by Anne Rice
“Mommy,” Suzi said. It almost sounded like she was pleading. Then she heaved again. But there wasn’t much for her stomach to expel, just some chewed egg and bread colored with bile and drippy with phlegm. Suzi bent over the rug and coughed it out. “Mommy,” she said again, “I think maybe I shouldn’t eat anymore.”
Emma nodded and lifted her daughter in her arms. She carried her to the bathroom, where she washed them both off.
And Emma didn’t make Suzi eat again, except that she gave the girl a glass of water a couple of times when she seemed to feel dry. It didn’t seem to do her any harm not to eat. She never got hungry. Not even once.
Emma went back to work, and that went well enough.
For two months—through the end of May, all of June, and most of July—Emma and Suzi lived quietly and happily, in spite of the circumstances. After a day or two Emma really did get used to Suzi looking and smelling like she was a dead thing. It was kind of wonderful, in a way: Suzi wasn’t suffering at all, and the cancer was gone. Or at least it wasn’t killing her anymore. She wasn’t hurting in any way Emma could see, anyway. Maybe she was uncomfortable sometimes, but it wasn’t giving her pain.
The summer turned out to be as hot and rainy and humid as Emma could have imagined, and because it was so warm and wet Suzi’s body decayed even faster than Emma had feared it would. After a while the smell of it got hard to ignore again. The evil thing in her belly, the cancer, kept growing, too. By the end of July it was almost the size of a football, and Suzi really did look like a miniature pregnant lady come to term.
It was the last Friday in July when Emma noticed that Suzi’s skin was beginning to crack away. She’d just finished getting into her uniform, and she went in to give Suzi a kiss good-bye before she left for work. Suzi smiled and Emma bent over and gave her a peck on the cheek. Her skin felt cold and squishy-moist on Emma’s lips, and it left a flavor on them almost like cured meat. Emma was used to that. It didn’t bother her so much.
She stood up to take one last look at Suzi before she headed off, and that’s when she noticed the crow’s feet. That’s what they looked like. Crow’s feet: the little wrinkle lines that older people get in the corners of their eyes.
But Suzi’s weren’t wrinkles at all. Emma looked close at them and saw that the skin and flesh at the corners of her eyes was actually cracked and split away from itself. When she looked hard she thought she could see the bone underneath.
She put her arms around Suzi and lifted her up a little. “Oh, baby,” she said. She wanted to cry. She’d known this was coming—it had to. Emma knew about decay. She knew why people tanned leather. The problem was she couldn’t just take her little girl to a tannery and get her preserved, even if she was dead.
If Suzi’s flesh was beginning to peel away from her bones, then the end had to be starting. Emma’d hoped that Suzi would last longer than this. There was a miracle coming. Emma was sure of that. Or she thought she was. Why would God let her daughter be alive again if she was going to rot away to nothing? Emma wasn’t somebody who went to church every Sunday. Even this summer, when church seemed more important than it usually did, Emma’d only been to services a couple of times. But she believed in God. She had faith. And that was what was important, if you asked her.
Someone knocked on the outer door of the apartment.
That shouldn’t be, Emma thought. The only way into the building was through the front door downstairs, and that was always locked. Maybe it was someone who lived in the building, or maybe Mama Estrella, who owned the building and had the keys.
Whoever it was knocked again, and harder this time. Hard enough that Emma heard the door shake in its frame. She could just picture bubbles of caked paint on the door threatening to flake off. She set Suzi down and hurried to answer it.
When she got to the door, she hesitated. “Who’s there?” she asked.
No one answered for a long moment, and then a man with a harsh voice said, “Police, ma’am. We need to speak to you.”
Emma swallowed nervously. The police had always frightened her, ever since she was a child. Not that she had anything to be afraid of. She hadn’t done anything wrong.
She opened the door about halfway and looked at them. They were both tall, and one of them was white. The other one was East Indian, or maybe Hispanic, and he didn’t look friendly at all.
Emma swallowed again. “How can I help you?” she asked, trying not to sound nervous. It didn’t help much; she could hear the tremor in her voice.
“We’ve had complaints from your neighbors about a smell coming from your apartment,” the dark-skinned one said. He didn’t have an accent, and he didn’t sound anywhere near as mean as he looked.
“Smell?” Emma asked. She said it before she even thought about it, and as soon as she did she knew it was the wrong thing to do. But she really had forgotten about it. Sure, it was pretty bad, but the only time she really noticed it was when she first got home from work in the evening.
“Lady, it smells like something died in there,” the white one said. He was the one with the harsh voice. “Do you mind if we step in and take a look around?”
Emma felt as though all her blood drained away at once. For a moment she couldn’t speak.
That was a bad thing, too, because it made the policemen even more suspicious. “We don’t have a search warrant, ma’am,” the dark one said, “but we can get one in twenty minutes if we have to. It’s better if you let us see.”
“No,” Emma said. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. I’ll show you my daughter.”
She let the door fall open the rest of the way and led the policemen to Suzi’s bedroom. Just before she got there she paused and turned to speak to the dark-skinned man. “Be quiet. She may have fallen back asleep.”
But Suzi wasn’t asleep, she was sitting up in bed in her nightgown, staring out her open window into the sunshine. For the first time in a month Emma looked at her daughter with a fresh eye, saw her instead of just noting the little changes that came from day to day. She didn’t look good at all. Her dark skin had a blue-yellow cast to it, a lot like the color of a deep bruise. And there was a texture about it that was wrong; it was wrinkled and saggy in some places and smooth and pasty in others.
“She has a horrible disease,” Emma whispered to the policemen. “I’ve been nursing her at home myself these last few months.” Suzi turned and looked at them. “These two policemen wanted to meet you, Suzi,” Emma said. She read their badges quickly. “This is Officer Gutierrez and his partner, Officer Smith.”
Suzi nodded and smiled. It didn’t look very pretty. She said, “Hello. Is something wrong?” Her voice was scratchy and vague and hard to understand. “On TV the policemen are usually there because something’s wrong.”
The dark-skinned policeman, Gutierrez, answered her. “No, Suzi, nothing’s wrong. We just came by to meet you.” He smiled grimly, as though it hurt, and turned to Emma. “Thank you, ma’am. I think we should be on our way now.” Emma pursed her lips and nodded, and showed them to the door.
Before she went to work she came back to say good-bye to Suzi again. She walked back into the hot, sunny room, kissed her daughter on the cheek, and gave her hand a little squeeze.
When Emma took her hand away she saw that three of Suzi’s fingernails had come off in her palm.
Suzi wasn’t in her bedroom that night when Emma got home. Emma thought at first that the girl might be in the living room, watching TV.
She wasn’t. She couldn’t have been; Emma would have heard the sound from it if she was.
Emma looked everywhere—the dining room (it was more of an alcove, really), the kitchen, even Emma’s own bedroom. Suzi wasn’t in any of them. After a few minutes Emma began to panic; she went back to Suzi’s room and looked out the window. Had the girl gone crazy, maybe, and jumped out of it? There wasn’t any sign of her on the sidewalk down below. Suzi wasn’t in any shape to make a jump like that and walk away from it. At least not
without leaving something behind.
Then Emma heard a noise come from Suzi’s closet. She turned to see it, expecting God knew what, and she heard Suzi’s voice: “Mommy… ? Is that you, Mommy?” The closet door swung open and Suzi’s face peeked out between the clothes.
“Suzi? What are you doing in that closet, child? Get yourself out of there! You almost scared me to death—I almost thought someone had stolen you away.”
“I had to hide, Mommy. A bunch of people came into the house while you were gone. I think they were looking for me. They even looked in here, but not careful enough to see me in the corner behind all the coats.”
Emma felt her blood pressing hard against her cheeks and around the sockets of her eyes. “Who? Who was here?”
“I didn’t know most of them, Mommy. Mama Estrella was with them. She opened up the door with her key and let them in.”
Emma fumed; she clenched her teeth and hissed a sigh out between them. She reached into the closet and grabbed Suzi’s hand. “You come with me. We’re going to get some new locks for this place and keep all those people out. And then I’m going to have words with that witch.”
Emma’s arm jarred loose a double handful of hangers that didn’t have clothes on them, and hangers went flying everywhere. Seven or eight of them hooked into each other almost like a chain, and one end of the chain latched into the breast pocket of Suzi’s old canvas army jacket, which hung from a sturdy wooden hanger.
The chain’s other end got stuck on the nightgown Suzi was wearing. It caught hold just below her belly. Emma wasn’t paying any attention; she was too angry to even think, much less notice details. When Suzi seemed to hesitate, Emma pulled on her arm to yank her out of the closet.
The hanger hook ripped through Suzi’s nightgown and dug into the soft, crumbly-rotten skin just below her belly. As Emma yanked on Suzi’s arm, the hanger ripped open Suzi’s gut.
Suzi looked down and saw her insides hanging loose, and she screamed. At first Emma wasn’t even sure it was a scream; it was a screechy, cracky sound that went silent three times in the middle when the girl’s vocal cords just stopped working.
Emma tried not to look at what the hanger had done, but she couldn’t stop herself. She had to look.
“Jesus, Jesus, O sweet Jesus,” she whispered.
A four-inch flap of skin was caught in the hanger. Suzi twisted to get away from the thing, and the rip got bigger and bigger.
Emma said, “Be still.” She bit her lower lip and knelt down to work the hanger loose.
There was no way to do it without looking into Suzi’s insides. Emma gagged in spite of herself; her hands trembled as she lifted them to the hanger. Up close the smell of putrid flesh was unbearable. She thought for a moment that she’d lose her self-control, but she managed not to. She held herself as careful and steady as she could and kept her eyes on what she had to do.
Suzi’s intestines looked like sausage casings left to sit in the sun for a week. Her stomach was shriveled and cracked and dry. There were other organs Emma didn’t recognize. All of them were rotting away. Some of them even looked crumbly. An insect scrambled through a nest of pulpy veins and squirmed underneath the tumor.
Emma had tried to avoid looking at that. She’d had nightmares about it these last few weeks. In her dreams it pulsed and throbbed, and sometimes it sang to her, though there were never any words when it was singing. One night she’d dreamed she held it in her arms and sang a lullaby to it. She woke from that dream in the middle of the night, dripping with cold sweat.
Even if those were only dreams, Emma was certain that there was something wrong with the cancer, something unnatural and dangerous, maybe even evil.
It was enormous now, a great mottled-gray leathery mass the size of Emma’s skull. Blue veins the size of fingers protruded from it. Emma wanted to sob, but she held herself still. Gently, carefully as she could, she took the loose skin in one hand and the hanger in the other and began to work Suzi free. Three times while she was working at it her hand brushed against the cancer, and each time it was like an electric prod had found its way into the base of her own stomach.
She kept the tremor in her hands pretty well under control, but when she was almost done her left hand twitched and tore Suzi open enough for Emma to see a couple of her ribs and a hint of her right lung underneath them.
She set the hanger down and let out the sob she’d been holding back. Her arms and legs and neck felt weak; she wanted to lie down right there on the floor and never move again. But she couldn’t. There wasn’t time. She had to do something—she knew, she just knew that Suzi was going to crumble away in her arms if she didn’t do something soon.
But again: what could she do? Get out a needle and thread and sew her back together? That wouldn’t work. If a coat hanger could tear Suzi’s skin, then it was too weak to hold a stitch. What about glue? Or tape, maybe—Emma could wrap her in adhesive tape, as though she were a mummy. But that wouldn’t solve anything forever, either. Sooner or later the decay would get done with Suzi, and what good would bandages do if they were only holding in dust? Sooner or later they’d slip loose around her, and Suzi would be gone in a gust of wind.
No. Emma knew about rot. Rot came from germs, and the best way to get rid of germs was with rubbing alcohol.
She had a bottle of rubbing alcohol under the bathroom cabinet. That wasn’t enough. What Suzi needed was to soak in a bathtub full of it. Which meant going to the grocery to buy bottles and bottles of the stuff. Which meant either taking Suzi to the store—and she was in no condition for that—or leaving her alone in the apartment that wasn’t safe from people who wanted to kill her. But Emma had to do something. It was an emergency. So she said, “You wait here in the closet, baby,” and she kissed Suzi on the forehead. For a moment she thought she felt Suzi’s skin flaking away on her lips, thought she tasted something like cured ham. The idea was too much to cope with right now. She put it out of her mind.
Even so, the flavor of preserved meat followed her all the way to the store.
The grocery store only had ten bottles of rubbing alcohol on the shelf, which wasn’t as much as Emma wanted. Once she’d bought them, though, and loaded them into grocery bags, she wondered how she would have carried any more anyway. She couldn’t soak Suzi in ten bottles of alcohol, but she could stop up the tub and rinse her with it, and then wash her in the runoff. That’d do the job well enough, at least. It’d have to.
When Emma got back to the apartment Suzi was asleep in the closet. Or she looked like she was sleeping. Emma hadn’t actually seen her asleep since she’d died. She spent a lot of time in bed, and a lot of time resting, but whenever Emma looked in on her she was awake.
“Suzi?” Emma said. She pulled the clothes aside and looked into the closet. Suzi was curled up in the corner of the closet with her head tucked into her chest and her hands folded over her stomach. “Suzi, are you awake, honey?”
Suzi looked up and nodded. The whites of her eyes were dull yellow. They looked too small for their sockets. “Mommy,” she said, “I’m scared.” She looked afraid, too. She looked terrified.
Emma bit into her lower lip. “I’m scared too, baby. Come on.” She put up her hand to help Suzi up, but she didn’t take it. She stood up on her own, and when Emma moved aside she walked out of the closet.
“What’re you going to do, Mommy?”
“I’m going to give you a bath, baby, with something that’ll stop what’s happening to your body.” Emma looked Suzi over, and the sight made her wince. “You get yourself undressed and get in the bathtub, and I’ll get everything ready.”
Suzi looked like she didn’t really believe what Emma was saying, but she went in and started getting undressed anyway. Emma got the shopping bag with the bottles of alcohol from where she had left it by the door and took it to the bathroom. It was an enormous bathroom, as big as some people’s bedrooms. The building was old enough that there hadn’t been such a thing as indoor plumbing when i
t was built. Not for tenement buildings, anyway. Emma never understood why the people who put the plumbing in decided to turn a room as big as this one into a bathroom. When she got there Suzi had her nightgown up over her head. She finished taking it off and stepped into the tub without even turning around.
Emma took the bottles out of the bag and lined them up one by one on the counter. She took the cap off each as she set it down, and tossed the cap into the waste basket.
“Put the stopper in the tub for me, would you, honey?” Emma said. She got the last bottle out of the bag, got rid of the cap, and carried it over to Suzi.
She was already sitting down inside the tub, waiting. “This may sting a little, baby. Why don’t you hold out your hand and let me make sure it doesn’t hurt too much.”
Suzi put her hand out over the tub stopper, and Emma poured alcohol on it.
“What does it feel like?”
“It doesn’t feel like anything at all, Mommy. I don’t feel anything anymore.”
“Not anywhere?”
“No, Mommy.”
Emma shook her head, gently, almost as though she hoped Suzi wouldn’t see it. She didn’t like the sound of what Suzi’d said. It worried her. Not feeling anything? That was dangerous. It was wrong, and scary.
But she had to get on with what she was doing; things would only keep getting worse if she let them go.
“Close your eyes, baby. This won’t be good for them even if it doesn’t hurt.” she held the bottle over Suzi’s head and tilted it. Clear fluid streamed out of the bottle and into her hair. After a moment it began to run down her shoulders in little rivulets. One of them snaked its way into the big open wound of Suzi’s belly and pooled in an indentation on the top of the cancer. For a moment Emma thought something horrible would happen, but nothing did.
