The Unwelcome

by Jacob Steven Mohr

  “I need to talk to Ben,” she said at last, inspecting the far corner of the bedroom through squinting eyes. But when Alice and Riley raised their voices to protest, she only waved them off almost casually.

  “It’s all right,” she told them, her mouth creased by a hard flat smile. “I know what I’m doing.” Then she cried out in a loud voice: “Ben! I know you’re out there. I can see your shadow under the crack. Come in here, I want to say something to you.” And when no reply came from beyond the door, she added, a little coyly, “It’s all right. I’m not going to shoot you. I don’t even know what they did with the rifle.”

  Then, almost like magic, the doorknob jiggled and turned; the door swung outward, revealing a sheepish-looking Ben standing behind it. He’d washed his face, but there was still some dried blood on his bottom lip and caked into his eyebrows and hair, and the cut above his left ear was badly bandaged and weeping a little. He looked wilted, and he clearly didn’t know what to do with his hands. They twitched at his sides, slipping into his belt loops, then into his pockets, then crossing in front of his waist like a penitent schoolboy. His eyes were red and puffy, and his bare chest glistened with sweat and water.

  He took a step into the room, but froze when he saw Kaity standing next to the bed. His eyes flicked from face to face, and he finally dropped his gaze altogether, turning red up to the roots of his matted hair. “I was trying to think of something I should say to you here,” he stammered out. “And I think I had something, just a minute ago. Only now I can’t remember what I was going to say…”

  Kaity seemed to dismiss this with a shake of her head. “How’re you feeling?” she asked.

  Ben’s mouth opened and shut like a fish. “My head hurts like hell,” he said at last, and Kaity nodded, but would not drop her eyes.

  “I’m sorry I hit you with the gun.”

  “Don’t be,” Ben protested. “I… You did what you had to do.”

  “No.” Kaity shook her head curtly, her eyes never leaving Ben’s. “I didn’t. Not the second time.” Her hands made knots in the sheets, twisting in circles. “So, I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have acted like that. It wasn’t your fault. Can you forgive me?”

  “Really?”

  Kaity nodded, and Alice saw her boyfriend’s chest swell.

  “All right, then,” he said. “I forgive you.”

  He was facing away from her, but Alice thought she saw him stand a little straighter, a little taller—she felt the sudden urge to run up and kiss him, and it was only pure animal survival instinct that kept her from at least reaching for his hand.

  But in the end it was Kaity that drew her gaze: again Alice saw the change in her, a hardness coming into her eyes and the position of her body—but now the hardness showed cracks. She was splitting wide at the seams. Now there was light pouring through all over, and Alice had to fight, to truly struggle against the will to rush forward and put her arms around her friend, to push her fractured pieces together in an embrace, to knit her whole with her love. Kaity had never needed it before, that kind of love. She had always been strong—but now, Alice was almost grateful for the cracks, though the thought made her ache with shame. Here, at last, was something she could do for her. A break she could fix. A great wide hurt she could kiss and make better.

  Alice Gorchuck would do just about anything for Kaity Brecker.

  “So you believe it, then?” Riley asked cautiously. “About Ben—and Lutz?”

  Kaity shrugged. “My hands are tied,” she said, as if this were justification enough. She wrapped her arms around herself, turning to face the window so that her profile showed against the backdrop of the glass and the night beyond that.

  “There was something he used to say to me,” she began, almost casual in her tone. “Lutz, I mean. Before he… When we were still together. He would tell me that sometimes he wished we were the only two people on the planet. Picture a beach with a million empty beach chairs and umbrellas, stretching north and south for miles and miles and miles—and us walking on the sand, always in the shade, always together. I used to think that was so romantic.”

  The sound of a single sob rang out—but instead of tugging Alice’s heartstrings, it sent hot shafts of nameless dread plunging into her stomach. In one rough animation, Kaity’s face had collapsed down on itself; the effect was almost grotesque, a parody of anguish, and now the air quivered with the sounds of her weeping.

  “I’m sorry,” Kaity was saying, scrubbing at her face with the corner of the bedsheet. “I’m so, so sorry—but it’s too late. I can’t protect you from it. He’s not going to let me go. He’d rather die than let me go. But you’re in the way—don’t you understand? Now you’ve gotten involved. Now it’s not me he’s coming after. It’s you. It’s all of you…”

  But Alice couldn’t hear her anymore. She was thinking about that long empty beach, with those millions of umbrellas, and the miles and miles of warm, smooth sand all in the shade. She pictured them—her and Kaity, in bathing suits, or wrapped in matching towels, or wearing nothing at all, walking hand in hand through this lonely and beautiful world that woke up each day just for them. The water was calm, and the surf quiet, and the rows of seashell-colored beach houses stood empty, their dark windows staring. There were no birds in the sky, and time moved slow as sunset.

  North and south. Sky and sea. Always together, always in the shade.

  For the first time in her life, Alice perfectly understood how Lutz Visgara felt.

  She wished for it, that lonesome world. She had always wished for it.

  Chapter 10

  Through a Wide Keyhole

  Jill Cicero was thinking about houseplants.

  Her mother had kept them, ever since Jill was a little girl. She would get them as gifts or buy them from the Home Depot on Sundays after church, and fill the house with them. There were bromeliads on the countertops, devil’s ivy in the bathrooms in hanging pots, elephant’s feet in fat, squat jars in the living room, and always a peace lily as the centerpiece of the family dining table. Her mother would feed them, Jill would water them—one of her first chores, and she did it well—and the whole family took turns shooing Patty-Cake the cat away from them when he tried to sidle up for a nibble.

  And, one after the other, regular as the sunrise, the plants would always die.

  It wasn’t her mother’s fault. She didn’t have a green thumb, but she’d always managed to keep their garden plants green and healthy. They had tomatoes and bell peppers and fresh basil all through the summer, and their front walk was always guarded by rainbow rows of posies. But the plants inside the house stubbornly refused to thrive. No matter what Jill’s mother did, after about a month’s time they would wilt, turn brown, and crumble apart like something that had been mummified.

  By the time she was ten years old, Jill was terrified of the plants. A dog, she reasoned, could bark and whine when it was hungry, or paw the door when it needed to use the yard or go for a walk. Cats were more self-reliant, but they could still meow and hiss and prod with a forepaw to communicate their needs. A fish couldn’t, of course—but at least a fish could move. She’d heard stories about goldfish that leaped from their bowls, committing wet and gasping suicide on the floor below in protest against some secret agony of their existence. But a houseplant couldn’t even stir its leaves. She imagined the peace lily on the dining table, already turning a little brown at the edges of its leaves, watching the rest of the family eating ravioli, silently screaming out for some unknown thing it desperately needed to survive. With every bite, she tortured herself with thoughts of what life would be like if she couldn’t tell her mother she was hungry. Trapped in her seat—or potted, like the lily—watching her brothers and sisters gorging themselves, vibrating with need and pleading with her eyes, slowly drooping earthward as silent starvation devoured her from the inside out.

  One day she shrieked when her mother walked through the door with a tall ficus, and after that there were no m
ore plants in the Cicero house. The outdoor garden continued to flourish, and, eight years later, Jill packed off for Armistice University. And her mother, as far as Jill knew, went right back to buying and killing houseplants. But this was fine—so long as Jill stayed safely tucked away on the coast, where she could not hear the screams.

  “You don’t have to keep her in there anymore,” the girl, Kait Brecker, was saying. “I mean—not if you don’t want to.”

  A young man’s voice chuckled, and a door creaked open. “I thought you didn’t like her staring at you,” Lutz Visgara replied airily. Their voices were close by, muffled by wood and darkness.

  “Maybe I know better now,” Kait replied. “Maybe I’m starting to understand.”

  Jill stared at the closet door, her back against a cushion of thick winter overcoats, her eyelids blinking mechanically every sixty seconds or so without her willing them to. Every so often, her left hand would twitch involuntarily, and her knuckles would scrape against something hard and crooked—the hook of an umbrella, she guessed, leaning in an urn. The closet was pitch dark, but over the hours her eyes had adjusted to the conditions; when light crept in through the slats and the crack under the door, she could see just enough to make out the dingy white of the faux wood three inches in front of her nose, and beyond that, the occasional dim, moving shape out in the hall. For twelve hours, she had seen nothing else—and for twice that long, she had not stirred once from the confines of the closet.

  But Jill Cicero was not a prisoner. In fact, she wasn’t even there at all.

  Jill was thinking about houseplants.

  Forty-eight hours back, now, counting back to the last moment she could remember seeing the sky. Through the windshield of her own Jeep Grand Cherokee, driving to the little apartment on the bay side of downtown, speeding the whole way through rain that turned to early flurries halfway there—and when the female cop pulled her over two miles from the parking deck, Jill had laughed in her face. All this she saw as if from some distance, peering out of the darkness, watching her life whirl by through the keyhole. Lutz had been in the passenger’s seat beside her, laughing as well, hiccupping with mirth like he was going to choke on it, but she was only vaguely aware of him, in the same way she was aware of the nails on her toes or the hair on her head or her tongue in her jaws.

  She no longer wanted to scream.

  * * *

  He hadn’t knocked on the classroom door; he’d simply appeared, as if he’d always been there, as though he belonged, the door hanging ajar behind him. Three pages stapled together dangled in his right hand, and right away she knew why he’d come. Even across the room, she could see the maze of red ink on the topmost page, so right away she laid aside her satchel, half-packed and already bulging with work, and folded her hands on Dr. Kamaczek’s desk.

  For a moment, they merely regarded each other across the room, expectation hanging heavy in the air with neither speaking. Then:

  “Jill,” he said with a broad smile. “That’s a very pretty dress you’ve got on.”

  “You must be Lutz.” Jill sighed, and Lutz nodded, still grinning. She gestured to one of the dozen or so fixed desk-chair combos arrayed in the classroom. “Go ahead and sit down, I guess, if you want to.”

  As he ambled forward, Jill realized just how strange it was that she’d recognized him on sight—considering that she’d only read his essays. But this shuffling, gangly youth could not have been anybody else. Lutz Visgara. The name suited him, somehow. He came toward her in a wobbling mosey that was almost a strut, the shrubbery of loose curls piled on his head tottering back and forth with every step he took. He didn’t stink of money like some she’d seen on campus, but you could tell, by looking, he’d never had a hungry day in his life. His walk, his clothes, that stupid sloppy grin smeared across his face… it all made sense, in some ineffable fashion. When was the last time you held out your hand and didn’t get exactly what you wanted? Jill wondered. When was the last time somebody told you ‘no’?

  He didn’t sit. He came up to the desk with all the pomp of a young hotshot lawyer approaching the bench, case-breaking evidence in hand, his grin never wavering. He lifted the papers in his hand to chest level and let them drop silently onto the desk in front of Jill, who looked at the C– on the front page and the words Graded by Jillian Cicero written beneath.

  “I don’t get C’s,” Lutz said.

  Jill pushed back her chair. “You’re supposed to call me ‘Ms. Cicero,’ I think,” she said, puffing a strand of hair out of her face and knotting her hands behind her head. “I know I’m not a proper teacher, but there’s decorum in place. You know.”

  “You’re Dr. Kamaczek’s TA?”

  “That’s right,” she replied.

  “And you graded my essay?”

  Jill glanced down. The essay, titled in bolded capital letters, read A Swift Affirmation of Principles, and she chuckled, remembering a joke Dr. Kamaczeck had told her the week prior: “Students who make puns in their essay titles,” she’d said, “generally have dick else to say, and you can quote me.”

  “That’s my name on it, isn’t it?” she responded, pointing with a manicured forefinger.

  Lutz splayed his fingers across the essay, shifting the pages as if to draw her attention to them. “I have a deal going with the world,” he said. “I put in a certain level of effort, and I get back a certain kind of return for my hard work. I can’t take a C lying down—it wouldn’t be fair to either of us.”

  “It was a C minus,” Jill corrected.

  “More to my point, then.”

  “Fair, huh?” Jill tugged the essay out from under Lutz’s hand and studied the first page. “Well, let’s see. For starters, this was supposed to be a four-page essay.”

  “I thought I would get points for brevity.”

  “Your third page was your works cited.”

  “I’m a slow writer,” Lutz replied with a shrug. “Cut me some slack, huh?”

  “Lutz, your essay actually supports Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal,” Jill protested. “You realize it’s a satire, don’t you? He’s talking about selling and, and eating the children of London’s poor. What were you trying to do here?”

  “I took a risk,” Lutz said as if this explained everything. Then he shrugged again and rolled his eyes skyward. “My essay’s satire, too, if that helps. It was all a joke.”

  “A joke.” Jill rubbed her eyes. It had been a long day already, even before this incursion. “Well, I don’t get it. Don’t you want to be taken seriously here?”

  “Of course.” Lutz’s eyes flashed—for the first time since he’d set foot inside the classroom, his big grin had slipped away. Now his mouth was set in a determined line, only degrees away from a smirk. Jill could feel the heat of his eyes on her, and she straightened, almost unconsciously trying to appear bigger in the chair.

  “I can’t take a C minus for this,” he told her.

  “You’re going to have to,” Jill responded. “It’s a C minus essay.”

  “Look,” he said, drumming his fingers on the desk, “what scale are you grading by? I want to know exactly where I’m losing points here.”

  “Baily—Dr. Kamaczeck, I mean—has a strict system laid out,” Jill began, trying in vain to think back to the syllabus she’d gotten by email at the beginning of the school year. “Certain proofs she looks for in each paragraph, things like that. I just follow the—”

  “But it’s still you grading it,” Lutz interrupted. “Not her. So there’s room for subjectivity on your end.”

  “Of course.”

  “Part of the grade could be determined by your personal opinion of the essay.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Lutz leaned forward, a single curl of dirty blonde hair flopping down across his forehead. “So I’m asking you to change your opinion.”

  “I can’t,” Jill said, then cocked her head and shrugged. “No, that’s not fair,” she added. “I could—but I won’t. I wante
d to fail this essay, do you understand? I hated reading it, I mean I really hated it. Your writing style is… pedestrian, you make only the barest attempts to support your claims, and your jokes just aren’t as funny as you think they are. But the worst thing is: I don’t believe you when you say this is supposed to be satire. This doesn’t read like real satire. Part of me thinks you actually believe every word you’ve written here. I don’t know what that means about you, and frankly I’m afraid to think too hard about it. I certainly don’t want to believe it—what a terrifying human being you’d have to be, if it were true.”

  She rubbed her eyes again, shrugged again, and sighed. “Listen, maybe I could have taken a second look a week ago,” she said. “If you’d brought it to me when you got it back—or better yet, to Dr. Kamaczek. But you’ve had this back since last Tuesday. Why are you only talking to me now?”

  The grin returned, slotting into place on his features like a puzzle piece clicking home. “I just didn’t think of it until today.”

  A feeling like distant thunder rose up inside Jill; she wanted to holler, to scream, to lunge across the desk and commit violence against this young man, at least to wipe that smug, satisfied grin off his face. You thought you were going to get away with it, she wanted to yell out. You thought you had this licked. You’re like a baby lamb that’s learned how to bite, aren’t you? And now you bite and you bite and you bite, because nobody can touch you—oh, look how cute and fluffy and tiny and harmless you are, you couldn’t hurt anybody. Well, I’ve seen what hurt boys like you are capable of, Lutz Visgara. I’ve still got the screws in my shoulder. So today, you lose the game. Today you’re going home empty-handed.