The Eye Unseen (27 page)

Was I jealous or just indignant? Did it bother me that he stared at her innocent flesh and wanted to own it?

The answer was clear.

I was enraged. Joan looked up at us, invisible to her, her eyes piercing my heart, as if she could see straight through me, even though she didn’t know we were there. I wanted to crush her skull. Dig out her eyeballs. Let her know that he was mine!

“This is the one,” My master informed me, his face beaming.

My heart dropped.

“Really? The one to replace you?” I asked.

Joan’s long hair rose with the wind, flying back from her face. She twirled in the yard, spinning around in circles, until dizziness overtook her and she fell upon the ground in hysterics.

“No. The one who will bear her. Look at her fine skin. The happiness in her eyes. I can’t wait to destroy it!”

For a second I felt relief. He wasn’t here to convert Joan to his wicked ways or to covet her body. We were just there to look at the child. To laugh at her future death.

“She will grow up to be beautiful.” Although disappointed, I tried to sound supportive.

“Well, until I get my hands on her. Then she won’t be much of anything after that!”

He suddenly became very interested in me again. I had my uses, and I understood that.

But I couldn’t shake my sorrow.

He rattled on about Joan endlessly. Her perfection. Her glow. Her eagerness to please, one of his favorite qualities in girls and women.

I put on a good act but knew he could see straight through it.

For months we spied on the child. He spiced our days with occasional forays into soul-catching, but neither of us had the same passion for it. My companion was obsessed with his new plaything, and my heart shriveled each time we visited.

“Did you really believe I’d choose you?” He asked me once, after a week-long tryst with his friends had left me close to death.

“Yes.” My honesty turned instantly into shame at my weakness.

“But you are nothing without me.”

Did I know that already? Somewhere, in the recesses of my heart, I understood this to be the complete truth.

My flesh was wracked with pain. Every breath I took seemed to be my last. Yet he insisted I continue to give him pleasure. Was he the only thing that kept me alive?

“You have served me well, Evelyn. Even when you were a teenager and I wore your father’s flesh, you gave yourself to me. You have done what I’ve wanted and born up to the consequences when you’ve let me down. But being a whore doesn’t make you the woman I’ve been looking for. Taking orders doesn’t make you a leader. Flinging souls into the abyss is fun, especially when you work as a team, as we have. But what we’ve got going is a war. You need wits. You need backbone. You need aggression. And you, quite frankly, fall short in all three categories.”

I tried to let go.

To whisper myself away.

But I knew it could never be so easy.

He would decide when I would die.

And it certainly was not now.

Lucy

I approached Mom in darkness. She was moaning in her sleep, and I thought it would be rude to flip on the lights and wake her. I also didn’t want her eyes to open to the treachery of my hair. Stealth and I had become good friends.

Her room was trashed. If she had been killing chickens again, she had had to chase these all over the furniture and maybe up a wall or two. The chair from her vanity caught my left foot while I tried to tiptoe into her room, and my tray with her breakfast went flying. I lay, sprawled on the floor by her bed, waiting for her belt or something worse to meet my skin after making so much noise.

“No! Not again! I can’t take it anymore!” Mom started sobbing. Her voice sounded like my fifth-grade teacher’s, scorched and scratchy after decades of heavy smoking.

I was terrified. Did I let her know it was just me? Did I take ownership for breaking into her bedroom and dropping oatmeal on the floor? Or was comforting her the better solution?

“Please, just kill me this time,” Mom begged.

“It’s only me, Mom. I thought you were sick and I brought you breakfast, but I fell over this chair and dropped it.”

“Brandy? Sweetheart?”

My heart plummeted. Now my betrayal had doubled. I was skulking about in the dark, hiding my appearance, and I wasn’t my sister, the one she loved.

“No, it’s me, Lucy,” I practically whispered.

She met me with silence.

“I don’t want to be served by the devil.”

“I’m not the devil, Mom. I’m sorry I woke you up. I was just trying to take care of you.”

“Get out of here. Go! Get away from me!” Mom raised her head from the pillow, but didn’t have the strength to hold it there for long.

“Be careful if you walk over here. I can’t see to wipe up the oatmeal….”

A pillow landed against my head.

“Leave, you wicked spawn! Just let me die in peace!”

“Okay, but if you decide you need anything, I’ll get it for you. I’m sorry you don’t feel well today.”

I backed out of the room. Made sure Tippy was in the hall before shutting the door. Worked my way downstairs with the wooden tray, eager to make my own breakfast.

“I can’t let you out, sweetie. But I’ll put these newspapers over there and you can go on them.”

Tippy and I both knew Mom would get furious with her for going in the house, even though it wasn’t her fault. We both stared at the big windows in the living room, and for once I wanted to throw a chair through one and climb out. But I remembered God’s words and kept my promise.

“I don’t see how this can ever end well,” I told Tippy as I filled her bowl.

We sated our hunger and went on a survival walk through the kitchen. Granola bars, dried fruit, Milkbones, and some of Mom’s favorite beef jerky all went into baggies so I could stash them under my mattress. We found a few more plastic bottles in the trash and filled them with water.

“This time pack the right things,” Tippy insisted.

“What do you mean by that?”

She nodded at the knife drawer.

I agreed, it was definitely time. And this was probably the best opportunity we’d have to find a good weapon.

I snuck over to the drawer, in case Mom was listening to the floorboards creak and knew exactly where I was. Furtively pulled it open. Almost screamed when I realized it was empty.

“Tip, they’re gone!” I whispered.

We checked every place in the kitchen, but couldn’t find anything sharper than a regular dinner knife. As the day progressed, Tippy and I snooped through the downstairs and never found a sign of the whole array of kitchen paraphernalia we used to have.

So we went to the attic.

An amazingly bold move on my behalf. Tippy stood at the end of the ladder after I pulled it from the ceiling, standing guard in case Mom came. But, for some strange reason, I wasn’t even nervous about that.

Just the darkness and creepy crawlies that awaited me at the top of the mini-stairway.

The chickens were back and moved through the walls until they were gathered back by the attic door. They knew it was a forbidden zone in our house, and my behavior gave them quite a bit to squawk about.

I had never been in this part of the house before. My nerves were chattering as I made my way up the steps, slowly gathering my courage as I went. The flashlight in my hand wasn’t as powerful as I wanted, and I found myself encased in darkness when I finally made it to the top.

Most of it was hot pink insulation. As I moved the spotlight back and forth, I kept expecting enormous child-eating rats or even some wintering raccoons to jump out at me, but overall the place was boring. Mom had stashed a small pile of boxes not far from the entry, but that was it. No corpses, no secretive KKK robes, no drug labs.

Maybe the attic had always been off-limits because the insulation might make us sick. Or, possibly, the place was so boring that it had just never entered conversation in the first place.

But since I had managed the steps and braved the whole event, I decided to rifle through the boxes anyway. How long had it been since I’d openly defied Mom and snooped through her things? Probably my entire life.

Time to live on the wild side.

I crawled to the boxes, staying as silent as possible. In my excitement I had completely abandoned my quest for anything sharp that would possibly save my life in the battle with Mom that was sure to come.

The cardboard was old. Waxy. My hands felt uncomfortable, just touching it. Like the act of snooping was so filthy it would rub off on my skin, leave me covered in big boils or coat my palms with hair.

But that didn’t stop me. I plundered with ease, like I was destined to find these boxes and unveil their contents.

The first lid came off in no time. The box was empty, except for a couple of papers scattered at the bottom. I scooted it aside and pulled the next one closer. This cardboard was falling apart, but the box had weight.

I don’t know what I expected: lost family photos, the signed confession from whoever killed Jon Benet, the original Constitution. But I was sadly disappointed. It contained neither dinosaur bones nor the lost cutlery from our kitchen drawer. From what I could tell, the box was filled with documents from my grandmother’s life. Her old tax returns, insurance papers. Nothing exciting.

The last box was almost as empty as the first. Since it was taped shut, I shook it a bit and heard something bang around inside. I determined it was worth going through all of the trouble to open it.

Quietly I undid the seal. Thankfully the glue was old, the tape brittle. I fantasized that when I finally got it open, the box would contain something marvelous like an emerald necklace or a huge wad of hundred dollar bills.

But no such luck.

I pulled out a book, leather-bound and tied with what looked like an old black shoelace. When I flipped through it, I discovered it was some kind of diary written decades before I was even born.

I almost threw it back in the box. My grief at having found nothing of great significance in the attic caused me to just about give up.

But then I remembered my boredom. Days of watching chicken drawings play out on the upstairs walls could only keep me entertained for so long.

I put it on the attic stairs, where I grabbed it when I was ready to head back down to Tippy. She huffed off, exhausted by our adventure.

I hated to disappoint her again. As Tippy made her way to our room for a nap, I slid down the wall by the bathroom and thought about all the opportunities I had missed: the screwdriver in the junk drawer, the snow globes in the living room, the glass jars I could break into shards ready for stabbing. They were all downstairs and my energy was waning at best. I didn’t want to stand up and waste calories on such an excursion. At this point I didn’t think I’d even make it to my room again.

I vowed to get them the next morning. Mom didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Tippy and I weren’t completely starving or lingering on the verge of death anymore, but we tired easily.

Too easily.

The shoelace slid off the journal.

The chickens all gathered behind me as I began to read. Almost immediately their squawking took on a fevered pitch, but it quickly blended into background noise as Evelyn’s story consumed me.

Joan

The rooms were different, but at the same time, evil conjoined twins that had me in a strangle hold.

My body sprawled on the bed. But instead of sheets, I could feel the touch of our brand-new plush carpeting. My mind knew it was soft, but to my tortured flesh it felt like a cheese grater.

Curtains kept the sun at bay.

The darkness, my best friend, sat vigil while I decided whether to survive or decay.

Brandy, ever diligent, tried to bring me food and make me well again.

Only this time you were Brandy, and I couldn’t handle being near your devil’s stench.

Lucyfer.

Your brief foray into my room made me want to peel off my skin. I could smell him in your every cell. Were you working in tandem? Had you made me your personal captive this time?

Like before, I could barely speak. Sleep found me and kept me pleasantly occupied, but then I would wake up and the sweaty smell of nightfall would remind me instantly of what I had endured.

I couldn’t remember if my husband still watched from the new eye blasted into his forehead. If my mother’s final gasp of breath had crossed her lips fifteen years ago, or last night?

I called my daughter. The good one. The one who, years ago, had finally done as I had asked and gone across the street for help. Two days after the corpses started rotting.

The neighbor, according to the police, reported my child as announcing with pride that her mommy was going to have another baby and that she was really sick. If Brandy hadn’t been wearing so much of my blood, the old man who answered the door would probably have sent her back home and never thought anything of it.

But the scene was so similar to my tomb today. Alex, dead. Mom, tortured and catching flies in her open mouth. My body a canvas of blood and semen, the sight horrific but dotted with the activity of a child—the crayons and scribbling paper Brandy had dragged out of the moving boxes in her room, the jar of peanut butter lying by my head, the water she had given me out of the cereal bowl she had filled in the toilet when she couldn’t reach the tap.

My eyes shut. Closed to this world.

I had wet the bed. How pathetic was that? My legs couldn’t recall the simple method used to transport me to the bathroom. They didn’t understand movement. Urgency. Grace.

Instead, I stay silent and still. Let the blackness consume me. Not like a shark or giant snake, but like a veil of fragrant poison, slowly taking away my ability to breathe.