In Nightmares We're Alone (30 page)

Fine. Sure, Tennyson. I am a part of all I have met. But God help me, I wish I knew what to do with that thought. I wish I knew how to sharpen my senses with it and make the magic things in the world stop waiting.

“Who wrote it!?” I shout at the class.

Everyone is looking back and forth at each other. Nobody wants to fess up. But they have to know. A full classroom of children and one of them had to walk up and write the entire sentence. Everyone had to see it.

“I’m going to count to three and if nobody will tell me who did it, the whole class stays in for recess.”

That sunken look on all their faces when I say it. It hurts just to see it.

“I am a part of all I have met.”

“One…”

They look to each other frantically, hoping somebody saw something, hoping somebody will save them.

“Two…”

I feel like crying myself. I don’t want to punish this group. But somebody has to know. They
have
to.

“I wrote it,” comes a voice from the back of the classroom.

Every head spins around. Every student, along with me, turns their eyes to Martin.

“Why?” I ask him, and I realize I sound like I’m begging.

“I don’t know. I think it’s cool.”

“Where did you hear it?”

“In a book my mom gave me.”

I have a hundred questions but I don’t know how to ask them, especially not in front of a whole class. I want to ask about the other quotes, and the typewriter. I think he’s lying, but I don’t understand why. Whatever I was hoping for when I begged the class to confess, this wasn’t it.

“Never write on my board without permission,” I say. “That’s a lunch detention.”

He smiles and nods. I hate to let it be over with that, but I don’t know what else to do.

I feel my cell phone vibrating in my pocket. With no thought given to where I am, I snatch it up, putting it to my ear without even checking the ID.

“Arthur?” I ask frantically.

“Edna,” says a female voice on the other end I barely recognize as Ellen. She sounds terrified, like she’s about to beg me for help.

“Ellen?”

“I came to your house. I had nothing to do today so I was going to do some packing for you, to surprise you. And… Oh my God.”

I rush out of the classroom again and into the hall. I speak to her in a hushed voice.

“What is it, Ellen? What happened?” But I already know. That sick, twisting feeling in my stomach, it comes from already knowing. I just need to hear it out loud to give me the excuse to curl up on the floor.

“Edna,” says Ellen, a level of empathy in her voice you hope you’ll never hear directed at you. “Arthur’s dead.”

* * * * *

Arthur didn’t die well like Mom did. I wasn’t there to see it or hear it, but comparing their bodies, it doesn’t take a coroner to spot the differences. Mom’s eyes were shut and she looked at peace. Arthur is contorted with his fingers curled like he was clawing at the floor, his eyes wide, and his mouth stretched open and twisted to one side. It looks like it might be open so far he dislocated his jaw.

Mom died sleeping. Arthur died screaming.

If Ellen had her way I wouldn’t even see Arthur there, but I push past her into the living room and wish I’d taken her advice and stayed back. I’d rather never see the horrific sight of a husband of two-and-a-half decades with twisted limbs reaching out for nothing, or anything. He’s lying right in front of the door. It’s almost as if he were trying to get out of the house as he collapsed. You always assume that the reality of a situation can’t be any worse than your imagination, but sometimes the world gives your imagination a run for its money.

I sit in the living room and call the authorities from my cell phone and sit there chain smoking without an ashtray as a couple of handsome young guys come to the house to put Arthur on a gurney and take him out of my sight.

When they’ve gone, Ellen asks, “Do you need me to help you call people? To let them know?”

It sets in then just how empty our lives have become, how distant we were from each other. I don’t have a single number to call. I could call his doctor if I wanted condolences and feigned empathy, but it won’t concern him. A man whose profession is in dealing with the sick and dying has emotional walls built higher than even mine, I’m sure. The medium who confessed to being a charlatan yesterday? Ha. If he had the powers he’d claimed, he’d be chatting it up with Arthur right now.

No. Nobody to call. Poker buddies whose names I don’t even know. A few days ago I entertained the possibility of a mistress. I know he was too much of a luddite to program numbers into his phone, but maybe back at the apartment he’s got an address book tucked away somewhere I can go through with a phone.

I don’t need much emotional support for that though. To call people I’ve never met or don’t remember and say, “Hey, your friend’s dead.” “Hi, the older man you’ve been sleeping with passed on. Who’s this? Why, I’m his wife. Good day, ma’am.” I don’t mind any of that. I can get through it.

I wonder who he would have called. If he could have put in calls to five people to let them know he wouldn’t be seeing them anymore, what numbers would have been on his list? Would it extend any farther than me?

That’s the real pain of the whole thing. My life extends no further than what’s in this house now. I have Ellen. One old friend. Above her I had Arthur, who would have been first on my list, but the young men taking his twisted body out of my house are taking him out of my life as well.

That’s all I have left anymore. Ellen. A house. A thousand knick-knacks organized into piles of what’s worth keeping and what’s worth pretending to keep and an enormous pile of what’s not even worth that.

And memories. Too many of those to count. Painful memories of all the times I stepped off course, all the reasons I never made it where I was going. A trail of breadcrumbs from someplace hopeful to a place where I’m alone. A brain filled to burst with past regrets, worthless quotations, and self pity.

“To regret deeply is to live afresh,”
said Henry David Thoreau.

Fuck you, Thoreau.

One thing they didn’t teach me in college was how full of shit every philosopher was who ever etched out a name for himself.

“No,” I tell Ellen. “There’s nobody to call.
I
know. I’m not sure he had anyone else.”

She takes a seat in front of me at the table. “Is there anything I can do?”

I snuff out my cigarette on Mom’s table. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“I’ll take you home,” she says. “You need to get some rest.”

I shake my head. “I don’t want to go home.”

“What do you want to do? Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” I say, standing up. “I don’t know. I think I just want to be alone.”

* * * * *

There’s a memory box sitting in the master bedroom. A small collection of things I was planning on taking back to the apartment instead of to storage. Things of Mom’s and Dad’s that I could keep around and look at if I ever needed something to spark those old memories for me. After Ellen leaves I sit down on the bed and start digging through it.

Mostly it’s photographs. Their wedding picture. Old family albums from when I was a little girl. A couple of stories I wrote in grade school about dinosaurs or princesses. Grandpa’s pocket watch Dad had held onto as a memento the way I’m holding onto my parents’ things. Their wedding rings.

This hairpin with a gold flower on it. I don’t know its significance, if it even had any. Mom used to wear it on date nights with Dad. I never asked her where it came from and she never told me. Now I wish I had. Everything has a story, but the story varies depending on the perspective. I only know the hairpin’s story from my own perspective.

When I was in third grade, Mom gave it to me to wear in the school play. I wanted to look grown up and Mom said I’d look grown up if I wore it. Maybe I did. I don’t know.

These days I feel like not much has changed. Like I’m still that little girl dressing in a grown up costume and putting on a performance, hoping I can convince the world I know what’s going on.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

Everyone knows that, from Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
. You don’t need college for that, although they’ll tell it to you all the same.

Yes, everything is acting. Put in your golden hairpin and pretend you’re not a confused and terrified child like the rest of us. We’ll all pretend together, and maybe for a minute now and then we can forget how scared we are.

As the variation from
The Merchant of Venice
goes,
“I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; a stage where every man must play a part, and mine a sad one.”

As I look down at the golden hairpin, I feel Mom brushing my hair, saying, “Oh, don’t look so down, pretty girl. Mommy will always be here.”

I bow my head as my eyes tear up and I feel her run a hand down my arm and take the hairpin. She pins it in my hair.

“There you go,” she says. “Beautiful.” She kisses the top of my head.

I jerk my head around suddenly and she’s not there. Nothing but an empty room, like I knew there would be. I jump up from the bed and put a hand to my chest to steady my heart.

What is this? These kinds of delusions, hallucinations. I’ve never had them before. Since college I’ve hardly had an imagination at all.

My hand finds its way to my hair and I feel the pin there. Did I pin it there myself? I must have.

I pull it out and throw it on the bed. For some reason I anticipate a slap from Mother, but it doesn’t come. I back up until my back hits the wall. I turn and run through the door.

At the top of the staircase I have to stop. I feel as if I see somebody standing at the bottom. I know I don’t. I’m looking right at the base of the stairs and it’s clear to me there’s nobody there, but for some reason I feel as though I’m looking at somebody. Worse, I feel somebody is looking at me. Not just somebody. Many people. Hundreds.

That feeling Arthur spoke of. Being watched. That’s all that’s happening. I’m grieving. I’m adopting my late husband’s suffering as a means to cope.

The same way he adopted Mom’s? And Mom adopted Dad’s?

No. I won’t go down that road. It’s a matter of willpower. Nobody is at the bottom of the stairs, as I can plainly see with my own eyes. And a few glances around the house tell me nobody is in here watching me. Nobody is speaking. Nobody is touching me.

So why then is it so hard for me to convince myself to put a foot forward and walk down the stairs?

Get it together, Edna. You have a doctorate. You ought to be able to walk down the stairs in your dead mother’s house without fear of being ambushed by ghosts. Even if it’s only a literary degree.

I walk down the stairs, deliberately, quickly. I refuse to slow down or stop. When I get to the bottom I turn and head for the front door.

No. I need my coat and my purse.

No I don’t. I can come back for them when I’m feeling better. Or if I’m not feeling better I can send Ellen for them. The house means nothing to her. I’ve had my whole family die in this house. She’s only lost acquaintances.

I reach out for the doorknob and my arm stiffens. I’m not sure I can do this. Something’s wrong. It’s illogical. It’s ridiculous. But I can feel the presence of countless people or things behind me and I know as soon as I open that door they’ll grab me and pull me back into the living room and I’ll die screaming the way Arthur did.

I
know
this, even though I simultaneously know it’s absurd.

What George Orwell called
doublethink
.

“Let me go!!” I shriek into the empty living room. The feeling doesn’t dissipate. It only gets worse.

I reach back out for the door and draw back again. I slap myself hard in the face. What’s wrong with me? What am I turning into?

I go into the kitchen and grab my phone off the table. I’m about to rush up the stairs to the guest bedroom, my old bedroom, when I hear it ring. I put it to my ear and answer.

Silence.

Another ring tells me it’s not my phone that’s ringing. It’s someone else’s. My eyes dart around every dark corner of the kitchen, over every invisible face, searching, before I see the light of the ringing phone.

Of course. Arthur’s phone, not mine. I grab it off the corner of the counter and run. Seconds later I’m in my old bedroom with the door shut. A bedroom nobody ever died in. The master bedroom, the living room, sure. But never my room. Not that that’s relevant, but it feels a little soothing.

“Hello?” I say, finally working up the nerve to answer my late husband’s phone.

“Hi. Is this Arthur Harris’ phone?” asks a man’s voice, a young man’s voice.

“Yes it is. Who is this, please?”

“This is, uh… my name is Casey Holt. I’m his, uh… I mean, up until recently, I
was
his medium.”

“His medium…” Great. Wonderful.

“Yeah, uh… I thought I just saw him on the street and I…” I look up at the mirror to see Arthur sitting next to me on the bed, his arm around me. I spin to face him and he’s absent. I leap from the bed and back to the corner of the room.

“I’m sorry, I’m all over the place,” says Casey. “This is his wife?”

“Arthur’s dead,” I say, with all the certainty I can.

There is a long silence. My eyes explore the room. No Arthur. Not in a reflection. Not in the air. No sounds of his speech or his cane as he limps around the room. Arthur is dead. Arthur is no longer here.

Casey finally speaks. “I… I just… I mean, I could’ve sworn I just…” He stops. “I’m sorry for your loss.” I expect him to hang up, but he asks, “How did it happen?”

I can’t do this now. I thought it would be easy, but not now.

“Next time you’ve got your crystal ball out,” I say, “why don’t you ask him yourself?”

I hang up.

For a long time I sit on the bed and try to remind myself of my expensive education, and how certain I am that nothing in this house can hurt me.

I dream I’m dead.

My soul leaves my body but it’s trapped in the same house where it’s always been. The house where it slipped out when I was a teenager and never found its way back in. Where all my dreams died.