by Dan Noble
“Did you hear something?” Angie says. My chest goes cold, but I didn’t hear anything.
“Is something wrong with Millie?” Angie asks in her overdramatic voice. “I haven’t heard from her in days.”
“I hate to tell you this, Angie, but she’s not doing well. I had a bit of a health scare—cancer, and I’m afraid she wasn’t coping.”
“Barricading Rose again?” Fuck, Angie, don’t come within 100 yards of Broadway, they’ll kick you right out.
“Yes. And the blackouts, too.”
“Is she talking about the book code?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. She even went to her father and she scared him so much he called the police.”
He’s digging my grave. I can almost smell the earth.
“Let me go up and see her.”
“No, Angie. I’m afraid that’s not a good idea. She’s resting, and she hasn’t been quiet or calm in a long time. I’m not going to disturb her.”
“Well, I think she’d want to talk to me.”
“If you want to know the truth, Angie, she’s been saying some pretty distressing things about you lately, too during her blackouts. She thinks you haven’t been upfront with her. And I can’t say I blame her. You’ve never been happy for our good fortune.”
“What a strange thing to say.”
“Is it?”
“Well, just because I’m protective of my best friend, who’s had an incredibly tough life doesn’t mean I’m not happy for her.” That actually sounds genuine.
“You never exactly welcomed me with open arms.”
“Are we going to do this now?” And that.
Did everyone think Kennedy was strange except for me?
I realize I can hop the chair over to the knife block, but it will be too noisy. I try to pull my hands out of the zip ties, but they’re too tight. Next, I try yanking through. This just gets my wrists raw.
“It’s a day of getting things out in the open. We might as well.”
“Okay, then. I thought it was strange, the way you swooped in and fell in love right away, and then disappeared.”
“I think you should stop speaking, Angie.”
Think, Millie. Think. This might be your only chance to get out of here. They’ve clearly gone off script and you’ve got a few minutes. They keep arguing, Kennedy shushing Angie after nearly every other word. I look around for a plan. I can, perhaps, squat down and carry the chair on my back, and then get to the knife block.
Then I have a thought: is Angie buying time, starting in on all this now? Is she going along with Kennedy, doing a double acting job, just for my benefit?
I take a deep breathe, bend over at the waist so my chest is flat against my thighs and with all my strength, I attempt the first step in what I hope will be a crab walk over to the knives. When I lift my foot slightly, my leg shakes and my balance goes wonky. I feel the chair rush down onto my head and back. Thankfully, I can lower my foot in time to stop the chair leg banging into the floor. It does make a small sound, but I tell myself it was too low for them to hear. I manage to straighten it back up. I wait, perfectly still, to see if they respond to it.
My breath is sharp and shaky as I exhale.
“You were suspicious, or you were jealous, Angie? Yet another Burns woman deserting you? And the most intriguing one at that. Everyone wants a piece of Millie. Look at this house. Look how every day is an adventure. You think I don’t know the texture she brings to the dull, meaningless world?”
I had no idea anyone felt this way about me. What a way to find out.
48
MILLIE
The first thing I notice are the rhododendrons. They’re everywhere. My eyes flutter open and all I see are bunches and bunches of them. All different varieties and colors. Only the white ones, like Mother always kept. Mother? The scent is transportive. I open my eyes and imagine I’m in her office. No, I am in her office. Where is Rose? I shiver at the memory of her kissing me before her nap. Have I fallen asleep? Blacked out? Been drugged? I don’t like the thought coming but there it always is in the background, still hoping: paged-in?
“Rose?” I ask though I don’t see anyone.
“Rose is fine. You’ve barricaded her in her room, because you’re about to commit suicide,” Angie says, making her way into the room. I have no memory of this. Is Rose sleeping in there? Taken out of the house altogether, so I just think she’s locked in?
“What? No. Not you, Angie.”
“Well, I don’t know what you heard of my conversation with Kennedy before you blacked out, or should we say ‘paged-in’ since that’s how we’re going to recount it to the police when we report your suicide and all the strange things you’ve been saying and doing. But, Kennedy and I, we have come to an agreement. I won’t tell anyone about his little bout of tying you up and he won’t kill me. It’s a decent deal, don’t you think? I mean, I can’t blame him. You’re a danger. You always were a danger. You told me and I never believed it. You just always seemed so weak, so broken down. But all this time you killed Emily. She was everything to me, hope, love, creativity. She taught me how to live a bigger life. But you didn’t like that, did you? I remember the way you used to look at me whenever she hugged me. ‘Come here, Angie,’ she used to say. Nobody hugged me the way that she did, gripping her fingers into my skin, really wanting me to know how she felt. And she’d look me in the eye like we both got it. The truth of life was our little secret. Then she’d curate the reading. Imagine who I’d be without that.”
“None of what you’re accusing me of is true, Angie. I never felt like that. Sure, I was jealous sometimes. There was just so little of her to go around. But that’s natural. Especially in my situation. My dad had run out and Mother had already tried to kill herself. I wanted some attention from her. Did it upset me a little how much easier she was on you? How she complimented you but only had harsh words for me? Of course.” Am I exactly in the same place I was all those years ago? Maybe I am all those things Angie is saying. She probably knows me better than anyone.
Suddenly it all seems too hard, like what have I been fighting for? Perhaps it’s time to pack it in on this life. If I’m a danger to my daughter, surely she’s better off without me. But not with Kennedy, I remind myself.
My vision is blurry, but Angie’s wearing what she had on earlier and it looks like she’s smiling. She’s got glasses on. Wait. They’re the rose-colored glasses; I recall them from when we were kids, inspired by a music video—the Cars. She touches the frame.
“You like? They’re growing on me.”
“Where’d you get those?”
“You told me they were lost, but here they were, in your room all this time. Proof: you’re just a dirty liar, Millie. And that’s all you’ve ever been. A murderer and a liar. No wonder you’ve had to make up all those fantasies just to get through the day. But it will all be over soon.”
Oh, Angie, not you, too. Please not you, too. Just when I think I’ve found the edges of reality, they shoot out of reach. What does she know, really? What’s she doing?
Keep her talking is my only option at the moment. She lowers and raises the Cars sunglasses in question, the checkered ones with the red lenses that, yes, I’d swiped from her in the fourth grade, which I’d been wearing reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. God, we loved them. They’ve been in my closet all this time. She just had everything, and she wouldn’t miss them, I’d told myself. But there was another side to that too. I knew how much she loved them. And because of that, I wanted them for myself. She was right about that.
“So you’ve been looking around?” I say. “Tell me this: was Rose really barricaded in her room?”
“She was, you sick fuck.”
“Is it possible Kennedy’s trying to frame me? Or what about you?”
“You’re not in any position to be making wild accusations, Millie.”
Her showing up here is so odd. My suspicions must be correct. They’re in it together. What else can it be?
“I still can’t believe I found these glasses here,” she says, as if I’m not tied to a bed, with a person threatening my life lurking somewhere, and my daughter god knows where. “I’d been dreaming of these glasses all these years.” She yanks them off her head and lowers them over mine. “And you know what? They look awful now. You’ve kept them so long they look awful.”
“I’ve got news for you,” I say, deciding I need to get her even more agitated if I’m going to get more information. She always was a hot head. “They always looked awful.”
“Did they? I don’t remember it that way.” She turns toward the door. I can hear the kettle begin to hiss downstairs. Yes, you psychopath—what a great time for a cup of tea!
“Yeah. Because those rose lenses made everything look so beautiful. That’s why we loved them.”
“Really? Because you always looked like crap to me.” It’s her sarcasm, but with an edge—a sloppy one, but knife-sharp all the same.
“Thanks.”
More seriously, she surveys the room, slowly, thoughtfully.
I keep talking. “You didn’t believe me when I confessed my greatest fears to you—that I might have killed her without knowing. You said it wasn’t possible, that this is just what I did, blame myself for everything.”
“Well maybe there was a reason you blamed yourself.” She looks around, takes in the flowers. Smells deeply. “Anyway, this will be your piece de resistance. It’s beautiful, the perfect ending for you.”
Is that true? All this time, even now, despite what Pinocchio has said, I’ve had the same lingering doubt: could I really have suppressed something like that?
“Millie. You’ve woken just in time.” It’s Kennedy. With a fucking cup of tea.
My heartbeat races.
“Found your copy of Robinson Crusoe,” Angie says. “That book left a bad taste in my mouth. But we used to have so much fun with your dad’s old hunting rifle, pretending we were on the lookout for savages.”
That’s not exactly how I remember it. I was never very good at picking up the signals, was I?
I think of what my father told me. The time I’ve lost, incomprehensibly. My therapist, the look on Officer Lou’s face, as if he, too, found something vital in the words I spoke. It’s getting too difficult to keep it all straight. I need my lists. They’re calling to me. The ice cream shop, the trembling hands, the hazy aura around everything, love makes it work, pain too; Individualists, Universalists, a softening of reality. I think of Mother’s hand in the earth, her art deco ring. Could I have killed her? Has this all only ever been a manifestation of my guilt?
I’ve read plenty of books about suppressed memories. They always come back to destroy you in the end. Everyone knows that. But people, at least I, wonder can that really happen? Could I kill my own mother and not remember it? I am brought back again, through the cotton wool in my head, of the doppelganger family images I get from time to time at the ice cream shop, the diner. What if that is real, that family, living a parallel life that could have been?
I’m overcome with dizziness, feel my back collapse against Mother’s desk chair. I look down to see it in this context. It’s stunning. I can see her there, her beautiful dark hair, that perfect pink shirt.
They’re securing me into a straitjacket now. That’s a symbol if I’ve ever seen one. I don’t even resist. I try to work out which is worse: being crazy or a murderer.
“You must have a million questions.”
Someone approaches, the halos are too strong, they’re overtaking the figure so I can’t make it out. Pinocchio? Whoever it is might be about to untie me, I think, and then he—yes, it’s definitely a he—sticks a cloth doused in some chemical in my mouth. I pass out.
Who knows how much later, I keep my eyes closed, pretend I’m still unconscious. I hear Pinocchio and Angie. “You cannot mess this up,” Angie says.
“You think I don’t know that? Everything is riding on her. This is Emily’s most crucial scene. Each word counts. We’ve stacked all the details, all the tension, and this is where everything crescendos. If there’s even one detail wrong, it won’t work. And we’ll find that out right now.”
Emily? Mother is alive? And if so, how is she involved? Before the thoughts can even crystallize, I give into sleep again.
The next time I wake, my sight is improved. Almost one hundred percent. But everything looks pink.
Pinocchio is gone. That was not me being in a book world, it was some kind of dissociative episode. In this new clarity, this is absolutely certain. I understand that now, which in itself is an improvement, though ironic, given the circumstances.
“You’re back.” It’s Angie, by herself. She’s not wearing the glasses. When she sees my eyes open, she approaches, taps the bridge of my nose, where I realize, the rose-colored glasses are now resting. Ah, that’s why everything looks pink. More symbols. The flowers look even more meaningful this way. Maybe this is the right ending for me. It’s starting to feel more and more that way.
“I can see why you wanted to steal them,” she says. “They do add a level of meaning, a tone of significance to life that only a storyteller can normally give it. Don’t they?”
I don’t speak.
“You and I are not storytellers. We are just two poor schmucks, looking for meaning in the mystery of human experience.”
It has been many years since Angie spoke this way. She stopped after Mother died. She said she was done with all that. She asked me not to discuss books and reading and “all that” with her anymore. I respected her wishes. She gave me a pass when I was at my lowest point, hospitalized for my dissociative episodes. Listened to all my worst fears about killing Mother, all of it. I always assumed it was a beautiful, silent ode to our friendship, the way she always brought books for Rose. But now? It seems more like a fuck you.
And there it is. She won. I lost. Are we all so simple that in the end, it is all about love? I think of Mother and her Wuthering Heights, how shocked I’d been that she could love a book so obvious in its selfish, self-obsessed take on love. Here was another girl in love with Heathcliff. How I’d read it and read it looking for something more, something deeper it could have been. But it was about the love, the connection unexplored, destructive because the people in it were too un-self-aware to get anywhere. That was it. That was everything, I saw now—perhaps had always seen without wanting to admit it.
Everything I’ve ever done has been for love. I refused to admit it because I loved Mother so, and could never, ever be enough for her. If it was all about love and the most important object of that love didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t love you back, well then what would my life be for? In the end, am I so easily undone for a mother’s love? Angie clearly thinks so. And look, everything I’ve done since I failed at achieving her love has been to make up for that loss, hasn’t it? Kennedy, Rose. Could I be such a simpleton? I should accept this end. It is more than I deserve.
Just as I think this, Angie says, “But this, this final scene, this conclusion—it is incredibly satisfying. I can see the appeal of the Book World, the Readers, the Writers. I really can.”
She shakes her head, angles it. “I changed my mind. Those glasses suit you.”
She laughs, more like Roxanne than anything else. “Why don’t we concentrate on what’s happening now? Discovery writing. Isn’t that what you call it? God, I’m enjoying this too much. All those years of listening to you, the main character, complain and struggle to make yourself comfortable with the choices you’ve made, the failures you’ve accepted as someone else’s fault.”
“You loved me, Angie. All those years. You couldn’t have faked that.”
“There was a time, yes. There was such enchantment to our time together, I couldn’t help but love you. But nothing could compare to Emi.”
Emi. My skin crawls. She would hate that nickname. “Are you playing the bad cop, Angie? Where’s Kennedy?”
“Missing the point, again. You’re ado
rable, Millie.”
“Where’s Kennedy? If what you said is true, that you’re just doing this to save your life, then why are you enjoying it so much? Why does it feel like you’ve planned this? What have you done to him, Angie? Where is Rose?”
Something is not right. Angie is lying. Or more likely, being played herself. Am I just reading too much into things? Always I’ve been trying to work out the puzzles. It’s a habit that’s hard to break. Even now, I feel a catch in my chest. I feel a desperate need in my bound hands to write this on my Quelque Chose. I feel a prick in my thigh and my lids grow heavy. As I do, I hear Rose screaming. Rose, Rose, I feel myself mouth, but there’s no sound.
I embrace the blackness, the strength of my subconscious, despite my awareness of the delusions, is too strong to resist.
49
MILLIE
This time when I come around it’s harder to focus. The glasses are gone. No pinkness, but there’re the halos, the kind from my page-ins, but denser, and they’re are everywhere. Drugs. They gave me drugs. They? Pinocchio? I feel on the verge of blacking out or paging-in, who can tell? But I fight it, muddy my thoughts with strings of nonsense sounds and counting, because I can tell I’m on the brink of losing consciousness, and I’m not leaving this place until I get to the truth. Until I see her. Mother. They said her name. I’m sure of it.
Though physically unchanged, Pinocchio looks different, in the same way Kennedy did earlier. Like an actor playing a different role. And he smells like smoke, though he didn’t the other day. I’m not sure yet what that means. He’s less sure of himself, I think—than he was the other day.
“Why did you disappear?” I ask him.
“My part was done.”
“And what part was that?”
“To get you to here. To have you worry about what I knew—about your, what you think was your ‘murder’ of your mother.”
“So what did happen with me and Mother that day?”
