Seed

by Ania Ahlborn

  Arriving home, Aimee busied herself with emptying the dishwasher, purposefully clanging plates together, testing the durability of their glassware by banging tumblers against the counter. Charlie was in a mood after her meeting with Dr. Markin and insisted on an afternoon of Spongebob reruns, which Jack happily obliged to, then excused himself to the kitchen. His reasons for misleading Aimee were confusing—torn between what he was doing versus what he knew was right. The possibility of telling Aimee he wasn’t himself had crossed his mind, but the ridiculousness of it only made him smirk at how pathetic it would all make him look; piling a psychotic husband on top of a psychotic kid. Jack was starting to consider changing their last name from Winter to Manson.

  He paused in the kitchen, about to try his hand at comforting his angry wife.

  “Let me do that,” he told her, making a move to take over dish duty if only to keep her from throwing a plate against the wall. But Aimee continued to clang dishes like the Duchess of Wonderland.

  “That man was ridiculous,” she said with a snort. “Did you see him? Did you see his stupid little ratty face?”

  Jack leaned against the counter and shrugged.

  “What?” She stopped the clanging, a plate held dangerously in her grasp. “You didn’t see his stupid ratty face? He looked like a rat, Jack. Probably like the goddamn rat that’s scratching the insides of our walls. It’s like that rat got out, morphed into a human, and dared to call himself a doctor.” She exhaled an exasperated laugh. “One hundred fifty dollars, Jack. One hundred fifty fucking dollars down the drain.”

  “He did have a point,” he said with a wince, though the wince was more for show than anything else. “There are specific signs, Aims. None of which Charlie has.”

  But she wasn’t satisfied with that answer. Not one bit. To her, Markin was a dirty sewer lurker who’d had the audacity to tell her he knew more about her child than she did. She shook her head as she stacked plates on the counter, precariously close to the edge.

  “I’m not crazy,” she said.

  “Nobody said you are.”

  “No? Doesn’t being convinced of something that nobody else can see make me delusional? Because I’m convinced, Jack, and nobody else seems to see it but me.”

  Jack sighed and took a seat at the table, propping his chin up in his palm. He wondered what she would do if he just came out with it. It’s the Devil. Maybe she’d stare at him for a long while before exhaling a snort and rolling her eyes. Maybe she’d grab one of those plates off the counter and chuck it at his head.

  “I mean, I may as well prance around declaring my unshakable faith in the Easter Bunny,” she said. “What difference does it make? I sit down in front of a shrink and the second my suspicion drops out of my mouth I feel like I’m the one who needs a diagnosis.”

  “We’ll get a second opinion,” Jack heard himself say, but he wasn’t quite sure he’d actually said it.

  “No.” She caught the handle of the utensil basket and pulled it loose from the dishwasher door. “You’re right. That slimy rat-faced creep did have a point.” She plucked spoons from the basket. “Besides, I forgot to water the money tree out back. I’m pretty sure that one fifty was the last of it.”

  “We’ve got the money,” Jack countered. “Well, sort of. We’ve got the car fund.”

  Aimee exhaled a breath. She yanked the utensil drawer open and tossed the spoons in.

  “That’s a dumb idea. If Mom was being serious, Daddy wants the Olds back, which takes us down from four borrowed wheels to zero. It’s hard enough as it is with one car. And I’m sure Reagan is having a grand old time driving out here every morning to pick you up for work. Not to mention that he probably hates me by now.”

  “Why would he hate you?”

  “Oh come off it,” she said, tossing a handful of forks next to the spoons. “I know you’ve told him how pissed I get every time you drive down to New Orleans. He probably thinks I’m an idiot for marrying a musician, surprised there are gigs to play.”

  Jack frowned but didn’t argue. Angry wives were a rocker’s way of life.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her back to Jack. “I’ve been a total bitch lately. I’ve just been so stressed out, so worried. And maybe that nasty rat is right; maybe there’s nothing wrong with Charlie at all. Maybe I’m just… imagining things. Maybe it’s a phase.”

  It was then, with perfect six-year-old timing, that Charlie appeared at the mouth of the hallway with a request for her mother. “Mo-om,” she sing-songed. “Can you make me something to eat?”

  Aimee turned from the counter to look at her daughter, a child she was starting to fear. She managed a half-hearted smile along with a nod. “Sure,” she said, her tone unsure. “What would you like?”

  “Nuggets!” Charlie said in her three-notches-too-loud indoor voice. Then, as if she’d shouted some wizardly Harry Potter incantation, the plates that Aimee had stacked on the kitchen counter fell, a cacophony of breaking glass filling the house. Aimee yelped and jumped away from the counter. Jack leapt from his seat in alarm. All three of them stood in place, staring at the pile of broken dishware that had somehow found its way to the floor.

  Charlie clamped her hands over her mouth, and when her parents turned their attention to her she wore an undeniable expression of guilt. “I’m sorry,” she yelled. “It wasn’t me!” And then she ran down the hall, away from the mess she was sure she had made as fast as her little feet would take her.

  Chapter Ten

  On a regular summer afternoon, while Jack sat slumped on the couch watching Scooby Doo on the cheap JVC, a rage slithered into his blood just as it had in the cemetery. Gilda was in the kitchen frying up cheap skirt steaks she’d picked up at the Thriftway. The Winters didn’t often have steak for dinner unless they were on manager’s special, and Gilda had been lucky enough to walk by the meat counter at just the right time. They were the last ones left, and she reflected on her good fortune while standing over the stove, cheap vegetable oil casting a thin veil of smoke across the interior of the trailer. She was singing the Happy Days theme song, except she didn’t know the words somehow—it was like, what, ten words plus the days of the fucking week?—and it was driving Jack crazy.

  “Sunday, Monday, happy days,” she sang—right over an important part of Scooby Doo dialogue. Shaggy had always been Jack’s favorite. Jack loved the way he called Scooby ‘Scoob’ and swore that one day, when he finally had his own dog, he’d name him Scoob even if it was some girly poodle.

  “Tuesday, Wednesday, happy days.”

  He grimaced at his mother’s singing and snatched the remote off the couch, mashing the volume button to drown her out, but the volume didn’t go up. The batteries were dead again—that or the remote itself was fried. It was a cheap piece of crap Stephen had picked up at a random yard sale along the side of the road. He insisted it worked on the same frequency, and maybe he was right because it worked half the time. But the other half, it was nothing but an ugly paperweight taking up room on their scuffed up coffee table.

  “Thursday, Friday, happy days.”

  Scooby and the gang finally cornered the ghost they’d been chasing through the entire episode. Fred looked sure of himself, holding the phantom by its sheeted shoulders while Velma revealed its true identity.

  “Saturday and Sunday too, all happy days for you!”

  Right over the name of the bad guy. Jack narrowed his eyes at the TV. He clenched the remote as hard as he could, imagining the stupid thing exploding into pieces in his hands. Gilda kept singing and Jack twisted his head toward the kitchen. He could see her standing over the stove, her silhouette faint and hazy through the smoke. If she had been quiet, Jack would have known who the ghost had been. If she’d just stop singing, he could enjoy the Smurfs in peace as soon as Scooby was over. They’d be on in a matter of seconds. Jack knew this because it was part of his regular scheduled programming; he knew this because during summer vacation, when it was too hot to go outside, he�
�d watch Hanna-Barbera all day long. But his mom just kept singing.

  The Smurfs’ theme filled the living room and Jack’s frustration skyrocketed. He glared at his mother, boring a hole into the back of her head.

  And then she started to scream.

  At first Jack thought that maybe he really did stare a hole right through her skull, that maybe she was screaming because her brains were oozing out of her head and into the frying pan. But then his mother moved, and he saw that wasn’t the case: Gilda jumped away from the stove, revealing a plume of fire as tall and deadly as the Devil’s finger. The pan was on fire.

  “Oh my God!” she yelled. She grabbed for a dish towel, tossing it onto the pan in an attempt to suppress the flames—but the fire was too big for the likes of a cheap scrap of fabric. As soon as it hit the pan the flames spiked higher, and for a second they burned blue.

  “Oh my God!” she kept screaming, scrambling around the kitchen, searching for something to douse the flames. In a panic, she grabbed the handle of the pan and moved it from the stove to the sink. Something twisted in the pit of Jack’s stomach—a pang that told him what his mom was about to do was a bad idea; maybe a lesson he’d half-listened to at school, or something he’d seen on PBS. He opened his mouth to protest. Gilda twisted the kitchen faucet open. Her screams shifted from panic to terror.

  As soon as the water hit the boiling oil, there was a hiss of steam. The oil jumped out of the pan and onto the counter, onto the kitchen floor, and onto her cooking apron and bare arms. That fire kept burning. Jack’s eyes widened as he watched his mother spin around, her arms outspread like Jesus, her skin blistering before his eyes, like a vampire standing in the hot Georgia sun. She screamed in pain while the Smurfs skipped and sang through their village.

  She didn’t sing.

  She wailed.

  It was Jack’s turn to give Charlie her bath while Aimee caught up on a few of her favorite shows. Jack listened to Agent Dana Scully talk about alien invasions through the open bathroom door while Charlie piled suds atop her head, turning herself into a giant soft-serve cone. When she wasn’t piling bubbles onto her head, she was squeezing them out of a sponge and into an old plastic Big Gulp cup which she’d then serve to her father as a milkshake. And if milkshakes weren’t in season, she’d spend her time arranging foam letters along the bathtub wall.

  Tonight was milkshake night. Charlie carefully squeezed a foamy stream of suds into her plastic cup while singing something Jack didn’t recognize beneath her breath—probably off of a new cartoon he had yet to catch. He lathered up her hair with apple-scented shampoo while she worked on a shake. Scully fired her gun in the other room. Charlie served Jack his soapy confection, tilted her head to the side as if seeing her father for the first time, and posed a question Jack hadn’t expected.

  “Daddy, why did you run away from home?”

  Poised to rinse the shampoo from his daughter’s hair, he stared at the little girl before him with alarm. It was something nobody knew—he hadn’t told a soul. To hear it questioned so plainly, so innocently, as though she was asking whether tomorrow would be rainy or sunny, all but bowled him over.

  “What do you mean?” he staggered, trying to shift his surprise to something resembling confusion, but he did a lousy job. Charlie squinted at him, lifted a wet hand to rub at one of her eyes, then let it fall back into the water with a splash.

  “You ran away from home when you were little,” she told him. “Didn’t you love your mommy and daddy?”

  Jack felt his heart palpitate in his throat. He was found out. Exposed. Naked. Ready to deny it, the fact Charlie knew his darkest secret, seemingly out of the blue, assured him that she hadn’t simply pulled it out of thin air; she hadn’t just dreamed it up. No, someone had told her.

  “Where did you hear that?” he asked as nonchalantly as he could, tipping her head back and rinsing the shampoo from her hair. But Charlie didn’t reply. She sat quietly while he rinsed, and once he was done she went back to making her milkshakes, squeezing the sponge with pruny fingers.

  “Charlie, honey?”

  Charlotte avoided his gaze, purposefully busying herself the way kids did when they didn’t want to answer a question. But Jack wasn’t about to let it rest; he wasn’t about to let his secret walk out of that bathroom and, potentially, into Aimee’s lap. To tell Aimee that he’d run away from home when he was just shy of fifteen was to tell her everything, and that wasn’t something he was prepared to do.

  “Charlie.” Jack caught her hands in his. “I asked you a question.”

  She frowned and mumbled under her breath. “What?”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  Jutting her bottom lip out like a dock over a lake, she huffed.

  “That’s too bad,” Jack told her. “You brought it up, so now you answer my question.”

  “No,” she muttered. “I don’t want to.”

  “I’m not giving you a choice. Now, you tell me where you heard that before you get yourself into trouble.”

  Charlie shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’ll be mad,” Charlie murmured.

  Jack’s mouth went sour. He tasted blood.

  “Who?” he asked.

  Again, Charlie shook her head in denial. Jack dropped the rinse cup into the water.

  “Fine. No more ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’.”

  Charlie’s mouth fell open in an O-shape. Her eyes went wide in disbelief. Jack pulled the stopper to the tub and the water began to drain, swirling into a siphoning whirlpool of soap and shampoo. He grabbed Charlie’s Spongebob towel off of its holder, dropped it onto the toilet and caught Charlie beneath her soapy armpits. As soon as her wet feet hit the bathmat her eyes were welling up with tears.

  “Not ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’?” she asked in a whisper. Her bottom lip trembled.

  Jack stuck to his threat and said nothing more about it, toweling Charlie off with silent discipline.

  “Fine!” she yelled. “It was Mr. Scratch. He’s the one who told me. He knows everything, and now he knows I told you and he’s not going to let me sleep ever again.”

  Jack wrapped the towel around her and paused, trying to read her expression. She was upset with herself, as though asking her dad about his running away had been against the rules in the first place, whatever those rules may have been.

  “Who’s Mr. Scratch?” Jack asked, but he already knew the answer. He’d seen Mr. Scratch the night he had popped his head into the girls’ room to make sure all was well—he’d seen that shadow perched in the corner of the room. It was the same shadow that balanced at the foot of his bed when he was a kid—the shadow with needle-point teeth and a jagged smile.

  “He says he knows you,” she whispered. “He says you guys are friends.”

  A shiver shot down Jack’s spine. He felt his skin crawl with the memory of pulling his sheets over his head, hiding from the demon that watched him while he slept.

  “What does he want?” he asked, suddenly ten again. Tell him to get out of here, he wanted to tell her. Tell him to leave me alone.

  Charlie shifted her weight from foot to foot, weighing her options, considering her answer. Finally, she looked up at her dad with a sad sort of smile.

  “He’s here to play,” she told him. “He said he isn’t leaving until someone wins.”

  Jack had suffered for four years. The afternoon he saw those eyes beyond the branches of cemetery trees had changed everything: his youth, his mind, his family. Had he known what lay in store while sitting among the headstones that day, he’d never have set foot beyond that rusty wrought iron fence. Had he had the slightest hint of the distant future—of his own family, his own children and the curse he’d put upon them—he would have done more than just run away. How a ten-year-old went about suicide was a mystery, but Jack was a resourceful boy. If he could have glimpsed the future, he would have found a way.

  After Gilda’s cooking accident, she kept a
wide berth when it came to her son. Even though Jack had been in the living room when the fire started, she knew it had been him. She saw something lingering behind the gray of Jack’s eyes. It swirled beneath that stormy hue, like ink coiling through water, like fog crawling across the marsh. Her insistence that doctors diagnose his condition faded into silent defeat. And when she dared tell Stephen that she was afraid of their only child, she was sure she appeared insane. Strange things never happened around Stephen. Gilda was the one who saw the darkness, who battled fires and found cats swinging in trees. Stephen only heard the stories, and there was only so much he was willing to believe.

  By the time Jack turned fourteen, his mother hardly spoke to him. The woman who had once been content to stay home and watch soaps between loads of laundry and batches of Hamburger Helper was now working sixty hours a week just to keep herself out of the house. She couldn’t bear spending time at home, especially when Stephen was at work and Jack was home.

  Thrust into solitary confinement, isolation didn’t do much to cure Jack. He spent hours laying on his bed, staring up at the ceiling until his eyes blurred. He’d zone out on the couch only to find himself in a different part of the house hours later. The longer he spent alone the less he could remember.

  During one of Gilda’s late night waitressing shifts, she looked out the window while refilling a customer’s cup of coffee and saw her son standing in the parking lot. Staring at the diner, he was waiting for her to finish her shift, waiting for her to walk outside so he could finally do away with her. At least that’s what she told herself. She snuck into the stock room and tried to call Stephen. When she couldn’t reach him, she peeked back out into that lot. Jack was gone.

  Stephen insisted she hallucinated the whole thing. It was the only logical explanation. The diner was a good dozen miles from the house. Jack didn’t have access to a car, let alone have a license. But she just about had a heart attack when she spotted him standing under the same light post the next night. To assure herself she wasn’t losing her mind, she asked a big guy in a John Deere cap if he saw the kid in the parking lot too.