Because You'll Never Meet Me

by Leah Thomas

  But I saw the lines in her face. Her red eyes. She was just as sorry as I was that no one was going to come to my stupid party.

  “You should go take a nap, Mom.”

  She settled back into her chair. “In a bit.”

  Three o’clock came and went, and none of them showed up. I slumped in my seat. At four, I rubbed my palms together and Mom caved.

  “This Havisham’s restarting the clocks, Ollie.”

  “Maybe we’ve got the wrong day.”

  “Never mind. I’ll go make you some hot chocolate.”

  “I’m not five, Mom. Chocolate won’t make me forget all my woes.”

  “I know. I’ve been eating it for years. But happy birthday.”

  She pushed cobwebs away when she lifted her dead bride’s veil to peck me on the forehead.

  After she left, I put my hands over my eyes.

  Of course they wouldn’t want to come.

  Who was I kidding?

  It began to rain. I didn’t consider puddle-hopping. The driveway was longer than ever and I couldn’t stand looking at it anymore, so I went inside the haunted cabin to wait out the storm.

  Mom stayed with me as afternoon became evening. She was overdoing it. I scowled when she came into my bedroom. I snapped anthologies closed and glared at her. Or I continued carving or folding origami until she left, as if she had no more presence in my room than any of the origami litter. All the same, every seven minutes she was in the doorway again.

  I finally pushed the telescope against the pinewood door until it jammed shut.

  “Oliver? It’s … dinner. Sandwiches. Not tuna.”

  I heard her set the plate down, but she was still standing there.

  Thirty minutes later, her knocking became frenzied. “Damn it! You’re scaring me! Just open up!” The door rattled. “Do I have to call Auburn-Stache?”

  “Just leave me alone!” I said. “Go do something else!”

  “Do what else?” she shouted, and her voice broke like it never had before.

  “Mom?”

  No reply.

  I don’t know how she came to be here, what exactly happened to Dad and whether she was guilty of bringing this on herself. Maybe she wanted to start a rock band. Maybe she wanted to study astrophysics. I didn’t know what she used to do on rainy days, what she used to dream about, who her friends had been. I didn’t know.

  I’d had one shitty day where no friends came to visit; she’d had a decade and a half. Maybe she didn’t lock herself in the garage because I left her alone with a rotting brain. Maybe she really did lock herself in there to get away from me.

  “Mom!”

  I knocked the telescope away and opened the door.

  She was on her knees on the floor. Tears streaked down her cheeks under her Havisham veil, and her shoulders shook when I held her.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Aren’t we both? The sorriest ever. If your father could see us now.”

  I rested my head on her shoulder. “Why don’t you ever talk about him? Really, Mom?”

  “Needling.” She took a deep breath and exhaled into my hair. “You’ve always loved mysteries, Oliver.”

  “Yeah, but …”

  “As long as there are mysteries to solve here, you’ll have a reason to stay.”

  You had to hand it to her. The largest, most impenetrable lock in our house, and I’d never even seen it before.

  Liz showed up alone after dark. I had gone back outside after Mom went to bed; I was sitting on the porch without a coat on, even though it was damn cold. I was fuming, so I didn’t really feel it.

  She seemed hesitant in her raincoat as she wheeled up on her bike, nothing like how she used to be. Maybe she could see the black taffeta we’d hung in the windows, the spiders dangling from the banisters, the streamers, and the bats. Maybe she could see me sitting there. She certainly saw me when I stood up.

  “Ollie,” she said, hiking her backpack up onto her shoulder. “Hey. Happy birthday. Sorry I’m so late. Driver’s ed.”

  I wanted to say something, but I really couldn’t. When she stood beside me on the porch, I tried to meet her eyes.

  “Can I come in?”

  I just walked inside. She could follow if she wanted, I supposed. I wasn’t going to tackle her to the ground or anything.

  When we reached the living room, she screeched—one of the dangling plastic centipedes we’d hung from the ceiling had slapped against her face.

  “What the hell!”

  I watched her eyes widen by candlelight as she scanned the room. My anatomical skeleton looked horrific in the light of lanterns covered in green and blue film, jutting from a cardboard coffin, organs pulled out and draping down to the floor. Cobwebs coated every bookshelf and table. I was heading for my room, but Liz stopped as we passed through the kitchen to the dining room. We’d decked out this part of the cabin in a Poe and Dickens crossover party. The dinner table was laden with lace and a half-dilapidated cake Mom had spent hours stacking up just so we could smack it with a mallet, giggling like sadistic ghouls. There was a swinging foam pendulum in the entranceway, and we’d lifted some of the floorboards to shove a papier-mâché heart underneath, although, of course, it had no telltale beating.

  “Wow, Ollie. You went all out.”

  We’d spent so much time trying to make the table look as though it hadn’t been touched in decades, and now it would never be touched after all.

  I walked up the stairs without a word. She followed me past black lace curtains into the chaos of my bedroom. I sat on the bed. I didn’t bother moving the canvases and comics.

  “I have a present for you.” She held out a pink package; when I didn’t take it, she set it on my cluttered desk. “So say something, please.”

  “So everyone had driver’s training, right?”

  I had never seen her so uncertain. She was wearing a lot of makeup, biting her lip.

  “I didn’t invite anyone. I didn’t even tell anyone.” She sat down beside me, laying her bag at her feet. It was glowing softly; she couldn’t come over without her phone anymore. “But your decorations are really something. You know, there’s going to be a Halloween dance in a couple weeks, at school. And it won’t look half as amazing as this. Your costume’s great, too.”

  “Yeah, zombies are easier to pull off when you’re me,” I said. “So you can just come here instead, hey. We can leave the decorations up for a few weeks. No biggie.”

  Liz sighed. “I’m going to the dance. With Martin Mulligan.”

  “Because I know who that is.” My blood rang in my ears. This was it. She was finally done with the hopeless hermit.

  “He’s a senior. He’s going to study computer engineering at State. You’d like him. He’s really nice. Smart, like you.”

  “I don’t think I would like him, although I might like kicking him between the legs.”

  First she was angry. Then she put her hand on mine. “If things were different …”

  “If I were anyone else,” I said, trying to grin. “I can never listen to electronica. I can never study engineering.”

  “It’s not that. After all this time, you think—Ollie! It’s not the fact that you’re trapped in the woods—it’s that you’re trapped in yourself!”

  I stood up. My face felt numb, but not because of electricity. Because of other charges in the air between us. Because I wanted to repel the truth of what she was saying. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Tell me, Ollie. How many siblings have I got?”

  “I—”

  “What’s my favorite subject?”

  “You—”

  “Or my favorite color, even? My favorite food?”

  “You never talk about those things!”

  Or what she does on rainy days. Something twisted in my stomach.

  “You never ask about them, Ollie. You don’t care about anything that goes on that you’re not a part of. It’s like you think the rest of the world doesn�
�t matter!”

  “That’s not true. I care about other people. I care about Moritz.”

  She threw her hands up in the air. “You mean the pen pal you never have to meet. The one you’ll never have to deal with in person. The one who’s only ever going to exist inside your head!”

  “Shut up.”

  “Tell me, Ollie. When’s my birthday?”

  I didn’t know the answer, Moritz. I closed my mouth.

  After a moment, Liz got up to go to the bathroom. Her tears were messing up all that mascara.

  I had to do something. I was losing her. I was losing everything.

  She’d left her backpack on the floor. It didn’t take a lot of digging to find what I was looking for. It was one of the things that people seem to superglue to themselves, a little square of metal with earbuds dangling from it. I put the earbuds in my ears. My fingers hovered over the triangular button. When I heard the toilet flush, I pressed it.

  A viridian, amorphous surge of electricity engulfed me.

  When Liz came back, she knew something was wrong. She was probably tipped off by the bulging of my eyes or the way my head kept thrusting itself back and forth, back and forth against the headboard.

  “Ollie!”

  “N-New Wave.” I tried to smile, but my face went slack. Liquid slipped from my bottom lip. More than saliva, because I’d bitten my tongue burning red.

  Her eyes widened. She tried to pull the player from me, but my fingers tightened around it.

  That wasn’t the oncoming seizure doing that, I swear. I couldn’t tell her that the sounds from the buds were so different from anything I’d ever felt that I would have died to hear more. There were … poundings? Bass? And something that must have been a synthesizer, punching my eardrums.

  If it hadn’t been her face, her eyes imploring me to stop, I never would have let go. When she yanked the earbuds from my ears, there was blood on them. She kept clawing at my hands.

  I unclenched my fingers. Hot blood spewed from my nose as she threw the machine out my window, into the rain. But it still felt like I was holding it, like its vibrations were shaking my brain against my skull. I was trying my hardest not to let the tremors win. But when a seizure takes you, you’re powerless.

  Mom told me that she came in right then, right when I lost consciousness and started convulsing outright. It didn’t take her long to understand what had happened. She told Liz to leave.

  Liz went.

  I wondered if all she had ever wanted was an excuse.

  Later, I opened the package, and inside was that stupid old book light again. Passing the torch, I guess. Or another good-bye.

  Hey, Moritz. Have I ever asked you when your birthday is? If being raised in a laboratory made you a monster, what did being raised in the middle of nowhere make me?

  I wish it would stop raining already, but that’s selfish, too.

  ~ Ollie

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Rose-Colored Spectacles

  Do not think that my silence has been because I blame you for the harrowing events relayed in your camping confessional letter. That letter left me gasping in sympathy.

  Hear me now. Hear me in ALL CAPS:

  IT WAS NEVER YOUR FAULT.

  The guilt you feel is no more unusual than it is justified. I know how difficult it is not to feel responsible for terrible things that happen when you are helpless to change them.

  My birthday falls on July 3. Can you believe I’m a summer child?

  Ollie, you have given me all the kindness I never deserved. If that is selfishness, then I do not know the meaning of the word.

  I did not mean to abandon you like this, sad and alone in the wake of both my neglect and Liz’s. But I am so lost. I have been feeling very low for what felt like an eternity. Doubtless Father told you.

  I wanted to hurt him. When I realized he had forwarded my letter to you without my consent. But his face. It was on the verge of dissolution. I can’t hurt him. He saved me once, twice. I haven’t told you. But the man I call Father saved me.

  I do not know what has become of Lenz Monk. I have not left the apartment. I dare not tell Father what happened. I cannot face his disappointment.

  It has taken me so long to tell even you. Your confessions shed light on my own experiences, and now I tremble at my desk. Your honesty about your suffering—your confounded honesty!—has at last given me cause to share my own trials with you.

  Long before the disaster with Lenz, other memories made me monstrous.

  I began writing down my beginnings some time ago.

  Here is a concept you might not have read about: Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The word roughly translates to “working through the past.” This is difficult to describe to you. You are not German. But the people of Germany, as you have hinted before, do have a dark history behind them. We are haunted.

  On a personal level, I am also haunted. All of us may have darkness in our past, Oliver. Some of us are haunted by those who came before us.

  I said I would not speak of this. I try to see the laboratory as you imagine it: a factory that produces dolphin-wavy superheroes in bright colors? Perhaps a workshop full of vials and potions? Where men are given adamantium skeletons? Where the dead return to life? But this is not science fiction, Ollie.

  In the hopes that it will strengthen the friendship that has grown between us, in fear that it is just as likely to rend us asunder, I want to tell you of my mother and the initiative she founded. I want to tell you about the children she worked with.

  The children like us.

  I won’t apologize for withholding. Despite your disdain, I want to spare your ears whenever possible. I did not consider myself bound by linearity. Whenever you spoke of your mother, I recalled my own mother in vivid bursts that all but left me gasping. Your mother’s electric fences and locks, smothering as they seem to you, are better than what raised me.

  There is no pacemaker for this manner of heartache.

  Like my mother before me, I am a weakhearted fool.

  The name of my cardiovascular disease is cardiomyopathy. My brand of this disease is hypertrophic. My heart is weak, Anatomy Expert. This is due to an inexplicable thickening of the arteries within the cardiac muscle. This thickening restrains my blood flow. Chokes my heart out from the left ventricle.

  This disease is often passed down in families. The heaviest inheritance. My mother knew to look for it even when I was a fetus. Not because she was a renowned doctor, which she was, but because a swollen heart claimed her sister. It stole her cousin, and a distant uncle.

  It is this disease that leaves me frequently breathless. That swells my legs into tree trunks and makes my heartbeat rhythm-less. It is this disease that has often claimed young people at unawares. During sports matches or at nightclubs or in the moments when they are most excited. When their hearts fail to keep up with their hopes. Did you wonder why I am such a pessimist?

  It is this illness that my mother passed down to me. This illness that she once spent every spare moment of her life working to cure. When she founded the laboratory that made me how I am, Oliver, she did so with good intentions: to study and amend cardiomyopathy and other genetic conditions in utero. To spare infants lives of inherited pain. Pains as small as color-blindness, as large as sickle-cell anemia.

  Vergangenheitsbewältigung: correcting a broken past for the sake of the future.

  When most people reminisce about dear ones lost, they see those dear ones through rose-colored spectacles. I’m not sentimental. I see my mother as she was.

  There was something deflated about her appearance. She could put on the nicest patent leather shoes and a skirt and a silk blouse beneath her lab coat and just seem to sag inside them. Her eyes were ringed by circles a corpse would envy. She smiled rarely, and even then a misalignment of her jaw that made her top and bottom gums level ensured that her smiles were inevitably sharkish, displaying all her teeth at once. Perhaps this was fitting. Her smiles wer
e calculated.

  Of course I loved her. Does a child consider anything else? I did not consider how she never looked at me. She fed me and clothed me and raised me. That was love.

  My mother never spoke of my father. She acted as though he had never existed. Implied that he was no more tangible than an anonymous donor. He mattered no more than a strand of DNA in a vial.

  Perhaps she was more human before he left her. Perhaps not. I have no way of knowing. I wouldn’t have known he was a man of flesh and blood at all, except that in my youth I overheard my nanny saying over the phone that a “good-for-nothing” had left my mother alone with “a retard in her belly.”

  Some things you forget as a child. Some things you do not.

  My mother studied medicine in Berlin before she ever worked at the laboratory.

  Yes, Ollie. A laboratory. The laboratory. However fantastical your hypothesis, you are a good detective. Soon you might wish, more than ever, that you were wrong.

  Doubtless this was the same laboratory that your father spent time in. I imagine your father was a kind man, just as many of my doctors were.

  Most of the doctors who began working at the initiative had noble intentions, Oliver. They wanted to fix us before we even existed. They manipulated fetal DNA. They spotted diseases in amniotic fluid and endeavored to undo them. They plucked and pulled at genes to defy kidney disease, to purge Tay-Sachs from the womb, to deter fragile X chromosomes. To take hardships from the very beginnings of people. Sometimes epilepsy is genetic, isn’t it, Oliver?

  In the beginning, they meant well. I don’t know when this changed, but it did. By the time I was toddling, the scientists were no longer seeking cures to diseases. They were seeking evolution. They were seeking dangerous frontiers. Science for the sake of science is a terrifying thing, Ollie.

  I know this in my weak heart. In my gut. I know this because this laboratory was my second home. The people working there were my family. The laboratory is here in Saxony, likely within one hundred kilometers of Kreiszig.

  In the workday hours, my mother worked at a clinic in Kreiszig. Treating colds and fevers. Fungal growths and eczema. I remained at home with that cold-natured nanny. My mother did not want me coddled.