by JJ Pike
She’d run when the subway tunnel started to collapse; made a beeline for the access tunnels that ran alongside the tracks. She’d made it by the skin of her teeth. Perhaps the floor below her was the floor of the tunnel. It was possible. She’d blacked out for a while, but she had no memory of falling. Her hope fired up. She could be near the stairs that were bracketed into the wall and ran straight up to the street. That would explain the strong presence of metal in the air. And the clean air she’d sensed to her right.
“Clean, Mom? That’s a stretch. How can anything be clean, now that MELT has been let loose? MELT did this. You did this.” It was her own conscience, not Paul, talking. Paul would never say anything so blunt or so cruel to her. Not even if she deserved it. “That’s right. You deserve this. You deserve everything that’s happening to you. You’re guilty as the day is long. Guiltier, because you knew better. MELT is your baby. Deal with it.”
How had she managed to seal that part of her brain off?
The jitters started back up. Come on, Alice. #notdead. Keep it together. Say it with me. #notdead #notjam #notguilty
That was the heart of the matter. She was guilty. She’d made this happen. She’d heard Professor Christine Baxter say MELT wasn’t ready and let her boss Jake strong arm them into launching anyway. She’d let her pride and ambition override her usually risk-averse self. Why hadn’t she stuck up for Baxter? Why had she steered the child actress to her death? Why hadn’t she found the Fire Chief and prevented him from detonating his charges? Why, why, why? Why had she failed?
“Not now, Mom.” Thank goodness for her son. What a good boy he was. He was there for her, even when they were apart. “Regrets are a luxury for the living. So…live and you can wallow as much as you like.”
Yes. Live. To do that, Alice, you need to escape. Get your brain back here. Right here in this sliver of an air pocket somewhere under 11th Avenue. Think about Swiss cheese and air flow and falling rocks. Think about kicking and punching and elbowing your way out of here. Think about freedom and the twins and Bill. Yes, Bill. That was a good one. Think about all he’s done for you all these years.
Think about anything. But, whatever you do, don’t think about MELT.
Chapter Eight
Bill’s foot slithered and slipped. He crouched low, his hands out to his sides. He kicked his sneakers off. Should have thought of that sooner. His socks had saved him. All hail the most excellent Christmas present: 100% Merino wool socks.
He waited. Had the earth moved or had it just been his sneakers decomposing under him? Either way, he needed to quit doing goat moves and inch forward, slug-like, only when he was sure that it was fine to put his weight on the next foothold. This was going to be slow going, but at least he had his system down. He was a slug. A smart, determined, slow-moving slug.
Aggie cackled, her head thrown back, her laugh infectious. “You’re not even that, Dad. You’re a klutz. A mega-brained klutz. Who do you think Petra takes after? Come on. You think you have goat feet? That you’re fast and agile and able to leap tall buildings in a single stride? Really? You’re teetering on an abyss and we both know it.”
Great. Now even his favorite daughter was mocking him in his imagination. Shoot. Was he allowed to admit that, now that he was facing “the abyss” as she called it? He loved all his children equally. He did. But “equal” didn’t mean the same. It meant he loved all with the same quantity of love, but each in their own way. Paul and Petra? Well, they were Paul and Petra. He cocked his head to one side. What was it about them that made them so different? It was the twin thing. They locked everyone else out. Not in a malicious way, but in an “our jokes are better than yours” and “I know what s/he’s thinking all the time” and “this is special and you could never understand it” way. He loved their joined-at-the-hip independence from other human beings, their smarts, their humor. He just felt a little distance.
Midge, of course, was their darling. She came at just the right time. Rescued Alice from herself. Showed them all the way back to love and innocence after “the episodes.” No need to dwell on that.
But Aggie. Aggie was his special girl. She was tough and brave and inventive. An original. Aggie was separate from the rest, not just because of what had happened when she turned eight but because she was so unique. She’d be what he could never be. She’d be her own person. Even thinking about her and how much she’d gone through and how she’d prevailed calmed him. She’d saved him as much as he’d saved her.
That was the truth of their lives: their kids had saved them. He knew what his single friends thought: you’re a happy sap who’s been snared by biology and forced to love a mewling infant when no one sane would go near those screaming banshees.
He’d been one of those people in college. “Yeah, yeah…kids won’t change me. They’re just miniature humans who poop and pee and cry a lot. Call me when they start talking.”
Then Alice had gotten pregnant and they’d had the twins. Everyone said they were mad to go through with the pregnancy. They were still in college. They weren’t ready. They needed time to put away some money, get a little house, and perhaps spend some more time together, but they knew they could make it work.
His kids had turned his life inside out and made his heart sing in ways he’d never known were possible. Loving your children was unlike loving your parents, your siblings, even your sweetheart. Alice was his everything until the kids came along. Then she was his everything-plus, because they owned him utterly. He would tell anyone who’d listen, and several who’d rather not, that his kids were the best thing he’d ever done. He was loud and proud and in-your-face with those single friends who’d mocked him. He wished he could open his chest and show them what it was like to have your entire viscera flip like a pancake when you saw your kid come home from school. Bill wouldn’t have traded being a dad for a million dollars. Heck, a trillion.
He sighed. Life was good, Manhattan being a sink hole notwithstanding.
He took another step, sliding the ball of his foot onto the flattest surface he could find and pressing his weight down until he was pretty sure it could take him. For all he knew it was cantilevered over a hole the size of Madison Square Garden.
“At least you’re a slug, Pops. You’ll bounce when you land.” There it was again, that laugh. It had carried him through some dark days. It’d carry him now.
He couldn’t orient himself. There were no markers, no signposts, not even enough sunlight to tell him which way was which. He needed to be heading west, towards the water. He couldn’t hear the Hudson or smell it. Even New York’s usual cologne of choice—rotting garbage, exhaust and pollution—was overpowered by pulverized concrete, asbestos, and whatever K&P Industries had added to that lethal mix.
He ran his hand over his face. The grooves on his cheeks were inflamed and tender and gathering dust, the filth crusting around his nostril and lips, but the pain had gone from a nine to a four. Things were looking up. It was a borderline autonomic response to think of his cracked lips then lick them, but he couldn’t do that. He needed as little of this stuff inside him as possible. He pressed his mouth shut, imagined zipping it and throwing away the key the way Aggie would do when she was a toddler and didn’t want to answer any questions. He pressed his face deep into his pea coat, hoping it gave him a little protection against the elements, gripping the lapels together with one hand so all that was exposed to the noxious fumes were his eyes.
He slid his foot forward but was met with new resistance. It wasn’t soft exactly, but neither was it steel or concrete. He squinted, trying to make out what was at his feet, but he couldn’t see anything. He nudged it with his foot a second time. It could be a couch cushion from some high-end corner office, or a pillow from someone’s bedroom, or a dog bed. Definitely something with “give.” It wasn’t safe to step on top of it.
He crouched, reaching his hand out to investigate the lumpen mass that was impeding his progress. He withdrew it immediately. He’d been luck
y so far. He’d only encountered destruction, not carnage. The acid in his stomach churned, threatening to surge. He didn’t need to know what was at his feet. He ought to move on. There were going to be casualties, there was no way around that, but why linger? No good would come of bearing witness to the odious carnage wrought on a person by a collapsed building.
He stepped back, slipped, losing his footing. It was the ground this time and not his klutziness. It shifted again, the slab beneath his feet easing its way down the concrete-and-steel mountain. Bill toppled forward, grabbing at the air, his hands landing on the “cushion” he’d been so eager to avoid. It registered as flesh. He wanted to let go, but his fingers were locked in place.
Then the ground beneath him gave way completely and Bill was freefalling into the jaws of Manhattan’s underbelly with a human torso in his grip.
Bill bounced from one unstable ledge to the next. He used the fleshy cushion as a buffer, shielding his face from the crushed and cracked concrete, the sharp and sword-like metal, the unidentifiable edges that threatened to part him from his limbs and slice away his life. The waistband on his jeans snagged on an outcropping, but it didn’t hold. He hung from his belt for a second, his face buried in a dead man’s belly, then was falling again.
He landed hard, his head bouncing off the corner of something unyielding with a dull, wet crack. The space was dark, damp, and deadly. He couldn’t let himself fall asleep. Not now. Not with two hefty blows to the head. He jerked his body away from the wall, but he was wedged in tight. He investigated the space with his left hand. The torso that had shielded his face on the way down was lodged against his stomach. He withdrew his hand immediately and turned his face away from that gory reality. If he could just rest for a moment, he’d be able to work out what had him pinned. He couldn’t feel his right hand. He tried flexing his fingers, but if they bent he didn’t register it.
The dark came in closer. Then closer. The present was a blank canvas on which the past slapped its colors, vivid, angry, and larger than life. Where he’d seen flashes of his life when he was half-awake and half-asleep on the pile above, he was now at the mercy of his memories.
He drifted away on a cloud of shock and the blissful release of endorphins.
Bill sat upright. Alice was beside him, sound asleep. He had no idea what had woken him. Was it the fact that he was sleeping in a new bed? Or that he was sleeping next to such a beautiful woman? Or something more pedestrian? A sound from one of the nearby dorm rooms maybe? The party in the next building had been shut down after they’d complained about the music three times, so it wasn’t that. The dorm was quiet in that way the world is only quiet at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., even for the college jocks. They had to sleep sometime and not all that sleep could be had at lectures. He waited for a door to slam or voices to waft up from the quad. Nothing. He strained to hear anything that might have jolted him out of his dream, but no one was padding about the halls.
He leaned his head on one elbow and watched Alice sleep. Even with her eyes closed, her hair splayed over her pillow, and a frown creased into her forehead, she made his heart tumble in his chest. She looked like the singer Selena, had the brains of Eva Gardner, and the va-va-voom of Penelope Cruz. She was smart enough to be at the top of her class, funny enough to make the jocks and nerds laugh at the same joke, and sharp enough to cut any idiot who crossed her path with a single look. She took no prisoners and didn’t care who knew it. She’d even called out their professor, telling him “the Canon” was an historical construct which favored the victors and ignored literature from around the world; a polite way of saying there were no South American writers represented on the syllabus. No one in Lit 101 had expected her.
She was way out of his league, but she seemed not to have noticed. Of all the guys buzzing around her, she’d picked him. Madness. She could have had any one of them, but he made her laugh so he won. He laced his hands behind his head, grinning. “I win. Who saw that coming? Not me.”
Alice’s leg thumped on the mattress. Bill sat up. What in the world? She did it again. Her leg was straight, as if it was locked at the knee. She lifted her entire leg until it was at a 45-degree angle to the bed, then dropped it like a dead weight. The hair stood up on the back of Bill’s neck and chills ran down his arms. She was dead asleep but moving like a robot doll following some unheard commands.
It was weird but aren’t we all? Who’s to say what goes on in anyone else’s mind is good or bad? It all just is what it is. No need to judge. So his new girlfriend slammed her leg into the bed? Big deal.
Turned out he was right. It was a big deal.
The next night she did the leg drop accompanied by low moans. Not the good kind. Within a week, she was crying out in her sleep. By the time they’d been dating for a couple of months, he was privy to her wrenching night terrors. She never mentioned them in the morning, so he didn’t either. She had to know, though. No one made those kinds of noises and didn’t remember. Right?
Wrong. She didn’t remember a thing.
The bedcovers were a tangled mess. He reached across the bed and lay his hand on her shoulder, but only after he’d raised an arm to shield his face. He knew what came next. She was up and hammering on his chest, screaming a name. Same name every time. Mateo. Mateo Hernandez.
Mateo was part of their dating life and then their married life. Bill didn’t know the whole story, but he figured it had to be pretty gruesome. He knew her parents had been killed in front of her, but she never spoke of what happened after that. There was an information gap of several months. Not knowing any details, Bill imagined the worst.
Alice held it together by day, looked like a model citizen: hard working, fiercely protective of her kids, and a bit on the nutty side when it came to emergency preparedness, but by night she thrashed and cried out and held him close, begging that he protect her from the, “bad man. The very bad man.” Bill accepted all of that until Aggie turned eight.
He came home from work one day to find his middle daughter hiding in his shop, tucked behind the lawn mower, sucking her thumb. “What are you doing, Agg?”
“Mom says I have to stay here.”
Bill crouched down. “She does? Why’s that?”
Aggie shrugged. “I just have to stay here.”
The first time, he figured it was a “naughty step” time out. The second time, he asked Alice what was going on but was blanked. Alice simply didn’t reply. The third time, neither his daughter nor his wife would speak to him, but Aggie had welts on her legs. Worried, he started coming home for lunch and found Aggie in the shed day after day. Paul and Petra were never given a time out. The baby was in perfect health. On the surface everything looked perfect. Still, Aggie was banished to the shed. After two weeks, he gave up asking and took Aggie to work with him. It was summer vacation, so they at least didn’t have to deal with teachers or administrators or other do-gooders who might have made it worse.
He begged Alice to seek help. She said she didn’t know what he was talking about.
Desperate, he asked a friend to refer him to a psychiatrist. He didn’t dare go to their GP. He was worried they might call Social Services and take Aggie away.
The psychiatrist’s office was cozy with deep seats and floral wall hangings. Everything about the place said “relax.” Bill sat on the edge of his seat, eager to unburden himself. “This is confidential, right?”
The shrink assured him that as long as he was putting no one else in harm’s way, she was ethically bound to keep whatever he told her in the strictest confidence.
“What if someone else is hurting someone?”
Dr. Moore put her notepad on the table and smiled gently. “I can see you’re in great pain, Bill. Why don’t you tell me what you can, and we’ll take it from there?”
Bill was scared. His wife was in trouble. Could he tell Dr. Moore everything? Could he not? What would happen to Aggie if he had a work-related project that required him to travel? He didn’t dare leave her alone w
ith Alice. His heart splintered in his chest and he wept openly. He didn’t trust his wife to be alone with their eight-year-old.
Dr. Moore pushed the box of tissues towards him. “In your own time…”
“My wife’s parents were murdered in front of her.”
Dr. Moore picked up her pen and jotted a note.
“It was brutal. Bloody. Vicious. She has nightmares about it.”
“How long has she had nightmares?”
“As long as I’ve known her.”
“How often would you say she has one of these nightmares?”
Bill blew his nose. “Every night.”
“Every night?” Her pen hovered over the page. “And you’ve been married…” She flicked through the paperwork he’d filled out online. “She’s been having nightmares for thirteen years?”
“Yes.”
“Every night?”
“Yes.” Bill held up his hand. “No. There was a time when they let up.”
Dr. Moore nodded. “When was that?”
