White Horse

by Alex Adams

  “I am going to cut you.” His voice crackles like wrapping paper.

  I run.

  DATE: THEN

  “Come with me,” Jenny says one Thursday afternoon when we meet on the library steps. She’s in her red coat, a camel scarf wound around her neck. My outfit is similar, but black.

  “To see my therapist, I mean.”

  I look at her like she’s lost her mind, which makes it a very lucky thing that she’s in therapy. When I tell her that, she laughs.

  “You’d like her. Lena is fantastic.”

  My shoulders slump slightly. Somewhere at the back of my mind the possibility lurked that Nick was her therapist.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It would help me.”

  “How?”

  “Lena says I have unresolved issues about abandonment that stem from childhood. She feels that meeting you will paint a better picture. So?”

  “No. When were you abandoned, anyway?”

  She’s huffy when we go inside, her shoulders tense, her chin high. She doesn’t look at me save for the occasional glare delivered sideways.

  We follow the drill. Inch our way forward. Try to steel ourselves when we hear the inevitable anguished bursting of battered hearts.

  Our turn arrives too soon and not soon enough. I see it before Jenny. Mark’s name leaps off the page. My arm goes around her, I try to steer her out of there before she sees.

  “Jenny, let’s go.”

  But it’s too late, she’s seen his name. Mark D. Nugent. There’s no way for her to unsee. She’ll lie in bed, close her eyes, and that string of letters will come at her out of the darkness. Tonight. Tomorrow. All the days after. The pain strikes me, too —less of course, but there’s no time for me to feel it; I need to get Jenny out of here.

  She sags against me, moans.

  I walk her to her car, drive her to the only place I know to go: home. When I pull into our parents’ driveway, the pitted lawn and the ragged garden that our parents normally keep so beautifully don’t register. Times are anomalous, so unusual things no longer surprise me as they once did. Our mother is slow to come to the door.

  We are portraits of the same woman: grief, determination, and, thirty years later, surprise.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks, but the answer comes to her as quickly as the question forms. She presses a hand to her chest. “It’s Mark, isn’t it? Oh my.” She’s in her nightie, the latest in a long line of floor-length garments designed to prevent me from having a good time, our father used to joke. She closes the door behind us and seals us in the furnace. It has to be eighty-five degrees in here, easy.

  “Mom, is everything okay?”

  “Fine, fine,” she says, and I know that means it’s not. She takes over, doing the things a mom always does. She steers Jenny to the cabbage rose sofa, sits her down like she’s a small child again, and pulls my sister into her arms and rocks her.

  Jenny needs her mother now. No, Jenny needs Mark, but he can’t be here. He won’t be here ever again. We’re all just meat puppets with an invisible hand inside us, making us dance and live. When that hand slips off the glove, we collapse and that is the end of everything.

  I go into the kitchen, fill the electric kettle, then go in search of Dad. From room to room I wander. I check the garage. It’s the same as it always is. There’s a table set up in the center with a half-finished project taking shape. The pile of wood pieces look like they’ll grow up to be a clock.

  Then I make for the basement. You won’t find it behind a door in the hall. There’s no rickety staircase descending into darkness, with a bare swinging bulb to light the way. The way to this basement is through a cupboard in the bathroom. It’s a trapdoor in the floor with a ladder attached. Usually it’s open unless company comes over. No one likes to imagine a head popping up through that hole while they’re flipping through the magazine rack beside the toilet.

  Today it’s closed. But that’s not what worries me. What makes my heart thump so hard my mother’s cooing in the other room dims to a whisper is the brass bolt locking the wood flap to the floor. There are new hinges, too. They’re the same shiny metal as the bolt. That shouldn’t worry me, either, except the trapdoor used to lie flush with the floor all the way around, and now the hinges jut at perfect right angles. Outside.

  “Hiya, Pumpernickel.”

  I slip right out of my body, crash into the ceiling, then glide right back in, sliding on a spiritual banana peel. My father is here, not down in the basement locked in like—

  A monster.

  —a prisoner. And he looks great. His eyes sparkle with suppressed punch lines.

  “You scared the crap out of me, Dad.”

  “Then you’re in the right room, aren’t you?”

  We hug.

  “What’s wrong with your sister?” he says into my hair.

  My eyes are rapid-filling cisterns.

  “Mark,” he says in a voice too jovial for this conversation.

  He marches into the living room, pulling me in his wake even though I don’t want to hear what comes next, because I know something isn’t right; Dad doesn’t look great, he looks young. He’s ten years older than Mom but now he’s fifteen years her junior.

  “Jenny, my girl,” he says. “Let’s celebrate. He was never any good for you anyway. So he’s dead, so what? Now you can find another one. One with a real job. A man’s job. Not that sissy sit-behind-a-computer shit he liked so much.” On and on he rambles while Jenny stares at him in horror. I’m wearing the same expression. But Mom isn’t.

  Her gaze meets mine, weary with resignation. She knows this isn’t right, that something’s seriously wrong with Dad, and yet she doesn’t intervene.

  “Turn up the heat, would you?” Dad thunders, and she scurries to accommodate him.

  The air thickens. The heat isn’t flowing just from the vents but also from him. There’s a fire raging inside his body. I can almost see the steam rising from his pores. The air around him shimmers. He’s a sidewalk in summer.

  “Dad,” I say. “That’s not—”

  “Zoe,” Mom says.

  “Why’s the basement locked?” I ask her.

  Dad doesn’t stop the flow.

  “He was worthless. I never wanted you to marry him, if you remember. ‘Jenny,’ I said—remember this?—‘are you sure you want to do this?’ You were so young, only twenty-two, a baby. You should have lived your life first, done some things, then settled down. Trust me, it’s a good thing Mark is dead, because now you can live.”

  I press on. “What’s in the basement, Mom?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “We’ve had raccoons.”

  “Bullshit. This is the city. We don’t have raccoons.”

  Dad wheels around. “Don’t talk to your mother like that!” he screams.

  I recoil. One hand—that’s all I’d need to count the number of times he’s snapped at me. He loved Mark. Treated him like a son. This is not my father.

  “It’s good that he’s dead!” he shrieks at Jenny. “It’s good.”

  He flops on the ground, body shaking like James did. Only James’s body wasn’t a griddle.

  “Get ice,” I bark at my mother. She runs in that nightie, hand at her throat clutching the ruffles closed, not to the kitchen like I expect, but to the basement. Jenny sits on the couch, eyes the size of dinner plates. First her husband, now her father. I slap her. Her eyes focus.

  “Call 911.”

  She hurries for the phone, dials, waits. “They’re not answering.” Not even a tin lady.

  “Keep trying.”

  Mom rushes in with a plastic bucket, shoves me aside, upends the contents onto Dad’s chest. Ice cubes. Some sizzle on contact, the steam rising off him in a dense, wet cloud. A one-man sauna. She takes the phone from Jenny’s hands, gently places it back in its cradle.

  “They won’t come. They never do. They don’t bother answering anymore.”

  My father starts to moan. His
eyelids flutter. The seizing stops and soon the ice cubes melt no more.

  Jenny stares at him in horror. “What’s wrong with him?”

  I look at my mother. See her fate in her resignation.

  “Has he been sick? Have you?”

  “Yes,” she whispers. “You girls have to go. As a mother, that’s the best I can do for you both.” She kisses my sister’s forehead. “I’m sorry about Mark. We loved him very much.”

  I can’t leave without knowing. “What’s in the basement?”

  Her voice drops so Jenny doesn’t hear. “That’s where we’ll go. When it’s too late. We have a pact with some of the neighbors, to … to help each other.”

  I hold her tight, tell her I love her, and repeat the exercise for my father.

  To my old room is where I want to run, not out into the cold with my grieving, shell-shocked sister. To my room where the covers have powers to protect me from the bogeyman. To my old room, where my parents are young and whole and my sister is a pain in my ass. To my old room, where death was just a word in my Merriam-Webster dictionary.

  DATE: NOW

  The streets of Athens limp by. I wish the sidewalks were filled with people who’d conceal me with their bodies and banter, and yet I can move more freely with empty streets; I am divided by my loyalties. The scalpel is rooted in my arm, and I can’t remember if I’m supposed to pull a blade or leave it until help comes. But help isn’t coming—only the Swiss. So I tug it free and hide it in my pocket like a dirty little secret. A red carpet rolls the length of my arm. I need a place; I need a place now to stop it unraveling further.

  Refuge is a warehouse. Gallon cans of olive oil stacked ten feet high create a shield from the world. And still he finds me like I knew he would.

  “I know you are there, America. I see your blood. Is the scalpel still inside you? I believe it is. Are you bleeding faster now? I know how to hurt a person, America. I know how to kill. Can you say the same?” His voice lowers, and I know he has crouched or sat on the other side of the cans. His voice comes from my level. “There was no baby in her. I believed there was, but I was wrong. But I found something. Do you want to know what I found? Maybe it’s inside you, too. Do you want to know? You are a curious person; I sense all your questions. Even now you are burning to know: What did he find inside the stupid girl?”

  Black spots mar my vision like a fungus as I slide the belt from my hips and yank it tight around my arm. They sprawl, contract, disappear, and new replace the old. My eyes are a kaleidoscope through which I can barely see. Is this what dying looks like?

  “Talk to me, America. Ask me what I found, what was inside her.”

  His voice comes from further away now, but I know he hasn’t moved. It’s me. I’m drifting away.

  “I don’t care.”

  I don’t realize I’ve said it aloud until he laughs.

  “Of course you care. All you do is care. Why else bring that stupid girl with you? What is she to you?”

  I speak through gritted teeth. “Just a girl.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I know people, America. I know people do things for reasons that they do not always understand. She told me how you took her from the farm, away from her family. Why would you do such a thing? Shall I guess?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “When you are a doctor, you see many different people. The women I saw always had a story for why they were in my office. Some, they wanted medicine for birth control. Some wanted an abortion. Some wanted tests for disease. All wanted me to say, ‘It is okay.’ Validation for their actions. Absolution for their sins. Redemption. Who were you trying to save, America? Not that girl. She was nobody to you. A surrogate.”

  Jesse. My parents. Everybody.

  I close my eyes, hope the names remain in my head. Reality is shifting out now and something new is moving in furniture. The black spots metastasize—from my eyes to my neural pathways.

  “Who were you trying to save, America? A sister, perhaps? Your family. A husband? No. No husband. No ring on your skinny finger.”

  Jenny. Nick. My parents. Am I trying to save someone? Is that what I am? Some kind of wannabe hero? I don’t feel like a hero. I just feel scared. For my child. For my future, which looks to be about five minutes long; maybe fewer.

  “That stupid English girl killed herself. You helped her.”

  “I don’t understand.” My tongue grows thick, my words slide into one another.

  “Ask me what I found inside her.”

  “I’m tired of your games. Just tell me.”

  Skidding, scraping. Metal on concrete. Death touches my leg and I jerk, but already my fingers are reaching for it. I know what it is. I know what it is before my fingers slide along the tight curves that make up the slick, shiny helix. The cold comes for me, arms open wide. Let me take you, it whispers. Let me take you to a place where nothing can ever touch you, where you’ll never feel again. We’re all dead and soulless there.

  “You know this thing, don’t you, America?”

  “Yes.”

  “How? Tell me.”

  “I gave it to her. So she could protect herself.”

  “You provided her with the means to rip out what she believed was inside her. She pushed it through her cervix, as though her womb was a bottle of cheap wine.” Satisfied. Smiling. “Are you shocked?”

  “Is that what was inside her?”

  “No. She was clutching this thing in her hand as though it was precious to her when I found her. Happy. This is what the foolish girl wanted. If you are shocked, you are as big a fool as she.”

  “I couldn’t save her. I can’t even save myself. I’m not a hero.”

  “No, you are not. I could have saved her. I am the hero. I am trying to save the world from the abomination its sins have produced.”

  A chuckle bubbles out of my mouth. “You?”

  “I am a hero. You are nothing. What do you try to save? One stupid, blind girl. My goals are much bigger. More important. They will benefit the world. I will kill the monsters man created.”

  My eyes close. The here and now is greased rope slipping through my fingers. “Why do you give a shit about me, then? I’m nobody. Just a cleaner.”

  “Not just a cleaner. You worked at Pope Pharmaceuticals. Which means you belonged to George Pope.”

  FOURTEEN

  DATE: THEN

  Beep.

  “Mom? Dad? If you’re there, pick up. Please.”

  Pause.

  “Jenny and I are fine. Neither of us are sick. Just so you know. I … we miss you.”

  Beep.

  It could be the dead of winter except there’s no snow. Yet. God knows, the air is cold enough to hold a flake to its unique form. The library is still aglow, but the watch on my wrist tells me it won’t be long. I can’t stay out late. Jenny is holed up in my apartment, eating a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

  “Is that all they had?” she asked when I jubilantly waved the carton at her. “I wanted rum raisin or cookie dough.”

  The ice cream had cost me twenty bucks. Twenty. That was all they’d had at the drugstore unless I wanted their store brand for twelve. And that’s more air than cream.

  One week since Jenny lost Mark and we discovered our parents were lost to us both. I call and call and no one answers. The phone system is dying. Calls ring off into nowhere more frequently now.

  I still come here every day—without Jenny. I look for Nick’s name and hope I don’t see it. Usually I come straight after work, but today Jenny called in tears.

  “Can you believe this?” she asked when I let myself in the door. She’d had the television on, old episodes of some soap because they weren’t making any new ones. “He died in a plane crash before she could tell him she was pregnant with twins.” Then she started sobbing. “Mark and I were going to try for a baby this year. Then he had to go and die, just like Julian.”

  “Who’s Julian?” I’d asked.

  “On the show.”
/>
  So I’m late to the library because of a soap opera.

  The head librarian looks up as I walk in. She’s a cliché right down to the glasses performing a balancing act on the end of her snip nose. She’s the only librarian now, aside from a young grad student who prowls the aisles with his metal cart. It looks like it should rattle, but it doesn’t: the wheels are greased into submissive silence. She nods at the round metal clock hanging on the wall like I should be aware that the doors will be locking at any moment. I nod back, to let her know that, yes, I’m aware of the impending closure. Not quite satisfied, she turns back to her work.

  The list is up. The crowd has long petered out except for the lone figure standing, legs akimbo, inches from the wall. My heart accelerates. I know the lines of that body. Many a time I admired them across a coffee table, skimmed them in my fantasies. He seems taller to me now, but I’m not sure if that’s because I haven’t seen him for a while or because he’s become almost mythical in my mind these past months. Larger than my tiny life.

  Then he turns. …

  Oh God, he’ll see me. Not now. Not like this. I’m wearing graying underwear and no makeup. Did I shave my legs? No. There was no need. I am Sasquatch and he is magnificent.

  His face is stone. Granite. Marble. Is there something harder? I don’t know, but the hardest rock is what I’m seeing. He’s Nick, if Nick had been carved from the sheer side of a mountain instead of flesh.

  “Dr. Rose.”

  The words come out stiff, formal. He told me to use his first name but I can’t. Dr. Rose implies there is a wall between us—me safely ensconced on one side, him on the other.

  “Hello, Zoe. Are you looking for someone?”

  You. “A friend.”

  He nods, glances over his shoulder at the list, then returns to me. “I hope you don’t find them there.”

  “Who were you looking for?”

  Across the invisible wall. “My brother, Theo.”