The two of them had been walking home from school together when Jackson heard a loud noise—“a gigantic explosion,” he claimed. He fell to the ground at the sound, and when he got back up, his sister was gone. Vanished. As if the noise had triggered her evaporation.
That’s the way he tells it, anyway. What really happened was that the kids’ ex-stepfather had jumped out from between two buildings and snatched the little girl. Jackson never remembered seeing him. He only remembered a thunderous noise, powerful and loud enough to bring him to his knees.
I didn’t need the police report to tell me there wasn’t an explosion. When I met with Jackson, twice a week for a month after that, it was obvious: the sound was a story his mind made up, remapping the memory of that day. Our brains can do that. Especially when we’re kids. They can scrub out whole people, whole experiences, leaving only a tiny trace of the truth.
So, that sticky web. That silk spun straight from a spider.
For a few minutes, I consider postponing my trip to Ted’s. I can’t imagine going down to my car right now, buckling my seat belt, releasing the emergency brake. Astrid’s hands finally reaching me. Astrid’s hands forcing mine to turn the wheel. But the second I think of Ted’s I need you on the phone last week, I find I can move again. I actually jump off the couch as if its leather has burned me. I grab my keys, grab my bag. Open our loft door and let it shut behind me. Focusing on Ted’s voice, the low gravelly timbre of it, I will the red-haired girl away.
* * *
All things considered, I should have outgrown my craving for Ted’s attention. Dr. Lockwood and I have talked about the ways he made me ache—his gestures of dismissal, his Experiments, his obsession with other people’s success, which kept him type-type-typing in his study all hours of the day. I’ve told her I can’t hear the clack of typewriter keys without feeling nauseated, but Dr. Lockwood thinks that Ted’s work methods actually have a lot to do with my “attachment” to him. She says his praise and attention during our post-Experiment interviews was so effusive that he basically trained me to excuse his long stretches of neglect. (She, too, uses this word, even though I always balk at it. I’ve told her about the cat-food-eating children.)
“He taught you that your reward for enduring his absence, for playing along with his Experiments, was attention,” she said. “And the way he spoke to you during those interviews validated the idea that his attention was something worth wanting.”
I hate to think this way—that Ted’s I need you provoked a kind of Pavlovian response in me. But Dr. Lockwood is right about the way I felt during our interviews, how Ted’s enthusiasm and encouragement flushed my body with warmth, even as something like dread prickled the back of my neck.
That prickle interested Ted, too. Dread, after all, is closely related to fear.
“Did it scare you,” Dr. Lockwood once asked, “living with your father?”
My answer came quickly. “No.”
“But the subject of his research was fear,” she pushed. “His Experiments were all about making you feel scared.”
“No. They weren’t. His Experiments were about the fear response. He studied its triggers, its duration, things like that.”
“I’m afraid I don’t see the difference.”
“It’s— He doesn’t… There is a difference, but it’s hard to explain.”
I wasn’t lying to Dr. Lockwood. It really didn’t scare me to live with Ted, not even after the worst of his Experiments, that August night I can still feel in my body whenever I recall it. Before then, Ted’s Experiments had been mostly benign—driving home from a store without me, only coming back to pick me up after an hour or two had passed; gluing a jar of garden spiders to my bedside table, despite (or because of) my arachnophobia; screaming in the kitchen with a red-soaked rag clutched to his arm, finally revealing after my seconds of panic that the red was paint, his body was woundless, the only marks on his skin were the scales of his psoriasis.
I was ten when the worst Experiment happened. Ted and Mara left one night for a rare dinner out, and the note I found in the kitchen told me they’d be back in an hour. (This is where I should have known. Ted and Mara never leave notes.) When the sun set and they hadn’t returned, I stood vigil by the window, watching for their headlights. When the driveway stayed dark and carless, I thought of collisions, murders, explosions. I wrapped myself in an afghan and crouched under the coffee table. I piled books on the edges of the blanket to keep it firmly in place. Shootings. Sinkholes. Choking on chicken bones. I stared at the phone, wanting to call the police, but believing that if I did, I would doom my parents further, make real the possibilities swarming my mind. This is “magical thinking,” Dr. Lockwood often reminds me.
At six the next morning, I finally gave in. Caskets. Funerals. Orphans. Ted and Mara never spent so long away from home. Mara stayed close to her art studio, as if leaving it was the same as abandoning a newborn, and the only time Ted ever left was to run an errand or teach his classes at Wicker.
It was definite, then: something horrible and irreversible had happened to them.
I extracted myself from my hiding spot. My hands shook as I reached for the phone, and it was then that the door burst open, Ted leaping into the house with Mara trailing behind him. Before I could react, Ted picked me up and twirled me around, his laughter thundering against my ear. I closed my eyes, savored the tightness of his grip, let the relief fill me up and up, my body buoyant as a balloon. When he set me down, I was smiling, because I still didn’t get it. I actually asked, “Where were you guys?”
“We were outside!” Ted answered.
“No, I mean—where did you go after dinner?”
“Dinner? There wasn’t any dinner. We were outside, Fern. Watching you!”
I tried to speak through the lump hardening in my throat. “You were here?” I asked. “The whole time?” My voice was squeaky and small.
“Of course!”
“So you were gonna… leave me alone, in the house… forever?”
“Forever?” he repeats. “No, no, an Experiment is never forever. You know I always reveal what I’ve been doing, always let you know what’s real and what isn’t. I do that for you, Fern. Because I value your participation in my work. So, come on now, let’s get upstairs. I’ve got so many excellent notes that I need to transcribe. So many questions, too. That thing with the coffee table and the blanket? It’s like you were paralyzed. This is wonderful, Fern. Truly sensational. We’re going to have a very productive interview. Let’s go!”
But I didn’t follow him the way I usually did. Instead, I opened my mouth and wailed. Closed my eyes and shoved out tears. Dropped to the floor and rocked.
“Fern,” Ted said. “What is this?”
I sobbed out my answer in thick gasps of words. “I thought… you were… dead!”
He smiled then. Pleased with himself. With me. “But we’re not dead, Fern. Not yet. Look, we’re standing right in front of you. You can reach out and touch us.” He held out his hand to me. I stared at the empty palm that waited for mine. “Let’s start the interview, okay? You’ll feel better once we do.”