Open Me (14 page)

T
he door is closing in the playroom, where Mem and the man sit around the old card table. The tweed on the old man’s jacket is cloudy with cat hair. Mem stares at the jacket and uses her fingernails to pick at the edges of the sticky strips of shelf-paper glued to the table.

The door closes and the man puts his meaty fingers on her knee. The moment his fingers touch her she can’t move.

“Stand up for me,” he says, gently. “Stand up in front of the mirror.”

Mem does what he says, getting up and moving in front of the tall mirror that leans against the wall. There she is, yes, it is her in the reflection, wearing her blacks, looking much smaller than she feels. Looking scared. “Don’t be scared,” he says and he stands up, too.

He stands behind her, clamping his hands onto her shoulders. “Start crying,” he whispers into her hair. “If you don’t do it, I will have to call the police and turn your mother in, and then you will never see her again. I wouldn’t want something like that to happen, would you? Start crying.”

She starts crying. It isn’t hard to cry but it is hard to watch herself crying in the big beveled mirror with pretty cherries and cherubs carved into the frame. Her reflection looks strange, shrinking. The man nods and smiles. His hands fumble forward a little, touching Mem’s nipples over her doole.

She is watching it happen, in the mirror. He watches her watching his fingers. Then he closes his eyes, pressing himself against her bottom, rubbing.
He opens his eyes. Rubbing. He says, breathlessly, throaty, “Look at yourself in the mirror. You are so lovely! You don’t even know how lovely you are. Look at yourself. Aren’t you lovely?”

Mem’s skin feels feverish, like when she’s sick and her mother sprinkles the bed with talcum powder and feeds her toast-and-jelly soaked in tea. Like when her skin hurts so bad she’s afraid to move, afraid that if she turns over, the wrinkles in her sheets will leave bruises.

“Keep crying.”

She watches the mirror, watches the man watching her.

What does she say? Does she whisper? Does she shriek? Mem can just make it out, the movement of her lips, the sound of the man’s voice coming out from between them, saying
don’t tell, don’t tell… so lovely…

  That night, for supper, Mem’s mother makes homemade M-shaped pancakes. Puffy, syrup-soaked Ms that Mem doesn’t want to eat. She chews their spongy sweetness and her stomach fills with the feeling she gets when they drive on the serpentine roller-coaster road, only the feeling isn’t going up and down like the humps on the street. Instead it just stays there, semi-solid, its insides whirling while Mem chews and chews and chews.

The man left a ghost of himself there, too, lingering in the house like an old smell. Mem can’t see the ghost but she can feel him. He is watching her. He is right behind her. He is everywhere. He is inside her.

Mem dutifully swallows the Ms on her plate. Her mother hums softly to herself while she tidies up. Her humming is made of Ms, too.
M
for
Mr. M with a Mustached Mouth. M
for
Mirror. M
for
Monster
.

And
M
for
Money
, which Mem’s mother counts out onto the kitchen table, each hundred-dollar bill at a time.

M
em and Sofie are playing Funeral in the spare bedroom when they hear Mem’s mother calling.
Girls, girls, come down
. The girls reach the top landing and try to walk down the stairs and they see that the steps are covered in guts, slippery pink entrails that move as if breathing.
It’s okay
, Mem says, and she takes Sofie’s hand. Barefooted, they step carefully, but a few pieces of guts squish between Mem’s toes. Downstairs, Aunt Ayin and Mem’s mother are eating supper at the dining room table, their forks lightly scraping against the good china. The light in the dining room is harsh and makes sullen shadows under the grown-ups’ eyes and noses.
How old are you?
Ayin asks Mem, and when Mem says,
I’m almost eleven
she can hardly hear her own voice.

Girls, girls, come here
, says Mem’s mother. She catches hold of Mem’s other hand and squeezes it as Mem looks out the dining room window and sees, pale in the black darkness, her mother walking by, looking right at her. How can this be? She can feel her mother’s cool hand in her own but the woman on the other side of the window is clearly also her mother. Panicked, Mem looks at Sofie, who smiles, and Mem knows it is too late.

Mem tries to pry her fingers away from Sofie but it is impossible, Sofie is already strong with ghost force, her fixed smile gleaming, glimmering dog’s teeth, and the pounding sound of footsteps rushes into the room and Mem knows it isn’t Sofie anymore, it is the someone-else, the
ghost, and it is starting to hurt her, pushing its fingers onto Mem’s body, trying to tickle her but it doesn’t tickle, it hurts so bad it is like dying.

The pictures on the wall are of people Mem doesn’t know, looking away, at something else. Mem wraps her hands around the not-Sofie’s wrists and tries to get it off but the not-Sofie doesn’t budge. Mem twists and turns and tries to get away. The fingers are tentacles and huge. Mem fights them off, angry at herself; she should have grabbed the not-Sofie’s fingers, not its wrists, because now its fingers can grow and get at her, no matter how much she struggles.

The not-Sofie keeps smiling. The feeling in Mem’s stomach where the fingers press is too much, worse than nausea, it make Mem want to crawl out of her skin. Does she hear her mother say
look at yourself such a pretty girl aren’t you lovely?
Mem can’t hear well, the pounding is so loud, like footsteps approaching on the floor above, like someone is walking right through her. The pain is coming out of Mem’s mouth. The pain is bigger than Mem.

Mem cries and begs,
No, please, not again
and her mother is finally there in the room again, but she isn’t watching. She is looking away, out the window, at something else.

When Mem wakes up she remembers,
I am the legend, I am beloved
, but she feels disoriented, confused, for a second not knowing where she is, not recognizing any of the objects in her room. Her heart pounds with the rhythm of the phantom footsteps. The ghosts could be anywhere now, having escaped from the dream. Mem tries to calm herself. She tells herself there are good ghosts and bad ghosts and someday the bad ghosts will go away. But Mem doesn’t really believe that the bad dreams will ever really go away. They have been waiting for her at the end of each day for months now, predators under the sheets, angry and gray. The color gray is for ghosts who came after Mem in her sleep, gray for the thumping sound they make as they walk through her dreams in an angry parade. Gray for how hard it is to see them. In her dreams Mem can be anywhere but the ghosts are always there, hiding. Mem never knows when they
might come because they can disguise themselves as people she knows, people she loves. Once they came looking like the neighbor’s dog. Once it was Aunt Ayin. A million times it is her mother.

In Mem’s waking life, her mother is mostly proud and loving, especially now that Mem is one of the only Wailers people will still hire. Things have changed. Now there are two cremations for every five deaths, and Mem’s fantastic notions of bone-choked green spaces are replaced with images of sandy ash piles clogging rivers, ashes in the food, ashes in the air so that everyone will soon be forced to breathe their dead. But Mem is so well-respected that she is hired to wail for these scattered cremains—both the disposals and the pick-up-and-burns. Mem has become so marketable, is in such high demand, that she is hired to weep for whole families as they die off in clusters, as older loved ones tend to do. She is hired to wail for dead children. She is even hired to wail for the very rich men who die, usually an impossible population to penetrate because their very young and well-coifed wives don’t usually like to be outmourned.

But Mem’s mother does not want Mem, who will soon be a teenager and thus not as young-looking, to take her fame for granted. She tells Mem that the mighty and prosperous Aurora, once endowed with a Master’s talent and an eternity in which to perform it, soon became Aurora, little-known goddess, burdened with a most important and painful task, her immortality a strain, then transformed into Aurora, completely forgotten Roman goddess, barely even indexed in reference books about antiquity. And now, Aurora, the name of a distant galaxy. A ruin.

Once, while Mem was looking at her mother’s framed photographs of Rome and the
Via Salaria
, she asked Aunt Ayin about the random ruins exposed right in the middle of modern city blocks. Aunt Ayin said that because there were so many ruins in Rome, there were ghosts everywhere and that the residents of Rome accept them as part of their lives, like stray cats.

“Bullshit,” said Mem’s mother, rushing past them to scoop the
schmutz
off the top of the boiling chicken soup. “Don’t feed the girl lies, Ayin. You’ve never even been to Rome.”

After huffing and harrumphing and adjusting her too-tight doole, Aunt Ayin told Mem that the zephyrs winding through the small streets of Rome bounce off the cobblestones like lost change and in them you can hear the small voices of dead children ringing. There are footprints everywhere that can not be accounted for. Small voices rustling through linens in the closets. Messages written in the dust. The ghosts of Rome are like house-guests that wouldn’t go away, she said, opening her round eyes wide. The residents learn to live with them and their anxious petulance, taking them for granted until the best plums go missing or shoes disappear. Desperate gamblers take poor advice from utterings that they mistake for intuition. At night the dogs growl at nothing. The children talk to themselves.

Mem had nodded, solemn, pursing her lips together. She could tell from Aunt Ayin’s distilled expression that she had never actually seen a ghost herself.

Lucky you
, thought Mem.

Ever since the old man has been inside her house, the ghost part of Mem’s self has solidified; it is dense and rigid as pewter now, silvery, non-porous, cold. But Mem knows that there are ghosts, other ghosts, living in her house. She has suspected this since she was younger, but now she feels it, deep down inside her. There is always a silent audience, like the photo of her grandmother over the mantel. Watching, judging, taking notes. She can feel them but she can’t see them, they are invisible and as adhesive as the pieces of gauze that stick to you when you accidentally walk through a cobweb. Mem knows she is never alone in her house.

Even though the outside of Mem’s house isn’t scary at all, it is the inside that Mem finds frightening, especially at night. The basement stairwell, the clean corners, the creaking gray bubbles of air under the confetti-colored carpets. Mem has seen other houses, older, more expensive single homes with sleeping monster eyes for windows, screaming mouths for doors. Horrifying houses of shut-up faces, flat eyes hideously separated and shrouded with screens. Whenever Mem looks at her house through the back window of her mother’s car she thinks the front of her house
doesn’t look anything like a face. The windows are too modern, too set into the deep siding to look like eyes. The blue door is off-center, not at all mouth-like. But sometimes it feels like there is another house inside Mem’s house, hidden and hard to see, with other doors and rooms Mem doesn’t know about. A dark gray house she only visits in her dreams.

In bed at night, Mem stares at the blue-black air and feels she is lost somewhere inside of it, that she cannot find herself. She watches the air around her burn slowly from blue to maroon, angry lava rusting in its shell of black. By early morning the air is red, having slowly grown blood-colored bark. Rust red. Snake red. And black-and-blue bruise black,
lazyfilthyliaruglysmellyweird bl
a
ck
but edged in a thick crimson hide. The sodden gray of shadows, of half-memories undulating their limbs under water. The grays of ghosts thumping through Mem’s bed in their angry parade, dragging their heavy-footed vapor down the hallway to her room.

A few days before her eleventh birthday, Mem is hired to weep at a funeral for a man who threw himself out of a window. The deceased’s name is Edgar, he was seventy-five years old, a retired tool-and-die maker who had been married for fifty years. There were no children. There was no suicide note. In the newspaper clipping that Edgar’s wife sends, Mem reads that Edgar jumped from the 22nd floor of their apartment building the week before, crashing head-first on the sidewalk at about 3:30 p.m. He died instantly, landing next to a pedestrian who had to be treated at a nearby hospital for trauma. Dozens of business people, tourists, and street vendors flocked around Edgar’s body, which police had to cover up with a bedsheet. Some of the people, probably the tourists, tried to take photographs of the scene, so police held up more sheets to impede their view.