The Last One(58)

But I was still startled when the crying resumed a few seconds later. It was louder, and I was able to identify the source as the mound of blankets on the bed. A hiccupy gulp interrupted the cry. Puzzled, I stepped toward the bed. The oblong shape beneath the blankets made me uncomfortable, but I’d come too far to stop, and they were watching, everyone was watching. I picked up the fabric and pulled it back.

Given the chance, a fraction of a second will gladly feel like forever, and that is the kind of forever I experienced as I lifted and immediately dropped the blanket. The light-haired mother prop lying there with marble eyes, black-brown dripping down her latex face to stain the sheets beneath. And in her puffy, mottled arms, a doll swaddled in pale blue. Its lips puckered and frozen, waiting for the bottle by the sink. I barely saw, but I saw. The blanket drifting so slowly from my hand to cover the prop, the doll.

It shames me to admit that their trick worked, that for the length of that forever I thought the props were real. And then the soundtrack looped back to its beginning and the cry sounded again and this time I heard it: a faint mechanical buzzing within the sound. At the same time they sprayed the smell through the vents, I think, or that’s when I noticed it, or maybe in my memory it’s just less important than the sound. Either way, this was my first experience of their rotting stench in close quarters and it permeated my being. I stood there, transfixed, a length of time that I know couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but every time I think about it, every time I remember, it feels longer, it feels like hours.

Even though I knew it was fake, even though the doll was ridiculous-sounding, ridiculous-looking, it hit me, hard. I don’t know why: exhaustion, the poignancy of what that scene was intended to represent. It was like they knew the secret truth behind my confessionals, that this was their way of telling me that they knew I wasn’t really here for a pre-motherhood adventure, but because I don’t think I ever will be ready to have a child. I want to be ready, I want to do it—for him—I wish I could, but I can’t. I applied, I came, in order to delay not the inevitability of motherhood, but of telling my husband the truth.

Standing in the too-blue cabin, I couldn’t stop thinking of myself in the prop’s place beneath the covers. The doll’s face was—is—seared into my memory, but my guilt grasped the image and warped it. I saw my husband’s chin, miniaturized and smoothed. I saw the little pug nose that flares so dramatically in photos of me growing up. I saw the divot on its flaking head pulsing.

The doll’s soundtrack reached the cough—a tight, choking sound. I remember my stomach clenching, a visceral reaction.

I panicked. I turned and ran out of the bedroom. I grabbed my pack and jump-shoved my feet into my boots. I stumbled out the front door, sliding on HOME SWEET HOME as balloons entangled my feet. I broke free and took the path of least resistance: the dirt driveway, which spilled onto a crackled asphalt road where my quivering legs poured me to the ground. Just off the side of the road I lay among last year’s leaves, mired in exhaustion and hate and dispersing adrenaline. They wanted me to quit, that much was obvious, and I wanted to, I wanted it to be over, but I couldn’t give them the satisfaction. I lay there, stewing, for a long time. Eventually, I sat up and took off my glasses. I remember my stomach roiling, caustic fluids riding between my throat and bowels like tides. I pinched my glasses between my fingers and stared at where I knew they were without seeing them, reminding myself over and over that the prop and the doll weren’t real, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next, where I was supposed to go. Then an amorphous bubble of lighter space somewhere beyond my glasses caught my unfocused eye. An iridescent, dancing space that after a breathless moment I realized was the balloons, reflecting moonlight and skipping about the mailbox in the wind.

That’s when I understood: The Clue wasn’t the picture books or the balloons, it was the welcome mat. Home Sweet Home. That’s the direction I had to go next. East.

I also knew the creators of the show would love my panicked retreat, and I resolved from that moment on to be as boring as I could be. That would be my revenge. I kept to back roads and avoided houses. It was slow going at first; I got sick—the water, maybe the food but probably the water—and lost a day or two, maybe three but I don’t think so, shivering by a fire I was almost too weak to build, even with my fire starter.

I feel the pinch of loss. Just a thing, but such a useful thing. I don’t know that I would have made it through those days of illness without the fire starter; they probably would have had to disqualify me, pull me for my own safety. As it was, I came distressingly close to saying the safety phrase; I think it was only the fact that they didn’t come for me, that they were confident enough to let me wait it out, that gave me the strength not to quit, that allowed me to believe I would be okay. And I was. I got better, and I knew where I had to go; I started walking and I found peanut butter and trail mix, their next prop, telling me I was still on track.

Beside me, Brennan releases an especially loud snort and shifts on the couch. His arm flops over the side and his fingers twitch briefly into a fist before relaxing to graze the floor. He looks comfortable, at home on the plush cushions. He hasn’t screamed tonight.

I stare at his dangling hand. Firelight bounces off the face of his wristwatch. Sleepless curiosity prompts me to check the time. Eight-forty-seven. I’ve spent so long operating by light, not hours, that I immediately feel as though I’ve just done something wrong. My face warms, and I realize why as I watch the digital seconds snap toward sixty—I hadn’t expected it to be a working watch. Which is stupid; there’s no reason for a camera watch not to also tell time.