by Casey Lane
I put my lips to her ear. “Be careful what you wish for.”
Chapter Twelve
I was safe beneath the earth, her life coursing through my veins, long before she opened her eyes on darkness and the press of soft cotton on her face. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.
She bolted upright and a pillow hit the floor. I saw her room the way she must have seen it. The white, chipped dresser glowed in the low light of morning. The stiff, secondhand plaid curtains swayed in the breeze coming in from the window.
The closet door stood open, revealing the few hangable items she had to her name. A shoebox with Kai’s baby pictures on the top shelf. A pair of red shoes with one heel broken off, revealing a rubbery underbelly. A leather jacket which had belonged to Kai’s father and hadn’t fit her in years with swatches of electrical tape at the elbow.
Voices.
Loud, strident voices.
And a television that was ten decibels too loud. That’s what had woken her.
She threw back the covers and put her feet on the cool carpet. As soon as she stood, blood rushed to her head. She swayed on her feet, arm reaching out to grab anything for stability. Her fingers brushed wood and clamped down. The dresser held as she covered her eyes with her hand. That awful pounding in her temple had returned.
You took too much, I chided myself. She will collapse and die before the day is even done.
And it seemed I might be right as she stumbled toward the door and pulled it open, stepping out into the hall. One hand on the wall, she walked as quickly as she could toward the living room and the sound of her mother’s voice. But not just her mother’s voice.
Light broke open and filled her head with cold fire.
Too much blood. I gave her too much blood.
She blinked as tears pricked her eyes. When the light cleared, the room came into focus, but it was still too bright, unbearably bright. Damn.
Her mother was in her recliner, a cigarette poised between her arthritis-twisted fingers as smoke rolled toward the ceiling. She gave Lettie one look and snorted.
“Finally care to grace us with your presence sleeping beauty?” her mother said, her nose curled up with a sneer. She flicked her ashes into her glass ashtray. “I would’ve starved if Merek hadn’t been kind enough to feed his old mother.”
Merek turned toward her. He had a cigarette between his fingers, twisting the paper closed. He had the same flat black eyes as their mother.
Except his eyes were glassy. Both Lettie and I knew what this meant—he was between highs. Coming down, most likely. Dangerous, but not as dangerous as he could be.
“Have a cigarette with us, Lettie,” Merek said. “We’re celebrating.”
Merek flashed his best smile. When they were younger, it’d been handsome, back when the girls thought he looked like Jim Morrison with his guitar and his wild brown curls. It wasn’t as effective now, not with the crooked, rotting teeth and the pockmarked face. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so—Lettie agreed.
“What are we celebrating?” she asked. I felt the caution in her bones warring with the pounding in her head. She felt unwell, horribly unwell, but didn’t want to lower her guard while the sharks swam so close. I noted her wobbling legs and irregular heart with more than a little concern.
“Your brother got a job,” her mother said, plucking a stray bit of tobacco from her tongue.
Lettie snorted.
Merek spoke as if he hadn’t heard. “One of the warehouses needs forklift drivers. My certificate is still good,” he said.
Lettie didn’t believe this was true. He had received it over ten years ago, back when their father had been alive, and had still been putting him to work. It was their father who had paid for the course.
“At least someone in this house is holding down a steady job,” her mother said. “I don’t see you with a job, Lettie.”
“If I had a job, who would take care of you?” she fired back. As soon as she said it, she knew it was a mistake. It was what her mother wanted her to say. It was the bait and lure, and Lettie was reaching for it even though she knew better.
“Yes, you’re doing such a fabulous job.” Her mother sneered.
“There’s always whoring,” Merek said. He lifted a cigarette to his own stained teeth. In the motion, Lettie caught sight of his bruised inner arm. The puckered yellow skin shone in the low light. The tracks running up his arm looked like poison rushing toward his heart. “There’s a good business in whoring. And you look the part. I’ve got some friends you can meet.”
Her mother snorted.
“Excuse me?” Lettie’s face burned.
“Look at you,” he said, pointing the red cherry at her. She looked down and realized that she still pantless in the long t-shirt, the bottom of her ass hanging out beneath its hem.
When they saw her humiliation, they laughed. I imagined tearing out both their throats.
“Fuck you both.”
When Lettie turned, hurrying back to her room as fast as she could, they only laughed harder.
She slammed her bedroom door shut with fury. A job? When would I have time for a job? When we have a maid to do all the cooking and cleaning around here? Someone to bathe you? To make sure all the bills are paid? Someone to spend hours on the phone with the collectors to beg for more time, because someone robs us blind in the dead of night? Someone to tie down all the pawnables?
She yanked on a pair of jeans with frayed ankles and a missing button.
She found a clean shirt, this one gray with the red letters of Ohio State printed on the front—as if she’d ever stepped foot in a college in her life.
Kai had gone. Kai was halfway through a BSA in painting, and Lettie was damn proud of that. But Lettie herself had dropped out of eighth grade. The year before, her father had started sending her to school with pills—quaaludes, OxyCotin, somas, Valium—which she was supposed to sell to the other kids on the playground, in the bathrooms, in the hallways at lockers, and between classes. She was caught, of course. When another student’s parents discovered a stash, the school officials had been pulled into it. She was suspended by the principle and whipped by her father for not having the foresight to not sell to snitches.
She never went back after that, and her parents hadn’t made her.
Lettie found an overstretched elastic band in a plastic cup advertising Split Lanes Bowling and swept her hair up into a bun on the top of her head. She caught sight of herself in the mirror as she did and gasped. Her hands faltered in her hair, her mouth fell open.
She leaned over the dresser and peered into the old discolored glass.
A new bruise, twin to the one on her right side has bloomed on the left. It was even darker and more savage than its sibling. Bright purple lines of crushed vessels spider-webbed up the side of her throat.
“My God,” she whispered. “I should be dead.”
I agreed with her. And if one were to compare the two bites and their severity, there was no doubt that the third would kill her.
A knock sounded at her door. She knew who it was even before he pushed it open and let himself in. In one panicked gesture, she tugged her hair down and smoothed it down around her face, trying to hide the massive bruising.
Her heart leapt in her throat, knocking against her lower jaw. I felt that delicious pulse in my own cold bones beneath the earth. I relished it.
“Yes, just let yourself in why don’t you,” she said. “God forbid anyone respect anyone’s privacy around here.”
Merek’s pockmarked face appeared in the crack. “Oh come on, Lettie. Don’t be like that. I haven’t seen you all day.”
Money then. Here we go with the bullshit I-love-you-I’m-your-brother card.
“Where’d you get your new job?” she asked, attempting to head him off.
“At the warehouse, down by the water.”
“That’s real vague, Merek. There’s a lot of warehouses down by the water. And we both know what they cut—and i
t ain’t paychecks.”
“It’s a legit place. It’s new. They’re hiring all kinds of people.”
All kinds of people—of that Lettie was sure. Including druggies and drunks with shallow background checks, if they had background checks at all.
Here it comes, she thought. She braced herself.
“I’m hoping you can give me $20 until payday.”
“It’s the end of the month,” she said, flatly. She glanced at herself in the mirror to see if her neck was hidden by her hair. It was. “You know I’m flat broke until Momma’s check on the first.”
The muscles in her stomach tightened, but she refused to flinch away. If he was going to hit her, he would hit her, and she wasn’t going to cower before he did it.
I was proud of her for that.
It helped that she knew it was too soon for fists. She recognized this ritual. He would ask. She would refuse. He would ask more nicely again, and if she chose to continue to refuse him, then that was her choice, but she knew what would come next. The asking would get harder, and his response to her refusal would get harder too.
“Come on, Lets,” he said. “I just need twenty.”
Lettie thought of her reeling head, of the swimming sparks behind her eyes and the way her whole body just wanted to lie down again. Lie down and pull the covers over her head. Merek had gotten their mother up and put a diet coke and a cigarette in her hands and had set her in front of her shows. He could go on caring for her like that, making sure she got to the bathroom when she needed to.
But he wouldn’t, and they both knew it. He’d do only enough to keep himself in their good graces and that was it.
“I’ll give you the last bit of my money if you’ll do something for me,” she said, already hating herself. She thought bargaining was pathetic. But she couldn’t suppress the impulse to get herself on top of the situation, to exert her authority and control somehow.
And Merek was willing to play. “Sure, sure.”
Without looking at him she said, “There’s a dead rabbit out by the shed. I saw it yesterday. Can you get it into the trash? I want them to haul it away tomorrow before it starts to stink something awful.”
“All right.” With a big grin, he planted a sloppy kiss on the side of her face, did it as if he hadn’t been joking—threatening—to whore her out to his drug buddies not two minutes before. Everything inside her curled up, peeled away from him like milk in vinegar. He smelled like piss and old tobacco.
She waited until the door clicked shut, until she heard the back door slide open and close and saw her scarecrow brother marching out toward the shed, the dark smudge of him framed in the square of her window.
She opened her paperbacks and fished out three fives that had been stashed between the pages of two novels—$15 instead of $20, her final act of defiance. She placed the novels back on the slanting shelves and checked the mirror to make sure her throat was covered once more.
I tried not to take it personally, her shame regarding my handiwork. As much as I might have bridged our lives with the sucking, fucking, and bloodletting, we were still from different worlds. There were rules she followed in that world, which no longer applied to me. I had to respect that. For now.
Her legs were surer of themselves now, but she still felt weak. She still wanted to lie down.
Standing in the kitchen, one hip leaning into the side of their scratched dining table, she tapped out a cigarette from her case and lit it, enjoying that first slow inhale.
When Merek came through the back door, he wiped his hands on the back of his jeans and eyed her expectantly.
“Something had been at it,” he said, those eyes fixing on her hands. “Half its guts are still on the ground.”
She wasn’t surprised to hear this, and of course neither was I. She only held up the rolled bills between her fingers, watched his eyes soften in victory, but hoped her face remained placid, unreadable.
A slow smile lit up his face, making those pockmarks stretch and his thin lips pull back to reveal those crooked yellow teeth. He plucked the bills from her hands.
“There’s fifteen,” she said. “Would you get me and Momma some double cheeseburgers. Just something from the dollar menu. I’m sick. I don’t feel like cooking.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, flashing another charred and charmless smile.
He kissed his mother on the cheek, and she beamed at him the way she always did, patting his arm lightly. Then he was out the front door with the excuse she’d given him. He comes home for money and cigarettes, and then he’s gone again. She wasn’t sure if she was happy about this or insulted.
“Have you eaten?” she asked her mother as she watched the rusted-out van pull out of the drive, one of its old belts squealing with the effort. “I can make us some lunch.”
“You just sent him for burgers. Why would you go and make lunch?”
“He’s not coming back today, Momma. He’s going to take that money I gave him and shoot it up his arm.”
“Don’t be ugly, Lettie,” her mother said with a sneer. “He’s your brother.”
He was her brother, but she also dreamed of killing him. Some nights, after a particular bout of violence, she would lay in her bed seething. She’d close her eyes and see his face clearly in her mind. Imagine herself walking toward him, fingers hooked into claws. She’d watch his eyes go wide with fear as he cowered, unable to run from her. She imagined the way his slick, sweaty throat would feel when she wrapped her hands around it and squeezed. Squeezed and squeezed until the blue veins in his face bulged and pulsed. Squeezed until the whites of his eyes turned red. Until his tongue lolled uselessly in his mouth, swelling until it was forced out between his lips.
Watching his dark complexion turn blue as she eased into sleep with a swollen eye or blackened cheek gave her great comfort. More comfort than when he disappeared altogether. Because even if he was gone, spending his days in the nearest den, or gone nine months in the county jail, he always came back.
Once, he pulled their rusted van into the driveway of a condominium and hefted a brand-new washer and dryer into the back. He drove it to the scrap yard and sold it. That got him nine months in jail. But Lettie knew now what she knew then. No matter how the interlude might arise—he’d be back.
This time, he didn’t come back for four days. While he was gone, Lettie continued to live.
Lettie cooked, meat mostly. My blood had returned her appetite, but only an appetite for flesh. She covered chicken breasts in flour and whipped egg and cooked them in bacon grease. She pan-fried two cheap and fatty steaks in the heavy cast iron that took two hands for her to lift onto the gas range. When her mother ate only half of a steak, Lettie finished it with a generous dollop of store-brand ketchup. She made bacon every morning with eggs.
When Lettie wasn’t cooking, she cleaned, taking more breaks to catch her breath when the room began to spin. Lettie turned her mother and inspected the hose cleaning the infection from her backside. She washed the sheets and bedding when the woman wet herself, shit herself, or coughed up enough blood that a simple pillowcase change wouldn’t do.
She wasn’t surprised. This was the way of it for as long as she could remember. There were flare-ups. Her mother would seem well one day. The next, so ill that Lettie would hold the phone all day, thinking she’d have to call 911 at any moment.
Throughout all this, she kept eyeing the front door, waiting for her brother to appear. Her ears strained to hear the van door creak on its rusted hinges and then slam shut.
Merek didn’t come, but neither did I. I still lusted for her, still spent my days in the grave following her every minute, slipping into her mind, feeling her thoughts and feelings and desires. Her bruises faded. The meat helped. Perhaps also the sleep.
I told myself I could stay away, that I could let her heal, and with time my blood would fade from her veins and it would be as if I’d never come at all.
But that night I saw her at the window. She stood
in a thin nightshirt, her nipples dark and erect, searching the night for me.
You’re out there, she thought. You’re out there now.
And that was all it took.
Yes, I returned. Come to me.
Chapter Thirteen
Before she realized what she was doing, she’d left the window.
She passed her mother’s closed door, down the narrow hall and into the kitchen. The back door slid open easily, and she stepped out onto the moonlit patio. Her bare feet slapped against the warm concrete walk. When the walk ended in long grass, those delicate feet found the cold earth.
I pulled her to me using that invisible tether.
The shed glowed ghostly in the moonlight. A specter in the night where demons lay in wait to tear open virgins. And yet, she kept walking toward me, toward a drumbeat that she’d begun to realize beat in the back of her mind, a twin to her own terrible rhythm.
Once I heard the grass bend under the arches of her feet, I broke the psychic connection. I left her mind, wanting to see her with my own eyes, hear her with my own ears. Or perhaps, if I am being honest, I didn’t want to know how she saw me.
“Good evening, Ms. Cole,” I said.
She started as I materialized from the darkness. She had not seen me until I stepped more fully into the light.
“You’ve been away,” she said. I could hear the longing in her voice and the accusation.
I flashed a smile, fangs showing. It was a warning as much as a welcome. “Did you miss me?”
She didn’t step back, didn’t turn and run. Her feet remained planted where they were. “Where were you?”
Under your house, I thought. Inside your every thought. “You can’t take too much from the soil or the tree will rot.”
Her brow furrowed. “What?”
Already that lust burned, my throat aching. It was as if I was standing in the desert, under the high noon sun, and here she was, a fountain of cool water where I only had to bend my head and—
“Have you made your choice?” I asked. I stepped toward her and slid one cool arm around her body. She shivered when my breath touched her cheek. “Are you mine or have you chosen another?”
