Lauren

Lauren

Ted was gone and all the pain that had been shared between us rushed into me. I had not known the body was capable of standing so much. I tried to follow him down, inside. But he had locked the door against me. I wonder if he could hear me screaming, from down there. I expect he could.

Mommy put us back in our little bed when she was done. The gauze was itchy over the stitches but I knew better than to scratch. The room was full of moving shadow and the mouse’s pink eyes gleamed where it watched from its cage.

I’m scared, I tried to tell Teddy. Teddy didn’t answer. He was deep in a good place full of black tails and green eyes and soft coats. I tried not to cry but I couldn’t help it.

I felt Ted soften towards me. ‘You can sleep now, Lauren,’ he said. ‘Someone else will watch.’

I heard the pad of great paws as Night-time came upstairs. I sank into the soft black.

I was woken in the morning by his weeping. Ted had found Snowball’s bloody bones in the cage. He was so sorry about it. ‘Poor Snowball,’ he whispered over and over. ‘It isn’t fair.’ He cried more about that mouse than he did about the new little railway of black sutures that ran down our back. He wasn’t there when it was done, I guess. He didn’t feel it. I did, each one.

Ted knew it wasn’t Night-time’s fault. Night-time was just obeying his nature. Ted told Mommy that the mouse got out of its cage, and a stray cat got it. It was true, in a way. Of course, Mommy didn’t believe him. She took Teddy to the woods and told him to hide who he was. She thought he had a hunger in him. Ted was afraid that she would find a way to take Olivia and Night-time away. (And then it would be just me and him. He didn’t want that.) So he let her think it was the old sickness, the one her father had, the one who kept his pets in the crypt beneath the iliz.

I had begun to understand what Ted could not – what he would not allow himself to know. Each time the thought bobbed up he pushed it down harder, harder. Up it came again like a cork or a corpse surfacing. The sickness had indeed been passed down, though not to Ted. I wonder what the people of Locronan would say, if you asked them why they cast Mommy out. Maybe they have a different story to hers. Maybe it wasn’t her father who had the sickness.

At school they sensed that something had changed in Ted. He was like a mask with no one behind. Everyone stopped talking to him. He didn’t care. He could go inside, now, with the kitties. For the first time he could recall, he told me, he did not feel alone.

To me, who had been with him for all of Mommy’s repairs. He said that to me.

Teddy began calling the inside house his weekend place, because there was no work or school down there. Soon he found that he could add to it. He couldn’t keep his job at the auto shop in Auburn, so he made a basement where he could work on engines. He liked engines. It was a good workshop, full of tools in shining boxes and the scent of motor oil. He put white socks in the drawers, the kind that Mommy would never let him wear, because she said they were for girls. He put a window in the ceiling on the landing, where he could watch the sky all night, if he wanted, but no one could look back at him except the moon. He fixed the music box and put the Russian dolls back on the mantelpiece. Down here, he can fix everything he breaks. The picture of Mommy and Daddy can never be taken off the wall. Olivia walked through it all, her tail held curious and high. He made sure she had a peephole all her own. For her, it is always winter outside: Ted’s favourite season.

Ted made sure that Night-time only hunted downstairs, after the thing with Snowball. He put lots of mice in the weekend place to keep Night-time happy. Ted didn’t want any more suffering.

He added an attic, which he kept locked. He could put memories and thoughts in there and close the door. He didn’t like some of the inhabitants of the house. The long-fingered, green things, which had once been boys. He was afraid that the green boys were the ones who went missing from the lake. But that was just fine, because he put them in the attic, too. Sometimes they could be heard in the night, dragging their bony stick fingers on the boards, and weeping.

The more time Teddy spent inside, the clearer and more detailed it got. Soon he found that he could go there whenever he wanted. He began to lose time, there. The TV played anything he wanted. He could even watch what was happening in the upstairs house. If he saw something good was happening, like Mommy had got ice cream, he could open the front door and he would be up there again. Usually he found himself lying in the freezer in the acid-scented dark, with the air holes shining above him like stars. He went up less and less as the years went on.

More and more, he left me alone with Mommy. When she angled the light just so, Teddy went down to the weekend place and stroked his kitty.

I came to hate that smug cat. Ted knew it. Sometimes when I tried to come down he kept me suspended between the two places, in the black, vinegar-smelling freezer, because the cat was downstairs. Then when she went away it was my turn. If I did something he didn’t like, he found he could keep me in the dark freezer all the time.

I can’t come forward fully when we’re outside the house, unless Ted lets me. I can do little things – scribble a note, maybe, on the inside of some leggings, or make him lose concentration for a couple seconds. And of course it has to be stuff that doesn’t require the use of working legs. I don’t know why Ted’s broken mind made me like this but it did. He has to carry me through the world, maimed and powerless. I think that’s why he sometimes forgets that it was my strength that kept us alive.

Ted couldn’t say boo to a goose, or so I thought. I soon found out how wrong I was.

One day we were looking for mints in Mommy’s drawers. She didn’t like candy but she liked her breath to be fresh, so she would put one in her mouth for a few moments then spit it into a handkerchief. She moved the hiding place but sometimes we found it. We knew to eat just one, no matter how hungry we were. Mommy counted, but one mint was a plausible margin of error.

Mommy kept interesting things in her drawers. An old song book with bears on the front, a single white child’s flip-flop. Teddy was careless today. He pawed through her hose with damp hands.

‘She’ll notice, Teddy,’ I said. ‘Sheesh. You’ll tear them!’ He looked up and I caught our reflection in the mirror on the vanity. I saw it then, in his face. He didn’t care any more. Mommy would punish us and make the body cry. She would put us in the big box with vinegar. But Teddy could just go downstairs. It was me who would feel it.

‘Ted,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t …’

He shrugged and took the box of mints from where it was neatly folded inside a camisole. Slowly, dreamily, he opened the tin and put it to his lips. He tipped it so that the mints flowed into his mouth. Some spilled from his lips and fell bouncing to the floor.

‘Ted,’ I whispered. ‘Stop! You can’t be serious, she will hurt the body for that.’

He shook the last mints into his mouth, which was already crammed with round white shapes. Even in my panic I could taste them, my mouth was filled with sweetness … I shook myself. I had to stop him.

‘I’ll scream,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring her.’

‘So what?’ he said, through a mouthful of clicking mints. ‘Bring her. You’ll feel it, not me.’

‘There are more ways to hurt than the body,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell her about your weekend place, and those cats. She will find a way to deal with that. I don’t know what it will be, but you know I’m right. Mommy knows how to make brains do things, not just bodies.’

He growled and shook his head at me in the mirror. Suddenly there was nothing in my mouth. The taste was gone. He had cut me off from our senses. He looked as surprised as me. We hadn’t known that was possible.

‘You can stop me eating mints but you can’t stop me telling,’ I said.

Ted took a pin from the cushion on the dresser. Slowly he drove the tip into the fleshy part of his thumb.

A red line of fire ran through me and I screamed and wept.

Ted stood before the mirror. His face held Mommy’s expression of clinical interest. Again and again he drove the needle home. ‘I’ll stop when you promise,’ he said.

I promised.

I understand something about life that Ted never has: it is too painful. No one can take so much unhappiness. I tried to explain it to him. It’s bad, Teddy. Mommy is nuts, you know that. She’s lost it. She’ll go too far and end us one day. Better to choose our own way out. We don’t have to feel bad all the time. Take the knife, knot the rope. Go hide in the lake. Walk into the woods, until everything goes green. The kindness of ending. Teddy tried to block his ears, but of course he could not shut me out altogether. We are two parts of the whole. Or we were supposed to be.

Shortly after that I tried to kill us for the first time. It wasn’t a very good try but it showed Teddy that he didn’t want to die. He found a way to silence me. He started playing Mommy’s music when he gave me pain. He gave me so much pain that the music became it, weaving through the air. The agony only stopped when I slipped half way down, into the dark freezer, leaving the body empty. I quickly learned to vanish as soon as the first note was plucked on the guitar.

Ted doesn’t know everything. I still fight him. And I am stronger than he thinks. Sometimes when he goes away, it is not Little Teddy who comes. It is me. When he finds himself with a knife in his hand – those times it is me, trying to do what should be done.

But I wasn’t strong enough. Ted had too good a hold on me. I had to make the cat do it. And that’s how we come to be where we are.