by JT Ellison
He said, “She didn’t blow away or nuthin’, so you know, or whatever.”
Brindy swatted at the air between them, but didn’t make a move to get out of bed. Her head was thick with something other than booze, and she was having trouble shaking it clear.
“Why am I… Jesus, pervert, what’d you do?”
“I ain’t no pervert where you’re concerned, and you know that. You and your pop and that girl of yours are family like my blood is family.”
“I’m just foggy is all. No offense meant.”
“Family don’t always mean friend, though.”
She nodded, not sure what to say to that, and horked up a thick wad of phlegm. The room spun when she spit off the side of her bed, and she was aware of her mouth opening and her tongue moving and some kind of sound coming out, but the specifics were gooey. When she woke up again, the pervert was gone, her head was clear, and she had a decade’s worth of mourning to do.
Brindy read the coupon circulars with a cigarette and a coffee mug full of DayQuil. The storm that had blown through took some trees and some trailers with it but left behind the shitty weather and oppressive heat. She’d taken a walk around the park when she woke the second time, hoping everything she remembered was a dream, or her imagination. But nobody was outside, and she wasn’t ready to go talk to people until she cleared her head and made a plan. A picture of her baby from a birthday party last year was on her phone and reminded her that at least some of it was real. She had a daughter and her daughter was gone.
Nine years old. How had that happened? Brindy tried, she really did. The minutes and hours had gone so wrong, but the years, they’d been okay. The birthday party at the skating rink. Church camp. Even days around the park with Pop. She’d done what she could. Weren’t a lot of men in her life to look to, and the women weren’t much for role modeling, either, but she didn’t hit her baby, didn’t touch her with anything but motherly love. And she fed her carrots and whole milk and made her read real books without pictures. Her baby was smart.
Brindy rubbed her thumb across the cracked phone. Even through the webbing of broken glass, NeNe’s aura shone brightly through the decrepit trailer. Framed photos on the wall across the room, moist with rancid condensation, anchored Brindy’s nerves and kept the worst of her… the worst of everything… in check. Without her baby, whatever was left, Brindy would be left with the rot of her world, the rot of her life, the rot of forever.
She finished her drink, put her cigarette out in the kitchen sink, and put on enough clothes to keep temptation away from her neighbors, but not so much she’d suffocate from the heat. She’d strut across the park in her rain boots and a smile if she weren’t too Christian to cause her fellow man to stumble. She settled for a linen dress and steel-toed boots—bought on credit for a week’s work in a factory—in case she had to kick off a snake or swamp rat, and carried Pop’s old cane just in case.
The pervert across the way saw her coming and met her on the porch. She waved and dug her boot toe into the ground in front of her. It was spongy and clung to her boot like her grandma’s Jell-O salad clung to their old dog one year at Christmas, when he was being an ass and knocked over the dinner table.
“You look better,” he said. “So we can go see the preacher now.”
“That man ain’t no preacher,” Brindy said. “Don’t care how many crosses he wears or prayers he says.”
“You want that precious girl of yours to pass on the right way, you got to get a man of God to—”
“I’ll pass my baby on myself. Don’t need no preacher man to hold my baby and ask God not to send her to hell.”
“But the preacher says—”
Brindy kicked him in the balls and smacked him across the back with Pop’s cane. He fell to the ground, gasping.
“’Less you want this cane somewhere even the preacher can’t reach it to bless, you’ll keep your mouth shut and help me find my baby.”
He nodded, and when he was breathing again, she helped him up. They walked around to the back of the park where Brindy remembered seeing someone pick up her daughter. Park was too ambitious a word for where they lived, she thought, as they slowly marked their steps along the outer edge of the dozen trailers that made up their little compound. It was far enough away from schools and playgrounds and pools to be safe for anyone on the sex offender registry, including her father, who was dying of lung cancer and didn’t have anyone else to take care of him. Her baby was supposed to spend time with Pop in his last days and build memories and a family tree, then go on and live a life Brindy couldn’t provide her alone. Pop and his rotting lungs weren’t supposed to outlive her baby.
Brindy and Matthew the pervert walked together toward the spot she’d seen NeNe’s body last night. Regrets from a life of shitty living piled deep in her head, but the big regret was not being with her baby when she… well, during her last few… truth was, she’d been drinking whiskey at Pop’s bedside when NeNe was outside. He’d been a vegetable for a month now, but she couldn’t bring herself to pull the plug. She kept hoping someone from the homecare agency would come for the equipment and make the decision for her, but they never did, so she spent an hour every afternoon drinking and watching Judge Judy with him and an hour every night reading to him from the Bible.
“I saw you in the window when it happened,” Matthew said, touching her arm lightly.
A creepy tingle slithered up her arm like a leech and she shook his hand away. Had he touched her baby like that? She’d never thought of that. The perverts in the trailer park, they were family. They bought her a turkey at Christmas and NeNe a Barbie doll Jeep to drive around the park in the summer.
Brindy swung Pop’s cane at him and missed his head by an inch or so, which sent Matthew to the ground again. She stood over him.
“Did you touch my baby?”
The pervert shook his head and curled into a fetal ball.
“I was just looking out for her. You let her bob around here like a piece a chum for these others… these other… we don’t want to touch nobody’s babies. We living right, and staying away, and you can’t just keep putting us in position to… you can’t just—”
Brindy poked the cane into the pervert’s throat.
“Didn’t say I cared about anybody else ’round here. You the only one watching us every day.”
“You ain’t watching your own baby, so somebody should, and that somebody’s me.”
She eased the cane off his neck and helped him back up again.
“Already feel bad enough about my mothering,” she said. “Don’t need a pervert like you making me feel worse.”
Matthew nodded and took her hand. The creepy tingle was still there, but faded a bit. She turned her hand so she was shaking his instead of holding it.
“Tell me what you saw.”
“I always been worried about them wires over there,” he said, grabbing the cane and pointing toward a mess of jumper cables and circuit boxes and wires wrapped around a small tree. “Think maybe one person in the entire park pays for electricity and everyone else taps into that… mess.”
Brindy tried to take the cane back, but Matthew pushed her off with his shoulder and kept pointing at the tree as he walked toward it.
“Your girl was a climber,” he said. “Reminded me of my own Ruby back in the day. But you look around and it’s all swamp and no good climbing trees.”
“Except that one,” Brindy said.
“Except that one.”
“I don’t even think she cared about climbing. She liked the jumping. Wanted me to put her in gymnastics. Can’t afford food without bugs in it, but expects me to find money for gymnastics.”
“Every day I seen her over there looking at that tree like she had a plan. Couldn’t do nothing from my house while I watched her. Kept hoping she’d turn back, but… well, I don’t think she suffered any, if that makes any difference.”
Brindy thought about yesterday. One of her worst days of the year, e
ven before this. The weather. The whiskey. The everything. She’d done some things with Dusty she hoped would relax her, but the whiskey got to him, too, and pissed ’em both off even more.
“You shoulda come and told me,” she said softly.
“Knocked quite a bit when she was in the tree,” he said. “Heard some moaning that sounded private, so I kept on walking.”
“Jesus,” Brindy whispered, then silently said a prayer asking for forgiveness.
“I went around back, too, but didn’t want to get too close to her. We’re doing life right this time. Best we can, you know? And that means stayin’ away from what haunts us.”
“You saw her fall?”
“Like it was one of them slow motion replays on television,” he said. “Even remember reaching my arms out, like maybe I could catch her or something from all the way over here. But all I caught was a vision I can’t shake from my dreams and a nasty eye from you.”
“And she was dead?”
“Wasn’t moving, and that scream… being dead’s the best thing for her after that scream.”
The combination of memories and guilt and the creeping wetness in the air made Brindy sick to her stomach. She put her hand out to hold herself up with the cane before remembering she didn’t have it, and fell face first into the swampy ground. Matthew crouched down next to her and pulled her face out of a puddle by her hair.
“You seen where it happened. You made me hear that scream again. So now we goin’ to the preacher to make sure that baby passes on the right way.”
She nodded the best she could with her movement restricted by Matthew’s grip on her hair, and he pushed her face back into the mud.
The preacher had a trailer in the park, but he never stayed there more than a few hours on Sundays, to watch football or play cards with the other perverts after reading something to them from his old crusty Bible and saying a prayer for their souls. A quick walk around the trailer confirmed no one was there, so Brindy and Matthew set off on the walk to the bigger house. That’s where the preacher spent his days with his families, and did God knows what else in the small house out back.
Brindy had been to the big house with its giant, decaying steel gate once before, when she first arrived at the park with NeNe. The preacher, no name ever given, was the one who ran the park, and he’d tried several times to talk her out of staying. Toward the end of that meeting, he even hinted that something awful would happen to Pop if she stayed and corrupted the perfect balance of healing intent he said he’d created. But Brindy insisted, he relented, and they drank two bottles of wine by the fire while NeNe played with the preacher’s wife.
“Never understood where this place came from,” Matthew said as they approached the gate. “Looks like it should be up north in New York or Massachusetts as a school for preppy kids or horse riders or something, not out here in this swampy hell.”
“Fits in around here about as well as that preacher man.”
“I had a dream once, the first time I came out here,” Matthew said. “Drank a beer with the preacher and fell asleep on his couch. I remember seeing him in this old black wool coat standing out by these gates right here trying to get in. Dancing around, putting a hand or a foot through the bars, but never walking through the gates. Went on like that for a time before these big ol’ gates turned blue and zapped that preacher man right in the heart.”
“Like my baby.”
“Never did believe him when he said I had more than one drink, but who am I to argue with a man of God, right?”
“We shouldn’t be here.”
Brindy turned to walk away, successfully grabbing the cane from Matthew this time.
“You walk away, you’ll always wonder,” Matthew said.
“Better than seeing whatever he’s done to her in there.”
“Ain’t nothing bad in that house. Too cold and stone and barren.”
“Not the one out back.”
The small carriage house out back fit the area better. Sagging wood that had once been elaborately engraved and trimmed held up a roof with enough peaks and turrets to make the whole thing look like a giant wooden birthday cake. The red and yellow paint had long ago peeled away in most places, replaced with cobwebs and climbing vines, and the walkway to the front door was clouded in a hazy red mist Brindy imagined was from brimstone. She reached out for Matthew’s hand, but hesitated, remembering the creepy tingling she got each time they touched earlier.
Matthew knocked once before the preacher appeared at the door. He had a wide smile full of yellow teeth and puffy gums. His hair was messy and electrified with static. The black wool coat Matthew mentioned from his dream was draped over the preacher’s shoulders, even though Brindy’s old weather thermometer on her porch had shown the temperature nearing ninety that morning.
“It was wet last night, or you would have been here sooner, I reckon,” he said, waving them inside.
The smell inside matched the rest of the house. The air was still and flat, musty, rotting, and vaguely electric. Brindy wished she’d worn something more concealing and protective than her thin linen dress. She felt the spirits of the house move through the flat air and through her body and up her legs.
“I want my baby. I want her to… You need to help me—”
“All in good time,” the preacher said. “Would you like a drink first?”
“I don’t want a drink. I want my baby. I want to know what you did to my baby and I want to take her home.”
“The Earth is not our home, my dear Miss Dye. We are but temporary—”
“I don’t need your mumbo jumbo bullshit, preacher man. I want to see my daughter.”
The sharp smile turned quickly to a menacing leer.
“Yes. Let’s go see your daughter.”
Brindy prepared herself mentally for many outcomes. She wanted to be strong in the face of tragedy and strong in the face of even the worst possible outcomes. What she wasn’t prepared for was to hear her daughter say hello.
“Mommy,” NeNe said, her voice floating from a small nook off the entrance to the house. “I missed you.”
Brindy took her daughter in her arms and spun her around joyously, but the mood remained somber. The air remained flat and putrid. Her daughter was not smiling.
“It’s so good to see you, baby. I missed you, too.”
Brindy hugged her daughter again. She expected NeNe to nuzzle her chest, like she did when she was a baby, but NeNe kept her head turned toward the preacher. When the hug was over, Brindy fell back against Matthew in exhaustion and relief.
NeNe said, “Why did you let me die?”
The three walked back to the trailer park in silence. Brindy was confused and horrified by her daughter’s cold demeanor, and Matthew was twitchy and awkward around NeNe, which made Brindy even more nervous.
That night, she decided the time had come for Pop to pass on properly, so she made his favorite spicy chili for dinner and ate three bowls of it in his room. Together, they watched the evening news. Her daughter was spacey and reserved, and every attempt Brindy made at fixing things sent them both into a depressing spiral.
When Pop took his final breath, Brindy kissed his forehead, then dialed the number for the funeral home to come and get him. NeNe was in the other room, but she appeared in Brindy’s side view and quickly swatted Brindy’s phone out of her hand.
“Bury him by the tree,” she said. “Or they’ll come for me, too.”
The corner of NeNe’s mouth wiggled as she stared at Brindy. Her eyes were unfocused, lazing so far apart they seemed to be splitting off from each other. She wobbled around for a few seconds before falling to the floor. Brindy bent down to make sure her daughter was breathing. When she leaned in close to NeNe’s face to listen for a breath, her daughter’s eyes opened, and she snapped at Brindy’s throat with her teeth.
NeNe continued snapping at her mother, even as Brindy scrambled away from the bedroom and slammed the door shut.
“Make him e
lectric,” NeNe said through the door. “We’ll live forever.”
Brindy ran to the kitchen and reached around on top of the icebox until she found the revolver she kept up there for emergencies. She held the gun away from her body as she approached the bedroom door. There were no more sounds coming from the room, so Brindy relaxed her gun hand and ran to Matthew’s house.
“That preacher man did something to my baby,” she said. “I need you to stop me before I do something ungodly.”
She could see Matthew looking down at the gun and waited for him to invite her inside. The invitation never came, and Matthew seemed more off than normal. A salty film of sweat and liquor hung in the air, and each breath Matthew took smelled like the underside of her liquor shelf.
“It’s dark times for you both,” he said, slowly. “You’re edgy and ripe with visions and demons, and that ain’t no time to be grabbing no gun or visiting no preacher man.”
“I need you to watch her for a bit.”
“No, no, no,” he said on the verge of tears. “You can’t be doin’ something like that to me. It’s not right. It’s not right. It’s not right.”
“I don’t have anyone else, and I need to know what he did to her.”
“You thought she was dead, now she’s alive. Rejecting a miracle can only bring you more pain.”
“She’s not alive, and that’s not my daughter. I brought a corpse in my home and the preacher man needs to pay.”
Matthew shut the door and turned the dead bolt.
“I’m living life right. You can’t make me do this.”
“I know you’re always watching her,” Brindy said. “This time I won’t be there, is all.”
She’d taken a few steps away from his trailer, when Matthew opened his door slightly.