Audrey’s Door (21 page)

S
aturday. Another day at Betty’s side. This time, alone. She listened for the sound of black wings flapping, unable to fly. Then wondered: are all people born with holes, or just God’s mistakes?

She opened the letter. It was written on unlined paper and short:

She tore it up, along with the good doctor’s papers. They littered the floor like sloughed skin.

When she returned to the empty Super 8, she was too depressed to order dinner and instead took two Valium and a lithium, and crashed. Something squirmed in her stomach, and she dreamed of doors and crushed houses and black rain, only this time, they were soothing.

In the middle of the night, she sat up fast, and thought she saw the man from The Breviary in the corner of the room. A dark shadow without a body. “Come home, Audrey,” he said.

She didn’t bother seeing Burckhardt again. Didn’t sign any papers. Sunday morning, she ordered her ticket home. She cried during the long drive back from Lincoln to Omaha. Roads she’d traveled, so many times before.

Above was the wide-open Nebraska sky that sheltered sane people with families and children and car pools. Content people who knew how to calm the gnawing monsters inside them. As she drove, she understood that she didn’t belong here, and neither had Betty. They were too damaged. They’d never belonged here, in the country of God.

She returned the Camry early and beat the approaching hurricane back to New York by a few scant hours. She arrived back in John F. Kennedy Airport late Sunday night, a week to the day since she’d moved into The Breviary.

It was still dark when she collected her suitcase from the baggage carousel, then stood inside the plastic taxi-stand enclosure, while all around, rain pitter-pattered. She hesitated as she told her driver where to take her. Even as she said the words, she knew they were a mistake.

“One hundred tenth and Broadway. The Breviary.”

November 8, 1992

On Wednesday, November 3, at 5:30
P.M
., Officer Raymond Passman was called to a mobile home parked at 621 Station Street on a noise violation. The home is currently occupied by Betty Lucas (39) and her daughter Audrey (16). Through the window, Officer Passman believed he saw blood on the kitchen floor, and forced his entry when the young woman at home would not allow him access. Alleged blood was determined to be the crushed remnants of a red-ant infestation. As this was the third complaint, a $250 fine was issued for noise.

From the
Hinton Weekly

“Edgardo!” You-hoo, Smelly Pants! When ya gonna get rid a all these ants?”

Crazy Mrs. Parker from 14C,
hollering down the elevator shaft.
August 3, 2012

T
he man in the three-piece suit played “Heart and Soul” at the piano while the children ran in circles. Keith, Olivia, Kurt, Deirdre. Audrey was there, watching. Wishing that just once in her life, she could join in on the fun. They played Ring Around the Rosy, hide-and-seek, hopscotch—all the games she’d never learned growing up. “One! Two! Three! Four!” they shouted while leaping from cardboard box to box.

Everyone was at the party. Loretta Parker from 14C. Galton in his mask. Marty Hearst, red-eyed and weeping like a pussy. Evvie Waugh from 14D. He swung a rebar instead of Edgardo’s cane. Its head was clotted with hair and gristle. The rest of the tenants were there, too. Dapper and self-made, clasping cocktails in crystal glasses. Even their skin was their own creation.

The man in the three-piece suit scratched the ivories. This time, his skin had sloughed to reveal a faded beige skull, like he’d been dead for a very long time. “One!
Two! Three! Four!” he shouted. Clara’s children ran in time, leaping from box to box, and Audrey sucked in her courage and joined them. What fun!

After a few stanzas, the piano began to play on its own, and the man curled his bony hands into a fist. “One!” he shouted, and extended his pinky bone. “Two!” his index finger. “Three!” his middle finger. “Four!” his ring finger. Finally, he opened his palm at her. “And Audrey makes five!”

The tenants in faded vintage finery clapped: right fingers against left heels of left hands like dainty sophisticates at the Metropolitan Opera. “And Audrey makes five!” they cried.

She smiled at the sound of her name (famous!), and broke away from the rest of the red-throated children, whose pajamas were so wet. Then she stacked the boxes together over the hole in the rotten wood floor and assembled them into the shape of a door. “Tah-dah!” she announced with her arms outstretched. “Look, you guys! I
made
that!”

The children stopped playing when they saw what she’d done. Motionless feet over swaying torsos, wet puddles at their toes. Doleful little blue peepers gazing floorward while they shivered. Little brats. They ought not to complain. At least the water hadn’t scalded them. Like any devoted mother, Clara had tested it on her wrists.

…Funny. How did she know that? And if this was a dream, why did her arms ache so bad?

The children wept with sniveling little faces. Dimpled fingers and cheeks, she could tell just by looking that they’d never missed a meal. Store-bought comic-book-character pajamas. The eldest was Iron Man. The girl, Pepper Pots. Audrey’s envy squirmed in her stomach like a worm. It got bigger as it writhed.

The children jogged in a circle around her and the door. Their hands were joined like a spinning wheel.
They spun once, twice, three times, four as they sang with pretty voices:
It’s the hard-knock life!

As they raced, the room changed, and time raced backward, too. Red velvet furniture, not hers (Clara’s?), rushed to the center of the den. Empty ice-cream cartons, wine bottles, and dirty diapers littered the now-carpeted floor. Flies buzzed. It got hot. High summer. July. The fourteenth floor; closed windows and no air-conditioning.

The children kept circling, and as they ran, their bodies grew gaunt and their clothing soiled. The velvet furniture crumbled and became a smashed pile in the center of the room that rose toward the ceiling and covered Audrey’s cardboard construction. The pile took shape, and became a door made from cherry oak and walnut, jigsaw puzzles, pulped self-help books, and toys. Shoddily made and lacking a frame, it rattled as if about to topple.

The children stopped circling. The door began to hum. And then, from down the long, dark hall, a woman’s deep voice cried, “Keith! Olivia! Kurt! Deirdre! Don’t hide from Momma!” Her voice carried, strong and resonant. It belonged on a stage.

The children shrilled as they ran: high-pitched screams and barks and moans. The red on their throats clarified into handprints. Thumbs up front: the better to squeeze you with, my dears.

Did something bad happen here?

“Keith! Olivia! Kurt! Deirdre!” the monster sang while the tenants clapped their polite, half-assed claps.

Audrey crouched toward the turret and tried to make herself small.

The boys, holding Deirdre, fled from the den and down the hall while the little girl stood still. She was thinner than Audrey had thought, and not blond, after all, but a green-eyed brunette. Her throat was bleeding. She leaned toward Audrey as if to whisper a secret, but shouted instead: “Watch out. You’re it!”

Then she tore from the room and was gone. They were all gone. She couldn’t see them, but she could hear them. Her stomach slopped. The thing inside it gnawed. The man in the three-piece suit played the same C flat-E sharp combo, again and again. Jangling and discordant. Off-key, the tenants sang: “You’re it! You’re it! You’re it!”

The shoddy door creaked open. The opening made a vacuum. Pieces of the door, velvet furniture and children’s toys, collapsed upon themselves. The vacuum sucked the light, too, and stole its own reflection from her eyes. When she looked directly at it, all she saw was black.

The children shrieked. The tenants cheered: “YOU’RE IT! YOU’RE IT! YOU’RE IT!” C flat-E sharp, C flat-E sharp.

The worm got big inside her and shrank her organs small. She hated the sound of these people. She hated the sight of them. She hated the door. She hated her life.

She charged down the hall with her hands outstretched. But her body had grown bulky, and these runts were quick. They weaved just out of reach. She checked the bedrooms; empty. Then swiped under the kitchen table and sink. The walls went red as she lurched. The ceiling, too. Blood or ants or simply paint, she couldn’t tell which.

Running. Panting. So hot in here. High summer. The extra bulk she carried made it hard to breathe.

“Olly-olly Oxen free. It’s safe to come out. Don’t hide from me!” she cried. Her voice was a sweet soprano.

The children screamed. The sound didn’t echo. But maybe they weren’t screaming. Maybe they were laughing. Finally, she spotted them as they darted: Keith, then Olivia holding the glassy-eyed baby, last Kurt. She followed. Out of breath. Down the hall. It got longer. It got darker.

“Keith! Olivia! Kurt! Deirdre!” she cried, her voice
more charming than an incantation. She belonged on a stage, beguiling presidents. She belonged on the other side of the door, where her adoring fans waited. If only these little bastards had never been born.

One by one, the children dove underwater. Keith. Kurt. Unmoving bodies. Olivia, holding baby Deirdre, was the last to leap. Audrey clawed the sole of her foot and pulled her back by the ankle. Braced her like a slippery fish, then squeezed her bloody throat. Thumbs in front, fingers in back. A terrible snap.

Clinking their cocktails, the tenants cheered her on in the doorway: “Kill your love. It’s the only way to open the door!”

The work was hard and thankless. The girl fought back. “She can’t breathe!” Loretta declared with glee. The man in the three-piece suit played “Heart and Soul,” off-key and dissonant, while Evvie Waugh beat his knobby cane in time.

She watched as little Ol-lovely’s eyes bulged, then kept watching, to make sure the girl wasn’t just playing dead. When she was done, she looked at her hands, which were wet with blood, then at the mirror over the sink. Clara DeLea grinned back at her, and limp in her arms was a small brunette in tan coveralls, her throat bleeding now, as if it had never stopped. Young Audrey Lucas, dead.

A
nother Monday morning at The Breve. Rise and shine!

She slid off the deflated air mattress. The dream departed fast. Acute panic remained. Had she hurt someone? Would she hurt someone?

Her body ached. Her knees, her hips, her shoulders, even the sockets of her eyes hurt. She stretched her hands along the floor. They sank into something wet—the tub! But then, no, it was only the rotten hole in the floor…. Had it grown? It looked about three inches wider in diameter, and its broken wood was jagged now, like teeth.

Zzzzt! Zzzzt!

As she sat up, a laser of searing pain sliced her temporal lobes in two. The separate parts throbbed
out of sync like
the ventricles of a heart. “Oh,” she cried out, and squeezed her skull as if holding it together. “Oh, jeez.”

She was in 14B, The Breviary, instead of Nebraska. Tears came to her eyes. What was happening? How had she gotten here? Hadn’t she planned to leave The Breviary, and move back with Saraub? Weren’t there papers left to sign back in Lincoln? Betty. The coma. Had she really left her there without pulling the plug?

“Crap,” she moaned.

Zzzzt! Zzzzt!

And the room, oh God. At first she didn’t know why the floor was covered in sparse carpet that rippled near the heating ducts like a field of butterflies. But a split second later, she understood. All the clothes from her suitcase. All her other clothes, too. She’d hoarded them for years. Her army peacoat from Saraub, her never-worn but much-loved, skimpy polka-dot bikini, her thrift-store slacks and blouses, grad-school overalls, I
NY T-shirt. Every one of them signified an event she’d survived; another move, another episode with Betty, finals week at UN, the blue paisley blouse she’d worn to the Film Forum that first night she’d met Saraub. All gone now. Everything she owned but the clothes on her back, gone.

The fabric of her former clothing lay in pieces on the floor. They hadn’t just been torn, but shredded small as flower petals. Red, pink, green, gray, black, blue: a motley rainbow. As she walked toward the turret, the breeze her body made carried them with her.

Z
zzzt!
Z
zzzt!

She realized now, that the sound was coming from her pants. A bug? A bone finger, scratching? Was she still sleeping? She reached fast into her back pocket. Her phone, set to vibrate. “Oh Goddamn it!” she whispered, then flipped it open.

“Hello?” the woman on the other line asked.

“Yeah,” she said. Her voice was raw, like she’d been screaming all night.

There was a pause for a second or two. Then, “Audrey?”

“Yeah.” She looked around the room. A mess in here. She felt her crotch, to make sure she hadn’t pissed her pants. Wished she hadn’t felt it, because her hand came back wet. Seriously? Again?

What was the last thing she remembered? The taxi driver, who’d smelled like patchouli and Jheri Curl. And then, the brass letters that read 14B. She’d stood in front of them, not wanting to open the door, but having no place left to go. The door had been unlocked. Open, even. And inside…a shiver ran down her spine. The man in the suit had been waiting for her. He’d played piano. “Heart and Soul.” Had she been awake, or sleeping?

“Audrey?” the woman on the other line asked. It sounded like Jill. “Are you okay?”

“No,” she said. “I’m all fucked up. But you figured that, right? It’s pretty obvious.” Out the turret, the storm had arrived. The wind gusted the rain sideways. She realized she didn’t know whether it was morning, or afternoon. The blackbirds trapped in stained glass watched her. She punched one of them with her fist, but the glass didn’t break.

On the other end of the line, Jill didn’t speak. She started to close the phone, then heard, “Yeah. Well, kiddo, who isn’t fucked up?”

She sighed. “I’ve been sleepwalking. Hasn’t happened since I lived with my crazy mom. I woke up just now, and the place is a mess. I trashed my own apartment.”

Another pause. Because nobody ever knew what the hell to say to her when she came out with this shit.

“Are you hurt?” Jill asked. Audrey could hear the frustration in her voice. Imagined her sitting at her desk with a pile of work, looking for somebody to dump it on.

“No,” she said. “I’m in one piece.”

Another pause. And then: “Do you need a therapist? I
can give you a few names. My second son has emotional problems. Lack of emotions, really. He sees someone good.”

Audrey shook her head into the phone. Rich Manhattanites, they loved their shrinks. “I think I’ll start with sweeping up the mess.”

“Are you alone?”

“What do you care?” She’d clearly forgotten she was talking to her boss.

“Nice, Lucas. That attitude’s gonna get you far. I’m asking because I need your input, but if you want, I can come over and help you clean while we talk about it. Also, as a fellow human, I’m concerned about you.”

Audrey frowned, then pulled the phone away and inspected it, like maybe it was defective. Jill Sidenschwandt, showing heart? She put the phone back to her ear. “…No. But thank you. I’ll clean it myself. But that’s. Well, it’s thoughtful.”

“A rain check, then,” Jill said.

This time, Audrey looked around the walls of The Breviary and wondered if they were playing a mean prank and speaking to her through the phone. “That sounds nice…”

Another pause, and then, the moment they’d both been waiting for, that let Audrey know this was her boss and not her concerned buddy. “I know the storm outside is bad, but do you feel up to coming in to the office?”

Audrey’s face crumpled. She didn’t breathe, because she knew it would sound ragged, and she’d start crying. They’d stare at her in the office. They’d know she’d lost her marbles, just like Betty. Or worse, maybe they’d pretend not to see her, because over this last month, she’d become a walking sick house, with a skull nailed to her chest.

“Audrey?”

She reached into her pocket for reassurance. The ring. But instead, out came three Valium and a lithium.
She dry-swallowed them as she talked. The bigger one didn’t go down, so she chewed it into bitter little pieces that dissolved on her tongue. “I was sleepwalking last night,” she repeated, as if to prove it to herself. Only, she remembered little bits, didn’t she? The fabric shears that she’d used to cut the clothes. And the music. And the boxes. She’d worked on the door again, too, hadn’t she? And when she’d finished, she’d put it back in the closet like a secret from herself, because something about it was very bad. Something to do with killing what you love.

Her face went pale as the blood drained, and the thing in her stomach began to slither. She punched it to keep it still and covered the phone, so Jill didn’t hear the sound as she gagged. Had she been sleeping last night, or possessed?

“I can take you out for lunch if that works better,” Jill said. In her mind, Audrey folded the room upon itself. Made it a box that got smaller and smaller. Put herself inside it, where she was safe from the world. Where the world was safe from her, too.

“Audrey? You’re on the East Side, right? I’ll meet you halfway. How about Smith and Wollensky? The company’s treat, obviously.”

She pictured a knife through Jill Sidenschwandt’s head. Ear to ear. Perfectly symmetrical. If she did it right, the point would line up with her eyeteeth and temporal lobes. She’d keep talking for a few minutes before she bled to death. The brain has no sensation. No pain. It would be interesting to see which faculties she lost and which remained the same. “I’m not hungry.”

“Okay, the office? I hate to do this, but you were gone all last week. I saw the work you gave to Simon and David. They’re not as quick as you. Besides…It might be good for you to get out. You don’t sound yourself.”

Audrey grinned the way the children in her dream had grinned: bitterly. Sure. She’d come down and lend a
hand. She’d cut off this bitch’s head. “I’ll be right there,” she said, and snapped the phone shut.

Her shower was quick. She didn’t see her own reflection in the mirror, only black. At times the water was pink. Pretty color, she had to admit. Especially the way the red diluted in ribbons. She’d cut up her clothes, but in the master bedroom’s built-in bureau, she found a blue sweat suit, extra large. She remembered it from the
New York Post
photo she’d seen of the DeLea family. The monster in black glasses had worn it. She pulled it on and cinched the drawstring waist very tight. The soft lining felt like a hug.

At the back of the drawer were a pair of glasses. Her head still throbbed like someone had shoved an ice pick through both temples. She put on the oversized black glasses, Jackie Kennedy, only prescription. The headache immediately abated. “Thank you, Breve,” she whispered. The worm writhed as if in acknowledgment, and she headed out the door.

Outside of 14B, she found a present wrapped in shiny silver paper. She tore it open. Pulled out a ceramic lamp with a Hawaiian hula-girl base. Her skirt and shade were decorated with drawings of banana bunches. The note read:

Gratitude penetrated her haze. She smiled. Sweet, meek Jayne and her dyed red hair. May she inherit the earth. Then she turned it over, and thought about the note. In her mind, she heard the children from her dream, laughing.

Did Jayne think she was crazy, too?

Through the glasses, everything seemed a shade darker. The squirming thing fed on her insides with sharp teeth. Gnawing, gnawing.

She dropped the hula girl. Black hair and lithe body. A bikini top, like the one she’d lost to the floor of 14B. The lamp thudded as it landed on the red shag carpet. In her mind, it wasn’t carpet but red ants. They swarmed, sweet and insane.

She looked at the hula girl’s flesh-colored skin and imagined it was Jayne. Idiot Jayne, who thought an orca was a dinosaur. Beirut, a band. Indians from Iran. Blithely happy Jayne, whose job at L’Oréal was probably forty-year-old copy girl. Of course she could stay up late getting drunk, dating grandpas, and hanging out in coke bars; nobody gave a shit whether she showed up at all. Infuriating Jayne, who didn’t know she ought to be miserable.

The hall was quiet. Not a sound. The overhead light blinked and buzzed like a locust. She looked at the brass letters behind her: 14B.

She knew it was wrong, but the compulsion was strong. Fragile grass skirt. Little fingernails painted red. Idiot dimpled smile, just like those monstrous children. In her mind, the red-carpeted hallway glittered like an artery, coursing with blood.

She looked down at the lamp and saw herself do it. Played the image over and over again until it became inevitable, like a thing already done. Finally, she stomped on the ceramic girl with both feet.

Muffled by the carpet, the sound was delicate, like eggshells cracking, or Jayne’s bones.
One! Two! Three! Four! And Audrey makes five!
She did it again and again. Imagined Jayne’s face beneath her feet, cut up and marred by ceramic shards.

Dumb Jayne, who would accidentally stumble into the better life that Audrey had been scratching for with
both hands. A year from now she’d be running down the aisle with the old guy while redheaded bridesmaids in tacky pink taffeta threw rice. Strolling into never-never land, where fucking bluebirds chirped. And Audrey would remain trapped here in 14B, watching television in the dark.

As she stomped, she remembered a tub. Keith! Olivia! Kurt! Deirdre! But that wasn’t the right order, was it? No, first had gone Keith, then Kurt, last Olivia, who, in her terror, had squeezed the baby too tight, so that by the time it got to the water, it was already still.

…How did she know that? No matter; the truth is the point. Olivia. Clara. Jayne. Betty. Jill. These needy bitches always squeezed too tight.

She smashed again. Again. Again. Until the wires separated, and hula girl’s face became flecks of flesh-colored sand.

The sound didn’t carry, soft as a secret. You’d never know what was happening unless you were out here, watching. During her time with Saraub, she’d missed her secrets. At least now that it was over with him, she could stop pretending that she was happy, or even that she’d ever loved him. That love was anything more than a lie people needed to believe, to keep from slitting their own throats. The world was idiots and dope fiends, and if you weren’t one, you’d better be the other.

The lamp sliced the soles of her shoes, but she kept going. Ground her feet so that they bled. Didn’t bother pulling out the shards from her wounds. The pain was evidence of her devotion. A gift to The Breviary.

When she was done, she looked down at the mess. A red, dusty paste with wires running through it, and a broken lampshade. She imagined Jayne coming home and finding it, and for a moment, her senses returned. “Oh,” she moaned in quick remorse, and bent down to lift the shards, but quickly reconsidered.

Twittish Jayne and her dependence on the kindness of
strangers. Someone ought to teach her to stop knocking. “Fuck you, Jayne,” she shouted down the hall, then punched the elevator button. Feet bleeding, she slammed the iron gate and headed down.