by Anna Roberts
The wheels on the bus go round and round all the way to Islamorada. Yael loves repetitive music and picks up the tune, so that when they arrive West has murder in his veins and pounding behind his eyes. The music – the music on the outside, at least – has stopped. Charlie has nodded off right on cue, the better to look like a sleepy, golden haired angel for grandma.
“He’s a cherub,” says Gloria, although he looks more like a sack of potatoes as she lifts him out of his car seat. His lips squash against the shoulder of her blouse, leaving a dark drool spot. Possibly some snot, too. “Look at those curls.”
“I was blond, too,” says West. “And look at me now.”
She does, and like always he’s not sure she likes what she sees. Her hair is a new buttery shade that’s definitely out of a box, only there’s nothing she can do about that platinum streak shining out in front. It’s been getting whiter and wider for years, and the smokers’ lines around her lips look deeper. Charlie stirs at the touch of unfamiliar hands and scrumples up his face, filling his lungs and probably his diaper. Linda’s fucking about with something in the trunk of the car – “Wes, can you just please...” – every second syllable coming out in that pissy way that says he’s done something wrong. Again. Yael snickers and keeps right on humming – the wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, and it’s all he can do not to join in with Charlie, who’s screaming now, because he’s tired, because he’s dirty, because he’s two and because that’s what he does now.
“In a minute,” West says, and he thinks of the bones, cold and silent. There’s a lovely certainty in the way they fit together. They’re the hard order buried beneath the squashy chaos of skin and blood and flesh. He finds himself yearning for them, for their important-sounding names and their silence, and it’s the kind of yearning that he thinks might make some people suspect they were bound for the nuthouse. But not him. He’s known he’s been halfway there for years.
Gloria is playing at being normal for Linda’s benefit, right down to the cylinder of canned cranberries and the dry turkey. The foster kids have been packed off out of sight, the bones buried deep in the yard, although you can never bury anything deep enough for Yael. Gloria brings out the worst in him; he rattles the cutlery, flickers the lights and bothers the hens. When the garbage disposal starts to grind and stutter, you can bet he’s behind it.
“I’ll get it,” says West, and gets down to his knees to look. Two rooms away Charlie is yelling his head off and Linda is trying to shush him. Ma just keeps on talking – “...I don’t know why it shut off like that, it was fine. You gotta keep him on a leash, Wes...” – and every word is like a rock landing on his head. His gut is full of a scorching turkey dinner, hot mashed potatoes and gravy. Food for cold hearted, cold blooded pilgrims, not people in Florida, where the humidity never quits, even in November. He unscrews the pipe and the stink and sludge is enough to make him moan, while the kid howls and his mother yaks and Yael keeps on singing his new favorite – the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh connected to the hip bone...
He reaches into the disposal, his fingers touching the back of the blades. Something there. Something hard. He wiggles it a couple of times and it comes loose.
...now hear the word of the Lord...
It’s a bone. A wing or a leg, he can’t tell. There’s grease and skin and dark meat still clinging to it (dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones) but it’s hard underneath. Hard and dry. Maybe that’s why he likes Old Boney so much – the one dry thing in a life sticky with snot, poop, tears, drool and mac and cheese spattered all over the wall because His Majesty wanted mashed banana instead. Dry things, quiet things. They’re like a wonderful dream.
“There,” he says. “Turkey bone.”
“Huh. It was supposed to handle that.”
“Well, it didn’t.”
“Smart,” says Gloria, lighting up a menthol. “You always did have a knack for fixing things.”
He straightens up, rinses his hands. It’s the smallest praise, but he’ll take it. “It’s nothing,” he says. “You can always figure things out how things work if you know how to take them apart.”
“Ah,” says Gloria, and the moment’s gone. He can feel the chill in the air before she even opens her mouth again. “Like what happened to the cat?”
“I told you I didn’t...” But it’s no use. And honestly? He can’t completely remember if he did or he didn’t; the lie keeps eclipsing the truth, or the other way around. Charlie has stopped crying, and West knows it’s only a matter of minutes before Linda carries him back in and Gloria goes back into doting grandma mode. There’s no time to broach this gently.
“Look, never mind that,” he says. “I’m just gonna come right out and say it –”
“ – you need money?” She’s not offering. Chance would be a fine thing, says Yael. She was always tightfisted.
“Yeah.”
Gloria exhales. Through the smoke her eyes are the flat, bleached blue of a pitiless summer sky. “Then get a job.”
“And how’s that supposed to work?”
“I dunno,” she says. “Ask Yael. I figure you’re holding things together, since you haven’t yet eaten your firstborn. When did you last turn?”
“I can’t remember,” he says, and it’s the truth. In his mind’s eye he sees the cat, green eyes slitted as he pulls back the skin of its face, ears gristle and fur under his hands, its little fang teeth bared. The slow, angry yowl. The snap. The silence. Yeah. He did that.
His spine itches at night. Who would have thought he could ever miss it?
“What was the point of any of this if you can’t hold down a job?” says Gloria. “I did it so you could have a normal life.”
She did it because she had to, says Yael. Because she was trying to stiff me out of what she promised.
“Shut up,” says West, and realizes too late he’s said it out loud, the way he does sometimes. Those are the times when Linda looks at him like he’s really, truly insane. Full on crazy.
But Gloria knows better. “Don’t listen to him,” she says. “He’s full of shit. Always has been. At least he’s keeping you from turning.”
Keeping you neutered, more like. How’d you like them apples, Wes? Your own mother arranged to have you fixed.
Shut the hell up, Yael. Let me think. “Yeah,” West says, desperate for something to make sense here. “But is that right?”
“Right?” says Gloria. “What do you mean, right? It was the only way you were going to live through puberty, you dumb pup.” She sighs. “Please don’t tell me you’re still not trying on that whole werewolf pride thing for size? Because that was fucking stupid.”
“You don’t get it.”
“What don’t I get?” she says. “Explain this to me, son.”
He’s in too deep, and he knows he won’t say anything good, but if he says nothing he’ll explode or die or go crazy. Or crazier. So he tries. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s...it’s not natural, what we’re doing. We are what we are. Don’t you ever feel it? When you don’t turn?”
“Feel what?”
“Feel like the wolf is in there all the same. Maybe it’s just...just easier to let it out. I don’t know.”
“I do,” says Gloria, lighting another cigarette. “You have a wife and a child. You can’t afford to let it out. Keep letting it out and it’ll grind you down – your bones, your brain, your heart. You won’t live to see that boy graduate high school, never mind college. What the hell’s wrong with you that you want to go through all that pain? How is that easier, Wes?”
“Because it goes away.”
“What goes away?” Oh, she’s not making this easy. This is the closest he’s ever come to spilling his guts and she’s just being an asshole. As usual.
“Everything,” he says. “If you hurt enough you can’t feel anything else. It’s clean. It sweeps away everything else, scrubs you down to the bone. You know Catholics used
to do that? They used to beat themselves with scourges and barbed wire, so it hurt enough to contemplate God that much more clearly.”
Gloria raises a thin, plucked eyebrow. “Child, are you kidding me? The only thing you ever contemplated at length was pussy.”
He pictures the cat again, only it’s no pussy joke. He remembers how the tiny bones had cracked under his fingers. All that fight, all that snarl and claw and resistance. Gone in a snap. So easy. If he had a bullet right now he’d put it between his mother’s eyes. This is exactly the kind of noise he’s been trying to drown out – the whiny kid, the wife asking for money, the foulmouthed old nag of a mother. Every month now he fights the temptation to leave it all behind and become an animal. When he’s the wolf there’s not even him, not even Yael. Yael’s in there somewhere, but he can’t figure out his way around a wolf brain; he forgets how to talk and just wallows around in the taste of raw meat instead.
And it’s beautiful, in spite of the pain. It’s like taking a vacation from yourself.
Not that she’d get it. He knows that now.
“So,” he says. “Are you gonna lend me some money?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t have a dime. You should know that better than anyone.”
*
Sirens.
An ambulance streaked down the other side of the road, flashing and blaring. An accident, like the one she kept threatening to have if Yael didn’t let her get some rest. The bleeding had stopped, but it had left her tired to death, like he was leeching on every last cell in her body.
I want to keep going.
“I don’t give a shit,” said Blue, and pulled in at the next exit, hoping he’d fall asleep again and give her a moment to think. Jesus, was this what it had been like all those years for West? And for Gloria? No wonder they’d gone nuts.
Assuming they weren’t nuts in the first place.
He sounded sleepy. She pictured him yawning and actually felt him stretch, his movement stirring the taut fabric of her yellow t-shirt. Holy Christ, had she got even bigger? The t-shirt felt tight enough to bust apart at the seams. She was like the Hulk, carrying around this rage inside her, a rage that was big enough to tear her clothes apart.
She pulled in to another faded motel. There was a building site right next door – a new convenience store – and the wind blew the smell of brick dust into her face. A cement mixer rolled and rumbled, but she was glad of the background noise.
As she stepped out of the car she felt strange and top heavy. She swayed back on her heels and realized she was starting to walk like a pregnant woman, shoulders back, feet splayed. The bump stuck out in front of her and when she caught sight of herself in the motel window she let out a brief yelp of horror; he’d turned her navel clean inside out. It was sticking out under her t-shirt, a smooth round lump, like a cherry on top of a bun.
Like billions of women before her, Blue looked at the shape of the thing growing inside her and wondered how on earth it was ever going to come out. And what the hell was she going to do when it did?
She waddled towards the door, still feeling the bones snap under her fingers. That poor little black cat; the sense memories were vivid and awful. And Gloria hadn’t helped one bit. She should have at least understood what it meant to walk around with Yael crawling under her skin. If anyone could have empathized with West, surely it should have been his mother?
The desk clerk looked directly at the bump. “There’s one down the road,” she said, not looking up. “About five miles. There’s no building works there.”
“I don’t mind,” said Blue.
The clerk looked up. She had thick brows and a tattoo along her collarbone, but Blue couldn’t make out the words. “Is it the dreams?” she said. “They never tell you about that, do they? But God, the nightmares.”
“Yeah.”
She pushed the check-in book across the desk. “I had super vivid dreams all through my first,” said the clerk. “Second time? I didn’t even have to pee on a stick to know I was pregnant. Before I even realized I was late I had these, like, Technicolor nightmares. Exactly the same as the first.” She laughed. “I remember I woke up from one, stuck my elbow in my boyfriend’s ribs and said ‘I’m pregnant’.”
“What did he say?” said Blue.
“He said ‘You’re dreaming. Go back to sleep’.” She handed over the key and styrofoam ice bucket. “I’ve put you in the end room, okay? It’s not gonna be quiet, but it’ll be better than the others. Check out’s at ten, and there’s an ice machine on your way down.”
“Thank you.”
Blue made her way to the room. As she passed the ice machine she realized why the woman had maybe mentioned it. Pica, they called it, the strange craving to eat things that weren’t really food – ice, chalk or clay. It was one of those things she would have read about in the baby books, if she’d been doing this with any kind of willingness.
Paint swatches, second hand strollers, onesies – all the things you did to prepare for a baby. She’d done none of them, and even if she’d wanted to there was simply no time. He was growing at a freakish speed.
And it was tiring him. That was the one up side of this all. When he slept she could go wandering through his dreams and memories, and not just his. West’s. Gloria’s.
She cracked ice between her back teeth and sat down on the bed, walking back into the past, looking for answers.
9
He knows he’s home. He was never meant to walk around under someone’s skin, but he got attached to bricks and mortar somehow, the way the disembodied often do. That’s why they haunt houses more often than they haunt people, and it’s a mercy, really. A haunted house is fun at Halloween: a haunted person is seldom ever fun.
Someone turns over in their sleep upstairs and Gloria hears the baby snuffle and whine, like he caught the whiff of a nightmare as it drifted past his nose. She freezes for a moment, straining her ears towards the inevitable explosion, but the cries don’t come.
Weird. West keeps saying Charlie’s an extra special little shit at night time, and Gloria’s dragged up enough boys to know that the worst things happen to children when they’re not making a sound.
She sees the light before she reaches the hallway, and she knows she turned it off. And she knows why it’s moving. The light swings in sloppy circles, casting funhouse shadows that set her falling back in time some twenty-five years or more, to the day when she stood in the Keane house kitchen with a bag of chicken guts at her feet.
The day she changed her world.
A dirty trick. She’d been a child. She would have said yes to anything that meant she could eat her lunch in peace.
The stairs creak beneath her feet. She hears someone breathing, the deep, slow, steady breaths of sleep. Only it’s not coming from the right room; it’s coming from the one at the very top of the stairs, the little box room where Charlie’s tucked up in his crib.
She creeps closer. She sees his head first; he’s looming high in the room, his dark hair sticking up like a brush in the back. West’s back is to her and he’s standing stiff over the crib, breathing so slow and so deep that it catches in the back of his nose like a snore.
He’s asleep.
Gloria hurries forward, but it’s okay. Charlie lies on his back, snoring softly in one of those boneless poses common to toddlers, while his sleeping father stands there like someone rammed a poker down his spine.
“You’re sleepwalking again,” she says, and touches West’s shoulder.
He turns to look at her, and instead of staring right through her the way he should, he looks her right in the eye. And that’s when she knows it’s not him in there.
“He is,” says Yael. “I’m wide awake.”
“Get away from that baby,” she says, already thinking of iron and blood and the means to keep Charlie safe.
Yael grins. “Why? I’m not going to hurt him.” He peers down into the crib, smiling like the doting dad West never was. “They’re a
mazing at that age, aren’t they? So much potential, like blank pages waiting for the words.”
“Get. Away. From. My. Grandson.”
“If you’d just handed West over when he was a newborn it might have gone better. Two personalities in one head; you know how crowded it gets in there, Gloria.”
There’s a roaring in her ears and it grows, fading out everything else, like rage bleeding through a dream.
“Stay out of my head,” says Yael, but West’s lips aren’t moving any more...
*
Stay out of my head. Or I’ll...
“Or what?” said Blue. She was surprised to find how little she cared anymore. “You’ll make me blind? You’ll put me in a coma? If you could have done it by now you would have, but you haven’t. So what is it? You need me? Or you can’t do the things you used to do?”
He kicked her in the bladder, and she couldn’t help but smile.
“This whole flesh thing is kinda limited, huh?” she said. “But I guess you wouldn’t be told.”
What a motherly rebuke.
“Careful what you wish for, Yael,” she said, thinking of Medea. There had been that woman who faked a carjacking and drove her car into the water with her children locked inside, or the Nazi who had tiptoed to her children’s bedsides in the bunker in Berlin, and kissed each one goodnight with a cyanide pill.
You don’t have it in you, said Yael.
“Try me.”
He laughed. Some are born killers, some become killers and others have killing thrust upon them. And that’s you, Baby Blue. You forget – I can see your nightmares. And you have a lot of nightmares.
She clenched her fists tight enough to leave half moons on her palm, but he was already there, poking in her brain, teasing out the worst memories. The trails of blood and fluid winding between the beer kegs in the cellar, the puckered, ruined mess of Eli’s spine. And Charlie. She still could feel the shudder that had run down her arm when the ax made contact. In all the horror of the night it was strange that it was the smallest thing that still made her sick to the center of her bones. Every time she remembered the hard, tiny ‘tink’ that part of his skull had made as it flew across the kitchen and struck the cupboard door.
