On the Day I Died

by Candace Fleming

  Someone tall and dour, dressed in deep black, met me at the door. “Good evening, sir,” she said, her piercing eyes never leaving mine. “I am your housekeeper, Mrs. Usher.”

  I cannot remember her exact words now, but I know she explained the arrangements. She was there to cook and serve meals, do laundry and tidy the house. If I needed a new shirt, she would buy one. If I needed a doctor, she would fetch one. She was not there to entertain me or play with me. She was not my companion. When she finished, she waited for a reply.

  “When will Mother be here?” I asked. “When is Father coming?”

  I saw a little smile of scorn touch her lips, and I guessed at once that she had been told about my ponderings and considered me mad. Something in the expression of her face, so cool and politely impersonal, told me that she would also be watching me, her eyes always upon me, reporting back to Father.

  “Your parents are not coming,” she said firmly. “No one is coming.”

  And as days turned to weeks, and weeks became months, I resigned myself to the truth of her words. No one was coming. Not Mother. Not Father. Not ever.

  Thus I gave in more and more to my ponderings. And though I knew Mrs. Usher’s eye was upon me, I easily dismissed her from my thoughts as I mused for long hours on the texture of a pinecone; became absorbed for the better part of a summer’s day on a blue shadow slanting across the floor; lost myself for an entire winter’s night in watching the steady flame of the gaslight. So many objects seized my attention, held me in thrall, that—how to explain this?—the years simply slipped by unnoticed. Summer became winter. Winter became summer again. And still I pondered. The winking brass of the bureau drawer knobs. A hairline crack in a glass paperweight.

  And then … the wallpaper.

  Pondering the wallpaper was unlike anything I had experienced before. Its whispers were clearer. More alive. And as I pondered the wallpaper, its patterns seemed to crawl deep inside me, revealing dark secrets … No! Reflecting my own darkness to me.

  I could barely—just barely—make out a figure, skulking behind the confusing, uncertain curves of the wallpaper’s pattern. It crouched and crept, provoking me with its sly coyness. But I was cleverer. I pressed my ear to the wallpaper. Yes … there! The faint thump of a heart. I held a candle close. Aha! I caught the figure out of the corner of my eye. It scuttled into the shadows.

  And then I discerned something else. The wallpaper, which looked so solid and substantial by daylight, dissolved in the candle’s glow. The roiling pattern shifted, taking on the shape of prison bars. The teeth above the bedstead clacked a warning. The glowering eyes blazed.

  The skulking figure grew clearer, and I could see that it was a boy. A boy exactly like me, trapped within the malicious pattern. Alone.

  All by himself.

  The glowering eyes of the wallpaper watched the boy’s every movement, while its teeth—those strong white teeth—kept guard, refusing to let the boy out.

  I knew I had to help him. I had to free him!

  With a howl of fury, I lunged at the paper. I pounded it with my fists, clawed at it with my fingernails until they were split and bloody. But still the paper clung stubbornly to the walls, thwarting me, enraging me.

  “Hurry,” urged the boy in the wallpaper.

  I redoubled my efforts, snatching a letter opener from a bedside table and gouging at the paper. I stabbed it, raked at it, skinned it from the plaster wall as one would a pelt from a rabbit. And at long last the paper surrendered, peeling away in great sticky strips. Those glowering eyes grew wide with fright. The teeth clenched in terror. The boy, at last, was free! I laughed victoriously as scraps of the odious red-flocked stuff dripped to the floor like dried blood. I fell back, panting and drenched in sweat.

  Am I awake, or am I still pondering?

  With a moan, I buried my face in my trembling hands.

  Bits of sticky paper still clung to my shaggy hair, and red flocking still dusted my white shirt when Father suddenly appeared in the library like an apparition.

  “Are you real?” I asked. “Or are you a figment?”

  Father did not answer. He was assessing me, sizing me up in that way of his, taking in my gray pallor, my overlong hair, my red-rimmed eyes. It had been only this morning that I’d awakened from my struggle with the wallpaper—three whole days of focus—and I was spent. But I knew that did not begin to explain the differences Father must have seen in me. Six years was a long time. I had changed from a boy to a man.

  Asked Father, “Do you still suffer from those”—he searched for the word—“inclinations?”

  I nodded.

  He paused, collected himself, pulled his waistcoat straight. “No matter,” he said. “I didn’t make the trip to discuss that. Your mother is dead. She succumbed last week to cholera.” He waited for my response.

  I gave him none.

  “Her last wish was that I come and see you myself.”

  As he talked I watched his thin pink lips parting to expose his hard teeth, gleaming white against his dark beard. Those teeth. How I wish to God I had never seen them!

  “Have you nothing to say?” said Father.

  I could not speak. The blood was boiling in my head, and my hands and feet were beginning to tingle.

  From a distance I heard him say, “I shall have Mrs. Usher show me to my room.” I heard the library door close behind him.

  Then all became dark, but I could still see him—Father’s face … his beard … his glowering eyes … those teeth. Those hard white teeth. Not a speck on their surface. Not a mark or indentation on their enamel. Perfect and glistening; now making a clacking sound, now a grinding sound.

  NO!

  I wrestled with my pondering, struggled against its strange and irresistible focus. But it was no use. Everything else faded away, and I was left with one mesmerizing thought—Father’s teeth. They, and they alone, were all I could see. My mind’s eye traveled over their surface, taking in their shape, their sharpness. They felt so real, as if I was holding them in my hand rather than my mind. My muscles tensed. My blood rose.

  Night closed in on me, and still I pondered Father’s teeth.

  The morning mists came and went, and still I pondered.

  A second night passed, and a day, and still I remained motionless as visions of Father’s teeth floated above me—clenched, grimacing, commanding all my attention.

  At last the clock in the hall chimed midnight and the spell was broken. I blinked, panting, suddenly free. In place of the spell, a feeling of dread began to creep over me. I had done something …

  I searched my memory. But all that came to me was a dim recollection of a man’s voice crying out.

  “What was it?” I asked myself.

  My question was answered by a pounding on the library door. It banged open and two gray-uniformed policemen filled the doorway. Behind them stood Mrs. Usher. “There he is!” she shouted, pointing at me. “There’s the madman.”

  I shook my head in confusion.

  The first policeman pointed at my shirt.

  I looked down. The white cotton was soaked with blood.

  The second policeman grabbed my arm.

  It was covered with scratches, and the crescent-moon imprints of human fingernails.

  And then I remembered.

  Oh, God, I remembered!

  My eyes fell on the wooden cigar box sitting on the desk. I had put it there when … Shaking off the policeman’s hand, I bounded over to it.

  “He’s going for a revolver!” shrieked Mrs. Usher.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot!” shouted one of the policemen.

  I ignored his warning and snatched up the box.

  “I’m warning you, drop it!”

  There came the soft click of a gun’s hammer being drawn back. But I was too feverish and agitated to care. I wrestled open the box. It slipped from my trembling fingers and fell with a crash to the floor. Oh, God … no!

  Mrs. Usher screamed.

&nb
sp; The policeman fired.

  I felt a white-hot bolt of pain as I, too, fell to the floor.

  The last things I saw, spilling from that wooden box, were a pair of bloody pliers and Father’s thirty-two hard white teeth.

  “Jeez,” croaked Mike. He fell back against Carol Anne’s gravestone, gripping the cold granite for support as the strength seeped out of his body, just drained out like water from a leaky bucket. “No wonder the guy looks so … so … hollowed out.”

  “Yeah, that was awful, all right,” said a new voice, a female voice.

  Truly awful. Mike shuddered as Edgar retreated to the shadowy branches of the willow tree. “How could something like that happen?” Mike wondered out loud. “How could a father be so cruel?”

  “Good old parents,” the girl said, raising her right eyebrow sarcastically. “They bring you into the world just to drive you crazy or dump you, you know?”

  Mike turned to look at her now—a wiry girl with attitude. “You have a story you want to tell?”

  She gave him a withering look. “Like why else would I have waited around all friggin’ night?” Stepping into the rapidly waning circle of moonlight, she hollered, “Okay, you freaks, listen up.”

  YOU WANT TO KNOW why I was standing on the sow’s front porch that night? Because I didn’t have any other choice, that’s why. See, it was either the sow’s house or child protective custody, and frankly, I’d rather have my guts pulled out through my nose than spend another night in the ESC—that’s the Emergency Services Center, for those of you with nice, comfy homes.

  The sow pushed open the screen door with her dough-fat hand, and a smell like dirty scalp escaped from the house. I wasn’t surprised. I mean, let’s face it, there was a sagging blue chest of drawers leaning against the porch railing and an open bag of cat food spilling down the stairs. Chicken-and-liver pellets had gone crunch-crunch-crunch beneath my platform shoes as I’d kicked aside papers and books and bits and pieces of busted-up sewing machine on my way to her door. I’d even counted, like, seven pairs of identical white tennis shoes piled in a corner. Crazy!

  The social worker standing next to me tried to peer past the sow’s fleshy bulk into the house. I could tell he was unsure about leaving me here, didn’t like the look of the place. He asked, “Do you mind if I step in, ma’am? Take a look around?”

  “I certainly do mind,” she said. She straightened her beefy shoulders, tried to push out her sagging-to-the-waist boobs. “It’s bad enough being saddled with the girl for the weekend. I won’t have you in my house, too.”

  The two locked eyes, and for a second I thought they might go at each other, you know?

  Then the sow said, “Either sign her over right here or take her back where she came from.”

  The social worker backed down. The last thing he wanted was to return me to his car, drive me all the way down to the ESC, especially after I’d called him “donkey breath” and smeared a booger under the car’s headrest. So he nodded, pulled out some paperwork, got the sow to sign on the dotted line. “Good luck, Tracy,” he said, acting all sincere the way grown-ups do when they can’t wait to be somewhere else. Then he practically danced down the littered walk to his car.

  Mission accomplished: kid dumped.

  The sow locked eyes with me now. “You’re Tracy,” she said.

  Duh! “Yeah,” I went.

  “I’m your aunt Viola,” she said. “I guess you’ll have to come in.” She pushed open the screen door a few more inches, just enough for me and my overnight bag to slip in sideways.

  “Whoa!” I went. “No way!”

  Her house was packed to the gills. Actually, packed to the gills doesn’t begin to describe it. Imagine the entire contents of a town dump squeezed into a five-room bungalow on Chicago’s North Side. Now do you catch my drift? The whole place was a mess of empty pizza boxes, rumpled magazines, sun-faded lawn chairs, stained clothes, tattered stuffed animals, buckets and boxes of screws and strings, towers of newspapers, wind chimes, dented lamp shades, busted umbrellas. You name it, she’d saved it. Piled floor-to-ceiling. More, more, more. Room after room after room.

  “No way!” I said again.

  Aunt Viola ignored me. “I suppose I have to feed you something,” she said all martyr-like. “I have hot dogs.” She paused. “And sherbet. I have some orange sherbet.”

  “Whatever.” I was too busy looking around to think about food.

  “I’ll have more variety day after tomorrow. That’s when the delivery boy leaves my groceries on the front step,” she said. “I don’t go out, and I don’t let people in, so hot dogs’ll have to do until then.”

  As she waddled down a narrow canyon that’d been cleared through the mountains of debris, her mammoth hips bumped into a wooden sled propped precariously against a rusted bedspring. The sled fell, knocking into a tower of twine-tied shoe boxes, which brought down an avalanche of soda cans, board games, paperback books and a bowling ball.

  “This house is a friggin’ booby trap!” I shouted, covering my head and plowing through the junk.

  Aunt Viola didn’t even flinch.

  “Why don’t you throw some of this junk out?”

  She snorted. “You young people nowadays think everything’s disposable.”

  I noticed a laundry basket full of, like, a hundred used margarine tubs. “Some things are disposable.”

  Aunt Viola just kept waddling.

  I followed along behind her, being real careful not to bump into anything. The deeper we went into the house, the stronger that dirty scalp stink got. It reminded me of something dark, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  We reached the kitchen. Every surface was piled high, and every one of the cabinet doors hung open, their insides a ceramic jigsaw puzzle of mugs and bowls and plates and platters. And all of a sudden I got this itch to play Ker Plunk. You know that game? It’s the one where you try to pull out a stick without letting all the marbles tumble. Except in this case, I wanted to see if I could slip out a saucer without causing a clattering tidal wave of china.

  Aunt Viola took a cleared pathway to the refrigerator, and I winced even before I saw inside. If the sink and countertops looked like this, I could only imagine what science experiments were growing in there—loaves of once-white bread fuzzy with blue mold; black slime floating on the surface of an open can of fruit cocktail.

  But the fridge’s insides were surprisingly white and empty, the cleanest place in the house, probably because food was the only thing that didn’t get saved around here. I mean, it was pretty obvious Aunt Viola enjoyed her groceries.

  She took a pack of hot dogs out of the meat tray and sidled down the path toward the stove. Only one of the burners was clear of debris. The rest of the stovetop was buried and the oven door hung open, stuffed too full of baking pans and casserole dishes to ever be closed. Or used. Her thick fingers dropped two hot dogs into a saucepan of water. She turned the stove’s dial.

  I took a closer look at her. She was padded everywhere—belly, back, shoulders, thighs. Even her ankles and elbows were soft. Blubber bulged behind her knees. Blubber had filled out the wrinkles and sags in her face, too, leaving her looking like some weird oversized porcelain doll complete with grayish-blond finger curls and these crazy eyebrows she’d penciled in above her cold blue eyes.

  She can’t be in my family, can she? “How are we related, again?” I asked.

  The water boiled. “I’m your great-aunt. Your mother’s mother’s sister.”

  I tried to work this out in my head as she forked two steaming hot dogs onto a paper plate and handed me a half-empty mustard bottle.

  What, no bun?

  She sat me at the only cleared space at the table. It was sticky and sprinkled with what looked like cracker crumbs, although in this place, one could never tell. I took a closer look, made sure it wasn’t maggots. Then I squirted a splotch of mustard onto my plate, picked up a hot dog carefully so I didn’t burn my fingers and dipped it into
the mustard like it was a French fry or something. Bon appétit, right?

  “So,” she said, crossing her big arms across her bigger belly, “let’s get acquainted, shall we?”

  I started on the second dog. “What do you want to know?” You nosy, hoarding cow.

  She leaned down until her china-doll face was just inches from mine. “It’s what I want you to know,” she said. Her voice sounded like a wasp in a glass jar—angry and trapped. “I’m doing this—letting you stay here—against my better judgment. I don’t like people in my house. I don’t trust people in my house.”

  I arched my right eyebrow, a sarcastic gesture I’d been practicing forever. “So why’d you say yes? I mean, it’s not like we’re some lovey-dovey family or anything like that. Heck, I never even knew I had a great-aunt until yesterday.”

  She arched her right eyebrow even more sarcastically than me. “I thought I’d get in trouble with the authorities if I said no. The last thing I want is any trouble with the authorities.”

  “What, you murder somebody or something?”

  “Sherbet?” She waddled up the path to the refrigerator, pulled out a pint carton and worked her way back to the table. Somewhere along the way she’d picked up a spoon, maybe from one of the half dozen drawers that were hanging out like dogs’ tongues. She peeled the sticky lid off the pint, then dropped the sherbet and the spoon in front of me.

  First no buns, and now no bowl. Yeah, this place was first-class.

  “So what’s your mother in jail for this time?” she asked. “Stealing some guy’s wallet? Public brawling?”

  I paused, pretending to be on the emotional edge. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m too … overwrought.” I stroked that last word, giving it just the right amount of angst. I even quivered my lower lip a little like I was about to burst into tears, you know? It was a great performance—got the social workers every time.