Pulling Me Under

by Rebecca Berto

  “Please, is Ella . . . ”

  “Urgh! Out with it already. ‘Is she alive?’” Brent mimics me in a girly voice. “Maybe, probably. Could be, won’t be.” He shrugs nonchalantly. “I don’t know, for fuck’s sake.”

  Suddenly Brent is on my lips, angrily pressing himself to me, ravishing. I believe what he said. The kiss is from someone who’s been waiting his whole life for this.

  But now he’s raged and he’s biting my lips. He snaps at me, pulls away, taking my lip with him. I think I taste blood when he lets go. His nose touches mine as he says, “I want you to feel loss. Feel what I’ve been through with you.”

  “Can you . . . can we . . . ” the words catch in my throat. They don’t want to budge. They stick their arms out in protest and cling onto an imaginary bedhead as I pull at them to come out, “ . . . talk about what I can do for you?”

  “That-a-girl. Right question. Yes, we can. Gosh, why didn’t I think of that before?” The knife slides away from the inside of my thigh.

  It comes at me, hard and fast. It’s too late to think of a reaction. The handle comes toward my head faster than I have time to realize what is happening. Then, it drowns out my surroundings.

  Liam, please come.

  Ella, Ella, Ella . . .

  The pain doesn’t rip out my insides as Brent’s punch had earlier. It calms me in a way. It’s a lullaby sung by Satan.

  I’m mildly aware of my head hanging upside down, my neck and knees dangling, but mostly I watch the ceiling swirl and the carts of boxes dance from side to side. They form the same actions as the Macarena. Left palm down, right palm down, left palm up, right palm up, cross it over to the right shoulder and the other to the left. I mumble the steps as I imagine wiggling to the side, getting ready to jump ninety degrees.

  Tonight is still once more. There’s no upbeat music, or crickets chirping in the background, for that matter either. It must be because the music has stopped. “God you’re so hopeless at dancing it’s almost hard to watch,” Liam says in my head while I dance, taking my hand and squeezing it tight. I want to tell him what I should have said earlier, but he replies, screaming: “Just shut up.”

  I shake.

  “Just shut it! No more stupid mumbling. I don’t care what it is,” Brent says over me. My eyes are open. The ceiling, the crates and even the ground are swimming, swirling, rocking.

  “At least now we are doing it the proper way, bitch! You’ll remember me when I’m in you this time.”

  My fingers tingle as I look over. They have a blue tinge under the flooding light. Oh gosh, I am under him. Again. My shins hurt as they grind against the long shafts of his thighbones. I remember the agony I felt in at Tim’s party, only this time there’s nothing under me cushioning my battered body. I am a heap of rubbish crushed underneath him.

  “Pleathe, no—o, pleathe . . . ”

  “One more time and you’ll be sorry. This is meant to be fun!” The shrill chant to his voice freezes every part of my body that should move. This is a monster. This is not the boy I grew up with.

  “Why? The—the . . . drugs?” I ask, pleading for more conversation, anything to distract him. I push back the fuzziness with the last bit of strength I have left.

  I need to stay awake. Ask questions. I rub my heels on the concrete so they will graze and bleed. I hope I’ll bleed.

  I cannot lose consciousness if I’m in pain.

  My ribs feel crushed under his weight; my breaths, even shorter.

  “This is my empire!” he roars, looking around, pleased. “I own this shit. Fuck my business; I would have gone under if I relied on it. It never did me any good, anyway. Never served its purpose; look at you, not even impressed. This is my destiny. I control money, enjoyment, lives . . . ”

  I try to mumble no, but I’m speaking to an empty shell. I can only think this can’t be him. One of my friends. My family.

  I think of Ella again. She’s the only thing keeping me here. We’re both on our backs. Both our bodies are weak, used, beaten up. Panic takes over, washing away the love I try to feel for my daughter. It hurts so much more than being walloped with Brent’s knife. All I think is orphan, orphan, orphan.

  My mind is screaming but I’m not sure what my mouth is doing anymore.

  I can’t leave her without parents at the tiny age of seven. And me, I’ve barely entered a new decade of my life, only to have it torn away. I never imagined, not in my wildest dreams as they say, that tonight would end like this. Not staring at the man who I look—looked—up to as my brother.

  “ . . . I control you,” Brent finishes.

  His fingers tighten around my neck. That’s when the panic sets in. I’m not sure what I was before, but now I’m something . . . unhuman.

  For a while, I scream so loud I can’t think. All I am is screaming: the instinct to make as much noise as possible. Attract help. Someone will come. It’s not too late. I begin to think of my blue body and glassy eyes staring at nothing, so I scream more to dissolve the terror.

  His face blurs into the background quicker than I think it will. A restricting pressure pushes out my soul. Brent has closed off the passage for any fresh air to enter. In between coughs and splutters, I try to breathe more, but my efforts are as good as a fish dangling off the end of a nylon line gasping at air.

  I want to scratch at him, but I can’t place my hands or feet. They don’t feel there. My surroundings have blackened, including the skewed image of Brent’s grimace. The throbbing has ceased over my body. The only feeling is a faint prickle in my mind asking for air, for what feels like the last order it will give.

  The emptiness calls me in. It has already swallowed everything else. I have no limbs or torso left.

  Blackness. Nothingness.

  Slipping.

  Then Paul materializes. He isn’t the undead vision that appeared to me in the shops, in my sleep or in a photo on my wall months ago. His skin looks lucid. His curls seem to pop out. Two-dimensional, to three-dimensional. Alive.

  “Pauly?”

  I have to ask. I have to be sure this isn’t my PTSD again. Not that a delusion within a delusion will tell me what’s real. After all this time, I want him to go away because I must reach Ella, must help her, and must rub the smooth web skin between her fingers to feel she’s warm and alive.

  “Kates, beautiful,” he calls.

  I suck in a breath and yelp. I should run to him and take him in my arms while I have the chance but for now I just cup my face, trying to hold it together, I suppose.

  He floats over to me.

  So I’m in heaven?

  The point where the ground meets the sky is indistinguishable because it’s all white. This is it. I have wanted this, I think. I am here with him. My life on earth, gone.

  The air tastes sweet and wet. It is exactly the atmosphere I have wanted to feel, if dry ice could ever have a “wet” taste. My fingers and toes all seem perfectly . . . pink.

  This is crazy. Where am I?

  I grab Paul’s figure before he reaches me. He feels almost real, yet not entirely solid. I bury my head under his chin, close to his heart. I have dreamed of this, been haunted by this, too. When I pull away to see him, his eyes are emerald green, so bright that the white expanse around us doesn’t even matter. Neither does the fact I have no clue what I’m standing on.

  I pull at his ears so he’s at my level for our foreheads and noses to touch. He smells the same: his scent and a splash of aftershave. His curls just are as bouncy. He even has the two-day-old stubble he loves the best out of the regrowth stage.

  Eventually my mouth opens and agrees to what I want to say. And, oh my, is it a stupid first question. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s a preview, hon.”

  I tremble as he speaks. The vibrat
ions of his voice settle on my ears. I bring my finger to his eye, poke the flesh from his lid then trace his cheek down.

  “I’m real. It’s different here than on earth, hey?”

  I make a noise.

  He takes his gut, the little there is of it, in his hands. “This thing never grows. I never have bad curl days. You know,” he lifts me in his arms and spins me around so we face a screen of a photo collage with an endless frame, “look at this thing.”

  Brent and Liam smile, laugh, play in various shots. Their parents are there too, bathing me in a sink in one shot. Pam and John Anselin are in family shots with Paul’s little brother, Nathan, and Paul too. I pop up doing a starfish in the Great Barrier Reef on the first family vacation I ever went on with them. Nancy and I are in neon colors, leg warmers, Chucks, big, big curls for her sixteenth birthday party. My parents are everywhere. Mom, of course makes it into more shots than Dad. She never misses a photo opportunity. Then Paul and Ella. The last professional family shot on Ella’s bedroom wall. There’s one of her in a walker with Nutella up to her wrists. She couldn’t get enough of the stuff.

  Other photos pop up that aren’t of anything I’ve seen and done. What the . . .

  I don’t recognize these shots. This teenage girl has bright blue eyes and curly blonde hair. She’s thin and has full lips. She looks familiar but I’ve never looked like that, nor Nancy, Mom . . .

  “Who’s that girl?”

  “Amazing, isn’t she?” Paul says smiling then floating up to the collage. “And here she’s getting married. Oh, Josh will be a shithead. He won’t be her last marriage, but when she finds Emmett, she’ll have found the right one. She’ll need Josh to understand that Emmett will be the type to keep his you-know-what in his pants.”

  “How . . . you mean this,” I hold my arms up in front of me, to him with my life in photographs, “this is the future too? Not just my past?”

  “It’s your entire life, stupid.’

  If it weren’t for his absurd humor, I’d have been in pieces. So I laugh. My eyes water and I’m not sure if it’s for joy at being here or the loss of imagining Ella at her wedding without me there.

  I sink lower into the white fluff below my feet. “I don’t get to do up Elly for her wedding, do I?”

  “You’re very pessimistic, aren’t you?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m showing you your life.” He floats again, somehow crossing twenty meters in a second. He takes my shoulders and lines himself in front of me. “I can’t choose what you want.”

  So. All this perfectness. It’s everything Paul wants. How he looks, feels. It comes at a cost. It’s like I already know this, though. That when things happen exactly as they are wished for that’s when warning bells should ring. Life is twisted, and confusing. And it’s meant to be. We only get this reward after we’ve done our time.

  Thump.

  “What’d you do that for!” I yell, clutching my chest. It feels like he walloped me.

  “Stay with me,” I hear in my head.

  Thump.

  “Why are you hurting me?”

  Thump. And again and again.

  “Oh, please, please, please. Stay, Kates,” the voice says again. This time I’m looking at Paul, direct in the face and his lips haven’t moved.

  “Huh?” I say.

  The thumps happen over until I lose count.

  Suddenly Paul presses his lips to mine. Instead of kissing me, he puffs me up like a balloon.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  The Whiteness dissipates, and I’m not sure where Paul’s gone. Everything’s spinning. I feel immobilized, twisting, hurting for minutes. Longer. There are no objects to focus on. I’m in a whirlwind. Everything spirals until my fingers and toes are numb, until my chest expands again and I explode with pain. Everywhere.

  • • •

  I open my eyes.

  Wait, I open my eyes?

  My body is a haze. The corrugated walls seem smooth, no edges, just gray. And boy, does it hurt to be alive.

  What’s happened? Where’s Brent? Already, the memory from the whiteness with Paul is hazy.

  The crates are still everywhere, but there are noises: crashing, thumping, screaming. Only, I am barely moving. Someone else must be here.

  I breathe again, telling myself I can’t stop breathing while I figure out if I’m real. If this is real. I heave myself upright, wincing against the pain that shoots up my chest every time I move.

  Everything seemed perfect in the whiteness; here it’s a mess.

  I am alive.

  There are two figures tossing and tumbling in the shadows near the roller door. One is definitely Brent. I’m familiar with the force of that swing. My eyes are still hazy, like sleep is still lingering at the edge of my vision, so I can’t make out the other figure.

  Finally, my eyes adjust. I recognize his golden locks and the tone to the grunt as he aims a wobbly swing at Brent.

  Liam.

  A sense of déjà vu sharpens me from weakling to superhero. I can see blood on Liam’s shirt. Grunting and movement sounds play back and forth between them. Tingles stab at my throat, still coming to. I’ve seen this many times before: at school, on a sofa. Brent was always bigger than his younger brother, so he wins.

  He’s winning again. Only, this time winning means his life over Liam’s, and he looks like he wants to take everything he can.

  I control lives, Brent hissed before.

  No. He won’t do this to someone else. I’m on my feet as quick as a kid practicing karate. Then I’m charging at Brent as fast as I can. My fist punches him in his kidneys. I add a swing of my leg into the side of his ribs.

  Brent lifts one of his hands from the scruff of Liam’s collar, and throws me back with his free hand.

  I land on my back. Without realizing what I’ve done, my hand skids along the floor to guard my skull from the concrete. There isn’t enough time to look, but I feel hotness spread through my palm. Shots are firing up my arms. Maybe it’s a graze, though it’s probably a gash.

  Brent doesn’t flinch from his punching; he is hammering into his brother’s tiring body once more.

  I know I’ll earn another decent wallop. It may not be in my ribs or even my gut, not even to my head, but it will come at me, somewhere. And it will throb.

  However, before the chance comes to pull Brent off Liam again, my world shakes. In my mind, an earthquake has rocked. It’s the only shock that’s hit me so hard beside Paul’s death.

  Brent pulls out his knife. He thrashes his head, sweat dripping, as if he were trying to gnaw meat off a bone.

  Though bloodied, though cut and beaten, Liam is still quick enough to send the knife slipping through Brent’s grip. The knife claps against the concrete.

  That’s when time warps. They are facing each other. Brent’s face is away from mine but I feel the terror. Whoever wins next has the reward of life, whoever loses, doesn’t.

  I have a feeling in my stomach. It’s a seed, but it’s come with instructions so I know what to expect. I throw out the papers. I will not follow.

  Liam had said he’d give his life for Brent and here Brent is, trying to take it from him. Liam’s fighting for his life, and I think something funny. I don’t mind dying. I could pass on, meet Paul again. Because I’ve done what I was meant to do. I’m a Mom. And I’ve changed my relationship with my own. I think of Liam, how he’s always stuck by me when other people faded away.

  Brent scrunches Liam’s collar and drags him into his face. With a scowl, Brent studies him for a second then knees him in the gut. Liam folds and falls. A weird sound escapes my lips. I don’t know what I’ve said.

  As Liam uncurls from the floor, pressing his weight on both arms, pushing himself off all fours, Brent swi
ngs his leg back. When it hits Liam’s lip, the thwack echoes against the empty space in the warehouse.

  It’s not me about to be killed by Brent this time. This event, this murder, cannot happen. Liam will not die for me.

  I don’t have a choice. Like I don’t get to choose if I love Ella. My thoughts are on autopilot.

  I lunge forward and grab. My body shocks me again: I have stolen Brent’s knife.

  I don’t know what to do with it, don’t want to hurt anyone with it. Oh my God. I have a knife in my hands and I could hurt someone. I’m not sure what I had expected to do with it when I picked it up. I can only focus on keeping it away from Brent. Then he can’t harm us with it.

  Gripping the knife tight, I will my fingers to hold on for as long as they can. That I must pass out before this knife harms Liam.

  Brent has his hand hovering over the empty spot on the concrete for a second. He looks up. Black and white eyes again, pupils dilated. His lip snarls.

  I see Liam for the briefest of moments, his bloodied eyes wide. His cut lip in an O-shape. He sees what I have in my hand. I can’t look at Liam’s face and I can’t look away. His eyelids flitter, a breath escapes and that pain radiating from him hits my chest. That moment, in slow motion, creates an unbreakable link between us.

  In that split second, I am not courageous, or quick. Blood drips over my thoughts. Shaky hands. Vomit, so chunky, splayed everywhere. I don’t understand any of it. But for a second Paul’s body is there. I blackout that image.

  Brent must think I’ll lunge or duck away, that’s why, when he stops centimeters away from my face, we share the same confusion. When I look behind him to the shock wiped over Liam’s face, then to the hot liquid warming my hands, I am a million thoughts.

  My hands are frozen in fear, frozen so tight that . . . why is there pressure on the knife? . . . so rigid, that the knife barely flinched when Brent launched himself onto me. My dress feels heavy with moisture. The colors blend seamlessly.