Poe & I by Matthew Mercier & Crystal Lake Publishing

Author:Matthew Mercier & Crystal Lake Publishing [Mercier, Matthew & Publishing, Crystal Lake]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Published: 2024-07-18T14:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

The Woman in the Box

THE SON’S NAME was Brad McKittrick. It must be said. It must be remembered. Even if I don’t want to remember it.

The day of the funeral, Andy and I were told to stay away from the parlor. We obeyed, although I wish we hadn’t. I wish we’d gone and paid our respects. Walked up to the family and apologized. But Father said the McKittrick clan didn’t want to see us, so he suffered through it alone. After the funeral, he went on a three-day bender, hibernating in his man cave with a bottle of bourbon and his Remington. I thought for sure we were about to be orphans, but he emerged later as if all was just fine, nothing to see here.

This is what Peabodys do; we stuff the darkness into our lower depths, where it simmers in our stomachs for months, years, decades, the pressure building and building until it finally explodes in a gooey mess. It’s how we arrived here at Brad’s funeral. We suppressed and ignored the darker side of Mother’s behavior until she exploded. If we’d acknowledged the darkness in Mother, nobody else would be dead. It was that simple. Now she was locked away in the loony bin (I refused to call it a hospital), but for me, she might as well have been dead, so I tried to forget her.

Impossible since our house had turned into her mausoleum.

Every room was a memorial. I could walk from the den to the library to the kitchen and get an analog slide show of her youth—photos of Mother as a child, teenager, college student, young wife. There was a shot of her in Father’s study, cradling me as a newborn, with Andy staring over her shoulder. They all looked so happy to see me, but I didn’t trust it. Where did this beautiful family go? Why did Mother insist I wasn’t her son? Maybe that baby in the picture was me, but maybe afterward I’d been switched out for a changeling. Maybe I was a fake son, a demon, replaced in the night by trolls and who had yet to discover his true destiny as a monster. Which meant another Jonah Peabody—the real Jonah Peabody, my twin—was out there in the world, living my real life.

See? Too much time alone and your thoughts begin to eat their own tails. I’m not real. I’m a double of a double. My true self is out there, not in here. Crazy talk, right?

Except it’s not. Let me explain.

Andy and Father visited Mother at the loony bin once a week. Andy tried to go by herself, but even though she’d graduated high school she was still a minor, so they needed to visit together. During these visits, I’d often snoop around the house, searching for evidence of my former self—instead, I found Mother’s self in Father’s man cave. He forgot to lock it up one afternoon after he’d gone to work, so I slipped inside, hot

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