Lullabies for Suffering

by Caroline Kepnes et al.

  He clenches his teeth. The rage he must feel, the guilt. “She’s getting help.”

  Suzanne shakes her head. What a load of bullshit. She’s getting help. Don’t these people understand that it’s not the world’s job to help them? Monster was like that too, offering to see a psychologist, swearing that he would change, as if it wasn’t too late, as if the damage could be reversed. He touched their fucking child. The end. Vince’s mother chose cocaine over her fucking son. The end. These people have no will power and then they want pity. She takes a long sip of her Corona. They can fuck off. It’s pretty simple that way. They’re both monsters. The difference is that Vince’s mother is the ideal monster, the one who lets Suzanne be the brave warrior, the one who never got her paws on her Goddamn daughter.

  She throws Vince a bone and tells him that it’s great to hear that his mother is getting help, as if “getting help” ever worked in the past. The poor kid just nods, with all the conviction of a sock in the washing machine. His childhood is shot. The only thing he can do now is get through college, get on his own two feet and find himself a girlfriend, a wife. But it’s hard to imagine him ever shedding the baby fat, earning a consistent paycheck, paying a mortgage. Socks get lost in the dryer and no one ever knows who to blame, but Suzanne’s sure of one thing—his mother should be dragged into an alley and shot, along with Monster.

  “So,” she says, in her brightest mom voice, the one that always lifts her spirits. “You’re on your own at home, then? Must be kinda hard…”

  He’s too closed up to cry, to stand up for himself. “I’m taking care of the house,” he says. “But she’ll be home soon. It’s okay.”

  “Right,” she says, as if his unfit mother won’t be spiraling down a mountain of cocaine before the end of the summer. She remembers those ridiculous fruit baskets, her chicken scratch on the thank you notes. Suzanne hates pears, and it was always mostly pears in those fruit baskets. Monster loves pears, and she remembers him slicing the cokehead’s pears and feeding them to her fucking daughter. She opens another beer. Pigs. Monsters, both of them.

  Vince’s hands are shaking. He’s holding them together but he’s not doing a very good job of covering. “Vince,” she says. “I meant what I said. You can talk to me. I know that this can’t be easy. I’m here.”

  “I know,” he says.

  “And hey, if you want to stay with us, we have plenty of room.”

  “No…no, that’s okay. I’m good at home.”

  “No, really, Vince,” she begins, because the more she thinks about it, the more she wants him to move in. They are the perfect Pyles. This home is a safe haven and Vince needs to move in and make it all true again. It would feel so good to tell her friends. My neighbor’s kid moved in again…Another mouth to feed, but how can you say no? She likes her house better with a man in it, and it would be nice to have someone in on the lie, even if he didn’t know the whole story. Maybe Ariel would snap out of it, stop being so grumpy and realize that she’s lucky to be alive, that we all are.

  Suzanne doesn’t let go of a good idea when she gets one. This is what she does at the agency. She pitches. She’s selling Vince. He could stay in his old bedroom, the guest bedroom. “Naturally,” she says. “We would never ask you to pay rent. If anything we’d pay you for helping out with Ariel.”

  “Maybe,” he says, and his leg is thumping. He wants her. He’s ashamed of his desire, ashamed of his mother. He thinks it would be cruel to move out of that house but he needs to move into this house. Suzanne is going to win this one. She doesn’t say it to Vince—it’s none of his business—but she worries about Monster coming back one night. That’s what happens in all horror movies. Monsters return. And if Vince were around every day, well, he’s certainly not physically intimidating, but at least Ariel wouldn’t be alone and Suzanne wouldn’t have to be self-conscious about getting babysitters for her twelve-year-old daughter when girls Ariel’s age are out there babysitting. Right now, her friends believe her story, that they had a break-in while Roger was on a business trip, that Ariel is scared and doesn’t like to be home alone. But kids are resilient and this charade can’t go on forever. Suzanne saved Vince so many times and now it’s his turn. She trusts him. She recognized innate kindness in him when he was a boy and it’s still there now. He would never hurt a fly. She was attracted to the Monster for the opposite reason, because he seemed callous enough to compete, to earn, and you reap what you sew. But then you buy more land and you plant more seeds. That’s what Vince is, a new seed, a new field.

  “Mrs. Pyle,” he says. “I actually…I don’t know how to say this.”

  She licks her lips. Oh. He’s not as innocent as she thought. He really does want to fuck her and he’s going for it, blushing. It would be nice to have sex again. She wouldn’t have to go to the gym as much. She’d never let Ariel find out about it. They’d do it in his mother’s house, assuming it’s not a total pigsty.

  She drops her voice. “Go ahead, honey. Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

  “Well,” he says. “I’m concerned about Ariel.”

  Suzanne’s insides coil up like springs in a mattress. “Oh?”

  “I’m probably being crazy,” he says. “But a couple times tonight, I dunno, I took some psych courses this year, and I’m someone…Do you think anyone hurt her?”

  No. Suzanne will not stand for this invasion of her privacy. Vince is not on her side and he will not passively reject her and accuse her of being a bad mother. Her daughter is fine and children are resilient and everyone fucking knows that. Everyone. Vince is a child. He knows nothing about kids, about life. He took a couple of courses and now he has the nerve to accost her in his own namby-pamby way, as if she didn’t provide the only stability in the kid’s fucking life. He’s never been much of a talker. He never sent any thank you notes or fruit baskets. His mother did that. Not him. He never said how much he loved her tuna casserole and their big back yard with the good grass, unlike his crabgrass at home. Fuck him and his ingratitude. Fuck anyone who wants to focus on Monster instead of her. Ariel is fine and Suzanne is fine and she knows how to cry on cue. No waterworks, just a few teardrops because any mother is sad to think of her child not being well.

  “Oh God,” she blubbers. “I can’t thank you enough. I know that’s not easy.”

  The ingrate is all sweaty and puffed up, as if this is about him. “I’m sorry. I was so scared to bring this up, but I felt like I had to because she just seems…off.”

  “You did the right thing, Vince. It’s like those signs at all the stadiums. ‘See something, say something.’”

  She sees that sign every day on the way to work and every day it kills her, as if you’re supposed to see everything always.

  “Is Mr. Pyle, is he really away on business? Did he…you don’t have to tell me.”

  She will not snap. She will not remind this little shit that his mother is away on weakness and selfishness. She rubs her forehead. “It’s good you brought this up now. This way, I can talk to Ariel when he’s not here.”

  “I really hope I’m wrong.”

  “Oh Vince, I do too.”

  He stands, as if he gets to decide when to leave. “If you need me to talk to anyone…I don’t know if that’s how it works, I’m just saying, you’ve always been there for me…I know I owe you for all the nice things you did for me, I just wanna…I’m here to help you.”

  He finally said something true. He owes her. A lot. “Don’t be ridiculous, Vince. You don’t owe me anything. I’m in shock right now.”

  She brings him in for a hug. His stiff arms call attention to the lack of stiffness between his legs. Another insult. He thinks he gets to look down on her. She pats his back before she pulls away.

  “Thank you, Vince. You’re a good kid. I know it hasn’t been an easy road for you and I know this took a lot of courage.”

  He stands tall, like he just figured out what to do with his shoulders. The arrogance is spreading through him like a
virus, as if suspecting Ariel of being abused elevates him, as if he isn’t the latchkey offspring of a drug addict.

  “I think it’s gonna get better, ya know?” he says. “For all of us.”

  She doesn’t offer to pay him because she knows he won’t take the money. He broke the deal, not her, and she opens the door because it’s time for him to go the way of the Monster. “Absolutely, Vince, from your mouth to God’s ears. Get home safe.”

  Vince

  You did it. You didn’t get a woody when she hugged you. You saw something and you said something and this is the time your mother’s sobriety really will stick. You open the door and run into your house and pull the Slip ‘N Slide out of the closet. You didn’t need a girlfriend. You needed to grow up. You needed to be a man, an adult with a responsibility in this world that didn’t have anything to do with the apron strings, with your mother.

  You open the sliding door and step into the back yard. You won’t be a virgin for much longer because tonight you learned how to talk to women. You aren’t fat. Your heart is racing and your body is a furnace. You pull the bright blue tarp out of the box and you toss the box in the dirt. Your mother is right. It doesn’t matter what other people think. It doesn’t matter that you’re older than the kids on the box. What matters is that you do the right thing at the right time, before it’s too late.

  You breathe in the smell of the plastic. You spread the tarp on the lawn.

  You hear the doorbell ring. You get a little hard in your pants, but that’s okay, you’re human. Of course you hope it’s Mrs. Pyle. You pray she wants to thank you, to sit on your face and kiss you all over.

  “Coming!”

  You run inside through the back door to check your hair in the mirror. It’s impossible, but you think you aged tonight, like you grew into your skin. Your bones are more pronounced. Your eyes are larger. You take a deep breath and you open the front door and it’s a police officer you know, one you’ve met over the years because of your mother.

  Ariel

  Ariel is eighteen years old.

  She’s the same age as Vince, well, the same age he was that summer. She thinks about that night all the time. She carries it around in her head while she’s walking to class, while she’s checking out books at the library. Her mother came downstairs. Ariel pretended she was sleeping. She was good at pretending by then. Her mother reeked of beer and she turned on the light. She hissed at the flickering light bulb and pulled up Ariel’s nightgown and for a moment, Ariel thought it was happening again, that her mother was like her father.

  She was but she wasn’t.

  Ariel can still hear the sound of her mother rummaging through her bedroom. She can still hear her cutting up the pages of her diary and sobbing on the phone to the police about what she came home to, how stupid she was to trust the unstable son of a drug addict with her precious daughter, who was naked underneath her nightgown on the sofa, in the dark. No panties, Officer. None.

  Ariel found Vince online a few years ago. He lives here in LA too. He’s just a person in the world, like her. He was never charged with anything. The police went to him the day after her mother called. They asked him questions, but it ended there. Suzanne didn’t want to pursue a case. She didn’t want little Ariel to be questioned. She didn’t see how that would help. Instead, she started telling everyone in town about what Vince did. For the rest of that summer, Ariel listened to her mother talk on the phone about Monster, Vince, and how when the police went to see him, he was setting up a Slip ‘N Slide in his back yard. How creepy. How perverse. Obviously, he’d been doing that to lure Ariel over to his house, to get her all wet. Why else would a kid his age use a Slip N’ Slide? Vince was Monster now. He went back to college early. Ariel’s mother said he was lucky to be free, but Karma’s a bitch. He will pay for this in other ways. A few months after that, there was a For Sale sign in front of Vince’s house. A few months after that, there were new people in the house.

  Ariel still can’t wrap her head around it, how comforting it was to hear her mother talk about Monster, even though Vince wasn’t Monster. Her father was Monster. But you want your mother to love you, to protect you, and she supposes that anyone in her position would have reacted the same way. She was a child. She was helpless. She didn’t have her diary anymore. She didn’t defend him and she didn’t tell the police that she took off her underwear, not Vince. The real Monster was gone and if she had ridden her bike to the police station and told them that her mother was a liar, what then? Her mother cried a lot. She told her friends it was all her fault and her friends always said she was wrong. It was that monster’s fault, not yours. And that was true.

  The GPS lady advises Ariel to turn left in 250 feet. She puts on her blinker.

  She’s a freshman at UCLA now. She chose LA because Vince chose LA. She’s known where he lives since she arrived in August. All year, she thought about going to see him. She just kept not doing it. The same way she kept not asking her mother why she lied about Vince that summer. Not doing something becomes doing something, and it’s hard to stop.

  He lives at a small apartment complex on a side street in Hollywood. His mother died last year. It wasn’t drugs. It was cancer. She parks in a loading zone. This might be a bad idea. She should have gone to see him sooner, when his mother was sick, alive. She should have gone to the funeral. But it was always something and she pulls her little satchel out of her clutch.

  Just one bump. One quick snort. For courage.

  She doesn’t know what she’s doing here but not coming was driving her crazy. This must be what it’s like to be an addict—she’s not like Vince’s mom, she only does a few lines of cocaine every now and then—but she can’t take it anymore, the burden of carrying around all this love inside of her, this guilt, ever since that summer. This is the only way for it to escape. Love and guilt can kill you if they stay inside.

  She rings his buzzer. He probably won’t want to see her. He might be looking out a window right now. But would he recognize her? She looks so different. So grown up. Someone leaves the building and she slips in through the door.

  One more bump to shoot confidence down her spine. Nothing about this is easy and of course she has issues, monster parents, finals, and a double shift at the library tomorrow. You do what you have to do to survive and you don’t survive unless you take action. She’s not a kid anymore. She can’t pretend that life is a cartoon, that you don’t control your own actions.

  She knocks on his door. Does he live alone? Does he have a girlfriend?

  “Coming!” he cries and she wants to bolt. She wants another bump.

  She ruined his life and he probably despises her, all those rumors. All those terrible things her mother said about him to anyone who would listen, the lady at the bank, the neighbor across the street, the real police, the ones who don’t carry loaded guns, the ones who whisper that it was only a matter of time before the kid turned out to be like his mother, poisonous. It’s not too late to run. She could run. She should run. Sometimes she thinks about that Slip ‘N Slide, how he didn’t tell her to put on panties. She hears her mother in her head. She was young, traumatized. Maybe he was Monster. She needs another bump. God she is flying. She needs to get the fuck out of here before the door opens.

  Vince

  In theory, you should be depressed. You’re still a virgin. You did meet a girl junior year, but you couldn’t get it up. She was kind about it. She said you should get help. She said she didn’t want to try anymore. But you didn’t want to try. You didn’t get help. Better safe than sorry. Maybe you’re just better off alone.

  The buzzer goes off and you flinch. It’s probably a mistake.

  Your mother is gone now, and you ruined the last few years of her life. She could never get over what that “monster” Suzanne did to you. She told you over and over again that you were the world’s best son, the best boy, the sweetest boy, the kindest boy.

  You still remember the joy in her voice when she said
, “You got me a Slip ‘N Slide!”

  The rage that followed was too much for her to cope with on top of the yearning for drugs and eventually, nobody believed in her, not even you, and she went to prison for knocking off a convenience store when she was high. That’s where she died, behind bars. It wasn’t the drugs and it wasn’t even the cancer. She died of “complications.”

  You never asked to know what that means. You figured there’s no point. She’s dead. And death is simple. Life is what’s complicated. You graduated but you didn’t major in Psych. You have a job but you don’t feel like the other people at work, the people who laugh easily. What the hell do you know about people? You never took another psych class after freshman year and everyone knows that kids who take psych classes go nuts. They decide they’re crazy. They decide everyone’s crazy. What makes you any different? You didn’t read Suzanne Pyle right. She fooled you. For all you know, you were always stupid, imperceptive. You always thought your mother was going to get better. Every single time. No matter what. You could have passed a lie detector because it was the truth.

  At night in the dark, you believe in yourself, in your eyes. You know what you saw, what you suspected, and you will never forget the pink and red dots in Ariel’s diary. There is no doubt about what her father did. But in the morning light, your security from the dark hours when you’re tucked in bed is gone. You go to work and you keep to yourself. You think maybe you were wrong about Ariel, about her father. Who says it was him? You don’t know that. Ariel didn’t tell you that. She didn’t point him out in a line-up. You get in the car to drive home at the end of the day. You sit in traffic. You eat fruit roll-ups in the car and you leave the wrappers on the floor of the passenger seat. No one’s ever been in your car but you. You think Suzanne was right about you. Maybe she sensed something was wrong with you, the way the doctors know a bad spot from a normal spot in an X-ray. You get home and mostly you stay home. You don’t get out much and if you ever did get arrested, if you committed a crime, your neighbors would describe you as a textbook loner who keeps to himself.