Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories (30 page)

THE ONE YOU LIVE WITH

Josh Malerman

Mom held her face and said,

“There’s two yous, Dana. And there always will be. There’s the you that you show to other people. The you who goes to school and goes to parties and meets people and talks a lot or a little, dances or doesn’t. Then there’s the you that you are inside. Now, since you’re just a kid, the two yous are much closer together than mine are. You might not even notice the split. But it’s there. You’re just not smart enough yet to see it. And the older you get, the more that split is gonna grow, breaking up the two yous, until you hardly recognize the you you are when you’re out of the house and the you you are when you’re not. Now, I’m not talking about split personalities here, though believe you me, they
do
live separately. The public and the private.” To Dana, it looked like a cloud passed across Mommy’s eyes, inside her head. “I think it’s the best thing a person can do is to try and keep those two yous as close together as they can. It’s hard. It’s
damn
hard. But you gotta try, right? Cause if you don’t try, one of your yous might get up and do her own thing entirely, without permission from the other. I’ve seen it before. It ain’t pretty, Dana. I may even be guilty of having lost sight of one of my mes a time or two, but I’ve always got it back. Back together. Under control. You know what control is, Dana?”

Dana, five, shook her head no.

“
Control
is being the one who says where the two yous go and who they see and what they do with their day. That’s control. None of this money power shit you’re gonna hear all about for the rest of your life. Real control is controlling the two yous: the one you show and the one you are, giving them permission. Do you understand what I mean?”

Dana shook her head no.

Mom sighed.

“Well, it’s like I said. You’re a kid. Your yous are so close together you think it’s all one cuddly person. But mark my words, girl.” She tapped Dana’s forehead with her fingernail. “You are . . .
not . . . alone . . . in . . . there.
And the sooner you realize
that
, the sooner you can go about taking control. Now, go fetch Mommy something to drink.”

Dana crawled off the couch and crossed the living room. Mom had scared her good. All that talk about two people inside of her and that word, “control.” Momentarily, she wondered if it was Mom still sitting on the couch behind her so she paused at the entrance to the kitchen and spun, to get a good look at her. To be sure.

“Orange juice, Hon,” Mom said. “With just a wee splash of that vodka. Or the other way around. You’re the one fixin’ the drink, Dana. Up to you.”

***

On stage in the school theater, singing soprano with six other sopranos, Dana wondered if this was really her. It didn’t
feel
like her. Singing this stupid song with all these other girls, it’s not what she’d expected of middle school. Dana, twelve, wondered if the only reason she was in the choir was because Michelle said she should do it and so here she was doing it. It was very Michelle to join the choir and the debate team and the track team and all that other stuff but maybe it wasn’t really Dana to do it. And yet . . . here she was.

“Dana!” Mister Terrence called, waving his hands, the signal for practice to pause.

Dana stared back at him, silent.

“You’re not
singing.
”

Dana thought she’d been singing. Wasn’t she singing? And if she wasn’t singing, who was up here on the stage instead?

Whatever this was; Mister Terrence, Michelle, seventh grade . . . it wasn’t her.

“I quit,” she said.

And the theater was very quiet as she left, as her stupid choir shoes clacked on the wooden stage and echoed all over the place like an exit that was much more dramatic than she was.

***

She was drinking a beer on the front porch with a depressed maniac, wondering what she was doing here. She didn’t necessarily enjoy this guy, yet she’d been coming over every other day for a month. Or two. Might have been two. The numbers and time could get confusing when you were on your back, eyes closed, floating down the Universal River, letting life take you where it would. When you didn’t really make any decisions on your own. When you kinda went along with things and acted a certain way in front of other people, a different way than how you acted at home.

“What you thinking about?” the depressed maniac asked. He had a twinkle in his eye. She shook her head, or maybe it was more of an inside head, like she shook her head without him seeing her do it.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” he repeated. Then he laughed real loud, too loud, and part of Dana thought he was making fun of her. But another side of her guessed it was a funny thing to say. Nothing.

“I was wondering what I’m doing here,” she said.

She sipped her beer.

The depressed maniac sighed deep.

“Oh shit,” he said. “Are we about to have the talk?”

Dana didn’t know what the talk was.

“We could have a talk,” she said, but she didn’t really want to.

“No,” he said. He even held up an open palm. Like straight out of a book on how to say no with your hands. “We’re
way
too early into this to start defining things.”

Dana smiled. Define things? She didn’t think she could define things if she had the rest of her life to do it.

“Look,” he said. “If you’re thinking we need to start calling each other girlfriend and boyfriend and all that jazz, I don’t—”

Dana smiled again and hopped off the porch banister. Then she crossed in front of where he sat in the outdoor recliner and took the steps down to the grass. There was still some snow lining the streets.

“I’ll see ya,” she said. Kindly. Relieved, too.

“Hey,” the depressed maniac called after her. “Hey! Where you going?”

Dana turned and waved goodbye. Part of her felt good about it. Like she’d seen the ending of the movie and so she didn’t need to sit through the middle. But another part of her, like half, wondered at her own behavior. Surely sitting on the porch with that guy, spending time with him, her college years, wasn’t her. But what about where she was going, and what she’d do when she got there?

Was that not her either?

***

Dana was getting real pretty. It seemed to be happening fast. Every time she looked in the mirror she saw someone who was prettier and prettier than the last time she checked and more often than not it was real hard to make sense of the person looking back. So this was her. Alright. A pretty woman. Twenty-four years old. She was aging well. As they say. As Mom said. And Mom had aged well, too. So, all right, this was her and this was who her body was growing into but it was hard not to suppress a nervous smile every time she looked in the mirror, like maybe she was letting the person in the glass know that this wasn’t
really
her. And it was nobody’s fault really. This was just the public her, the
visible
her, the one she presented to people, the her she showed around the room. But really she may as well have walked a dog and pretended the dog was her for how close this blonde woman in the mirror was to being her.

She liked this idea.

Liked the idea of the dog.

So she went out and got one.

***

The dog, a golden retriever, was a good one. But he wasn’t as simple as everybody said dogs were. It felt like, to Dana, that over the course of the four years she’d had him, he was the only living thing that’d ever noticed another person wedged inside her. He looked at her funny, with a different shine in his eyes, on the days and in the moments she felt like someone else. Sometimes he even sniffed. Like he could smell this other person in the room. Sometimes this scared her. Part of her. Like half. And she’d smile and shake her head and tell him to get lost, that he was freaking her out, that he should go play with a toy or something and stop staring at her like he saw someone else in the room and that this someone else was sitting on top of her.

Sometimes she’d call her Mom when this happened but Mom was always out partying with friends, with a new boyfriend, someone, and she’d sound only mostly like herself on the phone and she’d always ended up whispering the things she didn’t want the other people around her to hear. Drunkish whispers. Things like,

I’m foolin
’
everybody in this place.

And

They have no idea.

Dana would listen to Mom, hear her out, then hang up without ever really saying what was on her mind, what she was thinking about, that the dog she’d had for four years was getting more and more skittish, barking at nothing, sniffing the air, and staring at her with this stupid tilted head thing he did, as if asking her a question, as if asking who are you that I live with, and who are you that’s sitting on top of her?

***

Aging well. Yes. Prettier at thirty-one than she was at twenty-one. Dana imagined it made some people mad but she just rolled her eyes, inward, thinking how nobody has any say in how big their nose is, how wide their eyes, how high their cheekbones. Some days she made herself ugly on purpose. She’d get some grease from the garage and run it up the sides of her hair, pour ketchup under her nose and over her lips, spin around real fast, then look in the mirror again. These were exciting times when she did this. Because in those moments the person in the mirror truly looked like someone else, or at least someone other than the person she’d been watching growing outside her for thirty-one years. Then the phone would ring or the dog would bark and she would wash her face and get in the shower and clean herself up before returning the phone call or seeing what it was the dog wanted so badly.

She met a man in these days.

The man liked the dog and so he asked if he could pet the dog and Dana said yes, believing she was the kind of person who said yes to questions like these. Then the man stood up and asked what the dog’s name was.

“He doesn’t have one yet,” Dana said, smiling. She could tell the man thought she was pretty.

“No? Did you just get him?”

“Oh no. I’ve had him for seven years.”

How could she know him to name him?

The man laughed so hard that Dana wondered if he was going to be okay and then his eyes settled on hers and she knew he was going to ask her on a date before he did and she decided she would say yes before she did.

“I don’t mean to sound like a crazy person,” the man said. “But you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I’m Jason.”

“Thank you, Jason.”

Not
I’m Dana
because . . . who knew?

“What’s your name? Do you have one?”

More laughter, mostly on his end, but Dana laughed, too, as it always felt like the right thing to do.

She wondered if the man, Jason, felt like he was talking to two people.

“My mom named me Dana.”

“Well,” Jason said. “Your mom picked out a lovely name.”

Silence then. The dog sniffed close to Dana and she shoved his head gently aside.

“Would you like to get a coffee?” Jason asked.

Dana smiled. She could feel her high cheekbones lift the corners of her lips, as if her mouth were a marionette.

A well-built one.

“Yes,” she said. Then she pointed to the coffee shop they were standing in front of. “Here, right?”

Jason laughed again. He looked surprised.

“Well, I didn’t mean right now!” he said. “But, yeah. Absolutely. Wanna get coffee right now?”

Dana didn’t know if she wanted to. Maybe a part of her did.

The dog sniffed.

“Yes,” she said.

Jason held the door open for her to enter.

***

Married nine years and Jason always seemed like the same person. Sure, sometimes he got angry, sometimes he said things that were out of character, but eventually these things became part of his character and Dana had a hard time believing his continuity. It must take a great effort, she imagined, to keep himself together like that.

Sometimes she spied on him.

When he was watching a movie or fixing himself a sandwich, sometimes Dana would crouch behind the kitchen island and peek up over the marble top and watch him do things. Even in these moments he rarely looked like anybody other than Jason. Sure, sometimes he appeared tired but it was tired
Jason.
The same floppy brown hair and loose lower lip; the kind look in his eyes. Sometimes Dana scared herself when she did this, when she spied. As if not only was she spying on Jason in the kitchen but someone else was in the room spying on her, too. Like someone else was watching her watch her husband and one time the feeling was so great that she actually popped up from behind the couch and said, “Hey there!” Just to not feel alone with whoever was watching her.

Jason was scared good and laughed about it and asked if she wanted to join him for a movie and she said yes. They hadn’t named the dog, a thing Jason cutely ascribed to half the reason they got married,
the Nameless Dog
, but the dog would always join them for movies. And sometimes Dana wondered if Jason called the dog in to protect himself. Protect himself from this other person who was watching Dana watch Jason.

***

At seventeen years old, the dog died. Dana was forty-one. No more sniffing. No more staring. No one around to make whichever Dana was present feel like the other Dana was the truth.

***

At fifty Dana looked fifteen years younger than she should have and Jason would point out the younger men who looked at her. He said he liked it and Dana had no reason to think he didn’t. Jason was very good at being Jason.

But the cracks were showing and had been for some time.

Maybe it was a lift of one eyebrow. An unnecessary shrug. An exaggerated thing to say.

Like:

Are you sure, Dana?

Always are you sure. Like Jason was just now seeing the open space, the gap in Dana. Like he knew someone else was inside her and he’d decided to love her, too. A good man. Good enough never to bring it up. Good enough never to tell her she wasn’t acting like herself. The closest Jason ever said to anything like that was on New Year’s Eve.