Ophelia, Alive Page 30

  “Stop! Go away! You’re not real!”

  You’re dead, you’re not real, stop following me.

  They shrink away, a little. I bite my lip to stop the bleeding and blow water out my nose. But the footsteps in my head don’t go away (in the walls, in the attic?), and I just want to be alone, by myself, alone, but I don’t think that I ever will be again. I reach up into the steam, and the faucet cuts my hand (twice) before I have a grip on it, and I pull myself up to my knees. I kneel in the water and tears mix with blood, and they run down the drain, and I beg for it all to just stop.

  I don’t know how long I stay here like this, because seconds turn to hours and ounces to gallons, but the red water turns pink and then clear. Then I reach out for the faucet and shut it off and drops drip down the drain in the echoing silence. My hair hangs in matted strands across my face, and the white-and-black stripes bob up and down, and in the cavernous tile, no one can hear me crying. I can feel the house heaving under the buckling weight of the snow—white and gray layers of ice crystals entombing us in our own home, like the layers of rock that turned the dinosaurs into goo. If no one ever digs us out, we’ll die here, and then we’ll just be puddles of petroleum waiting to burn. No one will ever care that my mom was a writer or that I was a murderer; we’ll go back to just being carbon molecules cycling through the system, dug up and burned and pumped into the air (the water, the soil), until maybe the last bits of us become part of someone else.

  You’re not special, snowflakes. People say you’re unique and no two are the same, but none of it matters. If you hadn’t buried me alive in my mom’s house, some other dumb snowflakes would have, so stop acting so smug about it. And then you’d all melt and disappear anyway.

  God, it hurts.

  Hurts to carry all this guilt. Hurts to be unable to tell my mother the truth. Hurts to know that she’s unwittingly hiding a killer in her own home. Hurts to know that I betrayed Kate’s trust and I didn’t tell her the truth when I could have, and now she knows because she found out in the worst possible way, and she probably called the police last night (of course she did, why wouldn’t she have?), and it’s only a matter of time before the roads are clear and they’re knocking on my (mom’s) door. Maybe I should just crawl back into bed and shut everything out and sleep away my last few hours of freedom. With any luck, I won’t wake up.

  And I’m about to do that, but that’s when I hear the piano.

  It’s a song that I’ve heard before; Sara used to bang it out all the time. “Take the ‘A’ Train,” by Duke Ellington, but it’s different from how she used to play it. There was a mechanical exactness in her strokes—it was a sequence of notes timed just as Duke had recorded them, programmed precisely into her hands and executed like a surgeon. She used to play it all the time, like she got real pleasure from hitting the same notes over and over again, never deviating from the head or changing the tempo. I’ve been sick of it for years.

  But this isn’t her.

  This is someone different, someone who likes to ride a groove, to improvise however she wants. Notes that bounce, notes that dodge in and out from the melody, tripping over each other in an awkward and thrilling ballet of pent-up emotion, somehow (miraculously) sliding up and down the keyboard. It sounds like Kate’s slide guitar.

  But—?

  I know it’s not my mother because my mother doesn’t play—just keeps the baby grand around because it looks nice. And it’s not Sara because Sara’s never played like this, ever. It doesn’t make sense, though, that Kate would be here, that she’d be playing my mom’s piano like nothing had happened last night. And it really, obviously, doesn’t make sense that she’d manage to get here when every road in town is blocked.

  And yet, there it is, someone (someone!) banging away on the keys in a style distinctly Kate-like while I sit on the floor of the tub brushing wet hair out of my face and feeling sorry for myself. I rub my sore eyes till the tub floor turns green and then purple and then white again, and the music keeps playing, darting back and forth and doubling in on itself, like someone who doesn’t really know the song and doesn’t care. And somehow, it steadies the quivering room, till my mom’s knocking on the door, saying, “Ophie, you all right in there? There’s someone here to see you.”

  Somehow that’s enough, and I jump up, through the curtain, grab a towel from the wall to wrap myself in, and it’s one of the “good towels,” but who cares, and I’m stumbling down the stairs, out into the living room where Kate is making the piano sing.

  She’s sitting there, in snow-covered boots, her spiral dreads bouncing up and down and her scarf swinging back and forth while her mildly clumsy fingers stumble over the keys. It’s obvious she doesn’t play piano all that much, that she’s just blowing off steam, and there’s a determined half-scowl on her face that tells me being any better would mean less catharsis, less to hear. It still makes no sense that she’s sitting in my mom’s living room, but it takes me forever to return to that thought because I can’t look away from her fingers, and it takes her a minute to look up and see me, but then when she does she says my name and she runs across the room and I’m in her arms.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask as she squeezes my towel and I fumble, trying to keep it around me.

  She says, “I had to come after you,” as if that makes perfect sense and explains everything. And she hugs me again and says, “Do you want to get dressed? You look cold.”

  “Uh—okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I ascend the stairs to my room in a daze, entirely confused by what just happened. The old high school clothes in my closet fit me again, though they’re admittedly a little childish. Studs and spikes from a misguided attempt at being edgy. I find some jeans that aren’t too worn and a t-shirt with the name of a band on it that’s not too embarrassing, and I open the door to let Kate in. She raises her eyebrows a bit when she sees the band on my shirt, but that’s okay, and she sits in the middle of the floor, cross-legged, like story time in kindergarten.

  I sit on the edge of my bed. The sun’s back behind the clouds and ice is overtaking the window again, covering it in crisscrossed bars that remind me I’m trapped like an animal. It’s snowing more, and the snow has already piled up high on the windowsill, and now it’s just bouncing off. She’s looking up at me from the floor, surrounded by half-full boxes, the shadows from the bars of ice playing across her face. She takes a breath, and she swallows.

  “I’ve...got a lot to say,” she says.

  “I’ve got a lot of questions,” I admit.

  She says, “I imagine, but—let me get this out. This is important.” Clears her throat. “I guess I’ll start at the beginning.” And she bites her lip and she picks up a paperback from one of the boxes—my Lovecraft collection—and plays with its dog-eared cover. And finally, she says, “I like horror movies...a lot.”

  “What?”

  She laughs, awkward. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It makes absolutely no sense to start the conversation there, does it? I’m—I’m trying to work my way toward my point. It’s hard—you’ll have to be patient with me.” She half-opens the book and she flips a yellowed page back and forth between her hands, and sighs, and says, “What I’m trying to say is, I’ve seen all sorts of weird violence on movie and TV screens. I’ve seen every zombie movie ever—and yet, somehow, that didn’t prepare me at all for what I saw last night. Even, like, a little, y’know?”

  “I—”

  “No, it’s okay,” she says. “I get it. I see it now. Honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. I guess I was just blinding myself to the truth on purpose, y’know? I didn’t want to think that my roommate was capable of something so disgusting. I like to assume the best of people, and it’s always a mistake.” She’s dog-earing a page. “It’s the drug, isn’t it? It doesn’t just make you act strange—it makes you kill people.”

  I try to think of something to say, but honestly, what c
an I say? Yes, I’m secretly a zombie? Sorry about that?

  She says, “Did you know?”

  “I’m—I’ve been figuring it out. Slowly.”

  “And the fire at the hospital?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that was me.”

  And then there’s silence.

  I’d like to fill it, but with what?

  “Well,” she says, flipping pages, “that’s uh—that’s quite a body count.” She’s staring at the floor, no doubt wondering why she came here. As am I.

  I’m biting my split lip. The blood is sweet, and it’s sour, and I wish it would stop flowing.

  And then, quietly, under her breath, I hear her add, “I really like musicals, too.”

  “Uh—what?” Such a weird thing to say, but I don’t laugh, mostly because I’m just struck by how bizarrely convicted she sounds about this.

  She says, “I’m sorry, this all sounds so stupid now that I’m saying it out loud.” She’s picking at Lovecraft’s pages with her purple nails, calmly. She’s so weirdly comfortable in this room, like she’s forced herself to forget that I’m a danger to her life and everyone else’s. Her breathing is even. “I was thinking about these things the whole way here—rehearsing this conversation over and over. It all made so much sense in my head, but now that I’m saying it out loud, I realize that it’s nonsense. Y’know that feeling?”

  “Every day of my life.”

  “Then I guess I’ll keep trying,” she says. “Man—the truer something is, the harder it is to put it into words, y’know?” She shuts her eyes and scratches her forehead like she’s trying to free an idea, and she asks, “When you tell someone you like musicals, what’s the first thing that they say?”

  “That they’re cornball?”

  She opens her mouth in a frustrated grin, and she breathes through her teeth and says, “Yeah, but more specifically. Everyone who doesn’t like musicals has the exact same complaint about them. At least, in my experience. Any idea what I’m getting at? Try to help me out here, so I know I’m not crazy.”

  “You mean, like, People don’t break out into song in real life, so why would you want to watch a movie where they do? That?”

  “Exactly!” she says. “Exactly. That. I’ve heard it a thousand times. Pretty much every time I admit to liking musicals.”

  I kind of want to say, That’s why most people know better than to admit to liking musicals, but I think better of it. She’s looking up into a corner of the ceiling, like she’s trying to find the next few words there, like she’s still not sure anything she’s saying makes sense.

  She says, “But it’s really weird to me that I never get that reaction when I tell people I like horror movies. Y’know? Like, no one ever says Horror movies are so cornball. People don’t rise from the grave and feast on human flesh in real life, so why would you want to watch a movie about it? No one ever says that. And that’s really interesting to me—that it’s so much easier for people to accept flesh-eating zombies than a little bit of singing and dancing. Y’know?”

  I admit that I hadn’t thought about that before now. I feel like I should say something to fill the silence, but I’m too busy considering the point.

  “I’ve been thinking about this,” she says, “and I’ve decided that I don’t think musicals and horror movies are really all that different, y’know? Musicals take powerful emotions and turn them into something beautiful. Horror movies take powerful emotions and turn them into something ugly. But otherwise, they’re the same. They just go in opposite directions.”

  She stops for a minute, and I can tell this is the moment where the conversation gets harder, where the point she’s been trying to make turns to vapor that can’t be wrapped in words, can’t be nailed to the air. And I can’t say anything, but I’m thinking Keep trying.

  And finally, she says, “I don’t know what I’m trying to say, exactly. I guess that—well—I mean, I believe in heaven. And I believe in hell. But you know that.”

  Keep trying.

  She sighs. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I can’t believe that what we experience directly is all that there is. There are things above our reality and things below it—things that are more real than we are. I mean, otherwise, how do you explain things like horror movies and musicals? Why do images so far removed from our experience resonate with so many people?”

  I could probably explain them a thousand other ways, but Keep trying.

  “What I’m saying is, animals adjust to whatever reality you present them with. If you start kicking your dog every day, pretty soon he’ll just accept that his purpose in life is to get kicked. If you feed him a steak every night, he’ll decide he exists to eat steak. Whatever there is, there is, y’know? That’s how animals think. But people aren’t like that. They’re always reaching above, reaching below, trying to touch the transcendent and the sublime. And I know that doesn’t prove anything, but it’s just what I’ve been thinking about lately.”

  She’s not breathing, just waiting, waiting for me to say something, anything to assure her she’s not just filling the air with craziness. I think she has a point, that there might be something to it, but I can’t find the words.

  Finally, she says, “And again, it’s so weird to me that people are so much more accepting of horror. That no one says, That’s stupid, zombies and ghosts aren’t real. That people are somehow more okay with using their imaginations to create hell than to reach for heaven. I just wonder why that is.”

  “I don’t know.”

  She says, “I don’t know either, exactly. At least, not in a way I can put into words without sounding really trite and blasé.” She breathes, plays with my book, then throws it on the floor and adds, “But I’m realizing something: that you can respond to ugliness by creating more ugliness, or you can respond by trying to do something beautiful. Horror begets horror unless you reach for heaven, y’know?” She sighs, like she finally it all out. “Anyway, that’s why I came here, I guess.”

  She’s leaning forward now, brow furrowed, eyes looking up at me, waiting for a response, some validation, something, anything. I say, “How’d you even get here? I mean, with the roads all blocked?”

  “I walked.”

  “What?”

  “I walked,” she shrugs, like she’s embarrassed, and maybe she is. “It took me all morning and most of the afternoon.”

  “Even driving, it takes forever to get here.”

  “I know.” She breathes. “Maybe I should tell you what I’ve been up to in the last twenty-four hours.”

  I say, “Yeah, I think you should.”

  She sighs, she gets up, she walks over the window. Leans on it (hard), her hand on the sill, while the snow and the sleet push back on her shoulder.

  I listen.

  She says, “I don’t think there’s any way to really describe what it felt like, last night, to walk in on you standing over a mutilated corpse. Like I said, a thousand horror movies couldn’t have prepared me for it. Somehow, seeing you, standing there, gnawing on a human leg bone, was nothing like seeing a zombie in a Romero flick do it. There’s just no comparison.”

  The sleet pounds hard on the window, like dirt being thrown on a coffin.

  “To be honest—and I know this will sound really petty now, but—I was still really mad at you for losing my rosary. But then I saw you there, completely out of control, just tearing another human being apart like an animal, and—well, it’s weird, but what I felt was actually pity. Is that weird? No, I mean, pity’s not quite the right word, but, like—well, I felt bad for you. Not right away, I mean—obviously, first I was just shocked and horrified, and then I was pissed. I was pissed that you would do something so disgusting, but I was more pissed that you hadn’t even tried to tell me the truth. And then I was pissed that you were running away, but then I started thinking, like, What would I have done if I were her? and the answer was Probably the exact same thing, which to be honest was a terrifying thought. I mean, bac
k when we hid that body? Cyndi, or whatever her name was? That was my idea. We all do stupid shit and then try to run from it.”

  Her hand slips off the windowsill and she turns back and looks over the posters on my walls. I’m pretty embarrassed by most of them, but she doesn’t say anything.

  “I’ve only taken a couple of physics classes,” she says, “so don’t let me act like I’m Stephen Hawking or anything, but I was reading the other day that relativity theory would tell you that the passage of time is actually an illusion. We think this moment is happening now, but what’s now is entirely arbitrary. Time’s just another dimension, and right now and tomorrow and three years ago are all coexisting in some sense. Our future selves are all looking back at us, shaking their heads sadly, and our past selves look forward at us, laughing, like Ha! We screwed Present Self good! or whatever. Y’know? I mean, I don’t think that’s the way it really works, but the point is, we’re all basically victims of our past selves. I’m not saying we aren’t responsible for our own actions, because obviously we are, but it’s also true that we can’t undo them. It doesn’t matter what lessons we learned, or didn’t learn, from our pasts—we’re still stuck with them. It doesn’t matter who we are right now; we’ve all done stupid shit that comes back to bite us in the ass. God knows I have.”

  She sinks into the one chair in the room, the one my mom used to read to me in when I was little, and a mushroom cloud of dust explodes into the air.

  “Obviously,” she says, “I didn’t think about the situation all that deeply at the time, because I had a dismembered corpse sitting at my feet. And obviously my first instinct was to call the cops. But clearly I didn’t.”