My guidance counselor, Mr. Greensboro, said you can only have a memory once. After that, you're apparently recalling the last memory you had of the event rather than the event itself, and each time you cycle through the memory, you're subconsciously altering it. The changes are so subtle you don't even realize you're overwriting your former reality. Mood. Music. Indigestion. The temperature of the room. Police sirens wailing in the distance. The scent of the baking pie-any number of factors could impress upon that memory, stamping it, transforming it. If that was true, then, by the time you got to the end of your life, everything that came before was just a fantasy.
I'd thought about my mother so many times over the past year, she may as well be a goddamn unicorn in my head.
I held a butter knife in front of my mouth, using the reflective surface like a mirror as I applied bright purple lipstick. The shade was so unnatural against my pale skin and pale hair, which was dip-dyed mint-green, that I didn't look real. I looked more like a doll than a seventeen-year-old, small town girl. But that was the point of my heavily smoked eyes and neon-blue nail polish, the diamond stud in my left nostril, and the ripped black tights under my ragged cut-off shorts: I didn't want to look like myself, because myself looked too much like her.
My dad didn't seem to mind all of the modifications. I think, in a way, he was also relieved to not have to stare back at his dead wife's face every day. Not that I ever saw him for more than the twenty minutes each night, when he ate dinner with me and my sister. My friends, however, weren't so fond of my new look-I'd pretty much been banished from the popular table in the cafeteria, and from the pom squad, and from the Friday-night-after-football bonfires.
Mr. Greensboro didn't like it either. He says I should find a more productive outlet to exercise my feelings. I smacked my lips together and capped the tube of lipstick with a loud click. Mr. Greensboro didn't have to stare back at his dead mother every time he looked in the mirror.
I opened the fridge and peered inside despite knowing its contents. I'd stocked it myself, but still, I double-checked that Tabitha would have everything she needed after I went to school and she was left with the sitter. On the shelf, perfectly stacked, were three identical sandwiches: Bunny Bread, mayo, and ham. No crust, cut into two triangles. Never four. It's not that she would throw a tantrum if there were four-no fits or freak-outs. It's the total opposite. You cut her sandwich correctly for your own sake, because cut any other way and you'd have to endure the sadness.
My six-year-old sister's eyes were like large crystal orbs that either lit up like sapphires or glossed over like the rolling seaside tide. Great, bluish-green waves of sadness that eroded your soul like a sand castle. The kind of sadness born from grave injustice. Seeing that sadness in her eyes killed me. So two triangles, never four.
Purple Kool-Aid (sugar-free). Green seedless grapes. A drawer full of string cheese. I moved to the pantry, completing the inspection: graham crackers, check. Goldfish, check. That completed the list of things the kid would consume. No amount of begging, screaming, or pleading was going to change it. At dinner she'd eat a mountain of Brussel sprouts. Who does that? The kid only eats ten food items if you include mayo and one of them is Brussel sprouts. They were mom's favorite, too.
The scent of something burning wafted, and I and sprung to the toaster, popping the lever just as a little plume of smoke spiraled out. Pop Tarts, breakfast of champs. Only strawberry. Only the kind with white icing and pink sprinkles. Shit, I thought, seeing the scorched edges. It doesn't matter; she only eats the middle. I scraped off some of the char anyway, poured her a glass of milk, and took both down into her basement lair.
#
"Tabitha?" I called as I hopped down the stairs, careful not to let the milk slosh over the edge of the glass. The basement had been re-finished ages ago, but it still felt creepy and dank. And it was dark. Tabby did her crafts in tiny pools of low-watt light scattered here and there throughout the cluttered gloom.
When Tabitha was born, my mom quit her job as prop master at the Boston City Opera, no longer up for the commute, and took over the local puppet theatre in Marblehead. It was a significantly smaller operation, so she had to do everything from props to sets to costumes to making the actual puppets. The basement became her new workspace. From floor to ceiling, her creations crowded the place. Kabuki masks, sugar plum fairies, pirate swords, chandeliers, papier-mâché mice. A white powdered wig from Figaro. A giant pair of shears from The Barber of Seville. A dozen leering day-glow skeletons from a playfully sinister Halloween production. (To the dismay of the old biddies of Marblehead, Halloween around here was a recreational sport, being so close to Salem.)
Someone visiting the basement for the first time might notice each and every one of these things, but they were just noise to me, easy to ignore.
But no one could ignore the Victorian mansion, brooding as it did at the heart of the basement. It was a show-stopper, and all the little assorted bits of this and that strewn helter-skelter throughout the wide, low-ceilinged room seemed to lean toward it. It looked like a thing cut off from its own space and time, like something you'd find surrounded by thousands of acres in the North of England. With fountains and gardens and white-gloved butlers. Only this version put the Goth in Gothic. Mom said it had been a model used to shoot a t.v. pilot in Salem that had been touted as "Dracula" with witches. The show never made it past marketing, but the model-sized mansion became her special side project. She said that she'd started it for Mina but was finishing it for us. Me and Tabitha.
Balancing the plate and glass in one hand, I switched on a floor lamp. My little mouse of a sister bounced to her feet, her light blue dress ballooning around her bony frame.
"How can you see what you're working on?" I asked her, turning on another lamp. She glided over to me, her big blue eyes hopeful. Deprived of sunlight, proper nutrition, and social interaction with other children, she was too small and too thin and seemed younger than she actually was. She was too pale. Note to self: buy kids vitamins.
I handed her the dishes. Her nose scrunched. She carefully set them on the floor, then popped back over to me, eyes even bigger. I mimicked her, opening mine as wide as I could.
"Hmm?" I asked despite knowing exactly what she wanted. Maybe today is the day, I thought. Hoped. Just like I hoped every morning. Her eyes narrowed. I pulsed my gaze even wider and gave her a shrug of innocence. Her nose scrunched again, and she held out her hands, cupping them together.
Today's NOT the day, is what that meant.
I dug into the right pocket of my jean shorts and emptied its contents into her hands. I'd barely pulled back before she thrust her hands forward again. I repeated the action until my left pocket was void and her palms were full.
"That's today's loot," I said. "That's all I got."
She brought her hands closer to her nose, her big bulging eyes carefully examining each item: three silver chewing gum wrappers, two seashells not much bigger than my thumbnail, a twisty-tie from the last loaf of Bunny Bread. A couple of red paper clips. Twine from a broken yo-yo, and two glitter-glue pens, one gold and one pink. Evidently pleased with today's bounty, she returned back to her spot on the floor.
Nope. Today was not going to be the day Tabitha finally spoke.
She hadn't uttered a word since the night. Not to me. Not to dad. Not to the shrink. Not even to the police.
The only thing worse than being the daughter who'd discovered my mom's dead body was being the daughter who might have witnessed her being killed. My mother was murdered on Homecoming Night, junior year. Almost exactly one year ago today.
I hope she hadn't witnessed it. I hope she'd been squeezing her eyes shut tight and covering her ears as someone gutted my mother in the playroom last autumn. One look at Tabby and you knew that was wishful thinking.
Some people say that when a traumatic event occurs it's all just a blur. I'm not sure how that fits in with the whole memory overwriting thing, but, in my case, it's a load of crap. I remember it all. We'd won the game, and not by a hair, like we had so often throughout the season. No. The Marblehead Magicians had destroyed the Vikings, and everyone had gone berserk. The air was electric. It crackled. The cheerleaders and the pom squad all went out with the team afterwards. Bobby and I drifted away from the bonfire, making out in the woods. His hands on my face. His hands in my hair. The whisky on his breath as his lips touched mine while our friends laughed somewhere behind us. The wind rattled the leaves as he kissed me, and the air smelled like the times we'd gone camping when I was a kid. When he dropped me off, I could feel his gaze on me as I walked up to the house, and I remember wondering if my lips looked as swollen as they felt.
The front door knob was cold, and unlocked as usual because nothing bad ever happened in Marblehead. The house was utterly silent, which felt strange after the rowdy football game and the after party celebration. As I crept through the through the hallways, careful to not wake anyone up, I heard strange noises coming from the playroom. Kind of like a whimper. Kind of like Whiskers when he got stuck behind the couch. But the noises weren't from the family cat, they were coming from my mom, who I found lying on the playroom floor, gasping and gurgling, her eyes glassy and distant, her blood everywhere-on her face and on her lips, sputtering and bubbling from the wounds in her chest. Death is nothing at all like it is in the movies. There's no final moment of clarity, no lucid goodbyes followed by parting words of wisdom and a peaceful slide into darkness. No, there's just panic and fear and debasement, and then there's warm flesh going cold.
I was covered in my mother's blood by the time I called the cops, screaming, crying. I puked four times, straight onto the floor, before they arrived. The house had been ransacked, electronics and jewelry missing. My dad and Tabby were missing, too. I was standing outside on the street, wrapped in a blanket, in a barely lucid trance, surrounded by cops, yellow police tape, and flashing lights, then I heard commotion coming from inside. I heard the squeaks and took off towards the front door. A crew-cutted cop whose younger brother was in my class, stepped outside with Tabby. I screamed her name and she leapt from his arms to mine. But she wasn't screaming like me. She wasn't even crying. Her small arms circled around my neck, nearly choking me. She wouldn't let go for hours. I even had to let her in the shower with me when I washed off all the blood at the station. They'd found her when they were clearing the house-Tabitha had been in the playroom closet the whole time, hiding behind the louvered doors.
To this day, no one knew what she saw. She hadn't spoken a single word since.
The woman from child services said Tabitha would come around when she was ready. We couldn't force her. Doing so might cause her to retreat further into her own head. Her fantasy world.
In the quiet, disjointed months following my mother's murder, my dad took that piece of advice a little too seriously. He didn't encourage her to talk. He told her that she was "perfect that way she is," and that "most little girls talked too much, anyway." I hated when he said that. I wanted her to talk. Cry. Something.
I wanted my sister back.
I think my dad felt guilty for not being home that night. His assistant found him asleep in his office. Which I'm pretty sure meant passed out at his desk. You'd think something like this would've kicked the bottle, but it only exacerbated it. He dove head first both into work and into the Crown. His business was thriving, but I'm not so sure about his health, or his decisions when it came to Tabitha.
Rather than encouraging her to be a normal kid, he held her back from school. So, instead of her first spelling bee and hopscotch at recess, she haunted the basement, making dolls at our dead mother's unused workbench or rested on her bony knees in front of the Victorian mansion playing with them.
"Eat." I said, when she went straight back to work, as if it was her duty. Her barely-there blonde brow scrunched in concentration as she painted a figurine she'd made from dried clay. Without looking away from the doll, she reached out with her left hand and meticulously snapped the brittle edges from all four sides of the Pop Tart. She put the remaining inner portion between her lips. She didn't bite, rather just let it hang there in her mouth like a pipe as she went back to painting with both hands.
I peered over her shoulder. She was painting ribs onto the clay. She's six. Where does she come up with this stuff? I looked around the room. There was a rippled old copy of Grey's Anatomy open on the floor near her feet. Some kids read Doctor Seuss. This one read surgical reference books.
Her dolls surrounded us, lining the floor. She'd made a hundred or more since her descent into the basement. Some from clay, some from fabric, some from sticks. Still others from the variety of found objects I brought her every morning. Along with a mess of her own loot that she scavenged like a squirrel when no one was looking: the shoelaces from my dad's gold shoes, lint from the dryer, the spout from a broken tea pot, feathers from my mom's pillbox hat, dried holly from the Christmas wreath, an abandoned bird's nest from the backyard.
It might seem weird, but at least it meant she was coming out of the basement on her own.
Some of her dolls were modern and proper, others looked historical and regal. Some were magical and faerie-like; others were twisted and grotesque, nightmare amalgams with knobby limbs and blank, screaming faces.
Despite there being so many dolls, I knew which one represented her. It sat near the base of the Addams Family Barbie Dream House, its big shiny eyes made from two differently-hued blue sequins, and it wore a cerulean dress made from a patch of blue silk that I'm pretty sure she'd swatched from last year's prom dress. My jaw clenched for a second before I remembered that I didn't care about junior prom or any memory that involved Bobby Thornton.
The Sadie doll was made from a bundle of twigs wrapped in pink felt that had been jammed into a clay head. It had a mermaid tail, and button eyes, and a glitter-glue mouth. I knew it was me because of its mint-green hair, which had resulted in the only time I'd ever lost my temper with my sister in the last year-after she snuck into my room in the middle of the night and chopped off a chunk of my ponytail. At first I thought it was because she didn't like my new dye job, then I realized it was because she liked it so much she need to immortalize it in clay.
Our father was made from armature wire and several lumps of charcoal she must have stolen from the bag near the BBQ pit outside. And mom had the head of Bratz Doll and the body of an angel that used to be on top of the Christmas tree. Wings and all, though the artificial silver feathers had been replaced with real yellow and blue warbler feathers collected from the bird carcasses left in the backyard by Whiskers. She'd accented the feathers with butterfly wings collected from the garden.
"You need to come back, Tabs," I half-whispered to myself. With that, I knew it was time to leave. Otherwise I'd be crying and begging, and she'd just go about her work, her busy little hands crawling like pale spiders over bone and clay. "I miss you."
She continued to craft, and I wanted to scream.
"Who are you working on now, Geppetto?"
She gave me a stern look and thrust her work-in-progress toward my face-a waif, skeletal form, demurely posed, its placid face sculpted onto the dome of the bleached, inverted skull of a baby sparrow. The paper-thin beak looked like a crown.
"Nice," I lied.
I hated it. It was pretty, but too dark. Even for Tabitha.
*****
Hello Kittens!
Is it October yet? Is it? Is it? Has anyone besides me already started hanging Halloween decorations? Would anyone here like to read a little short story, gothic-fantasy style?
I'm super excited about this piece that is inspired by the upcoming flick, Crimson Peak, directed by Guillermo del Toro! HAVE YOU SEEN THE TRAILER? If you answered YES, keep reading. If you answered NO, pause from reading this and Youtube it NOW!
I had the pleasure of working on the marketing campaign for Pan's Labyrinth way, way, way, back in the day, and it's been one of my favorite projects to-date, so I nearly fell on the floor when Wattpad asked me to create some new content for their Crimson Peak campaign. Not to mention, it's a film that I have been waiting to come out FOREVER. Did I mention Tom Hiddleston's in it?
Back to the writing... most of you know I'm swimming in deadlines right now, so I enlisted my friend RJ to co-write this piece with me. I've never co-written anything, so I'm excited about that too!
Are you ready to meet Sadie, Tabitha, and Sutton? Do you dare to enter Allerdale Hall?