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Preview: Cuckoo Prologue
🕑 Added 2024-03-11 20:35:57 +0000 UTCPrologue: The Good News
Angel’s Climb, Montana
1991
Monica Howard couldn’t stop cleaning. It was two days until her daughter Casey — seventeen in three weeks — came home from camp, a thought that nagged at the back of her mind every moment she wasn’t scrubbing, sweeping, tidying, mopping, or folding something. If the house is clean enough, her subconscious whispered to her as she lay awake most nights beside her husband Wayne’s snoring bulk, then maybe it would be alright. Maybe Casey’s problems would be cleaned up, too. She didn’t know what Wayne had paid that place in the desert, he didn’t like to worry her with things like that, but she knew it was a lot because she’d heard him talking it over with Cal Olson in the den one night just after the camp’s people came for Casey.
It’s an arm and a leg, Cal, but I’ll be god-damned if any girl of mine turns bull-dyke. I’ll drown her first.
Mm, Cal replied, as though mildly interested.
Monica, a tray of ham and cheese sandwiches and glasses of cold Coke balanced on one hip and her ear pressed to the door, had whispered, “you misheard,” out loud to herself without meaning to, then gone in to bring the men their lunch.
“Too much ice,” said Wayne. “You know I only like a little. Where’s your head this week?” The air was thick with cigar smoke. On the television, one boxer pounded on another. Monica had thought of the dull thud of her mother’s meat tenderizer against a piece of veal. Sunday dinner.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she said, forcing a smile.
It had to work. Two years now of screaming, cursing, sullen looks, the stink of marijuana clinging to the jeans and sweatshirts Monica found balled up in one of Casey’s backpacks. And then the magazine. You expected it with boys. They couldn’t help themselves, dirty little animals rooting around in the filth, always touching themselves, chasing girls on the playground like a pack of baboons, grimy hands tearing her blouse open, serrated teeth on her nipples, her sons, but her daughter? Her little girl? Tan limbs twined together in those glossy pages hidden under the mattress. Teased manes of hair, pink lipstick glistening, and the dark forks of their legs, those obscene curls and shadowed clefts. Roadside ditches, overgrown and choked with muck.
A phase, said pastor Daniel. Just a phase some girls go through. A dirty, nasty little phase brought on by MTV and communism and free love and grass and the tribadists haunting locker rooms all over the country. A brochure pushed across his desk. Smiling children in ranch clothes. A huge man in a suit of cream-colored linen, a smile on his face, his hands on their shoulders. Camp Resolution. That night as she’d sat beside her husband in the den, watching college football reflected in his glasses, her empty stomach tied in knots, she’d asked Wayne if maybe there was another way, if maybe they should try counseling or medication first, or sending Casey to stay with her parents in Flint for the summer.
“She’s going,” said Wayne, still watching the game, and the flat, dull dismissal in his tone nearly drove Monica to allow herself to know what she had spent nearly sixteen years unknowing every day, to tell him that he could blame her for coddling their girl, for raising her wrong, but that she knew the real reason Casey had turned into such a mess. Then, as it had perhaps a half a dozen times before, that small urge to poke holes in her family shriveled up and died. She was making up stories. She had simply misheard.
The next morning Monica had started to clean. First the windows, scouring each pane inside and out, squinting to make out streaks and water spots in the late summer glare. Then surfaces until her hands were red and itchy from all the cleaning product. The girl on the plastic bottle of Fairy smiling mindlessly out at her. On her knees wiping stray hairs from the bolts on the toilet in the den bathroom. Cleaning urine from under the toilet seat. Wayne and the boys never checked. Their pubic hairs stuck in nameless residue.
The baseboards, furred with dust. The red wine stains on the den carpet, usually hidden by Wayne’s navy La-Z-Boy recliner. Hydrogen peroxide fumes stung her nostrils as she watched her cleaning mixture fizz between the carpet fibers. It was the same one her mother had used. Peroxide, club soda, and dish soap. Monica still tasted it in dreams sometimes. She scrubbed until her shoulder burned and her knees ached from kneeling. She was so tired that night she nearly forgot to make dinner. As she cleaned the dishes afterward her hands began to shake. She chipped a plate. The rough edge cut through her glove and opened her palm as easily as a letter opener slides through paper. No one asked at breakfast why her hand was bandaged.
The days passed. The house rebelled against her. Her sons Brian, eleven, and Stevie, thirteen, tracked dirt through the kitchen and the dining room. Wayne and his friends left constellations of crumbs and broken chips ground into the carpet. In the attic she found oceans of little black mouse turds and for weeks afterward the high-pitched squeaks of mice caught in the glue traps she’d set out tormented her through sleepless nights. She lost weight. The women at church and at the Moms Against Satan group said she looked wonderful, then asked if she was alright, then stopped mentioning it. Her sister Jane asked delicately over coffee if she’d seen a doctor lately.
Still, the house fought her. It fought her with water spots in the tiles of the basement’s drop ceiling, with mold in the vegetable crisper, with dry rot under the sink and grime in the basin of the bathtub, and a clotted string of hair and nameless gunk she fished out of the drain with the aid of a bent hanger. The smell of it, dank and flatly mineral, like lakewater, made her think of the box at the back of Wayne’s closet, a worn and sagging cardboard box that had once, perhaps two decades ago, held little miniature Snickers Bars like the kind her parents had given out on Halloween. She had never touched that box, not once in eighteen years of marriage, and she never would, because it wasn’t there. It had no smell. It was just another thing that she’d misheard.
At night she dreamed of Casey torn apart by lions on the African veldt, of hyenas with matted red faces cracking her daughter’s blood-slimed femurs in their jaws, of black flies swarming over exposed viscera and vultures roosting on the rotten arch of a scraped knee, plucking Casey’s eyes out of their sinking sockets. Casey baptized dead at Righteous Savior in Lincoln, where they’d lived before Wayne’s job with the ministry, her big brown eyes filmed and staring under the clear water, her curls floating on the surface of the font. Casey kicked by other girls behind the school until her mouth and anus bled. Night after night she woke soaked in sweat, hours before dawn, and polished silverware or dusted shelves until it was time to pack lunches for Wayne and the boys, and then to make breakfast.
Five weeks after the men in their van came for Casey, Monica broke down crying in the middle of a meeting of the Angel’s Climb Christian Decency League. Veronica Peterson handed her a Pecan Sandy and she burst into tears. She told them everything, weeping on Carol Anne Forester’s shoulder, clutching at her blouse with its ugly paisley print. The magazine. The fights. The call from the principal’s office. And then finally, shamefully, the camp. “They’ll kill her,” she screamed, not caring that Carol Anne’s elderly mother was upstairs, that there were children playing in the yard who looked up from their games as though they’d heard a wolf howl. “They’re going to kill my baby. I did it. I did it.”
“Hush, now,” Carol Anne said awkwardly, patting Monica on the back. “You did the right thing, hon. She needs help. You remember everything we went through with Terry? They put him right. It was a miracle, Monnie.”
Monica only cried harder. She felt as though something in her chest was tearing open, as though behind the frail cage of her ribs was a terrible box with no smell and no feel to it, a box that had been misheard and un-seen, that had never existed at all, and she had opened it up without looking and shoved her daughter inside. She had never liked her daughter. She felt it now, a thought she’d kept wriggling under her thumbnail like an earwig for seventeen years. She had never liked Casey.
“I’m a terrible mother,” she wailed.
Patty McMahon, the League’s chair, took a different approach from Carol Anne’s. In three quick steps she was across the room, frightfully quick in spite of her sixty-four years and considerable bulk, and without expression she slapped Monica across the face hard enough to make her ears ring. When Monica stared up at her in openmouthed shock, Patty hit her again.
“Smarten up,” Patty snapped, adjusting her bifocals on their chain. She rubbed her hand, working stiffness from the joints. “The good Lord wants you up shit creek, you shut your mouth and paddle.”
Later, drifting on a gentle tide of Valium in the back seat of Carol Anne’s Volvo, Monica wondered what had come over her. Wayne wouldn’t send their daughter anywhere dangerous (drown her first), would he? He loved the kids. He was a wonderful father. She just needed to trust him. It has to work, she told herself as Carol Anne and Cynthia Ludgate whispered about her in the front seat, the huge open sky beyond them. It has to be the right thing.
The dreams grew worse. One stifling August night she didn’t sleep at all, just sat awake in the empty living room, staring at the photos on the wall. Wayne and Cal and other men on Wayne’s bass boat, Glory, a huge striper in her grinning husband’s arms. Casey’s fifth grade ballet recital, not the screaming, kicking two-hour tantrum it had taken to get her into her tutu, but her and the other girls in her class turning clumsy circles up on stage. When Monica could no longer stand the sight of all her memories, she returned to her work. She went over the ministry’s books, in which Wayne, their congregation’s treasurer, sometimes made careless mistakes. She went over grass stains in the knees of Brian’s baseball pants with Didi until her head swam with the fumes.
The next night she slept an hour and a half. She had almost forgotten why she was cleaning when, on the fifth day of the eleventh week of her crusade, as she was knocking dead insects from the dining room fixture’s frosted dome into the trash, there was a knock at the door.
Monica found Casey standing on the front stoop, bags at her feet. The pale, untoned girl the camp’s staff had dragged out to their van three months ago was gone. In her place was a lean, wiry young woman, hair a little bleached from too much sun, a smudge of freckles across her snub nose. For a long moment they stared at one another across the threshold, and Monica felt with a clarity that slid into her breast like a knife that she had made a terrible mistake, that something in her life, in her home, was very wrong, and that she had pushed her little girl straight into its waiting teeth. She was seized with a sudden memory of holding her newborn daughter to her breast, of that little pink body squirming and fussing, refusing to latch. A feeling, which had come with her out of twilight sleep, that this child was not hers. Was no part of her.
Casey stepped across the threshold and wrapped Monica in a tight embrace. She smelled of dust and sweat and something else, something unpleasantly sugary and wet. “I know why you sent me,” Casey said, her voice muffled against Monica’s shoulder.
Monica felt as though Patty McMahon had slapped her again. “What?”
Casey broke away. She wiped her nose on the back of her arm, sniffing. Her eyes were rimmed in red, her cheeks wet with tears. “I know why you sent me,” she said thickly. “I was out of control. I was disrespecting you and Daddy. Pastor Eddie and Mrs. Glover helped me see that I was never really… gay.” She spat the word out like it was a maggot on her tongue. “I was just trying to hurt you, because I was confused. I had the wrong friends. I was trying to fit in with people who weren’t good for me, who didn’t want what was best for me, like you do.”
Monica took a step back.
That night at dinner Casey said grace for the first time in years. Brian and Stevie ignored her. They shoveled chicken Kiev and mashed potatoes into their mouths. Monica thought of their sweetness as toddlers, of their soft little hands and the clean, milky smell of the tops of their heads. Wayne ate without taking his eyes off their daughter, fork and knife moving mechanically between his plate and his mouth.
“I learned so much,” said Casey, smiling shyly. “How to build a fence, how to hull peas, how to milk a cow—”
Brian sniggered. Without a word, Wayne reached across the table and slapped him.
“Wayne,” said Monica, but that was all.
“There are ladies present,” said Wayne, ignoring her. “If you can’t behave like a man, you can go to bed right now.”
“Yes, sir,” said Brian, staring at his plate.
Wayne leaned forward. “Are you going to cry now? Is that how I raised you?”
Brian blinked fiercely, his shoulders trembling with what Monica thought was rage. She wondered suddenly if he ever fantasized about killing Wayne, and how he would do it. If he did.
“No, sir.”
“Apologize to your sister.”
Brian turned his simmering gaze on Casey, who stared back at him placidly. “I’m sorry, Casey.”
“Thank you, Brian.” She smiled. “Thank you, Daddy.”
Wayne looked almost surprised. Monica couldn’t remember the last time one of the children had called him that. It made her cringe, that word. Daddy. A performance of weakness. Calculated. Cynical. A ploy for table scraps.
Daddy.
“Your sister’s been through something very hard,” said Wayne in the broad, expansive voice he always used when he thought he was being magnanimous. He had a smear of breading at the corner of his mouth. It made him look like a mental patient, nodding in his chair as an orderly spooned slop into him. “And she’s had to be brave for all of us, so I want us all to give her a little extra respect.”
“Yes, sir,” Brian and Stevie chorused.
After dinner Casey gathered plates without being asked and joined Monica at the sink. For a while she dried and Casey washed, the only sounds Wayne and the boys watching television in the den and the gentle clink of dishes. It felt wrong to have her daughter back so suddenly, to have this helpful girl beside her, uncomplaining and composed. She glanced at Casey. She’d grown her hair out; it looked better, more feminine. Monica still had a scar on the heel of her right hand from a struggle they’d had years ago when she caught Casey trying to shear off her curls in the bathroom. Her daughter had kicked her in the elbow as they wrestled with the scissors. It had taken months to heal.
“Let me finish up, mom,” said Casey, smiling.
“What?”
Her daughter’s brown eyes glittered in the overhead light. “The house looks so beautiful; you must be working hard. Can I finish the dishes?”
Ungrateful, thought Monica. She didn’t know why she thought it, which made her angrier than the thought itself. “Was dinner that bad?” she said through gritted teeth. “I can’t be trusted to wash a dish?”
“Oh I’m so sorry, mom,” said Casey, and somehow being treated as reasonable made Monica even more furious. “No, dinner was so great. Can I do anything to make it up to you?”
“Go watch television,” Monica snapped.
Casey left, looking puzzled. A few moments later, a burst of Wayne’s laughter came from the den. She’s telling them all I’m crazy, thought Monica, scrubbing fiercely at a smear of oily butter. They’re laughing at me. She felt sick to her stomach. Something was wrong. Something was wrong with Casey, and she couldn’t put her finger on it. They’d taken the daughter she’d hated all her life, whose mouth at her breast had felt like a leech’s boneless orifice, who she’d left one day at six months old in the back seat of their old sedan when it was ninety-five degrees. She could still remember the red flush of Casey’s skin, the slick of sweat on her small body. She’d stood beside the car and stared at her child sitting slumped half-conscious in her carseat, and wondered what would happen if she just waited half an hour. That feeling that had always lain between them, unspoken, uncomprehended. Now it was gone.
Now there was… nothing.
Laughter echoed in her ears.
Monica woke just after three from troubled dreams. She had been in the woods, caught in the thorns of a dark and tangled thicket, and something had been creeping closer. The more she’d struggled the deeper the thorns dug. The house was dark and silent, except for the thin whistle of Wayne’s deviated septum. There was no moon, only faint starlight between the blinds. The Kirks’ yard was empty and still outside. Gradually she became aware of the distant thrumming of crickets.
She sat up and slipped out of bed. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom she saw that Wayne’s closet door was ajar, and the thought that he had taken out the box and opened it while she was sleeping crossed her mind in a horrible rush, a thought like a centipede skittering across a bathroom floor.
There isn’t any box, she told herself. It isn’t real. It was only something I misheard.
The hall was quiet. No light under the boys’ door. No light under Casey’s. In the bathroom Monica splashed cold water on her face, hoping it would take the edge off of her prickling nerves. She felt as though she’d rolled through nettles. The least caress of her rayon dressing gown shifting as she moved was enough to make her want to crawl out of her skin. Then she saw it, and her irritation vanished.
There was a light under the basement door. Casey’s down there smoking reefer, she thought with something very like relief. She’s looking at smut. Little hussy. And then, with a twinge of frustrated concern: She’s cutting herself again.
Quietly, carefully, Monica opened the basement door. She took each step with care, stretching to skip the third stair from the top, which creaked. The light, which flickered and buzzed every few seconds, was the bare hanging bulb over Wayne’s workbench. The surface had been dusty with disuse until she cleaned it a week previous. Wayne had no real interest in woodworking, no real knack for home repair. The sagging loveseat and armchair were empty. The old TV, the one Wayne’s father had given them for a housewarming gift, was dark and silent.
Monica sniffed, but the only odor hanging in the air was the last faint trace of mildew she’d been unable to scour and spritz away. The light flickered again. Maybe one of the boys had been messing around with Wayne’s things and had left it on. She crossed the carpet and put a bare foot over the line where it gave way to cold concrete. The boiler loomed dark and silent in its corner. The lightbulb whined. It was nothing. Monica felt curiously deflated. Disappointed, almost.
“Mom?”
Monica screamed, clapping her hand over her own mouth to stifle it as she spun around. Casey was crouched in the shadows under the stairs. In the darkness Monica couldn’t see her daughter’s face, only the soft crescent of her mouth and the faint suggestion of a nose. “I’m so sorry, mom. I couldn’t sleep.” Casey’s lips curved into a smile. “I came down here to pray.”
“Are you out of your mind?” hissed Monica. “You scared me half to death. And praying? Missy, I have dragged your behind out of bed enough Sunday mornings—”
Casey’s face fell. “You have every right not to trust me.”
Monica slapped her. “Stop it,” she snapped, not caring that she might wake Wayne, not looking at the memory that surfaced like a bubble through thick mud of a little girl with an overbite and big jug ears cowering in front of a shrieking woman in a tatty housedress. That girl’s shoulders had been red with welts. Her ribs had been painted with bruises. She wasn’t real. She was shut up in a box somewhere in the back of a closet, on the highest shelf.
She seized Casey’s shoulders and shook her. “What did they do to you? Did they touch you?”
“Mom, no! Mom!” Terror in those big brown eyes. Real fear. “You’re hurting me!”
Monica let go of her daughter and stepped back, stumbling a little. “Honey I’m so — I’m —”
Casey burst into tears, hugging herself and doubling up. She cried silently, fat tears falling to vanish into the carpet. Finally she sank onto the floor. “I k-know why you’re mad,” she gulped. “I know why you don’t trust me, mom, but I want to show you that you can now. I j-just want to stop hurting you.”
She doesn’t really look anything like me, thought Monica, staring down at Casey’s loose blond curls, her little ears and button nose. She’s all Wayne.
“It’s okay if you c-can’t believe me,” Casey sputtered. Her eyes were red and swollen, her upper lip glazed with snot. “But I’m better, mom. I r-really am.”
“I didn’t mean to hit you,” said Monica. Her own voice sounded flat and dead to her. She took Casey by the elbow and got her on her feet and over to the old green corduroy couch. They sat side by side, Casey still sniffling, Monica awkwardly holding her arm. “I didn’t — I don’t think we should discuss it outside the family. Do you understand why?”
“I do,” said Casey, eyes downcast.
Monica patted Casey’s arm weakly. She tried to picture her daughter kneeling in the dark under the stairs, eyes closed, lips moving in fervent prayer. “What were you praying for, honey?”
“For you and Daddy and Brian and Stevie,” Casey said. “And for pastor Eddie, and Mrs. Glover. Everyone at camp. So many of them are still fighting for themselves. For their souls.”
“What was it like?” asked Monica.
“It was hard,” said Casey. “Meredith — Mrs. Glover — told us it’s like suicide to change who you are. That most people are too afraid ever to admit they might be wrong.” Her eyes glistened in the faint, flickering light of the overhead as she stepped out from under the stairs. “I didn’t want to believe her. I was so angry at you and Daddy—”
Daddy.
“—it was like that was all I could feel, even in sessions with pastor Eddie, when we were talking about, you know, the things I did, and why I did them, I was so angry, I could hardly sleep I was so angry, and then one day a few weeks ago I was scrubbing the floor in the farmhouse —”
Cleaning.
“—and it just… fell away. I felt this light in my chest, this white fire, and all my anger was gone.”
I opened a box, and I put my daughter inside it.
“That’s very good,” said Monica, not knowing what else to say, not knowing why suspicion still gnawed at the pit of her stomach. “I’m… that’s good, Casey.”
Casey leaned her head against Monica’s shoulder. “I love you, mom,” she whispered.
Monica’s skin crawled.
Days passed, became weeks, then months. Fall blew in over the Rockies.
Casey’s grades improved. She joined the baking club. Sundays she volunteered in the church daycare. Monica had looked in on her once or twice, disturbed somehow by the thought of Casey around little children, but they adored her, crawling over her, demanding stories, cuddling in her lap for naptime. Mrs. Hansen, the harried, bone-thin woman who ran the daycare, said that Casey was so sweet, so responsible, she felt she hardly had anything left to do herself.
By Thanksgiving Monica had almost grown used to this dutiful, even-tempered new daughter. Casey helped her roll out pie crust, bake biscuits, stuff the turkey — a twenty-eight pound monstrosity from one of Wayne’s fishing buddies who had a farm in Gelton, two towns over— and lay the table. She led the grace at dinner, and that night once the bones were picked, the talk among her family and Wayne’s was what a fine young woman Monnie’s girl had turned out to be, how gracious, how lovely, how obedient, and what a fine, fine wife she’d make one day soon.
Two days later, pastor Brian told the congregation Carol Anne Forester and her son Terry had gone home to Jesus in a terrible accident. There were prayers. Tears were shed. The whole church entered mourning. It wasn’t until Monica read it in the paper that she learned the truth: Carol Anne had made her family turkey sandwiches the day after Thanksgiving, then gone into the kitchen and returned with a loaded shotgun. With the first barrel she blew her son’s brains onto the walls. With the second, she’d added her own.
“She was always crazy,” said Wayne when she told him.
“No she wasn’t,” argued Monica. “She was as normal as you or me. I knew her fifteen years.”
“What do you want me to do about it, Monica?” he snapped, looking at her with faint disgust and irritation. On the television, Pat Robertson was explaining the ways in which teaching children about evolution made them homosexual. “I didn’t ask her to put a sunroof in her head. You lost your friend, well that’s sad and I’m sorry, but don’t make it my problem.”
She stared at him for a long time as Robertson continued his tirade. She wondered what it would feel like to ask Wayne for a divorce, if he would laugh at her, or hit her, or simply nod and say he’d been meaning to get around to it himself. She would have to find a new congregation. Righteous Heart was full of Wayne’s people, though without her they might soon realize he wasn’t the accounting wizard they believed he was. Marriage is a sacrament, she heard her mother say. She could almost see the ugly purple bruises on Mary Lampell’s throat, the cuts and scrapes on the side of her pretty face. It says in the Bible, wives, be subject to your husbands. Her mother had put up with much worse than she got from Wayne, and she had been a beauty in her day, too. Monica, with her overbite and stuck-out ears, had never turned heads.
At Terry’s funeral — Carol Anne had been quietly cremated and her ashes left in a repository — Monica thought it was strange how Casey wept. The two children had never been close, not even in a playful, teasing way. Could it really be nothing more than that Terry had gone to Camp Resolution a summer earlier? The strength of that place, the strength she and Wayne had prayed for, disturbed her now.
Across the open grave, Stan Forester stood looking dazed and broken, his bent little mother beside him holding his toddler, Maggie. When Monica squeezed Stan’s hand after the service it was like touching a dead man. He looked straight through her. Maggie screamed and kicked in her grandmother’s arms. And then, just as she was set to pull away, to chivvy the boys into the caravan and head home to begin Casserole Patrol for the grieving family, Stan’s grip tightened. His eyes focused.
“I didn’t know,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Did you?”
“I didn’t,” said Monica, deeply uncomfortable with how much Stan reminded her in that moment of Stevie at the age of six, his big blue eyes wide with shock as he clutched his cheek where Wayne had slapped him. “You can’t blame yourself, honey.”
“Do you have her diary?”
Monica blinked up at him. “What?”
“They’re all there, back to eighty-two, but this year’s…” His face crumpled. “I can’t find it. I thought if I could find it… if I could… do you know where it is?”
“I’m so sorry,” said Monica, backing away. She pulled her hand from his. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about that.”
She left the church — not Righteous Heart, but a much smaller Episcopalian ministry nearly an hour’s drive from Angel’s Rest — at a walk quick enough to flirt with running, ignoring the stares and murmurs that followed her. Her heart was pounding as she hurried down the whitewashed wooden steps. “Brian!” she called, her voice wavering. There were children at the graveyard’s edge, girls standing together at the wrought-iron fence, boys whipping rocks and clods of earth at one another, scaling the side of the groundskeeper’s shed. Animals. “Stevie! If I find you making fools of yourselves on holy ground, you will be very sorry!”
They met her at the van, both of them red-faced and sweating, Brian still surreptitiously wiping his hands on the seat of his pants where later, Monica knew, she would find grass and dirt stains. “Car,” she said. “Now.”
“But mom, we didn’t do anything,” whined Stevie.
“Can I sleep over at Trevor’s?” Brian interjected. “It’s not a school night and his mom said—”
The boys fell abruptly silent, like rabbits when a dog is near. Monica stared at them in confusion for a moment until she felt Wayne’s familiar crushing grip on her wrist. “What the hell is the matter with you?” he snarled in a tone a stranger might have mistaken for solicitous. He was standing close. She could smell the spearmint on his breath, and the earthy stink of chew beneath it. “You ran out of there like you were on fire.”
“I… I think I left the oven on,” she lied, grasping for the first excuse that came to mind as she turned to face him. “I’m so sorry, honey.”
He was silent, his dark eyes narrowed. “You’d better hope you didn’t,” he said finally, his voice low and dangerous. “Go and get Casey. She went back to the grave to say goodbye. Some people have a sense of decency.”
Monica scampered away, rubbing her wrist where he’d gripped it. Wayne had always been strong. He’d pulled Brian’s left arm out of its socket once when he’d found the boy poking around his office. In the emergency room, four-year-old Brian sobbing in her lap, Stevie hungry and bawling in her arms, all Monica had been able to think about was Wendy Torrance stammering to Danny’s doctor in The Shining that Jack hadn’t meant to hurt him, and he’d felt just awful. She’d seen the movie on television late at night as a teenage girl, sitting enthralled and disgusted by its dark spell, moved to wonder at a world beyond church and school and the kitchen. A world of secret thoughts and hungry ghosts, beyond the grace of God.
Wendy, she thought, still feeling a little hysterical. I’ll never touch another drop.
She hurried through the graveyard, cutting between headstones and monoliths, ignoring the leaf-strewn walking paths. The sun was setting and a light sprinkle of autumn rain had just begun to fall when she reached the final resting place of Terry Forester. Casey knelt at the edge of the open grave. Monica walked briskly toward her, wondering again what had gone on between Carol Anne’s son and her daughter. Then she heard the whispering. It wasn’t words, or at least not words she understood, but her daughter was speaking into that hole in the ground, and above the gentle autumn wind, Monica heard something whisper back.
“Casey?” she husked, but the words died in her throat. She couldn’t draw a breath.
Nevertheless, her daughter stiffened and fell silent. Slowly, very slowly, she turned to look back over her shoulder at Monica, and there was a cold, alien shrewdness in her stare that Monica didn’t like at all, that made her think for a single terrifying, exhilarating moment of rushing at Casey and pushing her into the open grave. And then it was only her daughter, looking at her with mild concern. Casey rose. “Are you okay, mom? You’re so pale.”
“I’m alright,” said Monica. Her mouth was dry. It took every inch of willpower she had not to take another step and look into that yawning hole, look down at the thing that could not have whispered to her daughter. She wet her lips. “We’re leaving, honey. Your brothers are in the car.”
“Oh,” said Casey. “Okay. I was just saying goodbye.”
They walked back in silence. A light mist was rising in the fading daylight as rain swept the graveyard. The last leaves clinging to the oaks and maples danced dark and wet on the gusting wind. It was on that walk to the car that Monica finally allowed herself to think what her shocked mind had volunteered when Casey first returned from camp.
This girl was not her daughter.
“Monica,” pastor Daniel sighed, massaging his lined forehead with clear frustration. Monica had always thought he looked more like a personal trainer than a pastor, with his broad shoulders and clearly defined muscles, his short blond hair and icy eyes. He was softening a little as he came to the end of his forties, but not much. “It’s so easy not to trust success when we’ve grown used to failure. Your daughter is home. She’s happy. She’s healthy. Her issues are behind her, and she’s going to have a warm and blessed final year of school. You should be thankful.”
They had been talking for close to two hours in the gray of early morning. She’d come straight to the church after bringing Brian, who’d missed his bus, to school. Righteous Heart was an enormous complex off of I-90 just over the Greer town line, one of the new breed of vast white churches with neon crosses and gigantic billboards that had been steadily creeping North and East since the Reagan administration. A lot of money moved through Righteous Heart. Millions of dollars a year. Her proximity to Wayne, the steward of that fortune, meant Daniel had to take her early morning walk-in, but his patience was obviously beginning to fray as they went in circles around the issue of Casey’s transformation and her strange behavior at Terry Forester’s funeral. Monica had omitted the voice from the grave.
“I am,” said Monica, though she wasn’t. She wasn’t grateful at all. She hadn’t slept in close to thirty-two hours. When she’d gone to the bathroom and seen a light under Casey’s door at half past two, she’d been too frightened to so much as knock. She gripped her skirt, twisting the fabric in her knotted hands. “I just can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong, pastor. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“You had a hard time with Casey these past few years,” said Daniel. “Wayne shared with me some of what you and your daughter went through. That kind of strife can be very rough on a family, and sometimes even after it’s gone, we keep trying to recreate it because that’s what we know. Our hearts want what’s familiar, even when it leads us into sin.”
Monica frowned. Wayne? Shared? It didn’t sound right. She forced herself to take a breath. “I’m not worried she’s gone back to… to what she was doing before. I’m worried there’s something else. Something worse. Schizophrenia, or…” She could hardly make herself say it. “A demon.”
Pastor Daniel’s eyebrows shot up. “She’s a straight A student, Monica. She volunteers three days a week right here, where she’s a beloved member of the congregation.”
“I know how it sounds, it’s just—”
“I’m going to be frank with you,” said pastor Daniel. “I think you should consider a rest, Monica. Stay with your sister. Or a bed and breakfast, maybe. Somewhere you can get away from all this stress and give yourself a chance to catch up.”
Monica stared at him. He wouldn’t help her. She’d known that, but she’d come anyway, because where else was there to go? She had seen evil in that graveyard yesterday. She had heard its quiet voice at work beneath the ground, but nobody was going to believe her for the simple reason that she wasn’t very likable. “No,” she said, brushing back a stray lock of her lustreless, graying hair. “No, of course, you’re right.” She allowed herself the luxury of tearing up. “I’ve just been worried for so long. My nerves are… and losing Carol Anne, and Terry…” She let out a sob. “I just don’t know my left from my right, Daniel.”
He rose and came around the desk to rest his hand on her shoulder. “God knows,” he said, smiling kindly. “Let Him do the worrying for you, at least for a while. We forget it’s Christian mothers who’ve always had the weight of our future on their shoulders — you deserve a rest.”
“I’m sorry for being so silly,” she hiccup-laughed, still crying. “I know how busy you are. I’ll get out of your hair.”
“It’s no trouble at all,” said Daniel, his smile taking on a pained quality. “I’ll see you at the silent auction this Wednesday. Wayne tells me it should be quite a crowd!”
“T-that’s good,” said Monica, rising from her chair. “Thank you, reverend.”
He resumed his seat, reaching for his cup of coffee and the book he’d been reading before she arrived. The Turner Diaries. She’d seen her father reading that, once. Years ago.
“Thank you, Monica.”
When Monica pulled into the driveway half an hour later, Wayne’s car was still in the garage. She had a strange feeling as she got out of the van and locked it. Wayne never overslept. He never called in sick. She went inside. The house was silent. In the kitchen she found pb&j detritus. Casey must have made lunch for Stevie before walking him to school. Monica sniffed. That wet, sugary smell hung in the air. The smell of Wayne’s box. The smell that had wafted out of Terry Forester’s open grave as Casey knelt beside it, whispering to something.
Stan’s voice echoed in her memory. Do you have her diary?
She heard a sound. A faint groan of bedsprings coming through the ceiling. The thought that Wayne was having an affair flickered briefly through her mind, but it inspired no real anger. He wasn’t interested. He had his box. Sometimes she imagined him fucking it, creasing its corners as he pushed himself against its velvety, ragged cardboard. She imagined it was full of his dried secretions, a milky lake concealed in total darkness, hiding its true purpose. Slowly, she moved toward the stairs.
The noise grew as she reached the second floor. Someone had drawn all the curtains, and the hall was gray and dark. She could hear the bed’s headboard thumping against the wall of her and Wayne’s bedroom. The box is open, she thought. She opened the bedroom door. The noise grew louder. Clearer.
It was dark in the bedroom. As Monica’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw something moving on the bed. Her first thought was that Wanye was having a seizure. Limbs thrashed under tangled sheets. There was a sound as of someone trying to inhale in the midst of an allergic reaction, an awful sucking, thin and desperate. The silhouette was wrong. Monica stepped closer. Her heart pounded like a drumbeat in her chest.
“Wayne?” she whispered. “Wayne, honey?”
The shape convulsed. There was a tinny rattle as something caught hold of the blackout curtains beside the bed and yanked them out of position. A blazing swath of sunlight lit the room, and Monica saw Casey. She was on top of Wayne. Straddling, thought Monica, grasping for the filthiest words she knew. She’s straddling him. He’s inside her. She made him do this.
Casey turned to face her, shoulders heaving, breasts and stomach slick with sweat. There was a division in her lower jaw, a gap between its left and right halves, and a thick secretion dripped from it. Monica could see her daughter’s teeth right back to her molars. Her inner forearms were open, too, and glistening tendrils of opaque white tissue spilled from the parted lips to coil around Wayne’s neck and penetrate his mouth, his ears, his tear ducts. He moaned, one eye twitching in Monica’s direction. Casey’s jaw sealed itself shut. Her tendrils began to withdraw as the flaps of skin along her arms fluttered and closed.
“Mom,” she breathed, her voice crackling.
Monica turned and ran. She screamed as she sprinted out into the hall, banging her shoulder hard against the far wall, clawing along the wallpaper toward the stairs. She screamed as she tore down the steps, slipping on the second to last and banging her chin on the hardwood floor. Rapid footsteps on the stairs behind her. A weight on her back, crushing her as she tried to scramble to her feet. “No,” she wailed. She could feel her mind beginning to break. “No, no, no.”
“Don’t be afraid,” said the thing that looked like Casey from where it knelt astride her spine. “It’s okay. Hey. Hey.” It touched her cheek. “I’ve got you.” It pressed her flat against the floor, its palm on the back of her head. Monica whimpered. Her bladder released, soaking through her panties and nylons and the front of her skirt. The Casey-thing kissed her just behind the ear. She could feel the slippery parts of its mouth shifting against her skin. “Are you going to be good?” it whispered.
“Please,” sobbed Monica, not knowing what she was begging for, not knowing if she was alive or dead and in Hell, if Christ had abandoned her, abandoned all the world, because how else could something like this happen? He was gone. He had left them all to rot. “Please, please.”
As easily as a man lifting a child, the thing flipped her over onto her back and punched her twice, breaking her nose and cracking something in her eye socket. As she struggled to draw breath, it sat down backwards on her stomach, took her right leg in its hands, and hauled back on it, unbearable pressure mounting in her calf, her muscles knotting, cramping, and then the sickly snap of her tibia breaking. Her ears rang. The pain was like frozen lightning in her flesh. She stared at the thing as it rose and took hold of her arms. It dragged her down the hall and through the dining room into the den, where Stevie sat crouched in the far corner facing the wall and I Love Lucyplayed silently on TV Land, washing the room in black and white. “What did you do to him?” groaned Monica. “Stevie. Stevie! It’s mommy. Can you hear me, sweetheart?”
“Yes,” he whispered, not turning.
The Casey-thing pulled her to the couch and dragged her up and onto it. Pain lanced up and down Monica’s broken leg. She could hardly think. Lucy and Ethel were stuffing bonbons in their brassieres and into one another’s mouths in an effort to manage a conveyor belt in a chocolate shop. She’d always hated that gag. So obscene. Casey stepped between her and the television. Her eyes were very dark. Almost black, with only a faint hint of sclera. It smiled. “Have you heard the good news?”
Her daughter’s face opened up like a flower, splitting into fleshy petals lined with jumbled baby teeth and dripping thick, opaque secretions. A wet red mouth gnashed mindlessly. Monica was still laughing when it tore her blouse and bent to seal itself against her breast, its tentacles cutting into her chest and collarbones, something within the raw, squirming mass of its split face fastening tight around her nipple, squeezing so hard that her laugh became a scream, a strangled hiss, fingers in her mouth and that sweet, damp taste on her tongue, and then nothing opened up beneath her, vast and wet and dark, and she fell into it.
And she was gone.
