Before
MADDY BOYLE WAS torn.
Between what? She didn’t know; she’d only recently begun to understand her place on the other side when she’d felt the tug to go back to the white room.
The white stone-walled grotto and her life before she’d entered it.
Thinking of it now made her mind fuzzy and her eyeballs hurt, and already she couldn’t remember, which meant the here was already fading to the there. Made her wonder if it was even real at all. That fucked-up place with all the fucked-up things in it.
And the others? She’d miss them. She felt sure of that.
She could remember her name now. That was something tangible from her past, her previous life as Maddy Boyle. Born Madeline Louise Boyle, Charleston, South Caroline, in the year … the year still evaded her.
She remembered very little else, except that something bad had put her here. No, that’s not right. Not here exactly; first, she’d gone to the white room. The bright, sunlit grotto with the pocked limestone walls, scarred with the stark green lichen and ivy that meandered and climbed, with dark doors the shape of fingernails, like Hobbit doors, but tall enough to walk through without ducking. More like open-aired corridors than doors, now she thought of it. She’d never really opened a door. She’d just—after her time was up in the white-walled grotto—gone in. Stood up like her name had just been called at the doctor’s office.
Come back she did. And now she was coming back out.
Out of her hallucinations and back into the limestone grotto waiting room, where, like before, others waited nervous and confused like she’d once been. Trying to understand things like she’d once done, much like she was trying to do all over again now, because the walk back from there had been an arduous one.
Like wading through knee-deep water.
She entered the grotto, shielded her eyes from the brightness.
The others shielded their eyes too. One had a bullet hole in the center of his forehead, another in the gut, his shirt stained with a rose bloom of blood around the wound. A woman in a chair didn’t seem wounded at all, as she stared at all those dark corridors punched into the grotto’s ivy-covered walls. A little girl seemingly taking a nap on the grotto’s floor had the worst head wound across her right ear that Maddy had ever seen.
Over there, in that place, Maddy had seen plenty of things that walked and lived and breathed that never should have, things that had no place anywhere outside the imagination. The place where the grass was a buttery yellow, where the wet-paint color of everything—the trees, the mountains, the rivers and roads—was just off enough to think it was all a mistake, like a painting a kid might have done when they didn’t quite know yet how everything should really be.
Something that could only come from dreams and nightmares.
Limp, drippy images that made her think of Salvador Dalí.
See, Dad, I’m cultured.
Maddy willed her tired, heavy legs to move. Like she had to relearn how to walk. The slowness of her gait made her think of the rivers of molten lava that ran like scars all over the rugged terrain of that place, that constant flow of heat, the rising tendrils of smoke coming from the twists and turns of it, slowly churning and coiling under bridges, rolling through woodlands and prairies in meandering ribbons of glowing, red and black char.
Someone in the white room yelled, “Don’t touch me.”
Another woman, her skin blue as if she’d recently drowned, flexed her hand, cupped it like she was holding an invisible one, saying in hushed whispers, “Yes, I can feel your hand.”
Even though Maddy saw no hand.
The light grew brighter. The grotto pulsed with it.
Maddy Boyle stood in the middle of the room.
“Maddy? Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” she said to no one, to everyone.
“Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”
Maddy flexed her right hand, and somebody started crying.
Somebody—a man’s voice: “She’s coming out.”
Maddy could now remember going in. That tunnel of light growing larger until it had consumed her.
Her head throbbed. She closed her eyes to the brightening light. Felt someone gripping her hand. Running fingers through her hair. Machines beeping. Her name being whispered. Her hand touched, squeezed. Quit touching me. It was coming back to her.
She’d been attacked. A blow to the head had knocked her out.
“Maddy? Can you hear me?” Yes, I can hear you.
During the sponge baths, the nurse wondered if she could hear her humming, and yes, she could. It was terrible, that humming. Off tune and wrong. But this wasn’t the nurse.
“She’s coming to!” Her father.
“Praise the Lord.” Her mother.
Her parents. They wouldn’t shut the fuck up, whispering fake words of remorse, wishing they’d done better, wishing they’d been there for her, wishing they’d given her more support. Maybe she wouldn’t have been doing what she’d been doing if they’d done this and that?
If only she’d come back to them, they’d make things right.
Wet lips against the top of her right hand. Her forehead.
I’m coming back, but it’s not to make things right. Not for you, Mom. And not for you, Dad. I’m coming back because I have a job to do.
And now I’m torn.
Torn because both places are bad. But at least there, where the ocean tides moved away from the shore, she’d been somebody.
Older than what she felt like now, but somebody for sure.
“Maddy!”
Yeah, I’m coming.
“She’s opening her eyes,” her father said.
Charleston, South Carolina. Born the year of Y2K. It’s coming back to me.
I’m twenty-two years old. I was attacked. Brutally attacked. I fit the profile for all his victims.
I’d been scared for weeks, just like all the women like me had been scared. And when I say like me, I mean brunette, twenties, and what the newspapers called “pretty” and “petite.”
Oh, and a stripper. Yes, Dad, a stripper.
So I carried pepper spray.
I was strangled, and nearly raped, but I fought back. And I’m strong, so I was able to spring loose. I hit him with the spray. He dropped to one knee and cried out like a boy. The goodness in me made me hesitate, to see if I’d killed him. But he was only stunned. He caught me. His weight on top of me. My face against the concrete, two bloody teeth out and bouncing on the Battery’s walkway. The smell of body odor and mint. His garbled whisper in my ear. He called me a bitch—oh my God, that voice; like I imagined Owen Meany’s might be in that John Irving book (yes, I’m a stripper who reads, Mom)—and he hit me in the back of the head with something hard, what the detectives trying for months to catch him believed to be a horseshoe.
Some of the newspapers had begun calling him the Horseshoe Rapist.
So stupid, Maddy had thought of the sensationalized headlines in the weeks before her attack. He doesn’t rape with the horseshoe, so that nickname wasn’t right. He’d hit me with the horseshoe—that much I can confirm now—and then he’d thrown me over the Battery wall and into the harbor, where I was found, unconscious, two hours later.
But he never got at me.
No one has ever gotten you, Maddy Boyle.
The pepper spray had panicked him. I’d broken him from his routine. All serial killers have routines.
I’m an English major. No, a double major. The other, creative writing.
The Charleston Strangler nearly killed me. The Horseshoe Rapist, but he didn’t.
He never got that far—he didn’t get me.
Not like that rat orderly sort of got at me in the hospital two days later, with his hand under the bedsheet when nobody was looking, when by then everyone had assumed I couldn’t feel or see anything. Right before I’d completely entered Lalaland.
That’s what they’d called it.
I take my clothes off and dance—to pay my way through college, Dad. Because you and Mom wouldn’t. But that oftentimes makes men feel like they have the right to touch me. And they don’t. You fucking don’t, Jerry-the-Orderly.
“Maddy?” Who’s touching my hand? “Can you hear me?”
My dad, before the attack, had not been able to look at me, not since he’d learned what I was doing at night to make money. He’d assumed the worst.
He’d never cried over me then.
So why was he crying over me now?