Jack & Jill (4 page)

"S'ok," he'd said, with a tilt of his head. "I know you don't mean it. Daddy either."

He'd acted like all this adult stuff was beyond caring about, but I knew as well as anyone the potential psychological repercussions the behavior of adults can have on children.

My name again:
"Gillian." Sharp and irritated.

Chris
was at the door in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. His eyes were puffy from sleep, his face drawn and tired.

I blinked, dug sleep from the corner of my eye.
"What?" I asked in a raspy whisper.

"
It's midnight. Put Sam to bed."

I look
ed down at the top of my boy's head, as if to reassure myself that I hadn't simply dreamt he was there in a day characterized by estrangement from the ones I loved, and nodded. "Okay."

H
e disappeared, plodded upstairs. Nothing else to say. He wasn't one to let an argument die easily. Nor was I, for that matter, which made for some interesting and ugly periods during the course of our marriage.

I sigh
ed and gently shook Sam. "Hey kiddo. Wake up."

He moaned, stirred
only slightly.

"
Sam." I shook him a little harder. "Time for bed." A little harder still.

And still he d
idn't wake.

"
Sammy, you have to—"

He moaned louder then
, as if in a nightmare of his own, and the fear in that sound hit me so hard I quickly adjusted myself in the seat, and he finally woke.

There wa
s a look of pleading in his eyes.

There wa
s something odd about his face.

"
Sam?"

His mouth opened, kept
opening wider and wider. Then I heard the sharp sound of a peanut shell being cracked as his jaw broke and muscles snapped to accommodate the width of his agony.

Oh Jesus...

Above his slack jaw, his small pink tongue worked madly, wordlessly, until it freed itself completely and tumbled from his mouth, landing to splat against my wrist.

My
child began to convulse.

I tried
to rise, but suddenly his small body had trebled in weight, perhaps filled with the shadows of the dream in which he had been imprisoned, as he brought his little arms up to embrace me.

I scream
ed hoarsely for my husband.

"
Mom-mee?" Sam gurgled hollowly as dark blood spurted from his mouth.

I cried
out in horror and felt the world tilt crazily away from me.

My baby's
hands were gone.

In their place were the rusted hooks
of a pair of clothes hangers.

SEVEN

I stoo
d in the driveway and watched as Chris stowed the bags into the back of the Toyota.

Sam wa
s in the back seat, sleeping, worn out after a long night. Beside him, Jenny was listening to her iPod and staring down at her hands.

Ordinarily I would
have considered it a beautiful day. We were edging out of summer into fall, and the leaves had already started to change. But that golden light blinded my tired eyes, and I had to force myself not to squint. Add in the fact that my husband was removing himself and the kids because apparently I was losing my mind, and the quality of the day was the last thing on my mind.

Chris
wasn't leaving me. Not for good, at least, though I suspected unless something changed, we were going to look back on this as the start of it, the first volley in a war that was going to end badly. His mother would hardly be surprised, and I was bitter that it was from her he was going to seek solace. Once he got there, she'd treat him like a big child, and reinforce his misgivings about the woman he'd married. No doubt he'd tell her that I mutilated her chair. She hadn't liked me from day one. Why, was anyone's guess. Maybe because I wasn't the kind of woman she'd have chosen for him, wasn't like her. Or maybe because I was six dress sizes smaller than she. I could have told her that for all the years she'd been struggling with her weight, I'd been struggling to pull both mine and Chris's to keep the marriage afloat. Because she was a baby boomer, and more than happy to be walked on by her stevedore husband, Chris had been exposed to a decidedly uneven, and at times, chauvinistic view of how a partnership worked. I could have blamed her for that, for being a pushover, but what would that have gotten me only more discord from both of them?

Chris
slammed the trunk shut, harder than was necessary, an unspoken protest at the way things had gone, or more accurately, the way
I'd
forced them to go.

"
You know the number," he said. "We're going to King's Island first. Should probably arrive at Mom's by early evening." He opened the car door and added, without looking at me, "See you Sunday night."

"
Okay."

H
e hesitated, as if there was something else he wanted to say. Maybe he wanted to ask why I wasn't blubbering or begging him to stay. A fair question, and one I'd have had trouble answering, if only because I'm not, nor have I ever been, a particularly convincing liar.

In truth,
I wanted them to go. Just for a little while.

"
Have fun," I told him. He looked at me as if that was a ridiculous statement, then nodded curtly and got into the car.

A
nything that needed to be said he'd already taken care of the night I'd scared poor Sam almost to death. At the sound of my screams, Chris had come running down the stairs, the door flying open hard enough to slam against the wall, and before I knew what was happening, he had gathered Sam up into his arms and was hushing his tears, his eyes blazing as he looked at me.
What the hell is wrong with you?
I remember being confused, wondering why he was not as horrified as I was by our child's grotesque injuries. But then I'd realized the only thing wrong with Sam's face was that it was contorted by fear and sodden with tears. I'd been dreaming.

Chris
had lectured me long into the night, and I'd said nothing. I hadn't needed his hostility to compound the guilt I felt, nor had I shared with him what I'd imagined had happened to Sam. It would only have forced him to add further concerns about my mental stability to his already unflattering portrait of my relationship with my children.

The following morning,
he had coldly informed me of his intent to leave.

"
We could all use the break," he'd said. Meaning
they
could use the break from
me
.

I thought maybe I could use the break too, and that was
part of the reason I hadn't argued with him, though he seemed surprised by my silence. "In the meantime, you might reconsider talking to someone."

"
I will."

"
Before you have nobody
left
to talk to."

EIGHT

I dream.

I am walking in darkness, my legs brushing against hard, unyielding wood that smells of lemon-scented furniture polish and ironically, of dust. Pews. I am inside the church, my footsteps echoing loudly, rising up to an arched ceiling I can see only in memory. It is the only sound in the world until I speak, my voice brittle and small. "Hello?"

I am alone, it seems, though there is the undeniable sensation of being watched.

I stop walking, if only to silence the maddening sound of my passage in the immense nothingness. It announces me, makes me a target. My hand finds the angled edge of a pew. The wood feels like cold skin, needled with course hairs that bristle to the touch. I recoil, and a light comes on, its source a figure sitting on the steps leading to the now-illuminated altar up ahead. It is my brother, John, sitting with his knees drawn up, his bare arms looped around them. I have seen him this way a thousand times. Even the mournful expression is familiar.

"
John," I say, relieved, not only that he is here, but that he is whole again.

Behind the altar, just outside the reach of the glow that emanates from my
brother, is a figure nailed to a cross. Such effigies are hardly uncommon in places such as these, but this one is. The figure is not of Our Lord, but one of his "brides", a woman wearing a nun's outfit—or a "penguin suit" as we used to call it back in the day. She has been crucified, rusty orange ingots driven through her feet and wrists. I cannot tell if there is a beatific expression on her face, because although her body is facing forward, her head has been turned around to face the wall upon which the cross is mounted. In the space in the wimple where her face should be, I see a fall of dark hair that reaches to her belly.

There is no way to identify who the woman is, but
still I know, as I am meant to.

"
Honey..." she whispers, the words muted by the proximity of her lips to the wood of the cross, "Forgive me..."

"
Gillian," John says, regarding me from the steps, his features marred by a confusion of shadows courtesy of a spotlight from no discernible source. "This has to end. It's killing you."

"
What is?"

"
You know what."

"
I don't."

"
Don't be a fucking idiot, sis. You know what happened, what's
still
happening."

I am rendered
paralyzed by the alien rage in his voice. It sounds like it belongs to someone far older than John, perhaps his adult self, had he lived to become it.

On the cross, my mother whimpers.

"You're broken," John says. "Badly. And it's going to cost you everything before it's over. I think you know this."

My voice
, when I speak, is older now too, the voice of my real self, as if I have stepped fully into the dream. "I can't lose anything else, John. How do I stop it?"

"
He can't touch you out there so he chases you here, and you let him. But you're not running from him, you're running from yourself.
He's
not even real."

"What will happen if he catches me?"

He shrugs, even has the audacity to yawn, as if he's merely reciting lines. "Nothing of any consequence. It's the chase that matters, not the interception."

"So it's just a ritual, like us rolling down the hill."

"Kinda. Except our ritual meant something, didn't it?"

I smile. "Yes. So much."

"That's why you're here. That's why you dream. We created a ritual to escape. It might have continued to work for you if I hadn't died. That poisoned the world we invented between us." He shrugs. "Sorry about that."

"I wish you hadn't died. I wish you were still alive."

"So do I."

"Really?"

He grins. "Nope. You're imagining me, sis. I'm only saying what you expect me to say."

"Well, I still wish you were with me. All of this would be so much easier to bear."

"Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you wouldn't even be talking to me. Maybe we'd hate each other."

"That's ridiculous. I love you."

"Hmm...see, that's the problem right there."
"What is?"

"Love. Do you think you're even capable of that?"

"Of course." But another voice, one I don't recognize or want to hear, pipes up from somewhere deep in the darkness inside me.
Do you, Jill? How could someone who has gone through what you have possibly know how to love? Wasn't that the price of surviving it all?
"I love you. I love my husband and my children with all my heart. How could I not? I've spent my life trying so desperately hard to treat them better than I, than
we,
were ever treated, caring for them more than anyone ever cared for us. Trying to make them happy."

"
And are they happy?" John asks. "Is Chris happy? Are you?"

"Maybe not as much as they could be right now but
that will change in time."

"He hurt me, Jill," John says. "Bad. Did he hurt you?"

"Yes. You know he did."

"Why?"

"I don't know. He said he loved us."

"Do you think he did?"

"I don't know that either."

"Maybe you should find out."

"How?"

"How else? Ask him."

Even in the dream, the idea is preposterous, and terrifying.

"He told me it was your time," John says.

"What does that mean?"