When we decided to have a proper wedding, my fiance Jay agreed to pay for it but refused to have anything to do with the planning. When the officiant I found insisted on a zoom meeting with both of us, I had to tell her my fiance couldn’t do that. She ended up giving me a lecture on mental labor and advised couples therapy. The next day I got an email from her saying she didn’t think she would be a good fit for us and wished me good luck in my future endeavors.
But even that paled in comparison to what I went through trying to find a venue. At one place, the owner kept asking me why I was alone and why I didn’t have a ring and basically treated me like a time waster. She made me wait an hour to do the tour with this other bride who arrived with an entire entourage including her parents, fiance and fiance’s parents. The owner fawned over her and ignored me completely except when she told me to fetch a bottle of water for the other girl.
Anyway, I finally found a venue that checked all the boxes. It was beautiful, cheap, and the manager was so sweet and non-judgmental. She told me she planned her wedding alone too because her then fiance had to work two jobs.
She sent over the contract and I showed Jay and he was like awesome. I told him how much the deposit was and he was like cool. I checked with the venue a couple of days later and they said they received the money and the date was ours.
Finally, I let myself get a little excited. Jay hadn’t been lying to me about paying and this wedding actually had a non-zero chance of happening. Oh my god, I thought, I am so happy!
I next booked the florist and catering and again he paid no questions asked which I confirmed with all the vendors.
I should mention here that Jay and I had basically been living together for months at that point. He had his own apartment but he was at my place 90% of the time. I never asked him to split groceries or utilities, so I felt like him offering to pay for the wedding was fair.
And just to be clear, I would have gladly split the wedding costs with him, except every attempt to discuss the budget or anything wedding related began and ended with him shutting me down with: “Do what you want and I’ll pay for it.”
About a month before the wedding, I found out the final payments were way past due. Vendors were calling me left and right to tell me they couldn’t move forward until they were paid. I let Jay know and he apologized and said he would get on it.
A week later, the vendors were again calling me to say the payments weren’t coming through.
So I figured now was the time for some real talk. I asked Jay if money was a problem and he said no. I asked him if he wanted to cancel everything and we would go to the courthouse and he said no. Finally, I asked him if he really wanted to marry me, and I said it was okay if he didn’t, and we would just continue on as before.
At this point he turned it around on me and accused ME of not wanting to marry HIM.
I was gobsmacked.
I wanted to strangle him!
He immediately apologized and said he would pay the vendors first thing in the morning.
A couple of days after that I got a call from the caterer and he was PISSED. He said the credit card that had been used to make the previous payments had been canceled and a dispute placed on all the charges. I said there must be a mistake.
“What’s your fiance’s name again?” he said.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told him Jay’s name, but then this was also the so called “professional” who needed three email exchanges to get the wedding date right.
I reminded him of Jay’s name and he said, “That’s not the name on the card.”
And then he gave me the name on the card which wasn’t any that I recognized.
“Maybe it’s his Dad’s name,” I suggested.
“Maybe?” he shrieked. “Are you saying you don’t know?”
He burst into a storm of expletives and then hung up on me.
Five seconds later the phone rang.
“How dare you hang up on me!” he shrieked. “Do you even have a fiance or did you make him up? You owe me five thousand dollars girly and I’ll take you to court for it!”
*
If anybody had asked me why I fell in love with Jay, a truthful answer would have been: “He was there.” Physical beauty is a powerful drug and I was infatuated, mesmerized at first sight. He lived in the apartment across from mine, and all I had to do was look out the window to see him coming and going. I didn’t know his name but I knew every routine of his day from when he went to the store to when he took out the garbage. I even fished out his trash from the dumpster once to see what was inside.
I was coming home from the store one night when I saw him standing outside of his door. To be blunt, he didn’t look like he was in his right mind. I asked him what was wrong and he mumbled something about his bathroom being flooded.
Being that it was late and he looked like he didn’t have anywhere to go, I invited him to stay at my place. He was reluctant at first, but I somehow convinced him I wasn’t going to eat him and he finally agreed.
He insisted on sleeping on the couch and seemed quite alarmed when I subtly and then not so subtly hinted I didn’t mind sharing my bed. I was disappointed but figured having him on my couch was better than nothing.
When I woke up the next morning, I was sure he would be gone, but no he was still there. As the day wore on, he kept saying he should go but made no move to do so. Next morning rolled around and he was still there.
As luck would have it, I twisted my ankle that afternoon and for the next two weeks, he took care of me day and night. But while he would go into the bedroom to bring me food or otherwise help me, never would he stay there one extra minute no matter how many hints I dropped.
By the time my ankle healed, there was no more pretense that he would go back to his own apartment. He was quiet, unobtrusive and as clean as a cat. He was the perfect roommate. He was even a vegan just like me, and made such good sesame tofu skewers that I could almost forget the insatiable desire for animal flesh that haunted even my dreams.
But after almost three months of living together, he still insisted on sleeping on the couch. He was polite as can be about it, but there was no denying he was refusing to be intimate with me. And not to be crude or anything but I had my needs.
I told him to sleep with me or get out. If he wasn’t interested, he could leave.
Or he could sleep with me. The choice was his.
I woke up the next day with the worst hangover I ever had and immediately regretted everything I said the night before. I rehearsed an apology and went out into the living room to say it, but it appeared I was not the only one with something to say.
“Listen,” he said, looking as sick as I felt, “I have something to ask you.”
Oh my God, I thought, no no no no no.
Next thing I knew, he had proposed, and I had to make him repeat it to make sure I heard right.
There were no fireworks, no photographer hiding behind the door, no celebratory dinner. There wasn’t even a ring, and he seemed surprised when I asked him about it. He said he could get me one if I wanted, and I told him to not worry about it.
Because the writing was on the wall: once we were married, he would sleep with me. I’m not sure what line of logic I was following, but I had somehow convinced myself that everything was going to work out splendidly.
*
I knew from the beginning that Jay was not being straight with me. I’m not talking about deep dark psychological things but the simple and obvious things.
His apartment, for example, which I had never been in for the entire time we were together. He kept saying it was messy and I could come over once he had cleaned it. And then he told me there were bedbugs? And yet I saw him go in there time and again. But when I confronted him with it, he would give me some obviously fake story about leaving his wallet or phone in there.
Another thing was his obsession with missing dog fliers. It would bother him excessively to the point where he would worry for hours whether the creature in question was found, and if so, in what condition. Once, when I offered to call the number on a flier to see if the dog was found, he completely freaked out and made me promise to never mention it again.
And then early one morning, I woke up to voices in the living room. I heard him saying “no” over and over again, followed by a crash and then silence. I lay in bed paralyzed with fear, and then I ran out of the room envisioning the worst: a break in, smashed glass, broken door, him lying on the floor wounded or worse.
But what I saw was infinitely more confusing. Nothing had been smashed, nothing had fallen, nothing was out of place. And he was sitting on the couch, his face white with fear as he looked at me, his eyes blank and startled as a deer caught in the headlights.
“What was that sound?” I said.
“Sound?” he said.
“Was it the door?”
“The door?”
I gave up and went back to bed. I had a terrible hangover.
The wonder of it all was that I accepted his half-ass explanations and bald faced lies, and even believed them the same way a person who had never left Nebraska could believe the earth was round. But he was clever and careful, even when he had been drinking. Because knowing what I know now, he must have been terrified.
*
In the dream, the girl stands there and looks at me. She is a stranger to me but her face is as familiar to me as the back of my hand. Which is an odd thing to say when you think about it because who would actually recognize the back of their own hand? Who would even recognize themselves across a crowded room?
My dreams were often horrendous so I was used to waking up in a cold sweat while screaming. But this time I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was seriously wrong.
I went out to the living room and Jay was there as usual. He had a bottle of whiskey and we were both pretty smashed when I asked him as a joke if he had a sister because I finally realized who that girl in the dream looked like: him!
He hit me so fast and hard I didn’t feel it at first. The pain came afterwards.
He looked even more stunned and frightened than me. In all the time we had been together, he had never been violent to me. He was always so gentle, so distant, I could have never imagined him putting hands on me.
I went to bed pretending to sleep and then really fell asleep as I was so drunk.
When I woke up, I told him we needed to set a date for our wedding, and start on the paperwork for the marriage license among other things. To which he said in his usual half ass way that he would look into it once he had some time.
Time! He had nothing but time. What did he even do?
“I want a real wedding with venue and catering and a photographer,” I said, “so we have to get things moving if we want to get married this time next year.”
He stared at me as if I had lost my mind. “You’re serious?”
“I can pay for it if that’s what you’re worried about,” I said, not having any idea how I would pay for it. I hadn’t paid rent in months at that point.
“Or we can do a courthouse,” I said, “it’ll be cheaper and faster.”
“I can pay for the wedding,” he said quickly. “I want it as much as you do.”
I didn’t believe him but I felt like he had me in a corner. I regretted having mentioned a wedding at all and wished I had insisted on the courthouse in the first place. With a big wedding to plan, he now had the perfect excuse to delay and put me off and god knows what else. I felt like I had walked right into a trap.
*
So that was how our “wedding planning” started.
The day I found out Jay had used fraudulent credit cards to pay the wedding vendors turned out to also be the day he walked out on me. No text, no email, no note, nothing. He just didn’t come back to my apartment, or his own as far as I could tell. It never occurred to me something might have happened to him, and at the time I just assumed he had left Los Angeles and went home to his parents or something.
Before I knew it three months had gone by.
I woke up one afternoon to the sound of people talking outside my window. Blue and red police lights flashed through the gaps in the curtains. I looked outside and saw three police cruisers in the parking lot. I thought they were coming for me at first, and then I saw a van from Animal Control.
Jay’s apartment door was wide open, and people in bio-hazard suits came out carrying lumpy looking bags which they put into the back of the Animal Control van. Even with my windows closed, the stink of decaying flesh made me gag.
A girl in a strait jacket was led out of the apartment and put into the back of the police van. She looked so much like Jay that they had to have been siblings, twins even.
The police was talking to some woman and asking her about the landlord. She said she had been trying to call about some repairs but couldn’t reach either the manager or the landlords. Her last three rent checks hadn’t been cashed and she didn’t know if she should start looking for a new place or not…
I stumbled back into bed and dreamed of Jay. It starts with him sitting at the edge of the bed with his back to me, and then like a film in slow motion he starts turning around, and I see that one side of his face is perfect and the other is smashed in with the brains spewed out like a rotten grapefruit.
And it was the same dream night after night.
*
I was coming back from the store one night when I saw a guy who looked exactly like Jay and it was a full minute before I realized it WAS Jay.
I yelled out “Hey!” and ran to catch up with him. He looked back at me and for a second I thought he was going to run so I jumped on his back and grabbed him in a choke hold. He had no choice but to come home with me.
He told me he left because he didn’t have the money to pay for the wedding. He never had the money. He was stone broke.
“Then why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “We could have just gone to the court house.”
He stared at me as if I still wasn’t getting it. “We can’t get married,” he said, as if explaining something to a child.
I made him look me in the eye and asked him if it was because of his sister. It was a stab in the dark, a wild guess, but somehow I had hit the nail on the head.
He looked surprised and said, “Maybe.”
“So you would marry me if not for her?” I said.
He didn’t say anything which I took to be a yes.
By now I’d had time to notice how bad he looked. His eyes were too bright, he was thinner and there were bruises on his arms and collarbone. When I asked him where he was staying, he couldn’t give me a straight answer and I didn’t press it.
“You know they aren’t collecting rent here anymore,” I said. “I haven’t paid a dime in months. People’s rent checks are going un-cashed.”
“I know,” he said.
*
We were married two weeks later in a symbolic ceremony officiated by somebody I found in the park. We put off the legal paperwork due to Jay having lost his wallet and IDs. It would take months to replace those papers, and then it just didn’t seem all that important whether we went to the courthouse or not so we never did.
And then about six months after our “wedding,” as I was going through Jay’s jacket for laundry, I found a receipt for a parking garage downtown. I looked up the address, and found the nearest point of interest was the psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.
It was a minimum security place that resembled a rehab for the decently well off. I gave the receptionist Jay’s last name and hoped that would be enough because I didn’t know his sister’s first name. As Jay and I had the same last name (a really common one, think Smith or Williams), I gave the receptionist my ID and said I was family and they let me in to see her.
His sister was more lucid than what I was expecting for somebody who I last saw in a strait jacket.
“I don’t trust him at all,” she said. “He doesn’t care about anybody except himself. He looks like an angel and he acts all innocent but who knows what he’s really thinking?”
“He’s a good husband to me,” I said.
“So he wasn’t kidding,” she said. “And I thought he was messing with me.”
“He told you we got married?” I said.
“Sort of. I didn’t believe him at first and then he stopped talking about it. I didn’t think he would go through with it.”
She looked as if she expected me to commiserate with her on her brother’s disgusting choice of a wife.
“Why wouldn’t he go through with it?” I said. “I’m not a leper.”
I tried to be calm and not let her get to me but it was hard.
“Does he come here every week?” I said, needing to know the worst.
“He comes here almost every day,” she said. “I think he’s scared.”
Her eyes suddenly focused on a point somewhere behind me. I looked back and saw Jay standing at the other end of the room. He was staring at us and I had never seen him so angry, or so scared.
“If they knew half of it,” she said, “it would be you and him in here, not me. Any parents at the wedding? Got a lot of gifts?”
“It was a simple ceremony,” I said, “we didn’t have any guest.”
A person in staff uniform looked at us. The chills ran down my back as an echo sounded somewhere in the depths of my mind. I could feel Jay’s eyes on me.
“He’s being so weird about it I’m surprised he hasn’t turned himself in,” she said, looking from my face down to my stomach.
I put a hand protectively over my belly because if looks could kill…
“You have no idea how freaked out he is,” she said. “Anyway, who’s going to believe me even if I tell?”
I stared into her leering face as if I were looking into a mirror. “What?”
“But what I really want to know is, how in God’s name did they let you two freaks get married?”
I felt as if somebody had hit me in the face. “We never did the paperwork,” I said.
An inmate being led past looked from me to her and then at Jay, who was still standing at the door.
“Triplets?” he said, shaking his head in awe.
*
Not identical but close enough.
When the three of us were together in the same room, the sameness was striking, even chilling. For while my sister and I were merely pretty in that unremarkable way most girls our age were, the same set of features transposed into the masculine mold on our brother became strangely and compellingly beautiful. And when the three of us walked down the street together, it was him that people looked at.
I suppose it is a testament to my lack of vanity that I never noticed my resemblance to him. I looked in the mirror so little that I wouldn’t be able to recognize myself in a crowd or even be able to pick myself out in a photograph. But whether my avoidance of shiny surfaces was a conscious decision or a personality trait, it seemed impossible to me that my loss of identity and my inability to recognize my own face wasn’t in some way connected.
Or perhaps it was simply due to my being drunk all the time.
Because when people say they drink to forget, I was doing exactly that. I drank continually, layering a fog of forgetfulness over the mental confusion that concealed who I was and what I was from myself. But while I now knew for a fact that I was my brother’s sister, to my heart and mind this knowledge was as abstract as a mathematical equation. It was absurd.
I got home first from the hospital.
When he came in the door, I said, “You can drop the act.”
“You’re one to talk about acting,” he said.
“I wasn’t acting, you know that,” I snapped at him.
I hoped he wasn’t going to gaslight me about how I knew the entire time when it was HIM who’d known everything the entire time. Our sister was right: he wasn’t to be trusted.
He looked at me with suspicion and then interest. “You really weren’t faking then?”
“I wasn’t,” I said. “Even now things are…spotty.”
I felt like a sick person who was just waking up. Things were coming back, but piecemeal, and each piece was more bad news I didn’t need.
“I wish I had your luck,” he said.
I wasn’t sure if he was being serious or not.
“You should have let me alone,” I said. “I would have been fine here by myself.”
He said, “You talk as if I followed you here. I didn’t. You were already here when I got here.”
“And you just happen to come here too?” I said. “So you did follow me.”
He got out a cigarette. “Our parents own this building. We’ve always stayed here ourselves.”
“So our parents are the absentee slumlords?”
He turned to light the cigarette at the stove, and it occurred to me that I had never seen him smoke before.
“They were monsters in every sense of the word,” he said. “Anyway, apart from not having anywhere else to go, I had to keep an eye on you.”
“For what?” I said.
He held the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. “So you still don’t remember?”
“What-” And then I suddenly stopped, because I did remember.
“They walked in on us and went wild,” he said. “Called us weirdos and degenerates, which is pretty ironic considering what they get up to themselves.”
“And you thought I would tell somebody?” I said.
“I didn’t know what you would do. I felt bad about what happened but not enough to go to prison,” he said.
My stomach twisted with panic and horror. “What do you mean go to prison? What happened?”
“It was after you ran away. I wanted to go after you, but they wouldn’t let me. They locked me in the basement where there were rats and you remember how I’ve always been terrified of rats. I begged them to let me out and they wouldn’t. Anyway, while I was down there, I realized this one part of the wall was rotten, and so I just kicked my way through. They heard the noise and got there before I even realized what was happening and the whole thing came down on them. I barely got out myself.”
“But that wasn’t your fault,” I said, not understanding at all.
“I mean, they were trapped but very much alive. If anybody had found them, which wasn’t very likely, they would have concluded it was an unfortunate accident. But if you had told anybody about what happened before you ran away, then people might have put a very different construction on things. So I had to find you and warn you, but then-”
“You left them there, buried alive?” I said.
“Not quite,” he said.
I breathed a sigh of relieve. So things were bad but not that bad.
“It’s worse,” he said.
I stared at him.
“I went back a few months ago and I couldn’t find them,” he said. “I searched everywhere. The part of the rubble they were trapped in had been moved, which shouldn’t have been possible without some kind of…help.”
“So they’re alive?” I said.
“But then why hadn’t somebody said something? I checked all the hospitals and there’s nothing. I search every inch of the woods behind the house and there’s no sign of a camp, there’s just nothing. It’s like they disappeared into thin air.”
“I guess you better hope it stays that way,” I said coldly. “Even zombies don’t like being left for dead.”
He looked as if I had physically struck him. And then in the next moment, his face had changed, his entire bearing was different, harder.
“It’s a terrible thing to say about one’s parents,” he said, “but they weren’t very nice people.”
“They were our parents,” I said.
I got a beer and went into the bedroom. I had a terrible headache. I wanted to get drunk and pass out and pretend my life never happened.
“They would have done the same to me. And to you too by the way, make no mistake about that,” he said, following me into the bedroom. “Forgive me for being blunt, but you weren’t exactly the favorite. So you could almost say it was self-defense.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and he stood in front of me and I could feel him watching me.
“When did you start smoking?” I said.
“I’ve always smoked,” he said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I remember now why I ran away,” I said.
“Oh?”
“It was to get away from you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I loved you.”
“You would kill me now for nothing, just like you did them,” I blurted out.
“You’re raving,” he said calmly, taking out a gun. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. Strange how you don’t remember that.”
It all happened so fast that I was literally blinded by fear and disbelief. I saw nothing. Visually, I had blacked out. All I heard was a shot, incredibly loud, and then the smell of smoke. When I opened my eyes, he was lying on the ground, half of his face gone.
There was a loud knock at the door followed by the sound of wood splintering. It was like some giant insect with sharp teeth was gnawing through the building. The building shook as whatever it was tried to get in. I heard a woman screaming and something crashed through the window and landed at my feet. It was a human head. It was the head of one of my neighbors. I recognized it by the bright green hair and eye makeup.
I looked up and saw my parents standing over Jay’s body. Mom got on her knees and at first I thought she was going to hold him like I see parents hold their dead children on television. And then I saw Dad with his hand inside my brother’s belly.
*
When I woke up, the smell almost made me pass out again. I was lying in bed and my parents were sitting on the bed next to me holding a steaming bowl of…something. They forced a spoonful into my mouth and it turned out to be not too bad. It was nice and tender, almost like pork. It was the best meat I ever ate in my life. It was delicious and I opened my mouth gasping for more even as my stomach turned and heaved and my parents gave it to me, bowl after bowl after bowl…
“Now isn’t your brother nice?” they said as they spooned the thick meaty stew into my mouth.
And I was hungry, so hungry. It was probably the first decent meal I’ve had in years. When I was finished and there was no more left, I licked the bowl clean. My parents beamed at me with approval and love, just like they used to do.
Because Jay was wrong: I WAS the favorite.
It was only when he convinced me to become a vegetarian that they began to despise me and then hate me. When I became a vegan, they practically disowned me. But before that, they had loved me best because out of all my siblings, I had the most insatiable appetite for human flesh. Out of all their children, I was the most like them.
My dad ruffled my hair and my mother kissed me. She even licked a bit of gravy off my cheeks just like she used to do. My stomach was full and bloated, and my arms and legs felt insignificant beneath its weight. My mother lifted up my shirt, exposing my huge round belly, and we all stared at it. I was shocked at how large it had become. My mother rubbed it just like she used to after a meal, to help the digestion she said. My belly twitched as if something was trying to get out. A lightning stab of pain ripped through my body and I screamed.
My parents exchanged proud happy glances.
*
It’s a boy!