Follow Me into the Dark

by Sullivan, Felicia C. ;

  WE PASS IN PARTS

  1985

  “DO YOU KNOW sometimes, at night, my mother burns her hair in the bathroom? She pulls it out of her hairbrush and creates little balls, like tumbleweed, and sets it on fire? She says she likes the way it smells, but it makes me sick and I have to breathe into my shirt or this blanket I carry around. She hides matches all around the house, places where she thinks no one will look, but I always find them. The matches. It’s like hide and seek, only Mom doesn’t know I’m playing.”

  I am ten and doctors ask the strangest questions.

  “Why don’t you tell me about the pool, Kate? Can we talk about the water?” one of them asks. I know they’re doctors because my mother tells me this, but they’re not wearing white coats or metal tubes around their necks, the instruments they use to listen to my heartbeat. They wear pants and shirts and write in their notebooks with blue pens. They ask so many questions.

  “What’s there to say? Water’s cold and it kills you. I can’t eat lobsters, you know. Can’t stand the sight of them. Once, Mom brought a bag of them home, and I screamed—wouldn’t you after seeing giant red bugs moving real slow? And then she threw them in a pot of hot water and I waited for them to scream. Do lobsters scream? I know I would if my skin was being burned off. Now I can’t look at red things, like the sky before it gets dark or Stop signs.” I chew the end of my braid because I like to get my hair wet, not like the water in the pool, but my wet. Hot water kills you too, I guess.

  I am ten.

  I look around my room for my clock, a windup that sounds like a ringing telephone when the alarm goes off, but it’s been moved. Somebody moved it. It used to be over there, next to the chair with no legs. “How long do we have to keep doing this?” I ask the men.

  “For as long as it takes, Kate.”

  “Why do you keep saying my name like that, like I don’t know it?”

  “If it makes you uncomfortable we don’t have to say your name at all.”

  It makes me uncomfortable.

  I hear my mother’s voice coming out of a tape recorder: “I can’t take those pills anymore; they mess with my head. Make me see things that aren’t there. These pills are picking at a wound until there’s nothing left but the ache of a life that used to be there. What I did in that pool was merciful. Because who wants this for their child? To crawl into the same hole her mother can’t bandage up?” The men press the Stop button and her voice is gone.

  “Do you always touch things that aren’t yours?” They put the tape player in a bag and zip it shut. No one trusts me with their things.

  “Yes.” I tap my fingers on each of their thighs, high up, and say, “Mine.” Their mouths make an O and they write things in their notebooks. I ask them if they’re writing a story, and they say, “Yes, a kind of story. A story about you and your mother, and we need help filling in the blanks. Can you do that for us? Why don’t we start with the pool? Can you swim?”

  “Fish tank,” I correct. “Four feet of water, and I dog paddled and kicked my legs, fast, like a fish. I wore the blue bathing suit my father gave me. It felt so soft that I kept rubbing my hand across my tummy, until the heel of my hand got real hot and I wanted to crawl into the pool to cool off. I brought my marbles with me, the clear kind, the ones you can see through. I put them in the pocket of my shorts and held them in my hands. Safe.”

  The men look at each other, and then they look at me. “Where was your mother? Was she already in the pool?”

  “Of course she was,” I say, rolling my eyes. “She’s always everywhere first. She was in the pool wearing her nightgown. Told me her name was Ingrid.”

  “A nightgown? Ingrid?”

  “Yes, yes. Can’t you hear me right? For doctors, you guys don’t seem all that smart. Anyway, people got used to her wearing funny stuff in the pool. Sometimes Mom would swim in my dad’s suit, other times her wedding dress, or in a sheet she’d wrap around her body. She’d wave her hands in the air and yell, ‘Just call me Mummy!’”

  “Let’s get back to the nightgown, to yesterday. Did you notice whether your mother was acting any different than usual? Headaches? Saying strange things, anything out of the ordinary?”

  Why are these doctors asking stupid questions? I thought doctors were supposed to be smart. I’m smart because my mother tells me so. Mom told me to forget about the pool and it’s forgotten, so why are these people, these men she let into our house, making me remember? I chew on my braid again. The men walk around the room and I hate that they’re touching things. Did they take my clock? They pick up some of the books my mother reads to me: The Awakening and Laughter in the Dark, by some Russian writer whose name I can never pronounce. They pause in front of a videocassette of The Shining. The men ask me where all the children’s books have gone off to.

  “They’re for simple people,” I say. “My mother says I’m not that kind.”

  “What kind are you?”

  “The kind of girl who doesn’t want to read stupid books about seeing a dog run, or stories about stupid Ramona helping her dad quit the smokes when everyone knows that you can’t beat an addiction.” The doctors write in their little books. “Did I tell you about a boy I saw today, a boy who pulled the wings off flies? He just sat there in the middle of the sidewalk, just him and his jar of flies.” I hold my breath for a minute, trying to get brave, and then I ask, “Did you take my clock?”

  “No,” they say.

  “Someone did.”

  “You watched this movie?” they ask, pointing to The Shining. I nod, proud, and say that I saw it when I was five. Back then it was confusing and loud, but now it comforts me like a record played again and again. “How does this comfort you?” They hold up the box cover with a picture of Jack Torrance. I roll my eyes because again with the stupid questions. “It’s nice to know there are others like Mom, except she doesn’t run around with an axe like some crazy person shouting about three little pigs. Ha. Ha.”

  “It didn’t scare you?”

  “No. It’s a movie. Make-believe. Also, my mother would never wear the same outfit two days in a row like Jack. I’ve seen her change her clothes, sometimes, three or four times in one day. Watching the movie is like being with Mom even when she’s asleep. See?”

  “I see,” they say, nodding slowly.

  I know they have my clock. I can hear it ticking.

  With my books I create a circle around me so the men can’t get in. Safe. “My mom always has headaches, says strange things. But that’s the way it’s always been. That’s just Mom. All work and no play,” I singsong. “Burning hair in the bathroom. Swimming in panties and a hairnet. Mom told me that adults have to lie to children until they’re found out, until the lies pile up so high like snow and they can’t see past them.”

  “I wouldn’t call it lying. There are some things too complicated for a child to understand.”

  “Tell that to the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, and the fat man and his reindeer that can’t fit down a chimney.”

  “You’re very perceptive for a ten-year-old.”

  “My clock’s gone.”

  “Do you have any friends? Play with kids your own age?”

  “Mom says a girl’s best friend is her mother.”

  “Do you know why one of your neighbors would call the police on your mother? Do you know why we’re here?”

  “I thought doctors were supposed to know the answers instead of asking all the questions. Why don’t you come out with it? You want to know if my mom tried to kill me, right? Because some lady in the pool screamed and told the cops that Mom held my head underwater for a long time. It was a long time and I was scared, but I’m here now. Mom told me all she wanted was for me to see light because it was so dark and she couldn’t see. She didn’t want me to catch the sads, and I believe her. I believe her!” While I’m telling the doctors this, I start crying and the tears won’t stop. All this water could kill you if you’re not smart about it. “You don’t understand us.�
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  “We have an idea.”

  Downstairs my mother is smoking a cigarette because she has an addiction. My father, Tim (I have to say Tim instead of father because those are Mom’s rules), puts a bowl of noodles in front of her and she gives him that mean look (sometimes she growls but not today, not in front of the doctors), and says, “Why would I want this?”

  I love Mom but sometimes she can be a little mean.

  She holds her gold lighter, the one she bought at a yard sale, the one the seller said used to belong to Lionel Barrymore. When I asked, Who’s Lionel Barrymore? my mother shoved me away and said, An actor from old movies. I hid under the bed and kept saying Lionel Barrymore, imagining an old man with cotton-candy hair living in a castle. Like a king. Not like Santa Claus, or God, who’s Santa Claus dressed in white—no, not like those make-believe men. A king in a kingdom is real, and I could be queen.

  Lionel and me. King and queen.

  The doctors don’t notice I’ve followed them downstairs. When they ask if I could sit in the other room, my mother says, “Kate stays here. Kate stays with me.” The men grow quiet and when they speak it’s so slow and soft you can hardly hear them. They don’t sit on the chairs; they stand behind them. Why won’t they sit down?

  “You want to speed this up,” my mother says. “I’m not five, or a moron, so don’t speak to me like one.” She holds her cigarette but doesn’t smoke it.

  “You’re not smoking your cigarette,” I say. “You’re holding it, but you’re not smoking it. You’re a smoking addict, Mom, so smoke your cigarette.”

  “Oh honey, you’d be surprised just how much restraint I can exercise. Even now, as these fine doctors don’t deign to sit in my chairs, but they’ll drink my coffee and rifle through my things.” One of the doctors begins to speak, but the other shakes his head, and they just watch my mother playing with her lighter, watch my father watching her.

  Tim doesn’t speak. You see, this is Mom’s kingdom.

  “Or maybe we can talk about that drunk who called the cops, the drunk who probably thought the water in the pool was an extended happy hour, a well from which she could drink, because wouldn’t you get sauced if you came home to find your husband fucking some illiterate Fabco Shoes cashier on the bed you just made? And if the whore cashier was wearing your shoes, the expensive ones with the sequins, while she was fucking your husband? If it were me, and that sure as hell would never be me, I’d probably pour a bottle of vodka over my eyes. Then I’d start seeing things that weren’t there. So tell me more about your star witness and the tape recording you made of me before you read me my rights?”

  “Why don’t we talk about the books you’ve got in your daughter’s room? Do you think they’re appropriate reading material for a child?” one of them asks. He’s the angrier of the two, and when he talks to my mother he spits through yellow teeth.

  Mom notices the teeth and points at them, says, “You should do something about that. What kind of doctor are you if you can’t fix your own teeth? And don’t go blaming it on nicotine because I’ve smoked a pack a day since I was fifteen and I’m all white.”

  “Mom, my alarm clock is gone. The windup.”

  “I have it,” she says, annoyed. “You don’t need a clock when you have me. I keep good time.”

  I could cry! I could scream! Like lobsters in hot pots. Instead, I ball up my fists and count to one hundred.

  “We saw the books. And the fact that you’ve completely isolated her from children her own age concerns us greatly. We are concerned with Kate’s development.”

  Why are they talking about me as if I’m not here? What is my development?

  “Maybe I should pour sugar down her throat or grow strawberry patches in her room and clip unicorns in her hair. Tell me, Mr. Hoffman, would filling Kate’s world with delusion and fantasy be more appropriate?”

  The other one sighs and says, “Your daughter owns a movie about an alcoholic who tried to murder his family with an axe.”

  “There’s more horror in one episode of Sesame Street than in The Shining.”

  “We’re going to recommend that the child be removed from this environment while you seek professional help.”

  The child. This environment. Help. Those are the only words I hear.

  “Should I lie down on the bed and have you fuck me? Or do you prefer the floor? I know you love it when my back burns,” I hear my mother shout through the wall later that night. I crawl out of bed and sit outside their room. The door is open a little, and I see Tim wearing a white mask and a blue jumpsuit; he holds a big knife in his lap. Mom turns the lamp on and off, and all I hear is a constant click, and all I see is Tim moving the knife from knee to knee. I shake.

  “Look at me having to do everything. Making you dress up like a murderer just so I can find you remotely interesting. So here’s your script for the evening, Michael Myers. You meet a blond riding a blue bus and you take her home and kill her. Let’s give her a name. Let’s call her Ellie. But first you tell her how much you want to die. You tell her about the canaries your mother bought you, and how one day you opened the cage and the birds went wild, scattered, and flew out the window. You thought you did a good thing, right? But here’s the rub—birds don’t really come home or escape; they fly as high as they can and then they fall right out of the sky.”

  I see my mother’s feet at the edge of the bed and Tim kneeling down and kissing them. I am ten.

  “What if I told you that girl was already dead?”

  “I don’t even know what any of this means,” Tim says. “This mask is making my face itch.”

  In the dark I feel a hand shaking under my sheets. “We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go,” my mother whispers. I’m cold and confused. “What?”

  “They came in my house and smashed all the windows,” she says.

  “Windows? What windows?” I ask, rubbing sleep out of my eyes. “The windows aren’t broken.” Mom is starting to act like Jack again, before the axe.

  “It’s like Humpty Dumpty, but I can’t put it back together again. I collected all the shells but they only ended up cutting me. Stop eating your hair,” Mom hisses. “You’re always eating your hair. You got a lunchbox hidden in there?”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying. Who’s Humpty Dumpty?”

  Mom turns on my night-light and I see her face, all wet with water. Again I ask about Humpty Dumpty—“Is he a real person or make-believe?”—and she mumbles out of the side of her mouth that this Humpty is no one I need to know. In her hand she holds a lamb mask. She pulls the mask over her face, covering it, and I’m scared. Not like water scared, but for real scared. Mom tells me we need to go. Put your clothes in this garbage bag.

  I reach for the blue swimsuit I’ve hidden under my pillow. “What about Dad? Is he coming too?”

  Mom shakes her head. “No, he’s not. I left him with my parents’ remains and I’m never looking back.” With the lamb face on she sounds different. Funny.

  What is she talking about? Remains. My body shakes. “Where are we going, Mom? Why are you wearing that face? Take it off. Take it off.”

  Oh the places we will go. We have brains in our head (she pulls a hat over my head). We have feet in our shoes (she puts on my shoes, left, then right). We can steer ourselves in any direction we choose (she shakes the car keys). We’re on our own, little lamb. And we know what we know (Why does she have my bathing suit?). And I am the one who will decide where we go. Mom grabs my hand; she grabs the trash bag and says, “Run!”

  I am ten.

  Mom drives fast. The lamb face is gone, replaced by a cigarette, and she looks over at me when she says, “We’ll need new names.”

  “I don’t want to change my name,” I say. “I like Kate just fine.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you want; this is about what we need. Pick a name, any name. Think of it as a game. When I was your age, my mother gave me another name every other year, whenever she was bored or forgetful.
Every new name meant I had to become a new person until my mother decided I would be someone else. Those were the rules. When I was Vanessa, I was a mean cheerleader who didn’t wear underwear and played card games for smokes. When I was Amy, I played the flute and wore fake prescription glasses from the drugstore. One time I was Chuck, and I stuffed socks down my pants and didn’t shave my legs.”

  “What did your teachers say?”

  “They didn’t know. It was a secret. And I only wore the sock in my pants when I was home.”

  “Weren’t your friends confused?”

  In a small voice Mom says, “I didn’t have many friends. I wasn’t really a cheerleader; I stole a uniform and practiced in the basement where no one could see me, until someone did and all the kids laughed at me. And I was a shitty flute player on account of I didn’t know how to breathe, so I gathered up all the flutes and threw them in the pool. Back then I wasn’t what you’d call subtle.”

  “I’m tired, Mom.”

  “The glasses used to give me headaches, and the principal called my mother when he found me banging my head on a locker because I wanted the pain to stop. But it never stops. No one tells you that, but it’s true, Kate. The pain is with me, right here, right now, in this car. Even as I drive.”

  She’s running red lights again. It’s quiet outside except for a few dogs barking and a can being kicked into the street. I roll down the window to feel the air on my face, and part of all this feels good, like the night only belongs to Mom and me. But the more she drives the more I get tired, and soon all I want to do is go to sleep and wake up as Kate, in my bed, in my house, with my books around my feet. But there’s Mom asking me to “try on Meg for size,” as if I’m a shoe.

  I am not a shoe!

  “When are we going home?” I ask.

  “We’re not,” she says. “They want to take you away from me, sweet Kate, and I can’t have that. Besides, you don’t even love your father, and we can always get new books.”

  “That’s not true. That’s not true at all. I love Tim.”