by Anne Valente
A familiar summit, an anniversary, where nearly a year ago we’d brought this on ourselves. The enclosed space of the rocket felt wistful, as if we were young again, as if we had a chance to take this back, to decide against speaking and summoning. But there was no Nick, no Rachel. There was no Trina, no Craig bent over mirror shards, friends we’d heedlessly traded for novelty, fleeting thrill. Tom looked as us, waiting, and Misty Jones blurted out, We could dig him up, we could set him free. We held our breath, a thought we’d all shared, but Tom said no, we’d be too obvious, with the police and FBI, volunteers swarming the streets. And Stillwater Park was closed at dusk, he said, due to curfew, and where would we find shovels? Would we have the strength to dig?
Tom watched us a moment, and we knew then that he’d formed a plan. I will have a party, he said. His birthday, two weeks away. We would all be invited, would share cake and ice cream, but when his parents went back upstairs, time alone he knew they’d grant us, we would gather in the basement bathroom. We would summon the Rosewood Phantom, just as he and his babysitter had done before, and we would at last close this portal, send him home and away from us forever.
When Tom finished speaking, none of us said a word. We felt relief, finally sensing closure, some schematic of structure to rein in chaos. But we were frightened, wordless in terror, of a specter we’d only imagined, one we’d seen in no more than fluttering curtains, in shape-shifting circles of pooled streetlight. We have to do this, Tom said, and we knew that he was right. We knew the word right, as well as we’d known it then, though knowing cleared no path for us, no well-worn route to mercy.
On the day of Tom’s birthday party, our parents drove us willingly. A distraction, some flash of joy amid weeks of panic, and supervised, all of us in one place. We wore party hats, festive cones. We brought gifts, ate cake, not caring whether we garnered a corner piece or the middle, the amount of icing so trivial in the wake of our mission. We pinned tails on a donkey, we watched Tom open his gifts. We wondered whether his parents knew from Tom’s lack of zeal for each gift opened, or if they assumed only the heavy shade of our classmates, missing, shared celebrations no longer shared, our sanctuary fractured and broken. When Tom finished opening gifts and asked if we could watch cartoons by ourselves, they didn’t hesitate, moved upstairs, offered us the allocated solitude they must have guessed we needed.
When Tom heard the door to the basement shut, heard its click, he raised the volume on the television, gathered us into the bathroom, lit a candle and turned off the lights. The pitch dark startled us, no windows, no light, no sun, only a flame casting our faces in ethereal glow, illumining the outlines of the mirror and sink, Tom’s bloodstain still darkening its edge.
We’ve come to summon you, Tom began, to drive you back from where you came. An introduction that felt forced, even to us, and some of us laughed, giggled into our hands, out of nervousness, we knew, not humor. Tom stepped in front, before all of us, leaned his face close to the mirror. The candle lit his face from beneath, like flashlights held under chins beside campfires, for ghost stories, a terror we longed for, something foreign and lost. Then Tom turned to us. Say it with me, he said. And though our hearts drummed anthems inside our chests, though our temples broke small beads of sweat, we stood as tall as we knew how, straightened our backs like we’d learned to do before scoliosis tests, like we’d done against height charts.
Karen Kettleman, the quietest, said it first. Rosewood Phantom. The words on her tongue ripped chills across our skin. But we said it with her, Rosewood Phantom, and thought of Craig, of Rachel, of Trina. We let go of their pencil boxes, their friendship bracelets, handed over our need for vigil, for memory. We thought of Nick and yearned for him the most, to tell us this legend was for children, that there was nothing to fear.
And then, as we watched, the mirror began to tremble. We watched Tom wince, for only a moment, and then he said it first, the second chant, the fugue of our voices all waterfalling behind him. We heard ourselves speak as the mirror vibrated and shook, and for once we felt weightless, our guilt floated and hovering, even among terror, the greatest we’d known, every fear we’d kept secret escaped and at hand.
The mirror rattled against the wall, a noise drowned out by cartoons beyond the bathroom, a muted blare that settled an ache inside our bones, to be there watching, to be there and not here. But we felt right, so feathered and light—not just for our classmates but for everyone, those astronauts, each plane passenger, every voice choked silent by poison cloud or bloom and we pushed the last summon from ourselves, for them and for all of us, Rosewood Phantom, Rosewood Phantom, Rosewood Phantom. We screamed it for what we’d done, for what we’d not done and for every life ahead of us, every disaster averted, for everyone we imagined, every moment big and beautiful and rolled out before us, unscripted. As we spoke, the mirror stopped shaking, and a fogged swirl appeared in the center. And then the candle blew out, quick eclipse, and Tom flicked on the lights and we stood together, all of us there, every one of us wild-eyed and breathless and still.
After the New Year, after we watched the ball drop with our parents, wishing the year goodbye in the quiet privacy of our hearts, a year we wished to never see again, the FBI caught a man in Illinois, 1979 Buick LeSabre Estate, his vehicle linked to Rosewood. They caught him in a motel with a nine-year-old girl—still alive, returned her to her parents—spread the news across Rosewood and across the whole nation, Rosewood killer caught, Rosewood terror laid to rest.
We grew up, in spite of ourselves. We never knew the stain of kidnap or murder again, not after that year; had classroom birthdays and Halloween costume parades, the same as every other kid. We graduated into junior high, then high school, bloomed inside the softness of first kisses, first dances, held each other awkwardly beneath banners and before photographers, made faltering steps to connect. We never spoke of the Rosewood Phantom again, grew apart gradually, beyond initially comparing what we saw, what we might never have seen. Tom Davies swore he saw torn rags. Misty Jones, the bloodied shape of a face. But we stopped talking altogether when the killer was caught, our fear still unsettled that we’d ever endure this again. Because even though our town celebrated, though the FBI, the police and volunteers disbanded, we wondered what no one else addressed, what our parents hushed us for, when we raised the question unasked.
Why wasn’t that girl from Rosewood?
Every other child gone missing, all of our friends, every anguish we bore, all here. But not her. A question we knew our parents wondered too, at times, and the parents of Trina, of Craig, a closure they’d never find.
We grew up. We left ourselves behind. We built homecoming floats, earned our driver’s licenses, attended proms though we held hidden the burn of our classmates who never grew with us, never bought their first cigarette packs, never held someone close inside a car, a kiss goodnight, never unloaded their suitcases in front of their college dorms, never waved their parents goodbye.
We see it from the other side, now, hold that heartbreak as close as our children, those of us who have them, who didn’t turn away from the possibility of a grief so vast, who understand now what all those parents lost. We’ve survived the collapse of regimes, the collapse of buildings, shootings inside schools, disaster after disaster that we couldn’t have prevented, couldn’t have caused. We watch the news with feigned disinterest, and we tell no one of the dull throb that hides, always, beneath the bones that hold our hearts.
Because we are waiting, all of us, though we never speak to one another, though we never go home to Rosewood. We are waiting for our shadows to claim us, as we tuck in our children, as we watch the evening news, for a killer never caught, for a closure that we have never found. We are waiting for a phantom to come for us at last, to pry open our windows, to smother this immeasurable guilt.
MOLLUSK, MEMBRANE, HUMAN HEART
When Dr. Carver made his rounds, clipboard in hand to check every lab’s progress, Walter held the eyedropper high, te
nded fastidiously to the octopus’s dietary needs, and checked the aerators to ensure that enough oxygen passed over her eggs, a thousand small pearls beaded beneath her tentacles. Yet after Dr. Carver peered over his glasses, nodded stern approval, and closed the metal laboratory doors behind him, Walter set down the eyedropper and stared into the tank, sometimes curled himself into a ball with his kneecaps settled into his eye sockets, and tried to remember how the world felt in the womb.
The small female—which Walter had named Sedna, though he never spoke the name aloud—hung a laced cord of eggs along the ceiling of her lair, a makeshift cave of plastic and store-bought rocks, and splayed her tentacles across the roof to protect them, though Walter saw the satin globes anyway through the translucence of her suctioned feet. There were thousands of them, a caviar of test subjects, and Walter knew Sedna would die once they were born. He’d tried to feed her, an eyedropper of sugar water, no substitute for crabs. She’d ingested one of her own arms instead, a behavior Walter knew was common among mothering octopuses but he regarded this as protest nonetheless, Sedna stretched thin across the roof of the cave.
What they’d done was wrong. Walter felt the wrong rattle in the marrow of his bones, standing there in the lowest reaches of the labs, hidden away where officials from the National Academy of Sciences would never find them. Up above, tanks upon tanks of zebra fish filled the labs, creatures within the realm of regulation—their capacity to breed in enormous numbers, their small, lucent bodies fertile for the type of research Dr. Carver wished to conduct. Cardiovascular disease, he’d told the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, all those zebra fish and their tiny glowing hearts, to further our understanding of the organ that sustains us. But within the anonymity of night, Dr. Carver had caught an octopus himself, had pulled Sedna from the wild-dark sea beyond the reaches of the labs and had locked her beneath the ground for Walter to oversee, for Walter to ignore the experimental regulations on octopuses, the laws mandating that no surgery be performed without anesthesia for their nearly infinite nerves.
We are groundbreakers, Dr. Carver had told Walter once as they locked up the lab. Any scientist can find a cure for heart disease, but we, we will find the origins of love.
Walter had let his eyes slide toward the tank, had disavowed any we Dr. Carver intended.
The complex nervous system, the neurons in their arms, their problem-solving capacities and their ability to find their way through mazes—for all of these reasons, Dr. Carver had said, octopuses were the perfect candidate for exposing the human mystery of love. In the neurons, the synapses, the brain activity blinking blue, he would find that love was nothing more than a firing of electrical impulses, a Petri dish of tangible chemistry.
We can eradicate divorce, Dr. Carver said. We can match synapses perfectly, brain to brain, no messy guesswork involved. He’d laughed and looked at Walter. Animals don’t have feelings, and neither do we. It’s all just biology, nothing more.
Walter peered over the edge of the tank, watched Sedna’s tentacles creep along the edges of her cave, there beneath the wavering surface of the water. Dr. Carver fixated on the brain but ignored her multiple hearts, a cephalopod, one of the only organisms with more than one center. Walter imagined her three hearts pumping lucid blood, three hearts to sustain her weak body, to beat above her pearls of children, and to perish, when they were born into this world.
When the thousands of eggs hatched and Sedna withered away, weak and feeble, Dr. Carver told Walter to dispose of her down the laboratory toilet and separate the small octopuses into containers. Walter donned latex gloves, divided the babies with a fishnet, and placed them in bowls no bigger than baseballs, to be dispersed among the basement labs, to be overseen by other attendants and prepped for adulthood, for surgery without the costly expense of numbing agents. Walter did as he was told, kept a hundred fishbowls in his own lab to watch and aerate, but he slid Sedna into a plastic container and stowed her quietly inside his briefcase.
At home, Walter waited for Roseline to return from work before they stepped outside together, through the backyard to the frog pond, a saltwater remnant of the sea that once washed over the land. Roseline observed with solemn poise as Walter lowered the octopus into the water; she crouched down and patted Walter’s shoulder as he watched Sedna float away, disappear.
A sad day, she said, as Sedna’s tentacles receded, hovering on the water as if waving goodbye. It’s a shame they die after childbirth.
Walter gritted his teeth and stared at the water.
You know, honey, you can quit. Roseline rubbed her palm across his shoulders. We don’t need the money. At least, not that bad.
Walter touched her palm, pulled her hand across his chest. She knew everything about the animals, the zebra fish and octopuses, and now she knew what was illegal, what constituted his crimes.
I can’t leave them. He sighed, breath rippling the water. God, it sounds so stupid, but I can’t. All those eggs.
Walter thought of the marbled eggs, creatures balled inside their tiny wombs and unfurling into light, shiny billiard balls burst to mollusks, their tentacles stretched and splayed beyond their shells. Roseline’s hand squeezed his, a language developed without words, a tongue they knew alone, the squeeze of the childless while babies bloomed all around them, a grip that breathed I know.
That man is a fool, she said. You do what you can. Those eggs, they’re in no better hands.
And Walter squeezed her hand back but wondered, if only for a moment—he wondered what she saw when she looked at him, what pheromones and oxytocin swirled through her brain to blind her to the trespasses he allowed, the mistakes he sidled alongside, complicit. As the baby octopuses grew, Walter fed them sugar water, pumped full of vitamins and antibodies that would mask the lack of crabs, provide the nutrients starfish could not. Walter prepared them, documented their growth and size for Dr. Carver, but in the quieter moments in the lab, between feedings and aeration, Walter settled into his chair and blinked at the small mollusks through their bowls.
Little suction cups, no bigger than pencil points. Tentacles waving, testing their own movement, a fluid blanket of only muscles, no bone, just the beak Walter imagined squeezing through small spaces, the only hard place on their whole jelly bodies. Some of the octopuses began shifting colors, from their mottled pearl to muted yellows and orange that blended into what, Walter didn’t know, their shapes the only substance in a lab of metal and endless water.
One morning, as Walter held the eyedropper over the fishbowls, he accidentally squeezed three drops into one bowl instead of the regulated two, and watched as the tiny mollusk below him swelled in size and color, muted gray to bright green. Walter crouched low, examined the little octopus through the glass, a billowing emerald circling the bowl. The octopus punched the water with tiny tentacles, then floated down to the floor of the bowl and lay there, skin flushed back to gray.
Walter blinked at the octopus. He dropped another sugar droplet into the water. The mollusk pulsed key-lime green and leapt, then receded back to the color of rain.
Walter looked around the room.
In moments he held a small rock poised high, the same that had adorned Sedna’s cave, and dropped it squarely into the bowl, a splashing meteor hurtling through the water. The octopus darted to the rounded edges, flattening itself against glass as the rock settled to the floor, and then turned the darkest red Walter had ever seen, angrier than poison oak.
Walter stood in the middle of the lab, surrounded by fishbowl upon fishbowl, a room full of snow-globed pods. He walked on tiptoe among the bowls, peering cautiously down into the stilled surfaces, and dropped another pebble here and there, breath held as helium within his lungs. But none of the other babies reacted; they simply darted away without changing shades, and Walter picked up the fishbowl with the irritable mollusk inside—faded pink, sliding back to blemished gray—and set him apart, placed his sphere of a home beneath the lamp on his desk.
As t
he baby octopuses matured, Dr. Carver rounded the labs, made notes in his charts, studied their small anatomies for the best angle of incision, the ripest points of entry into their developing, fertile brains. He drew diagrams, held them side by side, pointed to the vertical lobe of the octopus brain and murmured yes, hummed the word beneath his breath, trailed his finger from there to the amygdala sketched inside the human model, where he believed the ghost of love resided.
This must be it, he told Walter—the place that holds all those electrical impulses. Those firing synapses that tell you to buy your wife flowers, to do the dishes.
Dr. Carver laughed, a wheezing cough. Walter didn’t know anything about Dr. Carver’s personal life or marriage, but he imagined something snarky and scornful, some relation full of contempt.
They are almost ready, Dr. Carver said. He stared at Walter through the glass of his spectacles. Are you ready for a windfall of press? Think of all the heartache we can prevent, the broken relationships we can thwart.
Walter nodded and looked away, and when Dr. Carver left the room, he pulled the fishbowl on his desk out from behind the lamp, his hiding place for the small octopus whenever the doctor entered.
In the weeks since Walter first set him aside, he’d watched the growing octopus shift through a spectacular rainbow of colors, an array that none of the other babies displayed. He turned banana yellow when Walter shined the lamplight above him, and pumpkin orange when Walter placed other fishbowls near him, tiny tentacles splayed against the glass. He even turned deep purple once, when Walter placed a handkerchief over the fishbowl and left him alone for two days.