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The Disciple (continued from preceding page)
have that fiendish housekeeper fired for putting a
curse on my new home.
My daughter guided me to the bed, her eyes big and black and glassy. I knew then that she had drugged the cupcakes. I could feel the effects starting to kick in, the bugs crawling under my skin. I fell against the pillows and felt a kind of paralysis spread slowly from my fin- gertips, up my arm, and through the rest of my body.
“I’m going to make some calls, okay, Mom?”
I accused my daughter of poisoning me. I threatened to call the police, but when I tried to reach for the phone on the nightstand, I found that I was unable to move. She looked at me, her lips curling into a smile, and somehow spoke without opening her mouth.
“I’ve been trying to be responsible, Mom, I really have. I’ve been trying to be good. I even have a steady part- time job. Cleaning apartments after school. I’ve had the same job now for almost a year. I thought you’d be proud of me.”
I must have regarded her with a comical expression.
When she finally stopped laughing, she said, “Stay right here. And whatever you do, Mom, don’t go back in that bathroom.”
The moment she closed the bedroom door, I heard the distinctive click of a lock. I wasn’t sure how this was possible since the door locks from the inside. Still pinned to the bed, I asked if housekeepers were in the habit of carrying a phillips head screwdriver and a set of allen wrenches when they felt it necessary to tam- per with their client’s locks. In a much louder voice,
in case she was having trouble hearing me through the door, I asked about her work. How many apart- ments did she clean in a day? Did she find the job rewarding? When she failed to respond, I knew I had to speak more forthrightly, and so in my most heart- felt voice, the one I used to tell my ex-husband that one day I was going to get even with him, I said that I didn’t believe a word of her story. We both knew she was incapable of holding down a job for longer than
a week or two. I then congratulated her on having played a terrific prank, but now the joke had run its course and it was time to release Mommy from the bedroom.
That’s when the music started, a frighteningly famil- iar fugue played at full volume. Since I didn’t own a stereo system, I assumed she’d smuggled a portable speaker into the apartment, one with a subwoofer
that could make the paintings and pictures rattle against the walls. Good, I thought, let her blast that nihilistic noise. Sooner or later someone would come to my aid, the superintendent, a neighbor, a sympa- thetic mother on her way home to face her own little monsters. How many of us were there in the world, how many parents imprisoned in their own homes, living in mortal terror of their children?
It grew dark. Above the music, I could hear bubbling bong hits, coughing, clapping, howling, peals of manic laughter, the sound of a glass shattering against the granite countertop. Soon the bedroom reeked of cigarettes and marijuana. I attempted to roll off the bed so I could crawl across the floor and wedge a
wet towel under the door, but I couldn’t lift a finger, couldn’t even blink.
As I stared at the ceiling, I wondered how long it would take before the bedroom door suddenly burst open and a dark figure demanded to know where I’d stashed the liquor. Which of my daughter’s guests would do the honors of interrogating the morose birthday girl? My ex-husband? The yoga instructor? Or perhaps that handsome man from the cafe? Yes, let it be him! Not wanting to spoil the party, I would fully cooperate with my impeccably groomed inquisi- tor. Maybe, if there were no profanity-laced temper tantrums on my part, no promises of self-abuse, no gleeful threats of suicide, he would even let me join the party. He might fetch a paper cup from the bath- room and pour me a shot of bourbon from a bottle
at the bottom of the laundry basket. I imagined him standing before the mirror, the drawing of Baphomet superimposed over his face. Raising his own cup,
he would propose a toast. “To daughters!” Then he would tell me that, if I so wished, he could relieve me forever of all my responsibilities as a parent.
But as he leaned over my bed and poured the burn- ing liquid into my mouth, he would stroke my face with his gentle hand and say, “Of course, under circumstances such as these, the best thing to do
is accept the fact that children are a curse that can never be broken.”
After working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio, Keating be- came an instructor of English and began teaching at several Cleve- land area colleges and universities. His essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in over fifty literary journals. The Natural Order of Things, his first novel, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes/First Fiction Award. His second novel The Captive Condition was released as a Pantheon hardcover in 2015 and was featured at the San Diego Comic Con International.
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