The Eye Unseen (25 page)

I whined and brought his attention back to me.

We put on a show. For our audience. I was amazed, after all the blood soaked into the carpet, that I had any left in my veins at all. How had he not yet done me in?

Although I wished for years afterward that he had.

Alex was the first to go.

After hours of witnessing my personal tragedy, he was exhausted, his cheeks coated in tears.

“Have you seen enough yet, Alex, my man?” the intruder asked. “Tired of watching?”

At first I was terrified that the man would assault him as well. Untie Alex, flip him over, and wreck him just as he had me. But when the redhead walked to the corner and came back with our shotgun, we all knew Alex’s life was over.

Before he died, before the last second we shared together, Alex sent me all of his love with a barely discernible nod. Just the slightest dip of his forehead, and we were frozen in that moment, our silent farewell.

My heart exploded with the blast that took off his face.  The man held me over Alex’s fresh corpse, his fingers forcing my eyelids open, the scene paralyzing me with sorrow and fear. My mouth opened, but the scream I desperately wanted to unleash refused to budge from my throat. Blood turned my new curtains into gothic art. Bits of Alex’s brain fell from the walls, the drapery rod. As his body slumped, the chair toppled. Alex landed on the floor, his skull a white watermelon husk, the pink meat staring at me as my captor grabbed my arm and twirled me around to face him.

“Well, it’s just the girls now, isn’t it? Should we get this party started?”

Hours upon hours upon hours. The things he did to me so shameful I didn’t know how I’d ever be able to face the world again. The things he made me do to my mother so atrocious I knew our relationship would forever be so fragile we’d never know another day but this one.

“Do you think you’ve had enough yet, Joanie? Because you know why I’m here, don’t you? We’re going to have a baby together!”

Did I pass out then?

“I don’t know. Could you ever have enough? Let’s see if your mom will give us a hand.”

He laughed as he tied her forearms to the chair, then pulled the handsaw out of a moving box piled in the corner of the room.

“You should be more careful who you hire for odd jobs around the house, Joanie. Remember that in the future. I don’t want my daughter to ever get in trouble like you have!”

The first cut was horrific. Mom’s cries were guttural, mind-churning horror. They filled the room, sliding down the walls with the drips of blood as it sprayed from the cheap saw-blade.

How I loved her. I could barely comprehend that Alex was gone, but at least it had been sudden and he hadn’t suffered. Too much.

But this man was evil personified. Her pain was his glory. When she closed her eyes, he kicked her in the knee so hard I could hear the bone shatter. He wanted her to watch.

The sawing took forever. Our attacker savored his work, went about it like an artist. When Mom’s wrist hung from her bone, connected only by the muscles underneath, he flipped it, mocking her, cackling through her pain.

When the first hand was severed, he paraded around the room with it, making bloody handprints on the wall, dipping her fingers in her bloody stump and drawing curly-qs, wavy lines, anything that caught his fancy.

“This is so much fun! Let’s do it again!”

By the time he had removed her other hand, Mom was all but gone. Her head rolled limply against her shoulders, but he pulled it back up by her hair and slapped her to consciousness.

The blood pooled at her feet, soaked into the carpet. I imagined the pad underneath sucking it up, drinking it like a sailor, taking Mom’s life and making it a Bloody Mary to last throughout eternity.

I was happy she would soon die. To end her suffering. To get her out of this room, out of this house, away from my torturer.

But he had one last thing planned.

“Wake up, Mom. You’ll want to see this!”

He took her hands and used them on me. Started with my mouth, pushed a finger between my lips and made me suck. Then became cruder. The man pushed his fingers inside Mom’s severed skin, wore her hands like gloves, and squeezed my breasts while I yelped beneath him.

“Do you see that, Gladys? I think Joanie likes it.” When Mom didn’t respond appropriately, he bludgeoned her other knee, the pain forcing her eyes wide open.

Her hands developed a life of their own. I was barely alive myself, and knew I had to be hallucinating, but when I looked over at the chair where my husband had toppled, the redhead sat holding my daughter.

He pointed at my crotch, my splayed legs.

Mother’s fist entered my body. Brandy giggled while I bucked on the floor, Mom’s fingers reaching into my very womb, checking, I was almost certain, that I was ripe to carry on the family curse and that his seed had been planted.

Brandy watched while her grandmother bled out. While her severed hands roamed my sacred spots, while I writhed beneath them. The devil laughed and pointed, tickling my little girl, telling her horrible things about me.

“Your Mom is such a slut. Look at what a whore she is!”

Brandy threw back her head triumphantly, joined him in laughter.

“But guess what? She’s going to have a baby. You’re going to have a little sister.”

“I am! A little sister! How do you know?” Her excitement filled the room. For a second, I was so elated that she wasn’t in fear, that Brandy seemed oblivious that her dead father lay right beside her chair.

For a second.

“Because I put her there. But you’ve got to promise me something, Brandy.”

“What?”

“You’re going to have to look out for her. Your Mommy is going to be sick for quite a while, and you’re going to have to treat that baby like she’s your own.”

“Mommy’s sick?” Brandy finally looked at me, her eyes absorbing the situation. “Are you sick, Mommy?”

“Promise me, Brandy. Tell me what you’re going to do.” His hands ran up her legs as he talked, and what strength I had left dissolved as I thought about what he might do to my child.

“We’re going to have a baby! I’m going to have a little sister! And I’m going to have to take care of her, because my mommy is so sick!”

The past faded.

The curtain came down.

But when I reopened my eyes, he came right back at me, teeth yellowed and dripping blood.

On the pillow my mother’s hand flinched.

I would never survive this another time.

At least, if I managed to die, I wouldn’t have to live with you again.

Nine days left.

Nine days, and then I was done.

Lucy

The horizon stretched out like long strips of cotton candy, layered one flavor on top of another, pink, yellow, peach, and pinker still, until it gave way to the blueberry taffy that made up the sky.

As night neared, it all darkened. The fuchsia contrasting to the black that made up all the landmarks.

They rose from the ground like miniatures. The farmsteads that dotted the countryside, trees reaching up in prayer, all dramatic, outlined against the colorful sky. From my perch against Brandy’s window, I could make out barns and silos and the homes of people who used to flavor my life.

The Millers lived a mile to the west of us. Their house sat, black, empty while they finished their second-shift jobs at the Walmart twenty miles away. I couldn’t imagine how busy their store was, so close to Christmas.

Four grain elevators abutted the gravel road that eventually connected to the highway, running south. Birds jumped from spot to spot, foraging for seed in the cold. From so far away they looked like the fleas that infested Tippy’s tummy in the summer.

Mr. Wyckoli had been a widower for six years now. Brandy and I used to bake him pies and big loaves of bread and bike them down to his house. He was a sweet man. I could see his light on in the kitchen, this one bright flag breaking up the night, and knew he was sitting at the table, probably in his undershirt, watching the little television mounted on top of his microwave. Smoking his loneliness away.

It hit me hard. Mr. Wyckoli’s depression. After his wife passed, he rarely left the house. Just wiled away his hours watching game shows and playing solitaire. His house was filthy. Mom had sent us down several times to clean it for him, and I was always ashamed to touch his dirty clothes, feed them into the washing machine. I couldn’t imagine how he felt inside, watching us do it for him, seeing us scrub his toilet and or scrape the old food off the dishes that stretched the entire length of his kitchen counter.

A couple of times a year Brandy would visit him, open up his barn, and take out his riding mower to run over his yard. I picked up the sticks for her, made piles in his side yard. Took the rake and tried to tame some of the vines that grew wild around his hedges.

Did he think of us? Miss our holiday cookies? Did our lack of attention this year send him into a deeper cave, emotionally?

Poor man. Alone, and I couldn’t do anything to make him feel better. We had tried to convince him to get a dog. He loved Tippy, even babysat her once for me when we had to travel overnight for a mission event with church. But he didn’t want one of his own. He didn’t want to abandon it when he finally died and met his wife, when, he said, they would be united for all eternity.

I touched the window pane. Sent him a bit of good cheer, all that I had in me. How odd that my life would become like his: passing time watching my chickens parade around the walls, talking to a sister that didn’t live here anymore, waiting for the day Mom would finally kill me and bury me in the backyard. 

From the edge of my vision, I saw movement. Ants running across the field. When I narrowed my eyes and concentrated, I realized that the deer were streaking through my neighbors’ yards.

I dared to move the curtain. Twenty, maybe thirty, stretched like a garland across the horizon. I wouldn’t yell to them but screamed in my head so loudly my eardrums pounded, and I about fell over when they stopped as a unit and turned to face me.

My fingers wiggled in a pathetic wave.

The buck stepped forward. Raised his head. Bowed to me.

I could feel our connection. Just seeing him made my heart beat stronger, my will strengthen. As if he were inside me, bolstering my confidence.

I nodded.

He lowered his head, his eyes remaining fixed on me.

The herd ran into the trees, where the branches pulled them in like children, protecting them from outside eyes.

I wondered if Mr. Wyckoli would outlive me.

*  *  *

I liked it better when Mom had just muttered through the night.

Now, her bad dreams kept us all awake. I wanted to go to her, rouse her, do anything to get the agonizing screams to stop, but I was afraid.

What would she say about my hair?

When Mom started begging for someone to kill her, Tippy and I decided we were being petty. She needed help. What did my hair matter in the whole scheme of things?

My hands shook so violently that I could barely turn the knob, and I had to use both of them to twist it far enough to unlatch the door.

Tippy and I both sighed with relief that it wasn’t locked. God must have closed it completely when He left us. My dog and I no longer shut the door all the way.

But the second my eyes adjusted to the mayhem in the hallway, I slammed it closed.

“What the fuck was that?” Tippy backed away.

“I don’t know.”

Mom’s screams were piercing.

“Don’t you dare open that door again!” Tippy hollered when I reached for the knob.

“She’s in trouble, Tip. She needs me.”

“Oh, screw that. She’s never needed you. She couldn’t give a rat’s ass if you lived or died. Why do you care about her?”

“Because she’s my mother.” I found enough strength to pull the door open again.

The hallway was gone.

The stairs, non-existent.

I couldn’t tell if the house was on fire, but I felt caged by flames. Nothing was burnt, but everything was scorching hot. My fingers sizzled when I caught the door frame, gripping it fiercely to avoid falling into the abyss that stood between me and Mom.

Her wall chickens had gone into hiding. They no longer protected her room. Even through all the darkness I could see new friends pulling free from the paint and dropping into the swelter down below.

She had taken in snakes.

Hundreds of them, big and small. They festooned her doorway, as if they had come to embellish the house for Christmas, only in less traditional colors.

I remembered my own madness. Cherished the fact that I still had enough of my wit about me to realize that I had gone crazy. How else could this happen?

The board beneath my feet started to crumble so quickly that I was certain I’d fall straight through to the basement. And what would await me there? The corn?

Any corn that could grow in this madness wouldn’t be a plant I’d like to meet.

Mom screamed again.

“MOM! I can’t get to you!”

I retreated to my room. Shut the door. Put my hands over my ears. Tried to block out her horror.

Tippy paced. Her nervous grumblings were punctuated with florid curses, exploding out of her mouth like a bowling ball hitting the pins.

Mom didn’t hold back. Whatever was happening to her, she couldn’t swallow the pain. Her agony sounded like she was being skinned alive, lemon juice poured onto her open wounds.

“What are we going to do, Tippy?” I sat on the edge of the bed for a split second, hid my face in my hands.

I darted back to the door and peeked out, hoping I’d only imagined the crazy scene I’d seen earlier.

But the snakes were still there. Falling, almost dripping out of Mom’s walls.

Where were the chickens when I needed them? They could chase some of the smaller serpents. Peck at them.

“You mean, what are
you
going to do, Lucy.” Tippy’s eye took on a menacing look. “What
you
should have done all along. There’s the window.”