Supernatural fic: We’re All Mad Here
Title: We’re All Mad Here
Fandom(s): Supernatural
Rating: PG
Word Count: 4,895
Summary: But I don’t want to go among mad people! Oh, you can’t help that...
Author’s Notes: Tag to “Let It Bleed.”
We’re All Mad Here
Things are wrong, just wrong. Her brain hurts, and it’s not from the concussion. Hurts, hurts, hurts. Unfamiliar house. Where is she? Why? Battle Creek, wrong. It’s all wrong. Shadows in the corners. Bad things here. Bad, bad, bad. Right?
Like any proud mom in suburbia, Lisa has decorated her house with pictures, some professionally taken, some blurry candids snapped at barbecues and taped to the fridge. They’re so familiar to her that it requires a full week for her to realize how…off they are.
Some look perfectly normal, old ones of Ben or family reunions. But the others, the newer ones that litter each room of the house, it’s like returning home to find out someone moved your furniture an inch to the left. In a few, she’s the only subject of the photo, and it’s disturbing-she’s not nearly so vain as to advertise solo shots.
The framing puts the cap on it all. She’s always a bit too far to either side, with no accompaniment but green lawn or a dimly-lit restaurant booth. Yet in all of them she’s smiling broadly next to that empty space, eyes sparkling with happiness. And for the life of her, she can’t explain it.
(There’s a dull, persistent pain in her heart when she gazes at them, and she wants the goddamn thing to disappear.)
Ben’s decked out in mud-splattered baseball gear in another picture, clutching his championship trophy and sitting atop his uncle’s shoulders. It wouldn’t be out of place, except Lisa knows she hasn’t seen her brother since last Christmas, and Ben won the season in June. Her amnesia has made her hazy in some areas, but she can remember that day in full clarity-pre-game, post-game, and all seven innings between-and she’s certain Nathaniel Braeden was squarely at his home in Dayton eating leftovers.
She calls him a moment later, to make sure, and he answers in the negative as expected, with an added, Sis, are you okay? for good measure.
(She uses the photo as tinder and replaces it with one of Ben and two of his teammates.)
Shhh, ignore it, says a voice inside her head. Oily, dark. It tells her to shut up, to stop poking at the walls inside her head. She wonders, why, why, why. She’s special. Isn’t she? Or not. Would you say someone’s special if they’ve lost their mind? Buzz, buzz, wrong answer.
She tries Matt’s number a dozen times after they get back before finally storming into his hospital and demanding to know where he’s been, why he hasn’t answered her calls. It’s not like him, she hisses.
(They say he was found in an alley, wrong place, wrong time, assailant still at large. His neck was twisted, and they’re very sorry, and is there anything they can do, Ms. Braeden?)
It’s odd. Odd, odd, odd. Flashes of things come to her mind, of big strong men, too strong, too evil. A sound, then. Snap, crackle, pop. There are seven bones in the neck, did you know? Matt’s got only pieces these days.
Ben’s school and Lisa’s work give them two weeks’ lenience due to the severity of their accident, but as the deadline nears, she realizes she’s in need of a car. The insurance money hasn’t come in yet, and she decides it’d just be easier to buy a new car rather than fix her old one.
She drags Ben with her to the lot, looks around at all the options. All the new cars are too expensive, too shiny. The salesman flags them down and spews a lot of pretty words at the two of them. She listens, and ignores the bombardment of information. All it’s meant for is to get her to agree to something she doesn’t need. (He can’t bring back her memory, so what’s the point?)
She has every intention to tell the guy off, but her son gets there first. “You're charging this much for a 2005?” Ben asks, gesturing to a Rav-4 that’s somewhat worn but seems okay to her eye. “Can you pop the hood?”
The salesman appraises Ben like he’s an overactive puppy, and gives him a too-wide smile. “Sure, sport,” he says genially. He opens the hood as requested and presents it with a flourish. "Like what you see?”
Ben squints at the dozens of parts inside and after a few minutes’ judging and prodding, he snorts. “That timing belt’s on its way out and the battery terminals are pretty corroded. Engine mounts are loose. This car’s not worth the price tag, dude.”
Lisa’s torn between criticizing Ben’s backtalk and wanting to praise him for being so astute. The salesman, on the other hand, isn’t pleased. He offers some half-assed attempt to explain away the deformities for which neither Ben nor Lisa herself fall. Finally, he gives up and gestures to a 2007 CR-V.
“If you don’t tell my boss about that, you can have this one for nine grand even,” he says grumpily.
She shrugs, internally pondering if this counts as extortion. “Ben? What do you think?”
Ben takes a look at the Honda’s innards and nods. “Seems fair.”
“Just so you know, this never happens,” the salesman comments. “Your old man must’ve taught you well, eh, kid?”
“It wasn’t my father, he’s a deadbeat,” Ben grits out. Then, proudly, “I learned it all from-from-”
He cuts off so abruptly it gives Lisa whiplash. “From a family friend,” she fibs hastily.
The salesman stares at Ben curiously for a moment before turning back to Lisa. “Well, in any case. Why don’t you come inside and we’ll get that paperwork squared away. Your kid’s not an auto policy prodigy, too, is he?”
“No, but I dated a lawyer once,” Lisa smiles.
(They brainstorm in the car as they drive home, but neither can decide who might’ve taught Ben. I’m sure you just picked it up somewhere. TV maybe? Lisa suggests. It’s not true, and they both know it.)
Grease stains the concrete in her garage. Grease, like life draining from an old wound. No stitches. Just drip, drip, drip. She’s always taken good care of her cars. There’s still grease when she opens her eyes. Concrete streaked with black. Or ichor. Which is real? She doesn’t know anymore.
Being late isn’t a new phenomenon for the Braeden family, but losing her work uniform is. Lisa locates it eventually, buried between a winter jacket and a too-large plaid shirt that’s missing a button. How odd it is that her clothes are all confined to one end of the closet and that there are two empty drawers in her bureau doesn’t occur to her until midway through a Bikram class. She has plenty of outfits to fill that space; it doesn’t track that she’s not using it.
(She doesn’t get around to rectifying the situation. The space isn’t hers, though she couldn’t tell you to whom it belongs.)
Too much space. Too much. Leering. Saying, threatening, asking. What, what, what? You don’t remember? Ha-ha-ha. A thick, battered silver ring serves as her bottle opener. More liquor for her. Cupboards, floorboards, empty condom box. Liquid amber, flames in her throat. Curiouser and curiouser.
Her mother’s the first one to notice the shotgun. Visiting for Lisa’s thirty-second birthday, she takes over the master bedroom and screeches a few moments later as Lisa’s making up the spare room for herself. She bolts toward the yell, heart racing on reflex. Her mother begins a tirade before Lisa can pause to consider what sort of calamity must have befallen her to cause such a reflex.
“Lisa Katharine Braeden, why in heaven’s name do you have a gun in your closet? A loaded gun? What if Ben had found this?”
She can’t fabricate a decent reply, mumbles something about how it must be Matt’s. Never mind that Matt had never left any of his stuff at the house, never mind that she’s positive he hasn’t gone hunting once in his life and would rather talk down a burglar than shoot one. Never mind all the nicks and scratches on the shotgun showing years of hard use and the stain of oil on the wall from a too-zealous lubrication. Never mind that its appearance evokes neither fear nor revulsion in Lisa, it’s simply…there. As normal to her, somehow, as the off-kilter door on the linen closet or the box of VHS tapes she keeps meaning to donate.
“I want it gone, today,” her mother insists, and Lisa complies, stashing it on a shelf in the garage. She doesn’t unload it, and if it’s precisely at waist height, easy to access, well, no one has to know, do they?
(Unshakeable is the feeling of how comfortable it is in her grip, how she knows its sight is a bit cockeyed and that a proper hit would require aiming a few degrees up and to the right.)
Bang, bang, dead, dead. Iron rounds, so says the gun store. Strange, that, iron. Fe, 26, transition metal. Wrought fences, cast pots, molded, melted. Melt, melt, melt. Gray heat in her palm. Her skin boils.
Ben has never been a kid with nightmares, not since Lisa declared on his fourth Halloween that neither creature nor ne’er-do-well would touch him so long as she was around.
He has them when they return to Battle Creek. Once a week, if he’s lucky, every night when he’s not. Vivid things they are, invisible nasties that have him thrashing and sweating and screaming no matter how roughly she jostles him.
His moans are mostly unintelligible but she catches phrases like There’s men in the house and demons and help me, what do I do?
He doesn’t remember them the next morning (maybe he does, maybe he can’t forget) and she doesn’t have the courage to bring it up. His complexion is downright ashen on these such mornings, and he mumbles about how he’s not hungry and she puts her hand to his forehead to check his temperature.
(He’s not sick, but they pretend anyway because the reality’s worse.)
A rational person would probably contact a child psychologist, as Ben’s teachers have recommended more than once, only she knows it’d be a waste of time and money. Lisa can’t do anything to quell her own terrors, let alone Ben’s; a shrink would have no chance.
She, too, has dreams of things with black eyes and a searing pain in her stomach and fruitlessly banging around in her own head for control of her faculties, but keeps her son out of it. She has to be Super Mom, she has to be unaffected, she has to be. And if she wants to lie about all the blood and fire and badawfulbad, then she’s damn well going to. No matter what.
(Her dreams aren’t always terrible. Sometimes, on rare occasion, she’s pleasured so thoroughly by a man whose face she can never make out that she wakes hot all over and panting with an orgasm miles better than any she can remember.)
Hee, says that voice. Are you afraid of the boogeyman? Boo! Gotcha. Don’t be frightened, little girl. Lights, she needs lights. Sixty watt, no one-twenty. Stars go out, blink, blink, blink. She suffocates in the dark. Dead? Halfway? Yes. Maybe. No?
Sleep falls away just before sunrise, an hour at least before her alarm is set to go off, which is cause for homicide all by itself, before she realizes what woke her up. It’s a thudding, smacking sort of noise, one that has her instantly out of bed and on guard. She grabs a book off her nightstand for lack of a better weapon and creeps out into the hallway.
She’d almost prefer it have been a creepy-crawly.
“Benjamin, what are you doing?” she snaps, glaring at her son who freezes with his foot an inch away from kicking a soccer ball. Green and brown smudges mar the once-clean wall, the very thing she’d wanted to avoid.
She heaves an exhausted sigh. In the months since the accident, Ben’s been more rebellious than ever, and she can’t put her finger on the impetus. Friends have suggested it’s merely due to his burgeoning adolescence, but she has a feeling it’s something else. Her Ben used to be mild-mannered, if effervescent. Now, he’s on edge, always, jumpy, and can’t-or won’t-tell her why.
Ben pouts and kicks the ball down to her, then scurries back into his room with a half-sincere apology floating behind him. The ball misses Lisa entirely, bounces off the doorjamb and skids underneath her bed. There’s a heavy thunk, followed by the chink-crash of glass breaking, and Lisa curses, acknowledging only belatedly that she doesn’t store anything under there.
A puddle of water begins to pool out from underneath and, curious, Lisa gets on her hands and knees to peer below the bed frame. The water soaks into her pajamas but she pays it no mind, appalled and downright baffled by what she finds there. Stained into the off-white carpet in viscous crimson paint is a large symbol she has no name for, joined by another firearm just as worn as the last and a smashed jar of water. She pulls from the container a string of beads, a rosary, and studies it in confusion.
Her mother’s Catholic, had put her daughters through Sunday school and Confirmation, but Lisa hasn’t been to church in over a decade. Ben was baptized on Carol’s insistence, and she continues to beg Lisa to attend at least for Christmas and Easter, but Lisa’s never held the religion in high regard. Besides, the Bible wouldn’t exactly have approved of the exploits she’d had in her youth.
All told, there’s no cause for her to have a rosary beneath her bed, not to mention a sigil that makes a shiver slide down her spine. Despite that, all she does to deal with the mess is blot up the spilled water. She should run by the hardware store to buy some industrial paint remover, or maybe call the flooring company to re-carpet her room, or maybe give the rosary to her mother as a peace offering.
(She doesn’t do any of that. What she does is leave everything where it is and buy a bed skirt to hide it from view.)
Scarlet, vermillion, rosewood, carmine. How nice. Watercolor? No, wait, acrylic. No, tempera. No, silly, blood. Blood and holy water. Funny how they go together. Funny, funny, funny. She pricks her finger on the broken glass. Blood on the carpet, paint, no difference.
In late January, she receives a package from a source she only half-recalls. The return address is from Cicero, Indiana, some woman named Emily Keel, so in spite of her cluelessness, she gathers they must have been close. Lisa opens the box and pulls out the letter on top, scanning it quickly.
Hey Guys!
Katie and I remembered it’s your man’s birthday today! Hope you’re all still together, but if not, could you make sure to give this to him? Katie absolutely insisted on sending it. You know, she still talks about those monsters. (We’ve both been to see this great doctor. I haven’t flinched at Katie in over a year now.) But just knowing our hero is out there makes us sleep better at night.
Wishing you the best!
Lisa frowns, none of the words registering sense, and unwraps the gift inside. There’s a hand-drawn picture of a man clad in a brown jacket with a sword in his hand, spearing a large monster straight through the heart. Off to the side stands a group of kids and a few adults, one of whom looks remarkably like Lisa herself, cheering.
Beneath the drawing lies a container of shotgun shells filled with…salt? A Post-It note affixed to it says concisely, I remember he told all of us that salt repels a lot of monsters, so hopefully these come in handy!
Lisa replaces everything in the box and seals it up, setting it on the kitchen table that’s already littered with a cornucopia of sundry crap she keeps meaning to sort through. Her head has begun to throb, the type of headache she’s come to associate with her brain trying so damn hard to overcome her amnesia.
She wishes she could pass off the birthday presents as a mis-delivery, but the contents are too personal, too centered on Lisa’s family, to be a mistake. And besides, it’s her name written squarely in the center of the UPS package in thick black Sharpie. Not exactly indicative of a postal error.
(She pins the drawing to the fridge, and Ben never comments on it, as though somehow it belongs there. She sends a thank-you note to the Keels because it’s the right thing to do, and refrains from asking them whose birthday it was.)
Not a sword. Monster burning. So she was told. Scars in a circle on her neck, permanent. Her son, not her son. Sharp teeth, razors dipping, sucking. Killed, can’t forget. Not real, only a movie. Shitty movie. Nightmares, though, always nightmares, always afraid of Ben, just a little, now.
Ben’s in one of his moods on an otherwise run-of-the-mill Wednesday, insisting that they have ice cream for dessert and watch a rerun of some Avengers flick. She doesn’t have the energy to argue with him after dealing with whinier than normal members at the studio, so grabs her keys and drives down to the local 24-hour Meijer to pick up a tub of Häagen-Dazs. (All the parenting books would shame her for giving in. All the parenting books can fuck off.)
There are few people in the grocery store and even fewer workers finishing up their inventory duties. The sole cashier gives Lisa a withering look as she puts the ice cream on the belt. She thinks about making some snippy comment, but acknowledges that the minimum-wage teenager has probably had a long day, too, or maybe failed a Chemistry exam.
Just as her card is swiped, a figure comes striding towards them. Lisa glances over to see an imposing man dressed all in black, complete with a ski mask that covers everything but a pair of gray eyes hard as flint. He’s got a pistol as well, she notices, only instead of feeling afraid, she merely feels inconvenienced. Of course she’d be subject to a holdup the one night she just wants to relax.
It’s this thought alone that spurs Lisa into action. She doesn’t think, just moves as the robber makes the egregious error of taking his eyes off her for a moment to demand the cashier open his drawer. He’s a good foot taller than her and weighs two-thirty easy-what he lacks is a lower center of gravity and the element of surprise.
Needing to first disarm him, Lisa kicks the gun out of his hand, the piece skittering well out of his reach. His attention now fully on her, he aims a punch which she easily ducks, and she counters with an elbow to the solar plexus and subsequent knee to his groin. He’s stunned for a moment but not down, so she shifts all her weight and lays a fist straight to his jaw. She supposes her hand should throb from the impact, except it doesn’t. Like she’s done this before. Been trained for it.
She commands the cashier to grab the gun and toss it to her. The kid does, and in one quick, fluid movement, Lisa checks that the safety’s off-it is-cocks the .45 and fires a bullet into the robber’s kneecap. Blood spatters the tile as the would-be attacker cries out in pain; the kid lets out a strangled sort of squawk; Lisa doesn’t react.
“I had to deal with assholes all day and have a bitchy thirteen-year-old at home. Do you really think I have time to deal with your bullshit?” Flashing red and blue lights outside catch her eye, and she guesses one of the other employees must have alerted the police. “Enjoy prison, scumbag.”
With one last glare, she snatches up the tub of ice cream and her credit card, and strides towards the parking lot. She meets the cops halfway and gives them the Glock with a brief description of what happened. They’re more than a little dumbstruck and she pushes past them to get to her car. She has even less time for cops than she did for the robber.
(Ben asks her what took so long. She tells him there was a line. As she scoops them both bowls of Neapolitan, her palms start sweating. What had she done? How had she done it? And worst of all: why was it so damn easy?)
Mortal men, ha! Kneecaps shatter so easily. Squeeze, boom, crack, blood. Easy, so easy, easy, easy. Soufflés are hard, maiming is simple. Her knuckles are fine. Used to it, the violence. It’s there, inside her, sourced from impossibility. It feels good. Too much, perhaps.
Ben’s baseball team gets a new assistant coach in March, who has an impressive list of credentials and, according to her son, is even cooler and better than the head coach. Lisa stays after a game one night to introduce herself, idly noticing that he’s rather attractive in that frat-boy-with-a-good-heart kind of way.
“Hi, I’m Lisa Braeden, Ben’s mom,” she says, pointedly ignoring how his hair accidentally-on-purpose falls into his hazel eyes.
“Glad to finally meet you, Lisa,” he says, shaking her hand. Then, with a sheepish smile, “Sam Winchell.”
It’s a nice name, ordinary, but as soon as he says it, a wave of ice slams over her. With it, she feels a strange combination of sentimentality and resentment, like being snubbed of a wedding invitation from an old friend, or attending the funeral of a second-cousin she’d never had the chance to meet. It’s not a pleasant sensation, and it immediately sours her opinion of this man who’s so far done nothing but be genial and flirtatious.
She musters a smile for him, because no matter what’s going on with her right now, she’s at least got to be polite. “Well, good luck. I know Ben can be a handful.”
“Nah, he’s a great kid. Must take after his mom,” Sam replies with another soft grin.
Lisa smiles perfunctorily, retracts her hand and gives him a noncommittal nod before walking away. She imagines his face has fallen, that he’s wondering where he’d erred. She wants to apologize, to start over, she does, yet the ice down her back makes her keep walking.
(Ben continues to extol Sam’s virtues and Lisa continues to avoid him for no reason at all.)
Sam Winchell. Winchell, Winchell, Winchell. Familiar, and not. What’s in a name? A face, almost, long hair and sad eyes. After, beneath, nothing. Flat, and selfish. Selfish, selfish, selfish. Taking what’s hers. What was hers. Wasn’t it? What was it? She hates him anyway.
She buys a journal one weekend while Ben’s at a friend’s. It’s a thick, leather-bound number that she gets imprinted with her initials, the pages pristine but begging to be used. She’d found more symbols that morning, sweeping marks that could almost be letters, etched into the siding of her house and painted in unassuming locations-behind the curtains, on the walls in the basement, in the ceiling beams.
She fills up five pages of the book with things she’d found in her home, the bits of her memories she’d uncovered, the odd talents both she and Ben possess with no recollection of how they came to be, the headaches that afflict her, even her adverse reaction to Coach Winchell.
It doesn’t help much when she reads over it all, but just knowing that it’s written down, that no matter what, she’ll have a record of everything and that maybe, in the coming months, all the mismatched images would finally coalesce and give her some long-needed peace.
(She notices Ben’s handwriting at the back of the journal the next week, and wonders if her little boy’s got just as much pain rattling around in his head as she does.)
Spiky, shaky letters they are. Childish. He’s a child, it’s okay. Can a child be a child? Not Ben, not Ben, once. Pages too blank. She needs to write. Write, write, write. But what? Black eyes, not enough. More. Outside dims. Bad things there. Where? Somewhere.
It begins as such an innocuous thing, a search for the contact information of Jacob Singleton, one of Mom’s old neighbors. Lisa doubted she had the address at all, but her parents had cleaned house a while back and lost track of their own book. So she peruses, flips to “S” in search of the elusive Jacob. She pauses, though, between Isra Sharif and Jacob himself, perplexed. Written there in block handwriting she doesn’t recognize is the name, address, and phone numbers (all five of them) for a Robert Singer.
The numbers have all different area codes, but the house is listed in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which is stranger still given that the only people she knows out that way are a few college friends in the Pacific Northwest and an aunt in Wyoming. She’s never even been to either of the Dakotas, let alone knows someone well enough to keep their address.
Ignoring her mother’s request for the moment, Lisa dials the first number in the book and hears two rings before it clicks over. “Who is this?” barks a gruff voice on the other end. “How did you get this number?”
“Um…I’m sorry, my name is Lisa Braeden, I found your-”
“Don’t call here ever again,” the man interrupts harshly. A dial tone greets Lisa a moment later. Irked now more than anything, she punches the number again, only to get a nondescript answering machine; the other four lines are no more helpful.
“Asshole,” she mutters to herself, drawing a large X through Robert Singer’s information with a marker. He’d clearly been put in there for a reason, but Lisa has no need for more crotchety, prickly people in her life, especially ones who have no interest in talking.
(Singer calls her once, three weeks down the road, leaves a message so curt she’s hardly certain he meant to leave it at all. Sheriff Jody Mills, it says. Call only if-if something happens. She can help. 605-555-7814. She saves the voicemail, just in case.)
Rugged beard, old books. Dusty, rusty, scary. Drawings of monsters. Ink, or ectoplasm? Vellum, paper, skin? Matches, also. How easy it would be to set it all aflame. Gone, goodbye, forever. No more evil. Just ash, ash, ash. How quaint.
She gets nosebleeds now and then, when she tries to remember too much, too fast. Some days she’ll sit for hours staring at one of those off-angle photos or a stray Van Halen tee-shirt she’d never bought or a half-full container of Chevrolet power steering fluid. Mostly, she gets nothing but an agonizing migraine for her efforts.
But occasionally, as her mind drifts into a fugue, images will come, scents, feelings of times gone by that make her long for something she can’t place. Glimpses of green eyes framed by dark lashes and gentle hands roughened by calluses and evenings spent in animated discussion over the afternoon’s festivities.
Yet whenever she tries to delve deeper, to piece together the puzzle, she hits a wall that shuts out everything anew. Her reality crushes back around her and invariably she’ll reach up to find blood dripping and what might as well be a pickaxe chugging away at her brain. In moments like these, she can’t help but wonder if there’s something…else keeping her from remembering, something more than a car crash, something science can’t explain.
(She should probably go to the doctor again, to ask if this is normal, but none of this is normal, none of any of this.)
Serves you right, says the voice. I told you, don’t scratch. Scratchy, scratchy, scratch. Broken brain, girl. Stupid. Stop trying. Or don’t, just die. Yes, yes, just die. Come here. I have the answers. Oh, fine. Don’t forget about me. I’ll have fun with you yet!
I’m Dean. I’m…the guy who hit you. I just-I lost control for a minute.
He’s not, she knows he’s not. Or at least, that’s not all he is. And they’re not okay, not really. She still gets assaulted by her own body and Ben still has nightmares of shadows and terror, and she knows there’s more to this than the doctors say. There’s nothing quite so maddening as scrabbling for even the tiniest bits of memory and coming up emptier than when you started. Not that anyone would believe her.
No one besides Ben, except he’s kinda off the deep end, too. After all, crazy is as crazy does.
I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?
Fandom(s): Supernatural
Rating: PG
Word Count: 4,895
Summary: But I don’t want to go among mad people! Oh, you can’t help that...
Author’s Notes: Tag to “Let It Bleed.”
We’re All Mad Here
Things are wrong, just wrong. Her brain hurts, and it’s not from the concussion. Hurts, hurts, hurts. Unfamiliar house. Where is she? Why? Battle Creek, wrong. It’s all wrong. Shadows in the corners. Bad things here. Bad, bad, bad. Right?
Like any proud mom in suburbia, Lisa has decorated her house with pictures, some professionally taken, some blurry candids snapped at barbecues and taped to the fridge. They’re so familiar to her that it requires a full week for her to realize how…off they are.
Some look perfectly normal, old ones of Ben or family reunions. But the others, the newer ones that litter each room of the house, it’s like returning home to find out someone moved your furniture an inch to the left. In a few, she’s the only subject of the photo, and it’s disturbing-she’s not nearly so vain as to advertise solo shots.
The framing puts the cap on it all. She’s always a bit too far to either side, with no accompaniment but green lawn or a dimly-lit restaurant booth. Yet in all of them she’s smiling broadly next to that empty space, eyes sparkling with happiness. And for the life of her, she can’t explain it.
(There’s a dull, persistent pain in her heart when she gazes at them, and she wants the goddamn thing to disappear.)
Ben’s decked out in mud-splattered baseball gear in another picture, clutching his championship trophy and sitting atop his uncle’s shoulders. It wouldn’t be out of place, except Lisa knows she hasn’t seen her brother since last Christmas, and Ben won the season in June. Her amnesia has made her hazy in some areas, but she can remember that day in full clarity-pre-game, post-game, and all seven innings between-and she’s certain Nathaniel Braeden was squarely at his home in Dayton eating leftovers.
She calls him a moment later, to make sure, and he answers in the negative as expected, with an added, Sis, are you okay? for good measure.
(She uses the photo as tinder and replaces it with one of Ben and two of his teammates.)
Shhh, ignore it, says a voice inside her head. Oily, dark. It tells her to shut up, to stop poking at the walls inside her head. She wonders, why, why, why. She’s special. Isn’t she? Or not. Would you say someone’s special if they’ve lost their mind? Buzz, buzz, wrong answer.
She tries Matt’s number a dozen times after they get back before finally storming into his hospital and demanding to know where he’s been, why he hasn’t answered her calls. It’s not like him, she hisses.
(They say he was found in an alley, wrong place, wrong time, assailant still at large. His neck was twisted, and they’re very sorry, and is there anything they can do, Ms. Braeden?)
It’s odd. Odd, odd, odd. Flashes of things come to her mind, of big strong men, too strong, too evil. A sound, then. Snap, crackle, pop. There are seven bones in the neck, did you know? Matt’s got only pieces these days.
Ben’s school and Lisa’s work give them two weeks’ lenience due to the severity of their accident, but as the deadline nears, she realizes she’s in need of a car. The insurance money hasn’t come in yet, and she decides it’d just be easier to buy a new car rather than fix her old one.
She drags Ben with her to the lot, looks around at all the options. All the new cars are too expensive, too shiny. The salesman flags them down and spews a lot of pretty words at the two of them. She listens, and ignores the bombardment of information. All it’s meant for is to get her to agree to something she doesn’t need. (He can’t bring back her memory, so what’s the point?)
She has every intention to tell the guy off, but her son gets there first. “You're charging this much for a 2005?” Ben asks, gesturing to a Rav-4 that’s somewhat worn but seems okay to her eye. “Can you pop the hood?”
The salesman appraises Ben like he’s an overactive puppy, and gives him a too-wide smile. “Sure, sport,” he says genially. He opens the hood as requested and presents it with a flourish. "Like what you see?”
Ben squints at the dozens of parts inside and after a few minutes’ judging and prodding, he snorts. “That timing belt’s on its way out and the battery terminals are pretty corroded. Engine mounts are loose. This car’s not worth the price tag, dude.”
Lisa’s torn between criticizing Ben’s backtalk and wanting to praise him for being so astute. The salesman, on the other hand, isn’t pleased. He offers some half-assed attempt to explain away the deformities for which neither Ben nor Lisa herself fall. Finally, he gives up and gestures to a 2007 CR-V.
“If you don’t tell my boss about that, you can have this one for nine grand even,” he says grumpily.
She shrugs, internally pondering if this counts as extortion. “Ben? What do you think?”
Ben takes a look at the Honda’s innards and nods. “Seems fair.”
“Just so you know, this never happens,” the salesman comments. “Your old man must’ve taught you well, eh, kid?”
“It wasn’t my father, he’s a deadbeat,” Ben grits out. Then, proudly, “I learned it all from-from-”
He cuts off so abruptly it gives Lisa whiplash. “From a family friend,” she fibs hastily.
The salesman stares at Ben curiously for a moment before turning back to Lisa. “Well, in any case. Why don’t you come inside and we’ll get that paperwork squared away. Your kid’s not an auto policy prodigy, too, is he?”
“No, but I dated a lawyer once,” Lisa smiles.
(They brainstorm in the car as they drive home, but neither can decide who might’ve taught Ben. I’m sure you just picked it up somewhere. TV maybe? Lisa suggests. It’s not true, and they both know it.)
Grease stains the concrete in her garage. Grease, like life draining from an old wound. No stitches. Just drip, drip, drip. She’s always taken good care of her cars. There’s still grease when she opens her eyes. Concrete streaked with black. Or ichor. Which is real? She doesn’t know anymore.
Being late isn’t a new phenomenon for the Braeden family, but losing her work uniform is. Lisa locates it eventually, buried between a winter jacket and a too-large plaid shirt that’s missing a button. How odd it is that her clothes are all confined to one end of the closet and that there are two empty drawers in her bureau doesn’t occur to her until midway through a Bikram class. She has plenty of outfits to fill that space; it doesn’t track that she’s not using it.
(She doesn’t get around to rectifying the situation. The space isn’t hers, though she couldn’t tell you to whom it belongs.)
Too much space. Too much. Leering. Saying, threatening, asking. What, what, what? You don’t remember? Ha-ha-ha. A thick, battered silver ring serves as her bottle opener. More liquor for her. Cupboards, floorboards, empty condom box. Liquid amber, flames in her throat. Curiouser and curiouser.
Her mother’s the first one to notice the shotgun. Visiting for Lisa’s thirty-second birthday, she takes over the master bedroom and screeches a few moments later as Lisa’s making up the spare room for herself. She bolts toward the yell, heart racing on reflex. Her mother begins a tirade before Lisa can pause to consider what sort of calamity must have befallen her to cause such a reflex.
“Lisa Katharine Braeden, why in heaven’s name do you have a gun in your closet? A loaded gun? What if Ben had found this?”
She can’t fabricate a decent reply, mumbles something about how it must be Matt’s. Never mind that Matt had never left any of his stuff at the house, never mind that she’s positive he hasn’t gone hunting once in his life and would rather talk down a burglar than shoot one. Never mind all the nicks and scratches on the shotgun showing years of hard use and the stain of oil on the wall from a too-zealous lubrication. Never mind that its appearance evokes neither fear nor revulsion in Lisa, it’s simply…there. As normal to her, somehow, as the off-kilter door on the linen closet or the box of VHS tapes she keeps meaning to donate.
“I want it gone, today,” her mother insists, and Lisa complies, stashing it on a shelf in the garage. She doesn’t unload it, and if it’s precisely at waist height, easy to access, well, no one has to know, do they?
(Unshakeable is the feeling of how comfortable it is in her grip, how she knows its sight is a bit cockeyed and that a proper hit would require aiming a few degrees up and to the right.)
Bang, bang, dead, dead. Iron rounds, so says the gun store. Strange, that, iron. Fe, 26, transition metal. Wrought fences, cast pots, molded, melted. Melt, melt, melt. Gray heat in her palm. Her skin boils.
Ben has never been a kid with nightmares, not since Lisa declared on his fourth Halloween that neither creature nor ne’er-do-well would touch him so long as she was around.
He has them when they return to Battle Creek. Once a week, if he’s lucky, every night when he’s not. Vivid things they are, invisible nasties that have him thrashing and sweating and screaming no matter how roughly she jostles him.
His moans are mostly unintelligible but she catches phrases like There’s men in the house and demons and help me, what do I do?
He doesn’t remember them the next morning (maybe he does, maybe he can’t forget) and she doesn’t have the courage to bring it up. His complexion is downright ashen on these such mornings, and he mumbles about how he’s not hungry and she puts her hand to his forehead to check his temperature.
(He’s not sick, but they pretend anyway because the reality’s worse.)
A rational person would probably contact a child psychologist, as Ben’s teachers have recommended more than once, only she knows it’d be a waste of time and money. Lisa can’t do anything to quell her own terrors, let alone Ben’s; a shrink would have no chance.
She, too, has dreams of things with black eyes and a searing pain in her stomach and fruitlessly banging around in her own head for control of her faculties, but keeps her son out of it. She has to be Super Mom, she has to be unaffected, she has to be. And if she wants to lie about all the blood and fire and badawfulbad, then she’s damn well going to. No matter what.
(Her dreams aren’t always terrible. Sometimes, on rare occasion, she’s pleasured so thoroughly by a man whose face she can never make out that she wakes hot all over and panting with an orgasm miles better than any she can remember.)
Hee, says that voice. Are you afraid of the boogeyman? Boo! Gotcha. Don’t be frightened, little girl. Lights, she needs lights. Sixty watt, no one-twenty. Stars go out, blink, blink, blink. She suffocates in the dark. Dead? Halfway? Yes. Maybe. No?
Sleep falls away just before sunrise, an hour at least before her alarm is set to go off, which is cause for homicide all by itself, before she realizes what woke her up. It’s a thudding, smacking sort of noise, one that has her instantly out of bed and on guard. She grabs a book off her nightstand for lack of a better weapon and creeps out into the hallway.
She’d almost prefer it have been a creepy-crawly.
“Benjamin, what are you doing?” she snaps, glaring at her son who freezes with his foot an inch away from kicking a soccer ball. Green and brown smudges mar the once-clean wall, the very thing she’d wanted to avoid.
She heaves an exhausted sigh. In the months since the accident, Ben’s been more rebellious than ever, and she can’t put her finger on the impetus. Friends have suggested it’s merely due to his burgeoning adolescence, but she has a feeling it’s something else. Her Ben used to be mild-mannered, if effervescent. Now, he’s on edge, always, jumpy, and can’t-or won’t-tell her why.
Ben pouts and kicks the ball down to her, then scurries back into his room with a half-sincere apology floating behind him. The ball misses Lisa entirely, bounces off the doorjamb and skids underneath her bed. There’s a heavy thunk, followed by the chink-crash of glass breaking, and Lisa curses, acknowledging only belatedly that she doesn’t store anything under there.
A puddle of water begins to pool out from underneath and, curious, Lisa gets on her hands and knees to peer below the bed frame. The water soaks into her pajamas but she pays it no mind, appalled and downright baffled by what she finds there. Stained into the off-white carpet in viscous crimson paint is a large symbol she has no name for, joined by another firearm just as worn as the last and a smashed jar of water. She pulls from the container a string of beads, a rosary, and studies it in confusion.
Her mother’s Catholic, had put her daughters through Sunday school and Confirmation, but Lisa hasn’t been to church in over a decade. Ben was baptized on Carol’s insistence, and she continues to beg Lisa to attend at least for Christmas and Easter, but Lisa’s never held the religion in high regard. Besides, the Bible wouldn’t exactly have approved of the exploits she’d had in her youth.
All told, there’s no cause for her to have a rosary beneath her bed, not to mention a sigil that makes a shiver slide down her spine. Despite that, all she does to deal with the mess is blot up the spilled water. She should run by the hardware store to buy some industrial paint remover, or maybe call the flooring company to re-carpet her room, or maybe give the rosary to her mother as a peace offering.
(She doesn’t do any of that. What she does is leave everything where it is and buy a bed skirt to hide it from view.)
Scarlet, vermillion, rosewood, carmine. How nice. Watercolor? No, wait, acrylic. No, tempera. No, silly, blood. Blood and holy water. Funny how they go together. Funny, funny, funny. She pricks her finger on the broken glass. Blood on the carpet, paint, no difference.
In late January, she receives a package from a source she only half-recalls. The return address is from Cicero, Indiana, some woman named Emily Keel, so in spite of her cluelessness, she gathers they must have been close. Lisa opens the box and pulls out the letter on top, scanning it quickly.
Hey Guys!
Katie and I remembered it’s your man’s birthday today! Hope you’re all still together, but if not, could you make sure to give this to him? Katie absolutely insisted on sending it. You know, she still talks about those monsters. (We’ve both been to see this great doctor. I haven’t flinched at Katie in over a year now.) But just knowing our hero is out there makes us sleep better at night.
Wishing you the best!
Lisa frowns, none of the words registering sense, and unwraps the gift inside. There’s a hand-drawn picture of a man clad in a brown jacket with a sword in his hand, spearing a large monster straight through the heart. Off to the side stands a group of kids and a few adults, one of whom looks remarkably like Lisa herself, cheering.
Beneath the drawing lies a container of shotgun shells filled with…salt? A Post-It note affixed to it says concisely, I remember he told all of us that salt repels a lot of monsters, so hopefully these come in handy!
Lisa replaces everything in the box and seals it up, setting it on the kitchen table that’s already littered with a cornucopia of sundry crap she keeps meaning to sort through. Her head has begun to throb, the type of headache she’s come to associate with her brain trying so damn hard to overcome her amnesia.
She wishes she could pass off the birthday presents as a mis-delivery, but the contents are too personal, too centered on Lisa’s family, to be a mistake. And besides, it’s her name written squarely in the center of the UPS package in thick black Sharpie. Not exactly indicative of a postal error.
(She pins the drawing to the fridge, and Ben never comments on it, as though somehow it belongs there. She sends a thank-you note to the Keels because it’s the right thing to do, and refrains from asking them whose birthday it was.)
Not a sword. Monster burning. So she was told. Scars in a circle on her neck, permanent. Her son, not her son. Sharp teeth, razors dipping, sucking. Killed, can’t forget. Not real, only a movie. Shitty movie. Nightmares, though, always nightmares, always afraid of Ben, just a little, now.
Ben’s in one of his moods on an otherwise run-of-the-mill Wednesday, insisting that they have ice cream for dessert and watch a rerun of some Avengers flick. She doesn’t have the energy to argue with him after dealing with whinier than normal members at the studio, so grabs her keys and drives down to the local 24-hour Meijer to pick up a tub of Häagen-Dazs. (All the parenting books would shame her for giving in. All the parenting books can fuck off.)
There are few people in the grocery store and even fewer workers finishing up their inventory duties. The sole cashier gives Lisa a withering look as she puts the ice cream on the belt. She thinks about making some snippy comment, but acknowledges that the minimum-wage teenager has probably had a long day, too, or maybe failed a Chemistry exam.
Just as her card is swiped, a figure comes striding towards them. Lisa glances over to see an imposing man dressed all in black, complete with a ski mask that covers everything but a pair of gray eyes hard as flint. He’s got a pistol as well, she notices, only instead of feeling afraid, she merely feels inconvenienced. Of course she’d be subject to a holdup the one night she just wants to relax.
It’s this thought alone that spurs Lisa into action. She doesn’t think, just moves as the robber makes the egregious error of taking his eyes off her for a moment to demand the cashier open his drawer. He’s a good foot taller than her and weighs two-thirty easy-what he lacks is a lower center of gravity and the element of surprise.
Needing to first disarm him, Lisa kicks the gun out of his hand, the piece skittering well out of his reach. His attention now fully on her, he aims a punch which she easily ducks, and she counters with an elbow to the solar plexus and subsequent knee to his groin. He’s stunned for a moment but not down, so she shifts all her weight and lays a fist straight to his jaw. She supposes her hand should throb from the impact, except it doesn’t. Like she’s done this before. Been trained for it.
She commands the cashier to grab the gun and toss it to her. The kid does, and in one quick, fluid movement, Lisa checks that the safety’s off-it is-cocks the .45 and fires a bullet into the robber’s kneecap. Blood spatters the tile as the would-be attacker cries out in pain; the kid lets out a strangled sort of squawk; Lisa doesn’t react.
“I had to deal with assholes all day and have a bitchy thirteen-year-old at home. Do you really think I have time to deal with your bullshit?” Flashing red and blue lights outside catch her eye, and she guesses one of the other employees must have alerted the police. “Enjoy prison, scumbag.”
With one last glare, she snatches up the tub of ice cream and her credit card, and strides towards the parking lot. She meets the cops halfway and gives them the Glock with a brief description of what happened. They’re more than a little dumbstruck and she pushes past them to get to her car. She has even less time for cops than she did for the robber.
(Ben asks her what took so long. She tells him there was a line. As she scoops them both bowls of Neapolitan, her palms start sweating. What had she done? How had she done it? And worst of all: why was it so damn easy?)
Mortal men, ha! Kneecaps shatter so easily. Squeeze, boom, crack, blood. Easy, so easy, easy, easy. Soufflés are hard, maiming is simple. Her knuckles are fine. Used to it, the violence. It’s there, inside her, sourced from impossibility. It feels good. Too much, perhaps.
Ben’s baseball team gets a new assistant coach in March, who has an impressive list of credentials and, according to her son, is even cooler and better than the head coach. Lisa stays after a game one night to introduce herself, idly noticing that he’s rather attractive in that frat-boy-with-a-good-heart kind of way.
“Hi, I’m Lisa Braeden, Ben’s mom,” she says, pointedly ignoring how his hair accidentally-on-purpose falls into his hazel eyes.
“Glad to finally meet you, Lisa,” he says, shaking her hand. Then, with a sheepish smile, “Sam Winchell.”
It’s a nice name, ordinary, but as soon as he says it, a wave of ice slams over her. With it, she feels a strange combination of sentimentality and resentment, like being snubbed of a wedding invitation from an old friend, or attending the funeral of a second-cousin she’d never had the chance to meet. It’s not a pleasant sensation, and it immediately sours her opinion of this man who’s so far done nothing but be genial and flirtatious.
She musters a smile for him, because no matter what’s going on with her right now, she’s at least got to be polite. “Well, good luck. I know Ben can be a handful.”
“Nah, he’s a great kid. Must take after his mom,” Sam replies with another soft grin.
Lisa smiles perfunctorily, retracts her hand and gives him a noncommittal nod before walking away. She imagines his face has fallen, that he’s wondering where he’d erred. She wants to apologize, to start over, she does, yet the ice down her back makes her keep walking.
(Ben continues to extol Sam’s virtues and Lisa continues to avoid him for no reason at all.)
Sam Winchell. Winchell, Winchell, Winchell. Familiar, and not. What’s in a name? A face, almost, long hair and sad eyes. After, beneath, nothing. Flat, and selfish. Selfish, selfish, selfish. Taking what’s hers. What was hers. Wasn’t it? What was it? She hates him anyway.
She buys a journal one weekend while Ben’s at a friend’s. It’s a thick, leather-bound number that she gets imprinted with her initials, the pages pristine but begging to be used. She’d found more symbols that morning, sweeping marks that could almost be letters, etched into the siding of her house and painted in unassuming locations-behind the curtains, on the walls in the basement, in the ceiling beams.
She fills up five pages of the book with things she’d found in her home, the bits of her memories she’d uncovered, the odd talents both she and Ben possess with no recollection of how they came to be, the headaches that afflict her, even her adverse reaction to Coach Winchell.
It doesn’t help much when she reads over it all, but just knowing that it’s written down, that no matter what, she’ll have a record of everything and that maybe, in the coming months, all the mismatched images would finally coalesce and give her some long-needed peace.
(She notices Ben’s handwriting at the back of the journal the next week, and wonders if her little boy’s got just as much pain rattling around in his head as she does.)
Spiky, shaky letters they are. Childish. He’s a child, it’s okay. Can a child be a child? Not Ben, not Ben, once. Pages too blank. She needs to write. Write, write, write. But what? Black eyes, not enough. More. Outside dims. Bad things there. Where? Somewhere.
It begins as such an innocuous thing, a search for the contact information of Jacob Singleton, one of Mom’s old neighbors. Lisa doubted she had the address at all, but her parents had cleaned house a while back and lost track of their own book. So she peruses, flips to “S” in search of the elusive Jacob. She pauses, though, between Isra Sharif and Jacob himself, perplexed. Written there in block handwriting she doesn’t recognize is the name, address, and phone numbers (all five of them) for a Robert Singer.
The numbers have all different area codes, but the house is listed in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which is stranger still given that the only people she knows out that way are a few college friends in the Pacific Northwest and an aunt in Wyoming. She’s never even been to either of the Dakotas, let alone knows someone well enough to keep their address.
Ignoring her mother’s request for the moment, Lisa dials the first number in the book and hears two rings before it clicks over. “Who is this?” barks a gruff voice on the other end. “How did you get this number?”
“Um…I’m sorry, my name is Lisa Braeden, I found your-”
“Don’t call here ever again,” the man interrupts harshly. A dial tone greets Lisa a moment later. Irked now more than anything, she punches the number again, only to get a nondescript answering machine; the other four lines are no more helpful.
“Asshole,” she mutters to herself, drawing a large X through Robert Singer’s information with a marker. He’d clearly been put in there for a reason, but Lisa has no need for more crotchety, prickly people in her life, especially ones who have no interest in talking.
(Singer calls her once, three weeks down the road, leaves a message so curt she’s hardly certain he meant to leave it at all. Sheriff Jody Mills, it says. Call only if-if something happens. She can help. 605-555-7814. She saves the voicemail, just in case.)
Rugged beard, old books. Dusty, rusty, scary. Drawings of monsters. Ink, or ectoplasm? Vellum, paper, skin? Matches, also. How easy it would be to set it all aflame. Gone, goodbye, forever. No more evil. Just ash, ash, ash. How quaint.
She gets nosebleeds now and then, when she tries to remember too much, too fast. Some days she’ll sit for hours staring at one of those off-angle photos or a stray Van Halen tee-shirt she’d never bought or a half-full container of Chevrolet power steering fluid. Mostly, she gets nothing but an agonizing migraine for her efforts.
But occasionally, as her mind drifts into a fugue, images will come, scents, feelings of times gone by that make her long for something she can’t place. Glimpses of green eyes framed by dark lashes and gentle hands roughened by calluses and evenings spent in animated discussion over the afternoon’s festivities.
Yet whenever she tries to delve deeper, to piece together the puzzle, she hits a wall that shuts out everything anew. Her reality crushes back around her and invariably she’ll reach up to find blood dripping and what might as well be a pickaxe chugging away at her brain. In moments like these, she can’t help but wonder if there’s something…else keeping her from remembering, something more than a car crash, something science can’t explain.
(She should probably go to the doctor again, to ask if this is normal, but none of this is normal, none of any of this.)
Serves you right, says the voice. I told you, don’t scratch. Scratchy, scratchy, scratch. Broken brain, girl. Stupid. Stop trying. Or don’t, just die. Yes, yes, just die. Come here. I have the answers. Oh, fine. Don’t forget about me. I’ll have fun with you yet!
I’m Dean. I’m…the guy who hit you. I just-I lost control for a minute.
He’s not, she knows he’s not. Or at least, that’s not all he is. And they’re not okay, not really. She still gets assaulted by her own body and Ben still has nightmares of shadows and terror, and she knows there’s more to this than the doctors say. There’s nothing quite so maddening as scrabbling for even the tiniest bits of memory and coming up emptier than when you started. Not that anyone would believe her.
No one besides Ben, except he’s kinda off the deep end, too. After all, crazy is as crazy does.
I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?