Cackle, page 19
“It is not all right!” Jill screeches. “There were bones in my husband’s food!”
“What?” the waiter asks.
“Look!”
My laughter begins to subside as I peer up to see what the waiter’s reaction is. I’d say it is mainly confusion.
Dan’s skin looks the color and consistency of cement. There are rust-hued stains on the sides of his mouth from the blood. He’s not bleeding anymore. His jaw is slack, and in the dark void of his mouth, I can see teeth. His teeth. Still attached. His tongue is extended slightly. Also still attached.
He’s fine. No major damage has been done. I use my napkin to dab away my remaining laughter tears.
The waiter stares at the bones.
“Well?” Jill says.
“I’m sorry about this,” the waiter says, reaching to clear the plate with the bloody napkin on it.
“This is ridiculous!” Jill says. “He could have choked and died! Are you okay, honey?”
Dan nods his head but doesn’t say anything. I bet it’s the first time in his life he’s ever been speechless.
“We’re not paying for this!” Jill says. “I want to speak to a manager. This is unacceptable. Disgusting.”
She’s shouting, and her voice carries throughout the restaurant. Silverware begins to clink, clink, clink all around us. The sound of people setting down their forks and knives and spoons, too afraid to take another bite.
The manager comes over and apologizes. She offers to escort Jill and Dan to her office, I assume to prevent the rest of the diners from hearing any further details about the fiasco. Jill helps Dan up, and as he stumbles to his feet, another chuckle escapes me. I cover my mouth, but it’s too late.
Dan looks at me, his eyes focusing after being blank and dead for a few solid minutes. His expression is a mix of confusion and fear. Or maybe it’s suspicion. Whatever he’s thinking or feeling, it’s definitely about me. Jill, too, only her feelings are clear. Anger. Disgust. She glowers at me as I sit with my hand clapped over my mouth.
The manager ushers them away. Dan now possesses a wobbly wide-legged gait, like he’s just had a colonoscopy. Jill follows at his heels, her hands placed on his back as if she’s pushing him or worried he’ll fall. They turn a corner and disappear.
I exhale and take a sip of ginger ale, and when I set it down, I realize Pascal is still here, sitting right next to me.
“Why’d you laugh?” he asks.
“Nervous reaction,” I say, proud of myself for coming up with a quick plausible lie.
“Huh,” he says.
A minute goes by, and in it I come to the conclusion that there’s nothing else to do but leave.
“All right,” I say, standing, “I’m going to go.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” he says.
“Nice meeting you,” I say. “Good luck with the logs.”
He seems offended by my words, which admittedly came out more venomous than intended. I do genuinely wish him luck with the logs. Without a personality, they’re probably all he has.
I hurry out of the restaurant to my car. I take off my shoes the second I sit down and toss them in the backseat.
I don’t know why exactly, but I feel good. I drive home singing a song I make up as I go.
By the time I pull into the driveway, I’m so full of energy it’s coming out of my ears. I leave my shoes in the car and run into the backyard, saying a quick hello to Mr. Frog.
The grass is dead and scratchy underneath my feet, but I don’t care. I like the feel of it. I dance on top of it, singing my song from the car.
And when you hate someone you meet,
they will get a tasty treat,
bones on their tongue and in their cheeks,
bones to make them hush and make them bleed.
Bones are the escape you need;
you can sing and dance alone,
all thanks to the bones.
Above me, the moon is full and shines silvery white.
So bright, so bright, so bright.
But the brightness isn’t just above me. It’s in front of me. Glowing toward me.
There’s a light on.
Downstairs.
The light is coming from a downstairs window.
I notice it now. The other car. It’s parked in the street in front of the house.
Lynn.
She’s home.
And she’s standing in the window, staring at me. She’s been watching me. I don’t know for how long. Long enough.
I should be mortified. Right now I should be experiencing the excruciating sting of embarrassment. I’ve felt it for less.
And yet.
I face the window. I step forward so I can be fully illuminated, so my smile is not masked in shadow. I wave to the face behind the glass. To Lynn.
With a quick swish of the curtains, she’s gone, and the light goes off.
“Oops!” I say to myself. And to the moon, “Oh, well.”
I lay myself down in the grass, waiting to feel some belated humiliation.
It never arrives.
I revel in its absence. It’s liberating.
I laugh and laugh.
RALPH
The next morning, I head to Sophie’s first thing. I decide to stop in the Good Mug for coffee. I wait for Oskar to comment on the two coffees, on the fact that one of them is for Sophie, but he doesn’t. He does ask me if I’m feeling all right.
“I feel great,” I say. “Why?”
He shakes his head.
It’s nippy, and there’s a shimmering layer of frost on the ground, but it’s not bothering me at all. I like the way it makes me feel, how it reminds me of my body. You’re here, the cold says. It’s now.
I trot up to Sophie’s door and set the coffees down so I can knock twice. The door opens itself and I step inside. Sophie is at the top of the stairs wearing a long purple velvet robe with black fur trim.
“Pet,” she says, yawning, “good morning.”
“Am I too early?” I ask. “I have coffee.”
“I’m tired is all,” she says, descending the steps. “Thank you for the coffee. How was your date?”
I hand her the cup and she removes the lid to sip. She looks at me, her eyes bright and eager.
“You don’t know?” I ask her.
“Know what, darling?”
“About the date?”
“What do you mean?”
“We talked,” I say. “Last night. On the stall?”
I was so sure. I didn’t doubt for a second.
“The stall?” she asks.
“Are you messing with me?”
She leans back, puts a hand over her heart. “No, darling. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh,” I say. “I guess I had too much to drink or something. I could have sworn . . .”
“Tell me,” she says. “Come. Let’s sit.”
We sit on the stairs and drink our coffee as I give her a play-by-play of the night. I tell her about handsome, terrible, bland Pascal. I tell her about Dan and his repulsiveness. She scoffs.
“Some men are so foul you wouldn’t even bother to save their blood,” she says.
“Sorry?”
“Never mind,” she says. “Continue.”
I tell her about how the restaurant was tacky and the food was gross, about how I drank straight whiskey and escaped to the bathroom. I tell her about how I saw the graffiti, the message that I assumed was from her. The red ink.
She keeps shrugging and shaking her head like she had nothing to do with it, like she has no idea what I’m talking about. I’m not sure I believe her. Part of me hopes she’s lying, because the alternative is scary. Did I hallucinate? See what I wanted to see? Was I drunker than I realized?
I tell her about how I started to get sassy, but then realized it was futile.
And then I tell her about the bones.
She’s silent as I recount the story. She doesn’t sip. She doesn’t move. I don’t think she breathes.
“I laughed. I started laughing. It took me over. I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, the funniest thing to ever happen. He was bleeding from his mouth, spitting out bones, and I was laughing. I laughed. The whole restaurant was staring.”
Last night, the laughter made me feel immortal, but in the yellow light of day, I feel ashamed of it. It was crazy to laugh. Why did I laugh? What was so funny?
“I thought maybe it was you,” I say. “Like the spider. I thought it was a curse.”
“It wasn’t me, pet,” she says, stroking my hand. “It was you.”
I have a flash of memory. Me spinning around and around, a swirl of trees, the house. The moon hovering above me. My feet numb. A mist like a silver aura delicate as lace. My voice. A strange song.
I remember how it felt. How I felt.
I conjure it. The feeling. The feeling of watching Dan spit bones from his wretched mouth. The feeling of dancing on the grass, in the moonlight. Of being seen by Lynn and not caring. Not caring at all.
I wasn’t myself. I’m not myself.
Or maybe . . . maybe I’m more myself than I’ve ever been.
“But how?” I ask. “How?”
Sophie puts a finger to her lips, a thought haunting her face.
“What?” I ask.
She smiles widely. “Nothing at all, my dear,” she says. “Let’s go out for breakfast. We can talk over pancakes.”
“You’re obsessed with pancakes.”
She shrugs. “What can I say? They are cake disguised as breakfast. I’ll go get dressed. How’d the dress work out, by the way?”
“It was perfect. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, my pet,” she says, walking upstairs.
I’m left sitting on the steps drinking cold coffee and questioning everything.
I let my eyes wander around the foyer. They distinguish each detail. The shape of the crystals dripping from the chandelier, not quite teardrops. They’re too sharp, and in this exact light, at this particular time of day, they look dangerous, like the kind of icicles that kill people.
The colorful silhouettes the crystals project onto the walls, they’re in constant movement. They make me dizzy.
I put my face in my hands and rub my temples with my thumbs. It smells like incense in here, a scent so rich it’s almost rotten. I’m finding it hard to breathe.
There’s a pain in my chest. A gnawing.
Once Sam and I were watching some show on the History Channel about medieval torture, and there was one type where the torturers would adhere a bucket of rats to your chest and then heat the bucket so the rats would panic and chew through you.
“That’s actually happened to someone,” I said to him, “to multiple people.”
“I don’t want these anymore,” he said, setting the bowl of Cheetos we’d been snacking on down on the coffee table. Then he used his foot to push them farther away.
“I feel bad for the rats,” I said.
He laughed.
“They didn’t do anything! Must be scary for them.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, still laughing, “too bad for the rats. Not the guys getting eaten by them.”
“I feel sorry for the people, too,” I said, because I did feel sorry for them, and because I didn’t like it when Sam laughed at me like that, like I was crazy in a not-adorable way. But then I decided to be honest. “I feel worse for the rats, though.”
I thought about how terrifying it must have been for them, to be minding their own business, happily nibbling on garbage and scurrying through the streets, only to be scooped up and find themselves in a situation in which they thought they’d burn to death if they didn’t eat through some smelly dungeon human.
“Pet,” I hear. Sophie emerges from her room in a dress that looks pretty much identical to the robe. I don’t know why she bothered to change. “You look upset.”
“Just thinking about rats,” I tell her. “Do you think I have too much empathy for rats?”
I ask because I know she won’t laugh at me. She won’t think I’m crazy in a not-adorable way. She would never.
“Rats are selfish creatures,” she says. “They want to survive, and they do whatever they can to survive. I admire them.”
“Yeah.”
She reaches for my hand and helps me up.
“Shall we?” she asks.
I follow her out the door. I hear it lock behind us.
We walk in silence for a while, the ground chomping beneath our feet like it’s something alive, like it’s something we bring to life with our contact, with our presence.
“Are you still thinking of rats?” Sophie asks me.
“No,” I say, “I’m back to thinking about last night. What do you mean, it was me?”
“Here,” she says. “Open your palm.”
I do. In it, she deposits a large spider. So large I can see its face perfectly without having to squint. Countless eyes and a smile. A big lively grin.
“This is Ralph,” she says. “He and I are good friends. He’s very cheery.”
“Is this real?” I ask her.
“Annie,” she says, “there’s only so much I can tell you, only so much I can teach you. I can show you things about the world, about yourself. Beautiful, wonderful things. But I can’t make you believe them. There are some things you need to discover on your own. Do you understand?”
“I . . .”
I look down at Ralph, whose smile is so big it takes up most of his dark, fuzzy face.
He’s the most adorable creature I’ve ever seen. And she’s right. He is very cheery.
And suddenly, I’m cheery, too.
“He’s amazing.”
“I thought you two might hit it off,” she says. “He’s good company. Almost as good as me.”
When we arrive at the diner, we sit in our usual back booth and order pancakes. Sophie pours maple syrup into her spoon and lets Ralph stick his face in it.
“Should he eat that?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “But he loves it.”
“This is so weird.”
I almost say that I can’t believe it, but I stop myself. Instead, I say, “There’s a lot I used to believe wasn’t possible.”
She smiles, picking an apple out of thin air and tossing it to me. She says, “I know.”
INTERLUDE
In the weeks after the date, Jill, along with the rest of the staff, avoids me like I’m a leper on fire. I assume Jill told them what happened and I have to admit that between the Chris Bersten spider incident and the bone-date incident, they’re fully justified in being wary of me, though, since the date, there have been no other suspicious occurrences on my end.
It’s unclear if it’s a phenomenon I can control. My curiosity has been outwrestled by my extreme apprehension. I try not to give it too much thought. I’m well aware I can’t avoid it forever, but that’s a problem for future me.
Present me has melded herself to her routine. It’s a source of stability, instilling a much-needed sense of normalcy in my life. There’s comfort in the simplicity of doing the same thing every day, every week. There’s beauty in the ritual.
I get up, stop for coffee at the Good Mug, go to work, pretend the whole school doesn’t suspect I’ve got evil powers—which is TBD, I guess—come home, take a shower, eat an easy dinner like a frozen burrito or scrambled eggs or peanut butter on bread, drink a glass or bottle of wine or occasionally something stronger, watch a TV show and, depending on any romantic story lines in the show, maybe fit in a quick ugly cry or go straight to bed. Most weeknights I’m asleep by nine p.m. at the latest.
The weekends, though . . . The weekends I spend with Sophie. On the weekends, I’m not lonely at all. I’m eating homemade strudel, dressed head to toe in silk and soft velvet. I’m lounging around the library reading old books, or in the conservatory tending to flowers. I’m playing shuffleboard or dancing or watching an old movie where the actors are all hams. There have been no ghost sightings since Sophie captured all the ghosts and put them in the basement.
It’s been blissful.
But fleeting.
I’m too ashamed to admit to Sophie that I can’t maintain my happiness on my own. That when she’s not around, I’m a pathetic mess who eats meals off of paper towels and uses her sleeves as tissues. She gets impatient at any mention of Sam or if I make any implication that I’m unsatisfied in my singledom. So I try to keep this aspect of my life, of my routine, to myself.
But. Sophie’s not stupid. When she suspects I’m having a particularly rough time, she’ll send me home with Ralph. She’s done it on multiple occasions.
“Why don’t you take Ralph this week, pet?” she’ll say, and Ralph will crawl out of her pocket and into her hand, then make his way into my hand. He’ll look up at me, smiling his big silly smile, and we’ll walk home together.
I made him a tiny bed out of a cereal box. It’s got a tall headboard and a sponge for a mattress. I covered the headboard in orange construction paper because orange is his favorite color. I covered the sponge with an old pillowcase.
He loves it.
He also loves to watch TV with me. I’ll let him use the remote, pick whatever he wants. He particularly enjoys HGTV and home-makeover shows. Also cooking competitions.
“You’re so silly, Ralph,” I’ll say, and he’ll smile, march his little legs.
It’s astonishing how normal it is to love a creature you’re not supposed to love.
It’s astonishing what you’ll accept when you want love. When you need it. You’ll welcome it in any form, from anyone, anything, regardless of circumstance, however peculiar. However fantastical.
