Ophelia, Alive Read online

  She says, “I don’t know. There’s a missing piece here. Something you’re not telling me.”

  Till we prove it works. “Maybe you should mind your own business.” I said it again, and I wish I hadn’t said it again, and I wish I could take it back, again.

  “I just think it’s weird to see someone who’s obviously young and ambitious working in the morgue in a public hospital. And that she got you a job, even though you two obviously don’t get along, and she didn’t ask you anything in return—”

  “Kate. Stop.” Don’t tell anyone.

  “I’m just concerned, is all. You’re sure you’re not taking anything? Maybe a prescription? Ambien or something?”

  “No. Leave me alone.” It’s our secret.

  “Look, Oaf—”

  “DON’T EVER CALL ME THAT.”

  And she’s suddenly quiet, and I realize I just yelled, and she shrinks back against her bench, eyes shining in the crisscross shadows.

  She sighs and I’m shaking. “I just—if something’s wrong, I want to help.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I tell her. “Just drop it.” And as I stand up I bump my bowl and milk splatters all over her food. Soggy Cheerios in her ketchup.

  “Phelia, don’t be this way. I’m just trying to be a friend—”

  “Maybe I don’t need a friend, okay? Maybe I can live without the condescending bullshit you call friendship. Maybe I—maybe I don’t need you to rescue me.”

  I shouldn’t have said that, either. I don’t know why I did, but I did, and I can’t take it back. The eyes in the room are all staring at me, and the noises of forks and glasses have stopped, and there’s nothing to do but run for the door.

  So I do.

  “Phelia, wait—” (and I stop)—“I’m sorry,” she says, “for whatever I said. You just don’t understand. You think I’m condescending, and maybe I am, but I’m trying to help, the best way I know how. I can’t save you from drowning if I’m treading water myself, and I can’t pretend to understand, I can only try.”

  (But I can’t turn around.)

  She says, “I know—I know it’s fucking lame, and I’m sorry, but I can’t dress up the truth. And the truth is we all need friends to pull us out of our shit, and maybe I can’t be that for you, but—what am I trying to say? Find someone? I guess?”

  I can hear her voice choking on salt, but I can’t turn around, won’t be weak, won’t be wrong. I knock someone’s tray off their table and throw the door open and run.

  I don’t know where I’m going, but I have to escape all the eyes, all the people who are wandering around campus. People on sidewalks, standing in crowds. I run back toward my dorm, trying not to make eye contact, trying not to breathe, not to think. Cop cars parked on the street, walkie-talkies and officers standing and talking with horrible mustaches, sunglasses years out of date. Dirty piles of snow melting fast in the sun. Soggy squishes from wet mud, under my feet. Yellow tape, yellow tape.

  I throw open the door, the one that leads into the stairwell, and I climb under the staircase and hide, like a troll waiting for someone to cross her bridge. I hug my knees and I squeeze out the light while my cheeks burn with tears, and I pray hard for silence and let painted concrete suck heat from my body. I breathe. And I breathe and I breathe.

  It’s horrible, completely awful, but everything is starting to make sense now. The bodies, the nightmares, the gaps. The way that she found me last night.

  And I just hope she doesn’t see it. I hope she hasn’t put all of this together.

  But what if it is me?

  An hour ago, I would have said that was the stupidest thought ever, but now it seems like a real possibility. The nightmares started a few days ago, and that was about the same time I started finding the bodies. And as they got more intense...

  The killer is me.

  Is that even possible? Real murders woven through my dreams and enacted while I slept? Is that a thing? Can that happen? Kate was talking about drugs, but I’m not on drugs except—

  Yeah...

  It’s so stupid, but that has to be it. Sara said the drug was psychoactive (whatever that means), and she was banned from human testing, and she’s avoided every question I’ve asked her about it, and she’s been questioning me about my moods and behavior, and—

  I look at my nails, the ones with the paint chips, broken and flaked and bleeding in places. Kate’s telling the truth, she must be. No, this is the only possibility that makes sense of everything—the nightmares, the sleepwalking, the bodies.

  It’s weird to think that I’m a killer—

  That my theme song should be Jackson’s “Thriller”—

  But the facts all align:

  All the bodies are mine—

  Something...

  Something...

  (This last line’s just filler.)

  I’m telling you, limericks are so freaking hard.

  I guess the first thing to do is quit the stuff.

  Wow, what will Sara say when I tell her I’m done?

  I guess I’ll have to look for another job, or—

  But I can’t think about that now. People’s lives are in danger.

  Do I turn myself in?

  What an awful question. Either answer is terrible.

  My cheeks are stinging and my eyes are burning.

  I shut them again.

  It’s not your fault, she says, and I feel her hand on my shoulder, with the manicured nails and the pea coat that scratches my ear. I say But it is, I never should have listened to Sara, I should have refused, I’m so weak. And then he’s there, the one with the flannel and beard, at my other side, saying We have to move forward. I say, But where’s forward? Where can I even go from here? and she says, Get up. There’s something upstairs that we need to get rid of. I tell them I’m not sure I can. I’m not even sure I can stand up at all. My legs are both burning from thousands of sleepless nights spent spilling blood—and he says, Don’t exaggerate, it’s only been a couple. And he takes one hand and she takes the other, and I’m back on my feet, and my phone is ringing.

  Vibrations and ringing. A buzz in my pocket. My phone ringing, for real.

  An unrecognized number that looks familiar. “Hello?”

  Silence, then a crackle, then: “Hi, is this Ophelia?”

  “It is.”

  “Ophelia, this is your father.”

  The words are tiny in my phone’s little speaker, but they fill the yellow-gray glow of the stairwell, and I swallow.

  “Hello?” he says.

  “Yeah, I’m here, sorry—I just—I just didn’t think you’d actually call me back.” I’d actually forgotten that I had called him. It was so long ago.

  He says, “Listen, I, uh—I don’t know what you were hoping for, but —I dunno, we could go grab a beer, or something. That’s not weird, is it?” And when I say nothing: “Is it?”

  “How’s now?” I say, on top of his words. Anything to get out of here. Anything seems like a small problem compared to the blood on my hands.

  (Anything at all.)

  sun. jan. 16.

  2:34 pm.

  waiting.

  I’m sitting on the curb now, waiting outside my building, still in disbelief this is happening, that he’s actually coming to get me. And I can’t believe I’m doing this either, can’t believe I’m meeting up with a man I’ve barely given a thought to since I was kid. The wind is blowing gently, whipping a stray wisp of my hair up and down, and it tugs at my scalp. Everything outside is muddy and warm and waiting to freeze over again.

  I jump every time a car goes by, thinking Maybe this is him and what do I say and what do I do? but each car slides past me, kicking bits of gravel at my knees.

  Maybe he won’t even show up.

  An hour or two ago that would have been a relief, but now that this rendezvous is my only escape from the realities I just discovered, I’m kind of dreading his absence, the way I used to at night when I would lie in bed awake listening
to Sara’s snores. I’d lie there and stare at the glowing star stickers on the sloping ceiling, shining green and bending over like the supernatural trying to kiss the real. And every moment without a click from the screen door downstairs was another spent listening in fear to the breath in the room, praying it wouldn’t turn into snorts and invade the air with its words. And after the clicks, when the snores would fade into low, simple breaths, the stars would burn out, a chemical death, repeated each night, inevitable for all glow stickers. And yet—when mine would burn out, I would witness it live, every time, as the masters of galaxies dwindled to red dwarfs, then brown, and then turned to black holes in the darkness. Then nothing was left there in front of my eyes except dull, faded stickers veneered with a salty, green crust. They still might be stuck to that ceiling somewhere in a landfill, yellowed and cracked but still there, because stickers cling on, even once you outgrow them. If you keep your old stuff and don’t throw it away, the stickers stay glued to it, fading in sunlight and wearing off slowly when your sweaty hands rub against it, till faces you loved are distorted and grins become mocking. Somewhere in my bedroom at Mom’s place are drawers of old notebooks all covered in grimacing, torn Barbie faces with blinding-white skin and gray, fuzzy teeth, black grease in their hair and their shoulders ripped off. I can’t open the drawer without looking away.

  A door clicks open.

  “Ophie?”

  There’s a car in front of me, a yellow Beetle, not the new kind but one of the old ones from the ‘60s—repainted and running smoothly, but definitely one of the old ones. And inside is a man I haven’t seen in years, stubbly and wrinkled, but not all that different. A starched white shirt and pleated pants, a stethoscope hanging around his neck for no good reason. He’s wearing a lab coat, but it’s open and splayed over the seat.

  “...Dad?”

  “Hi.”

  And I stand there for a moment looking into a tired pair of eyes, blue like mine, but he’s skinny like Sara, lanky and crammed comically into this car, hands refusing to leave the wheel and argyle socks showing. He’s biting his lip. I stand in the wind, adjusting my coat and noticing that my shoe’s untied. The wind is warm and dry and it’s chafing my lips. “Well,” he says, finally, after too long, “would you like to get in?”

  I stoop into the car, pulling on my coat to keep it from shutting in the door. “Nice wheels.”

  He steps on the gas and we’re moving. “Well, y’know. Keeps me humble.” Hits the turn signal, makes a right.

  “No, I mean I really like it. It’s unique. You don’t see a lot of old-school Beetles anymore.” He coughs and I slam the ends of my seatbelt together until they click. “Anyway, I was expecting a Porsche or something. This is fun.”

  “Well, it used to be a Porsche. Before alimony payments.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. I reach inside my coat and scratch my arm.

  He says, “Sorry, that probably wasn’t the right thing to say. I didn’t mean to insult your mother. I—”

  “It’s all right,” I tell him. “We’re not getting along right now, anyway.”

  He says, “Oh.” And I hope we get to the bar soon, because God, I need a drink, and he adds, “You two always seemed like you were on the same wavelength.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Anyway, I only drive this because it was cheap. I have a friend who restores cars for fun, and he got this thing street-legal for me. Barely charged me anything.”

  “It’s nice.” We’re stopped at a light. “Actually, I kinda wish I had one.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s a lot more interesting than the nineties Escort I’m stuck with. Blah. The nineties were the dark ages of cars.”

  “‘The dark ages of cars’? Really?”

  “And also movies. I was thinking about that the other day.”

  “You realize you were born in the nineties.”

  “Yeah, I’m still trying to live that down.”

  He laughs. It’s a laugh I haven’t heard in years, one that would shake the floorboards in the house as I drifted to sleep at night, wrapped in warm blankets. “But ‘90s movies suck, huh? Hmm.”

  “Come on,” I tell him. “Forrest Gump? Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Even the award-winners were terrible.”

  “Fargo?” he says. “Shawshank Redemption?”

  “Name a third.”

  “Uh—” and he bites his lip and makes a left and laughs. “Okay, you win.” Pulls into a spot in front of a bar, adjusts the gearshift, yanks on the parking brake. I open my door and step out into an almost-puddle. The road is wet from all the melting snow, which is flowing (loudly) into storm drains. “You ever been here?” he says.

  “Uh—yeah. I used to come to concerts here in high school, sometimes.”

  “High school. Huh.” He stops for a second, standing there in the breeze, gray strands of hair flipped vertical. “Well—” he opens the door for me and I walk into the smoky darkness. It’s a place I used to know well, with a bar up front and a stage off to the side. Black walls crusted with guitars and neon beer signs. Dangerous and safe, tacky and real, the sort of place that truckers and hipsters both pretend to like. Where the sound system will play Nirvana, then Enya, then Miles Davis. The sort of place I used to come all the time, back when I needed a fake ID.

  But I’ve never spent much time on the bar side before. I’ve never seen the stage empty. I’ve never been here on a Sunday afternoon to see all the sparsely filled tables of middle-aged guys picking at nachos. Somehow it’s darker when it’s emptier, even in the daytime. The tables are crowded haphazardly, casting jagged shadows against the black paint that joust with the guitar necks and jut up against the bar like encroaching ivy. It’s strange to see it like this, when my only memories of it are concerts with friends. Crowded rooms and loud music, youth and rebellion, back when I thought those words meant something profound. Back when rebellion was easy and cheap.

  I study his face. Like the bar I used to know it’s familiar but more worked-over, and more vacant. The strong lines I remember chasing monsters from closets now clash with jagged wrinkles and five-o’clock shadow. The strong arms that once held me have atrophied some.

  He sits at the bar and asks for a Guinness. I join him and ask for the same.

  “Same beer,” he says. “Cool.”

  “Oh come on, everybody likes Guinness.” I shouldn’t have said it. Shouldn’t have shot down his stumbling attempt at connecting. Should’ve given him a fist bump or whatever. Should’ve done a lot of things, but the moment is gone now, and we’re sitting in silence. His blue eyes (like mine) are looking down, scanning the bar for something to play with, and he finally picks up a peanut from the bowl. Rattles it around in his fist like he’s rolling a die, and then flips it between his fingers. “Here,” I finally say.

  “What?”

  “Here.” I’m making mirrored “L”s with my thumbs and forefingers to form football goalposts, laughing at my own lameness. “Go for a field goal.”

  He laughs, and he turns the peanut on its end on the bar, pinning it down with his left pointer finger. Then he starts whistling my school’s fight song in a goofy, piercing tone, and he jogs his fingers up the bar, pauses, and flicks the peanut through the smoky air. It sails, end-over-end, till it flies perfectly between my goalposts.

  My arms shoot into the air. “It’s good!” I make some of those throaty crowd noises that people always make even though they don’t actually sound much like a crowd, and he laughs, and he grabs another peanut, and I laugh too. I swallow some beer and I say, “I bet you can’t do that twice.”

  He shrugs at the peanut he’s got now—it’s crooked and lopsided, with a point at one end—and he sets it up on the table, backs up his little finger-person, whistles some more, and glances up at my eyes for just a second. “You ready?”

  Finger-person charges up the varnished cherry, dodges the puddle from the condensation on his glass, and kicks like it’s the fourth quarter of t
he big bowl game.

  This one pulls a little to the left—I blame the weird, pointy shell—but it easily slips between my fingers. “Another lucky shot.”

  “I could do this all day,” he says, and grabs another, sets it up, and flicks it again.

  I barely have time to get my fingers up, but it sails right between them and smacks me in the forehead, and I feel the shell crack with a sudden, salty sting. “Ow.”

  “You okay?” he asks, putting a hand on my arm.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I tell him, rubbing my head. “I’m just a whiner.” And he laughs, and I laugh. And he gives me a hug—the first in ten years, and it’s weird, but I like it.

  “Sorry, I was caught up in the moment.”

  “I could tell.” And I add, “You’re pretty good at that.”

  “Yeah, well,” he says. “Years of putting off studying for med school exams.”

  I laugh.

  “I used to take your mother here all the time,” he says. “Back when we were in grad school.”

  “A dive like this?”

  “It used to be nicer.”

  “Yeah, I thought I remembered it that way.”

  “That’s so weird that you used to come here.” He picks up his beer.

  “This used to be where all the really good shows were,” I tell him. “I used to sneak in here all the time for concerts when I was in high school.”

  “You’d sneak in?” he says, and I see worry flash in his eyes, but he knows it’s too late to be a dad.

  I say, “Yeah, a lot of the shows were eighteen and above. But so what? I’m twenty-three now and I turned out okay.”

  “Twenty-three...?” I see him counting years, adding in his head.

  “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

  He says, “Yeah, but it’s not just that. I’m just wondering why you’re twenty-three and you still haven’t finished your bachelor’s.”

  “I, uh—” I better drink for this conversation—“taking a fifth year isn’t that all unusual.”

  “Oh no?”

  “Uh—no.”

  “...but?”

  “But I also had to change my major.” (Here we go.) “I mean, what can I say? I started in education because I thought I should do something with a clear career path, or whatever. And then I tried teaching and got my ass handed to me.”