Bedfellow

by Jeremy C. Shipp

  The problem, she decides, is that she’s living not so much in a bedroom but a mausoleum of abandoned hobbies and forgotten dreams. Maybe she’s being a little overdramatic, but the truth is that she doesn’t give a crap about her scrapbooking table or her saxophone or even most of her posters. She doesn’t want to throw any of this stuff away, because the thought makes her want to cry.

  Ultimately, she puts away her astronaut cat notebook and opens her laptop. The first perfect video that she comes across is of a Sphynx who won’t stop meowing until her human places a glittery, violet cowboy hat on her head. She swiftly opens up the same video on her phone and heads for Tomas’s room. In truth, she’s going not only to show him the Sphynx (as well as the enormous possum who bites an old man’s arm) but to check on him. While she’s not particularly frightened of Marvin, she still feels a faint swirling energy in her limbs that makes her want to run laps around the house or punch a wall. On a conscious level, she knows her family isn’t in any danger. Nevertheless, she can’t stop thinking about the imaginary man in the black ski mask. In the back of her mind, he’s in her brother’s room right now, pointing a butcher knife at his eye.

  Thankfully, she finds her brother alone, playing on his computer, wearing his massive orange headphones. He looks even smaller than usual in those headphones, sitting on their dad’s hand-me-down office chair.

  “Tomas,” she says. “Tomas!”

  The boy jumps in his seat and spins around. With a glance at her phone, he pauses his flying goat game and rolls his chair to the side of the bed, without ever standing up. Kennedy sits cross-legged on the Steven Universe blanket. She shows him the possum video first, since it’s the less important of the two.

  While her brother watches, Kennedy gazes past him at the spiral of yellow sticky notes that blazon the wall with miniature coats of arms. There’s a jerboa in chainmail with a blue-and-white background. There’s an upside-down house with a bigfoot gripping the chimney for dear life. Kennedy once asked if these little escutcheons mean anything, and he said no. Ordinarily, she experiences nothing but a mild sense of pride when looking at her brother’s artwork. Tonight, she suffers a few pangs of jealousy. He knows what he likes, and he has the capacity to stay interested in an activity for more than a few weeks at a time. Worst of all, he makes it look so easy.

  Thankfully, the envy dissipates as soon as she focuses on her phone once again.

  “Is that possum his pet?” Tomas says. “Can you have possums as a pet?”

  “I dunno,” Kennedy says. “I have another good one.”

  Partway through the cat video, their mom interrupts for the millionth time tonight. She’s wearing her dancing-taco nightgown.

  “Everything fine and dandy in here?” their mother says.

  “Great,” Kennedy says, tossing her flip-flop a few feet using two of her toes. “I smoked a pack of cigarettes, and all of Tomas’s teeth fell out.”

  “All his teeth, huh?” their mom says. She leans back against the doorframe, her arms crossed over her chest. “That sounds flossome.”

  “Mom, no.”

  “It hurts me when you lie like that. I’ve got fillings too, you know?”

  After Kennedy tosses her second flip-flop across the room, she looks up, and her mom’s already disappeared. As Kennedy shows her brother the rest of the cat video, he casually pinches a few of his teeth. The video ends, and he rubs his right eye, smiling.

  “That cat should ride on a little horse,” he says, yawning in the middle of the sentence. “She could use her yarn for like a . . . a cowboy rope. A lasso.”

  “That would be cool,” Kennedy says. She takes a circuitous route to the door, collecting her flip-flops and wearing them on her hands. For a moment, she considers walking on all fours like a horse but ultimately decides against it.

  As soon as she passes through the doorway, she hears, “Did you find any other videos?”

  Kennedy freezes and then walks backward into the room, as if someone’s pressed Rewind on reality. She even tosses her shoes on the floor, where they were, to enhance the effect. Tomas isn’t paying any attention to her, though. He’s spinning around slowly in his office chair with his eyes half-closed.

  “Do you want to go to bed?” the girl says. “You’re already asleep. You’re sleep-spinning.”

  “I’m not.”

  Kennedy hops onto the bed and take out her phone. She taps the screen on and off and on again. “No one’s gonna break into the house, you know? It was just a misunderstanding, like Dad said. Marvin tapped on the window and Mom freaked out. That was it.”

  After a few seconds, Tomas slows to a stop, facing a shelf of ceramic skulls and dragons. “Mom’s face looked weird in the restaurant,” he says. “Her eyes looked mushed.”

  Kennedy feels her heart climbing up into her throat. “What do you mean?”

  “Her skin kept moving,” he whispers. “The man looked weird too.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “In the restaurant, when the hamburger got stuck. Everything was wavy and mushed.”

  Kennedy taps her phone gently against her knee. “Well, I mean, when you choked, your brain probably freaked out or something. Mom’s eyes were never mushed. I was there too. Everything was normal, except for the burger chunk that flew out of your mouth a hundred miles an hour.”

  He’s facing her now, his eyes more awake than a minute ago. “Can I stay in your room tonight?”

  “All right,” Kennedy says. “But no egg farts, okay? The last time you egg farted, I almost died.”

  The boy grabs his Stay Puft Marshmallow Man head pillow and follows her into her room. For a while, they listen to Bowie’s “Magic Dance” on repeat, and tragically, Tomas does end up releasing one of his more severe egg farts. Kennedy pretends to die in her bed. Her last words are “Avenge . . . me.”

  Tomas falls asleep first, curled up on a cloud of ultra-plush blankets on her floor. His sister makes sure that his chest is still moving before turning away.

  Sitting on her bed, she takes one last grim look at her room and decides that what she needs is the holodeck from her dad’s Star Trek show. She needs a room that’s decorated with illuminated manuscripts and K-pop album covers one day and Wonder Woman memorabilia the next. She needs a room that can keep up. Kennedy closes her eyes and tries not to think about her mother with mushed eyes and moving skin. She commands her brain not to dream of it. Soon, she’s outside and Tomas is up high in an oak tree, a pale branch impaled through his chest. She tells him not to keep climbing, because that will only make the hole inside him bigger, but he won’t listen. He won’t stop climbing until he reaches the top.

  SATURDAY

  Imani

  When Imani discovers that her son’s room is empty at four thirty in the morning, she pictures him bound with bright red cable ties, trapped in an oil-stained trunk. The image wraps around her consciousness until she checks her daughter’s room and finds Tomas sprawled like a doll on the floor. His hand’s resting on one of his sister’s orange Havaianas. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s sleeping serenely in an erratic tangle of limbs and blankets and body pillows. To make an attempt at unscrambling her at this point would only wake her up. Imani leaves them be, and gazes at them for a while from the doorframe. She hopes they’re dreaming of candy houses and puppies, and not the featureless face that haunted her through the night.

  Once she turns away from her children, she notices that the guest room door now stands wide open. It was closed only a minute ago. Before she can decide whether or not she should take a glance inside, she hears the distinctive and disheartening sound of a man violently vomiting. Imani herself feels the jagged claws of a headache squeezing the back of her skull with every step she takes. She often wakes up with headaches, particularly when she doesn’t get enough sleep, but she’s still worried that she’s the next in line to violently vomit out her insides.

  Despite all of her anxieties, Imani looks in on Marvin and finds him sitting
on the edge of the bed, olive-green vomit splattered on the Persian-inspired rug she ordered from eBay.

  “Hey,” Marvin says. “Sorry for Linda Blairing all over everything.”

  After one of her children vomits, Imani likes to say, “What’s up, Chuck? How are you feeling?” This time, however, she decides to travel a different path.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Imani says. The way Marvin’s sitting there, slumped forward with his hands on his knees, reminds her of her brother during those last few months in the hospital. The thick, dark rings under his eyes look more like bruises, as if someone punched each side of his face.

  “I should get going,” Marvin says. “But I was wondering if I could try sleeping some of this off? Just a few hours maybe would get me on my feet again.”

  “Do you want me to drive you to urgent care?”

  He waves away the thought with a slight raising of his hand. “Nah, I think this is just the flu my mom had recently. Nothing too deadly.”

  “You get some sleep,” Imani says, crossing her arms over her chest. “Can I get you anything? Water? Tylenol? Holy water?”

  “Nah, I’m fine.” He says this lying on his back, with his eyes closed. By the time Imani returns with her pink surgical mask and a box of baking soda, Marvin’s snoring like her sleep apnea–suffering grandfather. Quietly, Imani uses towel after towel to remove as much vomit as possible off the rug.

  “Howard, stop,” Marvin grumbles, between snores.

  As she blots away the pea soup–green moisture, her headache travels from the back of her head to the front, pulsing in steady bursts of bright red pain. She pictures a jaundiced tumor, twisted and wrinkled, in the shape of a featureless face. She shakes her head, admonishing her own mind. After the rug is moderately dry, she sprinkles the baking soda on top. That should do the trick.

  Before exiting, Imani takes one last look at Marvin, to confirm that he’s not vomiting in his sleep or bleeding from the eyes or something worse. The poor man’s no longer snoring. Each protracted exhale brings with it an audible sigh. “Haaaaaaaaaa,” he says, as if he’s performing some new-age meditation.

  Imani closes the door silently, to contain the illness as much as possible. Next, she descends into the basement in order to deposit the vomit rags into the washing machine. One of the plastic storage boxes has been moved off the stack into the middle of the basement. One of the kids must have been playing down here. Without thinking, Imani begins collecting the clothes from the rest of the house. Technically, it’s Hendrick’s turn to do the laundry, but once again, he’s allowed all the hampers to overflow. As she works, she seethes, and she feels petty for allowing herself to get so worked up. She knows, of course, that this isn’t about the laundry at all. This is about the photos in her phone that she scrolled through in the bathroom. This is about Hendrick’s diminishing grins, the loss of his double thumbs-up. He’s lost bits and pieces of himself over the years, and maybe Imani let that happen somehow. Maybe her mother was always right about her after all. She pushes away the thought.

  Once she finishes collecting all the dirty clothes from the bedrooms, she feels like Santa dragging the bulging laundry bag down the stairs.

  “Good Tide-ings,” she whispers to herself.

  In the downstairs bathroom, she finds a Looney Tunes nightgown resting on the pile of laundry in the corner. Sometimes, Hendrick will shower down here when she’s using the shower upstairs, but this isn’t Hendrick’s. This doesn’t belong to either of the children. When she touches the grimy nightshirt, goose bumps surge up and down her arm. Her head trembles lightly. After a moment, she recalls purchasing the nightshirt herself during a late-night online shopping binge. She snickers at her own paranoia and tosses the Space Jam shirt in the Santa bag. A cloud of uneasiness follows her out of the bathroom, through the living room, down the basement stairs. By the time she reaches the washing machine, she can’t remember what it is she’s worrying about. Story of her fucking life.

  Tomas

  Kennedy’s the one who stood on the couch and leaped over the ottoman and almost stumbled into the TV, and yet their mom says, “Outside, you two. And don’t come back until you get your ringle-dingles out.”

  On the neatly trimmed lawn, Kennedy kicks her flip-flop as high into the air as possible and manages to catch the shoe with her bare hands. Tomas can’t help smiling, even though he’s still upset at his sister for dooming the two of them here. In truth, Tomas doesn’t have a single ringle-dingle to expel from his body. All he wants is to spend a nice quiet morning playing the last level of Goat Flyer so he can finally eat the Big Bad Can.

  “What about bocce ball?” Kennedy says, kicking her flip-flop again. This time, she almost loses her shoe over the brick wall.

  “Yeah,” Tomas says, rushing over to the side of the lawn. He carefully aligns his feet so that he’s standing exactly behind the boundary line. Kennedy brings over the azure bag and lets him throw the little white ball first. A few months ago, Tomas drew a terror-stricken pineapple face on the ball in permanent marker, and thankfully the fruit hasn’t lost his luster.

  As usual, Kennedy throws all her balls overhand, as hard as she can. On her second turn, she manages to knock the white ball off the lawn.

  “Poor pineapple,” Kennedy says. “Lost in the abyss for all of time.”

  While his sister retrieves the white ball, Tomas follows a metallic-looking hummingbird on a zigzagging path from his mom’s gnome collection to the raised garden beds that always remind him of coffins, and then over the roof. Facing the house, Tomas notices Marvin watching them from the second-story window. The man waves, but the boy doesn’t wave back. For a few seconds, he can’t seem to move at all.

  Tomas isn’t quite sure why he’s feeling like such a frightened pineapple, because he liked Marvin when they first met him in Sequoia last summer. Back then, with red-orange flames reflected in his eyes, Marvin told a story about a boy who befriends a ghost wolf and together they stop an evil mime from burning the forest. Marvin said that the mime’s famous catchphrase is “ . . .” When the boy and the wolf fuse together, the boy’s eyes burn white, like little full moons.

  In spite of all of this, Tomas turns away from Marvin now and takes a few steps away from the house for good measure.

  “Wanna go to the tunnel?” Tomas says.

  “I think I’m gonna trampoline.”

  After dropping his neon-yellow bocce ball on the grass, Tomas hops across the stepping-stones imprinted with tiny hands and feet. He goes out of his way to step on his own footprints, to obscure them completely with his black Nikes. He feels a sense of tepid fascination, thinking about himself the size of a baby, but the sentiment only lasts a moment.

  To enter the tunnel requires you to climb onto the squat brick wall the back fence rests on. You need to reach high so that you can grip the top of the posts and then walk sideways. Only the front half of your feet can fit on the wall, so you need to walk slowly, carefully. If you happen to slip and fall, you’d better hope there isn’t a yard gnome right below you. Their pointy hats can be major deathtraps. Once you reach the corner of the yard, where the two fences almost touch, you squeeze your body through a narrow gap in the corner. Here, you can either jump off the wall onto the dirt or sit first and scoot yourself off. Tomas prefers the scooting method. The tunnel itself is a narrow pathway of dirt and weeds that exists between two fences. Tomas isn’t quite sure why this rift exists, and Kennedy wasn’t any help when he asked her.

  Months ago, he and his sister buried butter knives throughout the tunnel, their blades facing up toward the sky. The two of them memorized the exact location of each knife so that there wasn’t any danger of them getting hurt. He tried to explain this to his mom once she figured out about the booby traps, but she made them return everything anyway. At least his mom didn’t notice the two-foot-deep hole carpeted with spiky seed pods, covered with sticks and leaves. Tomas wanted to leave a sign on the leaves that read DON’T STEP HERE, becau
se of reverse psychology, but Kennedy convinced him that this probably wouldn’t work.

  Taking a breath, Tomas steps gingerly over the pit, almost in slow motion. Two crows scream at each other from above, and the boy wonders what exactly they have to argue about. They can fly anywhere in the world. See anything. If Tomas could fly, he would never complain about anything ever again.

  As he continues his journey, Tomas keeps his eye out for the glimmer of a knife, just in case they missed one before. He doesn’t understand why Kennedy is so obsessed with the trampoline that she won’t come here anymore.

  At the end of the tunnel, there’s a craggy chunk of cement buried partway in the ground that reminds Tomas of a giant’s tooth. A giant with bad hygiene. Once, he considered excavating the incisor, but ultimately, he didn’t want to waste a good obstruction in the trail. Once you step over this final hurdle, you enter the courtyard. Here, trees of various kinds peek over the fences from all sides and drop their leaves. No one ever rakes this place, so Tomas steps onto a crunchy, spongy floor of scarlet and russet and golden bronze. The courtyard is smaller than Tomas’s room, but he still has space enough to sit down and play.

  This time, before Tomas even has time to sit, his knees give way and he falls forward onto the soft layer of leaves. He isn’t hurt, but the fall startles him. He sits cross-legged on the vegetation, and the fence posts whirl around him. When he lies flat on his back, he feels as if he’s rising higher and higher into the indigo sky. He feels light-headed. Almost giddy. When the sensation ebbs, he stays looking up at the sky for a while. Little marshmallows of cloud dash from left to right, while a medical helicopter zooms from right to left.

  Tomas can hear the everyone-speaking-at-once rumbling of a barbecue or party. Nevertheless, he experiences an almost tactile sense of solitude. The fences are tall, and the trees surround him and protect him like guardian spirits. The courtyard itself can only be accessed by his own secret path.