American Rapture, page 8
I think of her story.
I see her, lying there, with the animals.
I suddenly don’t feel powerful at all.
I feel as though I am the adult and my mother is someone I am meant to take care of, and I have failed.
“Mom—” I say.
“I said that’s enough, Sophie,” my father says. “Go to your room. It’s enough.”
I want to scream or cry or throw something, or for my mom to hug me or yell at me or hit me again. I don’t know what I need. I feel too much and want too much and can’t handle the look of shame on my parents’ faces. But I can’t stop. Even with the guilt and shame and all the feelings I cannot name surrounding my mother’s story. I can’t stop. Not now. I’m not sure that I even want to.
Holding my mother’s eyes, I say, “I’m nothing like you.”
The timer dings from the couch.
I turn and walk up the stairs. My mother starts to cry.
HOW TO RECOGNIZE THE LAST MOMENTS BEFORE THE WORLD ENDS:
You won’t.
Confession
My father locks me in my bedroom so I can’t do anything. I can’t get the number for St. Joseph’s Hospital. I can’t try to steal either of their cell phones to get more information. My bedroom window has been sealed shut ever since that night, so I can’t even climb out.
I don’t sleep. I don’t even read. I lie awake all night, praying to God that everything will change, that this is not the life Noah and I have. That we can find some way to be together again.
I drift off in the early morning hours, and when my alarm finally sounds my door has been unlocked. I head downstairs for breakfast and find a note on the table next to my cereal bowl:
Your mother isn’t feeling well, and school is closed today. Mrs. Ingles will pick you up and take you to confession.
It’s my father’s handwriting. It doesn’t say where he is.
I read the note twice more. School is closed. I’ve never gotten a note from my parents. They have never not come down for breakfast. The coffee maker isn’t even on. I consider knocking on their door, but then I remember my mother’s face last night. I am not ready to see them yet either.
My lip is swollen, and since I am not permitted makeup, I can’t do anything to cover it up. I tell myself with each step out the door that I was right to say those things. I was right.
So why doesn’t it feel like it?
Mrs. Ingles, our next-door neighbor and a member of the church, is waiting outside already when I step out. She speaks little to me, something I have learned to value in adults. But today it’s unsettling. In the back seat of her car is the same bloodred fabric that Sister Margaret had in the school parking lot, thick like a blanket or robe. At the church, she sits in one of the pews, and I trudge to the confessional, step into the small space, and kneel down.
After a moment the window opens, and I can see the outline of Father James’s face. I tense. I never like being in here. I make the sign of the cross and look straight ahead. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been one week since my last confession.”
My tight clothes, my feelings of hatred toward my mother, the two girls in the music room, touching myself, Ben at the library, The Valley of Horses, Will, Sister Anna, everything I said. My mother’s face last night. The note at the breakfast table. What comes out instead is, “I disrespected my parents. For this I am truly sorry.”
Father James replies, “Is that all?”
“Yes.” I feel a little sick. I can’t stand the guilt that overcomes me just sitting in this space. This tight room with this man, determining my eternal fate with his judgment of my sins. The confessional is meant to remind us of what we are. Wicked, suffering, base. In need of absolution. And it does it. It strips away the world and leaves you only with the priest and yourself. With all your endless faults.
“Are you feeling alright?” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“You sound troubled.”
“Maybe,” I say. “I don’t know.”
Father James breathes a ragged breath. “I haven’t been feeling myself lately either. But Sophie, the blood of Christ is on us. In His love we are safe, and we need not fear. How’s Noah?”
I jerk my head up, try to see him through the small cutouts in the wooden screen. I can just make out his old-man face, the slight white stubble on his chin. Have my parents said something?
He coughs into a handkerchief. “Such a troubled boy,” he says.
I bite my tongue, as hard as I can. I close my eyes. I scream inside, loud enough to drown out the prayers I have to say, the words that do nothing to bring my brother back to me.
Hail Marys, the Prayer of Contrition, the Prayer of Absolution. I feel sure that he can see through me as easily as I can see through the screen. For once, I don’t care.
“Amen,” I finish automatically.
“Your sin is forgiven. Go in peace. And send Noah our prayers.” He falters on the last word. I eye him through our divider. Sweat dots his forehead, and he is wheezing.
I leave the confessional, peering into the space as he opens the door on his side. His palms shake as he rubs them together.
They are as red as if there is blood on them.
* * *
Mrs. Ingles takes me to do volunteer work, which in this case is cleaning the Sunday school and choir rooms. She watches me the entire time, so I can’t sneak off and try to find a computer. She even follows me to the bathroom. I scrub and scrub again, down on hands and knees.
* * *
Hours have passed and I’ve hardly felt them. Questions, swarming. Everywhere.
We pull into my drive with a basket of get-well-soon items for my parents that we picked up together at the store. I take the basket and my backpack through the door and into the kitchen. On the car ride over, I practiced what I will say to them. I will use the opportunity to start a dialogue. To bridge a gap. Or try. The idea turns my stomach, but I know it’s right, and might be the only course for change. And … I want it. Change. Dialogue. Something. I want us to go get Noah.
A sound emerges from the silence of the house.
Coming from the living room.
Gooseflesh prickles my arms. The sound at first is not quite human, but familiar.
A rhythmic panting, and a grunt. Like the girls in the music room.
This time, though, there is one female voice and one male.
And though on later—involuntary—reflection I will realize that I should have known exactly what was happening, that I should never have taken one single step toward that room or I would regret it for the rest of my life, at that moment my only thought is,
Are my parents okay?
The question carries me into the living room, heart thudding in my chest, where I drop the basket on the floor.
There, on the off-white carpet, beneath the stone mantel my father designed, supporting a painting of an ever-watchful Jesus, are my parents. Completely naked.
Pushing, pulling, clawing at one another other in a steady, unapologetic rhythm.
Infection
My first thought is that it’s my fault. I sinned and somehow brought this into being. This is my punishment. My second thought is that there has to be something firing wrong between my eyes and my ears and my brain. There is no way this is happening.
My parents are fevered and sweaty, their eyes bloodshot. My mother’s hair sticks to her face, and my father’s glasses are crushed beneath their bodies on the carpet.
These are not my parents. They are strangers, and they are all wrong. All of this is wrong.
I close my eyes and open them again. This cannot be happening. In years, I haven’t seen my parents so much as share a fleeting kiss, and now …
My mouth goes dry. I don’t know what to do. I think I need to put a name to it, and I don’t want to, and my heart is racing, and the word comes to me, and I don’t want it to. I don’t want to acknowledge it, but they don’t stop, and I—
Copulate. Copulating.
Bile claws its way up my throat. My parents copulating on the living room floor. Right in front of me. And I am standing here watching.
My legs feel like Jell-O. I think I am going to be sick. Even with me standing here, even with their bodies and depravity on full display, they just continue. Pulling and clawing, writhing against each other. My mother’s nails digging into my father’s shoulder, his naked shoulder, my father’s naked shoulder, and—
I run.
I am out the front door. I don’t feel my legs. I don’t feel anything. My head is spinning, and nausea threatens to overwhelm me. They are possessed, they have to be. It wasn’t them. Possession would be preferable, anything would be, to … that.
But there was the article, and the flu. Erratic behavior. Manic behavior. I am dizzy and unwell, and there is an immediate and pressing need to get as far away from my house as possible.
My mom’s car sits in the driveway. I was required to take my driving exam when I turned sixteen, and I got my license, but my parents don’t allow me to drive. I’ve never done it on my own.
I run to the sedan and try the door. The car is locked, I’m stupid for not thinking of it. The keys are in the house.
I fight down panic and tell myself it’ll be no problem. I’ll go back inside and quickly grab them. Maybe I’ll realize I never even saw what I thought I did, and life can return to normal.
I take a deep breath and head back up to the front door.
I open it slowly. Set one foot into the house. I can’t see the living room from here, but I can hear, and with a fresh wave of nausea, I realize that what I witnessed before is still taking place. I did not imagine it, did not dream it up in my sinner’s brain. I gag.
I can do this. The keys are in my mother’s purse, and it is just there on the other side of the kitchen. I’ll have to pass by the same open hall to the living room through which I saw them before, but I can do this. I just won’t look.
I take careful steps over the wood. I don’t let myself see what’s happening. I can still catch motion from the corner of my eye, but I will not let my brain put together what it is. I reach the bag and open it, carefully. Inside are my mother’s keys, along with her wallet and other small items. I take the keys. I turn, keeping my eyes down and my focus on stepping lightly.
I am halfway back toward the front door when I notice. Something has changed.
My heart beats once, twice.
There is no sound.
The house has returned to silence.
I turn my head toward the living room.
Just in time to see my father, naked and snarling. Running straight at me.
I move. Don’t think, throw myself into action.
The kitchen, ragged breaths. My father’s breaths. And—
My mother comes at me from the side.
I lunge, surge forward. Her fingers reach, grab hold of the arm of my sweater. I’m almost at the front door. She pulls the fabric, and I shrug out of it, her fingertips brushing my skin, and my father is almost on me, and—
I jump through the open doorway and slam the door shut on both of them. On my parents who are chasing me, naked and insane.
My back against it, I feel a thud and buckle. I don’t want to, but I turn my head, just enough to see inside through the stained-glass cutout behind me.
They shove and slam their bodies up against the wood. I can see them through the glass. Fevered eyes. Their rage or hunger or whatever it is that is so unlike the only parents I have ever known. I don’t know what they want from me, but I can barely hold the door against them, and my mother snarls at my father, who shoves her aside. Shoves her, hard, so that she falls, and I can’t process anything except that I need to get in the car, and that the second I let go of this door they will come for me.
These are not my parents.
I grab the metal cross that sits on our porch, my other arm and back straining to keep the door closed. It opens a little, my father’s hand pushing out into the daylight.
I turn and slam the door on it. His palm is red and blistered already, as if he’s held it to a stovetop. He lets out a yell, and tears blur my vision as I slam the door again and again. Until he pulls his hand back and I can finally shut it.
I shove the cross through the handle. I don’t know if this will work, if a brace only works on one side or both, or even at all. They pound against the door, and I know this flimsy attempt won’t hold. A cross and my bare hands between my parents and me. Drool trailing down from my mother’s mouth, her eyes someone else’s.
I turn. Run for the car, but I don’t even make it past the porch.
The front door bursts open, cross clattering, broken in half. I trip, catch myself against the porch rail, and stand. My father staggers out, still naked. Roaring with rage I’ve never seen or heard.
And there between his legs is something far too horrible to contemplate. But it’s there, and it’s the thing that was pressed up against me by Will at school. It can’t be here on my father. Here pointed toward me. I am paralyzed, and I am going to be sick.
And then—
The world tilts.
I’m down. Tackled to the porch, breath knocked from my lungs. My father, my own father, on top of me. His naked body on top of mine.
He pins me down so that I can’t get free, no matter how hard I writhe. His breath and skin are hot, nearly burning, and he is sweaty all over. I can’t be touching my father’s skin or sweat.
I struggle, and blood leaks from his hand where I slammed it in the door. He is not there in his eyes, his face without glasses unrecognizable. It’s not my father, this hungry sweating thing hovering above me. Something else is in there, and he is gone. I make myself believe it.
I seize the cross and shove the sharp end into his shoulder. He rips at my shirt with his red palms, and I scream and shove the cross in again, piercing his skin, blood spraying over my chest. Drool on his lip. His eyes unfocused. He reaches down and tugs at my skirt.
I cry out, thrust the cross into him harder. He takes it from my hand as though it is nothing, tosses it into the yard.
I can’t move. I can’t do anything. My legs bare on the front porch of our house, afternoon daylight, and my father’s skin hot against my skin.
I close my eyes, tears falling, and I start to pray.
Our father, who art—
His weight lifts.
I open them to find he is no longer on top of me.
My mother has ripped him away. How was she strong enough to do that? I suck in a gulp of air, scramble back.
Her eyes fixed on mine, she lunges for me.
My father grabs her hair and yanks her back. My mother shoves him, harder than I thought was possible, against the porch rails.
He throws her back against the house. Her head collides with the metal porch light with a crack, but she just shakes it, and staggers back up to standing. She is disoriented, stumbling, but she rights herself. She runs at my father again, tripping now as she goes.
The keys are on the grass. I don’t let myself think. I get my footing and sprint for them, and then to the car. Across the grass, over the driveway. I open the door, throw myself in, and thrust the keys into the ignition, locking it, making sure every door is locked.
Only now do I look up, now from the momentary safety of this vehicle. My parents have forgotten me.
On the front porch, for all the world to see, my mother on top of my father, her head thrown back as if she is broken. My father’s blood covers them both. Because I stabbed him. I stabbed my father, and they are pushing and pulling at each other.
I pull out of the drive. Mrs. Ingles stands on her own front porch. Her mouth wide open. I don’t know how long she’s been there, if she watched me screaming, my parents attacking me, and made no move to help. She turns at the car’s motion. Our eyes lock.
And I know. She did see. She saw and did nothing, would have done nothing, even if it had continued. We hold each other’s eyes.
Then I whip the car around, tires squealing over the asphalt, and I leave my home, my parents, and Mrs. Ingles behind.
I don’t turn. I don’t look back, even for a second.
* * *
I don’t know where I’m going, only that I need to get away from the house. I have to swipe at my eyes because the tears haven’t stopped, and as I drive these streets I know so well but have never navigated alone, these streets I have traversed in the back seat and passenger seat of my parents’ cars for the whole of my life, I can’t clear the images from my eyes, can’t shake the feeling of my father’s body on mine and the sound of my mother’s skull slamming against the side of the house.
I shake my head, my hands unsteady on the wheel. Nausea bubbles up again. Splinters are lodged in my legs and back, from the porch. Splinters because—
I turn on the radio. My mother’s favorite church organ. I turn the dial and land on a rap and hip-hop station. I don’t listen to this kind of music, have never been allowed to. But it is loud. Loud enough to drown out my thoughts and obscure the insidious images that I. Cannot. Get. To. Stop.
I’m not paying attention to where I’m driving. All I know is that my house is behind me, and the road is in front. The other cars are going the speed limit, but it’s too slow for me, too slow for what I need. I come upon a ramp leading to the freeway. I’ve never been allowed to drive on the highway, it’s too fast, too dangerous. I see my parents again. On the floor, sweating, panting, writhing. I feel my father’s body on mine, and something like a sob escapes my throat.
I veer left and take the ramp.
The car accelerates as my foot presses down on the gas. My heart is pounding. The music blasts through the speakers. I drive. Time doesn’t mean anything. There are only the images and this car, and me trying to keep myself together. I turn the music up as loud as it can go.
