Phantoms

by Marie O'Regan

  (My mother used to recite this to me at night before I went to sleep, you wanted to tell Amaya in a whisper, earlier. Gave me The Collected Works of Shakespeare for my seventh birthday, so I could read along. She was understudying the part at the time, and guess how many years it took me to figure out I was mostly there to take her on her lines? I mean… actors, right? This is what I got, instead of fairytales.)

  “Make me a willow cabin at your gate

  And call upon my soul within the house.

  Write loyal cantons of contemned love

  And sing them loud even in the dead of night.

  Halloo your name to the reverberate hills

  And make the babbling gossip of the air

  Cry out…”

  “Sometimes I’m amazed, too,” you say instead, and slip an arm around her waist.

  * * *

  The key is finding a non-destructive way to release stress, Dr Lavin told you. I promised you when we started this journey together that I wouldn’t press you for more than you were ready to give – because I have to tell you, Isla, it’s been pretty obvious you’ve been holding stuff back. To which you’d said nothing, because there was nothing you could have said without lying.

  Which puts us in an awkward position, Lavin went on after a pause, not sounding awkward at all. You need to express the issue underlying your stress, but you don’t have anybody to whom you feel you can do that safely yet. I might become that, eventually, but—

  A shrug. Fortunately, your subconscious mind isn’t nearly as fussy as your conscious. A purely symbolic action may very well help as much as anything more explicit.

  Like what? you asked.

  A ritual. Get yourself a container – a bottle, an empty spice tin, a small fabric bag you don’t use anymore, so long as it’s something unusual and striking. Then tell your story into it, with as much detail as you can, and close it up: cork it, wax it, tie it shut. Put it somewhere you can’t get to it again afterwards, and forget about it.

  That’s therapy? you finally said, once you realized she was serious. Doc, no offence; that sounds like fucking witchcraft.

  Lavin shrugged again. A lot of what people called witchcraft is based on exactly these kinds of psychological techniques, she’d said. Sympathetic magic, metaphor, whatever – but if it works, who cares? She leant forward, holding your gaze with hers. Just promise me you’ll try it. Please.

  So you did. You went home, found that huge cowrie shell your dad once sent you from Australia, furled and blushing like a fine-toothed vagina dentata, brought it up to your lips and breathed your worst behavior in, over and over. You didn’t get rid of it, though, after. It’s at home even now, hung on the wall of the bedroom you and Amaya share in a gold-rimmed glass display case your mother once got you, right next to your other family relics – driftwood and coral, a tiny box full of baby teeth, a bleached-out tin button impressed with a snapshot from 1974 (Mom, Dad, you at maybe six, posing just like a real family on a day out to Toronto’s Centreville fun-park, even as your relationship hovers on the ragged edge of dissolving).

  Most importantly, however, Dr Lavin’s crazy-seeming idea actually did work. Does still. Always has, the shell absorbing your words endlessly, holding your secrets like a cup that never spills over. Because that rage-fire’s dimmed somewhat since you were a teenager, but it never entirely dies.

  Yet still, as long as you have somewhere to put it all, you’re okay.

  So far.

  * * *

  Sometime in the very early morning darkness there’s that voice again, reverberating, setting your skull’s shell ringing. Whispering, murmuring—

  Did something, oh, I...

  —are you there?

  …something so terrible, so unforgivable, I

  have to tell, must—

  Are you listening?

  Is anyone listening?

  * * *

  Amaya’s half out of bed before your posture registers – slumped over, elbows on knees, hands holding up your forehead. “Oh, baby, you barely slept again, did you?” She doesn’t wait for an answer before she bounces to her feet. “Give me a few minutes, I’ll make coffee.”

  You listen to her chatter in the kitchenette, wondering how you managed to fall in love with a morning person, ’til your iPhone chirrups. You pick it up and groan. Who else? And you don’t dare ignore a FaceTime call this early in the morning; that’ll just make it worse when you finally do reply. Pulling up whatever reserves of energy remain after last night, you tap ANSWER.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Amaya glances at you, instantly silent – she’s learned the hard way to stay off your Mom’s radar. For her part, Mom seems a little more relaxed than usual: early morning fatigue, maybe.

  “Isla. Don’t tell me I woke you.”

  “Nope, I was up already.”

  “Hmmm. Well, I just wanted to see how things are going—”

  “See for yourself,” you tell her, sweeping the phone around, grateful and annoyed in equal measure as Amaya skips hastily out of its sightline. “One more day, maybe. The play was great, by the way.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you earned it. I appreciate that this was an inconvenience…” Mom’s eyes narrow, staring at something behind you. “Oh, God. So that’s where that went.”

  “What?”

  “That horrible bottle you bought at the Weekend Market, the one you used to keep in your room. Smelled like rotten vinegar.” She gives an affected micro-shudder of disgust. “I never could tell whether you genuinely didn’t notice, or just claimed you didn’t; should’ve guessed it might have found its way up to Nan’s. You two always did like that… stuff.”

  “Antiques?”

  “Old things. Junk. Like the useless beach trash your father used to mail you every year instead of money, full of all that muck—”

  A flickering image of ripping brown paper away from a box and opening it teases you, of pouring sand from the cowrie’s inner folds back inside its packaging, purest white-blonde and apparently ground from the cracked wrecks of even tinier shells, every grain a new skeleton. As right in your inner ear, meanwhile, you almost think you can hear that most recent dream’s voice murmur, telling you to break it off, don’t take the bait for once, just hang up on her, Isla—

  (You’ll feel so much better if you do.)

  “Mom,” your mouth says, curtly, “I have to run – still got that last bit of stuff to do, remember? We’ll get back to you.”

  “‘We?’”

  “Amaya and me. You know, my girlfriend, who I live with? Who’s here cleaning out Nan’s crap too, for free, just because she loves me?”

  Mom frowns, dismissing all of the above with a single flick of her brows: not now, not yet, not ever. “Well, when exactly will the two of you—?”

  “When it’s done, Mom; talk to you then. Bye.”

  A finger stabs hard on red, and the screen goes blank. To your left, Amaya resurfaces from under the kitchenette counter, filter and coffee-tin in hand. “That sounded… different,” she says, eventually, to which you simply shrug, spasm-quick.

  “I’m done tiptoeing around her,” you reply, not turning. “Especially when she keeps pretending you don’t exist.”

  “Huh, well… some people might call that a blessing, considering.”

  “And some people might call it an insult, ten years’ worth at least, ever since I first tried coming out to that bitch only to have her completely ignore me: Oh, that’s very interesting, Isla. Will you be inviting any of your little college friends home this Thanksgiving? That nice boy Randy, perhaps?”

  “Babe, you’re getting yourself all upset—”

  Just be quiet, Maya; pour yourself a cup of that fucking awful coffee of yours, and shut up. Don’t talk about things you couldn’t possibly hope to understand.

  The same faint whisper, even lower, now barely thrumming through your marrow: Yes, just like that, that’s good, yes.

  (Oh, Isla, yes, that’s perfect.)
/>   “Agree to disagree,” is all you say out loud, cool enough to wound. And walk away, back up into what used to be Nan’s domain, mounting the rickety steps through a spill of memories let loose, like you’re breasting some awful tide, submerged and struggling as the current bears you inexorably back, years peeling away like skin until at last you see clearly what you once thought you’d never have to think about again, so clear it hurts—

  Should’ve known that cork was far too fragile to last, shouldn’t you? the murmur asks, sweetly. But the bottle was cheap, at the very least… cheap enough, anyhow.

  You see it, blue-white where a shaft of sun from the door catches it on the edge of one of Mom’s favorite Sunday Market tables: lit up from within, what’s left of its original glaze gone silvery, come away here and there in patches like glue worn tissue-paper thin. Remember paying for it with a random handful of change, three dollars and four two-dollar coins, the weight of them suddenly so palpable in your palm it makes you start to sweat. It seems frankly impossible you could ever have forgotten – that the bottle belonged to you once, along with anything you might have left inside it. That it still does, and always will.

  The frosting, like a bubble, a slow pocket of time. It didn’t just appear there, in the closet; you put it there, cork in place, certain you wouldn’t see it again. And what was it that attracted you to it, in the first place?

  Sometimes, things simply suggest themselves, on sight. Objects find their own utility.

  * * *

  Here comes your mother’s voice from years ago, meanwhile, overheard through a half-closed office door, younger than you ever recall her and angry in the way only someone terrified can be, biting the words off like poisoned threads: Don’t you dare tell me those quacks at the Clarke Institute have it right, Doctor – that my daughter’s an… early-onset child schizophrenic, a psychopath, for Christ’s own sake. That she’s mentally goddamn ill.

  But: Isla’s angry, Mrs Decouteau, Dr Lavin replies, maddeningly calm as always. Abandoned by one parent, pathologized by the other… You’ve got your own stresses to deal with, I’m sure, but those aren’t my problem, except in terms of how they manifest through Isla’s various behaviors. What she needs most right now is to let herself forget the ways in which her fits of rage cause her to let you down – forgive herself for them, eventually, if she can. But that will never happen until you learn to stop pressuring her. She’ll only come to terms with what she does when she’s pushed beyond her limits. When she’s ready. Not at my convenience, or yours.

  (Or hers.)

  * * *

  The next night you have another dream entirely, lying silent next to Amaya, who’s curled away from you with her pillow tucked over her face. This time there is no beach, no shell, no voice. Just Nan’s house the way it used to be back when you lived here, however briefly. She’s already gone out and left a list of things for you to do behind: one of those weird scrawled, barely legible ones she used to tape to the basement apartment door before you came up in the morning. But this time the house is full of animals you’ve apparently agreed to look after, a random bunch of pets Nan – animal-hater that she was – would never have owned in the first place: cats, dogs, birds, rats. Plus some sort of thing you can’t even begin to recognize, something truly awful, unnatural… long and hairless, with a ferret’s slithery body but the head of a leech or lamprey, all teeth, no face. And it’s going around swallowing the smaller animals down whole with its jaw unhinged like a snake, as you watch, horrified. And you want to interfere but you don’t want to touch it long enough to, for fear it’ll turn that fierce appetite your way before you can – too afraid your disgust will take over and make you beat it to death with a skillet, then having to explain that to Nan afterwards, too revolted by the idea of having to take responsibility for its actions, or your own lack thereof. Because Jesus, it’s not your pet, after all…

  Which is exactly when you notice it’s shitting as it swallows, of course, but also giving birth at the same time, as messily as possible – all these tinier versions of the same animal sliding out onto Nan’s spotless vinyl-tiled kitchen floor slimed head to toe with crap, stinking and spilling, humping and squirming. The sound of this horrible unknown creature panting, grunting in painful effort, its very pain repulsive. The fucking smell.

  It makes you want to scream, to set the house on fire. Makes you wake up crying so hard you think you’re going to go blind, choking and shuddering as Amaya bolts upright, cringing away when she tries to hug you. And teetering throughout on the brink of some memory too painful to access at all during your waking hours. Of something, something, something so bad—

  * * *

  “I need to tell you about what else happened, after Nan threw me out,” you begin, later that morning, as Amaya glances up from her smartphone’s screen.

  “Your mom blame you for that, too?”

  “No, actually. No, she was… occupied… with something else, back then. Someone else.” You swallow, throat dry.

  “The boyfriend she didn’t marry.”

  “Mmm. Which kind of worked out for me, as it happened, but anyway. Not the point.” Your hands work against each other, massaging the knuckles as if you can already feel the arthritis both Mom and Nan have probably passed on in your genes. “You see, I didn’t just go straight home.”

  Amaya tilts her head, silently, patient as always. You make yourself go on. “Nan locked me out of the basement; I kicked a hole in the door, but I couldn’t get it open. Still, I wasn’t going to leave everything I cared about behind – so instead of leaving, I went into her room and hid under her bed, to wait for her to come back. Just lie there ’til she was asleep then sneak out and get the new keys off her ring, that’s all I was thinking… all I think I was thinking. But—”

  The darkness and silence of Nan’s bedroom, stinking with overflowing cigarette trays, thick dusty air, talcum powder – then at long last an opened door, stumbling steps, clothes dropped to the floor, a body settling back onto the mattress, so frail the box spring barely creaks. Wait ’til the light goes out plus an hour more, counted by heartbeats, breathing slowly through your nose, before finally slithering out, straightening up. Tiptoeing to the dresser and the purse left there, open far enough for you to rummage through it, your own silent anger outlining every shadow like it’s boiling out through your pores, a radiation-sickness halo—

  From the bed, there’s a sudden sickly gasp as Nan jolts upright, eyes bulging, too disoriented to recognize the threatening black shape in the corner as her granddaughter: that rigid-backed thing already turning on her, its mouth gone square and teeth bared, eyes hateful enough to scald. You’d probably scare you too, you remember thinking, if you could see yourself: good, good. You should be scared, you horrible old—

  But here the gasp is cut off by a squeal, then a thick, disgustingly hoarse rattle; the sound alone’s enough to cut your horribly happy pleasure at her fright right off at the root as Nan’s gaze glazes over, one eye skewing and mouth going slack on the same side, face half-melted. As she slumps over, settling into a permanent lean, with you all the while thinking, equally terrified: Oh God, what happened, what did I do?

  (That voice, coolly: You know, Isla.)

  “A stroke,” Amaya says, out loud. “You frightened her into a stroke.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, well, um… that’s really, really bad, obviously. But it was… that was an accident, babe.”

  You snort. “Fucking her brain forever, just because I wanted my stuff back? Yeah, I can see how you’d like to think so, and me too. But no.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Isla! I mean, how could it not be? There’s no way on earth you could’ve known that would happen, and – well, she survived, right? I remember you saying. Your nan didn’t die until—”

  “Five years later, right. And how do you think she was all that time, Maya? I know I told you that, too.”

  You see her stop and take a breath, thinking. Hearing
your voice in her head, maybe, recounting Nan’s subsequent downward plunge into dementia, paranoia, sheer outright insanity. How she went from simple bitch to raging harridan in what seemed like zero to sixty, only to let her house degenerate into a human rat’s nest so bad it had to be almost entirely gutted and rebuilt from the studs after she died.

  “I did that,” you tell Amaya, perversely glad to hear the words out loud. “Me. I knew something would happen when I moved in with her, just not what—”

  “Yeah, but you thought it would be a blow-up or a fight, something you were actually responsible for. As opposed to her just chucking you out for nothing, because she was a bitter, verge-of-nuts bitch – your mom squared, basically. Because she’s where your mom gets it from.”

  You shake your head. “I was a guest. She let me into her home, and—”

  “Hey, you need to stop. That is not your fault.”

  “Oh baby, it is my fault, and more than you know. More than even I remembered, up ’til now.”

  Back in the bedroom, you watch Nan’s expression distort like a fist-crushed clay mask. Obscenities explode on a cloud of spit, too fast and slurred to make any sense – yet you know you’ve heard them all before already, more snidely, more subtly. And here’s the primal raw hatred version, flayed and bleeding: how you’re worthless, unlovable, a monster who’ll make nothing but more monsters, a waste of time and breath and life. How everything you’ve ever dreaded is true, and worse.

  You should feel sorry, and you do. Guilty. You do.

  It also makes you hate her, more than ever.

  You pick up Nan’s keys from the floor and leave the bedroom; her ranting doesn’t change or stop, not even when you close the door on her. You unlock the basement door and go down to collect your belongings, as much as you can take in a single trip, and—

  (This is the part you don’t tell Amaya, because…)

  (…well, it sounds crazy, even to you.)

  —you see the Jaundice Bitters bottle by your bedside, its silver patina glimmering in the dark; stare at it a moment, before making the decision. Then pick it up, work the cork out carefully. In a series of whispers, tell the empty air inside the bottle what you did, feeling the story slip from your shoulders as you say it aloud – slip out and down, inside, settle at the bottle’s bottom. Shove the cork back in with your last word, hard, to keep even the faintest shred of it from leaking back out. Go over to the closet, move as much of the stuff inside as you can, make a hole; lifting the bottle up to the top shelf seems to take disproportionate effort, let alone shoving it in, far as you can.