My mother was also sometimes given to such cryptic ponderings and hers alarmed me no less than my father’s. I’m not even sure I always understood what they were telling me, or even if they understood it themselves, but the sadness with which their words were delivered was never lost on me. For reasons that remain a mystery, they always seemed mournful. On my worst days, I tell myself my entry into their lives did not so much fill a vacuum as create one. They were good people, but never completely there. They were like portraits of themselves.
“You’re lucky to have us,” my mother always said, with what I took at the time to be humor, but can’t recall the smile. “I never knew my parents, and they didn’t know me.” When once, I broached this claim with her parents, my grandparents, they seemed genuinely baffled by her words, and assured me I had misheard them. But I know I didn’t, and entered into my adolescence convinced I had been raised by ghosts.
The muted squawk and hiss of a police radio broke through my reverie. Flares of pain jolted my back, made me wince as I struggled to get to my feet, one hand braced on the counter to keep from falling.
The place I had seen...the ill-lighted cabin, the room, the woman, and the dolls. It was there. I had felt her, the slight bristling of the long coarse hairs on the nape of her neck at the sense that people were yet again, indomitably, encroaching on her domain. What I didn’t yet know was what it all meant, but I was damn sure now that it meant something, perhaps the key to everything that had happened thus far. And that awareness left me with two possibilities, neither one of which I found unappealing:
If I could find out what and where that woman’s sanctuary was, perhaps I could stay there forever in a hell that would welcome me for all that I had done. Or all that I hadn’t. A fitting end for my failure as both parent and husband. That it might be little more than the visualization of my own madness didn’t alter what it would represent should I reach it.
Or I could destroy it, and Blanky, and at least die knowing I had saved someone else from the nightmare that had consumed my life.
But through it all, no matter which way the pendulum swung, I was still left with one desperate need: to know why. Why had this happened to me? What kind of ungodly force could so callously take away my family with nary a pause for breath between executions? What had I really done to deserve this?
“Mr. Brannigan?” A stern voice through the front door. Could they just come in unannounced? Would my failure to respond be adequate cause for them to barge their way in? Too much TV told me they probably could, and I knew I could not be there when that happened.
I rushed to the closet, grabbed my overcoat with its too-tight buttons, and shrugged it on. I stepped into my trainers and exited out the screen door, sliding it slowly shut behind me, cutting off the concerned officer’s final summons.
I had no desire to grant an audience to people who thought worse of me than I did myself. So instead I went to the only safe place left that would have me.
I STAYED AT THE BAR until the choice was removed and the drinks stopped coming. The night is a blur after that, though I can vaguely recall heading to the square where the Columbus Market vendors gather on Sundays, where Mr. Baby Close had sold Lexi the blanket that murdered her and our child. It was empty of course but for a three-legged dog engaged in warfare with a greasy Wendy’s bag, and a breeze that carried the faint smell of smoke. I took a bench and mulled incoherently over my options until I became convinced that there was something watching me from the darkness beyond the ranks of streetlights.
Somehow, I found my way home, where, mercifully there was nobody at the door, and tried to find solace in an episode of Barney Miller but it was too hard to focus on his tough yet congenial face, and eventually, I passed out.
In the dream, she was telling them a story...
The next day, Lexi’s parents tried calling again. I quite simply didn’t know what to say to them, so I didn’t pick up. I had already run this gauntlet after Robin’s death, and I didn’t know how to do it anymore. And for them, this was worse. Robin had been our child; Lexi was theirs. I knew all too well the horror of that unique and soul-destroying loss.
And of course, I knew, no matter how unfair, that they would blame me. Every day I refused to take their calls only made it worse.
But I couldn’t avoid them at the funeral, not unless I didn’t attend, and that was never going to be an option. Despite all the horrors associated with what had happened and the things that had come to find me in the wake of them, I loved Lexi and would never have been able to forgive myself if I didn’t say goodbye.
OUTSIDE OF THOSE FIRST few times in the beginning, I had actively avoided coming to see Robin’s grave. It was, as she had been in her all too brief life, so small and so new that the sight of her name chiseled into cold uncaring stone was enough to drain my will to go on each and every time I was faced with it. So I started making excuses not to visit, a decision that guts me now.
On the day of the funeral, that’s where I found Lexi’s parents, not before the grave of their daughter, with the coffin propped above it, but at Robin’s. I stood behind them, relishing those few moments in which I did not register to them. I did not look at my child’s grave. Instead I focused on my one-time parents-in-law. Joe had his arm around Marcy’s shoulders, which were spasming as she wept against him. I looked from them to the people slowly making their way across the cemetery to my wife’s grave, and wondered how any of this had happened. It felt surreal in the worst way, like waking up to find yourself in a room
full of dolls with babyfingers for eyes
with no doors and no idea how you got there or how to get out. Self-preservation is an amazing thing. It can make fighters of the fallen and summon determination from the dust, but it can’t last forever, especially in the face of overwhelming odds. When you’re being beaten, sometimes it’s best just to stop struggling and embrace the end. Sometimes you can even convince yourself you deserve it.
“Steve?”
I flinched and looked at Joe. His face was the color of a dust cloth, his eyes sunken in their sockets. If there was a reprimand there, I didn’t see it. At his summons, Marcy turned to look at me and she looked even worse. I thought of faded paintings in dusty attics. Behind them, the bare branches of the sycamore trees clacked together like bones. Red and yellow leaves tussled across grass that was one rain shy of needing a haircut.
I opened my mouth to say something and only the breeze came out. My throat tightened and as I willed myself to speak, I saw their faces melt like wax and then they were upon me, all sobs and fumbling arms and clambering hands. At first I stiffened, possessed of the crazy notion that maybe they were attacking me, trying to suffocate me or squeeze me to death, but at Marcy’s whisper in my ear—“I’m so, so, sorry, Steven”—I finally broke down and let loose the torrent of pain that had held me in its thrall for what seemed like years.
“We tried to call you,” Marcy said, with Joe content to nod along in sympathetic agreement. His eyes were red and swollen now, his lower lip quivering, which I guess is about as much emotion as a man’s man will allow himself. I wouldn’t know. I hate football, remember?
“I know,” I told them. Marcy’s eyes seemed to be reaching deep inside mine, looking for the fragments of my heart so that she could assist me in putting them back together. “I’m sorry. I was...I needed some time.”
“She loved you,” Marcy said, her words shaky as more tears pricked her eyes. “My God, she loved you so much.”
I nodded, gave her the best smile I could muster, which was no smile at all, and put a hand on her shoulder.
“You’re family,” she said. “We want you to know that. Don’t we, Joe?”
“Yes,” he said, and though he looked mildly uncomfortable, I took him at his word. “Of course. Our home is your home. Stop by anytime.” He could have been speaking to an old friend after a backyard barbecue, but I appreciated the gesture.
Later, as we stood shoulder to shoulder,
me and my borrowed family of broken people, we watched in silence with a crowd of strangers as the morose priest read words that meant nothing to me and they lowered down into the earth the only woman who did. The device used to facilitate the coffin’s descent shuddered and whined as if it too opposed the senselessness of it all. Around us the leaves scratched and the breeze hissed through the grass. The overcast sky mumbled of thunder.
I expected to be assailed by memories of my life with Lexi as they lowered the coffin, images of her face, her eyes, her smile, auditory recollections of the funniest and sweetest things she’d said to me since that rainy night I met her outside of a Costco and offered her the shelter of my umbrella. But I saw none of these things.
And when, after the roses had been thrown into the hole in the earth, Marcy leaned over to me and whispered, “We put Robin’s blanket in there with her,” I could only back away and stare at her in abject horror until those strangers were coming to my aid and I was fighting them off and then running, running, running back toward the car and away from this garden of death and madness. I had to, because the only other course of action, the first to present itself as the rational course of action, was to jump down into the grave, tear open the coffin, and rip that blanket out of there.
I didn’t want that fucking malevolent thing anywhere near my wife’s body.
It was the reason she was dead in the first place.
Worse, it had taken me seeing Lexi’s grave and hearing her mother’s words to realize why we hadn’t seen that blanket in the weeks after Robin’s death. We’d mistakenly assumed the paramedics had used it to cover our infant’s body when they took it away. But they hadn’t. In all the chaos of that night, it had remained behind in her crib until we brought it to the funeral home and tucked it into her coffin a few days later.
We should never have seen Blanky again.
Because we buried her with it.
And as I drove home screaming at the windshield and the world beyond it, all I could picture was that foul dirty blanket in Lexi’s coffin, crawling slowly and inexorably toward my dead wife’s mouth.
I LOST TRACK OF MY days and nights, spent many of them seated beneath the tree where I saw, or thought I saw, the woman from the dream who became my wife and took me away to that other place. And every time I thought of how calmly and casually I accepted those events, the needle on the insanity meter began to inch a little closer into the red.
The progression of events was thus:
Robin died, suffocated in her crib by an old blanket, and we, addled by sentiment, had buried her with it.
And it had come back. Neither of us could or would recall putting Blanky in the coffin because we didn’t want to. It was an emotional connection to our lost little girl, no matter how it had appeared, and we were as unwilling to question that as we were to let go of it.
Then Lexi died, choked to death on the same blanket.
And there was only one person who could tell me why.
6
“I UNDERSTAND OF COURSE,” Principal Lewis said. “You’ll be missed a great deal. By the staff, but mostly by your students.”
A rotund and cheerful man, Lewis regarded me as one might a drug addicted relative, with a caution borne of affection. His brows were furrowed slightly, his smile strained.
“We were of course, all of us, devastated to hear of your loss.”
Same thing he’d said to me after Robin’s death. A well-practiced line, but by then, almost two weeks after Lexi’s funeral, I’d decided to let go of my derision for sympathy. If the worst thing you can say about somebody is that they tried to make you feel better when you clearly needed it, well then, who’s the real asshole in that equation?
“Thanks, Bob.”
He pursed his enormous lips and clasped his fingers together atop his desk. A single tuft of red hair rose from the middle of his otherwise bald skull like a flame. It was the reason the kids had nicknamed him Principal Tin-Tin.
“Would you consider an extended hiatus instead of quitting us altogether? In light of your circumstances, I have no doubt the board would understand. Take some time, take a vacation somewhere nice. Clear your head, maybe, and come back to us.”
A thousand different responses came to me as I sat looking up at the anti-bullying posters on the wall behind him, none of them charitable. Clear your head of what, exactly? I wanted to scream at him. The memories of my dead family? But he didn’t deserve that. His heart was now, as it had always been, in the right place. He was a good guy with bad taste in suits and a preposterous hairdo, but that didn’t make him an enemy, no matter how painful his choice of words.
“I’ve considered it,” I lied, because I hadn’t considered much of anything good since the funeral. “But I think I’d only keep dragging it out and putting you in a bad situation. Better to just accept the end of the chapter and move on. It’s what’s fair to everybody.”
And besides, by this time next week, I’ll either be in jail or dead.
“I was young when I lost my father,” he said, looking past me to the bloomless azalea bush outside the window of his office. “Cancer. It’s tough when we lose the people closest to us. Not sure I’ve ever gotten over it. You have to, though, right? You just have to, or nothing makes sense anymore.”
If it was a pep talk, it was a shitty one, and my expression must have conveyed that, because he focused, cleared his throat and stood with a sheepish smile, a hand extended over the desk. “I always liked you, Steve, and I hate what you’ve gone...what you’re going through.”
What I was going through was evident in how I looked. I hadn’t shaved or changed my clothes in days, my eyes were bloodshot, and I was trembling uncontrollably. Meth addicts suffering through withdrawal have more composure. After glimpsing myself in the mirror before leaving for the school, I’d burst out laughing at the wretch staring back at me. It was nobody I knew.
“And you’ll always have a place here with us. We’re family.”
Resisting the grim urge to compare his words to the those best utilized in cult indoctrination, I rose and shook his hand. “Thanks, Bob.”
After a moment of awkward silence in which he looked around his office as if seeing it for the first time, he brightened and said, “You’ll want to say goodbye to the kids, of course.”
CLASSES WERE IN SESSION, the hallway echoing with the sounds of subdued instruction and robotic response. My footsteps sounded impossibly loud on the tile as I took in the light blue rows of lockers on either side of me. Naturally, graffiti was forbidden, and yet this rule had gone largely ignored. As I neared my classroom door, I saw that someone had stuck a goggle-eyed cartoon ladybug on the door of their locker, and was not at all surprised.
There are no coincidences.
I was not sure I wanted to say goodbye to my students. I felt deep affection for each and every one of them (with the possible exception of the Martin kid, who, barring therapeutic intervention, was destined to become an asshole of the highest order), and I would miss them dearly, but I didn’t want them to see me in my current state. Better they remember me at my best. I was also afraid of how they might treat what had happened to me. They were innocents, driven by curiosity about the world around them, and death was particularly fascinating to them. What might they ask me, and how on earth could I answer without falling apart?
Where are your wife and daughter now, Mr. Brannigan?
Well, Sam, they’re in the ground. Cold and dead and waiting for the worms.
Not in Heaven?
I don’t believe in Heaven, Alice, and you shouldn’t either, because Heaven is a construct fabricated by people who can’t let go of those they’ve lost and who wish to relegate the notion of personal responsibility to a ghost in the sky.
That’s not what my Mom says.
Then she has a lot to learn, and so do you, and you will, eventually, when everything goes wrong in your life. I wish that wasn’t what had to happen for you to find out that the edges of the wor
ld can cut you, but there you go...
You look sick, Mr. Brannigan. Are you going to die too?
I sure hope so, Katie.
The phantom discussion stayed my hand on the door handle, and instead I peered in through the tall wire-mesh window in the upper half of the door. The substitute teacher, Mrs. Jove, bane of a thousand students, was drawing what looked like a vintage baby carriage on the chalkboard. When I saw the two words she had written above it, in a childish font I knew wasn’t hers, I licked my lips and backed away from the door, my heart trip-hammering in my chest. I wasn’t scared, not quite. What I had endured over the past few months had finally inured me to such purposeless responses, but I still felt threatened on an atavistic level, sure now that no matter where I went, this thing, the woman, would follow me. The words on the chalkboard were her way of letting me know she was watching:
BABY CLOSE
I MOVED TO THE OTHER side of the door so that the substitute teacher and the chalkboard were out of view, and looked instead at the students. Despite the need to be gone from there, from the crawling sensation of being monitored by forces I was thus far incapable of comprehending, I couldn’t go without seeing the kids one last time.
Immediately, I wished I’d resisted the urge and just gone home.
The children were looking in my direction. All of them wore long-eared rabbit masks with black buttons for eyes, their mouths split into lascivious leers, rubber tongues lolling. Before I moved away from the door, crestfallen, the course of the next few days now clearer than ever, they each brought sheets of paper up from their desks to obscure their faces. It was the emoji game I had devised for them, intended to show how their weekend had gone.
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