Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 21: The Children

Photo by Holly Stratton on Unsplash

The walls were plain, a sort of yellowish-brown, like wheat fields in the fall. The hardwood floors were shiny and clean and the lone dresser was tidy and neat. Save for a white-rimmed vanity mirror and the large photo collage — also framed in white — the small boxy room was void of decoration and character.  Gracie Fogleman herself had painstakingly painted the walls years before and refused to let her daughter hang a single poster or picture without her consent. Grace rarely consented.

In the center of this room, Olivia was in the full-sized bed with the brass headboard, the covers pulled to her chin. Under the sheets, she wore blue jean shorts and a baggy, oversized black t-shirt.

She felt guilty about something but had no idea why. Accompanying the shame was a vague recollection of a farmhouse party, a keg of beer, and a roaring bonfire. Olivia wasn’t sure if this was an actual memory or some trick of her brain.

Had she been napping just now?  Perhaps so. It wasn’t morning, at least she didn’t think so. Outside the room’s lone window, the deep orange of early dusk colored the sky. 

Olivia then thought that maybe she was still asleep at that very moment. But this feeling, this sense of having just been at a high school party, was undeniably strong and real.

“I hate parties,” she said, then blinked twice in surprise at the tone of her voice. It was her voice, of course, but sounded as if she was hearing it played back from a cassette recorder, foreign and high-pitched.

She sat there under the sheets thinking of those parties she hated in her adolescence, yet regularly attended nevertheless. Those gatherings were the foundation of her extreme distaste for falseness and insincerity in others.  The cornfield cliques of Cornerstone, Illinois were the primary catalysts for catapulting her far from Cornerstone’s farmlands.

But still, there it was, the feeling of great immediacy and proximity to that bonfire party as if it had just occurred the night before. The long-forgotten memory had relocated to the front of her brain of scores of teenagers gyrating and dancing around a bonfire blazing hot and yellow amidst a dry patch of worn and stamped-down dirt in the middle of a cornfield.

“I’m hungover,” she whispered into the sterile room. She shook her head again at the sound of her voice.

“Hungover, but no headache,” she said, cocking her head to the side and listening to herself. “Headache. Headache. Hungover. Hungover.”

She tossed the sheets off and swung her feet over the edge of the bed.

Accompanied by the vague hypnagogic thoughts that rang with a certain sense of reality both recent and far away was an unsettled perception that she’d done something she shouldn’t have, but she knew that wasn’t the case.  Yet a feeling she hadn’t experienced for decades pressed upon her that her parents would somehow discover she’d been drinking the night before at a high school party.

“Wait,” she said and looked around the room. “This isn’t a hangover.”

What she at first thought was a migraine was instead a vague cloudiness, like being half in and out of a dream. But this dream was based on actual memory. This memory, of being surrounded by people whose names she’d tried to forget over the years, Olivia had long ago tried to dispel and replace with happier memories. With a new life. A new life in North Carolina. A life with David and Mark and Rosie.

“Mark!” she said suddenly as his name and face abruptly appeared in her mind.  “Rosie!”

For a moment she’d forgotten they existed. How was that possible?

Quickly, she stood then and walked towards the door in this strangely familiar room, but the door opened before she could reach it. 

In the doorway stood her mother and father, Grace and Mickey. Just days before she’d hugged them goodbye as her father backed out of her driveway in North Carolina. They’d come for David’s funeral and then flew back home to Illinois. Mark, Rosie, and her brother-in-law Jeremy all stood in the driveway waving as they drove away.

But now Olivia was in her bedroom from years before, in the room that looked more like a guest room in a bed and breakfast than a teenager’s retreat. And standing in the doorway were two people who looked not like the parents she’d just said goodbye to after David’s funeral, but versions of her mother and father that Olivia hadn’t seen in forty years, versions that were younger and just now starting to show signs of gray in their hair and wrinkles at the corners of their eyes.  Mickey, her father, even had his old beard which he’d long ago shaved away for good.  

“This can’t be real,” Mickey said, looking at his daughter. “You’re just a girl.”

“Of course she’s a girl,” Grace answered her husband.

Olivia took a step toward her parents and then suddenly collapsed to her knees.

“My kids!” she cried and clasped her hands to her cheeks.  

“They’re not here?” her father asked.

“My kids!” Olivia screamed, and tears poured out from her eyes. “Oh my God, oh my kids! Oh, my kids!”

“Kids?” Grace asked, confused.

“Something ate our walls,” Olivia cried.

“Blackness,” Mickey answered.

“Yes!” his daughter responded. “You saw it, too?”

“What are you talking about?” asked Grace.

“Wait,” Olivia said. “This is the Cornerstone house.”

“Of course it is,” Grace answered.

“Look how young you look,” Mickey said. He stepped forward and touched Olivia’s smooth cheek with the back of his hand.

“Dad, where are my kids?” Olivia asked.  Her face tingled with pinpricks, like tiny sparks igniting across her cheeks.  

“Honey, you’re white as a ghost,” Mickey said.  “Take a breath, girl. Take a breath.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Olivia said.  “Did I come back with you after the funeral?”

“Funeral?” Grace asked.

“That’s right,” Mickey gasped. He covered his mouth with his hand. “David.  David’s funeral.”

“David?” Grace echoed. “David?”

Olivia’s mother said David’s name as if it wasn’t real, like she wasn’t sure who they were talking about, as if her daughter had not been ridiculously enamored with a man named David since her senior year of college.

“Where are my children?” Olivia screamed again.  The pinpricks intensified, pointing inward. She nearly expected her skin to explode.  “I need to wake up. This isn’t real. That blackness wasn’t real. And where’s Jeremy? He was there, too.”

“Now who’s Jeremy?” Grace asked.

“You’re not dreaming, honey,” Mickey said, taking a seat next to her on the bed. “We’re all wide awake right now.”

“I must be sleeping,” Olivia argued. Then, more questions came flooding out of her mouth:  “This doesn’t make sense.  Why am I here?  How are we in Cornerstone in this damn bedroom? Why do you both look so young?  Where are my children?”

“Olivia, stop this nonsense,” her mother said.  “You’re too young for children.”

“What?” 

“Grace,” Mickey said, turning to his wife.  “What are you talking about?”

“Look at her,” Grace said.  “She’s just a girl.  She can’t have children.”

“You know she has children,” Mickey said. “Our grandchildren.”

“Are you insane?” Olivia yelled at her mother. She scrambled up off the floor and pushed past her parents.  As she moved to leave the room, she caught her reflection in the mirror on the wall. 

“Oh God,” she said upon seeing her own face, tan and smooth.  Her dark brown hair was pulled back, held in place with a dark forest green headband.  As her mother insisted, Olivia’s face was now that of a young girl. “How is this possible?  I have to be dreaming.”

“David,” Grace said again. She pushed her palms against her eyes. “Wait.  I…David. Oh no. Oh no. How could I not remember David?”

“It’s okay, Grace,” Mickey said.

“Oh sweetie,” Grace said, uncovering her eyes.  “David’s gone. David died, didn’t he?”

“I think I must have lost my mind,” Olivia said. “The grief. I’ve lost my mind.”

“Then we all have,” Mickey answered.

“Yes,” Grace said.  “The kids. Are they still in North Carolina?”

“I don’t know where they are!” Olivia said.  “I need to get out of here.”

Pushing past her mother, a much too young version of her mother, Olivia plunged into the darkness of their hallway with the antiquated and tattered rug on the floor. The hallways then opened into the contrasting brightness of the kitchen with its plastic white cabinets and countertops and hideously matching avocado green refrigerator and oven range. 

Olivia then burst out the backdoor and stood on the gravel driveway. There was her father’s old pickup truck he’d purchased before she was even born, parked in front of the detached garage with the basketball hoop where she used to throw shots by herself, wistfully dreaming of places far beyond Cornerstone.  In the air were the scent of wheat and the dry dusty smell that permeated the summers of her youth.  

She heard her parents approach from behind her with the familiar sound of the banging screen door from the kitchen.

“That’s your old truck,” Olivia said.

“Indeed it is,” Mickey answered as he stepped next to his daughter.  

“That thing died twenty years ago,” Grace said from Olivia’s other side.

“Thirty,” Mickey corrected.  “Maybe thirty-one.”

“How did it get here, then?” asked Olivia.

“How did any of us get her?” Grace asked and suddenly bent over, heaving.

“Mom!” Olivia cried out as Grace vomited onto the gravel stones, emptying her stomach.

“That’s okay, Gracie,” Mickey said as he moved to his wife’s side. He gently rubbed her back. “Get it all out.”

Grace wretched again, her gut involuntarily clenching up, seemingly contracting every muscle in her body.

“Gah!” she gasped and took a stumbling step backward.

“Hold steady, there,” Mickey said and took her by the arm.

“It’s all there!” Olivia gulped.  “It’s all there! A second ago everything was normal and now all of a sudden I can see everything like I just got walloped with a baseball bat!”

“It’s alright, Grace.”

“We left your house after the funeral,” Grace said. “We buried David just a few days ago.  It’s like we just buried him. And there were like three different quiches we ate for lunch afterward.  And that neighbor of yours made that spinach dip.”

“Kay,” Olivia said.  “From next door.”

“Yes,” Grace said.  “Kay.”  

“And I didn’t want to leave, but we had to get back here because this is such a busy time of year. What a stupid reason to leave you and the grandkids for.”

“It’s okay,” Olivia said.

“KIDS!” Grace then yelled at the top of her lungs. “KIDS! Where are you? Come out if you’re hiding!”

“I don’t think they’re here,” Olivia said.

“We should have stayed!” Grace said. Another dry heave forced its way through her body. “You just lost David. And now where are the kids?”

“We stopped to get a cup of coffee on the way to the airport,” Mickey said.

“That’s right,” Grace answered. “At Waffle House.”

“And then we were here,” Mickey said.  “We were here now. But you see how that doesn’t make sense?”

“Nothing makes sense,” Olivia told her father. “It doesn’t make sense that we’re back on the farm. It doesn’t make sense how you’re forty pounds lighter and thirty years younger than you were just a few days ago. It doesn’t make sense how a few minutes ago I was in my bedroom with the kids and now I’m here.”

“That’s enough,” Mickey said firmly.

“Yes,” Grace agreed.

“The kids,” Olivia said and looked pleadingly at her parents.

“Yes,” Mickey said. “We need to get to Mark and Rosie.”

Photo by Federico Respini on Unsplash