Eventually, she returned to her parents’ house, and I returned to work.
The kids in my class were overjoyed to have me back, though whether or not this was because the substitute teacher was a battleaxe, I can’t say. They asked a lot of questions I wasn’t really prepared to answer, so I distracted them by allowing them reading time rather than burden them with instruction. The staff, too, seemed inordinately happy to see me. Apparently, rumors had started to circulate that I might never be coming back. I found their concern touching and sincere, especially since I’d never considered any of them close, and thus, I accepted their invitation to attend the regular Friday karaoke night at a local dive bar. The night was a terrific one. They even got me to sing, something I imagine was an ordeal for all concerned. Nevertheless, I was invited to go again the next Friday and told them I would. I even considered bringing Lexi. Her singing voice would make up for mine and everyone would love her.
It was, if not a new beginning, then at least the first real attempt at one. Before I found the blanket, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed without forcing it, or enjoyed anything without letting the guilt crucify me afterward.
Loneliness awaited me at home, but it was offset greatly by the promise of what my life now held: new friends, a social life, and a renewed relationship with my wife. So, when I sat down before my sitcoms, beer in hand, it was not so much a desperate escape as a pleasant and enjoyable one.
To cap it all, I got a rather unexpected phone call the following Tuesday afternoon. It was from Lexi’s father, Joe, a man whose apparent coolness toward me could be traced back to that one Christmas Eve when I admitted while sitting with him before a OSU V Clemson game that I’d never much cared for sports. To a diehard Buckeye and the kind of man’s man the world just doesn’t seem to produce anymore, that was akin to confessing that I liked to burn flags and speak Russian in my spare time. Okay, maybe not that dramatic, but whatever my ill-advised admission instilled in him, he’d never been very warm to me after that, his gaze somewhat withering, his smiles plastic when aimed in my direction. Lex had always assured me I was imagining it, but I knew better. It’s easy to tell when you’re the least liked person in the room. As far as I could recall, I’d never received a phone call from Joe that hadn’t been meant for Lexi, so when I saw his name on my cell screen, I was filled with sudden dread. It couldn’t mean anything good. Maybe he was calling to tell me to back off his daughter, that it was only going to cause her more hurt, or maybe to inform me of his true feelings once and for all.
You couldn’t even keep my granddaughter alive, you piece of shit. Why on earth do you think I’d trust you to keep my Lexi safe?
Mouth dry, I jabbed the button to accept the call. “Hello?”
“Steve?” Steve?
“Yeah, hey Joe. Is everything okay?”
“Huh? Oh yes, fine, fine. Everything’s just fine.”
When he didn’t say anything, I filled the silence. “What can I do for you?”
“Huh?”
It was like I’d wandered in on his conversation with himself.
“Oh, I just wanted to call. To call you. It was Marcy’s idea, really. I thought she might call you. I got back from work and she said she hadn’t…yet…so she said I might as well just go ahead and…you know…do it, so…”
I put a hand to my mouth to stifle the laughter. Already this was likely to go down in history as the most awkward conversation I’d ever had, and that included our fateful Christmas exchange, which had concluded with him looking at me in confusion and saying, “If a man doesn’t like football, I just don’t know what he can like.”
I decided to be merciful. “Well, I’m happy to hear from you, Joe. It’s been a while.”
“It has, yes. It has. Awful business what happened. Was so very sorry to hear it. Poor little thing. Terrible loss.”
Little thing. The enormity of her passing has always rendered such descriptions redundant.
“Did you want to speak to me about something, Joe?”
“What? Oh, yes. I, that is to say we, Marcy and I, and Lexi, of course, wanted to ask if you’d be at all interested in joining us for dinner tomorrow night. I think she’s making lasagna. Marcy, I mean. Don’t know if you like lasagna, but I think hers is pretty good. Best I’ve ever had, anyway.”
“I’d love to. What time?”
“Huh? Uh, hey, what time?” he yelled, and I heard Marcy respond a moment before he did. “Say, eight? Does that work? Eight o’ clock?”
“It does indeed.”
“See you at eight, then?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
For the rest of the day I felt like my blood had been replaced by sunlight. The guilt lingered in the wings, of course, and I suspected it would be some time before any degree of happiness did not demand a fair and merciless accounting, because at the end of the day grieving people are not supposed to be happy. But damn it, I couldn’t help it. And I needed it. Things were changing. A few weeks before, I’d thought I was destined to suffer alone, thought I had lost my wife in addition to my child. But now Lexi had let me back in, her family had let me back in, and I could at least allow myself a moment of celebration for how that made me feel.
Every Monday morning in class, I asked my students to draw on a piece of paper an emoji that best reflected how their weekend had gone and hold it up before their faces. Invariably, the faces were happy, sometimes, sad, which would lead to a discussion about what had gone wrong—assuming the child wanted to discuss it, of course—and we would try to dissolve the negativity through a class discussion. Positive reinforcement to counter negative experience, because ultimately, nobody wants to face the bad things alone.
It was my hope now, that I would no longer have to.
* * *
That night, as I lay in bed, drifting off to sleep, my cell phone hummed. To my delight, the text was from Lexi. It read: “Harder to sleep alone now that I’ve been reminded what it’s like when I don’t have to :)”
Beneath the words was an overhead selfie of her lying in bed, the sheets and her bra pulled down to reveal her breasts. Her nipples were hard. The smile on her face was coquettish, seductive, and full of promise, eyes glimmering in the light from her bedside lamp.
I responded: “I’ll be there in five minutes. With or without pants.”
“My parents would love that.”
“Do I at least get to stay over tomorrow night?”
“I’m sure you could if you wanted to. Just don’t talk football with Dad. :)”
“Believe me, I’ve learned my lesson.”
“And we’d have to be quiet. They go to bed early.”
“Me be quiet? You’re the one with the volume control issues.”
“Only when you do good.”
“Well, I intend to, so I may have to gag you.”
“Ooh, kinky.”
“I know, right? Short leap from there to whips and chains.”
She laughed at that. My favorite sound in the world.
“So, Mom’s excited to have you over.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. She always liked you. Even after we lost Robin, and I came to hide away here, she asked about you a lot. She worried.”
This was news to me, and while I couldn’t speak to the veracity of my wife’s words—it was entirely likely she was just laying the groundwork for the next night’s get-together—I appreciated hearing it.
“Well, I’ve always liked her too.”
“I’m looking forward to tomorrow night, to things feeling normal, like before. Is that wrong?”
“Hell no, it’s not wrong. You deserve this. We both do. And your family does too.”
“Good. Well, I should get some sleep. I’ve got a busy day ahead of me tomorrow.”
“Send me another picture before you go.”
“Horndog.”
“You know it.”
For a few moments, the phone was silent, then a picture of her po
pped up on the screen. It was a close-up of her mouth, those wonderful lips parted enticingly, the nail of her forefinger pressed against the lower one.
It was followed by one last text: “See you tomorrow night, lover. Be sure to bring your appetite.”
* * *
That night, I had a terrible dream. I was lying on the floor in a house I didn’t know, a dirty house, little more than a cabin, with small windows occluded by yellow dirt and clotted with old cobwebs, their architects long dead. The ceiling was oppressively low and crisscrossed by huge timber beams still wearing their bark. The floor, what little I could see of it, was fashioned from similar material. Crowding the area around me were dozens upon dozens of antique dolls, all of them seated around me like an audience before a stage. Some were porcelain; some were straw, others were made of what appeared to be clay. Why they might be positioned as if to give me their attention was a mystery, however, because their heads were turned away from me, toward the opposite end of the room, to the woman seated at the rickety kitchen table.
The light was dim in the room, and what little there was came from no discernible source, so I only had the faintest impression of the woman. She looked like a clothes horse made of bones, the material hanging from her skeletal frame as dirty as the room in which she sat. Her dark matted hair hung in clumps over her face and she nodded jerkily along to the arrhythmic tapping of her long yellow nails on the table top.
As I lay there, stricken, I began to feel that tapping radiating up through the floorboards into my chest, rapping at my heart, forcing my teeth to clack together, invoking dread in me that I was in some lethal, alien place I would never escape even by waking. I tried to move and found that the sleeves of my shirt, which seemed fashioned from the same rotten material the woman and some of the dolls wore, had been nailed to the floor with rusty ingots. The cuffs of my threadbare pants, the same. My feet were streaked with dirt, and were most definitely not mine. The toenails were curled and yellow and spotted with something dark. I opened my mouth to scream and choked instead as a thick black thread spun out and upward from the back of my throat before snapping free to vanish up into the darkness of the rafters. There was no time to try to make out where it had gone, because now there came a leathery creaking sound, like someone twisting a belt in their hands.
I turned my head in time to see all the dolls do the same.
All of them looked at me in unison as the woman rose up, blocking the light from the room.
Fingers protruded from their eyesockets, too small to belong to adults.
Too pink and spongy to be fake.
Their mouths gaped hungrily.
The woman reached her full height and I strained to follow her progress. She was tall, impossibly tall now, and had to bend to avoid colliding with the rafters. Her arms, with those awful spindly fingers, seemed to grow toward me like a time-lapse video of kudzu vines. Her belly began to swell outward until she resembled some massive sea creature fished dead and bloated from the tide. I smelled dirt and blood and sour milk, glimpsed purplish skin sloughing off the woman’s wrists to spatter on the floor and thought the dolls might have scurried to retrieve it. All I knew for sure was that they had moved as one toward the area of the floor where the blood was thickest.
The room began to shudder and quake. Dust rained down from the rafters as they cracked and splintered. The woman continued to grow, the dolls continued to move. And feed. The stench thickened and I knew she was going to reach me soon, struggled against the nails pinning me to the rotten floor. The light began to bleed out of the room, eclipsed by this enormous creature as it continued to swell, swell, swell, bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until she seemed to fill my vision without ever having left the other side of the room.
And then her face was hanging over me and I screamed in absolute mind-shearing horror at the sight of what had been hiding beneath that caul of hair, until the dolls found my mouth and begin to climb inside, their tiny hands warm against my lips, my tongue…
* * *
When I woke with a cry, I thought the nightmare had followed me, that the woman had filled the room, blocking the sunlight. Thought I glimpsed her shrinking back into the shadows beyond the foot of the bed, thought the dolls might have scurried underneath it, just waiting for me to go back to sleep. After a panicked moment, I realized it was still night, still dark, and that my phone was ringing. No, not ringing. Tapping. I’d fallen asleep and had knocked it off the bed and now it was vibrating against the hardwood floor, making the same sound I had ascribed to the witch (for surely that’s what she’d been.) Maybe not the same sound, but close enough to fuel a nightmare if the sleeper had an overactive imagination, something of which I have frequently been accused.
I waited for my heartbeat to regulate and my breathing to follow, then leaned over and scooped the cell phone off the floor. It was Lexi, and she was video-calling me at three a.m.
Disorientated and confused—why would she be calling me at such an hour?—I reached over, turned on the bedside lamp and tapped the green button to accept the call.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light. Even longer to adjust to what was on my screen as it bloomed to life on the display.
At first, I thought I was looking at Lexi tossing in her sleep, which would have begged the question of how she’d made the call, unless it was by accident. But then the screen tilted back and I was able to see her head. Her face. Her mouth.
And I screamed so loudly in horror it roused the neighbors from their beds and brought them hammering at my door. I ignored them, fell sideways off the bed and slammed my head against the floor. In my terror, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Hang up? Or call someone? Sense permeated the panic and I killed the call, then immediately dialed her parents. They didn’t answer and with each beep of that accursed busy signal, I punched the floor so hard my knuckles split and bled. Maybe they were already calling the police. Please, God…
Then I was up and running, pausing only to throw on a pair of pants, no shirt, no socks and shoes, and yanked open the front door, pushing past my startled neighbors, Harriet Dean and her husband Tony. “Call the police,” I yelled at them, “Call them and send them to 81….fuck, no, 88 Market House Lane in Grandview. The Jacobsons.” I tripped, stumbled, crawled to my car, fell into the driver seat and gunned the engine, mowing down my trashcans in my haste to get to where I desperately needed to be, all the while screaming at the reality that I was never going to make it.
Because I knew, knew, knew in my heart and in my head, in everything that mattered and would never matter to me again, that Lexi would be dead by the time I reached her.
4
The rest of that early morning is a dream, the events seen through a flickering confusion of red and blue lights. As I wandered like a broken puppet from my car to Lexi’s parents’ house, what little rational thought remained in my beleaguered skull told me that this was just an extension of that monstrous nightmare from before, that nothing so cruel could happen to a person twice. It was countered by the insidious notion that if it had happened, it was certainly no coincidence. Which of course, I knew. I’d seen the truth on my cellphone screen. I just hadn’t been able to fully process it yet.
It took me twenty-five minutes to reach the house, and when I arrived, my feet padded by the carpet of dead wet leaves from the walnut trees overhanging the Jacobson’s drive, the police and EMTs were already there. The sun had not yet risen, but the world was lit by the silent flashing lights of the emergency vehicles, which turned the night to hellish day and sent odd shadows racing across the façade of the two-story Colonial and into the surrounding flora.
I walked as if submerged in the deep, my vision pulsing in time with my heart, my hair standing on end, mouth dry. This wasn’t real. Couldn’t be.
And yet it was.
A young police officer who looked perfectly suited for babysitting, and little else, broke away from a discussion with his female partner and approached
me, hand held up at chest level. “Sorry sir, you can’t go—”
“She’s my wife,” I said, my voice small and alien to my ears. His face lost none of its practiced impassivity, but he lowered his hand.
“Sir, I’m sorry to tell you there’s been an—” He paused to consider his words. “—incident involving your wife. I’m afraid she’s dead, sir.”
You were going to say accident, I thought. But that’s not quite right and you know it. Everyone here knows it…
Dazed, I looked past him to the front door where the Jacobsons were watching a stretcher bearing a body beneath a sheet being guided down their stoop, and felt my gorge rise. Lexi’s parents were like gray, melting statues, worn down to nothing by the horror of all they’d lived to see, the horror we shared.
…because slipping in the bathtub is an accident…
Lexi’s mother was screaming. Her husband was doing his best to support her weight against him, but his knees looked in danger of giving out at any moment. I looked from them to the gurney, to the bland simplicity of a shape that had held such import in my life, and the strength left me.
…falling down the stairs is an accident…
I only barely registered the pain of my knees driving those dead leaves down into the gravel as I fell and vomited all over the officer’s shoes.
…but, in any sane, reasonable world, choking to death on your dead child’s blanket is not.
* * *
The police helped me to a cruiser, where I sat in the back with the door open and my head bowed, not looking at that stretcher being loaded into the back of an ambulance, not looking at Lexi’s parents for fear I would only see the same demand for answers I had seen the day we buried my daughter. Why did this happen, Steve? Why did she die? How could this happen? And most damning and haunting of all: Why didn’t you protect her? I hated them in that moment as I sat awash in the pulse of the emergency lights, a string of bile dangling from my lips like a silver thread until it detached and disappeared into the darkness between my feet. I hated the look I imagined on their faces without even knowing for sure it was there. But even if it wasn’t, it would come. Over the coming days and weeks, it would come, and it would persist. Once the shock subsided, they would hate me for this just as I hated them for having every reason in the world to feel that way. Grief is so much easier when there’s someone to blame. And what defense did I have? Robin would still be alive if I hadn’t left that blanket in the crib with her. And Lexi would still be alive if she hadn’t run away to hide from our daughter’s loss, and worse, if I hadn’t found that fucking blanket.
Blanky Page 3