They Don't Come Home Anymore, page 2
If you die out in the open, before you are ready, they will find you and take you away.
At long last, the air took on the stench of rot, detectable even through the medicinal numbness of her sinuses. Hettie was hoping the smell wasn’t her. The fishy, fecal undertone reassured her that it was geographic in origin, and that she was close to the canals that took out waste fluids from the hemorrhaging city and brought in salt water to hopefully wash it away clean. By the odor in the air and the black mold that seemed to crawl from every cracked thing that touched the ground, the ocean wasn’t doing its part.
Her joints ached and her bones hurt. The unfamiliar clothes felt like sandpaper, overpriced fabrics chaffing her dry skin. Every step felt like she had nails hammered into the balls of her feet, and the wound on her inner thigh bowed out her legs, throwing off her already destroyed sense of balance. Her head was on fire, but when she touched her forehead, the skin was icy cold. She could taste nothing in her mouth except the taste of nothing in her mouth. Had anyone noticed, they would have suspected the flu, brought on by the stress of the last two weeks, which were clearly the most stressful in all of her sixteen years. But no one noticed, allowing her to come to the realization that she wasn’t just sick, she was infected. She knew that it was real. That it had worked. What the man with the glasses had warned her about. What the thing that lived in the tall building had promised. But Hettie still had a hard time processing this new reality, even as she was gripped ever tighter by the physical realization of it. The truth was unfurling inside her, marching on tiny legs into every cell of her body. Death was coming, and then something else was coming after that.
You will wake up on a table, being cut apart. Your sentient pieces stored in jars, zipped into bags. Burned. Or perhaps something worse …
She arrived at a chain railing overlooking a channel choked with refuse, and picked her way down the cement stairs built into the tide wall, her legs shaking like a palsy victim. She was losing control of her body. It was slipping from her, tamped down by those tiny feet, with a promise to be returned at a later date, changed in ways that were irreparable. How long? How long would she be down here, dying and waiting? The man with the glasses never told her. She hadn’t even thought to ask.
Your new eyes will open inside a wooden box, and you will not be strong enough to break free. Not without feeding. You will be entombed inside the earth, waiting for an end that will never come.
At the bottom of the staircase a cement landing fronted six round openings that burrowed back into the city, each surrounded by three rings of red brick-like lips circling a mouth. A lamprey clamped onto the metropolitan underbelly, if parasitic fish wore strawberry red lipstick. Slimy water dribbled out of the lamprey’s mouth and into the brackish canal stream. The smell was overwhelming. This entire drainage system built two centuries ago was declared a federal Superfund site last year, and still nothing had been done to what was deemed “one of the country’s most polluted urban waterways” by the perfectly coifed news anchor while Hettie’s parents just shook their heads. The term ‘polluted’ was generous, and probably should have been replaced with ‘lethally toxic.’ Either way, Hettie’s parents were outraged into doing nothing.
So choose wisely and plan accordingly, as a mother would with a child. Prepare your bed, secure your tools, and memorize your route.
Hettie removed her shoes and put them into the backpack, feeling like she was moving in slow motion, because she was. Slinging the pack over her shoulder with difficulty, she bent down and crawled into the lamprey’s mouth head first, her knees scuffing and bleeding on the broken glass, rotting sticks, and chewed-up pieces of the city. She didn’t feel it. Even if she did, she wouldn’t have cared. What would have been the worst thing to happen? It would kill her?
When you wake up, you will be the reborn dead. Like an infant, you will need to practice everything. Everything.
As Hettie moved through the wet, the blackness around her started to lighten in the back of her eyes. She could see details of the walls, things flitting in front of her. She could hear the life in the tunnel, and the earth which surrounded it. Chewing mouths, beating hearts, and the electrical fizz of a million brains firing their own private synapse diaries. For a moment, she wasn’t sure if she was listening to herself and the stew of a trillion organisms that swam inside the skin sack covering her fluids. She was aware of it all inside her. Heard them speaking to each other, speaking to her. The line between the self and the outer was becoming hazy. But that could just be the creep of death, following the breadcrumb boulders she had set along the trail.
A scraping sound came from behind her, and she stopped, thinking briefly of a book she had read, years ago when she was younger. It was becoming difficult to remember things now, numb as she was amid this noise. Memories were draining away like sand, flowing out the bottom of her feet and disappearing into the ocean far behind her. But this one, this book, stayed afloat, at least for a second. It was about a clown who hid in the sewer, holding colorful balloons and waiting to kill anyone who came too close. Children, gay men, anyone. It, the book was called, written by a King. She remembered it scaring her, making her terrified of dark tunnels that waited underground, and the things that might lurk there. She had heard all of the stories about alligators and albinos and mole people who all seemed to live in harmony down below. A whole new subclass had moved underneath Las Vegas after the last economic crash. She now found herself hoping that she’d run into one or all of these things, even that chuckling clown, because she knew she would be hungry soon. And she wouldn’t be afraid anymore. “Everything floats down here.” No, not everything. Some things sink.
Listen to your instincts, and practice.
A hiss issued from somewhere in front of her. Her eyes cut through the dark and she spotted it immediately. A possum, balled up in a filthy side tunnel, glaring at her with bristling malice, all pink and grey and needle teeth. Possibly the world’s ugliest animal looked even more loathsome down under the ground, like burying it turned it into something else. She would remember the spot for later, after it was over. Right now, she needed to vomit, and did, heaving up something wet and reddish black from her disintegrating insides.
Practice makes perfect. Practice makes perfect.
4
Hettie arrived home minutes after the ambulance left the school parking lot. She sprinted from the scene and didn’t stop until her left bare foot (she had lost her shoe several blocks previous) slapped on the flagstone of the entry walk to her house.
Inside, she ran up the stairs, shedding outerwear as she went and stomping her feet into the brown shag covering each step. Reaching the top, she trudged down the hall and dove into her room, landing face down on the bed. The thick comforter absorbed most of her sobs, but not all of her screams.
“What the dickens?” Hettie’s mother Hilde, a tall, thick-boned woman with tall, thick framed glasses and a Prince Valiant bob, appeared in the doorway, wiping oil paint off her fingers with a stained t-shirt rag. “What’s all the racket?”
Hettie didn’t raise her face from the bedding. “Oh, mom, it’s horrible. Horrible!”
Hilde padded over to the bed in suede clogs, covering the woolen socks pulled up high on calves lightly haired and knotted like an oak branch. “What is?”
“It’s the end … It’s over!”
“What happened, for goodness sake?”
“She fell down. She … She … She’s going to die, I just know it.”
“Who? Who?”
“Avery … Avery’s going to die.”
Her mother paused, shoulders slumping as the crisis amped down sharply. “Is this another one of your friends? Those ‘school-only’ friends of yours? The ones you never bring around here because you’re ashamed of your family?”
Hettie began crying harder, a wail clipping off at the end as she devolved into that paralyzed, choking inhale, midway between hyperventilation and a chronic case of the hiccups.
“Calm it down, now. You’re going to have a conniption.”
“I—don’t—care.”
“You better care. Your great uncle Friedrich died of agitation. About those two horses and the crabapple tree. It’s a real concern, Henrietta.”
“You don’t—understand. If she dies—I will too.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. You have lots of friends. I hear you talking to them on the phone all the time.”
Hettie’s breathing was stubbornly returning to normal, even at the mention of those phone calls to people who most certainly wouldn’t be considered ‘friends’ by any stretch of the imagination. “But she—was special. She was the best one. Of all the girls, she’s always been the best.”
“They’ll be others. And if not?” She made a clicking sound out of the side of her mouth. “Your father and I don’t talk to one person we went to high school with.”
“You and dad don’t have any friends.”
“We sure do,” she said, putting indignant hands on hips. “We have each other. What else would a person need?”
“I need her. I need Avery. And she needs me, too, mom. She needs me to keep her secret.”
“Oh, goodness grapes …” Hettie’s mother stood up, clearly uncomfortable to the point of irritation. “Girls and their secrets.”
“There’s something wrong with her. I’m going to help.”
“Help your mother first by taking your laundry to the basement and throwing in a few loads. It looks like a tornado hit this place.”
A short time later, down in the hushed stillness of the partially finished basement, amid the cobwebs and exposed beams and boxed-up memories, Hettie stood in front of the washing machine, a mountain of dirty clothes at her feet, the washer chugging and sloshing, and stared up into the one tiny window letting in the last rays of that day’s sun. She pushed her energy, her presence, out through the window and up into the sky she couldn’t see. She told it to find Avery in the hospital, and to stay there with her, protecting her, until she could properly arrive.
5
It was Saturday morning, which meant that Hettie’s parents were at the Midtown Farmers Market, drinking small batch coffee and discussing the merits of locally grown boysenberries while filling their yaps with sweatshop raspberry jam. They left Hettie alone, as they had since she was very little, preferring to raise a self-sufficient child than one who was programmed to be a slave to taskmasters. This seemed to be a Machiavellian answer to a softball question, dropping an innocent into Darwin’s testing pool and rowing the boat away. But if a child actually made it into adulthood without being kidnapped, raped, and/or murdered, they’d probably be pretty independent and self-sufficient. Self-starters. They’d probably also have missed out on a lot of parenting, not to mention a good portion of normal childhood innocence.
Hettie made a few of her phone calls while preparing herself a breakfast, then took her tea (English Breakfast—her mother’s Earl Grey was a perfumey nightmare) into her parents’ bathroom. Her mother never wore a stitch of makeup, declaring it the cruel dictum of misogynists and self-loathers, but she kept a few of the basics in a small black makeup case stored behind the pipes under the sink. Hettie’s Auntie Viola had brought it over on her one and only visit to the house, and attempted to do a makeover on her sister. That hadn’t ended so well, with tears and accusations left festering for twenty years, and Hettie never saw her again. Auntie Viola drank a lot. And wore a lot of makeup. Her mother had said those were never a very good combination, self-loathing or not.
With a bit of maneuvering, Hettie pulled the makeup bag from under the sink, shook the dust off into the toilet, and unzipped it. There was a dark maroon lipstick, crusted over with age. A mascara that was totally dry, and a four color eye shadow compact. Hettie would use all four.
6
The front doors of the hospital slid open and Hettie stepped through. The doors closed quickly behind her, nearly clipping her backside, drowning out the songs and chants of the boisterous vigil that had collected in the parking lot moments after the news vans arrived two days ago.
Her face was done up in five shades of loud colors that perched on her skin rather than blending in with it. Dark purple lips. Bright blue eye shadow accented with lines of yellow and green. Cheeks covered in red blush that brought to mind the word ‘rouge.’ She wore a dress made of some long outlawed fabric that belonged to her grandmother, that was last used as a costume, high heels two sizes too large, and a wide-brimmed woman’s hat that her mother had employed as a base for some sort of bird diorama. Hettie looked bold. She looked ridiculous. She looked like she was wearing an absurd disguise straight out of a ’70s British sitcom instead of a well-to-do member of the Valancourt clan.
All eyes turned to look at her. Nurses, orderlies, news producers, walk-ins, fretting family members of any of the hundreds of patients housed in this factory of blind hope. There was a dip in the noise, and after a split second of non-recognition, they all went back to their phones and conversations and worries.
Hettie walked through the intake reception and headed for the nearest hallway into the hospital proper. She didn’t know where she was going, but made sure she walked with purpose anyway, following the old axiom that if you acted like you belonged somewhere, no one would question if you actually did. Tell yourself that you’re a rock star, and you’ll be a rock star. The article she had read about this was published in one of those men’s magazines with half naked starlets on the cover (“being brave”) and way too many cologne ads, and focused on getting into A-list nightclubs, but she figured it would work anywhere. Confidence pumped to the level of giving zero fucks was portable, at least in theory.
“Excuse me,” a voice said from behind Hettie, who walked on, prepared for this initial interference but having trouble keeping her balance in those wretched heels that made her move like a drunk person, no matter how hard she gripped her toes, or high she held her chin.
“Excuse me,” the woman repeated, more forcefully. Hettie snapped her fingers to a silent beat like she was listening to headphones somewhere under that hat. “Stop!”
Hettie did, then turned slowly and held a gloved hand to her chest like she’d seen women do in old movies. “Are you speaking to me?” she asked, affecting a continental accent and trying to bat her heavy lashes but only succeeding in sticking them together, turning her demur flutter into Morse code.
“Where are you going?” the nurse said. She was a thick woman with Q-tip hair and a permanent furrow carved into her brow. In short, she was straight out of Central Casting for ‘No-Nonsense Intake Nurse.’
“To visit young Ms. Valancourt,” Hettie said, dabbing at her protesting eyes that were starting to water. Perfect timing.
“No you’re not,” she said, clipboard at the ready position and cocking her pen. “Visitation is restricted to all but essential family.”
“I’m her sister.”
She tapped the clipboard. “No siblings listed. So, unless you’re her mother or her recently reassigned father, you need to get in line with the rest and go through the family attorney if you want to set up a visit.”
The nurse walked forward and handed her a business card. She must have had a stack of them hidden in one of her many pockets. The card was thick, gold embossed font printed on expensive card stock. Sy Katz, it read. Esquire.
Hettie hobbled out of the hospital. She pulled off her hat and smoothed her sweaty hair that was teased and crimped through three different decades. She looked past the mob milling about in the parking lot and up into the sky that had turned grey while she was inside, searching for the sun. It was nowhere to be found. What she did see was a single engine prop plane arcing across the sky without a sound, towing a sky banner that read “GET WELL SOON, AVERY! WE ♥ YOU!—VIC’S MARKET.”
Honking came from the access driveway into the lot. A fleet of food trucks were pulling in. Excited chatter began as everyone rushed toward the trucks, surging with the syncopated movements of a bird flock. The chorus of an insufferable dance track blared suddenly from huge speakers, as the local pop radio station finished setting up a booth and was now live on air. Several girls, and a few boys started dancing, snapping selfies in between beats.
This wasn’t public grief, support for a dying teenage girl. It was a circus, being fed in tiny bites to the gaping maw of social media.
As Hettie tried to process the impromptu block party that had spontaneously—or maybe quite purposely—cropped up in the parking lot of St. Vincent’s Hospital, two girls, both of them two grades behind Hettie, walked up quickly and leaned against a nearby lamp post as if ordered there, wearing nearly identical sophomore year outfits down to the pink flip-flops and identical side ponytails. One of them was eating blue cotton candy, picking through it with a disgusted look on her face, lips curled up over braces that gleamed in the weirdly bright grey light. The other held up her Starbucks cup like it was an ID badge. Probably was.
“I’ll bet she’s totally faking the leukemia,” said cotton candy. “Like, who would put that out there?”
