The Other Side of Styx Street by Rebecca Kilroy
Photo by Mathias Reding for Pexels
TW: Domestic abuse, mention of suicidal ideation
Dee waits for 4:30 exactly. She sits behind the shadow of a parked car, looking at the gray-walled house. Late afternoon light cuts a shadow across its face. One upstairs window winks in the sun while the rest are cast in darkness. It’s a hideous place on a hideous street. It even sounds ugly: Styx Street. There’s a used condom in the gutter. Beside it the shards of a whiskey bottle still smell like bad decisions. This is no place for a child, especially not hers.
A breeze picks up blowing the scent of a nearby river, biologically dead and nasty with chemicals. Dee rocks on her toes. Her legs are stiff from squatting. She’s been here for hours, three maybe four. The February cold runs its fingers over her bones. She wishes for a better coat, a cup of coffee, spring.
Not long now. It’s 4:30. That Man is suspiciously regular as if his whole life is an alibi waiting to happen. At the same time every day he takes his ugly mutant wolf for a walk. She watches as they clomp out of their basement apartment and steps into view.
“Hey! Stop!”
“Fuck,” the man startles. The wolf-dog snarls and yanks its chain. That Man holds it back. Barely. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I want my daughter.”
“Not this again.”
“She’s in there, isn’t she? What have you done? Why won’t you let her see me?”
“She’s not here.”
“Where the hell is she then? You hurt her, didn’t you?”
“Back off.” The wolf-dog pins its ears back and leers with a mouthful of teeth. Dee steps closer.
“I just want to see her. Please.” She knows he has no mercy to throw herself on but she still tries. His thin mouth twists into a taunt.
“And who says she wants to see you?”
“Bastard!” The word echoes down the street. The three old ladies on the next door porch glance up from their knitting. “I know she’s in there. I’ll get her myself.”
Dodging around his wolf, Dee flings herself towards the gate that guards the basement stairs. She yanks on it, but it’s padlocked shut. Who padlocks things except someone who has something to hide?
“Stop!” he yells. “You can’t do that. I’ll call the cops.”
“Go ahead! I’ll tell them you’re a kidnapper and a rapist and killer!”
The ladies abandon their knitting to stare openly now. A crowd begins to gather, blank-faced neighbors wandering onto their lawns. Kitchen windows slide open and TVs are turned down. A vein in That Man’s neck starts to throb, a sure sign she’s getting to him. Good. “Dee, go home.”
“I’ll leave when I get my daughter back.”
“I’ve told you, she isn’t here! Now fuck off.”
The wolf-dog growls and strains its leash. Dee can see every fleck of slobber on its teeth. Given half a chance, it’ll tear her in half.
A dull buzz rises up from the crowd, perhaps calculating the odds. Dee looks to the three women on the porch and prays they’ll intervene on her behalf. Are none of them mothers? Do none of them understand this feeling? They look back but not one of them rises in her defense.
She whirls in an unsteady circle, taking in the faceless crowd that seems to drift together out of nowhere. Their eyes blink back at her, flat as coins. Useless cowards.
That Man smirks, clearly thinking he’s won. He thinks he can take her daughter from her and never pay the price. Dee’s arms begin to shake. Only holding her hands in fists will steady them. And if one of those fists ends up in his face before this is done, who will blame her?
The neighbors edge closer like a tragic chorus and wait for battle to commence.
Dee steps towards him. “Killer!”
“Bitch!”
“Go to hell!”
“You first!”
“Mom? Mom!” Kora charges down the street and breaks through the crowd, a paper grocery bag hugged to her chest. Dee’s knees tremble with relief. She could happily crumple to death on the pavement now she’s seen her baby girl. Her eyes rake over Kora’s golden skin to see what That Man has done to her now.
“What are you doing here?” Kora asks. “We talked about this.”
“She fucking showed up again,” That Man growls. “You better not have invited her. I thought I told you—”
“I swear, I don’t know what she’s doing.” Kora pivots. “Why are you here?”
Dee lowers her voice so That Man won’t hear. “I’ve come to take you home. It’s okay, baby. You’re safe.”
“Mom…” Kora shakes her head like she can’t quite believe her luck.
Dee squeezes her hand. “It’s all okay now. We’re together.”
Kora sighs. Poor thing. That Man has taken years off her life. “I’m so sorry, babe,” she tells him, handing him the groceries. “I have to take her home.”
He rolls his eyes as if this has happened too many times for him to care.
Kora leads Dee to her beat up gold Civic. Dee makes a point of not giving That Man the satisfaction of looking back. When she glances at the rear-view mirror, he’s already pulled his wolf inside.
__________
Dee’s house is one of many press-board new-builds in a wide, flat neighborhood that used to be a wheat field. In honor of this she lets the grass in her front yard go feral. In the summer it is a six by six meadow, all wildflowers and honey-drunk bees. This time of year though it’s dried out and dull. Dead stalks droop over the path and run their fingers along her ankles as she hurries towards the door.
“Has the HOA sent you a notice about yard maintenance yet?” Kora asks. “They’ll fine you again.”
Dee bats the thought away. No mere mortals can dampen her mood. “I’m so glad to have you home, sweetheart. Are you tired? I could put clean sheets on your bed. Oh, I should have gotten flowers!”
“Don’t worry about it Mom.” Kora steers her toward the kitchen.
“I always used to put fresh flowers on your desk when you were little, remember? We picked them out at the farmer’s market every week. You loved the yellow ones.”
“I remember. Please sit down.”
“No, no. You just got here,” Dee insists. But weakness is starting to pull at her legs. The adrenaline has drained leaving her shaky and cold. Perhaps it’s for the best. She sits at the sticky-topped table and watches Kora whirl around the house, turning on lights and raising the thermostat.
“Jesus, it’s freezing in here. Did you pay the gas this month?”
“Honey, it’s not your job to worry about that.”
“Isn’t it?” Kora asks. She returns to the kitchen with a herd of used coffee cups and full ashtrays, and sets them in front of Dee like a police line-up. “When was the last time you had a real meal?”
Dee shrugs. Without her daughter, the days turn short and dark. She loses track of things like food.
Kora opens the cupboards and pulls out a dusty box of pasta and a jar of sauce. Dee thinks they might be leftover from her last visit. Pans clatter and hiss on the stove. Kora pops open the pesto (she knows her mother’s aversion to red foods) and the room smells like a summer dinner party. Dee takes a deep breath. The house is alive again and the whole world with it.
“Here.” Kora lays a plate in front of her.
“I can’t eat all this. Grab a bowl, sweetie.”
“I’m fine.”
Dee clucks her tongue. “You are not. Anyone can see you’re skin and bones under that ugly black jacket. Doesn’t That Man let you eat?”
“He has a name, you know. It’s Hayden.”
Dee waves her hand away. If she will not allow the specter of the HOA in her garden she will certainly not allow That Man’s name to poison her kitchen.
“You’re here now and that’s what counts,” she says. “You can help me plan out the garden. Planting time will be here before we know it.” She pulls a seed catalog out of the mail pile and slides it towards them. “We’ll have daffodils, of course. Your favorite. You know you were born the day the first ones bloomed.”
“You’ve told me.”
“It was only because you were early. Always impatient. You were so eager to get into the world that you tried to come out feet first. They had to cut me open to save you. The pain was so bad, I thought it would rip me in half. But you made all that worth it.”
Kora stands quickly and crosses to the window. Her hands grip the edge of the sink, turning white. Dee frowns. In the cheerful kitchen light, she notices evidence of That Man creeping all over her daughter. She’s wearing one of his hideous black jackets. It can’t possibly be warm enough. Underneath is a ratty t-shirt and torn jeans. Her beautiful gray eyes are smudged with eyeshadow above and blue circles below. She looks like an old photograph left out to fade. Whatever happened to the sunshine girl who bounced around in florals and pastels? At least her hair is still the same, golden as sunlight through a honey jar. But even that looks dull today.
“Sweetie–” she begins.
“You should really do something with that vegetable garden,” Kora interrupts. She gestures out the window at the cold, trampled earth of the backyard. In the far corner, a few stakes lean against sagging chicken wire.
“I’ve been thinking about it.” Dee pulls the seed catalog onto her lap. “What would you like? Last time the zucchini took over. Maybe squash. Would you like squash?”
Kora nods and turns back to the window. “Yeah. Squash would be great.”
Later, when the dishes are washed and her mother is asleep, Kora sits on the cold concrete of the back steps. When she was seventeen, this used to be where she’d go to sneak one of her mom’s cigarettes. Not that it was sneaky with her mother’s bedroom window just ten feet away. Not that it mattered because her mom was too busy screaming at Stepfather Number Three to notice or care. But even now lighting up on the back steps has a certain rebellious appeal to it. She takes a slow, measured drag, swirling in nostalgia.
That was the year she met Hayden. She and some friends snuck into a bar to watch a band. In the current of moving bodies, she’d gotten buffeted away from her group. For a moment, the pulsing lights and screaming vocals threatened to drown her. She was going under. For the first time she wished that she’d listened to her mother and stayed home. Then a hand reached out to steady her and drew her to the safety of the wall. His eyes seemed to burn into hers through the dark. “This,” she thought, “is what Fate feels like.”
Her mother hated him from the start, of course. Dee claimed she’d only turned against him because of that one time Kora came home with a bruise on her cheek but that was years ago and hadn’t really happened since. Her mother already hated most things about him by then: his motorcycle, his tattoos, his music taste, his dog.
“Why can’t you find a nice man?” she whined. “Someone who’ll be good to you?” It took everything in Kora not to shoot back, “Why can’t you?”
To be fair, Hayden didn’t like Dee either. Kora used to think that if he just made an effort, if he just let her mother see how happy they were and how in love, things would change. But she knows now there is no changing either of them.
Her eyes drift towards the vegetable patch. It looks even smaller and more shrivelled in the dying light, much the way her mother looks on every visit. Guilt worms in her chest. She knows she won’t be there for the planting, much less the harvest. And her mother will not eat a garden’s worth of squash because she doesn’t eat, not unless Kora is there.
“Your mom’s psycho,” Hayden says. “She just wants to control you. You have to stop doing everything she says.”
A few months ago, he made her promise to stop answering her mother’s calls. “If you love me, you can’t keep putting her first.”
“How will she manage without me?”
He shrugged. “She’ll be fine.”
Eight years older, he’d always had that never-wrong confidence. It was a relief to trust him and not have to argue. For a while, he was right. Dee seemed fine. But then Kora had rounded the corner on Styx Street that evening, and heard her mother and Hayden trading curses, and everything had fallen back into its old place. She’d run between them so fast her dollar store flats slid half-off her feet and the pavement scraped her heel. She looks down at it now, half a dozen beads of blood pooling through the skin. She wishes she’d been more careful. Hayden will say it serves her right.
“It’s what you get for letting That Bitch order you around.”
“Don’t say that. She’s my mom.”
“And you’re my girlfriend. But sometimes I don’t think you even care about that.”
“Of course I do!”
“Then start acting like it, okay? I’m sick of waiting on you.”
They had this argument the last time she went to see her mom. She knows they’ll have some version of it again tonight. Lighting a second cigarette, she’s just delaying the inevitable.
The sky is losing light now. Kora shifts so she can look along the gaps between the houses. When she was a kid she discovered that if she craned her neck, she could just see a bit of the horizon. She’s always loved the sky. Her mother used to say it was because she came from Heaven but that’s never felt true. She stares at the blushing clouds now, waiting for stars to pop out like old friends. Somewhere out there must be a piece of sky that no one’s ever touched. Maybe she could be the one to find it.
For a moment, she lets herself imagine that life. She is free, walking through a field of white flowers (it’s a bit dramatic but if you’re going to dream, do it right). The sun bakes her hair and fills her with a bone-deep warmth that her basement apartment never has. A river rushes at her feet. She wades in and floats on her back and waves of forgetting wash her clean. It’s a good dream.
But Hayden says if she ever leaves, he’ll kill himself. And her mother, with her hunger-strikes and sleeplessness, has proven that she will. They both want more of Kora than she’s ever had to give. Love, she thinks, means tearing yourself in half.
Rebecca Kilroy
Rebecca Kilroy (she/her) is a novelist and short fiction writer. Her work explores themes of mental health and coming of age, often with a speculative twist. Her pieces have been featured in "Fatal Flaw", "Capulet Magazine", and others. She is editor-in-chief of "Mount Holyoke Review" and founder-editor of "Thanatos".