Brian Helt
Ghosts in the Room

<< continued from Part 2

I couldn't take it any longer. I sat down on the sidewalk not two blocks down from the stand and nearly ripped the bag to shreds trying to get to the food. The fingers of my reaching hand found something tender, something hot. I wrenched the burger out from the bag and stuffed as much of it as I could into my mouth, trying to fill every single crevice of my palate with the food that made my nerves sing and my heart melt.

Whatever I could get into my hands I devoured in a feverish blur of gouging bites, the emptiness in my stomach never yielding. The tastes and textures were everything that was missing in my life right then and it was as if I had finally received my fix after a lifetime of withdrawal. Feeding had taken me into another realm where comfort and solace wrapped me like linen, fresh from the dryer. When I had finally finished, it was because I came to realize that I had eaten Wendy's food along with my own.

The elation of a swollen belly over ripened into the acrid dread I have come to know so well now. I hated my self entirely. I rose to my feet, my stomach lagging behind like wet elastic. Each step threw my weight in a new and off-kilter direction and a fatigue that I had never before felt in my life penetrated my veins, dulled my brain and softened my muscles.

As I approached the block where the house stood, dread gave way to anxiety and anxiety gave way to panic. Nausea swept down into the bottom of my stomach only to rise in a threating dry heave. I walked alongside the chain link fence to the unkempt yard, trying my best to compose myself, to think of how I would tell her what I had done, how I would live with myself.

At first, it was the noise of it. The faint and rhythmic bumping reached through the gentle breeze and down the block. As I continued, the faint beat became louder and clearer until I found myself standing at the gate, gazing at it. The nausea that had once sent dry heaves up my throat was eclipsed by a bottomless gulch of dread as I stared at the front door swaying open and closed.

I threw myself across the yard and up the front steps as fast as I could, wrenching open the front door.

"Wendy!" I bellowed, from the front living room.

"Wendy!" I leapt from the front room to each of the vacant and dilapidated rooms, shouting her name as I went, praying that I would find her, curled up, out of breath in one of them.

I stepped into what was left of the kitchen where I found the back door swaying in syncopated tandem with the front. The absence of her voice roared in my ears as I looked out the window, past the empty back yard and into the forest of oak trees. The crumpled paper bag, stained with grease, dropped from my fingertips as I stepped to the kitchen sink, reaching into my mouth with my index finger and running it against the back of my throat, purging all that I had gorged on.

I remained - in that kitchen - wholly alone; the remnants of a life and identity shared up to that point. I hollowed myself out, trying to destroy that which the guilt threatened to eat away. It was all I could do to outrun the pain and the hatred I felt each time I looked in the mirror, only to see the undeserving survivor, the one that should've disappeared.

The front door opens and Wendy Addison appears in khaki pants and a wrinkled blue blouse that hangs, untucked, from the frame of her bony shoulders. Laugh lines, crow's feet, tear troughs, marionette lines; the scriptures of her face describe more than an age that is simply too remote for my missing half, but something familiar in a way that terrifies me. I cannot put my finger on it as it draws me into its arms. A nauseating cramp descends from my heart and nestles itself into my stomach as I fight the words out from my stinging lungs.

"Are you Wendy Addison?"

The peculiarity in her face unravels. She stares at me as if we have met before.

"I guess you haven't received any of my letters." She says.

The smell of her life pours out through the open doorway; the vagueness of some animal undercut with dried tobacco; a sour aroma of cured fruit that bites at the ceiling of my sinuses.

"Letters?" I parrot.

"I'm sorry," she restarts. "That's rude. Please, come inside."

I step up onto the porch and into her house. On the far wall, newspaper clippings from all around the country billow and crinkle in the cross breeze, hanging from metal thumb tacks. The burning desert light seeps in through the front window and casts long and wild shadows of the clippings that writhe across the wall. Each of the headlines is named Katrina and is adorned with photos of a flood, the watermark of which has yet to fade for so many.

From down the hall, an old man shuffles into the room and over to a ruddy brown sofa that is pivoted at the corner of a couch that faces the wall of clippings. The feral hair that rims his scalp reaches out in all directions. He blinks hard at me through a pair of glasses with small eyes buried under the loose packing of their lids before he sits down on the sofa. He stares up at me, standing behind the couch, and I can see from the slant of his expression that he is wondering if he has met me before or perhaps what I am doing in his house. Wendy returns from the kitchen and hands me a glass of water. The cloud of tiny air bubbles dissolves like a plume of powdered sugar.

"You're so thin, you look to be on the verge of death. Are you hungry?" She asks.

"No thank you." I reply as my stomach throttles itself. Wendy Addison doesn't hear me, disappearing again into the kitchen and rummaging through the cupboards for something. The percussion of tableware fills the house with the stale symphony of domestic life. On the sofa the old man scribbles on a notepad. He lifts it to show me the question scrawled in longhand that looks almost exactly like the writing on the payphone in Kettleman.

ANABEL?

"Nora," I say as I press my flat hand to my chest, feeling the blotchy keloid scar underneath the fabric of the shirt that is stiff from body soil and dirt. I throw half the glass of water into a bottomless thirst with three sweeping gulps. He shakes his head at me, tapping the notepad with his finger over and over again.

"I don't know who-is that your daughter or-?" My words trail off as he hunches over his notepad again, scribbling another message.

WHY ARE YOU HERE?

"I'm looking for my twin," I say. "Her name is Wendy. She looks like me."

The mute man's expression melts with the precedence of sympathy. He looks at me as if I am drowning right before him. His eyes are shaped by a sorrowful knowing and I am reminded of Wendy Bickford, of the trucker. He looks at me as if I am already dead, or is it that he knows what I refuse to admit to myself, what I have felt in my bones all along? That Wendy has been dead for all this time. That her heart gave out long ago.

Sweat collects at my temples and between my shoulder blades and my own heart begins to race so fast that I believe I could die right there and I almost wish it so.

"Have there been any breakthroughs in the search?" Wendy asks, appearing next to the sofa, holding a bowl of cashews with both hands like an offering to the gods of young worship.

"No." I manage to force from my lips.

I catch glance of the mute man, shaking his head.

The bowl of cashews shatters against the hard wood floor, sending shards and nuts scattering at Wendy's feet. She steps towards me with a terror in her eyes that I myself recognize by synesthesia. I have felt it before, tasted its loins, smelled its sour breath and heard its voice.

In the pate celeste of her irises, I see the faded slate of a woman whose soul has been eroded by the cavity of loss. I feel this in myself, the great empty shape - the void we craft in ourselves because we are afraid of the horrible things that are more real than we care to admit, that we only wish we could forget. It's cold but recognizable, the way your dreams make sense only to you for a moment before melting on your tongue in a flash, lost forever.

Ice drips down my spine and chills my veins as I realize what it is that I recognize about Wendy Addison. Hers is the face of a woman whose greatest flaw was the knuckle busting grip that she refused to loosen on the ones she loved and lost. It is the face I see every time I look into the mirror, the face of a girl who has grown into a woman who has let the trueness of herself wash away in the saline tides of guilt fed pursuit. It is the face that I find I no longer share with my Wendy. It is the face of a woman who has begun to weep at my silence.

Her sobs fill the room which feels newly empty with the exception of the clippings on the wall, fluttering like the wings of a thousand dead monarch butterflies. These clippings will never come down and Wendy will wake up tomorrow and in her mind, Anabel will still be alive somewhere. Lord knows how many more times she will relive this moment.

"Haven't you found her yet?" Wendy heaves and chokes, stuffing a napkin under the sloping point of her nose, crushing it against her lips. "It's been a whole year. Where is she?"

I take her in my arms and feel her balsawood bones wrapped in the soggy raw hide of her flesh. She could dissolve in my arms, I think. My lips, wetted by my own tears, are against her scalp.

"It hasn't been too long, right?" She asks. "There's still a chance."

I hold myself, press my lips to myself and breathe myself in. Anabel; the emptiness she left behind when she was eaten alive by this thing, this life, this loud concoction of places and people and dreams and doubts - and as I imagine her, I see my Wendy in a hospital bed, breathing heavily, on the cusp of her transcendence. This is the one true inevitability. This is what I tell myself. I am a house fly, trying to escape.

In that room with the Addisons, staring at the wall of newspaper clippings about a horrible hurricane that drowned their daughter, I find myself as I am; marred by the fantasy of this search. We are two of the same halves that do not fit together, each with a missing piece that fell down the storm drain of life before being washed out into the ocean through the river channels.

With Wendy Addison in one arm, I reach into my pocket and pull out my steno pad and pen. I uncap the pen with surgical dexterity and, holding the steno pad with my left hand. I cross out Addison and find that it is the last name on my list.

>> click to read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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Brian Helt credits his attendance at CSSSA/Innerspark for igniting his passion for fiction. He studied creative Writing at San Francisco State University. His work has appeared in publications such as Ginosko Literary Journal, Forge Journal, The Blue Moon Literary and Arts Review and more. Follow him on Twitter at @brian_helt.

>> Back to Issue 20, 2017