Oblivion (6 page)

“No.” I drag a stool closer to her chair and sit. “No word on Palmer.”

“Here. Don’t forget where you came from.” My mother turns her drawing toward me.

It’s a sketch of a crucifix, sans Jesus’s dead body. His shroud is draped over the arms of the cross, and His crown of thorns hangs from the neck.

Her thick black lashes brush against her cheeks before she meets my gaze. It’s like looking in a mirror sixteen years into the future. “They have you going to church, yes? That foster family of yours?”

“Yes.”

“Holy Promise?”

“Carmel Catholic.”

She sighs, as if to say some-God-is-better-than-no-God.
She shakes off what I perceive as disappointment with a shudder. “How long have you lived there with them?”

“Six months now.”

She rolls her eyes. “My, how time flies.”

“I know it’s been a while since my last visit,” I say. “I’m sorry about that.”

After a few moments, she replies: “Good of you to come.”

“Why are you in a new room?”

She wipes charcoal from her fingers onto her jeans and pretends she hasn’t heard me. She reaches for her deck of Tarot, which she keeps sheathed in a man’s dress sock on her night table.

I have a deck, too, but mine is stuffed into a crocheted bag. I don’t know how to use the cards, but my mother gave them to me shortly before she was sequestered here, so I carry them with me everywhere.

I try again: “Did you lose privileges, or is this a permanent change?”

If it’s the latter, it means she’s getting worse.

“Can you get out at all anymore?” No answer. “Mom?”

Her silence hides nothing from me. I can deduce how she got from point A to point B on my own. There was a time, in the beginning, when Palmer could sign her out for weekend visits. Now she’s under lock and key. Can’t leave, is my guess. Not that there’s anyone left to sign her out anyway.

She shuffles the cards.

The threat of tears builds in my chest, in my lungs. Like it or not, I’m on my own from here forward. Maybe I should stop laughing off Lindsey’s desire to officially adopt me, seeing as it appears the Hutches are the only family I have now.

I stare at the figure that used to be my mother. How is it that I can talk to her, touch her, feel her, smell her, yet no longer rely on her?

“I’d kill for a smoke,” she says.

“I quit.”

She shrugs and slaps the deck down on the snack tray between us. “Good.”

We grew up together, Serena and me. I was born on her sixteenth birthday, when she was a few months younger than I am now. I can’t imagine having a baby at my age, but she made it work. I indulge for a moment in distant memories of my early childhood: drawing pictures in the sand on a sunny beach, the waves tickling my toes as they washed up on the shore. Calmer days. Happier times.

It had always been the two of us against the world. Suddenly, I feel very alone without her. She probably feels the same way, especially since I haven’t been here in such a long time.

I consider telling her about Elijah’s lying to me, about the words perpetually consuming my brain, about the calc test I’m pretty sure I failed this morning. I even want to tell her about John Fogel, who hasn’t left my mind since
our hands touched at chapel that morning. But these things don’t matter in Serena’s world, and what would it look like, if after weeks—months, maybe—I showed up here only to complain about my life?

I take up the cards, shuffle them, cut them twice to my left. I don’t believe in Tarot any more than my mother does, but lately it’s the only avenue she’ll travel to reach me, the only method of communication she’ll explore. “I want to know,” I say slowly, “where Palmer is. If I’m crazy to think he took Hannah.”

Her lips harden into a thin line as she gathers the deck into a single stack again. “Crazy is relative. He’s crazier than both of us.”

“I’m sixteen now.” I swallow hard. “I’m not the same kid you left behind when he stuffed you into this box. I deserve to know: why did you stay with him? Because he was my father?”

“You think you can date that hoodlum, Elijah, and claim to be an adult, Calliope?”

Her words throw me back on the stool a few inches, as if she physically kicked me in the chest. My heart pounds with adrenaline. “You don’t even know him.”

“I know enough to know what happened at that County home.” Her tongue clicks against the roof of her mouth as she stares me down. “For everything I’ve done to protect you, I would’ve hoped you wouldn’t jeopardize your future for the sake of a juvenile delinquent.”

“I love him.”

“Don’t confuse love with sex.” The way she talks about Elijah and me, we’re nothing more than a sleazy fling, and considering my last few meetings with him, I’m starting to wonder if she’s right. There’s no fighting the tears now. I wipe one away.

“You think making adult decisions qualifies you?” She begins to lay out the cards in a cross formation.

I shake my head, then shrug a shoulder. “The decisions I’m entrusted to make are decidedly more adult than the ones you’re making these days, now, aren’t they?”

Her eyes widen, but her jaw remains set.

“But that’s not the point,” I say before she can respond to my rather rude observations about her circumstances here. “The point is that, like it or not, I have to be an adult now. And all these secrets … my whole life is a secret, Mom. I have to know. I have to know why you thought Palmer should die. What you had with him might not have been conventional, but … You loved him. Didn’t you?”

“Calliope …”

She drapes a tendril of my hair behind my ear. The tenderness, the ordinary nature of this tiny gesture, evokes a sob from deep in my throat. God, I miss having a mom. The Hutches care about me—I know they do—but I don’t crave the occasional hugs they give me the way I yearn for contact with my mom. And when my foster parents do embrace me, it doesn’t feel like this.

“Callie, do you think I didn’t know what he had in mind for you?”

Cobblestone. Cobblestone, cobblestone, cobblestone
.

I shake away the word, but I hear it again, as if the pen in my mind is stamping its proverbial foot, reminding me who’s boss:

cobblestone
.

Shut up.

I want to know—What did Serena think Palmer had in mind for me?—but there’s no use in asking. Her memory is unreliable. Most of the things she remembers about that last year never happened: we never collected shells up the coast of the lake, she never learned to play guitar, we never planted daisies on Highland Point. I’d have better luck finding Palmer to learn the answers to these questions—even if he turns up dead.

But I don’t really have to ask, anyway. I think I have a pretty good idea of what Serena meant. She’s one person I never have to convince that Palmer’s capable of evil things. And if she’d known of the horrific possibilities ahead of me … that would explain the knife she stuck into his thigh.

“Do you think I could turn my back on my daughter?” She shoves her tray aside, the locking wheels of which skid on the institutional carpeting. The cross formation becomes a haphazard sea washing around an island of a card in the center: the Magician. Nothing’s between us
now but fifteen inches of air, pregnant with dread.

“My sweet girl.” She gathers me in her embrace, holds me a bit too tight. “When it comes to you, I may as well be the damn holy trinity. Believe in me before, even, you believe in God.”

T
he words overpower me. They bleed through my flesh like sweat, pound in my head like a thousand tiny fists beating me from the inside, churn in my gut like a hamster running amok on a wire wheel.

Too much. It’s too much. I might vomit.

Buried alive, buried alive, buried alive
.

Still half asleep, I throw back the covers and drop my feet to the floor, only to stumble and fall, when my numb extremities cannot sustain my weight. Carpet fuzz clings to my moist skin and accumulates under my fingernails, as I search the floor frantically for my favorite pen and this week’s notebook. I see it in my mind—spiral-bound, white cardboard cover with a crease in the lower right corner,
random verses recorded atop it in red felt-tip.

A wheeze sputters through my lungs, as I pinch my eyes closed, then open them again, in hopes of forcing adjustment to the dark. Elijah. A shadow of his image encompasses me.

I focus.

Elijah, Elijah, Elijah, calm me down. Silence the words.

I try to remember what it feels like the moment he kisses me, the energy consuming me the second our bodies join, but I can’t grasp a single feeling beyond impending cold, damp danger. I seek the comfort of his tongue brushing along my inner wrists, but instead I meet with teeth like daggers.

Their chomping stings my skin, cuts at my flesh, like a rabid dog shredding a raw steak. It feels so real that I wonder: am I still asleep and dreaming?

At last, my fingers close around a pen. Feels like a felt-tip. That’s good.

I hold the pen in my mouth and rake the carpeting in search of my notebook. The fibers itch, consume the whole of me.

As the words rise closer to the surface, the teeth dig deeper into my body.

I can’t find my notebook. Can’t find it. But the words won’t stop.

Buried alive, claw at the case …

Gasping.

Can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t
breathe
.

I bite off the pen cap.

Bring the tip of the pen to my left forearm.

Expunge.

Ah, sweet surrender. I feel as if my lungs are deflating, releasing excess pressure, like a tire too full with air. The pounding behind my eyes begins to wane. My skin stops crawling. The gnawing ceases.

I reach for the switch of the lamp. Even the measly forty watts of the bulb blind me, but I have to read what I’ve written, have to transfer it to my notebook, so I can wash it off my arm.

Fuck. It’s in Sharpie. Fine-tipped. Red.

A tattoo. That’s the comparison Dean Ritchie draws between the words on my arm and the rules of etiquette and conformity here at Carmel Catholic. I’m sitting in his office, yanking at my sleeve, which covers all but a few letters of what I wrote a few hours ago.

“Tattoos must be covered,” Ritchie reminds me. “Therefore, those words must be covered in entirety.”

Ritchie knows about my graphomania, as do most faculty members. However, I suspect many, if not most of them, assume I exaggerate the issue, use it to act out.

I can’t blame them. I was a holy terror when I arrived here. Not because I wanted to be, but because I was suffocating for a while—wearing Land’s End apparel, carrying
a traditional Bible in my hand—and only attempting to grasp a modicum of what used to be my reality. I’ve gotten used to things, just as they said I would, but the lot of them has yet to forgive me for my less than desirable behavior during the adjustment. I remember when I thought attending class was too much to expect of me, as long as I got my work done to the teachers’ satisfaction, and more than once I dared to tell off some teacher who dared to push me to exert my best effort, when I assumed she simply didn’t understand the processes of my mind.

Now, passing notes yesterday with John Fogel aside, I’m damn near a model citizen walking these halls, but Ritchie can only remember the actions of the student I used to be.

Yesterday’s note practically burns my hip through my skirt. I wish I hadn’t brought it with me today. If I’m not going to read it, I ought to throw it away. There’s too much anxiety involved in hiding it from Lindsey. I consider coming clean about it:
Can you imagine? He wrote me a note, instead of you. What a jerk
. But I don’t think he’s a jerk, and after feeling that surge of energy erupting between us, yes, I can imagine why he’d write to me.

“Miss Knowles.” Ritchie rubs his rotund belly, clad in a navy sweater vest that bears the Carmel logo, as he traverses around his mahogany desk, staring all the while at the open manila file in his hand. My name is emblazoned on the tab, and like the neon lights at the Vagabond, the label suggests
Ritchie might find unfortunate things inside, if he dares to open the door. “I’d like to be sympathetic about your condition, but if I bend rules for you, everyone walking these hallways will be a graphomaniac by sundown.”

I don’t dare to look him in the eye. I neglect to inform him—again—of the differences between the girl who constantly updates her status because she wants to tell the world about her latest leg waxing, and the girl who writes because there’s a sufferable force within her.

“You should have washed it off.”

I’d tried. But Lindsey and I ran out of nail polish remover, which is far more effective in erasing Sharpie than soap. Announcing this, and explaining that the marker wasn’t even mine but Lindsey’s and I hadn’t meant to use it, would be talking back, and I don’t do that anymore. Not here, anyway.

“You’re medicated,” he says. The file meets his desk with a slap. He traces a few words with his thick, sausage-like fingers.

“It’s my understanding the medication is supposed to curb these … these … these
urges
of yours.”