Clueless

 

I guess I expected a lot more time to pass before pictures with a new boyfriend appeared on her Instagram account. She'd claimed I was the love of her life. Didn't that deserve a solid year of feeling shit? Maybe even two?

The answer seemed to be no.  Or no was the answer to another question I was now forced to ask myself: had she ever really loved me?  Because she sure looked happy with her new meathead boyfriend way less than a year after she collapsed into my mother's arms at my funeral. She'd even scrubbed all photos of me from her social media. I mean, okay, I'd left her first, but she didn't know that. She thought I was dead. Didn't death count for anything anymore?

 

Nightmare

 

The dog disappeared.  

Although it was after midnight, I wanted to look for him. I asked my mother to come with me. She said no; I pestered her until she agreed. 

Even with the streetlights to guide us, the neighborhood felt eerily dark, and devoid of life. But this was suburbia. I told myself I had nothing to worry about.

 

My mother chose our route. At first we just walked on the sidewalk, like normal people.  Eventually, however, she started leading us across lawns, and then into backyards. When she opened the backdoor into a bungalow, I protested, “We shouldn’t be doing this.” 

 

She laughed at me. “You’re the one who wanted to take a walk.” 

 

Not knowing what to do, I followed her into the house. We moved through the unlit rooms, until exiting via the front door, unseen. But my relief soon flared into horror, because my mother now insisted on passing through the next house, and the one after. Each bungalow seemed emptier than the last, until finally, inevitably, we came across a woman sitting on her couch. She greeted us with a welcoming smile. “The way you came in is now locked,” she said. “I'll show you another way out.”

 

She brought us into the kitchen. With a flourish she opened the oven door. "I'm afraid there's no other choice," she said. "You'll simply have to crawl through it."

New Month, New Project

    Megan woke with a start, her breathing ragged.

She reached over and ran her thumb over the smooth green stone on the bedside table. “I am here,” she whispered. “I am safe.”

Her heart rate slowly returning to normal, she took a sip of water from the cup next to the stone. Outside a dog was barking—probably the Hoovers’ Irish Setter, and probably what had woken her. With her aunt and uncle out of town, Megan would be alive to every sound in and around the empty house. As always at this time of night, she yearned for her tiny apartment, free of dark corners and spooky sounds. Her friends called it a shoebox, but they would never understand why Megan needed to see the front door from every corner of her home.

Now, though, she needed to sleep.

Megan lay back down and, closing her eyes, started reciting the alphabet backwards. The soft click of a door—or what she thought was the soft click of a door—made her fly up again.

You’re being ridiculous, she scolded herself. Her aunt and uncle’s house sat in a quiet, middle-class Minnesota suburb where nothing ever happened, except the occasional bike theft. The only burglary she knew of was the time Jim Clendenny broke into his grandma’s house to steal $10 for weed. He’d said he was sorry, and that was the end of it. The next-door neighbor was even a cop, for god’s sake.

Andy.

He was definitely home—she’d seen him a few hours ago, sitting on his mother’s back porch with his sister, the two of them chatting in low voices. She’d nearly gone out to say hello, but afraid to intrude, had decided against it. She and Andy already had plans to take an ice tea break tomorrow morning, while he painted the garage and she weeded her aunt’s flower beds. Megan had even made her aunt’s special ice tea recipe in anticipation of it.

She was trying to remember if there were any lemons in the refrigerator when she the sound of footsteps in the hallway shocked her into stillness. She hadn’t imagined it, or dreamt it, or simply feared it. Someone was in the house.

Whimpering to herself, Megan started to scramble out of bed, but she’d left it too late. A silhouette stood in the doorway of her bedroom.

“Megan Cooper,” a male voice said. “How nice to meet you.”

Blindsided

 

It was a lovely evening—typical Southern California weather. Busy with an inventory take, Rick couldn’t come over, so we talked for a while on the telephone. “I need to run to the art store,” I told him. “I should have gone earlier but I got caught up in a drawing.”

“Can’t you go tomorrow? It’s getting late.”

“It’s not even 7:00!” I reminded him. “The store is open for another two hours. I’ll be back well before bedtime. And Vince is hours away.”

“You should still be careful, though.”

“I will be. Now get back to work. You need to set a good example for your staff.”

“I don’t see why I should start now,” he answered, a classic Rick response that left me giggling. At the art store the clerk and I rued a discontinued line of much-loved brushes, and then I drove to a nearby grocery store for some laundry detergent and coffee beans. Just before I started the car to head back home I glanced at my watch: 8:45 p.m. Plenty of time for Daisy’s pre-bedtime walk. Now that Vince was in another part of the state, I had no reason to be afraid.

I pulled into the parking lot underneath my apartment building, musing at the little tricks life could play on us. Funny how it was my mother who had unwittingly engineered my present happiness: a cool apartment, a lovely neighborhood, and the boyfriend I never knew I wanted. I parked in my spot and got out of the car, chuckling to myself. I would have to point that out to her during our next phone call.

“What’s so funny?” someone demanded from behind me.

Startled, I turned around.

Vince stood just inches from me.

I started to ask him what he was doing there, or maybe to scream. But he lifted his arm, and the world went black.

Wake Up

 

I wait until you are

sleeping

let the heat from this being

sear the skin of

denial

if I burn down their treason

turn ash into reason

only then will I see their

lie

January's End

 

when I am the snow without 

the season

made to believe in the riddle 

not the reason

Breaking Point

 I woke up not in heaven, but in another hospital room. It took me a few minutes to get my bearings. 

When I did I saw Michael sitting in the chair next to me. He looked like absolute hell, but at least he was sober. 

“Wolff,” he said. “Welcome back.”

“Why am I not dead?”

“Because I woke up and found you before you had a chance to die. So here you are.”

A long, horrible pause passed. 

 “I’m sorry," I said.

Michael gave me a weird smile. “For what? Not dying, or trying to kill yourself six inches away from where I was sleeping?”

“...I don’t know.”

“Well, we’ll have words about it later, but it will have to wait because I have other places to be.”  Michael stood up, his car keys jingling in his hand. “Your mother is on her way. Our family is a major donor to this hospital so they're letting you go home with her.”  He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t make me regret that.”

Confused, I returned, “Where are you going?”

“Rehab. See you around, Wolff.”

In that moment I understood that he was not only going to rehab, but that he was also leaving me. As I watched him walk out of the door I never hated anyone more in my life.

The Happy Ending -- New Prologue

 

Prologue

 

I know a thing or two about fairy tales.

Not the Disney kind. The kind that gives children nightmares.

When I was a kid, a family friend gave me a recording of Rumpelstiltskin for Christmas. Either they had never listened to it, or they had a sick idea of fun, because nothing about that recording was suitable for children. The memory of Rumpelstiltskin’s scream as the queen got his name right still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

That kind of fairy tale.

Look up the definition and the first one will say a fairy tale is a magical story set in an idealized world, filled with happiness. But the sting comes in the second definition: a fabricated story, especially one intended to deceive.

It’s a paradox, and one I’ve lived. I was the little girl orphaned young, sent off to live with the wicked relative. The teenager who fell in love with a dimpled prince, only for forces of darkness to separate us. The woman who realized I had read the moral of the story wrong from the start, and battled evil for my own survival. 

I experienced the magic, and confronted the lie, in search of my happy ending. 

Because even in the Disney fairy tales, happy endings aren’t simply granted—they’re earned.

This is how I earned mine.

Servant of Time, Redux

I am the servant of time

of a truth I cannot

form

made of wisps and

dirt and stolen pieces of

lung

I tried to breathe around it

that was always my way

until the gasping became a

forbidden scarring in the

mind

do not talk of journeys

of hope without destination

decades mean nothing to me

I am still there

counting the tick tocks of

passing

serving a master who knows

I will never be free

Turning Point

 

I slipped into the booth across from Bryan, where he sat nursing a drink.  At his half smile I said in a stiff voice, “Hi.”

“Hi. You’re early.”

“So are you.”

“I’m always early,” he returned. “Do you want something? Iced tea?”

“No thanks.”

Bryan lowered his gaze to his glass. “How are you doing at Bob’s?”

“Fine.”

“You’re registered for school.”

“Yeah, I know. Thanks.”

A waitress approached our table; Bryan waved her way. “It’s no problem,” he told me. “But you wanted to talk about something, and I don’t think it was school.”

I took a moment to steady myself. For some reason, having Bryan squarely under the heel of my shoe felt a lot less rewarding than I’d thought it would. “Bob said when I went to live with him that I would need to do something with you once in a while,” I answered. “I guess we need to set something up. If you want to.”

Bryan just looked at me.

“If now isn’t the time-”

“It’s as good a time as any.”

“We don’t have to do this,” I said, but he replied, “Just tell me what you had in mind.”

“I don’t know. Maybe dinner every couple of weeks.”

“Dinner every couple of weeks,” Bryan repeated. He laughed a little. “Wonderful.”

“If you don’t like it-”

“I don’t think I have a choice. Fine. We can do that.”

Bristling now—how was it that I kept coming off like the nasty, horrible person, when our reality was his fault?—I snapped, “Everything is difficult enough. You don’t have to make it worse.”

 “I’d like to know how I could possibly make it worse than it already is.”

“What did you think was going to happen?”

Bryan’s faint air of amusement vanished. “I have no expectations anymore. I just have how it is.”

“And how is that?”

“Exactly what you’re proposing. That you’ll spend an hour with me once every two weeks. And then, when you turn eighteen, you’ll tell me to fuck off and it will all be over.” Bryan pushed his now empty glass to the edge of the table. Wordlessly the waitress scooped it up on her way to the bar. “So,” he said, “let’s just get on with it, shall we?”

“This is how you wanted it,” I reminded him, but he was quick to answer, “This is not how I wanted it. This might be how I made it, but this was never how I wanted it.”

“Are you saying I should just forget what you did?”

“I’m not that delusional.”

Frustrated, I demanded, “Then what is it you do want?”

“For you to come home. For you to go to Northwestern after you graduate. And,” he concluded, in a voice so low I could barely hear him, “more than all of that, I want you to stop treating our relationship like some kind of fucking nightmare that you can’t wait to be rid of.” 

The waitress deposited his refill on the table. Bryan moved to take it, but I was quicker. Holding the whiskey well out of his reach, I asked, “What are you trying to do, drink yourself to death?”

“What do you care if I am?”

“Oh, that’s fucking great.”

“You don’t need me. You don’t even want to see me. How I choose to live my life shouldn’t make any difference to you.”

“That doesn’t mean I want you dead!”

“I’m dead to you now, anyway.”

Infuriated, I shot back, “If you are, it’s your own fault.”

“And let me assure you, I’ve beaten myself up for it far better than you ever could.” Bryan held out his hand. “So, if you don’t mind, I’d like my fucking drink now.”

“You were the one who didn’t want me around anymore!”

“We all know what I said and did, Katie. I can’t keep begging for you to understand. You’ve made your decision. Now let me make my own fucking decisions.”

“But all I want is to know why. You can never tell me why.”

“I did tell you,” Bryan retorted, and for the first time I noticed that his outstretched hand was shaking. “Maybe you don’t understand this,” he said, “but I thought all I’d become to you was some kind of fucking obstacle that you were stuck with and that you couldn’t wait to unload at your first opportunity. I’m sorry if this isn’t a good enough reason for you, or if it sounds trite, but I felt rejected, all right?  Like I meant nothing to the one person who meant everything to me.” 

He turned his head, his embarrassment almost palpable.

“I’ve been told I have an abandonment complex because of what happened with my mother,” he said. “That I don’t want to be left again, so I leave first. If you can believe that recycled, fucked up psychoanalytical bullshit.”

I could believe it. And because I did, I forgave him.

This is How I Break - Rick's return

 

I prayed to a god I no longer believed in and pressed the call button.

The line never rang on his end. There was just his voice, saying, “Hey, you,” in such a gentle way that suddenly I was in floods of tears. Whatever cool, sensible words I’d meant to utter were drowned in a tidal wave of grief. “Why did you come back?” I demanded. “Why didn’t you just stay away?”

“I guess because I didn’t want to.”

This classic Rick answer hit me like a hammer blow. Reeling, I told him, “I didn’t love you. I never even liked you. I was only with you because I didn’t know how not to be. You never gave me a choice.”

There was a long pause on the other end. I hated myself for being so cruel—so false—but had no will to apologize. I just sat there, dying inside, until Rick said, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “Okay. That doesn’t change how I feel about you, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean go ahead and say whatever it is you need to say, if it will make you feel better. It won’t make any difference to me.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I think you understand.”

“No, I don’t. What do you want?”

“You know what I want.”

“You can’t want to get back together,” I charged. “It would be insane.”

“We never broke up. You just needed some time away from me, and I needed to sort my head out. If you’d wanted me around, I would have stayed. I kept my distance until you needed me to come back. Now here I am.”

“What makes you think I needed you to come back?” I argued, but when Rick returned, “Are you saying you didn’t?” I lost my venom. In fact, I lost it completely. I just curled up into a ball on the floor, the phone still pressed against my ear, and nearly tore myself apart with the force of my sobs.

“Stevie,” Rick said, his tone changing, “I need you to get up and open the door.”

I struggled for breath as my bare feet worked against the floor, over and over again.

“I know you’re having a terrible time,” he told me, “but you need to be strong for just a few seconds, all right? Stand up, go into the living room, and open the door.”

“I can’t do this, I’m not going to be okay, I keep trying and I’m never going to be okay...”

“Stevie. Open your door.”

“...What?”

“Open your door,” Rick repeated. “You’re going to be all right. You just need to open your door and let me in.”

“You’re here?”

“I’m right outside. And if you don’t let me in, I’m going to break the door down, and the neighbors will call the police. You don’t want that, do you?”

I certainly didn’t. But I had already stopped listening, because I was now running into the living room. I threw the door open and there he was, filling up the whole space.

Rick.

He caught me as I fell into his arms.

For a moment I was convinced my imagination had conjured him, but he felt strong and solid and like a million beautiful dreams all come true at once. Even Daisy, rubbing her head against his leg, wanted to be near him. “Don’t let go,” I wept to him.

“I’m not going to,” he said. “Ever.”

Lost

 

The pen bothered me. It was fat and filled with ink cartridges, from black to the colors of the rainbow.

“Where’d you get this again?” I asked him. 

The strange animal character on the screen jumped over a crumpled brick wall with an appropriate boing sound.  “I found it,” he answered.

“Where?”

Now just a tiny dot hopping around some far corner of his pixelated meadow, he shouted back, "In the library."

“Okay," I said, but I still didn't remember. And I had no idea how to bring any of it back again.

 

Insanity

 

The message read, It’s over.  He then attached an itinerary for a flight reservation in my name from Madison to San Francisco, in one week’s time.  Provision had been made for one small animal to accompany the traveler in the cabin.  There didn’t seem to be a return flight.  I stared at the monitor, in a brutal war with myself, before I texted him, I can’t.  Five minutes later he answered, Please.  

Jesse never said please.  Convinced someone must have stolen his phone, I called him.  

“Megan,” his voice answered. 

                     

“You’ve gone crazy,” I told him, without any conviction.  

“In a way it feels I have,” he admitted, “but I don’t know what else to do.”

 

I went quiet, and so did he.  

“When would I come back?” I finally asked.

 

“I don’t know.  When it burned out, or we couldn’t deal with it anymore, I guess.”

 

“It might burn out in a week.  I can’t put Cookie through all of that—I’ll just come for a few days.”

 

“I might not know what’s going to happen,” Jesse said, “but I’m fairly certain it will take longer than a week.  It’s better to bring him with you.”

 

A Window to the World, Scene 1

 

The desert both fascinated and frightened Kitty.

Every time her family came to Nevada, Kitty’s ten-year-old brother Jack would say in an affected voice, “The desert is teeming with life.”  It was a joking reference to Mr. Henry, Kitty’s science teacher.  In addition to running a fire lab every year that gave the principal sweats in more ways than one, Mr. Henry liked to quote nature programs.  Most of the quotes weren’t worth more than a groan and an eye roll, but this one…this one made sense to Kitty.  She liked how she could look for miles and see nothing but the occasional cactus when, all around her the desert was—well, teeming with life.  Just life she couldn’t necessarily see.  Underneath the rocks, underneath the needles on the cactus, even in the sand beneath her very feet.  “Life finds a way,” Jack would conclude in a fake creepy whisper, this time quoting Jurassic Park.  And here in the scorching Nevada heat was the proof.

Life did find a way.

Kitty shielded her eyes against the sun and gazed out at the road.  No car was coming.  No car was ever coming, it seemed, except their own when Kitty, Jack, and their mother drove in from the airport for their annual visit to Aunt Jessica (why that visit always had to take place during the hottest month of the year Kitty could never quite figure out).  Aunt Jessica was only two years older than their mother, but after twenty years of baking in the desert sun her skin now resembled the cracked leather of Jack’s old cowboy boots.  She also wore too much perfume and teased her ginger hair too high.  But she was fun, and she was kind—both qualities Kitty knew not to take for granted.

Aunt Jessica’s pre-breakfast cigarette had driven Kitty out of the double-wide trailer in which Aunt Jessica lived, past the outer limits of the small trailer community.  For a little while, at least, Kitty could explore the desert before the sun drove her back to the trailer again.  She could have gone with Jack and a couple of the neighborhood kids to the trailer park’s community pool but the kids were Jack’s age.  At nearly sixteen years old Kitty found she no longer possessed the same tolerance for horseplay and fart jokes she had in years past.

So here she was, outside at 8:32 a.m., on their second to last day at Aunt Jessica’s.

Up until now the trip had gone pretty much like all the ones before it.  Mom and Aunt Jessica sat in the trailer, watching soap operas and crowding near the little air conditioner, while Kitty and Jack amused themselves--in Kitty’s case with her acoustic guitar, or latest knitting project.  It wasn’t very exciting but it wasn’t bad, either.  Aunt Jessica made the best BLT ever, and she told funny stories about her waitressing days in Los Angeles, before she married the first of her three husbands and somehow wound up living in a trailer in the Nevada desert.  After the third divorce Aunt Jessica swore she would never get married again, but Kitty had noticed one of the neighbors—a quiet, balding man in his fifties—hanging around, offering to tune up Aunt Jessica’s air conditioning unit.   Kitty had asked her mother about it, but she hadn’t noticed him.  Her mother didn’t notice a whole lot sometimes.

Kitty squatted down to examine a delicate flower seemingly out of place in the harsh desert environment.  It looked terribly exotic compared to the flowers the neighbors grew in the suburb of Milwaukee, where Kitty lived with her mother and Jack.  They never planted flowers of their own, because her mother’s job at the school district didn’t pay enough for non-essential items like marigolds or geraniums.  Her mother had never finished college, and after she was left with two children to support all on her own…well, there wasn’t much of an opportunity to take classes then, either.  That meant no flowers, no paint, no pretty decorations.  Their slowly deteriorating house occasionally embarrassed Kitty, now that she old enough to notice it.  There just wasn’t anything she could do about it. 

As for Kitty's mother, she spent most of her free time watching old movies on television.  As long as Kitty got decent grades at school, her mother seemed content to let her live her life exactly how she pleased.  Or at least how she’d lived it so far, anyway.  Ever since the accident, Kitty hadn’t done much.  Her friends from grade school had long since drifted away.  Sure, she knew a few kids well enough to have lunch with at school, and occasionally she was even invited to a party.  But the shadow permanently cast over her five years ago made true friendship difficult.  The longer she stayed removed from her classmates, the harder it became to cross the ever-widening gulf that separated them. 

Busted

 

Ursula sent Andy a long email, in which she denounced him as an emotional cripple.  She also compared him to her father, who had never loved anything but the family dog, and said neither of them (Andy and her father, not the dog) had no idea what emotional intimacy was.   I’m sure you’ve already stopped reading by now, she sniffed at the end, but she was wrong.  Andy read the whole thing.  He even showed it to Jake, who had a good chuckle over it.  

“Women,” Jake snorted.  “Always so damn superior.  Talk about needing a psychiatrist, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, whadya want with a chick named Ursula?  I’m telling you—stick to the women with normal names.  The ones who sound like they should be in a Bond movie are always psychopaths.” 

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Andy answered.  But he wasn’t smiling.

Bus Error, Core Dump

 

“It’s about Mom," Jonah said.

"What about her?" Jack asked, his eyes still glued to the television. "Did she burn another pot roast on Sunday?”

“Yeah.  And she’s got a brain tumor.” 

Jack whipped his head toward Jonah.  “A what?”

“A brain tumor.  They can’t operate on it.  Dad says she’s got a few months.”

“To live?”

“Yeah.”

Jack sat back, his expression like someone had just hit him in the stomach with an empty beer pitcher.  “Holy shit. How long have you known?”

“Since Sunday.” 

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“You know how they are.”

Jack made a rude noise. “But only a few months…really?”

Jonah nodded.

“But she still has all of her hair and whatever!”

“They’re not going to do chemo. It won’t help, so Mom doesn’t want it.”

“Dad's going along with that?”

“He said it’s up to her.”

“Oh, great. He’s leaving critical life-or-death decisions up to the biggest ditz on the face of the planet." Jack jumped up and grabbed his coat.  “I’m going over there. Someone has to talk some sense into her, and it seems like I’m the only one in this family willing to do it.”

The door slammed behind him.

A couple of hours later Jack stomped back into Jonah’s living room.  “It’s amazing we were born with any brains in our head, considering the morons who conceived us,” he said bitterly. “No chemo, no radiation, no nothing. She’s just giving up.”

“The doctors said it was hopeless."

"But even if there's a remote chance that treatment would work, isn’t a remote chance better than no chance?” Jack crumpled his jacket into a ball and chucked it across the room.  “I just can’t believe this. I had no idea.”

“She has been acting weird lately, I guess.”

“Who can tell?” Jack shot back.  “She’s always acting weird. How was I supposed to know that this week it meant she had a terminal illness?”

Lucky, Redux

 

No longer me

just a girl on a screen

he bit her once 

she never told

they already knew far

too much

 

for a shot at forever

a lie wrapped in power

she and he bundled 

together

then lavender powder

a hiss in the ear

and the end of it all

 

but smoke and threats

no match for this master

yesterday jumps out

again and

again

I am so sorry

she screams in the closet

he made her laugh

he was her friend