by Phoef Sutton
The house groaned from a gust of wind. The snow puffed into the room and dusted us. There was no sound except wind and creaking wood. Sometimes a parent can hear silence more clearly than any noise. Charlotte snatched up the baby monitor and held it to her ear. Your breathing had stopped.
We both dashed up the steep staircase, running with controlled panic. In your room, the covers were thrown back on your empty bed. Snow from the open window was collecting in the creases of your pillow and drifting on the wind.
Your mother ran from room to room calling your name, but I knew you weren’t going to answer. Through the open window, I saw footprints on the snowy roof.
There was only one set of prints, but I knew you hadn’t left alone.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I just went into the hospital room to make sure you were still there. That you hadn’t jumped out of the window and rappelled down the steep incline of building. No worries. You were still there, tucked into your bed. At least your body was.
Where the rest of you is, I can’t say.
The howling wind cut through my shirt, burned my fingers, and stung my eyes. The four of us gathered around the scuffed depression in the snow where you’d dropped from the roof to the ground. From the look of things, you’d made a good landing then taken off toward the shore. Toward the water.
We raced down the slope, slipping on the powdery snow, trying to track your footprints even as the wind whipped them away. When had you left? I tried to place the last time I’d heard your breathing over the monitor, but it was useless. I was sure that Charlotte and Neil were blaming themselves, thinking that it was their fight that had woken you up and driven you out of the house. I knew better.
Neil stopped when we got to the well. I’d had that horrible thought myself, but I kept on running. Neil would stop me if he saw signs that you moved the lid and dropped in, like those damned kids in TV newscasts were forever doing. I followed what I hoped were the faint traces of your footprints further onto the beach. The tide was high, so any sign you might have left in the sand was under the cold, choppy foam that lapped at my feet. Neil was beside me now, panting heavy clouds into the night air.
“The well’s okay.”
We both looked across the water. We couldn’t see the green roof of the Moseby house, but we knew it was there.
“Why would she do this?” Neil asked, plaintively.
I could hear Charlotte and Kathleen calling your name. I turned to see them racing aimlessly across the snow, hands cupped to their faces, screaming into the wind.
“Go help Charlotte,” I told Neil. He went off without questioning. I moved fast, racing along the shore toward the woods. There were no footprints to follow, no sounds to lead me forward, but I wasn’t going to any particular place. I just needed to be alone. I couldn’t do what I had to do in front of the others.
The crowded trees make a thick wall at the edge of our property, a tangle of gnarled trees and new growth fighting jealously to reach the sunlight. I hit that wall of branches without breaking my stride, raising my elbows to protect my face, drained parchment-dry from the cold. Welts stung my hands as I broke through the brambles and tripped over a fallen trunk, tumbling onto the frozen ground. Back there on the lawn, the moonlight and the reflecting snow had given the night a twilight glow. Here, everything was pitch black, dark as the inside of Jellica’s windowless room must have been. I struggled onto my knees without thinking, in an instinctive imitation of prayer.
“All right, you little bitch,” I whispered, more in my mind than through my cracked lips, “I’m here. Talk to me.” My fingers entwined, smearing blood on the back of my hands. I opened my mind. Or tried to. There was nothing there but the cold wind, the ragged pain in my hands, and the aching of my knees on the frozen ground.
Damn it. Why did I have to be so useless? I grabbed a handful of grit and snow and rubbed it on my face, gasping. “It’s all right, Jellica,” I mumbled, trying to calm myself. “I’m not mad at you, I just…The hell I’m not mad! I’m furious!” I was shouting against the wind now, and I felt my dry lips split open, “You’re hurting Maggie. Don’t you know that? Don’t you care?”
The laughter came from someplace far away, though whether it was a distance inside my head or outside it, I couldn’t say. The tinkling laugh of a child delighting in a new game. I sprang to my feet, running at the sound. It seemed to have no source, but it led me forward, pulling me with its mocking glee. I slipped over slick granite slabs, tumbled into frozen ditches, ran at icy branches that tore my face and stabbed at my eyes. I ran until my lungs ached and my breath gave out, and then I ran farther, but no matter how much ground I covered, the laughter never grew louder or softer, closer or farther away.
I burst into a clearing and stopped, my body drenched in sweat despite the cold, my eyes blinded by the moonlight, which was dazzlingly bright after the darkness of the woods. The wind, even colder now, swept up at me from below. I stood on a ledge ten feet above dark water. Black Granite Quarry. One of the many long-abandoned stone quarries on the island, filled with freezing water from underground springs. Some of the quarries were used as swimming holes or for skinny dipping, but this one was too small, too off the beaten track, so it had become overgrown and forgotten. I stared around in the colorless moonlight. The laughter stopped. Had Jellica led me here, or had I been running blindly from something inside my own mind?
Below me, the dark water reflected the stars, a circle of night sky planted in the earth. But the scattering of stars was incomplete; in its center was one spot of pure blackness. Something dark and motionless floating in the quarry.
Something shaped like you, Maggie.
I jumped. Feet first, without thought, without grace. Ten feet of freezing air, and then the water hit me, stabbing me with needles. I sank into the murky darkness. I knew I wouldn’t hit bottom; the quarries were deeper than I could imagine, so I forced my arms and legs to move, to slow this fall and carry me the impossible distance to the surface. I swam upward, my wet clothes weighing me down, pulling me toward the cold vastness beneath. My mind fought against me, recalling in involuntary flashes every childhood story I’d ever heard of the mysteries hidden in the bottomless deeps of the island quarries. Large, vicious eels; lost cars full of forgotten tourist skeletons; unpredictable undertows that snatched innocent swimmers and sucked them through hidden channels to the sea. If your mind is fighting you, I told myself, then shut it up. What good has it ever done you anyway? Who I was talking to at that moment, if not my own mind, I couldn’t guess. A multitude of voices argued inside me, but none of them seemed to bring me any nearer to the surface.
All at once, I burst out into the night air. I gasped for breath too soon, sucking water into my lungs, so that I had to cough and spew it out again. I twisted in the water, looking for you. I spotted you, still floating, still motionless. I splashed toward you, the cold sapping my energy, seeping into my joints, making every movement an agony. I pushed past the pain, threw myself like a seal through the water, stretched out my hand as far as I could reach. My fingers grabbed your leg. My grip was weak, but I pulled you toward me, straining to see your face. Your eyes were shut, your expression relaxed and much too calm.
“Maggie!” I yelled, feeling myself sinking. No response.
I wrapped my right arm around your waist and fought to pull you toward the shore. I spotted a ledge level with the water a million miles away on the far side of the quarry. I wasn’t sure I could have reached it even on my own, but pulling you with me? I told myself that would only make it easier; I could give up on myself, but never on you.
Should I rest for a moment and regain my strength? But no, the effort of keeping us both afloat was exhausting in itself. Rest, and I’d only use up the tiny resources I had left. I took in a breath, snow caking my split lips, and pumped my legs, pivoting my free arm, dragging us both slowly, unforgivably slowly, toward the ledge.
I kicked off my waterlogged shoes, trying to use the sting
ing pain of the cold to keep me awake, to keep me moving. Something brushed against my stocking feet. I kicked hard, forcing from my mind the image of quarry eels slithering around my legs. There it was again. Tendrils fluttering against my feet, my calves. I thrust my aching body forward, pulling away from whatever it was—algae, seaweed, or nothing at all but a manifestation of my panic and the frozen state of my limbs.
But again, it was there, stroking my leg, feathering the soles of my feet. Playing with me. And as soon as that thought entered my numb brain, the thing grabbed hold of my leg. Gripped me tight and strong and yanked me under the water. I lost my hold on you as I sank into the darkness. Flailing, I kicked my leg free of the icy grip. I struggled to the surface and grabbed you again, pushing you now, shoving you with what feeble strength I had left. We were almost there. Another thrust with my legs. Another. My muscles burning and freezing, aching and numb all at once.
We reached the ledge.
I felt you bump against the granite lip, allowing myself to hope that you might react to this, that you might reach out and grab the rough stone. But you simply bobbed against it, limp and unaware, like a bundle of clothing someone had dumped into the water. I got underneath you and pushed, lifting you onto the ledge, shoving your awkward limbs onto the cold, snowy granite. You rolled over. I winced as your head cracked on the stone and you lay still. Dead weight. The phrase came unbidden into my head, and I shoved it away. I hugged the ledge, treading water, staring at your face. Your mouth was open, and water drained from your lips, just the way spittle used to when you were a baby sleeping on my shoulder.
Then, I felt it again. From under the water, something grabbed my leg, seizing me tight. The cold grip of tiny fingers. I scratched at the slippery surface of the ledge, fighting to hold on, but the grip was too strong, or I was too weak. It pulled me down into the cold water, and even as it flooded my mouth and nose and ears I could hear Jellica laughing.
The night sky rushed away from me. The pressure of the water bore down on me, crushing me until I was small, tiny. Until I disappeared altogether.
Breathing was no longer a struggle. No longer necessary at all. Time slowed or sped up, was extended or compressed. It became meaningless, like breathing, like the beating of my heart or the throbbing of my pulse….
Water drained from my body, pattering into a puddle on the wood floor beneath my feet. Wood? Why should there be wood underneath me?
I could see the wood, examine every whirl of the grain, but I couldn’t feel it. The soles of my feet rested on it, but did not touch it. I wondered, again, why it was there. Then, I remembered Mrs. Day’s teachings. I was entering a spirit room. Some spook’s home. I braced myself. I took a deep breath.
The air was so hot and humid that the freezing water of the quarry evaporated from me in a cloud, leaving my flesh painfully sensitive. Every hair on my body stood on end, antennae straining for reception. But I could feel nothing, come into contact with nothing. I could see a room around me, but I was not in it.
I could smell it, though. This room stank of New York summer heat. It was dark, but I didn’t need light to see. I knew the room; I’d been here before. This was Jellica’s room. Whether it was in my head or her head, the distinction made little difference. I couldn’t see a door, and even if I had, I couldn’t move to use it. I was here, and all I could do was stand and look at the bare room with the windows painted black, listening to the tiny scratching sound that came from inside the upended playpen in the center of the room with the crumbling cinder block holding it down. Jellica’s fort.
The scratching was constant, purposeful, like rats in the walls, building paths unseen all around me. Fingernails digging an escape route or trying to signal to the world from under the plastic lip of the playpen that rested on the scuffed wooden floor. Then, I saw the plastic lip bend, bow outward, pushed by something from within. A tiny hand with broken dirty nails worked its way out, still scratching at the floor.
“Mommy?” The voice was small and frightened. “Mommy, can I come out? I’ll be good. Please?”
I tried to open my mouth to answer, but I couldn’t.
“I said please, Mommy. I sorry. I made a potty in here, can you please lemme out?”
I watched the little hand retract, pulling itself back into the playpen. The air grew thick and foul all around me. I felt a nauseating wave of claustrophobia and anxiety, like the worst morning terrors of my life. Every moment of depression I’d ever felt filled my heart and weighed me down, as if this room were the black heart of my soul. The world was bleak and hopeless, and as bad as things were, they were only going to get worse.
The lip of the playpen bowed out again. Two hands crept out this time, extending from beneath the plastic wall. Shoulders came now, pressed to the floor, bones flattening like a rat’s when it squeezes through an opening no bigger than its head. A mass of hair flowed out next, like spilled ink, then the head of a little girl twisting and rolling as she dragged herself forward, her ribs collapsing flat, forcing herself through the tiny opening. She lifted her head to look at me. Jellica’s dark, gleaming eyes, devoid of fear now. She pulled herself free, rising to her feet with slow, easy grace, and looked at me through greasy, matted hair. Her body was shining, slick with blood and filth, but as she moved toward me, the muck evaporated from her in a fetid cloud so that by the time she stood next to me she was clean and perfect in her little flowered dress. She smiled at me, then turned back to look at her playpen cage.
The scratching started from inside it again.
A tiny hand crept out from underneath the plastic lip and scraped at the floor. Next to me, Jellica gave a little laugh and slipped her hand in mine. The touch of her fingers was like sandpaper on my raw skin.
“I hate being in there alone,” she said.
“Then come out,” I said. I could speak now, at least to her.
“You’re stupid. You say stupid things.” She looked up at me. “Will you come in there with me?”
“No. You have to come out.”
“That’s where I live,” she said, simply, as if that decided everything. “I leave, but I always have to go back there.”
“Why?”
“I jus’ do.” She was irritated now. “Maggie said she’ll stay with me.”
The fingers scratched harder on the wood.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You’re stupid. Why are you always so stupid?”
“Mommy?” It was your voice now, coming from inside the playpen. Your little nails scrabbling on the wooden floor. “Unca Sam?”
“Maggie?” I tried to keep my voice steady.
“She can’t hear you,” Jellica said. “She can’t hear you ‘less you’re inside there. She’s such a crybaby. She said she’d stay with me, but she doesun’ like it. You wanna go in?”
The room reeked of fear, sweat, and shit. It was the worst place I could imagine, but there was no way to leave. I tried to picture the universe around it, but it was no use. This room was all there was. It was reality, and every other place I’d ever been was a dream. This room was all that life had to offer me or Jellica. Or you.
“If I go in, will you let Maggie go?”
Jellica thought it over. “I guess so. She’s kinda boring right now.”
I wanted to move. I wanted to say “yes, I’ll go in. Just let her go.” But where would you go? How could there be a hope of escaping this room if this room was the whole universe?
Something moved, flashing quickly past the corner of my eye. Something white in the dark edges of the room. I felt a rush of fear. Who could it be? How could there be anyone else in this world of a room that contained just the three of us? I forced myself to look closer, but the white blur eluded me. The fear shook me, and I hugged it close. Fear was better than the despair I’d felt seconds before. Fear wasn’t emptiness. Fear meant that something in this bleak world could change, even if for the worse. Fear meant there could be a way to run or fight.
“Yes,” I told Jellica. “I’ll go in with you.”
The world of Jellica’s room didn’t behave like that other world, the one I only vaguely remembered, the one I used to live in. In that world, you moved in some way I couldn’t recall to get from one place to another. Here in the real world things simply shifted and flowed to Jellica’s will. The playpen was all at once around me, and I was small, insignificantly small, trapped inside its sweating walls. There was no air in the cramped, humid space. The world had shrunk down to this. Even fear and the cold comfort that had offered me was gone.
“Unca Sam?”
I reached out my hand and touched your matted hair.
“Maggie. You’re not supposed to be here. You have to go.”
“I don’ know the way.”
I held you to me and told you there was a way out. There had to be.
I turned to Jellica, who sat against the corner of the pen, and demanded that she show you the way. Jellica shrugged. “If she’s too dumb to figger it out, that’s her problem.”
I tried to control my anger. “You said if I came in here, Maggie could go.”
You held on to me tighter. “I don’ wanna go by myself,” you whimpered.
I was suddenly weak and powerless. A child whining at the world’s injustice. “It’s not fair!” I cried.
Jellica’s eyes flashed in anger. As I watched, she grew in front of me, Alice in Wonderland after eating the mushroom. Her voice boomed with authority. “Who told you life was fair, you little shit! You sinned. You’re damned. Be grateful. You could be in hell.”
You started to cry, and as I turned to you, I saw another figure flitting past the corner of my eye, a dark figure this time. I looked up to see it, but as soon as I tried to focus on it, it vanished. I understood at once that the voice I’d just heard hadn’t been Jellica’s. It belonged to the dark figure who wanted to stay hidden. I felt a rush of fury. Who was it? Why was it watching, playing with us? Were we entertainment for it?