I sat at the kitchen table in Kerry Manor, staring dazedly into my coffee cup, watching the oils swirl and create strange patterns. I saw Todd walking hand in hand with Isis on the frozen beach. Her winter jacket enveloped her tiny body like bubble wrap.
We had been back in the house for two days. Someone had removed the Halloween decorations, mopped up the fake blood - and the real - and unraveled the spider webs.
“I don’t want to do that,” I responded, loathing the prospect of returning to the house we had created as a family.
What would the first seconds be like? Swinging open the blue door, marred by the claws of our two cats, and smelling, for the first time, our little home without Sammy? How could I step into that foyer, painted with our favorite poetry in elegant black calligraphy I had spent hours perfecting while Sammy read the poems aloud?
“Your lease here is up on May, you have to go back sometime...”
Was that true? Did we have to go back? What if we never went back? I could pack a suitcase for Isis and myself, and we could fly to Costa Rica or Australia. I had always wanted to hike the rain forest and listen to monkeys chatter from the trees overhead. Isis could chase birds on the beach, and I could learn to be a tour guide or a snorkel instructor.
Or if I was really desperate, I could continue my therapy practice. Costa Rica was likely filled with expats dying to pour out their woes on some other first-world prat.
“May is six months away, Amy.”
“Sure, but in the meantime, you’re stuck in this creepy house all by yourself. I’m worried about you, Corrie.”
Amy awkwardly rubbed my back, and I continued to stare out the window and refuse the lurid images from Halloween that the oak tree conjured. Sammy’s face, streaked with sweat and then later, streaked with blood.
“Todd and I would love to take Isis, maybe for a week. She can play with Tyler and Adelaine. Plus, we have tickets to Elmo on Ice.” Amy sat down across from me at the kitchen table.
I looked up at my sister. Her freshly dyed blonde hair was neatly arranged in a French braid, not a single strand out of place.
“All-Together-Amy,” I murmured, echoing a nickname Sammy secretly called my sister.
Amy had responded to our mother’s chaos and alcoholism by constructing the perfect life. She and Todd bought a sunny yellow house in a subdivision of Stepford two-story family homes, each adorned with two rose bushes, a single lilac tree, and a little concrete pathway that led to white doors hung with decorative wreaths, no matter the season. The rooms were color coordinated with paint and artwork and even figurines to match.
When Sammy and I visited, we slept in the ocean room with deep aquamarine paint, sand dollars decorating our bureau, and a giant photograph of a sailboat drifting on a calm sea.
When we’d gone down for coffee one morning, Sammy had opened the cupboard and laughed.
‘Which mug do you want?’ he’d asked me.
I had looked up to a shelf of tidily arranged, identical white mugs in three perfect rows. Our own coffee cupboard was comprised of two dozen mismatched mugs in different colors, some chipped, all connected to a memory. Sammy loved to buy mugs at truck stop gas stations during road trips. Arkansas or Wyoming, they’d announce in huge black letters against a painted backdrop of rushing streams or snowcapped mountains. We picked up mugs at thrift stores, traded mugs with friends, and Sammy had at least five advertising his favorite horror flicks.
“What did you say?” Amy asked.
I felt guilty for the comment, and guiltier for all the times Sammy and I laughed at how hard she tried to put everything in its right place. It was only funny from the bubble of Corrie and Sammy – but here in this untethered place, floating in a vast terror, I understood her desire to keep it all together perfectly.
“Nothing,” I sighed, rubbing at my face, where dark circles spread beneath my eyes like spilled ink. “Isis would love that.”
“She would,” Amy agreed. “And you need a break. I know Sammy’s mom loves to take her, but she needs time to grieve. This will give all of you a little time to put the pieces back together.”
I snorted but said nothing. The pieces had been stabbed to death. They sat in the cold, dark earth. There was no putting them back together.
Amy stood and moved around the table, wrapping her arms around me and pressing her face into my disheveled hair.
I smelled her perfume, something strong and heady, the perfume that assails you when you walk through a department store.
“You will get through this, Corrie. You don’t believe it right now, but I know you. You’re strong.”
She pulled away and moved to the kitchen counter, pulling dishes from the sink and loading them efficiently in the dishwasher.
I LAUGHED and clamped my hand over my mouth as if I’d committed a sin. The graveyard yawned darkly beautiful in the moon’s light. Splashes of white and gray headstones rose like teeth.
“And I in the beast’s mouth,” I murmured, sitting on the damp leaves that blanketed the cemetery floor.
I clutched a canvas sack, which held a Ouija board, four reiki candles, a book about using the board, and a pair of Sammy’s worn socks. I wanted something that held remnants of him, and it didn’t get much more potent than those. This was just the kind of thing Sammy would do, as a joke, and my laughter bubbled when I imagined him waving the socks wildly in the air and demanding their owner reach out from the spirit world.
A mass of withering flowers lay near my elbow, their scent grossly intoxicating. I closed my eyes and searched for a breath free from the scent.
The gates to the cemetery had been closed hours earlier, at dusk. I had walked around them but felt like a trespasser just the same. Despite my layers of clothes, goosebumps rose along the back of my neck.
As I sat in the pervading darkness, terror edged in, but I shooed it away with thoughts of hearing Sammy’s voice drifting up from the mound of fresh dirt beside me. I didn’t look too closely at that pile of earth. I couldn’t truly consider what lay within it.
I pulled out the Ouija board, unwrapped the plastic sheath and stuffed it into my bag. I lit two candles and set them on either side. The cheap board felt flimsy beneath my desperate fingers, a child’s toy. I set it on the dirt and took up the little plastic dial.
I had never used a Ouija board but couldn’t shake the idea when it struck me that morning. I knew he was close, Sammy. He’d been close since it happened. I saw him slipping around corners, sensed him watching me. I needed to bring him into the light.
“Sammy?” I asked, placing the dial in the board’s center and moving it slowly in a circle.
My hands shook, and I stared hard at the black letters.
“Sammy, if you’re here, move the pointer.”
The candles flickered in the night breeze and I shifted my gaze to them. If one blew out, would I believe he stood nearby? Was that rustling in the leaves my dead husband reaching from beyond the grave?
I closed my eyes and waited. Seconds ticked by, and then minutes.
Nothing happened.
I opened my eyes and stared at the board until the black calligraphy blurred and my tears wet the dirt beneath me. I took a handful of the dirt in my hand and clutched it to my chest.
The silence turned into pain, unbearable pain. How could I go on living with it? One of these nights it would tear me in two and I would bleed to death on the cold, dark floor in Kerry Manor.
“Please,” I whispered, pushing the dial toward the letter S. “Please.”
A movement caught my eye deeper in the graveyard, and I stared into the darkness, searching the shadows. I saw the whisper of a hand behind a tall tombstone.