From Away

by Phoef Sutton

  I used that anger to push me forward, grabbing Jellica by her hair and dragging her down, making her small in front of me. Making her a child again. She wasn’t the only one who could control this world.

  “I don’t believe in hell,” I told her, or whoever she was. I felt power surge through me. I heard a voice clear and loud in my head.

  You can do anything you want to a child, it said. I hated that voice, wherever it came from.

  Jellica looked up at me, a frightened little girl, all too used to the anger of adults. I let her go, and she retreated to her corner. I felt ashamed, polluted, invaded. The voice that had spoken through Jellica was in my head now. I tried to find it inside me, but it dashed away, like a cockroach in a flash of light.

  Jellica was crying now. “It’s not my fault,” she said. “We’re in his house, we play by his rules.”

  “Whose house? Who told you that?”

  “Daddy. He pays the rent. What he says goes.”

  I rose to my feet. I had to confront him. “Delecourt!” I yelled. “Let me see you!” The white figure darted past in the corner of my eye, but I ignored it. It was the dark one I wanted. Jellica’s father. “I’m not some kid you can scare,” I yelled, hoping it was true. “I’m not some puny civilian! I’m a medium!”

  The playpen and the bleak room surrounding it flew away.

  It was replaced by another room altogether. A white room. Sunshine through Venetian blinds making blinding slashes of light on the walls. A boy sat on a twin bed under a Molly Hatchet poster, his face turned down, his eyes red from crying. Did I really have the power to move from room to room? Or did they just drag me along?

  I looked around for you and for Jellica. I couldn’t see you, but I knew you were there. That Jellica’s room was somehow within reach.

  I was sitting on the bed now, without even moving. “Why are you crying?” I asked the boy.

  “I’m not,” he said quickly, wiping his nose. “I’m okay.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The boy turned to me. I tried to guess his age, but it kept changing from boy to teen to adult as the clouds moved across the blinding sun, shifting those slashes of light like semaphore signals. “Billy Delecourt,” he said.

  “Is this your room?”

  “Sometimes.” He looked away. “You better go.”

  “Why?”

  “You just better.”

  He was scared now. I could smell fear in every corner of the room.

  The sun washed the room again and Delecourt grew up. Suddenly, he was tall and rail-thin, with black, glaring eyes and the patchy, stringy beard of a teenager trying to look like a man. He glared at me, his unwashed body stinking like those homeless panhandlers you cross the street to avoid. “You better go,” he growled.

  I kept my voice even. “You go. You don’t have to be here, Delecourt. You can leave. You can let all this go. You can cross over.”

  He shook his head, defiant, certain. “I never hurt her. My Jellica. It was that bitch of a wife of mine. She kept trying to keep us apart. She couldn’t do it, though. We’re together now. Always.”

  “This isn’t always,” I said, calmly. “This is just a trap you’ve built, and you’re both in it.”

  Delecourt smiled. “You don’t even understand. You don’t know what I’ve done for her.”

  What he’d done for her? I wanted to knock his teeth in for what he’d done for her. For the hell he’d put her through. For the hell he was keeping her in. But I knew anger wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get mad. I had to get smart.

  “I know you’re keeping her here,” I said.

  “Yes. Yes, that’s the point,” he said. “She’s safe here. It’s the best I can do.”

  He opened his hands and looked down at them, empty and helpless. They were little boy’s hands and he was a child again.

  Behind us, the door opened. Billy looked up, eyes wide, welling up with tears.

  An ogre strode into the room.

  “Who the fuck are you talking to?” it said to the boy.

  “Nobody,” Billy answered, with the quick habit of habitual apology.

  The ogre walked to the bed, ignoring me as if I wasn’t there. Which I suppose I wasn’t.

  He took his huge hand and placed it on the boy’s head. He was a monstrous man; his body hairy, bulging, distorted; his gray face covered with a sandpaper five o’clock shadow; his eyebrows wild and bushy; his knuckles swollen and knobby. He stank of shit and sweat and urine. He was a giant out of a fairy tale. Popeye’s Bluto. A child’s nightmare of the awful power of the grown-up.

  “Have you thought about what I said?” His voice was a low rumble in my rib cage, like the bass beat at a rock concert.

  “Kind of, but—” The boy started to speak. The ogre twisted Billy’s head upward, wrenching his neck.

  “Are you going to whine again?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The man’s breath smelled like beer and onions and rotting meat. “Have you thought about how sick you are? Have you figured out what’s wrong with you?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  He smacked Billy with his hammer of a hand. “Don’t lie to me! You think you can fool me like I’m some kind of retard? You’re not leaving this room until you give me an answer. Do you hear me!?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not leaving this room!”

  The boy nodded rapidly, hoping that a wordless reply wouldn’t provoke him.

  It didn’t work. The boy’s head rocketed back from the ogre’s slap.

  “You sick little fuck!” the ogre cried. “You’re making it happen again. Look at what you’re doing to me.” He bent down and kissed the boy with his blistered lips.

  A hand gripped my shoulder and pulled me away, yanking me out of this room and back into Jellica’s windowless prison. I turned to see the grown-up Delecourt holding me, keeping me there.

  “You like to watch?” he asked me. “Is that what gets you off?”

  In anger, I seized Delecourt by the hand that held me, prying it off my shoulder. He looked startled, surprised that I could do that.

  He still hadn’t accepted that I wasn’t helpless in front of him. It was then, I think, that he realized what a mistake he’d made inviting me in. I was learning. I was learning how to navigate in this world.

  I swung him around, but not through the room, not through space. I swung him through time, back to that other room. I can’t explain how I did it; it was as if I’d found a new muscle, a new limb I’d never known I had. I could work this world as if it was a part of me. I had learned so much.

  Delecourt wrenched himself away.

  “You touched her,” I shouted at him, spewing hate.

  “I had to. She’s like me. She’s got so much sin in her. I had to find a way to let it out. To release the lust from her.”

  He wasn’t lying. Feeling nauseated, I realized that he’d made his sin her own and convinced himself that all he’d done had been done to save her. “You thought you were protecting her?” I asked.

  “I am. You saw what happened to her when I left. What my wife did to her. God, that was my fault. I’ll never let anything happen to her again. I have to keep her safe.”

  “Let her go, Delecourt. Nothing can hurt her if you let her go. She needs to pass over.”

  “No! She’s sinned. She’s evil. If I let her go, she goes to hell.”

  “She won’t. She’s innocent, she’ll—”

  “Nobody’s innocent, you stupid fuck. We’re all corrupt.”

  “We’re not,” I said. “We don’t have to be.” I took Delecourt by the wrist.

  “What do you want to do to me?” He tried to pull away, but I held him still. I had the power to do that, and this was why it had been given to me.

  I turned to the ogre, calling, “You!”

  The ogre stopped moving, his back hunched over. But he didn’t turn to look. He tried to ignore me.

  “You heard me!” I cried.
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  The ogre twisted around, black slime dripping from his broken teeth. “You’re next,” he growled.

  “Show me your room,” I said.

  He tilted his shaggy head, puzzled.

  “Show it to me,” I repeated, my voice calm, steady.

  It seemed he was used to being told what to do—the sudden wash of fear looked absurd on his heavy brow. I reached forward, pulling Delecourt along with me. Before the ogre could back away, I’d pressed my hand against his greasy chest, pushing it wrist deep between his huge ribs, plunging inside of him.

  The world twisted and rippled again. We found ourselves in a new room. A tree house made of splintered planks and knotty branches. A group of boys were huddled in the center of an uneven floor, spitting on something, laughing at it, punching it with their hard little fists, kicking it with their Keds-clad feet.

  I craned my neck, though I knew what I would see. A small boy curled up in the center of their huddle, wet with spit and tears.

  “Look at the pussy cry,” the boys said. “You know what we do with pussies?” And they started to piss on him.

  “Who is that poor boy?” I asked Delecourt.

  Delecourt yanked at my hand, trying to turn us both away. “I hate this place,” he screamed.

  But then I understood. The little boy was the ogre as a child. And he grew up to be Billy Delecourt’s father.

  “This is where he comes from, isn’t it?” I said. “Your monster. This is his room.”

  The rooms were like Russian nesting dolls, I told him. One resting inside the other. Delecourt’s father’s room in this tree house, Delecourt’s room inside that, and Jellica’s room inside that. And outside of those rooms, there were others, on and on. There was no telling how far back it went. It was a legacy, passed from generation to generation.

  “Original sin,” Delecourt whispered.

  “No,” I told him. “It started somewhere. It can end somewhere. It can end with you.”

  He looked at me, terrified. “No. This is the way things are. I can’t change this….”

  “Take us back,” I told him. “I want you to take us back to Jellica’s room.”

  He couldn’t meet my eye. “You do it.”

  “No,” I said. “It has to be you. I can’t do it.”

  Delecourt shut his eyes, tears streaking the dirt on his face. And he did it.

  He made it be Jellica’s room again. You and Jellica sat in the playpen, but we could see you. We could do anything we wanted, if only we knew it.

  “Let her go,” I said to Delecourt.

  His breath caught in his throat. “I can’t.”

  “Don’t you see? She’s trying to pass it on to Maggie. Even though she’s dead, she’s still trying to pass this pain on. That’s how strong it is.”

  “Too strong.”

  “But you can break the chain. You’re the one who’s holding her here. You can let her go.”

  “No. She’s safe here. She’s not hurting anyone.”

  “You know that’s not true. She’s not like you, not like the others. She’s too powerful. Power like hers, combined with this kind of pain, is too strong. It can’t be contained. She’s killing Maggie. She’s killing me. She’ll take Kathleen next, and she won’t stop there. She’s too powerful to be trapped between worlds like this. You have to let Jellica go.”

  “But what will happen to her?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows. But it’s what has to happen.”

  He turned in my grasp, twisting, writhing, changing from man to boy and back again. “Won’t he be mad?” the boy asked me.

  “Who?”

  “The monster?”

  “He won’t know,” I told him. “Not if you go, too.”

  His eyes opened wide with fear. “I can’t. If I leave here, I’ll go to hell.”

  “This is hell,” I told him. “There’s no hell unless you build it. You put up these walls and you can tear them down.”

  He shut his eyes. The color drained from him. I felt him trying to disappear, but it was a trick he couldn’t play with me. Not anymore.

  I heard the patter of dripping water on the floor next to me and turned to see Jellica at my side, looking up.

  “Daddy?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  He shut his eyes tighter, turning away from her. Fading from her view.

  “Where are you going, Daddy? Where are you going?”

  The color drained from the room around us. I felt the walls grow less substantial, as if they were beginning to stop being walls. The white figure was there again, flitting past my peripheral vision like a flat stone skipping on water. It was sharper and more defined than before. Growing more real as the room began to fade.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Delecourt told her. “You are.”

  Jellica blinked her eyes in confusion. The white figure was swirling behind her now. “I don’t want to go anywhere, Daddy. Are you mad at me?”

  The white figure was wrapping itself around her. It was a woman, I could see that now. Its smoky gown fluttered to wrap itself around Jellica.

  “I’m not mad at you, Jessica,” Delecourt said, his eyes still closed, his shape flickering and dimming. “I love you. Go with her.”

  The white figure bent low, her hair flowing around her face. She looked up at me now, eyes piercing and brilliant. I knew the face. I’d seen through those eyes. It was the Good Mother, her expression filled with compassion and hope. Jellica’s little face tilted up toward hers, and for the first time, I saw peace on the little girl’s features. Their arms flowed into each other until they were the same figure, and then they were gone.

  I looked around for you, but I couldn’t see you anywhere. It was getting harder and harder to see anything here. The place was disappearing from the world, and everything in it was flowing away.

  I could hear Delecourt sobbing. A faint sound, from a great distance.

  “Go with her!” I called to him. “Go!”

  From a long way off I could just glimpse him, just make him out shaking his head, small, tiny, helpless. “I live here,” I heard him say.

  And then water burst through the windows, though the windows themselves were gone, and crushed the walls, though they weren’t walls anymore. Freezing water engulfed me. I resisted it, shaking it off me like a dog.

  I was in the kitchen at our house. On the Thorofare.

  I heaved a sigh of relief. Everything was normal now. The way it was supposed to be. There was Mom and Dad and George at the table playing cards. I pulled up a chair and joined them, happy, relaxed for the first time in years.

  But I wondered if I’d done something wrong. They were looking at me, surprised and maybe a little irritated, as if I’d committed some obvious faux pas.

  “Can I play?” I asked.

  Dad laughed, good-natured. “No.”

  “Not yet, little brother,” George said, shaking his head.

  “Wait for the next hand,” Mom said, reasonable as ever.

  Then the room filled with water, and they were gone.

  Cold air and moonlight hit me with a sudden shock. I was struggling on the surface of the quarry, my lungs and arms and legs blazing with pain. My hand slapped against stone. I grabbed the granite ledge and pulled myself toward it. I saw you stretched out on the gray rock, foam drooling from your open lips.

  I don’t know where I found the strength to pull myself out of that water. It came from some deep reserve I never knew I had and that I’ll never be able to refill. I’ll die a month earlier because of that effort, but at least it’ll be some month in the future. The distant future, I hope.

  I hauled myself up onto the rock and crawled to your pale, still body. I pushed on your little stomach, trying to pump water out of you. I opened your lips and blew my breath into you, filling your chest. Again. Again. I wanted to give you all my breath, every breath I’d ever taken and would ever take. I gave you as much as I could, and between my breaths I heard myself repeating the same n
onsense words, over and over.

  “Knock-knock. Who’s there? Banana. Knock-knock. Who’s there? Banana. Knock-knock. Who’s there….”

  You still hadn’t told me the rest of your joke, Maggie. You couldn’t die without delivering the punch line. You couldn’t leave work that important unfinished.

  Your jaw clenched, and you spit up water and phlegm. I scooped the spit and vomit from your lips and breathed into you again.

  You breathed back at me, feebly.

  Orange, I thought, remembering the joke from when I was four. Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?

  My eyes drifted shut, and I fell back toward the water. Someone caught me. My eyes opened, and I saw Neil and your mother standing over your shivering body. Someone asked me if I was all right. I looked up and saw that it was Kathleen holding me in her arms.

  I laughed. They looked worried, like I was acting crazy or something. But they just didn’t get the joke.

  I’d never been better in my life.

  I don’t know that Neil and your mother ever made up, exactly. They just spent the next twenty or so hours hovering over you, caring for you. Comforting each other. Bringing each other food, taking shifts sleeping and eating. They became a unit, a team. A couple. So, I don’t think they have a choice. They’re going to have to work out their shit, whether they want to or not.

  With me and Kathleen, it’s a little less clear. She showed up at the hospital after we were airlifted to the mainland. She’s brought me coffee four times and Chinese food once. She hasn’t left town. And I think she’s genuinely glad I’m not dead. More than that, we’ll just have to wait and see.

  Waiting is the main thing we do now. Waiting for you to wake up, to open your eyes, to laugh. They won’t tell us if you will. They act as if they’re protecting us, holding back information that might disturb us, but I think that’s just an act. They don’t know either. And they’re so foolish, they don’t even know that they don’t know. They ask me how long you were in the water, but how can I give them an answer they’d understand? We’d spent a lifetime in that quarry, you and me.

  The Good Mother isn’t trapped here like the other spooks. She’s not here because of fear or denial or pain. She’s not looking for her missing children, not the way I thought. She’s here for the same reason I am. For the same reason I think you are, Maggie. She’s here to help the lost ones, the trapped ones. We can help them from this side; she can help them from the other.