The Eye Unseen (22 page)

“Joanie! Boy, I’ve missed you!”

Claws raked down my back.

Ripped down my front.

My dead husband watching. Again.

“Mom? Are you okay?”

You pushed open the door, entered my room. My first thought was that I couldn’t believe your audacity, as my bedroom is strictly off limits. But at the same time I was so relieved I could barely speak.

“I heard you screaming.”

I was back in bed, the blankets tucked under my chin. “I was having a bad dream.”

One that never ended. You turned on the light, and all I saw was him, the intruder, the redheaded disaster that destroyed my life and put you in my arms. A daily reminder of the night Alex was taken away. Of what my life could have been.

“Get the fuck away from me! Go! Get out of here!” I hated looking at you. Just the sight of your hair, that horrid color, sent my blood pressure zooming. “I want you to leave!”

But you didn’t move.

Had you developed your father’s power? Were you going to laugh at me, taunt me, come at me with your claws?

“What’s on your wall, Mom?” Your mouth dropped open.

I saw it for the first time. A blood splatter, fresh and seeping down the white paint.

You looked at me, puppy-dog eyes filled with fear, and again at the wall.

Oh, Alex. My God, how I loved you.

I couldn’t stop the tears. Figured you would devour them raw from my cheeks, cackling like your father, feasting on the agony that lived just under my skin.

But instead you crawled under the covers with me, put your arms around my shoulders, and kissed the top of my head. As if I were the child.

“I’ve been having some bad dreams myself lately,” you told me.

What an odd thought. Could demons feel fear? How did they suffer?

Then I remembered God. Fetching you just before you started rotting. He had to have seen something worthwhile in you, something that I couldn’t.

We clung to each other, our eyes glued to the nastiness on the wall. I didn’t dare tell you about it, didn’t allow you that power over me, to know that your father had siphoned my soul straight from my body.

Oh, Alex. My heart lurched at the thought of him. I wish his death had been as quick the first time.

“Do you want me to help clean it?” you asked. If it had been Brandy, she would have demanded to know how a dream could have physically damaged the walls. You accepted it without pause.

We got the oil soap and two buckets, lit up the house so nothing could jump out of the corners at us.

“You might want to change nightgowns, Mom. That one has a big rip up the backside. I can see your underwear.”

Lucy

We worked together for hours, side by side, barely speaking.

I never knew beheading chickens could be so bloody. Or why Mom would possibly want to do it inside the house, let alone in her bedroom. The corpses on the floor outside her door were piling up fast, and I had tripped over the newest batch when coming to see if she was okay after her screaming woke me up. Their story was smeared across the wall by her window, had somehow travelled the length of her ceiling, even dotted the area around her dresser.

I hoped we wouldn’t be eating them anytime soon. The unsanitary way we stored them unrefrigerated in our hallway didn’t seem quite right to me.

But nothing in our house did.

We had to change Mom’s sheets, all of her bedding, even get out the steam cleaner to try to remove the stains from the beige carpet.

Was this part of her craziness? No sane person would take up butchering her house chickens, late at night, right beside her own bed. But it wasn’t my place to ask questions. I knew I could never sleep after having seen the goo coating her walls, so I didn’t mind helping Mom get her room back in order.

Tippy ditched us both, preferring to stay in the kitchen while we washed walls. I felt a strange closeness to Mom that I couldn’t explain, except that she seemed oddly vulnerable, in need of my companionship.

“Tell me about God,” she requested after I had dumped our dirty cleaner down the kitchen sink and brought the buckets back full of fresh water.

Her shoulders were hunched, and for just a second Mom looked old, withered, wearing a shroud of patheticalness that I had never seen on her before.

I had nothing good to say.

“When I was downstairs He talked about how well He knew you.” And Brandy. But I didn’t want to mention her name.

“Really? He’s heard my prayers?”

“I assume. He said that years ago you spent a lot of time together. Before I was born.”

She stood stiff as a board and closed her eyes, hand paused on the wall, the kitchen towel sopped with hot water that practically poured out of the cloth while she lingered, immobile.

“Yes. He helped me through a very difficult time. How wonderful that He remembers me.”

My lips stayed sealed. I watched Mom as she regained her composure, worked through whatever caused her to stop cleaning.

“I didn’t know chickens had red blood. I mean, I guess I did from cooking and stuff, but not THIS red.  In the packages from the store it usually seems somewhat yellowish-red, I think.”

“Chicken blood?” Mom asked. She picked some bits of flesh off her nightstand and threw them in her bucket. “What are you talking about?”

We faced each other, confused. I searched her eyes for some signal, whether she was Old or New Mom or Some Different Mom that I hadn’t met yet.

“I just thought that this was….” I stammered.

Mom said nothing but looked at me like I was speaking in riddles.

“God came to visit me earlier tonight,” I confided, wanting to change the subject, but not really wanting to talk at all anymore.

“Oh, Lucy, that’s wonderful. Tell me all about it.”

Mom smiled, a fake display of happiness that could not compete with her discomfort. I had the feeling she wanted me to talk just to fill the air with sound other than our rags wiping against the paint. Mom never had interest in my life.

But then again, who wouldn’t want to know about my personal relationship with a God that made house calls?

“He actually scared me, at first. And Tippy. Boy, did He frighten her!”

Mom tilted her head, quizzically. For a split second she looked just like one of the birds in my bedroom and I almost broke out into hysterics.

“He came in through the closet while we were sleeping,” I explained. “Tippy barked her head off at Him. Of course, she had never met Him before, and it was very confusing for her.”

“What did He say to you?”

“Not much. He wanted to make sure I was feeling better.”

“That’s it?”

I didn’t know if Mom doubted me, or if I had been too simplistic and roused her suspicion. But then again, maybe my exhaustion was clouding my mind. I hadn’t worked this hard in a long time, could barely stay on my feet anymore.

“Well, we talked about how I need to give myself to Him completely.”

“Now, that’s what I would expect God to say. How did you respond?”

Could I tell her that Tippy had an explosive reaction to God’s conversation or that it was all I could do not to hurl when He touched me?

“Very politely.” Did all women have sex with God? If Mom found it absolutely normal that God wanted me to join Him physically, did that make it right? Or since she was batty, did that make the idea absolutely insane?

I couldn’t ask her about it. Brandy had never warned me of God’s intentions. Tippy wanted to be left alone and pretend that our encounter with Him never occurred.

“Sometimes, He scares me.” I let my thoughts grow wild.

“I can certainly understand that. How wonderful is He? How powerful? I would probably cower in His presence.”

“He certainly makes me tremble when He’s around.”

But I couldn’t help but wonder, if God had had sex with so many women, how had He only had one son? What was the likelihood that throughout all of time, the billions upon billions of women that He had overseen and convinced to give themselves to Him, and He would only get one of them pregnant?

I blushed. What if that was my role? Was that why He found me worthy of His attention?

We finished her room. I started the washing machine, helped Mom put away the ladder, and checked on my dachshund. My body was ready to collapse.

“Thank you for helping me, Lucy. I know that wasn’t an easy chore.”

We stood on opposite sides of the hall, neither of us wanting to go back to bed.

“Can I get my glass of water? I forgot it in your room,” I asked. Mom hated having me in her personal space, and even though I had just come from her room, I knew better than to walk in without asking.

“Sure.”

I hurried to her dresser. Spied God, shirtless, waiting under the blankets for Mom to come back. He patted the empty side of her bed and smiled at me.

“You’ll sleep better now, Mom.”

“I will?”

“God’s in there, waiting for you. He’ll watch over you tonight. He must have known you were having a hard time.”

She bent forward and kissed my forehead, but never batted an eye when Tippy and I headed to Brandy’s room so we could go back to sleep.

*  *  *

In the morning, after she had returned from the store, Mom made me join her in the kitchen.

“Get on the chair!” 

Our camaraderie from the night before was long forgotten.

“Take off your shirt.”

Tippy and I exchanged worried glances. I didn’t spy any sage on the counter. Or cream.

“Now, Lucy.”

My eyes moved toward the door, but unfortunately Mom caught me looking.

“I said
now
!” As her hand caught my cheek, I thought of the chickens outside her bedroom. They were gone when I got up this morning, the pile of bodies removed without so much as a trace.

My stomach fell when I thought about her butchery. Could she have been slaughtering them for their blood, not their bodies? Was she going to purify me that way now?

My shirt landed on the floor. I had figured it out. Knew what she was going to do to me. What else would you use chicken blood for but some kind of ritual? And what better to symbolize your fertility than blood?

She was going to coat me in all that gore to prepare me for my pairing with God!

Did that mean He would come after me today?

Dread filled my heart. I didn’t want to do it. But how could I defy Him, when everyone I had ever met worshipped God as truth and love?

“I’m sick and tired of looking at that mop of yours.” Mom surprised me.

I looked up, saw the small box in her hand.

“From now on you’re going to have chestnut hair, like your sister.”

She put on the plastic gloves and starting oozing dye into my scalp. With her rolled-up sleeves so close to my head, I could see the scratch marks the chickens had left all over her forearms. They must have put up quite a struggle. Mom’s skin was a scabby mess.

If she had been the same woman I’d worked with last night, I would have asked her if she wanted me to clean the wounds for her. As it was, I kept my mouth shut and decided to let her worry about them.

While we waited for the color to set Mom retreated to her room and I stayed in the kitchen. The timer ticked away as I silently inspected the refrigerator. No big containers of blood filled the shelves. No chicken meat, no gizzards, no indication of what Mom had done with the bodies from last night.

From across the room I tried to inspect the yard. Daylight flooded the kitchen and I had a fantastic view of the back, the fenced in area that Tippy used, even the shed.

I figured that’s where she’d put them. Knowing that I couldn’t go outside and that, even if I could, the metal building was the last place I’d ever visit. What a perfect place to hide them.

I could see them there. Close my eyes and envision the metal bar on the back wall, the one she’d tied me to when she locked me in. The hens were hanging there. Legs tied together and strung up to drain the blood from their headless necks. In the grasp of winter, they’d probably be just as cold as if Mom had put them in our freezer.

I got goose bumps just thinking about eating them. Would she make me pluck the feathers? I wouldn’t even have the slightest idea how to go about it.

Something jumped from behind the shed, and I had to cover my mouth to keep from screaming.

A deer, sneaking forward to let me see her.

I waved, sent her my best thoughts. Let her know I was feeling much better. That I was walking pretty normally again. Thanked her for her loyalty.

We stared at each other until Mom came back to finish my dye job. As soon as she entered the kitchen, the deer slipped out of sight, almost magically, her movements so swift and silent that even Tippy didn’t react to her disappearance.

Mom pulled me toward the sink and rinsed the color from my hair.

“Much better!” she declared after I’d dried off and modeled my look for her.

 I became a brand new person. If Brandy were still around, we’d finally look like sisters. I couldn’t help but stare in the mirror, excited over my new locks. Hoping that maybe, just maybe, He wouldn’t recognize me when He came.

*  *  *

Tippy and I developed OCD.

Our routine, which we executed at least twenty times a day, started with a quick inspection of the hallway in the mornings.

We rolled out of bed, checked the hall for any sign of chickens, feathers, even poop—which we had never seen. Tippy could go on for hours about how everybody poops, even my ‘imaginary’ chickens, as she called them, since she had never really seen them. But these chickens never did.

“Sometimes I get a funny feeling and think I see something out of the corner of my eye, but at least I’m not crazy like you are!” She chastised me when I asked her about the fowl Mom kept upstairs. “I don’t have them crawling all over me on the bed at night!”

I started to pay more attention to Mom’s drawings. When I had first noticed them, I was so furious with her for keeping me locked away and not letting me eat that I didn’t do much more than glance at the walls when I walked past. With the stacks of corpses in the hall, I was often so concerned about stepping on them that I watched my feet more than the charcoal renderings.