Follow Me into the Dark

by Sullivan, Felicia C. ;

“No, you first.”

  How could I know that my grandmother wanted to fly like some sort of bird? There’s no way to describe the flutter of arms and the smack of a body onto grass; you only see the blood that stains it.

  “One day my grandmother woke up and she stopped being here. She was in some other place, and she was happy. Every time she’d blink there’d be another face to replace the one she’d just seen in the mirror. So many eyes, she’d lost count. And the voices, my God, they were loud and constant. But they were comforting because they each represented a different part of her father, who died this gruesome death. My grandmother told me her father was a man who plucked out her heart and squeezed it until there was nothing left, so it was a relief to see it in pieces, not complete. Complete was terrifying. Complete was Norah in the house with nail clippers and bloody sheets.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My mother was feeding my grandmother drugs that made her normal again. So one day my grandmother climbed on our roof because her father was afraid of heights and the roof was safe. I followed her up the stairs and held her hair back when she cried, because her father had found her! He was here! But no one was there, only the two of us. Can you help me, Ellie? But I wasn’t Ellie; I was never what anyone wanted. So I pushed her and ran down the stairs and saw her on the ground. For a second, I regretted what I’d done, but then I realized this is what she wanted, and I gave her a kind of peace.”

  “It’s always peace,” Jonah nodded.

  “Then people came into our home and talked to my mother about grief, about the method in which one should mourn a woman who landed a few feet from where her child stood. They never suspected me; they were strangely frightened of me, of what I’d seen and what it would do to me.”

  “Remember that boy you found in the snow when we were kids?” Jonah said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That was mine. Think of the life he would’ve had. Last one picked for teams; a full scholarship to a school where he’d learn to build bombs while his roommates date-raped all the girls who told him they just want to be friends; a mother who passed out under the tent during his valedictorian speech; a bomb built in a shed that exploded in a building that he’d visited seven times for eight interviews only to hear the words, We regret to inform you. I did that kid a favor. He was Ted Bundy in the making.”

  “So you’re a savior now?”

  “Better than pushing Granny off a roof. The problem with you, Kate, is that you lack vision.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell Jonah that he was a liar. The boy we once knew died because his heart suddenly stopped. When the boy collapsed to the ground, he smacked his mouth on a rock and all this blood gushed out from a body that was no longer living. I guess it was easy to claim the kid when you didn’t have the stomach to do your own work. I felt bad for Jonah, never able to finish what he started. I gave him his ego and strength for no other reason than the fact that I loved him. I would allow him to be the man that I was, would always be. I gave him me, Lionel, everything, until there was nothing else left to give.

  We passed a box of Little Debbie cakes between us.

  “I’ve got a problem. Gillian won’t leave.”

  Jonah smiled. “The heart wants what it wants.”

  “Can you not do this? Quote TV movies of the week?”

  “When you get like this, sometimes I wish she’d stay. You know, when she’s here, your eyes get different. You also do this thing with your hair.”

  “What thing with my hair?” I demanded.

  “You get it all messy, cover your face with it.”

  “You love me, right? More than Gillian? You’re mine, right?”

  “Who else’s would I be?”

  We wanted it all back, a childhood edited for television. Thirty minutes of joy with all the heartbreak and sorrow cut out. We wanted to hold the remote and press all the buttons.

  Two years later, the police found Alice in parts. They dug up her blistered feet bound in twine and discovered her manicured hands in a bodega freezer. For two weeks, the owners lit red candles and covered their hands in prayer beads because they believed that Alice’s hands were the beginning of the rapture.

  The local news fixated on the “grizzly nature” of the murder, as if we were bears or something. They completely ignored the hair. How it was singed at the ends. How chunks of it were yanked out of her scalp and scattered around her face, which was found under the boardwalk at Coney Island. How I braided a strand of it into my own hair. I didn’t mean for things to get messy with Alice—I just wanted her to apologize for what she made me do. We argued, and all I could remember was her screaming that I was a hysterical joke, and I got so close to her that I could smell what she had for breakfast, and I hit her until I felt the bones in her face crack.

  Then there was Jonah. “I thought we were just going to scare her.”

  “Did you really believe that?” I said. Sometimes it was hard to appease his simplemindedness.

  Then there was Lionel, me, with Alice’s bank card in our hand. “We got to get rid of her.” Ninety-five pounds never felt so heavy. “We got to get her light; we got to get her clean.” I giggled uncontrollably over the thought of hauling a bag of Alice’s bones to the dry cleaner. Could skin be starched? Could bones be pressed? The image of Alice covered in plastic, dangling from a wire, her face obscured by an I Heart NY logo, sent me reeling. I fell to my knees, laughing so hard I cried, and then I vomited. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

  Jonah dumped a duffle bag of tools at my feet. I held Alice close, took a lighter to her hair. Said my goodbyes. Lionel shook our head. “Don’t get sentimental about this.”

  A week after I returned home from boarding school, James shipped Jonah off to art school. “He wants you all to himself,” Jonah said, shoving shirts into the duffle bag that had once stored Alice’s torso.

  “You take everything from me.” I confronted Ellie in the bathroom because I knew this wasn’t James’s doing. Divisions and subtractions were the exclusive dominion of my mother.

  Ellie applied eye shadow to the creases of her lids. “Nothing’s been taken from you, Gillian. You don’t own Jonah. In fact, I can’t think of a single thing in this house that you own.”

  “I liked you better when you were off your meds.”

  Ellie stared at her reflection in the mirror when she said, “I never liked you at all. I should’ve left you to rot in that school, but no, James wanted you home. Didn’t want people to think we weren’t concerned parents due to the fact that a murderer was loose and all. As if you had anything to worry about. As if I didn’t know that Jonah used my credit card to take a little trip on a plane back east. Tell me, Gillian, do you think I’m blind? Do you think I don’t know?” Her words were a wound that would never close, and I wonder now if her honesty was the only act of decency she could muster.

  “My name’s Kate,” I seethed, and closed the bathroom door behind me. I leaned into her, close. I was taller than Ellie, and I knew she could feel my breath in her hair.

  “Open the door,” she said.

  I kissed the back of her head and pulled her close. “Say my name,” I said. “Because how long was I good to you? How long did I sacrifice?”

  Tears flooded her eyes. Her eyes darted left and right.

  “Look ahead, look at me,” I said behind her, forcing her hips against the sink.

  “Kate,” she said.

  “See? That wasn’t that hard. Now we’re going to stick with Kate for a while because I’m starting to realize that she is so much fun.”

  That night I watched her sleep. I opened my mouth to scream but no sound came out because no sound ever comes out. That’s what it was like to love my mother.

  WHEN I WAS eighteen I packed two suitcases filled with books. I would board a plane that would take me back to Alice, or at least my memory of her. I felt fear and it felt good. Every hour James delivered the weather report through a locked doo
r while Jonah bounced a ball against the wall and shouted for James to please shut the fuck up. Reports from back east warned of storms. Maybe I should stay home, James wondered aloud. Maybe I shouldn’t fly into the blinding dark. To which Ellie responded, “She’s getting on that plane tonight.”

  “Gillian’s gone now, for good?” Jonah said.

  “Whatever made you think that?” I held the lighter in my hand. I was hungry.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Hibernation,” I said. Ellie stole my childhood from me and I planned to spend the next eighteen years taking it all back. I traveled the distance between love and hate and all the desire, grief, and sadness in between, but in the end I found that I’d only inched my way to the middle of the two, and I would be forever stuck in this place of hating myself for needing my mother’s acceptance and love.

  “What do you need?”

  “I need you to stay here and play house. I’ll call you and you move to New York and I’ll come back here to do what I have to do. What I need is for us to be on opposite ends of the playing field.”

  “That’s cryptic. What is all this?”

  I smiled, leaned over on the bed, and kissed Jonah on the cheek. “Reconstruction.”

  “YOU GOT THE keys I left you?” I said over a telephone line, years later.

  “I met a woman on the plane,” Jonah said. “She’s the cover girl from the underwear catalogs you used to get.”

  “I don’t wear underwear. And I don’t need you meeting girls on planes—I need you out of California. I need you to not be a source of strength. Did you get the keys? Is the apartment like I described?”

  “Haven’t I always been your playmate? Fucking Christ, Kate, sometimes I don’t think you ever want me to be happy.”

  “Who the fuck is Kate?” I said. “Is the glue uncapped? You’re off your meds again? Wake up, Jonah. It’s Gillian, your sister.”

  “Right,” he said, quietly. “You’re back.”

  “What are you talking about? I never left. Did you get—?”

  “I got the keys. I’m in the apartment. I won’t come back until you call for me.”

  “Good. I need you settled while I set things up here.”

  “Where are you?” Jonah asked.

  “Home,” I said. “Playing house. Mother sends her love. Don’t worry. You’ll see me in time.”

  I always wanted to be all of someone else.

  WE WENT WHERE no one could find us. A year before my mother died, James and I met where the barnacles sleep and the ocean washes away what others discard. The sky settled into the horizon, the sand was still warm, and we dug our feet under the grit to find the cool spots. I pressed a handful of shells against my face to take in the stink of salt and sea, and he sat behind me, tugging at my hair while we spoke.

  “I don’t know why I continue to come here with you,” James said.

  “Do you have a better option?”

  There was a day when the wind blew in the afternoon rain and my mother woke from a deep sleep. I’d moved home the previous month and we barely spoke. I stood over her bed and she pulled the sheet over her head and said, Go away. I tried to talk about that morning when Norah fell off a roof and plunged to the ground. I could never get the blood—there was a flood of it—and her wide-set eyes out of my head. I kneeled down and tried to close her eyes, as I thought that was the sort of thing you should do for the dead—don’t tease them with a light they’ll never see again—and later a man in an ambulance told me that you had to be dead for a good four hours for the eyes to properly close. The body was still rattling; perhaps refusing to accept that it would fade into the forever dark. Over time it would be forgotten. The roof would be painted and new grass and trees would be planted to replace the soil that received Norah. I tried to tell Ellie this but she stared at me with a blankness that made me think that she permanently resided in a place between her and her mother. Why did you have to come back? she asked. Why did you make your brother leave? Shaking my head, I said, I made him leave? Don’t you know about the girl he’s living with? She models underwear, or used to. Now I think she just models it for him. Cruel world we live in where beautiful women are simply thrown away after they’ve passed their prime. Ellie pulled the sheet from her head and said, Aren’t you tired? You must be.

  “I want to make something clear,” James said. “I still love her. I never stopped, just because we come here and do these things.”

  “You fuck me but you still love her?” I said. “I guess I can accept that.”

  “It never bothers you, what we do? Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking she knows, she must, and then part of me wonders if we’re slowly killing her. We’re taking away the one thing your mother never had—a family. I tried to give it to her, all of it, but I couldn’t. Not in the end. And you can’t either. I guess that’s how we ended up where we are. This is how it always happens.”

  Later, we took a room in a cheap place and James lay in bed, glowing from a single lamp that I kept flicking on and off. The evening descended, piece by piece. I saw Ellie’s hair hail down in the shower.

  James placed his glasses on the nightstand next to an empty glass of water. “I’m thirsty,” he said. He twisted his ring round and round on his finger and tossed it in the empty glass.

  “Suddenly you have a conscience about fucking me? Where’s this conscience when you’re shoving my head into the sand or renting hotel rooms where you strap belts around my neck? Conscience is convenient; it lies dormant and rises when the guilt rushes in or when the condom comes off. Whatever comes first, right?”

  I started to turn around when James held my neck in his hands. “It’s better if you look straight ahead.”

  In a certain light, I’m the image of my mother’s mother.

  “You should take off your shoes,” I said.

  “We’ll get there.”

  Back then I still made mixtapes, and I pressed play on Tosca. An aria separated us.

  “You should take off your shoes,” I repeated. A libretto.

  “We’ll get there.”

  “I know I’m not supposed to say this, but I love you,” I said.

  I thought of the smallness of a child’s hands.

  “You’re beautiful in all the right places,” James said.

  What are the wrong places? I wondered.

  I LEFT MESSAGES, dozens of them. Why didn’t Jonah pick up? He was playing me hot and cold. It was always late when I called, and sometimes I’d pass the time with Lucia.

  “He doesn’t talk about you,” she’d said once.

  “He doesn’t talk about you either,” I said.

  The last time we spoke I said, “Let me tell you a secret.” In a day’s time I’d board a plane to New York because my dear brother wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain—he’d refused to come home, acted like my calls were something he could dodge, excuse. Didn’t he know that I was not one to be ignored? But I didn’t tell Lucia this. Instead I said, “I’m coming to visit. It’ll be a surprise. By the way, did you get the check I sent?”

  Lucia had a surprise of her own. “I’m leaving him,” she said. “So it’s good that you’re coming. He’ll need family.”

  “That wasn’t part of our arrangement.” Why did everyone think that they could shirk their obligations? I lived in a world where no one saw anything through.

  “Make new arrangements. The guilt has been killing me. How is it not ruining you?” Lucia said.

  Who are we without our family?

  “Goodbye, goodnight,” I said to Lucia. I’ll see you in the morning.

  THE BUSINESS OF LEAVING

  2013

  “I TRIED TO kill you once,” Ellie said a week before she died. I’d already planned what I was going to do to my mother—the pills, the pillow—I just didn’t know when. “Well, twice actually. The first time didn’t count because my motives were altruistic. I wanted to scrub your history clean with a little bleach, a little water—our family’s
sicknesses—but I wasn’t successful. The second time, you were ten and I saw you swimming in the deep edge of a pool, and I knew you would never be as beautiful and innocent as you were at the moment when you were hungry and tired. Yet your life’s ambition was for me to see you swim from one side of the pool to the other, and that kept you moving through the water. I had my chance,” Ellie said, her face awash in tears. Her heartbreak and hurt were palpable. “So I took it! I held you down as hard as I could, and you kicked and splashed and you filled the surface with your desperate need to breathe. Our instinct for survival is primal, and your need to live eclipsed my desire to love. Then someone grabbed me—of course it was a man—and you broke the water, shaking, crying, and gasping for air when all I wanted to do was rob you of it. You have to believe me when I say that I did this for you.”

  When you grow older you become accustomed to death; you become aware of your mortality simply for the fact that people around you die. Of course there are exceptions—that one friend you knew from college whose body was ravaged by illness from a needle she used one too many times. At the funeral, everyone lamented over a life snuffed out in the prime of youth. Everyone was vengeful of a God who neglected to fulfill his part of the agreement—give us our due time in this life, and we will humbly return to you in the afterlife. Some passed by the casket to see our friend for the final time—face all flush with false life and eyes brushed with blue shadows the color of certain skies—and stopped believing. Others, like me, waited until the end, until the casket was sealed and the body lowered six feet down. We walked away feeling nothing because we never believed in the first place.

  In this life we are the property of someone else. We are claimed by our father’s name and passed, at a certain age, to our husband’s house. But what if your family disowns you? What if every man refuses to give you his name? What then? To whom do you belong? Who claims ownership over a body that is merely a deed ready for transfer, a piece of property? Who will stand over your still, sleeping body and feel what it’s like to lose you?