The Society of Misfit Stories Presents... (February 2021)

Mary

by Jill Benson

THE NIGHTMARE IS VIVID and real.

A spring day, yet there’s still a bit of a chill in the air. A large house looms nearby, one that I know—or will know, I can't be sure.

A young man, his head hung low, his face hidden from me, tamps down the dirt, rocks and chunks of sod. He pauses a moment, then lets the worn shovel drop to the dirt. He’s disheveled, fresh dirt covers his old pants and stained chambray shirt, a hand-me-down from an older sibling, I think without precisely knowing why. I would guess him to be in his late teens, though at this moment he looks so much like a boy. His mouth is drawn down in a tired frown; gray eyes. Something about those eyes. Stony, harsh, yet a little sad. As if a lifetime of hardship had been heaped upon him too young.

It's finished, he says.

Standing beside him is a young woman, little more than a girl herself. She lays a fistful of flowers on top of the soft mound of dirt—tulips, crocus, and a few hand-picked daisies.

The young man eyes the flowers, then grunts slightly. Your mother'll miss those from her garden, won't she?

The young woman does not respond. She simply lifts the bottom of her dirt-stained apron and dries a tear. The last of her tears as she silently vows never to cry about it again. And I can see quite clearly underneath her apron, the swelling of her belly.

After a moment she says, We can never leave, can we. It is not a question.

The young man flashes his gray eyes at her briefly, then back at the mound of dirt.

No. We can't.

MY PARENTS SEPARATED in the summer of 1974, just two weeks after my sixth birthday. I'll never forget it. I was supposed to be asleep, but it had been hot all that day and was still uncomfortably warm, and in those days the only room in the house with a/c was my parent's upstairs bedroom.

I could clearly hear them in the living room as my bedroom was downstairs and adjacent to it. At first, they were just talking, a soft drone, the words unclear. But the talking grew louder and soon my mother was yelling, then crying. I remember getting up and walking down the short hall, standing just outside the doorway to the living room. My mother was standing beside an old armchair that sat stodgily in one corner, her face in her hands. I'd never seen her cry like that. My father was slumped on the couch contemplating the faded carpet.

I was so shaken I didn't know what to do. I began to cry, silent tears running down my cheeks. All I could say was, Mommy? They both looked up at me then, and that’s when I really burst into tears.

The next day our packed bags were sitting in the front hall looking lonely and somehow final. My mother told me we were going to stay with Grandma and Grandpa for a couple of weeks.

Is Daddy going?

No. Not this time.

She then said I should go say goodbye to my dad if I wanted to. He'd gone out into the backyard to work in the garden. I went to the backdoor hesitating at the screen and saw my dad hunched over some tomato plants. He was pulling weeds from the base of the stalks, and I remember thinking how tired he looked. Aged. Tears instantly welled up in my eyes, but I bravely swallowed them and stepped out the door to say goodbye.

THE DRIVE TO MY GRANDPARENT'S house was long and uneventful, and I drowsed most of the way there, the pleasantly warm sun shining through the side window, soft bumps in the road lulling me even further. We arrived late that afternoon, both of us tired and ready to get out of the car.

My grandparents lived in this old shadow of a house that seemed to exist in the middle of nowhere. As we got closer, I shook the drowsiness off and stretched my aching legs. We turned off the main road and followed the dirt lane for what seemed like an eternity into the heavily wooded forest. The gnarled honey locusts that dotted the perimeter reminded me of one of my favorite fairy tales, Sleeping Beauty, and I briefly fell into the fantasy that I was some forgotten princess trapped in an enchanted castle deep in the woods.

Finally, we rounded the last curve, and bright sunshine broke through the trees. Up ahead, I saw the house and felt a shiver run down my spine.

The old farmhouse was a large, rambling structure that sat in the middle of a small clearing. An immense oak flanked the eastern side, and it loomed over the house like a giant arm, lanky fingers dangling.

We drew closer, my mother maneuvering the car easily up to the front of the house. When we reached the end of the gravel drive, she paused for a moment, and I could feel the engine idling lazily in the warm sunlight. I looked up at the house, taking in its full visage. Sunshine danced off the rooftop, but the windows and the house itself were hidden in shadow, immune to the sun's warmth. I shivered despite the balmy weather, and my arms broke out in gooseflesh. This was a visit I did not relish.

As we walked up the overgrown pathway to the front door, I remember glancing up at the front-facing windows. There were eight in all, four on the lower half, three on the second floor and a single, oval window high up in an oversized dormer, the attic I supposed. That window was like a giant eye looking down on me, staring unblinking, as if it had caught me doing something I shouldn't have been. I quickly looked away and pulled closer to my mother.

Grandma was waiting for us at the door. Her hair was pulled back in a loose bun, the only way I had ever seen her wear it, and an apron with tiny blue flowers covered her dress. This vision of my grandmother was so familiar to me that even to this day I can't imagine her any other way, although I've seen several photos of her in her girlhood, smiling face, long hair in ribbons.

She stepped out onto the front porch and I shivered again.

Well, I see you made it.

My mother only smiled tiredly, gave my grandmother a brief hug and replied, It's good to see you, Mom.

Grandma then turned to me, leaning down to pinch my cheek, then dryly kissed the spot she had just pinched. I quickly brushed my cheek with the back of one hand.

We stood on the porch for a moment as if all of us were uncertain what to do next. My mother and I hesitating to go inside, my grandmother hesitating to let us in.

Or maybe that was just my imagination.

We stepped inside the dark and musty house and I turned back slightly, sad and a little wary, worried about leaving the safety of the sunlight. But leave it we did.

That was the first day.

THE THING I REMEMBER most about that summer was being so very lonely. It was just the four of us up there in that house in the woods with no one else around. I remember my grandmother saying the nearest house was over a mile away and that it was important not to wander off. If I got lost in the woods, I could scream all day and no one would hear me. Stories of old fairy tales my mother had read to me came tumbling into my mind, and I could imagine myself lost in a dark and scary forest surrounded by witches and monsters, all wanting to eat me. That had scared the crap out of me.

I stayed near the house.

The inside of the house was heavily curtained and smelled old and closed-in. I had the feeling that house hadn't seen sunlight for about a million years; if it ever had at all. It felt like I was in a coffin. Suffocating. Unable to breathe. So, I spent as much time as I could outside.

Mom stayed in her room a lot. My grandpa, I soon found out, had become bed ridden. He'd had a stroke earlier that year, which had paralyzed the right side of his body. He’d also become prone to colds and pneumonia. I remember going into his bedroom to say hello on that first day. He gave me a weak hug and said he was happy to see me and my mother. But the room smelled sickly, like medicine and urine, so I didn't go in there much after that.

That left only my grandmother.

Grandma, when she wasn't in the kitchen or taking care of grandpa, mostly worked on her knitting. She said little those first few days, and I got the distinct feeling that she wasn’t happy about us being there.

I didn’t want to be there either. I missed my dad terribly and only wanted my mother and I to go back home and be a family again. Already the two weeks had turned into much longer, and I'd asked my mother several times when we would go home. At first, she would say, Soon. Very soon. But after a while, all she said was, I don't know. And that I don't know scared me so much. Because that was the same as saying never.