At the edge of the Trails, I dug into my backpack and plucked the bear out. I don’t know that I had ever been in that particular thicket of dark roots by myself, and I wanted the bear with me, as if cotton and wool could somehow protect me from whatever horrors might lurk within. I plunged in, following the closest thing to a main path that there was. It was two feet wide, the packed dirt smooth and rolling, but knotted with knurls of roots that ran underfoot like great, thick veins. The path veered right, under a broad trunk that grew vertical to the ground, and I had to duck underneath it. The bear dangling in my hand dragged on the ground and jostled against the trail as I walked, but he never complained, and I was glad for the company.
As I wandered, I thought about the strange thing in the house. I thought about Andy, seeming to hate me more by the day. I thought of Dad, and for some strange reason, I kept picturing the version of him from the snapshots I found, clearly drunk but absurdly happy. I wondered if that man might ever be found again, coaxed out, and resuscitated. And then, as if my past had swung a hammer straight at my head, I thought of Mom, and I was overwhelmed by the unquestionable truth at the core of my family. If I had never been born, all of them would be better off. My mother had been, from everything I could gather, the beating heart at the center of our little family, and I was the stake that was driven through the middle of it.
By the time I made it home, I was all but spent. I curled into my bed early again after the three of us ate Chinese takeout, camped around the TV, our faces bathed in blue light and teriyaki sauce. Dad had stopped by the video store and rented a horror movie, I think it was one of the Jasons. I could never keep track of them, but he and Andy loved that kind of stuff. This was one of the few scenarios that I didn’t bitch about until I got my way. Don’t doubt for a second that if I’d tried hard enough, we would have been watching whatever I wanted, week in and week out. But there was something about those nights, the three of us, watching gruesome movies about teen campers being sliced and diced that was so… normal. It might sound stupid, especially if you lived a stable home life, but for us, it was special. This was our family dinner table, our weekend bowling trips, our overnight excursions into the mountains. It was the only time that all three of us found some sort of homogeneity, where the odd, bitter mixture of three people coalesced into something altogether different and individual. The giant, gaping hole left by my mother’s death was still there, but invisible. Unseen. Beyond our reach.
We were whole.
Dad would laugh whenever a particularly brutal kill happened, and more than once, I heard Andy chuckle as well, the sound still so rare as to be special. I could tell things were starting to cool off between us, so after getting up to dump my plate in the kitchen, I intentionally sat down on the couch closer than I had been before. He shifted, a bit uncomfortably, but he never made me move, and by the time the last act of the movie rolled around, I was leaning my head on his shoulder and snoring. He could have easily pushed my head off, told me to go to bed if I was so damn tired. But he didn’t.
I finally did wake up when the movie was over. Dad was stretching and yawning loud enough to wake the dead, but Andy just sat there quietly, waiting for me to rouse myself. I’m not sure how long he would have waited, but part of me believes he just might have sat there all night.
Chapter Five
I think, had things gone differently for all of us, that I might have been able to make it as an actress. I never set foot onstage. Even though the idea interested me, my dislike of theater kids was far too overwhelming for me to take a run at it. I’m basing all this on my inherent ability to manipulate people. It happened almost daily with my dad, but then again, he was terribly easy. I was also able to do it with my teachers, friends, coworkers, whoever was around. It wasn’t because I’m some great beauty, beguiling everyone with my good looks. I look good enough, but I’ve got a strike against me. Two strikes, in fact. There go my itchy fingers again.
It’s certainly not because I’m the nicest person in the world. I am, to be perfectly honest, the only person I know who has ever waited outside of a movie theater to threaten a group of teenagers who wouldn’t shut up during the movie. That was pretty stupid in hindsight, but the sheer sight of me, all one hundred and fifteen pounds, using language that made rowdy high school kids blush was enough to get the job done. I’ve spit on double-parked cars before keying them, and I once told a rude waiter that I hoped he got AIDS. So no, it’s not my rosy personality.
It might sound horribly pretentious to say it, but the simple fact is that I’m smarter than pretty much everyone. Let me edit that at least a little bit. I’m not smarter than everyone. Just everyone around me. I have a feeling, had I been born in some big city or gone to a respected Ivy League school, I might be totally average, maybe slightly above. And I’ll admit, there are plenty of people who know more shit than I do. I work with a guy in his forties who watches Jeopardy every single day. He can quote Shakespeare and count pi up to, like, twenty-five digits. He’s smarter than me. But if I get behind and need some help, I can easily get him to do it. If push came to shove, I could probably collect a paycheck for six months just by using the various people I work with.
In a way, it seems weird to say things like this about myself, but I can’t really deny it. Everyone who ever comes close to being themselves, really living in their own skins, they have the same kind of moment. It’s that single slice of time when they say, “This is who I am. I do this better than just about everybody.” It’s like Michael Jordan being humble about playing basketball. After a while, it just sounds silly.
I mention all this to tell you about one of my best skills. From a remarkably young age, maybe even five or six, I could fake being asleep. I know, it doesn’t sound like the most impressive skill in the world, but it’s harder than it looks. You have to let go of certain parts of your body, let your muscles loosen and relax in ways that just don’t happen while you’re awake. Your mouth droops open, your eyes are slitted just a tiny bit, while your pupils aren’t focused on anything at all. The kicker though, the one that really sells it, is your breathing. Deep and guttural, with hints of a slight snore on the end of it. All of it, combined together, is just another form of control. No one seems more helpless than when they’re asleep. People drop their guard, because, as far as they know, you’re not really there. But when I’m laying back, slobbering on my chin, I’m really the one calling the shots.
Somehow, after the horror movie and the absolutely draining afternoon in the Trails, I had the wherewithal to hang the Polaroid from the edge of my headboard. I figured, even if the hunt was more or less over, I would want it close at hand if I heard anything scurrying about in the night. That would turn out to be a rather serendipitous move on my part.
I slumped into the bed, wrapped up in the loose sheets once or twice, and began to drift. The room was awash in the same cold, blue glaze it always had, lit by the small freshwater aquarium on the desk in the corner. The fish were dead and gone by then, the last one having gone belly up six months or so back, but I kept it on just because I’d gotten so used to it.
Once or twice, Memphis pawed against the bedroom door. I knew how stubborn he could be, how much he liked to curl up at my feet in the night, but I was too tired to care this time. He gave up and slunk off to some other area of the house, probably next to the water heater. The house grew still, my eyelids turned to lead, and I wandered softly into sleep.