Chapter 5

Chapter 5 of 56 · 12-minute read

Everything is exactly as it was a few minutes ago. Maybe a few more people in the hallway, all of them trying to gather around the reception area where they giggle in hushed tones. I float up behind them. Some of them look familiar, like shades and faces from the past, but I can’t put a name to any of them other than Iris-Ann and Chelsie.

“I don’t know,” Chelsie is saying as I float near.

Gripping a worn-out pen in her hand, she presses it against a blank sheet of paper. She scribbles furiously before throwing the pen onto her desk with a huff. She digs through her desk drawer until she finds a red pen with a logo of a local feed-and-seed store. This one works.

“All I’m saying is that, if there’s an award for being the world’s worst daughter, my cousin would win it and take first, second, and third place, too.”

Someone I don’t recognize laughs. “I’ll second that. I heard she hasn’t been back since her daddy’s funeral, not even for Christmas. That’s what I heard, anyway. That was so hard on her mama to spend her first Christmas as a widow-woman all by her lonesome.”

I float closer to get a better look at the clueless gossip who has no idea that I spent last Christmas by my mom’s side or why I’ve been away since winter. My fingers brush her cheeks as I pass. Her skin is rough like sandpaper and smells of calamine lotion. I’ve never seen this woman before in my life.

“And then to have a stroke, and Lauren just abandoned her like that!”

Chelsie stops scribbling with the red pen and taps her forehead with it. “You got that right. My mama and daddy and sister and brothers did our best to intervene, and look at the thanks we got for that. I can show you the court documents if you want to see them. Fallon and Walker aren’t allowed to step within five hundred feet of Aunt Emmy’s house. Poor thing couldn’t even cook for herself or drive to town to the grocery store. Fallon was willing to give up her nice apartment to move in with Aunt Emmy and take care of her, but Laurie put a stop to that.”

The circle of strangers around the reception desk all shake their heads and make grumbling noises.

Am I dreaming? Is this what laughing gas does to me now? Is this just a bad dream or is any of the speculation real? Is this what I fear the people of my hometown are saying about me behind my back?

And Chelsie portraying Fallon as such a self-sacrificing and well-intentioned hero! My cousin was all but moved in when I discovered what she was up to, and I had to have Truett, the local sheriff, move her suitcases onto the front porch to be picked up. Fallon had been fired from her last job and was looking at the eviction when she saw an opportunity. She’d begged my mom to let her move in, and, as usual, my people-pleasing mother couldn’t say no, even if she never said yes. The one saving grace is that she’s asked me to take over all of her finances, assigned me her financial and health power of attorney, and authorized me to be the bad guy because she can’t stand up for herself.

And bad guy I am.

Someone else I don’t know speaks. From her physical appearance, I’d guess she’s the daughter or younger sister of the other stranger. “Laurie should’ve quit her job and sold her house and moved back here to take care of her mama when Miss Emma had her stroke.”

Chelsie laughs. “She ought to. I don’t think she can afford it, though. She’s got to be old enough to retire by now, but she can’t. And you know she can’t keep a man.”

Geez. These people just invent a life for me without being a part of it at all. And for the record, my first marriage lasted longer than all of hers put together. And what’s this crap about Mama having a stroke?

“Nope, she sure can’t hold onto a man!” Iris-Ann’s chair squeals and screeches on the floor as she drags it forward. She leans into her desk, eager to make sure everyone is listening. “Well, we all better be really careful then. She’s trying to get her hooks into Virgil. You know, he’s the one who set up this appointment for her with Neil-Junior. We didn’t have an opening for two weeks, and what does she convince Virgil to do? Use his influence to get a walk-in appointment for Laurie an hour after she hits town.”

I start to defend myself, but there’s no point. I’m not really here, at least not physically. Plus, this is probably a mere anxiety dream from being pinned down in a dental chair with someone’s hands in my mouth while I’m helpless and⁠—

The hallway folds in on itself, and when it opens up again I’m crouched in leaves high enough and damp enough to impart stains on my thighs and shorts. The dentist office was the present, but this… this is the past.

I know this place. I’ll never forget the dank smell of the leaves here in the swampy part of the woods close to my parents’ house. The smell of a small campfire in the distance, one that Bobby built. The sound of his footfalls in the heavy leaves. The back-and-forth swish of his flashlight as he passes me without seeing me. I know this place, and if this is an anxiety-produced trick of my mind, it feels pretty fucking real.

I stare up through the oaks and cypresses at the full moon, directly overhead.

Midnight. I’d forgotten that part.

I’ve been running from Bobby for hours, eluding him as he becomes angrier and angrier at my insolence for not giving in and being a good little victim. I’ve squatted here until I can’t feel my feet anymore for fear that I might move and he might hear me. I could easily walk home from here in the moonlight, but then I’d have to explain to Daddy why I bailed on Uncle Bobby’s camping trip. I can go back to Bobby and let him do things to me that I suspect are immoral, but I’m not sure what’s immoral because I’ve led such an insulated life at twelve.

If anything naughty shows up on TV, Daddy will send me to the kitchen to get him a snack and command me not to come back until the next scene is on TV. Everything I know about sex I know either from the Baptist preacher who talks about temple prostitutes in his sermons or what some of the kids at school have said. Most of my female classmates think it’s funny how stupid I am about anything beyond menstruation—which I haven’t started yet—so few of them have been forthcoming with any useful information. Still, I know what Bobby has done to me, and whatever else he wants to do to me makes me sick to my stomach.

I can’t understand why a man would want to stick his private parts—which I’ve never even seen except on my baby brother—into anyone’s mouth. What does he expect me to do? Is that fun for him? It’s like a nauseating joke that doesn’t make sense.

I’m not worldly enough yet to understand either his pleasure or what else he wants to do.

This swamp is full of alligators and snakes. And vermin like Bobby. Which is worse? The wildlife? Or an old man with emphysema who wants to jam his gray tongue—and his… thing—down my throat?

Drifting clouds momentarily hide the full moon, and everything around me grows impossibly dark. I could wait for the clouds to pass, run home in the moonlight, and have my dad rage at me for mistreating his favorite relative and get my bare legs whipped bloody with a pear tree switch.

Or I could tell my dad exactly what Bobby wants to do with me in the woods and risk a beating with a doubled leather belt for accusing an outstanding man of something I’m not even sure is wrong because nobody has ever told me exactly what constitutes a sexual act.

On top of that, Bobby has always hinted that his physical attention to me is my fault. If only I weren’t so sweet and pretty, he would be able to control himself. Don’t I want to be a good girl and make him happy? He’s promised repeatedly that if I’m a good girl, he’ll tell my parents I minded him and learned all about building campfires and setting up tents.

But there’s a third way that doesn’t involve Bobby touching me or Daddy beating me.

Crouching here in the darkness, I make myself as small and unnoticeable as the moldering branch on the ground beside me. When I do make a noise at last, it’s to whisper a prayer. I try to shape it like the sentence prayers I’ve been taught in Sunday School where we take turns around our circle of small wooden chairs, and each child repeats the beginning of a sentence and ends it with whatever it is we are thankful for. But sentence prayers don’t work for me in the swamp.

Nowhere in any of our Sunday School lessons have I learned about the appropriate response to an old man touching me in places I’m told I should be ashamed of. According to the stories our Sunday School teachers have taught us, Adam and Eve had their eyes opened by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and were ashamed of their nakedness, and therefore, we too are to be ashamed of our nakedness, of our bodies, even as children.

Uncle Bobby started with hugs and proceeded to quick kisses on the lips when no one was looking, and then his palms on my chest and his hands down my pants whenever he asked me to walk him to his car, which was conveniently parked beyond a row of six-foot tall pink azaleas. Bobby brought me gifts every week on his three-hour, round-trip drive. Not gifts for my parents. Not flowers for my mom. No. Personal, slightly intimate gifts for me. A delicate bracelet with my name engraved, misspelled. And expensive perfume that I’m far too young to wear.

I’m too young and too sheltered to understand why none of this feels right, so I always come up with excuses to not be present when Bobby comes around. Sometimes I say I have to do homework at a friend’s house. Sometimes I have a friend over and make sure she never leaves my side until after Bobby has angrily departed the premises. I come up with as many ways to escape Uncle Bobby’s lechery as I have my own father’s emotional dysregulation.

Bobby has complained to my parents, though, about how he brings me expensive gifts and I avoid him and how that hurts his feelings. My dad has chewed me out about it, which only adds guilt to my feelings of shame. The more desperate I’ve been to escape Bobby’s attentions, the more aggressive he’s become.

On his last visit before this phony camping trip, he made small talk with my parents and then told my dad he was going to drive me to town for an ice cream while he made plans for a camping trip that I had not yet been successful in getting out of. He’d stopped in an alley somewhere, unzipped his pants, and forced my head into his lap. After that, no amount of Rocky Road ice cream made me forget the taste. He’d brought me back home with extra ice cream for my parents and high praise for me for being such a good girl.

All I knew was that I had to stop these visits but still somehow not get myself into deeper trouble with my parents. If something were really wrong, they would protect me, wouldn’t they? They were certainly overprotective about anything and everyone else, enough so that every night of elementary school was filled with fears of being kidnapped. For years, I fell asleep with my palm over my nose and mouth, loosely, just in case someone tried to chloroform me while I was waiting to fall asleep. And yet, the biggest threat to my safety wasn’t some devil-worshipping stranger but the favorite uncle who came bearing gifts.

“Lauren? Lauren!”

I always thought of him as yelling my name, but here in this memory, it’s a stage whisper.

Ah. Of course.

Out here in the middle of the countryside, sound travels. If I can hear the crickets, bullfrogs, and whippoorwills from my bedroom at night, then surely not just my parents but neighbors several miles away or maybe over at the old Coleman place would hear him calling my name and come to find out what’s wrong.

I stop praying. I don’t want Bobby to hear me, but I guess that’s the only way God answers prayers is if He can hear them. I try thinking it instead but nothing happens.

The Bible says anything to do with my privates is a shameful thing. At least, that’s what my Sunday School teachers say. My mom, too. So if I feel shame, that must mean I’m guilty of something, right?

I watch the beam of light from his old silver-colored flashlight spray across the thick leaves ahead of me. He’s searching the woods in rows, all the way to the swamp’s edge and the dozens of reptilian eyes that shine back. If I don’t run now, he’ll find me in another minute.

What was it that Dixxie and Virgil’s mom had said? Something about calling on the Old Gods if no one else answers my pleas for help.

And no one else is answering.

Help me, I plead silently. I try to make the words louder in my brain. Help me!

Then something takes over in my head, jumbles up Bible verses and myths I’ve read at the library in the summer reading program, and words move my lips in a whisper that even I can’t hear.

“I call upon the Old Gods to prosper me and to protect me from evil.”

Somewhere overhead, clouds move and old oak trees and cypresses sway, and the light of the full moon peeks through. That’s when She appears to me. The Morrigan. In a split second, we commune for hours, and then, time moves forward again.

I’m still in shadow, but the moonlight hits the swamp water twenty feet from me like a spotlight. A fallen tree, cut down years ago by some storm, bridges the water to a patch of drier land. The trunk of the oak is half-rotted. Mushrooms grow out of a crevice in its surface. Where bark remains, some verdant fungus thrives. The outline of the tree gleams in the moonlight, like a map with a highlighted path to lead the way.

The beam from the flashlight blinds me. Squinting, I raise my arm to shield my eyes and try to make out what sprawls beyond in the dark expanse of swamp.

“Gotcha!”

I throw back my head to the sky. “Help me!” My voice, loud and clear.

“Oh, I’m gonna help you. You’ve been a bad, bad girl. All the trouble you put me through tonight? You better believe you’re gonna make it up to me!”

“Run,” The Morrigan whispers in my ear. “Now!”

As soon as my bare toes touch the squishy green carpet on top of the rotten tree, I bolt forward over the alligator-infested waters below⁠—

—And land some place else, some other time.

I blink and look around the long hallway. I don’t know this place. I’ve never been here.

Is this a vision of the future?

The carpet is ugly. Industrial. The lowest bidder. Some weird combination of orange, purple, and gray designed to hide stains in a high traffic area.

I push to my knees and take off in a dead run toward the far end of the hall, toward a door.

Someone’s behind me.

Someone I know.

Someone who wants to kill me.

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