We are Wormwood (11 page)

Momma, momma, I need you to tell me the right way to go
crazy so my heart doesn’t burst. You made it look so easy.

I reached toward the basket. It tipped over, and the wrens
spilled into the dirt. Their tiny mouths gaped, as if opening wide for food. I
tugged at one of the red ribbons and it unraveled from the wren’s neck.

“What am I supposed to do?” I called out.

Across the clearing Saint Peter emerged, her blue hair
sticking to the sun, her hunter’s bow drawn.

“Who brought you here?” she asked as she approached me.

I rose.

“Was it Cignus?” she said. “You're not supposed to be here.”

“Is something after me?” I asked. “Again?”

“She has your scent now,” she said. “We need to go.”

The sun plunged down as starlight burst across the dead
meadow. I heard a rustling. We both turned, and a fawn, its skin shining with
moonlight, emerged from the grass.

“Oh, it’s just a ”

Saint Peter shot the fawn in the neck.

She grabbed my arm.

“Don’t run,” she said. “Just walk with me.”

It seemed important not to look behind me as we walked away.
Like Lot’s wife, I might turn into a pillar of salt. Like Orpheus escaping out
of the underworld, I’d lose something I could never recover.

There was something in the woods looking for us, foaming
with anger, and I felt it. Anybody would’ve been able to feel that kind of
presence. Its shadow could’ve broken bones.

The fawn screamed and screamed.

I took a slow, careful breath with each step to keep myself
from bolting.
 

Keep walking. Saint Peter kept her hand on my arm. Keep
walking.

That something barreled out of the woods behind us. Saint
Peter tightened her grip. Its colossal shadow skimmed over the treetops, and it
brought cold with it.

I heard it tear into the wounded fawn behind us, ripping
into its muscle and flesh; the fawn stopped screaming. I stopped breathing.

We reached the tree line and ran.

I’d been into these woods before, years ago, trailing a
dead-thing’s dress behind me. Maybe the location changed, but the soil remained
the same. In the years when the demon left, I thought I would be safe, but,
with or without her, the shadows and their woods would follow me. One day I
would awake to find little blue flowers sprouting out of my arms, my feet
buried in the side of a mountain.

If I got out of here alive.

Saint Peter and I emerged from the trees into the backyard.
Cignus and Phaedra were gone.

“Where did they go?” I asked Saint Peter, but she was gone
as well.

The house lay empty. The street beyond the house lay empty.

I
took a step forward and something broke underneath me. It was the blood
painting of me, now cracked in two.

I
WENT INTO THE
artist’s house, but everyone had already left. Empty bottles
of beer and liquor lay strewn across the floor.

The couch and the stereo were gone. The broken mirrors on
the floor were swept away. Someone even removed the light bulbs from their
fixtures.

I burst into the artist’s studio.

The paintings were gone. The lights were gone. The desk, the
paints, the refrigerator of blood, and the stain from my spit dripping on the
floor were gone and gone and gone. Nothing left but bare, peeling walls.

Saint Peter stood behind me in the doorway.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“The party is over. It’s been over for a long time.”

“He promised he’d be here.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

For the first time I noticed how tall she was, taller than
her brother. She wore a faux fur jacket and platform boots, her hair dirty and
hacked away in various places. She hardly looked the part of the disciple that
once chased after Jesus like a dog.
The boy with ragged shoes
and ragged fingertips who demanded that he be crucified upside down because he
wasn’t worthy to die the same way as his god.

“Where do I know you from?” I asked.

“It was a long time ago.”

“One person shouldn’t have to bear this much.”

“And yet you do.”

“Where is Cignus?”

“He has done a terrible thing, and he is hiding,” Saint
Peter said.

“I wasn’t supposed to go into those woods. Is that what you
mean?”

“If I had known he was taking you there, I would have
stopped him,” she said.

“I’m such an idiot,” I said.

“Maybe,” Saint Peter said.

I felt heaviness in my throat, a dark hole in my stomach.

“But you’re looking better every day,” she said. “More like
your old self.”

She touched my stomach. It was bleeding again from that
dirty cocaine glass, spreading through my shirt, but she wasn’t looking down.

“Your eyes, they’re so bright. Like stars,” she said.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What happened to the fearless girl I used to know?” she
asked.

I pried her fingers away.

“Ask your brother.”

She pushed me against the wall. She covered my mouth with
her mouth. She thrust her bloodied tongue inside me. She ran her fingers
through my hair, smearing blood against my forehead. It dripped down my
eyelids, and pooled underneath the cusp of my collarbone.

I shoved her away. The mad saint reeled back, her eyes
laughing.

“You don’t remember when we used to kiss?” she asked. “You
used to love me.”

She pulled her fingers apart, blood peeling on her
fingernails.

“Let me take you away,” she said. “It’s not safe for you
here anymore.”

I pushed past her and into Cignus’s room. There too,
everything was gone; the bed, the red curtains he wrapped me in,
the
desk I hid underneath.

I pried at the boards on the floor. I scratched at the nails,
trying to pull them apart. There had to be a secret entrance somewhere. Or a
button, disguised to look like the wood or the wallpaper. If I could find it,
then Cignus would be revealed. The house would give up its secrets and this
cruel game would be over. Was it my birthday? I couldn’t remember. Maybe it was
my birthday.

Surprise, Lily! Surprise! We were all hiding from you, but
we’re here now. And we brought cake.

I scratched at the floorboards until I sunk, frustrated,
onto the floor, my fingers bleeding and sore.

I knew Saint Peter stood behind me, watching.

“Where is he?” I whispered.

“I’d give you the world if I could.”

“Just give me this.”

Cignus, it’s not right to do this to a girl. You can’t just
fuck her and paint a picture with her blood and send her out into the woods and
then never call again.

You can’t leave me here.

“He promised me,” I said. “He said he needed me.”

“My brother promises a lot of things.”

Tears dripped onto my wrists.

“You don’t understand. He has to come back. I don’t ever cry
like this,” I said.

“Let me take you home.”

I couldn’t pretend to resist as she pulled me off the floor.
She took led me outside. I shook so badly I could barely walk. She strapped me
to the back of her van, and drove me home.

That's how this all ended, wasn’t it? The best kind of story
is a tragedy. Everyone in my life must’ve been cursed to die or disappear.
Like Daddy.
Like Charlie.
Like Cignus.
God knows where Phaedra went. If I stuck around
long enough, soon Saint Peter would disappear. Time for me to crawl back home
and suck up some of that mother’s milk, spend some quality time with Momma in
purgatorial madness before we both fell backwards into a Viking ship, howling
toward the abyss. At least my mother and I could be at peace in our insane loneliness,
rocking and howling together on deck, polishing our weapons, plucking all the
hairs off our bodies in cohabited Trichotillomania.

Yet, when we pulled up to my house, I knew my mother was
gone.

I
ALWAYS KNEW
when my mother was gone. Maybe it’s a kind of sixth sense I
developed after years of being left behind in her whirlwind, of sleeping in the
house alone, night after night, while she saved the world. Maybe it came with
learning to drive a car at the age of eight so I could get to school on time,
or maybe it was learning to run and hide from police and social workers who’d
take me away, or being forced to eat cold peanut butter and ketchup because my
mother hadn’t bought groceries in weeks. I used to stand outside, on the neighborhood
cul-de-sac, as the other families cooked dinner, hoping to be invited in to
eat. I rarely was though I stood on the sidewalk until they cleared the tables
away.

After Saint Peter dropped me off, I flung the front door
open so hard it slammed against the wall.

“Where are you?” I asked.

I went upstairs to her bedroom.

I pulled apart her made bed, as if she’d be hiding
underneath the unwrinkled coverlets and spread pillows. I yanked open her
closet door, nearly falling as I did so. I threw her clothes to the ground,
ripped her senior high school prom dress apart at the seams, and showered
sequins across the entire closet. I went to her vanity, grabbed handfuls of her
lipsticks and compacts, and threw them against the wall.
 
I smashed her vanity mirror with my
elbow.

“I’ve been thinking about you and me,” I called out.

I shoved the closet door shut and went toward my bedroom.
There, I did the same thing, pulling up the sheets and tossing the pillows onto
the floor as if I’d find her hiding underneath.

“I don’t think anything is going to help us. I remember the
little yellow pills that Daddy forced you to take, before he left, but those
didn’t help.
And the doctor?
That didn’t help either.

“I thought maybe I could escape it. That I wouldn’t get sick
like you. Of course, I was an idiot. I’ve been sick ever since Daddy left. I
mean, don’t you remember the spider?”

I grabbed a vase in the hallway. It was one of my mother’s
favorites with its flower-eyed ceramic print, a wedding gift from my
schizophrenic grandma. I threw it against the wall.

“They’re going to have to lock us away and shove needles
full of sedatives under our eyes and, sometimes, people are just cursed. Did
you hear me? Can you hear me? Sometimes they’re just cursed and nothing in the
world can save them.”

I went back into her bedroom with lighter fluid I stashed
under my bed, and threw it across the carpet. I doused her bed sheets and her
clothes.
I splashed it across the walls and her vanity
,
leaving ugly wet marks everywhere
.

The pungent smell burned my throat. I pulled a lighter from
my pocket.

“Can you hear me, Momma?” I said softly. “Can’t you see you
made me in your fucking image?”

Downstairs, a window broke.

“Momma!” I cried out, and I dropped the lighter.

I ran into the kitchen. Glass glittered on the tiles.
Someone had broken the window and the curtains blew into the twilight beyond. I
edged toward the window.

The only source of light in the neighborhood emanated from
the open front door of Phaedra’s house. It was a red door, a loud door, fitting
for the mother and daughter across the way that wanted so badly to be sick. It
was the only red door on the row.
The only open door.
The hinges creaked slowly back and forth.

Something had opened that door, had grabbed it, wrenched it
open, and thrown it back until it slammed against the foundation.
Something in a great hurry.

Here’s another story for you:

The mad girl with the missing mother climbed through the
broken window toward the red door. The wound in her stomach ripped open again
with stress. When she crossed her friend’s lawn, she smelled the woods spilling
out of the open door, the smell of loam, dirt, and lightning-struck trees.

Maybe in a past life the girl had once been a great hunter.
She’d once woven for herself a crown of ash and deer bone and conquered all who
would defy her with her great hunting bow.

No longer.

Now she was a ruined girl, a girl crushed by a night sky
bloated with factory smoke. She was a dirty girl who rarely bathed, and smoked
too much for her own good. If she found a great hunting bow these days, she’d
probably try to sell it at a pawnshop.

The mad girl wasn’t prepared for what lay beyond the red
door. She knew she was in the middle of a terrible, otherworldly conspiracy she
could never hope to understand. The hunter could’ve conjured up the beasts of
the forest to go into the house and destroy whatever waited for her there. The
mad girl probably couldn’t even bend down to tie her shoelaces without falling
over, would lie in the grass screaming at her own shadow writhing beside her.

The mad girl was a stupid girl. Even without those powers,
she went through the red door anyway.

She found grass, weeds, and flowers growing on the floor.
Ivy hung from the walls as if it had been growing there for years. It’d started
wrapping itself in lazy, suffocating circles around the couch and the coffee
table, plunging itself into the piano. The mad girl picked through the
overgrown weeds, nearly tripping over a dining room chair. She called out for
her mother. She called for Phaedra.

The mad girl found
a family photograph
on the wall, one of Phaedra and her mother in white dresses and fake smiles,
trying not to squint underneath hot studio lights. As she looked at it, green
and white mold bloomed through the print, tearing into their smiles and their
dresses. The photograph slid off the wall.

The mad girl reached the moldy and crumbling. She sank into
moss and was forced to crawl up the stairs, clinging to the banister. Several
times one of her feet sank down into the rotting wood and, each time, she
struggled to pull it out again.