I met Matt in math class a week before finals. He lost an entire semester worth of notes and asked if he could borrow mine. And then we started studying together. When people started referring to us as a couple, Matt went with it and so I did too. But we never did the things real couples did like kiss or hold hands. On the other hand Matt didn’t seem interested in other girls so that gave me hope.
But when there was still no action after two years of being together it was frustrating to say the least. So I asked my best friend what I should do and she said, “Why don’t you make the first move? Why should guys have to do all the work?”
*
That was bad advice.
What went down was the most awkward and stupid moment of my life. The only good thing that came out of it was that I knew for sure now that Matt wasn’t into me. On the other hand I was still stuck living with the guy in a tiny one bedroom apartment. The worst of it was that as far as the world was concerned, we were still a “couple.” I doubt anybody suspected the truth of the situation.
So I came straight out and asked him if we should continue to live together. I told him I was thinking about moving in with a friend of mine, but I would be fine to stay until he could find a roommate or another place.
He stared at me and was like, “Why?”
He seemed genuinely taken aback, and I realized I had, maybe, gotten him all wrong. He didn’t want to sleep with me, clearly, but he didn’t want to leave me either. So what did he want with me?
Or was it even me at all?
“Never mind,” I said. “I was just thinking out loud.”
“If I’m doing something wrong, just tell me,” he said. “I don’t want you to be unhappy.”
“I was afraid you were,” I said.
“Me?” he said, reaching for my hand. “I’ve never been happier in my life.”
*
Matt proposed a few months later on Halloween, and right away we had our first fight. He wanted a big wedding, I wanted an intimate elopement, and there was no compromise in between that either of us could see.
It surprised me because Matt wasn’t an extrovert. He was popular in the sense that girls loved him and wanted to get into his pants. But he rarely went out, and if he did, it was with me. He had one guy friend, maybe two, and he was now telling me he wanted TEN groomsmen? Like where was he going to produce these guys?
More importantly, as far as I was concerned, where were we going to get the money for a big wedding? Matt said his parents will pay for it, but considering we haven’t even told them we were engaged yet, I thought that was a huge assumption to make on his part. But anyway, it seemed pointless to try to convince him otherwise.
*
We went to his parents’ house that weekend, and it was going to be my first time meeting them.
I was unimaginably anxious to begin with and my worst fears were confirmed in the strangest way possible. His mom seemed shocked into speechlessness when she saw me, and his father was taken aback as well.
It was baffling to say the least. I was the most vanilla looking person anybody can possibly hope to meet. I didn’t elicit much of a reaction one way or another in people, generally speaking. So I couldn’t understand why Matt’ parents were staring at me as if I was a ghost come back from the dead to spirit their son away from them.
Eventually it appeared to sink in on them that I wasn’t the devil incarnate. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they warmed up to me, but at least they were making an effort. His mother had started serving dinner and his father asked me about my major and future plans. But when Matt told them we were engaged, their half baked attempt at social pleasantries failed entirely. His father looked angry and excused himself from the table while his mom began to cry.
I was completely at a loss. But at least, I figured, we wouldn’t have to ask them how much they were willing to contribute to the wedding.
*
After that dinner, I was not expecting his parents to pay one dime. I was more so expecting they would disown Matt for his awful choice of a fiancee. Instead, I got the surprise of my life when Matt told me we were going to look at wedding venues. His parents had wired him the money, and there was going to be more coming.
Life is one big what-if, a series of roads not taken. Looking back, I wonder what would have happened if I had stood up for myself more and stopped the wedding in its tracks.
Matt’s parents kept sending him the money no questions asked (as far as I knew). There were no requests, no demands, nothing so much as an opinion from their end. Feeling weird about the whole deal, I texted Matt’s mom asking her if she would be interested in coming to the catering tasting, but she never replied back to me. When I sent her and Matt’s dad the invitation to the wedding, I got the RSVP back a few days later in the mail marked DECLINE. When I tried to text her again, I realized that she had blocked me.
If not for Matt, I would not have touched their money with a long stick. I still wanted to elope, just the two of us. But with each passing day, as the final payments from the vendors rolled in, I found myself further and further along on the road of no return. I felt as if I was walking into my doom.
On top of all that Matt begged me to wear his mom’s wedding dress. But holy crap, that shit was ugly as hell. It was pink, glittery and had bows. It was more like a prom dress than a wedding dress. I wanted to die when I put it on, and Matt looked as if he had seen a ghost.
We made love for the first time that night. So of course I had to say yes to the dress. Just like how I ended up saying yes to everything else I didn’t want with this wedding. Because when you really love somebody, you would do anything for them.
Right?
Because that was how I felt about Matt. He was different from all the other guys I ever knew. There was a mystery about him I was certain was meant for me to discover. I made a CD of love songs and mailed it to him anonymously. I wrote love letters to him and then tore them up and threw the pieces into oncoming traffic. So when he came up to me and asked me if he could borrow my notes that day in math class, I thought the gods had finally heard me.
As the wedding date neared, I was almost numb with the sense of impending doom.
On the morning of the wedding, I opened the closet and saw that the wedding dress was all scratched up and the strap was torn. It was fine the night before, so I figured a rat or whatever had gotten hold of it. It just about broke my heart to see Matt kneeling on the floor trying to fix it with a sewing needle and safety pins. At that point, I just wanted the whole nightmare to be over, so I put it on with a big grin and assured him it was amazing.
*
It was the worst day of my life.
The guest list was mostly people from Matt’s side I didn’t know. He invited everybody from his parents’ neighbors to his high school teachers and middle school classmates he hadn’t seen in years.
As I walked down the aisle, the entire room gasped and not in a good way. One woman stomped out of the room cussing loud enough to be heard across state lines.
I had no idea what was going on, so I kept walking down the aisle lined by row upon row of horrified faces. So many people had come, Matt’ entire hometown it seemed to me. There were at least two hundred people. Some looked outraged, some shocked, some as if they had seen a ghost.
Some looked as if they were ready to kill me.
I mean, the dress was ugly but I couldn’t understand how it could elicit a reaction on this level. But perhaps these people were really conservative, and my stupid pink prom wedding dress will be the talk of this town for the next fifty years.
On the one hand, I wanted to throw my bouquet on the floor and run out of the room screaming. On the other hand, I just wanted to be married to the love of my life and never see all these people again.
And so I gritted my teeth and kept walking towards the end of the aisle where Matt was waiting for me. It was the longest walk of my life and my legs were shaking the entire time. I was crying by the time I got there. It was the moment I had been waiting for, the moment I was willing to die for. I loved him so much, maybe too much, and it was too late to turn back now.
I practically fell into his arms and the rest was a haze. I just remember saying “I do” and our first kiss as husband and wife.
The silence from the crowd was deafening.
*
During the reception, people kept coming up to me and staring into my face, like really close. They asked me a million questions, like my name (it’s on the invitation), where Matt and I met (school like everybody else), how long we had known each other (three years), where my parents lived (wtf).
They seemed relieved, I guess? Most of them turned out to be nice enough, though a few were still standoffish, staring at me from a distance as if I had committed some unforgivable social etiquette faux pas.
When I went to the bathroom, a girl was sitting in a corner smoking. If not for her green hair, we could have been twins, from a distance anyway. We had the same height, same built, same face shape, same everything, or almost everything because she was much prettier than me in some way I couldn’t quite put a finger on.
She stared at me as I walked in and threw her cigarette on the floor and mashed it with her foot as if it were my face and said, “That’s my dress, bitch.”
I thought she must have been some mean sloppy drunk. The kind of mean sloppy drunk who would disregard the dress code and show up to somebody else’s wedding with green hair.
“Who are you?” I said.
“I’m Matt’s sister,” she said. “He has a little brother too, or did he not tell you that either?”
She came up to me, grabbed the front of my dress and ripped it down the center. And then she left, slamming the door behind her.
*
“You have a sister?” I asked Matt.
He smiled at me, his eyes even more blank than usual. There was a wall between us that I used to think it was possible to be on the other side of. But now I saw there was no other side and never had been.
“Yeah,” he said, “I have a sister.”
“How come you never told me before?” I said.
“My parents don’t like to talk about her.”
“Why?” I said.
“She liked to play pranks and things.”
“So?”
“So like she killed some girl’s pet snake, and then made her eat it.”
“Made her? As in coerced her?”
He nodded. “The police almost got involved but my parents talked them out of it. And then she dropped out of school and went to work at the funeral home and embalmed some guy and put him on his widow’s porch and gave her a heart attack.”
It all started happening when she was sixteen, he said. Before that she had been a straight A student, the perfect girl next door, the whole nine yards.
“And your little brother?”
“I rather not talk about him,” he said.
“Even to me? I’m your wife Matt.”
His wife. It still felt strange to say it. I couldn’t believe I was married to him. Once upon a time I would not have dared to even dream of it.
“Especially to you,” he said.
*
Months went by. Life went on as usual, from the outside at least.
Matt became even more quiet than usual. We were complete strangers to each other, and I loved him more than ever.
I came back from work one day to find a green wig and the pink wedding dress on the bed. When I put them on and looked at myself in the mirror, I felt like a different person.
When Matt came home, we made love like it was the first time.
The next day he texted me that he had something urgent come up and wouldn’t be home. When I asked him when he would be back, he said he would see.
He would SEE?
When an entire week went by and he still would not come home, giving me one bullshit excuse after another, I went to his parents’ house. The front door was open and when I knocked I heard somebody say “Come in.”
Through the doorway to the dining room, I could see his parents sitting at the table. They didn’t look at me or seem to notice me at all, which somehow didn’t surprise me given the way they had ignored their own son’s wedding. Perhaps they had made peace with the whole ordeal by pretending I didn’t exist.
Matt and his sister were sitting on the top of the stairs. She had one hand on the back of his neck. She seemed to be expecting me.
“Hello,” she said.
“Matt,” I said.
He said nothing. He stared at me unblinkingly like a cat.
“Don’t let his sweet innocent looks fool you,” she said.
I started going up the stairs. “Matt?”
I was about halfway up the stairs now. There were maybe five steps between me and her.
“He never loved you,” she said. “He can’t. He’s incapable of it. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
She gave the back of his neck a hard shove and ran down the hall. The body tumbled down towards me and I caught it as it crashed against the railings. He looked exactly as if he were alive. She had embalmed him.
I set him down gently and went up the rest of the steps. I saw her go into a room at the end of the hallway and I followed her. The door was open.
The room was windowless and pitch black.
“You can turn on the light, the switch is next to the door,” a child’s voice said.
I turned on the light.
A little boy was sitting on a chair and she was standing next to him. His head was abnormally large, his eyes were the size and shape of two ping pong balls, his nose was a lumpy protrusion with slits instead of nostrils, and the lip-less mouth resembled a badly healed flesh wound. The skin was a dark reddish color all over. He was playing with a Rubik’s cube.
“I did it Mom,” the boy said, showing her the cube. “I did it under five minutes this time. Can I leave the room now?”
He looked at me. “She said I can leave the room if I solve it and I did.”
“He’s five years old,” she said, “and he’s never been outside of this room.”
“Have you taken him to the doctor’s?” I said.
“So he can become freak exhibit A for science? No thanks.”
“Wouldn’t you want to know what it is in case you have another child?”
“It would be physically impossible for me to have anymore children.”
“I’m sorry,” I said sincerely.
“You said I can leave the room if I solve the cube,” the boy said.
“You can leave the room,” she said.
The boy jumped off the chair but then stopped mid-stride, his face becoming anxious and fearful.
“What about grandma and grandpa?” he said.
“They can’t hurt you anymore,” she said. “Go on.”
The boy ran out of the room. I heard him shout “STAIRS” as if he had discovered America. She left the room after him, and pulled the door closed. I stood there for a full minute before I realized what had happened.
I was locked in.
*
I had no idea how much time had passed. It might have been hours or days. I passed in and out of consciousness.
Sometimes I thought I heard another voice, not the boy or his mother, but somebody else, a voice that was both familiar and strange, like a face seen through dirty glass.
There was a lot of shouting.
*
When I woke up again, I was in the back of a car. For a long time I lay there, staring at the back of the driver’s head.
“Matt?” I said.
“How’re you feeling?” he said.
“You aren’t dead?” I said. “I thought she embalmed you?”
I sounded crazy even to myself.
He laughed, like a hyena. I had never heard him laugh like that before. “It was a wax dummy,” he said. “She made it years ago, I didn’t know she still had it. I’m surprised she didn’t burn it in effigy at some point.”
I stared at the back of his neck as he drove.
“Did you change your hair?” I said. “It looks different.”
It was so short it was almost a crew cut. Matt’s hair always looked like it needed a cutting.
“I did,” he said. “Do you like it?”
“I liked it the way it was before.”
“You’re hard to please,” he said.
He stopped the car next to an alleyway and turned around to look at me. The smirk on his face was nauseating.
“You really had me fooled for a second,” I said.
“Matt was older by about a minute,” he said, “so they always called me the little brother. It’s a joke in the family. Ha ha.”
He had the calculating expression of a wolf scenting its prey. I couldn’t imagine Matt making such a face, and yet it was Matt’s face feature for feature. It was weird how two people can be physically identical and yet so completely different.
Or conversely, how a person can seem like two completely different people with a different haircut.
“Matt’s the nice one,” he said, “I’m the naughty one, if it isn’t obvious enough. I don’t usually admire my brother’s taste in women, but you have the most beautiful-”
“I’m riddled with STDs.”
“Oh I’m not going to rape you, far from it.”
He dragged me out from the car and my heart sank when I saw the long black hearses in the lot. It was the back of a funeral home. He opened a door in the alleyway and shoved me inside.
“It was you,” I said, “it was you who made the girl eat her own pet snake, and it was you who embalmed the guy and put him on his widow’s porch, not your sister!”
“Everyone has their passion and mine is embalming. My sister’s is making wax dummies. It’s hard to tell our work apart but artistic tendencies run in the family.”
He took out a tray with various implements on it and began sorting through them.
“I always liked funeral homes. So quiet, so dignified. When my sister started working here, she let me follow her around. Not that she could ever say no to me.”
He picked up a scalpel and held it up to the light.
“Matt, no!”
“Matt’s not here, just me.”
He took my wrist.
“I’m pregnant…”
The scalpel stopped in it tracks, its tip just grazing the inside of my wrist. He stared at me for a full minute, his eyes wide with amazement.
“Boy or girl?” he said.
“Girl.”
He put the scalpel back in its stray. “You can live then,” he said.
*
Matt insisted on a home birth.
He didn’t let me go to a doctor even though by the seventh month I could feel something was wrong, horribly wrong.
The labor itself nearly killed me, the pain was terrifying. I didn’t think I could feel like that and not die. I knew then I could never have another child again even if I wanted to.
And the baby…the baby…was all wrong.
I thought I was hallucinating.
And then I fainted.
*
When I regained consciousness, Matt, his sister and her son were standing over the cradle on the other side of the room. They seemed very far away, and I felt as if I was looking at them through the wrong end of the telescope.
The thing inside the cradle was making a desperate little mewing sound like a kitten.
It’s looking for me, I thought. It wants me.
The three of them leaned over the crib.
“She’s perfect,” Matt said, holding up a squirming red mass to the light.
“She looks like me,” the boy said.
“She could almost be your sister,” Matt said. “You’ll never have to be alone again.”
His sister looked around at me and smiled. “Now isn’t that nice?”