Find Me (27 page)

They aren't usually home until after dark, so either the Psychologist has gotten confused about time or Mr. and Mrs. Carroll have changed their schedule. She doesn't know what is true.

She also doesn't know how long they've been watching and now there is something about their watching, about seeing their expression take on the wrongness of what is happening and reflect that wrongness back at her, that makes her feel like her organs are being rearranged. Her liver and her lungs switch places. Her spleen is in her elbow. Her heart is in her knee.

Mr. and Mrs. Carroll make no move to help her.

The whale vanishes from the screen.

The Psychologist is busy recording new data on his laptop. He doesn't yet know that his parents are in the room, that they are approaching from behind, slow and slack with shock, and very soon this girl will be sent away.

She sees them coming. She sees the wrongness grow. Piss runs down her legs and darkens the carpet. She feels the hot liquid curve around the edge of her foot.

She sees herself in the trunk of the car. The air was too hot and thick to breathe. It turned to cotton candy in her lungs.

She is going to pass out on the bedroom floor and wake up on a farm. It sounds impossible, but that is what is going to happen.

She will never understand what the Psychologist wanted from her, the nature of his experiment, but she knows what he took and that he kept taking it long after she left Allston.

His parents keep getting closer.

The Psychologist keeps clicking away.

“Look at you, my little monster,” he says. “Look at what I've trained you to do.”

 

33.

A theory on why we stop remembering: there is a part of our story that we do not know how to tell to ourselves and we will away its existence for so long that finally our brain agrees to a trade: I will let you forget this, but you will never feel whole.

*   *   *

What is a memory but the telling of a story?

*   *   *

In middle school, I went on a field trip to a whale watch at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. When we saw the first sign of a whale, the spray of white, the great V-shaped tail smacking the water, I screamed in terror and did not know why.

*   *   *

In high school, I kicked a boy in the chest when he tried to touch between my legs.

*   *   *

It was never my mother in the tunnel. It was always him.

*   *   *

Does this mean he's dead?

*   *   *

Ask me if I feel bad for hoping he is. Just ask.

*   *   *

When I stop remembering, I'm not in the Mansion. I'm standing in the woods, breathing fast. The land is heavy with silence. The tree branches are reaching toward each other like fingers and through them the sky is the opposite of faded. It is such a deep shade of blue that it almost looks unreal, like a screen that could be split open. I don't remember leaving the Mansion and walking outside. I don't remember crossing the yard and moving past the halo of bare trees. The woods feel like shelter.

The ground is damp and the heels of my sneakers are sinking into it. I stand on a mass of tree roots, like a person seeking high ground. The woods smell faintly of smoke. I listen to the rushing sound of the creek. I wrap my arms around the trunk and think of Marcus and feel my heart begin to slow.

A bird with a yellow chest flies from one branch to another, on the run from something. The ferns have left little wet handprints on my jeans.

Now it's like this: you look at yourself in the mirror and watch your reflection take off a mask. You look hard at all the wrongness in this new face, you look hard at the ways that wrongness has shaped it, and you have to decide if this new face is something you can live with.

If you decide no, you dissolve into yourself. If you decide yes, a small thing inside you is set free.

 

34.

In the Mansion, there are animals all around us. I've seen the scurry of whiskered rats, snakes in the grass, possums with spindly white tails stalking the backyard after dark. I've seen birds in the trees, the ones that sit hunched on the broad low branches, buzzards or something related. There are alive things in the house too. I keep hearing the tick tick tick of nails on the floor, a scraping in the walls. It's only a matter of time before one gets stuck inside.

In Charlestown, Ms. Neuman was always setting out cages for mice. Once they were in the cages, she would feed them cheddar cheese with poison inside. If Marcus and I found a trapped mouse sniffing at the bars, we carried the cage outside and let it go.

In the living room, when a raccoon gets stuck inside the trap door, Nelson says it will make a great tool for an experiment. The four of us stand around the closed trap door, having been drawn into the room by the sound of the animal's thrashing. I can feel the raccoon racing around beneath us. I can feel it slamming against the walls. A pulse, an aliveness, rises from the floor.

“You probably aren't aware that the history of animal experimentation goes back to the Greeks,” Nelson tells us, sensing our hesitation. “That the rhesus monkey helped find a vaccine for polio? That heart valve replacement surgery was tested on dogs?”

I can see that Nelson thinks of the Mansion as a kind of Hospital, its inhabitants the patients, and I do not need another Hospital or another doctor trying to pry his way inside. I've had it with scientific inquiry.

“We should let it go,” I say.

“Yes,” says Marcus, who has always had sympathy for trapped things. “I vote to let it go too.”

“Who said anything about voting?” Nelson stands on the trap door and crosses his arms, unwilling to give up his prize. Earlier he was outside. His pants are streaked with fresh mud. “You just got here. You don't know how things work.”

Somehow, in the middle of all this, Darcie continues with her remembering.

“I was in a basement,” she says, loud enough to get our attention. We stop arguing about what to do with the raccoon and look at her. She's pulling feathers out of her wings. “I was living down there. I couldn't get away. I was tied to something.”

“When?” I ask her. I don't know if she means the basement downstairs or some other place, if she was in a basement before Nelson found her on the side of the road in Cordova. The raccoon is whining now, a shrill plea.

“Sometime before. I think.” Darcie's eyes widen and she looks like she's about to tell us more, but then she stops and sinks down into the velvet chair, her wings bursting over the arms. She's holding fistfuls of feathers. There are bald spots on the ridges of her wings.

“See!” Nelson claps his hands. “She's remembering. She's getting fully cured.”

Marcus and I look at each other. We're not sure we like this idea of what it means to be cured.

“Oh no,” Darcie cries. She drops the feathers and pushes her face into her hands. “Oh no.”

A Real-Life Ghost Story, I think. That's what she's remembering now.

The animal claws around inside the trap door. The floorboards shudder. Darcie runs upstairs and into the bathroom. We chase after her and find her sitting in the rusted tub and rubbing her arms like she's washing herself, even though there's no water.

“Don't kill it,” she says when she sees us huddled in the doorway. She leans back in the tub and rests her black-soled feet on the porcelain edge. “Don't you dare kill it.”

“But what about progress?” Nelson asks.

She closes her eyes and shakes her head. For the moment she is the one with the power.

We decide to leave the raccoon alone for now.

*   *   *

That night, there are no games. No drinking, no copping and robbing, no hiding, no tunnel. Instead we vanish into our separate corners. Darcie stays in the bathroom, pretending to wash herself in the tub. Nelson retreats into the attic and soon after I hear the bowling ball rolling across the floor, the clatter of pins. The raccoon stays locked inside the trap door, thrashing. Marcus and I are in our room. I'm reading on the mattress. He's sitting silent on the floor.

My body is leaden. I am sleeping more and dreaming less. I am unsure if this is progress. The waist of my jeans has started digging into my stomach, leaving behind a mark that looks like a second bellybutton.

We don't speak. We don't draw. We don't play hide-and-go-seek or grand obituary, at least not aloud. I know we're not supposed to use our own names for obituaries, but silently I do them for my eight-year-old self and my Stop & Shop self and the self that is still locked up in the Hospital. All the little selves I want to kill and bury deep.

In the middle of the night, I wake up alone. The room is dark. From the cold of the mattress, I know Marcus is gone. I push open the window and climb into the sill. I drink in the mineral smell of the night. The moon is a white sphere in the sky. I watch the light shift, the pattern of shadows on the ground. I think about how easy it would be for me and Marcus to slip out of this house and away.

Marcus steps into the backyard, carrying a burlap sack. His steps are long and slow. From the way he's holding the sack in his arms, I know it's not empty. He walks past the halo of trees and stops at the top of the slope.

The raccoon is dead. It suffocated under the floor or bashed itself in the head. It did not survive us. Marcus stops walking and I think he's going to take out the dead raccoon and dig a grave or leave it for other animals to eat, let it return to the earth, but then he kneels and opens the sack and the raccoon leaps out, fully alive. In the moonlight, I can see the little black paws, the fluff of tail. The animal stands on its hind legs. Its head jerks left and then right. It opens and closes its mouth, tasting the air. It darts into the woods and is swallowed up by the night.

Marcus rolls up the burlap sack and slings it over his shoulder, but he doesn't come inside right away. He stays there long after the raccoon is gone. At first, I think he's just getting some fresh air or contemplating our current situation, how much longer we can stay in this house with Nelson and his experiments, with Darcie and her memories, or maybe even having a memory of his own, but then he kneels and starts pushing the dirt around with a stick and I know it's something else. I almost call to him, but I can tell he's really concentrating, that whatever he's doing feels important. He is looking very hard at something in the ground.

*   *   *

When I lose sight of Marcus from the window, I start to worry about him disappearing again. I don't get back into bed. I sit at the top of the stairs and wait for the door to open and close, for movement on the floorboards. At the foot of the stairs, he stops and watches me, his mask glinting. I see the burlap sack. I smell the dirt and sweat. I hear him breathing. He moves toward me one step at a time. On each new level he pauses and I think of my mother coming up from a dive, the interval stops. I stand and open my arms, and maybe it is because he did not disappear this time or maybe because he is taking so long to reach me or maybe it is all the remembering that makes a welling in my body, a pressure behind my eyes, that unmistakable feeling of being on the verge of tears that are going to come so full and so hot you think you are going to flood the house.

*   *   *

Nelson blames Darcie for releasing the raccoon. In the morning, we hear shouting from our bedroom and go downstairs, into the kitchen. Through the window we see that Nelson has Darcie cornered on the front porch. He is telling her that he is trying to do something meaningful and she agreed to help him but of course she can't really understand what that means because she has never done anything meaningful in all her sorry life.

We watch from the kitchen window. The sink is filled with Mason jars. A line of red ants marches up a dirty wall. My scalp itches.

“You know this about yourself.” Nelson has her pressed against a railing, the wood dark and soft with rot. “You know this is true, now that you can remember.” Darcie is shaking her head and doing her hiccup-cry. Her back is bare.

We go outside, looking to break up the fight. We stand in front of the knobless front door, the neon yellow skull. When Nelson sees us he shrugs and takes a step back, casual, like this is all a misunderstanding. “Go away,” Darcie says, and at first I think she's talking to Nelson, but then I realize she is looking at us.

We're about to tell Nelson that Darcie is not responsible for the raccoon going free, that we are to blame, but then we notice a gray haze all around us, settling over the house and yard like a fog.

We walk into the yard. We see a wild bloom of orange.

The ground squishes under our feet. We follow a path of footsteps through the mud. New grass has started coming up along the edges of the lawn, a sparse green fringe. The buds on the tree branches are tight as fists. I smell chemicals. I smell death. A wind blows the heat toward us and I feel it on my stomach and on my face. Swirls of ember and ash. A charcoal taste in my mouth.

We stop in front of the burning thing. The feathers are gone, but I can still make out the metal frames on the ground. They are glowing with fire. They are melting into nothing. Darcie's angel wings, alight on the front lawn.

 

35.

That night we leave the Mansion under the cover of a moonless sky. I take only what I brought with me. I can't be sure if the pages of the book are tainted with the trickiness of the Mansion, so I leave the sea behind. We stay away from the train tracks. We go out the back of the house, into the woods, down the slope. We follow the creek in the opposite direction, through a wet, brown valley. We stay close to the low rush of water.

There was a comfort to staying in the Mansion and watching the outside world recede, but after I started remembering, after Marcus showed me what he found in the woods, I thought of Ms. Neuman telling me I could be any kind of person I wanted and the thought of choosing wrong scared me more than being back out on the road.