Hugo & Rose

by Bridget Foley

  Below was her backyard, Isaac’s birthday party in progress. The bouncy castle jerked and swayed. Little boys with water pistols chased one another, serpentine around the trees, screaming with delight. The smell of barbecued meat filled the air.

  Josh was standing at the grill, a pair of tongs in his hand. A relief flooded Rose. Hugo hadn’t hurt him. Hadn’t made her husband disappear.

  Rose turned and ran back toward the stairs, passing Hugo on the threshold of the room. She needed to get to Josh. Somehow it felt imperative.

  “Rose, we need to find a way to get back to the island,” Hugo said, urgent. His feet clattered on the steps behind her.

  “I don’t want to go to the island, Hugo. I want to stay here. I want to be with my family.” Even as she said it, she realized it was true. She never wanted to go back to the island. She didn’t care what was in Castle City.

  “But it’s not safe here for us, Rosie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Rose reached the bottom of the stairs. Through the window she could see the party in the backyard. Parents with their coffee cups. The balloons waving in the breeze.

  There were still three children sitting at her table, eating waffles.

  But they were not hers.

  Rose stopped short, stunned by the wrongness of it.

  Adam, Isaac, and Penny had been replaced by a boy.

  Or rather three identical copies of the same boy sat before each of her children’s place settings. Eating her children’s waffles. Rose stared at them.

  “Hugo?”

  The boys at the table all looked up at her. “Yes,” they said. In unison.

  It was him. Or rather they were him.

  Three Hugos as he had looked when she met him. Hugo as a little boy. Sandy hair. Crooked smile. Chocolate eyes. Three pretty little boys sitting at her kitchen table in place of her children.

  The larger version of Hugo stopped just behind her, taking in the sight of the three changelings eating waffles. He wrapped his hand around Rose’s arm. She looked at him. Hugo—big Hugo—was frightened, his face pale. The defiant brat from earlier was gone.

  What the hell was going on? Hugo replacing Josh. Hugo replacing the children. There was something sinister about it. Wicked.

  At the table, the three little Hugos suddenly chorused, “We love you, Rosie.”

  “Whatever you’re doing you need to stop it.” Rose yanked her arm away from him.

  He was stricken. “I’m not doing anything, Rosie.” Shaking his head. “I promise.”

  Rose’s anger flared. “Where are Isaac and Adam, Hugo? Where is Penny?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’d tell you if I could. But I don’t know.” He was quivering. More a little boy than the other versions of himself at the table.

  Movement behind him on the ceiling drew Rose’s eye. A ceiling fan had sprouted where there was none in the reality of her home. It was spinning on its axis. The strong light from outside cast a shadow double on the cottage cheese of the ceiling.

  Grown Hugo followed her eyes. Suddenly he snatched her hand and began to haul her toward the back door. “We need to go, now!”

  Rose pulled against him and squinted at the fan. Something about it. It was starting to slow in its ellipses. And the shadow …

  It was beginning to … coagulate. To join with the actual fan. Shadow blades and wooden blades pulling into one another. Morphing into the motor, stretching out across the ceiling. A familiar shape somehow.

  Then, one of the blades sprouted a tarsal hook.

  Rose gasped. The fan suddenly sprang to life, bending upward, animating. The center popped off the ceiling, pull chains swinging, its exhaust screen forming an ad hoc abdomen.

  One of the island’s Spiders.

  It was growing rapidly, its legs stretching. Its carapace creaking with the metamorphosis.

  The little Hugos kept eating their waffles, watching the Spider transform. Their faces pleasant. Unworried.

  Big Hugo, however, was trying to drag her out the front door. “Come on!”

  Through the window Rose could see the party was still going on. All those people. And—

  “Josh,” Rose heard herself say.

  And suddenly she was running out the back door. Leaving all the Hugos behind her.

  She tripped over the threshold and fell face-first into a mound of pink sand. For a moment Rose was terrified that somehow Hugo had transported her back to the island.

  But when she looked up, what she saw was somehow two places that had become one.

  The pink sand of the island’s beaches blanketed a place that was somehow both Rose’s backyard and the parking lot of the Orange Tastee. Isaac’s birthday party was still in progress. Parents were eating cake by parked cars. Someone had placed a party hat on the grinning fiberglass Orange drive-through speaker. The bouncy castle rocked and danced as inside a dozen young Hugos jumped and drank soda from wax paper cups. Rose looked around. All the children had been replaced by little Hugos. A party of one, multiplied.

  Rose turned. Through the glass she could see that the Spider was still growing. A single leg bent down and made contact with the floor. She didn’t have much time.

  Josh was still barbecuing, the grill perched on a dune. His back was to her. Rose felt certain she needed to get him. To get them out of there. She stumbled upright, the sand spraying out from behind her struggling feet. “Josh!”

  He turned.

  It was Hugo. Again.

  “Stop doing that!” Rose was infuriated.

  Hugo’s voice a whine: “I’m not doing it.”

  “Then why is it happening?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re not my husband, Hugo.”

  “No, I’m your Hugo. And you’re my Rose.”

  He reached out to touch her face, but she slapped it away. “Don’t.”

  In the far corner of the parking lot, Rose spied a gathering of the young Hugos. There were more than a dozen of them, standing placid-faced around her car.

  Rose took a step toward it, her feet skidding down the dune. What were they looking at?

  Her minivan was filled with sand. Like one of those jars you bring back from vacation. Filled to the brim with pink grit, pressed against the glass. It rocked slightly in its place. Small jolts.

  A few more of the young Hugos joined the gathering.

  There was a mouse of a movement inside. Small pink curl, pushed up against the glass of the window.

  A hand.

  “Oh, my God.” Rose knew. Felt it. Was sure of it.

  It was Isaac. Or Penny. Or Adam. Suffocating under all that sand. One of her children, drowning inside of her car.

  Rose burst into a run. She had to get them out.

  She weaved her way through the group of Hugos. Behind the glass, the small hand was limp, no longer moving. Was it Isaac? Adam? She wrapped her hand around the lever and pulled. The door jammed. “Please!” She yanked again, but the latch wouldn’t give. “Oh God, please!”

  A small hand landed over hers. One of the young Hugos. His eyes were calm. He brushed hair off of his forehead, the way she had seen him do it a million times before.

  “They don’t belong here, Rose. Leave them in there.”

  Rose screamed. Pitched his hand off. She gave a final pull to the handle and the door swung wide, spewing forth pink sand. Rose plunged her hands into it. Digging.

  Her fingers brushed the softness of flesh, and suddenly they were wrapped around a small arm. She pulled, calling out as she did it.

  Isaac.

  Rose wrenched him free, dragging his torso from the weight of the sand. On his head was his dark red bike helmet. Red like a blood clot. He was cold, his body lifeless. Rose cradled him in her arms. She was sobbing. The group of Hugos contracted around her as she fell to her knees, their faces blank horrors. “Why?” she cried. “Why?”

  They all looked up suddenly. Movement on top of the car. Rose turned to see t
he Spider, grown to full size, perched on the roof of her minivan. Mandibles raised.

  She didn’t even have time to cry out before it launched itself at her and her son.

  * * *

  Rose sprang from their bed so quickly that Josh could barely believe she had a moment before been sleeping. In seconds she was out the door, her voice loud and panicked in the hallway.

  “Isaac! Isaac!”

  Josh twisted and rose to follow her, his body sore from his earlier ministrations and sitting these past hours against the wall. He reached the threshold of their room just in time to see Rose stumble over a toy that had been left in the darkened hallway. His wife fell to her knees, still moving, still yelling, “Isaac! Isaac!”

  “Rose?” Josh hissed.

  Still on her hands and knees, Rose pushed the door of the boys’ room open and began crawling across the floor. “Isaac!”

  “Rose, stop.” Josh whispered as loudly as he dared. “You’re going to scare them.”

  But her panicked hands were already roaming over the blankets of Isaac’s bed, searching for his sleeping form. She cried out as her fingers found his mouth, felt his warm, moist breath across the palm of her hand. Not dead. Not dead. Not dead.

  She collapsed onto Isaac’s bedspread, crying hot tears into the fabric.

  Not dead.

  “Honey?” Josh knelt by her.

  She turned, seeing her husband for the first time since waking. She put her hands on his face, confirming the reality of him. Confirming the Joshness of him.

  Rose worried that if she let go, this world might start slipping the way the last one had. That the moment she took her hands from the flat planes of Josh’s cheeks, they would change into someone else’s cheeks. If she moved too far from Isaac’s sleeping body, it would cease to breathe once more, and she would experience the loss all over again.

  Suddenly everything in real life felt threatened. Tenuous.

  She cried into Josh’s neck. “It was so awful.”

  He cradled her on the floor. Folding her inside his long arms. Rocking her the way she rocked the children when they were upset. Rose sank into Josh’s warmth.

  His touch was a relief. She was not a ghost. He was not a widower.

  She felt his hands stroke the back of her head. “You’re okay. You’re okay.”

  Rose shook her head. “He’s … torturing me. Hiding you. Hurting the children. He says he’s not doing it … but he is … he has to be.”

  “Why?”

  Rose could think of a dozen answers. Jealousy. Anger. Rejection. Hate. Love.

  “Mommy, are you okay?” Across the room, Adam had woken up to the sound of Rose’s cries. His eyes had found the shape of his mother and father huddled together by the side of Isaac’s bed.

  No, not okay. Mommy is not okay. Rose buried her sobs in Josh’s chest.

  Josh answered for her. “Mommy just had a nightmare, sweetheart. Go back to sleep. Everything will be fine.”

  nineteen

  Rose was not so sure that everything would be fine.

  In fact, she was pretty sure that things would never be fine again. She wished that she could reverse the order of her life. That she could hit the rewind button and fly backward through these last few weeks, undoing the mistakes she had made, righting the wrongs.

  She pictured herself and Hugo peeling themselves up from his bed, pulling the bedspread back into an unmade mess. The strange dance as Hugo’s limbs pulled away from hers, picking imprints of kisses off her neck, her breast, her face. Then Josh handing the comic she had shown him back to her and watching her put it in her bedside drawer, his mind suddenly erased of the knowledge of it. The crumbs scattering themselves away from the line Josh had made of them on the kitchen table. Hugo stepping backward away from her home, holding that plastic clamshell of grocery store cupcakes. Isaac’s birthday party in reverse, the children floating in the bouncy castle in an inside-out gravity. She would close the albums containing Hugo’s artwork and unknow them. The meeting in the outlet mall would unhappen. She would pull herself up off the floor and put the comic book on which some stranger had written her dreams back into its envelope and walk it out to the mailbox. She would find herself back in Naomi’s office. The Man Who Was Not Hugo’s car would follow her backward on the highway, through a disparate series of bachelor chores. She would unfollow him to his home. She would unsee him putting trash into the Dumpsters behind his work.

  And all of it would lead her back to the moment when it all happened.

  I should have just taken them to fucking McDonald’s.

  Rose thought about that rainy day in Hemsford. The line of cars spilling from the drive-through out onto the street. The wail the boys made when the motions of the car made it clear that they would not be stopping there.

  But before the everything that had happened … in that moment in the car … had Rose been fine?

  Or had she been simply less confused about the not fineness of her life? More settled with it?

  Rose longed for the way she used to be unhappy. The general gripes about the state of her marriage and the difficulties of child rearing. The repetitiveness of life. The disappointments of her body and the tyranny of other parents.

  That old unhappiness was a haven to which she longed to return.

  But she had destroyed it when she looked up into that drive-through window and saw him.

  She could never unsee him. She couldn’t unknow what she knew.

  And the mysteries that she had pursued with such delight, that had seemed a respite from the old unhappiness, they were the new tyrannies of her life.

  Why? How? To what end?

  Her dreams had been entwined with Hugo’s for decades, but now that their lives had intersected, the entanglement felt more like entrapment.

  Hugo was inescapable.

  She no longer cared about the mystery of their circumstance. The questions that had been so seductive before had all faded before a single practical quandary.

  How do I make it stop?

  * * *

  Rose and Josh had returned to their room after her sobs woke Adam.

  Josh held her while she cried quietly into his chest. When she had felt herself softening into sleep, Rose had pinched her arms and bitten the back of her hand. She did not want to return to the nightmare. She did not want to again experience that shifting hell of a dream.

  Finally, she forced herself to her feet. Josh had showered and left for work, two tan Band-Aids on his busted knuckles. He kissed her forehead as Rose pressed the plunger on the French press.

  “We will figure this out.… There has to be something.”

  “What if there isn’t?”

  But Josh was certain there must be. A pill for dreamless sleep. Something to give Rose’s body the rest it needed while cordoning off her mind to … well, to whatever it was it usually did.

  “I’ll do some research. Maybe among the side effects.…”

  He told her strange dreams were reported with many pharmacological interventions. But the absence of dreams wasn’t the sort of thing test subjects usually noted.

  “I’ll find something, Rose. Something that will knock you out so much you can’t dream.” He gripped her arms. “We will figure this out.”

  But until then, Rose wanted to stay awake. She drank coffee and waited for the children to wake up. She knew now was the time to lean on routine. Just do what you always do and don’t think about what will happen when you fall asleep. Bodies dressed. Lunches packed. Cheeks kissed.

  She had pulled Zackie into a hug as he and Adam came crashing down the stairs in their pajamas. His skin was so wonderfully pink and yielding and alive.

  Not dead. Not dead.

  “Jeesh, Mom. Let go,” he finally complained.

  * * *

  Adam was bit more subdued than usual. He finished his breakfast and got dressed without being asked. He remembered seeing his mommy and daddy in his bedroom the night before. Mommy crying on the flo
or by Zackie’s bed. So sad. Sadder than a mommy should ever be.

  He decided it must have been a dream. He must have been dreaming. That made more sense.

  After he cleared his plate, he pulled out his Lego bin. Started assembling the map of Hugo’s island. Why had what Mr. David told him made Daddy so angry? He and Isaac pretended to be Hugo all the time and Daddy didn’t get angry. If Mr. David was Mommy’s friend from when they were kids, he would have pretended to be Hugo, too. Adam thought about the loud sound the chair had made when Daddy stood up. The smack of it hitting the floor. It had scared him.

  Adam set up the Blanket Pavilion on the bumpy surface of the Lego mat.

  “Hi, honey.” Mom was sitting on the ground next to him. This was unusual, but then, she looked unusual. The skin on her forehead was shiny with grease, and there were gray bags under her eyes. “I was thinking we should get you a new Lego set.”

  Adam nodded and snapped together the brown domes that made the Plank Orb.

  “Is there any one that you think you may like?”

  Mom was looking at the map as he built it. Adam shrugged.

  “I think we should put this back in the bin.” Her fingers trailed on the edge of it. Poised to tug it away. “It’s almost time to go to school.”

  Adam suddenly felt sure his mom was going to steal his toy. Or break it. It was that feeling he got about Isaac sometimes—that even though he said he would give something back, he wouldn’t. That it would take telling Mom to get it back.

  But here, he was getting this feeling from Mom. Who would he complain to if his mother stole his toy from him?

  And somehow, this all tied up in his mind with the sound of the chair slamming against the floor last night and the dream about Mommy crying. Somehow, it all had something to do with Hugo.

  He put his hand protectively on the map. “I want to play with this when I get home.… Okay, Mommy?”

  Mom nodded slowly and her hand pulled away from the edge. Adam felt the feeling drain away. Mommy knew how much Hugo meant to him. She wouldn’t take him away.

  “But put it away for now, Addy.” Her voice was sad. Tired. “Okay, honey?”

  Adam nodded and snapped the pieces apart quickly, getting them into the box before she could change her mind. He carried the bin to its place on the shelf … for a moment he thought maybe he should hide it. Put it in his room somewhere or under his bed.