Chapter 66
“I try to keep it inside, I do, I do, but there’s too much now. It’s leaking, bleeding everywhere. Sometimes it happens all at once.” Grandma rapped at her skull with a tight fist, talking fast as they climbed the basement steps. “They say a girl died here. All of them died here.”
“Shhh.” Anna carefully pulled Grandma’s fist away from her head and led her back to her bedroom, matching her short shuffling steps.
“You have to see, Anna, you have to understand.” The curtains were half closed, the hazy light outside cutting through the gaps as if they were stuck somewhere where day and night coexisted.
It made Anna’s head hurt. She put her cigarettes on the dresser so they wouldn’t dig into her hip as she crouched to take Grandma’s slippers off, before tucking her into bed, sitting upright.
She wouldn’t sleep in this agitated state, but she could at least stay warm.
“You have to remember, Anna.” Grandma clutched at the beautiful notebook by the bed and thrust it into Anna’s hands. “I get so confused but you have to remember. You said you’d remember.”
“Okay, Grandma, okay.”
“Don’t just read, Anna,” Grandma whispered. “Remember. It’s in you too, but you don’t remember.”
Anna opened the book to the back, almost against her own will, sweat slicking her palms. Her heart was dancing a quickstep and she didn’t really understand why. There was danger here, so much danger. What was she so afraid of?
She looked at the page where her name had been scrawled, and opposite Grandma had written, Will Anna see this? Will it be here this time? She had jelly on her T-shirt but she doesn’t know doughnut jelly on her T-shirt … a girl died here once died here once …
The writing became illegible after that.
Anna’s breath was coming fast. “How did you know about the doughnut jelly, Grandma?” Her chest was constricted, tight, pulling in on itself, the start of an anxiety attack.
“It was in my dream. I didn’t tell you about it.
” Anna, Jamie, and doughnuts. She could feel the sugar on her lips.
Her heart skipped, irregular, as she turned the pages back, her eyes moving fast over the words.
All these dreams in my head all these dreams the same but different
“What are you dreaming, Grandma?”
“It’s in my empty space.” Grandma rocked backward and forward in the bed. “Pushing me out. All the time. Eating me up. It’s in yours now too. But you have to remember.”
Anna stared at one sentence. It made her head hurt.
It was tacos and then it was potpie and I am not mad. It was tacos before.
What did Grandma mean? Dr. Burdett brought them chicken potpie. It was chicken potpie, she remembered, she could see it on her plate, the pastry golden brown. The words shifted, blurred, and for a moment she thought they said something else.
It was chili and then it was lasagna and I am not mad. It was chili before.
She gasped as pain stabbed behind her eyes, and with each sharp bolt, there was a flash of a memory.
Dr. Burdett with a Crock-Pot of chili and homemade cornbread.
Her mouth filled with the flavor of it, moist and sweet.
The crunch of tacos. Sour cream. Cheese.
Another stab and it jolted her to the fridge at night, opening it for Diet Coke, not knowing Grandma was behind her, having a moment.
In the fridge she saw chicken potpie left- overs that changed to tacos, that changed to lasagna, then to the chili, then more dishes, changing fast. The world spun around her and the pain was so sharp she thought she was having an aneurysm right there on Grandma’s bed before thankfully it faded, leaving a metallic taste in her mouth and an awful nausea.
“What is this, Grandma? What’s happening?”
“You know,” Grandma whispered. “I thought it was dreams, but it’s all happened before. We make new ones. New realities. But the rest still exist, and it’s all happening at once. I can’t hold them all. Now they’re in you too. You took some in.”
More flashes came to Anna. Jamie dead in the swimming pool that flickered into Jamie dead in the bath, dead beside the bath, dead in the bedroom, dead on the bedroom floor. All of them as real as the one that came before.
She needed a cigarette. She needed air. She needed—her eyes landed on the pack of American Spirit she’d put on the dresser when she came in. Something about them, the sight of them, the placement—her racing heart stilled. No, no, no. She got slowly to her feet, taking the few steps to the dresser.
They were in exactly the same place as when she’d seen them days ago, helping Grandma back to bed.
When she’d thought they were Dr. Burdett’s.
The half pack of cigarettes that had disappeared when she’d returned to the room.
It was the same pack—she recognized the dent in the corner and the way the top had crumpled in her pocket.
She’d seen the cigarettes here, days before she’d picked them up in the diner, and days before now, when she’d put them here on the dresser. She’d had a glimpse of something that hadn’t happened yet. How could that be? It’s all happened before. It’s all happening at once.
She looked back at Grandma, eyes wide. Her ears were ringing.
Anna Anna Anna Anna Anna …
She thought about the blood in the basement.
Grandma seeing it too, in different places.
Her blood. Suddenly Anna knew. She understood the truth of it, deep in the core of her.
She took three shaky breaths, stroking Grandma’s hand.
“The voices you hear in your head, Grandma. The dead girls.” Sunlight cut through the curtain gap, casting Grandma’s aged face in a corpse-yellow glow. “Who are they?”
“You, Anna.” Grandma’s eyes met her, full of pain and confusion and terror. “They’re all you.”
They say a girl died here.
Anna sat down hard on the bed, head spinning. Dead girls in Grandma’s head. They weren’t Lila and Bonnie. They were Anna. Other Annas. Annas who failed. Annas who bled in the basement. “Did I die in the basement, Grandma?”
Grandma nodded, her eyes glistening with the effort of keeping hold of this moment, of helping to make Anna understand.
“How many times?” Bile burned Anna’s throat.
“I found the Lord inside me,” Grandma whispered, staring straight ahead, the words coming fast. “The first time. There was so much blood. From your head. You were dying. I opened up my empty space and the Lord worked through me.” A tear trickled down the crevices of her face, making a pattern as random as her words.
“I had to save you. I had to stop it. But now I have to keep stopping it. Every time. So many times. But they all exist. All the Annas. All the times. Sometimes the basement. Sometimes you make it outside into the dust. Sometimes in the hall. Until it’s over.
They fill me up. No more space. It leaks out.
Bleeds into each other.” She rocked backward and forward, keening. “They’re all so loud.”
Ghosts in my head
In my head
Anna’s hands were freezing and her teeth chattered, her whole body trembling.
The ominous feeling she always had in the house.
The sense that there was someone just out of sight in the corner of her eye.
Different realities playing out. Other versions of herself.
Girls who died. Grandma outside keening on her knees and so surprised to see Anna. Had Anna died right there one time?
The tips of her fingers were cold, her blood drawing inward. When she’d woken with that awful headache, was that everything starting again, trying to change the ending? Anna’s own death. How many times had this happened?
“It gets closer every time.” Grandma tugged at a strand of her hair. “Eating me. I can’t send us back so far.”
Anna carefully moved Grandma’s hand away before she hurt herself and tilted the old woman’s chin up so they were looking each other in the eye. “Who kills me, Grandma? Do you know?”
It was Grandma’s turn to tremble and shake, and for a moment Anna thought that more madness was coming her way and that maybe monsters did exist, and that she’d say the Farmhand, but that wasn’t the word she spoke.
She leaned in, a thin strand of drool running into the crease at the side of her mouth, and held one arthritic finger to her lips before she whispered, almost inaudibly—
“Clown.”