The Holding Place

Chapter 9

The rain is heavy against the roof of the car. The comforting music of Norah’s car seat mobile fills the interior of the vehicle. An old romance paperback half read is resting in my hands. Michael is lost in the music of his MP3 player as he drives through the heavy rain. The GPS on the dash shows another five hundred miles to go until we reach our destination. There is Disneyworld brochures resting at my feet, several rides circled excitedly in black permanent marker. The look on Michael’s face is one of relaxation. I settle back and return to my paperback, savoring the peacefulness of the car ride.


The seat is warmed with the heat of my body. Pure elation shoots through me. I close my eyes for a few moments and take in the sweet sensations of touch. The velvety surface of the seat covers is ecstasy against my skin. I tug at the holder in my thick curls and let them fall free around my shoulders. I breathe in the smell of musky cologne and fresh baby powder. There are no two scents that I haven’t missed more than the scent of my husband and of my child.


There is no sadness in the car. My senses are alive and crave more interaction with the world around me. Relief overwhelms me and thankful that I’m sitting down. Tears of joy prick at my eyes and I let them flow freely. Michael turns to me with a smile and rests with warm hand upon my knee.


“That excited for Disney?” he asks me playfully.


I open my mouth to answer him but he isn’t there anymore to hear my answer. The sound of the rain upon the roof of the car is gone. Michael and Norah are gone. The car is gone. The world has been ripped right out from underneath me. The chill of ice is once again lashing at my body and I’m surrounded by a purple blackness. Flashes of light in a multitude of colors travel and disappear around me. A howl, cries, shouts, and laughter mingle in together above me.


I’m not alive. I’m still dead.


“Hello again, Abby,” a faraway but familiar voice calls to me icily.


The burn of anger returns to my chest and I look around to find the owner of the voice. My vision has not yet adjusted to the darkness and I am reduced to feeling around this dark and musty place. Everything around me, the slimy walls, the wet ground, even the musty air greets each of my senses with sensations I have almost forgotten. I refuse to let the hope grow within me and squash it at its source. I’m dead and it would be foolish of me to entertain thoughts otherwise.


The sting of a sharp slap sends my head snapping back. A flash of white travels across my vision as I sustain the full brunt of the impact. Instinctively my hand goes to my cheek to nurse the newfound pain making its home there. Behind the pain and anger is a little flicker of relief. My brain is screaming in joy that I still retain some remnants of myself when I was human.


“You just had to ruin the show, didn’t you?” Casey asked, her breath warm against my face. “Ruined everything. Years I waited!”


She grates out a howl and strikes me across the face again. She has her fist twisted in the front of my clothing and is rendering me paralyzed. A faint light briefly illuminates her face and I can only widen my eyes to display my shock at what I see. I should be letting out a terrified scream and struggle to get as far away from her as possible.


“What?” Casey asks sardonically. “Don’t like what you see?”


Her hair and body are still hers but it is the face that sends terror through me. I struggle to look away, the black of her eyes boring holes right into the heart of mine. The red painted lips are twisted into a sneer showing off even perfect teeth. I can’t close my eyes or turn my head away, it is sheer agony. The maniacal laughter tears at me like long nails against a chalkboard. It is unbearable and finally I am able to let out a scream.


“Stop lying to yourself!” she taunts, over and over again. Her voice has taken on the sound of someone just as equally devastating.


“Just admit it!”


“You know you did it! Just admit it”


“Do you think you are normal? Do you think you will ever be able to fit in?”


I have control over my limbs again. Her taunts are swirling around in my head at an impossible rate of speed. The taunts all swirl together now and become one, saying the same thing repeatedly. I put my hands over my ears but the sounds of my childhood force their way through. I’m trying to keep the distant images of my childhood just as they are, distant, but I’m failing miserably. Every painful moment of my childhood plays out through me, as real and as vivid as the moments they happened.


Casey is a distant thought now as I plunge into places thought long ago forgotten. Darkness and animosity fill every crook and crevice. Happiness is elusive, in its place a constant cycle of emotional torture. Every sick game is played again. Nothing ever changes. I lose every time. Throughout my travels down this broken lane of memories are the sadistic echoes of Casey’s laughter, my mother’s laughter. I refuse to stay in this place.


“Stop! Stop it!” I scream at her, bringing my mind back to the present.


Casey is caught by surprise at my breakthrough. I see my opening and lunge at her, wrapping my hands around her cold neck as we tumble together to the spongy ground. Hate fills the slits of her eyes as she peers up at me. My hands are still wrapped around her neck and I’m having trouble suppressing the urge to squeeze tighter. All I want to do is watch her grow pale as life seeps out of her. I keep my grip tight but I do not squeeze. When Casey realizes this a smile spreads over her face.


“Come on, Abby,” she baits. “Squeeze a little harder, you know you want to.”


My grip slackens around her neck as I stare down at her. My anger is slowly ebbing away and is being replaced with something more profound. I no longer want to watch her suffer in pain. I have suffered and watched the suffering of others for long enough. I’m tired. I take my hands away from her and climb to my feet.


She sneers at my and lets out a little snicker. “That could have been interesting but you didn’t have it in you, never did. Always going to be weak, mousy Abby. Just like your childhood and your marriage.”


Her words are cutting my patience short and my fists curl tightly at my side. I bite the side of my cheek hard to prevent myself from taking the bait of her words.  I don’t know what she is trying to accomplish but I won’t fall into her game.


“You’d think there would be a hole where your cheek is,” Casey jabs. “All the times you bite it when really you should just say what you really feel. It could have saved you from a lot of heart ache.”


My patience finally snaps. “What the hell do you know about anything?”


“Are you naïve or just plain stupid?” she asks. “Wait, I take that back. You’re both.”


“Why are you being like this, Casey?”


She stares at me and doesn’t give me a reply.


“You were never like this before.”


A starburst of white-hot pain explodes as my face as Casey cracks her hand across it.  I’m starting to get more than a little weary at her slapping me. I force my arms at my side to prevent myself from retaliating. I’m tired of dancing around her words and striking her back won’t help me get answers any sooner.


“I know everything about you Abby and everything you don’t know. I know about you’re crazy bitch of a mother and that pathetic fool you remember as your father. I know what drives you and what terrifies you. I know a hell of a lot about everything.”


It finally dawns upon me. She hasn’t spent her years trapped somewhere in the middle on Earth just watching her family grieve for her. She has been watching me too. The same way I watch Michael only much deeper. She has been inside of me, listening and learning me. The pit of my stomach dips and I double over to wretch.


“Casey, I don’t understand.”


“Think back; think back really hard, all the way back to high school.”


I have no inkling of what she is talking about? High school? We were not particularly close friends back then, but friends nonetheless. We ate lunch together every day. We took a few classes together. There was no animosity between us. We were just very different. She grew painfully shy and retreated from the world around her. I yearned for acceptance amongst peers who I was convinced would never accept me.


“Casey,” I say and shrug my hands up in the air.


“Have you always been this stupid!?” she cries. “Think back, all the way to Matt Hamilton!”





That is a name I have not heard or thought about in at least a decade. He was the boy I unfortunately lost my virginity to at the end of my junior year. That was the time that I was convinced that giving my body away was the only way anybody would notice me. What happened between Matt and I was awkward and frankly was not much to remember. It was all over in a matter of moments and we never spoke to each other again. I regretted the second it happened and now cringe at the thought of him.


“The boy I lost my virginity to?”


“Your virginity?” Casey balks at me. “You have no idea, do you, you little slut?”


I wince at her choice of words for me and shake my head cautiously. I do not want to anger her. My cheek is tired of being slapped. I am finally breaking through with her and the last thing I want to do is make Casey retreat into her coldness towards me.


“I’m sorry, but I have no idea.”


The twinkle of hate is back in her eyes and she regards me with nothing but malice. “Well then Abby, have a fun time figuring it out. Oh and I forgot to mention a little something to you earlier...”


She is gone. There is no sign of her and I’m left alone in the purple darkness with random bursts of light. I have no idea where I am. The lights flashing by above me are beautiful. Casey has to be wrong. There is nothing beautiful about hell. I have no idea if I’m telling myself this for comfort or because I really feel that it is the truth. Either way, I can’t bring myself to believe her parting words.


There is something dark inside of Casey and it won’t let her rest. All of the years since her death she has spent them basking in her sadness, years to cultivate an obsession of hate. She has watched me and she wants to hurt me. She knows the right buttons to push. She knows all of my fears intimately. I am no longer on Earth but I can’t make myself believe that I am in hell either.


I walk around, trying to get a feel for the place I am now trapped in. Hours, possibly days have gone by since I started my exploring and everything is still the same spongy and wet purple darkness. The cries and shrieks still echo in the background and the lights the swirl above me but they illuminate nothing. My confidence that Casey is wrong is quickly starting to falter. I am all alone in this place. Casey would know how much I hate being alone.


The scenery changes and I’m standing in a seeming endless sterile white hallway with harsh fluorescent lighting beating down. The wall are covered with little gray colored frames all hanging neatly in congruent rows. There is no images in them. An uncomfortable chill runs down my spine and a lump of anxiety grows in my throat.


I peer closer into one of the frames and there is still nothing in them. This hallway reminds me of ones that exist in a hospital, the air heavy with a septic scent. I begin walking down the hallway and it keeps stretching farther along. The frames along the wall continue to multiply and grow with every step that I take. Whiteness is supposed to be the color that reflects purity but there is a vague notion that nothing pure exists within this endless façade of gray and white.


Echoes of a child’s carefree laughter bounces off the walls around me. The sounds are so numerous that it hard to tell from which direction they originate. A peculiar scratching sound begins to accompany the laughter. I turn in a full circle to see if there is another person with me here but I find that I am still alone. The sounds are quickly starting to grate at my already fragile nerves.


For a split second a darkly clad small figure catches the corner of my eye. I turn swiftly to the direction of the movement. There is nothing to behold but the emptiness. The laughter seems to be growing louder by the minute. A bead of sweat breaks at my brow as I start turning around in all directions frantically. There is an ominous glow warming at the pit of my stomach.


Suddenly the small figure darts before me again. There is dark hair but not much else is distinguishable. The rollerblades that he is floating on explains that scratching sounds that started moments before. The ground is flat but he is flying past me at a downhill speed. I dodge out of his way before he collides into me. He seems to be oblivious of my presence.


Just as quickly as the child appears I watch him become airborne, as if he is coming off of a skating ramp, and fly through the gray of one of the picture frames. I’m close enough to see the shimmer that follows his decent. The gray of the frame he jumped through is rippling like the raindrop on a still pond. Seconds later it becomes the still stone gray that was there before it was disturbed.  I am not sure what I just witnessed.


I reach out to the frame, expecting it to be submerged into its strange murkiness, only to be met with the coldness of gray cement. I lift up the frame to inspect it and discover that the walls are painted white. It is all cement underneath, industrial and unforgiving. I give my head a shake, trying to figure out where I am and what I am seeing.


I am surrounded by silence once again. It is a little disheartening to find cement under the white paint. A small part of me hoped that there would be something ethereal about this place. I am haggard from all the watching and waiting, not knowing what to do next. It is quickly becoming apparent that my wait is long from over. The child was nothing but a figment of my imagination, another sign my sanity is slowly getting away from me.


“Can anyone, anybody, hear me?” I scream out in frustration.


My wretched voice echoes down the hall for several moments, disappearing in what sounds like a hundred miles away. There is no use for me to continue on walking. This hallway stretches and replicates itself with every step in put in front of me. I look behind and in front of me, my eyes met with the same measure of endlessness in both directions.


This place is no different from what I have roamed over for the past four years. The suffering is still the same. Any direction I choose to look and I know the sight that will inevitably greet my gaze. This isn’t a dream. A spirit as lost as I am does not have the privilege of the realm of dreams. I’m tortured with the replay of my loved ones threnody day after day. I must listen to it, feel it, and relive it as real as the day that it happened.


Against the backdrop of my dark thoughts I reach my hand out to steady myself. My hand sinks into the wetness of the picture frame my hand touches. My eyes fly wide open with surprise and I am saved from the precipice of my sadness. The gray is rippling gently around my wrist. My hand is dry on the other side. The gray is only thin gel-like film concealing something on the other side.


I bring my face closer to the gray film and study it more closely. It is opaque and impossible to see what exists on the other hand.  I guide my hand back to my side and the gray is still rippling softly. I’m caught between apprehension and curiosity. I am dying to know what is on the other side but I’m afraid of what will become of me if I carry myself over to the other side. The boy flew through the frame and it quickly became sealed with cement. I am terrified of disappearing and becoming stuck in one place. I’m still trying to find my way out.


Curiosity has the stronger pull and wins over my apprehension. I steady myself and draw in a long soothing breath as push my head through the gray film. It is sticky and thick against my face. There is a little resistance and I push through with a little more effort. The barrier gives way and my eyes are met with a rather pleasant sight.


I cannot compact myself to fit through the frame and to my great disappointment can only look at it from a straight forward perspective. The sight ahead looks to be a modest living room that is part of a modest suburban home. A multi-colored crocheted afghan is draped prettily over a plaid couch. The dark wood floors are painstakingly kept. The mantel is filled with little league trophies from a various array of sports. A few rays of sunshine a peeping through the white lace curtains that adorn a large window on the far end of the room.


What is the true attraction is the large and beautifully decorated Christmas tree in the middle of the room. Icicles are scattered throughout the collection of handcrafted ornaments, stringed popcorn and bright tinsel. It is nothing like the scrawny excuse of a tree my mother would haphazardly attempt at a couple times throughout my childhood. A never ending pile of wrapped gifts are flowing copiously out from beneath the tree. It is a tree fit for royalty.


At the opening of the living room and the hallway leading away from it stands a small child with dark hair in fuzzy foot pajamas. In his hands are a ragged old teddy bear, rubbed threadbare with many nights of being snuggled close. He is looking around for someone and is making no effort to run to tear open the gifts that lay in front of him so invitingly.


A thin woman with the same dark hair, dressed in a white terrycloth woman, comes behind the small child and stands silently behind him. In one arm she is holding a little dark haired girl who looks no older than two years old close to her chest and with the other she places a comforting hand gently on the small boy’s shoulder. They stand there for a few moments, as if waiting for someone, but nobody else joins them. The woman wipes away a solitary tear from her cheek, trying to not let the small boy catch sight of it.


Behind the tree I can see a case filled with pictures of happy times. The frames are filled with the solemn people who are standing in front of me, the only difference is that smiles are lighting up their faces. Through the photo’s I am able to relive their memories of trip to the shore, theme parks and quiet trips to the park that is close to home. The three children in the photo’s all share the same dark hair and striking blue eyes. All three of them are beautiful. The two girls look almost exactly alike and seem to be the same age.


I look to the woman holding the small child and try to find where the other little girl must be. The girl in the woman’s arm is squirming impatiently and is trying to escape from the straw-like arms that hold her. The little boy stands silently and looks forwards almost obediently. The amounts of presents that are under the tree now seem to be excessive for only two children.


A man in a black robe walks out of the kitchen exit into the living room with a coffee cup and a solemn expression upon his face. He walks to the woman and gives her a soft kiss on the cheek. Then the man bends down to kisses both children upon the tops of their heads. Neither the man nor the woman is urging the boy or little girl to run towards the presents under the tree.


The boy looks up at the man and puts his small hand against a cheek. The man gives the boy a small smile and draws him into a hug. He lifts his up into his arms and holds the boy tightly to him. The man’s eyes squeeze tightly shut and he lets a tear run down his cheek. The woman draws her hand to his face to wipe the tear away.


“Dada?” the little girl squeaks. “Where is Simone?”


        The boy looks up at the tree and then stares into my direction. The clarity of his blue eyes hit me with force. Those eyes are one of a kind.


What kind of place have I landed in?