Karolina Waclawiak - The Invaders

And then a man’s voice said, “Say you want it.”

I sat there for a moment. He kept saying, “Say you want it.” Then a small voice with a thick accent said, “I want it,” over and over again.

I opened the laptop and he was shoving his penis into her mouth. I paused the video and looked at her face. Tears were frozen in a stream down her swollen cheeks. This is what Jeffrey wanted? He was trying to take so many things from her.

I minimized the window and opened another window. I stared at my mother’s ramshackle house. We didn’t have the internet back then. The sex happened skin on skin. There were no affairs with computer screens or disinterest because someone was waiting to video chat with wide-open legs. I had seen it all and ignored it for the good of us. It was part of the deal and it’s what made him the marrying kind, straying without hurting anyone. No one told me about the things that happened to all of us.

I stared at my mother’s dark house. How could I know so much and know nothing?

TEDDY

I WAS PRETTY SURE that Cheryl was chowing down on my pills. Some days she was nearly catatonic and it creeped me out. I couldn’t sleep and I found her sitting outside wrapped in a blanket staring at the dark skyline. I wasn’t sure if it was because she missed my dad or what. He was going away more and more now and I didn’t really think he had had a sudden uptick in business trips. I think he just needed to get away from both of us. My dad has never been good at taking care of people. It just wasn’t his thing. He couldn’t take care of my mom and he couldn’t take care of himself. If Cheryl wasn’t careful he’d leave her, too. I almost felt bad for her because she didn’t see the patterns like I did. She had no context; she didn’t know that this is how it started with him. Emergency trips, longer trips, extended trips. I need to bring my golf clubs along because that’s where we have meetings. When they first got together, he used to take her along because that’s what wives like her are for — showing off and saying I win. She might not be a great conversationalist, but she was really nice to look at. Don’t you feel bad about your wife with the wide hips? It was all mind-control shit. It was how he got the top-shelf accounts. No one wanted a middle-aged loser handling their account; they wanted someone who could attract a new young wife and knew the value in that kind of play. Strategic life plays. She looked like she had aged since the accident.

“Have you slept at all?” I asked as I stepped outside. She turned around, startled, and said, “A little.”

I looked up. Every star in the sky was lit up like white pinpricks. It was amazing.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Isn’t it?” she asked, shaking her head. “How could you ever leave a place like this?”

I sat down beside her and we watched the sky turn gray and the water light up. I was never going to be able to sail again. Screw this, Teddy. No dark thoughts; we went over this. I wanted to know when my father would be back. Cheryl didn’t seem to have any answers.

“Teddy?” she asked after a moment.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Why hasn’t anyone come to visit you?”

I thought at least Pauline would come, but no, it was just me and Cheryl now. The pariahs of Little Neck Cove. I wasn’t sure what she had done to deserve it, but me? Me, it was well deserved.

“I don’t know.”

The pain was acting up in my arm again. So now finally I had all the pills I ever wanted, and I didn’t even really want them anymore. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I wanted to be awake and feeling things again. Flipping your car will do that, I guess. Isn’t that what people say: I had a terrible accident, almost died, and now I wanted to live?

Well, I didn’t almost die. It’s not like I drove off a cliff or anything. I just plowed into the net of the tennis courts upside down.

Being unable to move my arm indefinitely seemed like an excessive outcome to something so small, right? I didn’t really want to live anymore. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get my fingers to wiggle. Something I could do so easily before, I couldn’t even do at all now. My brain couldn’t will things into existence anymore.

It pissed me off. It really did. I’m not saying that it wasn’t a big deal. I ruined the tennis season for all these bastards. I was now carless. I think I made my father cry.

These were all undesirable outcomes. It just didn’t seem to be fair, was all that I was saying. They put me on a morphine drip for like a week at the hospital while they checked things and opened things and made sure of things. I saw things then. I mean visions. Things that made me uncomfortable. Cheryl needed her own dose, but I wasn’t about to share my pile. I counted them every few days. I just really liked to see them poured out on the counter, rounded edges like Chiclets, to make sure they were still there. Old habits and all that.

“Look how pretty the water is just before the sun rises,” Cheryl said.

It was. I looked up at the fading stars and understood why Cheryl didn’t feel the urge to sleep. How could you miss all this? I held my phone up to the sky and Cheryl asked me what I was doing.

“I have this thing on my phone that tells you what you’re looking at,” I said.

She smiled at me, then looked up at the sky and said, “Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Orion, Gemini, Mars, Venus…”

She pointed and recited and I was amazed. She put her arm down and said, “Good memory from college astronomy.”

“You’re making me wish I’d paid better attention in class,” I said.

“We’ll see Mercury better around sunrise,” she said, and I put my phone down and stared up at the sky.

“I fucked up, I think,” I said.

“Which part?”

“Life, school, all of it,” I said.

“Who hasn’t?” Cheryl asked, still staring up at the sky.

I didn’t want to hear that no one knew what they were doing.

“It’s going to be a perfect day to be out on the water,” she said a few minutes later. “Let’s go sailing.”

“You don’t even know how to sail,” I reminded her.

“You do.”

I kinda thought she was suggesting it to piss my dad off because he had given up early trying to take her sailing. She didn’t move fast enough to be of any help. He said he needed another sailor, not someone who just wanted to tan on a boat.

I told her I couldn’t do it one-handed and she said she would help. She said, “We have the whole day ahead of us.”

She had a point. Days dragged on in this house and the only excitement in my life lately was doctor’s visits and being jabbed by needles and other medical instruments.

“Maybe go to sleep for a while and then we’ll go,” I said.

She looked at me and smiled and said she would.

Hours later, I woke up in my bed, the sun hot and bright. I got up and opened my drawers looking for clothes that were easy to put on, clothes that didn’t require buttons or zippers or anything like that. I waited for her downstairs and when she came down, she looked like good old Cheryl. She wore superbright colors, like she really wanted to be noticed. Today she had on neon-green shorts and a pink top. I didn’t even want to ask what had inspired this look.

We walked on the wall in defiance of the No Trespassing signs and headed toward Joanne in her slip.

Cheryl helped me pick off the seashells this time and she kept some and threw the rest of them away. She would leave seashells in the yard and my father would go nuts saying they got caught up in the mower. Cheryl didn’t care. She said she liked the way they looked with her flowers. I said, “Are you going to put those in the yard, too?” and she said, “Maybe.”