Sharing Nightmares

Robyn Marie || Cross My Heart

almost thirteen.

There's a reason I toss BooBoo where I can't see him when I sleep. His shoe-button eyes bulge like too-big grapes in his wilted face and his polished nose tics if I stare long enough through the shadows. Aunt Ada places him where he can see me, atop my desk opposite the foot of my bed. Her silver-threaded housecoat is a suit of armor that she dusts her palms on after she puts him down, like the things I own are dirty.

BooBoo leans to look at me when her back turns. I tell myself he's just falling over.

The lump glides up her throat, her hands chase it, frantic! Her bared teeth are stained carmine—too much food coloring in the "Happy Birthday Plum!" frosting.

Aunt Ada's knobby knuckles and bony fingers are decked in sparkly rings. Her perfectly carved fingernails bleed flawless red from the manicurist. Hands on bell-shaped hips, she surveys the wall above me and my chest tightens. Her one, true, love is her house and the things she puts in it. She'll know something is missing.

"Where's it gone?"

I tremble a little. Calm. Be calm. Like the nurse the day Mommy flopped face-first in the cake.

I can't lose the cross. "Where's what gone?" I tip my head backward into my pillows. From this angle, the ceiling is a floor. A yellow-brown water stain fans across it, the same aged-yellow as the wallpaper. I see what she sees: the cross remains on the wall, a pale imprint, an unfaded scar. Are the spaces between the peonies supposed to be that white?

"Grandma's cross."

"Whaddya do?"

"Don't sass, Plum Shelley."

Aunt Ada's beside me trying to wedge her hand behind the headboard. Her many, tasteful, rings click hollowly on the wood. There's no use in looking underneath my bed. The weekend I moved in, I made her peek every night to be sure it was safe. Three evenings buffing the floor with her stocking knees and she ordered Uncle Fred to batten the bed rails.

I throttle the cross. "Aunt Ada?" She continues to tug, wanting to separate the bed from the wall. The frame creaks, but won't budge. She's as strong as me from lifting HOUSE magazines and clipping gossip columns with her personal scissors.

"Have you decided?"

"Decided what?"

"Can I go the Haunted House for my birthday?"

She was cutting tomatoes when I first asked her, on a Friday, after school. Her knife flicked easily along the wood cutting board, slice, slice, slicing through gushy flesh. Seeds oozed, floating in a cloudy puddle as she prattled on about neighbors and dresses and cheap hair rollers. With each subject, the knife ticked, ticked, ticked closer to her thumb. And when I asked her, "Can I go to the Haunted House for my birthday?" she nearly took her red nail off. I don't know why it disturbed her. The abandoned house at the end of our street, Piper Row, a tangle of weeds and disheveled boards, was always decorated scary for Halloween by The Ladies Club.

Or that's what Mary Ellen told me. I'd never been. Mommy kept me away from Aunt Ada and Uncle Fred. She kept me from almost everybody I can think of.

My palm crushes the red and blue and green game pieces, crushing them until I'm sure they'll push through the top of my small hand.

"I hate you!"

Aunt Ada stops prying the furniture. My grip on the cross relaxes because I know she'll forget about where it is and where it isn't. She always forgets what she's doing the moment something new appears, front page, and in full color on the Sears and Roebuck catalog. But then she looks at me with that tight-lipped worry-face she always gives me. The face I got that Friday afternoon with her gold bracelet trailing in tomato juice. The face she wore the day she picked me up from the hospital, where I sat all by my lonesome on my birthday.