How long had he been this way?
Oh, for as far back as Cynthia Rigor could remember. The retired Sergeant Major wandered around the house all day, every day, with a mind preoccupied with trying to unscramble the universe, devoted to cracking riddles, calculating mathematical equations, his true love of quantum physics, peeling away the layers of reality and weaving back together all of which his senses—twenty-three of them, by his last count—could detect.
But it also wasn’t difficult for Cynthia to remember other times, not so long ago, when it wasn’t just the tremor of the new that set her husband up in his chair, but the physical beauty of the world—streamside camping in the Dakotas, say—that would put a warm grin on his face. The days when martialing to command a thousand troops had yet to replace the supernatural yodeling of a nesting loon among the thick foggy banks of a finger lake.
It was easier some days to live in those rarefied memories than in the present. The present was somehow more viscous. The days were slippery, polished—she’d grown so accustomed to the small things in her house that they barely registered anymore. But her memories were full of detail—she could almost feel again his thick arms cradling her in the sweaty darkness of the barracks, making love beneath the shrill screams of aircraft.
His arms had since grown thin and complacent. The flesh hung from the bone like hammocks strung between birch. No longer easing her awake, his hands instead jabbed, poked, sifted across the room pointing, sorting, the grip forceful now, more of a clutch, really. There was no touching her the way he used to, and so all the old sentiments were left to dissipate like dew in the staunch heat of these mornings.
Yet the Sergeant Major still made it a point to touch her skin lightly once a day—and only once a day—perhaps the ghost of some romantic notion. That’s the way it was with him now. He did everything once and only once.
Cynthia tried explaining this peculiarity to Lucy, her estranged sister, who listened mindfully while seated in her red padded chair at the kitchen table, hands in her lap and leaning forward intently. It took only a few seconds of being in the same room with the Sergeant Major to note some powerful eccentricity had taken hold, and Lucy was eager to learn more of this man whose comfort and care she would soon be responsible for administering.
“It’s an odd thing, to set about giving only a single solitary thought to each thing that might parade before one’s imagination in a day,” Cynthia added, pulling the kettle aside and pouring the steaming water into two cups bagged with Nocturnal Seasons—the name she’d given the bitter herbal mix she cured and ground herself from several leafy shrubs in her spice garden. “He must keep a mental tally. But as you might expect we’ve never discussed it. It took a few weeks to understand what was actually happening, the process. I just thought he’d had a stroke, or a hemorrhage.”
When the package arrived express mail from a Connecticut law office, Lucy didn’t quite know what to make of it. She opened the long envelope with the same scissors she was using for her couponing, read the letter inside, and left it there on the kitchen table for three weeks. Soon a donut shape of magazines and clementines and bills formed around the intruder, evidence of some psychic magnetism of grave importance. The truth was, the letter and corresponding document frightened her. It had been almost two decades since she’d last spoken with her sister—words were said—and now all of a sudden, this.
“Who is there to blame?” asked Cynthia Rigor, blowing cigarette smoke past her cheek and shrugging her eyebrows. “Despots in faraway jungles? Weasley sorts running secret tests in secret bunkers? They leave their loved ones to go live underground. Arid cities of dust. But the government must protect us, and he gave his life over to those missions. They worked him to the bone. Projects with names like disregarded automobile models. Project Alpha Alliance. Project Albatross. He burbles them up in his sleep like acid.”
The document detailed the executions of a living trust, held in the name of the Sergeant Major. The legal jargon was migraine-inducing but it appeared to Lucy that the Sergeant Major had designated her as some kind of beneficiary, bearing an important caveat. It took several phone calls and a short drive to a TV lawyer in East Providence to confirm that the document was real, and what her sister Cynthia had stated in her letter—though bewildering—wasn’t a joke. Her husband, the Sergeant Major, now required a live-in nurse, one responsible for his constant medical supervision, a caregiver, and that he’d specifically requested it be Lucy.
Cynthia wondered if she’d be up for the task. She called it “the task.” There was two extra bedrooms and Lucy could choose whichever she wanted. Oh, and the job paid eighty thousand a year, with healthcare.
Eighty thousand! A single year of work and Lucy could pay off her house. Buy a new car with A/C and junk the Subaru. She flattened the letter on the kitchen table and reread it again. Something was missing, but the lawyer assured her, as best as he could tell, the offer was real.
Before her stroke, Lucy had worked as an RN at Memorial Hospital, so she was quite capable of doing what was required. But that had been five years ago, and sometimes now her thoughts got scrambled. The floor swayed. Words and faces flittered into small dark spaces and hid there. She secretly called the time after her stroke “the effening,” or “the Big F-word,” because of how awful it was. But she wasn’t a person to give up so easily, so she took the disability checks and became a shopper for the food pantry at St Michael’s, helping families down on their luck.
But she still had bills, and eighty thousand!
“I mean, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. ESP, psychokinesis, alternate realities, stuff like this,” Cynthia continued, tweezering another cigarette from the pack. “Did you want honey? No? Brown flew him out for a private dinner with the school president before he finally settled on the Marines. The Company sent poachers. This was a kid, sixteen. Prodigy. Virtually hairless, from his father’s side. He looked so handsome in his dress midnight blues, my god. I have a picture. Okinawa. But the line between military and intelligence, it’s very blurry. I’m not sure he knew exactly who he was working for, most times.”
Just then the Sergeant Major peeked around the corner from the den. His expression was infantile, eyes widened, the look of a child testing if it was okay that he’d left his room after being scolded and sent there. Yet there was a boldness, if that was the word, in how he registered his surroundings—a real intelligence. The sisters watched as the Sergeant Major walked over to a bookshelf and began tipping off the books, setting certain ones on an end table for later. He was rearranging them reverse alphabetically. He soon became frustrated, spilling the hardback titles on the floor, and meandered over to the coffee table. There he picked up an ashtray, spun it in the air, caught it, then raised it to his face, where he slowly protruded his tongue and carefully, methodically, gave the glass bottom a light dab.
Lucy did her best to mask the quick inhalation that escaped her, terrified to offend. But her sister was watching, and blinked knowingly. “It takes some getting used to,” she said. “He won’t lick anything else today, thank goodness. But those books will stay unshelved till tomorrow. As you can probably tell, he often likes to arrange by spine color. His ability to discern between a Tyrian purple and a boysenberry is utterly impressive and deeply depressing. If mother were still alive she’d no doubt force him into the pigmenting service of some Milanese fashionista.”
Lucy remembered their mother as an affable, boozy, bitterly resentful housewife of a certain class and age, whose salacious yet somehow conservative cocktail parties thrilled the escapist gentry of New Canaan but whose domestic domination of her father and imbalanced, moody undermining of her two girls provided Lucy little in the way of daughterly affection. It was perfectly clear from early on that Cynthia had inherited these traits in full while Lucy curved towards the sheltered, shuttered existence of her father, a software engineer whose work on early AI robotics would one day allow a bodiless mechanized hand to reach down toward the grey expanse of a lab table and pick up a solitary grape without squishing it.
“You still with me, Lucille?” her sister asked with a puggish grin. Lucy nodded but returned her attention to the Sergeant Major, who was engaged in a series of physical maneuvers, like calisthenics—pushing the arm out, dropping a fist down, wiggling a pinky, inflating his chest, which devolved into a musical improvisation of yipping, yapping, squeaking, raspberrying, and hand-farting. On the street he might have been mistaken for a performer, but the only audience the Sergeant Major seemed to care about was an interior one.
“And for a while everything was fine. I couldn’t tell, of course, but the fact is, he stopped leaving work. So to speak. He would bring the experiments home in his head. Lock himself in the basement, turn up the music. A strict rigmarole. He enjoyed habituation. I was pushed to some backburner. Tickets to Switzerland expired. I ended up selling the beach house, we never went. He used to love sailing, the smell of the open air on the salt water. The white trousers, Nantucket. In the military, they drill you. They march you. They make you a weapon, your experience, your thinking, your body. One day you learn they can transmit viruses by whispers. Well why not? It’s all just coded information. You want an attaché in Singapore to hop to his death down an elevator shaft? Sprinkle these crystals in his gnocchi, call his home and read him these words. Gut bacteria. Mind control. Their job is to put people in boxes. Categories, labels. Or six feet down. I think what happened is, he became the box.”
This was why I’m here, Lucy thought. To listen to the mess her life has become and console her, because this is her effening, her eff-up, and she can’t bear it herself. I’ll help take care of her problems so she can go do whatever she wants. Oh, sure, I’ll just have my sister clean it up. Her whole life, the same thing! With me, with Dad, Mother. Well, I’ve got a surprise for you, dear. You may have money but you don’t— I’ll listen and nod, I’ll enjoy your tea, sis, but I’m not staying here a second past—
“More tea?”
“Please, yes. It’s wonderful.”
“I cure the leaves myself. It’s really very easy.”
Lucy nodded pleasantly.
Cynthia brought her leg out from under her and raised herself from the chair, sauntering over to the stove. Just like her. That little wiggle-walk, flat-footed, slender little slaps. Classic Mother, the hair even, bobbed up just so. And she knows me. I like to think she doesn’t, but she does. Old reliable, that’s me. Pawtucket gal, that me, rooted to a certain little grocery store, the mall on weekends, Payless, catch a flick at the Avon, lets me feel all artsy. She knows me. Haven’t had a vacation in forever, the bills. My bad back, but the memory loss wasn’t permanent, just a few things here and there, a few more shadowy corners. If little Lucy ever moved away it’d be like Manhattan, that great immobile quartz kingdom, had lifted itself up and wandered into the Atlantic.
“It was a forced retirement, as you know. Did you know? I’m trying to remember the last time we spoke, when was it?” Lucy turned to find her sister standing there with a rag over the kettle handle. Daring her to start in, to say it.
“I honestly don’t recall,” Lucy replied. But she did recall, every bitter detail. She was being evicted from her house, the family house, and Cynthia wouldn’t loan her the money to keep it. It has too many memories, she complained, let’s just sell the damn thing. Or burn it.
But Lucy needed that house, it was her house, she had nowhere else to go. The Sergeant Major and Cynthia were traveling the world and sending postcards, but Lucy had nothing, not a job, no man, nothing. Just a Medicaid check and a new stutter and a boatload of physical therapy bills.
“But you did know he was retired, formally. Against his will?”
“I think I did, yes.”
“I mean, they call it honorable, an honorable discharge. But the truth was a few anti-American Senators found out about one of the projects he was on, an approved project, all the way up the chain of command. But it was an election year. Long story short, they needed a patsy. Someone’s neck on the stump. I mean they said they did all they could for him. His superiors? Promised they’d take care of him. What did they give him, after years of service?” Cynthia pinched her fingers and sprinkled the air as if with salt. “Nothing. Once they cut him loose, he was just another dead soldier. A casualty. A burned-out hypothetical.”
She set the steaming cup before her sister, who took it up and drew in wisps of air before achieving the first scolding sip.
In the den the Sergeant Major was undressing himself before the television, neatly folding his undershirt, blue dress-shirt, olive polyester slacks, and striped boxers, placing them on the leather chesterfield. He stood before them naked save for a pair of pumpernickel and tan argyle socks. He blinked twice, three times, four. Then wandered up two stairs of a hidden staircase and came back down. He passed behind Lucy, who averted her gaze, and made his way into the living room. Remaining in sight, he took a seat on the burgundy bench of their piano. It was their mother’s, and he was drumming out three individual notes with three individual fingers, and now he was slamming his fists down upon the keys he hadn’t yet touched.
The piano had once felt the fingers of an actual princess, Lucy thought: Princess Margaret, visiting friends at Martha’s Vineyard, who her parents met at a garden party and who somehow, victoriously, they were able to coax back to their tiny house for drinks, back when they lived in New Bedford and her father commuted to MIT. She watched her mother’s arched fingers temperately peck at the keys, high-fingered towers of ivory, hair like coal dust and ruby lipstick, despite the fact she was married. She had been a glorious woman, playing at that piano, and an utter terror everywhere else.
“Any animal in a cage for too long. The pacing they do, their brains gone to mush. And what do they do when you open the cage? Nothing. It’s safe in there. They know the boundaries. He needs the structure. I found a diary. He’s always keeping notes. He thought the brain only ages, literally, figuratively, when it ceases to be curious. It requires a stable environment to function, optimally. It requires inculcation, was his word for it. Indoctrination of a sort, learning to be free in limited spaces.”
To confide in me, Lucy thought, watching the Sergeant Major flick his teeth with his fingernails, is to confide in a stone landscape. This is why I’m here. You’ll never have to worry about embarrassing information leaking out. And if I did ever let something slip, you’d deny it, call me crazy, blame the stroke. But I’m stronger than ever. Smarter too, maybe. What are you after? I recognize the probing, this ritual we do, advancing into the intimacies of each other, until we touch upon the real thing for a moment, then withdraw into the mundane and restart the process over. What do you hope to get from me? We have no admiration for one another…but maybe you’re counting on my admiration for your husband? Because he was a decent man. A tender and decent man.
“I should be thankful he didn’t take a shotgun out to the shed like some of the others. At least he found a way to cope, to continue experiencing life—”
“You mentioned,” Lucy interrupted, “an event?”
“An event?” repeated Cynthia, eyes searching.
“Yes, an event of some kind, when things changed, when you realized—”
Her sister’s mouth went crooked. “I don’t recall. Did I say an event?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lucy assured her, reaching across the table and nearly, very nearly, touching her sister’s hand. How veiny it was, with its rings. She patted the tablecloth instead. “Tell me, what would I be doing, if I were to come live with you?”
“Live?”
“Stay with you? The document said…well the letter you sent said—”
“Oh right right right,” said Cynthia, finding a train of thought. “We have two additional rooms in back, one large, one small. The small has a fireplace, wood-burning, so it’s a bit messy, but the large one is bigger, and faces the back garden. More sunlight.”
The Sergeant Major rose to reveal his puckered buttocks and a pair of white legs patterned with blue spider-veins. Lucy remembered when that backside had tucked quite neatly into the form-fitting lining of some slacks at the Rivendell Community Dance Hall. Her sister had been very pretty. All these soldiers to choose from. Lucy didn’t know how to dance, but their mother had forced her along as a chaperone. Insisted upon it. To teach her something.
To waste, it’s all gone to waste, Lucy thought, and looked down at her own knobby hands, pink and wrinkled. Liver spots rising to the surface like ghosts of former oil paintings bleeding into a new picture. Of what? Wiry hair she still had colored—for who? And the feel of it, ugh, like sagebrush.
She stopped herself. She was never this way, not usually. Body issues, who had time for body issues? She wasn’t a schoolgirl. Being around her sister was bringing it all back. Lucy gripped her tea cup, feeling the heat leap up and smooth the back of her tongue. She was anticipating the moment she’d tell Cynthia thanks but no thanks, the job isn’t for me, I have a life and people who depend on me. Not people, exactly. But there was a dog, Martin. And he was going blind. But there were also the folks at church: Pastor Linda, Deacon Alex and his weird son Ralph, Deandra Murphy the pianist, who ran the pantry—
Lucy stood up from her chair quite suddenly, not knowing exactly why. She was indignant, certainly, but also, yes, a little afraid. But why? Her body was reacting with pure anxiety, as if to an allergy. But when she searched her thoughts, nothing jumped out at her. There was this fear, of a loss of agency? She watched the Sergeant Major trace a letter across his furry chest while staring straight at her. He recognized her, didn’t he? The pattern, it could have been a number, or a symbol.
“Dear, are you all right?” asked her sister quite concernedly.
Lucy caught herself. “Of course. I was wondering if I might bother you for a teaspoon of that honey.”
“Sure, let me—”
But Lucy was already rounding her chair. The plastic honey bear with the yellow hat waited patiently for her by the toaster oven. Its little mouth, curled up in sympathy, was matted with brown crystals. All the while the Sergeant Major had taken to shouting:
“I lust! So entirely! For everything! I won’t be placed in one of those shitty old-folk’s homes waiting to die while my bunkmate’s pretentious children bring those damn death flowers and try to cheat each other out of their inheritance! I dislike waffles! Immensely! I adore bleu cheese dressing on red-leaf with cold romaine! It’s not the same without you here, mother! It never will be. How many more goddamn times must I tell you, princess—don’t touch the goddamn belly button!”
Lucy searched the immediate backlogs of her memory for any image, any song, anything that might take her from this place. Her hand shook as it squeezed the amber liquid from the bear’s head. A multicolored candle she’d bought at a store near the beach. Cliffs of orange sandstone casting shadows over several sun-warmed adobes. Her thoughts longed for a connection; they existed only because of her dreaming them up and placing them in that particular order. That’s what life was—a bundle of nerves creating personal order out of chaos. Perhaps this was what the Sergeant Major was trying and failing to do. She would mention it to Cynthia when the time was right. Or not.
What inhospitable nonsense, diagnosing disorders on the fly and asking a loved one to take them seriously. She breathed deeply and turned.
The Sergeant Major was fondling his privates. His wife attempted to calmly light another Pall Mall. These shenanigans, these outbursts? Nothing to write home about, her face seemed to say. But Lucy knew it had burrowed deep, this loss, this imbalance, and now it was all her sister could do from having the old jarhead committed. Her house, her rules. That’s why Lucy was there—she was to bring order out of chaos. Under the watchful, governing eyes of her sister.
“This is the job,” Lucy said, in a way meant to show she understood and empathized. She was upset at her sister, but she was still human. As a former ER nurse, she had a long familiarity with patients with mental disorders, and did not envy her sister’s future dealings with the Sergeant Major.
Cynthia acted as if she hadn’t heard.
“Would you like me to get a blanket for him?” Lucy asked.
“He won’t wear any more clothes today, now that he’s taken them off.”
“I’m fine,” said Lucy. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”
Cynthia’s expression radiated something altogether unanticipated, and so outside Lucy’s expectation that she could pinpoint neither its source—if it was perhaps something she’d said—or its intended message. The heat behind the eyes was ferocity, to be sure; the knitted brows in a state of steel lividness. But there it went, just as suddenly, with the red-tipped match struck and the smoke inhaled. The match waved to nothing. What migrant thought had hurt her sister so?
The Sergeant Major was rubbing the back of a vase indelicately, blinking five times in sequence, then six.
“I sit for hours thinking of how I might phrase questions to avoid thoughts he’s already had. If I say something that’s crossed his mind, he ignores me. Feeding him is tricky but navigable. Sometimes revolting. He prefers tapas, amuse-bouche. Bite-size singles. Nothing too spicy, he has an ulcer. Lucy, are you okay, you’re not looking well.”
“Perfectly fine,” said Lucy, taking the spoon used for stirring her honey to the sink, where sat several dishes and cutlery she figured she might as well wash. “What are his favorite meals?”
The rasp in her sister’s throat, as she itemized a standard meal plan, made Lucy cringe. The thought of all that smoke burning her up like a chimney. Liggett, RJ Reynolds, how they’d plotted the deaths of their users for profit. Lucy squirted some dish soap onto a sponge and flicked the faucet on. As she scrubbed, her hands again caught her attention. Veins ready to burst through their cellulose walls, thin and yellow as cheesecloth. She counted down from ten to one, took one deep breath, then took two more. From over beside the stove, hanging limply on a drawer knob, a raspberry-colored dish towel beckoned her over. Lucy obeyed and leapt toward it, drying her hands off in quick turns, then walked over and began drying the plates. One fork, two forks, she found the silverware drawer by the stove and dropped the dried forks in their slot. Typical, atypical, plastic?, soup spoons, coffee. Thin tines, diminutive fingers, thinning hair. A face full of furrows, soured saggy eye bags, breasts like deflated balloons. Even the slacks she wore, this colorful blouse, were both maybe a decade old. She never went clothes shopping anymore, why waste the time, she had closets full—
The Sergeant Major conducted a soundless orchestra with one hand while pitching forward rocks in an invisible game of hopscotch.
“I honestly wished he’d do anything, god anything, with some substance to it, some permanence. Lie, cheat, steal, screw. Anything that showed a level of care, intent—real decision making!”
Lucy was now in the pantry, straightening boxes of rice, beans, stuffing mix. The cans needed restacking, green beans and cream corn. Labels face out. Boxes aligned by height. Or no, perhaps unequal, like a rising and falling stock chart. Which would be more appropriate? Should she be creating an optimal space for herself, the Sergeant Major, or her sister? Was she actually considering taking the job? To be surrounded by crazies and carcinogens? What was she thinking?
It came upon her all at once: a premonition of death. The darkness between stars, the moment once becomes as willful as limestone. It ran goosebumps down her arm, an arm now peeling back from the bones, maggots twisting their subway tubes through her heart, invading the privacy of her eye-sockets.
“So you can sympathize, can’t you, Lucille? You understand why I say the things I do. You know more than anyone how much love I’ve given him over the years, but the fact is the doctor’s, they don’t see any signs of significant change—”
Lucy was back over to the bear, flipping him over—more honey, two teaspoons. The oven clock was off and she punched the timer button caked with food shrapnel. So much grime, just everywhere. The fridge was breathing. She could almost hear the machine inside its stomach, turning ice cubes over in various buzzes and chirps. And her soft knuckles, bruising there under the skin. What if she accidentally rapped them against an open drawer or a cabinet or the curved side of her ceramic mug. She was fragile, not as sturdy as she was when she was young. Younger—
Lassitude.
It was as if a great thunder had erupted in her brain and some blessing bestowed on her there in the kitchen. She felt herself go mellow, felt her joints and muscles loosen and her jaw, which she hadn’t realized she was clenching, creak open and go limp.
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?” she asked, feeling utterly fatigued.
The grin on Cynthia’s face wasn’t comical, it was eerie and inviting. She stared out from under her brow like a femme fatale from the old pictures. Learned, studied for effect. Like Mother. They wanted you to see it coming. “Come sit down, love, we have to talk.”
“I feel odd,” said Lucy. Her hands felt clammy. She wandered over with her mug and sat at the table where her sister waited, cigarette up by her eyes.
“He was trying to cure himself, I think. Or commit suicide, one can’t be sure. They mined those young boys for their fissures and faults. Exposed them, Exploited them. Bent them to the will of Uncle Sam. One day, it was a Saturday, I went downstairs to do the laundry and he had all these old folders from the military spread out on the floor. Plastic boxes, these folders with elastic straps. Little vials and baggies filled with pills, fungi too, it looked like. The one he’d opened was a small vial filled with crystals. He had some on his lips. He was sitting there in his underwear on the dirty floor, smiling away. Thought he’d just invented the lightbulb, but no, he’d given himself a life sentence.”
Cynthia frowned a smile. “He handed me a notebook, told me to read a single word he’d scribbled there in pencil. A single word, you see, and the world changes.”
Lucy wasn’t drowsy, exactly, just tired, and her sister wasn’t making much sense. She could hear the Sergeant Major in the other room imitating bird calls and rubbing something metal or hard over something corrugated. It was a kind of music, in its way.
“The effect took no time at all. He was up off the floor in a matter of minutes, resorting the tools on the wall. He unscrewed the top of an oil can, tried to set fire to an old travel book, and sang the alphabet to me before I even knew what was going on. I brought him upstairs and locked him in the room and called the police. That was three months ago.”
Lucy shook her head—it was all so horrible. She turned to watch the Sergeant Major reappear on the threshold of the kitchen. He had unzipped a throw pillow and pulled the cover over his head.
Suddenly Cynthia had her by the wrists, squeezing so hard it hurt. The bruising, the bruising!
“I know about the affair,” Cynthia rattled, her lower teeth showing. She slammed her sister’s hands on the table and retracted to full stature. Then smoothly, gingerly took her cigarette from the ashtray and brought it to her lips.
Lucy felt her stomach cinch and the blood pool in her legs. She felt dizzy and tested her strength by sipping her tea, unable to keep her sister’s gaze. “Oh lord, Cindy. Oh lord. Okay. Please understand. It was so, so long ago.”
“I have lived in the shadow of secrecy my whole life,” sang Cynthia through a trembling voice. “My husband used to share everything with me. We used to talk late into the night, about anything, sharing our thoughts. The military took that from us. Then the government condemned him for doing the job they hired him to do. And he couldn’t talk about that either, not with me.”
Cynthia took a long drag and examined Lucy cowering. “And you wondered why I wouldn’t give you money to save the house. Really? The house our mother willed to you, suspiciously?”
“I was there for her,” Lucy lowed. “I looked out for her! I lived with her!”
“Ho, dolly! You used her for room and board! You siphoned every dollar you could get off her! I should know, I paid the bills. Paid for the checkups, the nurse. She was a terrible woman, yes, and you had every reason to despise her. But don’t sit there and try to convince me you were in any way helping her.”
She knows you, thought Lucy, she knows you like you don’t know yourself.
Her stomach was an absolute knot, her heart palpitating.
“I would ask myself, why doesn’t Lucille just do her in? A trip down the stairs. Hell, a knife in the eye, even. I mean, the woman hated you, anyone could see that. Mistreated you, kept you under her thumb, and what did you do? You took it. I thought, what benevolence, what patience. Only you knew you’d get the house, the jewelry. It was another lovely Saturday—life is really that, isn’t it, bad news on lovely Saturdays? We were out at the beach house, we had plans to go fishing. I dislike fishing but I do like the water so. I take the call outside, in the garden, I was planting tulip bulbs. A mix-up of medication, they said. We’re sorry for your loss. This woman who spent her Sundays solving every Times crossword for the week, back-to-back, mistook what pills she was taking, along with the dosage?” Cynthia leaned her face into her sister’s. “We weaponize our diseases, yes? What’d she do to put you over the edge, love? What had you scraping at the walls?”
“Twenty years ago,” heaved Lucy, breathless. “You weren’t there. I was there, every day. All you did was send money. You paid others, so you didn’t have to look at her. I had nowhere else to go. I had school loans, the car. She knew it. She took advantage of me. She did. And you let her. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.”
“How is it that I couldn’t have a child, but apparently you could have an abortion?”
Lucy dropped her head and gripped her knees.
“That seems pretty unfair.”
The Sergeant Major was standing before them making bawling noises, the pillow over his face wet with his tantrum. It seemed he’d already used his hands to touch the cloth and now was trying unsuccessfully to chew and shake it off his head like a donkey.
“I asked myself, how could anyone live in that house, knowing what you did in there. And even if Mother was a cruel, depressive drunk—which she was—why would you stay after you killed her? Why not pick up and go? Oh, well I got the answer to that. It took me having to go through a basement full of sketchbooks and diaries, but I got my answer to that, sure enough.”
Huffing, Cynthia stood and walked over to her blubbering husband. She pinched the pillow covering off his head, pulled his face close, and pecked his forehead with a kiss, then turned him around and pushed him softly toward his next adventure.
The shape of Lucy in her chair was suggestive of a crumpled piece of paper. “You left me alone with her,” she gasped.
“You got back at me, though, didn’t you. Retribution? Sisters do things to get under each other’s skin. But you, you continued to sleep with my husband for six years,” Cynthia spit at her. “And if it wasn’t for that stubborn little clot in your brain, the affair would have continued. He certainly wouldn’t have quit fucking you. He wrote about it. It’s all there in the books. And not just you, whole barfuls of women at every station in every town we ever lived in. Names, dates, ratings even. He was a good soldier—always keeping records. Never a procrastinator, never tardy or apathetic. His mind was one of perfect clarity of intent.” And here she bore down alongside her sister’s cheek. “Until it wasn’t.”
Lucy rubbed her thumbs against her temples, trying to concentrate. Was this another effening? “Cindy, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Cynthia was behind her now, and she felt the spindly hands grip her trapezius muscles, give them a few good massages, and lean into her ear.
“I want us to be close again. You may not believe that now, but I do, I really do. We’re all broken, you know. We hurt each other all the time, and for what? It’s exhausting, all this time spent inventing ways to hurt each other, to pay each other back. And who wants to live that way, in a constant state of lassitude?”
A profound pain surged through Lucy, emphatic and intense, all-consuming. And then was swept away, and she found she was standing.
She stared dumbly at the linoleum. It had a swirly pattern that she liked. Her eyes followed the swirls right. Then left. When she went to go follow them right again, the pain again surged through her temples.
“I have enough crystals to last us for years, dear, and a couple triggering words you’ll never remember. They’re rare words, very infrequently used. And no, they’re not written down anywhere, so you can get that out of your head. How it works is, you pick a word that name a specific fear, or purpose. The crystals, once digested, work like Ritalin for ADHD. As a nurse, I’m sure you’re familiar. It gives one focus—a singular, unrelenting focus on a single thing, and that thing is a fear. You’d do anything not to think about this fear, a fear held within the trigger word. They probably did a good thing, shutting down the program. It’s really quite ingenious, but it does seem awfully dangerous.”
Lucy paced the kitchen in a slump but her eyes were wide and attentive. She had the overwhelming urge to count, to touch, to keep moving, to keep searching.
“No more secrets, Lucy. We’re going to live together again as a family, but this time we’ll do it right. But I have to know I can trust you. You need to be aware of who’s in charge, and that for actions, there are consequences.”
But Lucy wasn’t listening—she was in the den, huddled around the books scattered by the Sergeant Major. Flipping each one open, she located the publishers’ names and began stacking them atop each other in alphabetical order. Seconds later, frustrated with the task, she was up again, walking straight past her sister and out the front door. It was a large house with a nice yard. The nearest neighbors lived well beyond the woods and a full mile down the road, and no one growing up around farm land would have found the high-grade electrical fence surrounding the property surprising. Lucy was only noticing it now, when the first zap struck her as she attempted to open the gate to the driveway. She rubbed her arm with her withered hand, oh god, they looked so awful in the sun, and returned to the yard to kick a dandelion, stretch out a foot, hum an old television jingle. The sun was straight overhead and staring into it made her shriek and hurry back inside.
Having retired to the sofa, the Sergeant Major was blinking rapidly and patting his bald head like an ape.
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Joe Panic‘s most recent work can be found in Bowery Gothic, Dark Horses, Lovecraftiana, and Penumbra Magazine. He lives in Los Angeles. |