The Fall of Never (45 page)

—I am Simple Simon,
said the voice.

“I still can’t see you.”

—I’m right here. You can hear me, can’t you?

“Yes.” Sort of: the voice was inside her head.

—Then I must be here.

“I want to see what you look like.”

—You haven’t decided that yet.

“When can I see you?”

—Whenever you’re ready, I suppose.

The dull throb at her groin suddenly blossomed into exquisite pain, and she felt herself double over, planting her hands into the water and dropping to her knees. The pain was fierce and acidic, reminiscent for some reason of oranges, and with one great exhalation, she urinated in her pants.

She thought she heard faint giggling coming from the embankment and she blushed, embarrassed.

It was dark by the time she returned home. Glenda fussed over her as she entered the house, asking where she’d been and stuffing her full of hot chicken soup. Her parents were nowhere to be found. On her way past her father’s thinking room, Kelly noticed that the door was shut. She jiggled the knob and found it locked, too.

Upstairs, she prepared for bed and crawled beneath the bedclothes, suddenly exhausted. Closing her eyes, she waited for sleep to carry her away…yet found herself concentrating on the sound of creaking floorboards in the hallway just outside her bedroom door. Sitting up, she thought she saw a shadow pass beneath the crack in the door. Listening, she heard the footsteps recede down the hallway until they reached the stairwell. She heard the stairs creak.

Pulling back the blankets, she slipped out of bed and padded across the floor to the bedroom door. Careful not to make any noise, she turned the knob and pushed it open just a crack. The hallway looked empty, but she could clearly hear someone moving down the staircase at the end of the hall. Hers was the only bedroom on the second floor, and it was unusual for anyone—even Glenda, except for when she read to Kelly at night—to walk around up here.

Kelly crept into the hallway and tiptoed to the edge of the stairwell. A soft yellow light played against the wall: the downstairs hall light. Peering over the railing, she made out the lumbering shuffle of her father as he eased down the last of the risers and paused at the foot of the staircase. Black from shadows, he was only a silhouette to her, and she leaned further over the railing to see him better.

He appeared to waver at the foot of the stairs, confused as to his destination, and finally rested his bulk against the wall. Soundlessly, he let his weight slide down the wall until the first few stairs came up to meet him. He hunkered there, his legs bent, his long arms and hands draped over his knees like large fish laid out on rocks. She watched him, hardly breathing, frightened by what she was too young to acknowledge as his vulnerability. And then came the sounds—the soft, miserable hitches in his unsteady breathing. His massive back, like the canvas sail of some great ship, shook and trembled with each sob.

In utter shock, Kelly thought,
He’s crying.

Without thinking, she turned around the railing and grabbed the banister with one hand. She took a step down on the stairs; it creaked loudly under her foot. Terrified, she froze.

Her father’s head snapped in her direction. Shadows played heavy across his features, but she had no trouble making out his eyes—they pierced the darkness like those of a frightened forest animal. For a brief moment, the two of them remained silent and unmoving, trapped in a place passed over by time.

Then her father stood quickly from the stairs. “Go to bed,” he said. His voice was flat. “You stay away from me.”

He turned and disappeared down the hall. Motionless, Kelly watched her father’s enormous shadow withdraw from the opposite wall and disappear.

Before the conclusion of that year, Kelly came to understand two things: that her mother was pregnant and that this new child, once born, would come to occupy what little time Kelly spent with her parents. This did not bother her. However, she knew that it had been Glenda who’d taken care of her all these years, and that therefore her time with the old housemaid would also be severed. She thought of Glenda’s singing, thought of the storybooks the woman would read to her on occasion, and it filled Kelly with a premature longing for the woman. She found she missed Glenda before Glenda was even gone. And although her parents said very little to her about the new child, Glenda had sat her down on her bed one evening and asked Kelly if she understood what having a new baby in the house meant.

“I don’t know,” Kelly said, but thought,
It means that you’re going to forget about me and I’ll be all alone.

“It means,” explained Glenda, “that you’ll have a little brother or sister, and that I’ll have a new baby to take care of. You see, we’re both going to be very busy, Kelly. Do you know what it’s like to be a big sister?”

Kelly shook her head. Until now, the prospect that she herself might be expected to play a role in this strange child’s life had eluded her. “No,” she said.

“Well,” Glenda said, “it means you will have to take good care of this little fellow, and teach him or her how to do the things that you already know how to do.”

Kelly’s mind returned to the day in her father’s thinking room—the day she had made the animal heads come to life. Was that the sort of thing she was supposed to teach her younger brother or sister? And how in the world does someone even begin teaching such a thing? She thought of the barrage of tutors that marched through the house during the week and tried to understand the difference between teaching arithmetic and teaching…teaching
scary
things. It occurred to her then that she possessed no word for what she’d done in her father’s private room. And the thought of teaching someone else how to do that frightened her.

“No,” she said, “I don’t want a baby here, I don’t want it.”

“Why, dear?”

“I don’t,” was all she said. “I don’t, I don’t,
I don’t!”

Regardless, the baby came. After two days at a hospital in the city, her parents returned to the compound with a tiny, squirming thing wrapped tight in a soft pink blanket. Too afraid to approach, Kelly remained on the stairwell and watched as her parents silently ushered their new child into the house, spoke a few incoherent words to each other, then carried the baby upstairs. Her mother passed her on the stairwell and watched her with narrowed eyes. Haggard and distressed, Marlene Kellow paused briefly, her arms full of the little thing.

“Want to see it?” she said flatly.

Kelly nodded and her mother bent and exposed the ruddy, pig-nosed face of her sister Becky. It was impossible, she thought, that anything that looked like that could be alive. She’d never seen a baby before and suddenly her mind filled up with a million questions: how does it eat? What does it wear? When will it speak and what will it say? Mostly, while staring at it, she wondered what its purpose was—what did it do, what purpose did it serve? As Glenda cleaned the house and prepared the meals, as her father and mother earned money, what would this new addition contribute to the household? It made no sense.

She looked up and met her mother’s eyes. There was no compassion there. Yet the woman appeared deep in thought. The corner of her mother’s mouth twitched. Marlene Kellow said, “I felt the same thing with this one. God help me.”

Though she didn’t understand what her mother’s words meant, she understood the contempt in her tone. Backing against the stairwell wall, she watched as her mother rose and continued up the stairs with the baby.

She looked down and saw her father glaring at her from the bottom of the stairs.

Several evenings later, Kelly crept into the large and mostly barren room where Becky slept. The room was empty save for a crib in the center, the dusty shades half-drawn against the setting sun. Kelly moved across the floor, careful not to make the floorboards creak, and edged up to the side of the crib, peered in. The baby was awake and fussing to itself, sputtering tiny sounds that were almost nonexistent. Its face was red and puffy, its eyes almost lidless and squinty. And it was so
small.
It seemed ridiculous to think that this creature would ever grow to be a genuine human being. How could that be?

“Becky,” she whispered over the railing of the crib. Her voice caused the infant to start. “Becky.” She repeated the name. It sounded make-believe to her. “Where did you come from?”

Of course, the child did not answer. But at the sound of her older sister’s voice, infant Becky managed to turn her tiny head and look in her immediate direction.

Curious, Kelly reached over the railing and touched the side of the baby’s face with her index finger. It was hot and soft. She kept the finger there for several moments, until the baby started to struggle against her. Only then did she retract her hand.

“Glenda’s mine,” she said. “You can’t take her away. I won’t let you. I don’t know where you came from, but I won’t let you. And I won’t teach you anything, do you understand? I’m not your big sister. I don’t want to be.”

The baby began to cry.

Over the passage of seasons, the forest became her home. Though the imaginary creation that she had named Simple Simon only presented himself when she was lonely or angry or both, she found solace in the welcoming green of the woods. She spent several days during the summers of her tenth and eleventh years wading in the cold waters of the brook and reading high school romance novels beneath the trees. And although Simple Simon only emerged (vocally, at least) when Kelly needed him, there was always an underlying presence she was aware of on a subconscious level…as if the imaginary boy had somehow become part of the forest itself, and he was always all around her.

In December of that year, she fell ill with the flu and was castigated by Glenda for leaving her bedroom window open throughout the night.

“I didn’t open it,” she said, tucked beneath layers of heavy quilts.

“Somebody
did,” Glenda insisted. “Windows just don’t open by themselves.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“What if you get the baby sick? Wouldn’t you feel badly?”

“No,” she said truthfully. Then reiterated that she hadn’t opened the window.

Glenda waved a hand at her. “Oh hush, now. Anymore fibbing and I’ll tell your parents.”

Kelly shrugged. “Go ahead, they won’t care.”

Her mind floating in and out of fever, Kelly remained in bed for several days. At one point, in the middle of the night, she saw a blurred image on the other side of her bedroom window. It was white and vaporous, almost ghostlike. Contributing the hallucination to fever, she watched as the window slid open, the curtains billowed out, and a strong gust of wind assaulted the room. She could feel the freezing night air against her face. Her eyes fluttered.

When she awoke in the morning, the window was shut.

She called for Simple Simon on her first day back at the woods. He responded almost immediately.

“You came to my room,” she said, “and pulled my window open, didn’t you?”

—Where have you been? It’s lonely here.
He was avoiding the question.

“I’ve been home sick because you let the window open.”

—Are you mad?

Half-grinning, she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry you get lonely. I do too, sometimes. A lot.”

—I’m not lonely now.

“Me, neither,” she said. Crossing the clearing beside the now-frozen brook, she curled up on her throne—a pile of rocks covered with cushions from her mother’s patio furniture she’d constructed the previous summer. After some consideration, she said, “I almost saw you one night. When you came to my window. You were almost there.”

—I can feel it,
Simple Simon said.

“I think I’m ready to see you now.”

—Can you do it? It’ll be more difficult than seeing that stone…

“Don’t make me nervous!” she joked. Closed her eyes. She thought:
Simple Simon met a Pie Man going to the fair…

She thought of a boy—of a handsome, friendly, happy boy who liked to smile and play games and…and live in the woods. A
perfect
boy, just like in fairy tales. And yet she found it impossible to summon the image of an
original
boy; instead, her mind became cluttered with images of boys from television programs and magazines and books…from the few boys she recognized (and secretly admired) from town…

—That won’t do.

“I’m trying.”

Unsatisfied, she erased the images of those boys and started from scratch. Simplicity was the key—a nose, a mouth, two eyes, two ears. It was different with the stone; she hadn’t thought about it hardly at all. In fact, when it had appeared in her hand, she was almost as surprised as the ugly pug-faced girl who caught it in the shin. But now, this was something different, something much more difficult. She didn’t even know what to think about, what to focus her attention on…if it would even work…

She opened her eyes, exhausted, and realized that the sun had shifted position.

From the corner of her eye, and moments before it faded, she caught a reflection in the frozen brook water of a spindly male form standing at the bank. Like the impression of a waning shadow, it made itself visible only with the most rudimentary of details, and dispersed into nothingness moments after she saw it.