The Shadows Behind

by Kristi Petersen Schoonover

  The voice: Open me open me open me open me.

  There is an awful burning inside me, as though someone’s poured scalding water down my gullet. I have the sudden urge to get the hell out of the house. “Kent,” I can barely talk. “Let’s take this outside, man.”

  “So you can run, chicken?”

  “No. This place is under construction. There’s stuff around here that could get you hurt.”

  He laughs. “Oh, I’m not the one getting hurt. Somebody’s gotta teach you not to come near my property.”

  My fingers tingle. My face gets hot. She’s not property, I think. She’s a woman, dammit.

  Openmeopenmeopenmeopenme.

  He’s advancing, pushing us back toward the library.

  “Listen, I swear to God, I will never talk to her again. Just don’t come closer.”

  He comes at me with the crowbar and I duck. He ends up standing with his back to the library, and I notice the falcon-headed jar is not where it was a minute ago.

  It’s sitting in the doorway.

  Openmeopenmeopenmeopenme!

  “You really don’t want to do this, Kent.”

  He leers at me. “I can do anything I want. She’s the one with the problems, you know. She provokes me!”

  It boils over in me then, the stuff I’ve kept inside. The things I should have told others. The things I should have said to my father’s face. “You’re a sissy little man, that’s what you are, a fucking pansy-ass, picking on her! Now I’m gonna show you what it’s like to be picked on!”

  I lower my head and plow into his stomach. He falls back over the jar, the crowbar flying from his hand, and a spritz of blood peppers the air as he’s impaled on one of the giant girders that used to cement my glass ceiling.

  His legs spasm, his arm drops to his side, and his body goes limp. Then everything is still, and I’m numb.

  Jesus. I killed him.

  This can’t be happening. It can’t. I won’t get such a lax punishment this time. I won’t finish this house. I won’t be with Leza.

  I break down into tears.

  For a while there is only the sound of my sobs and the surf. Then I hear the voice:

  Open me open me open me open me.

  I remember what Mom said. Her last words: We could’ve kept it a secret. I think of the jars in the walls all over this house, the jars that were made for holding human body parts, the jars no one will ever know are there if I do it right.

  I know what Mom meant now, and I pick up the ax.

  DOWN IN THE GREEN

  S ummer had pressed in early this year on a June first heat wave, shrouding the camel’s-hump mountains in a blue-green haze, turning the lake into a gray expanse of razor-hot sparklers.

  A fish nibbled at Melanie’s toes, one of those damned bluegills. In the harsh light of the burning sun, when they writhed on the end of her fishing pole, their chartreuse bellies fat with peeled grapes she’d used as bait, they were silvery orange and rust, with a tip of blue on their gill covers. Beneath the green water, they were translucent brown slithers that hovered above the sand, converging on her feet.

  She was treading her way to the wooden raft with the diving board— one of the few left on the lake. The owners of this beach didn’t seem to care about insurance: swim at your own risk, dive at your own risk, the ancient yellow posted signs read, and if you cracked your head open, there would be no sympathy.

  She was halfway there when a bobby pin sprung loose from its home in her thick curls. When a pin tumbled from your hair, it meant someone was thinking about you, and you were supposed to retrieve it and say that person’s name three times; but she could not retrieve it now—it was floating down, past the tethering shoelaces of seaweed and darting ravenous bluegills. Cradling lazily to the depths like a falling leaf, landing in the sand not far from the gargantuan anchor at the base of the rusty chain which kept the raft from drifting away. But she could not resist the pull of the old wives’ tale, and so she envisioned the bobby pin between her pruned fingers and murmured the name anyway: Mom, Mom, Mom.

  Was this near the spot where they’d dumped her? Tied the boat anchor from their long-retired outboard around her feet and trundled her frail-as-driftwood body off the dock with a splash like the sound of vomit? She wasn’t sure, even though she and her brother had had the balls to do it during a blazing August Sunday morning. But everyone who was holy had been in church, so the beach had been deserted. In the burning sun there had only been Melanie, her mother’s body, and her brother’s argument that maybe they should have wrapped her in the old sun-faded green canvas boat cover.

  He’d lost the argument. They hadn’t dumped her at night, because she’d told them, before they’d given her that last dose of morphine—the fatal one—she’d wanted to see her beloved beach one last time. Make sure her eyes were open when they threw her in, she’d said, and no, no, don’t do it at night, because all she would see down there would be murk and the fish that came in to feed, and she didn’t want to watch them peck out her eyes before she got to have a few moments of clarity.

  The disease had kept Mom from her beach for eight years, and the doctors said she could live at least eight more, even if she could barely talk above a whisper and all she could mouth were soft egg salad sandwiches trimmed to the size of toast points; even if she were in pain and her waste products were filtered through a tube and into a bag at her side. Mom was tired. She was ready to go to that place where the road hopefully gave way to the Elysian Fields.

  Melanie and her brother, too, had been tired. Tired of reading lips or asking Mom to repeat her raspy whisper-gasps; tired of burning their fingers on the slick skins of hot boiled eggs and the smell of mayonnaise; tired of turpentine-colored stains on the bed clothes. So when last August had come, the insidiousness of sciamachy had made her brother fill the hypodermic needle, had made Melanie tie a silk peacock-blue turban on her mother’s balding head so she could have a proper burial, so that, perhaps, the bluegills would not be shocked by this lifeless mermaid’s lack of a swirling mane.

  Or, perhaps, Melanie had done this ceremonial tying so she would not have to endure the last sight of her mother’s body as a sinking head, crowned by only a few sparse, kinky hairs, like fiddlehead ferns brittling in a summer’s drought.

  Yes, perhaps Mom was beneath her feet now. Perhaps the bobby pin had landed near her. The tots and moms that were here sometimes had no idea what lay beneath their fat little feet and fleshy jiggling bodies, burnt as desert buttes. Those mothers had their babies to prevent from eating sand, and those babies had their mothers to plug their open mouths with ice cream. They didn’t give thought to the fish nests or the litter down in the green.

  She reached the raft and set her hands on the ladder, its stairs slippery with the tendrils of young mosses just beginning to weave their annual carpet. She hauled herself up, glancing briefly at the rounded blocks of pale aqua foam that kept the structure buoyant, noticing they were pocked with black craters of mildew that reminded her of cancer-infested smokers’ lungs. The water from her body dribbled onto the raft and she spread herself out facedown on the wood to drip-dry and peer down through the slats. The water was lime green, like the Chichen Itza sacred water hole she’d read about, which had been dredged to unearth fifty human skeletons. She winced, wondering if, just maybe, she could see to the bottom. Would she see her mother? The tip of the anchor they’d bound her with? Her eyes, glassy and open or long ago ingested?

  The idea spooked her. She rolled over onto her back, feeling the hot boards brand her skin and threaten her, if she shifted the wrong way, with a splinter. There was a faint smell of vegetation and fish and sand and motorboat gas—ahhh, the familiar scent of summer ; on the far shore, a cluster of white and red boats bobbed like ducks, their merrymakers diving off transoms, sending thick white splashes and fountains of water into the air. She heard laughter, and the cigarette boats were revving their engines so high she envisioned herself not on a lake but at an a
ir show. She closed her eyes and let that thought soothe her, and she fell asleep.

  Hours later, the sun was low and weak as a soft white oven light in the thick gray sky. A breeze blew up and she chilled. A storm was coming; she could tell because the decades-old trees looming over the sandy slope of the distant beach had the pale underbellies of their leaves showing. The boats that had been full of revelers had moved on now, over to Down the Hatch for beers, probably.

  She stood and stretched, felt the pin-prickle of sunburn on her chest. The water would feel cool on it, comfort until she could get to a vinegar bath at home. She stood at the edge of the raft and studied the water below, prepared to jump as she had done on so many summer afternoons growing up.

  And she couldn’t do it.

  A volley of waves rocked the raft, droplets splashing on her feet and the boards. She tried not to imagine the splash-gurgle sounds were really from a pair of hands rising from the water to clutch at the boat-tie rings—

  She sucked in a breath and turned. There was nothing there.

  Just jump in, she told herself. Where was this irrational fear coming from? She had swum here, in this same cool dark water, every summer day since she’d been in diapers. Even after she and her brother had done it, she’d come on the loneliest of afternoons to assure herself her special place had not been warped in any way. That what was beneath the water had not turned it to poison, and the swimming she did in it blasphemy. She sat on the edge and dangled her feet. Big toe, in. See? That wasn’t so hard, and the water was baby-bath warm.

  She stood again and studied the surface, not lime green anymore but oily in her own shadow. She thought she saw movement, down there, and changed her mind again.

  She rested her hand on the side of the ladder as though it were the shoulder of an old friend. She could climb down it, she supposed. Grip firmly onto the sides, turn her back to the enemy, slip down, and butterfly back as quickly as possible, concentrating on her lonely tropical fish-spattered beach towel, looking now like the sad remnant of someone who’d gone for a dip and drowned. It was the only item on the beach.

  She grabbed hold of the ladder, and then pulled her hand away.

  Jump in, just do it, quit being a baby.

  She closed her eyes and pinched her nose and down she went, the blub-blub low rush of water roaring past her ears. Underwater she popped open her lids. A curtain of white bubbles parted to reveal green murk and a bright yellow-rust whip of seaweed—

  Something shot past her. A fish, she told herself, a fish, but the panic made her clamber for the surface as though she were drowning, and she reached for the sky as though it were a tangible thing to grab, as concrete as a rock ledge, and she gasped at the air and then—

  It hit her, thud, on the bottom of her foot, and she didn’t want to look down but start swimming instead and then it was in front of her, her mother’s head. The bright blue turban mottled, a feather of seaweed jammed in it in queenly fashion.

  The head bobbed and rolled and she saw one eye, pink and bulging like a grapefruit, the tattered remnants of a lid winking.

  Melanie screamed as a fountain of water spewed from the head’s mouth, puckered as an angel in a gothic garden, pelting her in burbling, thick drops.

  The next morning it was her brother who found Melanie. She was washed up on the shore, not far from her favorite towel, a dead bluegill near her empty eyes.

  SNAKE IN THE GRASS

  T wenty-one years after I was the first girl to get boobs in fifth grade, I woke up with a penis.

  The first thing I noticed was an unusual weight, like a lump of mud was pressing on my pubis. I thought the cat was sleeping on my lower half, but when I sat up, there was nothing there—just a bump, poking up beneath the wine and cognac plaid of my quilt.

  Jesus, what was that?

  The room was shrouded in January’s pre-dawn ink, making it tough to see. I sat up, slid back, and groped for the lamp switch. Everything went awash in a forty-watt shade of ivory.

  Cautiously, I lifted the quilt and looked. And there it was. At attention, erect, and with one thick vein running up the middle. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was giving me a single sloe-eyed stare. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I peeked again.

  Still there.

  It was not a product of the five apple martinis I’d imbibed the night before.

  I rolled over to the other nightstand and grabbed my charging phone: Google it. Surely somebody in the world knows something!

  All that came up was a Daily News article entitled “Rise ’n’ Shine! Why a Morning Erection is a Sign of Good Health” (I guess I should’ve been relieved by that) and a tidbit in Cosmopolitan heralding the “5 Things You Need to Know About Morning Wood.” Frantic, I changed my search criterion to what should i do if i suddenly wake up with a penis? I felt hope when the top result was “I Woke Up with a Penis Today (Part 1)” from Journal Frankfurt in Germany, but hope was dashed when it turned out to be a humor column. I scrolled a few pages, but there was nothing more.

  Clearly, I was alone in this.

  I could call my gynecologist—maybe he’d heard of such a thing! I looked at the clock—my alarm hadn’t even gone off yet, so his office wouldn’t open for a few hours.

  Great.

  It wasn’t like I’d never seen a penis, of course—in fact, I’d beheld a mighty member just recently. Yesterday. Just before I’d dumped my . . . weekly bang? Weekend hookup? After our fight earlier in the week I’d finally realized Jim clearly wasn’t the one. He was really cagey about where he was when he wasn’t spending time with me, we rarely went out in public, and after four years I’d never met his parents. He wasn’t a boyfriend, as badly as I wanted him to be. He was, however, the hottest fuck on the planet.

  “There’s no woman on Earth who can keep up with me the way you do,” he’d always say after either a five-hour stint (yes, really) or sticking it in me while I was asleep (something I enjoy, although I understand most women find this violating).

  “Why are you doing this?” He’d looked hurt. A slushy Waterbury rain fell on the windshield and made little rivers down the glass. “Don’t leave,” he said. “You’re everything. You’re so beautiful.”

  “That’s right,” I’d said. “I know. And someone else is really going to appreciate it.”

  “But I do appreciate it!”

  “No,” I said, “you don’t. Now get out of my car so I can go find him.”

  Then I’d gone home and cried it out, fallen asleep, and awakened with a penis.

  My cell phone buzzed—a text. From him. Lets talk come over after work.

  I half thought, Maybe I should make a date with him and wave my new club in his face.

  I didn’t respond.

  I tried to assess this thing I was looking at; I had a strange urge to try and figure out if it was better than Jim’s. And what did better mean, exactly? Bigger? Longer? Thicker? Sure, I was aware that men compared themselves this way and slung insults at each other about it when they were pissed, wielding barbs like light sabers about overcompensating; I’d heard the girls at work laugh about our office manager Mr. Pancefoot’s package, claiming that’s why he was so anal about things like the tape dispensers: they had to be perfectly cocked at a forty-five degree angle to the magnetic paper clip holders. But mine was slim and a strange shade of ivory, not quite the darker color that another ex-boyfriend’s had been, and definitely not the flesh tone Jim’s was. It was somehow feminine, with clean, crisp folds. And yes, it had been circumcised. So where did that fall on the spectrum?

  Trembling, I reached out to touch it.

  It was all the hot and hard, smooth and veiny, silk and muscle that I expected—but it was also weird, because I could feel my own fingers on it. I worked them down to the base, then felt farther underneath, wondering if there were—

  —balls. They felt like warm, damp tea bags.

  I had to pee.

  I hauled myself up out of bed and set my feet
on the floor, then slowly stood, which didn’t seem to feel too odd; walking was a different challenge. It was like having a third leg.

  I went into the bathroom and stared at the toilet. Okay, guys aimed, right? How hard could this be?

  I held it at its base, like I’d seen Jim and a cavalcade of ex- boyfriends do. Then I pushed.

  Pee went everywhere. It sprinkled the toilet seat (which I’d forgotten to lift). It splashed the white walls and spit on the black tiles; it sprayed the mirror, soaked the toilet paper, and fountained into the bowl brush holder.

  When I was done I needed a shower and a gallon of bleach.

  I considered calling out of work, just until I figured this peeing thing out—although after my cup of coffee, sitting down and doing the tuck thing was much easier (and at least I didn’t have to have a second bout with harsh bathroom chemicals). But then I remembered today was the last day of the month, and my partner was out on appointments. Which meant I had no choice but to go in.

  Which also meant I had to find something to wear so it wouldn’t be obvious.

  Underwear first—and all I owned were thongs, because Mom always said you’ll never have to worry about your panty lines showing before swiping my frillies to cut the cheeks out of them. That was back in the 1980s, before thongs had paraded out of the dirty corner at Victoria’s Secret and became acceptable for not just sex kittens and women trying to put the spark back into their bedrooms.

  Well, this was one of those little things in life Mom had failed to prepare me for. I rooted through the stretched-out collection—sage polka dots, goldenrod stripes, lavender lace—none of them had a crotch area that was, in my opinion, large enough to rein in the johnson.

  There was the period stash—that ratty collection of full briefs I kept just for that time of the month.

  Oh, God . . . I’d be excited if I didn’t because it’s a pain in the ass, but would I ever get my period again? Was my vagina still even there?