She Walks in Shadows(10)
It did not work. Nate must have been waiting downstairs, because she woke up back in the attic with a welt and a throbbing pain in the back of her head. She resumed screaming because now the attic was drenched in fading amber half-light and that meant she had been locked in that room for almost an entire day. A child’s voice screamed back at her from somewhere on the second floor. The “Mom” dragged like a serrated knife through the wood and the insulation, and she realized it was Teddy. He shouted something about “Dad” and “crazy” and “room,” and she thought at first that he was talking about her plight, but no. Nate had locked him in the spare bedroom, the one they saved for family — family that never visited.
She told Teddy to apologize to Nate. She told him to ask Zeke for help. But in the end, all she could do was press herself flat against the floor and sing, “I love you. A bushel and a peck. A bushel and a peck, and a hug around the neck.”
That night, she stacked up broken furniture underneath the attic window and tried to signal Ambrose with the flashlight. His truck was hurtling by ten miles over the speed limit; he was probably on his way back from Cellar’s Bar and Grill, and he was probably rushing home for another, but she didn’t have a choice. She switched the flashlight on and off, on, off, on, off until his red tail lights disappeared behind the cottonwoods. Had the truck slowed? It hadn’t stopped.
When the attic door was pushed open, she had to bite her knuckle to keep from calling Ambrose’s name.
“You have to let the boys go,” she said. She could not see Nate’s expression, but his face had been a dark blank to her for months now. That light from the sky had come and eaten all the color off his face — all the variegation, the jokes he’d told her, the promises he’d made her. Every time he had shown her what a good father he was. “I’ll stay with you. I’ll help you through this, but you need to let someone else take care of them for a while.”
“I need you to prove your loyalty to me, Abby. You and Teddy both.” He pushed a cob of their corn — tiny shriveled kernels bounded their grotesquely swollen cousins like rings of baby teeth — toward her on a paper plate. The big, awful kernels looked like unblinking eyes. “Please eat it. Please show me I’m not wrong.”
She picked out a little tooth-kernel and tucked it down between her lip and her gum. It immediately dissolved and filled her mouth with something that melted like pixy stix, something that tasted like bloody soap. “Let them go stay with my sister.”
He nudged the plate with the long barrel of his gun. “More.”
So, she ate more, but Teddy must not have, because his little voice dwindled to nothing but a whisper that Abigail eventually realized was her own ragged breath, tearing in and out.
It took Merrill hours that might have been days to speak to her. He would only push the door open by an inch. She crawled toward him in the dark, chewing another kernel — she was hoping they were poisoning her and was taking the fact that she couldn’t feel her legs anymore as a good sign. “We have to be quiet so Daddy doesn’t get mad,” he whispered. Pale-blue eyes rolled down toward the light. “Teddy won’t come out of that room.”
“I know,” she said. “Listen, baby. You gotta tell your daddy that you’re going to the well. Tell him you’re going to get water and then go to Mr. Pierce’s, okay? Go. I love you.”
Pale-blue eyes blinked, very slowly. In between, she saw her little boy smiling, crying, sleeping, dead. A great many colors passing so quickly they were all bleeding together into one monstrous, endless whole.
When Abigail woke it was day. Rainbow sunlight filled the room with glitter, though she wore a cloak of shadow. The attic door was open and Ambrose was clambering up to see her. “Abby? Abby, are you in here?” He sighed green-mint toothpaste. “You’re okay, now. Nate’s downstairs; he’s messed up bad. I don’t think he can move. I don’t know what’s happened to him, he … I think he needs a doctor. I can’t find … any of the boys.”
She started to take off the shadow-cloak. The light started to touch the old useless leather skin she could no longer feel. Her hair wrapped around the sun and started to burn.
“Abby? Honey?”
The shadow-cloak pooled around the stumps that had once held her feet. All her cells looked at Ambrose, waiting to be embraced, but when his eyes and only his eyes looked back at her, they wept with horror and hatred, and he shot her with his unseeing fingers that cradled the gun like a baby. The pain was not a pain but a liberation. She rose as Ambrose fell, rose all the way to the ceiling and blossomed like a flower, filling the house’s every nook. She saw Nate on the couch, dying and then dead and still shuddering, pieces of his mortal coil stubbornly struggling along on the floor. But he was fractured; she was whole.
The walls of the house peeled open like an onion for Abigail. Outside, the well was beating like a brilliant magenta heart, a small nuclear star. The boys were inside with the dogs; they were all waving to her. The many-splendored light was in there, too, curling and coiling as it prepared to spring-board off this world and into the next. It wrapped her in electric seaweed tendrils and promised her oceans. It promised her color. But when the boys weren’t broken down into simpler matter, they were saying, “Mama,” and for them, she floated down. Crimson and indigo and violet, for violence.