Stay Awake (26 page)

And our mother said: He was standing there above your bed with the pistol, and the three of you were asleep and I didn’t know what else to do, I just got down on my knees and I said please don’t kill them please just kill me, just kill me, they didn’t do anything to you, they love you with all their hearts

And he said it doesn’t matter anymore, nothing matters anymore

And he pulled the trigger. I thought I would scream, but I didn’t. He pulled the trigger and it was your head, Brooke, and the chamber was empty. And then it was Eden. And then Sydney.
Click. Click. Click
.

And then he turned the pistol toward me, as I was kneeling there. Click, at my head. And then he put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger a last time.

Oh God I prayed there would be a bullet that last time, but there wasn’t.

Of course we remember all this as we sip our beers, as we sit there, a football game playing on the television above the bar.

We were asleep and in one universe we didn’t ever wake up, in
one version of the story we died and the rest of our lives was just a long dream in which we grew up and became waitresses and housewives and graduate students, an extended extended extended pause before the bullet entered our brains.

Alone in his apartment, Daddy lights a cigarette, and sits in his chair facing the television, and the dog rests her muzzle sympathetically against his thigh. He is not unhappy, not exactly, though sometimes it occurs to him, sometimes he realizes: This is how his life has ended up.

Not really what he would have expected.

He used to spend so much of his time in a state of dreadful anxiety about the future, so worried about the choices he’d made, so terrified

for example, he could have gone to college, he was smart enough, he thought he would just work for a while and then go, but before he knew it, he was caught up in his contracting business, all the tools and equipment and a new truck and the mistakes he’d made with his taxes, he was so far into debt, there was so much overhead, and he remembers that moment when he saw that he’d never never go to college

and he was married to his high school girlfriend, in fact the only person he’d ever slept with, and sometimes the guys he worked with would start bragging, ten women, they’d say, dozens of women, and even though he knew the guys were exaggerating he’d blushed inwardly

and it wasn’t just being married but there were children, the three girls one after the other and he had adored them in some ways but there was also the sense that once they were born he was trapped. He had built his own future brick by brick around himself but there were no doors or windows, at least that was the way it seemed at the time he had thought to himself,
I am locked in
, it was like one of those ghost stories where you wake up and you are sealed into a coffin

and you begin to thrash around, thinking, I must escape

He peers for a time at the television and rests the palm of his hand on the muzzle of Angeline the dog and she nudges it as if to remind the hand to pet, to continue to pet.

He actually did manage to escape, that’s the thing. He extricated himself. He pulled free

Eden is the youngest of us, she doesn’t even remember Daddy, really, though there are times when she is in the classroom, when she is teaching her class in remedial composition and there is an older student in the back of the room and she asks them to open their books: What are your reactions to the text? Is the work unified, with all the parts pertaining to a central idea? Is it coherent, with the parts relating clearly to one another?

The man is in his thirties, she would guess, dark-haired, dark-eyed, a stillness leaking out of him as she speaks to the class about analysis, interpretation, synthesis of texts and he has the face of someone who is passing a terrible accident in his car, trying
not to look. He doesn’t seem like someone who is paying attention and so she calls on him: Christopher? she says and he just stares at her with his shaggy tired glare.

I don’t know, he says. I didn’t get a chance to read it this time, and she feels uncomfortable about her authority in the classroom, and she feels actually shaky and so she speaks sharply, Christopher, talk to me after class, please, and afterward he stands there grimly in his muddy work boots and cheap janitor pants as the other students file out.

“Christopher,” she says, “I don’t see how you are going to be able to pass this class if you’re not doing the reading and you’re not turning in your work.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Bell,” he says, a broad-shouldered, bearded Yeti of a man, slumped and moody, an odd sort of spittly speech impediment, “I just can’t make sense of what you’re talking about,” he says, “I’ve got to have this class but this is not my thing, I’m not much for analysis,” he says, “I just need the degree or I’m never going to get promoted,” he says, “I’ve got a kid,” he says. “I’m a single father.”

“I sympathize with your situation,” she says, “but you have to do the work,” she says, “you understand that don’t you?”

“No,” he says, and she stiffens, he’s not threatening in any obvious way but, “I don’t understand. That’s the problem. You’re not a very good teacher, Ms. Bell, I can’t seem to grasp anything you’re talking about,” he says, there is a thick hostility emanating from him and of course she can’t help but imagine the long walk she has to take alone through the parking lot, 10:15
P.M.
, Monday night, what if he followed her

and even when she gets home she will be in bed and she closes
her eyes and she can imagine Christopher in her room, the heavy shadow of him leaning over her and she turns on the light and opens her book. Outside her window she can see the blurry golden smudge of the moon behind a miasma of clouds, the moon sinking in the west and she wonders where Daddy is right now what he is thinking about

When he was a boy Daddy’s mother lost custody and for a while he stayed with his grandmother and then after she died he was in foster care for a time.

He was placed in the home of an old farmer called Mr. Athen, back in Shenandoah, Iowa, and Daddy was sixteen years old, old enough for work, five in the morning and Mr. Athen was bending down to shake Daddy awake Time to get up Mr. Athen said, not mean but not gentle, either. There was no love lost between them. Mr. Athen took in a foster boy to have someone to work for him for free, an indentured servant, that’s what Daddy thought.

This was on a pig farm. He remembered the smell of it, of course, the noise of the hogs snorting and banging against the metal bars of their pens, the sows in their stalls and farrowing crates. The hazy blue eyes of the piglets, their clean wet nuzzling snouts. He put his fingers in their mouths and let them nurse, cradling them in the crook of his arm. It was a kind of love, he realized later, a certain glimmer. To care for something helpless, knowing it was doomed.

That morning he was walking through the barn with the farrowing crates, this was one of his jobs, to look for the baby pigs that were lost or had escaped or were in trouble. The piglets were fenced off from their mothers by a grille of bars, they could reach the teats but the sow was in a separate pen so that she could not roll over on her children or step on them or eat the ones she was dissatisfied with, and the piglets were always getting stuck as they tried to reach her or finding little gaps in the pens that they tried to squeeze through and he rescued the ones that he could, sometimes finding the ones that had broken their necks or suffocated and throwing their bodies in a wheelbarrow that he was pushing along.

That was the morning that his mother died. She hanged herself in the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women in Mitchellville, a convicted drug felon, thirty-four years of age, a little nutty the guards said, always a bit unstable, she had been singing all morning and then the singing stopped.

Daddy looked up.

He was in the barn with the piglet in the crook of his arm with his finger in its mouth and it was as if he heard the melody cut off abruptly as her neck broke. It was as if the noisy barn became suddenly silent.

She was standing down at the end of the barn near the open door and the sunlight made a blur against the dark edges of the wood. His mom. He would never tell anyone about this.

Later, he wasn’t even sure that he had really seen it, he thought that maybe he had made it up and it seemed so real in his imagination that it turned itself into a memory.

There she was She stood there dressed neatly in her jeans and her pretty peasant blouse with the orange flowers on it, and she smiled at him in her kindly, teasing way.

“I couldn’t get out,” she said, “I wanted to leave but I couldn’t get out,” she said, and she turned and of course she never spoke to him again.

We ourselves have never seen ghosts, though we would like to. Brooke would like to, particularly. She likes to read those stories,
True Tales of the Paranormal and Supernatural
, that sort of thing. Even today, even as an adult woman she watches the TV show about ghosts and mysteries and anomalies, a segment on a two-headed baby on the Discovery Channel as the sleet patters against the window of her apartment, and she looks anxiously at the room reflected on the windowpanes; there is herself in a wingback chair watching television.

She is thinking of that night with the Ouija board, back when we were girls. She was eleven and Sydney was thirteen and Eden was nine and it was a night in October, the three of us in the room with the candles in a circle on the floor and all of us dressed in black and our pale thin girls’ hands each on the planchette (the pointer tool), and we hunched there over it waiting for it to move.

There are things that you must never ask the Ouija board, Sydney told them. Never ask about God, she said. Never ask when you are going to die. Never ask where the gold is buried.

“Why not?” Eden said. “What gold? Why can’t we ask where it’s buried?”

“Because they want to keep it hidden, that’s why,” Sydney said, and then abruptly the planchette began to move in slow figure eights around the center of the board.

“Brooke, I know it’s you moving it,” Eden said. Already a little afraid. But Brooke was not moving the planchette. Of all of our hands, hers were held the most loosely, and the most still. Of all of us, her mind was most empty and receptive and willing.

“Spirit,” she whispered, her breath a little moth, “are you there?”

YES, said the Ouija board.

Brooke closed her eyes lightly. “Spirit,” she said, “who are you?”

The planchette seemed to hesitate for a moment. It trembled a little, then made its gentle figure eight.

W-E, it spelled at last. It began to move very slowly and deliberately, letter by letter, across the board. W-E-A-R-E-Y-O-U, it said.

Eden took in a little breath, and she looked at Sydney, and Sydney shushed her with her eyes.

“Spirit,” Brooke said, “what is your name?”

B-R-K, said the Ouija board. E-D-E-N, it said. S-Y-D.

“Brooke, I know you are doing it,” Eden said. “I’m telling.” But she didn’t take her hand off the planchette.

W-E-A-R-E-D-E-A-D-Y-O-U, the Ouija board spelled, very slowly.

YES            YES

“I’m telling Mom!” Eden said, her voice tight. “I’m telling Mom you’re trying to scare me!”

“Shhh!” Brooke said fiercely. “Shut up!” But by that time Eden had pulled her hand away. She was up in an instant and had knocked over a candle as she ran to get to the light switch.

Sydney had never admitted that it was she who had moved the planchette. She was very calm, though, calmer than Brooke, certainly calmer than Eden, she had been moving it almost subconsciously, that’s what she told herself later, though at the time she could barely contain her pleasure, she was happy that the other girls had been frightened, a kind of glow opened inside her as she looked at their faces, her hand still hovering above the letters on the board.

And now, years later, as she stands at the door to the basement holding her basket of laundry, she thinks of the little coffin-door down there with the skeleton key in it and she is almost certain that if she went down there right now and turned the key and opened the door she would find inside the little room her own body

There she would be, she thinks, she can picture it, her own body light as a husk, eyes closed, skin pale as paper, mouth pinched tightly closed

W-E-A-R-E-Y-O-U, she thinks. She remembers that night with the Ouija board: Oh, she should have never done that! She should have never made those words

those spirits.

Daddy is on his way home to kill us.

Sydney likes to imagine this, she can’t help it. Here: He is driving through the snow in his pickup truck, and the defroster casts its thick wooly smell over him. He is black-bearded, dark-eyed, and his black hair stands up in crooked tufts from the friction of removing his stocking cap. The gun is on the seat beside him, and the wet feathers of snow land against the windshield and the wipers cast them away.

Was it winter when he came for them? She isn’t sure. Maybe not.

She has the picture of Daddy and the snowman, one of the few photographs that haven’t been destroyed, and naturally this is the image she is drawing on, there isn’t any real memory.

What if she were to call him? she wonders. She has thought of it more than once, she has run his name through the search engines on her computer, Sampson Bell, also known as Spike, and there are hundreds of entries but nothing that resembles him. What if she could find him and call him on the telephone? Would he

In the photograph, Daddy is a big bear of a man, standing next to a snowman that is as tall as he is, and his little daughters are in his arms: laughing Sydney, age three and one half, in her pink parka; baby Brooke in green, too little to laugh, eighteen months old perhaps. Eden not even born yet.

What does it mean that she was once this, this round face
peering out from beneath a pink hood, her wide delighted eyes, her upturned, milk-drinking toddler nose, a little girl with her Daddy. Does it mean anything? Did she, the real Sydney, the Sydney she knows now as herself, exist somewhere inside that child in the photograph? Or was that other Sydney, the little Sydney that Daddy knew and loved, another creature entirely, entirely separate?