When we talk to the dead, p.18
When We Talk to the Dead, page 18
This animal will come for the others.
She wonders if they will have better luck using the spray on it. Wouldn’t that just be the way, if Omisha ended up the one using the spray, having made the most fun of Maeve for it? She tries to remember where they put it. She realizes what a funny thing to do, since she can’t let them know. With that, Maeve realizes it isn’t her concern and she lets it go.
She thinks of all the things she has long carried. Countless things she ticks off. Her tension about grades, her hair picking and constant list making to quiet her fears of messing up. Worries about drinking. How much she cares about her looks and how much she hides that because of how much it doesn’t line up with her politics.
When she was seven, she accidentally saw emails that her mom was having an affair. Sometime later, she discovered that her dad was having one too. She held these two secrets thereafter until last year when she overheard her parents and they both knew about the other one’s affair, which is when Maeve learned they weren’t affairs in that sense because her parents had long had an open marriage, the knowledge of which is the new secret she carries about them. Her parents’ accepting words when she came out at thirteen, but feeling a need to soften it, for herself, for them, saying she was bi, then at fifteen, being able to come out as “fully” lesbian, but always sensing in her bones that her parents’ ability to say the correct words hid genuine feelings of disappointment.
All the endless little things, the constant details of daily life. And now new concerns, realizing that what is happening to her will impact other people. How will her coding club do without her? Will this affect May-ling Lee’s ability to love? And what will become of their cat, Tulip, who only she remembers to feed so that since coming to college, she texts her parents daily to remind them? The bottles of booze hidden under her bed. The journals she’s written since childhood—who will read them and how will what they learn change them? That hidden side of Sally. Maeve realizes she will never learn what lives in the part of her best friend that could never be reached.
All these things, every thought or care or hope or dream or dread, released.
Like that, Maeve is weightless.
All that’s left for Maeve is this moment, this creature that has her by the foot, pulling her impaled body off the rod. Maeve watches it pull, in quick tugs.
Why are you doing this? she wonders. To eat me? Somehow, I don’t think so. But if not, what a strange thing for a dog to do, she thinks, her last thought.
For a moment, she is pure unburdened consciousness.
Her eyes flutter and she gurgles her last breath.
And now, what is left is Maeve’s body, a dead weight on the rod.
* * *
god does its work, pulling from below. the rage to kill has now turned into fear to hide what it has done. it pulls and pulls until finally the body falls to the ground with a thud.
* * *
Claude is on the bed, his head turned, squinting into the dark. He gets the lamp and holds it up and sees a figure step into the murky edge of the light.
Sally.
She steps into the full light and smiles. When he entered, Sally was going to say something, but instead she decided to watch him from across the room.
“Stalking me?” Claude says, putting the wick lamp back on the table.
“Yeah,” she says, sitting on the bed beside him.
Sally turns the key to the painted metal windup toy on his lap. They watch the little man spin and do a hopping dance, legs and arms flopping and swinging until he winds down.
Watching Sally, who stares at the still little metal man, Claude asks, “What?”
Putting Sally in a sort of trance, the memory seeps up like groundwater through the floor. “This must have been my mom’s side of the bed. This little man,” she says of the windup toy, “we had lots of weather out here, and I was so scared of thunder. I used to tear down the hall when it thundered and she’d let me curl up between her and Dad, and she would wind this guy up over and over.” Sally feels like a channeler, telling the memory as it appears. “When a clap of thunder would crash, she’d say, ‘That’s the drums keeping beat for the dancing man.’”
Sally winds up the man, and they watch him again dancing on Claude’s lap.
He says, “I’m sorry I came in here without asking. I was looking for more blankets. I was snooping, but also, the blanket you used last night was thin.”
Seeing him flush, having stumbled into admitting noticing this, Sally starts talking. “As the host or whatever, I figured I should take the worst blanket. It was fine in front of the fire, but when I woke and the fire was dead, I was miserable.”
“So, yeah, I thought you might want something more—you always being cold.”
“I’m always cold?”
“What we were just saying.”
“I said I was cold when the fire went out. You said I’m always cold.”
Claude shrugs, pretending he doesn’t see the difference.
“I am cold all the time,” Sally says.
“I know.”
“You remember that?”
Claude looks at her. “Yeah.”
Him remembering that Emily could draw, that Sally got cold, she wants more. “Tell me another thing.”
“Once you and Emily switched. She pretended to be you, you pretended to be her.”
In a flash, it comes back to Sally. “You knew we were faking.”
“Emily used to catch those penny toads. Since you were being her, you had to. You were fine until one pissed in your hand and you lost it.”
Then this comes back. “You liked Emily better. She was always climbing trees, getting into things, always grubby.”
Claude smiles. “She was always dirty.”
Sally takes the dancing man onto her lap, winds him up, watches him dance as she speaks, feeling the presence of her long-ago twin. “She was always grubby, tearing holes in her knees, twigs in her hair.” Sally looks at Claude and nods. “It’s cute, a girl like that.”
“When we were six, I had—for Emily. But right now, I mean, it’s you, I, you know—”
There’s a painful moaning, soft and far away, coming from outside the room but inside the house. They look at one another. The moaning gets louder, more vocal. Claude and Sally look away from one another, embarrassed as they make sense of it. Omisha and Marcus in the throes. Claude crosses the room, closes the door. The sex sounds audible but muffled.
“I’m actually pretty wiped,” Sally says.
“Oh, yeah, yeah.” Claude’s hand, still on the doorknob from closing it, turns it to go.
“You can sleep here if you want,” Sally says. “I mean, it’s a big bed.”
It had been summer when they left, so the bed’s made up for a warm night. At the foot of the bed is a wooden chest. Looking inside, but also remembering, Sally finds blankets. Together they lay out two. She blows out the lamp. It is dark.
Sally says, “My pants are a little damp.” She’s not being provocative; she’s making sure it doesn’t freak him out that she will be in her underwear.
“Mine too,” he says. “It’s okay?”
Sally slides off her pants, he slides off his.
She crawls into bed on one side, he crawls in on the other. They lay side by side, a space between them. Omisha and Marcus are reaching a very dramatic climax. Sally and Claude look at one another and can’t help it—they start laughing so hard and long that the other two are done by the time their laughter falls silent. Sally’s eyes have adjusted to seeing in the moonlight. She sees how Claude looks at her.
But he doesn’t kiss her. “So,” he says. “Good night.” Claude rolls over.
Sally looks at his back, disappointed, titillated, relieved.
Sally touches his hair lightly that he won’t notice, but he does.
He turns.
Why am I waiting for him to kiss me? Sally thinks. Why can’t I?
Then she hears herself say, “Night,” feeling like a loser.
“Yup,” he says.
CHAPTER
13
Chicken
the moon sinks low in the sky. god stands in the doorway. its shadow stretches long across the floor to the back of the couch where omisha and marcus lie sleepily, curled under a sheet.
“I’M GETTING MORE wine,” Marcus says.
Omisha gives him the thumbs-up. She puts in earbuds, puts on music off her phone. She closes her eyes and rocks her head to the music.
Marcus pulls on underwear, a hoodie, gets a chill in the cold draft. The front door is still open, letting in a long pale bar of moonlight; in the distance, the meadow shifts in the wind. He is unnerved by the open emptiness. He closes the door, turns, steps on something sharp and cries out. He holds up his foot, a shard of glass from the broken bottle Omisha threw earlier. It’s sizable and it’s in there deep; he winces as he pulls it out. He looks up at Omisha. “Ow,” he says, because she didn’t react to his first cry. “Ow,” he says louder, but her eyes are closed, head bopping to whatever she’s listening to.
He passes the couch, tries to decipher the song by the small sound leaking out, but there’s no discernible beat or melody. Probably listening to one of those muddy chopped and screwed hip-hop songs or some ambient indie emo rock track.
Marcus descends the cellar steps, and he is struck by how evocative this all is, sex in a house of tragedy, being alone in a basement. He has the urge he often gets, wanting to capture his strong feelings, to squeeze the fruit of life into a creative expression—a short story, a photograph, a film—so that people might fawn, amazed.
But what he makes is mostly a frustratingly feeble version of what he feels so deeply. Alone, he’s met again with jealousy for what Sally has. This house, her past, rich with trauma. Of course she makes poignant things! The film she just made, and her others he’s seen—honestly, it galls Marcus. By his estimation, she isn’t particularly smart, but somehow she makes stuff that’s—it’s just always good. If he were being honest, he’d use a more effusive word to describe her videos, but he can’t, not even with himself. And how intrigued Omisha was by her, how she and Maeve would whisper about Sally. He put on that he was being an ethical person, questioning their integrity for gossiping, but all he felt was the burn of envy for the gravitational force that drew their interest to her. Which he feels again, and to release it, Marcus mutters a long stream of ugly things about Sally.
* * *
Sally opens her eyes. The room is dark, not yet dawn. There is an arm around her. She inhales, but then realizes, sometime in their sleep, their bodies moved. Claude spoons Sally. Nestled inside his hug, she realizes how much she has yearned for this exact sensation. She closes her eyes, pushes back, snuggling deeper into his body.
* * *
The sound of howling wind.
Omisha has her eyes closed, listening to wind sounds on her phone. She’s relieved Marcus is gone so she can be still and fall into the wind instead of shaking her head, pretending she’s listening to music. It embarrasses her that she uses nature sounds, wind, rain, waves, to soothe herself into a good state. It seems so basic and lame. Plus, she isn’t about to let anyone know the surges of dread and terror that come for no reason. That most nights sleep waits on the other side of intrusive thoughts she must conquer into quiet. And the images that swirl behind her closed eyelids. Ugly abstractions with no sense: shadows and shapes, menacing movements. Sometimes, opaque fragments, imagined sensations her body experiences as real. The touch of a big hand, the sound of a voice, shh, just a dream, go to sleep.
Omisha doesn’t know these are what remain of many dark early mornings those summers they went back to New Delhi before her nani died eight years ago, releasing Omisha’s mother of the obligation. Putting off the pleas of her brother, Omisha’s uncle, that they still come visit, they were freed thereafter to have better summer vacations, Cape Cod, Cape May, Mexico, Greece.
Omisha has a chill. She doesn’t know if it is from the cold of the room or the creeped-out feeling she has for no reason. Everything Maeve’s felt, she’s felt too. Maeve’s hysteria allowed Omisha to vicariously feel her own fears while also letting her feel she was vanquishing them by making fun of Maeve. She takes out her earbuds. She pulls on Marcus’s shirt, pulls on her underwear, steps through the room, looks out a window, the overgrown meadow so wide and open, the night darker with the moon gone behind the trees. Her eyes comb the field, the grass black, looking grotesque to her, like massive, countless fluttering eyelashes. That thought gives her a shiver, and she scampers over and opens the door to the cellar.
* * *
Marcus quickly turns out his flashlight, tiptoes to the bottom of the stairs, watches Omisha at the top, lit by candles behind, squinting into the black. She calls him. She waits. She calls again.
When he remains quiet, she says, “If you want to hook up again, you better answer.”
Marcus uses his hand to squeeze his mouth shut to not make a sound.
“You’re dreaming if you think you can scare me,” she says. She listens. “Okay, fine, you win, I’m freaked out, now stop.” She waits. “Marcus? Marcus, come on.” Omisha feels genuinely frightened. “You’re an asshole.” She lets the door close.
Marcus squeaks, hopping up and down, holding in his laughter.
* * *
Omisha knows he’s just messing with her, but she paces. She puts in her earbuds, plays a hyper-happy song she loved as a kid. She dances and sings along, “I feel alive, I feel alive, I feel alive, I feel alive walking on sunshine,” until she’s gotten rid of the jitters.
She hangs the blanket over her shoulder and takes a flashlight and a candle and goes down the hallway to a line of three bedrooms on the first floor. She opens the door next to the one Maeve took.
Stepping in, casting the flashlight around, it is small, which makes her feel safe, as she feels when she closes herself in her closet, something she’s done since she was little and still sometimes does back home when her father gets to screaming at her older brother, who is, and has always been, in her father’s estimation, a shame on the family. The walls have wooden wainscoting three feet up, the rest painted marigold. Wrapped in her blanket, she crawls into the bed, Omisha feels snuggly enough to turn off the flashlight. She keeps the candle lit, the door open, so Marcus will see where she has gone.
“Fuckhead,” she says of Marcus, now amused, easily visualizing him in her head, holding his mouth to hold in his laughter, to hold in his delight. So cute, like a kid. “Love is so twisted,” she says to herself, pumping herself up, posturing, even if only to herself, as the tough girl.
She puts back on her wind sounds, breathing deep into her belly, exhaling, feeling herself as wind. This is the best part. Disintegrating, now she is only sound, now only air, she sleeps.
* * *
Marcus waves his flashlight around, over all the random machines that make a house function, large metal things, fogged gauges, thick iron pipes. He feels a wave of shame that he doesn’t know what any of them are. If left here to his own devices, he would be lost. In fact, he thinks that kid, Claude, is all right. It’s who that kid is, because of the things he knows, that makes Marcus lash out, makes him defensive as Marcus’s parents’ stories do. Mom grew up in rural Jamacia, Pop impoverished in New Orleans, but they both shared an experience. By the time they were half Marcus’s age, they’d learned to decapitate, bleed out, gut, and pluck a live chicken. At nineteen, Marcus still screams when he sees the occasional water bug or centipede that appears in the garden level of their brick row house.
When Marcus was applying to colleges, he told them he was thinking of anthropology as a major, that he was fascinated by ancient cultures and religions. His parents smiled as if he were being cute, brushing it off as one would a toddler offering navigational advice. Marcus wouldn’t be daydreaming his college years away, they reminded him. He would be majoring in something that drew on his strengths and would set him up for success. Something in tech, his parents decided. What they didn’t know was he’d been cheating in school since he was ten. His high grades in math and science revealed only a remarkable expertise in deception.
The youngest of four, Marcus knew about the SAT, and he began plotting in the eighth grade. For years, once a week, he stole small amounts of money from his parents’ wallets for the express purpose of hiring someone, which he did, to take his test. The deception has continued into college. He’s pursued his academic interests, classes like Studies in Textiles of the Outer Banks, Afro-Christian Religions of the Caribbean, Visualizing Colonialism, and each semester he pays a kid who majors in cybersecurity to manufacture a fake link that he forwards to his parent showing fake grades in fake computer science classes.
Marcus’s beam of light finds a wall of bladed tools. Sick! An old scythe, clippers, numerous axes, many types of saws. One saw is fifteen feet long, with two handles on either side. He knows it from a book he read about men out west who chopped down redwoods in the 1800s. It’s a two-man crosscut saw.
He gets out his phone and turns on the flash and takes a photo of the whole wall. He wants a single shot of the crosscut saw. He takes it off the wall, stands it on the ground on its handles like a two-legged table. The blade’s a mess, clearly not used in decades, covered in rust. But touching the saw’s teeth, they are still sharp. He takes a photo of it. Seeing his phone has low battery life, he shuts it off to save what power it has. Marcus loves this kind of thing, artifacts of the past, imagining people back in the day.
