I didn’t sleep that night. At first, I was to frozen with fear to even think about closing my eyes or moving at all. My brain felt like jelly, and my thoughts were dull and ponderous, sliding past each other in the congealing dark of my mind. I remember thinking that I was turning to stone, and that was all right. I would just turn to stone and then it wouldn’t hurt when Mama came to rip me apart.
But the thought didn’t last. Didn’t satisfy. Soon it was replaced with a new, stranger idea that I liked better. The idea that if I was still enough, not moving a muscle or making a sound, I would just fade into the background until I disappeared like a ghost. Once I was invisible, I could move around without Mama noticing. I could try to help her, and if I couldn’t, I could try to escape. I was still fearful of what the world had become outside our little shelter, but I was also starting to doubt what she had told me. If she was sick or confused, maybe things weren’t like she thought after all.
Hours passed with me staying still, barely breathing enough to stir my chest. It felt as though I could feel myself fading away from the world, growing thin and insubstantial before slipping away entirely into some ghost version of the storm shelter. Breathing a little more deeply, the only sound I heard was the placid snoring of Mama across the room.
I eased off the bed an inch at the time. Twice the unfamiliar springs beneath me creaked and my heart shuddered in my chest. Both times, Mama stopped snoring for a moment before the familiar drone of her sleeping began again. My bare feet were silent on the cold concrete floor as I crept in what I thought was the direction of the door leading out.
My initial thoughts had evolved into a rudimentary plan. I would sneak outside, see how things looked, and if there was help to be gotten, I would get it for myself and for Mama. If everything was as bad as she said, I could always turn around before she even missed me.
But when I twisted the doorknob, I found it was locked, with no way of unlocking it except for the small keyhole I felt under the knob. Biting my lip, I turned back to stare unseeing in the direction of Mama. She would have the key somewhere, probably on her body in a pocket or on a chain. I might wake her up trying to find it…but I might not. She was sleeping hard, and besides, what other choice did I have?
So I made my way back in the direction I had come, following the sound of her snores to guide me to the side of her bed. Every step I was scared I would bump something or fall—make some noise that would wake her and arouse her suspicion. But I reached her easily, and crouching down beside her, I sent out a trembling, questing hand.
She had changed into pajamas of some sort, and at first I wondered if there were any pockets at all. I was drifting my hands over her, light as a spring breeze, trying to sense the geography of her clothing without waking her. It wasn’t working very well. I had no points of reference in the dark, and I hadn’t paid attention to what she was wearing before she put me to bed. Just as I was losing hope, I felt a hard lump on what I guessed was her hip.
It was Mama’s box of shadows.
She’d had the box for as long as I remembered. She told me once it had been in the family for some time, and that it was always passed down to the oldest child, which she was, when they were grown. Mama said that one day it would be mine, but that until then, I was never to touch it or look in it. Such things, she said, weren’t meant for me yet. They could ruin someone so young.
As with everything, I had taken Mama at her word. Worked to do as she wanted. And while I still had curiosity about it, for the most part I had learned to act as though it didn’t exist.
But I was not an idiot either. I knew the box had shown her terrible things. Had affected her, making her strange—especially in the hours and days after she used it. When I was smaller, she had looked into it very infrequently, but within the past few months, I had seen her with it more and more. And every time she used it, she came back to herself a little less. It was as if she was leaving some part of her sanity or her soul in that thing every time she looked into it, trying to see…what?
I didn’t know. Possible futures and how to avoid them? Hidden knowledge from some distant, forgotten place? She rarely talked about what she saw, but it was clearly important given how it had captivated her. The thought didn’t occur to me at the time that she was an addict—an addict hungry for whatever poison that box offered. At the time, I just thought about how I needed to see what was in the box for myself so I could try and understand. So I could help Mama.
I carefully reached into her pocket for the box. It was icy to the touch, but not unpleasantly so, and after one gentle tug, it slid easily out into my hand. I froze again for a moment. Still snoring? Yes, at least for now, but I needed to be quick. Standing up slowly, I crept away from the bed, my free hand stuck out in front of me. I needed the door to the storage rooms. I could look at the box in there.
I went too far at first, but when I came back in the other direction, I found it. I sat down after I was through the doorway—if Mama decided to turn on the lights, I’d be around the corner out of sight. Feeling the box with my hands, I found the small metal door on the top of it. I knew from watching Mama that all you needed to do was trigger the door with a tiny button on the side and two small glass windows would be revealed. Then you simply held the box up to your eyes and looked through those windows into…whatever it was it showed.
It hadn’t occurred to me growing up how insane the idea of the box was, perhaps because I had never known life without it. Questions like how was it powered, how did it work, how could it possibly work…those things never crossed my mind. In part because I’d seen how it affected Mama whenever she used it. She wasn’t faking it, and I hadn’t thought she was stupid or insane. So whatever the box was, whatever it could do, it had to be real, right?
I triggered the button to release the lid covering the glass viewing circles. It sounded impossibly loud in the dark, and I strained to listen for the rhythmic sounds of Mama sleeping before relaxing my death grip on the box. I felt an untapped well of fear rising in me. I didn’t want to see what the box would show me. I didn’t want to be like Mama.
Shaking badly, I opened my eyes wide and brought the box up. My eyelashes brushed against the glass lenses and I blinked as I stared into…nothing. There was nothing in there. It was just a dark, empty box, and my mother…
“…was just crazy.”
I looked up from my notes at Addison. She seemed slightly emotional now, leaning forward in her seat as she spoke. I would normally take that as a welcome change from her typical flat affect and guarded body language, but something was off. Staring at the floor, Addison was wiping tears from her cheeks as she waited silently for my reaction.
I took a moment to pick up her file off the table and flip back through my earlier notes from when she first started having sessions with me a year earlier. Not notes from the sessions themselves--a troubled and angry fourteen year-old girl at the time, she had barely spoken to me in those first meetings. No, the notes were from things her grandparents had told me before I started counseling Addison. Ah, here we go.
**Addison is a sweet girl who has been through a lot. Her mother had mental health issues, which lead to her isolating herself and Addison from the family. This culminated when, after two months of attempts at contact with no response, her grandmother went to check on them and found Addison trapped in a sub-basement with her mother’s dead body.
She had been there for several days.
There was some investigation into the cause of death, which was ultimately ruled a suicide. Grandmother showed signs of dishonesty during the discussions of this death and Addison’s ongoing behavior. This may be partially unintentional, as she seems very protective of the girl, and seems unwilling to assign blame to Addison even after the incident at school.**
Looking back up from my notes, I saw that Addison was looking at me. Even at fifteen, her gaze was unnerving at times. She was highly intelligent, and while she often showed little emotion, I never got the sense it was due to any lack of feeling. Instead, I had recently began developing the theory that everything this girl did was extensively planned and tightly controlled. This could simply be the product of an unfortunate but charismatic young lady who was working hard to be liked and fit in, to find love and acceptance after a traumatic early childhood.
Or it could be signs of a budding sociopath.
“When you had this realization about your mother, how did that make you feel?”
There was a buzz from the office phone, and then Janice’s voice telling me that my 3 o'clock, Mr. Evans, was here. I told her it would be a few minutes. I looked back to Addison and apologized for the interruption.
I saw that her tears were gone now. She sat back in her chair, and crossing her arms, she gave a shrug.
“Well, not good. I had trusted her. Knowing she was crazy, had been delusional or lying or whatever…it sucked. Knowing she might hurt me…that was worse.”
Nodding, I weighed my options. I could let her continue to guide the session and retreat back to her normal posture. That would lose any real progress we might make today, especially if I was wrong and she was being genuine. Or I could try and provoke a reaction. See if I could breakthrough to…something.
“Did you kill your mother?”
Addison’s expression didn’t change at first. Then she smiled slightly. “Why? Do you think I did?”
I mirrored her earlier shrug. “I don’t know, Addison. There are details about what I’ve heard about your time with your mother,” I flipped through the remaining pages of notes I had from her family and a childhood counselor, “that don’t seem to match up with what you’re telling me.”
Her smile widened. “Like what?”
I flipped to the third page and scanned it. “Like, according to your grandfather, there were never any reports of a fight or murder at a department store near where you lived. Not during the relevant time frame.”
She nodded. “And what else?”
“There’s the pre-interview notes of the counselor you saw briefly when you first went to live with your grandparents. According to those, she reviewed an incident report from when you were found in the sub-basement with your mother’s body. That when police found you, you were in good condition and sitting on the front lawn. Your grandmother had gotten you out easily, because the door wasn’t locked.”
Addison crinkled her nose slightly. “Couldn’t it be I just remember things differently? Trauma and all that?”
I tried to keep my expression neutral. “It could. But in my experience, you are very intelligent and self-controlled. You don’t make many mistakes. And while a traumatized seven year old unlocking the door and then still choosing to stay with her dead mother is feasible, it seems less likely in this case.”
“Because I see here that I asked your grandmother about when she found you. She said she searched the upper floors and then went down to the basements. That she found you easily enough then by the smell. That the door opened right up, because there was no way to lock it. Never had been.”
Addison smirked at me. “What else did she say?”
I closed the file back. “Addison, if you want to make progress, if you want me to reach the point where I can sign off on you having completed the mandated mental health component of your pre-trial diversion satisfactorily, I need you to be honest with me. Tell me what really happened to your mother.”
I felt my breath catch as her smile fell away. For the first time, I was actually afraid of her. “She died and I lived. That’s the only part that matters.” Suddenly her smile was back as her eyes began dancing with mischief. “But if you want to know how, it’s going to cost you.”
---
Credits
Comments