The Accidental Siren

The Accidental
Siren

Jake Vander Ark

Copyright 2012 by Jake Vander Ark

Smashwords Edition

Cover by Timo Gellenbeck

For Alli

The most beautiful girl in the world.

www.jakevanderark.com

[email protected]

Table of Contents

1.
ONCE UPON A TIME

2.
MARA

3. SAINTLY MS. GRISHAM

4.
CAMERA TESTS

5. FAIRYTALE, PART I: THE GIRL

6. FAIRYTALE, PART II: THE WAR

7. FAIRYTALE, PART III:
THE FINAL SCENE

8. THE ZOMBIE-FERRETS
STRIKE BACK

9. NIGHT TERRORS AND
THE FLOODED CONFESSIONAL

10.
OLIVIA

11.
CARNIVAL

12. HAPPILY EVER AFTER

EPILOGUE: LOS
ANGELES, NOVEMBER 2004

REQUEST AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1. ONCE UPON
A TIME

I can’t recall many stories from my life
before Mara Lynn. From time to time, a certain phrase or smell
sparks a moment of nostalgia, but whenever an element from my early
childhood was later “touched” by the girl, thoughts of
leather-brown eyes and lacy fringe overwhelmed the memory like too
much red pepper on a slice of pizza. “Roselyn” is a unique enough
name to create an island in The Sea of Mara, and the word still
brings me back to the cool breeze of a Michigan May, the forest
dunes behind my home, and Danny Bompensaro’s mangled scar.

‘94 was a good year to be twelve. Star Wars
still had two more years as Box Office King, cartoons were still
hand-drawn, and the Disney “D” still looked like a backwards “G.”
Words like “Columbine,” “Al Qaeda,” and “Y2K” were not synonymous
with terror, and 9-1-1 was an emergency number instead of a date.
At twelve years old, summer still mattered. Monarch caterpillars
still crawled beneath every milkweed leaf. Dandelions (or “wishes”
as Mara called them) were flowers instead of pests. And divorce was
still considered a tragedy.

Before Mara, carnivals didn’t make me
sick.

“Imagine a whole herd of monsters!” I said as
branches thwapped my jacket and weeds caught themselves in the
wheels of Whitney’s chair, creating a rhythmic
fip-fip-fip
as we barreled through storybook shafts of afternoon light.
“Imagine a hundred creepy creatures chasing The Girl through the
trees! How cool would that be?”

The path ended abruptly in a patch of wild
raspberry bushes so I released the wheelchair at the dead end and
plundered the thickening brush. “I wanna get a shot like in
Jurassic Park. Remember when the camera is in the back of the jeep
and the T-Rex is chasing right behind?”

Whit scraped a fingernail of mud from his
left wheel. “Mom’s gonna kill me.”

I raised my hands to my face, formed my pudgy
fingers into a rectangle, and surveyed the forest through my
makeshift viewfinder. “Maybe the bad guys should carry lanterns or
torches or somethin’. Dad says I can’t have too many lights out
here without blowin’ a fuse.” I glanced to the tower poking above
the foliage and estimated the amount of extension cords we’d need
to reach from the house to the woods.

“It’s about fifty yards, dick weed,” Whit
said.

“How the H.E. double-hockey-sticks do you
know that?”

“Maybe you’d learn some geometry tricks if
you’d quit tryin’ to look down Ms. Conto’s blouse.”

I shuddered. “How’d you get fifty?”

“Just picture a football field and cut it in
half.”

“What do
you
know about football?”

Whit gripped his chair and balanced the
contraption on its back wheels. “Dad gets free Lions tickets from
work.”

“How many cords you think we need?”

“Depends on the length of the cords. Maybe
ten.” Whit reached in his pocket and pulled out two candy bars.
“Butterfinger?”

I slapped a mosquito from my neck and looked
from the tower to my best friend. He was swimming in thick folds of
a Bugle Boy sweatshirt, his bluejeans were creased as if they were
slacks, and black wisps of hair curled from a hat that read, “Grand
Harbor: a quaint drinking town with a fishing problem.” A notebook
sat open on his lap and doubled as a tray for his Snickers bar. His
red backpack was cradled in a mesh hammock beneath his seat,
bulging with more candy to sell at recess and wads of cash from
successful playground transactions. Whit was quite the
entrepreneur; that’s why I asked him to produce my movies when we
moved to Hollywood.

“Yeah,” I said. “I could use a snack.”

“That’ll be fifty cents.”

“We’re in the middle of the stinkin’ woods!
And you’re gonna charge me? You know I’m good for it.”

Whit slipped the bar back in his pocket. “I
don’t make six bucks a day givin’ out free candy.”

I scowled. “Penis breath...”

“Dip-shit.”

“No-legs.”

“Sphincter-licker.”

“
Whatever.”

Despite eating boat-loads of candy and
sitting on his butt all day, my crippled sidekick was still thirty
pounds thinner than me. But poor Whit had the “asking-for-it”
double-whammy of a handicap and girly name. I assume his parents
chose “Whitney” before they discovered the spina biffida; if not,
shame on them. Sixth grade was hard enough as a chubby boy named
James.

I unhitched my camera bag from my shoulder
and placed it on a log. I brushed ants from the bark, opened the
bag, and removed my very own Panasonic Super-VHS camcorder. I
huffed on the lens and used a special rag to clear the moisture. A
faint chocolate thumbprint defiled the cherry-red record button, so
I huffed on it too, then gently wiped it off with the corner of my
sweatshirt–

“BOO!” Whit screamed.

I jumped and nearly dropped the camera.

“Don’t break your baby!” he said and laughed
so hard that specks of caramelly peanuts splattered across our
notepad.

I grabbed a stick and flung it at him. “This
camera costed me twenty-five allowances and a Christmas. Don’t be a
jerk.”

“It’s just too easy!”

I finished my ritual by running an automatic
tape cleaner for precisely ten seconds, then I zipped the bag,
mounted the camera on my shoulder, and pressed my eye against the
viewfinder. The world dissolved into a glorious black-and-white
palate for my imagination. I pulled the zoom, then scanned the
trees for the perfect location.

“Who’s gonna be the army of bad guys?” Whit
asked and noshed another chunk of Snickers.

“Mom and Dad said they’d help,” I replied.
“Then there’s Livy, the twins–”

“I thought your sis was gonna be The
Girl?”

“Livy’s just a backup.”

“’Cause she’s black?”

“’Cause she can’t act.”

“Who else?”

“The twins, maybe my cousins... and any other
kids Mom has runnin’ around when the time comes.”

“The twins are six years old and your cousins
live in Ohio. I thought you wanted the army to be humongous!”

“We’ll invite friends.”

“We have friends?”

“Mom’ll order pizzas and we’ll make it a
party. We’ll figure somethin’ out. It’s gonna be killer!”

“If we want friends, I need to grow legs and
you need to lay off the Butterfingers. I thought your parents were
gonna buy you a Super Nintendo if you lost fifteen pounds by
summer?”

“Two weeks left, seventeen pounds to go.”

“So much for all-night Super Mario
sleepovers.”

My camera panned a lumpy mound of dirt that I
had dubbed “The Great Divide.” The ridge was as tall as my Dad and
cut through the forest as far as I ever had the courage (or
permission) to travel. Using my free hand as a third leg, I bounded
ten steps up the bluff and grabbed a sapling at the top to secure
my footing. On the back of the ridge, trees descended a gradual but
impressive incline into a vast, uncharted territory.

I focused my camcorder and scanned the valley
of trees.
These woods were mine.
I knew every fork and
downed oak like Whitney knew parts on the space shuttle. Whit was
just about the only person I invited to my domain. Sometimes, I
gave haunted-forest tours to new foster kids as temporary
initiation into the family. My sister Livy claimed she was “too
mature” for forts and rope swings, but I knew she was just afraid
of poison ivy. Two summers ago we went hunting for buried treasure
and she blew up like an Oompa Loompa. Her eyes swelled until she
looked Asian instead of African, and the doctor gave her steroid
shots so she wouldn’t die. After the Livy disaster, I deemed my
woods a “girl-free zone.”

A rickety deer stand caught my attention and
I steadied my camera to inspect the distant intrusion. The stands
looked like boring tree houses. They were popping up everywhere
along with salt licks and corn feeders.
“Buttheads,”
I
muttered. The forest would be paradise if it wasn’t for A.J.
Griffin, the dumbest kid in class and faithful stooge to Danny
Bompensaro, Bully King. A.J.’s parents owned twelve acres of land
that butted against my kingdom and A.J., Danny, and Trent (the
Bizzaro Three Musketeers) dropped by weekly to do things boys only
do under cover of trees. Alone, A.J. wasn’t too bad of a guy, but
Danny made him into a jerk.

If Danny B. were alive today, he’d either be
in prison or selling meth from a stolen trailer. A scar ran from
the lobe of his right ear to the bulge in the back of his head,
creating a ribbon of flesh where hair could no longer grow. He
claimed that a shark bit him when his grandparents took him to the
keys. Mom told me shark bites are rare, and Danny got the scar from
petting a stray dog. (Did Mom really know? Or did she use the
bully’s mangled head as an illustrated life lesson? Probably the
latter; I’m still afraid of strays.)

Danny was so rotten that his real parents
sent him to live with his uncle in Grand Harbor. Rumor was he went
swimming in the neighbor’s pool with his baby sister and–for no
good reason except he was pure evil–held her head under water until
she drowned. “He laughed the whole time,” Trent explained to a
group of wide-eyed boys, “and that’s why they sent him here.”
Whether or not Danny was as evil as I believed in elementary
school, the eight-ball eyes of a gasping little girl still haunted
my childhood. To this day, I can’t prove the rumor false.

I paused the camera and scampered back to
Whit at the base of the ridge. As we discussed the logistics of our
summer project, Danny and A.J. donned camouflage hunting gear and
watched us from the brush.

* * *

Three pages into my memoir and I can
so
clearly
recall the colors of my childhood: Mara’s denim-blue
eyes, the tangerine daisy that held back her hair, a milkshake
cherry—crimson—plucked from its stem and pinched between her
smirking pink lips. The memories expose the starkness of my
two-bedroom Los Angeles loft with its white-washed walls, naked
mattress, and broken vertical blinds caught between my desk and the
empty sill.

Another swig of two-buck Chuck. Three pages
in and the bottle’s nearly empty. My box of index cards is unlocked
and exposed beside my computer; the more I drink, the more I’m
taunted by the memories inside.

The book in your hands is the work of a
twisted romantic; a fool in love where “fool” connotes a child lost
in another dreamland where ideals were attainable and Mara was mine
for the plucking. It was Mara who encouraged me to tell our story;
to put into words the summer that defined our lives.

I should warn you now, we never found a
mortal origin for Mara’s apotheosis. Maybe she fell from Heaven
like the old pick-up line suggests; or maybe she’s always been
here—in one form or another—born first as the woman whose beauty
nearly snapped the rope that bound Odysseus to his mast,
reincarnated again and again to torture men throughout the
centuries.

Three pages into my memoir and I remember...
these memories are dangerous.

Back to the story.

* * *

“Write this down,” I demanded, and Whit
grabbed his pen. “I want cheesecloth for costumes and latex paint
for the makeup. Maybe dark red lipstick for their mouths... would
that be creepy? We have a pile of tiki-torches in the garage; the
fire’ll add killer production value. Got it?”

Whit scribbled the end of my rant. “Got
it.”

I looked through the camera’s viewfinder and
focused on a tree with low branches. “The Girl can escape the
monsters here. We need a wooden ladder.”