Restless

4 - Andrea

"Andrea," Debra called out as she put her grocery bag on the kitchen counter and dropped her purse on the floor. Lulu came in and greeted her with two meows before pawing at the lower cabinet.

"Hungry?" she asked the cat. 

She busied herself with the kitchen and preparing the cat's dinner when she heard something that sounded like moaning coming from the second floor. She climbed the stairs, again calling out the girl’s name. She wasn't sure if Andrea would remember her name. She wondered about that. Apparently she had remembered enough to come back to her old house, but she didn't seem to remember how to speak or write.

She looked into the room Andrea had chosen to occupy. Debra now realized it must have been her old bedroom. Boxes were emptied and their contents scattered on the floor. The Masons must have accidentally left a box or two of Andrea's things in one of the closets. They had left trash that Debra had already thrown out. The garage had been full of old tools and boxes of wet books, one of the hall closets had a Hoover vacuum cleaner that still worked, it just needed a bag, and in the master bedroom they’d left a whole set of floral sheets and comforters. She remembered thinking that it would have been nice if they had left a bed.

"Andrea," she said. "I'm making spaghetti. I know you probably don't eat, but we can sit and talk for a bit. At least, I can talk and you can listen. Lulu will eat with us."

She couldn't find the girl anywhere, until she realized that the attic trap door was down and the foldout staircase extended to the floor.

"Are you up there?" she asked

A whimper answered her. A faint yellow light was all Debra could see when she looked into the attic. She climbed the staircase carefully; the steps creaked with each step and made her feel a little unsteady. They'd had an attic staircase like this at her old house. When her husband climbed the stairs she always worried that his weight would be too much for them and he would fall through. She often worried about little things like that. In her mind she could see tiny catastrophes all the time.

As Debra reached eye level with the attic floor, she realized that the Masons had left more than a few trinkets behind. In fact, the attic was full of cardboard boxes, black plastic bags, and old bedroom furniture. Debra hadn't thought to check the attic when she moved in. She wondered what other useful items she might find there, until she walked to the middle of the room and realized what it was.

There was a cedar chest, a white canopy bed taken apart and stacked against the wall with box springs and mattress, and a white chest of drawers with pony and horse stickers on one of the lower panels. In an open box she could see a stack of trophies and ribbons, in another a collection of stuffed animals and dolls. From another she pulled a picture of a man and a woman in their early forties who looked a lot like the girl sitting with them. the kind of picture someone would pay good money to have made in a studio. Everyone in the picture looked happy and like attractive celebrities. The frame was black and metal, cold to the touch.

All around Debra were the years of a girl's life, stacked haphazardly in boxes with logos for produce and soup cans stamped to their sides. Debra reached into one of the boxes and took out a toy horse. It looked like something a Barbie Doll might ride. Its pink plastic mane was covered in rhinestones.

Andrea crouched in the corner. Her milky eyes gazed up at Debra. The same rust colored tears had stained her cheeks, but she didn't seem to be crying anymore. Debra approached cautiously, not sure what to say to the girl, and sat in front of her. She handed her the horse and asked, "What's her name?"

Andrea cried out something that sounded now more human but she still couldn't understand her. Debra had heard that sort of sound before. She had made it herself. The memory wasn't clear, but she had the image of three naked sun-tanned college boys sitting on hotel beds surrounded by stacks of empty beer bottles on a patio. The smell of sweat and the feeling of being held down and punched in the pelvis struck her now and she wanted to puke, like she had that night, but held it in. 

The sound was something like "No," with a long drawn out wail. A realization that your body was no longer yours to control and that all illusion of will was long gone. Debra could feel the sound in her chest and in her gut and it continued to sicken her.

"Let me call your parents, Andrea," she said. "They'll want to know. You have to forgive them this. I don't think they knew you would be back."

Andrea wailed again. This time she covered her mouth.

"They would want to know you're back. Andrea, please, you have to let me call them. If I were them, I would want you to call me."

Debra pulled out her mobile, but Andrea slapped it away with such force that it skidded across the floor and fell down the trap opening. Debra grabbed Andrea’s wrists and was surprised by her strength when she pulled away.

"Why don't you understand what this would mean to them? Oh please, God, how can I tell you this so you can understand?  I know you think that they did this to hurt you, but they didn't. They didn't know what they were doing."

Andrea rocked back and forth and Debra pulled her in closer. Holding Andrea was like trying to hold an angry dog, but despite her fighting and kicking, Debra held onto her and continued to talk into the girl's ear.

"We make mistakes. We do things that are stupid because we think we're going to lose you. We think you're going to go away, and we think we'll never see you again. I didn't mean to do what I did, don't you understand, Andrea?  I wasn't going to hurt my boy. I wasn't going to do it. They all thought because I had a gun, that I would hurt him and then myself, but I wouldn't have ever done anything like that. I loved him more than anything. I loved him more than myself."

Andrea broke free and pushed herself up the wall until she was standing and looking down at Debra.

Debra sat back on her heels and studied her empty, claw-like hands. Andrea dropped her toy horse to the floor and a pink comb fell from its mane.

Debra couldn't control her breathing or her heart rate. Her whole body was pounding adrenaline through her veins like she had just run a hard mile up a steep hill. Despite this rush from her body, her mind was detached, now in some darker place, as she had been that night when she went to her home and pulled a gun on her husband and demanded he give her their son. She’d been drunk and stoned, just arrived back from Mexico, angry at him that he didn't come after her, angrier at herself that she’d allowed her lover to do those things to her. She even hated thinking of that boy as her lover now. What was he, that he would care so little of her, that he would lure her from her family with promises of love and then use her and throw her to his drunk friends?

That night she had been angry at the world but she would not have killed her son. The police had her pulled over on the side of the highway, the boy was crying in the backseat, but she would not have shot him. She had the gun out and pointed at her own head, but she would not have shot her son. Never.

She’d experienced moments like this before on nights when she couldn't sleep and all the hours of regret piled so far on top of her she could hardly breathe. She felt at those times, like she did now, that she could gaze from outside herself, that she could see herself as she really was. The image that presented itself was not so unlike Andrea. She had grown thin in the past few years and pale. Her eyes sank deeper into her head and her hair had a wild unmanaged look, but these were just the superficial changes. The real changes grew from inside her. She saw these as bones that took on hook-like shapes and teeth that grew out in mandibles like an insect's. This vision of herself was cast in a gray smoke, as though she gazed into a white mirror that removed any sign of color or life, and all that eventually stood before her mind was a creature resembling something akin to a dead tree.

She could see the blood of her boy on her clawed hands and the wall of darkness building behind her, ready to take her, ready to drown her into the nothingness. 

"I'm not a monster," Debra said. "I'm not."

Andrea reached out her hand and placed it on Debra's head. Debra could not move for a moment. She did not want herself to feel any comfort. Debra turned into her hand and kissed it. The fingers were like ice, but they were real. She held her hand there and couldn't hold back her tears any longer.

"I'm sorry, Charles, my beautiful boy," she said. "I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. Please forgive me."