by Anne Heltzel
It’s as if this realization saves me, as if my fear had been sabotaging me, leading me deeper into the maze. Because as I turn left, relying on instinct and calmer than before, I see a dim haze of light far ahead. It doesn’t matter what road it is. Any road will do. Any road with people or maybe a gas station where I can ask for directions. I walk straight ahead, quicker and more confidently now, and I’m only a few blocks away when I hear a voice beside me: “Hey, sexy.”
I whip around; there’s a figure next to me who hadn’t been there just a second ago. He’s about my age, and he’s wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. But I’d recognize that build, that skin, anywhere. My heart turns to fire-ice.
Sam.
I am too afraid even to scream, but screaming wouldn’t do me any good here anyway, so I run. But as I run, I realize I am screaming, kind of. A high-pitched squealing sound that isn’t loud enough to get any attention, but I can’t seem to get any louder.
“Wait!” I hear, then some muttering, then some other voices and then, louder: “That chick is wacked, yo.” And still louder, in a shout so I can hear: “You hear me, girl? You wacked.”
I run and run. It’s only a few blocks, but it may as well be miles.
I can’t tell whether he’s behind me.
I almost cry when I reach the street because I recognize it; there is Saint Francis on the corner, just twenty feet away.
I run without looking back.
And it is only now, only after relief washes over me in a tidal wave, after the onslaught of emotion lifts me outside of my body, that I can answer my own question.
I know. I know what happened to Katie that night. The memory is thick and rancid, and with it comes a final, unbearable pain.
Sam pushes me to the ground, and we start down the staircase on all fours, me in front and him behind. I am feeling my way down and am nearly there when I hear a shriek that doesn’t belong to me. I am seized by it briefly, and I almost can’t move because I’d know it anywhere. Katie is inside. And now, now I remember what she whispered to me once, her secret I’d dismissed as false, an attempt at showing off.
“Sometimes, Addie, I skip cheer camp and nap away the day, listen to music, do my own thing for a while, and Mama never knows the difference. She doesn’t even know I’m home.”
“Yeah, right. Where would you even go?”
“The attic, silly. Right behind all those old crates, on top of the ratty sofa in the corner.”
“I hope you know you’re using ratty literally, Katie. That’s disgusting.”
“Suit yourself. Just don’t rat me out.” Then she’d laughed at her joke, looking up at me teasingly.
“If you’re always skipping out, Katie,” I asked quietly, “how do you stay on cheer?”
“I’m just that good,” she said with a wink. “It doesn’t take much.” And I felt revulsion fill my mouth and belly despite myself. Katie could flirt her way out of anything. Classes, cheer practice, extra chores around the house. She was that charming and, if I was honest, that sneaky.
And now I know for sure in the worst possible way that Katie hadn’t been joking. I’m so close to the door I can almost touch it, but I turn anyway. Sam grabs for me again, but he misses this time, and I clamber back up the stairs toward the sound of the scream. Sam frantically yells for me from the bottom. When I reach the top of the staircase, it’s louder, but the wall of flames that covered the doorframe to the attic before has now shot across the first few steps, forming a curtain of flames. Through it, I see her.
“Addie!” she screams. “Please, Addie!”
I crawl toward her and look for a way around it. There is none.
“Come through it!” I yell to her. “Or jump from up there.” I motion toward the attic.
“I can’t,” she says. “I’m too scared.”
“Don’t be scared. Turn around, jump from the top. Or run through to me and I’ll smother the flames.”
“No.” She is crying now. She reaches toward me. I try to reach for her, and I gather every tiny piece of strength from deep in my soul and I stay strong for her, because I need her more than anyone. She is the one person who fully understands me, who never asks more from me than what I am. I am reaching toward the flames because I want to pull her through to me since she won’t do it herself. I am gasping and reaching when I see the wooden beam, a torch ablaze, hurtle from the rafters above her. I close my eyes because I know where it will land. And when I open them again, I see I was right; she is lying motionless and I can barely make out her eyes, wide and still, staring into mine.
I run from her. I am consumed by smoke and flames and guilt and shame and horror until I can’t tell them apart. Everything is crumbling; the stairs give way beneath my feet, and there is tremendous noise, as if from an earthquake. And when I wake up, there is an angel above me, stroking my cheek, and I can’t remember a thing.
I am a specter, haunting and haunted, living in an in-between land. But at least now I am living, instead of caught in a dream. Sometimes I think the dreamworld was easier; sometimes I even miss it. But then I look down at the scar that inches its way from my thumb and forefinger to my wrist, my painful reminder of the night I lost everything, and I accidentally catch sight of my hollow cheeks and sunken eyes in the mirror, and I know: the world I lived in with Sam was a beautiful fantasy, but it would have killed me in the end.
I slip in and out of the cracks at Saint Francis. I take everything in and give nothing back. I watch and hear. I never talk. Talking is damning, and my secrets well up in my chest and threaten to push out all the time. But the shelter isn’t a purgatory for just me; thirty days hovers thick in the air like a death sentence. I can see an invisible hourglass hovering over everyone’s heads. My own has fourteen grains of sand left. When I am tired of watching, I sketch furiously. Sketch and watch, watch and sketch. Anything not to think.
There are a few guests here, mostly younger girls — high-school dropouts and former crackheads and teenage moms, who keep the place filled with chatter as though there’s a perpetual TV on in the background. But most of the women here are like me. Quiet, private. Not very talkative except for the pleases and the thank-yous. That’s because there’s no reason to form connections when no one’s sticking around for very long anyway.
But I have extra motivation to stay silent: it’s impossible to feel safe here. Each morning, I wake up wondering if today someone will recognize me. If today I will see an old neighbor, or a friend of my mother’s, some kind-hearted soccer mom who’s willing to drive an hour from home to volunteer at the Saint Francis soup kitchen. Every day I wake up wondering if it’s my last day of freedom.
And then there’s Sam. I miss him and fear him all at once. I know by now that the boy in the alley couldn’t have been Sam; Sam never spoke like that, and he would have shown up at Saint Francis by now, looking for me. I know that, but I am still afraid.
I see Sam now just as clearly as I see myself; I hate him and I fear him so much that I wake up screaming in terror from the nightmares in which he’s pursuing me. But despite it all, I still love him. I hate myself for loving him. In my mind, I list the facts I’ve pieced together from memory:
— Sam was a drug addict.
— Sam traded my body for drugs.
— Sam knew the truth about my family and the night they died.
— Sam lied to me. Everything he said was a lie.
— We did not live in a cave-palace. The place we lived in was filthy and cold, maybe one of the hundreds of abandoned mines that litter the forests here.
Then why do I miss him? I do. I miss him. I miss the way he’d stroked my hair until I fell asleep. I miss his stories, and his brilliance, and his long laugh. Maybe part of me, in that alley, wanted it to be him.
Hey, sexy.
The beat of footsteps.
Being pursued.
Being caught. Wrapped in his arms. Taken with no choice.
But I am afraid of him. I am afraid
of how much I miss him. I am afraid of the box of letters I keep hidden under my bed, letters I’ve written to him with the half intention of sending, if only I knew where. I’m glad I don’t know where. I’m glad that no matter how many hours I’ve spent scouring the Internet on the shelter’s computer, I’ve found nothing about him or the liquor-store robbery. Maybe Sam wasn’t his real name. Maybe he lied about that, too.
I’m glad he’s never there, hovering outside Saint Francis ringing the doorbell over and over and thumping his fist on the door, begging for someone to let him in, like so many of the women’s former lovers. I’m glad every day that I don’t see him on our stoop, but I’m also disappointed. Because he hooked me in the way the drugs hooked him. And now I don’t trust myself not to go back. I don’t know where he is, but I know he’s close. I can feel his presence the same way I felt Katie speaking to me, telling me the truth about things, through time and space and delirium and hallucinations. I am torn between a sickening desire for Sam and a terrible revulsion. I know what I’m feeling is wrong, very wrong. My weakness fills me with self-loathing.
There’s something else I found on the Internet:
July 10. Police have ruled out arson as a probable cause for the July 8 fire at the James residence on Orchard Lane. Officials state that the fire originated in the master bedroom, where a candle reacted with flammable materials to cause a blaze intense enough to buckle floor supports.
“This was no ordinary house fire,” said Eric Davies, chief of police. “The house literally caved in on itself. The blaze was highly intense; our firefighters couldn’t even get close to it.”
Investigators have stated that due to the extreme temperatures and the color of the flames, it is likely that the collapsed floor materials ignited with paint thinners and turpentine, both of which were known to be stored in the family’s basement, according to Al Reuter, a neighbor. Such materials, when burned, can reach the extreme temperatures necessary to reduce a home and its inhabitants to ash.
“I filled in with Justin, you know, on odd jobs here and there,” said Reuter, referring to Justin James. “There was all kinds of stuff down there. Paint thinners, fertilizer, you name it. Justin was like that, always prepared for any job that might come up. There was tons of stuff. Tons of it. We never thought twice about it. You never think of stuff like this happening.”
All four members of the James family are believed to have been home at the time of the incident, though they are currently filed as missing persons with the county police department. An official report will be released on Thursday.
I try hard not to think about it. But it’s there, all the time, a hand pressed against my chest, suffocating my heart until I’m deader than they think I am, because not even a soul remains. All of my grief is not enough. Sometimes I wonder, when I sit on the long steel bench at mealtime, or when I wait in line for an open shower stall, how many of these women are like me — which ones are running from something, hearts beating from anxious adrenaline, and which ones are just stuck somewhere in inertia, passing the time until they pass the time somewhere else. It’s not so easy to tell. Everyone watches one another, but this is what I see:
I see Myra, the obese woman who speaks to her belly and clutches her back when she walks, hoping everyone will think she’s pregnant. I see the way Myra skips meals. I see her trot back to her room at night, and because I watch very closely, I know where she keeps her stash of candy. I even know how much she eats: seven king-size Hershey bars per night.
I see Lulu, a scrawny kid, maybe fourteen, who cocks her fingers in the shape of a pistol and gnashes her teeth together if you look her way. I see her stuff things in her pockets when she thinks no one’s watching: a cheap plastic bracelet, a brownie from lunch, a postcard of Las Vegas. And I see the way she hugs her drug-addled mother when she bothers to visit. I see the way she slips these treasures from her own palm into her mother’s pockets. I made a sketch last week, one night I couldn’t sleep. I made it extra-beautiful with lots of detail. It was a sketch of the ocean, with a little beach hut off to the side and a girl playing in the waves. The next morning, it was stolen, but it was OK. I’d wanted her to have it.
And there are others. Others more like me who went to bed one day and woke up somewhere else entirely. Girls whose worlds changed in an instant because of a mistake, or an accident, or a bad decision they thought they could control until they found out they were horribly, grossly wrong. There are several drug addicts whose jittery mannerisms remind me of Sam. I try not to notice.
What strikes me most profoundly in all my watching and waiting is that I’m not very different from most of the people here at all. Less than a year ago, I had a good life: a family who cared, books and clothes even though we weren’t rich, and always plenty of food. Now I am here. And all it took was one mistake to go from being who I was to who I am. All in the flicker of a candle. And I can’t help but wonder, How many people here would say the same thing happened to them? If only someone told us all when we were little how easy it is to fall. How no one at all belongs at the bottom — it’s just unfortunate luck, a bad choice made in a minute or less. We think we’re different, we’re privileged, that those people are down here for a reason. But now I know the truth: they’re not. It’s just chaos, madness, accident, luck.
Even when I was with Sam, though, there was this idea that we were somehow different, or better. He made me believe we were destined for each other; that we were smarter and more in love and chosen. Chosen for greatness. If he were ever to find me here, he’d clasp my hands in his, and even as track marks ran up and down his forearms, he’d look around and laugh. And he’d say in a gravelly voice, “What are you doing here, mija, with all of these messed-up people? You don’t belong here; you belong with me.” And the worst part is, I’d go. I’d follow his skeleton frame out of there and never look back. I’d follow him and live in a situation far worse than this, all the while make-believing that he and I were above all of that. And I’d look the other way when he indulged his habits, and then maybe the day would come when he’d get me hooked on more than just him. I’d follow Sam all the way to the grave. That’s why I’m afraid of him. It would be my second grave. The whole world believes I’m dead, but I won’t get there Sam’s way, on a chariot of arrogance and obsession.
“I can’t remember,” I say, but I am lying. I remember everything.
“Try,” Dr. Tessler says. “The memories are there, somewhere inside of you.” I look at him then and he looks at me back and I see he’s so painfully sincere.
I read once that there are hundreds of emotions that can translate themselves to the human eyes. I think this as I look into Dr. Tessler’s brown orbs, which speak of all the ways he wants to fix me, as though I’m a puzzle he can reassemble if he only tries hard enough. And I remember my mother’s eyes the way I always seem to think of them now: their warmth as she smiled at me on Sundays, flipping pancakes on the stove, extra butter and one of them cut in an A for Addison. Her eyes spoke of love, contentment, happiness. Emotions that seem so inconceivably distant now.
I remember Katie’s wicked grin the first day she ever snuck out, scaling the tree next to our roof and hopping into the idling car below. She’d turned to me and winked, and I’d looked back at her, silently pleading with her to ask me along, knowing she never would, that in some ways I’d always just be alone. Even in the dim light of the street lamp, I could see it in her eyes: nervous abandon, pride, excitement, glee. Feelings that had everything to do with the parts of her life I couldn’t share. And when she returned home that night and kissed me on the cheek, her breath hot with gin, her eyes radiated a soft, muddled kind of peace.
The eyes can say so much more than words.
I remember the night of the fire. My mother’s eyes glowed amber in the reflection of the flames; they were pleading, frightened. My father’s eyes shone with resignation. Katie’s were worse. In them lay some emotion: maybe part regret, but also something more. Her e
yes screamed awareness of the whole life she’d never see.
But of course I can’t tell any of this to Dr. Tessler. I can’t tell him because then my life — the only thing that remains of all of this — will vanish as easily as theirs did. I don’t know why I want to live, but I do. And that fact is maybe even uglier than everything I’ve done to get here. It fills me with disgust. But I can’t tell Dr. Tessler who I am.
Because I am a murderer.
I wear my family’s blood like an impenetrable coat of armor. I betrayed them. I am a part of the very thing I’ve spent months fearing. I am Circle Nine. I am surprised Dr. Tessler can’t see it for himself. He will return home tonight to his empty apartment, or maybe even to a loving family. He will settle back into his armchair, a replica of the one he keeps in his office, and reflect on my case. He’ll sip a cup of coffee or a glass of whiskey, unwind from his long day. And he’ll think, Maybe I can really get through to her. I hope I can. She’s so young. . . . And later, he’ll fall asleep easily, clearheaded and optimistic. Certain that somehow, some way, he can fix me.
And all the while I will sit on my cot at Saint Francis House, and for me it will all be real and so excruciating that I will, probably, question for the millionth time whether I really do want to go on alone or whether I should end it all now. After all, I think, even if I keep fighting, what’s the point? Aren’t I already condemned? But like the many times before, I will recognize that tiny glimmer in me that wants something more from life. What happened will still be true. I will still be responsible for all these deaths. I will still be without my family and without Sam, whom I still — despite everything — can’t help but love. It’s not an interesting case but a life — my life — and the lives I destroyed. I know in my gut that what I feel is beyond repair. And I know if I stay here and let this doctor pick apart my brain, the things he’ll inevitably find will only make things worse.
