by Tim Curran
“I’m glad you’re home. It’s nice to finally see you again,” she managed. “I know you’ve been busy, but a phone call from time to time would be nice.”
“Every time I call, we fight.”
“We do not.”
“Yes, Mother, we do.”
Thrust, parry.
“But that’s my fault, isn’t it? It’s because I’m a bad person who can’t live up to your ideals, I’m sure. Well, I’m sorry,” Mother Alice said, a white froth of saliva at her lips. “It’s hard for the rest of us little people to live up to your grand expectations. We should be honored that you even speak to us.”
Bria just shook her head.
Good God, this could have been any conversation they’d had in the past few years. That was the sad, pathetic part about it. Bet you ten bucks she lies in bed at night and scripts this shit out. Bria wouldn’t have been surprised. Alice was a lot of things, but she rarely arrived unprepared for battle. She liked to organize her life the way other people organized drawers.
Bria pushed past her into the kitchen. She stood there a moment too long, feeling dizzy and disoriented, knowing the room and hating it because it was so tied up in all the things that had gone wrong for her as a teenager.
Do something. If you freeze up like this Alice will know why.
She found a pitcher of lemonade in the fridge and poured herself a glass. When she saw Alice leaning in the doorway, watching her, she said, “There’s no arsenic in this, is there?”
Alice gave her a sour look that could’ve turned milk. But it wouldn’t stop there; no way. Bria knew she would have to parry. Alice was planning another attack. They were circling each other, seeking out weak spots. As she sipped her lemonade, she noticed that Mother Alice had out her summer kitchen decorations—everything was peach motif: cookie jars, wall hangings, even the hand towels on the stove. These would disappear precisely on the 15th of September and be replaced by harvest patterns. To leave them up beyond the 15th would be to invite calamity.
“Would you like something to eat with that?” Alice asked, thrusting into her daughter’s soft white underbelly.
“No, I’m good.”
“Maybe just a sandwich.”
“No.”
“How about a salad? I have fresh tomatoes. Margie grew them.”
The idea of that definitely turned Bria’s stomachanything Margie produced (like Polly, for instance) was gag-inducing. “No, I’m not hungry.”
Alice had found a nerve and she was going to work it. She was an expert. Bria could already feel herself weakening.
“When’s the last time you ate anything?” Alice wanted to know.
“I had an egg this morning.”
It was absolute bullshit, of course, but Bria felt she had to say something, anything. She had not eaten in days. Just the idea of this meeting, this confrontation, had tied her stomach in knots.
Alice moved in for the kill. “Are you throwing up again?”
There it was. No more beating around the bush. This is exactly what Alice had wanted to ask all along.
Bria sighed. “No, I don’t do that anymore, but if I’m forced to eat something Margie touched, I just might.”
Alice didn’t like that. She had her daughter on the ropes, how dare she strike back just when she was going for the jugular! Now poor Alice had no choice but to back off. She had lost her footing. She played about, discussing the weather and the summer, random bits of gossip concerning the nabe.
“I was talking with Margie,” she said, recovering slowly.
In fencing, Bria knew, this was a feint, a false attack. Alice said this and nothing more, carefully gauging her daughter’s reaction which would instruct her on how to proceed.
“Lucky you.”
Alice ignored that. “Polly was telling her you have a very active social life at the U.”
Alice was advancing again. She was accusing her daughter of being promiscuous. Well-played, Mother. Well-played. Bria said nothing. Draw her in, draw her in. Polly Pukebag. Gah. For some ungodly, positively obscene reason, Alice liked her and probably because Polly was much like herselfall hollow pretense. She was wound tight, constantly fighting to keep all the nasty, painful things inside duly suppressed and locked in their individual cages. If they got out, the world might see how frail and broken she truly was, how frustrated and hurt just like all the others. And that would be a sign of weakness. So, like Alice, she kept a tight rein on the soft, squirmy things of her id. She conformed. She dressed right, spoke well, used her manners, never cried or caused trouble, presenting the world with a gleaming, well-polished shell that was wonderfully predictable and trouble free (and godawful empty).
On Birch Street, that was how things were done.
“Polly told Margie you have a lot of friends,” Alice said, moving in slowly.
“Being the campus whore, she would know.”
Counter-thrust.
It nearly drew blood, but Alice was still on her feet. “You particularly spend a lot of time with a certain professor, I understand. One that is twice your age. Is that true?”
Don’t deny it. “It is. Dr. Denning. He’s my advisor. He runs the Communications Lab.”
“What else does he run?”
Bria finished her lemonade. Years ago, she would have flown off the handle and made a fool of herself, which was exactly what Alice was fishing for. But not now. Hey, maybe she had grown up since she was gone. She didn’t like to consider the possibility (and mainly because she would have had to admit she was immature before), but maybe there was something to it.
She looked from her mother to the spice rack on the wall. Annually, Alice put a level to it to make sure it was even. She could not live with unbalanced things, save, perhaps, herself. The spices were arranged alphabetically. Bria had gotten screamed at once when she put several back out of order.
“There’s no romantic relationship between us, Mother, so get your mind out of the filthy black gutter…if possible.” Thrust. “Polly handles all the blowjobs on campus.” Another thrust. Alice was losing her stamina now. Time to press things. Flèche: a violent, running attack. “Interestingly enough, Dr. Denning has written several scholarly books on abnormal psychology which is something I’m fascinated by. It helps me understand you.”
Before Alice could think of an appropriate counter-attack, Bria purposely bumped into the flour and sugar containers which were carefully regimented. She could almost hear a psychic gasp escape her mother. She pressed the attack. She removed several spices—sage, mustard seed, and cinnamon—and made a show of examining them. Then she deliberately returned them out of order. She thrusted again and again, knocking one of the peach towels from the stove bar, bumping into a painting on the wall that featured a wooden bowl of juicy peaches.
Alice was showing all the signs of a building panic attack. She was weakened, leaning against the countertop. One last thrust would finish her, but Bria pulled back. She would leave her opponent here, broken and gored.
“You…you…you think you’re so smart,” Alice began, trying to recover even as her life’s blood spilled to the floor. “After all I’ve done for you.” Now came the guilt trip. “Your father would be so disappointed.”
That hurt. It really hurt.
“Shut up, Alice,” Bria said, which she knew was exactly what her dad would have said. “You were born alone and you’ll die alone.”
Which was an absolutely cruel and insufferable thing to say, but Mother Alice had a way of bringing out the best in people.
Match…
18
Alice was speechless. Once again, that little bitch had come to sow discord and reap grief. She was trouble when she was a teenager and only Alice’s firm hand kept her in line.
So cocksure.
So arrogant.
So superior.
Maybe she’d forgotten the pandemonium of her teenage years, the turbulence she created in the calm w
aters of this family, but Alice had not. She remembered very well the problems Bria caused and the awful aftermath of it, the wreckage she left in her wake, how she ultimately crashed and burned, the darkness and mania she brought to this household, and the final destruction she wrought on herself.
“But I’m sure she blames me,” Alice said under her breath after her daughter was gone. “It was all my fault. It was always all my fault. I was repressive and invasive and overbearing. That’s what she would say. That I pushed her into it all.”
She did not know who had returned from the U, but it was not Bria. A stranger, a pod person perhaps, a parasitic lifeform. The real Bria (the one Alice could control) had been duplicated, assimilated by this mouthy, snotty, uppity little wench. She was not Bria, but an alien thing. Alice remembered her own daughter very well. She saw her now in her pretty dresses and ribbons and princess shoes, always smiling, always so eager to please her mother as all daughters should be. God, what she would have given to have little Bria back…
19
Bria made it up to her room, shut the door and locked it. It took all the strength she had left. Leaning against it, panting, her head throbbing, she nearly went to her knees.
Oh no, she thought, don’t let it come back.
Slowly, she slid down to the floor. The room was spinning, rotating in ever-widening circles. Her brain was boiling in her skull. It was bubbling, steaming, liquefying. At least, that’s how it felt as she waited for it to come splashing out of her ears. Her breath was caught in the narrowing channel of her throat, her heart galloping madly in her chest. Tiny BB-sized beads of sweat popped on her brow, running down the bridge of her nose. Gasping, her guts convulsing in waves to her throat, she crawled on her belly until she reached the garbage can. She would throw up in it. Just like the old days, regurgitating some watery bile that would soon enough become blood.
“No!” she heard her own voice cry with some urgency. “No, no, no, no!”
I am not that person.
Gradually, she began to calm at the point where the shadows in the corner grew long and suggestive. Immediately, they retreated as she regained control. She was not the bad girl in the Dark Castle who could not get out of bed, her precious tissues and organs starved to the point where they began to cannibalize themselves. That person no longer existed. She told herself that she could go to the mirror right now and she would not see that horrible, skullish face leering back at her, that pale and deathly visage with its eyes juicy red from all the blood vessels broken during bouts of vomiting.
“Bad things, all bad things,” Bria told herself. “Put them in the box and close the lid.”
That made her feel better.
Ten minutes later, she had nearly forgotten about the episode.
Alice.
Goddamn Alice brought it all on. I knew she would.
That little exchange had taken more strength than just about anything else in her life. But she did it. She neutered the old crow. It was a start.
Bria looked around her room.
God, nothing had been changed since she went away to school. Nothing. Same posters on the walls, same magazines on the desk. Even the Justin Bieber poster (now, that was embarrassing). Bria had only been home once during her time at the U. It was for Christmas and it had been ugly. Alice had bought her a box of leopard-print peek-a-boo panties from Victoria’s Secret. You’re a college girl now and we all know what college girls are like. That had only been the first engagement in the Christmas war of attrition that had kept her away since.
The room was creepy. It was so…untouched. Everything was the way she left it in high school. Oh, sure it had been dusted regularly, the linen changed, but afterwards everything returned to exactly the way it had been. She wouldn’t have put it past Alice to measure things so that they would be in precise relation to one another.
No more.
She sat on the bed, angrily disarranging the magazines on the desk which promptly fell to the floor. Two issues of Seventeen. Bella Thorne was on the cover of one and Victoria Justice on the other. She kicked them under the bed with her heel.
There was a knock at the door, a light rattling of knuckles.
“Mother,” Bria said, “let it lay, just let it lay. It’s enough for one day.”
“It’s me” a soft voice with a slight lisp said. “It’s Sady.”
“Oh.”
Bria got up off the bed, actually seemed to launch herself free of it. Sady. Christ, it was Sady. The idea intrigued her and disturbed her at the same time. She made herself relax. It was important: Sady could be very perceptive. She knew things sometimes she should not know.
Just ignore her. Maybe she’ll go away.
But Bria knew she couldn’t do that, she just couldn’t. The very idea made her ache with guilt. Sady was her sister. She couldn’t just turn away from her. Sady wouldn’t like that.
Don’t open that door! a voice inside Bria screamed. If you do, it’ll start again. Sady will make bad things happen.
She unlocked the door. “Come on in, kid.”
Sady smiled and slipped inside. Bria locked the door after her so no one else—namely Alice—would sneak in. Sady offered her a thin smile and stood in the corner by the desk. She was a skinny, sexless twelve dressed in jean shorts and a tee that featured a sparkling, multi-colored kitten with a unicorn’s spike on its head. Beneath it was scrolled, IT’S SO MEOWGICAL! The shirt almost made Bria laugh. It was cute, but it reminded her of Sady at five. Sady had insisted to her kindergarten teacher that she was not a human being but a cat. She’d scamper about the house on all fours until Alice got after her. Sady had always wanted a cat, but that was something Alice would not allow in her house. When Bria told her she had always wanted a cat, too, Sady had said one of those unsettling things she often didI’ll be your cat, Bree. I’ll be a really good kitty.
“I heard you and Alice arguing,” Sady said.
Bria shrugged. “That much hasn’t changed.”
Sady offered her that same thin smile, as if she was afraid of letting out what was inside. Her hair was a pale mousy red, her face almost drab. The only thing alive about it were the red-rimmed sockets of her eyes that were the color of raw beef. It looked like maybe she had been crying.
Bria was amazed at how much Sady looked like her at that age. They could have been twins. She stood there, appraising her younger sister who appraised her right back, gnawing on a sandwich overstuffed with shaved deli ham and Swiss cheese. Bria found that she was captivated by the sandwich. It was the most delightful thing she’d ever seen.
“Are you hungry?” Sady asked.
“No, not right now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Bria sat on the bed. “Come sit by me,” she said.
Sady did, hesitantly.
“Are you all right?” Bria asked her.
“Of course. I’m always all right,” she said.
“You don’t have to be, you know. If there’s something bothering you, you can tell me. Believe me, I probably went through it, too.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You sure it’s not Alice?”
Sady smiled again. There was a slight tic in the corner of her lips. “No, she doesn’t bug me like she does you.”
Bria laughed. “What’s your secret?”
“Control.”
Bria just looked at her. There was something very stern and adult in her tone and something cruel in her eyes as if she was talking about a pet insect she could crush anytime she chose.
“Control?”
The same wan smile touched Sady’s lips. “Yes, Alice is afraid. She’s afraid of being alone, she’s afraid of time passing…I’m like her link to a world that is gone, the world of Roger and you and Aiden. When we all lived here happily, or not so happily, together and dear Alice had her brood.”
Bria just lifted an eyebrow. Sady was right and she knew it, but
there was something very disconcerting about a twelve-year-old speaking so clinically.
“She’s afraid, so I use that fear. Whenever she bugs me, I threaten to run away to another city.” Sady smiled fully now, her white teeth sparkling but her eyes still terribly dead. “That’s how I keep her in line. If she causes trouble, I’ll just fade into the distance and she won’t like that at all.”
Bria would have been the last one to defend Mother Alice…but this…this was a little disturbing. “Sady, I…I mean…”
“You don’t approve?”
“Well, it’s not that.”
“It’s okay. You never did approve of me.”
Bria reached out and grasped her hand, wanting, needing very much to make a connection before the chance was gone and her sister slipped away entirely. Sady’s hand was unpleasantly cool and moist. It was like holding a dead fish.
“Of course, I approve of you. Don’t say things like that.”
Sady stood up. “It doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter before and I see no reason why it should matter now.”
God, the way she talked.
Sady stood there, taking quick, voracious shark-like bites from her sandwich until it was gone. She licked mustard from her lips. There was something almost suggestive about that.
Bria felt hunger pangs rippling in her belly. She could go downstairs and make a sandwich like Sady’s, a wonderfully huge and satisfying sandwich, but then Alice would be down there, watching her, studying her, following her around. If she went to the bathroom after she ate, Alice would stand outside the door listening.
Like the Dark Castle. Just like the Dark Castle.
“Was it good?” Bria finally asked, trying to keep things light.
“Delicious. Eating is a good thing,” Sady said. “You should try it sometime.”