This marks Darren Godfrey’s third appearance in the Borderlands series, and his current Freudian offering examines the power of one’s subconscious—and decides it can be supremely terrifying. The idea that conscious control is merely an illusion may be the scariest proposition with which we ever grapple.
The truth hurts. But sometimes it’s so slow to act, so slow to sink in, that when it does come forward, it is often hard to recognize it for the beast it is. It took seven blurry years for me to learn the truth surrounding my wife’s death; that many, nearly to the day, and even then it had trouble solidifying in my mind.
It began with lost memories: one, the memory of an event, the other, the memory of a dream.
This was the event: Heather Rossier, my wife, sat on the corner of our bed with her back to me, just after putting baby Kenny down for his nap. She lifted up her blouse, pulled her soft auburn hair over one shoulder, turned her head, and asked, “How does it look, Michael?”
“About the same. Maybe a little purpler and scalier.”
The mole at the center of her lightly freckled back had been there as long as I’d known her, and was once the size of a dime. It had grown roughly to that of a quarter and fattened to almost oyster thickness.
“Purpler?”
“Yeah, there’s some purple to it. A little whitish around the scaly part, like a sunburn ready to peel.”
“So peel it.”
The idea had already occurred to me.
“No way, babe,” I said, “That can’t be good for it.”
“I don’t care what’s good for it, Michael. Do it.”
This is where memory gets prickly—not at all hazy, you understand, just uncomfortable. I tweezed the first flake away from that little knoll of tissue with my overlong fingernails, and the notion entered my head, This could be releasing poisons into her body. I envisioned a tiny spurt of black liquid on the inside of her flesh just as I yanked the scale from its outside.
I did it again: peeled and imagined.
So clear in my mind’s eye: the inky ejaculations mixing with the surging red of her blood in a clockwise-shooting spiral, the new blend racing through her system, providing the cells of her flesh with both nourishment and . . . what?
Well, cancer, of course.
I’d like it to be known that Heather and I didn’t know a damn thing about moles or melanoma at that time.
The recalled dream was the same basic setup: Heather with her back to me as I examine the mole. She says, “Peel it, baby,” turning her head just enough to where I can see the corner of her smile; she’s being seductive and that makes me happy. “Peel it good,” she breathes, and I oblige. I try to get a better look at her face; I see long eyelashes drop slowly as she moans. I peel another layer and her head hangs lower, the ends of her lovely hair now brushing the top of one bare thigh. She begs for more. Never one to deny her any pleasure, I continue to peel at the purple-black lump, I peel and peel, until it is no longer a lump at all but a bleeding black hole, and she gasps, groans, shudders, and cries my name, her breath quickening, her hands on her lap, clenching, spreading, clenching . . .
I find myself suddenly without clothing, and my prick as hard as steel. The hole in her back opens up to me as I rise up onto my knees . . .
. . . and really sick things happen in dreams sometimes, don’t they?
I’d somehow forgotten these things over the course of years, much in the same way, perhaps, that Kenny (no longer a baby, but not quite an adult) had forgotten how to be himself since his mother’s departure from this world. But when reality, or rather when the memories of that reality came back, it felt like a one-two punch to the gut.
Punch number one landed two weeks ago, after I spotted the dime-sized mole on the back of my son’s left leg, at about midcalf, while he was getting ready for school.
Heather had a mole like that, I thought. And it grew, and I peeled it . . .
Later that morning, I made a doctor appointment for Kenny.
Punch number two, the dreadful dream memory, came three days ago as I surfed cancer websites—peel it, baby—and saw black ciphers centered in flesh. It sickened me.
And excited me.
Kenny had claimed to understand what happened when Heather died (“Mommy’s body got bad stuff in it and it stopped working,” he’d whispered as the ICU nurse turned off the flatlining heart monitor), but then, as the days, weeks, and months followed, he withdrew into himself more and more. He stopped talking. Stopped smiling, stopped laughing.
He is now thirteen and most days he’s little more than a moving mannequin.
For my forty-third birthday, he “gave” me the laptop I’m currently tapping away on. In reality, though, it was purchased, wrapped, and delivered by my sister Barbara (always Kenny’s fave aunt), but it had Kenny’s name on the to/from tag.
What experience I’d had with these damned things stemmed mainly from work (environmental engineering) where I used the Word and Excel programs quite a lot, and accessed the World Wide Web very little. But as my fascination with cancer has grown, so has my willingness to learn to use this convenient yet maddening technology.
I understand hyperlinks, the highlighted text on web pages, there to be clicked upon and to whisk you to somewhere else. I understand, too, that these links normally have something to do with the page you’re clicking from, and that the highlighted words, in some way, tell you where you’ll go by clicking them.
Three days ago, on a melanoma-related website, I encountered a photograph of a mole identical to that of Heather’s in its later stages. The flaky edges recalled the dream (“Peel it, baby.”) and forcefully landed that second punch.
Near the bottom of the site’s page, my watering eyes caught this:
“ . . . while no such miracles can be expected in . . . ”
I rolled the cursor over to miracles (which was colored blue), where the thin arrow morphed into a white hand with a pointing finger. I checked the narrow space at the bottom of the window, the display where the hyperlink’s address would take me should I chose to click it: www.miraclemeadows.com.
But I didn’t click it. Not yet.
No “sense of foreboding” stayed my hand, no goose gallivanting over my grave, none of that silliness. It was simply that word.
Miracle.
We’d gone to a dermatologist, who excised the damn thing mere minutes after first laying eyes on it, and days later informed us that the tests on the scaly black blob proved it to be a Clark level 4 melanoma: very deadly. He also told us that, in all likelihood, the cancer would recur somewhere else in her body within five years—breasts and lungs being the most likely places. “Seeing as how,” the grim medical man put it, “the lymphatic passages run up the back, over the shoulders, and down the front, and that damn malignancy was big enough and centralized enough to affect both sides.”
Outside the doc’s office, Heather said, “Miracles happen every day, Michael.”
After she passed the five-year mark, the doctor, now grayer and grimmer, congratulated her on still being alive. Leaving the office, she butted my shoulder with hers and said, “There’s my miracle, right?”
I said nothing.
She collapsed the night of December 24 of that same year, and all the next day I sat with her in the ICU, awaiting the celebrated “Christmas Miracle”.
I sat with her the day after that awaiting the somewhat less celebrated “Day-After-Christmas Miracle”.
She died at 4:59 p.m. on December 26 without ever saying another word.
There are no miracles.
I rose from the desk and paced the house. I do that a lot since Heather’s death. Punching walls and doorjambs occupies a fair amount of my time as well. Not hard enough to make holes—or even dents, you understand—just enough to make sore, red knuckles. I like to think such restless actions ease my mind, but I know better.
Other than my footfalls and my duking it out with the walls, the house was quiet; I was on a self-imposed vacation and Kenny was at school.
My pacing took me back to the laptop, which was still online, still on “The Meaning of Melanoma”. The blue miracle still hovered there.
I clicked it.
A rectangle filled with blackness nearly as large as the screen. The laptop informed me (again, in tiny words on the lower-left part of the window) that the site was Loading, then that it was Done. A black window, still. I recalled encountering a similar void where words should be, on a film noir message board I’d gone to during a lunch break. Roger, an associate from down the hall, had been there, looking over my shoulder.
“Look, Mike,” he’d said. “It says here ‘highlight to read spoilers’.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“So highlight it.”
When I didn’t move, he reached for the mouse and did it himself. I don’t remember what the words were, but I do remember being impressed by the way they were revealed.
“It’s simple,” he’d said, “The color of the font they use is the same as its background. Highlighting changes the color and ta-da, you can read it.”
So now I highlighted the Miracle Meadows emptiness.
What are the odds that you are the one?
Is your path to discovery meant to be run?
The wounds of love and war do bleed.
Name the method, the means, the way to proceed.
Everyone you know has a tag and a plan.
“Sees the truth, I do,” claims the sailing man.
“Sewn into the fabric of the night.
“To begin in the black is to begin in the right.”
Her fate is but a peeling, a flick of your wrist.
Imaginary outcomes are done with a twist.
Shrouds, at burial time, receive their fill.
Dahlia? Who grew wild, and fought with a will.
Elizabeth? The maiden we all wish we knew.
Abby? Who gnashed leaves, wet with dew.
Trina? Who decorated herself with bows.
Heather? The wraith bearing one black rose.
I read it twice, my stomach muscles tightening each time I saw my wife’s name. Some squirmy part of me also reacted at the line about the wounds of love and war bleeding.
I x-ed off the site, off the web, shut down the computer and returned to the TV, stopping only for a gullet-cleansing beer at the fridge.
I awoke later with the remains of a French-bread pizza on my lap, beer bottles at my feet, and Murder, She Wrote playing out on the TV. A hand fell on my shoulder.
Kenny.
His face was a pale blotch in my lager-warped vision, but not so much so that I didn’t see the disappointment there.
“Hi, son. Did Mrs. Marshall bring you home?”
He nodded.
I straightened up and tried to smile innocently, as if decorating myself with crusty crumbs and drinking myself into an afternoon nap was still the normal Thursday thing for me. “She’s not still here, is she?”
He did a combination headshake and shoulder shrug and turned away.
“Kenny, it’s all right. Really. I just had a hankering for a few beers, that’s all.”
He turned. My vision had cleared some and I could see his expression had returned to its now-typical vacuousness.
“How’s the leg?” I asked.
Somewhere under the faded denim of his right pant leg lay a bandage where the mole used to be (which, according to the doc—a new one, not Heather’s—was benign and absolutely nothing at all to worry about).
No response from Kenny.
“Don’t worry about it. You can go to your room now.”
I returned to the computer the following morning, highlighted the strange doggerel. It hadn’t changed, not in any way I could tell, but I believe that on my last visit I must not have rolled the cursor all the way down, as there lay additional wordage: a paragraph, separate from the stanza and of a different font.
No choice but to start at the beginning, live your life. Laugh, cry, fuck, watch others die, and rapidly approach your own end. Given enough time, you will look back to your start. Now is that time. Look at the beginning.
Each. Separate. One.
Jeez, how many beginnings do we get? I wondered.
Then it occurred to me the thing might be referring to other kinds of beginnings. The lines of verse glowed on the screen, turned lime green by the highlight I’d given it. “Each separate one,” I said aloud, and there it was, there they were, the beginnings of each line.
What. Is. The. Name. Everyone. Sees. Sewn. To. Her. Imaginary. Shrouds.
I formed the words into a proper, if mystifying, query: What is the name everyone sees sewn into her imaginary shrouds?
Then: Dahlia? Elizabeth? Abby? Trina? Heather?
Apparently a multiple-choice question in which the reader is expected to either surmise or determine the name to go on someone’s shrouds. It occurred to me that “shrouds” should be singular rather than plural, but then again none of this seemed very real. The whole site had a phony feel about it, a spurious staged-just-for-me feel. Who exactly is “her” referring to (one of the given names, perhaps, or is it the shroud manufacturer)?
With the entire page still highlighted, I then passed the cursor over the names.
The pointing finger appeared at every one of them, individually and emphatically, indicating a link.
Every one except Heather’s.
I don’t know why I should have felt cheated by that, but I did. The one name I wanted to investigate, and it, apparently, was just text.
I clicked Trina.
The image emerged: a photo of an obviously dead woman. The caption beneath: Katrina “Trina” Johnson.
Her head nearly severed, she had part of a mangled pickup truck on top of her. Blonde hair swam in the surrounding pool of blood—it must have been very long hair, as it seemed to go on and on, finally disappearing beneath the bulk of the truck. Her eyes were open. A bright-orange blur intruded upon the lower-right corner of the photo: a traffic cone, probably.
I studied this image for a while before clicking the Back arrow.
I clicked Abby.
Dead, too, she lay partially across a kitchen table, facedown in what appeared to be a bowl of breakfast cereal, her hair, very curly and very dark, splayed out around her head. The caption: Abigail Finchley Olsen.
Elizabeth: Not dead, at least not in this picture. It appeared to be a high school yearbook photo, black and white, dating somewhere around ’62 or ’63, judging by the hair and clothing styles. She smiled bravely into the camera lens, but it was obvious she wished it were pointed somewhere else. I was fairly certain that, wherever this girl was, she was no longer among the living. No caption here; I had to take the site’s word for it that this was someone named Elizabeth.
Dahlia: Rather than a picture, a photocopied image of a death certificate. From it I was able to put together a mental image of a forty-six-year-old housewife who had succumbed to asphyxiation while climbing a tree. Death by misadventure: she’d somehow fallen and wedged her neck into a fork. It was not explained what she was doing up there to start with. Born in New York, she’d died in Indianapolis, Indiana. The document stated that she’d been cremated there as well.
If connections existed between these women and my Heather, I didn’t see them, other than their all being dead or presumed dead, of course. I also had no way of knowing whether the Miracle Meadows Heather was my Heather, or what the hell Miracle Meadows had to do with this bunch of dead women, or what the hell the stupid poem meant (despite having busted its first-word code), or what the hell I was worrying about it for in the first place.
The answer to that last was simple enough, though, and has already been stated: I am a glutton for punishment.
I’d Sherlock-Holmesed this thing to the point of frustration. I yearned for a little satisfaction. I rolled the cursor through the blank spaces of the web page, through the Northwest Passage above the lame poetry, down and around to the Gulf between said poetry and the prose paragraph, watching the arrow the whole time. As I traversed the Channel beneath the paragraph, it happened: the pointing digit appeared again. Directly beneath the word separate was a hidden hyperlink. I clicked it.
Welcome to the Miracle Meadows Message Board.
I am Mrs. Meadows, your hostess on this incredible journey. I advise you now that this board contains no search engines, calendars, member lists, or profiles. There will be no contests here, no games. There is a simple registration process requiring your name, email address (for verification purposes only), birthdate, and birthplace. There are two forums.
Begin at the beginning.
REGISTER
Not one of the more congenial boards I’ve visited (though I haven’t seen many) and a bit less than revealing as to what the hell Miracle Meadows was all about.
I clicked the Registration button, made entries into the spaces provided (none of which were truthful—was this woman crazy, thinking I’d let her know all that?) and clicked the Proceed button. After about five seconds, this popped up:
INCORRECT ENTRIES, PLEASE REENTER
I entered new and equally bogus info, and received the same message. With my third attempt, I entered my name and email address, Kenny’s birthdate, and Heather’s birthplace.
THANK YOU
PROCEED
WHAT YOU DID / WHAT YOU WANT TO DO
It never occurred to me until later that the verification process (for which the email addy was supposedly needed) never happened.
I clicked WHAT YOU DID. Deep-sea-blue background with white letters of apparently only one topic:
WHAT MR. ROSSIER DID
I clicked it.
Author: Mrs. Meadows
Subject: WHAT DID YOU DO?
Comment: Do tell!
A conversation ensued. It happened fairly rapidly (the Meadows woman must have been on-site at that moment as well), though there were several long pauses between some of the replies, as much as ten minutes, and mere seconds on others. It involved a lot of page renewing.
For the purpose of clarity and cadence, I will present the pertinent sections here in dialogue form.
Me: I’ve done a lot of things. What do you mean, specifically?
Mrs. M.: What did you do that brought you here? What miracle did you perform?
Me: There are no miracles, lady. Trust me.
Mrs. M.: I do trust you. However, you are mistaken on the subject of miracles. Had you not performed one, you wouldn’t be here now.
Me: Lady, I once sat in a hospital room with the woman I’d planned to spend the rest of my life with expecting a miracle to happen, okay? I suppose I was even trying to make a miracle happen by saying “I believe, I believe”, over and over. It didn’t work. It was Christmas, and if there was a more appropriate time for her to open her eyes, sit up, and be perfectly all right, that was it. There are no miracles.
Mrs. M.: Heather was your wife?
Me: Yes.
Mrs. M.: Perhaps you didn’t really want it to happen.
Me: Didn’t want what to happen? Didn’t want my wife to live? Are you serious, lady?
Mrs. M.: Mr. Rossier, I’m sure your conscious mind wanted her to live. I’m suggesting there may have been a deeper urge to see what life would be like if she were gone.
Me: Fuck off, lady. I’m outta here.
Mrs. M.: I know, Mr. Rossier, that you have been back twice in the last half hour. Talk to me.
Me: I loved my wife. Don’t even suggest otherwise.
Mrs. M.: No more suggestions. I do want to get to the miracle, though—the one that did happen. It arose some time before Heather’s death. It had to do with a mole.
Me: A mole is what started it all. No miracle in melanoma.
Mrs. M.: Oh, but there was in your wife’s case, right? In your case. You are the one who started it, correct?
Me: I don’t know what you mean.
Mrs. M.: Yes, you do. You released the poison into her system. You imagined it, and then you did it.
Me: No.
Mrs. M.: Without imagination, there is nothing. Yours, I suspect, is very powerful, though untamed. Uncultivated. But very much something.
Me: No.
Mrs. M.: I can help you, Mr. Rossier. I can help you get control.
The stuff that ran through my head was what you might very well expect: How does she know? How could she know? Is she right? Did I actually initiate the cancer in my wife simply by imagining it?
A low-grade tingle moved down the back of my neck and settled between my shoulder blades. I came very close to leaving the board then, but again, the glutton prevailed.
Me: Who are Dahlia, Elizabeth, Abby, Trina?
Mrs. M.: Like your wife, they were objects of man-made miracles. Targets. Receivers.
Me: They’re all dead?
Mrs. M.: Yes.
Me: Why?
Mrs. M.: No mental image can be more readily, and powerfully, called up in one’s mind than the death of a loved one. Those five women were loved. Their miracle makers, their senders, were very powerful. Like you, or rather including you.
Me: Tell me about them.
This was the longest stretch of inactivity on her side. I wondered whether she’d gotten offline or was merely debating whether or not I had the need to know. I felt a headache coming on, and thought perhaps I should back off myself.
Mrs. M.: Dahlia suffered from one mental illness or another, supposedly, but her condition wasn’t serious enough to have her institutionalized. She was on medication, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. She had a son. Alberto. He said some things a son shouldn’t say to his mother. Dahlia chased him outside, and, because she had neglected her mellowing medication that morning, she continued to chase him even when he climbed a tree. She was very persistent, very intent on seeing him punished. Alberto was no weakling, either. He climbed up to where the branches were thinner and swayed with the wind as well as his weight. When he saw his mother wasn’t going to quit, he thought, “I wonder what would happen if . . . ”
Me: That was it?
Mrs. M.: Guess the rest.
Me: He wished her dead?
Mrs. M.: He pictured his mother slipping, her grip faltering, her body twisting, then becoming wedged into a thick fork about a quarter of the way up the tree. Then it just happened.
Me: And Elizabeth?
Mrs. M.: Elizabeth was the Woman Who Knew Too Much. Family secrets. Someone who became aware that she was overly informed decided it sure would be nice if she weren’t around anymore, someone who had significant power. Pity, really, because Elizabeth had a fair amount of power herself, but was never made aware of it.
Me: Who was the someone?
Mrs. M.: Her grandfather.
Me: Did he kill her?
Mrs. M.: Not in the traditional sense. He wanted her gone and she was just gone.
Me: How do you know she’s dead?
Mrs. M.: I know. That’s all.
Me: And Abby?
Mrs. M.: She had a sister who wondered what it would be like if the cornflakes in Miss High and Mighty Abigail’s breakfast bowl were hemlock, and while the hemlock leaves alone might not have proved fatal, her sister’s belief that they were did the trick.
Me: Trina?
Mrs. M.: Katrina Johnson had a jealous boyfriend. Very prosaic, alas. He imagined her vehicle veering off an overpass, hurtling over the side. He was in the car behind her.
And I believe you are familiar with the story of Heather Rossier, Michael.
Me: You think I killed her with a thought.
Mrs. M.: Don’t you?
Me: Are you telling me she wouldn’t have died anyway, that the cancer would not have spread?
Mrs. M.: No. I trust she would have been taken eventually. You saw to it, though, that it would happen sooner rather than later.
Me: Why just these five cases? There must be a lot more, what with so many sharp imaginers around.
Mrs. M.: Of course there are more, Mr. Rossier, countless throughout history. These are just the ones who fall under my purview at the moment.
Me: Okay. Who are you?
Mrs. M.: I am Mrs. Meadows, Mother of five.
Me: How do you know all this, the circumstances of my wife and her death?
Mrs. M.: You’ve not even made the leap to believing in your own power. How can you expect to believe in mine?
Me: It doesn’t matter what I’ll believe. Tell me. Otherwise, this is over, and that is a promise.
Another long pause. Then:
Mrs. M.: I am a practitioner of the black arts, Mr. Rossier, using many varied types of arcane magic in an effort to help people. Years ago, I experimented with allowing certain individuals to really “see” themselves for the first time, thereby enabling them to admit to certain fatalistic traits. I did this by showing them a sort of reduced reflection of themselves. I resurrected my five children, tethering them to a temporary life with ribbon the color of midnight, and sent them to their targets with a kind of script in their heads to guide them.
Me: And then?
Mrs. M.: They performed said missions. They were returned to a restful state by the severing of their ties.
Me: How did your children die initially?
Mrs. M.: That information has no bearing on what we are doing here, so you have no need to know it.
Me: Did you kill them?
Mrs. M.: No.
Me: Who were these individuals, how did you find them, and how were you made aware of their “traits”?
Mrs. M.: Their names are unimportant here. I learned of their ways by spying on them, of course, them and many others. Those were just the five I thought I could help.
Me: And it was only five because that’s how many dead children you happened to have lying around.
Mrs. M.: Is that a question?
Me: This is: How did you spy on them? How did you spy on me?
Mrs. M.: I have what some refer to as a “third eye”. I can send it out virtually anywhere I want, even through electrical wiring. It searches. It watches.
Me: Right. Bullshit, of course. But if it were so, why me?
Mrs. M.: I sensed—or “saw”, if you will—great power coming from your direction.
Me: Sure. So tell me about my vast critical-mas power.
Mrs. M.: The power is not so much a radiation as it is a magnet. A great PULLING IN.
Me: You mean it sucks.
Mrs. M.: Yes, after a fashion. Imagine this: You’re a poor man living in a ramshackle house, you need money desperately, and, hey, you might as well shoot for the stars and hope for ten million dollars. Your imagination grasps the image of someone you know, or at least whose face you know, who has such a fortune. Donald Trump, for instance. The chances of him deciding, on his own, to send you ten mil right out of the blue are so miniscule that they don’t even show up on the probability radar, right? So, you picture Trump stepping into a huge library of telephone books. He locates the one for your city, opens it at random, closes his eyes, and stabs his manicured finger down on the open page. On your name. He draws up a certified check for ten million dollars and mails it to you. Voila!
Me: Right.
Mrs. M.: Again, the likelihood of such an occurrence is so incredibly small as to be nonexistent. But. The power. That awesome magnet can actually pull the likelihood of it up, up past the realm of the possible, the probable, and into the It-Is-Happening-As-We-Speak.
Me: That would be a lot of suckage. It’s also a load of horseshit, five miles high.
Mrs. M.: Then try it.
At ten thirty yesterday morning an overnight FedEx arrived from Donald Trump. Rather than a certified check (No way was I going to do exactly what Mrs. Meadows suggested—and wouldn’t I just show her!), it contained four large glossy photos. The first, of his first ex-wife, Ivana; the second, Rosie O’Donnell; the third, Barack Obama; and the last, news anchor Megyn Kelly. Each face in each photo was embellished with a nicely scrawled Snidely Whiplash moustache.
Mrs. M.: It’s time for you to wrap up what you’ve done and move on to what you’re going to do.
Me: I’m not going to do anything. Tell me about the shrouds.
Mrs. M.: Fine. As it’s time for wrapping up, that seems apropos. You put your wife in a shroud with your imagination, your dark miracle. The other kind of miracle—the kind you expected that Christmas Day—is all about wellness, happiness, and/or prosperity. Dark miracles are about shrouds. Death. And while that seems pretty bleak, a certain degree of wellness, happiness, and/or prosperity can spring from them as well. Even a dark miracle is, after all, a wish come true.
Let’s address the lines: “What are the odds that you are the one?” I can’t be wrong, Mr. Rossier, can I? Are you, in the case of Heather’s mole, the one? We control freaks often get so tunneled in our vision, don’t we?
“Is your path to discovery meant to be run?” Of course. To remain ignorant is to deny your self-entire.
“The wounds of love and war do bleed.” Obviously, you know that.
“Name a method, a means, a way to proceed.” This you will do in the next phase.
“Everyone you know has a tag and a plan.” A tag is a name you go by, or that I go by, or those closest to you. And we all have plans, whether we realize it or not.
“‘Sees the truth, I do,’ says the sailing man.” The sailing man was my husband, a great man, a great teacher in the ways of practical magic.
“Sewn into the fabric of the night.” That fabric, and the ties that bind it, contain the lessons taught to me, some of which I will instruct you in, by way of the apparatus you are currently using. Your computer.
“To begin in the black is to begin in the right.” Further instruction from the late Mr. Meadows.
“Her fate is but a peeling, a flick of your wrist.” You know that.
“Imaginary outcomes are done with a twist.” Ditto.
“Shrouds, at burial time, receive their fill.” My husband filled his, my children filled theirs, your wife filled hers, and you know the basic stories behind the other women here. Each of them had a sender. YOU are the fifth and final case, and after we tend to you and your future, I can go and fill my shroud.
Me: My future is mine to tend to alone, woman. Go and fill your shroud.
I shut down the computer at about noon yesterday. I spent the rest of the daylight convincing myself that none of it happened, and a good portion of the night realizing it had. Questions and comments popped in my head like kernels of popcorn, but I resisted the urge to return to the computer, not so much because I’d given up the gluttony. No, this was punishment, a new punishment, a self-torture that sang to me in sweeter and more painful tones, more painful than punching walls.
Sunday. This morning. I began the day’s pacing, and at some point, I noticed that Mr. Trump’s absurd gifts were not on the kitchen counter where I’d left them, nor were they anywhere along the usual traffic routes in the house. I peeked into my bedroom, and then into Kenny’s. He slept, snoring lightly. The eye-catching angles of blue, orange, and white of the FedEx envelope, balanced on a stack of compact discs, caught not only my eye but also my breath.
Kenny slept on.
I crossed the room, snatched the thing up. Looked inside.
Empty.
When the deliveryman handed the envelope over to me the day before, I’d given the label only a cursory glance. Now I brought it up nearly to my nose and read it.
Mr. Kenneth Rossier
Another memory: A bright and beautiful Saturday with little puffballs of clouds decorating a deep-blue sky . . . the kind of day Heather always said was made for bike rides and backyard sex. Baby Kenny sequestered in the playpen, Mommy and Daddy rolling around on (and within) a red-checked blanket, laughing and moaning in turns . . . and, hey, suddenly there is Baby Kenny, pacifier dangling from one chubby hand, a clump of lawn clenched in the other, inexplicably free of his baby jail and standing over Mommy and Daddy, sprinkling them with brown earth and green grass . . . and he laughs.
Kenny?
I went to my desk and found my scratch-paper scribblings (What Is the Name Everyone Sees Sewn to Her Imaginary Shrouds) and checked the beginnings, and the beginnings of each of those beginnings. Letter by letter.
W-I-T-N-E-S-S T-H-I-S . . .
And then the women’s names: Dahlia, Elizabeth, Abby, Trina, and Heather.
D-E-A-T-H . . .
What are the odds that you are the one?
Mrs. M.: You do have a power, Mr. Rossier, but it is small compared to that of your son. I was wrong—tunnel vision even in the third eye. I’m truly sorry.
Me: But why would he do what he did?
Mrs. M.: Imagination. That’s all it is. As a baby, he picked up what you sent out, the images and the results, and then he pulled it all into reality. Quite without malice, I’m sure. Look at it as if he were the camera and the film, while you were the lens. Or as if he were the loaded cartridge, and you were the gunsights.
Me: Could Kenny wish Heather back to life?
Mrs. M.: No. Far too late for that.
Me: But why the stupid Trump FedEx?
Mrs. M.: Again, he got it from you, just as he did the poisonous mole image.
As I said at the beginning of this thing, the truth hurts. And sometimes its sinking in is slow, caustic. The time between comprehension (staring idiotically at the FedEx label) and the plea for answers (from Mrs. Meadows), I freaked.
I thought of suffocating Kenny with a pillow, then thought, No, stabbing would be better, and I even ran to the kitchen for the knife. I thought of torching the house with both of us in it. I thought . . . well, I thought of a lot of things, but that isn’t really thinking. It’s reacting.
So I started actually thinking. That led me back to the laptop, and after communicating with Mrs. Meadows, I thought some more. That led to what I’ve written here.
My continued thinking has led me to this: I—or rather we—cannot bring Heather back, cannot, in fact do a whole hell of a lot about the past. But, together, Kenny and I can do a considerable amount about the future.
Sure, Mrs. Meadows, I could be a lens. I could be gunsights. With a little training, I could also be a scalpel. Or better yet, an eraser.
You were right: we all have plans.
And there are miracles.
Watch out, cancer, you life-sucking fucker, a new day is dawning!
Speaking of which, Kenny’s up now. I hear his door opening.
I wonder what he’ll think of my pla—