The Lovely Shadow (3 page)

In the beginning my mother would show an
almost instant remorse after striking me and would seem to return
to her normal self. Then she’d begin a regimen of crying, hugging,
apologizing, and explaining that my Daddy left poison in me. In
time, though, my mother’s ritual of repentant remorse began to come
later and later after the beatings, and finally there were no more
apologies.

The worst part of my mother’s derailment from
sanity came when she started wearing her wedding dress. She’d put
on the dress and wander aimlessly through the house talking to the
dead as though they were right beside her. She’d lost so much
weight and taken so few trips into the sunshine that her pale and
emaciated frame drifting through the house looked remarkably
ghost-like itself.

Although her appearance was more than enough
to scare the crap out of a six year old kid, it didn’t seem to be
enough for her, so to add to the overall creep factor she’d carry
on conversations with John and Joe, talking as though they were
really there, pausing like she was listening to a reply from them
and then answering in turn.

Sometimes she’d laugh like someone had just
said something funny or she’d toss her hair and put on a coy
expression like she was trying to be cute. Sometimes she’d even
raise her voice and wave her arms around as if engaged in some
vehement disagreement with the unseen dead.

I learned early on not to disturb my mother
when she was wearing her dress. The first time I saw her in it I
was completely unprepared.

It was nighttime and I’d awakened with a need
to pee. My bedroom was at the end of the hallway and Joe’s room was
directly across the hallway from mine. In the middle of the hallway
was the bathroom and at the far end of the hall, nearest the living
room, was my mother’s room. The hallway was lit by a small night
light shaped like Snoopy sleeping on his doghouse. It was plugged
into an outlet near the floor directly across the hallway from the
bathroom door.

As I entered the hall from my dark room, the
dim light in the hallway proved to be too much for my night eyes. I
squinted and rubbed them as I stumbled down the hall towards the
bathroom. When I finished rubbing them and started to open them
again I saw a ghost not more than four feet in front of me.

A scream escaped my lips as I stared at the
specter. A satiny, white, strapless dress was hanging loosely on a
frame of pale flesh that was barely sinuous enough to hold it up.
Bony, naked shoulders were protruding at strange angles above the
cut of fabric, highlighting deep hollows at the base of a long,
corded neck. Skinny arms with long concaves beneath tiny biceps and
strange bulging elbows were held straight out, away from the body
with the palms facing out as if awaiting crucifixion. The long,
gangly fingers of each hand were splayed outward, stretching
straight out as if trying to flee away from the hands that held
them prisoner.

The head that sat atop this macabre trunk was
no less ghoulish. Dark, matted hair stuck out in multiple
directions, weaved and knotted together in clumps like a bird’s
nest made of black grass. This broken nest framed a shriveled pale
face. Dark circles hung beneath closed, purple-red eyelids that
were set deep into sunken sockets. Hollow cheeks flanked thin, pink
lips like guards escorting a prisoner to his cell. The lips were
pressed together and stretched tightly into what was either a grin
of pure ecstasy or a grimace of pain.

The entirety of this lurid wraith was given
an ethereal glow by the innocently snoozing Snoopy as he laid on
his doghouse in the wall socket.

The sound of my scream hit my mother as
though there was physical substance in the sound waves the scream
produced. Her entire body convulsed like a shock wave had just
ripped through her. Her eyes popped open revealing too much white
and too much pupil. Her tightly stretched lips snapped into a
pucker like a rubber band that has been stretched from both ends
into an elongated shape and then had those ends released
simultaneously.

The rebounding force from the rapid puckering
was too great to hold the lips in a pucker for more than a
millisecond, and as her lips smashed together into a pucker the
shockwave of flesh slapping flesh caused them to immediately peel
open into a snarl revealing rapidly yellowing teeth.

A shrill, unwavering note emanated from
somewhere high in her throat and her arms that had appeared to have
been patiently waiting for the hammer and nails suddenly snapped
forward towards me, the formerly straight fingers bending
themselves into claws.

That was the image I saw with my eyes, but in
my mind, I saw the unassuming librarian ghost that transformed into
a malevolent demon at the beginning of the first Ghostbusters
movie.

As recognition washed over me I screamed
louder, for when I realized that this was my own mother, and not a
ghost, I was even more terrified. I tried to back away from her but
I stumbled and fell. My mother, still shrieking that singular note,
rushed towards me. When she reached me, she gave me a swift kick in
the stomach that knocked the wind out of me.

As I was busy folding up like a lawn chair,
gasping for breath, and suspecting that I suddenly understood how a
fish plucked from the water feels, my mother finally stopped
screeching and started screaming at me.

“YOU…LITTLE…BASTARD!” she screamed. “YOU
SCARED THEM AWAY! YOU SCARED THEM AWAY!” With that she turned and
marched down the hall to her bedroom, slamming the door after
her.

I laid there for a bit, crying silently and
staring at Snoopy sleeping peacefully on his little red doghouse.
Eventually my breath returned to me and I sat up and wiped my face.
As I got up off the floor I noticed that a trip to the toilet was
no longer necessary but a change of clothes was. I walked back to
my bedroom to change clothes and go back to bed but paused at my
door. From down the hall I could hear my Mother sobbing behind her
closed bedroom door and I felt sad for her.

The next day my mother seemed normal again. I
was sitting at the table eating a bowl of Lucky Charms when she
emerged from her bedroom. She had bathed, combed her hair for the
first time in a week, and dressed in her normal clothes.

Although she had dark, puffy circles under
her eyes, was still far too skinny, and seemed to be gaining more
wrinkles on her face, I thought she looked beautiful. When she saw
me, she smiled broadly and came over to tousle my hair and kiss my
forehead.

“How’d you sleep, Johnny?” she asked me. I
was uncertain how to answer so I just diverted my eyes and shrugged
my shoulders. She cocked her head and looked at me. “Well,” she
said, “I slept like the dead. I don’t think I’ve slept that well in
ages.”

‘Yeah, you looked like the dead too Ma,’ I
thought to myself with a certain morbid cynicism.

I suddenly understood that she had no memory
of the previous night. I would have thought I’d dreamt it, had it
not been for the bruise on my belly. I figured it might be best not
to mention it to her and simply hope that it never happened again.
But it did happen again…and again...and again. Fortunately, I’m a
quick learner and I never interrupted her dress clad wanderings
again.

When she wasn’t wearing her wedding dress and
conversing with the dead, my mother’s behavior was erratic.
Sometimes she was sweet and loving. Sometimes she was pucker-faced
and violent. Often she was simply so withdrawn that it seemed as if
she’d forgotten that I existed at all. When she went into extended
periods of secession from the human race I took care of myself.

Long before the Sickness had taken her, she’d
set up bi-weekly deliveries of groceries from the local grocer. The
order never changed so she was able to pay several months in
advance.

After Joe died we didn’t need quite so many
groceries but she never changed the order and we soon began to have
a surplus of food. Once the cupboards and the fridge in the kitchen
were full I started loading up the cupboards and freezer in the
basement.

So whenever my mother withdrew, I simply
spent my days watching television and feeding myself from our
stockpile of bread, and cheese, and peanut butter, and hot dogs,
and cereal, and so on, and so forth. In the end, it turned out that
I was very lucky that we had such surplus.

That was pretty much how things went on for
the majority of the time after Joe died. My mother had a few
moments of lucidity here and there, but for the most part you
couldn’t trust those moments. If you tried to talk to her while she
was lucid there was a very good chance that she was going to snap
and turn suddenly and unrepentantly violent. And if you interrupted
her while she was wearing her wedding dress and conversing with the
dead there was a good possibility that you’d wind up as dead as the
dead she conversed with.

Fortunately for me, my mother had taught me
how to read fairly early in my home schooling and I had a genuine
lust for it. I read every book in our house multiple times after
she went bonkers. I had discovered that reading was a good way to
keep out of her way as well as help me forget to be afraid.

Watching television was another favorite
pastime of mine while my mother’s brain was AWOL. We were lucky
enough to have cable television and I suppose that at six years old
I probably shouldn’t have watched the programs I watched, nor read
the books I read, but without anybody coherent enough to stop me I
was pretty much free to do what I wanted.

I thought life was pretty good for me during
that time, actually. I only had to eat the foods I liked, which
just so happened to be foods that I could easily prepare. I could
watch the television any time I wanted, and watch any program I
wanted. I could read any book I wanted (with the apparent exception
of Playboy Magazine anyway).

I didn’t know that I should have friends, or
that my mother should have been taking care of me. I had no idea
that the lifestyle I was living was completely inappropriate. I
simply assumed that it was the normal way that people lived.

At any rate, if someone had asked me what I
thought of my life at that point I would have probably shrugged and
said something like, “It’s ok, I guess.” I knew I was bitterly
lonesome, but I could mostly fix that with books and television. I
knew I was scared a lot, but I could also mostly fix that with
books and television. It wasn’t until June 12th, 1990—the day when
dawning realization crashed over me like tidal surf—that I
understood how bad my life was…and it was about to get worse.

During my mother’s rousing rendition of a
starving savage clubbing a pig to death with a Playboy magazine,
I’d blacked out. When I awoke my first thought was, ‘Dear God! That
crazy Bitch knocked my eyeballs out of my head!’

My second thought, which followed pretty
close after the first, was ‘Whoa, Buddy, you’d better cut back on
that cable television talk before that lunatic finds a reason rip
your tongue out too!’ After these two thoughts finished their
journey through my jumbled mind I took panicked stock of my
situation.

I truly was blind. I blinked a few times,
shutting my eyes at tight as I could and then popping them open
suddenly as if that manic action would force them to work better.
It didn’t, I still couldn’t see anything at all and I began to
panic a bit more.

I started screaming for my mother.

“Mama…Mama!” I screamed. “Where are you
Mama?”

There was no response and I noticed that my
voice sounded muffled, like it was being absorbed into its
surroundings. A thought tickled the back of my mind but I couldn’t
quite bring the thought to maturity. My panic grew.

I started to thrash around (as if that was
really going to do any damned good), and winced as my sore, tired
body protested against any sudden movement. I decided that laying
still and screaming my fool head off was a much better solution to
my problems.

I screamed louder, my panic escalating from
blossom to full bloom.

“Mama! I’m scared, Mama! Where are you?”

My voice still sounded odd and that thought
was still tickling my brain. If I had been able to calm down and
scratch the itch that the thought was creating I probably could
have saved myself from the sore throat I ended up with, but I was
too busy panicking to think coherently.

I lay on my back with my head up and screamed
at the top of my lungs until I was hoarse. I begged, pleaded,
threatened, and even cursed at the top of my lungs. There was no
response.

When I was too tired to make much more noise
than a small scratchy whisper I finally stopped. I laid my head
back down a bit too hard and winced as it connected with a solid,
irregular floor.

When my head thumped on the floor it seemed
to knock that niggling, tickling thought from the back of my mind
to the front.

‘Why is the floor so hard?’ I wondered. ‘Why
does my voice sound funny and yet familiar? Why is the air so
musty?’

I put my palms against the floor and felt
around. The floor was rough and cold. Small ridges swirled beneath
my palms as I dragged them across the surface. A small pile of grit
built up under my palms as I swept them across the surface.

“Cement,” I croaked out loud with triumphant
satisfaction. I had unraveled the mystery of the floor and with
that revelation several others came bursting forth like Fourth of
July fireworks exploding in my brain.

‘I’m in the basement! That’s why my voice
sounds funny! I’m not blind, it’s only dark!’

As these revelations washed over me they
washed the last of my panic away with them. I was going to be okay
after all, I thought. All I had to do was figure out where the
stairs were and crawl up them and head out the door.