by Lucy Snyder
Nobody in the house was surprised when her belly started to swell. But I feared the worst. I was scared he’d take her out in the woods and I’d never see her again.
But our father’s whole attitude changed. He was ecstatic and spoke of “miracles” and “gifts from God.” He pulled Leanna out of school but he treated her like a little country princess. And, somehow, he convinced us all it was for real. Convinced us that his sudden rages and violent fits were history and he was gentle again. Even Leanna seemed to believe he’d changed. He turned the sewing room into a nursery, all painted in pinks and blues and teddy bears.
He and my mother delivered the baby themselves, and despite Leanna never seeing a doctor once in the entire pregnancy, my little sister was born pink and healthy. I knew she was the fruit of a horrible sin against Leanna, but I fell in love with the baby right away. She was a little blonde angel who looked up to me, me of all people, as someone important. I mattered, finally. I had never been so happy as when I got to feed her and hold her.
Father let Leanna go back to school, riding the bus with me into town. She was relieved to be out in the world again. I couldn’t wait to get back home to play with the baby.
Yet one day, we got home and … the nursery wasn’t there. The crib and toys were gone, replaced once again with my mother’s sewing machine and cabinets of cloth and thread. In the space between morning and evening, pink and blue walls had become a flat, mute green. To this day, the smell of fresh paint makes me nauseated.
I ran to my mother with Leanna close behind and said, “Where’s the baby?”
And, God save her soul, our mother wiped the dishwater off her hands, looked me dead in my eyes and said with a gasping little laugh, “Don’t be silly, dear. There’s no baby here.”
Our mother stepped closer, lowering her voice to the faintest whisper. “There was never any baby here, understand? That’s how this has to be.”
Leanna wilted. In her dry eyes I could see her soul collapsing, and she simply went to her room and shut the door like a good girl.
My brain completely short-circuited. I lost all sense of self-preservation. I ran into my father’s art room where he was sketching yet another Aryan Jesus and I screamed, “What did you do to my baby sister?”
He got up from his chair and with a priestlike calm punched me right in the face. I went down like a sack of wet sand, my lip and nose bleeding, teeth feeling loose in my aching jaw.
He stared down at me like I was something his coon hound vomited on the carpet. “Don’t you ever raise your voice to me again, girl. Get to your room and don’t come out ‘til you’re called out.”
I went to my room and wept for hours. When crying wasn’t enough to release the horrible black ocean in my soul, I started tearing the room apart, screaming and breaking anything that would smash. My father came in and told me that if I wanted something to cry about, he would give it to me. He twisted my arm right out of my shoulder socket, and that evening he taught me that it was possible to endure incredible pain in perfect silence.
And so I was perfectly silent as I stared down at the old doorknob, the hooked memories climbing the walls of my skull. If I opened the door, what would I find beyond? But just as my fingers closed around the tarnished brass, I heard my father speak my name, summoning me like a sorcerer calling up an obedient demon.
“You gonna come say hello to me, Maybelle?”
“Yes, Dad, I’ll be there in a moment.” My voice sounded like my mother’s inside my own head.
I turned away from the door and went into the living room like any good daughter. My father was there in his favorite chair, his hair and beard looking a little greyer perhaps but really he was just about the same as when I’d last set eyes on him.
“How are things out your way?” he asked. His hands were folded in his lap and his soft flannel shirt made him look huggable. Kindly and gentle. He did not look like a rapist. He did not look like the man who had dislocated my arm and threatened to kill me. He did not look like a man who would erase the existence of his own child.
“It’s very pretty this time of year,” I replied. “Lots of wildflowers.”
“That’s good,” he said. “A girl like you deserves to live in a place of God’s beauty.”
“How long has Leanna been sick?” I asked.
“I reckon she lived with it a long while now. It’s a terrible thing,” he said. “We’re all terrible broke up about it.”
There was a faint, strange odor in the room that I couldn’t quite place. It mostly smelled like rust and rotten wood, but it also contained a sharp chemical note like burnt plastic. What could it be? Old mold and fungicide? Glue? I looked around at the ivy-colored carpet and the wisteria-patterned wallpaper for signs of water damage or a recent remodeling, but everything seemed just the same as when I called this place home.
A feline head butted against my calf. I glanced down, and saw a white and gray kitty who looked a whole lot like my old cat Mouser. He rubbed against me, purring, and I picked him up and set him on my lap.
My head spun as I stared into the cat’s face and realized that he didn’t just look a whole lot like Mouser … he was Mouser. His mismatched green and blue eyes, the deep scar on his left ear from a fight with a raccoon … he was the same as he’d been at his prime. But he’d gotten sick with feline leukemia when I was nine, and I’d buried him myself.
This cat had been dead for a quarter of a century, and yet there he was, purring and kneading on my lap. He was soft, very soft, just the way I remembered. I looked around the room. All of it was exactly the way I remembered.
A clammy dread filled me. I stared at my father, who was smiling at me benevolently.
“Where am I? Where am I, really?”
“Why, you’re home, Maybelle. You’re home where you belong.”
I gently set Mouser down on the carpet and stood up.
“Where are you going?” my father asked. “Sit down, relax. Your mother will bring us some tea.”
“I have to check on something.” I turned away from him and headed down the hall to Leanna’s old bedroom.
My father hurried after me. “Now, don’t go in there, she’s resting.”
“I won’t wake her.” Keeping my mind as neutral as possible, I opened the door.
Leanna’s room was just the way I remembered it. She lay in bed, fast asleep, looking just the way she had when she was recovering from a bad case of the flu.
And here, in this careful recreation of my home, she was still a teenager, not a woman pushing forty.
I turned, dodged past the thing pretending to be my father, and ran to the sewing room.
As my fingers closed around the brass knob, the father-thing shouted, “No, don’t go in there, it’s a horrible mess in there!”
I pushed open the door, not knowing whether I’d see my mother’s workshop or the pink-and-blue nursery –
– but instead I found myself standing in my own bedroom, staring at my own twelve-year-old self. My young face was bruised, streaked with tears. A rage that was far too big for my small body to hold contorted my features. Twelve-me had smashed apart all the furniture, and gripped a broken chair leg like a club.
“I HATE YOU!” She swung the chair leg at my head with both hands.
The wood connected solidly with my temple. My vision exploded in white, and my legs collapsed under me. I’d barely gotten my sight back before Twelve-me started beating the shit out of me with the improvised club.
“You’re worthless!” she shouted down at me. “You could have done something, but you didn’t do anything! You just covered your ears and pretended it was all fine!”
She screamed all the terrible things I’d secretly believed about myself on my worst nights. Hearing them out loud was like hearing holy judgment on my soul. I balled up on the floor, covering my head with my arms. Twelve-me continued to pound away, striking a numbing, agonizing blow on the nerve bundle behind my elbow. The next blow sent sparks of pa
in across my whole body.
She would kill me if I didn’t defend myself. I grabbed the club on the next downswing and tried to wrestle it away from her. But the chair leg sprouted tiny itchy vines like kudzu. They sprawled over my hands and arms, snaring me.
I bucked and fought to get myself free while Twelve-me hit me with her narrow fists. Then father-thing stepped into the room. Twelve-me ceased her attack and stood up, waiting.
Father-thing stared down at me with a look of profound disappointment and contempt. “You should have done as you were told, girl.”
Mother-thing came in behind him, wiping her hands on her apron, blankly gazing off into space. “‘Obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto the Lord’.”
Their expressions didn’t change as their bodies spasmed, dark green tendrils bursting through their pale skins. They collapsed, their flesh disintegrating and reweaving into writhing kudzu, vines joining vines that slithered over my limbs and held me down on the floor.
Twelve-me fell on top of me, suddenly serene as a graveyard angel. Her face and arms had grown impossibly long. Black kudzu leaves slit through her skin like necrotic tongues.
“Stop struggling and we can go eat mother’s supper. Stop struggling and it’ll all be just like it should have been.” Her voice was the hiss of rain on pine needles and dry bones, gentle and mesmerizing. “You’ll stay here where you belong. It’ll all be fine; be a good girl and do what you’re told ….”
The room went dark. It would have been so easy to give in. It would have been so easy to agree to the death the creature offered me: peace, at last, and forgiveness for my sin of surviving.
But instead I screamed and fought. The floor beneath me had disappeared into rough dirt and the viny monster was trying to drag me under. I struggled as hard as I could and got my good arm free, reaching for something, anything, that I could grab to get myself out of there.
A flashlight beam cut the gloom.
“Maybelle!” Alonzo shouted.
“Here!” I waved my free hand frantically.
“I can’t get to you!” he hollered back.
I pushed up with all my strength and reached out to him. Vines popped loose from the dirt. He grabbed my hand in his strong wiry grip and pulled. The vines held fast to my trapped limbs. I thought they would pull my shoulder right out of its socket again. But green wood gave before my flesh did, and I lurched to my feet in a cloud of dust and ash.
Alonzo and I ran like hell for his taxi. The black kudzu seemed to be exploding out of the ground all around us, vines writhing and flailing, hissing through the pine needles and leaves as they tried to snare our legs.
We made it back to the rusty gate, threw ourselves over the bars, and scrambled into his cab, me in the passenger seat, both of us gasping for breath. He tore out of there and neither of us said anything at all until we were miles down the highway.
A rest stop appeared around the next bend, friendly and bright. He pulled into the parking lot beneath one of the lights. The blue glow felt like safety.
“That thing wanted you bad.” Alonzo’s voice shook like my body. “I saw … I saw you in the house, but I could see through it, and those vines …”
He shuddered. “I saw those people … what were they, ghosts?”
I shook my head numbly. “Bait. Just bait.”
Then I took a harder look at him. “How did you know to come back? I didn’t call you. I couldn’t call you.”
“When I dropped you off, that place just gave me the creeps, you know? So I did a web search on the address. And there was … there was a fire five years ago. The house … it burned down with everyone inside.”
“What? Let me see.”
Alonzo pulled the news story up on his cell phone. “There’s all kind of jagged metal and holes and stuff in a place like that, and I thought I should check on you. My aunt would never let me hear the end of it if I left a customer someplace I knew was dangerous and they got hurt.”
I took the phone from him. It displayed a photo of the charred ruin of my father’s house. The article beneath said someone had doused the place in kerosene and lit it with a cigarette. Firefighters found three adult bodies in the wreckage, all burned down to bones and teeth. Arson investigators discovered the skeleton of an infant in the dirt beneath the porch. She had died of a skull fracture; either someone dropped her or someone strong had hit her just once.
“Oh, baby,” I whispered. Part of me had held onto some slight hope that my parents gave her up for adoption. Tears streamed down my face. “Oh, Leanna.”
My big sister had gone home to get her own closure, but something terrible and hungry had been born in the blood and ashes and lingering nightmares.
“I’m so sorry,” Alonzo said. “I … I can’t believe nobody called to tell you what happened.”
I shrugged miserably. “How could they? Almost nobody knew me when I did live here, and that was long ago.”
I wiped my eyes, turned and fixed Alonzo in a hard gaze. “Were you serious when you said you wanted to make the world a better place for everyone?”
He swallowed nervously. “Yes, ma’am. I am dead serious about that.”
“That thing you saw? It’s still alive up there. If it can’t have me, I bet it’ll settle for somebody else. You think any of the folks in your aunt’s church would be willing to grab some machetes and blow torches and do a little weed control come sunup?”
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I believe they would.”
The Cold Gallery
Emma and her mother joined the line of kids and parents in Riggleman Hall’s foyer. They’d be waiting a while. The Freshman Orientation coordinators had scheduled far too few advisors for far too many students.
Suddenly, a chill crept across Emma’s back, and she felt a pair of icy hands close around her neck.
“Hey!” She whirled around.
“What’s the matter?” Her mom looked puzzled.
“Someone…” Emma trailed off. Not only was nobody standing behind her, nobody was within twenty feet of her. “Nothing. Just my nerves, I guess.”
“Well, this is nice.” Emma’s mother led the way into the dorm room and plunked down the duffel bag. “Very nice, don’t you think?”
“Um.” Emma set down her suitcases. The relentlessly beige room was smaller than it had looked on the university website. At least she had the place to herself. “Yeah, it seems nice, Mom.”
“The dorms we had weren’t nearly this spacious.”
Looking wistful, her mom opened her purse and pulled out the letter from her father, Professor Burke.
Her father. It felt weird to even think the words. It was easier to think of him as the Professor. Growing up, the other kids at her school had fathers or stepfathers or erstwhile “uncles”, but never Emma. She couldn’t even remember her mom ever going on a date. Of course, with her grindingly long shifts at the hospital, it was hard for her to have much of a social life.
And that, at least according to her Aunt Mary, was entirely her father’s fault.
Emma’s mom rarely spoke of him, but her aunt wasn’t one to mince words or keep silent. According to Mary, her father was Edgar Burke, a chemistry instructor who dumped her mother when she got pregnant. Emma’s mom had to drop out of college and go to work as a nurses’ aide while he went on to become a full professor with a fat salary. Mary wanted her sister to sue for child support, but Emma’s mother never followed up with the lawyers Mary contacted on her behalf.
It seemed the good Professor was determined to have nothing to do with his daughter. But on her 16th birthday, a FedEx guy delivered a fancy basket of Godiva chocolates to their little clapboard rental in Huntington. That night, Burke telephoned the house, and Emma had her first, awkward conversation with the man who until that day had only given her half her genes.
The support checks came Johnny-on-the-spot after that. And on her next birthday, right when Emma and her mother were starting to fret over college
costs, he offered to pay for Emma to attend UC.
“Your father wants to meet with you in his office at noon tomorrow,” her mom said, reading over the letter. “He’s in Clay Tower.”
Emma suddenly felt nervous. She’d talked to the Professor at most six times on the phone, and he’d been away at a conference when she and her mom visited the campus before. “Are … are you going to come with me?”
Her mother’s smile faded for the briefest second. “No, honey, I … I have to be back at the hospital tomorrow. Look, it’ll be fine! Just be your regular sweet self. We can thank the Lord that he’s changed his ways and found the love of Jesus in his heart to finally do right by you.”
There were no crosses in Professor Burke’s office. Nor were there any Christian books that Emma could see in the floor-to-ceiling oak shelves that lined every inch of wall space beyond the doorway and wide window. The Encyclopedia Paranormal volumes and books on Voudun and Medieval witchcraft scattered amongst the organic chemistry and mathematics texts counted as a sort of religious reading, Emma supposed, but surely not the kind that involved Jesus or love.
The professor himself was sitting behind a wide desk, engrossed in a science journal. He was a lean, well-kept man in his late 40s or early 50s, and he was dressed much more stylishly than she’d expected. His handsome face was an odd mix of the strange and familiar: his nose and full lips were masculine versions of hers, and she’d seen his gray eyes in every mirror.
Emma wiped her sweaty palms on her khaki skirt and cleared her throat. Burke finally looked up and noticed her standing in the doorway. His face broke into a smile as broad and bright as the noon sun over Antarctica.
“You must be Emma,” he said, standing and gesturing toward one of the high-backed chairs in front of his desk. “Please, come in and have a seat. So, you’re settled in the dormitory okay? Got all the classes you wanted to take?”
