Hole: A Ghost Story Read online

  There we go…! he thought.

  Sofronio was back in business.

  5.

  Reclining in her tub, Mary’s brow furrowed. She wanted to cry, but it seemed all her tears were used up. She looked at the blade pressing into her flesh and wondered just how much it was going to hurt when she cut herself. She’d always been squeamish about pain.

  Well, she needed to do it soon, before she lost her nerve. Hank would be home from work in a couple hours, and she wanted to be dead by then, with no chance of rescue, or of revival. She wanted to be cold and stiff and ghastly when he walked in the bathroom. No wilted Lorelei for Hank, floating as if aslumber. She wanted to horrify, with blood and rigor mortis. Passive-aggressive, even in death. But that was always Mary’s style.

  She grit her teeth and found she could not do it.

  She was scared. There was a part of her that was afraid to die.

  “Come on, Mary,” she whispered. “You can do it.”

  Her heart was laboring in her chest like an icy fist, clenching and releasing. It made her breast quiver, it was beating so hard. She tightened her fingers on the handle of her husband’s hobby knife, her hand shaking. Just two quick swipes. The blade was sharp enough. The left one first, then the right. Her arms would come open like overfilled zipper bags, spilling her insides out, and then… and then she could lean back and let herself drift.

  “Whatever’s wrong, you should just talk it out with him,” her mother had said. “Why do you always hold stuff in? It’s not healthy, Mary. You need to get mad. Throw some dishes at him.”

  That, soon after she arrived at her parents’ home.

  Her father had been happy enough to see her. He gave her a hug, his oxygen tube dangling between them, told her she could stay as long as she needed. If she felt like talking, he’d listen. If she didn’t, well... they’d make some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and watch a ballgame together.

  Her mother only criticized, but that was Mother. She always acted annoyed with her family, as if each of them had willfully disappointed her. Never quite good enough: her father, Mary, her younger brother Steve. Only her oldest brother Dean seemed to meet Harriet Klegg’s high standards.

  Mary wondered what her mother would think if she knew the things Dean had done to her, the acts he’d forced Mary to do to him. He’d molested his younger brother Steve, too. Dean was an equal opportunity molester.

  It would do no good to tell. Her mother would just call her a liar.

  Dean was a pillar of the community, the pastor of a Baptist church in Alabama now. Mother’s Golden Boy. Compared to Dean, poor little flighty Mary and Steve the queer steer were sore disappointments.

  “So what did he do?” Harriet asked later, hands on her hips. She was standing in the doorway of Mary’s bedroom. Her tone said, whatever it was, she was sure Mary was overreacting. Again.

  Harriet Klegg was a husky woman. Gray curled hair, jowly cheeks, glasses. She was dressed in a sleeveless blouse and sea green polyester pants. Old lady pants, they’d always called them.

  “I don’t want to talk about it right now,” Mary had answered, her voice low. She was unpacking her bags and didn’t look up.

  Her mother sighed. “I tell you, Mary. I don’t know how Hank puts up with you.”

  “I don’t know either,” she muttered. She didn’t feel like arguing. “Just, if he calls, please tell him you’re not feeling well, and that I’m staying here a couple days to take care of you.”

  “Mary Louise Klegg, I am not lying for you!”

  “Mother, please!” she shot back. “Just this once… just spare me the sermon. All right? I need some time alone to sort things out in my head. I can’t deal with him right now. Or you.” And there was enough raw grief in her voice to make her mother relent.

  Harriet strode back to the kitchen, muttering under her breath. A few minutes later, Mary heard her banging the cabinet doors, but she put it out of her mind and continued unpacking.

  Hank called at six. Her father, who was happy to play along, told Hank his daughter was running some errands for her mother, but he and Harriet were grateful he’d let Mary come upstate to help them out. What? Oh, yes, Harriet is terrible sick. Has the diarrhea, you know. Can’t stay out of the toilet. Mary had to clamp her hands over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. Yeah, her father said, eyes twinkling, Poor gal’s squirting so hard, I’m afraid she’s going to get dehydrated. House is startin’ to smell like a sewer treatment plant. When Jim Klegg hung up, Mary laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “What in the world are you two laughing about in here?” her mother demanded from the kitchen doorway, drying her hands brusquely on her apron.

  “Oh... nothing,” Mary’s father replied, disappearing behind his newspaper.

  Mary sobered at her mother’s withering expression, picking at a seam on the sofa.

  “You sound like a couple of loons,” Harriet pronounced.

  Later, Mary went for a walk. She wandered up and down the sidewalks, not really headed anywhere in particular.

  Hicks was a river town. The Kleggs had moved around a lot when she was young, but after her father got disabled, they’d used his settlement to buy a home in this little southern town. It was where her father had grown up. It was the closest thing Mary had to a hometown too, she supposed.

  She drifted past the Dairy Queen and Don’s BBQ, the Laundromat and a handful of empty storefronts. She paused in front of a vacant building that was a Ben Franklin when she was a kid. Mother used to let Mary and her little brother browse in the store while she did laundry. She remembered watching all the brilliant tropical fish swimming in their tanks in the five and dime’s tiny pet department. Buying Silly Putty and comic books there: Little Lulu and Popeye, Caspar and Scrooge McDuck.

  The building sat empty now, the show windows covered in dust so thick the glass was opaque, a FOR RENT sign taped to the door. The Super Wal-Mart out by the interstate had killed most of the small shops in town, and with their passing, she thought, the passing of an era.

  She felt as irrelevant as these long-abandoned businesses.

  Forgotten.

  Extraneous.

  Mary wasn’t surprised when she found herself down by the river. She’d retreated to this same spot when she was a troubled teen. Hicks Riverside Marina. She walked by the river’s edge and threw rocks into the Ohio. It was late June. The river stank of mud and dead fish, but it wasn’t a wholly unpleasant odor. Its earthiness was familiar and comforting.

  She sat on a bench and watched the ferry cut across the broad brown surface of the river. A couple motorboats were buzzing up and down the waterway to the South. Mary watched the boats zoom around and around, not really seeing them, just staring. The lapping of the waves was soothing, helped her think.

  The thing was, she was having a hard time reconciling the man she knew with the stranger she’d chanced upon in all those secret emails. It was like she’d met her husband’s evil twin. Her emotions oscillated from agony to rage, love to hatred, confusion to determination.

  Just thinking about the things he’d said in those missives made her head spin. It made her feel like vomiting.

  Who was that man? That wasn’t her Hank!

  Her Hank was sweet and funny and caring. Her Hank was the definition of “southern gentleman”. This was the man who always held the door for her, never raised his voice. He was never demanding or condescending or petty. He’d always been her rock.

  She knew their relationship had been strained lately. She knew most of it was her fault, too. She’d sprung some pretty heavy family secrets on him last Thanksgiving, things that had obviously sent him into some kind of emotional tailspin. She saw that now. Hindsight’s 20/20, right? He’d reacted in a very supportive manner outwardly, but maybe she’d taken his resilience for granted. Maybe this was his reaction to the revelations she’d blasted him with.

  She never should have kept the truth from him so long. She should have told h
im sooner.

  There was one other thing to consider, too, wasn’t there?

  “He never said he loved her,” Mary said quietly to herself.

  In all the correspondence she’d read, all those nasty emails to his mistress, Hank never professed that he loved her.

  That, at least, was marginally encouraging.

  But that night, lying in her childhood bedroom and staring at the wall (same familiar square of yellow light: the streetlight down the street; same sounds, same smells) she was overcome with a horrible, overwhelming sense of nihilism. Hank’s betrayal pierced her afresh. The terrible things he said about her to his mistress, her memories of childhood abuse, right here in this room, her childlessness and lack of accomplishment—all those things collapsed into a giant boulder of despair and rolled over her, grinding her to dust.

  She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. She felt like she was being physically crushed.

  I want to die! She thought. Please, lord, let me die! I can’t bear this much pain!

  Dying seemed the only way out.

  She remembered her brother, creeping through that very bedroom door, sometimes two, three nights a week. He was nine years her senior. Already driving. Girlfriend, too. When she heard the creak of the door hinge, eight-year-old Mary Louise always snapped awake. She knew that creak! She knew that soft tread. Sometimes Dean would put his finger to his lips when she sat upright in bed.

  Sshhhh!

  She watched him press the lock on her doorknob, then tiptoe toward her bed.

  “I don’t want to do it, tonight,” she always objected, whispering because she didn’t want her mother and father to hear, didn’t want them to find out what she did with her brother. She was too ashamed.

  Dean’s teeth were always strangely bright, but not his eyes. His eyes were predatory slits. Black pits. He had dark eyes like Mary, and when he came into her bedroom at night, they were like bottomless caverns. You looked in them and felt like you were falling.

  Sometimes he climbed on his knees on her bed, but he always had his thing pulled through the pee-hole of his underwear by then. He was proud of it. He liked to swing it around in front of him, wave it over her head like a club.

  “Just do it real quick and you can go back to sleep,” he would hiss. “Come on, Mary. Do it or I’ll put it in your hole.”

  He called it a hole. Just like Hank in his email. It’s like masturbating, only I use her hole instead of my hand.

  Is that all I am to them? She thought. Just a hole? Just a fucking hole?

  Them.

  She lumped them all together in her head, unapologetically. Dean, Hank, her boyfriends before Hank: Todd Grant and Johnny Murphy and Max She-couldn’t-remember-his-last-name-now. All of them sons of bitches, every one of them, nothing but horny wagging cocks looking for a hole to wiggle into, any hole, so long as it was warm and wet and they could get that fucking baby batter out of their balls.

  Had any of them ever truly loved her? Or had they only loved the hairy split between her thighs?

  She stayed with her parents for almost a week. She stayed until Hank started whining over the phone-- about the laundry piling up in the utility room, about the dishes piling up in the sink, then she packed her bags and headed home. She’d hoped the time away would ease her pain a little, but when Hank came out in the drive to help her unload the car (Mary always returned from Mother’s house with more than she’d left with) Mary found that the hurt was still fresh.

  It cut like a knife.

  For the next week, they barely talked. Hank caught scent of her mood pretty quick and began to avoid her. He went to bed early and woke late, found things to do in the garage. Half the week he fell asleep on the couch and didn’t come to bed at all. She drifted through those days, through the rooms of her home, through to the very end of her life, like she was already a ghost.

  And then this morning… this morning she woke with his hand between her thighs, his lips on her throat, his fingers in her hole, and she thought: I’d rather be dead.

  She purposely laid there like the limp rag he’d complained about in his emails to his mistress, unresponsive, cold… but he didn’t even seem to notice. She let him spread her legs and put his thing in her, and the whole time she laid there beneath him, letting him do his business on top of her, she kept her body as motionless as a plastic blow-up doll, neither helping nor hindering his efforts, feeling like the world’s meanest cunt.

  When he was finished, he sat on the edge of the bed with his head down. He sat there for several long minutes, then finally he turned to her and said, “You’re a bitch.” Not angry. Just low and… hurt, almost. His voice quavering with emotion, his eyes gleaming.

  What gall!

  He rose, quietly got dressed and left for work.

  Mary stayed in bed until she heard the Mustang grind out of the driveway, the wheels of his “mid-life crisis” car spitting gravel.

  And then she got up.

  She got up and prepared to kill herself.

  6.

  She got out her laptop and powered it on, drinking some coffee as she waited for it to boot up. It was a Windows HP with a big screen. Had a quad-core CPU under the hood, Hank said. That was supposed to be impressive, she guessed, though for all she knew about computers, it might as well be powered by hamsters running in a wheel. The computer had been a gift from Hank last Christmas. She remembered how thrilled she’d been as she unwrapped the box, and Hank basking in her excitement. His lopsided grin, eyes drinking in her happiness. It was an unexpected surprise, but now she wondered if he’d given it to her just to keep her off his desktop PC, afraid she might stumble across all those nasty emails. She felt a pang of hurt in her heart, like someone had stabbed her in the breast with a knitting needle. Mary put her coffee mug down with a scowl.

  She’d already decided to cut her wrists. She just wanted to make sure she did it correctly.

  When her laptop was ready, she logged onto the internet and typed in “how to cut your wrists”. She wasn’t sure there’d be any information pertaining to such a gruesome—and illegal-- subject, but was surprised to find an abundance of helpful websites.

  She was somewhat appalled how many sites were devoted to helping people kill themselves. Then again, she supposed, people killed themselves every day. Mary was pretty liberal, in her politics and her ethics. People should have the right to end themselves if their lives had become unbearable, she’d always believed. She would have held to that belief, even if she weren’t intent of doing just that thing. Why, then, shouldn’t there be resources to abet the self-destructive?

  One website was cheerily accommodating.

  Before you embark on your new journey, you must first be in a rational frame of mind, it said. Ask yourself the following questions: Are you feeling suicidal? Do you feel there is no other way out of your misery? Is there nothing at all you'd rather be doing? And, finally, do you have a very sharp razor?

  She was feeling pretty suicidal, thank you very much, and no, she could see no other way out of her misery. She had devoted herself to Hank Stanford, made that man her life’s work, so there really wasn’t much else she’d rather be doing. She had no girlfriends, no hobbies other than reading and puttering in the garden. And she had no razors, but she thought she could scrounge up something suitable somewhere around the house.

  The website continued:

  Make sure you answer these questions honestly and carefully, because you won't get a chance to change your mind when the deed is done. If you did answer 'yes' to all the questions listed above, then you are ready to slash your wrists.

  Step One: In the 24 hours preceding your suicide, drink several glasses of water. This will help enlarge your veins and make it easier for the blood to escape when you make your cuts.

  It was a little late for that. She wasn’t going to delay her suicide to make sure she was properly hydrated.

  Step Two: Go get your razor. If you do not have one, we strongly recommend goi
ng out and buying one. A scalpel or fresh X-Acto knife will also work. The important thing here is that you are looking for a very sharp object. You are going to be cutting your own flesh, and if your utensil is not sufficiently sharp, the cut will be painful, and you won't have the inclination to do a proper job.

  Mary walked to Hank’s office and looked through his desk drawer. He sometimes did little craft projects to pass the time, refurbishing oddball junk he picked up at yard sales. It was a hobby he’d acquired to help him quit smoking, something to occupy his hands.

  His X-Acto knife was lying in the drawer amid his loose change, snacks and old receipts. The plastic cap was in place, and the edge, when she inspected it, looked unsoiled and keen.

  Not that it mattered if it was dirty. She needn’t worry about an infection later.

  She returned to her laptop and read on.

  Step Three: Fill a tub with hot water. You want your water to be hot enough to plump up your veins and keep them open as your blood escapes, but not so hot that you will have trouble relaxing.

  So that’s why people cut their wrists in the tub! Mary had never really thought about it. She’d always believed it was a cleanliness thing.

  Step Four: Now you're almost ready to slash your wrists. Strip down, lie back in the tub, and try to relax. The hardest part is coming, so be sure to think of all the pain and suffering in your life, and how much better you'll be when you end it all.

  Step Five: As soon as you are ready, take your right arm and turn it palm side up. Hold your razor in your left hand. If you are left-handed, reverse these instructions. It is important to make the first cut with your bad hand, because otherwise, two steps from now, you'll need to slash your good arm with a hand that is both unfamiliar and draining of blood.