by catt dahman
John paused on the stairs. “Hmmm? What?”
“Why did you call me Alice?”
“What should I call you?”
She smiled sweetly. “We’re practically married…at least in God’s eyes; you should call me Anna.”
“Anna.”
“Yes, Silly.” She opened the door as soon as it was unlocked and went in with a wave to John. “Goodnight.”
“Anna,” he repeated, leaning against the door after locking it. Some one was for sure crazy, but John wasn’t sure who it was anymore.
8
“That’s it, Father. We’ve done everything, and we can’t go on this way.” Luke expected his father to begin yelling.
“I didn’t cause all this. I never wanted anything like this. It would be so much easier if we all just could have lived normally: going to church and livin’ right, getting married and raising families, but it didn’t happen that way. I didn’t ask for the vision of what was coming with the apocalypse, but there it was.”
The brothers nodded.
“I didn’t expect…well…you know…with James and Martha. I didn’t anticipate Mikey being born.” He studied John’s face for a minute. “I am so thankful for Mikey. Blessed be that child.”
“Amen,” Tom agreed.
I know our ways aren’t the usual, but it’s all I can do. I never dreamed Jennie would…I mean, Jennie was a shock to me. I love her, and I want her back with us. Not a day goes by that I don’t want her to come back and be with her loving family…but….”
“But…the point is, Father, we can’t keep finding women and training them like we do and hoping they’ll work out with us, and then…Cain keeps killing them or ruining them.”
“He broke through; she’s getting better, isn’t she?”
John shook his head. “Sometimes she’s better, but tonight I explained many things, and Alice accepted them with a little resistance, but she was coming around. I felt hope.
Then we come back down the hallway, and Cain is after Tara again, kills her no less, and there she is and sees it.”
“How is she?” Aaron asked sympathetically.
“In some ways, okay, but she told me her name is Anna. Who knows how long this will last? What will Anna do? And will we get the original personality back?”
“She was calmer,” Luke said.
John frowned with anger. “She is Anna, and I care about Alice, or so she calls herself.”
“I’ll speak to Cain. No more women are to be taken to him for any reason. And John, work on Alice…Anna…whoever she is; time is short.”
Father always kept a stern look and was a serious man, but now, he looked sad and defeated as he stood. He had tried so hard and for so long, and yet, at every turn, he was tested and forced to find solutions to new problems.
Cain was and always had been a burden that God had placed upon him; how did the Big Man upstairs expect him to succeed when he kept facing trials much like Job.
“Begin the next stage, and have faith that we will get her back.”
9
“Take things easy,” John cautioned Alice.
“I don’t really understand what’s happening to me.”
“I’m no psychiatrist. I thought Anna was here to stay, but she was here for a purpose: as long as you were intimate with me, she took over and pretended we were married and in love to protect you.”
Alice had only just begun to accept this might be true. The marks on her arm (that was Nan) had faded away, and her bruises had vanished, so she knew time had passed. It was a shock to learn months had passed.
When she awoke, alone in John’s bed, her head was fuzzy as if she had been sleeping a very long time.
“I sat Anna down and had a talk with her, and then she drank cider….”
“Drugged?”
“Yes. And she fell asleep, and then you awoke. It sounds simple, but it took me weeks and weeks to come up with a plan after talking to Anna a lot.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That it was you, Alice, I wanted and that as long as she were here, I wouldn’t be with her or hold her….”
Alice shivered. He was implying that her core personality came back to be with him. He had abducted her, and she wanted free; how could he try to convince her that she wanted him?
She had sat with the rest for a weird, sickeningly normal family meal. Connie was there beside Aaron, her eyes kept to her plate and murmuring quietly when he spoke to her.
Tom looked at Audra often while she smiled shyly at him from under her lashes, not at ease, but obviously broken in spirit. She was classically ‘Stockholm’.
Brenda sat next to Luke and chatted while she helped serve the dinner, but they still watched her closely, and her eyes betrayed a restless spirit, still looking for a way to escape.
Cain sat alone beside Mikey, who sat beside Alice. He offered her second helpings often and despite herself, she did talk to him a little, watching him light up with the attention.
Father sat at the head of the table where he directed the meal, after having given a very long prayer of thanks.
Often, he looked at Alice. She ate lightly and was glad there wasn’t anything they claimed to be pork roast.
After the meal, Brenda followed Luke upstairs. Audra and Connie carried plates and dishes to the kitchen to wash, looking at Alice suspiciously.
“Do you need the bathroom?” John asked.
“No.” Alice had used it and had had a shower before they ate.
Down the second wing, where she had never been, Alice looked at dull, religious paintings on the wall. All looked violent.
When John opened the door to a room, they walked inside. Alice gasped and felt her head spin, but she bit her lip to keep her mind focused.
The room was done in pale pink, a deep rose, and white. A desk and a few bookshelves were against the wall, shining in white lacquer. A matching, wide, white-lacquered bed was covered in pink, polka-dotted sheets, pink fluffy pillows, and a handmade, scrap quilt made into what she somehow knew was a wedding ring pattern: small square and rectangular pieces of fabric pieced into overlapping, connected circles or rings. Above the bed was a beautiful, huge painting of gardenias, honeysuckle, and roses.
Covered in rose-colored velvet, a deep chair and chaise sat around a pretty, little white table. A white rug covered most of the hardwood floor, matching the thick white velvet drapes that framed pale pink sheers.
“Did Mike paint that?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll sleep here. If you need the bathroom, there’s a pot but try to rest. I’m glad you’re back,” John hesitated to close the door, but he did, and Alice heard the ping of the lock.
She went to sit at the desk. There was a glass ball seemingly filled with bubbles, a picture of John and Luke, Cain, Aaron and Tom, mugging for the camera, smiling and laughing. A basket of stationary sat to the side. Pens and pencils filled a pink ‘glad’ cup.
In the top drawer, she found papers and pictures. After scooping them up onto the desk, she traced something carved with a pen into the wood of the bottom of the drawer.
Jennie
and
Alice traced the lines with her fingers. This was Jennie’s room, and Jennie had carved her name here. Why was the name John in a heart? Had she liked a boy with that name? The same name as one of her brother’s had? Maybe. It was a common name.
Before she looked through the papers, Alice went to the window. Maybe she could open it and get out.
It slid open, and cooler air rushed into the room through the screen. There was no roof below to jump out onto, and it was a very long way down. After looking it over, she decided the only way down was to jump, and she would break an ankle and get caught; they had to be watching her closely.
In her mind, she looked down into the rose garden where John worked, his shirt removed, muscles hard and rippling with work, shining with sweat, and tanned. He must have known she watched him because he stopped the
work, reached down to pinch off a rose, and held it up and out to her with a smile.
Alice shook herself out of the dream she was having.
The papers were essays with an A+ on all of them and the name Jennie Carter scrawled beautifully at the top of each.
Between the papers were bits of poems, romantic and hand written in a masculine hand. The paper was pale green. She looked at an old picture of John, smiling and happy; she set it to the side.
On a sheet of paper was a name written over and over, with the dot above the i written as a big bubble.
Robin.
For some reason, it made her feel nauseated.
She put them all back except for the one picture, and she opened the bottom drawer on the side of the desk. A pink stuffed rabbit sat there. A framed photo was face down, and she took it out. Her head reeled.
What the hell were they doing to her?
What was this game?
A second carving stood out.
Alice and Jennifer Alice Marie Carter.
Despite her anger, she couldn’t stop herself from tracing the woman in the photo as if she could feel the pretty, lacey wedding dress. Alice knew every line of that body. She knew that face better than her own. It was faded, but the eyes would have been bright green, the hair, long, glossy, and dark. Alice involuntarily felt her own lips and nose, identical to those in the picture.
This was her mother, Martha.
The man standing next to her in the dark suit had glittering dangerous eyes, and his name was James. Not her step father; he had been her birth father, and one night when he was in a rage and beating her mother, Alice had hit him with a bat and stabbed him in his heart. Not once or twice. Not even a dozen times. She had stabbed him a hundred times, raising and lowering the wood until it was a stub and her arm ached furiously.
Her head whipped to the door of her room. Jennie’s room. Out there were floorboards that had never released the dark red blood it absorbed from James, her father, James, whom she had decided wasn’t her father because of something: because of the beatings, because of what he had done to her mother.
In the next drawer was the broken stub of baseball bat she had used to stake him through his cold heart. Alice realized she was crying.
Up and down went the stake. Downstairs people murmured, and then footsteps thundered up the staircase, calling a name.
Luke was there, weeping as he held a hand out to Alice to take the stake from her. She kept stabbing.
John, younger and a teenager, wrapped strong arms around her, and she dropped her weapon, allowing him to pick her up and carry her to her room where he tucked her into bed to warm her shaking body. He watched her from the rose velvet chaise lounge.
Father was there. He sat beside her on the bed and stroked her hair, eyes full of tears. “I’m so sorry, little one.”
“Mama?”
Father patted her head. “You have us. I’ll take care of you, honey, and I’ll be your father, now.”
She shivered.
“We love you,” he whispered.
Alice could hear the words echoing off the walls of the room as her head went fuzzy and as she fought to stay conscious. When she tried to stand, the dizziness hit her harder.
“We love you.” “We love you, Jennie.”
10
“I need to understand. I’m ready.”
John watched Alice closely. She said she had passed out the night before and then awakened and crawled into bed. He asked her to stay in bed now and rest; if she did, he would help her fill in gaps.
“My mother and father were Martha and James. He wasn’t very nice, and he beat us, pushed my mother down the stairs, and killed her, and I…well, I brutally stabbed him to death for it. You were all there. I’m not sure…was Jennie me? And I Jennie, or was she really your sister?”
“We treated her as a sister after the episode. Father became her father, your father. For twelve years, you had been Jennie, my first cousin, since James and Father were brothers.”
“You and I were close.”
Pain etched his face. “Far too close, I reckon. Isolated out here and always together, things got strange, and you developed a big crush on me.”
“How did you feel? Did you laugh at me?”
“No. You were only twelve, and I was eighteen, but I fell in love with you. It’s always been you. Father didn’t know what to make of it. James was opposed. Your mother didn’t say much about it. It was an innocent, chaste love.”
Alice accepted that. She recalled so little, as if her memory and mind were slices of Swiss cheese and full of holes. She smoothed the bed sheet and pretended to study the pattern.
“When Mama was killed, I snapped, I suppose. I remember stabbing him over and over in the hallway.”
“You were in deep shock. My father swore to care for you, and he was sorry his brother was gone, but the man had become brutal, trying to beat all the women and children as much as he could. We threw him into the well.”
“My mother?”
“Buried properly.”
“I remember like I’m watching it, how you sat on the chaise and watched over me.”
“I did. Aaron and the boys all worried after you. Father kept you sedated some, but then you seemed okay. You only answered to Alice, your middle name, and you were like Jennie, but stronger and more logical. You were braver, and I think you were what Robin would have been in five or so years; you were still you but refined.”
Alice couldn’t remember much of that time. She worked outside with the boys and cooked some, helping John’s mother; her name was Lilith, she listened to Father’s preaching, and she loved John.
She was fourteen, and John was twenty when they made love the first time: close to the stream under a canopy of trees and on a soft blanket that covered the ground. It was forbidden and wrong, and yet they were together.
“You got pregnant. Father was so upset, worried about what it all meant and if it were right or wrong.
You had a girl baby, and Father was worried and told us she had died during birth. He took that baby and left her at a church in a bigger city not far from here and only left a note, pleading for someone to care for Hannah.”
“Hannah.”
“I was young and didn’t know what to think or do, but Father thought you were too young for a baby, and you were unstable. He did what he thought was best.”
“Oh.”
“A year later, and you had Michael, and Father, by then, had accepted that this was okay because you were more stable and who could not love him?
My mother had delivered Cain not long before the happening with your parents.” Horrified by the birth defects, Father had railed and ranted, saying the woman must have sinned to deliver such an abomination. In time, however, they all came to accept Cain, and if they didn’t fully love him, they were fond of him.
“We had a daughter, too?” Alice tried to remember the baby and couldn’t. “Why couldn’t we keep her?”
“Father was having visions such as the one about the upcoming apocalypse, and he said he had a vision about Hannah, that she had a path in life that was not with us. He said she died but told me the truth later, and I can’t say I understand it, but it is done and over.”
“And Mikey is ours?”
John grinned. “He is. He loves his mama, too.”
Alice almost smiled.
“Mama was pretty crazy by then. She acted like…well…a different person, and who knows, maybe she was, seeing as how things went later. She was Father’s niece anyway so you can see….”
“Interbreeding, My, God,” Alice whispered. She felt revulsion, and yet, John was her first cousin, and that didn’t seem to be a factor.
“Mama was up in age. Almost fifty, and she and Father no longer…well...you know. They abstained.
But she was hanging clothes on the line one day.” Lilith reached up to snap the corner of a sheet onto the line with a wooden clothespin, and her husband, Peter (Father) watched
her, wondering why she was less graceful that day. His eyes took in and analyzed every detail and settled on her stomach. Striding over to the line, he yanked her blouse up to see the bulge in her belly. His backhanded blow sent her reeling with a broken nose.
“Who?”
John shifted uncomfortably. “We never had visitors, and she never left the farm, Alice.”
“Well, it wasn’t divine pregnancy obviously.”
“We were strong young men and with strong morals. But of course, if it weren’t Father, then it had to be someone else. Who could have gotten her pregnant? And why was Cain, the last child so deformed? That indicated it was serious interbreeding and right sinful, indeed.”
John knew it wasn’t he who had done this. He knew Aaron was way too strong, Tom, too fearful, and Luke was righteous. That left one choice, one man who was older and brazen, who frequently argued with Father and questioned the way things were done. He was the only one who scoffed and who sneaked off with girls at the carnival when he worked.
“Who?”
“You had a brother, Alice. Noah Carter.”
“Noah. Wait, Noah Carter, he’s my friend who invited me to Texas to visit, the reason I was here.” Her head reeled again, and she struggled to sit up, breathing so hard she hyperventilated.
John lovingly slipped a tiny needle from the drawer of her table and slipped it into her vein. He had feared this.
“Rest, Alice.”
It was morning again, and her mouth was as dry as cotton balls. Mike was watching her sleep and smiled when she awoke as he handed her a glass of cold iced tea.
“Drink this, and John will help you to the bathroom.” He raced to the door, knocked, and in a few minutes, John appeared, whispered to Mike, and then helped Alice to the bathroom.
Her legs felt like jelly, and her head was foggy, but she felt better after drinking the tea. Mike brought a fresh glass for her and ran back downstairs.
“He’s scared. He wants you back so much,” John told her.
After she finished and washed her hands, she leaned on John and collapsed gratefully into her soft bed.
