“I forgot something,” I called and hurried back to my sister’s seat. I dropped down so the driver couldn’t see me and traced my fingers over the worn material, but I didn’t know what it was I was looking for, and the seat was slick under my hands, so I rose and stumbled past the driver, my face in flames when he saw my empty hands.
First period was boring. An hour of listening to Ms. Adams drown on and on about the Russian Revolution, and I kept picking at my thumb, squeezed it and watched as the blood beaded against the desk. Five, then six drops, and I smeared my fingers through it, drew a heart in the stain and then scribbled it out. Shane Connelly watched me, but I couldn’t stop myself. His face was calm. Smooth. I burned under all of that indifference, but my hands swooped up and down and my blood smeared over the desk, and the air was thick with the hot smell of iron.
At lunch, I looked for Mina, but she wasn’t in our usual seats by the window, so I sat alone and picked apart the chicken fingers the school system called healthy. I had my head down when someone sat next to me, and the air filled with the smell of sweat.
“Why were you doing that?” Shane’s voice is low, a whisper scraping past his lips, and I froze.
“Doing what?” I said even though I knew what he meant. I wanted to hear him say it.
“With your thumb.”
“I don’t know. Bored, I guess.”
He paused and glanced down at his hands. There was dirt under his nails and ground into his cuticles. “Yeah. Gross though,” he said, but his face was still, and I didn’t think I believed him.
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
My mouth was open before I could think. Words poured out of me like water, and I tried to press my hand to my mouth to keep them back, but it didn’t work. “I have this dream. About my mother. She died when I was five and my sister was three. Car accident. Ever since then, my sister and I have had the same dream. Every night.”
“You miss her?”
I shrugged. “Probably. I think I do. It was such a long time ago,” I told him, but the lie tangled in the back of my throat, and I coughed into my hand.
He took my hand between his, turned it so that my thumb pressed flat against his palm, and my breath hitched. His hands were rough, calloused, and his skin caught at mine, and I wanted his flesh to hook against me so that we were part of the same beating heart.
“She won’t ever let you go. You’ll drown inside of her. She’ll split you open and plant herself inside of you, and your heart will tear in two, and she’ll eat those parts that are best.” He dropped my hand and stood. I was left clutching my hand to my chest over the place where I thought my heart should be, blinking at the hundreds of dark legs creeping over Shane’s neck. I didn’t call him back.
The rest of the day blurred together, and I waited for Mina outside the bus, but she never showed up, and I rode home alone. She’d done that before. Stayed after school for tutoring or to make up a test or quiz and then caught a ride from a friend, but her absence stung in a way it hadn’t before, and I folded my arms over my stomach and pressed down so that the emptiness there wouldn’t hurt as much. It didn’t help.
The house was quiet as I let myself in. The clock in the kitchen ticked out the seconds like a long thread, and I stood there and watched the second hand crawl over the numbers and wondered if Momma had ever done the same. Stood under the watchful eyes of that clock and questioned how it was she’d come here and what slow end would belong to her when life came winding down, a burial shroud borne in its hands.
Room to room, I wandered, my feet leaving a track through the dust, and I looked for Momma. Looked for the Dark Lady, but I could not find her. Not in the waking world.
Our bedroom was too warm, and I turned on the ceiling fan, so that the air moved sluggishly through the space. I went to Mina’s bed instead of mine, her laced, pink quilt crumpled at the foot, and I slipped beneath it, pulled it over my shoulders and closed my eyes. If Momma came, imagined that the daughter she found in the bed was Mina instead of her eldest, perhaps I could steal away the dream that had belonged to Mina. A birthright returned.
Sleep did not come. I turned my face into Mina’s pillow and breathed in her scent, and bared my teeth against the fabric and screamed until my throat ached. “Where did you go,” I said, but Momma wasn’t there, and the house stayed silent.
When the front door opened, I pulled the covers over my head and waited for Mina to come into the room. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“You don’t deserve it. I was the first.”
Mina didn’t respond but sank onto the mattress next to me and twisted her hands against the cover. “Was there ever a time you wished she wouldn’t come?”
“No.”
“I did. Would hold my eyes open until they burned, but she’d come anyway. Every night, her mouth open wide. Hungry. But she never did anything but press damp fingers to my skin and moan. There were never any teeth to the things she brought.”
“But now …” I said, and Mina brought her fingers to the comforter, a ghost touch over my mouth, my eyes.
“I don’t know,” she said and lifted the comforter, pushed her body into mine. “Stay here. Until she comes,” she said.
“Okay,” I said and together we waited for sleep to descend.
When the dream took hold, I could feel Mina against me. The hard weight of her body a tangible thing that tied me to the Earth, but there was another part tugging me upward and away, and I followed it.
When I woke up, I tried to remember the dream, fought to hold the wisps of it in my hands, but it bled away, and I knew that Momma hadn’t chosen me. Behind me, Mina slept on, and I left her there and crept out of the room. Dad must have come home and went to sleep because his door was shut as I passed it, and I paused, pressed my hand to the doorknob, and turned. Locked. I pressed my lips to the door. “Are you afraid of us?” I whispered.
Perhaps the Dark Lady came to him, too. She’d be with him now, ingesting pieces of him so that he could never leave her, and I wanted to kick in the door, to scream and scream until the dream broke and then take all of the things she’d gifted him. Even though I loved him. They weren’t for him. They weren’t.
“Take me, too. Please,” I said and thought of Mina’s face. So much like my own. So much like Momma’s.
“She heard you again. Ran away,” Mina said and I turned. She crawled on all fours, her hair pulled over her face so that I couldn’t see her eyes, and her fingers dug into the carpet. She’d taken off her shirt, and there was blood on her arms and chest, and she lifted a hand and traced a heart in the spatter. Her muscles flexed and shifted, and she opened her mouth, and there were the undulations of dark legs. An insect caught in her teeth.
“She didn’t,” I said, and I thought of my own blood spread over the desk. How it must have turned black by now if Ms. Bregeth hadn’t cleaned it. Wondered if Momma bent to taste it, if it would be the same as Mina’s. Skin begot of skin and blood begot of blood. If she would recognize it as her own.
“Yes,” Mina said and pressed herself into the floor, the blood smearing against the carpet. In it, I thought I saw something move, and my stomach turned over. “I’m tired. She won’t let me sleep.”
I stepped over her, left her lying on the floor, and went back to our bedroom. Her voice an undercurrent to the night sounds of the house, and I clamped my hands over my ears. “Fuck you,” I said, and Mina’s laugh was filled with the sound of underground things that crept on many legs.
In the morning, Mina was gone, the indentation her body left gone cold, and Dad’s bedroom door was open, the bed made and his pajamas mounded on the floor. I poured a bowl of cereal but didn’t eat it and then dumped it in the garbage. If Mina came home, I wouldn’t let her inside. I was the one who carried the key. If Mina wasn’t there, Momma would have to come to me.
When the bus pulled to the curb, it gave two quick honks, and I hid behind the curtain, watched as the driver pe
ered at the house, and then drove away in a cloud of black smoke. I thought about trying to go back to sleep, but I wasn’t tired. There were pills that Dad had taken after Momma died, but I didn’t think she would come to me if I took one. Or if she did, she would be all messed up, and I still wouldn’t have what I wanted.
I turned on the television. The woman on the screen looked too much like Momma, her teeth exposed, so I turned it off again. Something flickered across the screen, and I stood and pushed my fingers through the dust, but there was nothing there. No paper wing or jointed mandible waiting to snap at my fingers. I wiped my palms against my jeans.
I drifted in and out of the rooms, took inventory of all of the things that were supposed to make up our lives. All of the things Momma left behind when the earth swallowed her and how we’d tried to glue them back together.
I left the door open when I went outside, the cool shadows of the house spilling over the back porch, and wandered the fence line, my fingers tripping over the split wood so that it splintered, caught against my fingertips. I didn’t bleed. I wish I had.
Mina was crouched in the corner, her hands plunged wrist deep in dark earth. “Help me,” she said, and I didn’t think as I bent to help her claw open the earth. Her breath leaked out of her like something sugared. Syrup or some other cloying thing.
Our hands turned over bits of rock, worms squirming under our fingers, and our breath came fast, the rise and fall of our chests a singular movement. A small hole opened beneath us, and we cupped our hands full of warm earth and drew it out into the sunlight, but it didn’t mean anything, and I was so tired.
“She’s here,” Mina said.
“No. She isn’t anywhere. She’s fucking dead, Mina. Momma’s dead, and there’s nothing that’s going to change it. Nothing. She’s dead.” My voice was a scream lifted into the afternoon sunlight. The birds kept right on singing, and Mina stared back at me. It was like looking into a mirror. I raised my hand and brought it shuddering down against her face.
The sound was enough to make me wince. The sick slap of bare flesh against bare flesh, and Mina didn’t pull away or put her hand against her cheek. She didn’t even make a noise.
Mina smeared her hand over her mouth so that the dirt clung to her skin, and she reached over to me and did the same. “She’s here,” she said again, and something pressed outward from under her skin, reached out to me, but I kept myself still. If I touched her, I would kill her. My hands that had memorized her body because it was my body, would know the thin places to rip and tear, and I would have opened her up and fed her blood to the worms at our feet.
“Stop sneaking into my dreams. She doesn’t like it,” Mina said and rose, turned her back to me, and walked back into the house.
I spent the rest of the afternoon taking the worms between my fingers and crushing them, their multiple hearts bursting over my hands. I licked at the smears they left on my skin, my tongue tracing up and over the bare flesh. They tasted of nothing. I wondered if that’s what I tasted of, too. Wondered if that was why Momma hadn’t changed the dream yet.
When Dad’s car pulled up into the driveway, I was still in the backyard. His door opened and shut, and I heard him come into the house, heard him call for me. For Mina. When he came through the back door, I didn’t sit up.
“Where’s Mina?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and he sighed. Like I’m always supposed to fucking know where she is. Like it’s my responsibility.
“I got a call from the school,” he said, and I rolled onto my side and waited for him to stop talking. I heard him shift, take his hands out of his pockets and rub them together. “If you’re sick, you have to tell me, okay? You can stay home, but I need to know. In case you need me to stay home with you or to go to the doctor or something.”
Fuck off, I mouthed.
“Listen. I’m trying, Hayley. I really am. But you have to give me a shot,” he said, and I wanted to tell him I was sorry, but I didn’t. The door clicked shut, and I lay under the sky until it went dark and then got up and went into the house.
“There’s dinner if you want it. You just have to heat it up.” Dad sat at the kitchen table, his own food untouched, and his fork laid across the plate.
“I’m not hungry,” I said and left him sitting there. Once, we’d had family dinners. The memory was hazy, but I could see Momma in her place, her face frozen in a smile, her lips stretched back and back and back, and Dad beside her, his eyes cast down.
Mina was in our bedroom. She’d stripped the blankets off of our beds and mounded them in the center of the floor space, and she curled inside of it, her eyes locked on something I couldn’t see.
“Look,” she said and lifted her shirt. Her skin was drawn tight over her ribs, and something squirmed underneath. “She’s coming through.”
“Stop it,” I said, and she scratched at herself, her fingers digging until she began to bleed. I should have stopped her, should have taken her hands into mine and forced her to be still, but I couldn’t move, and Dad came into the room and started shouting, his hands fluttering over Mina’s body as he tried to push the blood back inside of her, and I sat down on the carpet and watched as he wrapped her in a blanket and carried her out.
Dad drove us to the hospital without talking. Mina gibbered in the passenger seat, her tongue lolling and her teeth clacking, and I picked at the frayed edges of my shorts and pressed my knees against the back of her seat. Normally, Mina would have turned around and hit me, told me to knock it off, but she faced forward, those strange syllables leaking out of her, so I stopped and drew my legs up into my chest.
The waiting room smelled of mold and antiseptic. Dad had gone back with Mina and told me to stay put, left his wallet in case I wanted something from the vending machine. A television blared in the corner. Some show where people stuffed their fat, little sausage bodies into spandex and ran through an obstacle course. Their grunts echoed through the empty waiting room, and I stood and turned off the television. No one came out to tell me I couldn’t or to turn it back on, so I picked up a magazine and sat back down.
Someone up front laughed, and the sound of low voices carried through the empty space. I pulled two of the chairs together—the cracked vinyl scratching my face and hands—and laid down. Again low voices floated from the front of the waiting room, the murmurs like soft tongues singing, and I closed my eyes, and then I was in the dream.
Momma stood behind me, her hands braided through my hair, but I couldn’t see her, couldn’t turn my head, and she hummed, something high and lilting, and I leaned into her.
I waited for the dream to change. For the dream to be Mina’s dream, but Momma hummed, and everything was the same, and I couldn’t move. My lips formed around all of the words I wanted to speak, but there was no air inside my lungs. Parts of me cut out like a paper doll. She hummed and drew her fingers through my hair, but she didn’t scrape her teeth over my skin.
When I woke up, my hands were wet, and I wiped them against my shorts and sat up. The room was silent. The women at the front still sat, their shadows playing out across the floor, but their murmurs were gone. I scrubbed at my face, touched my hair, but my mother’s fingers remained a part of the dream.
I looked again at the shadows that resembled the women, and I couldn’t remember if I’d seen the shapes before, if they’d stretched over the floor like that, their necks and heads deformed. They didn’t move, didn’t twitch or seem to breathe, and I forced myself to stand. The floor felt spongy beneath my feet, as if it would drop away if I didn’t move carefully, and I went to the entrance and paused. The shadows still sat there, and I counted to ten. My heart ached from beating, but I counted again to ten, and then stuck my head around the corner.
There was nothing there. No women fallen asleep with their heads and arms gone slack or still as stones as they stared at their computers. Their chairs were empty, and the computers cast a dull glow. I ducked back into the waiting room. The shadows stayed w
here they were.
I turned the television back on. Better to hear annoying chatter than silence, and I settled into my chair. I waited.
Three hours later, Dad still hadn’t come out, and no one else had come in. I didn’t want to look at those shadows, to see if they were still there, still unmoving, and so instead I watched the television.
When the woman who looked like Momma came on the screen—her face covered with a dark veil—I rose and went to stand in front of the television.
Behind her veil, she grinned, and her teeth were broken and stained, and they gnashed against the fabric, her hands pressed flat against the dress she wore. She wasn’t my mother. This woman with her wide mouth. She wasn’t my mother.
Click-clack. Click-Clack. The noise came from behind me, but I watched her, and the noise grew louder.
“Come out,” I told her, but she shook her head.
“It’s mine. The dream. Why won’t you bring it to me? It’s supposed to be mine,” she said, and her eyes rolled in their sockets so only the whites showed, and I pressed my face close to hers, breathed in the dust and waited.
When the doors opened, I shrieked.
“Let’s go, Hayley,” my father said. His right arm was wrapped around Mina, and she leaned against him, her eyes heavy and half-closed.
“Have a good night,” the receptionist said as we passed the front desk. She did not cast a shadow.
Dad buckled Mina in, his hands careful and slow, and then he pressed his lips to her forehead, and my heart surged. “I’m sorry,” I said, but I didn’t say it loud enough for him to hear me. Maybe it was better that way.
“They did a CAT scan. Of her brain. Doctor said he couldn’t see anything odd. Nothing out of place. Said maybe she was overtired or looking for attention.” Mina sat next to him and didn’t move, didn’t respond. Still as a doll, and Dad reached over and patted her arm. “Said to let her get some rest. They gave her a pill and said it wouldn’t take long. You’ll probably have to help me carry her inside.”
Everything That’s Underneath Page 12
