In Nightmares We're Alone (23 page)

She nods.

“He told me he wants to date your daughter. I think it’s out of anger at me though. You should watch out for that. He wouldn’t be good for her.”

She sneers at the thought. “Thanks. I’ll watch out.”

“He might be at your house now.”

“He better not be.”

“He told me he was going to see her tonight.”

She stares for a long moment. “How could you not tell me that? Why would you let me come here while a boy with ill intentions is planning on going to my house? What’s wrong with you?”

“I wanted you here with me. I needed you here. If you leave… I think I’ll die.”

“You’re an awful person,” she says. She starts digging in her purse for her phone and it rings before she gets to it. She picks it up.

“Hello? … Yes, Macie, it’s me. … What? … What do you mean, Macie? What happened? … Macie,
what happened?
… Are you okay? Macie? Hello?!” She hangs up the phone and dials, paces the room, curses under her breath.

“What did your kid do to my kid?!” she shrieks.

“He’s harmless,” I say, shrugging, but there’s a sick feeling in my stomach that I’ve let something awful happen.

“Oh my God,” she says. “I have to go. It’s time for me to go.”

“Don’t go,” I say. “You have to stay with me. If you leave me I’ll die.”

“You go ahead and die then,” she says, heading for the door.

I rush to her, tripping on my feet. I grab her. “No! You can’t go. I won’t let you.”

“Get off me!”

I hold her as tight as I can and before I know what’s happening my branches twist around and ensnare her. She’s tangled in my fingers. They grow longer before our eyes, wrapping around her neck like snakes as she screams, coiling and tightening until she can’t breathe.

“I won’t let you go,” I tell her. “You have to be with me.”

She pulls at my branches around her neck. She grabs them and tugs at them, she punches out at me. It’s only then I realize she can’t breathe.

I try to let go, but I can’t. I’ve become so twisted and tangled my hands are stuck to her.

“No!” I scream. “I’ll help you, Elaine. I’ll save you. Just hold on.”

No matter how hard I pull, the branches only wrap around tighter. I try to bite them and the branches coming out of my mouth wrap around her too. The one coming out of my eye stretches into her mouth, gags her, suffocates her with itself.

I push her so hard we both fall to the floor, but I’m still stuck to her. As I try to pull away, the sliding glass door fills my field of vision and the sycamore stands there. For a second I think I hear it laughing.

“Elaine!” I scream. “Elaine!”

I keep fighting my plant self until Elaine’s eyes roll back in her head and the convulsions start. Each jerk of her body pries on my branches and I wish she’d jerk hard enough to rip the roots right out of me. I don’t care how much it would hurt.

All at once my branches let go of her and her lifeless body goes still on the floor.

“No!” I scream. “Elaine!”

I climb on top of her and sob into her chest, try to give her CPR even though I don’t know how. It takes fifteen minutes of pounding on her chest and screaming at her to live before I finally give up and resign myself to the fact that Elaine Giddings is dead in the doorway of my home and I am the murderer.

Me and the tree. That silent, stoic sycamore. That expression of choicelessness and beauty or whatever the fuck it means. That ugly, indifferent, unflinching cluster of cells that stands in judgment of me always.

I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t understand.

In my dad’s last minutes of life he kept asking, “Do you think we get to know the plan when we die? Do you think we get to learn why all the things happened that didn’t make sense?”

I lied to him. I said I thought we did. But the truth is, even if we don’t get to know, it might be even nicer not to care, and I’m sure we at least get that.

I stand up in a rage. I have spent my life fighting against what I do not understand, and I will damn well finish it.

I waddle out into the garage and find my gas can. I take it out back and grab the matches off my barbecue.

I don’t care what the sycamore represents. Whatever it is, it’s on my shitlist. I’ll take a stand against the infinite.

I drench the trunk in gasoline. I splash the fuel on its branches and let it run down those knots and holes that used to taunt me with their beauty. I soak that majestic expression of beauty in the piss-colored liquid until it’s dripping from the branches and there isn’t a drop left in the can.

For ages I try to dig matches out of the box with my branches, but it’s hopeless. I end up firing up the propane grill and dropping the box of matches on the flame long enough to turn it into a bright brick of fire. I snatch it up with both hands and hurl it at the base of the tree, starting my branches on fire in the process.

I wave my hands and beat them against my body to kill the flames as I watch the fire climb the sycamore’s stump and extend into its branches. In a minute the whole tree is one mushroom of fire and smoke and I’d love to sit there watching it until the fire department arrives to stare at me in horror.

But I have more to do.

I lumber through the house and into the garage. I dig through the shelves until I find the big, white jug I know is in there somewhere and I clamp my branches around it and haul it to the backyard in front of the burning tree.

Arthur follows me through the house saying, “You’ve really lost it now. It’s just a tree, Casey. Anything else was perspective. You can torch a tree but you can’t torch your perspective.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Holding it between my left and right branches on the back lawn and steadying the base with my roots, I manage to twist the cap off the big, white jug.

My father stands next to Arthur. He asks, “What are you planning on doing with that weed killer?”

I smile.

This won’t help me, not in any meaningful sense, but it is the right thing to do.

The sycamore seems to stare at me through the flames. So does Dad. So does Arthur. And the fetus. And my grandparents and the dog I had when I was a kid. They’re all here on my back lawn. They’re all watching me. And in every one of their eyes…

Jesus. Couldn’t they scream at me to stop? Or beg me to come to them?

Pure indifference. They watch me like they’re watching a movie. Not even a good one. Like Martin and me watching this week’s creature feature.

I hoist the jug over my head and pour it down my naked body. Over my head, across my leaves and branches, running down my flowers, my foliage, pooling at my roots. I guzzle the bitter liquid hungrily.

This is what I am. A weed. And the world is more beautiful when the weeds cease to be.

The heat from the sycamore burns my skin, my bark, whatever I have now. I drink and shower. Sirens wail somewhere in the distance. As the jug burps out its last, my roots dry and shrivel and I fall on my knees in the heat of the sycamore’s flame.

I smile up at my audience of dead loved ones and acquaintances, and for the first time I notice Elaine among them.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper to her, holding back tears. “I’m so sorry.”

Her eyebrows tighten in a baffled expression. “For what?”

The lion’s weary eyes grew heavy. The light at the end of his cave hurt them. He found himself blinking slower, dozing off, ready to wake in a better world.

“You don’t get to know what it all meant,” says Dad. “You never learn.”

“I know.”

I am the universe expressing itself for an instant.

The heat from the sycamore becomes overwhelming. A burst of light hits me. The sound of an explosion. I shield my eyes until the night is no longer blinding.

The sycamore is gone, a blazing crater of fire where it used to be. Flaming leaves rain down around us. They set my dried roots and branches ablaze and it seems almost immediate that I’m engulfed in flames.

And as the lion’s eyes flickered open one last time, the light at the mouth of the cave was darkened by a shadow.

He lifted his chin from his paw.

Where the tree used to stand, the figure of a child now stands. He steps out of the fire, out of the light, out of the smoke, to stand in front of me.

Martin.

A sound I’ve never made before escapes me. I don’t know if I’m laughing or sobbing. My son smiles down at me and runs a hand across my cheek.

I raise my arms, my branches, my hands. I hold them out for him to take.

“Androcles,” I say. “I need help. I need so much help.”

Martin laughs as he takes my hands in his.

“You over-dramatic lion,” he says. “This isn’t so bad.”

And he reaches down and plucks the thorn.

I think Mom’s got one foot in that other world these days.

It’s a shame. Seems to happen a lot. A long, loving marriage where two people get so attached to each other they can’t live any other way, then one day one of them hits the end of the line and the other follows right over the edge.

Fifty-five years of marriage though. That’s something. How many people these days even make it to seven? The so-called “copper anniversary.” Mom and Dad took home the gold. People talk about a diamond anniversary at sixty or seventy-five, but I don’t know. I think if you hit half a century it’s pretty clear nothing can stop you but death.

Aristotle said:
“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”

I guess I understand. When you’ve spent twice as much time living for another person as you ever spent living for yourself, it has to be different. Arthur and me, we’re only up to twenty-six, just hit our silver anniversary last year, but already I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to him. I feel for Mom.

One soul inhabiting two bodies. When one slips away, you’re not just losing a loved one, you’re losing half of your soul. I can see how that pulls the life force out of you. I understand. It makes sense.

Still. It’s weird. The little details.

Dad wouldn’t let anybody leave him alone the last few months. His dementia had gotten so bad he wouldn’t go to the bathroom alone. Somebody needed to sit on the bathtub and talk to him. Or when he showered, somebody had to sit on the toilet. He wouldn’t be left alone in a room. The thought terrified him.

Now it’s Mom. Behaving the same way. The same bizarre symptom of dementia. Monophobia. Refusing to be left alone. Not for a second.

After Dad passed, Mom asked me to sleep with her. When I go to work Arthur has to stay with her. She says she can feel it, the other world preparing to take her. She says as soon as she’s alone in the house, it will take her. The house. The world. I don’t know.

At Dad’s funeral she was the picture of health. She cried and she spoke about him and I held her, but she told me she’d be okay. She said she knew he was in a better place and she’d see him again soon. In spite of everything, I thought she’d be all right.

And then a few days later, all of a sudden, it’s “Don’t leave me alone” and “I’m not ready to go yet.”

Neither one of them would leave the house. Dad said
they
would be angry if we left. Who
they
were he never answered. He screamed about
them
all the time. Sometimes he told stories about his family growing up and it made me think he was talking about them. All dead relatives. Doctors and priests both say it happens, they just can’t agree on why. Old memories of people from the past that spring up. But usually they’re nice memories. That would have been a bit of a comfort, I think. I wish Mom and Dad at least got that.

“As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.”

Leonardo DaVinci said that. I learned it in college.

What they didn’t teach me in college is what to say to someone to help them die.

Nine years. Nine years studying literature to get my doctorate only to find out no college in the country needs another professor of literature and the high school students who care to learn about it are few and far between, and somehow I ended up a second grade teacher with thirty thousand dollars in student debt, waitressing in the summers at fifty years old, with a husband on disability and one dead parent and another on the way out, with dreams of writing a novel that never came to fruition.

Most people, their most expensive possessions are their houses or their cars. I rent my house, but that degree on the wall in my living room is more expensive than my car and Arthur’s combined. That’s my most expensive possession. A framed piece of paper certifying my memorization of about a billion nuggets of wisdom from celebrated thinkers and an absence of thoughts of my own.

“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”

That’s Harriet Beecher Stowe. Do as you will with it, and hopefully it matters because the class I learned it in cost five hundred dollars. It might sound like a lot of help, but when your Mom tells you her dead husband has been calling to her all night and you’re wishing you had a credit card that wasn’t already maxed out so you could charge more sleep aids for her and vodka for yourself, dollars to donuts you’d rather have the five hundred dollars and the hell with Harriet Beecher Stowe.

There’s an empty lot next to Dad’s for Mom. They bought the two of them together so they could know they’d be next to each other even as they rot in the ground and feed worms. That should be a sad thought for me, the woman who raised me with a grave all picked out and ready to go, but it’s actually soothing. It lowers my stress-level to know at least that one thing is out of the way. That one expense.

Is that awful? I’m pretty sure that’s awful.

Mom calls to me from the dining room as I make her lunch in the kitchen. She asks me if there’s lemonade. I tell her I’ll make some.

It’s funny. Aside from the fear of aloneness and the calls from
them
, she never shows signs of dementia. She never mistakes me for somebody else, forgets my name, asks how I did on my spelling test or anything. She’s perfectly with it.