Follow Me into the Dark

by Sullivan, Felicia C. ;

“See! You can’t even call him Dad.”

  “But those were your rules!” I sputtered.

  “You always have a choice, Kate.”

  What choice?

  “And besides, that man can’t open a jar without saying, ‘Mother, may I?’ You want to grow up to be that weak?”

  “I love him,” I whimper. I look up at Mom and see shadows of trees on her face.

  My mother stops the car, leans so far into my face our lips touch, and she says, “You love me.”

  In the morning the sun is hot and I can’t see. A man leans into the car, kisses my mother on the lips, and says, “She awake yet?”

  “You awake yet?”

  “Where are we?”

  “Morning, Gillian,” my mother says, “It’s time.”

  The man leans in further and shakes my hand. His name is James.

  “Come closer,” Mom says. “He won’t bite.”

  James laughs and makes a joke about nibbling, a joke that’s not ha-ha funny. “Your mother told me all about your father. It was brave what you did. Escape. After two days on the road, you must want to see your new room, right?” James opens the door and takes my hand. “You’ve got the biggest room in the house, Gillian. All the books you can read. All the dolls you can play with. No one’s going to hurt you anymore.”

  Two days? Who said anything about hurt? I look down and my clothes are different.

  We go inside the house.

  My mother smiles like that day in the pool. “Don’t worry,” she says. “At home, we’ll call you Kate. Our secret.”

  A boy sits on the couch and stares at a blank television screen. He looks at me and he laughs. My mother is here. I will soon learn that the woman who used to live in this house abandoned her son and husband for another man.

  “Gillian, this is my son. Jonah.”

  COLD COMES THE NIGHT

  2013

  “CAN I TELL you about the first time I saw you? You looked sleepy and sad because Ellie had dragged you to come live with us in California, having made up some story about your father beating her and fucking you. They tell you kids never make up stories—that’s for adults to do—so part of me wondered if Ellie’s story was actually true, even if parts of it didn’t belong to her. Who knows, you know? In the end, I remember sitting on the couch, meeting a girl called Kate. Do I keep telling you stories? Do you finally remember?” Jonah says.

  “There’s this thing with Minnie,” I say. I’ve left the window open and I notice how the rain comes down in sheets. Tiny pools of water eddy under the sill. It’s been a while since I’ve heard thunder and my body shudders from the thrash of it.

  “There’s always a thing with Minnie, with the cakes, with Ellie and that woman—there’s always something that is never about you,” Jonah says.

  “Those girls on the news . . .”

  “I don’t think you’re ready for that just yet.”

  I can only nod. That’s all my body will permit me to do. Instead of closing the window I lean out of it, feel the cold on my face and the rain snake down my back. My instinct is always to close and recede, but I want to open. I want to run.

  I ask Jonah how he knows all of this—my mother’s history, my grandmother falling from the air like some weary star, Delilah Martin, the water and the bleach, Nevada.

  “Ellie loved me,” Jonah says, plainly. “Stories were the only thing she owned, the one thing that was exclusively hers. You were hers, but you weren’t. I can’t explain it.”

  “You’re telling me I’m your sister, that woman.”

  Jonah takes my hand and guides me into the one room that has a mirror. He stands beside me and takes my hair in his hands and I imagine it feels like gristle to him. Charred edges already bluntly cut. A neck (now shivering, now slick) dressing that requires constant changing like laundered sheets on an old mattress. Skin removed because of a lifelong betrayal—Fuck. You have to know I didn’t mean it, said Gillian, repeats me—and reborn because of a chrysalis, because of a stepbrother who followed me and dragged my screaming body (and I was a kicker, I was) out of that dark hotel room I paid for with my stepfather’s credit card. I remember Ellie telling me about Nevada. In life, would I ever make that kind of journey, if a journey were indeed the one thing that needed to be made? Will you forgive me, Mother, for being a silent observer as you ended your single, sad life? Here is my shorn, dead skin in my hands; I mix my skin with your ashes and wonder if that is the very definition of forgiveness. Will my burning in a cheap hotel room ever be enough punishment? When does one broken life cancel out a deliberate death?

  Jonah said then what he repeats now, all baritone and tenor sax: “I will not lose you to the dark.”

  “What if I deserve it? What if the thing I broke can’t be repaired?” I remember a car ride into the black night and my mother humming: All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.

  “Everyone needs to be broken in some way,” Jonah says.

  “Gillian,” I say. “I’m that woman.” I’m a woman carved in two, a delicate caretaker of masks. I went into this thing with James as Kate and remained as Gillian. Jonah is here and I am here and you know how it is. Gillian wanders in and out of the frame. And Lionel, I suspect he’s making the rounds, too. The storm, you wouldn’t believe. I think: I’m lonely. Does it hurt? Yes. Does it stain? Yes.

  All of the children have come home to play house.

  “Kate,” Jonah says.

  “Kate,” he repeats.

  “I am so sad,” I say.

  “And tired, I imagine,” Jonah says.

  That night we sleep like children, curled up under the kitchen table. Clutching our clothes for warmth, we’re soothed by the lullaby of each other’s breaths. I dream of Alice’s mother, Lulu, a woman I once knew only slightly. A mother who carried wind chimes in the shape of airplanes in her purse. Through a face full of tears, I remember telling Lulu this: “But we are children.”

  SHE HAD HAIR the color of animal pelts, a mix of mink and sable. Jonah told himself, this is the last time, final straw, last call, no refunds or exchanges. He lay down on the bed, simply to feel the imprint his sister’s body made. This was Kate’s room, sacred territory, and he felt sick for having violated it. Jonah contemplated the burden of murder and the stains humans leave behind. There was a woman in the bathroom and her hair was on fire, homage to his stepsister’s desperate attempt at punishing herself for sleeping with her dying mother’s husband. What was important here was the hair and how the perfume of it hung heavy in the air, even after this woman Ikaria’s death. Had that been her name? Lionel was right about him botching the basics . . . As if the completion of this act absolved Kate of all that she had done to herself. As if he could erase his sister’s pain and replace it with a fresh wound, a new hurt. For a moment Jonah believed his own fiction until the rain came down and the fire alarms blared. This time he didn’t wrap up his gift; the shower curtain remained intact and the body, the wreck of it, limbs akimbo and eyes supplicating and wide, remained untouched from the time when he’d urged her last breath out. There were prints everywhere. What he did take was her wallet. Her name was Ilaria and she had a small child. He shoved the wallet in his mouth as far as it could go.

  Later, in his car, Jonah curled up in a ball and sobbed. He’d taken all the mothers he could take, but the ground continued to give way and his fall continued to be bottomless. There was only his stepsister lying in a hospital bed from burns whose origin doctors couldn’t understand, and she woke as Gillian even though he pleaded, he fucking begged, for Kate. The small girl rubbing sleep out of her eyes with balled-up fists, the teenager who was content to live within the confines of her head, and the woman who ran through the trees—in the mess that was Gillian, somewhere was Kate. And Kate gave him hope when Gillian was so intent on taking it away.

  “SHE KNEW, DIDN’T she?” I say.

  Jonah is in the kitchen scrambling eggs. “You mean about you and Jam
es?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not at first, but in the end she knew. You weren’t exactly discrete.”

  “I was lonely, and he was just . . . there.”

  Jonah turns to profile and smirks. I remember this. He comes back like a torrent, and we’re teenagers again, waging our minor wars. Too stubborn to wave the white flags we never owned. Those eyes, so impossibly blue. “You fucked my father out of proximity? I’m not judging here—I mean, who am I to judge—but you can’t honestly tell me you took up with James while our mother lay dying because he was in arm’s distance. Pick up a man in a bar, take him home, and fuck him rough and raw—that’s convenience. This thing with James was about love, hate, and revenge.”

  “My mother,” I snap.

  Jonah places a plate of eggs and charred bits of bacon in front of me and smiles in a way that implies victory. “You keep holding on to that.”

  THIS ONE WAS older. She had the face of a bird: pinched mouth, sallow cheeks, and squinting eyes. She couldn’t be more than thirty, but there was something different about this one. Just below the surface of her skin, Jonah could detect a ravaging, as if the layers beneath had become impatient, as if her body wanted to get on with the business of decay. This one wanted death, opened her doors to it. Before he could pull the blade out of his pocket, she laughed, and in that laugh Jonah felt something inside him shift. He felt with the pickup of this doll—What was her name? He always knew their names—that he was on the precipice of a new horror. He didn’t know that this would be the last time he sat beside a woman with a knife edging out of his pocket. It had been a month since his sister came home from the hospital and she didn’t even remember being there. She was Kate, baker of cakes, and Jonah continued his night work.

  “I know who you are. Why do you think I picked you up?” The woman paused. “I want to get the job done, but I’m too much of a pussy to do it.”

  “Now what job would that be?”

  “I’m looking for a fast exit, and I think you’re the one who’s going to get me where I need to go. I just ask that you close my eyes and be quick and clean about it. I’m kind of a perfectionist.”

  “You think this is a joke? Some sort of game?” There was no begging, only a willful surrender. Why else would a woman take the back roads in the middle of the night, if not to drive directly into the dark, into a predetermined ruin? It struck Jonah that this had been the thing he’d once loved about Lucia—her desire to tumble below the surface, to become less than zero—until he realized, albeit too late, that she didn’t want the dark; what Lucia desired were twinkling indoor lights, a carton of slick noodles, and a marathon of romantic movies. All the things that Jonah wasn’t equipped to give. What Lucia wanted was to flee her wounds. In the end, it was Jonah who was the scab-picker, pain-burrower, fucking pain tourist. But this woman—What was her goddamn name?—with her hand steady on the wheel, was already measuring her own grave.

  “Am I laughing? I put an ad on Craigslist, but everyone I met thought I was into S&M. It’s like, I’m the only one looking for a killer and I get suburban men in dog collars.”

  Jonah thought: I should kill her. I should take off this belt and wrap it around her neck. Tie a fucking bow. In the distance he could feel Lionel, practically see the fucker tapping his feet, as if he were announcing his retirement. Jonah remembered his father and a story about a dog with mange he’d made up. Why was Jonah thinking of a shivering dog biting at its skin until there was no more skin? Remember the tweezers in your hand? Who do you think put them there?

  “You’re going to leave this to me, aren’t you?” Jonah said, without realizing he’d said this out loud. He thought, Not you, but her smile, in profile, was an affirmative, Yes, me.

  “I’ve got a gun in the glove compartment,” she said. “I’m thinking that might be quicker than that belt you’re carrying. Unless you’re a lousy shot—I didn’t think of that. All those other girls were choked. Or maybe we should go with the knife, but aim for the big arteries. I don’t want to be lying in the middle of the road for hours, bleeding.”

  There was no Lionel. There was only Jonah in a car with a headache. He considered jumping out, going for one of the regulars, a doll who pleaded, someone who had someone to go home to, but he was in the middle of nowhere. He’d have to walk all night to get to the nearest town and he didn’t have the shoes for it.

  “I’m dying,” she said.

  “We’re all dying.”

  “Yeah, well some of us are on an accelerated timeline. I’ve got leukemia.”

  “Don’t you get that when you’re a child?”

  “Are you seriously second-guessing my illness? Look in my bag. Read the labels on the pill bottles, smart-ass. While you’re there, can you grab my smokes? I’m suddenly concerned that you’re not going to go through with this, because who kills a woman dying of cancer? There’s just no kick in stabbing a woman with one foot in the grave.”

  Jonah checked the bag. Read the multisyllabic labels: clofarabine and methotrexate. How would he know which medications someone who has leukemia takes? This woman was dying—the sack of pills and barbiturates confirmed something was wrong.

  “During my third round of chemo, my husband left me for his yoga instructor. It would be funny if it weren’t such a cliché. Can you hand me a smoke? Don’t deprive a woman of her addiction.”

  Jonah lit a cigarette and pressed it into her open mouth.

  “And then there were my friends, who walked the breast-cancer walks even though I didn’t have breast cancer and created a website for me, a fucking online memorial. I mean, were they searching for every unflattering photo of me to post on Facebook? Was this payback for blowing their boyfriends in high school?” The woman sighed. “It’s amazing how all of the energy wears thin after round three of chemo. At this point, everyone wants a miracle or a casket.”

  “That’s pretty cold, lady.”

  “That’s cancer.”

  “What’s your name? It occurs to me that we’ve been driving for an hour and I don’t even know your name.”

  “Does knowing that help in what you do?”

  “What is it that you think I do?” Jonah said. “Don’t you think I’d be doing it already?”

  “This could be your foreplay. It’s not good unless you drag it out: make the girl feel like she has the possibility for survival, that maybe she’s the one who will be spared. She’ll run barefoot into the road with blood on her face and some trucker will flash his lights at her and pick her up. But listen here. I’m handing you a sure thing: the girl with her panties at her ankles and a rubber in her teeth.”

  “You watch a lot of bad movies.”

  “I know you,” she said. “You want to know how I know you?”

  It was as if Lionel were nailed down to a rocking chair, lighting a pipe, and taking in the scene. Wondering how it was all going to play out. “How do you know me?”

  “You’re the Doll Collector. I know this because my sister is the girl who got away. Mia. Left for dead, you know, before you got into the doll thing, and the cops got her in a safe house for the past year because every case needs a living witness.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jonah said. Mia. Black bangs that curtained her eyes, and he only remembered her vividly because right before he plunged the knife in her stomach, she started to sing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” He’d been messy that one time. Wouldn’t you be if you learned that your sister had been fucking your father? Sorry, stepsister, but did that really matter in the scheme of things?

  “Oh, I think you do. Before you get it into your head that this is some sort of vigilante thing, I should tell you that my sister is the yoga instructor my husband’s fucking. It would be funny if it weren’t such a cliché. The police have a sketch of you, but you’re good. Always in disguise—sometimes you’re dressed up like a woman with red or blond hair, right? You’re hard to find.”

  “You found me.”

&n
bsp; “It took time.”

  “You’re going to drive to the next town, and you’re going to leave me there. And then you’re going to keep on driving.”

  “So you’re a cocktease? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Is it my sister? I can tell you where she is. I can write down the fucking address.”

  “God, no. You’re not even listening. You hear how crazy you sound?”

  “I’m not the one taking a needle and thread to a dead girl’s mouth.” The woman was hysterical. “All I hear is some little bitch who can’t get it up. What? I’m not good enough for you? You stab my sister in the stomach but you can’t even put a knife in my back. What is that shit? Act like a man.”

  In a small voice, Jonah said, “Pull over.”

  “Like hell I am. You’re going to take that knife you got under the seat and stab me in the neck.”

  Jonah punched her harder than he meant to, and the car spun out of control and crashed into a tree. He’s a child again, playing with Kate, with Gillian, with his father’s blood on his hands. The woman’s head smacked against the glass, shattering it, and when he leaned over and felt for her pulse, checked for signs of life, he couldn’t help but laugh over the fact that she was dead.

  Jonah carried her out of the car and laid her down gently onto the grass.

  “Let me hold on to this,” he said aloud.

  THE DAY MY mother dies we make toast. We’re watching an old film from the 1950s, The House in the Middle. My mother is often tense with the remote, never quite satisfied with the channel she’s on because the possibility of something else, something better, exists just out of her reach. So she spends a few minutes flipping through the channels, everyone’s voice a note in staccato, until she pauses at this film on the History Channel. She says, “You know, Kate. This reminds me of . . .”

  We watch as a home that bears the earmarks of untidy housekeeping—cluttered papers and unkempt linens inside, and decayed wood and dead grass outside—is doomed to destruction. We await the bomb and the fireball, the fate of a house left to neglect. When the house in disrepair explodes, my mother says, “Can you believe this is the kind of bullshit we were raised to believe?”