Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“That’s right, you were there, too, Madolyn. You saw it all happen. My big breakdown.” She laughs that laugh again; it’s horrible, like a CD skipping. “You were there when the door opened.”

Madolyn has straightened over her cane. The botox injections have made actual facial expressions impossible. But her eyes are ice-cold. “Yep,” she says.

“She was there,” my mother tells me, patting my hand. “She helped me when I broke down. When I started screaming. When the paramedics came. You probably called the paramedics, didn’t you, Madolyn? She helped them get me in the ambulance. Made sure they knew about you. I never thanked you for that. How’d I even get that picture in my head, Madolyn? I still don’t know.”

“The one you saw, you mean.”

“The one I thought I saw. When Evie’s door opened.”

“So you think you didn’t see it? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Mom, please.” My own voice starts to crack. I’m too late , I think. One more time.

“You mean, giant spiderlegs scuttling out onto the landing?” The skipping laugh crescendos. “Grabbing Leyton and yanking him inside?”

“That,” says Madolyn. “And those sounds. Like a cat being ripped inside out while it was still alive.” She nods her fuchsia-haired, copper-skinned head. “Sounds about right to me. Pretty much what I saw and heard.”

My mother stops laughing. Stops breathing again. Sways on her feet. “Stop it,” she says.

With a shrug, Madolyn steps toward her. “I’m just saying your memory matches pretty perfectly with mine.”

“Oh, you bitch.” My mother’s voice is a pig-squeal, now. She’s shaking all over. “Stop right now.”

“You better bring her inside,” Madolyn says to me. “She’s going to collapse.”

“You cunt whore, stop,” squeals my mother, throws her head back, and screams.

“ Mom !” I try to grab her, but she jabs her elbows into my ribs, staggers away, and drops to her knees in the grass.

“Say you’re joking,” she hisses. “Say it right now.”

If Madolyn gets any closer to my mother, I’m thinking I will bowl her over. Drive her into the ground, cane, basket and all.

“Get away,” I tell her.

Instead, she plants the cane and sits. My mother folds into a little hump, then tilts sideways against the old woman, and lays her head in her lap.

“There, now,” Madolyn says, and strokes my mother’s braid. And there they sit.

It’s insane, the stupidest sensation of this stupid evening yet. But most of what I feel right then is jealousy. And guilt, for the last fifteen years. Especially the last few. I’ve been old enough to treat my mother differently for a long time, now.

Abruptly, Madolyn lifts the lid of her basket, reaches inside, and pulls out the turtle. I gasp, folding down beside them. My mother lies in Madolyn’s lap and shakes and coos like a baby. Madolyn lays the turtle in the grass, where it begins to nose about. Head sideways. Eying the sky.

“That’s him? Evie’s?” I stammer.

Madolyn nods.

“You saved him?”

“Afterward. Yeah. When the police were done.”

“Police…” I reach my finger in front of the turtle’s nose, the way one does with a kitten. The turtle pulls its head into its shell. Noses out again. Sidles sideways to get at more grass.

Madolyn watches him, too, shaking her head. “I found him under the couch. Under all the webbing.”

In her lap, my mother twitches.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I snap.

“What there was. A lot of ugly smears of God knows what, all over the walls and the floor and even the ceiling. A lot of web. A lot of mess. All the windows smashed out, and wind just whipping everything around. No bodies. Not Stan’s. Not Leyton Busby’s. Not Evie’s. No one’s.”

“Are you…” I don’t want to say it, or think it. Most of all, I don’t want my mother to hear it. It comes out anyway. “Are you seriously saying she was…?”

Madolyn strokes a curved, clawed hand down my mother’s cheek. Her face is so blank, you could project anything there. At the moment, insanely, I’m projecting grandmotherly kindness. The moon has just started to rise behind her, and there’s this white nimbus floating around her fuchsia head.

“Well, that’s one of the possibilities, I suppose,” she says. “I’ve thought of a few others, down the years. Mostly, I try not to think about it, to be honest. All I know for sure is that Evie wasn’t in there when the cops came. No one was. And no one saw or heard from her, or from Leyton Busby, ever again. And that ever since, I’ve been keeping a good watch. I don’t know what for, exactly. But I watch that building real close. The whole neighborhood, really. Just… seems like what I’m here for, maybe. And I keep my own house clean .”

It’s the way my mother’s lying there, I think, that makes me break down and weep. The way her knees have drawn up. The shudders wracking her. “You become the neighborhood,” I whisper.

“Second time you’ve said that,” said Madolyn. “What’s it mean?”

“Hell if I know. Evie used to say it.”

Leaning back on her hands with my mother in her lap and Evie’s turtle nosing around near her hip, Madolyn glances down at what’s left of herself, or maybe my mother, both of them suspended in pale moonlight. Then she looks across the street toward her own home, where she’s lived alone, I’m all but certain, for going on thirty years. Then she looks up at Evie’s windows.

“You know what I think?” Her voice is like a rainstick, a rattlesnake’s warning, a fire going out. Like she’s praying and fighting and giving up all at the same time. “I think maybe if you live long enough, and you see enough…” Again, she glances down. “And you lose enough, and life gets at you enough, and does what it’s going to do…”

Then she looks at me. Actually reaches out and wipes some of my tears away, while the shakes seem to sizzle out of my mother, through the grass like lightning, and up into me.

“Sooner or later, Hon. For better or worse. You become you.”

“You know how much they want for a Coke?”

“How much?” Vasquez said.

“Five euros. Can you believe that?”

Vasquez shrugged. She knew the gesture would irritate Buchanan, who took an almost pathological delight in complaining about everything in Paris, from the lack of air conditioning on the train ride in from De Gaulle to their narrow hotel rooms, but they had an expense account, after all, and however modest it was, she was sure a five-euro Coke would not deplete it. She didn’t imagine the professionals sat around fretting over the cost of their sodas.

To her left, the broad Avenue de la Bourdonnais was surprisingly quiet; to her right, the interior of the restaurant was a din of languages: English, mainly, with German, Spanish, Italian, and even a little French mixed in. In front of and behind her, the rest of the sidewalk tables were occupied by an almost even balance of old men reading newspapers and young-ish couples wearing sunglasses. Late afternoon sunlight washed over her surroundings like a spill of white paint, lightening everything several shades, reducing the low buildings across the Avenue to hazy rectangles. When their snack was done, she would have to return to one of the souvenir shops they had passed on the walk here and buy a pair of sunglasses. Another expense for Buchanan to complain about.

“ M’sieu? Madame? ” Their waiter, surprisingly middle-aged, had returned. “ Vous êtes —”