Over Her Dead Body(74)
Being the firstborn and foolhardier child, Charlie was determined to solve the mystery. I tagged along that brisk Sunday morning as he ventured into the shed to discover what magic had lured them there. After pressing on walls and pulling on rakes and spades and shovels, he finally thought to look under the rubber mat. I had just read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so when we saw that door in the floor, I thought we had found the real live passage to Narnia. I was gravely disappointed to discover that the cold concrete staircase led to a boring little apartment, with no toys, candy, or magical creatures inside. We knew from the way Mom and Dad had snuck in that we weren’t supposed to know about their secret hideaway, so we made a pinkie promise never to speak of it again. The whole idea that our house had a bomb shelter gave me the heebie-jeebies, and I was all too happy to forget it existed.
As I followed Charlie down the claustrophobic stairway, just as I’d done nearly two decades earlier, I marveled at how seeing that empty shelf had poked open my memory bank. I flashed to my nine-year-old self, sitting on the pantry counter, thinking we were just like the Jetsons with their space-age TV-phones. Sometimes Charlie and I used our closed-circuit TV system to play astronaut and comms director. “This is Major Tom to ground control,” Charlie would say into his walkie-talkie from RadioShack. And I would find him on one of the cameras and guide his spaceship back to earth: “This is your comms director, come on in.” But those were silly children’s games. The stakes of today’s outing were way higher than any fake earth landing, and I cursed myself that I was embarking on it sober.
As Charlie stepped into the cinder block living room, I paused on the stairs to take it in—the L-shaped couch, the midcentury modern pillar lamps, the shiny silver countertops.
“Mom?” Charlie called out. “Are you here?”
No answer. My heart was a metronome beating presto, loud and fast in the backs of my ears.
“Maybe in the bedroom?” I suggested.
But Charlie was frozen in his tracks. “Why isn’t she answering?”
“I don’t know, maybe because she hates us?” The anticipation was killing me, so I pushed past him and crossed through the living room, past the cold metal bookcase to the bedroom door. Of course it was closed, but I swallowed my trepidation and turned the knob. And immediately regretted it. “Oh God.”
The expression on my dad’s face when he died was peaceful. He’d looked a little pale when I’d gazed upon his motionless body from the doorway, but not grotesque. Except for the tiny swath of tongue that lilted out onto his violet-blue lower lip, he’d looked pretty normal. His head was on the pillow, his eyes were closed, his hands were palms up by his sides. He was, quite appropriately, in what yogis call Savasana, or corpse pose. By all appearances he had died quite peacefully.
The expression on Mom’s dead face was something entirely different. It was not my dad’s Sleeping Beauty—it was Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Mom’s eyes and mouth were open as wide as manholes, and her desperate fingers were clawing at her throat like ice axes stabbing at a frozen waterfall. I knew from my AP chemistry class that—unlike carbon monoxide poisoning, which can be achieved by sucking on a tailpipe—death by carbon dioxide can be quite painful. What I didn’t know was that, barring a miracle, Charlie and I were doomed to discover whether death by CO2 would be painful for us, too.
“No, no, no, no,” Charlie wailed, then choked on a sob as he fell to his knees. It was his crying, not the sight of Mom, that made me cry, because his grief was the only thing that felt real to me in that surreal moment. I don’t know how long we huddled in the doorway like that—him on his knees, and me steadying myself against the doorjamb—but I suddenly felt the weight of the earth bearing down on us.
“Get up, Charlie,” I said, yanking on his shirt. “We have to get out of here.”
He was still keening, so I pulled him up by his armpits and pushed him toward the stairs like a human tugboat.
“That’s it,” I soothed as I pushed. “Keep walking.”
I was behind him, so I couldn’t see the reason he was shaking his head, that it wasn’t from disbelief and sadness.
“We’re going to get out of here and call the police,” I said, pretending to be calm. And maybe on some level I did feel calm, because I knew the gargoyle that had lived on my shoulder my whole life had been permanently muzzled, and the steady stream of vitriol she spewed had finally been tamped.
“We can’t,” he stammered.
“Yes, we can.”
“No, we can’t,” Charlie cried. “The door is closed!”
I craned my neck to look. I had deliberately, without a doubt, and with great fanfare, left the door to our underground hell open. Growing up with a mother who always had a script that was more important than I was had made me come to revile closed doors. A closed door telegraphed you’re a nuisance, go away, leave me alone. So now I always left them open. Always. And so, like Charlie, I was shocked to see not rain and sky, but a cruel, dull slab blocking our way out.
I forced myself not to panic. “There’s a lever, one sec,” I said as I scooted past him and pulled on the mechanism. But it didn’t open.
I raised my hands over my head and pushed on the door. It still didn’t budge.
“Shit!”
“Let me try.”