We are Wormwood (4 page)

“You can’t even apologize? Get out of here before I call the
police on you! And this is the last time I’m hiring someone from PrimCare.”

That night I went back to her garden with an armful of
summer fireworks and set her rose bushes on fire. While the flowers burned, the
black cat rushed out from behind the garden shed, smoke in her whiskers. I
caught her in my arms. She scratched ribbons into my bare skin, but I held
fast. She mewed, hissed, and spit but I covered her in my jacket and took her
home. I locked her in the laundry room and slid some moist tuna and water under
the door.

I kept her that way for a few days, waiting for her to quiet
down. But every time I turned the doorknob she hissed. Then Momma, on one of
her better days, let her out and told me to let her smell the back of my hand.

“Speak softly to her,” Momma said. “Shh.”

Momma crouched with her hand held out in front of her. The
cat crept toward her with tentative steps, her pink nose like a cool, floating
pearl. She touched Momma’s fingers with her whiskers.

“Her name is Pluto,” Momma said.

As though on cue, Charlie, sleepwalking again, appeared on
my lawn. He walked with halting, jerky, hypnotic steps as if his feet were
about to pop off. His clumsy troll-like shadow followed behind him. Just like
his hands, the shadow seemed too big for his body.

He lurched to my window and pressed his face to the glass.

“Little B,” he called out, “Little B.”

Pluto hissed at him as I wrapped her in the sheets.

“Little B,” he called out once more.

Charlie rapped on the glass. Once. Twice.

“Leave my cat alone!” I said.

I held tight to her in the night. I knew that, whatever
waited outside in the dark, even if it was a fat, depressed, adolescent boy
like Charlie, was waiting for the chance to grab Pluto; waiting to tear her
eyes out and leave her blind and stumbling.

In the morning Momma came to me with skin flushed and bleach
burning her gums. She smelled of blood and tin.

“You’re leaving again,” I said.

“I’m going to Alaska,” she said. “I’m going to start a
colony there, to build Skuldelev warships and take over the United States.”

She threw on her selkie skin and smiled. I knew that smile.
It meant she’d left her body, OBE, gone to wrestle the moon.

“Fine,” I said. “Have fun.”

When she left I screamed. I kicked a hole in her bedroom
door. I smashed the living room lamp against the floor, broke the coffee pot
and dumped the kitchen drawers out onto the tiles. I smashed wine bottles
against the wall, and overturned the kitchen table, which shattered the flower
vase that had been on top. I strewed flower stems and dirt across the floor, the
windowsills, and the chairs, and then ripped open bags of flour and sugar and
over the carpet.

Charlie found me outside huddled on the curb with Pluto in
my arms, my arms covered elbow-deep in flour. He came to me with his mother’s
funereal veil pressed across his face and a book of ancient mythology in his
hands.

“They’re going to lock you up one of these days,” Charlie
said.

“Well, you look ridiculous,” I said.

He outstretched his hands against the veil.

“Nobody can see your face when you’re dead. When I get to
the spirit world, I’ll ask Persephone for a kiss.”

I pressed my face into Pluto’s fur and sighed.

“Do you want to walk with me?” he asked.

“Not when you’re wearing that.”

He didn’t move. I remembered when we were eight his mother
tied a snake to his wrist and told him it was poisonous. When we were ten, he
ran screaming into my yard because his father taught him to fear the cottontail
that lived in the mulberry bushes.

“Wait here,” I said.

I ran inside and grabbed Momma’s car keys. I never knew why
she thought she’d be able to get to Alaska without her car, and I didn’t care.
I went back outside, unlocked the car door, and got into the driver’s seat

“Get inside,” I said, pulling the seat up so I could reach
the pedals, “and hold Pluto for me.”

I drove out of the neighborhood with Charlie, past the
grocery store, then down Main Street. We lived in a small, murky town with
crumbling buildings and withering trees.
An insect-ridden,
rotting town.
The trains poisoned the ground. The factories poisoned the
sky. As a child I remembered blue flowers and lush grass growing here. Now
there was nothing left but whipped-back trees and the ashes of Miss Catherine’s
roses.

I drove onto the highway and sped away from town. Charlie,
underneath his mother’s funereal veil, sat beside me for a long time without
speaking, stroking Pluto’s thick black fur.

“You’re not a cat killer,” I said.

He pressed Pluto into his chest.

“Do you have any weed?” he asked.

“No. Miss Catherine fired her gardener.”

“Want a cigarette then?”

He handed me one from the pack in his pocket. I stuck it in
the side of my mouth.

“Keep driving, I’ll light it for you.”

He pulled out a lighter, flicked it on and brought it to the
tip of my cigarette. I inhaled and started to cough. The cigarette dropped down
onto the floorboards. I tried to stamp it out with my foot and the car swerved.
A black-flamed, hell-on-wheels Cadillac cussed at us as it careened past.

I pulled over into the grass, retrieved the cigarette from
the floorboards, and threw it out the window. Charlie exhaled. He’d been
holding his breath.

“Hey, you said you wanted to get to the spirit world,
right?” I said.

He laughed.
A pale, shuddering kind of
sound.
I couldn’t remember a time before when I’d heard him laugh. Misery
child.
Dead teddy bear connoisseur.

I kissed him through the veil.

I grasped his cheeks, his hair. I smeared flour over his
skin. It wasn’t the first time I’d kissed anyone, you know. There’d been the
gardener with the cracked-chasm lips, whispering “drugs” in my ear like a love
story. And the boy from the nearby high school that I’d revenge-kissed for
calling me ugly. But never like this. Not with the heat and the veil between
us. Not with his eyes rolling up in his head as if he was dreaming; not with
the blood draining from my face; and not with my flour-encased hands turning us
into ghosts. My hands felt like bear traps. If I weren’t careful I’d break my
own bones.

I leaned back into my seat and wiped at my mouth. Charlie,
panting, pulled the veil back over his face. I drove back home.

I pulled into the driveway and turned off the ignition. I
took Pluto out of his arms and she snuggled into the crook of my arm.
Everything seemed quiet, in a painful way, away from the blistering noise of
the highway. There was no engine to cross the space between the two of us.

Charlie held his hands up in front of his face, the fingers
outstretched.

“Trying to figure out if your hands are still attached?” I
asked.

Speaking felt like breaking a sacred thing.

“I’m trying to wake up.” He said. “It’s how you know if
you’re dreaming.”

“Your hands tell you all that?”

“In a dream you never know where your hands could be.”

He stretched his fingers further, further. I touched his
wrist. His hand was so taut I thought the veins might burst.

“The woods,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

All romance happened in the woods. Yes, we could be alive
together, climbing up trees and rolling in the grass. I’d toss off that veil.
Only the dead and boring, like our parents, made dates in coffee shops and
fancy Italian restaurants. Pass the wine, baby,
no
sex
until I’ve eaten my fill of garlic bread.

We’d be alone there.

The next night as I headed for the woods, I thought of the
story that I’d tell him.
A ghost story, about a demon that I
once met in these woods.
It would be almost comical, I thought, to get
him to believe that I met a girl who hissed like an insect. “And did you know,”
I would say, “that I found her in the hollowed out trunk of a dead tree? She
opened the folds of her dress and showed me the shining spiders she kept? She
was playing hide-and-seek with me.”

And when he trembled, I would laugh and say, “Don’t be
afraid, she doesn’t exist. It was only a story. It was only a dream.”

In the woods I found the demon with him.

She hung upside down from the trees dangling a teddy bear
from one arm. Teasing him, taunting him. Charlie reached out toward the bear,
his eyes those of the sleepwalker.

“Little B,” he called out. “Little B.”

She’d grown as I’d grown in the last few years, except she was
taller, leaner. Her dark hair fell across her eyes, twisted and dripping. A
spider crawled from her hand into Charlie’s hair.

She tilted her head back toward me and opened her eyes.
Those wormwood eyes.

And just as I did when I was six years old, I ran.

“Little B!” Charlie called, his voice a metallic echo.

I only stopped when I heard a familiar meow behind me. I
stood at the mouth of the woods, near the barbed wire. A wet nose touched the
back of my leg.

“Pluto?”

She meowed again, a soft, weak sound. I picked her up from
the ground. Blood trickled down her eye sockets and stained her snout.

The demon replaced her eyes with wormwood, shining stars.

I
DID NOT TELL ANYONE
about the demon that stole Charlie from me; I already
knew what they’d say.

“Little girl, those are not demon eyes inside of your cat’s
head. That is not a spider-headed child dying in the weeds. Schizophrenic -
just like your mother. We should’ve seen this coming.”

I’d be crawling across the floor in hospital ties, spit on
the cusp of my lips, eyes gurgling like a fountain, my mouth full of soft
pills.

Charlie didn’t mention the demon hanging upside down from
the tree with his teddy bear, but then again, he never remembered what happened
in his sleep. He could barely keep his eyes open in those days, even when he
walked barefoot across a carpet of sharp stones in his backyard.
 

“I’ll be a Houdini,” he said as the stones cut into his
feet. “I’ll be a Sufi mystic, transcending pain.”

Maybe he believed he could transcend the pain, even when he
started to walk like a cripple, bow-legged, wincing with every step. I asked
him why he no longer read from the book of mythology and why he no longer
pressed his mother’s funereal veil against his mouth. “Lost them,” he said. In
a place he couldn’t remember.

In the woods.

He took his shirt off. Streaks of sweat shimmered on his
back and his pale, chubby body quivered over the stones. When the stones no
longer hurt, he moved on to hot coals.

“I’m going to need you to light the coals for me,” he said.

I nodded, crouching in the grass, matchsticks in my hands. I
only ever saw the whites of his eyes since the pupils always rolled back into
his head. Maybe when we kissed, flour on my hands, black mesh on his lips, he’d
been asleep. Maybe he didn’t remember anything.

He stepped off the stones.

“I have a gift for you,” he said.

He gave me a pomegranate and showed me how to open it,
revealing the red glowing seeds inside. I ate one.

“Hades gave Persephone a pomegranate,” Charlie said, “and when
she ate it, she had to stay with him forever.”

“I know the story,” I said.

“Those are the seeds of hell. Now you’ll never again need
the sun to see.”

The more he sleepwalked, the more his
voice cracked, as if speaking to me from inside a collapsed cavern.

I gripped the pomegranate in both hands. I saw the demon’s
spider crawling on his neck.
Her hair unraveling from the
trees, her hips the hips of a witch.

“Now,” he said, retrieving a bag of charcoal from the patio,
“I think I’m ready.”

I whispered, “Okay,” but I knew that, even if he reached
Nirvana through bare feet on burning coals, it wouldn’t save him. He belonged
to her.
She who bewitched him with Little B.
She who plucked out my cat’s eyes.
She who made him
reach
out for her in the dark.
 

***

Momma came back home a few days later with her selkie skin
shredded and her hair in knots.

“Lily!” she called, “What have you done to the walls? My
lamp?”

I kept my hands at my sides. They still smelled of lighter
fluid and charcoal. Momma ricocheted through the kitchen, smearing flour on her
arms and face, flying through broken glass, flowers, and spilled wine. Scraps
of her selkie skin fell to the tiles.
 

“Baby, are you angry with me?” she asked.

I stepped barefoot on broken glass, and it sliced into my
heel. I stiffened.

“Why don’t you look at me?” She asked.

I didn’t want to tell her it was because I thought poison
would drip from her eyes to mine.

“Look at me.”

Why did my mother have to be a warrior chartered with
keeping the moon and sun from crashing into each other? Why did she have to
plant an acid seed in my brain, my sister Schizophrenia?

 
“Baby,” she
said. “Oh, baby.”

Her mad red hair shot up to the ceiling. She danced in
mid-air like Jesus.

“Stop calling me that,” I said.

I felt dizzy and dry-mouthed, but why?

“You’re bleeding everywhere.”

Ah, yes, that was why. Paralyzed from the waist down. My
blood congealed in between my toes.

Momma caught me before I fell.

She set me down on a kitchen chair. She spoke but I heard
only a ringing in my ears. She knelt and pulled the glass out of my foot, a
big, bloody shard of glass. From the looks of it, a piece of Momma’s special
Saint-Aignan wine I smashed, spraying it up the walls.