by Mae Ronan
Now, as I lie here in the dark and the quiet, I want again to take that book from its hiding place beneath my bed. I want to look at it, look at it till the sun comes up, and lose myself in my memories – my wonderful memories.
But I know that it will do no good. It is detrimental to my health, and to my sanity. I am addicted to those memories, addicted to them the way that Uncle Tom is addicted to his precious cigarettes. Whenever I am sad – whenever I am lonely – I run for a fix of the past.
I run for Elijah.
***
There was once a time when, upon waking, my first glance was not towards the window, made bright in the newly arrived morning; but towards the bed which lay across the room, atop which there lay a sleeping boy with the sheets tucked up round his chin. By this time of morning he always slept fitfully, lying on his side with his little face tilted upwards, his troubled breath rattling like a screw in a tin can.
Asthmatic since he was a baby, his breath was easily lost; and when it was lost, it was not always easy to find. Its evasiveness made it hard for him to behave like a normal boy, to run round with the other children of his own age, to take part in their rowdy play. To them he was an outcast: a pale, thin exile with wheezing breath, knocking knees, and dark blue circles beneath his eyes. But to me he was Elijah David, a beautiful angel sent from heaven to earth, and perfect in every way.
Each morning I left my bed, and went to our chest of drawers. In the top drawer were all of Elijah’s medicines. I took one small white pill, from an orange bottle which stood amidst a whole arsenal of tubes and inhalers. On top of the tall chest there was a pitcher of water. A small measure of this I poured into a little paper cup; and with the pill, I delivered it to Elijah.
I shook him gently awake. He looked up at me with clear, emerald eyes. He accepted the cup and the pill, and used the one to gulp down the other. Then, a weak smile.
I squeezed his thin shoulder. “You’ll feel better soon.”
He nodded, and laid his head back down on the pillow.
After I had seen to this, by far the most important task of my days’ beginnings, I would leave the room, and make my way to the kitchen to see Mama. Always she was there, standing by the counter, brewing a pot of coffee – and looking longingly out of the window for the shiny and comfortable life which had always seemed to elude her. Every morning she looked for it; and every morning she could not find it. These repeated failures made her irritable, and by the time I had come out to meet her, always she was in her very worst mood of the day.
“Hi, Mama,” I said.
She looked at me over her shoulder. In her eyes there was an unspoken accusation, as if it were my fault that she saw nothing she liked out of her silly window. Each time I greeted her, I wished that she would answer; but she never did.
I went to the refrigerator, and opened its grimy door. Inside there was an expired gallon of milk; a carton of orange juice; and a jar with several pickles floating inside. Always there were these three things, and nothing more.
I pulled out the juice and the pickles. I fussed about for a moment, opening lids and cupboards. The clack-clack-whacking of my progress attracted aggravated sighs from Francine.
Finally, equipped with two glasses of juice, and one pickle on a plate (Elijah hated pickles), I left the kitchen. Yet I could never keep myself from casting a final glance, a glance unintentionally morose and defeated, towards my mother.
She never noticed it.
***
Things are much different now; but I am perhaps more unhappy than I have ever been before. When my recollections fade, and I open my eyes once again, I find myself still in a room full of darkness. But miserable as I am, this night passes too, just like all the others which came before it – many of which I was convinced, each in the time of its own particular lingering blackness, would certainly kill me.
But here I am still; and gone is the treacherous night which preceded the light of morning. That light is here, now, and it shines with little suspicion of the malignant shadows which fled at its approach.
Today, I will try to be like that light.
I glance across the room, and half expect to see a second bed there, pressed up against the wall. Obviously there is nothing; but somehow this discovery surprises me. Even after I had made it a full three hundred times, still it surprised me.
“Why did you leave me?” I say suddenly.
This question I put to the empty air of the room, maybe even expecting it to answer me. But it never does.
Against my better judgment I retrieve the photo album. I open it to the very last page; to the end of the story. Yet this is my favourite picture of all. There is Elijah, in our old backyard beneath a tall oak tree. He looks into the camera, and waves at me. There are his green eyes, his innocent smile. There is his small face that looked so much like my own. There is my brother, my friend, my Elijah.
Simply to look at this picture, surely you would never guess that he was ill; surely you could never tell how much he had suffered. In this picture he is only a boy, only a child. As he is in this picture, so he is in my heart. No matter how frail, how broken he was in his short lifetime – always he is strong and whole in this heart of mine.
As I replace the book under the bed, I hear Joni, the family’s black Labrador. She walks directly past my door, her nails clicking on the hardwood floor. I hold my breath till the sound has gone.
I am terribly afraid of dogs. Leroy Masterson had a Rottweiler, you see, that he used to sic on me for sport. Usually he called it back, or grabbed hold of its leash, before it could spring on me; but once it seemed he was feeling particularly diabolical, and he allowed it to take hold of my ankle. For nearly three minutes it put itself to the challenge of shaking all the blood from my leg, till finally Francine came, and smashed a lamp over its head. Then Leroy smashed a lamp over her head, and I took advantage of the ensuing chaos, to crawl away and hide.
Presently, I dress myself quickly, and flee from the stifling loneliness of my little room. In the kitchen I find Lauren, standing by the counter, brewing a pot of coffee. She looks back at me. Over her shoulder. For the briefest instant, her face is not her own. It transforms most unflatteringly into the face of Francine Masterson, and sneers at me familiarly. My breath catches in my throat; my heart skips a beat, and then starts to thud heavily. I can feel the blood drain out of my face.
“Hi, sweetie,” Francine says.
I shake my head, confused. Never had Francine called me that. It is this endearing appellation that brings Lauren back.
“Hi,” I say quietly.
I go to the refrigerator, and fetch out the orange juice and a jar of pickles. I pour the juice into a glass, twist the lid off the jar. I grab a pickle off the top, and crunch it in my mouth, not really tasting it.
“What are you eating?” asks Lauren. She is staring at me strangely.
I look down at the former cucumber, and murmur, “He hates pickles.”
“What?”
I swallow thickly. “Nothing, never mind.”
I have lived with Lauren and Tom Kelly for nearly a year now. They have two children – a little boy and girl who are still asleep, because they do not have to be at school till nine.
My mother died in August. Leroy killed her. He’s in prison now – far away from here.
Several days after Francine’s death, I was brought to Bangor to meet Lauren. It was merely procedural, really – no one expected her to take me. Even her husband didn’t.
After spending two hours with me, however, her mind was made up. She did not care that I was a strange, quiet girl with hollow eyes. It was enough that I was her brother’s child. I think that, even then, she loved me for that.
I came to Maine with a social worker named Daniel Bunker. Five minutes into his temporary custody, it was obvious to me that “social work” was not his destiny. He was rude, rough and crass. He looked at me as if I were I a cockroach. After two days with him, I rather even began to f
eel like one, and to wonder why I was not sprouting antennae and extra legs.
Bunker told Lauren what had happened, with an infuriating but somehow awe-inspiring combination of bluntness and disinterest. Good woman that she is, she of course was horrified; and she turned to me, and took me in her arms as if I were the survivor of an earthquake.
Until the day we met, I did not even know what she looked like. What I knew of her consisted solely of my mother’s ravings, and always went something like: “That meddling sister of his is the reason we went bad. Our relationship was ruined, Rica, before you were even born. That two-dollar tramp – she had the nerve to call me trash! Well, I’ll tell you now that I gave her one good, the day of the wedding. She opened her mouth to me, and I knocked her down flat! Never saw her after that – though I heard that great big mouth well enough through the telephone wire.”
My father hadn’t spoken to Lauren since he was twenty, mostly on account of my mother’s hatred for her. Their parents were both dead; and with no conduit between their households, there had been nothing even to inform her of his death. She only learned of it when Bunker brought me to her.
Tom tried to be kind, at first; but his discomfort was obvious. He, for one, did seem to care that I was a strange, quiet girl with hollow eyes. He looked at me not as the escapee of some horrible tragedy, but rather as that stereotypical troubled youth with the detonator in her backpack.
During the first few weeks of my stay, I heard them arguing in their bedroom.
“She’s not our responsibility, Lauren,” I remember Tom saying. “She belongs in a foster home. We have two kids of our own – if you remember them.”
“You son of a bitch!” Lauren would fire back. “How dare you speak to me that way? When have I ever neglected our children?”
There was a pause, which ended in Tom’s beginning to speak, but Lauren’s cutting him off abruptly. “You can’t tell me when,” she said, “because I never have. I loved my brother, Tom, and I love Erica. You’re just going to have to deal with that.”
Though I appreciated wholeheartedly this defiant claim (it was in fact my only consolation), still I was never quite sure whether to believe it. Did she love me, I wondered – or did she love this haunted, long-haired miniature of Jonathan Whelan? To this day I am not certain.
Of course she knows of Francine, and of her death by Leroy Masterson’s fists; but she knows nothing of Elijah, for he is mine.
“You should run and get your bag, honey,” she says now. “It’s almost time for school.”
I look up at her, at the smile she gives me. Then I look down at my half-eaten pickle.
“You don’t have to eat that,” she says, a faint grimace breaking out over her mouth.
I take my pickle with me, as I rise from the table. “I’ll go get my bag.”
As I walk towards the staircase, Joni trots past me, and brushes against my leg. She looks at me, with a low grumbling sound in the back of her throat. I cram the last of the pickle into my mouth, to keep myself from screaming.
II.
My educational facility is a long, low fortress of brick, with three shining rows of windows that look like angry eyes.
I walk in at half past seven, and join the throng that is steadily moving through the wide double doors. I wear a white identification card round my neck, which displays my name and grade, along with a rather unbecoming snapshot of my pale and discontented face.
I take a right and mount the staircase. I climb two flights to my English classroom, and take my customary seat in the back row. A few people turn to look at me. They whisper to each other, and laugh. For a year I have been the foreign curio of Geneva, shipped over the ocean in a cage between a Bengal tiger and a great black elephant.
Maybe it’s the way I keep to myself. Maybe it’s the way I always seem to look like I’m in pain – as if there is a four-pronged fork sticking out of my neck, and no way to extract it. Or maybe it’s my friendship with Clayton James. If I’m the monkey in the tiger cage, then he’s the three-legged man chained beside the bearded lady, with the two-foot dwarf in a box at his feet.
Clay turned sixteen three months ago. He is six feet tall. He has curly blond hair that sticks up in all the wrong places. He has green duct tape wrapped round the bridge of his glasses. His shoes look like small boats, and the enormous hands that hang at the end of his lanky arms make me think of a pair of tennis rackets.
I have four classes with Clay. Today, though, he doesn’t talk much. I try several times to converse with him, but never with any success.
Outside, after the bell has rung, I run to catch up with him. It’s not very difficult, for he’s moving at a funereal pace, and looking down at his big feet as he shuffles along.
“Hi, Clay.”
He says nothing, just keeps looking down.
“What’s up?” I ask him.
He raises his eyes to mine, but looks away hastily. “Nothing much,” he says.
“Come on, Clay. What’s going on? You can tell me.”
He takes a deep breath; then lets it out in a great whoosh of a sigh. “It’s nothing new,” he tells me. “It’s just . . . them. I hate them, I really do. I wish they would all just die.”
“I know, Clay – but we can’t kill them all. At least, not at once.”
“Then we’ll pick them off one by one – every night. We’ll be the notorious Moonlight Slayers of Bangor. We’ll get away with it, too, because we’re smarter than all of them put together.”
“Who should we snuff out tonight? Miriam Johnson – or maybe Joe Blake? It’s your call.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he answers, turning his bright grey eyes up to the sky. As we move farther away from the school, the shadows disappear proportionately from his face. “There are so many choices – so little time.”
We continue on down the street. We part at the yellow house that is his father’s; and I walk alone till I come to the Kelly residence. It’s a pretty red house with white shutters. The door, too, is white, and there is a round pane of glass in its top, which looks like a porthole. I like it very much; for it makes me feel as if I’m boarding a ship. Where I would go, if it were a ship, certainly I don’t know. But just the thought of it is very pleasant to me.
***
Fast-forward, now, two weeks. Again I am walking home from school; and again I glance cheerfully at the round window. I am surprised, though, to find the door unlocked. It seems, today, I am not the first one home.
I find Lauren in the living room, reading the newspaper. She looks up as I enter the house. I stand stiffly under her gaze, my book bag still strapped to my back.
“Erica – can I talk to you for a minute?”
She folds the newspaper, and tosses it on the coffee table. My heart is pounding, and there are beads of sweat breaking out across my forehead. I wipe them quickly away, and walk unaffectedly towards the sofa, as if they were never there to begin with.
“Come sit down,” Lauren says. She pats the cushion beside her.
So I sit.
“What do you want to talk about, Aunt Lauren?”
She leans forward, elbows on her knees, staring at me. Her eyes make me wriggle like a worm.
“I got a call at work today,” she says. “From your school.”
“Really? What for?”
Genuinely I am interested now; and my uneasiness begins to ebb, in spite of the danger. My eyes widen, and my heartbeat slows.
“I’m not going to repeat what your principal told me,” she says, “because I don’t believe him. So I’ll just ask you a question.” She tilts her head to the side, and looks at me seriously; but caps the heavy moment with a smile. “Will you be completely honest with me?”
I nod.
“Has anyone been giving you trouble at school?”
“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”
“Any kind of trouble, Erica.”
“What did he tell you?”
“I want you to tell me.”
“No,” I say. “There’s no trouble. But what did he tell you?”
Lauren begins to laugh, now; but obviously it is forced, and obviously she is uncomfortable. “It must be nothing,” she says, “since you tell me there’s no trouble. Maybe they have it wrong. Maybe it was another student.”
“Maybe what was another student?”
Another laugh. “It’s really not worth mentioning. But –” (much more serious now) “– if anything ever bothers you . . . if you ever have a problem, will you come to me?”
“Of course.”
“Good! I’d better get to the grocery store, then. Do you want to come?”
“I have homework.”
“All right. Is there anything special you want?”
“No.”
Before she stands up, she leans over, and wraps me in a tight embrace. I return it weakly, tentatively; too distracted, really, by the light and pleasant scent of her perfume to do much of anything. It’s almost like flowers – almost like hot suppers, clean sheets, and soft kisses. It’s what I wish my mother had smelled like.
“I love you, honey,” she says, her arms still around me. “You know that, don’t you?”
I don’t know what to say.
She lets me go, and stands up. She takes her purse from the coffee table. “I’ll be back in an hour or so,” she says. “When I come home, we can make supper together. How would that be?”
I smile and nod. I know, though, that when she calls my name up the staircase, I won’t answer. I’ll turn off my light, and pretend to be asleep. I know I will – for I always do.
Almost with a sort of sadness, I watch her walk across the room, and out the front door. Every time she leaves, it’s like she’s never coming back.
***
My prediction comes true – and when Lauren calls me down to dinner, I am unable to respond. I douse the light and lie quiet.