Soft Apocalypses (8 page)

Food was the truest love she’d ever known, and every meal she made was a humble feast. We never went hungry except for the occasional week my father’s mood swung and he decided God had called on him to starve the Devil out of us.

I could smell ham and biscuits baking in the oven, and my mouth began to water despite the huge chef salad I’d had at the restaurant beside the hotel. I’d resolved to myself that I would be polite in my father’s home, but I would not accept any more of his and my mother’s hospitality than was necessary. They’d shunned me for fifteen years, and I wouldn’t let them treat me like family now. I wouldn’t even eat so much as the proverbial six pomegranate seeds there if I could help it.

I went to the front door and knocked.

“Just a minute,” I heard my mother call.

Moments later, the door opened. My mother was there dressed in one of her home-stitched gingham dresses and her favorite yellow apron decorated in embroidered blue clematis flowers and curling vines.

“Maybelle, we missed you so much!” Not quite meeting my gaze, she grabbed my hand in hers and pulled me into the house. She didn’t try to hug me, but she was never much of a hugger. “Your daddy is in the living room waiting for you.”

“Is Leanna here?”

“She’s taking a nap. Poor thing gets so tired. I need to get back to dinner—can’t let the greens scorch! We’ll have a chance to set a spell and catch up after dinner.”

And with that, she disappeared into the kitchen again. I stood there in the hallway, breathing in ancient house dust, willing my heart to stop hammering. This was a nice place now. A perfectly nice place.

My father’s artwork covered the walls. He made his own frames and cut his own glass to size. He’d started out selling portraits and landscapes at fairs and festivals around the state, and from what I heard he made a good living at it. But by the time I was five, his mind had turned in on itself and after that he only sketched religious figures, mostly Jesus. In the biggest piece above the entryway to the living room, he’d portrayed Christ with a square jaw, fierce eyes and flowing blond hair, as though the Savior was some Viking conqueror. He even had a sword tucked in a studded belt.

My gaze fell on the closed sewing room door. My heart started pounding again. Funny how one old brass knob and plain wooden door could be so thoroughly terrifying.

I was eleven and Leanna was fifteen when our father went from religious eccentricity to predatory insanity. After her birthday, he found a card from a boy in her book bag, and he was furious. He made her take a purity pledge at church, but that wasn’t enough. He started going into her bedroom at night to make sure she hadn’t been “sinning”.

I knew what he was doing to her. I should have comforted her. I should have tried to protect her. I should have gotten the rifle down from the mantel and blown the sick bastard out of his boots. But I didn’t do any of that. I pretended I couldn’t hear him violate her, couldn’t hear her weeping afterward.

Nobody in the house was surprised when her belly started to swell. But I feared the worst. I was scared he’d take her out in the woods and I’d never see her again.

But our father’s whole attitude changed. He was ecstatic and spoke of “miracles” and “gifts from God.” He pulled Leanna out of school but he treated her like a little country princess. And, somehow, he convinced us all it was for real. Convinced us that his sudden rages and violent fits were history and he was gentle again. Even Leanna seemed to believe he’d changed. He turned the sewing room into a nursery, all painted in pinks and blues and teddy bears.

He and my mother delivered the baby themselves, and despite Leanna never seeing a doctor once in the entire pregnancy, my little sister was born pink and healthy. I knew she was the fruit of a horrible sin against Leanna, but I fell in love with the baby right away. She was a little blonde angel who looked up to me,
me
of all people, as someone important. I
mattered
, finally. I had never been so happy as when I got to feed her and hold her.

Father let Leanna go back to school, riding the bus with me into town. She was relieved to be out in the world again. I couldn’t wait to get back home to play with the baby.

Yet one day, we got home and ... the nursery wasn’t there. The crib and toys were gone, replaced once again with my mother’s sewing machine and cabinets of cloth and thread. In the space between morning and evening, pink and blue walls had become a flat, mute green. To this day, the smell of fresh paint makes me nauseated.

I ran to my mother with Leanna close behind and said, “Where’s the baby?”

And, God save her soul, our mother wiped the dishwater off her hands, looked me dead in my eyes and said with a gasping little laugh, “Don’t be silly, dear. There’s no baby here.”

Our mother stepped closer, lowering her voice to the faintest whisper. “There was
never
any baby here, understand? That’s how this has to be.”

Leanna wilted. In her dry eyes I could see her soul collapsing, and she simply went to her room and shut the door like a good girl.

My brain completely short-circuited. I lost all sense of self-preservation. I ran into my father’s art room where he was sketching yet another Aryan Jesus and I screamed, “What did you do to my baby sister?”

He got up from his chair and with a priestlike calm punched me right in the face. I went down like a sack of wet sand, my lip and nose bleeding, teeth feeling loose in my aching jaw.

He stared down at me like I was something his coon hound vomited on the carpet. “Don’t you ever raise your voice to me again, girl. Get to your room and don’t come out ‘til you’re called out.”

I went to my room and wept for hours. When crying wasn’t enough to release the horrible black ocean in my soul, I started tearing the room apart, screaming and breaking anything that would smash. My father came in and told me that if I wanted something to cry about, he would give it to me. He twisted my arm right out of my shoulder socket, and that evening he taught me that it was possible to endure incredible pain in perfect silence.

And so I was perfectly silent as I stared down at the old doorknob, the hooked memories climbing the walls of my skull. If I opened the door, what would I find beyond? But just as my fingers closed around the tarnished brass, I heard my father speak my name, summoning me like a sorcerer calling up an obedient demon.

“You gonna come say hello to me, Maybelle?”

“Yes, Dad, I’ll be there in a moment.” My voice sounded like my mother’s inside my own head.

I turned away from the door and went into the living room like any good daughter. My father was there in his favorite chair, his hair and beard looking a little greyer perhaps but really he was just about the same as when I’d last set eyes on him.

“How are things out your way?” he asked. His hands were folded in his lap and his soft flannel shirt made him look huggable. Kindly and gentle. He did not look like a rapist. He did not look like the man who had dislocated my arm and threatened to kill me. He did not look like a man who would erase the existence of his own child.

“It’s very pretty this time of year,” I replied. “Lots of wildflowers.”

“That’s good,” he said. “A girl like you deserves to live in a place of God’s beauty.”

“How long has Leanna been sick?” I asked.

“I reckon she lived with it a long while now. It’s a terrible thing,” he said. “We’re all terrible broke up about it.”

There was a faint, strange odor in the room that I couldn’t quite place. It mostly smelled like rust and rotten wood, but it also contained a sharp chemical note like burnt plastic. What could it be? Old mold and fungicide? Glue? I looked around at the ivy-colored carpet and the wisteria-patterned wallpaper for signs of water damage or a recent remodeling, but everything seemed just the same as when I called this place home.

A feline head butted against my calf. I glanced down, and saw a white and gray kitty who looked a whole lot like my old cat Mouser. He rubbed against me, purring, and I picked him up and set him on my lap.

My head spun as I stared into the cat’s face and realized that he didn’t just look a whole lot like Mouser ... he
was
Mouser. His mismatched green and blue eyes, the deep scar on his left ear from a fight with a raccoon ... he was the same as he’d been at his prime. But he’d gotten sick with feline leukemia when I was nine, and I’d buried him myself.

This cat had been dead for a quarter of a century, and yet there he was, purring and kneading on my lap. He was soft, very soft, just the way I remembered. I looked around the room. All of it was exactly the way I remembered.

A clammy dread filled me. I stared at my father, who was smiling at me benevolently.

“Where am I? Where am I,
really
?”

“Why, you’re home, Maybelle. You’re home where you belong.”

I gently set Mouser down on the carpet and stood up.

“Where are you going?” my father asked. “Sit down, relax. Your mother will bring us some tea.”

“I have to check on something.” I turned away from him and headed down the hall to Leanna’s old bedroom.

My father hurried after me. “Now, don’t go in there, she’s resting.”

“I won’t wake her.” Keeping my mind as neutral as possible, I opened the door.

Leanna’s room was just the way I remembered it. She lay in bed, fast asleep, looking just the way she had when she was recovering from a bad case of the flu.

And here, in this careful recreation of my home, she was still a teenager, not a woman pushing forty.

I turned, dodged past the thing pretending to be my father, and ran to the sewing room.

As my fingers closed around the brass knob, the father-thing shouted, “No, don’t go in there, it’s a horrible mess in there!”

I pushed open the door, not knowing whether I’d see my mother’s workshop or the pink-and-blue nursery –

– but instead I found myself standing in my own bedroom, staring at my own twelve-year-old self. My young face was bruised, streaked with tears. A rage that was far too big for my small body to hold contorted my features. Twelve-me had smashed apart all the furniture, and gripped a broken chair leg like a club.

“I HATE YOU!” She swung the chair leg at my head with both hands.

The wood connected solidly with my temple. My vision exploded in white, and my legs collapsed under me. I’d barely gotten my sight back before Twelve-me started beating the shit out of me with the improvised club.

“You’re worthless!” she shouted down at me. “You could have done something, but you didn’t do anything! You just covered your ears and pretended it was all fine!”

She screamed all the terrible things I’d secretly believed about myself on my worst nights. Hearing them out loud was like hearing holy judgment on my soul. I balled up on the floor, covering my head with my arms. Twelve-me continued to pound away, striking a numbing, agonizing blow on the nerve bundle behind my elbow. The next blow sent sparks of pain across my whole body.

She would kill me if I didn’t defend myself. I grabbed the club on the next downswing and tried to wrestle it away from her. But the chair leg sprouted tiny itchy vines like kudzu. They sprawled over my hands and arms, snaring me.

I bucked and fought to get myself free while Twelve-me hit me with her narrow fists. Then father-thing stepped into the room. Twelve-me ceased her attack and stood up, waiting.

Father-thing stared down at me with a look of profound disappointment and contempt. “You should have done as you were told, girl.”

Mother-thing came in behind him, wiping her hands on her apron, blankly gazing off into space. “‘Obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto the Lord’.”

Their expressions didn’t change as their bodies spasmed, dark green tendrils bursting through their pale skins. They collapsed, their flesh disintegrating and reweaving into writhing kudzu, vines joining vines that slithered over my limbs and held me down on the floor.

Twelve-me fell on top of me, suddenly serene as a graveyard angel. Her face and arms had grown impossibly long. Black kudzu leaves slit through her skin like necrotic tongues.

“Stop struggling and we can go eat mother’s supper. Stop struggling and it’ll all be just like it should have been.” Her voice was the hiss of rain on pine needles and dry bones, gentle and mesmerizing. “You’ll stay here where you belong. It’ll all be fine; be a good girl and do what you’re told ....”

The room went dark. It would have been so easy to give in. It would have been so easy to agree to the death the creature offered me: peace, at last, and forgiveness for my sin of surviving.

But instead I screamed and fought. The floor beneath me had disappeared into rough dirt and the viny monster was trying to drag me under. I struggled as hard as I could and got my good arm free, reaching for something,
anything,
that I could grab to get myself out of there.

A flashlight beam cut the gloom.

“Maybelle!” Alonzo shouted.

“Here!” I waved my free hand frantically.

“I can’t get to you!” he hollered back.

I pushed up with all my strength and reached out to him. Vines popped loose from the dirt. He grabbed my hand in his strong wiry grip and pulled. The vines held fast to my trapped limbs. I thought they would pull my shoulder right out of its socket again. But green wood gave before my flesh did, and I lurched to my feet in a cloud of dust and ash.

Alonzo and I ran like hell for his taxi. The black kudzu seemed to be exploding out of the ground all around us, vines writhing and flailing, hissing through the pine needles and leaves as they tried to snare our legs.

We made it back to the rusty gate, threw ourselves over the bars, and scrambled into his cab, me in the passenger seat, both of us gasping for breath. He tore out of there and neither of us said anything at all until we were miles down the highway.

A rest stop appeared around the next bend, friendly and bright. He pulled into the parking lot beneath one of the lights. The blue glow felt like safety.

“That thing wanted you bad.” Alonzo’s voice shook like my body. “I saw ... I saw you in the house, but I could see through it, and those vines ...”