And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe

by Gwendolyn Kiste

  It doesn’t help. Each day, my daughter slips a little further from me.

  “Why can’t you find me, Mommy?” she asks from her hospital bed.

  “Where are you, baby?” I cradle her against me while my husband paces the room. He says nothing, does nothing, when the darkness clenches its moonlit fingers around our daughter’s throat and steals her from us. That’s against the rules of this game, but the darkness doesn’t care.

  After I put my baby in the earth with pine and lace, I search the house for a keepsake to help me remember her. She left nothing behind. When she was well, Emma Jo was always moving so fast. In pictures, her shape is no more than a blur. A dark blur with a shadow at her side.

  “Where did it take her?” I sob, and my husband embraces me. His scent isn’t sweet like lemonade. Instead, he stinks of cheap breath mints and cigarette tar and something else, something bitter. His gaze that pleads with me over silent dinners always says the same thing: We can try again. We can have another child. As though Emma Jo is gone forever. He doesn’t believe me when I tell him she’s still hiding somewhere, waiting for me to find her.

  “I’m here, Emma Jo,” I say to the gloom as my husband shakes his head.

  For my birthday, he gives me a painting. It’s a rummage sale rendition of an old folktale my grandmother told me when I was young. A woman in a dark veil dragged into a grave by her dead companion.

  “She mourned too long,” my husband says. “She mourned until something came back.”

  I toss the picture in the trash and say nothing else. My husband doesn’t say anything either. He just tucks his dress shirts in a garment bag and zips his toothbrush in a little black satchel.

  His outline lingers in the doorway as if he expects me to ask him to stay. I don’t bother looking at him. I’m looking for her.

  “Where are you, baby?” I whisper to the walls.

  Others offer to help me search. Women with crystal balls and ridiculous names like Madame Zoltair. Their handcrafted signs claim they can reach the other side.

  “For a price,” they say.

  Arrayed in black, I sit in their drooping carnival tents and watch them levitate old wooden tables until they claim they’ve found her.

  They’re wrong. Like mist, Emma Jo glides away from them.

  “She was right here,” they say. “We don’t know where she went.”

  But I know.

  At home, her playroom’s dark. I check there once, I check twice, and then I stand in the hall and wait until I hear it.

  A giggle. That tiny giggle.

  “Emma Jo?”

  Behind the toy box, there’s a shadow where it doesn’t belong.

  “Mommy?” The voice warbles strangely like the cries of a baby bird that’s toppled from its nest.

  My lips go dry, and I start to drift backwards—into the hallway, toward the front door, my feet carrying me from this place and whatever’s veiled in the gloom.

  Then something wafts through the air and stops me. Something familiar.

  A sugary aroma like pink lemonade.

  I think suddenly of that painting and the twisted expression on the woman’s face as the earth devours her. My husband’s right. There are things in this world that can return to us. Things so much worse than death.

  But none of that is important now. All that matters is Emma Jo is hiding.

  And this time, I’m going to find her.

  AUDREY AT NIGHT

  At half past midnight, Audrey crawled across the bedroom floor. I couldn’t see her at first. But the scratching of fingernails along the carpet as she dragged herself was enough.

  Next to me on the mattress, Daniel snored in his usual rhythm. I inspected his hulking figure in the darkness and prayed for him to awaken. But he turned toward the window, still dozing. For five years, he’d slept through her nocturnal cameos.

  My gaze returned to the floor. Audrey had reached the edge of the rug. As long as I watched her, she never moved nearer. But if I closed or averted my eyes for a moment, she’d drift a few inches closer to the bed.

  I asked her what she wanted, but she never answered.

  We stared at each other until sunrise. Then she heaved her body to the doorway and disappeared down the hall.

  When Daniel’s alarm clock roused him from bed, I was already hunched over the toilet.

  “Is there anything I can do?” He stood at the threshold of the bathroom, tightening his tie.

  I shook my head and wiped the sweat from my cheeks.

  Daniel smiled. “I sometimes think you got pregnant so you could quit work and stay in bed all day.”

  I retched and thought if Audrey permitted me a night’s sleep, I wouldn’t have lost my last three jobs.

  “I can get your lunch ready for you,” I said.

  “You need to rest,” he said. “And I think I can manage to make a sandwich on my own.”

  Daniel started for the kitchen, but his steps faltered halfway there. “Kaylee, I asked you before to stop rearranging the furniture. The lifting’s not safe for the baby.”

  I peered into the hallway. “I haven’t moved anything.”

  His calloused fingertips traced the scratch marks in the hardwood floor. “You don’t need to lie. Just don’t hurt yourself.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It won’t happen again.”

  After another hour of searing nausea, I retreated to the bedroom where my toes straightened the tassels on the rug. Like notches in a tree measuring a child’s growth, the fringe helped me gauge Audrey’s progress each night. She hadn’t made it past the tassels yet, and I hoped she never would.

  Alone until late afternoon, I rested on the couch in the living room. While the daytime protected me from Audrey, I couldn’t sleep in bed. Fingernails clawed at the hardwood and carpet, even when she wasn’t there.

  At around three, the phone rang and jolted me from my nap. It was the real estate agent.

  “That house on Second Street is back on the market,” she said. “The family decided to sell after all. Would you like to enter a bid?”

  I rubbed my face and yawned. “We’re not looking for a place anymore.”

  “Mrs. Cooke, I’m sure if we tried again, we could find you your dream home.”

  “Not interested,” I said and turned off the phone.

  After Audrey’s debut, I told Daniel I wanted to move. I never said why, and he never asked. Maybe she wouldn’t follow, I reasoned to myself. Yet the closing on every house we attempted to buy would falter in the final stage. The owners changed their minds, or the bank refused a loan for which we qualified. Not until a historic Tudor burned to the ground in one of the hottest recorded fires in the history of our little town did I acquiesce to Audrey and agree to stay. Again, Daniel didn’t ask why, and I didn’t tell him.

  He arrived home around six. We ate dinner. He showered. I washed dishes. He read the newspaper. I vomited in the sink.

  “I thought morning sickness was supposed to be in the morning,” Daniel said as he ambled into the kitchen and wrapped his arms around me.

  “Most of the time it is.” I wiped my mouth and looked past the red and white curtains. It was dark now. Audrey was on her way.

  I dangled my legs over the side of the mattress. “Can we please leave the light on tonight?”

  “Baby, it’s like I said before.” Daniel kicked his slippers to the floor. “I can’t sleep when it’s bright.”

  The lamp dimmed, and within a minute, he started to snore.

  Audrey crawled on her stomach. She never stood or walked upright. I wondered if death rendered the legs lame or if something else happened to her. Whatever the reason, on most nights, she could barely raise her head. If not for those cerulean eyes flitting back and forth, the body might have been a displaced corpse hunting for a morgue.

  Daniel rolled toward me. I leapt over him and smacked the bedside light. In an instant, the room returned to life.

  He grabbed me by my waist. “What’s w
rong?”

  I searched the floor. Audrey was gone.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You’ve got to stop this, Kaylee.” He kissed my forehead. “I need to sleep.”

  Plunged once again into darkness, I waited. She lingered in the room. Audrey was a petite thing, five feet tall and no more than ninety pounds. I could search for her, but she might hide. Under the dresser perhaps or along the bed below the baseboard.

  After a moment of strained silence, a delicate scratching disturbed the bedroom’s stillness, and I looked over the sheets until she materialized, that expressionless face studying my every shudder.

  Her ringlet curls poured onto the floor, and the deep red was just as beautiful as I remembered from high school. I always wanted that hair, but she’d laugh and tell me I couldn’t have it. So when I was twenty-two, I took something else of hers instead. I married him, and on the day of the wedding, Audrey swallowed a bottle of pills to celebrate the occasion.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered through the gloom, though I doubted she cared.

  Audrey used to wait weeks between visits, but now she came every night. She came because there was something she wanted.

  “You can’t have her.” I pressed both hands into my abdomen and willed Audrey away.

  But the phantom remained. She stared into me, never blinking, until the sunrise arrived and spirited her to whatever bleak domicile received her society each day.

  ***

  “Don’t leave me here.”

  Daniel slung his overnight bag across his shoulders.

  “Kaylee, someone has to make money. And this trip’s been planned for months.”

  “Let me come with you.” I advanced toward him. “I don’t feel safe alone.”

  “Have your mother come stay with you.”

  I shook my head. I wouldn’t let Audrey hurt anyone else I loved.

  He stood at the door, a hint of a gut peeking out from his suit jacket. A year after we married, his former football muscles went slack, and fat moved into the places strength used to live. Some days, he was more like a charlatan imitating Daniel. But under the skylight that morning, the face belonged to the man I wed.

  I collapsed to the floor and wrapped my arms around his legs. “You’re the only thing that protects me!”

  “Get up, Kaylee,” he said. “You’re acting like a child.”

  “But you’re taking the car. I can’t even drive anywhere.”

  “Call your parents. Call my parents if you need a ride.” He lifted me to my feet. “Baby, you’re going to be fine. This pregnancy has made you crazy.”

  I ran both hands across my face to dry the tears. “You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. Have a safe trip.”

  Once Daniel was gone, the presence of Audrey filled his vacancy with glee. Although daylight temporarily tethered her, her soul demanded recompense at all hours, and I wanted to give it to her before she took something else.

  With a remote queasiness as my escort, I walked to the cemetery where she was buried. The modest grave was well-manicured, giving no hint of its restless denizen. Her secrets waited elsewhere—in a little gray house nestled among the ranks of slumbering suburbia.

  “What do you want?” Audrey’s mother grasped the edge of the front door, eager to seal me out if I couldn’t invent a reason for intruding.

  “Hello, Mrs. Anderson.” I gawked at the welcome mat. It was the same one from a decade earlier, back when I was welcomed. “I was hoping we could talk. About Audrey.”

  Glaring, she beckoned me inside. “You’re lucky my husband’s at work. You wouldn’t make it past the porch light if he was here.”

  The distant aroma of cinnamon and roses that once permeated the home had long ago faded, and the stench of blue window cleaner and bleach erased any sense of comfort.

  “I’m having iced tea.” Mrs. Anderson shook her glass and led me into the den. “I’d ask you if you wanted something, but I’d rather see you die of dehydration.”

  “I’m good anyhow,” I said and examined the sterile walls where the family portraits used to hang. There were no pictures of Audrey. The house blotted her from existence. “The place looks different.”

  “Don’t you judge me, Kaylee,” she said, tightening her grip on the cup as though she planned to toss the contents into my face. “I removed those photographs because I couldn’t stand to see her smile frozen.”

  “I wasn’t judging.” I focused on the red grooves of the glass that now rested somberly in her hands.

  “When was the last time you were here?” Mrs. Anderson pursed her lips, and I knew she remembered without thinking about it. She waited, testing me to see if I could do the same.

  “Audrey’s college graduation party.”

  She smiled. “That’s right,” she said. “I took the nicest picture of you and Audrey and Daniel that afternoon. It was the last time you were all together.”

  “That was a good day,” I said.

  Searching the altered room for a relic from my youth, I found my childhood on a shelf on the wall. It was a kitschy figure, no bigger than a soda can. When we were ten years old, I convinced Audrey to help me get it down, and in our heist, the big-eyed porcelain child toppled to the floor and shattered into pieces. Audrey cried, even after I warned her tears would get us caught, but when Mrs. Anderson found us, she just shook her head and glued the thing back together.

  From where I sat, though, I could glimpse the damaged corner where the ceramic lost the smallest shard that she never did find.

  “You were a louse of a child,” Mrs. Anderson said as if intuiting my thoughts. “You were spoiled. And vain. But my daughter insisted I was wrong about you. So I figured you were a lesson she needed to learn.”

  She sipped her iced tea as she collected her face—a face that if not for the sorrow etched into every wrinkle would look no different than it had during my heyday with Audrey.

  “And she learned about you all right. Put her six feet under, but she learned.” Mrs. Anderson smiled a tight smirk. “You always had a penchant for other girls’ boyfriends.”

  I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but I knew she wasn’t. Audrey was the last in a line of childhood follies, mistakes for which an adult can never atone.

  The clock chimed four in the afternoon, and Mrs. Anderson sighed. “So what do you want, Kaylee?”

  “I’ve been seeing her.”

  “In your nightmares?”

  I shook my head. “She visits me,” I said. “When Daniel’s sleeping, she comes to the house. Drags herself on the floor in the bedroom.”

  “Night terrors, Kaylee. That’s the clinical name for it. Go to a doctor. They’ll fix you up.”

  “There are marks on the floor where she’s been.”

  Mrs. Anderson laughed, and the single, effervescent burst agitated the wounded figure on its shelf. “Then you need help. Serious psychiatric help.”

  We sat in silence for several minutes.

  “May I use your restroom?”

  She waved her hand. “You know where it is.”

  Scurrying past the bathroom, I proceeded toward the door at the end of the hall. A light was lit within.

  Audrey’s bedroom wasn’t as expected. I figured either Mrs. Anderson converted the space like she did the rest of the house or she preserved it as a kind of makeshift shrine, ready for Audrey if she ever came home.

  But it was an amalgam of both. The white daybed I always envied remained intact yet a new dresser and a bureau replaced the bookshelf and vanity. A couple posters—shirtless center-folds from trashy teen magazines—drooped from the walls, and even after more than a decade, the creases had never relaxed. But on the back of the door, yellowed tape was all that remained in the wake of forsaken décor. I tried to remember what poster Audrey had placed there, but my memory drifted away from me like deadwood in a black sea.

  I listened for my lost friend, and the house remembered for me. There in her sanctuary, the echo of Audrey’s candied
voice fused with the eggshell white paint. The room cradled her murmurs from bygone sleepovers when she had leaned close to me, that warm breath whispering into my ear about Daniel.

  “I love him, Kaylee. I really do. I’m going to marry him someday.”

  My question was always the same. “Can I be a bridesmaid?”

  “Of course, you can, silly. You can be the maid of honor.”

  “But I don’t want to be a maid.”

  Together, we’d giggle until someone hushed us. Then we’d laugh a little bit more.

  Mrs. Anderson nudged into the room and stood near me. “I thought you’d be in here.”

  I fixated on the empty daybed. “Did she leave a note?”

  “My dear girl, jilted women always leave notes.”

  “Did she mention me?”

  “She did.”

  “May I read it?”

  “No, you may not.” She stepped back and inspected me. “I need you to leave now.”

  Back at the welcome mat, I turned to Mrs. Anderson, my eyes wide and arms shaking. “She wants my baby.”

  She shrugged, one arm resting against the doorframe. “It should be her child with Daniel, not yours.”

  “Please,” I said. “If you could forgive me, maybe Audrey can too.”

  “But I have no interest in exonerating you, Kaylee. If I had my way, you’d die of guilt.” This time, she did slam the door, abandoning me in the bare sunlight with nothing more than my memories of Audrey to accompany me home.

  Around nine, Daniel phoned to say goodnight. He talked about his day and how stressful conventions were and a list of business complaints that I neither understood nor cared to hear.

  Fatigued with talk of spreadsheets, I interrupted. “Do you ever think about Audrey?” It was the first time since she died we’d spoken her name between us.

  He hesitated. “What made you remember her?”

  “I never forgot.”

  “Kaylee,” Daniel said, and in my mind, I could see him tilt his head and flash me that half-smile I loved. “She did what she did. That’s not our fault. We fell in love, and I won’t apologize for that.”

  I nodded and hoped he could envision my response the same way I imagined his.