My mother called at one in the afternoon to tell me about my sister. I was in the middle of a terrible lunch, an Indian buffet with coworkers, when the phone sounded. The grief in my mother’s voice, the sniffles and sobs that punctuated her awkward greeting, sent me from the table toward the relative privacy of the restaurant lobby as she sketched out the events of the morning and begged me to meet her at the hospital. She knew that Joyce and I had experienced a falling out, but that shouldn’t matter. She insisted it didn’t matter. Joyce needed her family.
I never returned to the table. I called my supervisor after pulling onto the freeway.
A frothing autumn sky darkened the road, forming a ceiling on the world painted to resemble a tortured ocean moments before a tempest ravaged its surface. Memories of my sister flashed like lightning: she was a frightened princess; I was her protecting wizard; there was a key and a carnival and an ogre who seduced his victims with fluffy, sweet cotton candy.
After three hours, it felt as if I had been on the freeway forever, and my sister was still a forever away.
In the too-warm kitchen I dry the dishes Joyce is washing. She is eight. I am eleven. Pumpkin and spices scent the air as pies bake in the oven. In the next room, Mother vacuums the carpet. Joyce hands me the last bowl. It is small and silver like the brain pan of a robot. I briefly imagine the final moments of my confrontation with a Terminator. He is programmed to think me human, just bone and meat. But I produce fire from my palm, a daring trick from the magic kit occupying a place of importance on the top of my dresser. The AI tries to process the appearance of flame from skin and is confounded by the impossible feat. I take advantage of my split-second reprieve and deliver a punch with my Ultra Glove, a weapon that exists only in my imagination. The Terminator’s head ratchets back, and its red eyes go black. As the victor, I claim its head for my trophy case.
It is Sunday afternoon. We have already gone to church. Father hasn’t been home in days.
“Do you know any new tricks?” Joyce asks, wiping her hands on the thighs of her jeans before hopping off the step stool that provides her access to the sink. “We could practice before dinner.”
I tell her I’m working on something special, and she insists I tell her what it is, but I don’t.
“It’s the best,” I assure her.
“What is it?”
I roll my eyes and present her with a stern you-know-better-than-to-ask-a-magician-that-question frown before setting the silver bowl in the drainer.
The vacuum’s growl fades and then dies. Mother, plump and pretty, appears in the kitchen doorway. She wipes at her sweaty brow and breathes hard, appearing as if she’s just run home from the supermarket. Turning to check the dish drainer, she smiles and holds her arms wide.
Hugs are her currency.
We cash in. Each of us takes a side and Mother wraps her heavy arms around us. She smells like flour and cinnamon. Her dress is damp against my cheek.
Joyce asks if father will be home for dinner, and Mother squeezes us tighter—an honest answer that tells us nothing.
At the back of the house, I close the door to my room. Books rest in a pile beside my bed. Stretching out on the mattress, I drape my head and arms over the edge and pick through the sloppy archive. I’m not browsing the titles. The one I want is on the bottom of the mound: a last-minute hiding place used when Mother burst in to insist my chores had waited “…quite long enough, young man.”
The corner of the red leather cover becomes visible as I pull away a thick volume of Poe’s collected works. In celebration of the coming of autumn, my teacher, Mrs. Oliver, had read from his poem “The Raven,” and the rhythm and language drew me, like a beacon, to his other stories. When I came upon the tale “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” the word mesmerism leapt out at me. I’d seen it in my book of magic, but the author of that text insisted on withholding valuable information, as he believed mesmerism (and its clumsier heir, hypnotism) was for advanced “practitioners of the illusionary arts” only. Having mastered the Chinese Linking Rings, the Cigarette Guillotine, a dozen card tricks, and the power to make a spongy red ball disappear and reappear at will, I considered myself firmly in the advanced camp.
The Science of Stage Hypnotism.
With the red book in hand, I rolled onto my back and returned to the chapter that had confounded and obsessed me since I’d first read it:
Consigning Subjects to the Hypnotic State.
In the dim light of the hospital room, my mother sat quietly. Her thin frame took up all the less space for its bent posture. The cancer had done more for her than Jenny Craig or Atkins ever could. Now that surgery and chemotherapy had removed the disease from her body, she felt it had been something of a brutal godsend. She clung tightly to God’s mysterious ways. Everything had a reason in the great plan.
The doctor would not commit to the outcome of Joyce’s surgery. He talked about waiting and tests. He discussed the severity of the injuries. The danger of infection. Or seizures.
Under tubes and bandages, under the cheap blue blanket and thin print sheets, Joyce took in the oxygen and fluids. Half-moon bruises stained the skin beneath her eyes. A bandage covered her nose like a white tent. The lips that had once called me “best friend” were swollen and split. Stitches ran from just below her nose to keep her upper lip together.
I asked what happened, and Mother just sobbed.
It is the middle of the night, and Joyce screams. She is convinced that her closet harbors a monster with talons and teeth as long as butcher knives. Though her fear once hinged on pure speculation and the odd sound in the middle of the night, she now insists she can see the monster emerging from the black void that holds her jeans and dresses.
My belly and chest tighten like setting concrete. Mother rushes down the hall, her steps heavy and uneven. “It’s okay,” she calls to my terrified sister. “I’m coming.” Then my sister’s sobs become audible as Mother pushes open the door to Joyce’s room.
I wish I could take away her fear. I wish she never had to see another monster.
In the cafeteria, Mother lifted her cup of tea and picked at the edges of a Danish. The green walls with white moldings were meant to be soothing; they appeared cold. I noted an elderly gentleman, sitting alone near the elevator bank. His hand shook as he attempted to lift his coffee. He gave up and dabbed at his eyes with a white paper napkin. Mother coughed and pinched an edge of the Danish. The pale pastry rose around the wound-red filling like swollen skin.
We found conversation difficult, so I was grateful for my husband’s call.
He asked about Joyce, and I told him what the doctors had told me and Mother, which amounted to nothing more than “Wait and see,” as they performed tests which may or may not advance a prognosis.
Briefly, I remembered visits with Mother in this same hospital. Her every phrase had been punctuated by whispered breaths and long pauses. She’d told me she didn’t mind feeling sick, but she missed her hair.
On the other end of the phone, my husband, Larry, grew agitated. He insisted that Joyce move in with us the minute she was well enough to travel.
I thanked him. I didn’t mention how unlikely her survival felt.
I’m sitting under the oak in the backyard, nestled in a pile of brightly colored leaves. One leaf of a particularly vivid orange rests on my thigh. I’m saving it. I’ll take it to my room later and tuck it into a Ziploc bag before placing it between the pages of The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe.
The red book is lighter in my hands now. After frequent visits to the dictionary, I now understand most of the words in the chapter. I believe I know the specific procedure for sending a willing subject into a trance.
Joyce hops off the porch and crunches through a layer of leaves. Her baby-blue puff jacket covers her neck to knee in a protective quilt of padding. She tromps through the leaves, making as much noise as her frail form can manage.
“Learning a new trick?” she asks.
I tell her I am, and I could use the help of my beautiful assistant. Carefully, so as not to damage the perfect leaf, I rise from the ground to lead my sister inside.
Mother sits in the living room, sewing our Halloween costumes. She affixes sparkly piping to Joyce’s princess dress with needle and thread. My magician’s cape covers the sofa cushions beside her like a deflated shadow. Halloween is still two weeks away, but we need our costumes for the Harvest Carnival, and that’s only a few days off.
Still wearing her puff jacket zipped to her chin, Joyce sits on the edge of the bed; her brown hair hangs over her brow like wispy curtains for her eyes. She pushes the hair aside. Her feet kick the air in a rhythmic motion and then drop back to disturb the edge of my comforter. She asks if I’ve learned to pull a rabbit out of a hat.
“No,” I say. “Nothing like that.”
Waiting beside the magic set on my chest of drawers, there is a key. It isn’t like the house keys Joyce and I have on small rings. It is long and silver and inscribed with a number on its barrel. The head is flat and shaped like a large kidney bean. I found the key at a garage sale, one of the many Mother insisted on dragging us to. I discovered it sitting on top of an ancient television console. Even the owner couldn’t remember what the key had once unlocked. I bought it for a penny.
I pinch the teeth between my thumb and forefinger. At the bed, I explain mesmerism to my sister. She frequently brushes the hair from her eyes as I describe the “vast and complex landscape of the human mind.” An expression of concern scrunches her brow. She’s seen hypnosis on television, in the animated programs that consume the hours between the time she gets home from school and the moment Mother returns from the fabric shop where she works. She insists the procedure never goes well.
Rubbing the key between my fingers, I explain the way hypnotism is exaggerated in cartoons and movies. She won’t quack like a duck. She will not be entranced into believing she’s a movie star, driving her to behave like a jerk. She won’t suddenly have the urge to roll in mud like a plump, pink pig. Even so, she makes me promise I won’t embarrass her, and I promise.
I ask her to sit back on the bed and prop herself against the pillows and the wall. Still caressing the key, I sit beside her and hold it up for her to see, and I ask her to focus on the silver, kidney-bean-shaped head. She brushes the hair from her eyes, and I see what a distraction it will be. Leaving her for a moment, I run across the hall and retrieve her white knit cap from the hook inside her bedroom door. She puts it on and tucks stray hairs up under its edges.
Then I begin. As I speak to her of relaxation and heavy eyes, I roll the barrel of the key between my fingers, slowly, rhythmically. I notice the light reflecting off its surface; it plays over the bridge of her nose like a lazy fairy. When I’m convinced she is in a trance, I pause, because my mind suddenly goes blank. What is next? Why can’t I remember?
Turning away, I search the room for the red book. It sits on top of the dresser, beside the magic set, not far from where the key had been waiting. I fear getting up, worried that it might break Joyce’s trance. I stare at the red spine and pretend I can read the edges of the words beyond it. And though this imagined power of X-ray vision does not allow me to read even a single word, it does shift the contents of my mind sufficiently for the answer I need to present itself. I remember what to do.
“Raise your right arm,” I say.
My sister complies, presenting me with a puffy blue tube and the back of her small hand.
I tell her the arm is strong, stronger than steel. When I try to push down on the arm, it doesn’t give. My fingers sink deep into the fabric of her coat, displacing wads of stuffing in the sleeve, and I exert tremendous force on the appendage, but it remains stiff.
My success brings a shock of excitement. I’m suddenly aware of my heart and how fast it beats. I inhale deeply, because it feels as if I haven’t drawn a breath all afternoon.
I suggest she lower her arm, and she does. I suggest she stand in the middle of the room on one leg, and she does. I suggest she fall backward, and she topples like a sapling, into my waiting arms.
The book explained trigger phrases, a word or words that could be invoked to instantly return the subject to the trance state. I have planned for this. The phrase needed to be obscure so as not to be uttered accidentally. I drew the trigger from Poe’s story, the tale that had sent me down this path.
“Issachar Marx.”
The doctor wore an expression of practiced sadness as he informed my mother and me that Joyce was not likely to live through the night. The damage to her brain was too severe. Even if she managed to survive, he said, she would be dependent on machines for the rest of her life.
Mother sobbed amid desperate, muttered prayers. I felt empty and numb as if my soul had evaporated. The tears at my eyes didn’t fall. They coated the lenses with heat.
Still, Joyce’s husband hadn’t arrived.
They had been married for two years. He was a police officer. A handsome man.
“He’s a good earner,” Mother often said, as if this single point could excuse anything.
I wrapped my arm around Mother and guided her to a chair. She still prayed. The utterances of her impotent mythology exhumed a hard vein of rage, and after my mother was seated, I felt eager to be away from her.
The accidents and injuries that had befallen Joyce in the years following her honeymoon were no mystery to me. They weren’t a mystery to Mother, either, but she opted to remain silent, to celebrate her son-in-law: the good earner. I chose to address the issue, to speak to Joyce and tell her that she didn’t need to stay in that house with that man. She could live with Larry and me. We had plenty of room. Her response was to call me “a hateful liar” and to stop speaking to me.
In the corridor, I watched the doctor trudge slowly toward the nurses’ station. His broad back straightened, returning to its natural posture after having completed the performance of sympathy.
At midnight I am still awake. The wonders of the past few days race through me like amphetamine. Ever since first introducing Joyce to a hypnotic state, I have considered the power of true magic and imagined what I might achieve with my newfound talent.
Mother could be mesmerized into a healthier life of exercise and proper diet. The kids at school could be influenced. I could end bullying and make the confused and frightened students understand that they will be okay. They will survive.
These are the altruistic notions that remain after entertaining scenarios that include collecting lunch money from my entranced classmates, and achieving A-plus grades on papers I never wrote and tests I’d never completed.
What are the boundaries of this unbelievable talent?
Joyce screams. Her terror is particularly sharp tonight. The peals of dread fill the house, slicing through the air and the walls and my ears. I sit up and hang my legs over the side of the bed as I hear Mother’s familiar refrain: “It’s okay. I’m coming.”
Father is home, though I haven’t seen him yet. He shouts, “What the fuck is going on?”
Mother’s calming of Joyce takes longer than usual tonight. I sit on the edge of my bed for a full thirty minutes before the padding of my mother’s feet sounds outside my door. When the click of the lock to my parents’ room reaches my ears, I leave the bed.
Opening the door to my sister’s room, slowly so as not to frighten her again, I watched the light from the hall fall across her bed. Joyce is soon at its center. She stares at me with tearstained eyes and a trembling lower lip. This is the way she looks when she hears Father yelling at Mother, when she hears the crack of skin on skin. I hurry to her and sit beside her on the bed, and she springs upward for a hug.
“Mother doesn’t believe me,” she whisper-cries. “She doesn’t know.”
“It’s okay.” My voice is soothing. I hold her tightly. “There are no monsters, Joyce. They’re just in your imagination. I used to be afraid, too, but I’m not anymore.”
“It is real,” she insists, grasping me so tightly I can barely breathe. “It’s in there and it hides and it wants to get me and it’s going to. It almost got me tonight.”
Her fear gathers inside of me, turning to anxious pity. I can’t bear to witness this dread.
“Issachar Marx,” I say.
A tremor runs through Joyce’s body and her grip on me relaxes. I ask her to lay back on the bed, ask her to relax and listen to the sound of my voice. Once I am certain she is comfortable and attentive, I say, “There are no monsters.”
“There are no monsters,” she responds, her voice deep and gurgling.
“You’ll never see another monster,” I tell her. “Monsters aren’t real. You don’t believe in monsters anymore.”
“I don’t believe in monsters anymore.”
Beside Joyce’s bed, Mother ended a phone call and exhaled loudly. “They’re not letting him leave the station.”
“You mean they’re pressing charges?”
“It was an accident, David. He said so.”
“But his buddies on the force don’t believe him. No rational person would.”
“David!”
“You know what he did,” I said. “You know damn well. Why can’t you just say it?”
“He wouldn’t,” she said, fresh tears running over her thin cheeks. “He’s a good man. He’s done well by his family.”
“He’s a good earner,” I said. The bitterness on my tongue nearly gags me.
She can’t believe the man would hurt her daughter, not because of the components of his character but because she had denied his cruelty for so long. If she accepted him for the bastard he was, then she would have to accept her complicity in my sister’s abuse. Part of the blame would fall to her, and she simply couldn’t bear its weight.
“Leave us alone,” I said, unable to endure Mother’s scrunched expression any longer.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“I need a few minutes to say goodbye to my sister.”
A cloud of balloons, red and white and blue, float above the small wooden cart from which the smell of roasted peanuts rises into the autumn afternoon. Ahead, the Ferris wheel turns lazily to the thrill of its riders. Children shriek and giggle as the Whirl-a-Way spins them like laundry, round and round. Lights blink and blaze. The crowds wander up and down the narrow dirt paths between food vendors and rides and booths that promise the skilled and/or lucky immense stuffed animals. Mother has Joyce’s hand. Joyce wears her princess costume beneath her puffy blue coat. The tiara is wedged tightly around the white knit cap she all but refuses to take off these days. Despite the crisp afternoon, sweat dapples Mother’s brow and cheeks. We are on our way to the center of the fairgrounds. The cheap map shows this as the location of the petting zoo. Joyce wants to visit the zoo to see the baby pigs.
Mother says she needs to rest. She sits on a wooden bench and tells us to be patient while she catches her breath. Joyce protests, invoking Mother’s promise to take us to the petting zoo.
The rest of the carnival goers are in motion, moving past us, and I am as eager to move as my uncharacteristically demanding sister is. I grasp the edges of my magician’s cape and swing back and forth at the waist. There are so many things to see. It’s as if we’ve been given a treasure map, the same map as a thousand other people, but we’re being restrained, forced to watch others pursuing the gold, absolutely certain they will find it all before we’re released.
Joyce’s insistence borders on shrill, and Mother shakes her head. She turns to me and says, “Would you please take your sister to see those pigs?”
I am ecstatic at being set free. Joyce jumps up and down as if she’s won a prize.
“You hold your sister’s hand,” Mother insists. “Don’t let go.”
At the center of the carnival, away from the noise and lights of the biggest rides, we come upon the petting zoo. Pens made of splintering wood rail and chicken wire occupy a wide section of fairground and run to a line of trees a hundred and fifty feet from the main path. Joyce sees friends from school and tears out of my grip. She races between two pens, one holding baby goats and the other serving as a temporary home for an exhausted donkey. She meets the group of four girls with sparkling giggles and quick embraces.
I have little interest in barnyard animals, and less in shrieking girls. I turn. Between a shack that offers cotton candy and another selling “Red Hot Sausages! Tasty!” I see a curtained booth. A piece of plywood stretches over two pillars made of four-by-fours. It reads county’s largest pumpkin in bright orange letters. Next to this claim in smaller black letters: “180-pounder!”
As I consider what a pumpkin of that size might look like, I’m sent off balance by a hard shove. Laughter erupts around me, and I regain my senses to find my own friends at my side.
Chester is there, with his carrot-red hair, and the amused grin that accompanies nearly every moment of his life. Ralph is there, too. Ralph is my height but very thin. “A string bean,” Mother calls him. Mother doesn’t like Ralph. He spends his days eating, constantly eating, but his body remains a barely clothed skeleton. Mother is certain he’s got worms.
Neither of the boys is wearing his Halloween costume, and they tease me for wearing mine. They think magic is goofy, and they remind me I wore the same costume last year; they don’t notice the cape is new.
Ralph sees the sign for the county’s largest pumpkin and decides we should check it out. Chester says, “That’s dumb.” I echo Chester’s assessment, but Ralph insists. Chester bumps his shoulder against Ralph’s, and then shakes his head. “Dumb.”
Even so, the decision is made.
I check on Joyce, who passes a dollar to Mrs. Braxton for the privilege of petting dirty farm animals. Then she quickly falls back into conversation with her friends.
Her best friend, Annie Presley, hooks arms with Joyce. Behind them, Mrs. Presley smiles and gathers the girls close. She spares me a glance and nods, all but saying, “I got this. You go check out that pumpkin. It’s amazing!”
As Mrs. Presley leads the girls into a pen with three mottled calves, I follow Chester, who is following Ralph toward the tent.
Chester and Ralph shove each other as they pass beneath the sign. The curtains, two long strips of burlap, were perfunctory. We didn’t enter a tent but rather stepped through to a cleared bit of ground, fenced in by more rough split rails. The area was decorated with three neatly stacked bales of hay on the right, and the star of the attraction, the pumpkin, waited at the center, cradled in a nest of loose straw.
As my friends roughhouse near the entrance, I walk forward, my mind already filling with images of myself and this grand squash on a stage. There I introduce the audience to a wonder of the natural world. The pumpkin is seated on a spinning platform so the spectators know its magnificence is three dimensional. I invite an audience member onto the stage to thump the hard shell to prove its solidity to the audience, and then I begin the magic. I cover the thing with a silky white cloth. Grabbing the edges of the sheet, I lift it slightly and rustle it, shake it gently so that calm waves spread through the fabric. My gesture intensifies, shaking the fabric until it whips over the pumpkin. Then, with a final flourish, I pull the sheet away to reveal the pumpkin has vanished or transformed into Joyce, my constant assistant.
Chester bumps me again and talks about pushing the pumpkin off the roof of our school just to see how big a splash it would make. Ralph considers the number of pies his mother could bake. We all run our hands over the smooth, tough hide, and then our conversation turns to school, to our teachers, to the latest episodes of television programs. Time folds in on itself. We have only spoken for a handful of seconds, but too many minutes have passed in the company of the great pumpkin.
My friends invite me to join their quest for new wonders, but I explain about Joyce. We all jostle out of the exhibition area, and they say goodbye, leaving me to the task my mother had assigned.
Mrs. Presley leans with her hip against the outer corner of the goat pen. She is smoking and chatting with Mr. Havish, the high school gym teacher. He tries to pluck the cigarette from between her fingers, but Mrs. Presley is quick. She yanks her hand away and laughs while pressing the other hand against the teacher’s chest.
I walk between pens to the place where I last saw Joyce. Mrs. Braxton hurries toward me and announces that it’ll cost me a dollar to caress her livestock.
“I’m just looking for my sister,” I say. “She wanted to pet the piglets.”
Though visibly annoyed, Mrs. Braxton forces a smile. She makes a show of searching the pens, and though many children are ecstatically touching the animals, Joyce is not among them.
“She went to get cotton candy with Annie,” Mrs. Presley says, barely turning away from Mr. Havish’s white smile.
Though I see Annie and two of her other friends at the corner of the spun sugar vendor, holding cones of pink froth, none of these children wears a powder-blue puff coat, a white knit cap, or a tiara. I hurry across to the shack and ask the little girls where Joyce has gone. Annie turns red before she points with her cotton candy to the north and says, “ladies’ room.”
People crowd the carnival. Children in their costumes and exhausted parents, trying to keep up with them. I’m furious that Joyce’s friends have abandoned her, that Annie’s mother would rather giggle with Mr. Havish than protect my sister.
“Do you know where the bathrooms are?” I ask. It becomes a mantra, as I stop every adult I come to. “Do you know where the bathrooms are?”
Finally, a short man with a black beard nods to his left. His amused smile confuses me, until I realize he has misinterpreted my desperation. “You’re almost there, buddy.” He points across the midway toward a family of five, huddled together as the father leans over to point at a thing of interest on the map his son is holding. “They’re behind the candlemaker’s tent. A whole row of ’em.”
I thank him and run off. I’m a blood vessel among thousands, being pushed away from the brain and rushing through a swarming vein until I again reach the heart.
The Port-o-Johns stand in rows. Five to a side, like pale blue booths, but it is another flash of blue that catches my eye. Along the tree line, sixty feet away, a blink of color that can only be Joyce’s jacket appears between the trunks and then vanishes.
I run at full speed and begin shouting my sister’s name. I do this for an eternity of seconds until I’m at the treeline, panting, holding my side, and peering into the shadowed woods.
Joyce stands twenty feet away. She is smiling and waving with a near-devoured cone of pink, spun sugar. A man holds her other hand.
He is a rotten man. His appearance suggests a festering life. At first I think he is wearing a mask. His bulbous forehead runs above narrow, dark eyes. Stubble, like smears of mud, clutch his cheeks and jaw, emphasizing the doughy paleness of his skin. Tiny ears jut away from his round face and would be comical on a man who wasn’t so wholly terrifying. A limp, dirty white shirt with the sleeves rolled tightly to above the elbow is tucked into a pair of brown pants, one size too small for his barreled stomach.
I think he is an ogre, pulled from the pages of a story unfit for a child, and given life.
“Davey,” my sister shouts. “We’re going to see the Miraculous Movie Show.”
The man beside her cracks his mouth to smile, revealing gaps between his upper and lower teeth.
“Come with us,” Joyce says.
The ogre nods but says nothing. His head turns from side to side as he looks around the woods. The hand that isn’t holding my sister’s opens and closes as if he’s working an invisible pump.
If my Ultra Glove had been a real weapon, I would use it on the man to force him away from my sister. I would use it to bash his grotesque head into pulp, but the glove is only a bit of imagination, harmless to anything that resides in the real world.
I am defenseless against this man, and I’m alone. But imagination has saved me before.
I throw a look over my shoulder and shout, “I found her. She’s over here,” as if I’m calling to a search party or a mob of townsfolk tromping the midway with pitchforks and torches.
“Mother’s ready to go,” I say, turning back to Joyce. “She sent me and Annie’s mom and Mr. Havish to get you.” Again I look over my shoulder. “It’s okay. She’s right here,” I shout.
The man opens and closes his free hand more furiously. His head notches from side to side like a broken, windup toy.
“But I want to see the Miraculous Movie,” Joyce says through a pout.
Her protests are insane. Can’t she feel how terrible this man is? Can’t she feel it?
“Mother wants to go.”
The ogre releases Joyce’s hand. He says nothing but backs away from my sister. Then he turns and walks slowly, deeper into the woods, finally disappearing behind an evergreen trunk a hundred feet away.
I run forward and embrace my confounded sister, and I hold her tightly and I take her hand and I hold it. I hold it for the rest of the night.
The bandages circling Joyce’s head reminded me of her white knit cap, but nothing else about the figure was familiar. Her face was too wounded and covered with the paraphernalia of medical science to be recognizable.
Though I couldn’t know the details, I knew what had happened to my sister—her husband; the motherfucker I’d warned her about; my mother’s “good earner”—I knew what he’d done to my sister, but I wanted others to know. I wanted Mother to know. Yes, it was cruel. In the end, it would change nothing for Joyce, but she deserved to be remembered honestly.
“Isaachar Marx,” I whispered.
A tremor shook her form. Her eyelids twitched and then sprang open, revealing white orbs, streaked with crimson veins.
“Joyce,” I asked, “can you hear me?”
The voice that emerged from her throat, low and gurgling and muffled by the tubes keeping her alive, turned my skin cold. She shouldn’t have been able to speak, but she did.
“Yes, Davey. I hear you.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“In a sea of blood,” she replied. “It’s cold and red and thick. It wants to pull me under.”
“Stay with me,” I said. “Just for a while.”
“Yes, Davey,” the warbling voice said. “For a while.”
Jimmy Pepper, a nine-year-old from Joyce’s class, disappears from the Harvest Carnival. His parents leave him at the Clown-Pop. He is happily spraying water into a plastic clown’s mouth, and watching the balloon on its head expand. They take his distraction as an opportunity to sneak behind the attraction to smoke a bowl.
When they return, Jimmy is gone. At first they laugh. Their child is curious and finds every inch of the world a magical place that he insists must be investigated and explained. Even something as common as a mote of dust triggers a slew of questions as he follows it around a room.
Their humor fades as the sun begins to set and the string lights burst on along the midway. Desperation seeps into their organs like acid as the police insist they wait at a patrol car while the authorities sweep the woods. Concerned neighbors gather around them. Some join the search.
Jimmy’s head is found three days later.
The doctor was confounded. He shined a light over the veined surface of Joyce’s eyes. Mother stood in the corner, hugging herself against a chill. Grief stole her warmth. I waited in the chair for the doctor to complete his examination.
He cleared his throat. “This might be the result of a seizure. I haven’t seen it before, but it’s certainly within the realm of possibility.”
“Tell them,” I said.
“Tell them what?” the doctor asked.
“Please, Davey, no,” the warbling voice of my sister said.
The doctor reared back. Mother gasped and threw her palms to her face, covering her mouth. Her eyes grew wide as she looked from the doctor to me to the figure on the bed and back to the doctor.
“I don’t—” the doctor started to say.
“Joyce, tell them.”
“He calls me whore,” Joyce said. “He accuses me of a thing I would never do. Never. He slaps me. Not as hard as usual, and I feel grateful. I feel grateful. It won’t be bad this time. I apologize for upsetting him. I’m sorry. Then he punches me and his ring splits my lip and the pain explodes and blood drips into my mouth, and he punches me again and again. He calls me shit.”
Mother trembled in the corner. She shook her head and wrapped her hands more tightly over her own mouth.
“What’s happening here?” the doctor asked.
“He kicks my stomach,” the horrible voice continued. “I’m trying to breathe and he goes away. He goes away. I am grateful.”
“No,” Mother sobbed into her clasping palms. “Dear Lord, bless my…”
“He comes back with his nightstick, and he hits. He hits. My bones break. I hear them. Crack. Crack. He hits. Seconds. Minutes. I don’t even feel myself being lifted and thrown at the staircase. I don’t feel anything as I break and bleed against the steps. I don’t feel.”
“Stop this!” Mother shouted. “Please, Joyce. Please.”
And I was about to ask Joyce to stop. I hadn’t accurately calculated the cruelty of my plan. The voice and the horrors it detailed sickened me. They heightened my grief and did nothing to salve it. My sister deserved peace.
“My eyes won’t close. I want them to close. He stands over me, and my eyes won’t close. His eyes burn. Spit glistens on his lips. His teeth show as he growls and shouts at me. I want my eyes to close. I don’t want to see him. He is a monster, but I don’t believe in monsters.”
Joyce’s declaration sprayed acid on my thoughts, burning them away, leaving nothing but a key and a red book and devastation. My organs constricted, pushing a sob from my throat. Tears spilled in streams down my cheeks. Her drowning voice and the message it delivered horrified me, but I couldn’t form the words needed to end her testimony.
“I didn’t believe,” Joyce screamed into the room. “I couldn’t see it, and I didn’t believe.”