“Oh, really? What am I doing?”
“You know what, it’s like you’re imitating him, you’re allowing him, somehow, you’re letting him into the space—stop it!” That smirk! I couldn’t restrain myself; I lunged, my fingertips like pincers digging at Milo’s skin, yanking at his shoulders, his neck like dough roll it and prick it and mark it and prick it and mark it as Milo yelped and leaped panther-like out of my grasp, jumping to perch on the armrest on the opposite end of the couch. I was breathing hard; my entire body was shaking with panic.
Get control of yourself, Jamie. Nothing good happens when you lose control of yourself.
I pressed my hands to my blazing cheeks.
“Jeez, Jamie. Way to take a joke.”
“You weren’t …” What had come over me? I’d gone and attacked this kid … he could call his father and report me … worse. “I’m s-sorry,” I stammered. “I’m not … not sure what came over me. For a minute I thought you’d become—that you’d turned—”
“Turned what?” he demanded. Glaring and scornful.
Turned into Peter. But I couldn’t force myself to say it out loud. “I don’t know. I don’t know what else to say. You scared me. You shouldn’t have talked in that voice. It wasn’t funny. I’m not crazy, but I am sorry.”
He dropped to the seat, exaggeratedly wary, as if I were some attack dog now chained. “Fine. Then I’m sorry, too.”
“Let’s just forget it, then.”
“Sure. Whatever. Already forgotten.” Only his tone told me otherwise as he stood. “I’m going up now. I’m beat.”
But by now I was collecting my thoughts and my reason. This hadn’t been entirely my fault. Milo didn’t see me as all the way “normal” and he took advantage of it, throwing his voice, freaking me out with his singular, menacing ability to channel Peter. This was all an intentional, elaborate invention for Milo, an amateur magician’s game to frighten and destabilize me. Then, as soon as I lost it, all he had to do was pull back and claim innocence.
Uneasily, I picked up the empty dessert plates, and Milo clicked off the television.
We moved clumsily through the next few minutes, excessively polite to each other as we headed upstairs, where I rinsed the dishes and wiped down the counters. But Milo had gone so quiet that new thoughts collided through me. What if Peter actually had manifested himself through Milo? What if I’d witnessed something, some kind of split-second transmutation, that even Milo himself wasn’t fully aware of?
Milo wasn’t talking. His silence seemed impenetrable, so I didn’t make an attempt at false conversation. We said goodnights and he left. I was still nervously over-tidying the kitchen when Isa came stumbling in, red-eyed and whining sleepily.
“I went down to your room and you weren’t there. I had another nightmare, that I was falling through the sky and I couldn’t—what’s wrong?” Suddenly she was right up in my face. I blinked. “Jamie, are you in one of your trances again?”
“My trances?”
“Sometimes you go away. You’re here but you’re not here.”
“Very funny.” Except I knew all too well what she meant. How, I wondered stupidly, in the thousandth iteration of this thought, would I ever get off these pills? They were making me see things, they’d turned Milo into Peter, but every time another one wore off, all I could think about was getting the next. It would require some act of extreme will or meditation or—
“LIKE RIGHT NOW!” Isa’s hand was flapping in front of my face. “There’s times like right now,” she repeated, more gently, “when I’ll be talking to you, and I know you haven’t heard what I just said.”
Good Lord, what was my problem? Focus, focus. “What did you just say?”
“I asked if you’d make me a milk and honey.”
“Sure.” Capably, my au pair persona re-pinned like a nurse’s hat, I took out a saucepan for the milk. After Isa drank it, I took her upstairs to her bedroom. Although I didn’t want to, I couldn’t leave without checking the fireplace.
More tiles had been chipped out. A few lay broken in the grate. Shivering, I rushed from the room and sped down the hall, nearly tripping over myself, my eyes averted from the portrait of the ghostly children, my hand out to grab the doorknob, not stopping until I’d locked myself safe in my own room.
Where I was too jittery to sleep. I tried a hot shower, my fuzzy socks, the radio tuned softly to classical, and then flipping through my journal, which was an absolute mess. I’d hardly been marking the dates and my thoughts seemed haphazard. My Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes was in my top bureau drawer; for the first time, I took it out and flipped through its pages. The illustrations—round-cheeked children in pinafores, with their flower garlands and quaint toys—always used to soothe me, but tonight the words seemed extra ominous. Pop—had the weasel exploded? And what had possessed Dumpty, a man made from raw egg, to scale a wall? The three blind mice reminded me of the portrait children outside my door.
With a shiver, I closed the book and shoved it into the nightstand.
Eventually, I picked up Romeo and Juliet. Peter’s spidery, over-slanted handwriting marked the play with notes like “joy before death?” “no way out but violence, passion, death.” It was pretty clear that Peter saw himself as a dark Romeo, the reckless romantic.
Midway through the second act, I butterflied the play and crept out of bed to the bookcase. Giving in. Justifying it. My back was still throbbing from the jolt my tailbone had taken, riding on the back of Sebastian’s bike last night.
So what if I needed something? It was just an itty-bitty little something.
I had a good handful of pills left. And then what? Did Connie have a stash? Would over-the-counters work? I couldn’t think that far ahead. I popped one, praying that it was just your basic painkiller.
Crawling to bed, I returned to Peter’s notes in the play, pausing to read the back inside cover.
We live with minimal awareness of why we choose certain paths. We are predetermined but we can’t escape ourselves—our families—our characters—our destiny.
It was a bleak vision, especially as I applied it to myself. What if Uncle Jim’s and Hank’s choices weren’t choices at all? What if they were destined from birth to meet their troubled ends? Did they know my future, my fate, before I did? Was that why they persisted? Would they hunt me down at my most vulnerable moment, the moment before The Moment, forever?