Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  “You’re wrong. Ksenia can tell just enough of the truth,” I insist. “She always finds a way to say enough, even if it’s hard for her. As long as you’re actually paying attention, you can understand what she means.” I force myself to lean closer, to wind an intimate arm around the thing’s neck, while its sweat clings to my skin. It shudders at my touch. I bring my lips up against its ear. In the midst of all this horror, where has my confidence come from, my conviction that I know exactly what to do? “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “But you have to let me go now, Sennie.”

  my voice becomes vapor

  It reacts to that name just the way she did the one time I tried it, with a sharp spasm and muscles knotting tight, a kind of rictus distorting her face. The only difference is that its limbs are so tangled that it can’t yank back a hand and hold it poised to strike me. I take my arm away from the thing’s neck, its tendons jumping now, and hold myself away a few inches: far enough to watch its eyes.

  “Did you talk to one of them?” it snarls, and its voice could be a recording of Ksenia from almost two years ago, played back into this unnatural twilight. Not a single note, not one flex of her breath, has changed. “If you did, you’d better tell me.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask it; I may not know where I am, or what precisely I’m speaking to; oh, but I still know my lines. That conversation made a terrible impression on me: I’d never seen such an awful look, like a bubbling wound, on anyone’s face before, and at the time I shrank into myself, frightened by what I’d evoked. “Are you asking if I talked to somebody about you? ’Cause if that’s it, just Josh, and you already know that.”

  “Then why did you call me that?” A pause. “Even Josh doesn’t know they called me that. Are you telling me you just made it up?”

  Just two soft little syllables, but already I knew better than to repeat them then, and I don’t repeat them now; once was enough. I’m trying not to glance to either side, since it feels important to keep my stare fixed on this thing’s gray eyes, but in my peripheral vision I can see the slither of its limbs retracting.

  “I just thought it sounded nice, Ksenia. I’ve never really liked Kezzer as a name for you.” I paused back then, giving myself a moment to master my fear while we sat alone together near the gorge, Josh off pissing in the woods; I pause now. “You might want to put that hand down, before you do anything completely stupid.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Ksenia’s voice echoes from the past and emerges from that thing’s mouth; but oh, its legs are buckling, shrinking, dragging back toward its body in white wormlike trails through the dusk and mud. Two years ago, this was the moment where her hand dropped back onto her leg, and I saw that she was shaking, violently. “I don’t believe that just came out of nowhere. Don’t think you can mess with me, Lexi.”

  “If I say something,” I told her, “then that means it’s true. And if you can’t accept that, and I mean absolutely, then you’re not worth being my friend.”

  That’s what I snapped at her then, so I recite it now, and I barely remember which time I’m in, which place; ever since I first glimpsed Josh through the window of my car, I’ve been so hopelessly swept up in dreams. But I remember that I felt just a bit cruel, speaking that way to Ksenia, because I knew in my heart that she wasn’t secure enough to say such a thing to anybody herself, not really. I knew she wouldn’t be able to withstand those words, coming from me. She was the one who’d raised her hand to me, ready to land a blow, but from the look in her eyes I had delivered that blow straight to her. She couldn’t even speak.

  That poor pale-limbed monster has folded itself almost to nothing now, twisting into a tight rope of arms and legs, with Ksenia’s shocked face perched at the top. It looks away from me, just the way Ksenia once did, using all her strength not to sob, and I walk around it, slowly, carefully. The woods are so close, so close, though I can hardly see anything of them now but frayed darkness against a violet-gray sky.

  The Ksenia-thing is at my back now, and I can hear it starting to whine, in a slow, sour, piercing drone. I can’t risk looking at it, can’t bear to feel so sad for anything; instead I pace as evenly as I can toward the opening between the trunks. The whine grows louder, creeping up the scale.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell it, calling over my shoulder without letting my gaze turn. “I hope you’ll be okay.” And then I push my way into the darkness of the path.

  It lets out a kind of shriek, and at last I look back. Just for an instant, I swear it.

  Four figures are standing in a shaft of moonlight that seems to have come out of nowhere, and the Ksenia-thing isn’t one of them. A heap of old straw, of broken sticks, sprawls where the spider-Ksenia watched moments before, and instead I’m looking at the trio that followed me, lace and scale and seafoam. I’d forgotten all about the bite on my calf until I saw them, but now I can feel the pain of it, a dull, steady throbbing. The boy with the foamy hair is holding a small brown girl by the hand, and at the sight of her yearning little face I nearly forget myself, nearly scream and go charging back to them.

  Because I know her. I’ve read her stories before, bounced her on my knees; I’ve chased after her, growling like a monster, while she screamed with laughter.

  It’s Olivia Fisher, the daughter of my parents’ close friends. And she died six months ago, still just five years old; died of a disease that no one has been able to identify. She’s buried not far from Ksenia, swathed in the same dewy grass; I only have to wander a few steps to share my flowers between their two graves.

  Oh, so this is the better world Josh talked about; this is where no one, so he claimed, will ever be wounded again.

  The impulse to run to Olivia fades with a new understanding: how close I’ve come to joining her, and how close my parents are, even now, to weeping by a stone with my name on it, and I suppose with some awful mimicry of my body just below. If I ever thought before that I knew what terror is, I was wrong: it’s an electrified cloud, blindingly white, that steals my breath and my vision, disintegrates my bones, fills my throat until I feel sure I’m choking. I have to turn, to race up the path, but my legs won’t listen to my mind.

  “Lexi?” Olivia whimpers, and then my paralysis shatters like a windowpane, my body spins away from her, and my fear turns from stillness into speed. I pound through the woods, guessing my way in the darkness, half-convinced I’m lost, but then I see the blackberry thicket like a mass of black teeth. I throw myself onto the ground and scramble through, not caring how the thorns tear at my face. Ksenia’s sweater snags and I thrash so hard the sleeve rips.

  And then I reach the far side, and even though I’m still in the night, the woods, something in the atmosphere eases and my breath glides smoothly from my lungs again. I only really understand the oppression I felt in that impossible place, that travesty where Josh and Ksenia are living, now that I’ve left it behind.

  Now that I’ve left them behind, along with little Olivia Fisher—and of course, of course, those other children who’ve died of the same unknown ailment in the past nine months. I lie on the dirt and twigs, letting the tremors slowly drain from my limbs, letting my breath gradually descend into something resembling normalcy.

  I escaped, and that was all Ksenia wanted. She practically begged me to go. What can I possibly tell everyone—that I saw her alive, and Josh, and Olivia? Saw them captive—because isn’t that what they are?—in a world that I could hardly distinguish from ours—because isn’t that right, too? It was like a perfect simulation of here and now; at least, it seemed the same until I provoked it.

  My phone is ringing, and I hesitate to answer—just in case I’m wrong, and I never got out after all. In case it’s Josh, his undertone rolling with bells. But no, the screen says Mom.

  “Hello?”

  “Lexi! Sweetheart, thank God! We’ve been beside ourselves with worry. Are you all right?”

  I try to answer, but my voice becomes vapor, becomes clouds, and instead I burst out sobbing. Because
how can I ever expect her to believe in the reality of what I’ve seen?

  Because how can I tell her that I left my friends trapped, just so I could save myself?

  once you’ve been to nowhere

  I’ve been gone for more than a day, I discover next. The whole town has been searching for me, and the police brought Xand in for questioning; it’s all so dreadfully familiar. How perfect it is, how flawless, this script that we all keep acting out, without ever guessing that that’s what we’re doing. The police with their suspicions, the doctors with their useless tests, the parents weeping by their children’s graves, and now me as well: we say the words those creatures have slipped into our mouths.

  “I have no idea,” I say. “The last thing I remember, I went for a walk by the gorge, and—I must have lost consciousness somehow. I came to lying by a blackberry bush.” I say it, knowing that there are no other possible lines for me, and knowing that they—whoever and whatever they are—have put me in this position, where for the very first time in my life I can’t just tell the truth.

  I assume they’re perfectly aware of that. I assume that they’ve quite knowingly manipulated me, by leaving me in possession of a truth that anyone would mistake for insanity.

  I spend a day and a night in the hospital, being tested for everything the doctors can come up with: epilepsy, date-rape drugs, brain tumors. The teeth marks on my calf excite concern, and I’m informed that I’ll have to receive a series of shots for rabies, just in case. The first injection is horribly painful, but I find I don’t care in the slightest.

  I care that those creatures—who really can’t be precisely human, considering what they can do—have effectively bullied me into lying to my own family, simply because of how distraught and frightened my parents would be if I told them what actually happened. As I float on my back in the clanging tube of the MRI, that’s what I’m thinking: that those creatures have compelled me to behave in ways I despise. I have a low tolerance for anyone trying to control me, much less succeeding.

  I’m thinking of something Josh told me: that Ksenia was raped repeatedly, when she was only eleven years old, by the biological son of the couple who fostered her just before the Delbos. That those earlier parents gave up their plan to adopt her and sent her away again, hoping to keep what had happened a secret, hoping to protect their boy from facing any consequences. She never even told her social worker, Josh said; she’d never told anyone but him, because she hadn’t actually said no, not out loud, and because she hated herself for choking on her own silence. Now, again, her right to make her own choices has been ripped away from her, I’m sure of it. I saw the despair on her face, and I know she can’t just leave that awful nowhere.

  I’m thinking of her, and myself, and Olivia, and my anger hums along with the machinery. I’m also thinking that if those creatures could have stopped me from leaving with physical force, they probably would have done so; instead they relied on psychology, on blasting me with guilt and grief and horror to trick me into staying. I gave way to fear, but possibly, if I’d just fought back, I might have caused some real trouble for them. By the time I leave the hospital, a single thought blots out the whole of my mind.

  I will not let this vileness stand.

  Quite uncharacteristically, my parents want to keep me home for a few days; all my efforts to shelter them clearly aren’t helping, because they watch me with mournful anxiety. I have to insist on going back to school, but when I get there I find I don’t have much to say to anyone, and after a few halting efforts at conversation most of my friends seem to be avoiding me as well. I suppose I seem changed; I suppose, even if I look just the same as ever, people can barely recognize me.

  Everyone but Xand, when he finds me alone on a bench. He stands there, too nervous to try to sit, light wobbling on the tears that fill his eyes. “I know I’m not supposed to talk to you yet, Lexi. But can I just say I’m worried? I’m really worried. Did—if somebody hurt you, you know you can tell me, right? I—no pressure. I heard you before, really. Just let me know if I can help?”

  Once again he’s the only one making any effort at all, and there’s a shattered sweetness to his voice. If I weren’t so changed by what I’ve been through, I might melt completely. As things are, though, I get up and hold him, and tell him I appreciate it, really. And yet the whole time I feel infinitely far away, and Ksenia’s kiss is closer to me than Xand’s arms.

  I have to give him credit, though: he still recognizes me, if imperfectly, even now that I’m on the other side of the veil.

  When I’m at home I feel a compulsion to check my reflection over and over again, just making sure that I can still recognize the girl in the mirror. All of five-foot-two, curvy and compact, with glowing brown skin, and natural hair worn in long twists, and uptilted, jet-black almond eyes; she’s pretty and sweet-looking, with a dangerous intelligence in her gaze, but I feel a certain detachment from her that I’ve never experienced before.

  Once you’ve been to nowhere, I discover, a trace of it clings to you, and it fundamentally alters who you are. At night, in the silence, I can still hear the shimmer of those bells.

  * * *

  On the third day I get in my car after school, and drive through our bland, placid streets, under our cresting trees, up Grand and as far as the intersection where I watched Josh cross in front of me. Rounding that corner is almost beyond my capabilities, and my hands shake on the wheel; they try to jerk back against my will when I start to turn. But I’m not going to be bullied again, not by the creatures who stole my friends, and not by my own fear, either.

  I think I know what I’ll find, but I have to know for certain; I have to take it in, accept its reality with my own eyes.

  Two miles farther and I’m looking at 32 Whistler Drive.

  It has the same creamy yellow siding as ever, the same magnolia tree, a few blooming azaleas in an almost exaggerated shade of pink; those shrubs weren’t in bloom, not in Josh’s better world. And, just as I almost knew would be the case, the house’s main section is only a single story high, with its split-level wing stepping downward on the left. In other words, that whole addition that I saw, that whole second story, was—what? An artifact of nowhere. Not of this world, in any case.

  I pull up just in front and stare at the house, absorbing it as it is now, and remembering it as it was when Joshua led me to its door. That upper floor, those stairs Josh and Ksenia couldn’t climb—they must have some kind of significance that I can’t quite put my finger on.

  Emma Delbo comes around the corner of the house, a pair of pruning shears poised wide open in both hands as if she were contemplating using them to commit a murder. I haven’t seen her—since everything, as Josh would say, since the funeral for that Ksenia I’m now convinced was as fake as a string of glass pearls—and I’m shocked at how aged Emma is, how her face is crumpled with bitterness and her body slumps forward. Of course the Delbos got in trouble—they weren’t really supposed to go off and leave their foster kids unsupervised, not even if Ksenia was just a breath shy of eighteen at the time. And coming home to find one of their kids dead, the other gone: that came as a crushing shock to them, since another feature of the oddness then was that not one person had thought to tell them what was going on.

  Now that I think of it, I’d bet those creatures arranged it that way; I’d bet they somehow reached into our thoughts, bent and tweaked them out of shape, and hid the ones that said, Mitch and Emma need to know about this.

  Emma’s curls are still light brown, but even from here I can see that her roots are three inches of pure gray. The bags under her eyes are slate blue and so puffed that she seems to peer over them with difficulty, and with suspicion.

  She looks at me and doesn’t smile, though we once saw each other fairly often.

  I almost drive off, but it feels too callous. She’s a husk, an emptied thing, and even if I can’t come out and say what I know, maybe I can still find some way to comfort her.

  I
turn off the engine and climb out, then walk across the wavering lawn, its grass the electric green of new spring growth. “Hi, Mrs. Delbo. How are you?”

  The look she gives me is utterly hostile, in a slow, oozing kind of way. “Alexandra. You must have some reason for coming around again? You wouldn’t have bothered just to see how I’m doing, now that my son is dead.”

  I nearly snap at her that she’s hardly the only one who’s grieved over Josh and Ksenia, but she’s too pitiable for that. “I—had a dream, Mrs. Delbo. It might sound strange, but I’m nearly certain that Josh is still alive. I thought I should let you know.”

  “I dream about Joshua every night.” She practically snarls it, and I make a note to stay well out of range of those garden shears. “Has that brought him back?”

  I’m sorry for her, but anger is also rising inside me, and not on my own behalf. Because there’s one terrible fact of the case: if the Delbos had decided to adopt Ksenia as well as Josh, then the two of them never would have been so desperate, never would have feared the separation that was coming. Josh and I never would have said the things we said to each other, and maybe Josh wouldn’t have gotten into whatever bizarre kind of trouble he’s in right now. If the Delbos had only been able to open their hearts, just a bit more, to my brittle, frost-flower friend, then maybe all this suffering could have been avoided.

  All right, it’s only a maybe. But the possibility is with us, along with those shaking azaleas, that single-story yellow house.

  “I didn’t say I could bring him back,” I tell her. “But I thought—maybe you’d be glad to know that not everyone has given up hope.”

  “If anyone’s dreams were going to bring Josh back, mine would,” she pursues resentfully. Emma Delbo was never my favorite person, but I really can’t remember her behaving like this, with such self-absorption, such a tainted heart. “That girl killed him out of envy, because of how dearly we loved him.”