The Eye Unseen (28 page)

I had lived in this same cloud for months after you joined me.

My cousin Jasmine buried them. Kept Brandy while I lingered in the hospital. Put my husband in the ground and sent him on his way before I even knew my own name again.

During those months I swam through seas of sorrow so deep no one else would have survived. But you did. You latched onto my bones and gnawed, did laps around me while we floated through the black together, emerging only to show me your red tresses and that horrible deformity you inherited in your eye.

Jasmine brought Brandy to visit, but even then I couldn’t shake the swarm of nagging memories that hounded me. My precious daughter never asked about her Daddy, didn’t seem concerned with the stitches that kept my face together like Frankenstein’s monster, or even ask when I was coming home. All she wanted to know was when you were arriving, so she’d finally have a sister.

My cousin suggested I tear you out. And how I wanted to! But the darkness beckoned, the black hole I called home, and I would run to it for weeks on end, emerging when it was really too late to take care of you. And what if you weren’t his? What if you belonged to my husband, the love of my life, the man who had watched while his hired man practically pulled my womb from my body to make it his own?

She buried my family. Raised my daughter while I remained in bed, my mind a burned out husk, and felt you lay root in my soul.

But after my cousin mentioned the word
abortion
, she was taken out of the story. Obliterated. Her children additional victims of the semi that crossed into her lane and totaled her car.

Brandy, by the grace of God, was on a play date at the time.

Her smiling face the hands that reached into my abyss and pulled me up again.

Without me, my daughter would go into foster care. Jasmine had been our only family. The last one. I could no longer wallow in my own despair. I had to resume my role as a mother.

But no one could force me to care about you.

I stood up and said hello to the world I hated. Found a job. Made us a new home. Hobbled through life like a robot, completely devoid of passion and sentiment. Did what was needed to survive.

When they pulled you from my body, I immediately saw your hair and wanted to die.

When you left my room today, I saw the same thing. If I had been able to move, I would have grabbed the ax and been done with business. But my legs had completely forgotten what it meant to have a duty. To be obligated to protect the universe.

To be a mother with a child to kill.

I closed my eyes and welcomed the black back in.

Surely this time he would let me die.

Lucy

I wouldn’t let sleep catch me.

The day had been too quiet, with Mom locked in her room. The threats of violence and irrationality that were her trademark were hidden away as long as I didn’t open her door. Tippy and I worried about her, and wanted to help, but at the same time our new-found freedom was addictive.

The second I opened Evelyn’s diary I felt jumpy. Plucky would straighten her feathers behind me, and I’d practically scream with fear. Tippy called me a frog, all fidgety and ready to leap. But my dog had no idea what the book was about, and I refused to let her call me a coward again.

I couldn’t put it down. Her language was stilted and sometimes hard to understand, especially when each page was dotted with foreign words or quotations, but I got the drift. Boy, did I get the drift.

This woman was scary. No wonder the attic was off-limits. I wouldn’t want my children to find this book, either. Mom would beat me senseless if she knew I was reading it. But then again, that box hadn’t been opened in decades. Maybe Mom had no idea this Evelyn woman even existed.

Evelyn began with thoughts of her sister. Laughing at her. The feminine weakness she wore like a badge, and how belittling Evelyn found it. She thought very highly of herself and expounded on her own intelligence, her independence and ability to take command. She discussed her tours of Europe, going on a safari, even an affair she had had with a woman in some remote area of Russia where they had lived for several months.

Then she had met a man and fallen completely in love with him.

A beast, really, from her description. Brutal and sadistic. No one I would ever want to meet.

At first I couldn’t decide if the book was fact or fiction. My experience with popular culture was limited to conversations the other kids at school had around me. I had listened to them discuss scary movies, where people were butchered and raped and cut up and even eaten, but I had never seen one of these films. Sometimes I read the magazines in the library and learned about serial killers and people who committed horrible acts of violence. Kids who came to school with guns and killed their classmates. Parents that locked their kids in cages and sold them to men for sex. People who lit other people on fire just for wearing funny clothes. Or dragged them behind pickup trucks because of their skin color.

These things seemed surreal to me, but other people incorporated them into their everyday life without batting an eye—watching violent movies, reading the countless books that promoted a deviant lifestyle, living with a complete lack of morals that I found utterly devastating.

When Evelyn moved into the story of her first encounter with her new boyfriend, I was convinced she was an evil storyteller. They didn’t meet on a date, or at a church function, or a neighbor’s barbeque. Evelyn was in an alley attacking a woman, and he jumped in to help her.

Literally, jumped into her skin and muddled the lines of reality. Two souls contained by one body. Two souls mauling the poor woman that Evelyn had found so attractive.

Together they tore her apart. Ripped her to shreds. Used their fingers like knives and shredded the poor woman. Evelyn described it in minute detail; the transformation of her own body as her hands turned into his talons, as they slid through her victim’s pale skin and into her gut, Evelyn had taken the time to maul the woman’s breasts, cut off her nipples, fling them across the alley for the dogs to eat. When she ran from the scene, Evelyn had left little intact. The dead woman’s intestines spilled into the alley, her spine tossed behind a building as the killer made her way home. I hated her, this Evelyn woman. Why would anyone even consider something like that? She enjoyed it. Couldn’t wait to do it again.

And again.

The chickens bickered in the walls around me. Swatted at one another. Fell out of the woodwork and onto the floor, only to hurry back again into their charcoal formation.

For a second, I thought about my reality. How headless fowl that went from drawings to living, physical entities and back again didn’t seem that odd to me anymore. Maybe Evelyn wasn’t weaving a bold, nasty tale. Maybe I was. What other purpose could the chickens have in my life but to symbolize my own break with sanity?

That got me laughing. So hard that my dog ran into Brandy’s room, tucking her tail and hiding from my hysterics.

Maybe Evelyn and I were a lot more alike than I wanted to admit. But, however horrible, her world was certainly much more exciting than the one where I sat watching chickens, waiting for Mom to either die or kill me.

The woman in the book loved blood. However demented her world, I easily fell prey to it. My eyes wouldn’t leave the book. I was mesmerized.

I practically screamed when something started thumping down the hall.

Big, bass-drum vibrations, making the very floor beat like a giant heart.

I dropped the book, tried to hide it in case Mom was coming, but the only place suitable was in my waistband.

The hens squawked louder, more frenzied, twelve of them issuing a warning cry I couldn’t understand.

Then one voice stood out above the rest, and the birds all flew over to the corner by Brandy’s door, scurrying to be part of the action.

One of the decapitated heads started screaming. A horrid noise, shrill and full of agony. I worked my way to the banister, the pounding noise accompaniment to my every step, and found the bloody neck flopping in the pile of chicken parts. With my toes, I moved it aside from the rest of the garbage and felt my heart pinch as I saw the desperation on this chicken’s face. Her eyes were wide and panicky. Her beak, cracked from the careless way her head was flung over here, emitted a curdling cry.

The other chickens were attacking.

After reading Evelyn’s story, I thought for sure they were coming after me. As if they were her minions and she didn’t want me to know the private details of her blood-drenched life.

But they gathered in the corner, all of the girls pecking away at one headless chicken. From the side it looked like Ms. Antoinette, already bloodied and battle weary. The others were killing her.

I tried to shoo them away, but they crawled into the walls and took her with them. Her protests filled the house. No matter how hard I tried, my hands couldn’t enter the paint to pull her back out of the plaster.

They fluttered their wings and stabbed poor Ms. with every bob of their necks, staining some of her feathers with blood, pulling out others and decorating the walls with them.

Her severed head never stopped screaming. At one point her body broke free of the others, and I couldn’t help but cheer her on, trying to get her to jump out of the drawing and back into my world, but Ms. was too weak to move that quickly. The hens ripped her to shreds.

Just like Evelyn and her first victim.

The other girls were vicious, like a clique at school, intent on making the weaker one suffer. Just because she was headless. Maybe they were jealous that she hadn’t had to see the weird world they inhabited or because she maintained her weight without ever having to eat anymore.

As Ms. Antoinette took her last breaths, I stroked her head and tried to make her feel more comfortable. Loved. I promised over and over that I wouldn’t eat her. Mom and I weren’t going to have any chicken dinners for quite some time.

I was exhausted when she finally passed. Tippy was already on my bed, acting like nothing had happened, when I collapsed against my pillow.

*  *  *

The house sat silent, backed up against the woods, surrounded by the devastated fields.

Occasionally it would shriek when the wind chilled it to the foundations or creak when stretching its frame, but otherwise the place was a tomb.

Mom didn’t make a sound. I wondered if she was alive.

The walls were empty, void of all fowl and their related activities.

I forgot to eat. Even Tippy stopped harassing me about keeping her bowl full. During one of our forays downstairs, I realized that it wasn’t so much that we couldn’t remember to stop by the kitchen and load up plates of tasty treats, but that the plates themselves were empty.

We were out of food.

How long had it been since we’d had a real meal? The fog hovering in my head didn’t allow for such deep thoughts. I found some stale crackers on the top of the refrigerator, and Tippy and I feasted on them.

“How about a stick of butter?” Tippy asked.

I shook my head.

The refrigerator wasn’t just empty, it was clean. Clean like it had only been during my first months of captivity, when I’d had my chore list and scrubbed every day.

How long ago had that been?

Was Mom still alive?

We sat on the floor, in front of the cabinets that held all of our cleaning supplies. Tippy, as usual, crawled onto my lap, stole part of my heat to help her thin body stay warm.

When I stroked her fur, I realized that she hadn’t been outside for days. Where had she gone to the bathroom? I hadn’t run across any accidents anywhere.

Still, I knew that when Mom finally got up, she would punish me for any violations of the house rules Tippy had committed.

We drank more water.

We had had a lot of water lately. Not that we complained; Tippy and I were not far from the days when water was the hottest commodity around. Right now it helped ease the hunger pains.

My thoughts returned to Tippy’s bathroom habits. I found myself staring lustfully at the door. I crawled to it, put my hand against it, half expecting an alarm to sound at my audacious behavior. None did.

The wood had ice on the inside. I scraped it with my fingernails, and then realized that maybe that was why everything looked so unfocused. The glass was coated with it as well. Thick and flakey, just like the windshield on the mornings Mom used to drive us to school and Brandy and I had to clean it off for her.

No knives, no food.

After I managed to stand back up and walk to the junk drawer, I scavenged for a useable tool. Of course we had no ice scrapers in the kitchen. But I did find my old library card, the one I hadn’t used in at least five months, and walked it back to the door.

Removing the ice did little for my vision. The world outside was still as white and ice-infested as the inside of our door. Snow piled high, up to my eye level.

Could this be a dream?

Tippy and I moved into the living room, where we slithered next to the curtain so as not to draw attention from any cars driving down the road.