by Aaron Dries
Mother and son were connected by a sinewy umbilical cord that continued to snake out of Claire’s mouth without end. She collapsed again, defeated, but still had the energy to reach out and prod the dying baby.
Her voice was dry as straw. Please, Mars. Yours.
Marshall shook his head, a quick and furtive signal. Blood pounded through him.
And take this thing with you. Go now, before I hate you again.
He watched Claire slump and gag. Her fingers clutched the umbilical cord and she reeled the squirming fetus in, leaving behind a thin trail of slimy gristle. She picked her child up in a hand that almost didn’t have the strength to hold it, and put it to her teeth and began to eat.
Students burst out of the school, passing under the shadow of the crucifix above the main exit. The weather was crisp November, full of electric energy, the nervous calm before the storms of winter. Teachers walked to their cars, hands in pockets and bags slung over their shoulders. Yellow school buses pulled out of the marked bays and slid down the streets, vomiting exhaust into the air. The clouds were heavy and painted everything a dull grey. The fog would roll in early.
Sam wasn’t on his bus. He was at the rear of the school with Anna, their backs flat against the wall, absorbing the warmth out of the bricks. It was so strong it beamed through their layers of clothing. Anna wore a woolen beanie that she’d bought the prior year and an imitation leather jacket, buttoned tight over her uniform. Her hair spilled down her shoulders, looking smooth and shiny. Sam wanted to touch it.
They were listening to Sam’s iPod, sharing his earbuds.
“I like this song,” Anna said. Her voice was waif thin, but it managed to carry on the wind, as though in its chords was a strength she didn’t want revealed. “It’s usually not my kind of thing, but this is nice. Kind of sad. I don’t really like sad sounding stuff.”
He nodded. The song finished and he took the earbud back, slipping it into the collar of his shirt. Sam took a swig from the beer they were sharing. It was hot and tasted like stale piss, but it was better than nothing. He’d taken it from the fridge that morning. The alcohol started to play with them within ten minutes of the first sip and soon they were laughing, slurring. They leaned against each other.
“I want to show you something,” Sam said. “And I’m only showing you because I trust you.” Anna stared at him, biting her lip.
He liked the way her upper row of teeth sank into her glossy flesh.
“Okay,” she whispered, a drop of beer clinging to her dimpled chin. “What is it?”
“I’m scared to show you, though.”
She smiled. “You don’t have to be scared around me, Sam Napier.”
“I know. I know. But it’s hard. I feel like nobody’ll understand.” He wrestled with his sentences; it was hard work to keep a grasp of them. “I don’t even know if you will.”
“It’s okay.”
Anna touched his hand. He could feel the blood flowing through her. She felt alive.
His stomach churned, heart beat racing. His voice quivered like the few remaining leaves on the branches of the trees that lined the empty school car park in front of them. “I’ve never shown anyone this.”
Anna’s eyes were large and brown. When he looked into her irises, he could see his warped and upturned reflection.
Sam wondered what it was like for her to live with her mom and the douche bag. Did she cry at night because she missed her dad? Did she ever shout at him for cheating and leaving them alone? Did she say “fuck” to him? He thought that maybe she did. He saw pain in those eyes, and Sam knew a little something about pain.
“Show me,” she said.
Anna knew that there was nothing sexual about what was going on—if she’d suspected anything weird, she would have gotten up and left long before now. She could trust Sam. He wasn’t like the other guys in their year, he was a good person. A dying breed. She’d gone out with a senior five months prior who, in the end, cheated on her with a bony-assed, tit-less girl who managed her weight by vomiting up every second meal… Anna couldn’t help wondering what it was about the Garland girls that attracted liars? Is it some message we’re sending, or what? A cry to be punished? Yeah right! It was easier to believe that than the simple, hard-earned fact that most guys were just plain selfish.
But Sam was different.
“Show me,” she repeated, taking another sip from the beer bottle, knowing that she would leave a ring of lip gloss on the rim and that Sam would taste it the next time he took a swig. She was okay with that because it was him and not the senior she’d dated, or any of the other men in her life who had ended up hurting her.
Sam swallowed his fear and took off his jacket.
Anna watched him unbutton his school shirt and noted how his fingers were shaking. He stopped to take another drink and he licked his lips afterward. It took a lot of courage for her to let him do that and get away with it, and Anna hoped he understood and appreciated that. She got the impression that he did.
“You can show me, Sam.”
He wanted to ask her to call him Noah, but remained quiet, instead slipping out of his shirt and laying it over his knees. He sat on his haunches with his arms crossed over his scrawny chest. Sam didn’t have a lot of muscle and his body was covered in a fine layer of silver hair. His fringe fell over his face, obscuring his eyes.
Sam turned around to show her his back and what she saw snatched the breath from her lungs. She saw the tree of scars across his skin, watched it seethe as he shifted his shoulder blades.
The wind blew, stirring the grass around them and the blood flushed from the scars. They looked bone white in the premature twilight. Sam had never felt so vulnerable. Emotion bubbled in his throat, but he couldn’t for the life of him identify what kind of emotion it was. Was it embarrassment? Or excitement? Did he want to cry, or laugh? In the end, he didn’t think it mattered. The only thing that was important to him was that Anna didn’t run away, that she trusted him.
She forced down her repulsion and the anger his scars ignited in her.
She stretched out her hand and laid her palm against his back. She felt him tighten under her touch. He was quivering. She watched him breathe for a while; his rib cage was as pronounced as an accordion. Anna wondered who had done it to him and for how long it had been going on. Some of the marks looked fresh and were covered in blood-splotched Band-Aids.
How did he keep it a secret for so long?
Gym class. The changing rooms…
It would’ve been hard, she thought, but not impossible. Secrets could be kept if you wanted them to be kept. She knew a little about that, too. It came down to a matter of choice.
The choice to keep your mouth shut.
The choice to confide in someone.
“Do you want to come back to my place?” Sam asked, turning his head towards her but not looking her in the eye. The day grew darker. The second round of buses would be leaving soon.
Chapter Fifty-Six
The bus dropped them off two blocks from Sam’s house and they walked in silence. The day was lingering, despite their predictions, but it wouldn’t for much longer. They could already see the fog climbing down Mt. Si. Soon, that wet cloud would be wrapping around the town, turning the streetlights into halos and swallowing whatever warmth had survived the sunset. Everyone from this part of the state knew that the fog here could be dangerous if you were caught out in the middle of it. They said it lingered in your lungs. People got sick. And sometimes, people disappeared. They got themselves kidnapped. There were MISSING posters all over town, the ink text running in the rain and the faces all streaked.
Anna looked up at the house and at the clouds rolling in behind its upper peak. It was awkward being here but something compelled her to not turn away. Allowing Anna a glimpse into Sam’s life was important to him, which in turn, meant that it was important to her. It had been a very long time since she’d felt as close to someone as she felt to him right now, despite
the sense of unease that crawled up her neck.
Sam grabbed at the collar of his jacket. “Home sweet home,” he said. “It’s not much.”
“It looks nice. You got a two-story house. Mine is a single. Stairs are cool.”
They shared an awkward laugh, filling the silence. Sam felt the specialness of the moment slipping away. The best thing to do would be to just get inside before all of the trivialities started up, destroying everything.
He asked, gesturing to the front door with his elbow. The iPod speakers around his neck tapped together. Anna hated how he wore them all the time, often having conversations with one ear plugged in, the music playing in a continuous loop—it was like he was never all there.
“Sure,” Anna replied and pushed a loose lock of hair back up under her beanie. “Let’s go.” The white plume of her breath was snatched away by the wind.
They walked up the short, winding driveway. The house loomed over them, seeming to grow, to swell. The garden was overgrown with brittle weeds and deadfall; nobody had tended to the grounds in a long time. Trees flanked the building on either side; their limbs were contorted limbs reaching towards them. The porch was lined with summer furniture—had they been sitting on her porch, her mother would have brought them in out of the weather months ago. Boots sat at the doorstop. Lots of boots.
“I thought it was just you and your dad,” Anna said. It wasn’t a question.
Sam just shrugged and offered up another of his dismissive smiles. Answer enough.
“Do you want me to take off my shoes before going in?” she asked, nodding at her feet, not taking her eyes of him.
“Nah, it’s cool.”
Sam stepped up to the screen door and pulled it open. He took out his wallet and retrieved a key from one of the zippered pockets and slipped it into the lock. Anna listened to the chewing of metal teeth. And then, almost in an anticlimax, there was a simple click. The door swung inwards and musty air rushed out to greet them.
What were you expecting, Anna asked herself? A puff of smoke? Bats? Ha! You’re as crazy as a coconut, Miss Garland.
“Just wait here a second, ’kay?” Sam said, stepping inside, leaving Anna alone on the porch, in the cold. She held her arms close to her chest and thought of her mother, stinking of cigarettes, back at home in their living room asleep in her chair. She wasn’t working much these days. The wind hissed across the yard carrying with it the stink of pine and wood rot.
There was no traffic on the nearby road.
Was that weird?
No… We’re just a little far from the main drag, she concluded. See, for every niggling doubt there’s a fine sounding explanation following right behind.
Nothing to worry about! That was her mother’s mantra. Anna had heard it many times over the years.
Nothing to worry about.
Anna didn’t want to acknowledge that she was afraid. The excitement she’d felt earlier had been replaced by an almost magnetic urge to turn, to run down the winding footpath and farther down that secluded, quiet road. She didn’t live too far from here—it wouldn’t take long to get home in time to snatch the cigarette from her mother’s fingers before she went and burnt the lining of her chair again.
I could maybe flag down a car once I reach the intersection.
Anna glanced down the porch and saw a collection of garden gnomes staring back at her. They sat in a straight line, their pointed hats covered in frost rind.
See? Totally normal.
But no, she didn’t believe that. Nothing here seemed normal—far from it. Her mother hadn’t raised a fool although many would argue that she’d married one. She looked through the ajar door into the darkness of the house, the pervasive niggle of doubt tickling at the part of her brain that housed her instincts, a part which had always served her well. But now, alone on Sam’s doorstep, out in the cold, she began to second-guess herself.
And the Garland girls didn’t second-guess themselves. Not anymore.
Peering through the door and into the house conjured a tangible sense in her mind. It felt so real and alive that it almost bore a scent. It smelt like secrets.
“Come on in, Anna,” Sam said, calling out from inside. His voice sounded small, diminished by corners and turns. It reminded her of the time the fair had rolled into North Bend when she was a child, and Anna had gotten lost in the house of mirrors. Only, the frightened voice she’d heard bouncing off the glass from the opposite end of the corridor had been her own.
A secret.
Anna pushed on the door and stepped inside. “Do you want me to close it?” she asked.
“Yeah, thanks.” He was to her left somewhere.
Anna let her eyes adjust to the dark—only to find that the dark wasn’t as deep or impenetrable as she’d first thought. Is it ever, she wondered?
Yes. I think maybe it is.
Her surroundings unfolded around her. She saw a hatstand draped with a slicker; beneath was an empty umbrella box. There was a carpeted staircase stretching up to the second floor, where the rooms above were obscured by murky light.
“I’m in here,” came Sam’s voice, which Anna followed through a living room full of over-stuffed furniture. She saw framed photographs above the fireplace—pictures of Sam and his father, their expressions strained and fake looking. A few of these photographs featured a woman. She was attractive in her own mousy way. In one photograph she cradled a baby. Her smile seemed genuine.
Anna inched across the carpet towards the opposite door communicating with the next room. There was another small table and upon it were two hardcover books. An open Bible full of highlighted passages and Tomorrow, Yesterday by someone named Claire Redman
“Do you want something to eat?” Sam asked, still hidden.
The kitchen, she thought. He’s in the damn kitchen making us an after-school snack, a sandwich or somethin’, and here I am, thinking the worst. Jesus, Miss Garland, get a net and go catch yourself a clue. Isn’t that what Mom always says?
“Sure, Sam,” Anna replied, moving quicker now, stirring the stagnant air, fluttering the crisp bible pages. She walked straight into the stench, which wasn’t like the smell of secrets at all. No. This smell was very, very real. This stench stabbed into every one of her senses.
She could taste it on her tongue—copper and salt.
She could hear it in her ears: the clashing. Chaos. The sound of someone else’s life coming apart.
She could smell it with her nose—it stunk like Fischer Meats way over in Issaquah where her mother insisted on getting her steaks.
And as Anna rounded the corner and stepped into the kitchen, she could see it with her eyes. The sight was a robber of breath. She screamed—and Anna Garland wasn’t the kind of girl who screamed. She had seen a lot and been hurt by some—she didn’t spook easily.
Anna screamed so loud that she questioned if the sound was even coming from her.
It wasn’t.
She spun around—away from the gutted corpse of the man who had been nailed to the door frame on the opposite side of the kitchen. Away from his legs, which were stripped of their flesh. The skin of the man’s back had been cut from his body and stapled to the wood on either side, framing his slouched form like pink, translucent bat wings.
Anna turned away from it all.
And faced the screaming blur rushing at her. She didn’t hear his footsteps on the carpet, or see what was in his hands—but she did see the face as he closed in. Sam was wearing the man’s face like a mask—the yellow jowls dangled over his jawline in excess and rubbed against the collar of his uniform. There was nothing in his speed, or his scream, or in the way his body pulsated energy, that reminded Anna of the boy she’d shared classes with.
The boy with the sad eyes, who always listened to his sad music.
That boy was gone. There was only Noah. Noah who wore the dead man’s face like a mask. It’s funny, he thought, I don’t have to act anymore, even though I’m still wearing it.
&nb
sp; She had seen his scars. The Man was dead. Performance over.
He held a wooden rolling pin. His grip was fierce.
Anna was quick to move. She bound into the kitchen, farther into the stink with him following close behind, wailing still. One scream, two mouths. Close behind her.
She had no idea where the surge of courage came from, but she thanked God for it. It hadn’t been there minutes before. When she had first set eyes on the dead body, she never would have thought that she’d be brave enough to draw closer to it, let alone do what she was doing now: Anna bent low and skidded underneath it, as though it were little more than a wet curtain left out to dry. Her brow slapped against the dead man’s skin as she straightened herself. Anna could smell his rot in her hair as she dodged into the hallway on the other side.
She could go left or right. The right led back towards the living room, left towards a door—a backyard, escape? But she also saw locks there, and working through them would chew up valuable time. Sam would be on her by the time she pulled back the first chain. She would have better luck going back through the living room and trying the front door, hoping above all else that Sam hadn’t deadlocked the door before attacking her from behind.
Anna ran, parting the foul-smelling air. The hall spat her out into the room she’d just been in. The over-stuffed furniture. The faces in the photographs watching with their unsympathetic dead-fish gazes.
The door.
She sprinted towards it, unaware that she’d stopped breathing. Nimble as a deer, she leapt in great strides and struck a small table near the staircase. A phone slipped off its hook to spin on a pile of newspapers.
A phone.
She had her cell in her pocket. As soon as she was outside—and I will get out of here, dammit, you got to believe it, girl, otherwise you’re going to trip or fall flat on your face and before you know it—she would dial 9-1-1. Though the notion of police, with their guns and mace, neither soothed nor drove her onwards. There was just the door, the lock and the horrifying prospect of it not opening. Wishing couldn’t defy metal, no matter how much she prayed for otherwise.
