Kathy says fear is something you don’t just go towards, but labor through, and anyway, Emma owes her this. Old Threshers is one of the premier regional haunted houses, made more terrifying by the fact that it is on an empty fairground, the darkness deep, but she pulls down a lane that is well lit and has costumed people directing traffic. There are families with young children and babies wrapped in blankets, held close to jacketed chests. There are cars everywhere, and school buses in a line.
“What the fuck?” Kathy murmurs. “This is not right. This is not how this goes. This is one that is not for little kids. That’s the point. No kids. Adults only. Without kids. I cannot do kids tonight.”
Kathy is a brilliant historian, chair of her department, extensively published. She wears her dark hair short in a pixie cut and wears a series of small, silver hoops in each earlobe. She started smoking again a month ago, but only does it outdoors. She does not have children, although she has applied herself relentlessly to getting pregnant in the last five years. In the last year, she’s had two miscarriages. She called Emma, before she called her partner, Steve, after each one.
After they park, they lean against the car, tugging on their hats, and Kathy immediately lights up. The flame flickers and casts her face in light and shadow, and Emma sees the sadness, the dark circles under her friend’s eyes. A family unlocks the sedan they parked too close to.
“What’s going on tonight?” Emma asks casually.
Kathy blows smoke toward the family dismissively.
“Are you here for the haunted train?” a small boy asks. “It wasn’t that scary.”
“The carousel was fun,” his sister says.
The mom, holding a sleeping toddler, rolls her eyes. “Family friendly event they’re testing out. Kids loved it, but you know how it goes for us parents.”
Emma nods sympathetically, but Kathy snorts. “No,” she says, “I don’t know. I’m not a parent. Not everyone pops out the rugrats. You parents, assuming everyone is a member of your club.” She flicks her smoke expertly and tosses a look at the dad who is paused with his car door open, glaring. “What?” she asks, and then she starts across the field. She turns and flips the man off. “You don’t know me,” she yells, “you don’t know anything about me.”
Emma follows without offering an apologetic look or word to the family. It’s true. They don’t know Kathy. They are strangers, and Emma’s allegiance is with her friend.
After the first miscarriage at eight weeks, Emma had helped Kathy off the bathroom floor, had bathed and nursed her, cleaned the bathroom, faced what Kathy could not, and then took Kathy to the doctor’s. Afterward, she had made chicken pot pie, and honeyed tea, and then they had gotten bombed on tequila, not bothering with glasses, lime, or salt. Steve had come home to them, arms around each other, singing “Purple Rain.” He’d driven a seriously drunk Emma home in disapproving silence, but Emma was unfazed. She’d lived with stony disapproval for years from her own husband (for laughing too loud, asking for her own debit card, loving her children and the work of teaching too mightily, and, actually, just the way she breathed) and she would never allow anyone to shame her for being present. Alive. Loving. Sometimes loving took a form outsiders didn’t understand, but those plaited by the act got deep down in the very marrow of their bones.
After the second miscarriage, this one a month in, and just a week ago, Emma had said nothing. They held one another, and wept.
“That’s it,” Kathy said, “I can’t go any further. I’m beginning to hate my body. For what it won’t do. And I hate Steve. The way he fucks. His face. And I hate going out into the world and seeing all the assholes who so easily had kids. And the assholes who shouldn’t have kids.”
Emma had wished for words, but what words would comfort or be a bridge? She made grilled cheese and tomato soup. Later, both very stoned, Kathy rested her head in Emma’s lap, on a pillow. She had stroked Kathy’s hair and forehead and sung her to sleep. Joni Mitchell’s entire Blue album. She’d walked home, nearly midnight, in the soft, waning summer night. Her legs and arms were bare, but even in shorts and a tank top, she felt naked, totally exposed to the world. Her own children were at her ex-husband’s for his weekend, and when she opened the door to the expansive silence, she met herself, literally in a decorative mirror. “Hello, you,” she’d said to herself and an unlikely happiness ignited, a blue pilot light in the ancient furnace of her own heart.
They buy the fast pass, thinking they will get to cut in front of the high schoolers in the slow line, but that doesn’t happen. A fake Freddy Krueger jump scares Emma, but Kathy hugs him because he wears a “Free Hugs” button, then laughs maniacally and says, “You want some more free stuff? I’ll give you free stuff, Freddy, all the free stuff you can handle,” until he pries her arms away and slouches off. Emma catches his eye, and the human under all that latex looks like he didn’t sign up for that.
“You good?” She asks her friend.
“No. No. Decidedly not.” She shakes out her arms like a swimmer before a race.
“Have you been here before?” the woman taking tickets asks.
“I have,” Kathy says, “but this is her first haunted house ever.”
“Step inside, and listen carefully to the rules, okay? Enjoy, ladies, and be good.”
“Ladies? What does that even mean? Ladies? Be good? Fuck that,” Kathy declares as she strides forward, and Emma feels alarm glow inside her.
There’s smoke, theatrical lighting, yelling, sinister music, and what Emma can only call tableaus. The funeral parlor. The meat locker. The doctor’s office. In the doctor’s office, there is a baby doll curled up in a model of the female reproductive system. Kathy removes it, cradles it slightly, then holds it by its neck so Emma can see that someone has painted a clown face on it. It is against the rules to touch the props and the actors, but she does not point this out. On top of a filing cabinet is a crawling baby with a demonic face. Kathy puts the baby doll on the demonic doll’s back, so it looks like it’s getting a pony ride.
“They belong together,” Kathy says, but her smile is one Emma has seen her use on people she’s actively trying to get away from. Emma has no idea why, but when her friend turns, she takes the tiny baby-clown doll and puts it in her coat pocket, her fist closed around it like a talisman.
The room that rattles Emma is the adolescent girl’s bedroom. The teenager is splayed on the bed, in a Catholic school uniform. The skirt is folded at the waistband to make it ultra mini. Her white socks are pulled high, and the patent leather shoes catch what little light there is. When they enter, she is theatrically crying into her pillow, but sits up, suddenly coy and cheerful, asking, “Will you play with me?” Her face has been zombified, dark hollows under her eyes, a piece of latex skin peeling off her cheek, teeth blackened, but her lips are a glistening cherry red. She follows behind Emma, whispering hotly in her ear, “Play with me. Play with me. Play with me.”
Emma doesn’t technically violate any rules, but she turns to the girl, who under the makeup is maybe 16. Or 28. It’s hard to tell. The strobe lights discombobulate her further. “This is messed up,” she says evenly. “They shouldn’t make you do this. I want to talk to someone. The manager.”
The girl’s face falls, and then hardens. “Nobody makes me do anything, grandma. I manage myself. I handle my business.” She gestures to the room entire. “This is all me. All mine. I made this up. To scare people like you.” She makes a V out of her index and middle finger and sticks her tongue through it, wiggling it vigorously.
Emma inhales sharply, and is stuck, unable to move. Even as a child, she froze, never flight or fight. She recently saw a wildlife program about the possum, playing dead, smelling dead even. In her own terror as a child, she had frozen, played dead with her eyes wide open, but she’d never told anyone until she found the words with Kathy, so sure no one would believe her. Now, women are telling and tweeting and posting and blogging those stories and she reads them once her children are in bed. She still feels alone, but not as alone. “No one will believe you,” is a line predators use. A seed they plant in children. Knowing this holds no comfort. She thinks of the goddamned possum coming to, shaking itself from the threat that turned it rigid, trundling off with what struck Emma as great patience and intention. Hadn’t she done the same, really, as a child?
“Look at me,” the teenager yells, “look at me. I am right here. Don’t act like you don’t see me.” Once Emma is looking, she sashays over to the Taylor Swift poster and begins kissing it melodramatically. Kathy has long since moved ahead and she feels untethered. She calls out, loudly, and her friend’s name sounds strange to her own ears. Her voice has a tremor that makes it sound like she’s been crying. The sound wakes her up, a part of her, the preteen part that kissed the mouth off of (paper literally dissolving an oval that showed her bedroom wall where his mouth should be) of a Ralph Macchio poster from the only Teen Beat she ever owned. She loved his kind eyes. When she saw Karate Kid in the theater, she’d stood up, and clapped, crying. Her friend had tugged at her coat to get her to sit down, whispering, “Oh my God, Emma, sit down, people are looking.” If she’d been friends with Kathy then, she would have stood up and clapped with her. And she sees the girl, she does, trying so hard, too hard, but she sees something else too. Something smart and brave in her performance.
“I’m looking,” she shouts, “I see you. I fucking see you!” And she claps, for real, and the girl turns and looks at her, and they share a beat of recognition, before the zombie-girl bares her teeth and howls. Emma flees, because it is legit frightening.
She has been navigating and investigating fear, post divorce, pretty much daily and most definitely nightly, and at 2:38 a.m. for sure. Kath says the antidote to fear is love, and if not love, then fun. She was pushing to live vicariously through Emma’s sexual revolution, which she thought would happen once she began internet dating. Which was probably never. Kathy had lobbied for a year, offered to build a profile, and she had held out. Emma was not a prude, in fact she thought about sex a lot and the verb devour danced—she wanted to kiss wrists hungrily, gobble the words that unspooled from a lover’s mouth. She wanted her own greedy hands to memorize a face, the length of a body. Only, she did not want to fuck randoms, as her students quipped. She wanted the more. Life was complex, her time limited, and maybe she was old fashioned in that she wanted to know a person too, unfold each other like origami, and offer kindness. Life is a wild braid of complications, and Emma wanted to do right, be deeply good, but even more she knew the troubling truth. She felt wild and insatiable and like she was looking for trouble. Her body was one giant mouth, wanting. And in her throat, a howl like she just heard. Truth. So, maybe she would ask Kathy to help build a no-bullshit profile, maybe soon.
Kathy’s waiting for her just around the corner. The red lights shadow her face, but she truly smiles when she sees her friend, and her face is so glorious Emma tears up and the world goes watery. She wants to hug her, hang on for just a moment, so she does, and Kathy laughs, really laughs. They are women who know all of the versions of one another’s laughter, can decode what the laughter means, and it’s one of delight and relief.
“This part always freaks me out, for real, but hold my hand, okay? We have to press through these inflatable things, and the only way out is through. It gets pretty claustrophobic, but try not to think. Just stay in motion, okay? It’s like being born again. Don’t think about germs or the skin cells from everyone else, just hold your breath in, hold on, and squeeze through.”
Emma does hold her breath. She does not have to close her eyes because it is so dark. It is as dark as the caves she spelunked fearlessly in college, until the graduate student leading them got stuck in a tight passage. She was directly behind him and heard him whisper, “Oh shit,” and the panic in his voice crawled up her spine. He had shimmied through, they all had, into a huge cathedral rich with stalactites and stalagmites dripping and sparkling, but she did not enjoy a moment of it. She knew they had to go back the way they came, and her brain unspooled scenarios that caught her breath and made her feel crazy. The trip back took too long, and her brain felt nearly boiled with anxiety.
The brain boil is happening now too, and Kathy is pushing through, ahead, occasionally murmuring, “We have got to be getting close. We got to be.” Then a particularly filled tube of air hits Emma hard, and she lets go of her hand and nearly drops to her knees. She takes a gasping breath and rights herself. She puts her hands out, like a woman searching for the light switch, and she feels fear, the sharp edges of it. She thrashes for a moment, wildly, but the tunnel is unending. Emma’s a reasonable woman, ultimately, and she’s been a mother for fifteen years. A speech pathologist, she teaches at the university and oversees the speech clinic there. She’s used to moving parts, incomprehensibility, puzzling sounds into words, and figuring people out, but this place, this darkness and closed in anxiety, how to puzzle or relax into it? She tries. She takes a breath and finds her voice.
“Kath?” she calls softly. Then panic squeezes her and she screams for her friend. She howls for her friend.
Emma’s oldest was an emergency C-section. She had labored for seventeen hours before the heartbeat was lost. The cord was wrapped around his neck. Before that though, when the baby crowned, they had positioned mirrors so she could see herself. Her ex-husband had said, literally groaning, face squinched in disgust, “Don’t look. Oh God, don’t look.” But she had looked, intently, and as exhausted as she was, her body hadn’t disgusted her or terrified her. She felt wonder. It was a geography she had only known by touch, by feel, and there she was—a terrain she now knew by sight. The nurse had turned to him and said, “That’s beautiful. That’s bloody, bewildering life.Maybe you need to step outside, sir, if you cannot handle this.” The nurse took a deep breath, and directed her gaze at Emma. “You are doing so well. You are so freaking strong.We are gonna focus on breathing and pushing, and I am right here.”
When the heartbeat was lost, and they had positioned her on the crucifix of a surgical table, arms outstretched, she had promised the universe so many things if her son made it, but how do you really measure goodness and virtue? Promises made under duress don’t really count. Or maybe they are the ones that count the most. The terror she had felt was a living thing, and she had tried so hard not to play dead or fight it, but to stay calm within it. She had said pleasepleasepleaseplease until it became a word that sounded foreign and unknown to her. Just a sound. The silence that followed the final, hard tug that signaled he was outside of her, in the world now, swallowed her and she had swallowed her scream, sure he was dead, but then he gave voice to a wail. They brought him to her, chalky and bloody, and while she did not get to hold him immediately, she looked into his face, and felt as fragile as a tea cup, totally unprepared, but deeply committed to the unknown, and married to mystery. The surgeon brought the scissors for the umbilical cord, but her now ex-husband said, “I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t look.” And Emma had decided she would always look, and asked if she could, please? It seemed right, the hard scissoring of what had connected them, and afterward, she held her son and wept—the only thing her body could do because no words could articulate the braided emotions she could not contain.
She has kept her children alive, has been watchful and attentive and mostly patient, and she has loved them vividly. Fear, real fear, is not this place. And maybe she needs to actively probe, dig out the shame microchip implanted all those years ago. She was just a kid. Kathy had said that. You were a child. And she had placed her hand over her friend’s heart and said, “I’m just gonna rest here with you.” Her heart. It beats hard in her chest, and she covers it with her own hand. “This too,” she says out loud to herself. And she means all of this, all of who she is—the deep longing for more and possibility and newness, and also the actual life she has right now. And Kathy? Kathy has lived through loss, knew the shifting contours of terror, and was still in the wilderness of alive grief. Emma remembers the strange and lonely terrain of grief while navigating a necessary divorce, and while she can’t know her friend’s loss, she won’t ever run from it or pretend it does not exist. Emma calls out again for Kathy, not claiming or reaching in fear, but out of love—a calling to. The world seems full of mystery, her best friend seems an exquisite one, and makes her feel as though, at forty-six, while life is often mundane and monotonous, full of the known and expected, somehow, you could find yourself emerging from an inflatable vagina, really, that’s what this thing was, in a haunted house in the middle of Iowa.
Kathy lets loose a victorious crow, and even from a distance, Emma can hear the joy and can call up her friend, arms held high in victory, face to the night sky, calling, “I made it! I made it! A-ha! Life! You wild and crazy bitch! I love you!”
Emma pushes through hard, then harder still, not thinking, just moving, moving, moving toward the world, and her friend, and maybe even herself, just as they all are, exactly as they truly are, just for now, and her hand finds the clown baby in her pocket, and she pulls it out, extends it, an offering of love.
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Barbara Lawhorn teaches Composition and Creative Writing at Western Illinois University. She’s into community literacy work, mindfulness, walking her amazing dog, Banjo, running, eating pie, and finding the wild places, within herself and outside in the world. Her most recent poetry and fiction can be found at Sand Hill Literary Review, Belmont Story Review, Santa Clara Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Poetry South, Dunes Review Literary Journal, and White Wall Review. She lives joyfully in the Midwest with her favorite creative endeavors ever—sons Mars and Jack.
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C. R. Resetarits is a writer and collagist. Her collage art has appeared on the covers and in the pages of dozens of magazines and book covers.
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