Chapter Fifteen #2
“Tasha, it was the funniest thing I had ever seen,” Johnny said. “I couldn’t believe it was her. That she could contort her body that way. That she was so full of energy and fun. I laughed so hard… that she caught me.”
That robe again, its sleeve folds opening as if she were literally flying toward him and could swallow him like a wicked grandmother in a fairy tale.
“I was such a little fool, I didn’t even know enough to be scared,” Johnny said. “I was just like, ‘Grandmother, is that you? Are you Lazy Mazy?’ Her face when I said that name…”
Tasha’s phone alarm sounded. The girls were supposed to be back by now. But Tasha was so rapt that she tapped the buzzer to silence the phone, her eyes immediately back on his. “What did she do, Johnny?” she asked.
Johnny sighed. Now he would be exposed as a liar.
“I’d better go check on the girls…” he said.
“Johnny.” Her tone was gentle enough, but not to be argued with. “What happened?”
Johnny moved toward Tasha, aware of their close body heat as he slid past her to leave the claustrophobic space and return to the hallway’s light.
The central heat was working, so he had taken off his jacket.
He pulled up his right T-shirt sleeve to expose his upper arm and the wide five-inch dark scar there.
Ugly and simmering. Johnny displayed the scar to her, as if for the first time.
She touched it with her fingertip as she often did when they were nude, her hands charting the nuances of his skin.
He hadn’t known it when he was thirteen, but the discoloration was called a keloid scar. It looked like a band of raised meat across his upper arm. In college, Money had joked that it looked like he’d been branded as a fraternity pledge.
He’d been branded, all right. But not by choice.
“You said… you fell against your kitchen stove,” Tasha said.
“That was what my mother told everybody,” Johnny said. “What she told me to say. After a while… maybe I almost believed it myself. But that’s no excuse. I lied. It was Mazelle.”
“What did she do?”
Mazelle’s hair had fanned loose across her shoulders, flapping like her sleeves as she dove at him.
The hand that grabbed his arm had held on as if she could snap it in two.
Johnny had thought of her as a sick old woman until he felt her unyielding iron grip.
He never saw the steel comb in her hand before the blaze of pain.
“She must have been doing her hair,” Johnny said. “She had a hot comb she’d been heating on the stove. She laid it across my skin and held it there until I could smell my skin burning. I must have screamed, but nobody came running. They figured it was family business.”
Tasha raised her hands to her mouth in horror.
Tears almost came as Johnny remembered how betrayed he had felt by Uncle Ricky, sleeping peacefully without him in the cabin outside.
How Uncle Ricky hadn’t spoken up when his mother said Johnny should sleep in the lodge, although he knew his sister wanted him chaperoned.
How his mother had agreed to send him at all.
Mom and Uncle Ricky knew better than anyone that life with Mazelle Washington was fraught with breaks and bruises.
“Anyway… that’s what’s up with me and this place,” he said.
“Mom dragged me here a year later when my grandmother was in her sickbed, near the end. When nobody was listening, I went to her doorway and whispered, ‘I hate you and I hope you die.’ I don’t know if she heard me…
but I didn’t feel better. It felt like a sin. ”
And the chair beside her cracked window had teetered.
And the curtains swished back and forth.
And something zipped through the half-open window with dizzying speed, a blur of sharp teeth and white fur. The motion was so fast that it strobed in only two or three impressions before it was gone. All of that happened as soon as he uttered the words.
A therapist in college had helped Johnny realize he had disassociated when he confronted his dying grandmother, his eyes imagining a creature and damnation.
But as a kid, he’d felt sure that wishing his grandmother dead had conjured a true-life demon.
For a shocked moment, he’d wondered if he had expelled some form of evil, releasing a demon’s hold on her.
Because it didn’t look real, that long body like a weasel’s, undulating snakelike, with a narrow snout and sharp teeth.
And just before it vanished, ice-blue eyes bore into Johnny while it made a chilling sound like a squirrel’s chittering, except deadly.
It couldn’t have been real—he knew that now—but as a kid he’d followed tracks in the snow that swerved right and left just like the demon had moved.
He’d tried to convince his uncle Ricky what he’d seen, and Uncle Ricky told him not to repeat his story to anyone else.
You shouldn’t try to go chasin’ after things you don’t understand, he’d said.
Humoring him. Johnny wished his uncle had just told him he was out of his fucking mind and saved him years of therapy.
“I’m sorry I never told you—” Johnny told Tasha, but she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him close before he could finish. The robe’s fur collar tickled his chin.
“No wonder you never wanted to come here,” she said.
“Yeah?” John said, uncertain. He hadn’t expected instant forgiveness. “Because I felt like an asshole watching the girls out there having the time of their lives. I waited so long…”
“We can go home,” Tasha said, the words Johnny had longed to hear so many hours ago. “We don’t have to stay. If I had known…”
“That’s not on you,” he said. “I could have told you. I should have. Let’s not ruin this for the girls. Even this robe, everything—I want different memories here. Keep it on. For me.”
As his grandmother’s scent strengthened in his nostrils, changed but unmistakable, Johnny realized why he was smelling her. “You found some of her perfume, didn’t you?”
Tasha smiled, embarrassed. “An old bottle. It was just a spray. I can take a shower…”
Whatever Tasha had found didn’t smell exactly like his grandmother’s favorite, Chanel No.
5, which Mom had sent her for Christmas each year.
Time had shifted the scent, muting some elements and exaggerating others.
But the smell was so altered that it didn’t flood him with bad memories.
Instead, he thought about how his mother’s hand might have touched the same bottle Tasha had sprayed herself with. Everyday use and all.
Johnny tapped Tasha’s phone so she would check the time: 4:35.
“They’re late,” Tasha said, nudging away her concerns for Johnny. They hadn’t heard any signs of the girls’ joy in too long. Johnny remembered the imaginary chittering from the window during his childhood, as if the tendrils of worry crawling in his chest had a sound.
In that moment, he understood Tasha’s terror of the slopes—their vastness, their hidden perils. And what would they do in an emergency? No phones. No internet. And darkness would come soon. Driving during daylight had been hard enough.
You shouldn’t have left them alone, Johnny chided himself. And the voice he had fought so hard to bury reemerged with his revelations to Tasha: We never should have come here.
Despair kicked Johnny’s stomach. He didn’t consider himself to be a psychic, but he was certain that something awful had happened outside while he was reliving his childhood ghost stories. Mazelle was hurting his daughters too—but this time, it was his fault.
“I’ll go look for them,” Johnny said, masking his sudden panic.
A wail from the front porch shredded Johnny’s stomach. Her voice was nearly unrecognizable, but Sharise sounded like she was in the worst pain of her life. Tasha looked at Johnny, her eyes begging to be convinced that she was imagining the horrific sound.
Laughter followed. Imani.
“Stop it!” Sharise said, muffled through the door. “You got snow in my hair!”
The girls were back from the hill.