Oblivion, p.10
Oblivion, page 10
“So on one hand, we have Elijah, who’s been known to impede the process. On the other, we have John, who seems to encourage the words. Do you find yourself gravitating closer to John because of it?”
“No, but I guess I don’t really know why I keep sleeping with Elijah.” I swallow hard, unsure I want to admit the next thought. “I think he’s seeing someone else.”
“Hmm.”
“Recently, I guess, I’ve seen a glimpse of how things are supposed to be.”
“Via John Fogel.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Have things gotten, you know, physical”—his nose crinkles a little when he says the word—“with John?”
I should tell Dr. Ewing about what happened last night in the rain. I should tell him that John Fogel and I hooked up, that making out with him was the stupidest, yet most natural, most incredible and dangerous thing I’d ever done.
Unless, of course, I killed my father.
Did I?
Do I believe in murder?
I ought to, if I committed it.
“Callie?”
“I remember things. About the past.”
My shrink lifts his chin. “What kind of things?”
“Well, that’s just it. Not the kind of past you and Lake County PD are hoping for. I don’t remember anything about Palmer and those hours I spent writing on the bathroom walls.
“I remember things I don’t exactly remember doing.”
One of his eyebrows contorts, bends downward toward the bridge of his nose.
“I’m crazy,” I say.
“No, no, go on.”
“It’s like a vivid dream, only it feels more real. I taste things, smell things …” I shift on the sofa, sprawl on my back. This is real psychoanalysis now—me, lying on a sofa, under the watchful stare of a man in glasses. “It’s like when your mom starts telling you a story about something you did when you were little, and slowly, bit by bit, the picture emerges until suddenly, it isn’t a story anymore. You remember.”
“Have you had any more blackouts since that last one at school?”
I can’t look him in the eye, but I feel his stare beating down on me. If his pupils shot lasers, I’d be charred right now. A chill jolts through me. I shiver and briskly rub my arms from elbow to shoulder. “Yeah.” In the periphery, I see him nodding. The pressure of his stare is too much to ignore. I offer him a glance.
“How long are the blackouts lasting?”
“Nothing like that first one, not like at the Vagabond.”
“Not thirty-six hours?” He cracks a smile.
I know he’s trying to relax me, but I shake my head.
“How long, then, would you say?”
“A few minutes, tops. Sometimes not more than a few seconds.”
I’m still cold. My head pounds. Words close in on me. Close the crimson door in your mind.
“Callie.”
“Close the …” I pinch my eyes shut, force my tongue to stop moving. Tears build behind my eyelids. Don’t give into the impulse. Don’t say the words. Crimson door.
“Callie.” His voice garbles, like when cell reception starts to fail. “Callie, focus.”
“On what?”
Close the crimson door in your mind.
I’m trembling now. Shaking. Chilled. I think of nothing, if not my pen, my paper. Putting pen to paper. I nearly taste the words; they’re that powerful. I close my fingers into a tight fist. Sweat. Shiver. I can’t take it. Can’t take it anymore. I reach for my pen.
Everything blurs.
I’m in the garden house at Holy Promise. Soaking wet. There’s a pair of panties on the floor. Yellow floral pattern, cotton.
God, what are they doing here?
How did I get here?
If I could muster the strength, I’d stand, but what’s the use? The door is locked. From the outside.
From the outside! And I’m in, I’m in, I’m in.
A blanket descends over me, comforts me.
My eyes open to see Dr. Ewing taking his seat again.
The blanket is a blue-and-orange plaid fleece, the type football fans bring to Soldier Field. Tears blur my vision. I glance down at my notebook:
Sift through as the hours pass.
“How much time do we have?”
“Don’t worry about the clock. Talk.”
“I don’t know what you expect me to say.”
“I don’t expect you to say anything. Want to tell me about what you wrote?”
I read it to him.
“Any images materialize along with that line?” he asks.
“Ashes. Buckets of them. In the garden house. But I don’t know why.”
“Was this indicative of what usually happens?”
“Yeah, that’s about it.” I think of the day in the labyrinth with John, and my breath catches. The terrible things I felt … horrific images I remembered …
“And what happens with the words, when you’re blacked out?”
“See for yourself.” I shudder with an inhalation. The tears intensify. They’re pouring out of my eyes, as if someone turned on a spigot in my head. “One word, written over and over again sometimes. It feels like a violation. Like something’s invading me. Like rape.”
“Rape?” Dr. Ewing shoves a box of tissues across the table toward me.
But I can’t reach for it. I’m frozen beneath the blanket. The pain at my temples is nearly unbearable. “I feel it sometimes. Vividly.” The nausea. The pain. The shame.
“Tell me what you think you remember.”
“The labyrinth behind Holy Promise.” A violent sob escapes me. I’ve never cried like this before, not even on the day Palmer sent my mother away. I hear movement across the table, but I can’t open my eyes to see what Dr. Ewing’s doing. I’m afraid, I realize. I’m afraid of the words—those I’m about to say, and the ones racing through my brain. Afraid of why I think them, afraid of what they might mean. Afraid of what Dr. Ewing will think of me, once I blurt them out.
The world spins before my eyes. I’m dizzy, so dizzy. I feel heels of hands against my inner thighs, spreading me wide.
I can’t breathe.
Can’t fight the hands.
Can’t block out the stabbing pain.
“Warren?”
“I’m right here.” His comforting hand lands on my shoulder.
He’s standing over me. Staring down at me.
My cheeks flush with humiliation. What a mess I must be. I wipe at my face, but the tears are coming too quickly. I can’t dry them. The little bit of eye makeup I’m allowed to wear at Carmel hangs on my lashes in midnight black gobs. I see it, glowing in the iridescence of my tears.
He gives my arm a pat. “Let it out, Callie. It’s okay.” He moves to withdraw.
I grasp tightly to his wrist.
Alarm registers in his wide eyes in the split second it takes for him to realize I’m admitting I need him.
I hold tight. Manage to sit up.
He lowers himself to the coffee table.
Our knees graze.
I hiccup over a sob. “Warren …”
“I’m here for you.”
“What do you think of me?”
His shoulders dip. He tilts his head slightly to the left, but refuses to break eye contact. “I think you’re strong.”
All evidence to the contrary, I’m unraveling before his eyes.
“And, Calliope, you’re special. These words … your ability to write them … it’s a gift. Not everyone can do what you’ve been doing.”
I resist the urge to roll my eyes at his attempt to bring me down off the ledge. “Am I a bad person?”
“Sometimes good people make bad decisions. Whether or not you’ve made a few of those … well, we’re getting there, aren’t we?”
I remember the feel of John Fogel’s body in my arms.
I nod. “Yeah.”
Elijah kisses my temple, while I snuggle in close to his warm body.
It’s Tuesday, and we’re in the apartment above the Vagabond. Elijah was late, nearly half an hour late, and I think maybe he shouldn’t have come today.
My head is pounding relentlessly, poisoned with the mysterious crimson door in my mind. I’m resting my head somewhere between Elijah’s bicep and shoulder. His arm curls up, framing my head; he brushes hair from my face.
Today, a single word haunts me: strangled. So far, it’s just a nagging sensation, but I know it’s only a matter of time before I’ll have to write it.
The music of a flutist and a timpani drummer filters up from below. Yet despite this easygoing, beatnik atmosphere, I feel dirty inside.
Strangled.
We’ve hooked up tons of times, and usually, it’s an experience I crave. Tonight, however, I did it out of obligation, so he wouldn’t be able to sense the impending end of us, so he wouldn’t know that I noticed the faint scent of girl in his clothing. Even while lying in Elijah’s arms, I feel the distance between us.
The distance has been growing, if only in minuscule increments, but suddenly, the small steps we’re taking to create the gap between us are lengthening.
Elijah and other girls is nothing new. But John’s changing everything.
I wonder if Elijah tastes John Fogel when he kisses me.
I wonder if Lindsey can smell him on my body.
It’s only a matter of time before my world erupts, and I feel powerless to stop it.
John doesn’t—or perhaps can’t—understand what Lindsey means to me, and Lindsey, despite John’s blatant disinterest, won’t give up on him. She’s used to getting what she wants, and I don’t want to be the reason she fails this time. Thus, I’ve talked John into doing what Lindsey says she wants—the four of us together at homecoming.
Strangled by cords.
“Promise me you’ll show up,” I say.
Elijah tenses, then he touches a thumb to the dent in my cheek, where a blue topaz stud used to be. “Yeah, I promise.”
“Come to the door.”
“Wearing a sport coat.” He tickles my ribs. “On time and everything.”
His fingertips lazily graze over my flesh.
“God …” He pulls me up, so I’m straddling him and he’s staring into my eyes. Yet still, he’s holding me close, pressing my body to his. “I love you, you know that?”
My lips brush against his as I speak: “I know.”
He fingers the scar on my right shoulder, lightly at first, then applying some pressure. “I wish I’d always been there to protect you.” His gaze won’t relent; he wants me to talk, to admit I relive the moment the mark came to be there.
I break the stare when I feel heat climbing up my neck, flushing my cheeks. I don’t know why the reference to the scar embarrasses me; if I’ve learned anything from Warren Ewing, it’s that it’s Palmer’s shame, not mine. “I’m okay.”
His tongue ripples against mine.
Scenes flash in my mind—partial recollections, anyway, as it happened so fast—of the altar, of Palmer pulling Andrew Drake away from me, punching him square across the jaw. Recollections of the labyrinth, of the fountain. Of the belt across my back.
As Elijah’s fingers now caress the spot my father connected with, my tongue dips to feel my sometimes boyfriend’s four crooked teeth.
Holy water stings when it meets with raw wounds.
My eyes well with tears when I remember the pain.
Elijah rubs away a tear, while his other hand worries my scar. “I wish I could have stopped him from hurting you.”
Finally, his fingers trail away from the mark on my shoulder.
“Elijah?”
He laces his hands into my hair.
“Hannah Rynes was in the fountain that day, the day he took her.”
He brushes his cheek against mine, and his fingers tense against my scalp. “You don’t know that, baby.”
“Right now it’s more of a feeling than testimony, but I do know. I’m remembering things. Flashes.” The pair of yellow floral-print cotton underwear—wet—darts through my mind. On the floor of the garden house.
I withdraw from his embrace, grab my notebook and pen. Stand.
“Callie?” He follows me toward the dark hallway.
The police tape still quarantines the area, although I know it’s only because no one’s come to take it down. The department has everything they need from this area—the four pens I’d used over the course of those thirty-six hours, as well as photographs of every inch of the walls on which I wrote. They have the little bit of clothing I was wearing, which is probably still caked with inches of lakeside mud. The only thing they found in this room and don’t have sealed in an airtight evidence bag is me.
I dip under the yellow tape and cross the threshold into the bathroom. Harbor lights shine through the lone window, illuminating the walls.
I’d written the same thing over and over:
I killed him I killed him I killed him.
Some other nonsensical poetry is interspersed, but Ewing says I wrote it—I killed him—a total of one thousand two hundred forty-six times.
Elijah spins me around, props me on the old-fashioned, pink porcelain sink, which stands on two thick porcelain legs and is skirted in a faded blue gingham print. It’s been there as long as my earliest memory and is just as tattered.
The words on the walls race around me, becoming red blurs.
My hand begins to ache. A dull pain registers in my shoulders. I yank off the pen cap.
Dig. Sift. Chink.
Someone’s digging in the labyrinth behind the garden house.
I can’t see her, but I hear her sobbing, hear the sift of dirt in the pan of her shovel.
I can just barely see over the brick ledge of the open-air bell tower, but I can’t see past the garden house. Too many tall shrubs.
I press my hands to my ears to block out the sound of her wailing, as my eyes well up with tears of my own. They dampen my cheeks, blur my vision, stuff my nose.
It’s pure torture to hear your mother cry … and not know how to soothe her.
“Shush, Callie.”
I recoil, back away from the hands attempting to calm me.
“Callie! Callie, come on, baby. Relax.”
Elijah.
I release a held breath and blink away hot tears.
The red words racing around me come to a screeching halt the moment he stops me from spinning.
I shake out my throbbing hand, sore from gripping tightly to a red felt-tip, and stare down at what I’d just written:
Strangled by the cords of daisies. Close the crimson door in your mind. Escape from the world of the crazies. Tear off the ties that bind.
Elijah lowers his mouth to mine.
An image materializes in my mind, but threatens to fade.
I knot my fingers in Elijah’s hair to keep him right where he is. I’m safe and secure while he’s kissing me, despite the vile thoughts entering my mind.
Focus.
Highland Point.
Near the steep, rocky shoreline, where John Fogel and I crossed the line.
That’s where it happened.
Long ago.
A body.
***
When I get home, Lindsey’s light is on, and a Said the Whale ballad pumps from beyond her door. Still, I’m careful to be quiet as I pass her room, in case she fell asleep while reading—or whatever it is people like Lindsey do before going to bed.
“Dude, get in here.”
I’m exhausted, but I can’t help smiling at Lindsey’s desperate-sounding demand as I push her door open.
She’s lying with her back on the floor, one ankle resting on the opposite knee. She’s wearing rainbow, over-the-knee socks—the type with individual toe spaces—hot-pink boyshorts, and a white tank top scrawled with a fuchsia I Kissed a Farm Boy. Her ebony hair fans on the carpet like a peacock’s tail, and her MacBook is open on the floor to her left.
Without awarding me so much as a glance, she shifts the laptop toward me. “Help.”
I toss my backpack to the floor and kneel on the plush carpeting next to her. “Oh. Wow.”
On the screen before me is a poor attempt at communication with John Fogel, who apparently sent her an e-mail this evening.
I temper the jealous gremlin kicking up dust in my gut, demanding that I stake a claim to John. It’s evident by the words on the screen—I’m totally excited for homecoming. I should switch with Brittany, so I can ride in the same car as you in the parade—that my pseudo sister’s connection with him is more superficial than shallow. A soft spot churns inside me. The night on the Point with him was a spiritual experience; mistake or not, it was more than a cheap encounter. And he’s writing to another girl because I told him to.
I want to be angry. But angry with whom, if not myself?
“Why can’t I just say what I want to say?” Lindsey taps her fingers against her thighs in time with the music.
“What do you want to say?”
For the first time, she glances up at me. “Whoa.”
“What?” I peek at my reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of her door. I don’t need to hear her reply. I look as spent and flushed as I feel.
She’s up now, legs in butterfly position, pressing the back of her hand to my cheek. “You look like shit.”
“I’m okay. Just a headache. Long walk from the marina.”
“Dude, tell the soccer stud to drive you home. You don’t have to worry about the serial wine taster and the workaholic golfer hearing the car pull up.”
But Elijah’s foster parents will hear him roll out of their driveway, if he drives. Elijah’s on a tighter leash than Lindsey and me, so he always crawls out his window, travels on foot to the depot, and hops the train that runs along the shoreline.
I type:
John,
Backspace and retype:
Jon,
“What do you want to say to him?” I ask.
“That I’m totally excited.”
I type:
I’m inspired by the possibilities, all the places we may go, all the things we might see, everything we may someday be to one another.
Hugs,
Lindsey
“You’re a genius,” she says.
I hit send.
