Page 3 of Night Songs

She nodded feebly. “Yeah, I’m fine. Nothing really happened. I was just scared.”

“I would have been scared, too.”

“No. You would have fought back.”

I didn’t know how to tell her that it wasn’t me who had attacked Rick. It was this creature inside me that I couldn’t control.

She picked up a bag of frozen pizza bagels and pressed it to my bruised temple. Then she wrapped an ACE bandage around my head and secured it in place. “Okay, you’re all set.” I looked in the mirror at the ridiculous wrap, and we both giggled.

We got into bed, and Shelli dropped off almost immediately. The clock next to me read 11:30 with its grains of demonic rice. I lay there perfectlystill, listening to the white noise of Shelli’s breathing, waiting for my body to shut down.

But I knew there would be no sleep tonight.

Birthdays filled me with dread. They always had, and back then, I had no idea why. When I was little, I thought it was the flu. But as I got older and noticed the sickness always dissipated the next day, I began to think of it as a premonition of the year’s coming misery.

My room in that house never shook off its guest-room origins, even though I’d lived in it since I was seven. The pastel plaid bedspread and matching curtains, the white wicker furniture, and the fake flowers sprouting from their gray-pink vase all felt temporary, like I was living on the set of a sitcom that was about to get canceled. The only distinctive feature was the gold cross on the left wall, which was more like the set ofCarrie. My aunt Lorraine’s attempt to passively exorcize whatever evil lay at the center of me.

I absently traced the long purple birthmark that stretched across my collarbone like a scab that wouldn’t heal. People at school gossiped that it was one sliver of an enormous tattoo or a scar from whatever killed my parents.

For me it was like a brand, marking me as the property of some distant, mysterious place, separate from everyone else.

My father died before I was born, and then my mother died when I was five. I was sent to live with my father’s parents, who croaked just two years later, and then passed along to my father’s sister, Lorraine, and her husband, Carl. I was like a pestilence, sowing death wherever I went. My aunt and uncle had only survived out of sheer awfulness, preserved by their meanness like cucumbers in vinegar.

They almost never talked about my parents, except to say that my father had been a good, God-fearing man until he met my mother, a “white-trash drug addict” who was apparently the devil incarnate. They didn’t call her by her name, onlyherwith a curving condemnation to the letters.

I didn’t have any concrete memories of my mother—only a few glimmers. Some nights I would dream of being held against a warm chest, and I would feel this comfort that was almost muscular in strength, but I could never see a face. When I woke, I would be filled with this intense yearning to be touched, and I’d wish I hadn’t dreamt it at all, that it was better not to know how it felt to be loved like that.

But I much preferred this dream to the nightmare I sometimes had, of squatting with my small child’s body in a tight, dark space, desperate to escape, a feeling of intense, claustrophobic panic suffusing my every cell. I would wake with sweat rolling down my chest, and while it was a relief to be in my room where I could move around freely, I never quite shook the feeling of being trapped.

In lieu of a clear mental image or any physical picture of my mother, I had conjured many versions of her in my mind. But there were two main ones: a soft, fiercely loving woman like Sally Field inForrest Gump, and a cold, thin-armed, tragically beautiful dope fiend like Kelly Lynch inDrugstore Cowboy.

Sometimes I wondered if the creature inside me, the one that filled my head with strange thoughts and impulses that didn’t feel like my own, was some remnant of the early years I’d spent with my mother before she died. Some remnant of her need.

When morning broke, Shelli snuck out the window for her own bed, and I curled in a ball like a grub and prayed to the universe for the day to pass quickly.

But as much as I wanted to wallow, I knew that if I continued to lay there, at some point my uncle Carl would poke his head in and say “Feeling lazy today, are we?” hoping to catch me in my underwear. I used to lean a chair against my door in lieu of an actual lock, but that had been prohibited for the sake of “fire safety.”

I dressed and walked downstairs, passing the new oil paintinghanging above the mantel. It showed my cousin Dinah posing with her lustrous chestnut horse Cocoa Puff. Their manes shone equally in the play of light.

The painting looked out of place in my aunt and uncle’s modest suburban house, as did the other dissonant luxuries they owned, like Carl’s yellow Porsche, or Lorraine’s tanning bed, which she kept in the living room for lack of space. I didn’t know how they could afford these things, given Carl managed a Chili’s and Lorraine worked part-time for their church, but I assumed it was something pathetic like tax evasion. Carl liked to pretend he was a red-blooded male, but at his core he was too meek to do anything truly risky.

In the kitchen, they were already eating their breakfast with Dinah. Five tiny purebred dogs surrounded them, breathing poorly, their beady eyes trained on the bacon between my aunt’s fingers. As I moved about the kitchen pouring a cup of coffee and adding cream, my uncle watched me with a similar expression.

“Rhea, you’re looking very mature this morning,” he said.

My body suddenly felt enormous and fleshy, and impossible to hide. I glanced at my aunt to see if she was listening, but she was busy cooing to one of the dogs and feeding him bits of burned fat. When I tried to make eye contact with Dinah, she looked away.

I had learned it was better not to engage Carl. If I told him to eat shit, he’d treat me like an alley cat that needed to be tamed. He liked to watch my skin flush. It was part of the game.

I kept my face blank and leaned against the counter with my cup, preferring the physical distance. But then he continued to gaze at me from head to toe, and I moved to the table, hiding my bottom half from view.

“Happy birthday, Rhea,” he leered. “It’s a big one this year.Eighteen.”

God, I was going to be sick.

Lorraine looked up from the dog and smiled wanly. “Oh right, yes, happy birthday. Dinah?”

“Happy birthday,” she said, staring down at her breakfast.