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can't dream of clouds, but I can see the knife on the kitchen counter. I can dream of it inside me, opening me up and closing me down.

31

    R AY IS WAITING WHEN I GET HOME, and one look at my face sends his fist smash crashing into me, CRACK into my chest, right near my heart.
    "I can see all the way inside you," he spits, red-faced, voice deadly low. "I see that you don't understand anything. Alice, I expected better from you."
    Curled up on the floor, white spots in my vision as I wiggle for air, wheezing in nothing as my body stops working for a moment, stunned, and I don't understand why it starts working again. I don't understand why my shell keeps living. Breathing. Why won't it listen to me, to the little part I have that isn't Ray, to that tiny once upona time girl who just wants to close her eyes and never wake up again?
    623 Daisy Lane. Helen and Glenn.
    That's why. Once upon a time, I belonged to them and they shouldn't suffer for that.
    Ray sits down next to me on the floor. "I'm tired of this," he says. "I love you, I trust you, I tell you what I want, and what do you do? Hurt me." He bends over and pushes my hair off my forehead, crooked bangs he trimmed for me because Alice has bangs.
    Alice has bangs and loves him, loves him.
    He puts one hand on my throat, higher up than normal, and the pressure is a sharp hot flare of pain, bright like light, and I am talking, babbling, grinding out words through a cracked throat I have a plan never hurt you never leave you love you please love you please.
    I am the living dead girl because I am too weak to die. I hate those crying dough women on TV because they are just like me, weak and broken and clinging to the hands that hold us under.
    "Plan?" Ray says, still red-faced, spit flecking his mouth, this was what the last Alice saw maybe, the Alice who wasn't as afraid as I am. Who was so much stronger.
    I dream of a knife in my chest but will never plunge it in. Will beg and plead to keep it away when Ray pushes it into me.
    I strangle out my plan in broken words as Ray puts ice on my throat and rubs my ribs and carries me to the sofa, careful tender as he opens my clothes and marks me all over.
    "This boy comes and picks up his sister," he says, rubbing my feet while he stares at the dark TV. Turned off and silent, he still stares at it, playing out stories in his head.
    "But not until she's been there awhile," I say, my toes curling up under his fingers, my throat hot with pain. I touch one hand to the fist-shaped bruise blooming near my heart. At least my feet don't hurt. Ray knows how to rub feet. He used to do it a lot for his mother, back when he was young.
    "What does his car look like?"
    "Red," I say, and when Ray pauses, hands hovering over my feet, I spit out what I can remember.
    He starts rubbing my feet again, nodding. "So I get her, and when the boy comes, you keep him busy--I know you can do that (eyes going angry, and bitter pressure on my feet)--and then I'll come find you, take care of him, and we'll--" He pauses, eyes gleaming, and his fingers skate feather light over my feet. "We'll put Annabel's things in his car, a little dirt and blood on them. Maybe a little on him. And then we vanish and he's left with a story of a girl who can't be found." He chuckles. "Two, even."
    Annabel. He is not calling her Alice. My bruised heart flutters, a trapped bird. "Annabel?"
    "We'll go to the desert," he says. "I decided that today. The desert for sure. You, me, and baby girl makes three. At night you'll sit and hold her hands while I show her how lucky she is to be loved."
    He is breathing faster now and pulls me toward him, a yank on my ankles drawing my rag-doll body in, lower half pushed against him.
    "You'll hold her," he says, and everything I own is easily pushed down, away, clothes falling off me like water. "You'll hold her and I'll love her."
    He grins at me. "You'll like that, won't you?"
    I nod because he wants me to. I nod because I will. She will get