Primal

by Serra, D. A.

  There is an unnatural pause. Curtis waits for her to continue. He knows she called for a reason.

  She says, “So he’s dead, you know, the last one.”

  “Yeah, I saw that on the AP. You must be relieved.”

  “Uh…not actually.”

  “Why not?”

  “Can’t shake him.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s like he put some kind of invisible cage around me. Or more like he’s actually inside in my brain. Sitting there pulling strings.”

  “That doesn’t sound too healthy.”

  “Actually I may be seeing things…you know, things that aren’t there.”

  “Uh, oh.” Now, Curtis realizes the seriousness. She was such a fragile thing when she burst into his cabin that night. He remembers thinking she looked like a half-drown kitten in his doorway: wet, freezing, terrified. No one was more surprised than he was when she survived. But that kind of violence has a cost. She has images in her mind that must shake her sanity.

  “How serious is it?” he asks.

  “Hank left me. He took Jimmy.”

  “Oh, that sucks, Alison.”

  “I got laid off.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Truth is I’m not completely sure what’s real anymore. A few minutes ago I was wondering if you were real.”

  “I feel real.”

  “But maybe you’re not. Maybe I didn’t actually call you right now and I’m not really talking on the phone. Maybe I’m sitting in an asylum at this very moment staring out randomly and being spoon-fed succotash.”

  “I can’t confirm anything else except you are definitely talking to me and no one has said succotash since 1950.”

  “Everyone around here thinks I’m crazy.”

  “You gotta right to be crazy for a bit, but then you need to get your act together, get your job back, and start doing mom things again. If you don’t, then, it doesn’t matter whether Burne’s dead or alive; he still owns your ass.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s right.”

  “You know it.”

  “What about you? You know we have a guest room. It’s yours when you’re ready.”

  “Thanks, but I hear you’re crazy.”

  She smiles. She hears him chuckle.

  “Take care, Curtis.”

  “Bye, Alison.”

  Night slipped into the kitchen as she sat there immobile. She had adjusted to the darkening room and hadn’t noticed. When she finally rises from the kitchen chair and grabs the teacup, she has to turn on the lights to put the cup into the sink. Her right leg, which was bent underneath her, had fallen asleep and she shakes it as she walks toward the stairs. She and Hank have never voluntarily slept apart. By tomorrow, surely Hank will be back. He will talk to me. I will go to therapy. I will do whatever it takes to bring them home. She turns off all the lights downstairs. She walks over to switch on the alarm system. She reaches for the touch pad, but yanks back as though she has been shocked. No. This is part of it, she thinks. The alarm, the weapons, the night watch, they are all symptoms. This fear is like an infection that has spread out and devoured my life. Enough. She turns her back on the alarm panel and she feels empowered by this simple move. She starts up the stairs to the second floor. The aggressive adrenaline that has been fueling her muscles for a month turns off like a spigot, and as she lifts her feet from one step to the next, she feels crushingly weary. Her legs are dead as stumps, and her arms hang useless and heavy by her side. She feels as if all the blood has been drained from her body. She drags herself up the last few steps to the little landing that separates her and Hank’s bedroom from Jimmy’s. She stops and peeks into Jimmy’s room. The paradox hits her: stuffed with so many things and yet utterly empty. She hates that his bed is perfectly made and it reminds her that Polly had been there that morning. Yes, how could she forget that? Poor Polly. She will call her tomorrow, call and apologize. How does that conversation go? Gee, hi, sorry I tried to stab you with the butcher knife, could you finish the laundry now? Damn. How could I have been that confused? I must have scared her to death.

  Leaning against Jimmy’s doorway, Alison would prefer it if his room were a complete mess, the kind of childhood jungle that only a nine-year-old could create, the kind of mess that would indicate without question that her little boy was home. I want him. Her chest aches. She looks around at all of his toys; they are waiting, too. His noisy prized robot is silent in the corner. His school books are gone from the desk and when she sees that she feels a sickening free fall inside. She is all alone in her own home at night. When has that ever happened? Not since before Jimmy was born. She turns toward her bedroom. Even with all the furniture, the family photos, the drapes, the bookcases, and silk flowers, her house feels hollow. She feels hollow. She thinks, if I open my mouth right now there would be nothing but a long hollow echo because the inside of me is dark and empty. She enters her bedroom and walks over to the window blinds where she has stood diligently night after night since their return, scanning the street for a dead man. She couldn’t even count the number of hours she has wasted staring into the bleak nothingness of the night, instead of making love to her husband, instead of curling up skin-to-skin in his arms where she belongs. She grabs the cord, and she takes a slow long breath, and then, she shuts the blinds. She steps back and stares at the blocked window. Her home has finally closed its eyes. The relentless vigilance has ended. Alison turns her back on the window blinds and she proceeds into the bathroom. She feels compelled in an almost ritualistic way to wash thoroughly and finally. She forces herself to close the bathroom door and she does not lock it on purpose. She pulls down a big fluffy towel and twists the shower faucet to hot. She strips down and catches sight of herself in the mirror. It stuns her. Turning fully front, she tilts her head, and blinks her eyes. The image in the mirror slaps her face. Naked, she studies herself honestly shocked: her chest looks corrugated as the bones that make up her ribcage are prominent, and the space on either side of her collarbone looks like a trough. How much weight have I lost? Her skin is loose and sallow. At the hairline, she sees the beginning of grey roots. Her shoulders appear hunched and the whites of her eyes are bloodshot. So, this is what crazy looks like, she thinks bitterly, not a pretty picture. Bereft, she turns away from her reflection and steps into the shower. This time, however, she forces herself to completely close the shower door and not leave it part way open so she can hear. Instead, she turns the water on full force, gets under it, and stands with her head submerged in the downpour. She prepares for the panic. Here it comes: heart rate up, puffy breathing, jumpy muscles. Now, she will mount a different kind of fight. She will not give in to the panic. She must master her negative thoughts and pull herself back from the lip of destruction. The enemy is no longer outside of her. In the gush of the shower water, she can finally understand this and even as she does, her primitive instincts taunt her screaming: Open your eyes! Open the door! Open the blinds! Listen. Watch! She clenches her fingers and her toes. “Stop!” Do you want your life back? Your husband? Your son? Your job? Feel the water hot on your head, good and hot on your back; feel it, you’re fine. See, you are fine. I am done being a hostage. Tomorrow I will go to the therapist. Tomorrow I will start the meds. Tonight will be my one and only lonely night. She scrubs her hair and scalp vigorously. She soaps every inch of her body twice. She tips her head up and allows the free flowing water to flush her face, hoping it will flow through her eyes and ears and pores and wash her brain clean.

  Fifteen minutes, later she steps out of the shower. The bathroom is steamed up; the mirror is fogged to a solid white. She slips her puckered skin into her favorite pair of flannel pajamas and they feel glorious. She takes the few steps to the bathroom door. She reaches for the doorknob and hesitates. What if…what if right behind this door…it’s not as though she could have heard anything in the shower like that. He could be… No. Stop. The problem is inside me. She closes her hand around the knob. Blood rushes to her face. Adre
naline swamps her limbs: pump, pump, pump. Do it. Do it. She swings open the bathroom door and sees…no one. This is the tiny reinforcement she needs. She breathes out a long slow stream through pursed lips, calms, almost smiles. She has turned the corner. She climbs into bed and grabs the novel on her nightstand. This is a transitional night. Tomorrow she will start the real journey home from the island.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Hank’s old room smells of familiarity. There is a distinctive scent in his mother’s house: a blend of cinnamon, which she uses every morning in her coffee, and Charlie perfume, which she sprays liberally on her clothes. It is an odd mixture but that is what makes it so uniquely his home. The scent reminds him of innocent times when all he cared about was music videos, winning at tetherball, and grapes. He smiles nostalgically and tries to fix the time when he started wanting so much more. What he wanted and needed when he was young felt so immediate, so much more visceral than the things he wants now. He remembers, in middle school, wanting to kiss Heather Roseman that day she came to school in her little sky blue shorts. And he did kiss her when she leaned over the water fountain. He got a detention for that, which seemed grossly unfair since everyone wanted to kiss her, and he was just the only kid who had the courage to do it. He thought he deserved a medal. He also remembers vividly when all he wanted in the world was to punch Mr. Caughey right between his beady eyes.

  “Henry Kraft, your homework was not in the pile yesterday.”

  “Yes, it was, Mr. Caughey,” Hank responded surprised.

  “No. It wasn’t. I went over all the papers last night and yours was missing.”

  “I put it there with the rest!”

  “Are you calling me a liar, Henry?”

  “Um…no? But I did the homework and I put it right there.” Hank’s cheeks were blooming red and fiery as the attention of the entire class was on him.

  “You get a zero.”

  “No! That’s not fair.”

  “You should get graded on homework you didn’t turn in? Is that fair to the students who worked hard?”

  Every cell in little Hank’s body was outraged. He had put the homework there, just like he always did. Mr. Caughey was so mean, he teased kids and called it humor, he was petty and self-important; and then he became solicitous and sickly sweet in front of the parents. Hank’s feeling of powerlessness was eating away at his insides. He could feel it chewing up his stomach. He had put his homework on the table with the others. Why wasn’t he believed? The zero would ruin all the good grades he had struggled for all year long. He slammed his fist on the desk.

  “I did it and I put it there.”

  “See me after class.”

  After school, Hank waited outside Mr. Caughey’s classroom and turned wide-eyed when he saw his dad striding down the school hallway.

  “Dad! What are you doing here?”

  “I thought I should ask you that. Mr. Caughey called my office.”

  “I did my homework, Dad.”

  Once inside the classroom, Mr. Caughey turned into an alien being from planet Suck Up. There was a sympathetic lilt to the tone of his voice that Hank had not heard in six months of daily class. Hank’s eyes narrowed as his teacher spoke to Hank’s dad as though they were colleagues and they both understood how trying middle school boys could be. Hank sat there as the teacher explained to his dad about Hank’s outburst in the classroom, his disrespect, and his lying about his homework. Hank’s fists were clenched beneath the desk and his desires were simple, direct, and all consuming. He waited for his dad to defend him. Mr. Kraft said, “I see” a few times and then apologized for Hank’s behavior and Hank thought his head would blow off. That was a moment of pure want, one item want, one thing wanted - to punch out Mr. Caughey. No rage in life is more passionate than the rage of the disrespected and defenseless. He couldn’t believe his dad was even listening. Why didn’t his dad believe him? Why was he unbelievable just because he was a kid? Why are all of the parents around always demanding respect but never showing any? Where was justice? He wanted to hit Mr. Caughey full-fisted right in the jaw. He wanted to do it so badly he jumped up out of his seat and ran from the classroom. Mr. Caughey shrugged his shoulders in complicity with Mr. Kraft who apologized again and went after his son.

  Hank rolls over big in his childhood bed trying to get comfortable but not wake Jimmy. Some teachers are like his wife, a gift to every child in her classroom, and some are petty bullies who humiliate with impunity and are fetid with arrogance. Since it can be hard for the parent to determine which teacher is which, that day Hank made a decision that he carries with him every single time he steps onto school property. Hank promised that he would always believe his own child, at the cost of being wrong, at the cost of alienating the teacher, at the cost of taking down the entire School Board, he would always side with his child, and he has always done so.

  What he wanted back then: to kiss Heather, to punch out Mr. Caughey, to be believed, all contributed drops to the groundwater of his character. Tonight, reminded of his basic self, he feels stripped of the trivial desires that grew up untamed like ivy on the inside of him. What made him want so many things? Was it the television? His friends? Did it invade like a virus from the outside, or were all these wants something that grew naturally within. He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. The moon is bright and throws its pasty gaze in through the window. Lying here, he realizes how much he truly does not want and he lists them: he does not want a bigger house, or a new car, or a 55” flat screen TV. He wants his wife, his son, and everyone healthy. Everything else is profoundly inconsequential. Everything else is negotiable.

  For five hours, Hank lies in bed and lets his mind wander like this. He tries to find relief in happy memories but nothing has been able to distract him. The discomfort in his mind has become physical. The mattress is lumpy, the sheets are scratchy, and the room feels excessively hot. The digital minute hand flips and the clock now reads 3:16 a.m. He turns over and looks at his son deep in sleep beside him. Do all parents think their children are beautiful, or is Jimmy really as beautiful as he seems? Hank feels envious of the peaceful sleep of children, the sleep that comes when nothing is your responsibility. He reviews the steps that led him back to his childhood home and he is suddenly certain that running out like that was wrong. It was just wrong. I know some of this is my inability to deal with the situation. She needs me. It’s Alison. It is my Allie. What if leaving sent her over the edge? What if she’s crying, or hysterical? What if she hurts herself? They have each been forever changed, and they need to adjust to this new world. He and Jimmy have been face-to-face with evil. It was an experience they shared on the floor that night, but it must have been easier to be together, to at least have had each other. Neither of them really knows what it was like to be Alison, to stand alone, to understand that it is kill or watch your family die, to stand in abject terror in the icy rain feeling the responsibility for all those lives, and to know you are their only hope of survival. How many other people would have been paralyzed? How many would have just hid behind a rock in the dark woods and wept? Is there some relief in being the helpless ones? What does it do to a peaceful spirit like hers to plunge a knife into the flesh and organs of another human being? Of course, she is stuck in that horror. How could she not be? He has not tried hard enough to save her. He has only wanted it all to go away, but there’s no blood on his hands. By her side is where he belongs. Those were the vows they took and she is his partner for life. No matter how hard. Bile in his stomach backs up and burns his throat as disgust overwhelms him, how could he have left her that way? Cautiously, he slips out of bed, careful not to wake Jimmy. He pulls on his worn jeans and Zeppelin sweatshirt. He grabs his socks and sneakers and silently leaves the room. He tiptoes across the hall to his mother’s room and enters.

  “Mom?” He speaks in a loud whisper.

  She rolls toward him, “Henry?”

  “Jimmy’s asleep. I’m go
ing home. I shouldn’t have left her.”

  “Good. You two go work it out. I’ll take care of Jimmy.”

  Hank sits down on the floor near the front door to put on his shoes and socks. His fatigue dissipates. Energy surges through him. He is certain where he needs to be. Jesus, I should not have left her. He pulls on his sneakers without untying them, grabs his car keys, and bolts out the front door. It only takes a few minutes of driving through the deserted suburban streets to hit the highway ramp. He considers calling Alison, but decides that she may have taken sleeping pills and have fallen asleep. He will be quiet so as not to wake her when he gets home just in case. And if she is asleep, he thinks, I will crawl in next to her and hold her safe until morning, and then I will get her the help she needs, and I will never desert her again.

  In her bedroom, Alison is soaked clean and velvety and warm in the arms of her feather comforter. The scalding shower reached into her soft tissues and unwound her knotted tendons and muscles leaving her deliciously limp. She had taken the time needed to do everything: cream rinse in her hair, shave her legs. The skin on her calves is smooth and slick and so her legs are slippery inside the threads of the fresh flannel pajamas. She turned off the bedside lamp not long after she began reading and promised herself tomorrow she would read more. She rolled over onto her side, pulled her legs up toward her chest, burrowed in like a furry rabbit and then without the help of pills and deep in a down-filled palm of comfort she drifted to sleep. Inside her mind, she is aware that she is sleeping and it feels glorious. She is finally on the path. In her dream, she is half-floating, half-skating over a glass-smooth frozen pond. She is wearing chiffon and it billows out behind her in gentle waves. She glides free of gravity and spinning with her arms up over her head in praise of the movement and the beauty of the pond all around her. She hops onto one foot and raises her back leg in an arabesque. Balanced, she leans her face forward into the cool breeze created by her own movement. And then she takes off on a spin so slow and so graceful that she feels it…clink...her eyelids spring open. What was that? The clink of the metal tongue of the front door knob as it opens. Someone has opened the front door. Or not. Or maybe not. Or maybe it was only part of my dream. The clink of the metal blade of the ice skates. Of course. It is only part of my dream. I will not be tormented by my imagination any longer. Only crazy people let crazy thoughts ruin their homes, steal their families. I am more resilient than that. I am smarter than that. I have too much to lose to allow this disintegration into madness. It has been remarkably easy to give in to the lunacy. How many times have I passed disheveled people on a public street, seen them talking to themselves, and never realized how thin the line is between them and me? I am ready now to take back control of my life. Damn it I am safe in my bed in the home I love. I will rise above this. No one is in my house. She smiles to herself and sinks her face into the soft forgiving cotton of her pillow. No one is in my house. She can feel there has been some kind of turning point and she is grateful. Her thoughts drift to Hank as she tumbles back toward sleep. How hard this must have been for my dear husband. How over the edge I must have been for that man who has loved me all of my adult life to walk out like that. I can’t imagine it now that my feet are back on solid ground. And look, miraculously, instinctively, my sweet husband did exactly what I needed. It was the proverbial slap across the face and it worked. I feel the dread that has been lying like dead weight on my chest has lifted. I can take a full breath of air without that constricted sensation. I needed another shock. I needed a serious shock like when they shock someone’s heart and it comes back to life. That is what happened to me when Hank and Jimmy walked out that door. Tomorrow will be a special day. And her thoughts are interrupted by the smallest sound, the tiniest nearly imperceptible creak from the loose floorboard, the floorboard in the foyer immediately to the left of the thin-legged side table. She knows exactly which board. She has wanted to have that fixed, wanted to get it nailed back down. She knows the sound of a foot on that board. She has heard that sound a thousand times. She knows it well, too well to pretend she did not hear it. With slow intensity, she rises up to sitting in her bed. Her ears are trained because she knows precisely where the next floorboard will sound. She waits for it. Nothing. Perhaps it is the house settling, one of the various innocent noises made by homes every day, like when the windows make a snapping sound as the bright sunlight hits them. Houses make noises: wood and glass expand and contract. This is fundamentally true. She knows this is fundamentally...creak - there it is. Her eyes narrow in on the bedroom doorway. Yes, she is sure. She is completely awake. She waited for a particular sound and that was it. Someone is slithering up the stairs taking care to be very quiet. Her heartbeat pulses in her throat. The dread hits her chest like a baseball bat knocking the wind out of her. He waited. Of course, he watched and he waited until she was alone. She slides her legs silently out from underneath the bed covers and she slips her body down onto the carpet. He is here. Where can she hide? Should she hide? He will find her. He will smell her like a beast. She reaches under the bed for the rifle. Where is it? She throws both her arms under the bed and sweeps them around frantically. Where? Panic clutches her and she begins to tremble! She remembers. The rifle is leaning up against the wall near the door to the hallway where Hank stashed it as Jimmy came up the stairs. She looks. Yes, she can just make out the shape of its outline in the dark. On her hands and knees, she scurries over to it while he takes the stairs one-by-one to the second floor cautious not to wake her. Fear strips away her pretense of sanity. She is an animal again. Her skin becomes damp as her heart races. Her breathing puffs staccato. Her eyes dart back and forth calculating her options. The comforter on the bed looks bunched up. That’s good because it looks like someone is sleeping there. That will give her an added second or two. In a quick blast of motion, she crawls over to the opened door to the Jack-n-Jill bathroom, which links her bedroom with Jimmy’s. She positions herself crouching to the side of the door. She lifts the rifle aiming exactly chest-high at the open doorway to her bedroom. She rests her elbows on her thighs and takes a secure and steady position. Ready. She’s going to blow him away. Time slows and the waiting feels endless even though she knows it takes only seconds to climb the stairs to the second floor. There! The dark silhouette of a man appears in the doorway. The figure takes a step toward the bed. The body is exposed. It is a clear shot. She’s got him. She begins to pull back on the trigger. Stop. She freezes. Disoriented. Wait. Is this real? Is it her husband? Inside, she screams at herself, don’t shoot! It’s Hank! Oh my god, and a split second before firing, in horror she puts the rifle down on the carpet.