The Atrocities Page 5

“I’m happy to talk with her,” I say. “I’ll be fine alone.”

  “Ah.” Robin gives me her phone number for the second time. “Call me if you need anything,” she says, touching my arm.

  I left my bedroom in immaculate condition, but when I enter I discover my novels scattered about on rumpled bedsheets. An oversized marker with a pea green tip rests on my pillow. I notice on the cover of one of my books, a woman peers through a fractured window, her forehead scarred with barbed green symbols. On another cover, a man in a straw hat escapes a dark pit. A cloud of tumultuous spirals swarms about his face.

  “Hello?” I say, glancing around the room again. But Mrs. Evers is nowhere to be seen.

  While I’m packing, I remember the day Stephen finally left. I can still see him, cramming balled-up T-shirts into an already-stuffed suitcase. I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, and he said he was going home for a while.

  “Where’s home?” I asked.

  “Nevada,” he said—where he grew up.

  “You’re really doing this? After everything?”

  He glanced at me with the expressionless eyes of a supermarket cashier. “Yes.”

  “This isn’t going to be forever,” he told me. He said—

  The memory jostles loose, because from somewhere under my bed comes a quivering whine. The sound intensifies with each passing moment. I picture Princess shivering on the floor, her brown lips frothing with yellow saliva. Her little legs kick and twitch.

  Before I can investigate, Mrs. Evers squirms out from under the tall bed. She snorts, and her smiling eyes peek at me through a tangle of dark hair.

  I take a long breath. “Robin said you wanted to speak with me?”

  “Yeah,” she says, ascending my bed with mud-crusted feet. As she jumps on the mattress, her ruffled sundress undulates and bobby pins rain down from her hair. “I gotta tell you a secret, Miss V. But we gotta go far away, or else he might hear us. He has ears like a wolf.”

  With that, she stretches out her arms like wings and springs off the bed. I gasp when she hits the floor at an awkward angle. She stumbles forward, ending up on her hands and knees. She giggles. As I help her up, I feel a mild urge to chastise her, the way I would one of my students. But of course I remain silent.

  “Come on,” she says, grabbing my hand. “My mom might wake up any time and then I’ll get pushed out.”

  She tugs at my arm, but I plant myself on the floor. “Mrs. Evers, is this another one of your games? Like last night?”

  “No!” she says. “We gotta hurry.”

  This time when she pulls at my arm, I let her tow me through the web of winding passageways. The scent of lavender follows us at every turn.

  In one sunlit corridor, Mrs. Evers plays leapfrog over a parade of plastic zoo animals.

  Ultimately, we end up in the garden of rock cress and buddleia and purple milkweed. I take a deep breath of the saccharine air. Mrs. Evers slips away from me and spins in circles on the grass.

  As she twirls, she says, “Did you know rats can chew through metal and concrete? They can chew so much because their incisors never, ever stop growing. They have to keep chewing or their teeth will grow into their brains.”

  I sit on the wrought-iron bench, and my mind begins pulling me toward another age. I remember the parks, watching the boy while he rolled down the hills and covered his legs in sand and sang to the ducks. No. I force myself back into the present.

  Mrs. Evers ends up resting on the base of the fountain. For some reason, the water is no longer flowing, and a monarch butterfly shivers on the tip of the warrior’s marble spear.

  The woman bites at her fingernail and says, “What are we doing here?”

  I take a seat beside her. I place my hand on her back.

  As if electrocuted by my touch, Mrs. Evers jumps and turns to me.

  “This is where I died,” she says. “I can’t remember everything. It’s so blurry.”

  A bright yellow swallowtail drifts in front of my eyes and then disappears.

  “I fell right here,” Mrs. Evers says, sprawling across the freshly cut grass. “I was alone for a long time, but then my dad came. My mom didn’t come, because she was in the city, visiting Auntie Sharon.” She rolls her head to the side, and I can see tears sparkling in the sunlight.

  I kneel beside her.

  “Dad said he tried to bring me back to life, but he couldn’t. The men took me away in the ambulance, and I got burned up before Mom could see me. Dad should’ve let her hug me and say goodbye!”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She lies there, gazing at the sky, pulling out tufts of grass at her side. “Dad acts like he cares about us, but he’s only pretending. One time, me and Mom and Dad were having a picnic, and I found a bird who couldn’t fly. She was like this.” For a few moments, she convulses in a frenzy on the grass. “When my dad saw her, he stomped her till she stopped moving, even though I was screaming. He said he could tell it was her time to go, and he didn’t seem sad at all. He just cleaned off his shoe.” She pinches the air above her face, maybe squishing the clouds above. “Another time, I had a nightmare about a wolf with a weird face. I went to tell Mom, but Dad said I should leave. I kept crying and I wouldn’t go, and Dad looked really, really mad. His eyes were like a stranger. Dad carried me away and put me in a black room. I could hear Mom outside, trying to get me out, but Dad said I had to face the shadows or they would eat me up. I cried for a long time.”

  “That’s awful,” I say.

  “Yeah.” She looks at me now with wide, dusky eyes. She whispers, “The real truth is, my dad’s not a real person. I saw him take off his face, and everything looked wrong. I don’t know what he is, but he’s getting stronger. Look.” With this, Mrs. Evers uncovers a bruise on her chest in the shape of a crescent moon. “Mom’s gotta run away or she might get eaten. You gotta warn her for me, Miss V. I can’t talk to her because she sleeps whenever I go inside her. One time I tried writing her a message using her hand, but my letters are all weird. You gotta warn her about Dad.”

  A little voice tells me that I can’t trust a word this woman says. She thinks she’s a ghost. The bruise could be from anything.

  But I already know I’m not going home. Not yet.

  Mrs. Evers races off to dance around the jacaranda tree, and I sit watching, waiting for the other Mrs. Evers to wake up.

  * * *

  The wind yanks at my clothes as storm clouds envelop the sky like a linen shroud. Butterflies vanish. Mrs. Evers freezes in place, sniffing at the air. A small branch plummets to the ground and looks for a moment like a mangled claw.

  Taking Mrs. Evers by the hand, I lead her inside, to the milk-warm sanctuary of my room. I close the door behind us and turn the lock. In a dark hollow of my mind, I imagine Mr. Evers lurking in the hallway, his face knotted and wrong.

  “Can’t we go in my room?” Mrs. Evers says. “I want to play in the cottage.”

  “Not now,” I say.

  The woman groans, and I hand over the plastic animals I scooped up on the way here. She grins. Almost immediately, the creatures begin shouting battle cries and go to war. A zebra with a British accent is the first to fall.

  As the light in my room dims, I pick the bobby pins off my bed and place them in a neat pile on a mirrored vanity tray. My hand trembles with every action.

  Thunder growls outside, and a small voice says, “It sounds close.”

  “We’ll be fine,” I say.

  In the battle of the animals, a short-range missile blasts the rhino and elephant. The rhino clanks against the window and the elephant barely avoids hitting the eighty-four-inch, high-definition television. My mouth opens, and I almost tell Mrs. Evers not to throw things in the house. What do I think I’m doing?

  After a few minutes, Mrs. Evers crawls over the carnage of the battlefield and climbs into my bed. She curls up in the shape of a crescent moon.

  I drag a mahogany armchair to the side of the bed, and
the clamor of the storm intensifies.

  “I hope the lightning hits the roof,” Mrs. Evers says, wearing a small smile. Then she closes her eyes.

  I sit, and watch her, and wait.

  Soon, my focus drifts beyond the bed, to a headless child depicted in the stained-glass window. The girl or boy grapples with a demon-faced crow, shoving a hand into the creature’s bulbous eye. When lightning flashes outside, the whole scene blazes, and I turn away.

  Mrs. Evers sleeps without even the slightest movement. Absurdly, my heart rate surges until I’m able to perceive Mrs. Evers’s chest rising and falling.

  I take a deep breath. Another.

  Grabbing one of my novels, I read the opening paragraph again and again. The author attempts to usher me into a churning metropolis where a woman in red maneuvers her body against the flow of foot traffic. I try to see what she sees, but the people and the buildings keep evaporating from my mind. Only certain words manage to anchor themselves inside me. Words like emphysemic and abominable.

  I give up on the book when Mrs. Evers sits up suddenly, as if waking from a nightmare.

  She glances around the room and her gaze pauses on my face. “Oh no,” she says, in her natural voice. “Have I been wandering again? I’m so sorry for the intrusion, Ms. Valdez. I’m afraid somnambulism runs in my family.”

  “It’s all right,” I say. “Before you go, I was wondering if we could speak for a moment?”

  “Yes, of course,” she says. She sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the clutter of animals on the floor. The wind murmurs at the window.

  I say, “You . . . um . . . you spoke to me while you were sleepwalking.”

  She bites at a violet fingernail. “Oh?”

  “Yeah.” What am I supposed to say now? I study my hands, searching for answers. “You told me that Mr. Evers didn’t let you see Isabella before she was cremated. Is that true?”

  Mrs. Evers releases a soft snicker. “That is none of your business, Ms. Valdez. But if you must know, yes. Hubert knows how sensitive I am. He knew my heart would break to see my daughter that way. He only wanted to protect me.”

  “You told me he locked her in a dark room. He wouldn’t let her out, even when she cried.”

  Mrs. Evers stares at me in silence, and lightning saturates the room with a dark blue radiance.

  “You showed me the bruise on your chest,” I say.

  “That’s nothing,” Mrs. Evers says, in a cold, piqued tone. She stands and heads for the door.

  “You seemed frightened,” I say, following behind her. “You can come with me, Mrs. Evers. We can leave this house right now.”

  Without turning, Mrs. Evers says, “I would never break up my family.”

  Then she lets out an awkward yelp and backs away from the door.

  “Oh god, sweetie,” she says, to the empty air. “You scared me.”

  Thunderclaps roll around us, like snarling dragons circling the house.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying, sweetie. Calm down.” The mother reaches out with trembling fingers and caresses nothing. Then she quickly pulls her hand away. “Oh god, sweetheart. Your face . . . Please calm down! What do you want, sweetie?”

  “She wants you to come with me,” I say.

  “She would never wish for me to leave our home.”

  “Listen to her.”

  “She can’t speak!”

  Mrs. Evers passes through the empty, spectral space in front of her, and I follow her into the hallway.

  “Mrs. Evers, wait.”

  “Leave me alone,” she says, her body dissolving into the shadows ahead.

  As the storm lulls, I collect the vanquished zoo animals, and among them I discover a crinkled photograph of Isabella. A crown of lavender flowers rests on her dark curls. I place the photo on the mirrored vanity tray. Then I stand hugging my chest in the middle of the room. Should I speak with Mrs. Evers again? What else can I do for this woman? For now, I sit cross-legged on the disheveled bed and I attempt to read. The characters keep transforming into a girl with big brown eyes and an impish smile. Isabella anchors in my mind, as if to say, “Don’t give up on us. Not yet.”

  * * *

  I wake up on a soft bed with sunshine caressing half my face. For a moment or two, I expect to find Stephen sprawled out beside me like a gingerbread man. I expect his ratty socks and his feminine arms and his Boba Fett T-shirt. The memory brightens and then fades.

  I’m in Stockton House. I am alone.

  According to my phone, I only slept for a few minutes, but this feels wrong.

  On my way to the servants’ hall, I turn a sharp corner and nearly collide with Mr. Evers and his walking stick.

  “Ms. Valdez,” he says, grinning at my stomach and then my eyes. “I presumed you would be halfway to hearth and home by now.”

  I can feel a mishmash of emotions amassing in my forehead, heating up my skin. Sweat slithers down my back.

  “I changed my mind,” I say, more quietly than I intend. “I’d like to help your wife.”

  The man’s smile stretches farther across his clean-cut face. “This is wondrous news indeed. No doubt our little realm will benefit from your influence.”

  “I hope so. If you’ll excuse me.”

  The man clears his throat and remains obstructing my path. “Before we part ways. I wonder if you have an inkling of my wife’s whereabouts? The last I saw of her, she hurled insults at me and then retreated into the ether. I was just about to comb the grounds.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know where she is.”

  He sighs. “Even in her altered state, Molly never used to spew such vitriol at me. I fear that she’s losing the battle against whatever enervating shadows she has inside her.” With a thumb, he massages the alabaster face that tops his walking stick. The carved head gapes at me with eyeless sockets and a wide open mouth. “I know she’s not to blame for any of this, and yet . . . her transgressions always sting me to my core. How could they not? Before we lost Isabella, my Molly didn’t have a dishonest or malicious bone in her body. My wife was never perfect, mind you. She spoiled Isabella, and she spoiled her husband, but she never . . .” His voice breaks, and he looks me in the eyes. “I’m droning on again, aren’t I? I fear your countenance brings this out in me. Well, thank you for listening.”

  “I’ll let you know if I find her,” I say, trying to sound convincing.

  The man smiles. He taps his walking stick on the floor. “Ah, before I forget. I would very much like to capture your likeness in one of my paintings. I will, of course, recompense you liberally for any hours you sacrifice posing in my chair. Whatever time you can spare would certainly satisfy my needs.”

  “No,” I say, as an image of my portrait flashes in my mind. In the painting, my eyes coil together in a bloodshot spiral. My tongue squirms from a yawning nostril. “I’d rather not.”

  The light of his smile wanes. “Even an hour or two would suffice.”

  “No.”

  “Very well,” Mr. Evers says. “If you change your mind, you know how to reach me.”

  The man grips his walking stick by the neck, and as he hurries past me, he grazes my arm with his own.

  I take a deep breath. Another.

  In the stairwell ahead, I ascend past the deformed faces etched into the walls. I observe savage, black scribbles on most of their foreheads. One of the women has her eyes blacked out. As I turn away from the image, I can feel the invisible hands on my shoulders, ready to twirl me around and push me down the stairs. I shut my eyes tight. The hands evaporate.

  A stuffed beaver sits at the top of the stairs. She wears oversized pink sunglasses and holds a permanent marker under her paw.

  I place the beaver on the dining table, next to the centerpiece of baby blue eyes.

  Raul leans against the pool table, shifting the cue back and forth between his hands. He says, “I finally solved the mystery of the runaway capybara.”

  “Oh yeah?” I
say.

  “Yep. She was bit by a radioactive hummingbird.”

  “That is the only reasonable explanation.”

  Of course, I’m assuming that Mrs. Evers is the one responsible for the capybara’s frequent escapes. Raul may not know about Mrs. Evers’s psychological problems, so I keep the theory to myself.

  “Robin said you need a ride into town?” Raul says, returning the pool cue to a red oak wall rack. “Are you ready to go?”

  “I’ve decided to stay awhile.”

  “A wise choice,” Raul says, and joins me at the table. “If you left now, you’d miss out on Robin’s famous pulled pork.”

  “Heaven forbid.”

  The gardener plucks one of the wildflowers from the centerpiece and tucks it behind the beaver’s ear. “Robin should be here in a few minutes,” he says. “Care to play some pool while we wait?”

  “Loser buys the winner a yacht?”

  “Funny. I was thinking the same thing.”

  We play, and I already feel myself losing. One summer, I played pool every evening, but I can’t quite invoke that girl with the frazzled jeans and the Jem and the Holograms T-shirt. I reach out, and the girl shrinks back into a thick fog.

  After a long stretch of silence, I say, “Raul, I . . . if I asked you a question, could we keep it between us?”

  Raul leans his pool cue against the table. “Yeah,” he says. “Shoot.”

  “I was wondering if you’ve ever known Mr. Evers to act violently? Inappropriately?”

  He rubs at the side of his neck. “Violently? No. I wouldn’t say he’s ever done anything especially inappropriate, but let’s be honest—the guy is weird. I once told him that I’d rather not use any artificial plants in the gardens and he went off on a five-minute rant about how fake flowers are basically alive? Something like that. I don’t understand half of what the guy says.”

  Within minutes, Robin arrives with her slow-cooker pulled pork with apple slaw.

  Robin says, “I didn’t know if you’d still be with us, miss, but I prepared a plate for you just in case, thank heavens. I used mayonnaise for the slaw, instead of sour cream, so you can rest easy, miss.”

  “Thank you, Robin.” I pick at a dried ketchup stain on the stuffed beaver’s foot. “I’ve decided to stay and help the family. I’m going to need Mrs. Evers’s cell number, so I can reach her more easily throughout the day.”