Bloody Bloody Apple

by Howard Odentz

  “How bad?”

  “Lockdown bad.”

  “Shit,” I say, because I know she’s right. When her tox-screen comes back and it shows anything in her system more noxious than pot, which it probably will, they won’t release her. That means she’ll be stuck at Wang for a while. First, they’ll keep her on some sort of suicide watch, to make sure she’s not going to try anything stupid like biting herself or yanking tubes out of her arm. After that, they’ll move her someplace else for observation. It’ll be a group home or an institution. They’ll spend days shrinking her, until she finally breaks down and has to talk about why she took so many pills.

  That’s a freaking good question. Why?

  I sit down on the edge of the bed, next to Annie, and hold her hand. We both don’t say anything for a moment. Finally, I get up the courage to ask, “Where did you get the pills, Annie? Mark Zebrowski? Ziggy?”

  A tear rolls down her cheek. “I told you. I didn’t take any pills.”

  I bite the inside of my lip. “What about your dad?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispers. “What about my dad?” I can see a hint of fear growing in her eyes. “What about my dad?”

  I realize that she doesn’t know. “He’s here, too.”

  Annie spaces out for a moment. Finally she asks, “Why?”

  I don’t know why. I look at my feet and shrug. Annie closes her eyes, and another tear spills out. Finally, she says, “I had a dream last night. I had a dream, but it was so real.”

  “About what?” I ask her as my fingers gently rub her hand.

  “I had a dream that the doorbell rang. It woke me up. I couldn’t figure out who would be ringing our bell. I thought it might be the chief coming back to talk to my dad—but when I opened the door there was no one there.”

  Annie drifts off for a moment, and a little bit of drool falls from her mouth. “There was an apple pie,” she says. “I remember there was an apple pie on the kitchen table.”

  A sick feeling gnaws at my gut as I remember what creepy Father Tim said to me and Newie last night when he was getting into his car at the BD Mart.

  Apple pie . . . that’ll do the trick.

  “What are you talking about, Annie?” I ask her. “Is this real, or were you dreaming?”

  She swallows and sucks in some snot. “I don’t know,” she whispers. Another tear pools at the corner of her eye and drips onto the pillow. “It feels like a dream, but it might have been real.” She wipes both eyes with her fists. “There was a note that said Carve her up—Mom, sitting next to it. I only had a little piece,” she whispers. “It tasted like McIntosh and cinnamon and caramel . . . and something else . . . something funny.” Annie sniffs and looks up at me with her glazed expression. “I don’t remember anything after that,” she says. “It was a dream, Jackson, wasn’t it?”

  No, I think. It wasn’t a dream at all. It was a nightmare.

  39

  I FEEL SICK TO my stomach and have to reach down to steady myself on the cot. The burning in my chest—the burning that always comes like hellfire whenever I get scared or stressed or angry bursts into feverish life underneath my skin. Not-Becky’s chanting comes flooding into my brain as clear as day.

  “Four and twenty blackbirds baked into a pie.

  Cut yourself a slice of it and you’ll get really high.

  Four and twenty blackbirds baked into a pie.

  Eat a bigger piece of it and you will surely die.”

  Along with that sick singsong rhyme comes something else. Annie said the pie tasted like McIntosh and cinnamon and caramel—just like my house smelled yesterday after school, when I found the candle lit.

  I hear Hatchet Face talking to Officer Randy. She lowers her voice and says, “Look, I’m not supposed to say anything, and I don’t have the toxicology report on this one and her dad yet, but the guy’s barely holding on. It looks like he took a boatload of prescription pills—antidepressants and tranquilizers—enough to kill a horse.”

  Antidepressants and tranquilizers? The words roll around in my head as Annie floats away on a cloud.

  Antidepressants and tranquilizers.

  That’s what my mom and Becky take. That’s exactly what they take.

  Ka-dunk. Another puzzle piece snaps into place in the picture inside my head.

  “I need to ask a few questions,” says Officer Randy as he suddenly materializes by my side. Thankfully, he doesn’t notice that I’ve probably turned green since I feel a little woozy, myself.

  Annie opens her eyes. She sees Officer Randy and nods. I guess there’s some sort of comfort in him being there. He’s always been there—at the school, in the library, at the playground.

  “I know you’re tired, Annie,” he says. “But I need to know. Your dad likes his beer, but”—he licks his lips—“what else does he like?”

  “Huh?” says Annie.

  “You know,” Officer Randy continues. “Percocet, OxyContin, Valium, Clonazepam.” He’s spews out a litany of drugs.

  “My father doesn’t use pills,” Annie says softly to Officer Randy.

  “What about your mother?” he asks, and I wince. He steals a quick glance at me, probably to make sure that I won’t say anything.

  I won’t. I’m sure there’s a protocol for telling Annie that her mother’s gone. A social worker and a psychiatrist probably need to be involved, but for now, she’s pleasantly in the dark. Whatever she took is still washing through her system. I see her face relax, and she closes her eyes and sighs.

  “She doesn’t take pills, either,” Annie murmurs before drifting off.

  “Mr. Berg’s a drunk,” I say to Officer Randy. “That’s all. He drinks like a fish.”

  “I know all about Tony Berg,” says Officer Randy. “I just want to know where he got those pills, because it’s starting to look like he never wanted to wake up.”

  I’m tempted to tell Officer Randy about creepy Father Tim and Annie’s dream of eating a poisoned apple pie, but I don’t. One thought keeps distracting me, banging against the wet insides of my head.

  How did Becky know? How?

  “Let’s let her rest,” Officer Randy says as he escorts me away from her bed. None of this seems real. None of this seems right. “I’ll drive you home, okay?”

  “What about Annie?” I ask, but I’m pretty sure I already know the answer.

  “Annie’s going to be here for a while,” he tells me. “I’m sure she’ll be fine.” Then he says it again for emphasis, or to make himself believe that what he’s saying is true. “I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

  “Thanks,” I say, trying to hide the pained look that I know is painted on my face. I must be doing a good job because Officer Randy seems not to notice. He brushes by me and pushes through the doors to the waiting room. The lady who was snapping her gum is still there, and she winks at Randy as we walk by.

  It grosses me out. I don’t know why, but it all seems so fucking inappropriate—like saying “fuck” all the time.

  That seems fucking inappropriate, too.

  It’s after twelve by now. My father’s working at the farmer’s co-op today. There’s a big fall sale, and all the tourists will want to buy something that means “Massachusetts.” Crap like postcards, or T-shirts, or coffee mugs with pictures of moose. Also, planting season is coming to a close. All the hobby-gardeners are getting in their last bulbs for fall. My father has to be around for that, especially if they need an extra hand at the registers or for loading up cars and pickup trucks from the warehouse.

  I wonder how he’s going to do all that with a twisted ankle.

  I slipped on the stairs out on the porch.

  Ka-dunk. A third puzzle piece fits into place inside my head, but I don’t want to look at the picture being made. Not yet. I need to make sense o
f why Annie and her father are doped up on pills—the same kind of pills that my mother and Becky take.

  Ka-dunk-dunk. The picture in my mind becomes almost clear, like a knob is turning inside my head, bringing everything into focus, one notch at a time.

  Suddenly, I know what I have to do when I get home.

  I know exactly what I have to do.

  40

  MY MOTHER DOESN’T bake—not since Margo Freeman was dismantled all over town, and not since Not-Becky came to live inside my sister’s head. My mother doesn’t make cookies or pies or homemade muffins. Gone are the days of pancakes from scratch and waffles made on a greased waffle iron and served with whipped cream on top.

  My mother doesn’t bake, so why the hell was there sugar all over the kitchen counter and in the cabinet where we keep her depression pills and Becky’s anti-psychotic stuff?

  Why?

  As Officer Randy drives me home—down the winding hill, away from Wang Hospital, and across the top of Glendale Road past the high school and the middle school, I can’t stop wondering why there was sugar all over the counter in the kitchen when my mother doesn’t bake.

  “You doing okay?” asks Officer Randy as he cuts down a street that I’ve never noticed before. The big houses on either side of the road are foreign to me. People with money live in them. They’re the ones who hire cleaning women to wipe up their sugar in their kitchens.

  I don’t answer him, which is as good as saying, “Leave me the hell alone. I don’t want to talk.” We pass by a house that’s already decorated for Halloween, with so many tacky things on the front lawn that it makes my eyes hurt.

  Officer Randy snorts as he sees a blowup sculpture of a Frankenstein monster with a tiny head next to a chorus of little cloaked figures with skeleton faces, all standing in a semi-circle. “That’s a crowd pleaser,” he says, but I still don’t respond.

  A few minutes later, he turns right where the BD Mart and the gas station face off against each other on opposite corners. I stare at the plastic picnic table where Newie and I sat last night, waiting for Annie to get off work. I think about Julie Dopkin and her rant against Annie for selling too much cough medicine to one person, and I think about creepy Father Tim buying that freaking apple pie because he had a sweet tooth.

  My eyes narrow into slits. Officer Randy maneuvers his cruiser down the hill and stops at the corner of Main Street.

  “Let me out here,” I say, reaching for the door handle.

  The wrinkles on his forehead accordion together, making them more pronounced. Eventually they relax, and he presses the button on the electric locks. I guess I’m not a suspect after all. “Okay,” he says. “But why don’t you take it easy today. You’ve been through a lot.”

  He’s right. I have been through a lot—today and yesterday, and all the days going back for a long, long time.

  I open the door, get out of the cruiser, and watch as he pulls past me down Main Street and back toward Tenzar’s. As he goes, the red and blue lights on his roof begin to flash, but with the siren off.

  After a minute, I pull my phone out of my pocket and text Newie.

  Annie’s okay.

  He answers me right away.

  U yank your chain at Wang?

  Fuckwad. I’m home. U?

  Still with Erika. She’s a mess.

  K. Later.

  I close the phone and stare across the street at the entrance to Vanguard Lane. There was a time when my street meant safety and security and home. Now it’s just dark and gloomy with bad memories and mental illness.

  I don’t want to go home. I want to put off what I’m going to find when I get there. One thing’s for damn sure. Whatever I find will be part of the out-of-focus picture in my head.

  I wait a couple minutes, shifting back and forth on my feet, before finally crossing Main Street and slowly walking down Vanguard Lane to the two-family house that’s the only home I’ve ever known.

  My father’s car is gone. The driveway seems like a lonely stretch of highway leading off into a gloomy wasteland. At the end of the wasteland is my father’s garage. I stare at it, pushing away the thought that I may very well discover another piece of the puzzle there, but for right now, I have to focus.

  I’m concerned with the kitchen and what I’ll find in the cabinets.

  With one hand shoved deep in my pocket, I blow a gust of air out of my mouth, push open the gate, walk up the stairs, and through the front door.

  The house is quiet inside. The air is thick with questions. I don’t even take off my coat and hang it on my father’s coat rack. Instead, I quietly make my way through the living room to the kitchen. I stop at the linoleum floor, only because I know once I step onto it, there’s no going back.

  Still, I need to know, and that need propels me forward.

  The cabinet with the medication in it looms in front of me, larger than life. I stare at the handle as it silently beckons me to pull it open so it can vomit out its secrets, but before I can reach my hand out to grasp it, I hear a creak somewhere in the house.

  Could it be the old man upstairs? Is my mother up? Could it be Becky downstairs, huddled against the wall and spewing filth into the decorative metal grate, so that she can pick apart what’s left of my grandfather’s already-addled brain?

  I wait and I listen, but I hear nothing else. Maybe it’s only the sound of the house settling. Old houses do that sometimes. After a while, their bones become brittle and sometimes crack. They let out short, involuntary moans, which are only their foundations settling into the holes that will someday be their graves. Old houses are just like old people, who come to realize that the bag of skin that holds their insides in will eventually turn to dust and decay.

  No more strange sounds come, so I grip the handle on the cabinet door and pull it open.

  Before me are the orange bottles of medication for both my mother and my sister. Most of them are less than half full because the end of the month is near.

  I pull the bottles out of the cabinet, tear off a double piece of paper towel, lay it on the counter, and set the medications on top of it.

  Then I do what I know I need to do, although I already know what I’m going to find.

  41

  SUGAR.

  Goddamned sugar.

  Capsule after capsule is filled with sugar—not that granulated stuff that my dad scoops into his coffee, teaspoon after teaspoon, but the powdered crap that sifts and cakes like flour.

  This is what was all over the counter before I cleaned it up. This is what was on the medicine bottles, giving me the briefest of hopes that my mother actually woke up out of her stupor and baked cookies or a pie.

  These little red and yellow tubes are supposed to hold the cure for my mother’s depression. Tiny granules of medication should be inside, each expertly engineered to react with her brain so that she doesn’t think everything around her is so bad.

  These pills are supposed to erase the crippling depression that holds her encased in a wall of stone, unable to get out and unable to interact with her family or the rest of the world.

  Now I know she’s been robbed of their help.

  Each time she’s been given a pill, it’s been a fraud—a clever ruse to disguise the fact that she’s not being given medication at all. She’s been given sugar. Her illness has gone unchecked for who knows how long and has left her all but paralyzed, a vegetable trapped in human form—trapped in the malnourished dirt of her own brain.

  I stare at the white powder on the paper towel before dabbing my finger in it and putting it to my mouth to confirm what I already know. The sickeningly sweet taste blooms on my tongue and makes me angrier than I’ve been in a long time.

  Also in the cabinet are Becky’s medications—two bottles’ worth. I know they’re both filled with tranquilizers,
one for the morning and one for at night, so I start with the evening pills. They look different from my mother’s. These are solid blue. I twist them in two and am surprised to find them filled with her medicine. I take apart several of them before I realize they haven’t been touched.

  I can’t say the same for her morning pills.

  Each time I open one up, more powdery white sugar falls to the paper towel.

  They’re useless. Becky isn’t being given the medication that she’s supposed to take every morning. Without it, Not-Becky hasn’t been silenced during the day. While I’m at school or in the tobacco fields in the summer, it must howl and berate and torment the ones in my house who can’t escape—my mother and my grandfather. Only after I mash the evening pills into its food does it quiet down.

  Only then does it sleep.

  I clench my fists as the ruined capsules lay in front of me like dead soldiers. My mind reels with this new revelation, adding bits and pieces to the picture in my head and rearranging the image over and over again in an attempt to make it clearer—but clarity still doesn’t come.

  Instead, the questions explode in my head like paintball bullets. Why are the pills being tampered with? What possible reason could there be to keep my mother and sister sick instead of well?

  Who the hell has done all this?

  Something whispers in my ear, forlorn and loving, like a soft and deadly kiss.

  The only person who could have done this is your father.

  The thought barrels into me with such force that I momentarily lose my breath. I gasp, sucking deeply on air as though it might be the last breath I’ll ever take. Quietly, I find myself saying the words out loud.

  “The only person who could have done this is my father.” The sentence echoes in the empty kitchen as though I’m standing in a room full of granite, carved through millennia by a stream trickling endlessly within the bowels of the earth.

  It makes no sense.