last reserve of strength to knock her away. I didn’t want her coming an inch closer. I could smell her, through the cold, through her clothes, through the short distance that divided us. She smelled like food, like life, like salvation, like home. My dry tongue scraped along the top of my mouth. I knew my teeth were bared, shriveled lips pulled back. Sharp teeth. My eyes, so dry they could barely blink, just burned instead.
“Get out . . . of here . . . please.” My voice gurgled through my ruined throat. My mother shook her head. She lowered herself stiffly, knees popping. She was too near, too alive. Her hands fluttered over and around me, as if wanting to touch me but afraid to. I would have laughed, if I had I the strength. Was this all I had to do to get her to touch me? She gasped at the floor she was kneeling on. My blood was everywhere, congealed and sticky.
“What a terrible life I gave you.” Her eyes were screwed shut. I was so confused. Where had she gone? I had searched everywhere for her. Was she hidden away? I wanted to ask her but I was too weak. Did she leave and come back? Was this a dream? It had to be a dream.
My mother could move, she was being kind, she spoke clearly. What a strange hallucination. The sight of her leaning over me, moving, talking, touching me as I lay dying was confusing. I thought of the sculpture in Hugh’s gallery—the mother looking down at her dead baby. I coughed.
“I was in the attic. When you came back I hid. I wanted to leave, leave you, but . . .”
“You shouldn’t be here,” I gasped out, my throat ruined.
She reached out and ran her hand along my face. The warmth from her palm left tracks of sensation, it was like an antidote. But I was greedy for more than a kind touch, and I wanted what was beneath her skin so badly my teeth ached. With a shaking breath, I squeezed my eyes shut.
“It’s not safe . . . please, just go.”
“I can’t.”
I turned my face as far away from her as my ruined neck would allow. My hands clutched tightly to my chest to keep them from reaching out to her. I heard her fumbling behind me, the sound of fabric, a hissed breath, and suddenly the air around me exploded with the smell of blood. I turned back, snuffling the air like a dog. She was on her knees, her coat sleeve pushed back, a streak of red blossoming where she had just cut her wrist with the knife. The cut was deep enough that I could watch the pulse in the fount, feel the heat. I keened, like an animal in a trap.
“Why are you torturing me?” A harsh whisper, my gaze staying riveted to the dripping laceration. A drop of blood, then a few more hit the floor. I could have wept for the waste. The desire to lick the cement was overwhelming. I whimpered.
My mother brought the offending wrist closer, my resistance leeching away as the distance closed between us. She lifted my head to her lap with her other hand.
“It’s not your fault.” Her other hand reached out and stroked my hair. The touch was so soothing, so kind. My whole life I’d yearned for such affection from her. I let out a wretched sob. I followed her gaze to her painting in the corner. Her eyes were hard to read then: guilt, maybe? Grief?
“I can’t . . .” I finally said, leaning closer to the blood. Eyes on the wound.
“It’s all right. I want you to.” Our eyes met and she smiled, and she was in that moment the most beautiful person in the world. A divinity made flesh, brought down to my basement hell to offer salvation.
“I love you, Mom,” I whispered and she nodded, bringing her wrist to my mouth.
PART IV: Epilogue
Some things are more precious because they don’t last long.
—Oscar Wilde
I lived alone my whole life: friendless, loveless, isolated, but despite my solitary existence, I wasn’t selfish. A successful life demands that you become selfish, that you must take care of yourself. Rapunzel was weak because she was waiting to be saved. She could have lowered herself down on her own hair anytime, hacking it off at the base. She could have run away from that tower a new woman, a free woman. But she didn’t. Instead, she waited in her prison. Sabrina could never have saved me. I wasn’t living in a fairy tale, and no one could save me from myself.
When I finally woke in that basement cell, I felt peace. My unnatural body, while still very hurt, was mending, and I got up without too much protest. My peace dissolved when I noticed the body of my mother. She lay in a fetal position, her small hands in tight tiny fists, her skin slack and yellow, corded blue veins standing out in high relief. Empty and desiccated. I dropped to my knees, scooping up those brittle hands. They were cold and stiff. Her cheeks were hollow, her closed eyes bulbous. The skin covering her eyelids was nearly transparent, reminding me morbidly of a baby chick in an egg. I let a shaking hand touch her head, her sparse hair.
My mother was dead.
My fist was in my mouth, choking off the scream in me. I threw myself onto her body. It was bony and unresponsive, all angles, but I clung to it as if it was a life preserver. I wrapped my arms around her and I squeezed, getting the embrace that she had never given me in life, until the very end. I cried, wracking sobs dragged painfully from my hunched body. I rocked my mother back and forth, kissing the dead skin of her face, wishing for so many things I couldn’t name. I wished she was alive, I wished that I could have known the red-headed painter she was. I wished I knew what her laugh sounded like. I wished she had loved me the way I had wanted.
But . . . she had loved me more than anyone else in the world, as much as anyone could. That truth quieted me. I stayed on the floor, holding her tight, spooning her small, brittle body to my own. And over time, I began to feel . . . lighter. I didn’t murder my mother. She had given herself to me, as a gift. That love was bigger than life and death, her love living on in me, in my body, in my memories. It didn’t give me peace. But it gave me resolve. I couldn’t let her sacrifice be for nothing, and I couldn’t ignore what I really was.
I stared at her body a long time.
I got up, returning with a bucket of warm, soapy water and a sponge, and I meticulously bathed her on the floor. I nearly broke when I caught myself testing the water to make sure it was just right—like I had for her a thousand times before. She didn’t care.
I carefully washed and dried every inch of her shriveled, scarred body. In the harsh basement light, her body was a galaxy, constellations of shiny pink scars everywhere.
Once clean and smelling of roses, I slid her into a crisp white nightgown, this one ornate with lace and embroidery at the
neck. When I lifted her, she weighed next to nothing, and I carried her all the way back into her bed, tucking her in lovingly and carefully. I put her hands on her chest, one over the other, and pulled the blankets up to her chin. I left her curtains wide open, the pale light giving her the illusion of sleep. I kissed her forehead. It was still a bit damp. I let my hand rest on hers for a moment.
“You did your best. I know that now.”
With a final squeeze I left the room, closing the door behind me.
When I left my mother’s house for the last time, there was a Rapunzel feeling of escaping the tower and cutting off all that hair, losing all the weight dragging behind me. I stood outside the gate, watching the dark smoke mingle with the night sky and blot out the stars. I was hypnotized by the vibrant flames hungrily devouring the old wood of the house and melting the snow. The smell of fire in the air cleansed me.
I walked along the lonely, snowy street, dragging my suitcase and the one painting I’d decided to keep. Tommy yowled in his carrying case, precariously balanced on the wheeled suitcase. I was still weak and heavily bandaged and it was a relief, after what felt like hours, to reach the high school. It was dark and locked up tight this late at night, so I didn’t feel the need to sneak as I crossed the parking lot and sat on the main steps, obscured from the road by some dormant busses and a large tree. I let my fingers wriggle around inside the cat box, petting the cat’s soft fur, coaxing him to relax.
I sat for a long time. My backside was frozen and stiff with cold by the time the car pulled up. It was a rental, nondescript, white. It parked in front and killed the engine. I rose with a creak and moved toward it. She was smiling when the window slid down and I welcomed the burst of heat that escaped from the car. She was similar to when I saw her last: pale skin, blonde hair, freckles, and a nice smile.
Parasite Life Page 25