Lullabies for Suffering Read online

Within these frames are the characters from my life.

  All except the last one, which shows a bloodied patch of wallpaper and the shadow of a girl who is no longer there to cast it.

  About the Author

  Kealan Patrick Burke is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of six novels, including the bestselling thriller KIN. His latest book is the horror collection WE LIVE INSIDE YOUR EYES. You can find him on the web at www.kealanpatrickburke.com, or on Twitter @kealanburke, where he thinks he’s hilarious. An Irish expat who does not believe in ghosts, he nevertheless currently haunts a house in Ohio.

  Monsters

  by

  Caroline Kepnes

  Monsters

  Caroline Kepnes

  You are a virgin. You are eighteen years old and you’ve never done anything remotely criminal. Yes, you ate too many Devil Dogs, you played alone, and you got fat. But you lost five pounds before starting college. You’ve been there for your mother. You’re there for her right now, in line with her at TJ Maxx. She likes to shop every time she comes home from rehab. You say you believe it when she says, “this time it sticks.” You aren’t lying to her. You aren’t faking it. Every time feels like the time that it will stick and this time is no different. She pays for a bigger bathing suit—detox makes her thighs rub together—and she laughs with the woman at the register. The laughter is a good sign, a sign that it will stick. You pick at pink bubblegum that someone pressed under the counter. It sticks. Gum is sticky. There is no such thing as gum that doesn’t stick.

  Your mom swings her bag of new bathing suits in the air. “Come on!” she says. “Let’s get outta here!”

  Outside, it’s summer, your first summer as a college student. You walk with your mother like you never left, like you’re the same old kid. She picks up a penny and you never do things like that. You wish you were more like her, that she was more like you. Her sobriety never sticks and your virginity always sticks and she elbows you.

  “Why so quiet?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You want to get ice cream?”

  You don’t want ice cream but you want her to stay home so you say that you do. She drives the car. You ride shotgun, the virgin and the cokehead. You have never even smoked a cigarette and your mother has had so much sex. When she’s clean the men are tidy and cold. They come from the Internet and they don’t stay long. When she’s using, the men are filthy and relaxed, like henchmen in a movie. There was that guy in the wife-beater who pissed on the deck. There was that married guy who wore suits and didn’t take off his wedding ring when he sat on the sofa and hogged your TV.

  “Soft or hard?” your mother wants to know.

  She giggles like a kid at school. That’s always her joke when you come to this place where they have ice cream that needs scooping and ice cream that comes from a machine.

  “Hard,” you say because no matter what you say she’s gonna elbow you and embarrass you in front of the younger girl who’s making your ice cream, blushing. There is no indoor seating area and you are jealous of the girl inside, roofed in. You bet her mother isn’t a cokehead and then you turn red because what a mean thing to think you fucking virgin, you fucking loser.

  Your mother’s cone arrives first and your mind is full of dirty words, a car wash in reverse where the vehicles emerge covered in shit, in mud. Your mother licks her cone—vanilla—and if you weren’t a virgin, you wouldn’t notice the tip of her tongue. She wants to sit at a picnic table and she gets everything she wants when she’s clean, when she can’t have the one thing she actually wants: Coke. Blow. A bump.

  Your cone isn’t dripping and her cone is dripping and you sit across from each other like two people on a date except this isn’t a date.

  “Hey,” she says. “Maybe we should get one of those Slip ‘N Slides.”

  A couple of nasty boys who can’t be older than twelve laugh at you, what a loser, he’s here with his mom. You wish you were twelve. When you were twelve you didn’t worry about being a virgin because twelve-year-olds can be virgins.

  Your mother crumples up her napkin and hurls it at the boys and they leave.

  You shouldn’t disagree with her. Not when she just got home and the sky is hot and she has a brand new bathing suit and rehab is sticking. But those boys got to you, those kids who get to be the kid that you never were, free and mean. You bark at your mother because you didn’t have the balls to bark at them. “I’m too old for a Slip ‘N Slide.”

  “Don’t be like that,” she says. “Don’t care so much about what other people think.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Yeah, you do and what a waste. What do you care if the neighbors see us having some fun? They’ll probably wanna come over.”

  You used to stay with the Pyles who live up the street when your mom went away. You picture Mrs. Pyle in a one-suit, wet, in your back yard. “No they won’t.”

  Your mother shrugs. You’re right. No one in the neighborhood wants to come over. They’ve seen too many random cars in the driveway, sometimes black and whites with the red lights blasting shadows into the other homes. It’s too quiet now. Your mother is bored of her ice cream, but she eats it anyway. You can’t think of anything to say to her and you worked so hard to lose all that pudding on your belly this year. You don’t want the ice cream but you eat the ice cream because you’re a bad son. You don’t believe it will stick. Not anymore. Not with her wanting to slide on a plastic tarp in the back yard. That’s who she is, isn’t it? She wants to slide, she doesn’t want to stick. She pulls at her bra strap.

  “Well, we have to do something. The weather guy says it’s only gonna get hotter tomorrow and we can’t get the AC fixed. I have to pay the electric, the gas bill, too.”

  Your house isn’t yours, not really. Your grandmother gave it to your mom when she died, when you were in pull-ups. It still smells like a grandmother, like the house doesn’t want to belong to you, to your mom who can’t take good care of it. The words plop out of your mouth like upchuck. “I’m sorry.”

  Your mother stares at you. Her hair is wiry and her eyes are clear. They’re so much scarier when she’s clean, when she sees you, when she’s not looking at you through a hazy veil of bloodshot eyes with her nose dripping and her skin sweaty. “Sorry for what?” she wants to know.

  You can’t think of anything smart to say and you don’t want to say anything stupid and when she decides to go out later that night, it is your fault. All you had to do was say you wanted a Slip‘N Slide. When she comes home loud and not alone—he’s filthy, he wears boots in summer—she is high and you know she’s high by the sound of her giggles. She’s a toilet that won’t stop running and there’s nothing you can do to slow the pace of her speech, to stop the chop, chop, chopping of her credit card. You hear him next, whoever he is, kicking off his boots and snorting your mother’s stash. So you stay in your room. You don’t play music to block out the sound of them fucking. You deserve to listen to it. You are a criminal, the worst son on planet earth. You are a virgin and everything bad in this world, in this house, in your dirty mind, in your mother’s bloodstream, it’s all your fault because she was clean until you turned your back on her at that picnic table, until you refused to get on her side. When the filthy guy sticks his dick in her, when he grunts and you hear the headboard slam into the wall, you get hard and you put your hands on your body and those boys were right to laugh at you today. They’re normal. You’re the freak.

  Ariel

  Ariel doesn’t need a babysitter. She’s twelve and some girls her age actually are babysitters. But her mom won’t listen to reason.

  “Don’t compare yourself to other kids,’ her mom said. “Trust me. It never works out.”

  Ariel tries another tactic. She tells her mom all about the babysitters, the girls who act so goody two shoes to her mother. They bob their heads up and down. They promise they won’t have boys over or spend all their time on the phone.

  “But then they do, Mom. All o
f them.”

  “Don’t be a tattletale, Ariel. Just let me think.”

  Ariel knows when to leave it alone. It’s been a weird few months. Her father isn’t here anymore but this is a secret, something Ariel is not supposed to talk about, not with anyone. When they run into people at the grocery store, her mother says her dad is away on business and Ariel pictures him on top of a big pile of manila folders. It’s a lie. He doesn’t live here anymore. Her mother got an invitation to a wedding the other day. Mr. and Mrs. Roger Pyle. Her mother RSVP’d yes and Ariel peeled the card out of the envelope when she found it on the table by the front door. Her mother checked both boxes, like she’s married, like her dad is going to come back for this wedding.

  Her mother flips the pages of her little black notebook that she carries everywhere, even to the beach. Ariel’s mother is beautiful, like a raven-haired queen in a cartoon and life is like a cartoon since her dad left. Ariel feels like she and her mother don’t quite get to decide what happens every day, as if they are just characters in a show, as if a whole bunch of adults are in California, drawing their bodies with colored pens while another bunch of adults make up the stories.

  Her mother pulls her long hair into a ballerina bun. “I could call Vince.”

  “Who?”

  The question is a lie. Ariel knows Vince. He’s the boy who lives up the street. His mother is a loser and Vince used to stay in the house with them sometimes when Ariel was little. She hasn’t seen him in a long time and she forgot that he existed, but she knows exactly who he is.

  “Ariel, he’s a nice boy. He’s home from college.”

  “But he’s barely older than me.”

  “Six years is a big difference at your age, honey. He can drive. He’s an adult.”

  “Can I just stay alone?”

  Ariel’s mother scoops the receiver off the phone that’s attached to the wall. It’s another moment that feels more like a scene in a cartoon, like her mother isn’t deciding to call Vince, like the storytellers in California decided that she would, and so she does.

  Vince

  You’re alone again.

  It was fast this time. Your mother stole more bathing suits from TJ Maxx and instead of putting her in jail they sent her back to get ‘treatment’. Other women get treatments too, but it’s different. The girls in your dorm got spa treatments and one of the girls was always crying because her mother was in ‘treatment’. You were sad when you learned it was treatment as in chemo, for cancer. There is no shame in that and you can’t imagine what it would be like to have a mom who pays people to make her hair shiny or destroy unwanted killer cells. Wishing your mother had cancer is sick and you don’t want that, you never would. You are still eighteen and you are still a virgin and after she left, you went to TJ Maxx and bought her a Slip‘N Slide. You felt mean and stupid standing in the aisle. Why didn’t you do this sooner? You didn’t set it up yet. You stare at the happy kids on the box, a white boy and a black boy on a healthy green lawn. Maybe you should throw it away. You are too old and too late, and it’s like your mother always says, timing is everything. She’s right.

  If you bought it when she wanted it, she would be here, slipping and sliding. All year your mother asked if you met any nice girls. All year you tried to find a girl to bring home to visit for the summer. If you had met a nice girl, if you had brought her home, she would have been there with you at the soft and hard ice cream place. She would have said that a Slip‘N Slide is a great idea because girls are polite to their boyfriends’ mothers. If you’d succeeded, your mother wouldn’t have slipped and slid back into rehab.

  You pick up the box and put it in your closet and slam the door.

  There are thousands of girls at the University of Wisconsin, but none of them would have you. They looked right through you and you could always feel them writing you off as doughy and odd. You wanted to grab them and tell them about the five pounds you lost, about the ten-pound weights you lifted, about how much you needed someone, how much your mom needed you to have someone. Maybe they knew that somehow. Maybe you’re only supposed to want a girl for yourself, not for your mom. There was that one girl in your Child Psychology class with the small mouth and the long neck. She gave you a pen when you needed one and once ate lunch with you in the cafeteria. She told you about her parents, they were going on a cruise and you told her about your mother. She was back in rehab. The girl didn’t sit by you after that and it was your fault. You said too much, too fast. It was okay for her to talk about a cruise but not okay for you to talk about your mom’s roommate at Sunny Mountain Retreat. You picked the wrong girl. A good son would have picked the right girl, the kind who wants to hear the truth about dark things, but no. And that’s why you’re a virgin, you idiot.

  The phone rings. You pick it up. “Hello?”

  “Vince?”

  It’s a woman and you wonder if she’s naked, how her tits would feel in your hands. “Yeah, um, hello?”

  “Vince, honey, it’s Mrs. Pyle up the street. How’ve you been? How you doing?”

  “Oh hi.” You gulp. “Good. Really good.”

  You know Mrs. Pyle. Barely. She says she’s relieved that she caught you and maybe she wants you. Your pants bulge. Maybe she saw you when you walked to the store. Maybe this is how you lose your virginity and maybe fucking Mrs. Pyle will make you smarter and the next time your mom comes home, you’ll be better. A man.

  “Vince, honey,” she says. And you are Honey—sweet, warm, and good. “This is coming out of left field, but I wonder if you’re free to babysit tonight.”

  You say yes because you can’t say no. Look what happened to your mom when you said no to her. The word of the day is yes and you’re not a babysitter, but you can’t say no to any woman who wants your help. You learned your lesson.

  “Terrific!” she exclaims. “I really need to get out and we were in such a jam.”

  You take everything the wrong way. She doesn’t want you. She wants to get away from you. “What time should I come over?”

  “Seven,” she says. “Oh and Vince, how’s your mom? It’s been ages since I bumped into her. Everything good?”

  Your stomach turns over. Your insides are twisting up. You spent a lot of time in the Pyles’ nice house when you were a kid. Every time your mother went away to rehab, you went to their home where the dishes were never piled up in the sink and their little girl was always toddling around with a plastic shovel while the AC hummed quietly, so quietly, always working, never broken. You weren’t their son and that little girl wasn’t your sister and when you liked sleeping in the spare bedroom, you felt guilty, like your mother would know. And when you got sullen and grumpy and played video games too much, you felt guilty, like you were ruining everything for the nice, perfect Pyles.

  “She’s great,” you say. “She’s on a trip with some work friends to some place up north. I can’t remember the name.”

  Mrs. Pyle is so happy to hear that. You don’t know why you lied. You want to protect your mother. You want the lie to be true. You wanted Mrs. Pyle to be calling because she wants your dick and this is your revenge, telling her how great things are in your house.

  You put on fresh clothes. It feels good to have somewhere to go and that’s another thing to feel bad about. You shouldn’t be happy right now, not when your mother is in pain. You should get a fucking life. You did get a summer job, but they don’t need you, not yet. Your deodorant smells good. Maybe Mrs. Pyle will smell you and want to stay home. You get your hopes up so easily but why shouldn’t you? Maybe your mom is getting better. You’re only eighteen. It’s not like you’re forty. Some of the biggest studs were virgins at eighteen you shouldn’t get so down on yourself. Next year you’ll be a sophomore and the girls will be a little busted up from the drinking and debauchery of freshman year. Next year they’ll be ready for you—what a good guy, he’s a babysitter so he must be great with kids—and they’ll look at you a little more closely. Maybe that one with the short d
ark brown hair will let you borrow her Abnormal Psych notes when you miss class and maybe she’ll ask you to have coffee with her and make fun of the pervy old teacher.

  It could happen. You’re a babysitter now, someone people trust with their children. You never babysat before. When your mother gets home, she’ll be excited about your new second job. Maybe then her sobriety will stick.

  Ariel

  Ariel doesn’t jump up to say hi to Vince when he arrives. Her mother does, though, telling him he looks great—not true, he’s squishy—and asking him about college—he’s a psych major.

  Vince stands like he thinks he’s a man, a grown-up. Ariel’s mom is writing things down, the phone number of the restaurant, the phone number for non-emergency police calls. She’s saying all the things she always says to the babysitters, that she’ll call, that he won’t have to use these numbers.

  “We’re going out with some of Roger’s colleagues,” she says. She’s lying again and it’s always weird when her mother refers to her dad like that. As Roger.

  “How is he?” Vince asks. “How’s Mr. Pyle?”

  “Terrific,” her mother says. “He got a big promotion and he’s on the road a lot, has to catch a late flight to Chicago.”

  When Vince picks up the piece of paper he seems even younger, like one of the boys at school. Does he know she’s watching him? He doesn’t look at her as much as she would like him to look at her. She wants him to look at her the way he’s looking at her mother. Ariel is the star of this cartoon, not her stupid mother, lying, repeating all the stuff she already said, as if he’s stupid, which he isn’t. Vince goes to college. He’s cuter than the boys at school, older and younger all at once. He keeps covering his mouth, as if he’s about to crack up. She wants to tickle him and make him laugh, let him laugh. She doesn’t remember much about all the time he spent here because she was young and her dad was still here. It feels so long ago, like those episodes are buried in canisters in the desert.