Darling (13 page)

She and Dennis had been making dinner a few nights after the incident when Marie and Bobby came over with a cake as thanks. Bobby had seemed healthy, happy even, and his mother said that no one knew what happened.

“The doctors couldn’t find a reason for it. They said they thought he might be epileptic, but I could tell they were just grasping at straws. None of the tests showed anything wrong.”

“They didn’t even want to hear about my dreams,” the boy said.

His mother assured him the dreams came from the comic books he always read before bedtime, but Eileen wasn’t so sure. Her own dreams were in their infancy and she hadn’t pried, but she thought she might have to knock on the Callahan’s door one day before Bobby started school again.

“Eileen?”

She looked up from her desk. A quarterly sales report sat in front of her, but she hadn’t been reading it. Even if she wasn’t distracted, she would have avoided it; she refused to let J. Crew suck her in any deeper than it already had.

Erik stood in the doorway, his scruffy Amish-looking beard and sideburns doing little to hide the fatness that had crept into his cheeks during the past year. He was twenty and had been gaining pounds since his marriage. His wife was the first girl he had ever slept with. He snatched her up so fast that a joke amongst the staff was that she told him she possessed the world’s only vagina. Eileen had seen the same thing time and time again. They’d be divorced in ten years, just like her brother, or be cursed with children and stuck in an ever-devolving marriage of spite and resentment, just like her sister.

If Erik had asked for her opinion before the marriage, she would have told him to sleep around first. She knew full well that what a man thinks of as love was often lust. No matter how much they think you hung the moon, no matter what sweet poetries they whisper to you at night, once they slide inside of another woman they realize how much of their feelings are an illusion.

Maybe it’s a good thing he never
did
ask my opinion.

“What’s up, Erik?”

“I’ve got a lady out here wants a refund on a sweater.”

“And?”

“Well, she bought it from the Christmas sale last year and I didn’t—”

“She can’t have a refund, but we can exchange it or give her store credit.’

“Okay. Just making sure. Thanks.”

He ducked out of the tiny office and she wheeled her chair over a few inches until she could nudge the door shut with her foot. It swung a little too hard and slammed louder than she intended. She jumped up, opened the door to apologize, and saw that Erik and the two teenage girls behind the counter were staring her way, eyes wide, faces white with fear. A giggle escaped her lips. “Sorry. Ignore that slam. No one did anything wrong.”

She shut the door and sat back down. The district manager had made a habit of using the office door as a way to communicate how happy he was with his employees. She laughed thinking of how they’d all become Pavlov’s dogs, salivating or whimpering based on the sound of the door.

Her mother talked like that. Not with the door so much as with pots and pans. Whenever she was angry at Eileen’s stepfather she would go off into the kitchen and beat around, uttering coded messages through a series of metallic bangs and clunks, until he finally deciphered them and left the comfort of the couch to go apologize. If only her brother and sister had come to such agreements with their spouses.

Contrasting her mother’s marriage, normal even in the frequency of its fights, to the botched attempts by her siblings had been a favorite mental exercise of hers. Dennis always accused her of playing pop-psychologist and, in many ways, he was right. She had already diagnosed her siblings with an acute desire to be their mother and stepfather. They had married too quickly, not to mention too young, and had paid the price. And for what? A vain attempt at becoming one of their progenitors while denying the other, that’s what. Her sister had never had a sense of her own identity, while her brother was emotionally crippled from middle-child syndrome. Eileen looked on them as examples of how not to live and acted accordingly.

Not that all of her relationships had been golden. Quite the opposite, in fact. If she were honest with herself (which, while rare, did happen from time to time) she could pin it all on her absentee father, whom no one had seen since he went out to get a beer after a football game fifteen years ago. But it was those mistakes that made her appreciate what she had with Dennis so much.

And what did she have? They had grown close, but she still felt a wall between them. Sometimes that wall was a thin, porous thing and they almost felt like the same person. Other times it was carved from marble and she had to strain to even hear his voice. She knew he cared for her—his actions made that clear, even if he never said as much—but he had gone through so much in the past few years. She didn’t know how much more serious he could allow himself to get.

Not that she wanted marriage or anything, especially at this point in her life (she had school and a career to think about, after all), but a girl still had to have something on the horizon. Once a relationship stopped barreling towards the future and reached a destination, it usually died. At least that was her experience. Hope and expectation kept love alive as much as any other feelings.

She shook off her doubts. Things were great with Dennis and she had no indication that they wouldn’t continue to be great. They were in—

No. She wasn’t going to use
that
word. Not yet. She had whipped out that word far too quickly in the past, and like a gunfighter whose timing was off with his draw, had taken her fair share of shots for it.

Closing time approached and she stepped out onto the floor to make sure everyone knew their duties. She closed down one of the registers and took the drawer back into the office. She sat it on the safe and began filling out her paperwork. She had being doing this since high school and a part of her mind was able to do the calculations by rote. She used the rest of her brain to call Dennis at work.

The girl at the front desk, an aspiring model with a bubbly, high-pitched voice, answered.

“Oh, hey, girl. He’s with a client right now.”

Her real name was Shelley, but she called herself Angel (
a stripper name if ever I heard one
) and flirted with Dennis every time Eileen came to join him for lunch. She was barely into her twenties and was already saving for breast implants. To Eileen, Angel summed up everything that was wrong with women today. Eileen was far from being a bra-burning feminist, but she still felt that women like this squandered everything the suffrage movement and the feminists of the sixties fought for. She ground her teeth together as Angel pretended to be some close friend, bitching about how she had three guys she was seeing right now but didn’t really like any of them.

Eileen, for her part, at least feigned a chuckle. “You’re like the female Rodolphe.”

“Who?”

“He’s from
Madame Bovary
by Flaubert. It’s really good, you might like—”

“I don’t really read.”

You don’t say? I never would have guessed.
“Well, they made a movie out of it. I think it was called—”

“Oh, speaking of movies, I saw a great one on Lifetime last night.”

Christ, I can’t listen to this. She’s
literally
killing my brain cells.
“Hey, I hate to cut this short, but I’m closing up here.
Could you get Dennis? It’ll only take a second and then he
can get back to benching or whatever.”

“Of course, girl. You and I should hit the clubs together one night.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Then she was on hold, listening to the Beatles tell her to let it be. She finished counting out the cash, made her deductions, and slid the drawer into the safe.

Dennis came onto the line, breathing heavy.

“Hey, babe. What’s up?”

She giggled. “Out of breath, huh? Angel must have come back and gotten you herself.”

“Well, now that you mention it, she did.”

“Mmm-hmm. Anyway, I was just seeing if we were still on for tonight. I already picked up
Dog Day Afternoon
and some wine on my way into work.”

“Awesome. I’ve been dying to see it.”

She had been introducing him to all of her favorite books and films and had been surprised by how similar

their tastes were. There had been a short point at the beginning where she had been afraid he would reveal himself to be a dumb jock, but those fears were quickly crushed. Dennis had turned out to be anything but typical and discussed literature and movies with her like a seasoned critic.

“You coming straight over?” he asked.

“As soon as I’m done here.”

“Cool. Well, I gotta get back—”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m sure she’s all worked up by now.”

“Of course she is. I do have the touch, you know.”

She laughed. “You’re touched all right.”

She hung up and finished her closing duties. When she was done she dismissed the staff, set the alarm, and locked up for the night. Something about closing the chained gate reminded her of the dream

—the slobbering, tearing sounds—

but she shrugged it off.

The mall was empty as she walked through its white halls. The fluorescent lights washed the color from everything and she had the distinct impression that she walked through a hospital,

—a tuberculosis hospital—

the only nurse on the night shift. Her steps echoed
from the walls like shotgun blasts in the otherwise silent mall. She felt tense and wasn’t quite sure why. The echoing footsteps increased the feeling tenfold as the noise made its way down the hall and doubled back, sounding like another set of feet trotting behind her.

She stopped and turned, but all she saw was a long line of closed chain gates and locked up kiosks. She continued on toward the parking deck, but couldn’t shrug off the impression she wasn’t alone.

She finally came to the two glass doors that opened onto the parking deck. She gave one last glance over her shoulder, half-expecting to see someone behind her

—behind her,

callused hands trailing up her abdomen—

but it just confirmed she was alone.

The night clawed its way into the parking structure and added an otherworldliness to the yellow lamps sunk every few feet into concrete supports. Her footsteps here still echoed, but it was a dull, flat sound compared to the booms of the shopping mall. She jumped when she heard an engine roar to life somewhere on a floor below her and then burst out laughing. She was being silly, she knew. Her old superstitions coming into play.

Old superstitions my ass. It was that goddamned dream.

She tried to shake it off, but the images danced around the corners of her mind. She attempted to replace them with thoughts of Dennis or the time spent with her girlfriends at the lake the past weekend, but it was no use.

They kept flooding back, like

—a river of blood and offal,

a tide of every foul thing that ever was,

rushing to drown her,

to drag her to the depths,

where hands grasp her and fingers dig into—

if you tried not to think of someone naked; your mind forced itself to do so.

She didn’t understand what was wrong with her. She usually didn’t allow herself to get this wound up and, unlike most of her girlfriends, fear wasn’t a common emotion for her. She had mace on her keychain, right next to a small nail file that could double as a knife if need be, and her cell phone was in easy reach. With her head high, eyes alert, and shoulders straight, she knew she didn’t look like a target.

Her uncle Gary, the notorious drifter, had taken her aside as a teenager and told her that criminals only looked for easy targets. “If you look like you’ll scream or put up a fight,” he’d said, “they’ll pick on someone else. The reason they fuck with folks like you and me, pardon my French, is because they’re looking for easy money. Don’t look like that’s you, and they’ll move on to some twerp who shoves his hands in his pockets and stares at his feet while he walks around.” The advice had stuck and Eileen never felt vulnerable the way some women seemed to.

So why was she so worked up now?

As she slid her keys into the Prius’ lock, she realized it was the idea of staying at Dennis’. Her mother and grandmother had filled her head with Appalachian folklore growing up and it had obviously taken a far deeper root than her love for an occasional horror movie. She had joked with Dennis that his building was haunted, but never really believed it. Her nightmare, though…it made her shiver. It felt so
real
, so tangible. Worst of all, it hadn’t felt like it had sprung from her thoughts like the usual garbage that floated through her mind as she slept.

It felt like it had come from the building.

That’s absurd. It was just a dream.

But even sitting in the comfort of her new car, turning onto Kingston Pike with its multitude of streetlights and throngs of traffic, some upbeat, happy sounding pop song blaring from her speakers, the feeling settled in her stomach like an invading army and refused to leave. The building had created that dream, those awful images. No matter how much she chastised herself, how much she knew the idea was beyond impossibility, the feeling refused to leave.

She rolled down her window and let the warm, night breeze whip her ponytail around behind her. Her hand felt around for the radio’s volume button and she cranked it up, singing along to the pop song, substituting similar syllables where she didn’t know the lyrics just to keep singing. Soon her trick had worked and she felt at ease. Carefree. Excited.

That was the thing she loved—that she
liked
about Dennis the most. The prospect of being with him still excited her in every way. Talking to him, holding him, sleeping together—it all sent a delicious thrill along the outside of her skin, raising goose bumps on her arms and the back of her neck.