His face so pale he almost glowed against the dark smoke, he asked, “Are you in labor?”
Mitzi tumbled the pills into her mouth and chewed them. Choked them down with wine. Said, “I killed your child. Lucinda.”
He looked at the knife on the mixing console and said, “I can’t.”
Mitzi reached out and clutched at the microphones, drawing them close like old friends. She reached up and pulled the hanging mics until they hovered in her face. She said, “Lucinda. Your Lucy was lost in a building, downtown.” Her words smearing and dissolving. “I found her. She’d always wanted an older sister.” She lifted her head to meet his eyes as she said, “I stabbed her to death on this very table.” The needles on the meters jumped in unison.
Gates Foster, this father who’d waited all these years to come here, his face begged her for a different truth. Then he picked up the knife.
Foster listened. She’d done one thing wrong, she said. She explained that it only takes one prick, one slice of a knife to start someone screaming but a hundred more to make it stop. She’d spent her whole life trying to resolve the afternoon she’d brought one little girl home.
He couldn’t. Not at first. He said, “You’re lying.” He said Lucinda wasn’t dead. This Mitzi person was his last link to her. He’d arrived here after seventeen years of slogging through the underworld where people fucked children and murdered them. He only picked up the knife to threaten her, but now the images hit him. The inventory of brutalized children. The hurricane of screams and smoke churned around him until one scream began to loop, screaming, “Help me! Daddy, please, no! Help me!”
The Mitzi person looked up at him, and he knew it was true. He had nothing more to discover. Nothing was worth more asking. She wore a loose-fitting smock, and he worried the knife might ruin it. An absurd thought. It was a movie. He told himself he was in a movie. And Foster swung his arm like planting a flag.
The knife drove into Mitzi’s chest with steady thuds. Withdrew and drove in. Withdrew with the perfect sucking sound she was so careful to include in jobs. A peace, the peace of shock and trauma had settled over her body and mind. Something more profound than the oblivion of wine and Ambien.
Now would come the hundred wounds to resolve the first, and he stabbed her again. He was sobbing. Her blood and his own tears mixed with soot on his face, a mask of red and black.
A small girl stood off to one side of the table and said, “Mitzi, I’m here. I’m going to help you get home.”
The girl cast pitiful eyes on her father, and Mitzi told her, “He can’t see you.” Her voice jumped as the Foster person yanked the knife out and stood ready to plunge it in again.
The girl, Lucinda, Lucy, her little sister for just one day, said, “Tell him about the pot roast. Tell him about cutting the end off with a big knife.”
As the knife came down, Mitzi stammered the strange message, and the blade stopped short of entering her chest.
Lucinda cried out, “Tell him that Grandma Linda is here with me.”
Mitzi gasped out the message.
“Tell him,” Lucinda cried, “that this wasn’t his fault.”
Mitzi tasted blood. Blood bubbling up from her lungs, and as she coughed and gasped to speak, specks of this blood peppered the microphones that clustered close to hear her. The needles jumped on the meters, but only faintly, before settling back to rest. She couldn’t speak, but she could hear. She could no longer feel the chains binding her legs together. She could no longer see, not out of her own eyes, but she could feel a small hand close around hers and hear Lucinda’s voice say, “Come with me. I know you’re lost. I’ll take you home.”
A second figure stepped out of the smoke. A dumpy man wearing a tuxedo. Malachite cuff links he had on. A Timex watch he wore around one hairy wrist and a sweet-smelling gardenia in his lapel. With him was a woman Mitzi had only seen in photographs. Mitzi’s bloodless face smiled. “Schlo. You look good…”
Schlo smiled in return. “Baby girl, I wish I could say the same for you.” He beckoned for her to get up and come along with him. He glanced fondly at the woman accompanying him. A blonde. He said, “Your mother would very much like to meet you.”
Foster continued to stab. The recorded screams continued, but she was dead. She was dead, but Foster couldn’t stop. He’d no idea how to do what needed to be done, so he sliced and hacked. He was chopping open a rosewood coffin. He tore aside the shredded, sodden clothes and dug into her and felt among the sticky, cooling organs of her.
He entered her. Entered and defiled. Defiled and destroyed as he rummaged through her the way he’d hunted through so many miles of tape, through so many websites, scrambling through the slippery contents of her body. With his bare hands he clawed with fingernails rimed in gore, and his fingers found what he’d hoped.
As the power failed, the lights failed. In a scene lit only by the crackling, flashing, orange flames, the screams grew quiet as reels slowed to stop. And as the last scream faded, Foster lifted his dripping prize from the dead woman. It took its first breath from the toxic air and began to wail. And the scream of that child brought into
