The Affliction

by Wendy E. Marsh

  Finding myself alone and without proper protection, I wanted to sprint for the stairs. Hopefully, I could emerge alive from the house, and drive into town to some public place like Gil’s family restaurant. It typically swarmed with people at this hour. However, a notion inside me contradicted this appealing course of action.

  There were a few possibilities that made my instinctual plan suddenly look ridiculously puerile. Whoever had stormed down my door could still be in my apartment, waiting to kill me.

  Maybe they took some perverse pleasure in stalking me in my own home. Or what if Cara was still there, alive but wounded, and I was able to help her? Either way, I knew I had to search the place, and I had an uncanny feeling I would find something significant.

  I positioned the fire poker like a baseball bat, ready to swing at the sight or sound of anyone besides Cara. With a glance, I saw that nobody hid in my small kitchen. For a brief moment, I considered switching out the poker for a knife, but I knew any attacker could easily turn it on me if I gained the intimacy needed for that weapon.

  I turned my back on my hopelessly 60’s-ish kitchen and as I absorbed the scene at the entry-way, felt an increased twang of fear shoot out from my overactive heart and pulse through my arteries.

  The broken hinges caused the door to stand partially open at an awkward angle, and the wall beyond featured a spiky puncture wound where the doorknob had blown into it. The amethyst ceramic lamp I made in high school lay in fractured pieces on the floor. Apparently, my art class craft served as the weapon of choice for whoever had so generously cracked me over the head.

  I also found the beginning of the small blood trail. I remembered the coarseness of the carpet and gently rubbed my hand over the rug burns on my back where my shirt had scrunched up, leaving my bare skin exposed.

  I continued straight on toward the darkness of the rooms beyond, without overly investigating the entrance, and peered into the large bathroom while keeping both ends of the hallway in my peripheral vision at the same time. I was spared having to enter due to the courteous, exposed layout where nothing could hide. And on principle, I always left the shower curtain open.

  I proceeded down the hallway toward my bedroom, where the door stood open as I had left it. I started to calm down a few degrees, now that I had ventured through the apartment unharmed and without confrontation. My bedroom, the only room left unchecked, was partially visible in the reflection of the mirror. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, just my black curtains fluttering gently over the only window in there.

  Finally, I stepped into my empty room, glaring at the closet hidden behind pearly slatted doors; the only place left in my apartment to hide, other than the small closet in the hallway, which featured full, cluttered shelves from floor to ceiling. I walked straight to the closet, my heart pounding out a rhythm fast enough to take the place of the double bass in any hard rock song.

  I yanked open the right-hand door, frantically searched into the dark corners, and almost attacked my laundry hamper. I had thought for one horrid second my clothes covered basket, hulking in the shadows, was a person crouched in hiding.

  “Wow. Pathetic,” I whispered as I lowered the poker with shaky hands. I turned back toward my bed and noticed my cell phone on the nightstand. I had to call the police, Cara, someone. I snatched up the phone only to find a blank screen, which told me the battery had died. I never turned my phone off since I didn’t have a landline, but I pressed the power button anyway. Nothing.

  I immediately hurried out to the living room, where I kept my charger plugged into the outlet by the couch. I flung myself across an arm, stretching down behind the end table to grab the charger, but hesitated as a piece of paper by the table leg caught my eye. I curiously picked it up and read the hastily scribbled words: I need to talk to you, I’ll be in Sundown. Please don’t tell anyone.

  This note was it—what I hoped to find in my search through the house. I needed a clue for what to do next, and as I stared at the paper, I knew Cara must have left it for me. I didn’t hesitate now. I was going to Sundown to discover the mysteries of the night.

  Don’t tell anyone. My first impulse was to contact the police, but if Cara didn’t want that, then I wouldn’t. I dropped the poker, intuiting that all my troubles had disappeared to the small town of Sundown, which was about an hour away from Aurora in the middle of Oil Creek State Park.

  Anyone else would have been disappointed with the note and its considerable lack of information; however, I had no trouble deciphering this short message. There was only one place in Sundown that Cara might have referred to in her quick message.

  When we were little, Cara’s family took me camping with them to their summer cottage on the less inhabited side of Sundown Lake. I hoped I would find Cara there.

  I half ran towards my bedroom, while recalling the way from Aurora to Sundown, ready to drive there immediately. Once again, I caught a glimpse of my pallid reflection in the mirror and cringed. If anyone saw me they might think I just killed someone, with the blood on my head and clothes. Reconsidering my condition, I decided it was not plausible to endeavor on a road trip just then, although I couldn’t clean up in my violated apartment. It was time to visit my mother.

  Chapter 3

  She pulled the door open only seconds after I rang the doorbell, as though she waited for me to arrive. More likely she saw me arrive as she spied on the neighbor across the street. At sixty-one years old, she was still the image of retired strip club goddess, “Ginger,” her hourglass figure and angelic beauty visible beneath her billowy gown and ashen, corrugated skin. I would’ve classified myself as good-looking, and I knew I had inherited many attractive qualities from my mother; however, even as I gazed upon her decaying body, I knew I would never compare to her exquisiteness.

  “Aubrie!” my mother exclaimed in her over-inflated, feigned surprise tone of voice. She raised her arms out to the sides as though she were about to hug me, even though we both knew that wasn’t going to happen. I could smell stale alcohol on her breath, and it made me cringe with painful memories of drunken rage she used to aim at my teenage self.

  “Hi Angela,” I said, with much less enthusiasm in my voice than she held in hers. She didn’t love me. She didn’t deserve to be called “mom.” It seemed I had no choice but to love her, though I didn’t know why that was.

  Even so, I couldn’t tolerate her company for much time, especially since the accident. She had developed a maniacal obsession with discussing the crash, as though I needed more excruciating reminders of it.

  I know her intention was not to make me suffer, but I did nonetheless. She merely wanted to know everything I was thinking and feeling…Her feeble attempts at consoling me. What she didn’t grasp was that I had already been through that once with Cara and that was enough. And though she didn’t have a problem spilling all the details of her life to me, I didn’t reciprocate her openness. I didn’t give pieces of myself away to other people.

  Our relationship was a needs-guilt one; meaning, I occasionally needed things from her, and she felt guilty for not loving me, so she gave them to me. The only reason I was alive was that Larry had convinced her not to go through with the abortion as she had before. Larry wasn’t my dad though; my father was an unknown one-night-stand, a patron of her former work-place when Angela couldn’t uphold the commitment of a man who actually loved her.

  She had returned to Larry after her bout of infidelity, only to be tricked yet again, by a darkness lying dormant in her…me. Her adulterous actions would not go unpunished, coming forth to torch the hopes and dreams she had started to stitch together. I had ruined everything, unraveled the seams she had sewn. Larry saved my life but left Aurora without a trace soon after I was born, and I knew Angela blamed me.

  She wasn’t the worst mother ever, but I had always known there was something wrong, something missing. After a while, I began to realize it was not simply because I had no father. I grew up not expecting love from any
one, and not knowing how to give it.

  Angela’s radiant smile was impossible not to return, although mine was probably closer to a grimace. I watched as the neurons from her eyes sent signals to her brain, watched her expression melt as her brain processed said signals.

  “Aubrie, what happened to you?” She blurted out while grabbing my arm and pulling me inside. I frowned. I didn’t look bad enough to warrant her expression and tone, but that was my melodramatic mother’s outlook on life—everything was a grand production, she could progress anything into a scene.

  “I’m ok mom, really, I just stopped by to use your shower, since my, um, my water’s been shut off.” I wasn’t about to tell her what had happened.

  “It doesn’t look like that’s all that’s wrong, what’s going on?” She said as she hovered by the bottom of the staircase, letting her cigarette burn away uselessly between her long fingers.

  “I’m fine; it was just an accident. If-”

  “No, you know what this reminds me of?”

  “No Angela, enlighten me.” She cringed but pressed on anyway.

  “It reminds me of when you got into that horrible car accident with Michael.” Of course. Only my mother would know some way to manipulate any conversation to fit into her own agenda. She started ranting on about things I’d heard a million and one times at least until I finally shouted at her.

  “Let it go! I’m not in the mood to talk about this, I need to use your shower, and then I’m leaving.” She stopped babbling and stared incredulously at me as though I had just slapped her in the face. She pouted her lower lip out, turned away into the smoke embalmed living room, and I faintly heard her mutter about how I used her and never appreciated her attempts to help me. I sighed and continued up the stairs to the bathroom.

  Even in daytime, the shag-carpet covered stairs were splashed with shadows, and the sight of the vacant landing faintly lit by an intruding ray of sunlight still gave me the creeps. It always had, ever since I could remember him standing there, just for an instant, looking down at me with a look of horror on his face. I had stood up on the wide end of the banister at the base of the steps, and balanced on one foot no less, something quite impressive for a three-year-old, when I felt someone staring at me. My mother always said I had imagined him and maybe I had. I don’t think we can rely on memories from that early in life so maybe I had just made it up or dreamt it.

  Either way, I could remember his wavy blonde hair, the concerned look on his face as he stared down at me for a minute, and then just disappeared. I didn’t know who he was, but after I saw him is when I remember I first started to feel things other people didn’t seem to notice. Like how I could swear I felt him watching me even though I never saw him again.

  As I hurried across the landing to the bathroom, I shivered at the haunted memories and pushed them out of my mind as I shut the door on them.

  But no matter how much effort I put into ignoring what my mother had said, she had successfully sent memories of the night of the accident and the months that ensued springing into my mind like bursting popcorn. The truth was that scenes from those desolate months played on the main screen in my brain every day, the accident the feature presentation in my imaginary movie theater. But for some reason, when anyone else instigated such thoughts, my anger with them for starting the movie rolling for me was unavoidable.

  As I stepped into the shower, the movie played over from the beginning.

  I had been extremely introverted as a child, a little awkward, somewhat of a loner, and unique. These characteristics had of course transferred into my teenage years, where I didn’t even fit in with the proclaimed outcasts.

  I wasn’t the superstar athlete, nor in any sense the kid who stood alone, the last to be picked for the kickball team in gym class. In fact, I seemed to possess extraordinary athleticism. When the gym teachers made us run, I outstripped the rest of my peers in sprints and could jog laps longer than anyone else. When they asked us to do push-ups and sit-ups, I didn’t understand why anyone couldn’t perform the required amount. When they took us on a field trip to an outdoor challenge course, I flew through it as though I had trained there my whole life. But I hated when people stared at me or commented on it, so I started backing off. I would run slower and pretend to get winded when the other girls did. I wouldn’t compete with the boys in strength tests.

  I hated labeling and preferred to avoid stereotypes instead of instantly judging those around me. But perhaps I hated it most of all because I found myself the one person that didn’t fit into any classification.

  I was essentially my own little entity, different than anyone else I knew. And yet, I seemingly associated well with everyone and never made any enemies. As for friends, I had Cara, but other than that I didn’t exactly experience friendship as most people do. I couldn’t ever seem to give out my trust and mostly ended up hurting the people close to me.

  I was, of course, a poet and hopeless romantic. But I never went on a date, never had a boyfriend, never fell in love. Not until Michael, anyway. And then he had been the only one. When I met Michael my expectations were not even low…they were nonexistent. As previously mentioned, I had never known what it felt like to be loved and had no awareness whatsoever how to love another person. However, there was a time in my life where I held onto this glistening hope, as I longed for something unknown.

  Countless nights throughout my teenage years I wished so badly that I would miraculously gain the grace of the character in whatever romance novel I was reading at the time. Day after day I was disappointed when I didn’t become the next Jane Austen character.

  And then reality flooded in and wrecked my little optimistic party. I’m not sure when it happened, but even though something deep down in my brain secretly wished for me to find true love, eventually I gave up my glistening hope. So when I fell in love with Michael, I couldn’t believe my luck.

  Two years later and nineteen years old, I sat beside Michael in his car as he drove me home. I had an ominous feeling about the night, and he cracked jokes the entire drive to make me feel better.

  Everything so perfect, and then not. How can something so glorious collapse so suddenly? At that moment, laughing, and then the lights so brightly burnt out the love that once was the beat of the heart inside of me. Both of us survived the blinding flash and torturous clamor that announced the converging of Michael’s car and the uncontrolled logging truck, but in that moment, we were both as good as dead.

  Every day I would visit him. Even though there was nothing to show he knew I was there, you could find me by his side for hours. His body started to heal itself, but he never woke. And although the days and the months ticked away menacingly into a time never entirely felt or lived, I never stopped believing that my hand would grasp some relief in the present darkness.

  My external wounds continued to heal, but in my thoughts there blistered the macabre realities that would never go away. The injuries caused by the loss of something so precious and unfathomable lay open and forever festering. My body was often thrown into fits of uncontrollable shaking, my emotions so fierce that they converted this energy into physical movement. My own emotions ambushed me at the least expected moments, assaulted me with tears.

  Through all the days I sat at the side of his hospital bed my hope never failed. It burned on fervently, despite the fact that there was nothing to fuel the fire. Finally, there was a point where I was the only pyromaniac left, the only one who truly had faith that he would wake out of his coma. I knew he had to. He had so much more life to live. We were supposed to have more time together.

  As I sat by his side one day, I realized that I had never fully given my trust to Michael. And even though I had told him I loved him, I hadn’t known or felt the meaning behind the words; not like I did then, but he couldn’t hear me even if I were to speak it with the significance it deserved.

  And then I found myself talking to him, ignoring his silence, apologizing for everything from my past
behavior to our current condition. My last words to him I whispered with the utmost sincerity. “I love you,” I said.

  There were so many places he wanted to go, so many things he wanted to do. Before, there was always time, but now, all time had possibly been torn away from him and there was no way to give it back. He couldn’t die. But even all the wishes and prayers and hopes would not save him. “I love you,” would remain the last thing I ever said to him and I can only hope that he heard me.

  I cranked up the hot water knob even higher, sending plumes of steam bulging out into the rest of the bathroom. Two more years later and I was twenty-one years old, still haunted by my real life tragedy. I had once been complete. Every day I would wake up and realize how comfortable my life was, but as I stood in the shower, I realized I was far away from that fantastic land. I had fallen through a wormhole in space and ended up on another planet where everything was the same except for the darkness that robbed me of my love, my love of life.

  For a while, there hadn’t been a point in my life going on any further. When I opened my eyes in the morning, I wished I hadn’t, wished I would have just died in my sleep and ended the suffering, because every time I woke a tsunami of fear and despair came crashing down on my pathetic little beach.

  I stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around me, noticing the red splotches on my skin from the scorching water. Life circumstances may have flooded my shores, and the music was pounded out dissonant melodies, but I would dance to whatever beat fate gave me. My life did having meaning. I had to save Cara.

  Chapter 4