Dark Things I Adore

by Katie Lattari

  For almost thirty years, I’ve been able to keep Coral Dunn in a tiny box buried in the very back of my mental closet. Not seen, mostly forgotten. I’d moved on. Because what happened to her was not my fault. It was not my doing.

  Chuk-chuk.

  In the maw of the clearing opening to my left, not fifteen feet away, just at the border of invisibility stands a ski-masked man with a shotgun. A man. Not Audra. The gun is trained on me. I am all lit up. So bright, god could see. I close my eyes.

  BANG!

  I scream and fall to my knees, the sound deafening, waiting for the burning sensation of thousands of particles of molten-hot buckshot to explode into my skin and organs. But I feel nothing.

  The gunshot echoes into the night. I open my eyes, my hands groping all around my body. I feel no blood. I feel no pain. I whip my head around to look for the man with the gun—but he’s gone. The suddenness of his disappearance startles me. My heart hammers. My eyes bulge.

  Then someone. To my right.

  “Coral!” I cry without thinking.

  “Max,” Audra says in a low, almost sultry voice, a smile hinting at her lips. Audra. It’s Audra. “Or should I call you M?” The hinky, gap-toothed Colfax smile attacks me. She is wearing a goldenrod summer dress, light, papery, with thin straps that show off her beautiful clavicles, despite the cold.

  It is the dress.

  Coral’s yellow dress from that day. Coral’s favorite dress in her hallmark color. The color she lived in. The dress she died in. The color in which I immortalized her. The color that has given me everything. Animus. Goldenrod, sparking amber, flowing to the ground. Audra, a double. Coral, returning.

  Her hands are clasped behind her back. She is barefoot.

  “You look as if you’d seen a ghost!”

  My mouth flaps dumbly.

  “Coral Dunn”—she says the name so, so carefully—“was a girl you once knew.” I nod at her, unable to help myself. Her perfect body is a sharp, bright cut-out in my vision. “I want you to understand very clearly what I am about to say to you. Are you listening?” Her voice isn’t even loud now. It’s low and dangerous, and her eyes are lasers on me, into me. I nod, tears leaking from my eyes. I’m crying, and I’m scared. “I’m sure you’ve already guessed it by now, M. Coral Dunn was my mother.”

  It’s as if every bodily function in me seizes up simultaneously—my lungs, my heart, my eyes, my bowels. I just look at her. Then it comes back in a rush, and my head might explode from the pressure.

  “N-no,” I manage in a whisper of a voice. I grab my head in my hands.

  “Coral Dunn was my mother, and I know what you did.” Her voice is a snakelike hiss. Audra looks beautiful, even in her mangling fury. Fury, I think to myself. The Furies. That’s it. That’s where we are. That is who she is.

  And then there is a gun pointing at me.

  I’m going to die tonight.

  Audra

  Sunday, October 21, 2018

  The man goes white and pasty as the rind of a brie. I mean, he really looks like hell when I tell him.

  Coral Dunn was my mother, and I know what you did.

  I can’t even imagine what I must sound like. Everything inside of me feels like it’s rattling at a frequency that might kill me. My every molecule and cell shaking with rage. With adrenaline. I will set you free, you fuck. I am the way, the truth, and the light. His hair is in disarray from scrabbling around in the dark, in the night, running away from the shotgun, the lights, my mom’s haunty scrawlslips. Despite the cold, sweat crawls from Max’s temples and hairline and neck. He nervously swipes his hand through his hair over and over again. He looks elementally shaken. His face is blanched with a sickly sheen. His eyes glassy and sunken and far away, and I know he’s terribly scared. He looks small inside his own clothes somehow. The butterscotch scarf with the black tassels wraps around his neck. His back is hunched as he sits there on the cold ground under my gaze, under my gun. He looks at me, and it’s different from any other time he’s ever looked at me. He’s not looking at me as his Audra. As his almost lover. As his student, his wunderkind, his mentee, his competitor. He’s looking at me as Coral Dunn’s daughter. Probably trying to reconstruct me as a baby then fast-forward me in time to see if the whole thing holds up. He looks petrified and worn and unbelieving.

  “You can’t be.” I leave him in silence for a long few moments. He starts shaking his head and crying again. “You can’t be!”

  “I am. I am Coral Dunn’s daughter. My father is Brady Bouchard. Don’t you remember him?”

  “Well, I—” He’s about to say something honest for once in his goddamned life, but he clams up when he realizes it. Tears stream from his eyes.

  “Go on,” I encourage him. “I already know all of the answers. Or most of them anyway. You’re looking at the proctor giving the test, Max.”

  “But it can’t possibly be,” he says, stricken. He grabs his hair, his face wrenched in existential agony.

  “Sure it can. And I’ll tell you how in a minute. After you answer my question: Do you remember my dad? Brady?” I feel nervous. I’ve had so few people to ask about my early life. There were my grandparents of course—Cindy’s parents, Buddy and Hanora—but no one else, really. Until recently.

  “Yes,” he relents. “I knew him.” I feel my hands begin to shake.

  This man knew my father.

  It solidifies everything into a horrifying, congealed reality. The notes. The drawings. Everything I found. Everything I’ve ever heard about Coral/Cindy. My mother. Real. My father. Real. M. Real. It is not just a story I read somewhere, half-formed glimpses allowed by my grandparents, by a series of crumpled notes found in innumerable places across our property, our house, in the cabins and on the grounds here. Lupine Valley. The terrible knowledge isn’t just inside me anymore. It’s out here, too. With me. With him. “Th-things were not going well between them when I was here.” We both look at each other cautiously.

  “Between—” My voice catches for a moment, then I harden my heart. “Between my mom and my dad.”

  Max nods. He is stroking and worrying something in his hand. Something small and square.

  “What is that?” I demand. “Give me that.” I point at his hand, which had been mindlessly running over the object. He looks down, seeming to recognize it’s there for the first time. He tosses it to my feet, terrified, unthinking. I carefully, anxiously retrieve it, never taking my eyes off him.

  It’s the folded-up print of Animus. The little package I left him by the lake. I swallow, shivering in gratitude that I was able to recover this part of tonight’s breadcrumb trail.

  “This is a prank. This, this can’t be—” he says again, returns to this safer idea. He places his face in his hands. “There’s no way.” He looks up at me searchingly. “You don’t even look like her!” He’s irate.

  “I know,” I say. “I’ve seen pictures. I look like my Gram. Cindy’s mom.”

  He looks like a dying man. “So tell me,” he finally says. “Tell me how, how…any of this could be t-true.” He turns his far-away eyes on me. Then he turns to look up into the branches of the birch above him, strangled in goldenrod. My mother’s signature color.

  “It wasn’t very hard to find you, Max. It wasn’t hard to put it all together. And now, it’s finally time to face what you did. To face the only person left to hold you accountable. Me.”

  Twelve

  Ascension

  Max

  Monday, October 22, 2018, just after midnight

  It’s not even really thinking anymore, what I’m doing. It’s all sensation. I feel hot. I feel cold. I feel poisonous nausea in my gut and throat. My body feels useless, outside and in. I’m out of control of it. I’m out-of-control. Audra has placed a bottle of gin beside me and is commanding me to drink. She points her gun at me. So I drink.

  A
udra is standing. She is the only firm thing in the whole world. She looks intractable. A pillar of stone. Yellow. So yellow and bright, blinding. And the gun.

  Coral Dunn. Jesus Christ. Coral Dunn. She’s been coming back for me these last few days. A phantom. Fully realized. Troubled. Sad. A new mother. The baby. Her baby. Evie? Could it be Audra? I try to do the arithmetic of it, but it’s really hard. I can’t.

  “Tell me what you remember about my mother. Tell me what you remember about Coral.”

  I lift my eyes from the spot on the ground I’d been absentmindedly focused on. I look at Audra. “I can’t,” I breathe. “Please—I can’t.”

  “You can, and you fucking will,” she barks at me. I think I see Coral off in the distance, an expanse between us.

  White snow.

  Red mittens.

  Dark-yellow scarf with black tassels.

  I cry out like I’ve been stung by a wasp. I look down at the scarf around my neck. Dijon with black tassels. I rip it from my body and throw it to the ground like it’s a boa constrictor.

  Her throat. My throat.

  Audra’s looking at me with a burning hatred I have never before seen in my life from anyone. She doesn’t like that I’ve thrown her scarf on the ground. Her mother’s scarf.

  “Are you going to kill me?” I croak.

  “That’s really going to be up to you,” she says through gritted teeth. I look at her. She’s so crisp compared to me. I am a bleary mass puddled on the earth. On all fours. A beast. But she is all architecture and geometry and surety. I can’t beat her. I won’t beat her. She’ll end me with what she knows anyway. What I now know that she knows. I swallow—I feel so dry and thirsty. I’m shivering.

  Her paintings swell into my mind. The ones that sit up in her garage studio. The ones she showed me earlier. The thick, deep strokes of umber and myrtle, or mustard, raspberry; the undulations of erotic and macabre landscapes born from simple objects, unreal, too real. The painting I destroyed. Obliterated. They come to me, and I don’t know why. They fill me, fill me, fill me up. Why? Why are they in me?

  Then it hits me.

  Because Coral is in them.

  Little bits of Coral. The small scraps of paper with the near-illegible handwriting. The little drawings. Those “found” objects painted and pasted and weaved on and under and through the brush strokes. Coral. Little slivers of Coral, come back to destroy me. She would write and draw some of them when she was with me in my cabin at Lupine Valley. These cryptic little scraps of paper. She used to hide them. She used to post them. Everywhere.

  I’ve reached the center of the storm, ground zero. Coral’s clearing. Here we are.

  I realize the house I’ve been sleeping in, eating in, lusting in is the Dunn house.

  The drawing of the upside-down raven in the living room, the one Audra said wasn’t one of hers. It’s a Coral Dunn. Of course.

  My hands grip my face. I can feel her—Audra, Coral, both of them, somehow—looking at me.

  “Coral D-Dunn,” I croak, feeling wretched, “was just a girl when I knew her. Young. Nineteen, twenty, something like that. Blond hair.” My eyes are zoned out on a spot on the ground again. I can’t look up at Audra. I can’t. I won’t. I won’t look at the dove. The golden bird at her throat. That necklace. Coral’s necklace. Of course it is. “Down to her rib cage. Straight. Like silk. These oversize eyes. Blue gray. Slight and wiry but strong. Shorter than you.” I can feel Audra’s eyes penetrate me. “She was from the area. Born and raised. A sad thing, really. She—she tried really hard not to be sad. But it was in her. It was in her. Part of what made her.”

  “Not that you tried to help,” Audra spits. “You destroyed her.”

  “Oh, no—I did try to help. I helped in my own way,” I look up at Audra finally. “I helped in the only way I knew how.”

  “You giant piece of shit.” She shakes her head, dark amusement in her growl. “Tried to help? You convinced her to go off her meds. You told her self-harm made her beautiful. You didn’t tell anyone how bad she was getting. You.” Barbs skewering me, one, two, three.

  “No—no.” I shake my head, adamant, old frustration burbling up into something akin to confidence. Righteousness. “They didn’t understand, and you don’t either.” My face feels tense as stone. I can hear the bite in my voice. “I mentored her. In her interests. In her art. I let her be exactly who and what she wanted to be. She became a better artist with me. With my help. And through her I became a better artist. And we both understood that—”

  “You encouraged her to destroy herself. So you could wring her dry.” Audra is cold and hard as granite. She wants to do something terrible to me, I can feel it. But she doesn’t let herself. Why, I don’t know. She holds back, at least for now. But I can feel the violence in her. I can feel the urge to kill. To end me.

  I thought I’d made it far away from all of this. From this place. From that time. From what we did, together. That’s the thing Audra will never truly understand. That what happened to Coral, it wasn’t just me. I didn’t do anything to her. Not really. And I never truly forgot what we did. What my part was in it. In our art. In her end. Coral helped me become me. Max Durant. It springboarded my ascension in the art world. Animus. It was a metamorphosis for both of us. She knew that—Coral knew that. But I’ve led an expansive, interesting, big life since then. A life much bigger than the decision of some dumb kids more than twenty-five years ago.

  I thought it could never catch me. That it would never catch me. That I had grown superior to it. But here I am. In King City. Under the very same boulder and birch where Coral’s life ended and mine began. With Audra, the daughter. What a world.

  Audra adjusts her gloves on her wrists with a primness that makes me queasy.

  “I’ve lived here with my grandparents, without a mother or a father, my whole life,” she says, lifting her eyes from her hands. “I was pretty aimless for a long time. Eventually I started taking classes down at UMaine, commuting both ways each day. Art classes, a gen ed or two. But at least I was painting. I had a gift early on, and Pops and Gram were so supportive because of what happened to my mom. They had told me she got pregnant with me, never got to live out her dream of going to college. Studying art. Becoming an artist. But I had a hard time fully committing for some reason.” Audra is shivering, just the littlest bit, gun still at the ready. “Maybe I was afraid that they wanted me to be the new Cindy. They spoke of her lovingly, effusively. They spoke of her mental health issues, yes, but also her brilliance. Her skill. Her talent. Her incandescent energy at times. I worried that they wanted me to become everything she never got to be. It was a lot. But then they died. I was very sad for a very long time, Max.”

  She pauses now and glares at me. My whole body is trembling. “You would have loved to see me then, you sick bastard. Some of the worst months of my life. Here, alone. Mourning. You would’ve said I’d achieved my highest form. And then you would have gotten a goddamned easel out,” she spits. Her ferocity surprises me. Her accuracy, a laser. “Take another drink, Max.” It feels like my insides are full of bile and fire and shit.

  “I can’t.”

  “There are so many, many places I could hide your body on this property, Max. Drink.” I swallow and grip the gin bottle with my hand and take a big swig. I immediately vomit. Hard, and heaving, and sickly. “Good boy.” I am sweaty and wrenched. My stomach cramps. I swallow and shut my eyes momentarily, moaning.

  “After my grandparents died, eventually I started going through the house.” She holds the gun on me in those gloved hands. Her form looks warm and radiating like she was sent down from another place entirely. Or up. From hell. For me. Her face is unclear to me now. Just a mangled smear. I wish so much that I could see her clearly. Remember her exactly. The things I could do with her rage, with this explosion of feeling. The catastrophe in the lines of her face. “And I found a lot
of things I didn’t know about—all these notes—they were these startling little diaristic things. They intimated so much. About her mental state. About my father. Coral wanting to go to school. Her dreams, her nightmares. The Lupine Valley Arts Collective.” She looks at me hard, now. My anxiety skyrockets. “The devil in King City.” I feel cut wide open.

  “So I started assembling a timeline. She religiously initialed and dated everything. Every scrap of paper.” She shakes her head. “I’d never had anything but pictures of her, a few short home video clips. My grandparents’ stories. That’s it. I had no idea what she was really like. This was different. Her own account of her own life in her own words.” Audra’s auburn hair lifts and flutters in the breeze. “I found out so many things. Disturbing things. She was clearly bright. Clearly smart. Had ambition, wanted to be an artist. But I knew that much already. I already knew, even, that she struggled with bouts of depression, bouts of mania throughout her life. My grandparents had told me about that. They told me that after I was born, she got postpartum depression. Except—that’s not quite right, is it, Max?” She smiles at me, but it’s more like a wolf baring its teeth. “She didn’t have postpartum depression. She was suffering abuse. By you.”

  “Audra—”

  “Shut up!” she screams, gripping the gun tighter. Her chest rises and falls like a bellows. She doesn’t understand. She still doesn’t understand. “Eveline Audra Bouchard,” she whispers. “It’s the name I was born into. But then my dad split, and you killed my mom.” I start to shake my head, but her ferocious eyes silence me. “So, my grandparents, my legal guardians, changed my surname legally to theirs—Dunn. Eveline Audra Dunn. EAD. That’s who I was for so long. Until just a few years ago, really. Until the notes and the drawings I found. Until they led me to you.” We are looking at each other, but I am not really seeing her. It’s hard to apprehend anything—the words she is speaking, the form she makes in my field of vision.