Take Your Turn, Teddy Read online

  “Lila, please. I messed up. I messed up big time. Things got so out of control. I’m sorry. Please hear me out. I’m so sorry.”

  Teddy stood behind his mother like a bear cub in the woods. She stood tall and crossed her arms. He could hear the struggle in her voice as she said, “No, Arthur. I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.”

  Teddy’s father put a hand over his mouth and released a heavy breath. When he raised his arms and let his hands smack the side of his pant legs, Teddy felt himself jump.

  “Lila, you can’t be serious. You can’t just run off with our son and live in this shitty house. I mean, Jesus Christ, Lila. This house? Has the blood even stopped seeping through the floorboards?”

  “Enough, Arthur.”

  His father took in a deep breath, but Teddy knew he wasn’t calming down when he exhaled. More rage and less patience filled his father. His eyebrows furrowed, and his nostrils flared in a distinctively animalistic way. It was his father’s pre-rampage look. Teddy only needed to see it the one time to recognize it instantly.

  Like a little kid who couldn’t see at the fourth of July fireworks show, Teddy tugged on the back of his mother’s shirt. He didn’t know how to tell her, but given his nightmares, Teddy knew it wouldn’t be long before the bull kicked out of the pen. And just as it had every time he closed his eyes, and as it had the night they left, the beast would strike her down.

  “You haven’t even told him. Have you?”

  Teddy poked his head out from behind his mother to meet her eyes. She glanced momentarily but couldn’t look at Teddy. Something was there. Something she knew. Something he had started to believe Ali knew too.

  His mother held her ground, strong and silent. Teddy hoped this difference in the defensive approach might lead to a different outcome than his nightmares. Teddy’s father took another breath. He raised his palms and pushed them down in front of him as if suffocating his anger’s rising energy.

  “It doesn’t matter. I get it. I get why you left. But that was then, Lila. I’m better now. I’m ready to fix things, to be who you need me to be. I’m sorry it took me so long to understand.” Teddy’s father reached for his mother’s hand and said, “But I do now, Lila.”

  His mother pulled her hand back, like touching his father burned her skin. Like he was some flesh-eating sickness.

  “Lila, please.”

  Teddy looked back and forth between them, feeling like he was frozen, waiting for the rest of his life to unfold there at that moment.

  “No, Arthur. You need to leave. I have company coming back soon—the man who helped my father fix up the house.”

  In his mother’s voice, Teddy could tell she shared that detail as a threat to his father. Someone would be here soon. It wouldn’t just be her and Teddy this time.

  “Are you fucking kidding me, Lila?” Spit flew from his father’s lips like a rabid dog.

  As if on cue, the bolt on the pen burst open, and the bull was free. Teddy and his mother watched as his father stepped into the doorway, sending the wicker chair to the ground and smashing small porcelain figures from the last owners his mother had placed in her writing station. He opened his mother’s journal and tore the pages right out, sending them flying into the cornfield.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” his mother yelled. “Same old Arthur, throwing a big-ass tantrum when he doesn’t get his way. Get out, Arthur! Get out now! We aren’t coming back!”

  Teddy’s father shoved past both of them, nearly sending Teddy to the floor. His mother hurried after his father as he stomped into the living room.

  Teddy’s father grabbed their unpacked tubs and sent the contents crashing to the hardwood floor.

  “Stop it, you crazy son of a bitch! Stop it now, or I’ll call the police!”

  Teddy stood in the hallway, panic taking over his body as his father grabbed the front his mother’s shirt like one of the bad boys before a fight from a James Dean movie his grandfather once showed him.

  “Fucking do it. I dare you. I’ll tell them my wife kidnapped my fucking son and stole all of my shit.”

  And before Teddy knew it, he was reliving the night they left. He closed his eyes tightly, thinking this had to be a dream, the most vivid, realistic dream he’d had in the arena. But when Teddy opened his eyes, his mother fell to the ground, and her shaking hands tried to cover her face.

  His father grabbed her wrist and squeezed hard to pry them to the side of her head. “No, you don’t. You fucking take this, Lila!”

  Teddy heard a small shriek come from his mother’s room. Ali. He had forgotten all about her. He poked his head into his mom’s room and whispered, “Ali? Ali?”

  Ali’s crying face poked out from under his mother’s bed. “Teddy, what do we do?”

  Teddy swallowed hard, afraid of his father catching him trying to do anything. “I need you to run, Ali. Run home, and get your dad. Hurry.”

  And without a moment’s hesitation, Ali crawled from under the bed and zipped out the back door. Using her momentum, Teddy ran and jumped on his father’s back. He hooked his legs around the front of him and clenched his fists. Teddy beat into the back of his father’s head, hoping to hit the same spot he had weeks before with the baseball bat. Teddy hoped the knot would still be tender.

  But his father, with one quick swat, threw his fist into Teddy’s face, hard.

  Teddy fell to the splintered hardwood floor of the living room. The light was blurring. He couldn’t lift his head, and when the train roared by, it sounded like a faint hum.

  Teddy could hear his mother whimper. Her cries were desperate and terrified. Teddy couldn’t bear to hear them fade out like they had in his dreams.

  “Shadow? Shadow, I need your help.”

  Tell me to come up. Tell me you give me my freedom and you give me my strength.

  Teddy watched the distorted image of his father wind his arm up and deliver it to his mother. Teddy wondered if that was it. He sat there, immobile.

  Tell me you give me my freedom and you give me my strength.

  It was just like the Polaroid. Teddy had to let the shadow speak to him to make it better. It would make it better.

  So, Teddy quivered through the words. “I give you your freedom; I give you your strength.”

  Good. Say, you give me absolute control.

  The heaviness of the words… Teddy had never said anything like it. He heard his mother cough, and a wetness splattered the floor. As the pain pulsated in Teddy’s head, he shouted, “I give you absolute control!”

  Teddy rubbed his eyes and scanned the blurred floor for his mother. She had gone completely silent and still.

  Teddy crawled to the basement door. It creaked open before he reached it. Down the steps came a hissing sound. Then, a growing, sketch-like figure. Teddy was afraid, but then he recognized the shadow’s golden eyes.

  The shadow was a gleaming tower in that old musty basement.

  I’m coming, Teddy. Say it again.

  The pain in Teddy’s head made his eyelids feel heavier. He fumbled through his words, “Absolute power. Absolute control. I give you strength. Strength and freedom.”

  The height of the shadow folded and stretched over the staircase. It tore through the basement ceiling. Insulation fell on the wooden steps as if shaken free by an earthquake. Then, with inhuman speed, the shadow arched its back and clawed its way up the steps.

  The shadow tore through the floor as it towered over his father, who was still beating his lifeless mother.

  The shadow didn’t say a single word. But as it stretched its skeletal hand around his father’s throat, Teddy heard it hiss. Teddy squinted to see through the haze and saw the shadow raise his father in the air as he kicked like an angry bull.

  Teddy saw something in his father’s expression that he had never seen on him before—fear.

  His father turned to Teddy. “Shit! Teddy, help
me! Help me!”

  The shadow turned Teddy’s father so he could see his son wounded on the floor. The shadow set his father down and tore its claws from the back of his neck forward. His father gargled and convulsed as he fell to the floor.

  Before the pain carried Teddy into the darkness, that awful copper smell beat into his nose.

  16

  When Teddy woke up, the smell of copper was more prominent than ever. It wasn’t much different from the smell of Mr. Abraham’s steel building at the end of the road. At that moment, Teddy put together what happened there. Ali never even flinched when the pigs’ squeals would break through the trees when floating in the creek.

  Ali. Teddy hoped she was back from getting her father. He lay on the floor, his head heavy with pain as he called for her, “Ali? Are you here?’”

  The house was still and silent.

  Teddy closed his eyes and opened them again and again. His vision only offered moments of clarity. He was still navigating in a hazy fog. One second he could see. The next he couldn’t.

  Once it faded in again, Teddy saw two lumps on the floor across from him. He knew one was his mother’s body, and the other was his father’s.

  Teddy heard the gurgling sound again and lowered his head as if the memory triggered a physical pain. He crawled to the first body, the one that belonged to his father. The tan skin around his neck was long gone. Pieces of the skin dangled around his muscle, like feathered strays of white that peeled from the inside of a clementine. His father’s throat had been torn away, and it looked flattened among the pool of blood.

  Teddy feared that when they carried his father away, his head would detach. Even worse, he feared they wouldn’t stop the severed head before it rolled to his feet. Teddy gagged and then felt a pang in his chest. He thought of his mother.

  With his vision still fading in and out, he crawled quickly to her. “Mom! Mom! Are you okay?”

  His mother’s eyes were sunken into her swollen face. It was finally healing, and now it looked worse than ever. Teddy supposed even if she was trying to open her eyes, she couldn’t.

  “Mom, please get up. Please. Mr. Abraham will be here soon. Please, get up.”

  Teddy felt a dry knot thickening in his throat. He swallowed, but the knot fought back. He sobbed and beat into the floor beside his mother. “Mom, please!”

  Her body shook from the force in the old, weak floors. Teddy stopped and waited for a response but got none. He put his hands to her chest and pushed again and again in a pulsating rhythm. Teddy had no idea if he was helping. As he pushed, more blood pooled from the sides of her mouth. He couldn’t help but think the living bleed, so she has to be alive.

  Teddy drove his palm into his mother’s chest as hard as he could. He had seen this done once or twice on television and prayed to God that he was doing it right

  When he heard a deep, dense inhale, his eyes lit up. “Mom?”

  But it was his own exhausted breath. With the throbbing pain in Teddy’s head, every sound felt answered or reciprocated, like an echo. Another thought occurred to him. Living things make echoes.

  Then it hit Teddy. “I’m the only live thing here.”

  Teddy looked at his mother’s lifeless face. There was no movement, but her face was full of color—pink from the clean smacks and purple and blue from the closed fists. Around her eyes, she had new bloodied cracks in her face that matched the permanent split on the side of her mouth.

  A single line of blood fell from her nose. It traced the softness of her freckled face. Then, the crimson strand fell from her chin to her chest. Her body hadn’t completely shut off yet, but she had.

  Teddy laid his head on his mother’s chest, closed his eyes, and cried. He had seen the bull for the first time not long before. As quickly as it had run them out of the home they had always known, the beast trampled the new life they had only begun to build.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry,” Teddy sobbed.

  Teddy looked up and saw the shadow on the wall, back to its two-dimensional form but still as monstrously tall as ever.

  Teddy tried to rise to his feet, but the weight of his head pinned him to the floor. He whimpered. Teddy stretched his hand out in front of him and brought one foot up at a time. When Teddy felt stable enough, he pushed his hands from the creaking wood floor and stood.

  There you go, Teddy.

  The living room looked like it had spun above the state in a wind gust that carried it to Kansas. The unpacked tubs were scattered, and Teddy’s baseball trophies, old t-shirts and jerseys, and his mother’s notebooks littered the floor. Some of the old sheet-covered furniture was flipped on its side. The edges of the sheets were stained with dust, and now blood too.

  Teddy’s head immediately punished him for the movement. The pressure beat into his eyes and tried to push him back down. He thought maybe the bull had climbed from his father’s body and was now trying to stampede his mind.

  He put both hands to the sides of his head and cried, “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  With the energy of building rage, Teddy kept his head down and went to his father’s dead body. “It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault.” Just as his father had done to his mother, Teddy crouched down to him and smacked his dead, clammy face.

  “Your fault! It’s all your fault.”

  Good, Teddy. Release your anger.

  Teddy heard a car coming down the gravel road. The noise pulled him from his anger. He looked at his bloody palms—the blood of his parents on his hands.

  You did all you could, Teddy. It is his fault. The shadow’s skeletal hand released itself from the entrapment of drywall, crawled across the floor, and pointed to his father’s bloodied corpse.

  But Teddy couldn’t bring himself to look at his father. His father was a monster. All this time, his father was the bad guy he had seen in cartoons and Columbo. He wasn’t the hero or the George Jetson kind of father he had always believed him to be. It made Teddy want to throw all of his baseball cards and jerseys into a fire and watch them burn, just as he did his own illusion of his father.

  Instead, Teddy looked once more to his mother. She had been the most beautiful person in the world. She was the one who tried to save him from the bull. And as much as Teddy wished he could’ve saved her, he knew his nightmares had been realized. The vague, empty arena that burned into his peace of mind as he tried to sleep was this old, beat-up house. Part of him wondered if the vagueness of the arena’s scenery meant it could’ve been a motel in Ohio or his grandparents’ house in Florida. Maybe it meant the bull was always going to come, no matter where they tried to run.

  Teddy listened for the car, scared out of his mind and hoping he would hear Ali and Mr. Abraham, but the car drove on. He went to the Crosley and lifted the needle to the opening track. He slumped himself onto the creaky staircase and thought the best thing to do was to wait.

  Paul McCartney’s vocals beat through the emptiness of the home. Its bare walls and hollow doors sat as still as his dead parents in the living room. Teddy listened to the Fab Four sing about a band that would make the crowd smile. The song that had once comforted him took on a whole new meaning. And instead of singing along as he always had, Teddy said, “I didn’t enjoy the show.”

  The blood on his hands was dry and splotchy. Teddy still couldn’t believe how much there was. He immediately winced. There was a good-sized knot and wetness that he felt was becoming inescapable. When he took his hand away from the wound, his fingers had a brighter, fresh red, atop the crusty crimson.

  Without warning, Teddy’s stomach somersaulted. The acidity of that morning’s orange juice charged up his throat and onto the floor. The reality that was closing around Teddy made him whimper and cry with every movement. He peeked out of the corner of his eyes at his parents. He was hoping, any minute, his mother would wake up. She would be weak from the beating but ready to take care of Teddy, ready to run if th
ey had to.

  “I would take care of her this time. I was still learning how.”

  Teddy tried to imagine how he would take care of her if she woke up. He could wrap one of her arms around his shoulders and just get her to the creek. He could lay her down by the water and run to Ali’s house. Mr. Abraham could call the police while he and Ali took care of his mother. Then, that day would just be an awful day, and they could work again to make that house home.

  He would play all his mother’s favorites on the record player while she sat in the entryway out back and wrote. He would learn to be less afraid of the house. He would make the most of it, just as she asked him to.

  He tried once more, “Mom?”

  Teddy raised himself from the steps, and nausea accompanied his every move. His mother was quiet and still.

  Teddy? Teddy, listen to me.

  Teddy dragged the top of his hand under his nose and wiped his eyes.

  “What do I do, Shadow? They’re both dead. Ali and Mr. Abraham aren’t here. What am I going to do? They are dead. Aren’t they?”

  The shadow nodded as if agreeing on the price of a train ticket rather than admitting to mutilating his father.

  Teddy waited for the shadow to explain, to help him make sense of everything, but it didn’t. Still, the way it closed its eyes when it nodded, the way its gold eyes looked at him, Teddy couldn’t help but feel as though the shadow was the gentlest thing he had seen that day. The shadow saved him. The shadow was his protector.

  Teddy, you have to listen to me. They’ll come for you. Soon enough, someone will come for you.

  Teddy sniffled. “I know. They’ll take me to Ali’s house. Or maybe they’ll call my grandparents, and they’ll come to get me.”

  Teddy turned toward the shadow, and with praying hands pleaded, “Bring her back, Shadow. Please bring her back.”

  The shadow’s hissing whisper encircled Teddy.

  I can’t, Teddy. I’m sorry. But the men that will come for you will take you away.