Mister Tender's Girl

by Carter Wilson

  She’s scared.

  It’s okay.

  Does she know?

  Of course not.

  I thought maybe they were planning a prank, something innocent like reaching out and grabbing me during a particularly jolting scene. But in the bedroom, they never touched me.

  After the movie, they offered me mushrooms. I didn’t understand why we would be eating mushrooms after we’d already had dinner, until they explained these were magic mushrooms. Horrible tasting, but mind altering. Illegal mushrooms.

  You’ll see everything differently, Alice. Everything will be beautiful, and nothing will hurt.

  I remember Melinda’s words so clearly, because we’d just read Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in school, and that sentence had stuck with me. The little hand-drawn image of the tombstone with the inscription EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL, AND NOTHING HURT. So curious.

  Melinda reached out her hand, and I saw little dried-up brown things shriveled in her palm, like the ears of small creatures. I knew some kids at school had access to drugs, or at least claimed to. Pot, mostly. But this was the first time I’d ever seen actual illegal drugs, and it made me feel completely out of my element. I felt older than I wanted to be and had a sudden longing for childhood.

  I could smell the mushrooms from two feet away, and the aroma was powerfully bad. My need to be accepted by these girls was overruled by my fear of the unknown. What if the mushrooms made me crazy? What if my parents found out? Could I get addicted?

  I declined. Melinda and Sylvia each popped one in their mouths, giggling in their communion.

  I always wonder what I would have felt that night had I taken the mushroom. I don’t think any drug would have made what happened beautiful, or would have anesthetized the pain.

  I recall their energy as we sat in their dark bedroom—energy that, as the drugs took effect, shifted from nervous to confident. They kept laughing over a joke never shared with me, and after a couple of hours, I no longer felt a part of anything, and I wanted to go home. It was nearly eleven at night, and I was supposed to be home by ten thirty.

  They insisted they walk me home. Said I shouldn’t walk alone through the park at night.

  Melinda and I walked out of the house; Sylvia said she’d be right there. This was the moment, according to testimony at the trial, she went into the kitchen and removed the eight-inch chef knife from the butcher block on the kitchen counter. Sylvia emerged moments later. Melinda took me by the hand, while Sylvia followed behind. I was distracted by Melinda’s hand on mine—Why is this girl holding my hand?—which I think was the whole point of it. At a normal walking pace, it would have taken less than ten minutes to navigate through the park to my house, but Melinda walked slowly, weaving me around the path, and any time I picked up my pace, she pulled on my arm with just the slightest pressure, easing me back. What’s the rush? she asked. Everything is beautiful. The mushrooms were taking hold of her.

  She asked me about my father, echoing her own dad’s line of questioning from dinner. What he was like? Where did he come up with his ideas?

  I told her I did not know. That I wasn’t even allowed to read the books.

  She squeezed my hand and turned to me. In the streetlight, her eyes blazed. You haven’t even read the books?

  No, I told her. Which was a bit of a lie. I had read some, but they disturbed me.

  Do you even understand who Mister Tender is?

  Yes, I said.

  I could hear the trickle of the creek. We had stopped just short of the footbridge. In the far distance came the sound of men laughing. Mates walking home after the pub.

  So you know he can make your dreams come true, right? If you do what he says, he’ll give you what you want.

  He’s just a character, I told Melinda. Ink on paper. A cartoon.

  But what if he wasn’t?

  What do you mean?

  Sylvia stopped close behind me. She said nothing, but I could feel her presence. Close. Blocking.

  What if he was real? Melinda asked.

  I don’t understand, I told her.

  Melinda squeezed my hand hard. At the time, I took it as a sudden burst of affection, maybe a reaction to the drugs. Later, I realized it was meant to keep me from running.

  She leaned in. She wore cheap perfume, and Sylvia didn’t, which sometimes was the only way I could tell them apart. He writes to us, she said. He told us to become friends with you. You don’t think we’d otherwise care about someone like you, do you?

  Now Sylvia giggled. I could feel her close behind me, but I didn’t turn. I should have turned.

  Alice, you know what we want? We want to become famous. Look at us. We deserve to be noticed.

  I think you’re high, I told Melinda.

  She grabbed my free hand, and I just let her. She looked at me with so much interest, like I was a newly discovered life form. She leaned in and said, He can give us fame. We just have to give him what he wants.

  I don’t think I ever actually asked the question, but it formed in my head. I think I was too scared to ask, because she might tell me.

  But she did anyway.

  He told us we had to make a sacrifice. That everything comes with a price, and our price was you.

  What?

  Melinda looked over my shoulder, and as both of her hands clamped tighter on mine, she nodded. Just the faintest bob of her head, and she held me fast in place. Then she mouthed the word NOW.

  I turned to look, but Melinda held my hands fast, so the best I could manage was a half turn. But it was enough for me to see the knife high above Sylvia’s head—silhouetted in lamplight—its grip held in both her hands. I didn’t even see her face. All I could see was that knife, and it seemed suspended above me for an eternity. But in truth, it was there for maybe two seconds. Perhaps there was the slightest hesitation on her part, a millisecond of second-guessing, the briefest splash of reality on her insanity. But that lasted only as long as it took Melinda to shout:

  DO IT!

  Just as she screamed, I have the vaguest notion of another voice. A man, somewhere in the distance, deep in the trees, screaming one word:

  Stop!

  This could have been a voice in my own head, or perhaps it was the man who found me bleeding and called for help. Whoever that voice was attached to, it has remained a mystery.

  The knife came down in a swift, tight arc. Worse than being stabbed is that instant when you see it about to happen, and you imagine how the cold steel will so easily penetrate your skin, your muscle, even your bones. The inevitability of it all. That’s what I still dream about. Not the moment I was actually stabbed, but that breath of time immediately before.

  Sylvia stabbed me three times before she handed the knife to her sister. When it was Melinda’s turn, I was on the ground at the edge of the bridge, just off the path, with my head in the grass. I remember the burning, sucking pain of that moment, but also the cool of the wet grass on the back of my head. It was soothing, like a cold compress. Melinda stood over me, and there was no doubt in her expression. No second-guessing. And before she plunged the blade five more times into my body, all she said was:

  We’ll have everything we ever wanted.

  I didn’t try to move after they left me to die. I couldn’t even if I had wanted to. My body had nothing left in it, no energy to expel. Shock settled over me like a heavy lead blanket, a sensation I still feel on the onset of my panic attacks to this day. Now when I feel it coming on, it’s terrifying, but at the time, in the moment, my body at the foot of the little pedestrian bridge, that lead blanket kept me safe. Told me everything would be over soon.

  The creek kept trickling as I bled to death in the softness of the night. I remembered thinking the sound of the moving water would be the last thing I would ever hear, and in that moment, that was quite all right. There was an eter
nal element to that sound. Music to carry me away.

  I don’t remember being found by the man in the park. Whoever he was, he called 999 and left before help arrived. I barely remember the blaring sirens, the police, the ambulance ride, the paramedics desperately giving me fluids and trying to stanch the bleeding. The next thing I recall was regaining consciousness in a gray-and-white hospital room, and my very first thought was an illogical one: I must be someone’s captive. Maybe it was because I was hooked up to so many machines and tubes, but I couldn’t help feeling that I was someone’s prisoner, their science experiment. A keepsake.

  And now, all these years later, I feel the exact same way.

  Tonight, in Gladstone Park, I look down and see a few leaves on the top of the bridge, and then I bend and pick one up. I drop it over the edge of the bridge into the small creek below, and though it’s too dark to follow its path, I picture it heading downstream, down toward the grate, to the deep, dark tunnel where the unknown creatures live.

  Thirty

  Minutes later, I’m standing in front of my old house, continuing my journey of bad memories. I expect to feel something, but I’m hollow inside. Maybe the years of suppressed, mostly good memories here were snuffed by the last few horrible months, which culminated with my mother whisking us to America and my broken father selling the house. Now, I’m left with indifference as I stare at the place where I grew up, not even wondering who lives there now. I stay here only a few minutes, then choose to visit one more memory before heading back to the hotel.

  Back in the park, over the little bridge for a second time, across the whispering creek. South, toward my hotel. Three men walk toward me, so I divert my gaze to my phone. Just after 10:00 p.m. They talk loudly, ranting about football. Drunk, from the sound of it. As they pass, one of them murmurs to another. I wouldn’t mind having a go at that. Another one laughs. My muscles tense, and I visualize a progression of defensive moves I could use against them, but they pass without incident.

  Through the south end of the park, across two streets, then a left. It takes a moment, then I realize I have it wrong. Back a street, then left again. Two, three, four houses down on the right. It’s not as obvious, because it’s dark and all the houses are cuddled together into long strips of brown and white, but after a moment, I have it right: 113 Fleetwood Road.

  This was the Glassin house. I had only been there a few times, the last of which was that night almost exactly fourteen years ago. I don’t have the same indifference here as I did looking at my old house. Maybe because all the lights are on in this house. There’s life inside.

  I stand in a yellow streetlight puddle, hardly feeling the chill in the air.

  Then, for no reason other than I have an impulse to do so, I walk up and knock on the door. The late hour doesn’t stop me. I don’t know what I’m looking for or what I will say if someone answers the door—or who that person might even be. Still, here I am.

  Footsteps inside, a slow shuffling. A curtain pulls back to the right of the door, but I don’t make out the backlit face peering at me before it disappears.

  I’m almost relieved when, seconds later, the door doesn’t open.

  But just as I turn to walk away, it does.

  I turn back.

  I know this man.

  Thirty-One

  Charles Glassin looks at me with confused eyes. Deep lines groove his ashen cheeks and forehead, and he looks more like a rock that’s been cut by centuries of water and wind rather than a sixty-year-old man. He says nothing, and I say nothing, but it doesn’t take too long for his confusion to shift to recognition. When he does, he is the first to speak.

  “Alice. Alice Hill. Is it really you?”

  I nod. “It’s Alice Gray now. But yes. It’s me.”

  He looks as if he’s seeing a ghost, and in some ways, I suppose he is.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  He opens the door fully. “Please, Alice, come in.”

  “It’s late, Mr. Glassin. And I don’t even know why I’m here. I don’t want to be a bother.”

  His face scrunches into a scowl. “Alice, you could never be a bother. Now come inside before you’re chilled through.”

  He steps aside, and I pass through the open doorway. The inside of his house smells musty, as if the opening of doors and windows is a rare occurrence.

  Charles ushers me into a living room I don’t quite recall. There are a small couch, a chair, a coffee table, and little else. What strikes me most is the lack of anything on the walls. There are a few random nail heads and the dusty outlines of where pictures once hung, but the white plaster walls are otherwise bare.

  “Can I get you some tea?” he asks.

  “I’d rather have whiskey.”

  He nods. “I might just join you in that.”

  Charles disappears into the kitchen and emerges a minute later with two tumblers of whiskey.

  As he hands me my drink, he says, “Why are you here, Alice? Have you moved back?”

  “No. I just…I suppose I needed to see this area again.”

  He nods and says, “I’d tell you I understand, but I could never understand what you went through. How does it feel to be back?”

  “Rather unsettling.”

  “Yes, I suppose that makes sense. So, then, you’re Alice Gray, not Hill. You got married?”

  I take a sip. The burn is wonderful. “No, I… It was just easier to change my name.”

  He nods at the floor. “Yes, yes. Of course.”

  “And Mrs. Glassin?”

  “Margaret left a long time ago,” he says. “In fact, just about the time you left for the United States, she went there as well. To New York. After what happened, things were never really right between us.” He takes a sip of his own drink and wipes his lips with the back of his hand. “When a couple suddenly realize they’ve raised monsters, maintaining a bond to each other is impossible. At least, it was for us.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He waves me off. “Don’t be. Don’t ever be sorry for the Glassin family, Alice. We took everything from you, and every morning I wake up wishing I’d never had those two girls.”

  “Mr. Glassin—”

  “Call me Charles, please.”

  “Charles, you didn’t do anything to me.”

  “For better or for worse, Alice, you can never separate yourself from your children. They are an extension of you. I haven’t spoken to my girls in over ten years, but they are still a part of me.”

  “Like a tree,” I say. “Branches on a tree.”

  “No,” he answers. “Like a cancer.”

  A heavy silence falls on us, and Charles uses the quiet to down the rest of his drink. I get the sense Charles and whiskey have been in a long-term relationship for some time.

  “You really haven’t spoken to them in ten years? You haven’t even seen them since their release?”

  “No,” he says and walks back into the kitchen. He comes out with a fresh drink. “I don’t have anything to say to them. I get letters sometimes, though it’s been a while. Sylvia doesn’t even speak anymore.”

  “You mean she won’t talk to you?”

  “No, I mean she doesn’t speak. To anyone. At some point in prison, she just stopped talking. I suppose she communicates through writing when she needs to, but she hasn’t even written to me in ages. I’m surprised they released her and didn’t at least send her to a mental institution.”

  “And Melinda?”

  He sighs, and there’s a wet rattle in his chest. “She’s found Jesus, that one. I’m not certain what Jesus was doing skulking about Her Majesty’s Prison for Women in Holloway, but Melinda found Him there. She writes me a few times a year, and there are a lot of glorys and hallelujahs in those pages. Not quite sure which of the two of them is c
razier.”

  I take another sip and feel suddenly light-headed, so I sit on the couch. Charles takes the chair.

  “Where are they now?” I ask.

  “Dover,” he says. “Sharing a flat there. They’re on some kind of prison-release work program. Strict curfew, that kind of thing. Melinda wrote me recently, asking me to come and visit. But…” He shrugs. “But I haven’t. Not sure I ever want to.” He drinks and changes the subject. “So what else are you planning to do back here?”

  “I’m not certain,” I say truthfully. “I felt a need to get away for a bit, and there are some things going on right now related to…what happened. And I suppose I wanted to come back to see if I could find some answers.”

  “Answers to what?”

  I remain quiet as I decide if this is a question I want to answer. Before I get a chance to say anything, he says, “Alice, sometimes it’s best to leave the past alone. We all have things we wish we could take back. I think about some of the things Margaret and I did when we were young. People we associated with. I wonder if some of the decisions we made affected how we raised the girls, but I’ve learned not to dwell on it, because I can’t move a pebble of anything from the past.”

  He seems lost inside himself, and the look of sadness on his face is painful to see. I wonder what he’s talking about, but before I can ask what kind of bad decisions he’s referring to, he snaps out of his fugue and says, “How’s your mother, Alice?”

  The question catches me a bit off guard, so I reply with the first answer that enters my mind.

  “Fat,” I say, then start laughing. I’m not sure if the tension of the moment makes this seem so funny to me, but I’m overtaken with it. “She’s so fat, Charles.”

  Charles seems momentarily appalled but then joins in with the laughing. Finally, as I begin to settle down, he says, “Well, hard to keep the body of one’s youth. She was a beautiful woman back then.”

  “You used to be social with my parents, didn’t you? Back before I was born?”

  “We were,” he says, though he shifts his gaze to the ground. “Went around a few times. Then kids come along, and no one has time for anything. Fell out of touch, but always saw them at school functions. Things like that.”