by Skyler Andra
That afternoon, I walked home in the pouring rain because I preferred getting soaked over riding the bus with idiots screaming in my ear about the next football match. I groaned when I saw my mother’s car in the driveway of our rented house. She was supposed to be at work. Her being at home meant one thing. My mind grew hyperaware with worry. I paused at the front door, wondering if I should stay there, suspended between one hell and another. Stupid me opened the door and entered.
“Locke?” my mother called out, her voice thick and slurred. “Locke, that you?”
God, not again. “Yeah, Mom. It’s me.”
“Come in here and come sit with me. I got pizza.”
For a second I told myself it’d be all right—that she got the day off, found a good pizza coupon and wanted to hang out with me. That she’d be happy to see me and not angry for ruining her life. Maybe I’d grow wings and fly away from all this.
The instant I saw her seated at the table with a shot of whiskey and a small pile of little white pills in front of her, I knew that I was just being dumbass for wishful thinking. This was just another fucking day.
“Go on,” she said, pushing the box containing two slices of pizza across the table. “You’re probably starving, aren’t you? It’s good. I got it from Delmonique’s, that place on Grand.”
“Cool,” I said evenly, reaching out to grab a paper plate for one slice.
Her hand shot out, wrapping around my wrist. “Hey, didn’t I teach you any manners?” she asked stiffly. “Say, ‘thank you.’”
“Thank you,” I said, managing to keep the sarcasm out of it. Honestly, I’d had a shit day at school and was too tired to deal with a screaming match tonight.
My mom snorted but didn’t let go of me. The way she stood and looked me up and down made me want to bare my teeth. I didn’t want anyone looking at me with such spite, least of all her.
“Look at you,” she sneered, contempt echoing in her voice. “Sit down. You’re not too good to eat at the table are you? To sit with your old mom.”
I sat down as she’d instructed. Better to do what she said than get her started on a rant. Though she toyed with the whiskey, she didn’t down it yet. She watched me with eyes the same gray as mine. Years ago, we were always mistaken for each other and sometimes it startled me how I grew into her looks, the same curves, eyes, hair, short and slightly snubbed nose. I did not want to become her though, heading for the same miserable life where her only relief equated to pills or alcohol.
“You’ve been getting some attitude,” she said, finally airing whatever stick was jammed up her ass. “I saw those applications of yours. You want to go to school.”
A few weeks earlier she’d discovered that I’d been forwarding all of my mail to my guidance counselor at school. Of course I wanted to leave this hellhole of a town behind for good. Leave her. Leave Reg. Every time I looked at that creep I was reminded of all the times he touched me inappropriately when I was twelve. When I told my mother, she accused me of lying and made me apologize to him. That was the day my mom betrayed me in the worst way a mother could. The time she broke me and left my heart in scattered pieces.
“Can’t stick around here forever,” I said with a shrug.
Instantly I regretted it when she slapped her hand down hard on my bare forearm. No matter how many times she’d done it, my mom struck fast, like a fox, and I was left staring in shock at the red and aching welt she’d left on my skin.
“You think you’re better than me?” she hissed, her face darkening. “You think you’re going to get away from this shithole?”
My throat clogged with a scream to tell her to back off. I tried to find some way to defend myself against her words, but the truth was that I had nothing, and she was my mom.
“You’re not any different from me,” she spat with a look of disgust. “You think someone’s going to tell you you’re smart. You think someone’s going to love you. You’re poison all the way through, Locke. A fucking disaster.”
Her words stabbed like a blade to my heart. I scrambled to my feet, but she slapped my arm again, making me yelp.
“Look at you!” Her cruel laugh rattled down my spine. “Whining like a little bitch over a tap like that. You’re weak Locke, and you’ll go crawling after every scrap someone throws at you. Maybe you can call that love. Maybe you can pretend.”
I had already done that with my first boyfriend, even if she didn’t know it. The rest of my life rolled out in front of me, resulting just the way she said it would. Every good thing would only happen by accident because I sure as shit didn’t deserve it. Every bad thing would happen because that’s what I got. Locke Casey, human black hole that sucked anything good in it and destroyed it.
At school I’d learned to never turn my back on the boys, to keep my eyes on the floor, but I never learned to guard myself against my mom’s contempt. Even if I warded myself with fury, hell, even with compassion and understanding, she’d cut through me like a glass.
Tears pricked at my eyes, and she laughed. God, we even laugh alike. It only made the truth of it cruel and inescapable.
“But you’re too good to drink, aren’t you?” she snarked in that same contemptuous tone. “You’re going to waste yourself on men, on what you think is love. Well let me tell you baby girl, love isn’t for you. You don’t have any in you, I could tell from the moment you were born. But you’re going to go chasing after it, aren’t you?”
She reached out to pinch me, grabbing a wad of flesh and twisting until I cried out.
“That’s you,” she continued, “crying out like a little bitch, to all those boys who love you until you put out, and maybe even more if you let them do things the nice girls won’t do. That’s you, Locke!”
Fuck you, I wanted to scream. But the weird part was that I knew what was going to happen right after this. I’d eventually break free and run to my room, and while she pounded on the door, ranting away, she could never break it down no matter how much she threatened to. That night I didn’t go out the window like I did sometimes. Instead, I lay in that little room desperately decorated with magazine photos, and I’d stare at the ceiling knowing that this was my life and always would be.
I shook out of my stupor and stared at my mother in shock.
“This didn’t happen,” I murmured to myself. “Not here.”
She glared at me. But this time I realized I was just as big as she was, just as strong, and I hadn’t spent the last ten years crawling around in a bottle. More than that, I wasn’t sixteen anymore.
“What the hell are you saying?” she demanded.
“I’m saying that when this happened,” I replied, “we were at that motel in Des Moines, weren’t we? We didn’t have this conversation in Lincoln where you were fucked-up most of the time.”
“You think you know anything?” she spat. “You don’t know shit.”
“Yeah, I do,” I declared, turning away from her, self-respect and my inner power swelling in me.
Standing up to her was incredible. Whenever my mother was in the room she was always the biggest, baddest thing, and commanded all of my attention. I couldn’t think about anything except her. Was too afraid of what she might do to think of anything else. Truthfully, I still probably couldn’t even if she were alive now, and I was in my mid-twenties.
My real life, not this random sad pit stop in Lincoln, Nebraska, came back to me in a rush. And the fact that there were not one, not two, but three people in the world who would never let me down, who loved me and thought that I was always more than just a cheap lay. I didn’t have to earn their love through doing whatever my mother thought I’d try. Their love had come as easily as rain in spring, as sweet as good butter. I had faced down people and things far scarier than one sad drunk in a crappy kitchen.
I tilted my head, glancing back at her. “You’re not real, are you?”
My mother reared back to slap me, but I grabbed her wrist in midair. God, had she always been this frail, this frig
htened? Gratification flowed in my chest for standing up to her. It was like I saw her with fresh eyes, and even more so, the differences between us instead of the similarities—things I was incapable of grasping as a frightened sixteen-year-old. I scrubbed a hand over my face. If only I had of put a stop to this abuse years ago, preventing all kinds of abuses against my body.
So why didn’t you? whispered an insidious little voice. Why didn’t you stop her when you had the chance? I bet you liked it and all sorts of weird things like it, you sick fuck…
Shut up! The ghost of her in my head tried to pull me back under the spell of this dream, but I refused to give in.
“I never stopped you because you were my mom,” I answered, closing my eyelids.
My eyes cracked open and I scrutinized the ugly and terribly familiar glint of violence in her eyes. But that mattered less. What mattered more was what I was saying now, what was breaking open inside me.
“That’s why, isn’t it?” I said, tightening my grip on her wrist so she couldn’t run away from me. “I figured out some of it when you died while I was away at school. At some point during this entire stupid god thing, I figured out the rest.”
A moment of fear crossed her features, and in some small way, I should have been vindictively happy about that. This woman had me afraid most of my life. Forced me to crawl and hide in the closet to hide from her. Sometimes staying out of her way worked, staying silent enough, making no trouble so she forgot all about me. How I tricked myself into believing that being good made her love me was beyond me. More than that, I thought of all the long-term damage. How she chased me away from anything good or magnetized me to bad situations and people had me fooled me into thinking I was worth nothing.
“I was always hoping that you would come around someday,” I said, my voice distant. “That if I did this or that right you would love me. Or maybe if you wouldn’t, someone else would. Christ, do you have any idea how much you fucked me up?”
“I was trying to protect you!” she snarled, trying to yank away from me like a child pulling away from an adult, but I clenched her wrist.
“No, you weren’t!” I shook my head. “You were trying to poison me with your own bitterness! You were doing whatever the hell you wanted because there was no one else in the goddamn world you could treat like that! Not even Reg!”
Everything seemed laid out in front of me now, like a book that had been open the whole time. If only I’d known how to read it. The abuses she had suffered and how unthinkingly, she unleashed them on me, nurturing the meanness into me. It was enough to make me pity her even if I knew it might be years before my residual anger withered away.
“So what now, Locke?” my mother sneered at me. “You’re going to take all this and enlighten the world? You’re fucked up, Locke, and you’re not going anywhere. If you tell this to anyone, they’re going to turn you away. I’m the only one who understands you, and you know it.”
I let her arm go, ready to have her fly at me, but she distanced herself as if wary of what I might do. That distance had once hurt me, but now I saw it for what it was: an act of fear by a woman who lived in fear.
“Wrong again, mom,” I said. “There are people who love me. There are people in the world who have helped me because it was nothing but the right thing to do. Not everyone is you. I’m not you.”
“Yes you are, you–”
I shut her down right there. “And you’re trying to keep me here, aren’t you? This is the damn orb. You’re keeping me here and just… letting me suffer… sucking the love from my cords.”
“What?” She squinted at me as if I were mad.
I looked at her as a sudden tiredness invaded my bones. It didn’t matter whether she was a figment of my imagination or not; this situation was still real. Mom had done everything she could to keep me from going to college, from getting away from her, or making something better of myself. From waking me up in the middle of the night to scream at me to stealing my mail from the guidance counselor, I’d wondered if I would have been better off just disappearing into the night, hitchhiking out of town with one of the truckers blowing by. But that wasn’t how it happened. I’d walked away from her before, even if it had been the hardest thing in the world. And that meant I could do it again.
For a moment I hesitated.
“You want to stay here with me, don’t you?” she asked, her voice soft and almost shy.
This was dangerous. Once in a very rare while, the years of abuse and the mental illness rolled back so I got just the barest glimpse of what she might have been like underneath. If she could have controlled this, let me see beneath the crap, there was a chance that I would never have made it away from her. When I was young, there was nothing more I craved than the idea, even the hope, that my mother would love and cherish me.
“I really don’t want to stay.” My voice was soft, but it rang with purpose, far from the whine that she accused me of.
I was slightly surprised that I wasn’t crying. Confronting this nightmare didn’t feel good, but I felt cleansed, as if something that I’d been carrying for a very long time had been spilled onto the ground.
“I missed you so much,” my mother whispered while she raised a hand up to my face, stroking my cheek. “I treated you… so badly, but I just wanted you to stay.”
There’s a little piece of every fucked-up little kid that wants to hear exactly this from her parent. I had actually managed to walk away from all the abuse, but I didn’t have any experience in walking away from a hint of kindness and the idea that it could have all been different.
The orb might have succeeded in keeping me here if I had been as lonely as I was before that one night where everything changed. The problem was, of course, that I wasn’t. There were people who depended on me: Byron, who was fighting for all of us, and Mads and Rane, who might have been fighting for their own sanity like I just had to do. I couldn’t leave them behind in this place. No ghost or some memory of the woman who had let me down was going to stop me.
“Mom.” I paused, and then shook my head.
Maybe I should have hugged her, poured my heart out to her, or told her I was sorry that it couldn’t have been any different. I knew, though, that I wouldn’t be saying those things to my mother, but to some strange figment of her. My mother was gone, and maybe Hades knew where she ended up, but I wasn’t going to go bothering him for her new address. For better or worse, she was gone, and that meant that I needed to get out of here.
I turned, feeling the ghost’s eyes boring into my back the whole way towards the door. Even at the last moment I expected her to fly at me in a fury, but she didn’t. The moment she ceased to have any power over me, she disappeared, and I was fine with that. Even if a small part of me always ached over her absence, or rather the absence of the mother she should have been, I could live with walking away.
I opened the door, stepped through it, and looked up into a sky streaked with green, white and vivid blue.
Chapter 14
Locke
Interesting. The inside of the orb looked a lot like the outside. The sky, an ugly impressionist painting while the ground was bare dirt. It was all nothing but an expansive waste all around me. The house that I’d lived in had collapsed into total nonexistence when I glanced back. Had I had wander into an episode of some sci-fi show?
Remembering what I came here for, I checked the three gold cords shimmering through the air. One faded into nothingness, which was probably Byron’s, but the other two were spotted and paling by the minute. The closer one, stronger for the moment, belonging to Mads. It led me forward into the great nothingness.
Mads was the first avatar I’d met when this had all began. After a creepy phone sex call, a bright light from the sky, and a bout of unconsciousness, home invaders working for a secret organization locked me in my bathroom and left me to contemplate whatever fate was waiting for me. Whilst busting my way out of my bathroom window, I’d interrupted Mads’ rescue attempt.
Here today and gone tomorrow—at least that was the image he projected into the world—
Mads had dropped me hints of something deeper he wanted.
Pfft. I was probably being an idiot.
Mads was really clear on who he was. Had a new place to crash whenever he wanted it, a luxury car whenever he snapped his fingers, and the ability to trick people into his whims.
I tensed, imagining myself about to walk into a nightmare about heights or something irrational. It probably beat Rane’s ordeal though. I had to admit, I wasn’t looking forward to whatever firefight awaited me there. Beneath Rane’s surface lurked wounds as deep as canyons, which this place clearly liked to exploit.
Please let me find Mads sitting in a white room, going slowly insane. An unpleasant thought, but with any luck, I bet I could talk him out of that.
I laughed, thinking about him. How he filled me with an irresistible gaiety or the times we used each other to blow off steam. Obviously, the gold cord connecting us said something different than fuck buddies. I hoped to hell that when we got out of this mess we’d figure out what it all meant.
Cracked soil crunched under my feet as I kept walking for what felt like forever. I wondered if Byron and the others had finished up with their mayhem while I’d been stuck in the great beyond. Maybe they were staring at our bodies, wondering what in the world had happened to us. Shit, he was going to lecture me once I got us out of here about how unwise it was to inject myself and enter this place. Unfortunately, I never had an abundance of wisdom.
Well, you’re certainly missing out now aren’t you Byron? Skipping all of this strange torture. Hope that you’ve figured out why this is all happening and what they want from us because I sure don’t know. There better be some good news when we wake up.
At some point, the world changed around me: bleak corridors taking shape, stone grey paint, a grey handrail along the walls, rows of chairs, and someone shuffling along the linoleum floor dragging an IV drip. Oh god, a hospital.