Jump

by Terra Little

“You’ll explode,” he says. “Again. It seems like it’s easy to pick up with your life and carry on like nothing’s wrong, but it’s not. It takes sheer will and determination to pull it off the way you have. But something’s off, something’s still not right with you. Call me psychic, but I can sense it. You think you’ve got it all wrapped up tight, got it all under control, but I can almost promise you, you don’t.”

  “I’ve had eight years to think the shit through, Kimmick, and I can almost promise you that I do.”

  “You’ll be in the grocery store one day, buying milk and bread, and all of a sudden you’ll think of something that hits you the wrong way, and—”

  “And what, I’ll pull out a gun and start shooting?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You are a fucking nut job.”

  “Or you’ll be at work and there’ll be a story that triggers something in your mind and—”

  “I’ll pull out a gun and start shooting?”

  “Maybe.”

  Pissed doesn’t even begin to describe what I feel. He makes me sound mentally unstable. Like I’m incapable of being anything other than an animal. If I had a gun, I would seriously consider shooting him. But I don’t have a gun, and if I did, I’d be in violation of my parole. It eventually occurs to me that my parole expired a while ago, and then it occurs to me that my thought process is way off to the left. Right back where it began.

  It scares me to realize that he can push my buttons with his silly questions. Even scarier is the fact that he can see my thoughts. He knows my first instinct is to strike out and to hurt like I hurt, without forethought. I feel transparent, like he can see right through me, and I don’t like the feeling at all.

  I find my purse on the couch and throw the strap over my shoulder. “Our time is up, right?”

  “Just about,” he says. “But I still have one more question for you, Lena.”

  I am at the door, touching the knob and tasting escape. My mistake is in turning to look at him and letting him see me. Once he has my eyes, he won’t let them go.

  “What is your greatest fear?”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “What?”

  “You heard me. What is your greatest fear? I have some theories of my own, but I’d like to hear your response.”

  “No,” I say. “Fuck my response. What’s your theory?”

  “I think you’re afraid.”

  “Feeling fear and being afraid are one and the same, Kimmick. You’re trying to trip me up again, and I’m not going for it. You tell me, what am I afraid of?”

  He walks across the office and stops directly in front of me. We are eye to eye, staring each other down, and I can smell chocolate on his breath. He gets in my face and challenges me with his body language. Makes me take a step backward and give him some of my own body language. “My space, Kimmick,” I warn him.

  “I think you’re afraid of letting it die, Lena. As long as you keep it locked inside you, it lives and breathes and justifies your existence. It’s your excuse to kick your own ass, in case no one else feels the need to do it. If you let it out and let it die, you’ll have nothing left. Then you’ll have to do what everyone else does, which is live a halfway normal life and feel good about it.”

  “Normal is overrated.”

  “But you want it.”

  “I have it.”

  “Do you?”

  “I had it.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “I pulled the trigger and it went away.”

  “Why? Why did you pull the trigger?”

  “I . . . he . . . it was . . .” I take a deep breath and slow my tongue down. “I had to do it.”

  “Who is he, Lena?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Another lie,” Kimmick accuses me softly. “Lying to yourself won’t make him any less real.”

  “You know less than nothing about him. How do you even know there is a him?”

  He looks at me and keeps on looking. Takes a deep breath and scratches the top of his bald head. Then he backs out of my space and retreats into his own. He sits in his chair and crosses an ankle over the opposite knee, gestures to the couch and raises his eyebrows. “I’m ready to hear about him, and I think you’re ready to talk about him. Sit down, Lena.”

  “Why are you pushing this?” I snap. But I throw my purse across the office and it lands on the couch with a dull thud. He is right about one thing and wrong about the other. I am ready to talk, but he cannot possibly be ready to hear what I have to say.

  “I’m pushing it because I care about you. Where are the men, Lena?”

  “I keep telling you there are no men. They’re dead.”

  “You said one of them, your uncle, died earlier on.”

  “That’s right. A stroke.”

  “But there was another uncle. What happened to him? You don’t talk about him.”

  “He’s dead too.”

  “Diabetes?”

  “No.”

  “A heart attack?”

  “No.”

  “Another stroke?”

  “No.” I join my purse on the couch and cover my face with my hands. Press my fingers into my eyelids, then fold my hands under my chin. I pick one of the fifty different motorcycle posters on the walls to stare at and I keep my eyes there.

  “Do you trust me, Lena? Trust that what we say here stays here and this is a safe place?”

  “I know it is.” I cannot give him complete trust, but I tell him what I know. In my mind, it is the same thing. “He didn’t have a stroke,” I say after five minutes of safe silence.

  “What happened to him?” We lock eyes, and he is a mind reader. He waves a hand negligently and shakes his head. “Let me refrain. I don’t give a shit about what happened to him. But I do give a shit about what happened to you. Can we explore that together?”

  “Do you really want to go there with me, Kimmick?”

  “If you really want to take me there with you. Do you?”

  “Maybe you can’t handle the trip.”

  “Or maybe you can’t.”

  I have to smile. “You’re a motherfucker, do you know that?”

  He smiles back. “I’m not the only one, though, am I?”

  Kimmick listens as I take him all the way back to the beginning and spin a story for him.

  He gets caught up in the hows and whys, but I refuse to allow him to stall what he has started with questions that have no answers. He doesn’t ask me anything that I haven’t already asked myself, and if I didn’t have answers then, why would I have them now? I ask him this, and then I tell him to be quiet and pay attention. What I say is important, and after I am done saying it, he will know what I know, and then he will understand. He will know the answer to his question. He will know my greatest fear.

  Halfway through my tale of doom and gloom, I notice that he is shifting around in his chair again, and I ask him if he is comfortable. He tells me not to worry about his comfort and to keep talking. He will not allow me to stall either. I wonder if he is in need of the Preparation H he buys at Target, but I don’t take the time to ask. I do what I am told and keep talking.

  And once I get past the first few sentences, once I see that they don’t jump out of my mouth, clash with the air in the room and spontaneously combust, I lay back on the couch and fold my arms under my head.

  It is not as hard as I thought it would be.

  I tell him that Ellie is my mother and that Dee-Dee is my aunt, and that they were the very first sacrificial lambs. The ones who paved the way for my eventual destruction. The very first members of the sorority. Then came Vicky and me.

  I remind him that my grandmother birthed four children, that one of my uncles did himself a favor and died before I could embarrass him along with everyone else. The other uncle is the one we want to focus on, I say. He’s the one to watch. The star of the show. The sick bastard that I meant to kill when I pulled the trigger.

  I look at Kimmick. “You remembe
r I told you that she wouldn’t move?” He nods. “Well, she wouldn’t. She protected his sick ass right up until the very end. Took the bullet that was marked for him.”

  He butts in and tells me that I have skipped a whole block of time and asks me to backtrack a little and bring him up to speed.

  “Don’t you have another client waiting for you?”

  “Lena . . .” He sighs.

  I chuckle and take my eyes back to the ceiling. “All right, Kimmick. I’ll back up a little bit and start from the beginning,” I say. And then I do.

  He has paranoid schizophrenia and he hears voices, talks to himself and does things that don’t make sense to me. He hangs wire hangers in front of the window in his bedroom so he’ll hear an intruder when he tries to come inside. Not if, but when. He walks up to me and shouts in my ear when he thinks I have said something that I really haven’t said. His mind tells him that I have said something to or about him, something smartmouthed and out of place, and he doesn’t believe me when I say I haven’t. He bursts into the bathroom while I am sitting on the toilet, ranting and raving about something I can’t comprehend, and then he slams out of the room and leaves the door swinging behind him.

  Once, when Ellie and Dee-Dee were young girls, he came home with a loaded shotgun and held everyone at gunpoint. Said the government told him his family wasn’t really his family and he needed to eradicate them. He shot a hole through the dining room wall, and there is still a noticeable dent in the far wall of the kitchen to this day. He beats his mother, who is my grandmother, and he has her running around the house, doing his bidding and saying everything but “Yes, sir.” A deep, booming voice and hands almost large enough to wrap all the way around a basketball, that is how I remember him. He is a big man, so wide that he seems to lean from side to side as he walks, and he is as tall as a tree. In fact, that is what we call him—Tree. Uncle Tree.

  Chronologically, he is the second oldest child, the second boy, but theoretically, he is the master of his household. The oldest boy shrinks next to his power, and the girls know enough to succumb to it. His mother is his puppet, wanting to keep him calm and nonviolent at all costs, even if she sacrifices her daughters to accomplish the goal. In some twisted way, he is her favorite, her most cherished baby. She believes his mental illness is her fault, and she does everything that she can do to make up for her shortcomings as the vessel that brought forth his miserable life.

  His medications are effective at managing his symptoms, and he is almost normal when he decides to take them on a regular basis. I remember times when he is stable and looking healthier, more like a human being and less like a mongrel with dark-circled eyes and shaking hands. Those times are few and far between, because what I remember most is the fiendish look on his face, the violent outbursts, and the sound of fright. I remember that I hate him and I wish him dead every day I draw breath.

  “It all started with your mother and aunt?” Kimmick interrupts me to ask.

  “Yes,” I say. “He was always a maniac, but he wasn’t diagnosed until he was around sixteen or so. By then he had raped the both of them a couple of times and beat the shit out of my grandmother at least once. I think my mother was twelve or thirteen the first time it happened to her. They were afraid of him.”

  “And no one ever told anyone about what was happening?” He is incredulous. “No one ever thought to call the police or Children’s Services?”

  “Is the possibility of a hell you know nothing about better than the one you already know how to live with?”

  “Jesus,” he hisses, angry but trying to suppress the emotion. “Go on.”

  “I think it stopped when my mother and my aunt both got part-time jobs after school and saved enough money to go half on a little studio apartment. They got the hell out of there as fast as they could.”

  “How old were they?”

  “Somewhere around sixteen and seventeen. They lived together in that apartment for years.”

  Vicky is seven and I am five when we first start going to the house that smells like old mothballs and feels like a morgue. After we disobey the rules and sneak outside, we are dropped off there every weekday morning over the entire summer, and this goes on until we are fourteen and twelve, when we finally take a stand and refuse to go there again, I tell Kimmick.

  “Why would your mother take you there, knowing—”

  “That in all likelihood we’d be abused? Shit, Kimmick, you’re the shrink, you figure it out. She says she didn’t have a choice, but you just told me we always have choices, so I’m asking you, what were hers?” He says nothing, and is, for once, speechless. “The sorority, remember?”

  Membership means nothing less than a slow death of the spirit and a complete annihilation of the soul. It means that Vicky and I are sacrificed to the maniac, like peace offerings, if only he will remain calm and feast in silence. We are licked and sucked, twisted and turned, touched and pawed, until we puke into our own hands from the filth of it.

  “Wait a minute. You’re telling me that your grandmother allowed her son to abuse you and your sister and she did nothing?”

  “She baked brownies and made homemade caramel,” I say. “Our favorite desserts. She let us have as much as we wanted. After.” I take a deep breath and feel beads of sweat pop out on my forehead. “He liked to watch X-rated videos with us and make us do the things we saw on the screen. Most of the time he wanted us separately, but there were a few times when he had to have us at the same time. He’d—”

  Kimmick shoots up from his chair, scrubbing his hands all over his face and pacing the floor jerkily. “That’s enough, Lena. I think I get the gist of what you’re saying.”

  “Are you about to throw up all those peanut butter cups you just ate?” I point to a nearby trash can. “Go ahead and feel free, if you are. I know all about puking your guts out, and I know it helps . . . a little.”

  Despite the fact that he says he’s got the gist of what I am saying, I keep talking. I tell him about all the crying we did, all the begging and pleading, all the fighting. I tell him about the night we confessed to my mother about what was happening in my grandmother’s house and about how she got this vacant look in her eyes and told us we were making things up just because we wanted to stay home by ourselves. I tell him that my vagina, unlike my mouth and my heart, was never penetrated by Tree because I wasn’t old enough to have the hideous pleasure of being filled by him, but Vicky lost her virginity to him when she was fourteen. That is when we decided to revolt.

  I tell him about the month Vicky missed her period. And then I tell him about the month my aunt missed hers. Tree is the father of her oldest son, the one they took away just a few minutes after he was born, at my aunt’s request. Somewhere out there is another Tree, and nobody knows what he looks like or if he is a lunatic like his father.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “She told me.”

  “Who? Your mother?”

  “No, my aunt Deirdre. When my mother stopped visiting me, she came. We talked.”

  “This is unbelievable.”

  “Believe it, Kimmick. This is my truth, believable or not. And it gets worse.”

  Beige is five and I go into the bathroom to call a halt to playtime in the tub. She likes to warm up with a little water-splashing and floor-drenching before she is ready to be bathed. I understand this, and I leave her to it, give her upwards of half an hour to do what she needs to do. Then I barge in and take control of the bath sponge and the bubble gum–scented body wash, and do what I need to do.

  She knows the drill. Face, neck and arms first. Then between the fingers and on to her chest and her back. I slick the sponge down her chicken legs and ask her to squat. I soap her bottom, and then I ask her to sit so I can see about her feet. She giggles as I touch the soles of her feet and full-out laughs as I work my way around to separating her toes with the sponge. I laugh too, because listening to the sound of her laughter is like listening to angels sing.
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br />   My smile slips sideways when her laughter grows into something more. It takes on a life of its own and fills the bathroom with the sound of lovemaking. She oohs and ahhs, throws her head back and swipes her hands over her flat chest, as if she is touching breasts that are not there.

  Eyes squeezed closed and mouth hanging open, she imitates pleasure that she has no concept of.

  “That’s when I started to suspect,” I say to Kimmick. Right now, his mouth is hanging open, his eyes momentarily squeezed shut. But he is not experiencing pleasure. His is shock, and I don’t blame him.

  “You allowed your daughter to go to your grandmother’s house?” He wants to pimp slap me, and he is only waiting for me to say yes, I did, so he can do it and not feel one iota of remorse. And if that were my answer, I would let him.

  “She caught a cold from one of those awful kids at her school, and she had to stay home for a week,” I explain slowly. “I had to work, so I left her with my mother that week. Not my grandmother. My mother. I thought she’d be safe.”

  I don’t question Beige after the bathroom incident because frankly, I am too stunned to process it completely. I push the memory away and hope that she saw something she wasn’t supposed to see on television when I wasn’t paying attention. It is the only explanation I can accept at the time.

  Still, I know it’s not the television that has her trying to kiss me on the mouth and push her tongue between my lips. It can’t be the television that makes her slap her hands on her hips and prance around the kitchen naked. Like she is on a catwalk. It’s not the television that has her leaning back on her bed and spreading her legs like Jenna Jameson. I have never seen her do these things before, and her five-year-old mind cannot possibly be sophisticated enough to pull them out of thin air.

  She goes back to school, and her teacher is calling me at work, saying she has walked in on Beige and another child in the bathroom together. Beige is bent over at the waist, with her clothing down around her ankles, and the other child stands behind her. The teacher walks in just as Beige is saying to the other child, “Put it in.” Her teacher wants to know if maybe something is going on at home that needs to be addressed. Says she might have to contact Children’s Services if this sort of behavior continues or progresses. Wants to know what the it is that Beige is requesting from the other child, and I do too.