Chapter 12: The Calibration

It wasn’t an alarm that pulled me from the deep, black void of sleep. It was the slow, wet, circling pressure at the base of my penis.

I stiffened, a current of confused heat flushing through me. My hands drifted down, pressing lightly against the familiar silhouette shifting beneath the covers, the curve of a shoulder, the crown of a head. My thoughts, thick with sleep, fumbled for reason. I glanced toward the bedside table where the hellish red numerals of the clock bled into the darkness: 3:37 AM. The dead of the night, Monday, June 15, 1992.

The date clicked into place with a cold, mechanical finality. Five days since the Mustang wreckage. Three days into this dutiful western trek to Yellowstone, a vacation my father had insisted would “heal us,” a surreal mask was strapped over our raw, gaping grief. The motel room around us was a tomb of cheap pine paneling, heavy with the ghosts of highway miles and unspeakable loss.

I lay there, trapped between the warm, insistent pressure below and the icy sprawl of reality sharpening into focus. Consciousness came not as a dawn, but as an invasion. What quiet madness had possessed her to wake me this way? Not a word, not a kiss, just the slow, deliberate claim of her body against mine in the half-dark.

Her hands were warm against my hips, a steady presence that seemed to tether my drifting soul. A tide I could feel more than hear in the grey light seeping around the edges of the drapes. My mind was a frantic pendulum, swinging from the comforting fog of what was to the stark truth of what is. Every swing was a silent plea to feel real, to feel anchored in a flesh that still seemed only half my own.

That line between dream and waking, between then and now, between the boy I remembered being and the one lying here hadn’t just blurred. It had been erased, wiped clean in the silent wreckage. Just like all the choices of our parents over the past week, permanently altered each of our lives. The boundaries that once defined safety and peril, love and obligation, memory and the present moment, were now just so much debris. And in this ruin, there was only sensation: the profound warmth of her, and the chilling, infinite sprawl of a reality I had no choice but to inhabit.

I let my head fall back against the stale pillow, a groan trapped deep in my throat as I surrendered, my conscience blurring in the heat. For a few stolen seconds, there was only the warmth, the movement, the escape.

Then, another movement.

A shadow detached itself from the deeper dark at the foot of the bed. It resolved, with a slow, horrifying clarity, into the pale, naked form of my mother. Her eyes were hollow pools, fixed on me, her expression unreadable in the gloom.

The sight sent an unforgiving shiver down the length of my spine. A visceral, electric jolt of wrongness that bypassed thought and screamed directly into my primal core. In a single, brutal instant of understanding, the hand I had placed on the head beneath the covers no longer pressed with encouragement.

It became a barrier.

I shoved down, brutally hard, mashing into the impression of Ash’s head, cutting off the warm, wet pressure that was now the epicenter of my horror. The air in my lungs seemed to solidify. The rhythmic motions resumed.

The awareness came in a cold, slow wave: she had been standing there, watching. For how long? Time had dissolved, leaving only the primal understanding of an observer at the edge of the nest.

Mom moved without sound. The coarse hotel carpet swallowed the passage of her bare feet. She emerged from the gloom beside the bed not as a sudden intruder, but as a statue coming to life. The faint light caught the line of her cheekbone, but her expression remained carved from something ancient and unreadable.

Her hand reached out. Not to stop me, not to chastise. Her fingers, cool, dry, and impossibly firm, settled on the bare skin of my shoulder where my t-shirt had ridden up. It was not a caress. It was a claim. An acknowledgment. Her touch was a seal pressed upon the scene, and it said, more clearly than words: I see this. I sanction this. This, too, is within the design.

She leaned down. The scent of her jasmine soap and night air enveloped me. Her lips hovered a breath from my ear, and when she spoke, her whisper was a single, taut thread of sound.

“You have been restless in your sleep. Allow your doll to finish smoothing your being.” Her tone was clinical, a gentle command that brooked no debate. “Direct your doll to clothe you. Once you are prepared, bring your doll to the hallway. I will be waiting. You will then bring your doll with you to the lobby. We have a new future to discuss.”

The weight of her hand lifted. The space where her fingers had been now felt branded, charged. Then, she was simply ... not there. She melted back into the dark between the door and the wall.

I looked down at the busy, devoted silhouette of what had once been my sister Ashley, now perfected into my doll, my Ash. A strange, cold clarity washed over me, chilling the last clinging fog of sleep. This was no fleeting, late-night secret. This was a scheduled detention, a meticulously kept appointment within the deepest, quietest cell of my being.

She had worked with a devout focus, as if trying to draw out the very explosion of my dissipated troubles, swallowing them into the deepest parts of her throat until nothing remained but a hollow calm.

A shiver moved through me, a cold tide raising goosebumps in its wake as I pushed the covers aside. In the gloom, my gaze found the darkness at the crown of Ash’s head, the smooth curve of her hairline a perfect, submissive arc.

“Ash.”

The name creaked in the stillness, a rusted hinge on a disused door. My own voice was a stranger’s, rough from silence.

She ceased all movement at once, a machine whose current had been cut. Her head lifted just enough, a fluid, obedient motion, to turn her face upward. A fragile string of saliva connected her parted lips to my skin, a glistening bridge in the gloom.

“Up.” The word was a stone dropped into still water. “We’re going. Finish. Dress me.”

She scrambled from the bed with an alacrity that was more than eagerness; it was conditioned readiness. Her movements were neat, automatic, a protocol written in her bones. She stood naked and attentive before me, a pale smudge in the dimness as she worked. She pulled off my pajama top, then the bottoms. She guided my arms through the sleeves of yesterday’s t-shirt, her touch efficient and impersonal. Kneeling, she drew up my socks and slipped on my shoes with a provision that felt unnerving in its completeness.

My mind, however, was elsewhere. In the limited glow, my eyes kept catching on the oversized collar, a band of dark leather standing in stark relief against the vulnerable column of her throat. It seemed to anchor her slim figure, a weight that both defined and overpowered her. The sight of it tugged my thoughts back to another girl: my sister Ashley, who would wince at the slightest sour taste, who recoiled from any whisper of unpleasantness. A spirit so sensitive it seemed to live on the very surface of the skin.