Blanky. Such an innocuous name for something that had now cemented itself as the locus of my grief and horror and rage.
Later, as the ambulance drove quietly away, the female officer I had seen earlier joined me in the backseat of the cruiser and offered me the standard platitudes. It reminded me of Lexi’s rage against condolences and those who casually and meaninglessly deploy them. It’s the most natural thing in the world, and the most useless, so I cut off the officer’s sympathy with a declaration I hoped might be of more use.
“I saw her.”
“Sir?”
“She called me. Facetimed me.”
“Your wife?”
“Yes.”
She took out a notepad and began to scribble. “When was this?”
“Three a.m.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing.”
“She didn’t say anything?”
I shook my head, my voice completely devoid of emotion. “She was too busy choking to death.”
Pen poised above the pad, the officer looked at me squarely. Perhaps there was suspicion there, who knows? It hardly mattered. If some confluence of events pointed at me as a person of interest, I’d gladly let them take me in, and, if they made a case, throw me in jail. What else was there left for me in the world out here but misery?
“You saw her choking?”
“Yes.”
“On the blanket?” And it was moving like a living thing.
“Yes.”
“Was there anyone else in the room with her?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Did it look like she might be doing it to herself. On purpose?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” No.
“And what did you do?”
“I tried to call the house.”
“Yes, we did too. Looks like the Jacobsons leave their house phone off the hook when they go to bed.”
“I know. I forgot that. So, I told my neighbors to call you guys and then I drove over here.”
“You stopped to ask the neighbors for help?” Definitely the faintest trace of suspicion now.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t think to do it yourself?”
“I was panicked, and they were there. At my door.”
“At three a.m.?”
“Yes. They heard me screaming, I guess.”
She stared at me for a few moments without saying anything. Probing me, perhaps, for the telltale signs of a man pantomiming the emotions expected of him upon learning his wife has died. Looking for the tell, the slipping of the mask, the shark beneath the surface. And for all I knew, I probably looked guilty as hell because I don’t believe I was displaying any emotion at all. I was numb.
So I asked her. “Do you think I had something to do with this?”
She shook her head. “Some people think it strengthens the spiritual connection to exit their lives the same way as those they’ve lost. I am truly sorry to hear about your daughter, by the way.”
By the way. My daughter, the afterthought.
“But, that’ll do for now. If I have any further questions, we have your address.” She pocketed the notepad and slid out of the car. “I’ll get someone to take you home. I think the best thing you can do is get some rest. The next few days will be hard. And again, I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Brannigan. Truly, I am.”
The words, like acid, bubbled up my throat and were out of my mouth before I knew they were coming. “And what the fuck would you know about loss? You’re just the uniform who tells people about their own. You’re a fucking accountant for other people’s misery.”
Clearly jolted by my outburst, she put a hand on the roof of the cruiser and leaned in to look at me, her face obscured by the dark. “My father shot himself when I was in grade school, so, I know plenty. Everybody has to endure it eventually. Death is part of life, and I sympathize that you’ve seen so much of it lately. Now go home, Mr. Brannigan.”
THEY DROVE ME HOME and the guilt chased me like a living thing, hiding in every shadowed pocket between the houses and hedges, hunkering just outside the sodium pools of light from the streetlamps, and sneering at me from the wedges of dark beneath the silent cars parked at the side of the road. Somehow, I managed to croak a thank you to the officers and walked like a zombie up the short path to the front door of my house. I didn’t want to go inside and instead stood with my key in the lock for what felt like forever, until the sky was turning pink and the shadows were forced to retreat. Only then, with nowhere else to go, did I concede defeat and admit myself once more into the sepulcher of disaster where this nightmare had begun.
Inside, I stood in my living room staring down at the sofa where Lexi had sat stroking Robin’s blanket, where we’d reconnected after my fears that she was gone forever. And now she was. There were no tears this time though, no self-pity, no buckling agony. Only rage.
I looked from the sofa to the coffee table where in the light from the TV I could still see the hardened rings of condensation where we’d left our drinks sit overnight.
I stalked to the kitchen cabinet and filled a glass to the brim with whiskey. There was a good chance I had some Vicodin somewhere too. I’d find those later and not stop until my heart did.
If this utterly fucking warped life was going to take from me all that I loved, then why not join them?
Nobody wants to live alone in the dark, and from my vantage point, I could see no tomorrow.
IN THE MORNING, THERE were twelve messages on my phone, seven of them from Lexi’s parents’ number, one from the Columbus Police Department, another from Principal Lewis. I deleted them all. Crawling out of bed in a fog of confusion and self-loathing, I was not in the mood to be berated or made to feel like a suspect, or worse, a victim. I had more pressing concerns, like trying to put one foot in front of the other without vomiting my intestines all over the floor.
The light through the partially open blinds was, like me, feeble and gray. I felt like my bones had been replaced by marbles, which rattled chaotically around every time I grew ambitious and tried to speed up my progress. I could not stop clenching my teeth, which, considering the deep ache in my jaw, seemed to have been a condition that had started in my sleep.
But I couldn’t think of sleep, or the horrific images—
the woman
the dolls
the fingers and blood
—that had populated it again, or it might have sent me screaming out of the house, an act that already seemed like an eventuality considering all that had happened in such a short space of time.
A reliance on mundane preprogramming led me to the breakfast nook, where I poured myself a bowl of Frosted Flakes, added milk, and sat down on the stool munching and staring at the backyard. It looked as it always had, albeit leached of color by the monochrome day.
The grass needed mowing. I’d been too preoccupied, too—dare I say it—enlivened by hope—to bother with it.
The door in the high wooden fence was squeaking in its frame despite being latched, as it had done over the past few months. The hinges needed oiling.
There was a tree in the center of the yard which provided merciful shade in the cruel heat of Ohio summers. But summer was long gone now and the tree had shed its leaves. They lay like a multicolored rug at its feet.
I stopped chewing and dropped the spoon into the bowl, splashing milk on my chest.
A woman sat in the shade of that walnut tree now, her back to the trunk, her knees drawn up, head lowered in the protective cradle of her arms, perhaps to avoid the discomfort of her skull meeting the gnarled lower branches, though they were higher than I could reach even on tiptoe. She wore a white nightdress, much as the woman from my dream had done. It was threadbare, marred by stains of indeterminate origin. The flesh of her arms was exposed, the skin mottled blue-gray.
Slowly I rose, the chair tipping over and startling me as it crashed to the floor.
I swallowed, heard my thr
oat click, my lips instantly dry.
I had seen this woman in my sleep, assumed both she and the gruesome scene in which she had played the starring role had been nothing more than the mad product of stress and hope and grief and despair, a subconscious mural meant to make sense to no one. A strange one-act play in the theater of dreams.
But now she was here.
Reason suggested I pull the blinds shut over the screen door and seek help, whether that help came in the form of more alcohol, more sleep, or fleeing the scene, mattered little. Anything other than what I already knew I was going to do. Maybe because I knew if she wanted to come for me, the door wouldn’t stop her. Walls wouldn’t stop her. If she could saunter into my subconscious unobstructed, anything I tried to do would only be delaying the inevitable.
Trembling, I grabbed the metal handle of the rain-speckled glass door.
The woman raised her head, damp hair still hanging in her face, and as she cocked it slightly in my direction, I was blinded by a flash of lightning, a dazzling blue pulse that forced my hand up to cover my eyes.
When I lowered them a few seconds later, vision still filled with dancing orbs and dervishing sparks, she was standing before the half-open door, allowing me to see through the shock and the confusion, that it was not the woman from my dream after all, but my wife, Lexi, albeit it not an interpretation of her I would ever have wished to see.
I screamed and recoiled, my ankles colliding with the fallen stool to send me tumbling backward, my spine meeting the hard wooden seat in just the right way to send radial explosions of pain through my body. But I barely felt it as I scrabbled away and my wife, this version of her so tall she had to stoop, stepped into the room.
She was soaking wet from the rain, her bare feet leaving ragged muddy prints on the tile.
Her skin was gray. Her eyes were gone. From the sockets, infant fingers waggled in a parody of farewell. And though she spoke, her words were lost to me, because Blanky, the blanket she’d choked to death on, was still lodged in her throat, one frayed end of it flapping in the breeze like an obscenely swollen and distended tongue. And on that tongue, I saw one of the faded rabbits, its eyes burning coals, skin tattooed with faintly glowing blue symbols, as she lowered her face down toward where I lay helpless on the floor. Her hair, now blonde and not black at all, tickled my cheek as I raised my arms and shrieked to ward off what must, what could only be a product of incumbent madness. She could not be here. This was not real. I must be dreaming.
But then those infant fingers poking from my wife’s empty eyesockets touched my skin, Blanky found my mouth, the cotton wet against my lips, and I knew none of those realities were the active one.
My wife was dead.
My wife was here.
She smiled at me and her face became something else, the same face from the dream, a face that will forever evade my ability to properly describe it without utterly breaking down, because it was no face at all, just a hollow filled with darkness, though if I dared stare into that cranial abyss for a second too long, I could almost see something moving in there. Lights or stars. Or maybe that was still a product of the retinal distress caused by the lightning.
Whatever it was, it infected me, rendered my whole body numb.
I might have smiled, might even have laughed. Certainly, I wept.
It felt like a mercy to allow it to take me.
THERE IS NO SADNESS where she lives. There is nothing. Everything here in this dirty little house in the middle of the woods is simple, forgotten, but useful. She exists not to cause pain, at least not as man thinks of pain, but freedom from the tethers of an ugly world she only vaguely understands. She is unique and terrible and content, for the most part, to be left to her own devices. But a woman who came from another place cannot be allowed to live here without her origin and nature being challenged at every turn. In the villages where The Others live, she is a thing to be feared, a Thing of Whispers. To them, she is The Other, which on some level she understands.
For decades, they have attempted to draw her out, sent expeditions of their bravest and most violent men to challenge her. She does not need to see or speak to them to know they have little interest in peace or understanding. She can feel their intent, their fear, their bloodlust, as soon as they rise in the morning seventy miles south of where she sits whispering to the dolls.
She feels no sadness, no remorse, no rueful wishes that things could be different.
She is not a being that can feel anything at all.
To the crusaders who seek out her destruction, she is Evil. It is a word they utter often in their taverns over tankards of bitter ale, their faces drawn by fear. Evil is the word that rises from the murk of their incomprehension. They have branded her with it.
Evil.
And Witch.
She ponders the irony of trying to cast in unflattering light, a creature that knows only the dark.
And though their language is mostly alien to her, she is able to draw their meaning from the images in their minds when they use such words. She knows also that she is none of these things, but to attempt to make them understand this, even if she sought to plant the truth in their heads, even if she cared enough to try, would be a waste of her time, and would undoubtedly drive them mad. They should not persist in trying to define her. Such pursuits are foolhardy and will end in their destruction, something of which they are intimately aware, and yet they persist in trying to end her.
The truth is that she is nothing at all, hardly a presence, certainly not a being. She is little more than a tool of uncaring and uncivilized gods and thus they would do well to avoid her.
Yet still they come, men who see her only as something to be punished. Absent this fear, she might have been invisible to them. Still, she senses their faces at the window, feels the heat from the torches in their hands. Long before she permits those blood-filled wastrels entry, they have already been undone by their own fear, their own uncertainty in the face of The One True Nothing.
Their sacrifice upon her altar is not quick, but it is necessary, for although she can subsist on the bad dreams of others and autumn breezes alone, the children need to feed.
5
THE SUN CAME OUT; THE sun went down.
The phone rang endlessly until I smashed it against the wall.
I ignored the people knocking at the door. The Deans, I assumed. Nice people who had forever been a little too nosy, a little too eager to invite themselves into our lives. I recalled Lexi being uncomfortable at just how attentive they were to the mound of her pregnant belly, like they were auditioning for a remake of Rosemary’s Baby. How Harriet had cooed and put her face close to Lexi’s stomach and spoke as if my wife’s body was a tin can phone connected to the baby inside. And all the while, her husband Tony stood much too close to me, nodding knowingly, as if pregnancy was some great conspiracy we had let him in on. The winks, the soft punches to the shoulder, like Gee whiz, kid, ain’t this something special?, which, coming from a man who had never spawned children of his own, seemed forced and out of place.
Busybodies.
Eventually the knocking became more forceful. They must have called the police with stories of screams and falling furniture. The thin walls between our houses had probably been a prime source of entertainment for them over the years, from arguments and laughter, to loud sex and the prematurely silenced wailing of the resultant child. I imagine them sitting with their matching armchairs pressed against the walls, their heads back, eyes hooded, mouths turned up in dazed, creepy smiles like emotional vampires as they imagined what we might be doing next door. Lately, I suspected I had turned their vicarious auditory voyeurism to outright alarm.
I lay on the floor before the open screen door, relishing the chill from the wind and the rain as it blew in on me like sea-spray. My wife, or the thing that had worn her costume, was gone and I was not dead. I felt no relief from this realization as the pounding on the door worked in synch with the beating of my heart.
I believed she had been here. I could still taste damp cotton in my mouth and remembered the whispery caress of tiny fingers against my cheeks. Recalled the smell of sour milk. She had come here and she had taken me away for a spell, yanked me, or maybe just my mind, through the hollow where her face should have been into...someplace else. The place from my feverish dreams. A place I now believed to be real.
Unbidden, I thought of my parents. Good people who came from nothing and yet found a way to pay for my education, perhaps in the hope that I would make them prouder than they’d ever been able to make themselves. I remember my father, a carpenter, laboring away over a length of pine he had propped up between sawhorses. I recall the smile when he saw me sitting atop a cabinet in his workshop, watching him intently, and the wistfulness he always seemed to carry in his eyes. “You know,” he told me once, “I tell people I’m a man of the world. And I think that’s true.” Then his smile had faded a little with what could have been the first sign of the confusion that would ultimately cloud his mind and kill him at the ripe old age of sixty-four. “I’m just not always sure which one.”
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