Follow Me into the Dark

by Sullivan, Felicia C. ;

  Lucia already saw her replacement: a pert blond with berry-stained lips and red-soled stilettos. Lucia noticed the subtraction of years and pigment, and understood that she was being replaced again. On a long enough timeline, everyone will expire. There were no second acts, no revivals—there was only a tawny blond on the cover of a magazine, or a temp sitting behind a desk cooing, “McCann Harrison. How may I direct your call?”

  Lucia calmly collected her things in a small brown box and carried it to the elevator, down twenty-two floors, and beyond a glass revolving door. In the street she dumped her box on the ground, kicked it, and walked home in heels that tore at her ankles. She wouldn’t cry; she wouldn’t allow herself that privilege, so instead she laughed. Laughed so hard it hurt. She stopped in a store and loaded up on Entenmann’s cakes, donuts, and pies. One by one, she took a bite and hurled the desserts, piece by piece, to the pavement, as if leaving a trail.

  People stopped and stared, but not like they used to. It didn’t matter though, because they were staring, and Lucia felt good, calm, and right.

  At home, Jonah’s face was so complicated it would take days to describe it. “How was your day?” he asked in a perfunctory way, in a way lovers were supposed to do. But on Jonah it felt wrong, scripted, as if he were trying on normal for size, not realizing the pants were too tight and the buttons had come undone.

  “A day is a day like any other day. There’s a food thief in the office,” she said, extending her legs as Jonah removed one shoe, then the other, and pressed his hands against the arches of her feet. Closing her eyes, she murmured, “That feels good.”

  “Did you call the FBI?” Jonah brushed crumbs from her face; he never made inquiries.

  “Funny guy. I’ve a far more dangerous weapon in my arsenal: Human Resources.”

  Jonah laughed.

  “What did you do all day?” Lucia said, moving his hair out of his eyes.

  “Waited for you to come home.”

  “And at night? Tell me, what do you do at night while you think I’m asleep?”

  “I know you’re awake,” he said and paused. “You know what I do. I drive around. Take fares. Make money. Mostly I drive around the city waiting for you to wake up.” He rattled a DVD in his hand, some Korean horror movie where everyone is haunted by their past and ends up dying from the guilt. “I got us a video, some takeout. Chinese. Remember Lost Boys? The scene where Kiefer Sutherland’s character makes Jason Patric think he’s eating maggots? You’re eating maggots, Michael.” Jonah bared his teeth.

  “Come on. It’s not like you have to work.”

  “So I should just sit around and count my money? Is that what you’d like me to do, Lucia?” An edge creeps into Jonah’s voice and he closes his eyes, prays that his anger won’t awaken Lionel.

  “I’m asking you to be honest. Is this about her, your sister? You know she keeps calling in the middle of the night when we’re supposed to be sleeping. Maybe she knows you’re not home and this is why she calls when she does. Maybe she knows you’ve trained me to disable the voice mail, to never pick up. Tell me, Jonah. Does she know something about you that I don’t?”

  “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get a rise out of me,” Jonah said. “We can keep at this all night if you’d like.”

  “Why won’t you take her calls? What did she do?”

  “What makes you think she did something?” Jonah said.

  Lying in the dark, Lucia said, “That day you met me on the plane, you told me your name was Telly. Why did you lie about your name?”

  “Because everyone lies. That’s the foundation of every relationship,” Jonah replied. “No one wants to know the truth, otherwise I would’ve asked you again how your day was. Because the bloody feet—and what is this, chocolate on your chin—tell a different story.”

  “I quit my job today,” she said, closing her eyes, drifting to sleep. “That’s the ten o’clock news. Maybe this’ll get a rise out of you.” She delivered the words as if they were barbed wire intended to keep Jonah from getting closer.

  Jonah regarded her as a doll with two cracked eyes and a sewn-up mouth. He shook it away, desperate to retrieve the image of the woman he loved—the woman who was breaking, was broken—as she was at that moment: real, human. Doll parts, beating heart, doll hair, knotted ropes—Jonah’s eyes were a shutter that slowly edged out the human part of Lucia. The one thing he had been wedded to.

  He stood over her sleeping body and pressed a box cutter against her cheek. Over and over he said, “I love you, I love you, please, please let me love you . . .”

  Lucia went to meetings in basements. Sometimes she’d get a call about a location change—a high school auditorium on the Lower East Side or a Baptist church in Washington Heights—but mostly she met in basements crowded with picked-over pastries, Styrofoam cups, and men who smoked Camels under No Smoking signs.

  For the first weeks she couldn’t speak. Instead, she’d hold up evidence from her former life, which was unnecessary since half the men recognized her from the junk mail piled up in their mailboxes (her catalog was the lone piece of mail that would survive the avalanche of Final Notices) and the rest didn’t care. It didn’t matter that Lucia had once been “that famous catalog model” because in this room everyone had been something once. This room was the Last Exit—no seriously, this was the end of the road, the final Final Notice before the repo man or undertaker took it all away.

  But still, Lucia held up the pair of jewel-encrusted underwear she’d stolen and said, “This was me.”

  From the back of the room, a woman laughed. Her name was Asia and her shrill was the loudest sound. “Girl, that ain’t even you.”

  “Lucia is sharing,” the counselor said in a voice that made you crave powdered, arsenic-laced donuts.

  “She’s not sharing, it’s self-pity.” To Lucia she said, “You need to stop carrying around your panties like you’re Linus or something. Holding on to them won’t bring your life back. You white women are always crying over some bullshit. You’re not a model . . . you’re not a millionaire. Try living with your mom in East New York and having to ride the A train for a fucking hour because this is the only meeting you can make before you have to work the night shift. Now that’s some sad shit right there. Now that’s a story.”

  “I’m feeling a lot of hostility in your voice,” a man said.

  Lucia balled up the diamonds in her hands. Everything was ugly and everything hurt.

  “You about to feel my fist, old man,” Asia snapped. To Lucia, “Say something!”

  The counselor asked Asia if she wanted to take a break or go outside, as if the words were a code for Asia to cool it, because as soon as she heard them she leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms, and remained quiet for the remainder of the session.

  When the group broke, Lucia wrapped her scarf around her neck and walked out into the cold night. Asia followed.

  “That was me trying to help you back there; that was me paying you a compliment,” Asia said.

  “You’re right,” Lucia said. “I don’t know what it’s like to live with your mother in East New York. But I do know what it’s like to feel like you’re nothing before, during, and after you were something, and having to live with a man who only loves you because he knows you know you’re nothing.”

  Asia nodded and said, “Let me get your phone.”

  “What?”

  “Your phone, your phone. I want to give you my cell, you know, in case you want to talk. You may be fucked-up, but you’re not nothing.”

  Lucia watched Asia in her white puffy coat race down the subway steps.

  From a parked car Jonah watched Lucia, his dark, fallen star. Over the coming weeks, he’d remain here, bearing witness to her slow ascension and his steady, frightening decline.

  When Lucia phoned and asked him to meet her in a house, he thought it was like old times, but when he arrived he found a second-floor apartment half-filled with boxes and a cat w
eaving through them.

  “What the fuck is this? What’s with the cat?”

  “Calm down. She’s gone off to work. She won’t be home until morning.” Regarding the cat, she said, “Oh, that’s Felix.”

  “We’re not taking the cat,” Jonah said. He was a fuse ready to blow at any minute. “Our building doesn’t allow pets.”

  “Our building doesn’t allow heroin, but you don’t seem to have a problem with that, do you?” Lucia snapped. Today, there were no sandwiches, but there were bags of groceries on the counter and boxes of food on the floor. “Don’t bother with the fridge. She doesn’t even drink real milk.”

  “Do you want me to take your picture?” Jonah touched her hair but she turned away.

  “No, the last thing I want you to do is take my picture. But I guess you already knew that since you’ve been following me to my meetings.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t follow you if you were honest with me.”

  “Honest? Do you even hear yourself? You stalk me at my AA meetings. The same man who disappears for hours at a time at night, and don’t even start that nonsense about being a cab driver. You hate people. The last thing you’d ever do is drive them.”

  “Let’s talk about this at home,” Jonah said.

  “I am home.”

  Jonah surveyed the apartment, opened the boxes, and saw piles of Lucia’s things. Her life, their former life, dismembered: books in one box, clothes in the other. He moved from box to box and saw none of her lingerie, photographs, or even the bejeweled panties she treasured. But he did see another woman’s clothes. This woman was larger (XL) and wore cheap polyester, knockoff bags, and a sweatshirt that read, “I like my Michael Coors, Light!”

  Pointing to the cat, Lucia said, “I’m spending tonight in your home but then I’m leaving you. I’m so sorry, Jonah. I don’t love you.”

  “You don’t love me,” he said quietly.

  “Right now I need to love myself, and Asia is helping me with that.”

  “You’re moving in with a woman named after a continent?”

  “It’s better than a man who stockpiles chloroform in his closet.”

  Jonah laughed. “Come home.”

  “For tonight, I will.”

  Lucia woke with a headache. Her skin hurt. Jonah sat on the edge of their bed, his hands steadying the mattress. In the corner of the room was a wooden crate. How did it get there?

  “I know you’re awake,” he said. “I just didn’t know for how long.”

  “Come back to bed,” Lucia said, reaching for him, but all he could do was stare at the wall as if he were looking through it, already clawing his way to the other side. “One last time before I go.”

  “I wanted to give you everything. I wanted to give you all of it. But now I realize I can’t.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Remember that winter we went to Utah and you wore that red hat and we realized we didn’t know how to ski and drank instead?”

  “I remember the bourbon.” She also recalled the sex, and how Jonah tied his belt around her throat and pulled so hard she feared her neck would snap, but she kept on and closed her eyes.

  “How the old man who ran the inn nearly kicked us out for getting booze on the floor and all over the sheets? And then you got naked in the snow, rolled around in it, and yelled at anyone who would listen that you were in camouflage?”

  “I did blend beautifully into the scenery. We had a time.” Lucia sat up and drew her knees to her chest, waiting for the searing pain in the front of her head to move to the back, to wane. She was confused. She didn’t remember drinking. All she could feel now was the pain, the sharpness of it. All she could see were parts of their room, pieces of their furniture, through a fog.

  “I don’t think there was a moment when we weren’t drowning. When we weren’t anesthetized.”

  “I want to learn Arabic,” Lucia said. “Maybe I can take some classes. Go back to school.”

  “Arabic? Christ, Lucia. Do you hear yourself?” Jonah said.

  Lucia palmed the sheets and slipped her fingers between her legs and felt only warmth. She looked at the sheets and then at her hands, not noticing the cuts down her leg that Jonah had made while she slept, and said, “Why is there blood on the bed?”

  “I tried to give it to you,” Jonah smiled and gave her a white dress he’d been holding. Told her to put it on. “I tried to give it to you. I’ve practically laid down my life. I’ve practically died every day to give you peace. And you still don’t have any peace. You look better than I’ve seen you in a long while, but it’s still not the peace I want to give you.”

  “Jonah, you’re starting to freak me the fuck out.” Lucia eyed the door, the window, any means of escape. “Stop this.”

  “I know about you and my sister. I know everything.”

  “Your sister? What are you talking about?”

  Jonah drew her close and kissed the place on her head where her hair was the thickest, the unruliest. This is sacrifice, he thought, swallowing his love for Lucia because he knew that she wasn’t fit to survive this life. On that plane he’d thought she was just like him, but he’d come to realize that Lucia, his great love, was nothing like him. She was ordinary, just like the rest, and he hated her for it.

  “Jonah, I can’t breathe,” she said.

  There’s a figure at the door, watching. The figure advances. “Let me take care of this.”

  “What? I don’t hear you,” he said.

  “This is me making other arrangements,” Lionel said, pressing down on Lucia’s mouth.

  When it was over, when their work was done, Jonah said in a small voice, “I wish I had the strength to kill you.”

  JONAH SAID TO his sister, “Fine, you won. I’m coming home.”

  THE MUSIC OUR TEETH MAKE

  1985, 2013

  I’M LONELY. DOES it hurt? Yes. Does it stain? Yes. It takes time to wash the blood off your hands, longer than you think. I used to say that I was alone, never lonely, and there was a difference between the two, but now, right now, I’m the loneliest I’ve ever been. This is my small life and I’m smothered by the weight of what I’ve done, my constant trembling forms another layer of skin.

  What have I done?

  My mother died, killed herself. Pills spilled out of a bottle, and a note on the bed. I set a woman’s hair on fire, and then my stepfather disappeared, picked up that woman—I can barely say her name, Gillian—right out of the emergency room, dumped her in another hotel, and then drove farther west. He told her that he needed some time, a break, but he’d come for her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This isn’t me leaving.” They say that a mother can feel every inch of her child’s pain, down to the tenderness of aches, but does that apply to a father at the wheel with a girl in a seat once warmed by my mother, by me? Can the man cutting through lights feel his daughter’s hurt, even if the daughter isn’t technically his? Or does another wounded bird, whose wings are wrapped up in gauze, and whose scalp is stitched up tight, infatuate James?

  The man I blame for it all is in a car with the top down, sitting next to a woman who is the image of me. Not my mother, me. Kate. Sweet Kate. Down to the blush on her round cheeks and the blue eyes that any man would dare tumble into.

  I mourn her by dyeing my red hair blond. I no longer look like Norah, Ellie’s mother. Hair and history are the only things that distinguish me from Norah.

  I select her final outfit, something cashmere and blue.

  I put on a shirt, James’s, and say, “My mother is dead.”

  I slam the phone down, crawl under the bed, and rest there. I’m safe here. I remember a show where arctic polar bears practiced “still-hunting,” the act of paralyzing one’s body, perched over a spotted sea lion’s breathing hole, waiting for the moment when the hunted emerges to breathe. That’s when the polar bear pounces, comes down on top of the ice with all of his weight to shatter, grab, and devour.

  Underneath the bed I wonder
, which am I? Bear or seal?

  Later, I hear Jonah on my lawn. “Kate, come out and play.”

  That night I catch a news report about an investigation gone wrong. The local police have teamed up with the FBI to hunt down a serial killer, whom they’ve been calling the “Doll Collector.” A man (why must they always assume it’s a man?) who sews his victims’ mouths and eyes shut, like some rag doll, and disposes of them precisely three months after they’ve been murdered. Since killers tend to return to the scene of a crime, the police have replaced one victim’s body with a department store mannequin fitted with a hidden camera behind its eyes, but the only action they’ve witnessed from the footage is a bunch of drunken teenagers humping the doll and slathering her face with pizza. Run of the mill action, they say. Boys will be boys, they say.

  I wonder this: Who would be brazen enough to return?

  It’s when I shut off the television that I realize all the victims resemble that woman. Gillian. And since I look just like her, someone out there is killing versions of me.

  Now all I have left are the Smurf cakes, and I don’t even have them anymore because one of those fancy organic markets just opened up, and they make cakes faster and cheaper than two hands ever could. And then my boss’s nemesis, Bunny Blake, swans in with her offer nobody can refuse and smiles for days. Minnie says, “Maybe this is the time when we fold, kid. Leave the table.” I know Minnie’s not just talking about shuttering her shop; she’s talking about me.

  What did I do? My mother: I did this to you.

  I still make the cakes because it’s what I know. Having baked for the greater part of my life, why should I stop because a sow of a woman kicked me out of the shop I considered a home? Because the one woman I trusted found her midlife crisis twenty years too late? We are all in our prisons, our man-made spaces of confinement. Some boxes have windows, some have doors, but they’re merely mirages in the sand, illusions that give us hope of escape. So I erect a room of buttercream and white flour walls, with bars of butter serving as window grates. Sometimes I try to claw my way out, only to see the scratch marks on my face.