by Pete Kahle
There was silence on the other end, then the sound of a turn signal. Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick-tick.
“Are you turning around?” asked Danielle with a glimmer of hope. If it was the force behind the lists, it should do whatever she told it, shouldn’t it?
“I’m turning onto Waialae Avenue. I have to take Bryce to school. He needs to get to school.”
Danielle had a thought. She reached into her jeans pocket, pulled out the list, and grabbed a pen. “I’m scratching it off,” she said, holding the phone between her neck and shoulder so she could use the pen. “Listen. Do you hear the scratches? I’m crossing it off and you don’t have to do it anymore. It’s not on the list anymore.”
“No,” said the voice. “No. You can’t just change the list like that. That’s not how it works.”
“I’ll tell you how it works. I’m going to hang up and call the—”
“If you hang up I will crash this car,” the voice snapped back.
The words hit Danielle like a slap to the face. “Don’t you hurt them,” she managed shakily.
“Hurt them? I love them. I’m their mother.” The woman -- no, the creature -- raised its voice. “Bryce, dear, can you unbuckle your brother’s car seat please? He looks like he needs to move around. In fact, why don’t we all unbuckle our belts. No-belt Thursday!”
“Stop,” said Danielle. “I’ll stay on the phone. Just tell them to put their belts back on.”
“Oh, I’m a very cautious driver. They’re completely safe back there. Did you know there’s a button to disable the passenger side airbags?”
“I said I’ll stay on the phone,” Danielle shouted into the receiver.
“Good girl. Now be a doll and let Mommy focus on driving. This car is made of such light metal I shudder to think of how it would fare in an accident.”
A breath sputtered out from between Danielle’s clenched teeth and she closed her eyes tight to keep herself from crying, to keep herself from imagining her car tumbling end over end, her babies tossing all about inside. Breathe, she told herself. You need to breathe and think.
If she couldn’t hang up, how could she still call the cops? She had Skype on her computer for calling her family back on the mainland. Could you call 911 on Skype? If not, she could call Kalani at work, and he could call 911.
She steadied herself and pushed off from the counter as quietly as she could, heading for the computer, phone still pressed to her ear, the kids chattering indistinctly on the other end over the sound of passing cars. She opened the computer and it made a loud welcome noise. The thing that wore her face didn’t hear. The blinker ticked again.
The password field popped up, and Danielle typed as silently as she could, pads of the fingers only. The computer didn’t accept her password and it made a dissonant honk to tell her so.
“Tsk, tsk,” came the voice on the phone, sing-song. “You’re not trying to email anybody are you? I’m afraid you’ll have a hard time getting into that computer if you are.”
A chorus of car horns blared into Danielle’s ear before she could respond.
“Goodness,” said the voice. “People don’t like it when you run red lights here, do they? Listen, why don’t you just sit down on the couch and wait for me. I’ll be back. There’s no need for any of this ugliness. Watch some TV. Read a magazine. Relax.”
“Why are you doing this?” said Danielle, unable to keep the tears from streaming down her face anymore. The voice didn’t answer. Danielle cried until it announced that they were pulling up at school. “Give Bryce to me,” said Danielle thickly. “Let me tell him goodbye.”
No response. She heard the car door open.
“Bye, Mommy,” said Bryce in the distance. His voice pierced her heart.
“Oh, Honey,” said the creature that had kidnapped her kids. “Don’t forget this. It’s for your science club. You give that right to Mrs. Ino, okay?” Danielle looked over at the form where it had fallen just inside the still-open front door. It made her furious that this thing, this Other, had remembered when she had not.
“Okay,” said Bryce.
“Have a good day!” said the voice, after which the car door slammed. “See,” the voice said to Danielle, “that wasn’t so bad. Now it’s back home for all of us. You just sit tight. We’ll be there in a jiff.”
For the next fifteen minutes, Danielle waited in tense silence, listening for every sound coming from the phone, trying to calculate where they were, coming up with ideas to contact somebody and then discarding them as too dangerous.
When the neighbor’s dog barked, she jumped to her feet and ran for the driveway. The car turned in and coasted towards her, the Other looking up and smiling menacingly, Cheyenne and Gregory behind her. Danielle jogged around to the driver’s side and yanked open the door before the car came to a complete stop. When she touched the door, she saw the Other’s face through the window, eyes wide. “Don’t –” the Other started, but Danielle didn’t listen.
When she opened the door, she had the briefest instant to see that there was nobody in the driver’s seat. Nobody at all. But for Danielle’s purse, the seat was completely empty. She only had a second though, because just as she swung the door open, the purse tumbled down onto the gas pedal, and the car bucked forward, accelerating with a roar. It slammed into the side of the house with the sickening crunch of metal on brick.
# # #
Danielle felt as if she were in a dream, unable to move fast enough as she ran for the back door of the car. The door let out a twisted squeal as she opened it and scrambled inside, reaching for her little ones. Cheyenne and Gregory wailed and strained against the harnesses of their car seats, clutching for her. She undid their seats with numb fingers and gathered them into her arms, a distant part of her mind registering that, yes, they’d been strapped in after all and she should be thankful.
It was only after she got Cheyenne and Gregory inside and called an ambulance that she started to shake. She was hugging them both to her chest and trembling all over when the EMT’s arrived.
# # #
Danielle awoke the next morning in a haze, muted light filtering through the bedroom curtains, stillness heavy in the air. She was lying on the edge of the bed, Gregory’s small form pressed up against her, Bryce and Cheyenne sprawled out on his other side, all of them unhurt, little chests rising and falling peacefully. At the foot of the bed, Kalani was conked out in the office chair, tilted back with his head lolling over the padded headrest and his feet propped up on the mattress.
Awareness of the day before filtered into her consciousness slowly, the terror dimmer now with her family sleeping safely around her. Last night she’d told Kalani about the whole thing and they’d made a plan to get to the bottom of it. He had her back and it felt good.
She got out of bed quietly and went out to the hallway, heading for the bathroom that wouldn’t wake the kids when she flushed the toilet. She became aware of the smell right after she closed the bedroom door behind her. Cinnamon and… something else, some kind of sharp chemical smell.
A knot clenched in her stomach, and she strode down the hallway faster, angry. She hadn’t made a list. This wasn’t how it was supposed to work!
The first thing she noticed when she got a glimpse of the kitchen were the sliding glass doors. Angular red letters slanted across their surface, scratched deep into the glass. They read “make breakfast,” and as Danielle watched, a red line slowly dragged itself over the letters with a nails-on-a-chalkboard screech.
Her steps slowed, but she kept walking. In the dining room, the kids’ table was set with French toast, each sprinkled with powdered sugar and cut into bite-sized pieces.
The line on the glass door came to a sharp halt, and Danielle had only a moment to let out a tense breath before it started again. New words dug into the glass: “Clean kitchen w/Comet.” It began to cross itself out just as “Make Breakfast” had.
That was the other smell. Comet. And then it dawned on her: th
at wasn’t powdered sugar on the French toast. It was powdered bleach. The thought of her kids eating it made her gag. She darted to the sliding door and slammed it open.
There was nobody outside, but strangely, her laptop sat open on the glass table. She walked out to it warily, the terra cotta paving stones of the patio rough underfoot. She glanced back at the kitchen to make sure the kids hadn’t woken up yet and then tilted the screen so she could see it.
Gmail was open, an email sitting unsent in the compose screen.
“Dear Danielle,” it read. “Where is my list? I don’t know what to do without my list.”
The table shuddered underneath the computer and Danielle jumped backwards. Words jagged across the wavy glass surface. “Wake Kalani,” they said, and then were crossed off violently.
From behind her in the house there was a crash, a pained shout, and a chorus of children’s cries. Danielle turned around in alarm and rushed back through the house to the bedroom, where she slung open the door and flicked on the lights.
Kalani was just pulling himself to standing using the dresser, his face was sheeted in blood. Gregory and Cheyenne were screaming their heads off in the bed. Bryce was trying to help Daddy to his feet.
Kalani groaned and staggered into Danielle’s arms. “What happened?” Danielle cried.
“Chair tipped,” Kalani slurred. “Bust ma head on da drawers.” He stumbled and it was the best that Danielle could do to get him into the bathroom where she sat him down on the toilet. Panic threatened when she saw the bloody gash on the top of his head. She grabbed a washcloth to staunch the flow. He tilted woozily.
“Bryce, bring me the phone,” shouted Danielle. And then as an afterthought: “Don’t touch the food. It’s poison.”
Bryce, wide-eyed, turned immediately to do as he was told, and Danielle pressed the cloth to Kalani’s head as hard as she dared, trying to keep pressure on the wound. She looked up to see Cheyenne in the bathroom doorway, hugging herself and looking afraid.
“Cheyenne, Baby, it’s okay. Go and hold Gregory. Tell him it’s going to be alright.” Gregory was still wailing from the bed.
“How come you pushed him, Mommy?”
“What?” Danielle said. Kalani hunched forward and she had to lunge to get an arm around him before he fell. Was that the right thing to do, keep him upright?
“You pushed Daddy,” said Cheyenne, with angry tears in her eyes. “How come you did that?”
“I didn’t, Sweetie. It was someone else.”
“Nuh-uh,” muttered Cheyenne, shaking her head, looking at Danielle as if she’d grown talons.
Danielle’s emotions roiled. She couldn’t think of what to say to her daughter. Then Bryce ran back into the bedroom to stop just behind his sister. “The phone’s gone, Mommy,” he said breathlessly.
“Look on the dresser or in my purse,” she responded, but as she said it, she had the sinking feeling that Bryce wouldn’t find any of the cellphones either.
Kalani moaned, and Danielle stabilized his head and pressed down harder with the cloth.
“Bryce, wait,” she said, loud enough to make Kalani flinch. “Bring me a pen.” Cheyenne was now cowering behind the bathroom doorframe, accusing eyes watching as Danielle carefully unwound her arm around Kalani’s chest and then sat in his lap, straddling his legs and steadying his torso with hers, all the while keeping the pressure on with her right hand. With her left hand, she sloppily unrolled some toilet paper and spread it out over the tank of the toilet. This thing wanted a list, she’d give it one.
Bryce came with the pen and Danielle wrote hastily with her wrong hand “Call 9-1-1,” the ink soaking into the toilet paper, making the letters blurry. The second she finished the words, they were crossed off, red ink ripping right through the thin material. She heaved a sigh of relief, and told Bryce to comfort Gregory on the bed. Cheyenne went with him with a final scared glance at Danielle.
When the knock came at the front door, Danielle expected EMT’s. She didn’t expect the police, or the words “domestic disturbance.”
# # #
The most painful thing was when they asked Danielle if there was somewhere safe her kids could stay. As in somewhere not here. She supposed she couldn’t blame them. Between the mad scrawl on the sliding glass door, Kalani’s scalp wound, and the poisoned food, it must have looked like she’d gone off the deep end. Combine that with the report from the day before, and she probably would have arrested herself if the roles had been reversed. But taking her kids away? It tore at her heart. This was their home. They should be safe here.
Even worse though was the look of betrayal on Cheyenne’s face as Danielle’s friend Vai bundled the kids into her minivan. If only Danielle could prove to her daughter that it’d been someone else. But that was the problem. Not just with Cheyenne, but with the police too, and then the psychologist they appointed to evaluate her. She told them it had been a woman who looked almost identical to herself, but even that tamer explanation had the doctor pushing his glasses up his nose while he made furtive notes on his clipboard.
# # #
It wasn’t until after talking to the doctor for near on two hours that she finally got her phone call, and by then it was nearly noon. A huge Maori in a white orderly outfit escorted her to an ancient bank of phones, each attached to the wall in its own semi-private cubicle. He gestured to one with a friendly smile and then stepped back a few paces to lean against the opposite wall, arms crossed.
Danielle wasn’t quite sure what her status was. The cop had said she wasn’t being arrested, which seemed to be backed up by the fact that they hadn’t fingerprinted her or anything, but the psych ward felt a lot like a prison.
There was a bench built into the wall of the cubicle, and Danielle sat on it, smoothing her hands over her jeans, thankful that the policeman had at least let her get dressed before he took her away.
Who should she call first? They’d taken Kalani to an E.R. to look at his head, but Danielle didn’t know which one, and she knew he didn’t have his cell phone because she’d searched for it while she was dressing and hadn’t found it. Vai first, then. Her friend could probably tell her about Kalani and the kids both. Thinking about the kids, imagining what the morning must have been like for them, broke Danielle’s heart. Thank God Vai had been able to pick them up so early in the morning. At least they were used to spending time at her house.
The metal buttons on the phone sunk and rebounded heavily as she dialed Vai’s number. It rang. And then rang again. And again. Danielle was starting to think something was wrong when someone finally picked up.
“Lameko residence, this is Danielle,” came the Other’s wet-sounding voice.
A wave of fear and helplessness drained the blood from Danielle’s face at the sound of the Other’s voice. She swallowed a gasp to keep from giving herself away. If the Other didn’t know it was her, she could maybe fool her.
“Hello?” the Other said.
Danielle had to act quickly before the Other hung up. She made her voice as low and gruff as possible. “May I speak to Vai please?”
The Other laughed, a throaty sound that sent a chill up and down Danielle’s arms. “Hey Vai,” The Other said loudly, “it’s Kalani. I’m going to take it back to your room, okay?” There was the sound of walking, then a door closing. “I wondered when you would call,” said the creature. You could tell by the way she spoke that she was smiling that cruel smile of hers. The thought of that thing with her kids again, it was too much to take, just too much.
“What are you?” Danielle asked, feeling defeated. “Why are you doing this?” Her words came out unsteadily, and the orderly straightened against the wall, concern in his eyes. Danielle made a placating gesture with her hand, but he was watching her now. She’d have to be careful or he might end her phone time.
“You know what I am,” said the Other. “You more than most people. I’m a loving mother. A hard-working employee. A devoted wife.”
Danielle wan
ted to yell so badly, but she hissed instead, not wanting to upset the orderly. “You’re a thief, is what you are!”
“A thief? I’ve done nothing you didn’t wish away every single morning out on that patio of yours. I simply picked up what you discarded. That’s not theft.”
“I didn’t discard anything,” Danielle said, a little too loud. The orderly was definitely paying attention now.
“Your thoughts echoed across the entire valley. They were deafening! There were those of my kind who would’ve killed you just to keep you quiet, but I wanted to help, because that’s who I am. I’m the one who helps.”
My kind. Danielle latched onto that phrase. “And what is your kind?”
The Other made a dismissive sound. “You wouldn’t understand. You humans never do. The point is that I heard you, and I stepped in to help, and I am taking my payment.”
“And what payment is that?” asked Danielle
“Don’t pretend you don’t know,” said the Other.
“What. Payment.” Danielle asked very deliberately.
“Your life, of course. Your form. Your family. Your job. All of it. All the responsibilities you despised, the list that you wanted done.”
The Other’s words dragged against Danielle’s soul like razors. “I didn’t despise… it was… you don’t understand!” Guilt ate at her. “I… I didn’t like some of the tasks, sure, but I never despised them. They were hard. I was tired.”
“You were weak,” said the Other. “I am not.”
Danielle was about to say something, but she forgot what it was. She just sat there with her mouth hanging open. Weak. She was weak. She hadn’t been the happy, industrious mother she’d envisioned when she first had Bryce. When she should have been enjoying her kids, she was dreaming about life without them instead, imagining moments stolen from them.
The Other’s voice softened. “Shhh, it’s okay. Every living thing has a place. I will care for your family better than you ever could. Tirelessly. And you, you can do all the things you always wanted to do, safe in the knowledge that your children are being loved and protected.”
