by John Philpin
“I’ll tell you,” she said.
Lily Dorman was born on May 1, 1967, in Portland, Maine. “We couldn’t afford to send announcements. We called a few relatives.”
Harper Dorman provided a sporadic, evershrinking income; Katrina cared for the child, the house, the meals, her husband, and the noises—the bits of static that beckoned to her from her mind’s dark corridors.
She inhabited multiple realities, wormwood worlds replete with holes and contradictions. Sometimes, when Katrina could not disregard her summons from the kaleidoscoping corners of her soul, she “rested” at Maine Central Mental Hospital.
“Lily always said her first memory was of the move from Danforth Street to Bayberry. She hated it here, and she cried for the old place.”
Katrina, confused and confusing, told her twoyear-old daughter that the child was too young to have feelings. Later, she told Lily that she had been too young to have any memory of the move.
Harper called Bayberry “a step up.” Katrina’s smoky eyes saw nothing of her new home’s prefabricated horror, nothing of the trailer park’s rancid poverty, and nothing of her husband’s incipient violence.
“I think now that Lily felt everything,” Katrina said. “She had feelings that I couldn’t know about.”
I imagined the little girl tasting and smelling the sweaty fear and rage that roiled the air within and beyond the trailer’s walls. The next day always arrived in a bottle with a smooth white label, one she could run her fingers over until Harper yelled or smacked her hand.
“I always said he had a love affair with Mr. James Beam. He called the bottle Jim. It smelled like cleaning solvent. He stared with those bloodstreaked eyes. ‘Keep your fuckin’ hands offa Jim,’ he’d yell at Lily, after he stung her wrist or the back of her hand with a hard slap.”
He glared. He swallowed. He roared.
“When Lily was six years old, I asked Harper to break off his affair with Mr. Beam. Lily was watching TV, but she turned to see how he moved, how he held his shoulders, whether his hands were open or closed. That’s how she knew what was coming. She read his body.”
Dorman pushed himself from the sofa, swayed, stumbled into the dining area where Katrina sat crocheting, wrapped his hands around her throat, and squeezed. Neither one said a word. He grunted once with anger or exertion; she uttered a single squeal like the soft peep of a kitten. The only other sound crackled from the TV.
“Lily said she had a terrible headache, like something grew inside her skull and clawed to get out.”
Lily watched Katrina’s chair tip backward and the two of them crash to the floor. Harper passed out. Katrina stared at the ceiling.
“Lily said, ‘He’s out like a fucking light.’ I looked at her, and I asked her where she’d heard a word like that. I didn’t have to ask. Harper said it all the time. But it wasn’t like her to talk that way. I told her he didn’t mean it. I told her that he would bring flowers.”
Katrina stood and walked to the rear of the trailer. She returned with a blue notebook, opened it, and slid it across to me.
“She left this here when she ran away from the hospital.”
I looked at the neat handwriting. “I read some of it,” Katrina said. “Part of it’s about her snakes. The rest… I had to put it down.”
The Story of Lily
Part One
(for Dr. Westlake)
Am I to sleep forever, silently, somewhere in black shadows?
My mother is one person struggling with many worlds. I am many people at war with one world.
Will the others always shove me aside?
On Lilith’s first night, we looked down at Harper where he lay across our mother. We listened to him snore and cough and nearly choke. Lilith wished him dead.
Our mother was motionless, her eyes wide, her face without expression. She looked as if she did not dare to move.
For three years, Harper brought flowers on the days after pain. He brought tulips or roses or miniature carnations, whatever the florist threw into the compost.
I was seven when Harper invited me to sit on his lap.
“Please don’t read it here,” Katrina said.
I closed the notebook. “I’ll return it,” I said.
“Give it to Lily when you see her. I don’t want to look at it again.”
“How do I find her?”
“I have a phone number. Lily said I could call anytime I wanted to. I haven’t. I don’t want to pester her.”
Katrina found a slip of paper in her pocket. I copied the number and returned it to her.
“Please leave, Lucas. I want to sleep.”
“I’d like to come back,” I told her.
“No. I don’t think so.”
I stepped out of the trailer and walked slowly across the courtyard. A chill crept up my spine and radiated through my neck and shoulders. Sadness and helplessness washed over me. I gazed back at Katrina’s narrow metal home.
“It isn’t my problem,” I muttered. But it was.
I WALKED UP THE RUTTED ROAD THAT WOUND AMONG trees that had tentacles for branches—slender, gnarled limbs that creaked in the soft, chilling breeze. A one-room cabin appeared in a clearing at the top of the hill.
I crept onto the porch and peered through a sooty window at the single room, dimly lit by a low-burning kerosene lantern. I watched as a man slept on the floor with a rug pulled over him. I walked to the door and knocked. When I heard rustling noises inside, I shouted that I needed directions.
I don’t know what I expected, or if I even thought about it, but he was a slightly built man, not quite as tall as I am. He opened the door and squinted out. He had no weapon. His hair was dark, dirty, in disarray. He needed a shave, and he stank of kerosene and sweat.
He asked me if I was lost. Then I said his name.
He groped behind him, staggered backward.
I raised my gun.
He studied my face.
I aimed at his face.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I told him the story of his recent adventures, and how I made them possible.
Then I killed him.
The gun’s sharp crack was surprisingly loud and satisfying in the small cabin. He fell, his expression that of a man who finally remembered something that he desperately wanted to know.
Perhaps he learned that there was reason to fear the victim in his mind’s eye.
I kneeled to examine the hole in his forehead, above the midpoint of his eyebrows. A trickle of blood followed the slope of his face and the angle of his head. The slender red stream looked like a fat piece of yarn.
I was mildly disappointed.
I expected more blood.
FALL TOURISTS WANDERED THE OLD PORT’S COBBLED hills gazing in shop windows. I parked on Commercial Street and wound my way through the gang of gawkers pinching a final few days before New England winter fell like a sodden white blanket.
I sat at the counter in Big Mama’s and ordered coffee. Lily Dorman’s blue notebook seemed insubstantial—a kid’s seventy-page, wide-ruled theme book—for the narrative it contained. She had illustrated “The Story of Lily” with pencil sketches and ink drawings, some stark, many cryptic, most marred with slashing streaks of red.
Harper told me that I could feel Jim’s label, but only while he gripped the bottle. He said nice things to me—what a good girl I was, how smart I was—while he rubbed my shoulders and moved me around on his lap. He said he wanted to be comfortable.
He flattered me, told me that I was a big girl and would have to sit just right. He slipped his rough hand beneath my shirt and rubbed my back. If we got along, he said, Mom wouldn’t have to go back to the hospital.
I didn’t want my mother to be sick, but I didn’t want to sit on his lap, either. Harper’s movements were jerky. His face sweated. His eyes closed. He held me with a firm grip, and I felt pressure against my leg.
Each time he let me go, I found red marks on my arms and shoulders, the imp
rints of his hands and fingers. I rubbed my arms to make the marks go away.
Harper took his black-handled knife from his pocket. The blade appeared with a loud click, as if from nowhere. He cut into an orange and slowly peeled it, leaving a pile of rind on the table. I thought I would choke on the tart scent of oranges. Harper stuck the blade into each piece of orange, bit it from the end of the knife, slowly chewed, and stared at me every second.
Images from a child’s tortured past informed the scene on Crescent Street. Take care of business, and enjoy a piece of fresh citrus fruit. For me, she plunged the knife through an orange and deep into the wooden counter. Why?
One night, Harper came home after eight o’clock, his Jim nearly empty. He wanted to know what was for supper. Mom told him that I’d made ravioli, and he asked if it was from a can.
My mother wrinkled her forehead and tugged at her hair. Canned ravioli was the only kind she knew, what we always ate. Chef Somebody in the pretty can.
Harper said he hated it. He walked to the stove, glared into the saucepan, and complained that the ravioli was cold and stuck together.
Mom reminded him how late it was.
Harper lunged at her. He caught her by the shirt, spun her around and punched her. She slammed against the sink and the wall before she crashed in a heap on the floor.
I scrambled under the table where I sat with my arms over my head, my head tucked down. I heard my father’s footsteps, saw his legs as he staggered past me, heard the click when he switched on the TV, and the smash when he fell across the coffee table and cracked his head on the sofa’s arm.
I crept from my hiding place and crawled to my mother. Her eyes were open. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth, and my stomach threatened to empty. I smelled the blood, heard it slide across my mother’s skin.
I went to the sink, moistened a dishcloth, then crouched beside my mother. As I wiped away the blood, I swallowed to keep down my stomach.
“I want a different father,” I told my mother.
She nodded and closed her eyes.
When I heard Harper snoring, I walked into the living room and stared at him. He looked peaceful, indifferent. His black-handled knife lay nestled in the carpet. I picked up the knife and carried it outside to the stoop. I tried to re-create the snapping noise, to make the blade magically appear like I saw him do. I twisted it, pulled at it, pushed the silver buttons on its side. The blade shot out, sliced my right palm, and sent a stream of blood coursing through the spaces between my fingers.
I sent a different stream, a torrent of partially digested ravioli, spewing onto the steps.
My mother heard me and dragged herself from the kitchen floor. She saw the cut, wrapped it with a piece of torn bedsheet, and said that we were going to out-patient. I didn’t want to go. I don’t like the smells, or the nurses’ swishing sounds when they walk, or muffled voices, or hallways where some noises echo and others do not.
She wiped the knife clean, placed it by Harper’s side, then got our coats. We walked through the damp, cold night to the bus stop and waited.
Then Mom told me that Harper wasn’t my real father.
My real father was Lucas Frank.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered.
“You need anything?” the waitress asked.
I shook my head and read the paragraph a second time. Now I understood my role in Dorman’s life, why she considered our lives entwined.
Lily Dorman’s world was a nightmare, a twisted, agonizing dreamscape populated by a father who betrayed and tortured her, and a mother who redefined the child’s reality by providing her with a new father.
You were alone with your snakes and nightmares, wandering from the swamp, pressing your face against Ellie’s window.
I resisted the impulse to drive back to the trailer. To challenge Katrina would waste time that I did not have.
When I sat with Ellie, you watched.
“Coffee. Two cups,” my caller had said.
Lily, as Melanie Martin, would have the money and the power to bring her father home. Still, he ignored her—and gave his attention to Jaycie Waylon.
You stood in the rain and watched through my window, didn’t you?
He was a doctor. I imagined him as a nice man, gentle, one who loved children. Mom told me that he loved me, but he was too busy to be any one person’s father.
I wanted to see his picture. Mom had one photograph, she said, her voice soft in the darkness. She promised to show it to me the next day. I sensed that my mother was smiling.
“Why doesn’t he visit me?” I asked.
“He doesn’t have time, Lily.”
“Maybe someday?”
My mother agreed. Someday.
The next morning, before she showed me the photo, she swore me to secrecy. Harper must never know that he was not my father.
My mother opened her special wood-and-leather box that she kept hidden in the closet. A tiny pillow of pine needles made the box smell like the evergreens across the road from the trailer park. She studied the photograph and gently touched it before she handed it to me.
I stared at the picture. My mother, much younger in the photo, stood on a beach beside a tall, slender man. Both grinned at the camera.
They were in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, and met in a restaurant where my father was a cook and Mom a waitress.
He had a mustache, and I wondered if it tickled when he kissed her.
My mother’s eyes glistened, and she smiled and told me about a special coffee cup she bought him. He loved coffee, but when he drank it, his mustache got soaked. The cup was made with an extra piece across the top so that wouldn’t happen.
I liked him.
I couldn’t wait for someday.
I remembered the coffee cup. I thought it was a shaving mug because it had a picture of a barber with a handlebar mustache. Katrina explained, and we laughed at my misunderstanding.
In the summer when I was nine, while I waited for someday, I discovered the swamp behind the trailer park. At first I was afraid to walk on the dike, so I sat in my favorite dry spot, listened to the breeze creep through the bayberry bushes, and wondered why my father—a doctor, after all—did not arrive, fix my mother, and send Harper away.
I couldn’t ask my mother. Questions like that might upset her, and I would never do that. If she got too upset, she might have to go away. Then what would happen to me?
In July, when the high water receded from the marsh, I walked onto the dike and discovered new friends, the snakes that lived in the bog.
I went to the school library and read articles about snakes and their habits. I studied the varieties that like to live in saltwater bogs and marshlands.
One day in August, I sat on the dike and called to Billy Brown-spot, Suzi Stripe, and Lenny Lemon-color. I advised them about their health, about shedding their skins, about the cold weather to come. I picked up Suzi Stripe. The small snake slithered and squirmed from my hand, but I always had my other hand ready to catch her so that she did not fall.
Then I heard Harper slam his pickup door and yell, “Where’s the fucking dog?”
It was early. What was he doing home? What did he want with the dog? He always stayed away from Spike.
I ran across the dike and up the path. When I got to the courtyard, the truck was there, but Harper had disappeared. I ran into the trailer.
My mother lay in a familiar heap on the kitchen floor. Before I could say anything to her, I heard a loud crack, then Harper’s voice: “Fucking piece-of-shit dog.”
There was a second loud noise.
Mom did not move. She didn’t seem to know that I was there.
Harper crashed through the door, his shoulders hunched forward, elbows jutted out, and feet wide apart. His hands and gun glistened red, coated with gore. He told me to take off my pants and get my ass on the sofa.
I slipped out of my jeans as I hobbled to the living room.
Harper told Mom to get off the
floor and go to Ellie’s.
I heard her moan and cry softly. I peeked over the back of the sofa as she stumbled down the front steps.
Harper slammed the door behind her, blood flying like spittle from his left hand, the gun gripped in his right. I lay unmoving on the couch, my fists pressed to my mouth, my bare legs cold, my eyes shut tight.
When Harper stepped around the sofa into the living room, he held something in his left hand and stared at whatever it was. He placed the gun and the other object on the coffee table, then wiped his hands in broad red strokes across the trailer’s walls.
He stared at his work, then slowly turned and pointed at the bloody mess on the table.
“Fucking dog’s heart,” he said.
“The man deserved to die,” I growled.
“You reading a mystery?” the waitress asked.
“It’s no mystery anymore,” I said.
You ripped him apart, then dropped his heart on the table.
I tucked the notebook under my arm and walked to the phone, a black-and-silver box decorated with coin slots and fine print. When I got to the part about calling cards, I had no idea what they were talking about. I popped in a quarter, punched numbers, then listened to beeps and hums followed by a digitized voice lecturing me about placing calls outside my local dialing area.
“Phone company needs more humans,” I muttered, as I made a second attempt.
This time I listened to a crackling noise, then another virtual voice informing me that the number I had dialed was no longer in service. “I’m calling a damn police department,” I shouted into the phone.
“Need help?” the waitress asked.
“Stay out of this,” I grumbled. “It’s between me and this machine.”
I reread the instructions. Calling collect seemed the easiest of the options, so I did.
“A fucking miracle,” I muttered when I heard Jaworski’s voice.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Nothing. You get anywhere with Squires?” I asked.
