Follow Me into the Dark

by Sullivan, Felicia C. ;

  In a few days, I will take a match to my hair and quietly watch the blaze from down below. My hair will smell like the sourness of sick children. Just in case I don’t make it out, I’ll tape a note into the palm of my left hand. (I’m left-handed, which will make the striking of the match tiresome for both of us.)

  But right now the phone rings and my mother mutes the volume on the television set. Houses like mine detonate in silence while homes with whitewashed walls and hanging succulents remain standing; the clean and austere endure the devastation. I glance at my mother and then at the trembling wood and I can’t tell which will blow first. My mother utters, “Tim? I can’t. I just can’t.” When Ellie puts down the phone she repeats his name without speaking; her mouth moves but no sound comes out. When I ask her about Tim, the man who is not James, not a man who exists in the space between my stepfather and lover, she is shrapnel. She is bone.

  “I bet you’d like to know who he was,” my mother says.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I say.

  “Tim will be dead so it doesn’t even matter,” she says, ripping the plastic off a loaf of bread.

  Ellie makes a tower out of the slices, placing one on top of the other, brick by brick. This is her house within her house. I lose control of my mouth; I tremble. There’s still time to explain. There’s still time for her to understand that fucking James wasn’t my doing; I wasn’t flashing No Vacancy signs in a house teeming with leftovers of a family. She has to understand there are factors at play beyond my control. There is a father who requires constant surveillance. There is a woman whose body is a house that won’t withstand the blast. When I was small my grandmother, Norah, waved to me from the roof of our house before she tumbled through the air and landed in the grass. All those ruined flowers, I thought. All that theater to show that she could fly. I raced over to her sleeping body and shook it. Wake up, I said. Quit playing pretend.

  Come back and play. Why is it that no one likes to play? Why is it that I’m always left alone to invent the games?

  “Men are always ready to trade in for younger versions of you. It’s still you, but with lighter hair and a tighter face. A body that has not traveled like I have,” Ellie says, slathering cold butter on toast, tearing it, but not noticing it.

  I take my mother’s hand in mine and pry the toast from under her clenched fist. She leaves the room as violently as she entered it. The ticking is the bomb. The house is on fire. No way out. The voices are here with me and they are shouting.

  Pausing at the doorway she says, “You keep holding on to that.”

  THE VICTIM, IDENTIFIED as thirty-five-year-old Julia Cassavetes, suffered severe face lacerations and contusions to the skull. The victim is at McGinley Hospital where she is in a medically induced coma. Family members are devastated, as Ms. Cassavetes has been fighting a five-year battle with leukemia. Police are on the hunt for a suspect after another blood sample was left at the scene. Investigators are hesitant to link this incident to the Doll Collector murders . . .

  Jonah regards the scar on his hand from where the knife burrowed its way in. Jonah also thinks this: the woman isn’t dead.

  “Want to talk about it?” I say.

  “Not particularly.”

  “Was it you, Jonah? Did you hurt those women? Were you in the car with that woman?” I point to the television where a woman’s face is splashed across the screen, along with a website and the name of an organization that is accepting donations for Julia’s treatment. The photo of the woman isn’t a particularly flattering one.

  Jonah peels the skin off an orange and seems momentarily satisfied by it, as if this small act of savagery is a Band Aid for a monstrous, incurable ache. He peels all the oranges in the bowl but leaves the flesh intact. “Remember Alice? The roommate who had you sucking cock for blow?”

  I flinch.

  “See, I knew it. It’s all coming back, isn’t it? It was only a matter of time. I know the things she made you do when all you wanted was to come home. It was James’s idea, you know, to ship you off to boarding school. All he needed to do was put a fucking whisk in your hand and all was forgiven. It’s because of him you were forced to do what you did.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” I stutter. “I want to talk about you, about those girls.” I see a girl on all fours in the snow. You can never get the bloodstains out.

  “And you know, rich girls like Alice never want to do the dirty work.”

  “So you killed her,” I spit out.

  “I still have to hold your hand, sweet Kate? Even after all this time? Alice was your masterpiece. Alice was all you. That little carve-up inspired a lifetime of work,” Jonah says. Then something shifts—a movement of a voice from the front of the lips to the side of the mouth, and blue eyes that burn.

  “Don’t worry. I cleaned up your slop then, just like I’m cleaning out his slop now. Correction, cleaned, because apparently Jonah’s in semiretirement.”

  Lionel.

  “Lady, this is getting old. You gotta start taking responsibility. Own up for what you’ve done. Before you got on the scene, Jonah here was your garden-variety bed wetter. Sure, he dismembered a stray cat here and there, but he probably would’ve grown up to be a real pussy. Probably would’ve found him locked up in some shithole bathroom with his wrists all cut up. Then you came along, the girl with two faces and a man, me, who was just itching to come out of your skin. You gave Jonah a vision, a partner in crime, as it were, and an alibi. Women always get in cars when they see other women. Makes them feel safe, and you knew that. Hell, you gave Jonah me. Remember the lighter, Kate? Does Lionel Barrymore ring a bell? Or do you still believe your grandmother threw herself off the roof, when really she was pushed because that was one of the games you liked to play. Poor kid; what you wouldn’t do to get Ellie to love you. Hell, you even hate your stepbrother because Ellie loved him more than you.”

  Jonah shakes my shoulders. “Don’t you see,” he says.

  My lips stop moving. I look in the mirror. I see Gillian. I see Lionel. I see all the dead girls, photocopy after photocopy of me.

  I see me.

  “Do you see now, Kate?” Jonah says.

  I turn away from the mirror and recede. I see Alice’s hair all matted in my hands. I see the rusted metal of a shovel as I dig a shallow grave for Lucia. I see my hands on wet mouths and on knives searing through necks. It occurs to me that my mother didn’t die on that day from all those pills slipping, slippery, down her neck. No, I watched her death, and it was slow, invisible, a disappearing into nothingness. It occurs to me that there’s no difference between her hand holding thirty pills in one moment of quiet desperation versus months of her smelling her husband in my hand. I had to burn it down; I needed to eliminate, excavate.

  “Tell me that you see,” Jonah says. There are tears in his eyes. Why is he crying?

  I see James.

  Sweet Kate, said James, before the pills and the fire. Before all of it, I was eighteen and on the floor with my stepfather watching dough rise.

  After his wife’s and my mother’s body went up in flames, James stood at my door and said, She didn’t want to die. I know it was you. I don’t know how I know, but what I do know is this: She was frightened of being alone with you. She was always frightened of you. Maybe that’s why she let this thing . . . (You fucking me?) slide, he finished. I haven’t seen him since.

  “I don’t want to see,” I cry out, closing my eyes.

  WHERE THE CHILDREN SLEEP

  1989, 2003–2005

  WHEN I WAS fourteen, I saw a body in the snow. It was a boy, no more than five; his mouth gaped wide. He had hair the color of linens. When his heart gave out, he had been bouncing a ball in the snow. Yes, a ball in the snow. The boy had been a little slow in the head, and when they found him his mother sighed and said, Good riddance. Before they found the boy and wrapped his small body in a trash bag, I kneeled down in front of him and saw a speck of blood on his lip. I kissed him
three times and ran away. Sometimes, if I close my eyes tight, I can still taste him in my mouth. How is it that beauty and ugliness could be one and the same?

  When I got home that day, Jonah said, “Everyone dies. Sorry to break the news to you.”

  “Spoilsport,” I said. “When I die, make sure you bury me right. No cutting corners. No polyester in the casket. Okay?”

  “Even corners. Silk all the way,” he said.

  I was frightened of death, but I couldn’t tell Jonah that. There was no room for fear in our house.

  We had our own world, Jonah and I, and in this world there were rules. I would be called Gillian until the heat wore off, because, “Do you want to end up in a home for girls?” my mother threatened. “Try on orphan for size and see how fast you come running back to me,” she said when I pleaded for my books, my room, and Tim, my father, who made sloppy peanut butter (the smooth kind, obviously) and jelly (strawberry, clearly) sandwiches with the crusts torn off. James tried hard to pick up where my father left off, down to the sandwiches. But he used that expensive jelly, those preserves, when I would rather have had Welch’s strawberry. James tried so hard—you could feel the enormity of his love. Serving my lunch on a clean plate, James would bow and say, Your majesty. We’d collapse into laughter as I pulled apart the bread with my fingers, which had already gotten sticky from the jam. This was our secret ritual, our small world, which was a welcome retreat from all the books about deformity and despair, and the darkness my mother wore like a veil, as if she were a bride wedded to depression. I tried to make sense of the complicated stories she told me and I memorized as many words as I could—so much so that I made it my practice to memorize fifty words a day from the dictionary—but the space between us grew wider with the passing of each day, and I could never, for the life of me, get closer to her. Ellie was slippery, always just beyond my reach. It was as if she wanted me not to love her.

  “Do you want me to lock you in the basement like my mother did to me? Because I can and I will. Don’t you see that I’m trying to protect you? Don’t you understand that all of this is for you? Can’t you keep this going for me?” The intensity of her tears frightened me, and I folded into myself, desperate to be shielded from the steady pulse of her breath. As soon as she left the room, Jonah would parrot back her threats in a shrill, which made me laugh. “At least in a home we wouldn’t suffer her perfume,” Jonah countered. “Do they call it Chanel No. 5 because one whiff of it would send you fleeing to the nearest toilet for five hours of dry heaving?” He had a way of opening up the sky and letting the light in. His eyes were an industrial blue, and through him I felt my heart beating. We had to be patient; he continued with the rules. We had to swallow our voices, bide our time, and play the parts of the dutiful children, until one day our revenge would be the loudest sound. I understood Jonah’s anger toward my mother—a recalcitrant, chain-smoking runaway whose clothes occupied the closets in his bedroom—but I never got the rage against his father, James, a man who appeared docile and liked the heat. When I pressed him, Jonah said, “You’ll see in time.”

  Be Gillian. Swallow voice. Wait the stretch. By the way, be Gillian.

  “You being here makes me stronger,” Jonah said, flicking my mother’s lighter, which he’d stolen. “You should know that, Gillian.”

  “Kate,” I whispered. I’m good at this, I thought. Playing him. Pretending to be a girl.

  Jonah narrowed his eyes. “You know the rules.”

  “That’s Lionel,” I said.

  “Who’s Lionel?”

  I pointed to the lighter, to the fire Jonah was making. “Lionel,” I said.

  “Lionel,” Jonah repeated, smoothing my hair.

  My mother might have manufactured the name, but Gillian was our invention. We made her from scratch using a notebook and two pens. Gillian loved blueberry muffins, Holocaust films, and the volume on the radio turned way up. She blasted Joy Division and old Depeche Mode (specifically, “Never Let Me Down Again”), because there was something about artificial sounds that felt right to her. From my mother’s drawer we stole a tube of lipstick, Cherries in the Snow, and colored a sheet of white paper with it. Our girl was free, clumsy, and willful in all the ways we weren’t. We made her tumble down the stairs and trip over her feet. Her laugh was a series of open-mouthed snorts. Hers was a world that was lived, while ours was one in which we endured.

  We spent days contemplating her hair and went through boxes of markers in pursuit of the perfect hue. Was it possible to fall in love with a color? To be so consumed by a single shade that it haunted your waking hours? One Sunday, we shook a bottle of peroxide onto my hair until it was bone white. “You look like a piece of chalk,” Jonah beamed. In the bathroom mirror I surveyed the shape of my clavicles and fingered my ribs as if they were individual parts of an instrument I hadn’t yet learned to play. When my mother crept up behind me and placed her hands on my shoulders and chin on my head, something in me stirred. Ellie said, “God, you’re beautiful,” and I finally understood how, the more I disappeared, the more I became visible to my mother. I began to fade into the scenery as my mother’s affection for me swelled.

  Barely a newborn, a half-written story on the page, and we’d already foretold Gillian’s death by drowning, because although the water fascinated her, she would never learn how to swim.

  “But I can swim,” I said, to which Jonah responded, “That’s the discipline.”

  “When they finally pull her out of the water . . .”

  “Boys will find her. Notice how boys always find the dead girls?” Jonah said.

  “They’ll find her covered in leeches.”

  Jonah closed his eyes. “Gillian,” he sighed. “Ellie can’t come with you.”

  When no one was listening, James called me Kate. “Our secret,” he said. It was fun sometimes, returning to me. Four years had passed since we moved to California, and I was getting the taste of Gillian and liking it. Meanwhile, Ellie was getting the taste of every man in a ten-mile radius.

  “I’m bleeding,” I said, one morning.

  “What? Where?” James shouted. He grabbed my face, my arms, and my scalp.

  I lifted my skirt and pointed to the naked space between my legs. “There,” I said.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he said, retreating.

  “You ever watch that movie Carrie? The scene where she gets her period for the first time and she thinks she’s dying. All the girls in the locker room think it’s fucking hilarious, and all you want to do is slap her in the face and tell her to get a maxi pad because the blood will always, inevitably stop, just like it’ll always, inevitably start again. You just don’t bleed out. Remember? Plug it up! Plug it up!” That day I wore my mother’s lipstick, Cherries in the Snow.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said, eyes wide and unblinking.

  “Don’t worry. No one bleeds out.”

  “We’re going to have a little talk about this—me, you, and your mother.”

  “I’m giving you what you want. I’m giving you Gillian. Don’t be pissed because you don’t like how the story turned out.”

  He slapped me so hard it stung. “Kate’s gone, baby,” I said.

  Jonah came from behind the door where he’d been listening, and clapped. His applause was like thunder. “Good work, your majesty,” he said, handing me a sandwich.

  Sometimes I could see the pictures as if it were yesterday. Dozens of blurry Polaroids of a boy’s head bashed in with a shovel. Amid the twigs, leaves, broken bones, and bloodied teeth, I recognized the boy as Johnny McIntyre, a senior. All the girls called him Johnny Panic because he had a habit of forcing girls to their knees—even the young ones coming out of grade school—and making them say yes even when they shouted no. You never knew if he was going to hold your hand or hold you down.

  “It didn’t start out that way,” Jonah remarked when I threw the Polaroids on his bed.

  “What is this?” I shrilled.

>   “Well, that was Johnny McIntyre.”

  “I know who this is, asshole. I’m asking you what you’ve done.”

  Jonah fixated on one of the photographs until I snatched it out of his hand. In the foreground was what was left of Johnny’s face and Jonah at the edge of the frame, smiling, one hand waving. Tweezers in a hand. One blue eye, bleeding. Sometimes I wondered if I did that to him. Made him bleed. Told him afterward that no one ever bleeds out.

  “What we’ve done,” Jonah corrected. “Who do you think took the picture? Who do you think always takes the pictures?”

  “I was here,” I said, emphatic. A flash of white—was it my hair or the clouded sky? A lip torn off and two knees cracked with a hammer. A cry for forgiveness, which echoed a cry uttered in a car in the back of a gas station. Stop. I don’t want to do this.

  “That’s right, you were. And so was I.” Jonah waved the photo, now aflame, and said, “It’s a shame. You know this is the only picture of me smiling?”

  “My God,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” Jonah said. “You cleaned James’s hammer.”

  I pulled the sheet over my head and closed my eyes.

  “By the way, I liked that thing you did with your voice back there. It’s sexy.”

  “We killed someone,” I said. “A person.”

  “You act as if Johnny was the first time. You know, you really need to stop talking about the dead granny in your sleep.”

  “I wanted her to play with me,” I said. I don’t like them seeing me do it, but I know they can feel me do it. It’s important that you feel this pain, that we feel it together. It’s important for you to know that love is about the delivering and receiving of pain. This is about love. You have to believe me.

  “Tell me about your first time,” I said. Jonah and I lay under my bed. Just us mice with all our snacks.