Teresa lingered for over week before succumbing to her injuries. Cassidy visited her grandmother in the hospital every single day. She held her hand and read Mary Higgins Clark novels. Whether her grandmother heard her was a mystery to Cassidy, but she was reading page 13 of 'I've Got You Under My Skin' when she died. Her daughter did not visit on account of being institutionalized.
Cassidy forgave her mother when she tried to drown her in the filthy sink water because she believed that she was trying to protect her. She had a very difficult time forgiving her mother when she killed her grandmother. She did not visit the Plant more than a handful of times, and said little. Her mother was also very quiet resulting in two brown women sitting across from one another looking like a mirror of the future.
It was her fault that her mother was in the bughouse. Cassidy had been convinced of her impending death since she could articulate her dreams.
It all started at five years old. She had been given her own bedroom, big girl bed and a kitten that had been haunting the back porch for weeks. Ugly little thing with two different coloured eyes, it had attached itself to Cassidy as if they had always been friends. Her parents finally adopted it and named it Bowie.
But even with Bowie sleeping in the curved nook of her back she felt unsettled. The first nightmare she remembered involved the Boogieman lurking in the dark corner of her bedroom beside the closed closet door. It watched her and had loud, phlegmatic breathing.
She couldn’t see him clearly. He created a dim outline in the girl’s room that she could barely perceive. But she knew he was there. She could feel him standing and waiting. She was too frightened to go to her parent’s room in case he grabbed her as she reached for the door. He wouldn’t make a move as long as she had her feline companion. Who would move first? A juvenile horror suffused Mexican standoff. Eventually he disappeared but by then Cassidy was a champion bed wetter.
Her parents, Hyacinth and Peter couldn’t understand why their bouncy, confident and brave little girl was wetting the bed. The doctors questioned them about anxiety or problems in the family that might be affecting their daughter but the future troubles were not in evidence at this stage of their lives. She was taken to the hospital for tests and nothing was found. None of the doctors or nurses thought to ask her why she was wetting the bed, but had they posed that simple question she would have told them it was because she was terrified of the Boogieman.
If pressed she could have described it in perfect detail. Very tall, loud, yucky breathing, pus coloured eyes that were close together, and an amorphous, pneumatic shaped body covered in wet, brownish-yellow, yielding, sticky boogers. Oh, and he smelled like bile.
Bowie saw the thing too, but nobody would have thought to ask the cat.
Cassidy had no idea what it would have done to her if Bowie had decided to go for a walk one evening. Smother her in its fulsome, juicy bosom? Pick her up and disappear into the walls of the house? Maybe.
Anyway. It never got a hold of Cassidy Holmes. No more worries there.
But she did begin to have the most horrific nightmares almost every night and Bowie could do nothing to stop those terrors.
The screaming would wake the house in or around 3 or 4 in the morning. The only thing that would calm her down was the sight of both parents by her bed. They tried to take turns sleeping in their daughter’s bed with her, Bowie shunted to the end or the floor. They thought having her sleep in their bed would work but she started to expect it. The night she saw her dad’s penis pop out of his boxer shorts was the end of the ‘sleep with parents’ experiment. The thing was she slept soundly, and without incident, when in their bed. They felt like bad parents.
Were they?
We’ll get to that later.