“What’s happening? Are you crying?”
“No. I’m not crying. It’s bad, Bobby. It doesn’t go away. You can try, but it never goes away.”
“I’m coming over, Liz. I don’t know how I’ll get there, I can’t drive in this rain, but I’m coming over.”
“You should stay home. It’s not safe here.”
“Is it Susan?”
Liz shone the flashlight against a wall, and instead of shadows, there were two very real little girls dressed in blue denim overalls, giggling. They laughed at her with hands over their mouths, or were they laughing at something behind her? Was it her father they were laughing at? “Yes. No. He did it to her. I watched, once.”
She turned around, fully expecting her father to be standing over her, but instead there were just more shadows. When she looked back, the girls were gone.
“He raped her?”
“I guess that’s what it’s called,” she said. “I think she murdered him, though. So maybe they’re even. Now she’s just after us.”
There was a droning in her ear. Persistent, and annoying. Shoo, she wanted to say. But the droning continued, and she recognized the sounds as one word, repeated over and over again. “Liz,” he was saying, “Liz,” he was crying, “get out of there. “I’m going now, I’ll start running. I’ll meet you halfway. Whatever it is, get out of there.”
She knew he was right. Still, she was not sure she could leave. If she wanted to leave. “I’m going now,” he said. “Meet me.”
“I’ll try,” she said, hanging up.
She might have stayed in the room, had she not shone her light from corner to corner, and seen, really seen, what she had not allowed herself to see before. The house was alive. The pink painted walls expanded and contracted in slow, deep breaths. The water, black water, dripped into the churning bucket. And what was that sound, that beating? The boiler in the basement going thump-thump, thump-thump. The heart, its beating heart. How could this be happening in her home, her room, how could anyone let this happen?
Just then, the back door opened. She heard shuffling footsteps. One foot was heavier than the other. Clip-clop. Clip-clop. It moved slowly, like something dead. Mary met the thing at the foot of the basement steps. “Baby? Is that you?” she called. The footsteps moved with intention toward Mary’s voice. Clip-clop. Clip-clop. In her mind, Liz saw her sister’s lumbering corpse winking at her.
Liz got up and ran.
She did not make it out of the house. While trying to reach the back door, she slipped on a sugar-laden floor. She sat there for a while, thinking that even if she didn’t get out, Bobby would come, Bobby would save her, and then she heard movement coming from the basement. Two sets of footsteps. She stood again, and pushed with all her might against the back door, but it did not budge. Locked.
She did not have the presence of mind to think of keys, if keys existed, what keys were. She smashed out a window with her fist. She pulled her hand back against the shards without scraping her skin. Hadn’t she always been the lucky one? When she looked at the opening she realized that she would never be able to climb out. How could she have been so stupid as to smash such a tiny window?
Two sets of footsteps started toward her.
She scrambled about the house but they were coming closer, no time, she would have to hide, make them think she was dead. But it was dark; was this her house? Where were the stairs? No, no place to hide. They would find her. She said a quick and pleading prayer: Please, anyone dead, anyone at all, help me, get me out of this alive. Dad, if you’re listening, I don’t care what you have to do, what you have to do to her, but get me out of this alive.
Susan’s voice answered her in her mind. Come, she whispered, Come here. There’s nowhere else. You belong in this dark place. Do you think Bobby’s coming? You know he’s not coming. He doesn’t love you. He never did.
She tried the front door just as they got to the landing. It opened. She sobbed in relief. She stepped onto the front porch and the rain hit her. The sky was not just dark but black. It stank of chemical burnt rubber. Her nose itched. There was an emptiness out here, a loneliness worse than anything in this house. She hesitated. Which direction, which place was worse?
When she turned, she saw the two of them. The woman and her elder child. Susan beckoned with her eyes. Blue eyes. Her funeral dress was torn, exposing her anemic thighs. Her head was shaved bald, and her skin was beginning to separate from her bones. It bagged in places like an ill-fitted suit. There was no blood on her face. Instead there was black embalming fluid that oozed from her orifices and tricked down her legs like urine. You wet your pants, too, Liz thought hysterically, and Susan smiled, as if she heard.
Liz thought she felt herself split into two. Thought she saw the part of her she liked best, the happy part, run away, off into the rain, not bothering to stop at Bobby’s, just away, to somewhere good. And she was left with the other part. The tired part. The frightened part. The angry part. She stood, indecisive, between the mouth of the house and the vast, cold night.
She entered the house only after her mother spoke. “My girl,” Mary said, “come here.” Liz took one step. Two. Three. Out of the rain, and into her mother’s arms.
The three women sat at the kitchen table. Mary lit the birthday candle on the cake. The flame threw shadows against the breathing walls. Shadows that formed long, curled fingers, and bodies watching, like a crowd.
Don’t be frightened, Liz thought, even while she cried. Let go. It will be so much better once you forget who you are. It will be so much easier once you accept that nothing matters because you are nothing. Susan lowered her hand over the cake and divided it in half. She handed one piece to Mary, and the other to Liz.
Mary chewed slowly, with no enjoyment. Liz watched. Chocolate frosting lined her lips. She ate mechanically, working on each bite until it was gone. Then both of them turned to Liz.
Liz lifted the slice to her mouth. In her hand the cake pulsed. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Something warm dribbled between her fingers and onto the table. She looked up at her mother, and saw that Mary’s mouth was caked, not in chocolate, but in the color black. Susan smiled. There was an emptiness on the left side of her chest, a grisly hole where her heart belonged. Liz whimpered. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. The sound was in rhythm with the boiler in the basement, with the ticking of the paper mill, with the soul of this house, with the soul of this town that someone had woken up.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Liz felt her own heart beating in the same rhythm.
“Eat,” Susan said. Her voice, oh, God, Liz had forgotten this, was indistinguishable from Liz’s. They may never have looked alike, but they had always sounded exactly the same.
“Eat,” Susan said again.
Liz looked down at the thing in her hands. It throbbed. She lifted it to her mouth. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. She put it between her teeth. She bit down, into meaty grease. She gagged. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. She took another bite. Another. Another. And it tasted so good. It tasted so goddamn good because with every bite, she devoured the part of herself she had worked so hard this last year to create.
PART FOUR
THE DEAD
THIRTY-FIVE
The Lady of the Woods
Summer 1990
It was her favorite place, out beyond the cemetery and into the deep pine and birch trees. Mushroom fungi grew there, spotted red and yellow. The soft ground was layered with leaves like the compost pile her father kept behind his shed. The sun did not filter through the sky, and all was dark. She wandered old paths, and kicked at used condom wrappers and beer cans: Pabst Blue Ribbon, Bud, Bud Light (for the girls, she imagined). After morning Froot Loops and armed with an apple or some berries for the road, she went there every day that summer of her seventh year.
Susan was a pretty girl. So pretty that people couldn’t help but look at her. In town they stopped her on the street. They bent down and said, “What a pretty smile! Are you g
oing to be a movie star when you grow up?” April Willow gave her as many SweeTarts as she wanted at the library during story hour. Dr. Conway had her blow on his stethoscope because he said little-girl breath made things shiny. At the grocery store where her mother worked, she sat on cashiers’ laps while they petted her hair.
Her mother sewed light blue dresses for her. In the mornings before school she twirled and twirled until her hem reached the sky. “Little Miss Muffett,” her mother said. “You live in your own world, my dear.”
She did live in her own world. A world where if she flapped her arms fast enough, she could fly. If she drew a picture, it came to life. If she prayed to the Virgin Mary for a snow day, even in spring, it snowed. If she closed her eyes and fell asleep she might never wake up. And if she spun three times in front of a mirror and told Bloody Mary to go to hell, the bloody queen would appear behind the glass, captured.
But even she knew that these things would soon change. Her plump baby sister was already talking. She herself could now read, and even write. She kept a journal at school and in it she wrote: When I grow up I will have a dog. I will name him Sundance. We will live in a castle. I will have lots of babies. My castle will be so tall it touches heaven so that when people die I can visit them.
But things were changing. She could feel the change inside her, like a bubble about to burst. Things would be different soon. Her dreams told her so. Bad dreams. She would be different soon. And so she spent that summer in the woods, treading in Keds over moss-eaten earth, listening to buzzsaws that felled miles of trees, and savoring this premature end to her childhood. She crossed streams and tempted deer to eat berries from her hands. She lifted stones and inspected the multilegged insects that scurried from the light. She wrapped her arms around small trees, pretending they were phantom lovers. “Take me,” she said, though she was not sure what that meant, only felt it in her body like a question without an answer.
Once, she saw a moose and hid behind a tree, watching the lumbering thing trample bushes while birds fled. Another time, she saw a boy and girl, old but not really old—not grown-up old—naked and tickling each other to tears. The last time she went to the woods she saw a tiny woman sitting on a rock. She had long blond hair, and a pretty blue dress. The woman waved a tree branch tied with string over the water, and like magic the water rippled.
“Come here, Susan Marley,” the woman said. Her voice was like velvet. Thick and soft and monotone.
“Who are you? How do you know my name?” Susan asked.
The woman lifted her fishing rod from the stream. A minnow gleamed, its gills pumping helplessly, unable to breathe inside so much air. “Should I let it go?” she asked.
“Yes, let it go.” Poor minnow, Susan thought. Trapped on a hook.
The woman tore the fish from the hook. It flopped between her fingers; flop, flop, flop! Then she put it in her mouth and swallowed. She smacked her lips while it wriggled down her throat. Smack! The wet sound gave Susan goose bumps. “You eat them, Susan. That’s what you do with them, you eat them,” the woman said.
Terrible. Not for little girls. Didn’t this woman know that she was just a little girl? Susan took a step back. A twig snapped. Someone called her name. Who called her name?
Suddenly, the woman’s face turned bloody. A nest of black knots appeared in a line down her neck and below the high collar of her blue dress. “It’s us, Susan. The shit, the shinola. It’s us,” the woman said.
Susan ran that day, down the hill and through town where April Willow lightheartedly asked, “Where’s the fire?” all the way to her house. Her mother sat feeding the baby at the table, and Susan crawled on the brown linoleum and hugged her woman-sized legs. “What’s the matter, Miss Muffett?” Mary asked.
But Susan could not tell her she’d been out in the woods. She couldn’t tell her she’d been anywhere but at the park a block away. “I got scared,” she said. “I saw a raccoon at the park. I thought it might bite me.”
Mary put down the baby’s Minnie Mouse spoon and looked at Susan. “A raccoon? Did its mouth have white stuff, foam?”
Susan shook her head.
“Are you still scared?”
“Yes.”
Mary lifted Susan onto her lap and held her close. “Better?” she asked.
Susan closed her eyes. “Better.”
The next day, the last day before she would start the second grade, Susan went to the park instead of the woods. There were no scary ladies in the park, just kids who filled their buckets with sand. But the park got boring. She was bad at the seesaw because she always forgot that if she got off at the bottom, someone else fell. She hung upside down on the monkey bars for at least five minutes, but all the blood rushed to her face and she was afraid she might explode. Pop! Her head would fall right off. And for how long could a person swing? You never got anywhere. You never got anywhere in the park, for that matter, because it was a place with limits, when the woods went on forever.
She left the park and walked up the hill, waving at each person she saw. There was Mr. Willow, who was sad because he was lonely, so she smiled extra wide for him, and even did a curtsy. There were the Fullbrights walking their baby in the stroller, except she didn’t like them very much; their heads were full of sand. She pretended they were vampires and covered her neck when they passed. And there was Cathy Prentice, who’d just moved back to town with her new husband.
“Hey you!” said the new husband. Paul. That was his name; people called him Paul. She knew him from someplace, but she couldn’t remember where. “I’ve got your nose right here, you know that?” He put his thumb between his index and middle fingers. “You’re a silly man,” she said. “You’re a cutie,” he told her, walking away with his arm around Cathy’s waist. That’s how people in love act, she thought, not like my mom and dad. Like them. She watched their backs as they went down the hill, and his hand fell away. Except they’re soft in all the wrong places, and hard in the places where they should be soft. Like crabs with their bones on the outside.
What did that mean? How can people be like crabs even when they look like people? Why was she seeing all these things when she usually had to look so hard? She had to scrunch her eyes real tight and concentrate concentrate concentrate just like the memory game with cards? Why were they coming to her now all at once?
She squeezed through the fence in the cemetery and entered the woods. On the rock she saw the woman. She was pretty again. Not scary. Susan tried to hide behind a hemlock bush, but the woman saw her.
Susan burst out from behind the bush and ran down a path in the other direction. “Come back,” the woman called. “I see inside you Susan Marley, and you’re already dead. You’re full of worms.”
Susan ran until her legs felt like cooked macaroni. Then she slumped against a tree and cried for a long while. In her mind she saw the woman’s face. It smiled at her. It beckoned. “Come to me,” it whispered. “I want to tell you a secret.”
She didn’t come. She also didn’t go home. Instead, she carved her name into the trunk of a tree with a broken piece of glass. She watched for deer and listened to the birds: a robin, a cardinal, a crow. But it was different now, not her woods. Everything was changed. She felt like a bubble had burst. Who called her name? Was someone playing a joke?
She went back to the river. She couldn’t help it. There was something about the woman that was so familiar. “Why did you do that?” she asked.
The woman put down her fishing rod. At the end of the string was a giant hook. “Do what?”
“Why did you eat a fish? It’ll swim in your stomach and make you sick.”
The woman smiled. Red threads spun out from her blue irises and black blood trickled down her neck. Everything nice about her turned rotten. And then she was pale and pretty again. And then she was both things at once. She patted the rock, “Sit here, next to me.”
“I don’t like you.” Susan shifted her weight between her legs as if she had to pee. Mom would
be so mad if she knew that she was talking to a stranger in the woods. Mom would spank her silly. She wished Mom was here.
“But you want to sit next to me, don’t you, Susan? You want to ask me a question. I won’t hurt you. I promise.”
Susan peered inside the woman, and she knew this wasn’t true. The woman did want to hurt her. The woman wanted to scratch her face until she wasn’t pretty anymore. But there was something about the woman, an answer to a question that she couldn’t remember. An answer she had to know because at night she couldn’t sleep, worrying about it. At night she cried and she didn’t know why.
“Come here, my dear. I don’t bite,” the woman said.
Susan looked up at her. Yes, you do, she thought, and the woman smiled, as if she heard. But still, there was a question burning inside her, and she needed to know the answer. She went over to the rock and raised her arms. The lady put her hands on Susan’s waist and hoisted her up so that they sat side by side. Her touch wasn’t cold or warm. It felt like nothing, like never being born.
“Tell me a story,” the woman commanded.
Susan cocked her head. “A story? I heard about this man with hooks. Instead of hands he has hooks.”
The woman cast her string into the water but it made no sound, only ripples. Then she smiled. Her blue eyes got big and then small. Solid, and then far away. She was two things at once. She was many things, but mostly, she was hungry. “Tell me a different story. You know the one I mean.”
Susan twirled a lock of hair between her fingers. “At the sideshow circus in Bangor I saw a man who could put his legs over his shoulders. I’m too little to go in so I sneaked under the tent. You can’t tell Dad. He doesn’t know,” Susan said.
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