The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Page 17

“What happened, Ethel?”

  She didn’t offer any reply. She didn’t move or appear to hear me until I went up to her and tried to put my hand on her arm.

  One second after I touched her, she came back to life. She flinched and darted seven steps away from Gigi and I, moved her eyes towards mine, turned them wide and wild and made the drumbeats in my ears quicken so much, they began sounding like one endless drumbeat.

  “A humanoid figure...” Ethel whispered, while suddenly being coated in a layer of white. “...did this.”

  White was all she was for the next half hour or so. Not blue, not covered in purple outlines of ovals, not with red circles of even sizes over her cheeks. Gigi was extremely blue, making me hear a violin going crazy and was dripping tears all over the carpet, but not Ethel.

  The whole time I watched her, I heard nothing but drumbeats.

  I was the one who called the police. Neither Ethel nor Gigi could take their eyes off the vessel for long enough to get it done. Gigi couldn’t even bear to put it down.

  The police were as horrified as we were when they saw what we were seeing. The medical examiners pried the vessel away from Gigi then sent us down to the living room so that the forensics team could get a proper look at the evidence on the furniture, floor and walls. Ethel’s kitchen, they turned into an interrogation room. One after the other, Gigi, Ethel and I were sent to sit with two detectives at the breakfast nook in the corner to give our statements on what we’d seen.

  Gigi went first. While waiting for my turn at the dining table next door, I heard her say everything she knew about the old Floridian cure I’d given her the night before. She told them she slept soundly through the night and woke only when she heard Ethel scream, then went on to tell them how we found Daniel, exactly as it happened.

  Ethel, who had been sitting next to me like a statue with a built-in fountain feature in the eye area, went next.

  In between sobs, with a voice that cracked once every few minutes, she told the police what she wouldn’t tell me or Gigi—that she’d been in the shower after waking up and making her bed when she heard a loud bang in her son’s room. When she got there, she found him in the hands of a ‘humanoid figure with no face’—her exact words—who was tossing him around like he were a ragdoll. The figure flew—“Yes, it flew.”—out the window when it saw her and vanished before she could get a better look at it so she wasn’t sure if it had been properly human or otherwise. When the detective asked if there had been anyone else in her house that night, she told them ‘no’ and that she’d sent Gigi to stay at my place because she didn’t want Gigi contracting the illness she had that night and missing work over the next few days because of it. She didn’t tell them she’d gone over to Baker’s house so I decided to leave that detail out myself.

  My turn was next and I told the police I’d fallen asleep in the living room while doing a bout of sewing at night. I told them I too had slept soundly through the night till Ethel’s scream woke me. The humanoid figure I saw, I left out. I knew they wouldn’t believe me. A single, pulsating horizontal line changing from grey to blue had appeared on the wall between the kitchen and the dining room when they responded to Ethel telling them about the humanoid figure she’d seen so I knew they hadn’t believed her.

  I joined Ethel and Gigi on the sofa in the living room once I was done. Gigi was called upstairs to show the forensics how she moved the body from the floor shortly after so for a brief space in time, Ethel and I found ourselves alone.

  I tried to make eye contact with her and touch her but again, she flinched and moved as far as she could get from me while the sound of a whistle being blown—the sound of disgust in a human being—rang repeatedly in my ears. She wouldn’t let me get anywhere near her and wouldn’t look in the direction of my face. She was no longer simply white but a mess of blues and reds and white and greens and highlighter yellows now. I heard not only drumbeats but a mess of bad violin notes, the scrubbing of brushes, whistles and all sorts of awkward, abrupt and rampant noises that wouldn’t stop messing around within my ears.

  I begged her to tell me what I could do to make her feel better and all she said was—

  “Don’t ever touch me again.”

  I hoped to see purple ovals around her eyes, mouth, hands and feet soon after but they never appeared.

  She wasn’t lying about not wanting me with her.

  I never heard saxophones in my ears when looking at her ever again.

  Chapter 29

  23 July 1975, Wednesday

  Our husbands got home shortly after midnight.

  By that time, the police had already taken Daniel’s body to the nearest mortuary and cleared out all indicators of their presence in Charlie’s house. ‘An accident’ was what the medical examiner and the forensics team concluded after an hour long meeting together in the kitchen. They told Ethel and I Daniel had fallen while trying to get out of the crib and that no signs of foul play were present. There was no evidence any ‘humanoid figure with no face’ had ever touched him or any other object in his bedroom. The medical examiner concluded the trauma of seeing her son dead might have led to Ethel hallucinating. He set up an appointment for her with her family doctor within the week, told her to double her dosage of Valium in the meantime and gave her a bottle of sleeping pills to help her sleep.

  Ethel was furious they didn’t believe her. She was adamant about what she had seen and her story never changed, not even when she told it to Charlie and Baker. It remained exactly what she told the police and there never once were any ovals in front of her to suggest she might be lying. A humanoid figure with no face attacked Daniel and flew out the window. She saw it. This was no accident.

  Charlie believed her. He was as blue as Ethel and Gigi were, with a face just as wet. He couldn’t speak or get anything done so Baker took the initiative to get it done for him. Baker told Gigi to leave. He paid her till the end of the week and told her she was no longer needed in the house.

  Gigi did as she was told, as she always did. I tried to say goodbye properly but she wouldn’t look at me. She was the blue-est of the three. Blue enough to turn almost all the furniture within ten feet of her blue and screechy like a destroyed violin trying its best to make tunes.

  I could only watch her go.

  Baker then gave Ethel the sleeping pills the medical examiner prescribed. She was clearly fatigued from the day of crying, and from having not eaten or drunk anything at all since morning, and was going to have to organise the funeral for Daniel once the mortuary was done preparing the body, so he decided it would be better if she got some chemically-induced rest while she could.

  She didn’t protest. She chased the pills down with a quarter bottle of gin then sent a double dose of Valium down after them with yet another quarter bottle of gin without the slightest hint of hesitation.

  An hour later, she was out cold.

  Baker and Charlie sent me to the kitchen to whip up a meal of supper for them then went into Charlie’s study and closed the door behind them. Two minutes after they’d gone in, I was outside the study, straining my ears to hear whatever they were saying on the inside, with an apron worn over my front, just in case. I needed to know what they thought of what happened; if they believed a humanoid figure with no face could actually exist.

  “Broke his neck,” I heard Charlie say from behind the door that was beginning to look as if it was covered in blue paint. “Exactly what it did to Violet.”

  “It’s a monster—”

  “He was just a baby, man! A God damn baby! Why him? Why not us? And how?! That darned thing has been sedated since it killed Violet. I saw it myself! Yesterday!”

  “Maybe it didn’t do it? We know now there’s more than one of them so it could have been any one of those other ‘girls’. Maybe they killed because they didn’t like us keeping their friend captive? Maybe it was a warning? What are we not seeing?”

  “Why not just negotiate? Why kill i
nnocent people? Babies too, God damn it! What the hell do they really want?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t know. Yet.”

  “I think we should kill the one we have, cut it open, find out what it really is, how its body works and use what we know to figure out how we can kill them all. While we still can. This could be the start of a war. They could be starting to get on the offensive. This could be only the beginning of worse things to come! We should weaponise whatever intelligence we now have our hands on and use it to hunt down the others like it!”

  Baker sighed. “Okay. I’ll go back to the office tomorrow and propose it.”

  “We can’t allow any more deaths to happen!”

  “I know.”

  “Who’s going to be next? Our other children?”

  “I know. It’s going to be a long fight, Ashlock. A real long fight. We better go get something to eat first.”

  I heard them moving towards the door so I fled back down to the kitchen as quickly as I could, grabbed a ladle, positioned myself in front of the pot of buttermilk soup I had left on the stove to simmer and began stirring right as Baker entered alone.

  “Is it ready?” he asked, his voice as solemn as it had been before.

  “Almost.”

  To my surprise, he came up behind me, hugged me and began sobbing into my shoulder. He shook like a baby, in no way anything like the large, burly grown man he really was.

  I dropped the ladle, turned, took him into my arms and hugged him the way his mother used to every time he fell down as a little boy. Hugged him the way I knew he was wishing I would.

  “What happened, Hank?” I whispered into his ear. “Tell me.”

  He shook his head and became white like a layer of chalk had fallen over his skin, hair and clothes. “Promise me you’ll never ask me this again and promise me you’ll stay home with the doors and windows locked until I tell you it’s safe to go out again. Promise me!”

  He pulled away, held me at arm’s length and stared into my eyes to the beat of drumbeats so I said I promised till he was sighing and hugging me again, blue and screechy as he had been at Violet’s funeral.

  I comforted him the way a good wife would—stroked his hair, kissed the side of his cheek, nuzzled my head into his ear, but all of a sudden…

  Sour lemons appeared in my mouth, close to my left cheek.

  I could feel the presence of someone watching us in the blind spot of my left eye because the ends of the hairs on my skin on my left arm seemed to be gravitating towards it. I turned my head in the direction of all those sensations and—

  —I saw it.

  Outside the closed window on the left. A humanoid figure stood with its face to the glass. It left in a flash when it saw me looking, as it had done before, at the speed of light again, but this time, I had turned faster and got to have a proper glimpse at its face before it went away.

  That humanoid figure was not faceless at all. Nor did it look anything like an alien.

  It looked thoroughly human. Female. White. With a short, blonde bob of hair and unmistakably red lipstick. It was a face I recognised too.

  It had the face of Weslyn Jaeger.

  Watching us like a hunter in the night.

  Suddenly, I got an idea why Daniel was now dead. And why Violet had been killed too.

  I finally found the answer I married Baker to get.

  Chapter 30

  24 July 1975 onwards

  I wanted to tell Ethel what I’d seen and the truth about what I knew about it but for the rest of the next week, there was simply no available opportunity. Baker went back to work the very next morning but Charlie didn’t. He stayed home to organise Daniel’s visitation, funeral and burial services and her three older sons came back to stay too, to help with cooking and cleaning. Ethel was now drinking all day long, taking three times her previous dosage of Valium and using sleeping pills three times a day. When she wasn’t sleeping, she would be in the arms of her husband or on the shoulder of one of her sons, crying her heart out.

  Daniel’s body returned home in a tiny coffin, with lips and cheeks too pink to be natural, dressed in a neat baby-blue suit that would only have been worn in any other circumstance by flamboyant middle-aged men. The body looked like it was smiling in its sleep, next to all of Daniel’s favourite toys—his G.I. Joes, his Hot Wheels Cars, that stuffed elephant with that soggy trunk he liked to bite, his rainbow coloured slinkies—but it didn’t really feel like him. It looked like him, yet felt like just a shell his essence, energy and personality had already abandoned.

  I wasn’t surprised—I had seen enough dead people in my lifetime to know what to expect—but I did think a great deal more about my own mortality after that. Perhaps Lilly wasn’t wrong when she said life was too short. Perhaps I was wrong when I argued that it wasn’t?

  The Ashlocks opened their home for two days of visitation, during which a horde of people, most of whom I did not know, came to pay their last respects and offer their condolences. I saw family of Ethel I didn’t know she had and family of Charlie I never knew she’d been close to. Almost every person in the suburb we lived in came to pay their respects—the women who liked fashion were there with their husbands and children; the women who liked knitting too; Ariel and Baker returned home to visit—but Gigi, the one who kissed his sticky cheeks all day long and taught him how to read and count in both English and Spanish, didn’t.

  She wasn’t invited.

  I offered to call her to get her over but Baker told me it wouldn’t be necessary. The visitation was for friends and family, he said. She wasn’t either. I liked him that little bit less after he told me so.

  I began wishing I’d told Ethel to run away with me when I had the chance. With her house full of people, it was next to impossible to get a quiet moment with her.

  The rare few times I did see her alone by the window in the deep of the night, rare enough to be counted on one hand, I tried to make eye contact to communicate that I cared for her and would be there for her but she never looked back, never looked my way. I knew she was aware of my presence though because every time I tried my hardest to make eye contact with her, I would hear gunshots.

  A few times, through the window, I spotted Ethel in Charlie’s arms, sobbing into his shoulder and clinging on to him the way Baker clung on to me the night he cried on me. Bad violin notes and the scrubbing of brush on a pavement would play in my ears every time I saw them that way, and sometimes saxophones too. He no longer minded that she was drinking and drunk and hysterical all the time; in fact, he seemed to love her all the more for it. She, in turn, seemed to enjoy Charlie’s presence way more than she enjoyed mine. She would gaze into his eyes for long periods at a go, albeit sadly, and him into hers, and it would be obvious to anyone looking that they were full of love for each other again.

  Their son’s death brought them back together; reminded them of why they made him in the first place, probably. I, on the other hand, was now only a neighbour like every other. One Ethel would do everything not to look at or call for Charlie or any of her sons to close the curtain on while emitting a vibe that made those gunshots go off in my ears again.

  I didn’t understand it. It tasted a whole lot like muddy grass to me. A whole heavy clump of it sitting on my tongue, pressing down hard, making it hard for my tongue to move.

  My way of experiencing rejection.

  Before Ethel, I had been numb to rejection. I tasted a lot of it as a young child but the taste eventually faded then vanished when I got accustomed to being confronted with it day in and day out.

  I always thought I would never taste it ever again, but clearly, I was wrong. Clearly, I was wrong about many, many things—Lilly included, and normalcy, and even Ethel.

  Clearly, I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.

  Chapter 31

  4 August 1975, Monday

  Charlie went back to work the Monday after they buried Daniel. Baker drove and th
ey left together.

  By that time, all of Daniel’s visitors had gone back to happier places, his older brothers and Ariel had gone back to their grown up lives and Ethel had transformed into a pious Christian woman.

  She only ever dressed conservatively from then on, in extremely dull shades of brown and greys, and began wearing a cross on her neck at all times. She went to church once every afternoon and once after dinner and very quickly nailed a large cross on her front door and every other door within her house, including the door of the room that used to be, and still was, Daniel’s bedroom. At Sunday Service, she prayed and sang hymns with such fervour, raised her hands in the air as the pastor spoke and said ‘amen’ with such gusto, nobody who hadn’t known her before would have ever suspected she once doubted the existence of Christ and skipped church for an entire year.

  I was no longer of interest to her. The gunshots were back and this time were all I ever heard when looking at her. She wouldn’t look at me, much less talk to me, and when I found out Charlie was going back to work and offered to come over to cook, clean and look after her while he was gone, she got Charlie to tell me ‘no’. They’d get Gigi to come over instead, he said. And, I think, just to make me feel less rejected, he told me it was because of convenience, because Gigi already knew where everything was and wouldn’t need to be taught.

  Because I still tasted whisky whenever I caught sight of or thought of Ethel, I spent a great deal of time trying to guess why she would hate me so much again, so abruptly, when I had done nothing to cause the death of her son. When I concluded she couldn’t have found out about my history with Weslyn Jaeger, I decided she simply hated me for seducing her and taking her attentions away from her son. I knew it wasn’t logical—logically, the number of times she’d come on to me far exceeded the number of times I came on to her, and technically, her son died when she was in the house with him, not when she was with me, so it wasn’t really my fault in any way at all—but I also knew, from experience, how illogical human beings were and how difficult they were to convince when hate was involved.