Lauren’s head swam and she felt as though someone had knocked all the breath out of her. She must have gasped because Val said, “Those were all miscarriages. The ones that lived were given away for adoption.”
Lauren opened another cigar box, and another. They all contained the same thing but in different shapes and sizes.
She heard movement behind her. Val stumbling to the bathroom. The sound of vomiting. Lauren followed, shocked, numb inside, unsure of how to respond. She wiped Val’s mouth with a warm wet washcloth. “It wasn’t only grandpa,” Val said, eyes downcast, “but my brother Howard, too. Dad never touched me. But he never lifted a finger to protect me, either.”
Lauren stroked Val’s matted hair, and pulled the strands that stuck to her sweaty face away from her forehead. “My god Val. I’m so goddamn sorry. I never even suspected. How could I have known?”
Val gave Lauren’s shoulder a forgiving caress. “How was I supposed to tell you? Saving those dead misbirths makes me a sicko, a fiend. Do you think I ever wanted you to know that?”
Lauren chuffed, made a noise that sounded halfway between a bark and scream. Not now! She prayed. Please! Not now! “But when they died—how were you able to keep them? Why would a doctor have allowed that?”
Val’s eyes blazed with fury. “If you think for one second they ever took me to a doctor, much more a hospital, then think again. No Lauren, they let me labor at home, in my own bed, and when a little critter was born prematurely dead, Grandpa let me sleep in my bloodied sheets for days before stripping the bed and burning them.”
Lauren swallowed hard, the urge to laugh was growing stronger. This was M.S.’s most perverse betrayal. She must kill the impulse. Val would think her a monster.
Valerie’s voice took on an odd lilt that was acidly sardonic, her words came out like miniature explosions. “Do you want to know why so many of them died? It’s a good story, scout’s honor. As soon as I would begin to show, Grandpa and Howard would gut punch me, repeatedly, several times a day. Howard loved that game. Pop-pop-pop!” Val’s eyes gleamed like a snake’s eyes—luminous, flat, and predatory.
Lauren giggled. She slapped her hands over her mouth and bit into the heel of her palm. She shook her head in agony. Blood welled in the bite marks. She couldn’t alarm Val with this inappropriate response. She just couldn’t.
Val must have noticed something because she turned away and hid her head. Lauren tried to draw Val into an embrace. Val stiffened and did not warm to the contact. Then Val shoved Lauren away and turned to the commode to vomit again, though this time only bile was expelled. Lauren reached for a towel and wrapped it around her hand.
Lauren held onto Val’s back. “It’s all right now. It’s over. You can let it go. It doesn’t have to rule you any longer. You are your own person. You can live with and accept the past. You are strong.”
A vacant, haunted lassitude replaced Val’s earlier savage fury. Flat affect meant dissociation: Val was trying to protect herself psychologically. She permitted Lauren to undress her while bath water ran. Lauren eased Val into the tub and sponged her body. Her tall, lanky frame filled the tub, her knees up to her chin. Lauren took her out clean, and toweled her dry.
Then she led Val back to her bed and lay down next to her, holding her. Lauren accepted her own past, and their shared past, and so found a level of compassion she could survive. People weren’t objects to be discarded when they stopped meeting your expectations. Val could not be other than who she was—neither could Lauren, and that was better than good, that was bliss.
*
Lauren woke with the dawn, having slept a dozen hours. Leaving Val in bed, she went out to the kitchen. Lauren noticed black specks on the kitchen counter, like spilled coffee. She ran her index finger through it, and brought it to her nose. Potting soil. Valerie had arisen in the night and tended her plants.
Lauren smiled.
She put water on to boil and then noticed the light on in the master bath. She went in to the tidy, clean room. An open bottle of vodka sat on the edge of the sink. Lauren’s heart sank. Oh, well, Val could be forgiven. She’d been through hell yesterday. Then Lauren spied the empty bottle of pills next to the vodka, and fear impaled her. “Valerie!” she cried and rushed back to the bedroom. The shriek of the boiling tea kettle competed with Lauren’s howl of dismay.
Everything that happened next passed in a blur. First came paramedics, then the police, and finally the coroner. After answering questions from six different officers from the city and county, she finally called Howard in Washington, D.C. and was relieved when she got voicemail. She didn’t have the energy to confront him with his vile secret. On the voicemail she told him, “Valerie told me everything about you and your grandfather before she died. I know everything, Howard.”
Howard did not attend Valerie’s funeral. Weeks passed as Valerie’s estate was probated and disbursed. Lauren and Howard were co-beneficiaries of Val’s will. Howard the attorney preferred communication by email, which Lauren considered a blessing.
“Lauren,” he wrote, “I want nothing that belonged to my sister. I’ll just take my half of the intangible assets (bank account/insurance policy proceeds, etc.) according to the will. You can do what you wish with all the stuff. Thx. -H.”
So, Lauren sold Val’s furniture and household goods at auction, except for a certain walnut cabinet of gothic design. Lauren didn’t care how much it was worth—she determined it would never survive her.
Marge and Lauren hauled it out to Marge’s cabin in the Cascade foothills. They pushed the cabinet out of the truck bed onto stony ground away from any nearby trees. Lauren doused it with paint thinner and struck a match. The cabinet hissed and spat as flames licked its surface. Lauren threw the pictures of Roland, Grady, and Howard Stone into the flames. The smoke that boiled out of the charring wood was pitch black and rank.
“That’s awful,” said Marge. “What is it?”
“The past,” said Lauren.
Then the mirror in the cabinet shattered. Marge and Lauren ducked, but even so, a piece of the flying glass grazed Lauren’s cheek. And with that, it was over.
From time to time, Lauren was bothered by nagging feelings of guilt that she’d failed Valerie by mixing her professional and personal lives. That ethical breach would require future soul searching.
And so, one day while she was watering Val’s plants two months after Valerie’s passing, she noticed something like a weed growing out of the potting soil near the stem of a heliotrope. She grasped the object and attempted to pull it free. But it was attached to something larger. She pulled harder expecting to see roots, but a doll’s arm came free in her hand.
Stunned, Lauren gazed at the thing as realization dawned. Her legs turned to rubber and she dropped to her knees on the carpeted floor. She loosed the planter and it fell and smashed, spewing soil across the rug. The heliotrope spilled from the clay pot, roots exposed. Tangled among the roots, dirt clinging to the dry substance that once had been soft flesh, reposed the fetal figure of a dirty toy, a tiny mummified proto-human.
Val hadn’t let her past go at all. She’d simply reburied it.
Lauren experienced a rising, uncontrollable impulse to laugh. It was her MS, sensory signals rebounding off scars in her nervous system. She felt no amusement, no lightness of heart or spirit, simply repugnance; but still she laughed, great whooping guffaws of laughter. Tears sprang from her eyes, as the sensation of pins and needles pricked the skin of her slack legs.
She didn’t look down at her legs. She didn’t want to see confirmation of the terrible image that rose in her mind’s eye: the desiccated husk of a fetus, moving with marionette-like jerks, fastening its mouth upon on her calf, licking, nibbling, biting, sucking…
T he Grief Season
Lee Thomas
Late morning and the offices of the advertising agency felt stagnant. The only sound, a persistent droning, came from the air conditioning vents. Matt Abbott couldn’t concentrate. His
thoughts, as sad and tragic as any other widower’s, nattered in morose echoes. He closed the laptop, tucked it under his arm, and told the co-workers he encountered on the way to the elevator he would be back after lunch.
At the coffee shop, he sat in the middle of the room, where sun spilled through the windows to touch the edge of the polished table. The place was neat and clean, and the natural light was welcome. Unlike other cafés, which were often eclectically furnished, new tables and chairs with cherry wood veneers decorated the space. Six tech geeks rearranged the room to create a conference area beside the window. Respectable in their blue button-down shirts, they were unremarkable in appearance. Their body shapes ran the spectrum, from scrawny to average, then right on through to roundly obese. One guy wore a navy sweater with an argyle lattice across the chest. The sky blue collar of his dress shirt clutched his neck. His face was forgettable, but he had a nice ass.
Behind the counter, two women steamed milk, toasted Panini sandwiches, and cackled mockingly. Cruelly. They weren’t truly sinister, Matt knew. They meant no harm. Even so, their expressions of joy burrowed like vermin, determined to nest in his skull. Through the speakers hidden in the ceiling, a bastard mutt of reggae and creeping folk music entered the room like a nerve agent under low pressure. He shoved nugget-sized speakers into his ears, found his playlist, and turned up the volume. Soulful blues smothered the invasive sounds, so he could focus on his work. He could have used the headphones in the office, but that wouldn’t have eliminated the feeling of desolation surrounding him there.
Matt’s laptop was a window, overlooking familiar but arid terrain. He told himself to concentrate. Concentrate. But when he did, the image on which he focused was bleached of color and the words read as torpid. Though the copywriters assured him the phrases for the ad sparked and popped and read fresh, he couldn’t feel it. The sentences were nothing but strings of words, paths of desiccated carcasses. These days, they always were. But because he had to work, because he was paid good money to pull the images and words into a pleasing whole, he tinkered, changing fonts, trying new positions for the product name and the ad copy. New positions. Again he looked at the techie in the argyle sweater, the man whose ass he had admired and whose face he found lacking. He imagined stripping away the layers of clothing from him, using his imagination to alter the image the way he used manipulation apps to reduce photos to their important elements, and he could imagine this man wholly raw, down to the musculature and the skeleton. There was nothing there – at least nothing that interested Matt – so his attention crept to the window.
Then he saw Kit. Except, he didn’t.
Kit had been his partner, and Kit was dead. He’d been dead seven weeks.
What he saw through the window was a pillar of color hovering in the parking lot beside a white Toyota convertible. The pillar was a misty, dusty plum color, so much a spirit Matt could barely see it, a shadow with no source. When he first set eyes on this trick of light, this impossibility, he saw Kit–still smiling, still desirable, still alive. Even now, a moment later, he detected the handsome contours of the face high on the cloudy surface, and something told Matt there was a connection between this vaporous yet substantial anomaly and the love he'd lost.
Residue.
He didn’t believe in ghosts. Death was the end. There was no place to go after life: no crowd of loved ones; no party, no busy kitchen, no strolls through twilight, no sweet fields of cloud to cushion wanderings in the hereafter. Anything that was left unresolved would remain unresolved.
Matt told himself there were no ghosts. That is not Kit.
Still, the illusion frustrated him. He tried to ignore it. His attention returned to the laptop’s screen and to the faces of the models–an elderly couple, holding hands with adoring smiles affixed to their airbrushed faces. Their affection was fabricated. They were paid models. The old man and the old woman had met an hour before the picture was taken, and yet they gazed at one another as if they were the greatest of loves, each constituting the other’s joy and salvation. Matt’s gaze flicked toward the window and to Kit and the white car.
He closed his laptop and stood, keeping his eyes on the residue of his dead companion. He crossed the coffee shop, imagining the form would reveal itself to be nothing more than a smudge on the glass once he got close enough to the door, but when the door opened nothing occupied the space between Matt and him… It… except air. He remained on the threshold, fixed to the spot.
Not exactly afraid, Matt’s hesitation was more than anything a moment to figure out what purpose moving forward might serve. Did he expect this residual presence to bestow a message? Wisdom? Condemnation? Or an embrace? Checking over his shoulder to the side of the room, away from the techies, he noticed two of the patrons eyeing his reticence, and what Matt hoped to find in their eyes was some indication that they, like he, could see the presence occupying the parking lot. They showed no signs of it. One of them, an attractive young Asian woman with a phone pressed to her ear, simply looked annoyed, and the other, a bearded man with thick forearms and a pleasant, round face, looked, not at Kit, but at Matt. His lips twitched into a smile. The expression and what it suggested startled Matt, though it was familiar and under different circumstances might have been flattering.
After turning away, Matt stepped outside. The vague shape remained, though he could no longer find any indications of the face on its surface. He walked to the hood of the convertible. With each step the residue of Kit faded, until it had vanished completely. Continuing along the length of the car Matt stepped into the driving lane of the parking lot to survey the concrete and the vehicles and the precisely spaced shrubs and grasses of the landscaping.
Nothing.
Feeling ridiculous and unnerved by the hoax his mind had played on him, he turned back toward the coffee shop, only to discover the bearded man who had smiled at him was now standing beside the white convertible.
He said, “Hello,” and Matt said, “Hey,” and he asked, "How's it going?"
In the living room of the man’s house, Matt allowed himself to be undressed and guided onto the couch. A halo of color, dusty purple, ringed the bearded face, and Matt wanted to believe that Kit was there, not only observing but participating, perhaps even inhabiting the man with the round face and the kind, blue eyes, guiding his actions. His positions. Perhaps Kit’s spirit would feel what this man’s body felt.
Of course, Matt knew the thoughts were absurd–a sign of emotional instability, insanity–so he pushed them away as the man dipped his face to resume the firm pressing of lips, the hard darting of tongue.
And as he relaxed into the act, he confirmed to himself that this was not a union orchestrated by a divine other. The bearded man was a fuck. A good time neither shared nor condemned by Kit or his memory. The round-faced man was an attractive stranger. He tasted like coffee and licorice, and his flavor helped Matt forget.
*
At home he avoided the computer–too many emails with messages he couldn’t face: invitations from friends who wanted to provide distraction. They meant well but they didn’t understand how much genuine discomfort accompanied Matt’s every attempt to conciliate their need to comfort.
He fixed a pork chop and green beans for dinner and ate half the food on his plate while watching a syndicated sitcom that he’d never found funny. But it was familiar and in its own way, pleasant enough. The characters were attractive and upbeat and their problems, though invariably exaggerated to the level of crisis, were small and manageable and would not follow them past the end credits. It was a simplicity he’d never believed in but had always wished for. Covered with foil, the remainder of the meal went into the refrigerator, and Matt wondered how he would spend the rest of his evening.
No housework. The apartment was scrubbed and swept and polished. He’d vacuumed the rug three times in as many days. To do it again would be pointless. Crazy even. Similarly, the only clothes that needed cleaning were the garments he wore. No errand
s to run.
The man he’d met that morning returned to his thoughts, but the memory was arid, sapped of vitality. He’d given Matt a business card and said, "Seriously, call me."
It’s too soon to call: a statement true in too many ways. He’d just met the man. Even under normal circumstances Matt would have given a relationship time to breathe. But these were not normal circumstances, so timing was irrelevant.
He threw the card away. Matt hadn’t sufficiently grieved for Kit. It had only been seven weeks, not even two months. Too soon. He considered watching another television program, surfing the web, reading, but these were distractions, inactive activities, to a person who, like Matt, needed to be moving.
There must be something I forgot to do.
He hated sitting in the room alone. Even to himself it was hard to explain the reason, but it felt as if the ceiling and walls were watching him, expecting Matt to be doing. For every moment in which he wasn’t in motion, the unease grew until what he endured felt near panic.
There were pills in the cabinet above the bathroom sink. Anti-anxiety. The doctor had told him to take them as needed to get through the worst of the mourning process. Twenty-three of the thirty-pill prescription remained in the bottle, because Matt wasn’t sure he’d know when the worst was over or if he’d even encountered it yet. Could it get worse? If so, would any number of pills help?
In reality, Matt avoided the pills because he didn’t like the numbness they imposed. It felt like cheating. Enduring the hurt was better. Yes, better.
Few mementoes of Kit were still in the apartment. Of all of the photographs that used to decorate its rooms, only one remained. It sat in a silver frame on top of the chest of drawers in the bedroom. In it, Matt and Kit were squeezed into the same side of a booth in a Palm Springs steakhouse. They wore the silly, matching Panama hats that Kit had insisted Matt buy – the ones Matt had thrown away a week after Kit’s funeral – and both toasted the camera.
Abominations of Desire Page 6