Hugo & Rose

by Bridget Foley

  Isaac. Adam. Penny.

  Each of them a part of Josh and Rose.

  Two cells that had found each other in the dark tunnels of her body. One pushing its way past the fortress of the cellular wall, until it finally exploded itself inside. From the two there was suddenly one … that then divided again and again and again—half, half, half … somehow the division of itself making more instead of less.

  Twisted strands, beads containing the instructions for growing humanity. Forming into miniature organs, pencil tips fluttering, dark buds of eyes and ears. Blobs of limbs. Each already with its own proclivities and propensities. A seed that could bloom into a tendency toward depression, or genius, or risk taking … All there in the fish-shaped sliver in the dark of the womb, burrowed down into its endometrial bed. Mother’s first homemade meal.

  Rose felt full of the miracle of what she had with Josh.

  What they had built together.

  People. Life.

  The glow of the orgasm still felt warm inside her.

  Josh fell asleep quickly in their bed, the length of his chest rising and falling under the blankets.

  It will all be okay.

  twenty-one

  Rose held on to that feeling of okayness for most of the night. She stayed awake in the electric glow of the TV, keeping company with broadcast-ready doctors holding forth about vaginal odors and the benefits of green tea.

  She didn’t even feel tired … not really, not the way she should have after more than a day and a half without sleep. Her limbs felt jerky and sensitive—but not tired. Likely it was the caffeine. Or the ephedra. Or the ginseng … though Rose felt sure that particular ingredient in her energy pills was ancient Chinese bullshit.

  But as dawn crept its fingers into the windows, Rose felt herself begin to fray again. There was now a constant ringing in her ears, a consistent pitch made louder by the quiet of her sleeping house. When her head pitched back from her neck one too many times, Rose decided she should no longer sit still.

  There were things that could be done. If she needed to be awake, there might as well be some benefit to it. There was laundry to wash and fold, drawers to organize. Rose fixed her mind on a dried brown puddle of mysterious origin that had appeared on the top shelf of the fridge. It had bothered her for a week … but there had never been time to take care of it.

  No time like the present. Rose headed to the kitchen.

  Hugo was behind the door of the refrigerator.

  Warm washcloth in her hand, Rose lifted the pitcher of filtered water off the shelf and knocked the topmost package off of a stack of yogurts. The container tumbled onto the tempered glass.

  Blood orange.

  As Rose’s wrist twisted to put the container back onto the stack, her brain took the picture on the lid and lit up a twisty pathway from orange to Orange Tastee to Hugo in a paper cap in the drive-through, then to Hugo as she had last seen him.

  I hope he’s okay.

  That word again. Okay. And as she thought about Hugo’s okayness, she felt the last remnants of her own slip away.

  Selfish. So selfish. He lost his job, remember? No more paper cap for him now.

  The sight of Josh’s hands filled her brain. Their swollen red knuckles. The bruises across them. The scatter of small cuts.

  You didn’t even ask what happened. Because you knew. Your husband beat him and left him.

  Rose tried to shake off the thoughts. She didn’t deserve this. She had made a bad decision, but it was over. She couldn’t be concerned with him. She couldn’t worry about what her decisions did to the feelings of a stranger—

  Not a stranger. Hugo. Your Hugo.

  So very selfish.

  He NEEDS YOU.

  “My children need me,” Rose said aloud.

  “What, Mom?”

  Rose turned. Isaac stood in the kitchen in his pajamas. He yawned and scratched his thigh, oblivious to the storm in his mother’s mind.

  “Who were you talking to?”

  Rose was suddenly aware of the washcloth in her hand. It had grown cold as she had stared into the recesses of the refrigerator. The dried spill was untouched.

  How long had she been standing there?

  “Mom?”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie.… No one. I wasn’t talking to anyone.”

  * * *

  Rose’s perception of time was askew, her patterns off. She spent the morning just responding to the children’s needs rather than anticipating them as she usually did. The stretched feeling now encompassed the world … everything was liminal. Between states.

  Somewhere Isaac and Adam were playing. Rose remembered supervising their dressing … but maybe what she remembered was yesterday. Or the day before that. Or one of the thousands of times before that.

  Penny’s potty seat was on the kitchen floor, a small turd sitting dry in its center. Had she brought that out? Rose didn’t know. Maybe. She wasn’t sure. She must have. Right? If not her, then who else?

  “Honey?” Josh was trying to get her attention.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Josh was crouching down to look her in the eye, his brows pressed together above his nose. Two commas of worry.

  Rose felt her head tip forward in a nod. Her tongue felt bitter and wide. A fat flap of stale, coffee-flavored meat in her mouth. Rose forced the sluggish thing into service. “Yes. Of course.”

  Rose waited until she heard Josh’s car pull out before she pushed two more pills out of the blister pack. She swallowed them dry, feeling their hard forms scrape down the sides of her esophagus, foreign bodies leaving a trail against the smooth muscle of her throat. The pills dropped through the sphincter at her stomach’s north pole, before falling into the slosh of bile at the organ’s center. The pill’s cheap coating began to slough off, and the chemical promise of sleeplessness released itself into Rose’s body.

  * * *

  At the playground mommies flanked the edges of the sand pit, their eyes flitting from their children and their cell phones. A few were sitting together, chatting politely. If any of them noticed Rose and Penny’s arrival beneath their wide sunglasses, their faces did not betray it. Rose found an empty bench and directed Pen to go play. Penny had taken a direct route to another girl child digging in the sand on the other side of their play park. She picked up one of the shovels lying next to the girl and immediately began digging. The other child did not seem to notice, but Rose lifted her hand to signal to the woman she supposed was her mother. Playground sign language. Is that okay?

  The woman lifted her hand back with a nod.

  It’s okay.

  Rose ironed her eyes with the heels of her palms … pushing the sleepiness out of them. The tyranny of sleep pressed down upon her. How much longer could she go? Even with chemical help she didn’t think she could continue to function much longer. Solution or no, sooner or later Rose would have to sleep.

  And the nightmares and Hugo would be waiting.

  The squeal of the swings was hypnotic. Rising and falling in a squeaky “ee-oo-ee-oo.” Rose’s eyes found Penny. She was playing well with the other girl, having co-opted her bucket now.

  Next time, I’ll have to remember to bring sand toys. I always forget.

  Rose watched the children on the swings pumping their legs. Ee-oo-ee-oo.

  ee-oo-ee-oo-ee-oo-ee-oo

  In the distant corner of the playground, a smatter of sand tumbled from its perch atop a tower. Rose sensed the movement in her periphery, the subtle shift in the landscape of the park.

  ee-oo-ee-oo

  Next to the mound, two blond boys of about three were fighting. Twins. Dressed identically. They were arguing, bickering over taking turns on one of the spring-mounted bouncies. A grinning elephant. Both toddlers wanted to be astride it (that one!), even though there was another bouncy creature (a tiger) right next to it. The boys pulled at each other’s shirts and ripped each other’s hands off of the elephant. Their voices carried over the pl
ayground, the high-pitched tone children get before tipping into tears. Where is their mother? Rose wondered. She would have stepped in by now. She remembered Zackie and Addy at about that age … she would never have let a spat between them like the one she was witnessing go on for so long without intervening.

  A sudden spray of sand shot up behind the twins. Loosed from the ground.

  Rose squinted. Was someone throwing sand? But then there was another spray, followed by another. A volley of grit landed in one of the twins’ faces and he began to cry, his eyes squeezed shut, face red. His brother looked around, guilty, though he had not thrown the sand. Rose followed his gaze … the patch of playground containing the eroding mounds was vibrating. Shifting oddly. Rose stood to get a better look. Something was moving about under the sand, digging itself up from beneath. Rose could see its dark green body wending its way toward the sunlight, sand catching on its scales.

  The twin who was not crying took a step toward the creature moving under the sand. Curious.

  It was then that Blindhead exploded from the ground, sending a blast of dirt and grit into the air.

  The beast pulled its muscled bulk out of the ground, rearing back and up until it could support the heft of its three sightless heads. They loomed over the children, the topmost parallel to the play structures. The heads waved out over the playground, independent of one another, their wire-thin tongues flickering out behind jagged fangs. Rose could see the reflection of the playground on the too-taut skin of their eyeless skulls—children standing frozen on redwood bridges and platforms. Shocked into silence by the sudden appearance of a monster in their midst.

  Suddenly, the lowest head shot out and seized the first crying twin, driving the boy into its mouth. A small morsel. A flash of blond hair was visible for a moment between the folds of its maw. And then the boy was gone.

  The screaming finally began.

  Mothers and children were suddenly everywhere, leaping off the play structures, knocking one another off swings. Screams of “Mommy!” rang out from dozens of throats … the same name for so many different women.

  The youngest among the children were frozen in place, screaming with tears but unable to command their legs to move. Women were running into the fray from all over the park, the sand shooting up from their scrabbling feet.

  Blindhead angled from the ground and whipped itself onto the monkey bars.

  Rose tore her eyes from the snake.

  Penny was gone.

  Through the legs of the women, Rose could make out the bucket and shovel Penny had co-opted lying abandoned on the sand on the other side of the playground.

  On the other side of the monster.

  Rose burst into a run, screaming Penny’s name. She ducked under a structure—the small hideaway fort—then followed the path through.

  “Penny!… Penny!”

  The sun shining through the plastic tunnel above revealed the snake’s still heads, tongues waving above the shape of a little girl. The shadows sat poised, waiting for movement.

  Rose watched from below as the shadow of the child tried to pull herself out of its reach. The plastic resounded, betraying her with a dull thud.

  There was a scream and the sound of denim sliding against plastic.

  Rose pushed herself out into the open as the topmost head pulled the girl out—a snail from its shell. The force of the movement snapped the child’s spine and suddenly her cries ceased. It held her flaccid body aloft a moment.

  If possible, the pitch of the screaming crowd got even louder.

  The creature dislocated its jaw, swallowing the girl whole, as Rose spotted Penny.

  Her daughter was sitting on the sand by the swings, oblivious to the violence around her, pulling a moat around herself with her chubby hands. Her movements were broad and wide. An easy target.

  Rose broke into a run as Blindhead’s body turned toward Penny’s movement. It was lightning quick, slithering from the structure behind Rose—

  Alighting right above Pen.

  Rose dove into the sand, her arms reaching out for Penny just as one of the creature’s jaws closed around her small body and lifted her upward.

  Rose screamed as a second head joined it, biting into the soft flesh of Penny’s lower half.

  Momma? Okay, Momma?

  Rose looked down.

  Penny was sitting across from her, a look of concern in her large eyes. “You okay, Momma?”

  Rose was sprawled out across the hot sand, her arms outreached around Penny’s spread knees.

  All around the playground, mothers and children were staring at her. Watching. Stock-still. Alarmed by her strange behavior.

  * * *

  “I was awake, Josh. I was completely awake.”

  Rose paced on the phone. Her heart was thumping.

  She must have looked like an idiot running through the playground. Screaming Penny’s name. Rose imagined what the other mothers must have seen, no idea of the horror that was unspooling before her eyes.

  It had been so real.

  So, so real.

  “Sometimes the brain…” Josh’s voice on the phone sounded careful. As though he were picking his words. “Given enough sleep deprivation, the brain will give itself little naps. Microsleeps.”

  Rose winced as she remembered the sound of the little girl’s spine as it snapped above her. The image of Penny’s shoulders disappearing into Blindhead’s mouth.

  “I can’t do this much longer. I feel like I’m breaking. But if I fall asleep…”

  Josh was quiet on the phone. Rose could hear the change in his breath, his lips pursing. “I’ll get the Klonopin.”

  Josh had that dark sound. Rose could tell he was going to do something he considered wrong. Bully someone into giving it to him. Steal it from somewhere. Lie.

  She didn’t care. She needed sleep.

  Sleep without nightmares.

  Sleep without Hugo.

  “I love you, Rose.”

  “I love you, too.”

  The room tone on the other end went dead. Josh was setting about his task. It was almost over. Josh would do what he needed to do to get her the drugs. Tonight she would go to sleep with the buffer of the antiepileptics stifling her brain, no matter what—

  The sound of the front door slamming against its frame echoed through the house. The familiar refrain of the boys getting home from school.

  “Adam! Isaac! I told you! No slamming the door!”

  Her head felt so heavy.

  She could sense Zackie standing right next to her. The smell of him. “Sorry, Mom.”

  Rose’s brain ran an auditory loop of the sounds it had just registered. Door slam. Footsteps. Door slam. Footsteps. Door slam. Footsteps.

  Something was missing.

  She looked up. Isaac stood in the kitchen, his backpack still on his shoulders.

  There had been the sound of only one pair of small feet.

  “Where is Adam?”

  Isaac shrugged. “He wasn’t on the bus.”

  twenty-two

  A dribble of ice cream broke across Adam’s knuckle.

  He licked it off, his tongue catching paper, cone, and soft serve in the same sweep. He would have to eat it a little faster not to make a mess in Mr. David’s car. He didn’t want Mr. David to think that he was a baby who didn’t know how to eat an ice-cream cone. Someone who didn’t know how not to make a mess. He was a good boy. A big boy.

  He was such a big boy that Mr. David even let him sit in the front seat, without a booster or anything.

  It was awesome.

  Adam was so lucky he had seen Mr. David waving across the street from where the buses all lined up. Mrs. H, the bus monitor, had been talking to a teacher and some new crying girl and had not seen Adam step out of the line and step behind the bus to shout hello to Mommy’s friend.

  Then Mr. David had curled his hand, telling him to cross the street.

  Adam had hesitated. He wasn’t supposed to do that on his own ye
t.

  But Mr. David, who had told him he was actually Hugo, seemed to think it was fine. He looked both ways and then curled his hand again. Adam took that as permission and he had jogged across the street as fast as he could. He felt giddy when he reached the other side. A sense that he had done something big. Crossed the street by himself! Something big boys do.

  Mr. David told him he’d asked his mommy for permission to take Addy on an adventure. Would Adam like that?

  Oh yes, please, and thank you very, very much, please.

  And now they were in Mr.-David-who-was-Hugo’s car on their way to a movie. And Adam had gotten a Happy Meal and an ice-cream cone, but he got to eat the ice-cream cone first because otherwise it would melt, and it wouldn’t be there when he was done with his hamburger.

  It was awesome.

  And it was even better because it was just him … no Isaac. If Isaac had been there, it would be him in the front seat. He would be telling Addy not to let the ice cream drip, even if Adam was already being careful about it.

  Addy felt special. Big. Good.

  Outside, the highway rolled by and Adam could make out the full sweep of it from where he sat. The dash of Mr. David’s car was really cool, with lots of knobs instead of buttons. Adam’s fingers itched to turn them, but he knew that was something grown-ups didn’t like, so he held himself back. The car was shorter than Mom’s car. Closer to the ground. He could feel the vibration of the tires under his feet.

  Adam decided the car was also his favorite color, blue. Sometimes his favorite color changed … but today it was definitely blue.

  And it smelled good. A sweet plastic smell, kinda melty and old. Adam liked it.

  Mr. David was quiet as he drove. He told Adam that the radio didn’t work so they would have to talk to keep themselves entertained, and would that be okay? Adam said that it was. He wanted to talk to Mr. David about what it was like to be Hugo … but instead Mr. David had gotten quiet and kinda drifty, like grown-ups do when they think about things.