The Key to Everything (15 page)

Abram faced away from her in his chair. Hunched forward like that, he looked so very tired. He pulled something over his head on a chain from his neck and set it on top of the desk with a heavy thud. His shoulders lifted, stretching, and he let out a heavy sigh. The top drawer slid open, and Dedra thought she saw the strand of frayed red thread and cracked brown leather. 

He placed the book down in front of him. His hands were doing something out of her view. She meant to move down another step to catch a glimpse; instead she slipped and fell down the stairs. There was no handrail to grab on to, so she tumbled all the way to the hard concrete floor. It all went in slow motion for Dedra. She thought she screamed but couldn’t be sure. Abram held the old key in his hand when he turned to look at her. His expression changed in that instant from determination to shock to recognition, and finally to a knowing sadness. 

From the time her heel slid from the step to the moment her head hit the floor took all of three seconds. In those few ticks of the clock, she witnessed her husband pushing the key into the center of the binding between two open pages of the book. His hand turned the key clockwise to the right. There was no bright flash of light. No thunderous music in the background created a sense of suspense or dread. He simply went into the book. 

No, that’s not right. He didn’t go into the book. He became the book. 

-26-

Dedra: Her Entire Life

When she woke up, the girls were crying. Marie found her. She screamed in fright while Jesse ran up the stairs to go find help. The bruises from her fall on the stairs made everyone assume that Abram had beaten his wife and run off. Dedra’s statements to the contrary were brushed off as the ramblings of a battered housewife trying to protect her husband and keep him out of jail. The manhunt continued for two weeks. No trail or trace of him was found anywhere, so the local sheriff called it off. They kept him on the most wanted list, but Dedra knew they would never find him where they were looking. 

Two days after the incident in the basement, Dedra woke up feeling queasy. She almost didn’t make it to the bathroom before she started throwing up. At the drugstore, the girls played in the toy aisle while she took the pregnancy test to the bathroom. Even the fluorescent light seemed surprised when the tiny blue plus sign materialized. 

The night after Abram came home with that awful tattoo, she had a strange dream. He started kissing the back of her neck the way she always liked. He whispered in her ear how much he loved her, causing a shudder of gooseflesh to rise on her arms. Rolling to face him, she opened her mouth to kiss him. She tickled him when he lifted his shirt over his head, and they laughed. Normally he didn’t like being tickled, but this time he tickled her back and pinned her hands to the bed above her head. The bright moonlight illuminated him as he reached for the bedside table. He kissed her breasts, to the sound of metal fumbling on wood. He sat up between her legs and held the key in his open palm. She couldn’t see his face in the shadows, but thought by the change in his breath that he was smiling. He offered his left hand to her and she took it. The key floated above his arm and sank slowly into the tattoo. He groaned in pain and pleasure. His eyes closed and he rocked forward, touching his forehead to her slightly rounded belly. They both accepted this event unfolding as the most natural and beautiful thing in the world. 

No other sound shared their world. The wind outside stopped. Her heart no longer beat inside of her chest. A patient world waited. She watched the skin beneath his tattoo ripple upward in a small, rolling wave. At its crest, the key stretched out to free itself from the black maze of lines. Once more it floated in the room, and Abram grasped onto it tightly. He spread her legs apart, lifted her knees high, and she closed her eyes waiting for what was to come. She had wanted this her entire life. 

When the sunlight opened Dedra’s eyes the next morning, she could still hear Abram’s voice echoing in her ears. “For your dreams.”

-27-

The Nurse: Black Rubber Mat

Jesse heard the automatic doors of the emergency room slide open, and when the cold wind came through, she was glad her elbow rested on the stack of papers she was supposed to be filing. She folded the top right corner of the page so she wouldn’t lose her place and closed the book, putting it down cover-side first. This way she could be sure no one would be able to tell without looking closely that she was reading romance novels at her desk instead of working. Normally there were maybe only one or two patients during the early morning hours, so no one much cared what she did, and today was especially slow. 

The door closed on an empty waiting room. Jesse leaned forward and looked around. All she could see were the two empty brown benches and three rows with four shiny green hard plastic seats each. The Home Shopping Network played silently in the corner underneath a really awful watercolor of a sailboat tacking in semi-rough seas. She never understood why they didn’t put something nice up there. Some doctor’s wife probably painted this jumble of bland colors in an art class taken on a whim to spend his money.

She went to see who had opened the door. Her white sneaker stepped onto the black rubber mat. The double doors whooshed to the sides, and instantly a chill wind pushed her back a half-step. She wrapped her arms around her thin waist and walked into the shocking cold. She scanned the empty parking lot to the right. It was still dark, but enough light emanated from the glow blooming on the horizon to show her that no one was there. Looking left, she thought she saw a hint of pink fluttering around the corner of the building. It quickly flicked into sight again, and then was gone.

She thought about calling Nick, but the security guard was making his rounds. Probably taking his time down in the basement smoking his morning joint around now. Bracing a bit tighter, she leaned into the wind and shuffled her feet down the sidewalk, past the darkened windows and parked staff cars lined up at an angle. Fortunately it was a small hospital, so she didn’t have to go too far before reaching the end of the parking lot. 

Jesse turned the corner, and everything around her froze in place. The small cloud of breath misting out of her mouth stopped. Her feet hung in the air. Two little girls stood in front of her, holding a newborn infant swaddled in a blue-and-white quilt. On the left, the taller girl had no face. Her head appeared as a wash of colorless finger paint smudged by a child’s hand. She held the baby in her left arm and waved with her free right hand. The shorter girl wore her hair in pigtails tied with shiny pink ribbons. Wind whipped the long red locks in swirls in front of her face, covering it from view. The ribbon on the left side of her head was undone and hanging in front of her shoulder, over the baby’s tiny exposed feet. This must have been the flash of pink she saw from around the corner. Both girls seemed eerily familiar. She recognized them, but a door closed in Jesse’s brain, refusing to open on the memory. 

Her mother’s voice came from behind her ear. It was deep and gentle, and reminded her of swinging from the tall oak tree over the reservoir with her sister Maria when she was a little girl. The mournful sounds didn’t come through to her in words she was familiar with. Such strange sounds. Soft but brutal. Vicious but kind. A language not invented yet. Still, she understood the voice’s intent. 

Jesse blinked, and the young images of her and her sister were directly in front of her. Their small hands stretched out, offering up the baby to her. Jesse noticed her arms hanging down, unmoving. They felt unattached to her…part of someone else. She concentrated so hard to make them lift up and take the child crying in the cold. The looks on the two girls’ faces turned sad as they took turns kissing their baby brother on the forehead. Young Jesse, the taller of the two, reached into the folds of her yellow dress and pulled out a strange old key. Everything around took on a strange blur to the edges. The brick-and-mortar walls of the hospital liquefied, melting from their hardened shells, rippling in the wind. The key, however, remained sharp, clear, and crisp. 

Young Jesse reached the key out in front of her, and Marie took hold of her hand. They both held onto the key and aimed it down at the baby’s face. He looked up with crystalline blue eyes and opened his mouth. As it stretched wide, the nurse turned away. The baby’s soft cooing reassured her that everything was ok. She turned back in time to see the baby close his tiny lips over the key. 

The girls were gone. Jesse was standing at the edge of the sidewalk, blown by the wind, holding the sleeping infant. Despite the cold, she was sweating. Her heart was beating so hard that she was sure she was going to pass out at any moment. She heard a light thump and a jumble of clicking noises off to her right. A squirrel stood on its hind legs on the hood of the Jeep parked in the space next to her. 

Another thump and scratching sound. A different squirrel stood on the hood of the Toyota parked next to the Jeep. As she looked down the row of the seven other cars in the lot, squirrels stood atop each one, high on their hind legs, looking right at her. Standing on a brown Hyundai, the third one down the line reached an arm out and pointed its clawed finger. In quick succession, each brown animal copied the gesture and directed their pointing fingers at the baby. 

The voice in her ear was unmistakable now. She needed to run.

Just then, each of the small heads cracked to the right and let out a piercing scream, shattering all of the windshields. Jesse turned back to the emergency room entrance in a panic and started running. She sheltered the baby from the projectiles of flying glass with her arms as she fled, the sharp claws scraping deep lines in paint as they fought for purchase on the slick fiberglass hoods of the cars. 

Jesse was afraid to turn around but risked taking a glance at the reflection in the dark windows of the building as she ran past. The wild claws flinted into sparks against the concrete as they chased her down the sidewalk. She was only a few feet away from the door when the first one caught up and sank its teeth into the back of her calf. 

Pain. She had been hurt before. One time she broke her arm skiing back in middle school. The thick red scar from the compound fracture still showed its crescent shape over her left elbow. A bad mistake of a boyfriend had punched her in the face when she refused to go down on him in college. But nothing compared to the pain tearing through the muscles and tendons of her leg at this moment. A darkening red crawled its way inward from the edges of her vision. The baby in her arms gave Jesse the strength to fight it off and get to the door before the next beast caught up to her.

The doors slid open, and she tumbled down onto the black rubber mat inside, screaming for help. Slowly, the doors automatically slid closed behind her. Jesse turned her head back, covering the still-sleeping baby with her body to protect him from whatever the hell these things were. She watched the squirrels all stop when they reached the glass, steam clouds rising in the cold air from their breath. She watched them raise their arms and point to the child hidden beneath her. She watched as their mouths all stretched open too wide for the structure of their small heads to remain intact. She watched as their heads bent to the right side, snapping the bones through the skin of their broken necks. She watched as they threw themselves into the glass in a splattered bloody mass over and over again until their lifeless bodies were left twitching and flopping around on the mat just outside the door, like fish gasping for air.

-28-

The Nurse: There Are No Squirrels in Australia

Comfortable in her chair, Jesse watched her husband heading off to the ski lift with their friends. It was snowing again, but not too badly. The season was pretty slow this year, so there weren’t as many tourists as expected. It was nice to have a little bit of quiet. She heard an American accent and turned quickly to see if she could pick the woman out. There were so few other ex-pats down here in New South Wales these days that she almost stood up to go and find her.

It was too much hassle to adjust the strap while it was inside her snow pants. She would just have to wait until everybody got back down the hill. Seven years since that night and back then, no one believed her. Nick finally showed up after she screamed herself raw for twenty minutes. Smelling like a skunk, he called the incident in and the police came as quickly as they could. She was stunned at first by the lack of blood from her leg wound. Her scrubs weren’t even torn.

Jesse’s throat burned and she could barely utter a sound louder than a whisper, but she kept on trying to scream until the resident in charge gave her a sedative. No one could figure out what was wrong with her leg. They did X-rays and MRIs that all came up normal. Out of the dozens of blood tests, one came back with an abnormal result indicating possible Lyme disease but it was subsequently ruled out by later examinations. 

The shrink assigned to her case after the breakdown attributed the “phantom pains” to “psychosomatic trauma.” Someone needed to punch that guy in the dick. Jesse felt a small twinge of justification when the flesh on the back of her calf started dying. If the pain hadn’t been so excruciating she might have even stood up on the reception desk of the hospital, pulled up her pant leg, pointed down to the necrotic tissue and screamed out, “See motherfuckers? I told you!” Instead she retreated into a morphine-induced heap until they amputated her leg at the knee.

The move to Australia was a good idea. After the incident, Jesse felt the need to get as far away from Rhode Island as possible. Teaching third grade was exciting, and the kids at the school were all terrific. Plus, life was better now with her son. Surprisingly, even with her time spent in the hospital, the adoption of the mystery baby went through relatively smoothly. Nobody came forward to claim responsibility for him, even with all the coverage on the local news and in the papers. Jesse’s lawyer exploited this fact to her eventual winning of custody.