by Terri Elliot
My lips won’t move to speak to her, to tell her to leave me alone. To leave me to my dark. She purrs in lieu of my first contact. I just want to sleep, yet she holds position. Just me and her, in the dark, this black cat atop my chest.
I keep its stare. I don’t know what she wants, I don’t know how I know its a she, but I do. She doesn’t meow. She doesn’t open her mouth, yet I see the pearly tips of her two front fangs peeking out beneath her pouty upper lip.
Have you eaten? I’ve never had a cat, though my mother’s mother had cats. I never enjoyed going to her house for that reason. Not only that reason. We were never close, despite, I think, her desire to be so. My grandmother was an affectionate, giving woman whom I shunned in fear of her advanced age. Her wrinkled skin gave me nightmares. She’d had cancer my whole life until her passing when I was seven. I was the youngest grandchild, dethroning my sister. When I was born and she exited her sweet years, my grandmother’s attention fixed itself to me. There was something of herself she wished to impress upon me, but I was not receptive.
I think the cat holds my dead grandmother in its chest. When it purrs, I can hear her hoarse voice from her deathbed, calling out to me by name.
Oh Christ, my grandmother rests on my chest and I can’t get her off. My mother stands in the room’s corner, almost out of sight, her thin frame shadowed. I can’t see her face, its downturned. Grandmother continues to purr on my chest, trying to tell me something. I don’t want to hear it. I want you both out of my room. Now! Get out of my room! Get out of here, don’t you see I don’t need you?! I don’t want you, and I don’t need you, goddamnit! Stop smothering me for Christ’s sake!
A sudden influx of air inflates my chest. My eyes open and Henry hovers over me. He’s no longer sweaty, his eyes are puffy. He’s been sleeping.
“Honey!” he whispers urgently.
I rally finally, the room stops pulsating with the sinister. “I’m sorry,” I tell him as I feel out the division between dreams and reality in my mind. Clarity takes over and I feel a pang of an ache on the top of my head.
“You’re okay,” he says.
“I know,” I tell him.
“You were dreaming.”
I nod. “My grandmother was a cat lying on my chest. Don’t suppose that was real.”
He chuckles and wipes sweat away from my brow with the side of his thumb. “Interesting, I don’t recall you ever having dreams about her. Or really talking about her.”
“I don’t. And I don’t. So I don’t know why she would be in my dream except to say that dreams are dumb and pull feverishly from…” I make an extended yawn, “the back of your mind.”
“Don’t suppose it’s a premonition?” he says with a grin.
I shake my head and scowl, I’m not in a mood to entertain teasing, even where sarcastic. I just want to go to sleep.
I don’t even reply, instead roll over and pull the blankets up towards my chin. My bare back is exposed, Henry takes the opportunity to plant a kiss against the small of my back. He follows it with a series of small pecks along my spine towards the back of my neck. I let him finish before I make a little moan for his benefit, then ask, “Babe, could you cover me up back there? I’m cold.”
I hear the air push through his nostrils before I feel his fingers roughly tuck the blanket underneath my side. He lays his body down with a drop, but the effect is lost to the memory foam. I can hear him roll over and tug at the edge of the blanket to cover himself. I don’t pay him more attention after that. Now, all I can think of is that journal. It jumps to the forefront of my mind as I prepare for slumber, sure to be disrupted by Casey’s words from beyond her death.
7.
February 14, 2009
Valentine’s Day. A waste of trees for the endless cards, a waste of cotton on the stuffed bears, waste of helium on balloons, waste of time, waste of energy, waste.
We went out to dinner earlier, Henry took me to a fancy steakhouse. Then we came home and fucked. We did the thing he likes.
We had no sooner crossed the threshold of our apartment when he seized me in the dark of our hallway. Before I even had the chance to flip the light switch, his arms were around me, his body pressed into my back. He spun me and slammed me against the wall, pressing himself harder into me, until I could feel his cock bulging through his pants into my ass. He lifted the end of my short dress over so that he could grind his hardon through his jeans in between my bare cheeks. Despite the rough texture of his pants against my soft skin, I enjoyed the treatment. I like it when he takes control.
He leaned forward then and whispered into my ear, “Get the ropes.”
It was lackluster. The actions were all the same, his control, his strength, the tightness of the knots, the commands, the “yes sir”s the “good girl”s, like script. The missing ingredient, which I hadn’t identified in the moment, was the criminality. Without the thrill, there is no chemistry.
I wonder now, beneath the mask, wrapped motionless in ropes, if I could be any other woman and he would derive as much pleasure from my body without me in it. I can’t say, I don’t know the answer to that. He says he loves me. He holds me at night, at least as we fall asleep.
Who’s to know the true nature of their lover’s mind? What thoughts occupy them behind the eyes you lose yourself in? Henry could be a psychopath. He’s shown enough to raise alarms, the willingness to commit crime, to do harm to others, the joy in the malice when we ruin someone’s night, home, life. In spite of our justification, I feel a twinge of guilt, it would be inhuman not to. Does he experience the same? How can I know? How can I be certain he’s human, with a heart that yearns for me?
I think he’s caught me writing in this journal. I don’t think he’ll say anything about it, save an off hand remark about the childishness of needing to put down in words one’s thoughts. I don’t know. Maybe this is childish. But it helps me, and I feel the self-care of it is actually rather adult. Psychological clarity is an adult pursuit.
Fuck if I know, really.
What if he reads these words? No doubt he’ll believe it dangerous evidence of our wrongdoings. Of our intentions. If after we execute our plan, this book were to be found, we would be implicated. It could be used against us. He wouldn’t like knowing these admissions are written down. If he read this, he’d probably destroy it. Maybe he’d stop trusting me.
I do wonder about that sometimes. With the cool nonchalance of a man without worry, he proposed murder. Granted, at the time, I didn’t see any other way, but I wouldn’t have been able to suggest something so grave in such a composed manner. It was like he was addressing a mechanical issue. “Well, we’ll just have to get a new car.” “Well, we’ll just have to kill him.” The man is a liability, the solution is clear. What if I was a liability? Would his response be as calm, absolute, and severe? Happy Valentine’s Day, from a loving relationship.
8.
The journal has moved, as has my resolve. The latter to someplace out of reach. I can’t neglect the urge, the admissions, whether true or false or some alchemy twisting the two into a perverse narrative concocted in the addled mind of Casey Simpson, compel me to know. To learn. I have to know the impetus to the entries. Were these the hallucinations of a broken mind in the months leading to its self-destruction? Or are there things Henry hasn’t told me, about her, about him, about what he’s done?
He’s at work while I sit before the desk in the seldom used office at the opposite end of the hall from our bedroom on the third floor. On the mahogany desk before me lies the little book, its worn pages, and the adolescent handwriting scrawled across them. I’ve sat here frozen for an hour, my brain in gridlock fielding thoughts on either side of the decision. To read through. To burn it. The light from the window behind me casts itself over my shoulders, and a shadow appears looming over the book, the round shape of my head transposed over it. I feel the muscles in my neck tensen.
What if Casey became obsessed with a true crime story ten years ago? She
could have envisioned herself and Henry in place of two actual criminals, a darkly romantic fantasy wherein a destructive young girl lives out her Bonnie and Clyde dream in fiction. I could see the attraction, of escaping into a false diary, the invention of another life to occupy my otherwise dull, empty moments alone, in a troubled relationship. But would an investigator see it the same? Say the journal fell into the wrong hands, by some fluke of shuffling about our home’s storage, found its way to a curious individual, what then? Could the police come looking? My husband would be implicated through no fault of his own, beyond entertaining the madness of his late beloved child lover.
He kept the book. What does that mean? He must have read it, surely. Or some. Or maybe not. Perhaps it's an emotional link to her, an heirloom of a time now gone, and an artifact where a memory lives on.
Come on, Emily. Henry isn’t sentimental. He clearly hasn’t revisited the journal in years, likely since he collected it with whatever else she left behind. But why?
I feel my hands reach up to the mess of hair above my head. I haven’t showered today, I sit in my silk nightie at the desk, the cool touch of the leather seat turned warm beneath my thighs, now sticking. I feel sweat collecting at my brow while I tug at my locks. I groan and sigh and slump in the chair, sliding down, lifting my nightie as I bend my back beneath my shoulders and slide my knees deep between the desk’s cabinets. I’m like a schoolgirl, petulant and frustrated. All of this is absurd. I think to put the book back and pretend all of this is nonsense, but I can’t. I just can’t leave the revelations behind, whether about actual events or the inner workings of my husband’s dead ex, I don’t know.
I slap my hand down on the face of it. The mystery of it all.
I need to research. I can’t let Casey dictate the story. If she’s talking about actual crimes, there will be record of it. Casey will not control me.
I push away from the desk, scooching the chair until my knees emerge from beneath the wood. I stand and view the wet marks left by my legs in the seat. I shouldn’t have sat in the chair without showering, without changing. It’s a six hundred dollar office chair, real leather, the lynchpin of our office aesthetic.
I’ll push the thought out of my mind, drawn to the more urgent matter of digging. I storm out from the office and descend the stairs. The desktop computer resides in a small study with hexagonal windows overlooking the side yard, where I once tended a rose garden. I enter the room and pause. Henry occasionally uses this computer for his own work. I imagine him finding my curiosity’s evidence on the history tab, or some hidden folder. I don’t know computers well enough to say with certainty I could wipe my search history from the computer.
I pivot and rush with impatience towards our bedroom where I keep my personal laptop. I think to calm my pace, to not tiptoe, that there’s no need, I have time, I have solitude. But I’m wrapped up in the secrecy of it all, and I can’t help it conducting my body with stealth and urgency. I would think myself silly if I wasn’t focused on my intention.
I practically launch myself onto our California king size bed and reach beneath it to retrieve the thin, silver laptop. I roll back and place myself up against the backboard, opening the device in my lap, watching while the screen turns over from white to the last window I had open, shopping for workout leggings. I open a new tab and place my cursor over the search bar, where it sits, blinking, awaiting me.
My vision blurs as it focuses on what I cannot see, through the screen, past it. The screen’s glow intensifies as it loses detail and I hold a breath, then release. What am I doing?
It’s momentary, I release the self-conscious pause and my fingers animate across the keyboard. The first query, “break ins los angeles 2009.”
I don’t know why I anticipated a first page epiphany, but within a short amount of time, I’ve amassed a collection of articles each occupying their own tab in the internet browser. Twenty three in all. Some of them essentially duplicates.
I discover quickly that small, less gripping crime reports often regurgitate whatever details the police must have released. Some hundred block of whatever street, estimated time and date of break in, information on potential suspects - likely none, and a tip line for information. The words between, the flourishes of the writer, make the only contrast between publications. I grow numb rereading the template.
I lean back in the chair. My eyes are dry after thirty minutes of sifting through. I need to narrow my terms.
I delete the search bar. I stare at the blinking cursor. Break in assault los angeles 2009. I think for a moment, type murder. I look at the words together. Break in assault los angeles 2009 murder. I type Henry at the end. It looks patently absurd, the way his name dangles at the end of this query, like an accessory to it all.
Yet he stands accused, by a dead girl’s journal. Casey claimed his guilt.
I have to know.
I delete his name and hit enter. The first link of the first page, an article titled “Home Invasion Ends in Murder in Atwater Village.”
I click and scroll. The content of the article is sparse, another rehash of police press release. Yet, the details it does contain are chilling. An individual, unnamed, merely “forty two year old white male,” was tied to a chair and beaten to death with a blunt object. The police have not released information regarding the man’s identity. Just that he’s dead, his body found in a house in Atwater Village, March 1, 2009. Two weeks after the last entry I read. She wrote of murder. Twice. Could they? Could he?
The screen blurs the letters together, engulfed in the white background behind the text, until I see nothing but the glow of the screen in my vision. Replacing it is the scene, constructed of my imagination, the body, the ropes, the dead eyes, the carcass. The police tape, the investigators, the gloves, photos, mini rulers, exhibit numbers propped up against items on the floor. I don’t know what it looked like, I can only imagine, and what images I have in my head come from television. None of this seems real to me, and I have a hard time comprehending it. There are things that line up here, two to my count. The timeline, and the crime. Not much else to go on, but without further details, all I see is a clear match. And now I can’t stop my mind from racing to the conclusion Casey was telling the truth in that lurid diary of hers. Which would make the man I’m married to a criminal, and a killer. A brutal one.
The bottom of the computer feels hot against the skin of my thighs. I push it to the side and cover my face with my hands just to disappear into darkness for a moment. What is going on? Henry, the Henry I know, would never do a thing like this. He barely raises his voice, his aggression is a passive one, given more to outbursts of show than direct attack. But this wasn’t aggression. This was cold, calculative. He killed out of necessity, not out of anger. He killed to keep from going to prison, thus doubling down on his criminal lifestyle.
What am I thinking? How could he do this, and a mere two years later fall in love with me? A romance matching anyone’s vision of a cliche love story. Our arguments now revolve around the petty, and we’re far from needy. He earns over a million a year, we have a house in goddamn Silver Lake, for christ’s sake!
I lower my hands and realize I’ve begun weeping from hysteria. My breath is panicked, shallow and quick. I place my hand over my chest and press down. Calm down, Emily. Nothing is wrong. Your life is not a sham. Henry earned this for us, Henry is a good man, and you lead a good, honest life.
Don’t I?
9.
The lighting is dim in our bedroom, despite the hour. I’ve drawn the curtains, the expensive ones I purchased to ensure daylight wouldn’t penetrate when I decided to sleep past when Henry left for work. They work like a charm, you couldn’t tell what time it was in here without a clock. The only light glows from six candles I’ve placed strategically around the room. Three across the dresser opposite the bed, one on each nightstand, another at my vanity. As each flame dances atop its wick, like a sultry dancer wrapping her body around a pole, the room feels a
live. The flickering from all corners feels like breath, and I lie naked in the mouth of the beast that breathes. Well, I’m not entirely naked. I wear the outfit I purchased from the sex shop in Hollywood earlier today in preparation.
I walked in and was immediately clocked by the cashier, whose pink dyed eyebrows rose in surprise. She was a thicker woman, and a dominatrix, I’d come to learn. She said she made a hundred dollars an hour. You’d have to pay me a lot more than that to convince me to do what she does. Although, she explained, no sex was involved, she was a professional. Some of the acts admittedly interested me, but not sexually. I don’t like control, it’s a turn off. But slapping a stranger in his face as hard as I can? That sounds therapeutic.
The outfit she helped me pick out consists of a black thong that barely covers my intimate area, and above the small triangle of cloth that disappears between my cheeks on the other side is a metal silver ring on a strap connected to the thin, elastic straps that I pulled high over my hip bones. A chain, with small, silver links, connects to the large ring at my lower abdomen and runs up along my body to a thick, black collar where it connects with a second silver ring. I have no brassiere on. I lie across the bed facing the door, patiently awaiting my husband. In the back of my mind is a hope this will reinvigorate interest in our love life, and subsequently one another. I have reason to believe it will. The little book, whose author I push well out of mind, has taught me as much. He enjoys control. He enjoys a woman in chains, knots. In the open drawer of his bedside table, I’ve placed a length of rope, specifically designed not to irritate flesh, even when drawn tight around the body, squeezing it, constricting a woman.
In a room otherwise silent, I hear the clock ticking seconds by. I’ve laid here long enough my eyes have adjusted, and with a bit of squinting I read the hands. Five thirty. Any minute n--
