The Accidental Siren

The Accidental Siren

  Jake Vander Ark

  Copyright 2012 by Jake Vander Ark

  Cover by Timo Gellenbeck

  For Alli

  The most beautiful girl in the world.

  www.jakevanderark.com

  [email protected]

  Table of Contents

  1. ONCE UPON A TIME

  2. MARA

  3. SAINTLY MS. GRISHAM

  4. CAMERA TESTS

  5. FAIRYTALE, PART I: THE GIRL

  6. FAIRYTALE, PART II: THE WAR

  7. FAIRYTALE, PART III: THE FINAL SCENE

  8. THE ZOMBIE-FERRETS STRIKE BACK

  9. NIGHT TERRORS AND THE FLOODED CONFESSIONAL

  10. OLIVIA

  11. CARNIVAL

  12. HAPPILY EVER AFTER

  EPILOGUE: LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 2004

  REQUEST AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1. ONCE UPON A TIME

  I can’t recall many stories from my life before Mara Lynn. From time to time, a certain phrase or smell sparks a moment of nostalgia, but whenever an element from my early childhood was later “touched” by the girl, thoughts of leather-brown eyes and lacy fringe overwhelmed the memory like too much red pepper on a slice of pizza. “Roselyn” is a unique enough name to create an island in The Sea of Mara, and the word still brings me back to the cool breeze of a Michigan May, the forest dunes behind my home, and Danny Bompensaro’s mangled scar.

  ‘94 was a good year to be twelve. Star Wars still had two more years as Box Office King, cartoons were still hand-drawn, and the Disney “D” still looked like a backwards “G.” Words like “Columbine,” “Al Qaeda,” and “Y2K” were not synonymous with terror, and 9-1-1 was an emergency number instead of a date. At twelve years old, summer still mattered. Monarch caterpillars still crawled beneath every milkweed leaf. Dandelions (or “wishes” as Mara called them) were flowers instead of pests. And divorce was still considered a tragedy.

  Before Mara, carnivals didn’t make me sick.

  “Imagine a whole herd of monsters!” I said as branches thwapped my jacket and weeds caught themselves in the wheels of Whitney’s chair, creating a rhythmic fip-fip-fip as we barreled through storybook shafts of afternoon light. “Imagine a hundred creepy creatures chasing The Girl through the trees! How cool would that be?”

  The path ended abruptly in a patch of wild raspberry bushes so I released the wheelchair at the dead end and plundered the thickening brush. “I wanna get a shot like in Jurassic Park. Remember when the camera is in the back of the jeep and the T-Rex is chasing right behind?”

  Whit scraped a fingernail of mud from his left wheel. “Mom’s gonna kill me.”

  I raised my hands to my face, formed my pudgy fingers into a rectangle, and surveyed the forest through my makeshift viewfinder. “Maybe the bad guys should carry lanterns or torches or somethin’. Dad says I can’t have too many lights out here without blowin’ a fuse.” I glanced to the tower poking above the foliage and estimated the amount of extension cords we’d need to reach from the house to the woods.

  “It’s about fifty yards, dick weed,” Whit said.

  “How the H.E. double-hockey-sticks do you know that?”

  “Maybe you’d learn some geometry tricks if you’d quit tryin’ to look down Ms. Conto’s blouse.”

  I shuddered. “How’d you get fifty?”

  “Just picture a football field and cut it in half.”

  “What do you know about football?”

  Whit gripped his chair and balanced the contraption on its back wheels. “Dad gets free Lions tickets from work.”

  “How many cords you think we need?”

  “Depends on the length of the cords. Maybe ten.” Whit reached in his pocket and pulled out two candy bars. “Butterfinger?”

  I slapped a mosquito from my neck and looked from the tower to my best friend. He was swimming in thick folds of a Bugle Boy sweatshirt, his bluejeans were creased as if they were slacks, and black wisps of hair curled from a hat that read, “Grand Harbor: a quaint drinking town with a fishing problem.” A notebook sat open on his lap and doubled as a tray for his Snickers bar. His red backpack was cradled in a mesh hammock beneath his seat, bulging with more candy to sell at recess and wads of cash from successful playground transactions. Whit was quite the entrepreneur; that’s why I asked him to produce my movies when we moved to Hollywood.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I could use a snack.”

  “That’ll be fifty cents.”

  “We’re in the middle of the stinkin’ woods! And you’re gonna charge me? You know I’m good for it.”

  Whit slipped the bar back in his pocket. “I don’t make six bucks a day givin’ out free candy.”

  I scowled. “Penis breath...”

  “Dip-shit.”

  “No-legs.”

  “Sphincter-licker.”

  “Whatever.”

  Despite eating boat-loads of candy and sitting on his butt all day, my crippled sidekick was still thirty pounds thinner than me. But poor Whit had the “asking-for-it” double-whammy of a handicap and girly name. I assume his parents chose “Whitney” before they discovered the spina biffida; if not, shame on them. Sixth grade was hard enough as a chubby boy named James.

  I unhitched my camera bag from my shoulder and placed it on a log. I brushed ants from the bark, opened the bag, and removed my very own Panasonic Super-VHS camcorder. I huffed on the lens and used a special rag to clear the moisture. A faint chocolate thumbprint defiled the cherry-red record button, so I huffed on it too, then gently wiped it off with the corner of my sweatshirt–

  “BOO!” Whit screamed.

  I jumped and nearly dropped the camera.

  “Don’t break your baby!” he said and laughed so hard that specks of caramelly peanuts splattered across our notepad.

  I grabbed a stick and flung it at him. “This camera costed me twenty-five allowances and a Christmas. Don’t be a jerk.”

  “It’s just too easy!”

  I finished my ritual by running an automatic tape cleaner for precisely ten seconds, then I zipped the bag, mounted the camera on my shoulder, and pressed my eye against the viewfinder. The world dissolved into a glorious black-and-white palate for my imagination. I pulled the zoom, then scanned the trees for the perfect location.

  “Who’s gonna be the army of bad guys?” Whit asked and noshed another chunk of Snickers.

  “Mom and Dad said they’d help,” I replied. “Then there’s Livy, the twins–”

  “I thought your sis was gonna be The Girl?”

  “Livy’s just a backup.”

  “’Cause she’s black?”

  “’Cause she can’t act.”

  “Who else?”

  “The twins, maybe my cousins... and any other kids Mom has runnin’ around when the time comes.”

  “The twins are six years old and your cousins live in Ohio. I thought you wanted the army to be humongous!”

  “We’ll invite friends.”

  “We have friends?”

  “Mom’ll order pizzas and we’ll make it a party. We’ll figure somethin’ out. It’s gonna be killer!”

  “If we want friends, I need to grow legs and you need to lay off the Butterfingers. I thought your parents were gonna buy you a Super Nintendo if you lost fifteen pounds by summer?”

  “Two weeks left, seventeen pounds to go.”

  “So much for all-night Super Mario sleepovers.”

  My camera panned a lumpy mound of dirt that I had dubbed “The Great Divide.” The ridge was as tall as my Dad and cut through the forest as far as I ever had the courage (or permission) to travel. Using my free hand as a third leg, I bounded ten steps up the bluff and grabbed a sapling at the top to secure my f
ooting. On the back of the ridge, trees descended a gradual but impressive incline into a vast, uncharted territory.

  I focused my camcorder and scanned the valley of trees. These woods were mine. I knew every fork and downed oak like Whitney knew parts on the space shuttle. Whit was just about the only person I invited to my domain. Sometimes, I gave haunted-forest tours to new foster kids as temporary initiation into the family. My sister Livy claimed she was “too mature” for forts and rope swings, but I knew she was just afraid of poison ivy. Two summers ago we went hunting for buried treasure and she blew up like an Oompa Loompa. Her eyes swelled until she looked Asian instead of African, and the doctor gave her steroid shots so she wouldn’t die. After the Livy disaster, I deemed my woods a “girl-free zone.”

  A rickety deer stand caught my attention and I steadied my camera to inspect the distant intrusion. The stands looked like boring tree houses. They were popping up everywhere along with salt licks and corn feeders. “Buttheads,” I muttered. The forest would be paradise if it wasn’t for A.J. Griffin, the dumbest kid in class and faithful stooge to Danny Bompensaro, Bully King. A.J.’s parents owned twelve acres of land that butted against my kingdom and A.J., Danny, and Trent (the Bizzaro Three Musketeers) dropped by weekly to do things boys only do under cover of trees. Alone, A.J. wasn’t too bad of a guy, but Danny made him into a jerk.

  If Danny B. were alive today, he’d either be in prison or selling meth from a stolen trailer. A scar ran from the lobe of his right ear to the bulge in the back of his head, creating a ribbon of flesh where hair could no longer grow. He claimed that a shark bit him when his grandparents took him to the keys. Mom told me shark bites are rare, and Danny got the scar from petting a stray dog. (Did Mom really know? Or did she use the bully’s mangled head as an illustrated life lesson? Probably the latter; I’m still afraid of strays.)

  Danny was so rotten that his real parents sent him to live with his uncle in Grand Harbor. Rumor was he went swimming in the neighbor’s pool with his baby sister and–for no good reason except he was pure evil–held her head under water until she drowned. “He laughed the whole time,” Trent explained to a group of wide-eyed boys, “and that’s why they sent him here.” Whether or not Danny was as evil as I believed in elementary school, the eight-ball eyes of a gasping little girl still haunted my childhood. To this day, I can’t prove the rumor false.

  I paused the camera and scampered back to Whit at the base of the ridge. As we discussed the logistics of our summer project, Danny and A.J. donned camouflage hunting gear and watched us from the brush.

  * * *

  Three pages into my memoir and I can so clearly recall the colors of my childhood: Mara’s denim-blue eyes, the tangerine daisy that held back her hair, a milkshake cherry—crimson—plucked from its stem and pinched between her smirking pink lips. The memories expose the starkness of my two-bedroom Los Angeles loft with its white-washed walls, naked mattress, and broken vertical blinds caught between my desk and the empty sill.

  Another swig of two-buck Chuck. Three pages in and the bottle’s nearly empty. My box of index cards is unlocked and exposed beside my computer; the more I drink, the more I’m taunted by the memories inside.

  The book in your hands is the work of a twisted romantic; a fool in love where “fool” connotes a child lost in another dreamland where ideals were attainable and Mara was mine for the plucking. It was Mara who encouraged me to tell our story; to put into words the summer that defined our lives.

  I should warn you now, we never found a mortal origin for Mara’s apotheosis. Maybe she fell from Heaven like the old pick-up line suggests; or maybe she’s always been here—in one form or another—born first as the woman whose beauty nearly snapped the rope that bound Odysseus to his mast, reincarnated again and again to torture men throughout the centuries.

  Three pages into my memoir and I remember... these memories are dangerous.

  Back to the story.

  * * *

  “Write this down,” I demanded, and Whit grabbed his pen. “I want cheesecloth for costumes and latex paint for the makeup. Maybe dark red lipstick for their mouths... would that be creepy? We have a pile of tiki-torches in the garage; the fire’ll add killer production value. Got it?”

  Whit scribbled the end of my rant. “Got it.”

  I looked through the camera’s viewfinder and focused on a tree with low branches. “The Girl can escape the monsters here. We need a wooden ladder.”

  “Okie-dokie.” Whit wrote it down.

  “And maybe the monsters will use fireworks as weapons! I wanna have the camera right above The Girl in the tree. We’ll shoot a roman candle beneath her–”

  In the viewfinder, something moved. I froze.

  “...right beneath her?”

  “Shh!” I hissed and tightened my hold on the camera. “I think I see something.”

  “What? Who? Maybe we should–”

  “Would ya zip it?” I snapped. I gripped the zoom lever and cautiously carried my eye toward the rustling bush.

  “Is it–”

  “I don’t know.” I turned the focus wheel... and the bullies emerged from the bushes.

  A.J. twirled a grocery bag of aluminum cans.

  Danny shouldered a BB gun. “Naughty naughty!” he said. “Fireworks are too dangerous for Fatty and the Gimp!”

  “Oh hell,” Whit said and instinctively grabbed his wheels.

  I lowered my camera and unzipped the bag, slowly, gently, so I wouldn’t excite the approaching wolves. “Hey, Danny,” I said. “Hey, Age.”

  “What’er you clowns doin’ on our huntin’ ground?”

  I wanted to yell, to scream, to defend my kingdom and shout “It’s not yours!” But all I could muster through the walnut in my throat was, “Sorry, guys. We were just leaving.”

  Danny scratched the back of his head and I was suddenly thankful that I couldn’t see his nails (yellow, I imagined) scraping the pink and curled flesh of that supposed shark bite. “Leaving?” he said. “But we came here to hunt!”

  I wondered what animal two sixth-grade boys planned on killing with a pellet gun, but I wasn’t stupid enough to–

  “What are you gonna kill with a silly pellet gun?” Whit asked.

  Danny smirked at the provocation. “Hey Age, put a can on the cripples head.”

  “Are you fa real?” A.J. asked.

  Danny sneered and nodded to Whit. “Hey crip, hold still a sec. A.J.’s got a hat for ya.”

  “He’s already got a hat,” I said.

  “Well, Fatty, maybe the gimp wants a new hat. Didja ever think of that? Fatty.” Danny gripped the barrel in one hand and the plunger in the other. He wiped his brow with his camouflage sleeve and cocked the gun over and over like a giant pair of scissors.

  A.J. tiptoed to Whit with exaggerated steps and flicked off his cap.

  Whit didn’t budge, but closed his eyes so tight that his temples pursed.

  “Stop it, Age,” I said, “or I’ll tell your mom.” It was the only threat I had. It didn’t work.

  A.J. removed an empty Heineken can from his plastic bag and set it gently on Whit’s head. “Don’t worry,” he said, “Danny’s a good shot!”

  I abandoned my camcorder, took three angry steps, and smacked the can from my friend’s head. “Leave him alone!”, I said, “We’re leaving.”

  A.J. planted his hands in the square of my back and shoved. My ankle caught Whit’s footrest and jolted my knee against his shin. My stomach rammed into some crooked wheelchair pipe and I keeled, twisted, and landed cheek-first in the thorny stems of the raspberry bush.

  Danny cackled and pressed the full force of his biceps into the last squeeze of the plunger. “Age!” he shouted and lifted the sight to his eye.

  A.J. snatched the beer can from the dirt, placed it back on Whit’s head, and scrambled out of Danny’s line-of-sight.

  (Although Whit denied it later, I swear I saw a tear pinched in the crease of his eye.) “No!” I yelle
d.

  THOOMP! went the gun.

  TINK!

  The BB smacked the can and Whit’s shoulders leapt to his cheeks.

  “Hot damn! Would ya look at that shot?”

  A.J. collected the can and raised a high-five to Danny.

  The Bully King ignored the gesture, leaned his weapon against a tree, and skipped to the wheelchair. (From my nest in the raspberry bush, I finally saw those tufts of brown hair broken by what appeared to be the rippled pink innards of a dissected worm. I gagged.) Danny bent down, picked up the cap, dusted it off and–

  Whit flinched.

  “Whatcha worried for, Gimp?” Danny said and pulled the hat backwards on Whit’s head. He turned around and offered me a hand. “Hey, Jamesy the Hutt, no hard feelings, okay?”

  I touched the thin beads of blood on my left cheek, bit back a bubbling tirade of sixth-grade cuss words, took Danny’s hand, and stood.

  “Won’t believe what I got,” said the bully, reaching into the front pocket of his army jacket.

  “You’re gonna show ‘em?” exclaimed A.J.

  “Dunno yet. Dunno if I trust ‘em.” He removed a Polaroid photograph and shook it as if it was still developing. “Have you retards ever seen a naked girl?”

  I bypassed Danny and reached for my camera bag, but A.J. cut me off. “Where you goin’, Fatty?”

  “Come on, Age. Let me by.”

  My spine tightened as Danny’s hand curled around my neck. He held the back of the photo to my face. “I asked you a question, Fatty. Do. You. Wanna. See. The picture?” His breath was like a stream of vapor, warm on my neck and climbing my cheeks until I could taste the sour. “Her name’s Roslyn,” he whispered. “Super hot bod. My uncle’s been bangin’ her for a month.” (Danny was always talking about “bangin’.” I didn’t know what it meant, and I was pretty sure he didn’t either.)

  “I don’t want it,” I said.

  “Of course you don’t. Why would I show you anyways? You get to see big ol’ titties every time you look in the mirror!” He snapped the picture out of my face and spun around.

  I made another lunge for my bag, but A.J. blocked my reach.

  “How ‘bout you, crip?” Danny said. “Wanna take a peek at your very first cooch?”

  Silence.

  When Whit didn’t reply, I turned around.

  He was scraping crusted mud from his treads. He was considering Danny’s offer.