Tweaker by Leah Erickson

Tweaker by Leah Erickson

She had not used for two and a half months. It was her third time getting clean. It was her second time in a sober house. It was her first time as a house manager. She had just turned thirty-five years old.

In exchange for keeping the residents in line, enforcing communal chores, and administering random drug tests, Tara got a considerable discount on rent. (Which was helpful, considering the fact that she was low on work at the time.)

It was in an old Colonial Revival mansion, brick with a gabled roof and columns. Although impressive looking from a distance, it had fallen into ill repair, with bad wiring and bats scratching inside the walls. Years ago, before it was a sober house, it had been broken up into rentable office space, and there were still ugly partitions made of cheap wood paneling, and framed motivational posters hung throughout. (THE BEST WAY OUT IS ALWAYS THROUGH! YOU’VE GOT THIS! THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS TO ANYPLACE WORTH GOING!)

Tara had been placed with a roommate when she first arrived, a nineteen-year-old girl with a European accent that she soon learned was Swedish. Her name was Alice. She had dropped out of her university exchange program while she kicked drugs and figured out her life. She was as petite as an underdeveloped child and dressed in baggy jeans and oversized hoodies, worn pulled up protectively over her head. Large headphones were usually clamped over her ears, through which the faint sounds of trance-pop fizzed, squeaked and popped. Her hair was long and dyed a harsh black, shaved on the undersides. Her eyes were alert and evasive. She didn’t like to talk much.

The only time that Alice removed the hood and took off her headphones was when she was doing her makeup; Tara would sit in bed and watch her while pretending to read a book.

The girl, when she gazed into the little light-up mirror, would change demeanor entirely, and became languid and dreamy-eyed. It was hypnotizing, to watch as she dipped a pinky finger into a pot of glittery dust, then draw it delicately across an eyelid. Her eyebrows were wispy and transparently blonde, which made her large, richly kohled eyes seem as deep and dark as twin spinning galaxies. (Which in turn made Tara try to imagine the sensation of being sucked into space, all the stars and gas and space matter…would it pull her apart, or implode her? Sometimes even she didn’t understand the strange and intrusive thoughts that sometimes popped into her head…)

Sometimes, as Alice worked, she paused to take a drag off her cigarette. If she noticed Tara’s gaze through the mirror, she would give a shy flick of a smile. And only then she would at last begin to talk. About the city that she came from (Stockholm.) About the music that she liked. (Her favorite was a latex-wearing rapper with spiked fingernails called Kamikaze Girl.) About what had once been her drugs of choice. (Ketamine and cocaine.) About the middle-aged boyfrend that she had run away from to go to rehab. He was a demon when he got high, he verbally abused me. I was afraid of him every time he would come home. Until I just packed my shit and left. He still texts me. Begs me to come back, and promising he will stop the drugs. He says he loves me for who I am…

Sometimes she would trail off mid-sentence and look into the mirror for a long moment with an implacable expression, as though stricken with amnesia. Then she would suddenly rub all the makeup off with a face wipe, only to begin to draw another face, all over again.

In Tara’s future memories it was always summertime, and they kept the bedroom windows open to the evening breeze; as Alice spoke in her quiet voice with its buoyant, rhythmic accent, the sound intermingled with the hum of nocturnal insects, and the sound of the night wind blowing through the overgrown grass, like the murmurs and whispers of distant voices. The more times she replayed these memories, the more vivid and sweet they became, and she knew that she had known an intense happiness in that brief time that she feared she would never feel again.

& & &

The girl had taken off one night, saying she was meeting the ex-boyfriend, “Just to pick up some things, that’s it.”  She never came back. Tara stammered and sputtered as she had told the sober house owner, a motherly retired woman named Janice, what had happened. She kept her eyes rolled up to the ceiling as she spoke, trying to blink back hot tears that spilled over anyway. But Janice just told her to relax, to breathe, that she shouldn’t blame herself. That some people simply weren’t ready to be sober. That being the house manager could be a hard, lonely job, and Tara was still in recovery herself. Just let her go, hon.

In the days that followed, Tara didn’t know what to do to feel better, so she threw herself into her job, as a distraction. To drown out the constant itching thoughts of What if? What if? She drew up chore lists in beautiful curlicue script on the kitchen whiteboard. She went on a frenzied cleaning binge, though she could only go so far to make the place look clean and fresh: there was too much peeling paint. Too many coats of urethane on the beat-up wooden floors so that it always felt sticky and yellow. She scrubbed the toilets and bathtubs until her knuckles were raw and bleeding. But still, the penance wasn’t enough to quiet her mind. I should have driven her to the twelve-step meeting. I should have been her sponsor. I should have given her a pamphlet on abusive relationships...

The other women that lived there were all Tara’s age, or older. Women that had had children. Marriages. Careers. But there was something daunting and opaque about them. Womanhood seemed like a club that Tara was never initiated into. These women looked at her with such knowingness, like they could tell she was a fake, an interloper. She would pass by their doorways, hear scraps of conversations, and felt like a guilty, eavesdropping child.

And so she made herself helpful, useful. Always there to give rides, to help with court paperwork, to give little gifts just because. Then maybe no one would give her those looks anymore, as though they could tell that her brain was a haunted house.

Maybe no one would know what she really was: a monster. Who had the capacity to kill everything good that she touched.

Somehow there seemed to be a great accumulation of empty time. She’d been applying to graphic design jobs but the work had dried up, except for the occasional freelance job, catalogues or sales flyers…she’d resorted to begging friends and family to design them things, just to have something in her portfolio…a business card, a wedding invitation, a baby shower invitation…

She would stare at the calendar page in her planner book, its squares lined up, blank and empty, like little jail cells, and it made her very, very afraid. When there was too much time, then the thoughts would crowd her head. Obsessive thoughts, fearful thoughts, shameful thoughts, like a mental quicksand that she couldn’t escape. She thought of what it would feel like to take a pill, how soft and forgiving life would then feel, like a warm bath of gray water. What it would feel like to give up, to sink under, to not have to try and try and try…

She hadn’t slept in days. Rather than lay in bed tossing and sweating, she began taking late night walks throughout the building.

Before the old mansion was broken up into offices, some kind of nondenominational church had used the space. There was one large room that had been a playroom or a daycare, and had been closed off and simply left as it was. There was a mural on the wall, crudely painted, of an outdoor scene with a sunny sky, green grass sprinkled with flowers, but no people. There were rolling storage units of toys and puzzles. The doorway was surrounded by a wallpaper frieze covered with little painted handprints, in red, blue, yellow, and green.

She lingered, looking at the things on a dusty shelf. There was some type of screen device that played spelling games, with pixel animals and a shrill little tune that played when you got the answers right. Tara was so transfixed with spelling the words, bad had sad bad, that for a short time she forgot that she wanted to smoke oxycontin until her brain blitzed out.

But then she was startled out of her happy trance when she saw a movement, in the corner of her eye. There was something in the room with her….she dropped the game to the floor, knocking the battery out of it so it went silent.

She had caught a glimpse of something low to the ground, creeping. They had had bats in the walls, sparrows trapped in the drop ceilings, but somehow she knew this wasn’t an animal. It was a small thing, but its presence filled up the whole room. The very light had gone funny, and the room seemed to glow with a strange green phosphorescence. She was too terrified to look at it, she would not turn her head, her eyes stayed locked on the dead spelling game on the floor.

But she could hear it. Breathing fast, nearly panting, then it suddenly lurched forward, knocking down a box of plastic balls. They exploded forth in a bright crash, rushing and clicking.

It was as though the noise broke her trance, and Tara was able to move: she ran out of the room and slammed the door shut behind her. Hurried back to her bedroom and pulled the covers over her head, gasping for air, now that she could finally breathe.

It must be the detoxing, she told herself. To detox took time. Maybe her brain was still scrambled, confused, from all the abuse she had inflicted on it over the years, and it was giving her false information. Hallucinations.  She just needed more time to heal…

(But what if it was real? Because seep down, she knew what it was: it was the baby. Her baby, if she had learned to walk. Her baby, come back from the dead to find her, to punish her…)

She pushed the ugly thought away, quickly.  It had come unbidden out of the depths, brushing against her like an undersea creature, some kind of eyeless eel, luminescent and sleek. A knowledge that lived submerged inside her, hidden from light. What she needed was sleep. She would give anything, anything, only to get some goddamn sleep.

& & &

The thing about obsession was that it was like catching a virus. It could begin with a little tickle in the throat. Then a bit of ache in the body. Then next thing she knew, it had taken over, and she was consumed with the full heat of fever.

Tara knew her own tendencies, but that didn’t always make a difference.

What was important was that she wasn’t going to give in. It was a new day, and she was starting over. She was going to eat healthy. She was going to drink three liters of filtered water. She was going to remember: the way to prevent bad things from happening was to do things right and do them all the way through.

She was going to save Alice.

She had all of the keys on a big keychain on a knotted piece of hemp rope. One of the keys was to the owner’s office, a little room with tacked up dividing walls that didn’t even go up to the ceiling. The owner was rarely there, rarely used the office except when a new resident was being admitted.

In the office was a filing cabinet full of forms. Forms that were filled out by anyone that applied and was accepted. Not only the application forms, but case management forms, all kinds of papers…

It was not wrong, to do what she was doing. Because she could not ask to have access. Someone could get the wrong idea, if they knew she needed to see Alice’s papers. Papers that listed her previous address, at the boyfriend’s house. And the dormitory before that. And her records from The New Chapter Recovery Center before that.

It wasn’t wrong to do what she was doing, because she couldn’t find enough information about the girl online. The only thing attributed to her name was a series of curated images. (Selfies.  Alice posing in ripped tights in a graveyard. Another where she was wearing a crown of white flowers and a gauzy dress in a field. A photo of pink glazed donuts. Illustrations of little furry animals in Victorian clothes. All were at least two years old and didn’t even seem like her.)

The address of the boyfriend’s house was in a seedy area of town. The run-down houses were crowded close together. Tara had to drive very slowly, squinting to read the house numbers. At last, she found it; like most of the other houses on the block, it had a double-decker porch that seemed to sag precariously, bowing at the center. There was no doorbell; she looked in through the pane of glass, she could see doors to the different units. Unit B was straight across. But the door was locked. Not knowing what else to do, she began to pace back and forth, gripping the straps of her bag in her hands. She would have to wait until someone came in or out…

But just as she was about to sit down on the front steps, a short, deeply tanned older man with a wiry quiff of gray hair opened the door and stared at her belligerently. “What do you want?”

“I need to see someone in apartment B. Does…Ricky live there?”

The man sighed harshly. “What do you want with Ricky? What are you, a tweaker?”

“Am I a… what?” She could feel her face flush hotly. In fact, she knew these kinds of neighborhoods, had knocked on doors like this before in the middle of the night, shaking, desperate. She tried to say more, to defend herself, but her throat seemed to have closed up.

The man looked at her keenly now. He was smiling meanly, trying to catch her eye. “Aw, cat got your tongue?  Think I don’t know what you are? I got your number all right, sweetie. I can see it in your eyes. You aren’t fooling anyone.”

“I don’t do drugs!” She tried to speak assertively, but it came out in a pathetic squeak. Her hands were starting to tremble, so she crossed her arms. She cleared her throat, took a deep breath, then said, “I’m actually looking for his girlfriend. Alice.”

“Why?” He took a step closer to her, looking her up and down.

It wasn’t fair, he was making her nervous, making her feel like a liar. “She’s…my friend?”

“If she’s your friend, why didn’t she tell you she’s not here no more?”

Tara had no answer.

“If you’re not a tweaker, are you a cop?”

Tara laughed like it was a joke. But the man wasn’t smiling.

“Lemme see your driver’s license.”

“Why?”

“So I can tell Alice who you are, if she comes around.”

She reached into her bag, took out her wallet, handed over the card.

The man looked at it, looked up at her, peering closely as though trying to memorize her face. Tara looked back at him, steadily, reminding herself she had nothing to be afraid of.

“Okay. If I see her, I’ll tell her. But I don’t want you coming back. I have cameras and I’m always watching.”

“Do you promise to tell her? Do you think she…”

But the man just snorted, shaking his head as he closed the door in her face. She could feel him watching her through the glass as she slowly walked back down the steps.

As she stepped onto the sidewalk she could hear the door open once more, and he called in a light, mocking tone:

“Tweaker!”

When she got back to the house, she went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. Then she peered at herself in the mirror. What was it about her, what did the man see? There was something about her that was off. But what was it? She inspected herself closely. Her teeth were clean, the gums pink when she lifted her lip up with her finger. Her pupils weren’t dilated. Objectively, she was a normal looking thirty-five-year-old woman with fawn colored hair pulled up in a messy ponytail. Maybe it was her eyes. Too large, too full of hurt and yearning. A strain there that always gave her away: it was the hunger that people always picked up on.

But she couldn’t help that she was always so hungry. Since she was a girl, she always lost herself, dissolving into longing for love, for connection. Constantly scanning the faces of others searching for clues for who she was supposed to be. And what did she have to show for it? She was married, once, to a man who did not love her back. She had the baby to hold onto him, and that was wrong. Or was it?

(He should have stayed, should have stayed. And then maybe what happened…wouldn’t have happened. The thing that she won’t think about.)

She had always been such a cautious, careful child. No one would have guessed she would grow up to be an addict. But she survived, through sheer willpower. Never went to a real shrink, other than group therapy, where she acted stammering and shy, and told them effortless beautiful lies. Trying to get people to like her. And to never know who she really was.

Certainly, she was not a tweaker. She was not a loser. She was a new person now. As long as people would allow her to do what she needed to do.

She needed to save Alice. More and more she wanted to be left alone with her thoughts, imagining the girl as a baby animal on spindly legs, vulnerable to circling predators.  Overdose. Jail. Death, either accidental or by another’s deliberate hand. There was the thuggy boyfriend. The smirking landlord who had called her…that terrible name. There were so many ways the world could demolish Alice, so many ways she could meet her end, living in a world not made for her. Because there were so many people who wanted to hurt those that were helpless.

The scenes ran like movies in her head. Alice pale and bruised. Alice broken, or even disfigured. They became more real to her than the girl had ever been real.

That night, she almost slept. Her active brain began to spin into oblivion, and she sunk deeper and deeper into the mattress…

But then she started awake again, by the sound of a baby crying.

Instantly alert, she sprung up in bed. She hadn’t dreamed it, hadn’t imagined it, because it was too loud, shrill and insistent as an air raid siren. She was wide awake, her eyes were open, and the baby was screaming.

She had thought, if she were careful enough, she could be safe. But she wasn’t safe. The terrible thing had found her. She would never be safe, because it was both in her and outside her. There were no boundaries. It was the past, present, and future all at once. The cries would never stop. And they hurt, they hurt!

She was too afraid to turn the light on, because then she might see it.

Tara didn’t know what to do, she couldn’t run from what was inside her. It would drive her mad. The only thing to do was fill her own lungs with a deep gulp of air. And she let out a thin, sharp scream of her own…

The sound of opening doors, the sound of footsteps. Then a rapping on the door, Tara? Tara!

The door flew open, and then the wash of light from the hallway was falling over her: it was the others, here to rescue her. What is it, Tara? You’re okay! Nobody’s in here! Are you having a bad dream?

When she cried, she couldn’t stop, it wasn’t for sadness, but relief, of gratitude for human voices, human hands on her; cries of helplessness as she allowed herself to be enfolded. Held.

& & &

Tara smiled gently and modestly at the house meeting the next day, and thanked the others for their concern, but she was fine. Just some pesky symptoms of detox. It’s a thing that would pass. She was fine. And if anyone looked at her a little too long, a little too closely, she turned away, changed the subject. Got straight down to the real business: The switching off of the chore list. Reminder of trash pickup days. Reminder of the no-visitor policy, and how it also included no visitors on the front porch, as there had been complaints…

Then the meeting was blessedly over. She could go to her room, try again to sleep.

But as everyone was leaving, Linda tapped her on the shoulder. She was petite woman in her early sixties, with waist-length dyed red hair. She tended to dress in concert t-shirts and skinny jeans. She had something wrong with one of her hip joints and walked with a slight limp that was more of a swagger; in her bartender days, she had beaten up men twice her size.

She leaned in, confidentially to say something in Tara’s ear. She hissed, “You think I don’t know?”

Tara’s heart pounded in fear: She knows about the ghost baby. She couldn’t answer.

But Linda pinched her arm and said, “You think I don’t know you have it in for me? All I’m saying is don’t fuckin tell ME I can’t have friends to see me on the fuckin porch. And don’t you fuckin single me out for a pee test, you think I don’t notice how you are out to get me? I’ve been here way longer than you have. Ain’t nobody’s given me shit like you.”

“Linda, I have nothing against you. It’s just my job. I don’t make the rules, I just do what they tell me…”

“I have a little proposition for you. Step the fuck back from me from now on, or I go to Janice and tell her what you’ve been doing.”

“What have I been doing?”

“I seen you going into her office when you thought we were all asleep. Snooping around in the files.”

“I don’t know what you’re…maybe I was just cleaning?”

“Yeah, bullshit, little miss house manager. Little miss free rent. I’ll fuck you up your gig, try me. Now,” she tilted one hip to the side and tossed her orange hair back. “Is it a deal? You stop breathing down my neck, and I don’t report your ass?”

Tara at first felt abashed. Ashamed, red-faced with confusion. But then, a swell of righteousness flooded her when she remembered, I have a job to do. She needed to do her job, because to no ttake action was like choosing not to scratch an itch. Or choosing not to breathe. To not act would be to die.

She took a long look at Linda, as though considering. No one could stand in her way. So she said cooly, “It’s a deal.” Then she walked away.

“Right answer!” called Linda to her back.

& & &

A lot of people don’t realize that you could go to bed as one thing, then wake up as another. That you could go to bed as a mother, and then wake up a monster, wild-eyed and howling, an annihilator.

It was true, she had been using that night. Roxicodone on foil, a hollowed-out Bic pen. Suck it in, exhale, and then take a hit off the marijuana bowl she had packed. The baby was crying. Her husband was gone. He had needed “time away,” his mother was putting him in a rehab program. He was the only son of a doting mother. He was theatrical, sensation seeking, drug imbibing…always seeing what he could get away with. The mother would pay Tara off, he would go to grad school…he would start over, as though none of this had happened.

She couldn’t think, the baby was really screaming now, she didn’t know what to do, and she hated herself. She was barely in touch with her own family, she had no one to save her. Bettina was still a red, squalling newborn, she didn’t know what she wanted most of the time. She was, she had to admit, afraid of the baby. Afraid she would hurt her. She could not even nurse her. She had to get off the opiates, she knew. Maybe with valium, or Ativan, plus the weed, maybe she coud do it alone. She didn’t want to be like this. She wanted to be normal. She used to think that to want to get high and not be able to was hell on earth. But the real hell was not wanting to get high and doing it anyway…she would figure it out, tomorrow. She took the baby into the bed with her, held her tight, tight. Until she drifted into oblivion.

You could go to bed as one person, and wake up in another world, forever transformed. And there was no way back. You could never negate, transform, or transcend what had happened. Your very self could be frozen in this moment, to live in stasis and repetition forever. You talk to the police, you talk to the judge, you get a plea deal for “culpable negligence,” a year’s probation, but your baby is still dead. Accidental suffocation. You are still a walking mutant, who can only try to survive. You learn the ways, day by day and moment by moment. Surviving. But not living.

& & &

If there was one thing to be said for obsessive thoughts, it was this: they made you prepared. Her brain, like a broken television, had played for her every worst case scenario, every terrible thing that could have happened to Alice. Sharp blow to the skull rendering her mute and dazed. In a hospital room, brightly colored tubes snaking from her body, monitor keeping the rhythm of her bird-like pulse. Held prisoner by a sex trafficker. Freebasing heroin with the boyfriend, ODing so that her eyes were rolled back in her head, face gone pale as a corpse, a trickle of drool running down her cheek. The visions of her ruminations left her shaken, exhausted. But also…exhilarated? Ready to take action.

Maybe one day Alice would be the subject of news stories, true crime podcasts, conspiracy theory videos. But for right now, she belonged only to Tara, and no one else.

It was focus that made her, for once, feel free from being haunted by her own mind.

And at that moment, she was completely focused on navigating a college campus that she had never been on before. It was lovely in a quaint way, all redbrick Federal style buildings arranged around verdant quads. It was September, but still warm like summer, and the students wore shorts and tank tops, walking in groups, chattering like flocks of birds. There was some type of welcome back to campus event, with inflatable bouncy houses. Music, happy screams and laughter. But no one in this crowd came close to resembling Alice. Watchful, reserved Alice with her pale skin and dark clothes, was nowhere among the happy crowd.

She was looking for someplace called Lyons Hall. It was the address Alice had been listed at before the apartment. At last she found it. The sign was small and tasteful, gold script on a maroon background. A three-story brick building with low hedges around it.

Windows were open and students were leaning out, having shouted conversations with passersby below. The sun was just starting to lower in the sky and the light was warm and golden. Tara closed her eyes for a moment, to feel the whole scene. What is it about the sun shining on you that makes you feel like a good person, she thought?

Was she a good person?

Sometimes she had such awful thoughts. The thoughts were tests, to see if she would act on them. Her brain was always there to remind her that she had the ability to be an awful person, in every circumstance. If she ever lost control.

But this place, this moment, was so lovely and gilded. These young people, so alive, so happy simply to be in one place together. And nothing bad had happened to them yet. I was like that once! She imagined, what it would be like to go back in time. Her clamorous thoughts quieted, and there was a slow bloom inside of her. Beautiful. They don’t even know yet what’s ahead.

Tara decided to just stand in one place and watch the front entrance of the dorm. She couldn’t ask anyone for help, or else they might stop her from doing what she needed to do. And she just needed to be finished, this once. She held her bag in her hands. She would be like vapor, mist, invisible. Watching these young people going in and out. Surveilling someone was an act of love. She was the eye of the camera, burning hot and bright.

Time felt honey-sweet and dilated, until she was startled by someone tapping her on the shoulder.

“Ma’am?”

She turned to see two campus police officers.

“Can I ask you what you’re doing, ma’am?”

They were young boys really, wearing dark blue uniforms and garrison-style hats, like playing dress-up.

“Why? I’m not doing anything wrong.”

“Students have reported that you have been standing here for over an hour staring at their doorway. Waiting for someone?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Who?”

Tara went silent for a long moment, brain ticking through all the possible ways to answer. Boundaries felt stretched thin, truth malleable: she would say what she had to say, to do what she had to do.

“I…I’m looking for my sister.” She tried to subtly pitch her voice into an imitation of Alice’s Swedish accent.

One of the cops, who was on the short side, with thick black hair and expressive eyes, gave her a long searching look. Then he said, “Please step this way, ma’am.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Security office.”

“But I’m no…” She almost said tweaker. But then she let the sentence fall unfinished, because the other cop had taken her by the arm, not gently, and said “This way, ma’am.”

The place they took her to was not as bucolic as the rest of the campus. It had ugly wood paneling, just like at the sober house. And a desk with two hard plastic chairs in front of it.

“Have a seat please. Can we see some ID?”

“Of course.” She tried to appear nonchalant, to hide her nervousness.

The cop with the large liquid eyes frowned at her driver’s license. Walked through a doorway behind the desk, and said some things into a walky talky.

The other cop, who had sandy hair and ruddy skin, sat on the edge of the desk and took out a pad of paper.

“So you were looking for someone? A student? Who?”

She gave Alice’s full name.

“And you say she is a relation to you?”

She had forgotten to speak in the accent! “Well, she’s like a sister. We were very close. And I’m just…worried.”

She began to tear up, because suddenly, she realized she couldn’t visualize Alice’s face any more. When she thought of her, she could only see a girl-shaped outline. Empty. But the emptiness was so still, so cool. A blank space that you could fill with whatever you wanted…

“We need to search your bag, ma’am. Please hand it to me.”

She did so, without a word. The policeman reached into it and took out a pair of pajama pants with Japanese cartoon characters on them. Then a stuffed animal that looked like some type of little badger. A set of large pink headphones. Tara looked at the items, feeling only a distant curiosity. These things all belonged to the girl. But they weren’t making the girl come alive in her head at all. She could only remember her in flashes. Like the way the light of a phone screen, a cold flickery glow, would fall across her face when she texted someone in bed in the middle of the night.

She had thought about the girl so much, maybe she had somehow obliterated her. The memories…gone.

But the police officer was still pulling things out of the bag. A Narcan pen.

“Is this medication intended for you, ma’am?”

“I, um…”

“Okay now, what’s this? A knife?”

“Um.”

“A pocket knife. What are you doing with this?”

“I..don’t remember having it. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry–”

“You had a concealed weapon on this campus.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll go, seriously, I’ll leave.”

“Sorry ma’am, it’s not that simple. Don’t cry, ma’am, but I’m afraid we’ll be detaining you.”

& & &

Later on, as the weeks passed by, she didn’t like to think about the incident very much. (How absurd, detained by campus police! Escorted off the campus with all those kids staring. They warned her that if she ever came back, she would be arrested for criminal trespassing.) It felt like another lifetime, as if it had happened to someone else.

Because she had transcended. She wasn’t that Tara anymore.

Like a spell had broken, she rarely thought of Alice. No more ruminations, no more daydreams about terrible things happening to the girl. She tried, tried, to imagine the girl, hurt, lost, and bleeding. But she could not elicit a single emotion. All she could remember now was the vague image of a girl sitting at the mirror, drawing on a face, and then wiping it off again. She could be anyone.

Tara felt like a new person. There was a lightness to her now that she had not experienced in years. She had gotten a call back about a job, working in production design for an insurance company, sounded soul crushingly dull to be honest, but still, it was a start.

She planned to give notice that she didn’t want to be house manager anymore. She had started going to meetings again, where she sat quietly and inscrutably, nodding encouragingly to those who told their stories, but never divulging her own. If they asked, she told a story of someone else. Beautiful lies, told with downcast eyes, a tenuous smile.

She was vapor. She was mist.

Sometimes it crossed her mind that she should see someone. Get help. But she couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t stand the way a therapist would give her that look, the look of total attention, a look like they could stare right down into the dark well of her soul. She just couldn’t. Instead, she would do good deeds. She could volunteer at the children’s hospital. She could picture it clearly, reading story books. Coloring with crayons. Singing songs to the little sick children, in their  hospital beds, little IV drips in their stick-like arms.

Another thing that was new: the ghost baby never bothered her anymore. There was no longer that small, lurching presence knocking things around and scaring her to death. No more cries in the night. The thing was, it must have been with her all the time, because its lack of presence was so striking. It was like a ticking time bomb, finally silenced. She was no longer waiting for the explosion.

She was free. She had shed her past like sloughing off a suit of dead skin. She had even thrown the knife into the sewer grate because she was sick of it. The ridiculous big deal the police officer had made over it! You could walk away from anything if you arranged your mind the right way.

But there remained just a little bit of the old hunger. An itch that had to be scratched. It was the urge to test herself.

What if I’m a bad person?

So, for testing purposes, she went into the room that she had been avoiding out of fear. The old playroom.

When she creaked open the door, it was the same as she had experienced it last. The same stale air. The same buckets of blocks and hand puppets and early reader books. But she did not feel frightened here, not of anything. She wandered over to the doorway with the frieze covered in little handprints. Like a constellation of friendly stars. She put her hand over one of them and held it there, observing how it felt. Hers was so much bigger. How ridiculous to ever be afraid when she was so much more powerful. She felt so calm and at ease that she took out a rolled up little sleeping mat made of dimpled foam and flattened it to the floor. If she folded her legs up into herself in the fetal position, she could fit her whole body onto it.

And just like that, she slept, her first untroubled sleep in a month.

She must have slept for a long time, because she was awakened by the voices of others, and it felt like the middle of the night, though she had no clock. The voices were hushed but urgent, everyone had come out of their rooms and had gathered together. She listened intently and could just make out some of their words:

It’s definitely her, they ID’d her, they just have to notify the family in Sweden, and there’s a time difference, of course…
But it feels like we just saw her!
Found her in a field, left to the elements
She wasn’t even twenty! Just a baby!
Well someone has to tell…
Where on earth is…

If she just lay still enough, no one would know she was there. She dug her fingernails into the foam mat until she made little tears.

If she lay still enough, then maybe none of it was happening, and it was just a confusing dream. If she lay still and quiet so, so quiet, then time wouldn’t move forward. Although inside, Tara was already running, running, through a maze. Running into dead end after dead end. She began to breathe quickly and shallowly…

…even as the police car pulled up in front, and there was the ringing of the bell.

Tara? They say they are here for you!

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Leah Erickson 2024