I Miss You Too Much

Sarah Langan

Through the rabbit hole.

“I miss you too much,” the old woman said.

These words had always been presented to Stella as love words. A language that meant Stella was her mother’s world. She was her sun and earth and moon; she was her inside and outside and reason. Stella was supposed to appreciate this declaration and reply in kind: I miss you, too.

But even as a child, the words had felt more like an accusation, as if by going to school or falling asleep or even by leaving a room, Stella had pained her mother: I miss you too much.

An imaginative person, Stella had sometimes wondered whether she was real, or simply an extension of Mom – a liver or marrow gone rogue, that had burst from its source body, leaving a mortal wound, an insult that could only be healed upon her return; her physical nearness to her mother.

…Were they the same person? she’d wondered in nursery school, as her teacher had taught left, right, and letters of the alphabet, and all the other children had seemed so very happy, so thrilled to define themselves, to trace their mirror images, and shout their own names, while she’d counted the seconds until she was back home, a heart without a house.

* * *

Years later, Stella forgot about growing up inside Baltimore House. She forgot about the half-person she’d been, the whispered words, the frog-footed bird (so terrible!), the yellow shadows that had moved at night, the house that seemed to shrink around her, so that she was too ungainly and big to fit inside it.

She made an adult life – kids and a husband and a house and a job and a dog and sometimes fish but usually the fish died. Though she suffered from phantom aches and mystery illnesses that doctors told her were not real, she considered herself happy. She passed for happy. She pretended to be happy.

Her first and only rebellion: in her teenage years, she’d sneaked the application. Packed her bags for college on the sly, waiting for but never finding the right time to tell Mom she was going. Still, Mom went through her things and found out. Stella’d stood in the hallway of Baltimore House, feeling strange and too heavy; unreal. Also, terrified.

“I’ll miss you too much. Don’t go,” Mom said, her eyes set inscrutably deep and dark. Surely it had been a reference to their shared love language. Surely it had not been a threat that she was going to kill herself, or trap Stella here for the night, then set the house on fire and murder them both while they slept.

“Please,” Stella said.

“No,” Mom said. “Your place is here.”

Maybe it was the repetitive thoughts (the frog-footed bird! the shrinking house!) that had only gotten worse since kindergarten. Maybe it was Stella’s survival instinct, kicking in at last. To this day, she had no idea how she found the courage to tear the heart free from its host and walk out.

Escape!

College was awful. She was terrible at school, at making friends, at setting an alarm, at living in the world. She got through two and a half semesters before quitting to work full time at the CVS. Life didn’t get easier after that. Bad roommates, hungry nights, loneliness. She didn’t know how to negotiate. No one had taught her the grey space between one person’s wants, and the other’s. She slept with men who didn’t call back, and pretended not to mind. Didn’t bother her a bit! She lent money to friends and strangers because she was afraid to say no. She never asked for a raise, and consequently only ever got the standard cost of living increase every January.

She was ashamed of this – that she was weak, the type of person others victimised, who then smiled and said thank you because it was embarrassing to acknowledge her own hurt feelings – her lack of life skills that indicated a strange upbringing. But then, a miracle! She met Bruce, a confident and oblivious pharmacologist who told her she had a jawbone sharp enough to cut glass.

They moved to New Jersey. She unpacked, got a part-time job proofing AI newsletters for the local real estate agency, signed the toddler up for half days at Loving Garden, and met the rest of the local moms, from whom she learned she wasn’t alone. They all felt bad sometimes; felt wrong, like pieces of them were missing.

Stella suspected that unlike her, they’d once been whole people; captains of industry, math geniuses, track stars, night club party animals with killer moves. But by the time their lives delivered them to preschool drop off, they were not these things. They were nervous, tired moms who may as well have had worn signs around their chests that read: WHATEVER HAPPENED I’M SURE IT’S MY FAULT AND I’M SORRY.

If only people knew, Stella thought when she learned it herself, that the feminine blight of suburbia was not entitled Karens, but women who blamed everything on themselves! Husband a drunk, you divorced him, and now the kids are messed up? Your fault! Is your son a bed-wetter? You shouldn’t have sleep trained him! Now he has an insecure attachment! Feel bad about not making enough money, which in turn gives you less say in your marriage? You should have leaned in! Why didn’t you lean in?

Together, they formed a feminist book club where everybody read novels written only by women (mostly). In their bravado, they made jokes about their husbands, who got cranky when undersexed. Didn’t the husbands know that cranky was the opposite of seductive? Could the husbands (and sometimes wives) please learn more than just that one move? They made jokes about their kids, who were pieces of work, every damn one of them. They made jokes about their jobs, which were going nowhere. Most jobs, ultimately, went nowhere. And even when they did go someplace, wealth didn’t magically make you well-adjusted and awesome. You were still you; a person (or sometimes just a heart) wrapped in weird skin, looking out through marble eyes.

Over the years of their friendship, these women confessed their histories; their heartaches; their porny desires; and even sometimes, their hidden bottles and pills and affairs. Stella, grateful at last to have discovered friends, tried to do this, too. But she couldn’t remember her history. Couldn’t think about Baltimore House (the sounds and smells, the feeling of disproportionality, like she’d been a giant inside it), without everything fading to black.

She stayed in touch with Mom. They talked on the phone once a week. These calls were polite and uneventful. Normal, in other words. Twice a year, Stella and her family visited Baltimore House. They never slept over. Stella had the irrational fear that the house was a kind of fairyland, and if she let down her guard, she’d be trapped. She’d never leave. Upon returning to Jersey, Stella often had nightmares that something terrible, something too needy, was kneeling on her chest.

“What’s wrong?” her friends would ask when a thought or word or bird in the sky made Stella remember Baltimore House (not Bruce. He’d given up on questions, though not on Stella). “Why are you sad today?”

Stella wanted to answer, but she didn’t know how. The feeling inside her was an undefinable black murk she was afraid to touch. Better to isolate it so it didn’t contaminate her friends, her family, her new house with its working garbage disposal and smooth ceilings.

This went on. Years and life. She engaged from a remove, like an alien anthropologist. When the kids cried, it took her an extra second to hear them, her thoughts skimming surfaces of notions, catching images through a sieve from long ago – of birds and beds and cut trees. Sometimes she forgot that this was her house in Jersey, her family. She’d startle, as if they were all strangers.

Bruce was soft spoken and decent. Genuinely gentle, and a good cook. He respected her privacy and her moods, seeming to believe that her gender was, by its very nature, mysterious and emotional. So long as she looked up and noticed him from time to time, he allowed Stella to remain an island.

She read all the child-rearing books, did her best in the best ways she’d known. Apparently, her children were normal. Their teachers and her friends told her they were normal, which meant they had to be. The lawn outside their house was mostly green. A happy marriage, food on the table, healthy kids, a roof. These things seemed like more than anyone like her ought to hope for. She ought to be content.

But she had the feeling that a clock was ticking. Something awful was about to happen.

It wore her down, this secret, ineffable terror. She went to doctors to check her colon and heart and brain and stomach and oesophagus. They drew blood. They took scans. They told her she was fine. They proscribed Prozac, then Klonopin. These things helped a little, but didn’t change the fact that it felt to her that her organs were not truly hers. They were foreign, pulsing bodies over which someone else had laid claim.

She went to a therapist who suggested she talk about her childhood. This was what she remembered:

Mom was amazing! She’d raised Stella all alone and she’d done it with so much love! Even though she’d worked full time at the library, she’d sewn all Stella’s Halloween costumes. She’d done the laundry and the errands and the extra-curriculars. She’d helped with the homework and listened and supported. She’d cooked nutritious meals!

“I had a perfect childhood!” Stella told the shrink. Then she went home. Those unwelcome repetitive thoughts she’d had as a kid, of birds, of Baltimore House shrinking around her, returned. Only now, these wild notions had uprooted, chasing her hundreds of miles to Jersey. She imagined that the sheets she shared with Bruce were just washcloth sized, the bed not long enough for her legs, her body too big for the kitchen table, too tall inside the low, clean ceiling. For days after therapy sessions, she doubled the Klonopin, walking carefully just like she’d done back at Baltimore House, terrified that the weight of her would break through the floors. She’d fall down, down, down until she was gone.

What’s that word? Alienation? She felt alienated. Or maybe like an alien. Her lapses in attention grew. She imagined birds and broken trees and crawling things. She stopped pretending to feel her life, because in truth it had never felt like anything. She lived with people who didn’t know her. She didn’t know herself.

You ever wake up and it’s the same as going to bed? You ever think: Why not have a shot of vodka for breakfast? The other moms’ll never smell it, and why the fuck does someone like me need to stay sharp? These were thoughts she had; uncontrollable. This was what happened to a heart separated too long from its body.

When her therapist pointed out that for a person who’d had a perfect childhood, she seemed pretty unhappy, Stella fired her. And why not! She didn’t take insurance and charged $250 an hour!

* * *

The mystery here was the absence of evidence.

During the regular calls back home, Mom acted like a normal, not remotely needy, person. She was nice to Bruce, interested in the kids. “How was that soccer game?” she asked, cheerful and enthused. “Now, I hear you like sushi, is that right?” She showed a kind of attentiveness that Stella lacked, remembering every detail about them, as if she kept meticulous notes in a journal and there would one day be a test.

When Stella and her family visited Baltimore House, it was nothing like Stella’s memories. It didn’t smell like chlorine and ashes and it wasn’t claustrophobically small. No stick figures hung from the ceilings. No secret doors led to cubbies and crawl spaces and disturbing hidey holes. Nope. It was a rundown two-bedroom ranch with chipped paint that smelled like Lysol and squeeze-tube cookies. Mom was always thrilled to see them all. Ecstatic, even, like every grandmother ought to be. The kids were friendly, if bored. Bruce looked at his screen. He loved his screen. Stella felt comfortable. Her old room was the same. The couch with her butt indentation was the same. Still, she never slept over.

* * *

Interminable, this went on. She kept waiting for the bad thing. The inevitable thing. And then one week, Mom didn’t call. It was the first missed call in fifteen years. Stella paced her kitchen, with its garbage disposal and its broken marble counters. She’d been researching how to replace them herself, pouring cement, which, from the YouTube tutorials, sounded tricky but doable. She drank two glasses of wine. She picked up the phone, thinking she ought to finally be the one to call. But she was afraid. So she dialled her friend Martha, who was training for a half-marathon. They talked about which kind of collagen to use for joint health and the fact that if their kids ever dated and got married, they’d be related.

Before first light the next morning, her cellphone rang from a strange number. It was a doctor at the hospital at Baltimore General with bad news. Mom was sick. Terminal, in fact. Then Mom got on the phone. Her voice was pleading. For the first time in fifteen years, she said: “I miss you too much. Please come home.”

With those words, it was like the umbilicus rope connecting Stella to Mom snapped her right back to Baltimore House.

* * *

Eat some cake. Drink some potion.

Instead of phone calls, she visited every week. Upon arrival the first time, alone, the house wasn’t menacing like she’d feared. Why had she thought that it would be? No vines attached themselves on and around her, trapping her within the walls of Baltimore House. Mom was visibly emaciated since Stella’s last visit, her eyes sunken, but she was still upright. Standing and walking and breathing and delighted to see her daughter. She wrapped her arms around Stella and held her, and for a moment it felt to Stella like they were separated magnets, joined at last.

The house was the same as at every other visit – neat and sterile, if also old. The first few weekends, Stella didn’t stay over. She took the early train, arrived before Mom was awake, cleaned, filled the fridge, scheduled the doctor appointments and rides, reviewed the accounts, ate dinner with Mom, who insisted on cooking, then took the midnight train home. But this got silly. The kids were older and could get themselves to their various weekend activities. If they needed help, Bruce was utterly competent.

Her first overnighter, she slept on the fold-out couch. But it was uncomfortable. No nightmares – since she’d been visiting, all the nightmares and repetitive thoughts had stopped. It was as if, by returning home, seeing for sure that nothing was amiss, she’d cured herself of wounds so undefined as to be invisible. But the mattress was too thin, the metal bar a mean, smooth mouth on her back.

The following weekend, she opened the door to her old bedroom. Remembered, vaguely, the sense of everything getting too small, of falling through and down. But then it was fine. Just a bedroom. There was still that Backstreet Boys poster. She’d gotten it at a garage sale when she was thirteen, thinking it would make her appear like a normal teenager. Then she’d listened to their music obsessively, even though boy bands were no longer cool. Stella laughed at the memory and the sound echoed within the small, pink-decorated room and the single bed that really did appear small, as if made for a doll.

Sleep was comfortable that night. Her belly full of her mom’s good stew, her worries hundreds of miles away, it was the best sleep she’d had in years.

Why had she thought she’d find totems? Stick figures tied with string and hung all over the ceilings, dangling both separately, and also joined like mobiles? Why had she remembered a yellow, musky smear against the second storey plaster?

It wasn’t like that!

Though she was sad that with every visit, her mother’s eyes sank deeper, she loved coming home, loved being back in her hometown, watching people in Orioles caps, panhandlers drinking hot coffee at the Western Union, hipsters with weird facial hair slow-sipping foamy caffeinated beverages. Mom was so happy to have her around that it made her feel special. The two of them didn’t have much in common – with Mom so sick and tired, they could barely keep a conversation going – but that was fine. “I needed this,” Stella told Mom one morning, after a perfect night of sleep. “I needed a break from my life so I could see it clearly. Someplace I could feel safe.”

“You’ll always have Baltimore House,” Mom answered, and Stella’s eyes got wet from the bittersweetness of it: she had a home. She had a place. This strange, impossible past (the birds! the totems! the yellow smears!) she’d imagined was irrelevant.

In rare moments, when all the work was done, they talked past politeness. Stella told Mom about Bruce, about their marriage. He could be stubborn and he didn’t admit when he was wrong. When it came to their relationship, he was happy to let her take the lead. Trouble was, she didn’t quite know how to do that. The kids were good, but she’d been bad about boundaries. She needed to set them more often, needed to maintain them and deliver consequences when they transgressed.

“You’re doing a wonderful job,” Mom reassured her, and Stella felt good. Warm in her belly like she’d eaten a perfect meal, which was often the case – Mom was an excellent cook. She still had questions. For instance, why did she remember so little? Why did she have this feeling of unease, this sureness that she must not trust Baltimore House, no matter how much she wanted to trust it? But she didn’t ask these questions. Like she told her kids when they were working up the courage to confront teasing friends, it would happen eventually, when they were ready. They’d hit a point where they had no choice but to articulate their feelings. She would ask Mom these questions when she was ready. And if her mother died before that happened, well then, it didn’t matter anymore, did it?

So, it was good. It was healing. And Mom’s food, her curries and soups, were so damned delicious.

Still, the cleaning, the appointments, the living and managing of someone else’s life, drained her energy. Even when she wasn’t at Baltimore House, she was thinking about it, worried Mom might trip or eat something bad or just get scared, all alone like that.

She and Bruce discussed a nursing home or hospice. They agreed these were good ideas. They also agreed there wasn’t a rush.

Though the cancer had spread all over, three months after the diagnosis, Mom still loved to roll her walker around the kitchen and make meals. Together, they’d eat in the quiet just like old times. Stella got used to the ritual, the breakfast and lunch and dinner that stretched and extended, so that the meals felt as if they rolled into one. Time passed strangely. Sometimes she’d look at her phone and it was morning. Then she’d look again and it was night. She stayed longer, missing work. She slept deeper. She missed soccer games, missed outings with friends, date nights with Bruce, a man from whom she’d always felt just slightly removed.

She liked Jersey, but she felt better in Baltimore House. She felt safe and real there.

There were other changes that happened so slowly as to be imperceptible. That strange scent returned – an old scent like tannis root and liver that Mom started adding to the stews and porridges. About six months into Mom’s sickness, Stella found a stick figure in her dresser drawer just behind an old spelling bee participation ribbon. The wood was carved smooth and pale, as to almost appear like bones. The creature had four arms and four legs, but in an ineffable way, appeared human. Tortured, but human.

Stella untied it and took it down. “Mom? What is this?”

Mom was in bed, her breath rising and falling in the darkness of dusk. “I don’t know. An octopus? I don’t know, you win. You tell me!” she said.

Stella held the thing. Was she real? Was she crazy? Why did her chest hurt so much? She tucked it into the back of her closet under a pile of old clothes, like something radioactive.

Seven months in, the repetitive thoughts returned. She and Mom were watching the old Alice in Wonderland cartoon, where Alice eats cake and gets larger, drinks potion and gets smaller. “I used to think that,” Stella said. “I thought I didn’t fit.”

“You didn’t,” her mom answered. “You never fit.”

Stella turned. Mom’s eyes were closed. She appeared to be sleeping.

That night, she imagined that Baltimore House was getting smaller. She wondered, when she found the second stick figure hanging from their shared bathroom ceiling, which was thick with angry black threads of mould (when had they grown? had they always been there?), whether she was really Stella, or someone else, someone ghostly and unknown.

Stage three didn’t reverse, but it didn’t progress. Mom’s skin got even looser. The cooking continued, only it was weird, half raw meat. Stella slept more deeply, missed more time. This was grief, of course. This was normal. Wasn’t it?

No matter how much Lysol she sprayed, the house stank. Was this what dying smelled like? Then why was it so familiar?

“I should get back to them,” Stella told her mom. “I think we need to consider hospitalisation.”

“They don’t need you,” Mom answered. “He doesn’t love you. The kids don’t want you. You can’t even keep them in line.” Stella had looked at her mom, stirring that awful turkey meat stew with tannis root and carrots, her expression so flat it was hard to believe she’d uttered such cruelness, and she’d thought: this is the pain talking; the cancer. She isn’t herself.

Stella’s hair began to fall out. Always her pride, the lush, black gloss thinned, running down the shower drain and sticking to her pillow. More totems made their way along the halls of the second floor, away from prying, rare visitors’ eyes, but not from Stella, who was no longer a guest, but beginning to feel like a resident. Branched, deformed things like bony sea creatures. Like men turned monsters.

An inversion occurred: the house in Jersey began to feel too large. When she slept there, she’d wake up to make breakfast, skip the vodka, stare at the crummy table, thinking: I’m too small to sit there. I can’t reach it.

Something awful is about to happen, I know it.

Travel days were the worst. She hated sitting on the train, heading to Baltimore. What would she find? What new ailment or calamity had befallen Mom? She hated the train back home to Jersey, too. Because by then she’d gotten used to Baltimore House, where there were no rules, and civilisation had fallen apart.

A problem happened. Stella noticed in a vague, distracted way. Her youngest, Denise, came home from soccer with tears running down her dirt-streaked face. She gave no explanation for her mood, no matter how hard Stella pried. Over the following days, Denise got quiet. Though Stella was back at Baltimore House by then, she heard from Bruce that Denise had refused to go to the game. Wouldn’t get out of bed all day. Over the following month, her grades dipped. Then Ben, Stella’s older child, got into a fight on the bus. He slugged a kid and was expelled.

“What the hell?” Bruce asked them both at dinner.

Sitting quiet, thinking about her mom (Was she okay? She’d winced so much when she’d rolled in her walker last visit. More than ever before!), Stella had only listened, wondering if she, too, had ovarian cancer. Was that why her groin hurt so much?

But vaguely, like a smoke signal wafting through her subconscious, she also thought: I need to get out of this. What this was, she couldn’t say. But the following day, after the doctor in Jersey told her that her scan was clean (“Please, stop getting scans. You don’t need them!” the doctor begged), she thought about her children.

Was it possible that the numbness she’d felt for so long, this worsening hollow inside her, wasn’t because of the life she was living? What if Jersey, with the lawn and the kids and the job and the husband and the friends, was her real life? What if it was the other life – the life she was carrying – that didn’t belong to her?

Just like it had done years ago, Baltimore House was making her sick. She needed to get out of this. She needed to put Mom in a home. “I’m done with this,” she said out loud, a resolution and a promise.

* * *

This thought, perhaps a revelation, was undone by a phone call from that same doctor. At last, the cancer had progressed. The doctor was certain, this time, that Mom had weeks, if not days, to live. “She doesn’t want a hospice,” the doctor said. “She wants to die among family. She wants you.”

“It’s not for long,” she told Bruce, who was tired of hearing it. But he was the kind of person who did the right thing, whether he wanted to or not. They both were.

To Stella’s dismay, Denise and Ben were fine with her extended departure. At first, she imagined that they were being brave for her. But soon, she understood they were glad to be rid of her. You treat people like obligations for long enough, they reply in kind.

In a moment of clarity, she gathered all three of them together before she left. “I’ve been bad,” she said. “I’ve been wrong. You’re the most important people to me but I haven’t been giving you my attention.”

They’d looked at her with a kind of horror she recognised. When you’ve been living inside something for long enough, you can’t see it, and when someone points it out, you’re utterly shocked. More than that, you’re angry.

“I love you,” she said. “And I want us all to think about the ways I can prove that to you once I’m home.”

Bruce had looked at her, and then his beer. Then he drank his beer. She felt sad for him. Realised that just because he never confronted, never complained, didn’t mean nothing was wrong. He was lonely. They were both lonely. Because she’d been thinking that this Jersey life was pretend. But all along, it was her only real thing.

Ben smiled a strained smile, a fresh bruise over his eye from yet another fight. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Why are you saying this?” Denise asked.

Stella thought then about the day Denise had come home tear-streaked from soccer. What had happened? She hadn’t been the same since. These secrets, she was so tired of them. Even when you tried to isolate them, they broke free and lashed out, invisible cuts inside arms. “Because it’s true,” Stella answered.

Denise glared, then blinked.

A kind of electricity ran all through the house and the room and between all four of them. The electricity was new and scary and for the first time, Stella felt connected. She felt a part of something other than Mom and it was glorious.

“I’ve been treating you all like a burden. But you’re not the burden. You’re the gift.”

Uneasily and with confusion, they saw her off.

* * *

Off she went to Baltimore. To ease her mother into the undiscovered country.

On the ride, she thought about how this trip might resolve everything. She’d give her mother what she needed, and in death, they’d both be free. She smiled at this thought, consoled.

* * *

The Queen of Hearts Desires an Audience.

Carrying her bag, she keyed her way into Baltimore House. It would be two weeks at the most, the doctor had told her. No one ever rebounds from something so serious at such a late stage. She was quiet, didn’t want to wake Mom. The hospice aid was sitting in the kitchen, scrolling her phone. “Is she sleeping?” Stella asked.

The aid shrugged. “She didn’t want me. She only wants you.”

“Who cares what she wants?” Stella shot back. “You’re supposed to sit with her.” Well, no. She didn’t say this. She thought it. But she didn’t want to make a scene. So she headed up the stairs, where more totems hung. They twisted in the air, sharp wood-bone points. How had bedridden Mom gotten them up there?

She went into Mom’s room (which had once been Dad’s room, too, though she didn’t remember Dad). The bedsheets were crinkled. She turned on the light and became unexpectedly frightened. Her heart beat strange and arrhythmic. No one was in the bed. She set down her luggage. Where was her mother?

Creeping, creeping, she thought. Always creeping. A kind of terror overcame her, swallowed her, spit her back out, wet and reborn. She knew, then, where to look. She went to her childhood bedroom, with its reassuring and unfashionable Backstreet Boys poster. There was Mom, covers pulled to her nose, breathing softly, eyes closed. But awake. Stella could feel it. On her pillow, a scraggle of long, black hairs. Stella’s hairs.

“Mom?”

Mom opened her eyes.

“Why are you in my bed?”

“I asked the girl to help me,” she said. “I missed you too much. I wanted to be near you.”

* * *

Late that night, after feeding Mom some broth by the spoon, and taking her blood pressure and pulse (both bad, both low – yes, she was definitely dying. This would not last!), she called home. Her home. Yes, she had a home. It was real. Bruce answered, groggy. She worried, suddenly, that he’d found a girlfriend. Someone present and happy.

“How is she?” Bruce asked.

“I don’t know. I’m confused,” she answered.

“Oh,” he said. Then, for the first time in a long while, he asked a serious question. “Why?”

She pressed the phone tight. Whispered now. “Did I ever tell you that I didn’t like it here?”

He didn’t answer and it made her scared. But then again, he was Bruce. Bruce was not a guy who knew what to say. Never had been. In the delivery room when she’d pushed out Denise, whose head had been as big as a basketball, he’d cried, “That’s awful! Doc! You gotta help them!”

“I can’t explain it. But something’s wrong.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s strange there. Bad.”

“You think so, too?” she asked.

“Yeah. I always thought it. No offence.”

“What’s strange?” she asked, and mostly she was afraid he’d answer: You. You’re strange.

“I don’t know. She seemed fine. Your mom. But I was always glad you never let the kids stay too long. I appreciated that.”

“I don’t want to stay,” she said. “I lived here eighteen years and I don’t want to live here again.”

“So don’t,” he said. “Come home.”

She thought this might have been the most honest and open conversation they’d had. It startled her that it came so naturally.

“It’s not forever,” she said. “They told me days. I’ll stick it out. If I don’t, I worry I’ll regret it. Closure and all that.”

“Sure,” he said. “Love you.” Then he put the kids on. Denise had quit the team but refused to give more details. Because of another fight, Ben was going to ride his bike to school from now on.

Because Mom was in her bed that night, she went to sleep in Mom’s bed. She was too tired to change Mom’s skin-shed-dirty sheets. So she wore her socks and a turtleneck, slept above the covers with a big towel as a blanket. In the night, everything went wrong. Mom gasped and shouted – a death throe? – and Stella comforted her, wetting her lips with ice. Later, the bed she returned to felt too small. Because of her socks, her feet were too warm. The mould-riddled ceiling was hung with stick figures on nooses.

And then, something slurking, slurking. She squeezed her eyes tight as it slid across the floor. The sound was familiar. From her childhood. The only thing that was different was the size. Last time, she’d been much smaller. She’d been a little kid. She opened her eyes and the slurking thing was upon her chest, its wide mouth encompassing her legs as slowly, it kept crawling.

* * *

In the morning, the memory was vague and awful. A clump of her hair had come out and stuck to the old pillow. She left it and made breakfast, which Mom was too sick to eat. She spoke with the visiting nurse, who told her that the end was within a day or two. She directed the aid, whom insurance had agreed to cover for four hours, to go sit with her mother, then went out to the grocery store. She cried as she walked the aisles, desultory and confused.

* * *

She’d forgotten about the slurker. For how long had that dream followed her? She wasn’t sure. As far back as she could remember, probably. A wide-mouthed thing.

“Stella Munsey?” someone called. By the yoghurt and cheese appeared a woman with dyed-blonde hair in a belted pink trench coat. Stella’s married name was Goyer. She hadn’t heard Munsey in years.

“Yeah?”

“I thought that was you! It’s me, Skyler!”

Stella still didn’t know her.

“Kindergarten? No, before then! Preschool with Ms. Dolly. We went all through. All the way through high school. My last name’s Moews. Alphabetic. We always sat next to each other! How have you been?”

Stella thought this was probably a redundant question, because she was sure her eyes were red and wet. “Fine?”

“I hear you moved away. Good for you!”

Stella shrugged. “I guess? What about you?”

“Me? Oh, you know me.”

Stella didn’t. She had no memory of this woman. What the hell? Why didn’t she remember this woman?

“I still live with my parents. I took over their house. I know, I know. I ought to be ashamed I never left the nest. But I love it there! I got married for a little while. But it didn’t work out.”

“Happens,” Stella said. This conversation was a welcome one. It took her mind off sick Mom. The slurker, too.

Skyler seemed genuinely interested and nice, like any of her friends back in Jersey, who didn’t understand what she came from, so there was no point telling them, but they wanted to understand, and that was precious. Skyler lowered her voice. She seemed earnest and innocent, perhaps a little slow-witted. “I thought about you a lot.”

Stella raised a brow.

“I mean, it was so weird. What she did. So wrong. Someone should have called the cops on her. Child services, at least.”

Stella had no idea what this woman was talking about. But she did, a little. Because this was about the animal, wasn’t it? The class pet. “Yeah,” Stella said.

Then the woman smiled brightly. “But you’re okay now. I can tell!”

“I’m great!” Stella said. She let the woman hug her, even hugged her back and promised to stop by for a beer sometime. Then she waited until the woman was gone, and burst into the most awful tears.

* * *

That night, she helped Mom onto the commode and wiped her. She set her back into her own bed, where she wheezily slept. She wasn’t taking food anymore. Hardly sipping water. In the quiet, Stella returned to her pink bedroom and looked through old dresser drawers. Found a yearbook. Opened it and saw her own picture from a long time before. People she didn’t remember had signed it. They seemed to like her, though they didn’t seem to know her particularly well.

She went through her other things. Old books and drawings. She found a diary. Most of the pages were blank. Except on one, she’d written: Madam Slurkins won’t leave me alone.

She called home again. Said the end was any moment. She was going to try to get some sleep while she could. She talked to Bruce who said he missed her and wanted to make a plan for a date night when she returned, which was new. He wasn’t an initiator. She said, Yes, I’d like that more than anything.

She talked to Ben, who said that it was too cold for his bike. “So ride the bus,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“This senior. He said I’m weird. I don’t like him.”

“I don’t like him, either,” she said. “This guy should mind his own business. Also, he’s weird. He’s eighteen and he’s riding the bus. You’re fourteen. What kind of loser senior picks on a freshman?”

“Yeah,” Ben said, seeming suddenly to realise that this was correct: the guy was a loser!

“But probably you shouldn’t hit him,” she said. “Unless he hits you first.”

“Yeah. But I get mad.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s good somebody in this house has a temper. I just don’t want it to bite you in the ass.”

“I love you, Mom,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

She talked to Denise, who still wouldn’t explain what was happening at soccer. Then the call was over, and Stella ate the stew in the pot on the stove – not the gross kind Mom had been making lately, but canned from the store. Only, had someone dropped pieces of tree bark in it?

Had Mom instructed the aid to do this? This seemed unlikely. The aid preferred scrolling her phone to helping. Who had done this?

She put her dish in the sink, walking slow and exhausted. But wait! Was that a new totem? Had someone hung totems in the kitchen? Had someone smeared yellow cream on the walls?

She called the hospice centre. Asked for the aid. They said this wasn’t possible. Aids don’t receive direct calls. “Can you ask if she hung stuff in my mom’s house?” Stella asked.

She climbed the stairs, noticed more waxy smears. Had the notion of something slurking, leaving slug trails. More totems dangled. Enough that their limbs weaved as they spun, even though there wasn’t a breeze. Their collisions sounded like rain sticks.

She checked on Mom, who was sleeping. Felt bad about it, but opened Mom’s private nightstand drawer. Inside, a giant, leather ledger. The contents: notes on every phone conversation between Stella and Mom they’d had over the last eighteen years.

For instance: January 14, 2016: Stella says Denise switched best friends: Sharon’s out, Asher’s in. Asher often has runny noses.

These notes were incredibly detailed.

Stella replaced them. Went to her bedroom. It felt too small. She swallowed three Klonopin, even though it meant she might not wake up if her mother called, and in tears, went to sleep.

Slurkins returned, laying on Stella’s chest, her jaw underneath Stella. Her eyes were doll’s eyes. Marbles.

* * *

The next morning, she’d lost more hair. So much that she cut the rest into a bob with dull shears. After, she sat by Mom’s bed. “What’s happening to me?” she asked.

The old woman wheezed. Her eyes were like marbles. Her skin was waxy, greasy yellow.

The phone rang. It was the aid. She said she hadn’t smeared anything or hung anything and Stella better not lie about her, because she hadn’t stolen, either. And by the way, that spiced food Mom cooked was ugly magic. The aid wasn’t coming back. She didn’t mess with witches!

Stella hung up. Returned to Mom’s room. Only, the hall didn’t go there. It wound and opened into a room she hadn’t seen for years. A small, low room with mouldy ceilings that led to a smaller room and a smaller room, all adorned with swaying totems, all stinking of rotten spices.

She got to the centre of it, found jars and potions that lined an entire wall. Inside were dead, pickled creatures, some of which had been cut and sewn and experimented on. A bird with a rabbit’s head; a mouse split in half; a squirrel with a tarantula in its belly.

Prominently displayed was a leather-bound book called a Necronomicon. She lifted it, decided right then. Ran with it, through rooms like hobbit burrows, winding and winding, until she was at the familiar stairs, and then down. She set fire to it, watched it burn.

She remembered, then, church as a kid. It had been at an old church, closed down with fallen beams. Everything had been painted black. A crucifix had hung upside down. Had she been there? Had Mom taken her there?

I miss you too much.

She remembered a group of people standing over a dead bird – a bird like any from those jars. Its wings had been sliced, its feet cut and replaced by frog feet. She remembered that the dead thing had shivered, then gotten up and flapped its wings.

She remembered why Skyler had stopped her yesterday. Her mom had killed the fifth-grade class pet. A rabbit. They were supposed to take care of it for the weekend. A class project on community. But her mom had snapped its neck, cut off its ears, and brought it to the church. Only, it had been too big to revive. So she’d blamed it on Stella: Stella killed the rabbit. She’s very sorry. She doesn’t know her own strength. She’d said this at drop off, holding the thing’s mutilated corpse, loud for all to hear. And the teacher, God bless her, had said, “No she didn’t, Mrs. Munsey. Stella’s not like that. I’ll bet money you did this.”

There was a stir after that. Phone calls and even an interview with a soft-speaking man. But nothing came of it.

* * *

Stella didn’t sleep that night, despite the two Klonopin. No aid came in the morning. Hospice apologised. The previous aid was angry about the false theft accusation. They hoped she’d understand. They also hoped she’d be more careful in her accusations in the future, despite these trying times.

“Is my mom a monster?” she asked.

The woman paused a long time. “She’s dying, that’s all.”

“How would you know?” Stella asked. “You don’t live in Baltimore House.”

Stella went up the stairs. Saw her mother on the hall floor, a totem clutched in her hand, pulling herself by her arms back into Stella’s old bedroom. Slurking. Slurking. Her skin left a trail of yellow grease.

Was her mother Madam Slurkins? Or was it worse than that? Did something called Slurkins live inside her mother?

She helped Mom up, lifted her to her bed even as she clutched the ugly totem she’d been trying to hang. She was light as a sack of empty corn husks. Stella tried to think of a time she’d spent, a good memory with her mother, but it was all a blank.

“Mom? Are you a witch?”

“Runs in the family,” she said. “Long, long line.”

“Was Dad?”

She laughed. “You know what’s funny?” Mom asked.

Stella waited.

“The more you do something, the less you care about it.”

She felt a terrible chill, then, that this lack of conscience was about her. She was, in some way, disposable. Her belly hurt right then, her chest, too. The pain ran all through, and for a moment, in her mind, she and Mom switched places. Stella was in the bed, Mom ministering to her.

Stella got the water, the pills. Gave her mom some extra morphine to keep her from wandering, sponged her clean. Saw, for the first time, the swirl inside a pentagram etched over Mom’s belly. It was an old scar, healed long ago. She took the totem from her mother’s hand. It was smooth and freshly whittled. Shaped like Stella, wearing a piece of Stella’s nightgown.

* * *

That night, she didn’t dream of Slurkins, but when she woke she couldn’t move. She felt wrongly proportioned, as if her body didn’t fit. What was most strange, most horrifying, it seemed that she had moved in the night. She had crawled into bed with her mother, who was holding her close, mouth open and drooling.

* * *

Exhausted, she extricated herself. “What’s happening?” she asked Mom. “What have you done to me?”

The old woman didn’t answer. But her hair had grown. No, it was stranger than that. She was wearing Stella’s hair, the hair that had fallen out. She’d knit it together somehow, and was wearing it like a wig.

“Why are you doing this?”

“It’s what you owe me,” Mom said.

And Stella remembered that the rabbit hadn’t stayed still. In class, it had twitched, its neck broken, and the kids had cried. She’d cried. She remembered Skyler, clasping her hand. “It’s my fault,” Stella had told the girl. “I’m sorry. I did it.” But no one had believed that.

The outside world, she’d understood even then, had been better than Baltimore House.

* * *

That day, she searched the house, the too small house. But it didn’t feel as small as it had. Or she was shrinking. She returned to the secret rooms of potions and jars with the intention of setting everything there on fire. The lights in the small, hidden room went out but that was fine. She’d brought matches, gasoline. She lit a match. Saw Mom, looking back at her, and then the match blew out. Everything went dark.

She lost time, somehow. Lost the day. When she looked around, it was night and the secret rooms were gone. She was standing in the hallway.

Frightened, she packed her bag. Mom could die alone. That was fine. She went to the door. Couldn’t open it. Literally, it stayed locked. She tapped lightly on the window, then slammed a pot against it. The glass was unsmashable. She called for help – to home, to the hospice, to 911 – there was no reception.

She screamed. No one came. Exhausted after hours of trying, of raging against Baltimore House, she came back up the stairs in the stark daylight. The totems danced like skeletons. The walls were all yellow now, smeared from Madam Slurkins’ nightly romps. This had happened before. Her mother had tried this before. But back then, it hadn’t taken. Stella’s body had been too small. Her mother had needed to wait. Needed Stella to grow up.

Stella looked in on her mother, whose eyes were marbles. “I love you too much,” she said, and Stella understood at last that love meant covet.

Weeping and exhausted, she sat on her childhood bed. And then lay down. And prayed. She tried once more to call home, because a solution occurred to her. The day Denise came home from soccer was the same day the new coach had started. It could be coincidence, but then again, it could be a reason. Denise was the only girl on the team. Sometimes, certain coaches didn’t like that. Or not even like, they didn’t know how to handle it.

Like she’d done so many times before, she imagined she was far away from here. She was a grown up who’d left her past behind, where it belonged. She was free. She was crying as she thought these things, and Madam Slurkins appeared. She fought, but Slurkins was so slippery, her mouth so impossibly large.

* * *

In the morning, everything hurt. It hurt awful. It hurt like nothing had ever hurt before. She would have cried but the moving of her body would have hurt, too. She stayed frozen, watching shadows dance as the sun got high and then low. The bedroom was pink. All around, pink and girlish – such a contrast to everything else in this awful house. In eyesight: the Backstreet Boys.

“Help,” she whispered, praying to Bruce and the kids and the nurse and the aid and Skyler and her Jersey friends. “Help me!”

That night, she felt a hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes, believing help had come. But it was Mom who leaned over her. Mom, looking fit and well. Rosy cheeked. Her hair was black. No, wait. It was a wig. Mom was wearing a wig of Stella’s hair.

Mom spooned bitter soup Stella didn’t want into her mouth. But she was so thirsty.

* * *

Slurkins came again. Praying to the people she loved was too sad, so she prayed to the Backstreet Boys. Wished they would hear and save her. She made her mind a blank, a nothing, as Slurkins’ jaw enveloped her.

* * *

In the morning, so much pain. Her body like fire. She opened her eyes and found she’d moved. She was in Mom’s bedroom. But where was Mom?

Then, someone leaned over her. She didn’t want to believe. It was too awful. The person looking back at her was Stella. Rosy cheeked, this Stella’s hair was restored to its glossy, gorgeous glory.

“Take this,” Stella’s voice and body said, only its eyes were black marbles. The medicine it was holding was liquid morphine.

Stella tried to see but this was hard. Her hands were wrinkled. Everything wrinkled. Everything tired. The pain in her abdomen was fire.

“Give me back,” Stella mouthed.

Stella’s body turned. It did a dance of joy. A kind of mean-spirited, monstrous jig. Then it waved an exaggerated goodbye to bedridden Stella, the way you might wave at an infant or someone very old.

A new aid arrived. She ministered to Stella. “I’m the daughter,” Stella said.

“Yes,” the aid answered, scrolling her phone. “Of course you’re someone’s daughter.”

“Help me,” Stella said. “Call my family.”

Stella recited the number. The aid made the call. Bruce answered. Stella burst into tears. “Hello?” Bruce asked. “Hello?”

“It’s Stella. Come get me. Please come get me,” Stella wept in muffled horror. “I’m sick. My voice is bad because I’m sick.”

“Stella?” he asked with confusion. “This sounds like Stella’s mom.”

“It’s me!” Stella cried. “Help me. Come get me.”

“Okay,” he said, bewildered and not quite believing. “I’m on my way.” The trip was four hours if he drove straight without stopping. She cried with relief, and then fear. Would he recognise her?

“You’re an odd one,” the aid said once the line went dead.

* * *

After the aid left, new Stella returned. She’d gotten her gorgeous black hair styled the way Bruce liked it, in ringlets down her back. She’d painted her nails glossy black. She was holding the ledger Stella’d spied. The detailed inventory containing the facts of Stella’s life. She held up Stella’s phone, which was now her phone. “He’s not coming,” she said. “I told him I’d meet him. We’d have that date.”

“He’ll know,” Stella said. “Even if he doesn’t say, he’ll know. They’ll all know.”

“Just like you,” new Stella said, smiling mean.

Looking closely, there was a difference. New Stella’s eyes were dull. She moved strangely, as if unaccustomed to her limbs, her space, her skin. Had Stella’s own mother been just as unsuspecting? For how long and through how many generations had this creature blighted the Munsey line? Real Stella couldn’t begin to guess.

New Stella slid her foot against the floor, walking backward, smiling too wide. Then the other foot. It was odd. Ceremonial. She stood in the doorway, facing Stella. Still that grin. Then the door shut, hard.

With the sound, Stella felt Mom’s sick, withered body tighten around her, like a shirt dried too long, that shrinks. Through dying eyes, she glimpsed the Backstreet Boys, those young angels, and the pink walls of Baltimore House, slicked with yellow.

She hadn’t asked Denise about the new coach. She hadn’t replaced that marble counter with concrete. In her mind, she screamed a warning to her family, because she could see the future:

This creature wearing her skin would install itself at Jersey House, turning the Goyer family home into a haunted, needy place. She would act the part of Stella, all the while, taking notes. There would probably be a divorce. A break, and confusion; new less happy homes established.

Ben would get mad and leave. Bruce would find someone new. Denise, who took after Stella, would linger, trying to fix this mysterious thing inside her mother, that had broken.

“I miss you too much,” the creature would tell Denise. And Denise, sweet Denise, would not know how to get away.

They say you can’t go home again. But what they really meant was that you should never go home again. Not ever.