The Bagging #5
In the end, we did the only thing cowards know how to do.
We waited until waiting became unbearable, then we wrapped Melissa in one of the dirty blankets from the couch and carried her out.
She was light. I remember that more than anything.
Too light for a person who had meant so much.
Her head rested against my arm, and for one sick second, with her hair brushing my wrist, I could pretend she had only passed out after drinking too much and would wake up cursing us for making a fuss.
At the emergency room, Jeff did most of the talking.
Too many drugs, he said. We found her like this, he said.
We don’t know what she took, he said. The lies came easily because they were shaped like truths people expected from us.
Nobody looked surprised. Nobody looked into our faces and saw the impossible thing we had carried there.
They took her away under white lights, and the last I saw of her for a while was one bare foot sliding beneath a sheet as the doors closed.
After that, there was no house to return to.
Not really. There were walls, a roof, furniture, stains, all the same ruined evidence of us, but the thing that had made it ours had gone out through the front door in Aaron’s clenched fist. Jeff and I went back once, later that night, because we had nowhere else to go and because people like us always return to the scene before they understand it has become one.
We sat on opposite sides of the living room until dawn, not drinking, not speaking, not even smoking much.
Every few minutes, one of us would look toward the door.
Aaron never came back.
By morning, the decision had made itself.
Jeff packed almost nothing. I packed even less.
We did not discuss Melissa because there was no version of her name that did not accuse us.
We did not discuss Aaron because saying his name seemed like a way of inviting him to answer.
We simply moved through the house with the dull obedience of people leaving a place that had already expelled them.
Soon, I parted ways with Jeff. The weight of that night was too much to bear.
The last I heard, he had overdosed in some motel not far from Detroit.
I found myself wondering what he had looked like when they found him.
Whether he had still been smiling, still carrying that boyish beauty of his, or whether he had become such a ruin that I would never have known his face, even if we had collided on the street.
As for Melissa, she lay in the hospital for a while.
She was in a coma, yes: that’s what the doctors said.
Too many drugs, too much of everything – lies rang in my ears.
I visited her a couple of times, but I always fled the moment I saw her parents by her bedside.
I regret that I never could tell them how much she hated them.
They comforted one another, clinging and crying for long stretches at a time.
Sometimes I would stand just around the corner and listen.
In some strange way, I found it comforting too.
And Aaron? Huh, I’d give anything to know where he is. Especially after what had happened recently. But he could be anywhere, and I am certain that he is just that – anywhere and everywhere.
It’s been twenty years, and I returned to that cursed house.
I felt the need. I told myself I had come for closure, the way adults name old compulsions so they sound respectable.
My wife thought I was away on business. My children had kissed me goodbye that morning with sticky hands and cereal breath, and all day I had carried the shame of lying to them.
I used to be a pretty good liar. But the truth was simpler and uglier; I had come because some part of me never left the house either.
Some part of me had remained on that floor beside Jeff, staring at Melissa’s empty eyes and waiting for the world to explain itself.
Time seemed to have stopped. Everything looked the same, only this time the boards were nailed over the outside of the windows.
We used to shut the world out by nailing it closed from the inside.
Every nail driven into those walls was another layer of protection against the world. Against the living.
Against everything that I had become.
I stood there for a while. I lit three cigarettes. I promise my wife and kids I’ll quit, but I never do. And then I saw a pale man, not yet thirty, walking slowly toward me, holding something very familiar in his hand.
It was that bag. With the red stars.
He approached, as if he knew me, holding out the bag.
“Listen…” he said.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I stiffened, letting him press the fabric to my ear.
It was a voice. The soft one, I had longed for since that Halloween.
“Take me back. Please. Take me. I am…”
The sound stopped. The haggard man tightened the drawstring and held my gaze, and I understood then.
I understood everything, except how to bring her back from there.
And the man, once a little boy, looked at me with a warped expression and did nothing but laugh, and laugh, and laugh. Yet there was nothing funny about it.
The End