by Lisa Unger
“No,” I said. “I’m not like that. It’s not like that with us.”
It was a realization for me, too. I started backing away from him. Again, that voice in my head: Run. This time I nearly listened, but it was too late.
“I have to go,” I said. I still thought he might let me. “Okay?”
He didn’t answer, just drew his arm back. Then slowly but inexorably, his fist was flying in my direction. But I was already on the ground, my head filled with the twin sirens of fear and pain, when I realized that he had hit me.
I stared up at him, feeling small and helpless. He stood over me, a rock in his hand. I tried to ask him why he was doing this. It was crazy … and what did he want? But none of those words made it out into the world. His face, as blank as my own, was the last thing I saw before everything went from bright white, to fuzzy gray, to black.
28
When I came back to myself, I was lying on the cold, hard earth and night had fallen. The cloud cover must have hung thick and low, because I couldn’t see the stars, and the moon was just a silvery glow in the sky. I squeezed my eyes closed, assessing the pain in my head, the hard place where my hip connected with the earth, the bindings on my wrists and ankles. There was a rhythmic sound that echoed off the trees around me. It was a sound I recognized immediately. And for a second I thought I’d lost my mind or that I was stuck in some kind of nightmare loop in my life.
The night I helped to carry my mother’s body out to the place where my father buried her, I kept thinking I was dreaming. Several times I was sure of it. Because such things didn’t really happen, and my daydreams and nightmares were often much more vivid than my waking life. And, certainly, even with all I’d suffered, nothing had prepared me for a reality like this.
The truth was that I often knew my visions weren’t real. I knew there wasn’t an old woman in my room that told me my mother didn’t love me anymore. I said things like that to upset my mother when I was feeling jealous or insecure. And I had overheard my mother and grandmother talking about my child-murdering grandfather. That time I was trying to comfort my mother. Maybe if she thought my grandfather was sorry, she wouldn’t think he was so bad. And if she didn’t think he was so bad, maybe she wouldn’t be so worried about me. It all makes a sick, twisted child’s kind of sense, doesn’t it? My poor mom. I wonder if she’s at peace now. I hope she is.
The digging continued, and I listened to its echo in the night.
This is the right thing. I know you’ll see that someday, my father said. I sat weeping against the tree. Otherwise, what will happen to you? Stop crying. You’re too old to be crying like a girl.
Yet another gender inequality: Boys and men are not allowed to feel. They’re not allowed to accept and express their emotions in the same way that women are. It’s weakness. Only pansies and little faggots cry. Everyone always talks about how bad women have it, how systematically they have been abused, maligned, hated, and discriminated against throughout history. And, of course, it’s true. But no one ever talks about how that misogyny has had its backlash on men. When you hate women, you hate all the female elements of your own psychology. Jung believed that there were two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. The animus is the unconscious male, and the anima is the unconscious female. Because a man’s anima, his more sensitive, feeling side, must so often be repressed, it forms the ultimate shadow self—a dark side that is hated and buried. Jung was a big believer in accepting the shadow, embracing it … or suffering the consequences in psychic pain.
I didn’t want to stop crying then. My father himself had been weeping just minutes earlier. The pain inside me was a living thing, a beast of fear and grief and horror. If I didn’t weep, I might have imploded.
But I didn’t cry this time. I lay very still, listening to the sound, wondering what the hell was happening to me and what I was going to do. No one knew where I was. I was not experiencing normal levels of terror for the situation I was in. Part of that had to do with the beta-blockers in the medication I was taking. They dulled the chemical fear response, hence my flat affect, which people were always so put off by. Tonight, I had a feeling my emotional flatness was going to work in my favor. Then the sound stopped and there was only silence.
I waited.
I have thought long and hard about those shoes I saw. I remember they were smallish and that I thought they might have been my mother’s. They were sensible, leather lace-ups—not like anything my mother would ever wear because she was all about style. She’d tell the girls at the group home that when we put on clothes, we’re telling ourselves something, and we’re communicating that something to every person we meet. If your clothes are dirty, or wrinkled, or ill-fitting, you’re telling people that you don’t care enough about yourself to put yourself together. It speaks volumes to teachers, to prospective employers, and to men. If you don’t care about yourself, why should they?
Those shoes belonged to someone who was practical, who cared little about form or style over function. But if they had been lying by the door when I came in, which I couldn’t swear to anymore, they were gone when my father and I left. I think. See? It’s hard. When you’re crazy to begin with, and deeply traumatized to boot, your so-called eyewitness testimony is next to useless. There were voices, too. I remembered hearing voices from my hiding place under the bed. But I couldn’t be sure of that either. Male or female, I didn’t know. And over the sound of my own frantic screaming, I certainly didn’t hear any words.
“What was it like that night?”
Langdon was standing over me. He, too, was wearing very sensible shoes, those all-terrain Merrells—the perfect choice for hiking, climbing, and digging graves. Whose grave was it that he was digging? I wondered. Mine?
“It was Florida,” I answered. “So it was warm and humid. And it was more of a swamp.”
“But tonight is the night, right? Seven years ago tonight?” There was an unpleasant eagerness in his voice.
“Yes,” I said. I had forgotten. I didn’t mark the calendar with my personal tragedies anymore. I thought I was moving beyond it all, in the ways that you can. When you begin to heal, you can tell because you start living your life again. You start living in the present moment, in the here and now. You look toward the future. You’re not always looking back, wishing, always wishing, that things had been different.
“Why did you let her touch you?” he asked.
I dared to look up at him, and I swear, he didn’t even seem like the same person I knew. The angry, hateful expression on his face so transformed him that he looked like a ghoul. I wondered, would there be a stop on the Haunted Hollows tour for this site in a few years?
“Why do you care?” I asked.
I tried to push myself up, but he pushed me back down with his foot. It didn’t take much; the whole universe was wobbly. I could feel something in my pocket, something hard pressing against my hip. It was the Mace; I finally remembered that I was carrying it. I couldn’t have picked a better day. Too bad I couldn’t get to it with my hands bound.
“What does it have to do with you?” I said.
There was some kind of battle taking place on his face then—a battle between despair and rage. I realized then that he always knew who I was, what I was. I thought about Beck’s gossipy little dig: I heard he has a boyfriend in the city. Maybe there had been some kind of weird undercurrent between us. But Beck showed me something about myself that I hadn’t really understood. I’d been so wrapped up, so repressed in that way, I didn’t know what the hell I wanted. Now I did. I wanted Beck.
“Where is she?” I asked. “Where is she, Langdon? Did you hurt her?”
An ugly smile broke across his face and he walked away from me. I pushed myself up to sitting with my elbows, despite the binding around my wrists. I started trying to rub them free. And that’s when I saw Beck lying in a fetal position near the grave he’d dug. She was pale, and bound, just as I was. She was wearing what she’d been
wearing the night I left her. I’d done this to her. It was my fault.
“Beck!” I yelled, but she was still, too still.
He put his foot on her shoulder. And I saw her move, I thought. Did she shift? Did she give a weak, frightened moan? He gave her a hard push and she rolled into the hole in the earth, landing with an ugly thud.
I need you to believe that I didn’t kill her, my father said in the car on the way home. I need you to understand that.
I believe you, I said. Even though I didn’t believe him at all. I mean, what are you going to say? And a numbness settled over me. I was comfortably sleepy.
I’m doing this for you, okay?
Okay.
Son, are you all right?
I’m fine.
Dr. Cooper and I have been over and over this conversation, how wrong the whole thing was, how manipulative and insane.
Now, this is how we’re going to handle it. We might have been talking about a particularly challenging school project. And he went on to tell me how tomorrow—after he cleaned up—he was going to report her missing. All I had to do was say that the last time I saw her was in the morning before I left for school that day. That I came home to an empty house, and assumed that she was working. And he said other stuff, too, but I don’t really remember what he wanted me to say to the police. Still, it was a fairly extensive coaching session on how to act and what not to say. Use as few words as possible when talking to them. Don’t answer any questions they haven’t asked. Don’t rush to fill silences.
I do remember when the police came the next morning, that detective gave me one look and knew. Later she would tell me that I was vibrating, giving off a terrified and grief-stricken energy that she picked up on right away.
But the question remains. Did my father kill her? The truth is that I just don’t know. I know they hated each other and that they stayed together just because of me. I know that he was having an affair—another woman, another child, another life that was better than the one he had with us. This information came out early in the list of things that damned him with me and everyone else. Beyond that: the police had visited our various homes several times, the neighbors having called to complain about raised voices and the sounds of violence. My father had been to a divorce attorney who would testify that he reacted badly when he learned how much a divorce was going to cut into his personal fortune. It was a lengthy and ugly list of damning activities. But there was no physical evidence, nothing that placed my father on the landing, nothing to show that he had pushed her. But how else might she have fallen? A thousand freak ways, the defense argued. Most accidents happened in the home. Or the missing lover had done it. Maybe he had pushed her.
But my father was convicted, and appeal after appeal was denied. And now the clock was ticking, his life winding down. For the first time, now that my own life was hanging in the balance, I began to wonder. Did I owe him something more? Was he on death row because he was a poor husband and worse father? Had someone else been there that day?
“Why are you doing this?” I asked Langdon. I am not sure he understood what I was saying, because it came out like a wail as I struggled to get to my feet.
“It’s where dirty little sluts like Beck—and your mother—belong, isn’t it?” Langdon said. “In an unmarked grave, deep in the middle of nowhere.”
His words, his tone, shut me down cold. A shudder moved through me and I let myself fall back.
“I’ve read every word ever written about you,” he said. “I know you helped him bury her body.”
“I was a kid,” I said. “I was a scared, confused kid.”
“Sure. I get that. But still. You helped him.”
I had heard this before, or rather read it. On those crime Web sites, where freaks gather to analyze various cases, people come to speculate and analyze media coverage, use pop psychology and knowledge gleaned from the myriad police procedure shows that dominate prime time to come up with their own personal theories. Much was made of this element of that case, of my supposed complicity. I always hated those people who tried to make me guilty, even as I pitied them. How sad, how pathetic and dull must their stupid lives be. Plenty of people believed that I killed my mother, and that my father went to jail to protect me.
In fact, even the private investigator who continues to lobby for my father’s release suspected my guilt at one time, though by this point he seemed to have dropped me from his list of suspects, for whatever reason. But it makes for a pretty story, doesn’t it, for my father’s fan club? He’s not a murderer, after all! He’s a hero! He went to jail to protect his crazy son. That’s why I wasn’t eager to return the calls I received from my father’s team. They’d been wrong about everything for years.
“You know my history,” I said to Langdon. “You know I was taking an antipsychotic, antidepressant cocktail, not to mention what they gave me to sleep.”
“I know, with the whole suite of side effects—sedation, blunted awareness and feeling, inability to feel pleasure, asexuality,” he said, bored. “They really fucked with your brain chemistry. They’re still fucking with it.”
“So they are.”
I was deeply screwed up and had been for as long as I could remember.
“So how do you even know who you are or what you want? You can’t want her.” He glanced toward Beck’s motionless form.
“Maybe I don’t.”
I saw his expression change, and somewhere inside I smiled. I was a fuckup, to be sure, but I was also extremely smart. Did I know what I was and what I wanted? I wasn’t gay. I understood that now. My feelings of affection, my closeness to Langdon … I think, looking back now, I saw him as a father figure—someone to advise me and direct me, someone I could trust. And I had become so divorced from my feelings, had so little idea of what good, healthy feelings were, that I confused my feelings for something else. Maybe he’d picked up on my confusion and mistaken it for repressed desire.
He moved a step closer to me. I lifted up my wrists. “Untie me,” I said softly. “This is crazy.”
I realized then how little I knew about Langdon. He’d been my professor and adviser since my freshman year. We’d arrived at Sacred Heart College at almost the same time, but all we ever talked about was me. He’d never told me anything much about himself, just that he’d grown up in the Northeast. His parents were both dead; he had a married sister in Poughkeepsie, two nieces. I only knew that because he kept their picture on his desk. Who was he? What had formed him? What were his appetites?
He moved closer to me, seemed to consider me a moment, and then he undid my bindings. Everything in my body wanted to run to the grave. Was Beck dead? Could I still help her?
“Anhedonia,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I asked, even though I already knew.
“It’s the inability to feel pleasure,” he said. “It’s a common side effect of antipsychotic drugs.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You didn’t seem to be experiencing that with her,” he said, nodding toward Beck. There was anger, bitterness in his tone, and I found myself repulsed by him. But I held my ground as he moved closer.
“So you wrote that last poem?” I asked.
He nodded.
“And the one before it?”
“I wrote them all.”
“You used him?” I asked. He had access to Luke at Fieldcrest. He’d pulled that ad from the board and handed it right to me. “You used Luke to get to me?”
“He was easy to use,” he said. He offered a slow shrug. “The kid’s a wreck. So desperate for male attention, he’ll do just about anything.”
I felt a deep twist inside—sadness and sorrow for Luke. We pick our own predators. The flower gives off the scent that attracts the insect that nature designed specifically for the task. Had he picked Langdon? Had I? We draw them to us, sending out messages we often don’t even know we’re sending. Luke and I were both easy victims. In other circumstances, we might have been the
predators, especially Luke, if he were older. Instead we were prey.
He took a step closer, approaching me tentatively. He’d only undone the bindings on my wrists. My legs were still tied. He didn’t want me to run. I tried to smile, but it felt tight and insincere on my face. My hand was itching to reach into my pocket. But still I held my ground.
“Just let her go,” I said.
It was a mistake. His face became a cold, hard mask. He reached for me, and as he did I shoved my hand deep in my pocket and brought out the tube, spraying.
He roared, stumbling, clawing at his eyes. And I dove my way out of his path. As he doubled over, screaming, I quickly undid my bindings and bolted for the grave where he’d dumped Beck. He was after me, but slowly—one hand rubbing at his eyes, one arm outstretched, feeling his way.
I jumped down, and landed beside her, nearly on top of her. Then I bent and lifted her shoulders, and nearly died with relief when she lolled her head and opened her eyes. They were glassy, and staring. She was heavily drugged. Shit. She was heavy. How was I going to get her out of this place? I had jumped into the grave without any notion of how to get us out.
“You left me,” she said. Her words were slurred and slow. “You asshole. You left me.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. Beck, I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you, Lane.” She reached up to hit me, but her arm fell heavily on my shoulder.
“Okay,” I said. Yes, that was my name: Lane. My real name. “Fine. We’ll fight about it later.”
That’s when Langdon started raining dirt down on the grave we were sharing.
29
For all the talk in our culture about how important it is to find ourselves, we don’t have a lot of patience for the task, do we? It’s kind of a joke, a mode of light derision, to say that someone is still finding himself. Most people, it seems, have a pretty good idea of who they are. At least that’s how it appears to someone as lost as I have been. The big things usually seem to be in line for other people anyway, like gender for example.
