Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4

by Cheryl Mullenax

  Maybe it was sustained indefinitely by the same looping mechanism that regulated so much of what her mother had to say.

  Innocuous Opening #1: “Hi, Mom. How are you getting along?”

  “Ohhh…it just goes from bad to worse here.”

  Thirty-eight times for that one, word-for-word, since Casey started keeping a tally. Phone calls counted.

  Casey said she was sorry to hear that. She was always sorry to hear that.

  Mom spent most of her waking hours in a single room now. As went the house, so went the family room, far more square footage than she needed. She interacted with the TV, the sofa, the coffee table…and that was about it. Everything else, from paintings to candle sconces, was just there, stored in place for some eventual estate sale.

  Her mother struggled first to sit upright, then to get comfortable. She’d gained the weight Daddy had lost, and then some.

  She’d never exercised. Casey couldn’t think of a single time she’d seen her mother exert herself for the sake of exertion. Some gardening, but even that was leisurely. She never so much as went for walks. A lady doesn’t sweat—that was her credo. She meant it, and lived by it. She’d drive around a parking lot for ten minutes to find a spot close enough to spare herself two minutes of walking. And that was when she was thirty-five. A lady didn’t sweat.

  Well, now a lady could barely stand up straight. Now a lady was more bulbous than she’d ever been in her life—a neat trick for someone who claimed to go days without eating because there was never any food in the house.

  “What would you say about getting you moving a little this weekend?” Casey asked, not for the first time. “Not far. Just to the end of the driveway.”

  “And back,” Mom said, as if that was the deal-breaker. She put on her skeptical face, like: Why don’t you just ask me to climb Mount Everest? “And you’d expect the same thing tomorrow, I suppose?”

  “Probably.”

  From skeptical to dismissive, in one practiced swipe. “Pssh. Are you trying to turn me into a crazy person like you? No thanks.” And, just as quickly, from dismissive to omniscient. “With that ring off your finger and you back on the market, maybe you’ll finally admit I was right all along. I kept telling you, ’til I was blue in the face, men don’t like girls who are muscly.”

  You couldn’t get too irritated with her, not when that tremor in her jaw was getting worse.

  “Mom. That isn’t what happens ninety-nine percent of the time.” And if it did, then, yes, actually there were men who went for that sort of look. Not a thing Mom would ever let herself understand. “Most women don’t get big muscles. We mostly get really fit-looking.”

  “Pssh. I never had to put myself through that. It came naturally to me. I didn’t have to work at it. I just had to be. I used to be pretty. As pretty as you.”

  Prettier, she figured her mother was thinking, but for the moment her diplomacy gyroscope was operational. Until it wasn’t. What a difference eight seconds could make.

  Start loop.

  Mom stared at her as if they hadn’t seen each other for years, and what the hell happened, anyway.

  “You used to be so pretty,” she said.

  End loop. Running tally, nineteen.

  * * *

  She’d added a new one to the playlist in the past months. It would usually take her awhile to get to it, something she held in reserve for later.

  “I’m at that age where I don’t know why I’m alive anymore,” she said. “I wish I wasn’t.”

  It would’ve been callous to tell her that a lot of people felt the same, and it didn’t take all those birthdays to bring it on. Purpose could abandon you at any age. You were never too young for the future to look meaningless. But maybe after a certain point in life this outlook was a guarantee. You crossed it like a finish line that was nothing of the sort, a cruel hoax, because there was so much left to go. So Casey said nothing.

  “I wish a heart attack or a stroke would come along and finish me off. I go to bed and pray for that every night. God never answers.”

  The good news was, he was bound to eventually. She couldn’t say that either.

  Now, though, finally, something new: “You could help me. Would you help me? Just get me some pills. They won’t give them to me anymore, not the good kind. All the doctors around here know me from when…”

  She didn’t finish. She didn’t have to.

  “I’m not getting you pills, Mom.”

  “I could tell you what to say. It would be easy for you. You were always a good liar anyway, it came so natural you hardly had to put your mind to it.”

  “Mom! I am not getting you pills! If you were to do something bad with them, they’re going to know somebody else had to bring them to you. Who do you think the first person they’re going to come looking for is?”

  Her mother sat a little straighter and swapped faces again, the poor-me face.

  “Isn’t that just typical,” she said. “Never thinking about anybody but yourself.”

  * * *

  Her old bike was still in the garage and the hand-pump still on a shelf, and for now the tires held air, so she went for it. The last thing that mattered was how silly she felt, a middle-aged woman astride a dorky-looking relic from another era, painted a mauve that only a teenage girl could love. Ten minutes of good, hard riding—that’s all she asked of it.

  Maybe fifteen.

  Twenty, tops.

  The reasons why could change but the therapeutics didn’t, and if a lady didn’t sweat, then let it be known—she was no lady.

  She whizzed along the streets of her childhood, then the roads of her youth, the old byways along the edges of town where she and her friends had learned to drink and smoke and barf and fumble under one another’s clothes. Most of it looked remarkably unchanged, as if she might round one of the more dangerous curves and collide with an old ghost, stuck in the amber of time.

  Here, where a carful of friends she’d almost joined had steered into a massive oak that had become known as Dead Man’s Tree.

  Here, where she’d met to engage in single combat with another girl over some slight that seemed gargantuan at the time, both of them backed by teams of jeering friends, and prevailed, because only one of them had a father who’d taught her how to fight.

  Here, the turnoff to the cemetery where young immortals once gathered to look at the night sky and confess their worst fears, how maybe they weren’t immortal after all.

  It was early November but she’d worked up a sweat worthy of August when the front tire gave out. Maybe this was it, the real reason she drove herself so hard. She’d always thought it was the most direct thing she could do to not be like her mother, but maybe the truth was more fundamental than that.

  When the time came, this was how she wanted to go: like a tire blowing out. No lingering, no hobbling, no complaining and no warning…just whup-whup-whup over to the side of the road.

  * * *

  Mid-November was peak rut season and the highway all the worse for it—that much bloodier, that much chunkier. That much more relentless striving for life jumping straight to the messy end. Casey navigated the carnage and considered it a small victory that she didn’t add to it, as she again looped back to where she had begun and hit Play one more time.

  “How’s David doing?”

  “He’s fine. He found a co-worker he really, really likes. They’re spending a lot of time together, so I don’t see him as much.”

  And at home, the old home, the once-and-dear-god-please-not-future home, the fourteenth occurrence of some variant of this: The young woman from the home care agency was in, not one of Natalia’s usual days. She’d swapped Thursday for Saturday because of a pediatrician appointment. But one day was about as good as another when $22 an hour was buying you all the shopping, cooking, cleaning, and light nursing needed to keep you living at home.

  Which made today floor day, but as soon as Natalia made some quip about mopping away the scuffs from
all the dancing, Casey knew it was a terrible mistake.

  “Did you hear that?” her mother said. “Do you hear how she talks to me?”

  “It was just a joke, Mom. It sounded pretty light-hearted to me.”

  Now came the face of wrath and condemnation. “Pay attention, clean your ears out if you can’t hear any better than that. She talks that way to me all the time. I’m supposed to sit here and take it? No ma’am. I won’t.”

  Mom looked to make sure there was no eavesdropping going on, and switched to her conspirators face.

  “You tell her to not come back. You’ll have to find somebody else. What kind of home did she come from? We brought you up better than that.”

  “We’re not firing another one, Mom. Not for a harmless joke. If you keep this up you’re going to end up on a blacklist, and you won’t be able to get anybody in.”

  The funny thing? Casey didn’t mind this one. Instead of being wearying, it was…validating. Every so often something like this popped up, another saving grace about being here, that reframed more of the past and put it into a context that made a reconfigured sense.

  It wasn’t age, it wasn’t the Parkinson’s, nor anything else in her mother’s mind that had degenerated to bring this on. It was her. Just her. She’d always been this way, only by this point she was off her game, no longer the least bit convincing in prosecuting her case.

  So think of all those whippings that hadn’t needed to be administered after all. Casey had never counted, but by the time she’d advanced to middle school—too big to spank now, and needing to be punished in other ways, because privileges had come to mean more than pain—it must have happened two hundred times or more. A conversation going off the rails and she hadn’t even known how, other than that she must not have rolled over in complete submission like a dog baring her throat to the alpha bitch. Maybe she’d asked to do some chore later, rather than sooner. Maybe she’d protested some minor domestic injustice. Even if she had been a smart-mouthed kid at the very beginning, she was a quick learner, and figured out how to neutralize her voice for the sake of peacekeeping.

  For all the good that did. Matters always ended up at the same go-to: “Just wait until your father gets home.”

  Protests and seeking clarification—What? What did I say?—only made things worse. Okay, she’d been slow to learn that.

  “It wasn’t what you said,” her mother would tell her, “it’s how you said it.”

  Come evening, though, the replay never sounded anything like the original. As for Dad, well, who was he going to believe, beyond his belief in the power of the belt to set things right?

  So thanks, Mom. Thanks for teaching me dread. Thanks for showing me how a master works, to really sell the lie. Thanks for teaching me self-doubt, that no matter how much care I’d taken with each and every syllable, decibel, and inflection, I still got it all wrong, but surely that was to be expected from somebody who couldn’t do anything right. That’s how we roll.

  And thanks, most of all, for teaching me to mistrust my own memory, my reality.

  You can’t imagine what an asset that’s been over the years.

  * * *

  Occurrence tally, only four, but emerging as the hot new trend: “I don’t know why I’ve made it this far. Nobody needs to make it this far.”

  She might have had a valid point there, actually. Maybe the human species wasn’t supposed to, and medical science had gotten overzealous to the point of godhood. All that hardy pioneer stock you heard about, from whom they supposedly descended? Those folks were done in long before now:

  Here lies the body of Jedediah McGee

  Died at the ripened age of 50 and 3

  Maybe cholera and bear attacks were overdue for a big comeback.

  Mom was wearing her pleading face. “Why can’t you help me with this? Just hold a pillow over my face. They do it on TV all the time. It shouldn’t take long. I won’t fight it.”

  “I’m not smothering you, Mom.” Casey huffed a sigh. “It won’t look like you died in your sleep. Can you promise me you won’t rupture the capillaries in your eyes?”

  “Yourself yourself yourself, that’s all you ever think about.”

  “You’re goddamn right I’m thinking of myself! It’s called matricide. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison for it. But if I did, I’d have a lot of friends there, because ninety percent of the other women on the cell block would understand.”

  Of course she hated herself for it, and would for the rest of the night. Maybe all day tomorrow, too. Self-loathing was a strange way to keep yourself sane, but better the verbal outbursts than an aneurysm on the inside.

  * * *

  Sometimes she could almost have fun with it, once she let herself start playing with the contradictions.

  Loop tally, twenty-nine: “He’s trying to kill me,” her mother would confide. “You have to stop him.”

  “Who?” Even though Casey knew damn well who. There was only one root of all evil under this roof.

  “Your father. Who else? Your father’s trying to kill me.”

  “Mom, you don’t have to worry about him. He’s been in the memory care unit for a year and a half. They don’t get out. So he can’t be trying to hurt you.”

  The aggrieved face. “I know that. Don’t treat me like I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Mom directed her to the chair across the room and had her run her fingers along the back edge until, ow, she drew back with a slice gouged into the pad of her finger. She wrestled the chair around for a look and found the culprit: an upholstery staple that had worked itself loose.

  “He set booby traps before he went. How am I supposed to sleep, not knowing what else he may have done around here? And if you think he doesn’t sneak out, you’re just being naive.”

  Early on, Casey could never decide which would be the better way to handle things like this. To play along, so her mother felt heard? Or try to set the record straight so she wasn’t reinforcing the delusions? Eventually she realized it didn’t matter. Either way, her mother had achieved master level status in taking whatever was there and using it to paint everyone involved as the worst human beings in the world.

  “Mom, he’s not trying to kill you. He’s always loved you. You’re going to have to trust me on this.”

  “You don’t know your father. You’ve never known who he really is. He’s a liar and a cheat. Even if the truth would save his life, he’d lie just to see if he could get away with it. He’s cheated half this town. There are all kinds of things I could’ve told you, but I never did. I didn’t want to hurt you. But you should hear the truth for a change. He wants to kill me for what I know.”

  Fun times? Why not: “Then why are you endangering me by bringing me in on this? What’s to stop him from coming after me, too?”

  Wrong tone, as usual. It wasn’t what she’d said. Must’ve been how she said it.

  “You’re doing it again. Treating me like I don’t know what I’m talking about.“

  Fun times, option two: “Listen, if you’re this tired of living, why not let him do it. Then you both get what you want.”

  “I don’t want to let him win. My terms. I want to die on my terms.”

  And who could argue with that? The sad thing was, there didn’t seem to be any such thing as my terms left anymore. She proved it every day.

  “Mom…it’s not Dad. It’s the Parkinson’s. It’s just…” Delusions, she stopped short of saying. It was such a cruel word, a hard-edged word. “Remember the doctor telling you how it might put funny thoughts in your head?”

  Mom sat with this awhile, staring straight ahead and down, seeming to try to process it, as though there was enough of a rational side in there to grapple with the matter, push back, assert some dominance. After a couple minutes, she turned back with a sidelong look that curdled into a sweet-and-sour smirk.

  “Parkinson’s is hereditary,” she said.

  * * *

  At
last the carnage along the highway began to wane. The end of rut season was near, plus maybe the stupid, reckless deer had all been killed off by now. Midway through the trip, Casey spotted a highway crew scraping up another godawful mess into the back of a truck, and wondered how the guys felt about the end of November. If they were relieved, sick of the blood, or if there was job security in it and they missed the overtime.

  You could miss anything.

  For sure, she missed making this trip in her own car. But in this instance it was safer to borrow from a friend, in case anyone checked later. Her license plate wouldn’t show up anywhere on surveillance video for the weekend, and with a big enough hat and sunglasses and coat, neither would her likeness. Whatever she bought, she would pay for with cash, so forget about a debit card trail.

  You could miss anything. But she didn’t think she would.

  There had been good times, too, beyond counting, but the longer this went on, the harder they got to recognize through the growing cataract of now.

  * * *

  The infinity loop: It always came down to not measuring up. There were so many ways to fail someone, so many iterations, it went on and on, and there was no outrunning it. You could drive until the tires blew out, then discover you’d been carrying the baggage in your trunk all along.

  Sometimes the reminders came from people who meant no harm.

  “How’s David doing?”

  “He’s got the world by the tail, Daddy. He’s got a new lease on life. It must feel amazing to be so admired by someone that much younger. It’s hard to compete with that.”

  And sometimes the reminders came from people who knew exactly where to stick the daggers. Their aim would be the last thing they ever forgot.

  “When your grandmother was going through this, I took care of her. I took care of my mother.”

  Although Mom didn’t come right out and say so, the implied contrast couldn’t have been more apparent. It wasn’t what she didn’t say, it was how she didn’t say it.