Seeing Double

by Karen Runge

  The rabbit hutch that stood by the back door, hidden under a thick fold of green tarp, was only uncovered and opened in times when calm and control suddenly slipped. I’ve talked to you about how balanced everything was. Well, it wasn’t that way all the time.

  I’ve seen you slip too, Ada. In much the same way. I’ve seen you crack. When you’re switching masks, sometimes, you’ve been known to fuck up. I don’t want to compare you to my mother, but she was something like that too, sometimes. Maybe she was nearing her period, maybe the bills were coming in too fast. Maybe things beyond her control were reaching in, making her hands shake, making her fidget, drop things. Doubt, I guess. Doubted herself, and her ability to keep the calm in our house. A smashed cup, a stuttered word, a utensil clattering on the clean kitchen floor.

  My father hated that. He’d give her a few chances. I’d see him counting them in his head. His jaw clenching. His shoulders stiffening. His eyes rolling toward her, watching her. And when she knew she was being watched, she’d get nervous. She’d be even worse. She’d fuck up again. And then again. And that was when it would all fall apart.

  Her eyes would widen. She’d hold her hands up to her face. Trembling hands—what greater immediate sign of weakness is that? Already beginning to blubber, holding those hands up. Against him. Backing away.

  Don’t say anything. I’d think that at her. Wishing she could hear me. Don’t speak, don’t cry.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid woman. I can say that about her now, in retrospect. I loved her—you know I did—but it’s not like she hadn’t had enough practice, or enough time to figure it out.

  She knew my dad would go for her. And when he did, when he’d had enough, she’d scream.

  Screaming. What a stupid fucking thing to do. You see what I mean? It invites hysteria and loss of control. It’s exciting to predators. You know that.

  Did you ever scream, Ada, in all the times you found yourself under that kind of threat? Did you? I don’t think so. But I can’t decide if that’s because you’re really fucking smart and know it’s better to shut up, or if it’s because deep down you liked it. You’re shifty like that.

  I’ve asked that question about my mother, by the way. This exact same question I have about you.

  There was the rattle of the belt as it came undone, metal dancing against metal as it looped, as it swung. I remember that sound. I still dream of it sometimes. When I wake up from those dreams my dick will be hard and there’ll be tears behind my eyes. Since I met you, I’ve thought of you in those moments in the dark. But maybe I shouldn’t tell you that. I guess you don’t want to know that.

  Do you?

  He’d grab her, drag her to the living room and bend her over the back of the armchair. Her mouth would fall open, she’d go limp, not even trying to get away as my father yanked her skirt up over her hips, tore her underwear down to her ankles. She’d grab at the plumped pillows. But she never picked them up. Never turned around. Never swung. It was like all her muscles dissolved or something. She’d lie there hanging over the back of the chair, sobbing. She stared at her display cabinet. I guess she focused on her china, the polished plates carefully arranged under glass. She had to look at something nice, maybe. In the spare seconds between each lash.

  I watched all this from the doorway. I saw welts rise on her skin, wounds open. Sweat on my father’s forehead. He used to grunt with each stroke, and after a while my mother would stop screaming. Too tired maybe. She’d still gasp on impact, though. And he’d keep going. Those sounds she made, you know, they’re a lot like the sounds a woman makes during rough sex. Gasping for air. Gasping against the barrage of sensation. And as a guy, no matter your intentions, you never really know if its pleasure or pain that makes a woman breathe like that. When it’s supposed to be consensual, sometimes you’re not sure where the turn-on stops and the guilt begins. Because I’m not like Daniel. You know that.

  When they both wound down, my dad would drop the belt and look at me.

  “Take the tarp off the hutch,” he’d say.

  He kept his hand pressed to my mother’s back. Holding her down. As if she’d even try to get up. To get away. She lay there collapsed over the back of the armchair, shoulders shaking, blood streaming from her ass, running down her legs. Kinda pretty, maybe. The blood, I mean.

  Yes, I thought that. Even then.

  I never saw her face in those moments. I have no idea what her expression was. I think sometimes it would’ve been good for me. If I could’ve seen.

  But she kept her head bowed, and I obeyed my father.

  I went to take off the tarp.

  – THIRTY-SEVEN –

  Neven zipped through the compound gates, cresting round the curve, glancing up at Daniel and Ada’s apartment windows as he passed. Ada’s studio faced out this way, and he often saw her lights burning when he went by in the evenings. If he was on foot he sometimes heard the music she played while she was painting. Harsh sounds, thrashing guitars, ghostly voices bellowing, shrieking.

  That girl. Maddening, crazy. Resistant, giving. Soft beneath her veneer. As all good girls were really, no matter how long or how well they played at being dangerous. Debauchery everlasting, it wasn’t for her. He should’ve known months ago, long before that walk.

  That goddamned walk.

  There was that night a while back when some guy was talking to them, and she admitted she was married—You? Married?—only instead of saying, “We did it to shut our parents up,” she said, “When you find the right person it’s just something you want to do.” That cop-out cliché sliding from her lips as Neven listened, stupefied. And then a few weeks later he suggested they give a dealer a call—it had just gone eleven and Daniel had confessed they were out of the wine—and Neven saw a look pass between husband and wife.

  Ah, he’d thought. Something’s changing here. And then pushed the thought away because it had seemed impossible to him, that Ada would walk away from him. Or rather, that she’d be able to let him walk away from her. As he had. As he wished now that he hadn’t.

  He was past the panic, the sense of abandonment. What he’d felt after that was a sense of loss. Replaced now by fury. But they were married, and he’d always been a third. Transient, temporary. He knew that.

  What God Himself has joined…

  Like God had anything to do with a couple like that.

  The next time they invited him for dinner, Daniel would likely offer him a Chianti, a brandy, something sniffy and pretentious like that. One only. They’d probably end the night with a card game, Ada’s vivid laughter reserved for the sly moves she made with her aces. He’d look at them both with a hunger her rich cream sauces could never satisfy. Not without the promise of that sweet, warm cream spilling from her cunt.

  Neven parked the Vespa by his building, locked her up tight, looked around. He shoved his keys deep in his pockets where they wouldn’t make any sound. He went round the back of the building, stepping softly on frozen ground. He stood at the gate of the old abandoned shed.

  He stared into the black.

  – THIRTY-EIGHT –

  I didn’t like to go anywhere near that rabbit hutch. I wouldn’t touch it unless I was under orders. It was dark in there, it stank. It was cold and small inside, and there was no way to lie down or sit comfortably. When my father told me to go and take the tarp off, to unlock it, sometimes I’d go and then just stand there for a few moments, staring at it. Knowing that my mother would have to stay there all night, and maybe the next night too. I knew I would hear her sobbing and whispering to herself while I lay in bed that night, wide awake. Wishing I could go to her. Help her. If not get her out, then at least sit with her.

  But my father wouldn’t have let me do that.

  Maybe more than anything, I obeyed because I knew what would happen when it was all over. I’d seen it many times, the beauty of the aftermath.

  I did what he asked. And then I ran to my room. I didn’t like to see him put her in there. Lock her
up in there. Leave her there.

  Later, I’d lie in bed with my pillow over my ears, comforting myself with the vision of my mother’s face. Imagining how it would shine when we finally went back outside, father and son, to open the rusted padlock and let her out again. I tried not to think of her as she was then—her muscles cramping in the small confines of the cage, her stomach burning with hunger, loneliness clawing at her with nobody to hug her or kiss her or keep her company in the cold.

  I told myself it didn’t matter because I knew that when my father rushed back home in the afternoon, after all those hours of agonised guilt, it would be worth it. Every second of it.

  Sometimes it was just a day. Sometimes it was two. My father would heat something up on the stove, slice some bread for us. But I found it hard to eat. Above all, I avoided the back door. I went out into the road during the day, walked down the winding dirt track closer to town where friends of mine might be playing. There was nothing to keep me home. No sound of her humming while she ironed, no whisper of her feet on the carpets as she walked through the house. If I got back early in the afternoons, I sat outside by the gate and waited for my father to come up over the crest of the hill. I watched for him. Sometimes he’d come back walking, a slow silhouette making its way home. And I’d know it would be a while longer. One day more.

  When he did give in, it was total. Those were the only times I ever saw him run. And as soon as he was close enough, he’d yell to me, “Get to the house! Get the key!”

  We kept the key in a pewter bowl on a small pine sideboard. I could never reach it fast enough. I’d be grinning, almost bursting with joy, dancing in the doorway until he caught up and snatched it out of my outstretched hand.

  I let him go ahead. I followed, but I hung back. The rabbit hutch stank of her urine, her sweat. Her excrement, smeared against her thighs. Filthy things that revolted me. I didn’t like to see her like that. She was like a wild animal. Like something barely human. But my father, I don’t know. Somehow I think it only made him love her more. From the way he looked at her, I got that idea. I’d stand to the side as he crouched down, as he breathed, his hands trembling, fighting with the old lock.

  “Magda,” he’d say softly, over and over again. “Magda, please. Please, Magda. Please.”

  My father was a monster, locking her up like that. I know.

  But even monsters can love.

  Their fingers met through the bars, the hatch came open, and with tears running down his cheeks, he’d lift her up and pull her into his arms.

  Ada. Imagine that. The beauty of it.

  It didn’t matter how dirty she was, how messed up she was, how bad she smelled. He loved her. He loved her, and he was sorry, and in her moment of gratitude, I saw in her face that she never loved him more than she did then. When he went back for her. When he released her.

  This is what I learned that you and Daniel only skirted around the edges of. The beauty of chaos, of violence. How it breaks and then it binds. A bond tighter than any other.

  After, it was my job to clean out the rabbit hutch. I had to wrestle the layer of soiled fabric out from the bottom and wash it under the tap. Scrubbing it until it bore only stains, trace smells. I cleared the cage of cobwebs and used pliers to straighten the bends my mother had made in the bars. Then I covered it with the tarp.

  At night, I’d listen to them having sex. Making love, maybe. Gentler, slower than at other times. I never looked in on them. I never watched. But I knew somehow the expressions they would have on their faces. Ecstasy and adoration.

  I know he held her close.

  – THIRTY-NINE –

  The next sighting was of Ada, and Daniel was the one who saw it.

  Walking the two blocks from his office to the subway station, a thin crowd pushing around him, too many voices too close to his ear. Bodies and hair and musty clothes. A few drifts of perfume sliding between the sour smells of sweat and oil and dirty skin. The astounding filth of this city. He thought of home, clean carpets and polished tile, the sweet, smoky tones of incense caught in the curtains.

  One day they would move to the suburbs. Sign a ten-year lease on one of those fixer-uppers by the river, let Ada paint whatever walls she liked however she damn well wanted. They’d need a car of course, but there was enough time and money for that. The important thing was that these ideas were not as impossible now as they had seemed just six months ago.

  We’ll have a baby on the way by then, he thought.

  The hassle of the crowd forgotten, he ran down the steps and into the station with a smile of wonder.

  He’d just pushed through the turnstiles when he saw her. She was ahead of him, going down the steps that led to the platform. Her hair was clipped up in a messy twist, the way she did it when she showered in the mornings without washing it, damp strands drying in soft curls. She was wearing her red leather jacket, the one with the belt he knew was fraying at the buckle. She was stepping fast down the stairs, her head bowed, watching her feet. The back of her neck a soft curve, smooth skin bare of a scarf.

  She’ll get sick.

  This was his first thought. The one that struck him before he wondered what she was doing there.

  “Ada!”

  He hurried to the top of the stairs, just glimpsing her as she hit the platform and strode on ahead, a flash of auburn hair in the clusters and drifts of people that moved, stood, loitered, some dragging bags, some turning their heads. Groups of out-of-towners stopping short to read the information boards on the pillars on either side, oblivious to the bottlenecks swelling behind them.

  It was futile to call out to her. Not across this distance, not in this crowd. He knew she would be heading to the far end of the platform, to the carriages right at the back where she’d be more likely to get a seat. She was moving fast, because the trains were only three minutes apart and she would hate to stay here in this station a second longer than she had to. She’d want to get on the very next train, doors sealing her in, announcements blaring, taking her away from the city’s hectic, tumultuous outer circle. And on to where?

  He reached the bottom of the stairs and glimpsed her far ahead. A woman dragging a suitcase had just cut across her path, almost tripping her. Ada’s hands flew out of her pockets to grab at balance. She side-stepped, shooting a glare at the woman. Even across the distance he saw the flare in Ada’s cheeks.

  She wasn’t a city girl. She never had been, really. She hated this chaos, this kind of crush.

  So what is she doing out here, so far from home?

  He ran after her, pushing past people, zigzagging to cut in front of the woman with the suitcase, making her stumble. He paused for just an instant, apologising with a malicious grin. He’d tell Ada about that later. She’d like that.

  The train had pulled up; the doors were opening. She was veering left to step into the carriage. He angled through the crowd, rushing after her. It didn’t occur to him to jump onto the train at the nearest door and then travel down as it moved, searching until he found her. He was too fixed on that slim figure in a red jacket, that messy twist of hair, that woman, his wife, found in a crowd and oblivious to him.

  The warning beeps sounded as he neared her carriage door, the doors sliding into action just as he was about to step on. His heart lurched, thundered in his throat as the doors clicked home. He stepped back, beaten. He returned his hands to their familiar clutch, deep in his coat pockets. Clenching. The crowd, momentarily quelled, surged back around him. Looking up as the train began to move, he saw her just beyond the doors. She was standing square in front of him, her jacket belted, the V where it crossed at her chest pulled wide enough to reveal the black lace of her bra, enough to show that not only was she bare of a scarf but of a shirt, too.

  She did that once at Red House, he just had time to remember before he met her eyes. That drunk guy grabbed at her when he fell over and ripped her shirt right off. She belted her jacket over her bra and laughed, said she was going for the dominatrix
look.

  This memory just had time to travel his mind in its entirety, and then his eyes met hers through the glass. And his heart, still thundering, gave an awkward jab. Sharp enough to hurt.

  She was looking directly at him. There was no surprise in her face, no humour, no love. Pure hatred spat from her eyes, raw and ripe, a power of malign loathing thick enough to stop his breath, enough to wash him in a wave of nauseous vertigo.

  She sees me.

  The train gained speed and whipped away, screaming down the dark tunnels.

  – FORTY –

  Do you understand me, Ada? Are you listening yet?

  You’re shivering. Are you that cold? Why did you stop trying to talk? I need to know you’re still here with me, listening to me. Ada, look at me. Please.

  – FORTY-ONE –

  Neven lay on his bed, his hands laced behind his head. Gripping clumps of hair between his fingers, tugging as he eased his hands apart, relaxed. Away, and back. He liked the sensation of his skin tightening, a line of pain zipping down the back of his head. The idea that if he yanked hard enough he might split it, peel the sheath of skin that covered his skull right off. Curl it down over his eyes, rip again at his nostrils to free that cartilage hook. Reveal his true face.

  Of course, it didn’t work like that. That was horror movie fantasy, unreal against the true mechanics of the body, the knit and weave of fat and flesh, nerves and muscles wired tight beneath.

  No, it’s not possible like that. I know. I’m just having thoughts.

  And thoughts were maybe all he had left. He knew that, too.