The Mall Read online

  And I never had a chance to thank him, she thought with sadness.

  It was the sound of Charlene’s voice that pulled her back to reality. “We were beginning to wonder if you had left the Mall altogether,” the woman said, then began to titter in that polite little way that society women adopt at cocktail parties--the quality they often had when forced to make pleasant conversation with strangers tolerated out of necessity.

  Suddenly, Lara felt an enormous anger and revulsion for the woman. For the briefest of instants, she felt as if she had been shoved from behind by two brawny hands. In that moment, she felt disoriented and confused, like she had forgotten who she was and where she was. Almost as if this were all a dream and the reality was that she was still seven. Still living under the same roof as her aunt. Still at her mercy of the crazy woman.

  The Witch

  But that sharp bolt of hate was followed almost immediately by an enormous sadness and pity for Charlene that drove the first impulsive emotion out into the wings of the stage. She was, after all, just a pathetic old woman with no life left to live and no children of her own.

  This thought led directly to an unexpected feeling of guilt and thoughts of Ben.

  Still holding her children tightly, one pressed against each side of her, she couldn’t help but feel like a gunfighter in one of those classic black and white westerns that they used to show on Saturday morning TV in her youth. But instead of a pair of six-guns, her weapons were her children, one strapped to each hip.

  And with this thought rattling around in her head, the words just slipped out of her mouth, “Shall we draw down on each other, Charley?”

  And suddenly she was feeling happy again. Giddy. And she found herself giggling. Uncontrollably.

  When Owen began to laugh as well, Lara gaped at him in wonder. She couldn’t honestly remember the sound of her son’s laughter. Oh, that’s how it sounds again, she thought, which spurred forth a deeper level of joy and a second wave of convulsive laughter.

  Cora looked up at them in confusion then began to smile as well, blinking aside the so-recently shed tears and taking a deep hearty breath, letting it hitch out slowly from her chest, the tension loosening.

  They were a family again. Here, even in this dark, abandoned place, they were home again because they were together.

  And she began to laugh with them.

  22

  As she watched the three of them having a grand laugh at her expense, Charlene felt the re-igniting of the enormous furnace of hate she had always harbored for the woman—the bitch her son had embraced and who had ultimate murdered him--and like a sharp whistle to a faithful hound dog, she felt her old friend rush back to her side. The one with the strength that rivaled her own. The one with the motivation and the plan. It flooded through her brain with the bright white shock of a hard slap. A sensation so ice cold that it burned like a flame.

  Just as she began to feel her identity began to fade into the background, she fought back, grappling with the guest-turned-invader. No, she barked in her mind. No one manhandles Charlene Myers-Cartwright! We want the same thing but you cannot accomplish it without me. You need me. You need my cooperation. You will not stifle my voice.

  She felt her friend settle into position somewhere within and its grip tightened on the shoebox held snugly under one arm, a well-manicured hand resting across one end.

  No, not yet, she replied. Soon. First, I need to settle a few things with the woman.

  After that, rest assured, you may have her.

  23

  As the laughter tapered off, Lara guided her two children back in the direction of the dealership, Chance taking it upon himself to lead.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  The three stopped and slowly turned to look back with expressions of good humor sobering into concern.

  “I can’t let you take those children knowing what you did to their father.”

  Sparing a glance at Owen and Cora, Lara leveled her eyes at the other. “Whatever happened between Ben and me is in the past and will stay that way.”

  “Have you ever told them the truth?” she asked, drawing closer. “Have you ever told Coraline about the accident?”

  For the first time, Lara appeared uncomfortable. “No, I’ve spared her the details, until she was old enough to understand and I think now is not the time to…”

  “Oh, I think now is the perfect time,” Charlene snapped, her voice rising. “After all, I think your children deserve to know that the same woman who got them here was also the same woman who was responsible for the death of their father,” she said tilting her smiling face up at the ceiling, the red sky reflecting off her eyes and teeth in a way that made her look uncannily like one of the deactivated Bots that stood like a small frozen army of Terracotta Warriors at her back.

  Owen glanced at Lara uncertainly. “I got us here,” he murmured in a low tone. “It’s all my fault.”

  “No dear, don’t you understand? It was your mother who created the perfect storm that blew your ship off course. It was her selfishness. Her hatred that…”

  “Enough!” Lara snapped. “Owen take your sister and have her show you back to the dealership.”

  “I can take them..,” Chance began in a low voice.

  “But don’t you want to know how your daddy died?” Charlene continued, stepping up to Owen and cradling his chin in her hand.

  Chance grabbed Owen by the wrist and attempted to pull him away, but he snatched his arm back. He glanced over at his mother who had lowered her head, bringing a hand up to her quivering lips. Was she crying, he wondered?

  “Please don’t,” Lara whispered, her dim voice wavering. “Not here. Not in this place.”

  The smile on Charlene’s face remained steady. “Your father…”

  “Cora. Owen,” Lara said pulling them in close and going slowly to one knee. She swallowed awkwardly, then in a stronger voice than before, she managed to say, “Your father committed suicide.”

  Charlene’s eyes hardened slightly. “Tell them the rest.”

  Lara closed her eyes for a moment, seemed to gather her last reserves, and continued. “He had been drinking and you were in bed, Owen. I was…”

  “Yes, where were you?” Charlene prompted, turning her back on Lara and gazing up into sky through the glass ceiling above. Outside, a reddish-orange worm cut through the darkening dusk sky like a tailor’s scissors dipped in blood. She brought the shoebox down from beneath her arm and held it protectively against her belly.

  “I was with friends,” Lara said to Cora and Owen. “It was sort of a mommy’s night out. Y’see, I was having a bit of a rough time of it, and your father was the kind of man who lent a hand when his wife asked for help.”

  Owen listened with a stolid expression, but tears began to roll down Cora’s face, which Lara reached out and wiped away with her thumb.

  “You were six months old and your father had an accident while giving you a bath, Cora. He started washing you then left the room to put Owen to bed,” her words dragging, like a man putting all his strength into moving a particularly heavy piece of furniture. “After he finished reading him his story and tucking him in… he never went back to get you.”

  She paused for a moment and seemed to will the threatening tears in her eyes away as she remembered that night at the ER, talking to the doctor. Looking him straight in the eye and lying about the accident. Lying so they wouldn’t take her children away from her.

  But knowing that Child Protective Services would be obligated by law to investigate.

  “But I was okay, wasn’t I, Mommy? I was okay,” Cora demanded, tears streaming down her face.

  Lara stroked her hair with both hands, feeling the tiny skull beneath, reassuring herself. “Yes, everything was fine. You were perfect.”

  “But your mommy was very angry.”

  Owen turned to stare at Charlene’s back, as she was still turned away from them. His blank expression slowly hard
ened.

  “Your mommy was so angry that your father started to think that he had done something unforgivable.”

  Lara pulled Cora to her shoulder, staring past her with eyes welling over with freshly exhumed pain. She squeezed her eyes shut against the memory of that night.

  24

  Lara lay in bed, facing the window. Eyes open. Listening to each creak as he moved from the living room up the hallway to their room.

  It was three in the morning. The first few days he would wait until she was asleep before he came to bed. By mid-week, he had begun to sleep on the couch in front of the TV and by the end of that first week, he had taken up residence in the guest room. As they grew apart emotionally, he moved physically further from their marriage bed. The bed where they had conceived their children. Where they had comforted Owen during thunderstorms and bouts of the flu.

  “I think your instinct was right about not having them.”

  Lara started at the words and turned to look over her shoulder.

  His dark silhouette stood in the doorway framed by the dim green night light in the hall.

  “Maybe I never should have convinced you to have them. Maybe they were a mistake.”

  Lara rose abruptly to one arm. “What are you saying?” she demanded.

  “I think I forgot she was there in that tub.” He shook his head then, as if embroiled in an intense mental struggle with his own memories. “That’s not quite right. I think I forgot she existed, because she should never have been born to begin with.”

  Lara felt her mouth hanging open. She was at a loss and while she waited for the equilibrium to return, the next words he spoke drove her even farther off balance.

  “Wasn’t Kennedy shot?” When she gave him nothing but silence, he continued. “I was just watching some documentary on PBS and it was about the sixties. They were talking about the election of Nixon and I was confused because I thought Kennedy was elected in 1960.”

  The words were familiar and it took her a moment to realize why. When she discovered the connection, all the heat fled from her body. Her heart fluttering in her chest, Lara realized that the night before they took the old lady

  THE WITCH

  away to the hospital, the woman had asked Lara the same confused question.

  “They shot Jack!” she screamed from where she was retrained on the stretcher--for her own protection they had assured young Lara.

  But the Witch had continued, even as they started to shut the ambulance doors on her: “They murdered Kennedy! Blew his brains right out of his head!”

  Was it possible, Lara wondered then? Was it remotely possible that insanity might be a contagion, and that once she had been infected by the Witch, she had passed it on to her husband? The man she loved?

  Then she thought something that shocked her even more than the previous thought.

  Was this the same man she married? Was this the same person she had fallen in love with? Or had he changed into something else just as her aunt had? Something she no longer recognized?

  She listened as her husband continued: “And I was watching this program and waiting for the part on Watergate but they never mentioned it and I… I…” Lara could hear him start to sob like a child. Like a little lost boy. “Lara, something’s gone wrong in me and I think I need help.”

  She knew she should go to him. Hold him and let him cry at her breast. It would be the right thing to do. But it was just too much to handle.

  Lara could not muster the pity she knew she should feel for him, for the man which might or might not still be her husband. There was no anger. Just confusion and exhaustion.

  So, Lara simply turned away from him to face the wall again.

  That was the night she decided that she would tell CPS everything during the interview that she had scheduled for the next morning. She would tell them the whole truth and sell him out if she had to.

  It was also in that moment that she first realized that her children had become more important that the man she had married, and if she had to sacrifice one or the other…

  25

  “Twenty four hours later they found his body in the front seat of his car parked in the empty parking lot of the Astrodome.”

  Cora began to cry against her mother’s shoulder. Lara held her tightly, stroking her back and riding the steady waves of the sobs wracking her tiny body.

  Chance stepped up behind Owen and rested a hand on his shoulder but the ten-year-old barely noticed. He stood as still as a statue, his eyes gazing at Charlene raptly.

  “He called me on the phone at four o’clock that morning talking about things that never happened,” Charlene proclaimed. “Psychobabble like the assassination of JFK. The election of Nixon in 1968, when every child with a third grade education knows he was president before Kennedy. A war in Vietnam that lasted until 1975 instead of 1970. A peanut farmer named Carter.”

  “Your father was a good man,” Lara said soothingly into Cora’s ear.

  “A good man who went insane and slowly despaired. With you for a confessor, the choice he ultimately made never surprised me. Death was a welcome alternative to investing in a lifetime of pain with you.”

  Stiffening, Lara lifted her head and said: “I guess I should have known that the life of a child raised by a woman like you would end tragically. Maybe it was my faith in the man that made me believe that his resolve would be stronger than yours.”

  There was a clunk and clatter of cardboard dropping to the floor. Charlene turned toward Lara. “You scourged him with indifference and crucified him with your guilt.”

  Chance saw the shoebox fall to the floor just before the old lady turned with what looked to him like a gun. He swept Owen back behind him and turned his back to her.

  Lara glanced at Chance as he turned away, noticing with alarm a handgun tucked into the lip of his jeans. What was a fifteen year old kid doing with a gun?

  In the next instant, it struck her that he was in a defensive posture and she glanced back over her shoulder to see what was happening.

  26

  As her hate for the woman who murdered her husband rose, the presence of the other spewed into her brain like an stream of venom through a snake’s fang.

  Kill them. Kill them all while you have the chance.

  She seized the metal ball in her hands and let the shoebox fall to her feet (the small forgotten object in the plastic baggie dropping alongside it). At the sight of her grandchildren, the throbbing hate she felt ebbed momentarily, and she re-exerted control over what was left of her.

  No, she snapped. Just the woman. The children can go.

  You must kill them! Kill them all! I command you!

  You command me, Charlene thought with amusement. Do you know who I am? Who are you to command me?

  I am. All that surrounds you is my creation, except for the humans. They must be removed immediately so that my domain may be perfect again.

  I am human. Shall I destroy myself then?

  You belong to me. Do what I ask!

  I belong to no one, Charlene roared with every cell of her brain, lashing out psychically like a cornered lioness.

  For a moment, there was complete and utter silence within her and she thought that perhaps “her friend” had once again left her to her own devices. Good riddance, she thought in passing. Instead, it appeared again the next moment, but now she sensed distance and somehow disappointment.

  So be it. If you will not remove them, I will.

  Charlene felt her legs go numb, then disappear beneath her. She felt her body move forward and as much as she fought, she could not stop herself. A tingling blanket of coldness rushed up her torso through the core of her, freezing her midsection (along with what was left of her womb) and her legs.

  My son is truly gone then, she thought. All that remained of my Benjamin has disappeared including the place where I created him.

  As the icy fingers moved steadily up her chest and into her arms, she realized fleetingly that indeed
a part of her boy still survived. In the children.

  She watched as the hand with the grenade disappeared over her shoulder, like a big league pitcher cocking his arm back to hurl a heater across the plate.

  And as the Presence moved toward her vocal cords, what was left of Charlene Myers-Cartwright gathered up all her will for one final time and screamed as loud as she could.

  27

  “Run Cora! Run Owen!” Charlene screamed as her arm holding the grenade recoiled.

  But the children were already in motion.

  Chance and Owen already had a head start and Lara was a few steps behind them, carrying Cora in her arms.

  Behind her, Charlene moved stiffly toward them, screaming at them like a crazy person not in control of her own mind.

  Like Ben.

  No, not like him. He had been sick.

  A fresh wave of guilt washed over her again and like a final reminder of her sin, her legs collapsed beneath her and she tripped, falling forward atop Cora. Locking her shoulders, she came down on the flats of her forearms, dropping Cora with a thud and driving the air from her lungs.

  Lara fell forward, nose to nose with her daughter. Cora’s eyes were white, the pupils rolled up again like shades of a window and she gave a sudden gasp, sucking air back into her chest, words fluttering out like birds from a shaken tree.

  “Grandma Charley’s gone black,” she whispered.

  Lara squeezed her eyes shut in expectation of the explosion and the inevitable pain that must surely follow. Even if the explosion might sear the skin from her bones or tear her apart, she would endure it for her children.

  28

  A figure separated from the shadows surrounding them and rushed up beside Charlene, snatching the hand holding the metal ball and squeezing it firmly closed.