by Mark Morris
“You don’t know your father. You’ve never known who he really is. He’s a liar and a cheat. Even if the truth would save his life, he’d lie just to see if he could get away with it. He’s cheated half this town. There are all kinds of things I could’ve told you, but I never did. I didn’t want to hurt you. But you should hear the truth for a change. He wants to kill me for what I know.”
Fun times? Why not: “Then why are you endangering me by bringing me in on this? What’s to stop him from coming after me, too?”
Wrong tone, as usual. It wasn’t what she’d said. Must’ve been how she said it.
“You’re doing it again. Treating me like I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Fun times, option two: “Listen, if you’re this tired of living, why not let him do it. Then you both get what you want.”
“I don’t want to let him win. My terms. I want to die on my terms.”
And who could argue with that? The sad thing was, there didn’t seem to be any such thing as my terms left anymore. She proved it every day.
“Mom… it’s not Dad. It’s the Parkinson’s. It’s just…” Delusions, she stopped short of saying. It was such a cruel word, a hard-edged word. “Remember the doctor telling you how it might put funny thoughts in your head?”
Mom sat with this awhile, staring straight ahead and down, seeming to try to process it, as though there was enough of a rational side in there to grapple with the matter, push back, assert some dominance. After a couple minutes, she turned back with a sidelong look that curdled into a sweet-and-sour smirk.
“Parkinson’s is hereditary,” she said.
* * *
At last the carnage along the highway began to wane. The end of rut season was near, plus maybe the stupid, reckless deer had all been killed off by now. Midway through the trip, Casey spotted a highway crew scraping up another godawful mess into the back of a truck, and wondered how the guys felt about the end of November. If they were relieved, sick of the blood, or if there was job security in it and they missed the overtime.
You could miss anything.
For sure, she missed making this trip in her own car. But in this instance it was safer to borrow from a friend, in case anyone checked later. Her license plate wouldn’t show up anywhere on surveillance video for the weekend, and with a big enough hat and sunglasses and coat, neither would her likeness. Whatever she bought, she would pay for with cash, so forget about a debit card trail.
You could miss anything. But she didn’t think she would.
There had been good times, too, beyond counting, but the longer this went on, the harder they got to recognize through the growing cataract of now.
* * *
The infinity loop: It always came down to not measuring up. There were so many ways to fail someone, so many iterations, it went on and on, and there was no outrunning it. You could drive until the tyres blew out, then discover you’d been carrying the baggage in your trunk all along.
Sometimes the reminders came from people who meant no harm.
“How’s David doing?”
“He’s got the world by the tail, Daddy. He’s got a new lease on life. It must feel amazing to be so admired by someone that much younger. It’s hard to compete with that.”
And sometimes the reminders came from people who knew exactly where to stick the daggers. Their aim would be the last thing they ever forgot.
“When your grandmother was going through this, I took care of her. I took care of my mother.”
Although Mom didn’t come right out and say so, the implied contrast couldn’t have been more apparent. It wasn’t what she didn’t say, it was how she didn’t say it.
“I did her laundry. I did the vacuuming and dusting once a week. I made sure she didn’t lack for anything. Anything. And I visited her. I sat with her like it wasn’t an imposition, unlike some people I know. And I was glad to do it, every time, because we never knew if that might be the last.”
So many answers, so many combinations. Like a slot machine, pull the lever and see what comes up.
[A] Yes, you did. You absolutely did, and I admire you for that. It can’t have been easy. It’s only now that I can appreciate how hard it must’ve been.
[B] Remember when you yelled at her and made her cry and said you hoped somebody would shoot you if you ever got like her? That time you didn’t sound very glad.
[C] Uh huh. Because you could. Because Daddy made sure you had the freedom to do it. He worked full-time in insurance with a side-gig in real estate to make sure you never had to work outside the home if you didn’t want to.
[D] The reason you could do that is because you pulled her out of her home and moved her seventy miles to an assisted living facility three miles from your garage door. And guess who won’t hear of that for herself?
[E] None of the above. Because sometimes, if you didn’t find a way to break the loop, get out of the rut, the loop would break you.
“Okay, I’ll help you,” Casey said instead. “What you’ve been asking for? I’ll help you. I just have to know one thing. Has it only been talk from you, all this time, or is it what you really want?”
For a change, her mother didn’t scurry back from being offered exactly what she said she wanted. So Casey told her how it had to be to work.
She’d once heard it said that success in life could be correlated with the number of uncomfortable conversations you were willing to have. Well, this was uncomfortable, profoundly uncomfortable, but nothing about it felt like success. A conversation like this reeked of failure. This was a conversation of last resort.
At least they’d only have to have it once.
* * *
What got to her most was hearing her mother murmur about being cold. A thing like that hurt to hear and nearly made her get them back in the car and turn around, because it didn’t arise from looking for something to complain about. A thing like that was real. It was primal. Because it was late November and the air promised winter, so of course her mother was cold. Anybody would be.
She’d worn her coat for as long as she could, for as long as Casey dared let her. But the town was never that big, so the drive was short, through the streets of her childhood and the roads of her youth, and the old byways along the edges where she and her friends had learned to live and lurk beneath the notice of adults.
She knew where to drive to. Knew where to park so the car would never be seen, not as long as it was night. The trees were thirty years taller, and the old woodland paths still the same. It just took longer to walk them this time.
“I have to take your coat now, Mom. I told you back at the house, it’ll look better if you’re not wearing a coat.”
She needed some coaxing, but finally complied. Housecoat, slippers… she looked the part. It would work. Tragic. This happened more than people realized.
“I can’t go with you past here, Mom. I’m sorry. But all you have to do is keep going a little farther. The walk isn’t that long. The highway’s right through there.”
And as Casey watched her go, she thought of the rumours she’d heard all her life, of women who enjoyed lifelong good relationships with their mothers. My mom’s my best friend. I want you to meet my daughter, the best thing that ever happened to me. She was pretty sure she had never encountered one.
Squabbles? Sure. Nattering? Naturally. Blow-ups? On occasion, but never bad, and five minutes later everything was forgotten.
These women had to exist, but there was a measure of relief in suspecting they didn’t. They were tricks of light and swamp gas. They were cryptids, creatures that had gone extinct fifty thousand years ago, that someone thought they’d seen. They were mythological, avatars of an ideal worth striving for, but impossible to attain in the real world.
She’d done the best she could. Maybe they both had.
What a horrible thought.
And as she drove back in the darkest depths of the night, to wait for the phone call in the morning, it went okay f
or an hour. Until she came to the first of the blood-smeared crossings where the last of the season’s deer had come to die.
Mile after mile, she thought she saw them from the corner of her eye, emerging from the darkness into the edge of her headlights, and she swerved to miss them. But there was always another one ahead, until she realized no, these weren’t deer, they were her mother, tottering out of the night, so in time she stopped swerving, because if she was ever going to get home, she’d have to keep driving through the woman, every chance she got.
SENTINEL
Catriona Ward
Anna droops in the green wing chair, black skirts spread about her. Night comes in through the open doors, warm and speaking. Wisteria, oleander, flowers that bloom as briefly as a gasp. The distant road is quiet. No neighbours but the dark and the trees. She thinks of the afternoons she spent as a child under the spreading reaches of those woods. She swore she’d get away from here and she did. But death has hurtled her back, the pendulum swinging over the fixed point.
Ma died the day after Anna came home, as if that had been the signal. By the end her faculties were blunted into nothing by stroke. She stared ahead or inwards. You could raise her arm and it would stay there. Her face was a carnival mask. Her lip drew up over her yellow teeth in a gunslinger’s snarl. Her body seemed barely tenanted. There was no sign of her passing. It was the nurse who told Anna that she held the hand of a corpse.
Sweat prickles on Anna’s brow, her palms. She should put out the lights, go upstairs and sleep. But she does not. If she sleeps now, her mother is truly dead and buried. When she next opens her eyes it will be to a world without Ma.
Her legs ache. Funerals require so much standing. Images flicker through Anna’s mind like sparks from bad circuitry. The Reverend’s red, sore nose, dripping. Soft rain on black umbrellas. Fresh-turned earth. Curling sandwiches, picked over by many fingers. The slight clunk, like a turnstile, as the coffin settled into the ground. Anna had hoped to feel lighter afterwards—that one burial might serve for all the past. She had wondered if she might feel free. She feels tired.
Boxes are piled high against the walls. Her mother’s possessions sit eyeless in the cardboard dark. Anna feels that they are judging her or planning something. The tiny glass figurines, each requiring careful individual wrapping. The collections of commemorative spoons and tea towels. The hundreds of plastic bags tucked into every crevice. Under cushions, behind radiators, at the back of cupboards. How can there be so many? What emergency would require them?
A thin wail trickles down the stairs. Pearl.
Anna starts, shivers, and goes to her daughter with relief. It is good to busy herself with life.
* * *
The tiny box room is hot, full of Pearl’s breath. They both sleep here. Next door is the dark bedroom where the apparatus of illness still stands; an IV drip swaying gently on an unfelt breeze.
Pearl is a small resentful shape curled on the inflatable mattress on the floor. Her head is silken under Anna’s hand. How can anything be so soft? The pyjamas with dragons on them, the plump, perfect limbs—Anna lets herself feel the animal joy in her daughter’s physical being. “You were so good today,” Anna says. “Such a brave girl.”
“I want to go home,” Pearl says. “I don’t like it here.”
“We will,” Anna says. “But now you sleep.”
Pearl clutches at Anna, tugs her hair. “I don’t like him. The boy. He was dirty. His teeth were brown. He said that he would take me. Tell him to go away.” She watches her mother for the effect of her words. Pearl’s imagination has begun to take flight. She is at that age.
“No one will take you,” Anna says. “Hush now.”
“It was the reekling,” Pearl says.
Anna’s blood cools so quickly that her ears sing. She strokes Pearl’s silken head. But the touch has lost its power. “Where did you hear that word?”
“He told me,” says Pearl.
“Don’t fib,” says Anna sharply. But who did? Her mother must have come to her senses when Anna left the room or as she dozed... recovered clarity just long enough to slip this old fear into Pearl’s mind, like a coin into a slot. Anna is savagely glad that her mother is dead. “That was just Granny’s story,” she says.
Pearl’s face goes pink. “I saw him.”
“Well,” Anna says, “I am a tiger and I will protect you from—everything.” She cannot bring herself to say “the reekling”. She makes her fingers claws, bares her teeth.
Her mother’s very own monster. It is different for everyone, taking the form of what you most fear. A beastie, or a scuttling thing… Perhaps it has long dangling arms like a chimpanzee and no eyes. Perhaps it curls about you softly, beneath the water, with its eight suckered arms. Perhaps it looks like the man at the deserted grocery store where Anna bought candy that summer when she was eleven. He slipped his cold hand up under her skirt as he gave her change. Whatever it looks like, it is the reekling and you know it when it comes.
Ma’s warm voice is in Anna’s ear now, shot through with the lilt of the old country. It takes you from the world and puts you behind a wall of glass. You are forever outside in the dark, your palms pressed against the lighted window. You feel the breath heavy on the back of your neck. You and I, alone together, the reekling says soft in your ear.
The hairs on Anna’s forearms lift like spiders’ legs and she scolds herself. “Do you want a drink?” she asks, nose buried in Pearl’s fine hair.
“I want hot chocolate,” Pearl says.
Anna wipes a fine sheen of sweat from her brow. “Surely not.”
“I do, I do, I do!” Each do rises higher.
* * *
In the kitchen Anna lights the stove. A breeze ruffles the curtains. Through the open window, the scent of flowers opening in the dark. She puts a drop of vanilla essence in the pan with the milk. It sits warm in the air, mingling with wisteria and moonflower. Anna thinks of her mother’s dark eyes, her dark mind. She curses her, wherever she is. And she feels the ache of loss.
* * *
Sometimes she thinks her mother began dying the day she stepped off the boat forty years ago. Ma never accustomed herself to this country, to its high clean horizons. The land here had no memory, she said. But Ma brought something with her from the old world.
“I led it here,” she said. “But I won’t let it get us. I know its tricks.” Ma took Anna tightly in her arms and the long brown skein of her hair fell over them both.
* * *
Anna stirs cocoa powder and sugar into a paste, takes the pan off the heat, pours in more milk. A little cinnamon, more vanilla. Anna puts the pan back on the stove now, just as Ma taught her. Not all the memories are bad. In the early days Ma cooked. Childhood was full of the grainy scent of scones, cauliflower cheese soup, tipsy cake which took a little bite out of the back of Anna’s throat and made her head sing pleasantly. Perhaps the reekling was just a story then, to frighten Anna into obedience. But imagination can be an unpredictable guest. The reekling took up residence.
Anna does not recall exactly when Ma stopped sleeping. She began to sit up nights, drinking coffee thick as syrup. Later it was laced with whiskey and then with ground-up Benzedrine. “I will stop it coming in.”
There was no more cooking. Or there should have been no more. Anna found pieces of glass in mouthfuls of potato. She spat the shards out carefully and said nothing. She was afraid but she could not say of whom. It was not possible that she should fear her mother.
Eventually Ma just stayed in her chair at the window. She watched for the reekling at all hours, her trembling hand parting the curtains in the dawn. “I guard this house,” she said to no one.
Anna taught herself to drive the truck. Each day she drove most of the way to school, parked down a track in the woods and walked the rest. She would have rather died than let anyone know about Ma.
Later they gave it a name. A soft-sounding word, schizophrenia, the s and z sounds slithering aft
er one another, the plump landing of the ph. But all that came afterwards. For years it was just Anna and Ma, watching for the reekling.
Everyone has a secret that lies at the heart of them. This is Anna’s. No matter where she goes or how many years pass, it is nested within her. Her mother’s wide eyes fixed on the middle distance, her frame shaking after six wakeful days.
The hot chocolate steams in the pan. Anna tastes it. It is perfect. Sweet, homelike in a way this home never was. Anna shakes her head, irritable. She has fought to give Pearl a life different from her own. But the past is everywhere tonight, wreathed about like smoke.
Anna does not see the boy until he is almost upon her. He comes out of the store cupboard like a shadow, face dead-pale above his ragged shirt, brown teeth bared, eyes deep whorls into nothing. An iron bar whistles by her head as she ducks, the air hums with its passage.
Anna seizes the pan from the stove and swings it at his face. She hears it connect with cartilage and bone. The boy screams. Steaming milk spatters, runs down his acne-scarred cheeks in rivulets. He falls to the floor, moaning through bubbles of milky blood.
Anna looks at him for what feels like an age but is probably no more than a moment. His lank black hair, his broken fingernails. Dark lashes, long on plump cheeks. Arms mottled with purple scars. Face dusted with acne. He is small, slight. He looks hungry. She takes in everything, each detail of the boy who has come into the house where her child is.
Anna seizes the phone from the shelf above the stove. She runs from the kitchen. She has been preparing for this moment since Pearl first opened her dim baby eyes.
Pearl stands on the half-landing. Her face is open, her mouth a soft questioning O. Anna seizes her daughter in her arms, throws open the front door and they are out. It feels like a single smooth movement. The world is rendered in the sheerest clarity, the edges of everything are apparent. They are held by the night.
Anna runs, stumbling, dialling with her thumb. She does not stop until she reaches the moonlit rise of the hill. She speaks into the phone. Yes, no, gives directions for how to get there from the highway, It’s ok, we’re outside. She is impressed by how calm she sounds. Below, the house is lit, windows blazing in the dark.
