From the beginning, I have made rules for my monsters.
That they are not real is the first rule, and the one that we all tacitly agree is only occasionally true. I informed them they were not real as a young child, but they became louder; more frantic, fingernails within my brain scratching for purchase, desiring acknowledgment, gray matter shredding as I ignored the plaintive voice that came from under my bed, asking for water. And so the rule was amended—my monsters are real, but only when I cannot ignore them any longer, when the desire for contact has superseded my need to remain sane.
In this way, I have negotiated with them.
Also, it would be helpful to have more friends.
Or at least one.
“Neely? We’re going.”
This voice is real. This voice is Grandma. This voice also refuses to be ignored and is gratingly nonspecific. Grandma will not say the destination or the function—namely, to put flowers on the grave of my mother and brother for Memorial Day.
“Are you leaving?” asks the girl under my bed, and I give a small kick to the mattress. It’s light and chiding, not aggressive, a simple reminder to her that she is not real.
“Neely?”
Grandma is here now, in the doorway, watching me.
“I’m ready,” I tell Grandma, yanking my hand away from my neck when she spots it twisting there, furtively pinching.
“You’re not,” she says. “When’s the last time you took a shower?”
There’s a snicker from the closet.
My hand goes back up to my neck, fingertips brushing over the line of small bruises and tiny half-moon marks, the topography of invasive thoughts.
“Neely?” Grandma asks again, this time coming into the room. She stands directly in front of me, which is a good move on her part. The more something can fill my five senses, the more chance it has of proving that it is a real thing, in the real world, attempting to interact with me.
I can hear Grandma, see her, smell her. The scent of the lilies that she puts on Mom’s grave every year have stuck to her, a trail of bright yellow pollen smears her wrist. They are the flower of resurrection, a promise of everlasting life, a symbol of purity. They belong on the grave of a young mother who was killed by a drunk driver, calmly asking her children to recite their full names and addresses before she died so that we could identify ourselves when the first responders arrived.
Mom gets lilies. Lance gets a plastic display that sticks into the ground, bought on sale, with very little attention paid to the message or the meaning. Last year, Grandpa had grabbed a blue wreath that assured Lance he might be gone but not forgotten, then thanked him for his service. He was never in the armed forces, but it was only one of the lies—he was definitely gone, and the forgetting part was being actively engaged. Grandma and Grandpa practically chase it.
Dead single moms get lilies.
Suicides get half-off, factually inaccurate statements.
Someone grabs my hand, yanks it from my neck.
“Neely, shower!” Grandma says. “We can’t take you out looking like . . .” She trails off, trying to find a word that won’t break me, won’t make me start crying, curl into a ball, or declare the absolute impossibility of personal hygiene today.
“Looking like this,” she says. She grabs my wrist, gives it a light squeeze. Unlike my kick to the girl under my bed to remind her she is not real, this is Grandma telling me I am.
I am real, and she is real. The world is real, and something is being asked of me; I must shower and then go say important words to dead bodies that are six feet underground, whose tympanic membranes rotted away years ago and most certainly cannot hear me. Somehow, that is considered sane. But if I answer the girl under my bed, or the man in my closet, that is a problem.
“Okay,” I tell Grandma. It’s all I’ve got, the most I can offer right now. I will clean myself and go to a location where we gather all the dead bodies and do what is expected of me. I know these things make Grandma and Grandpa if not happy, then at least a little less worried. And if pretending to be sane can alleviate some of the burden I bring to their lives, I will do it, every day, for as long as I can.
“Sorry,” I tell her, digging deep, finding words, working to make my tongue move. “I haven’t been sleeping.”
“I know, honey,” Grandma says, her fingers clenching my wrist. Whether she is saying that she can hear me moving around the house at night or if she’s aware that lately I have been answering the monsters, I can’t say. Maybe she is simply saying she knows, as if she understands.
Because Grandma doesn’t sleep, either.
And she can sympathize with me to a point. Her only daughter married a man that left her with no money and two children that carried a seed of instability growing inside their minds, small root systems developing, tree trunks of madness thickening, making rings, crowding out normality until we wore leaves like crowns.
“Neely!”
Grandma’s back, standing in front of me, arms crossed. I’ve been drawing, ink-stained fingers creating a tree boy and girl, heads intertwined, laced together. His half has died.
I never showered.
“Sorry,” I say again. “Sorry.” If my mouth makes twenty words today, this will be at least eight of them. I jump to my feet, grab some clothes from the clean laundry basket, and head for the bathroom.
I need to do better. Grandma sees a lot and guesses more. And while she might understand sleeplessness and grief, while she might be familiar with the long night and despair, she can’t ever know about the depths, the monsters, and the voices.
Or the fact that sometimes, they have really good ideas.
I’m greeted by a wave of applause when I step outside.
It’s true I have showered, but that’s not the reason for the sudden onslaught of joy at my presence; no one has ever been that glad to see me. When I was little, I would take a bow at the cinder block steps of our trailer, acknowledging my fans. Mom loved my confidence and what she dubbed my imagination. Dad frowned, pulled me aside, the first of the very rare moments when we spoke of the seed of madness from which our family tree sprouts.
“Don’t react to them,” he said, pushing my hair out of my eyes.
“The people?” I asked.
Dad put his hands on my shoulders and turned me in a slow circle, letting me survey the yard. The foxtails reached my elbows, ticks traveling their long stems. A rusted-out red Ford Escort stood on blocks, a tree growing through the windshield.
“Do you see people?” Dad asked.
It had never occurred to me that the sounds needed a source, and I locked eyes with Lance, who was waiting by the truck.
“Other than your brother,” Dad clarified, and I shook my head.
“No people,” I confirmed.
“Well, that’s something at least,” Dad said.
Sitting in the truck bed, the hot metal burning the backs of my legs, Lance had turned to me.
“Like this,” he said, pointing to his face, which was perfectly blank. “You keep your face like this until you know Mom can hear them. Then it’s real.”
“Not Dad?” I asked, pushing up onto my knees and glancing through the back windshield, watching Dad sneak a cigarette.
“No.” Lance shook his head. “Not Dad.”
This is how I learned, early on, that Mom was the litmus test for reality, the only one of us who didn’t have to filter the world. I slid down next to Lance, our arms touching in the summer heat, his freckles starting to pop.
“Am I doing it right?” I asked, holding my face perfectly still.
My name came from the tall grass, and I flinched.
“No.” Lance smiled. “But you’ll get better. What’s hard is when they say the bad things.”
“Bad things?”
But Dad started the truck then, the engine roaring to life, shaking the chassis, black exhaust fumes pouring out around us. Lance didn’t tell me the bad things then, or ever. I don’t know how long he fought it, just that he lost.
So far, my only bad thing is the Shitbird Man.
I don’t name my monsters, as a general rule. But the Shitbird Man is persistent, and mostly harmless. All he wants to do is tack shitbird onto the end of other people’s statements. He pops up right away as I get into the back seat of the car.
“How are we doing today?” Grandpa asks, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror.
“How are we doing today, shitbird?”
I sigh, both because Grandpa has no idea how terrible it is to refer to someone who has auditory hallucinations in the plural, and because the Shitbird Man usually doesn’t show up first thing in the day.
On the other hand, Grandpa doesn’t know about the voices, so I can’t blame him for referring to me as the royal we, but also, part of my negotiations with the Shitbird Man is that he gets only three uses of shitbird a day, and he just spent one. The downside is that I have to repeat it, or it doesn’t count.
I cover my mouth, and whisper quietly, “How are we doing today, shitbird?”
“What, dear?” Grandma turns in her seat, eyebrows drawn together.
“I’m fine,” I say, dropping my hand.
My childhood playmates resurface when we arrive at the cemetery, bubbling laughter, unintelligibly shouting. I used to join them, running through the tall grass, loving the invisible friends who also delighted in the tickling touch of the foxtails, answering when they called my name. I learned in kindergarten not to laugh with them, or push them on the swings, not to offer them part of my lunch or introduce them to my classmates. I learned the hard way, Fiona Fugate’s brow wrinkling as I explained that the swing wasn’t empty and she couldn’t have it.
It didn’t help that the Shitbird Man showed up right then.
I laugh, and Grandpa meets my eyes in the mirror again. I can’t explain that it’s actually okay. I’m not having an outburst without stimuli. I’m reacting to a funny memory, like a normal person would. I suppose it’s debatable, though, since the memory involves imaginary friends and my suspension from kindergarten for inflammatory language prompted by a disembodied voice.
There are other people at the cemetery, all of us remembering our dead. We did not go to the parade in town, or listen to the mayor give a speech about the patriots of East Independence who gave their lives for their country. The recently departed in the Hawtrey family gave their lives for nothing quite so easily packaged, or explained. Grandma and Grandpa raise their hands in greeting to a few people, who respond in kind but don’t approach. The smell of charcoal rises from a nearby house, and two little girls zip past us on their bikes, the gravel path crunching under their wheels. Red, white, and blue streamers fly from their handlebars, and one of them sports a handmade sign that declares, “Yay! A Prade!”
Grandma and Grandpa walk in front of me, and he reaches for her hand as we
pass into the shade of a weeping willow, its long fingers brushing against Mom’s tombstone.
“Hey, honey,” Grandma says, reaching down to yank at some crabgrass that has sprouted at the base. “We brought someone to see you today.”
I come forward, as if being nearer makes a difference. Grandpa reaches for my hand, too, but I pull away. It’s hot, my palms are sweaty, and feeling someone else’s pulse against my own will not help me speak.
Grandma does not have this problem. She talks to Mom like she’s still here, telling her that she brought lilies again, that I have finished my sophomore year in school—although she doesn’t share my GPA. She tells Mom that they finally recarpeted the living room and that Grandpa’s test came back negative.
I glance at him, but he’s staring at Grandma’s hands while she pulls weeds. I want to ask What test? I want to ask why I wasn’t told, and I want to say that the reason why I stare blankly is not because I don’t care but because I am first determining what has and has not actually happened before I react. I do this so they won’t worry. I do this so they won’t look at me and see Lance—a burden that may no longer be present but is still heavily felt.
“Neely? Do you want to say something?”
It’s Grandma, wanting me to speak, to interact, to talk to my dead mother. But my jaw has hardened, every word she’s said counteracting any sounds I might try to make, soldering my teeth together, making speech impossible. The things she says are right and correct, the way that a person is supposed to behave in a cemetery—a place where it’s socially acceptable to talk to someone who isn’t there. I fight so hard not to do this that when I am asked to, I cannot.
“Do you want to try?” Grandma asks. She puts her hand on my back, like a little pressure on my spine might cause spiritual healing. “Just say whatever is inside. Something you think your mom would want to hear.”
But what Mom wanted to hear was our address, full names, and social security numbers, her last duty as a parent to make sure that we could identify ourselves when we were found. That took a while, and the flies had begun to circle Mom’s open mouth, the temperature rising in the car as Lance and I sat, securely strapped into our car seats, baking with a corpse in the ditch.
I know that I’m supposed to say things for Grandma right now, not for Mom, or myself, the Shitbird Man, or anyone else. I’m supposed to make Grandma feel better, let her know that I’m okay. But that’s not true, and I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. We made that mistake with Mom, the three of us—Dad, Lance, and me—a pact I’m the only one left to maintain.
“I’m going over there,” I say abruptly, walking toward Lance’s grave. I don’t pull the weeds or place any flowers. I don’t participate in the rituals that everyone else does. My rituals happen in private, with witnesses that don’t actually exist.
“Well, I fucked that up,” I tell Lance.
But he doesn’t show up, doesn’t add to the conversation or join me at his graveside. Mom never has, either. I don’t get the consolation of departed loved ones whispering in my ear; I get a perpetually dehydrated toddler and a hovering foulmouthed dude.
Grandpa walks over, hands me this year’s memorial for Lance—a cross of red carnations. They are plastic and will have to be removed once they start to fade, prompting a return trip to the cemetery, one that I will not be invited to, the trip where my brother’s flowers are tossed in the community recycling bin at the end.
But they are trying, I remind myself.
Grandma and Grandpa have been trying for a very long time, bringing Lance and me into their home, swelling their household from two to four. The subtraction came after that, and now we are a trio.
I should be nicer, try harder, stop hearing voices.
All these things
are important and probably listed in the wrong order.
Beyond Lance’s grave is another, older, nearly swallowed by a fast-growing honeysuckle. It’s tilted, moss growing along the shaded side, a tuft of rabbit hair stuck to the curve in the top where a hawk had perched, eating its prey.
I wander over, pushing branches aside.
Mary is buried here, but her last name is gone, washed away by rain and years. I don’t know when she was born, or when she died. Soon, no one will even know she was Mary.
“How long does it take?” I ask as Grandpa comes up behind me.
“This is sandstone,” he says. “It’s very soft, so it wears away easily. When I worked at the quarry . . .”
He goes on, but pretty much any story that starts with When I worked at the quarry is one that I excuse myself from. And besides, that’s not what I meant, and the question wasn’t for him.
I was asking Mary how long it takes to be forgotten.
“I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time for me to get a job,” I say, concentrating on my cheeseburger, trying hard not to notice Maddie Sayers behind the counter of the Grill & Chill, dripping caramel over a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I cut my eyes away, focus on Grandma’s face. I’m asking for a lot, asking to leave the snow globe of their protection, asking to go out and move through the world like a normal human.
“Why do you want a job?” Grandpa asks.
“Why do you want a job, shitbird?”
Dammit. Of course, in public, and when there’s a hot girl a few feet away. I pretend that I’m wiping my mouth, and hurriedly whisper the sentence back into my own palm. “Why do you want a job, shitbird?”
I’ve got to be absolutely positive that one isn’t overheard. Grandpa does have a job, so does Grandma, and I guarantee neither one of them wants it. They were pulled out of retirement when the care and keeping of their grandchildren was foisted upon them. Walmart took them in, and now residents of East Independence can be welcomed by Betsy Holt when they enter and be encouraged to have a good day by Ed Holt as they leave.
Grandma definitely means it; Grandpa, probably not so much.
“Why do I want a job?” I repeat, my stomach tumbling the french fries I just ate, as if examining them for a possible exit strategy back the way they came. I can be honest and tell them that I want to alleviate the financial responsibility that I am the cause of, or that I am becoming aware, as I grow older, that the girl under the bed, the man in the closet, and the Shitbird Man will likely be with me forever. That is approximately not the amount of time I want to live in their house, a parasite that drains and returns nothing. If I start now, I can ease myself into normality, depending on the safety they provide less and less, until one day, I can be a real human, in the real world, with a job and a place of my own.
And maybe, just maybe, the man in the closet and the girl under the bed won’t make the trip with me.
That’s the real answer, the one I can’t give. Unfortunately, Maddie drops a can of whipped cream and bends over to get it, right when I’m trying to come up with an alternate, and my mind goes blank, so I choose to skip over the why and go straight for the where.
“I was thinking I could work at the caverns.”
“I used to work with the owner,” Grandpa says, inspecting a bit of fried egg that hangs off the end of his fork. “I could probably get you in there, at least get you a leg up on the other kids looking for summer work.”
“Well . . .” Grandma glances at Grandpa, the concerned divot above her nose deepening. Grandma never looked her age until Mom died and Lance and I moved in. “I know how much you like it there,” she finally says.
They might believe they know this, have watched their granddaughter exploring nature and enjoying history, feeling a connection with the earth and the passing eons. This could be what they think when they see me there, underground, the tension gone from my shoulders, my teeth no longer meeting in a forced, continual grind. They don’t know, can’t understand, that my monsters don’t follow me there.
It was not a rule that I made, for those seem to be permeable and ever fluid, broken at the whim of whoever is strongest in the moment; them or me. But I’d made the discovery early, after Dad left and Mom died, when Grandma and Grandpa did everything they could to make sure Lance and I were normal kids, leading average summertime lives. The pool, the park, picnics—and the caverns, a tourist attraction that brings in outside money. When it gets hot here, people go underground to cool off.
I go there to not be crazy.
“Could be real good for you,” Grandpa goes on. “Honest work makes everyone feel better.”
“And lots of kids work there,” Grandma adds, that Walmart smile still lingering.
Once, I heard her welcoming people at church, accidentally adding that they should let her know if they needed help finding anything. She blushed, then ducked into the bathroom, coming out with red-rimmed eyes.
They don’t deserve this version of their lives.
Grandpa wants me to get a job because he swears by bootstrap mentality and believes that honest work will cure all ills. Grandma could be brought around to it because she thinks I’m going to make friends. I want to get a job because I don’t want them to worry about me, a weight they didn’t ask for, an extra person on the perimeter.
But also—this could be good. Actually good, not just I’m going to convince myself that this is good and then find out later I was wrong, like the time I went to Candace Gentry’s birthday party in first grade and failed terribly at hide-and-seek because I was shushing everyone who had crowded into the closet with me . . . which was approximately zero real humans.
“The youngest Bailey kid works there, right?” Grandma turns to Grandpa.
“Jake,” he says, nodding.
“Josh,” I correct, not adding that Josh is a dick. “I’d really like to do this,” I say, cutting off my grandparents as they have a small argument about whether Josh is George Bailey’s son or his nephew. This is the kind of conversation that they excel at, and it can go on for quite a while if allowed.
“Yes?” Grandma asks, then knocks the question mark off the end, instead repeating it firmly, as if worried that her indecision might infect me. “Yes.”
“Good,” Grandpa adds, with a sharp, satisfied nod. “I’ll talk to John tonight, see if he’s got room for you.”
But I know that John will, because this is East Independence and personal favors carry a lot more weight than individual merits. We finish eating in a comfortable silence, Grandma not quite able to banish a smile that hovers, perpetually, even when she’s not being paid to do it.
That’s one version of my afternoon, the real one, the actual one, things that happened that other people witnessed, and so an agreed-upon version of reality has occurred. There’s another version, one that I indulge in once I’m at home, safely ensconced in my room, mouthing the words, mimicking the actions, as if replaying it with no audience, sotto voce, with minimal movement can make it real.
I stand at Mom’s grave, located at the foot of my bed. I pull weeds alongside Grandma, my hands plucking an inch above the carpet, tossing them over my shoulder. We stand, and she tells Mom they’ve brought someone along today, pushes her hand against my spine. I reach back and grab it, returning the squeeze, grateful for the support.
“I really miss you, Mom,” I say. It’s a revision I’ve earned, a do-over in my mind that might make the next actual cemetery visit easier. The more I practice being normal while I am alone, the better I can get at
at it in public.
“I miss you and I wish you were here,” I say, still speaking to Mom’s grave, still feeling that afternoon’s light on my face. “I don’t know what you would think of me. But I bet you would be worried.”
“Try again,” the girl under the bed says.
I sigh and close my eyes. She might not be real, but she’s not wrong. If I’m trying to get better at being normal, talking about being crazy isn’t a good first step.
“I really miss you, and I wish you were here,” I say, returning to my first statement.
Grandma’s hand presses against mine, and I know I did it right this time. We plant the lilies together; the carpet grinding against my knees feels like cool grass.
“I talk to your mother every day,” Grandpa says.
“Do you talk to Lance?” I ask.
I wanted to say it then, but had held back. Here, it comes out. I wait for a second, but there’s no feedback from the girl. She must think it’s a fair question, so I don’t revise. I let it hang, wondering what the answer is. ...
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