Holding my breath against the smell of his tepid breath, I kept my eyes tightly shut and continued to kick. As. Hard. As. I. Could. As. Long. As. I. Could.
I felt his hands upon me: both his hands. The gun: where was the gun?
“If you let us go, we won’t tell.” Where was that voice coming from? Was it really mine? I thought. “Please stop!”
I shouted the words as fast as my brain thought them. He was smart, but I was smarter. I could say something; one of my words would make him stop and realize this was a mistake. Maybe my words could rehabilitate him.
Or I could kill him. I could jab. If I could move a shoulder, if I could free a hand, it would all be over. I want you to die, you sick bastard. I live and you die. That’s how it’s going to be. I had to open my eyes; I needed to see him. I didn’t want to, those scornful eyes glaring through the nylon. The chafe of it against my cheek was bad enough.
Open your eyes. It’ll help you think.
The pain in my pelvis, the pressure on my chest were so intense, I couldn’t breathe. My temples tingled. I’m so tired. Maybe it’s time to stop kicking. If I stop, maybe it’ll be over. Maybe it’s time. Don’t people say you feel ready when death comes? Maybe I’m ready.
How did he know, without looking, that Grace had picked up the gun? Had he heard the rope snap free? Had he heard Grace struggling under that birch? But know he did and with one swift motion the gun was his again. Now he stumbled to his feet.
I could breathe again. There was no pressure, but instead pain from every part of me. And in my temples a warmness, a drowsiness: Blackness was coming.
Grace was crouched beside me now, holding on to me. Had she saved us? That’s what friends are for. Was that a song? More black. There would soon be total darkness. Where had the sun gone?
Unable to open my eyes, I realized one was swollen shut. I’ve got to help, I thought. How did Grace get untied? Thoughts rolled around like pinballs in the dark caverns of my mind.
I struggled to sit up and eyed the figure looming overhead. He wiped his mouth, the pantyhose off now. His hand, big and clumsy, wiped back across his face. He took a step closer.
And that’s when I saw his trembling hand: He was scared.
“I’ll kill you. I swear I’ll kill you. Is it your turn? Is that why you left that tree?”
He spit at Grace’s feet, the big feet of a beautiful girl. Another step. “Answer me!”
In his hand the gun trembled.
“Please. Let us go. You don’t want to do this. We won’t tell,” pleaded Grace. Her arms around me, I tried to pull myself into a sitting position, but the ground seemed unsteady.
“Shut up! I told you to mind me. I don’t want to kill you. Just shut up.” The gun was aimed directly at me. Think, think. Sit up. Sit up.
As he took another step, several things happened at once: His foot sank in a mole hole, a crow called overhead, and a squirrel darted under a nearby rock.
It was probably all three of those things together plus his shaking hands. All happening in a split second. In less time than it took me to draw in a breath, the stranger’s hand moved twenty inches. In the years to come, I would be convinced it was twenty. Somehow it mattered that I knew how far the hand with the gun traveled.
It mattered, because in the space of that twenty inches, the gun moved from my face to Grace’s.
As I heard the bullet, I felt our linked arms separate. I could feel myself rolling backwards. Then downwards. Smoke in the air above. Could I go any farther down?
Rolling with me, a size nine shoe, laces undone.
Besides my innocence, I lost many things that day at the Point. I lost the feeling of walking freely down a corridor, without turning at the slightest hint of footsteps. The ability to sleep without dreaming. The naïve confidence that people are basically good. The silly supposition of growing old. The beauty of closing my eyes to the tender kiss of a good man.
And something even more precious: I lost my faith.
Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.
Deep inside me—the part given to maddeningly maudlin acts of self-pity—I envied Grace that bullet. For it washed away the feel of his fingertips on her skin; that bullet separated Grace from the dirt and the fear and the blood. Spared the bullet, I was also denied its cleansing powers. My skin would continue to sear from his gritty touch, scorching through the dermal layers to the basement of my soul. Year after year, smoldering.
And this: the knowledge that the footsteps Grace took toward me were the ones that sealed her fate. In trying to save me, she lost herself. As surely as if I held the gun myself, I was responsible.
Fear became my constant companion. In a darkened corridor, in broad daylight and the draping of dusk, it was ever with me—like a playground bully, relentless in its pursuit. At times, I have wanted to surrender to that bully, be consumed by fear, pierced like a bullet, and thus able to move on to a new place: one without fear. That’s why I linger on the train tracks, waiting for the bully, ready to succumb to the place where Grace had gone.
But I don’t. I pick up my pace and run breathlessly toward light—toward what I perceive to be safety. I do this because I am human, and humans are built to survive. Perhaps God wants it that way. The eleventh commandment: Thou shalt survive. Maybe we ourselves want it that way. Perhaps it’s a little of both. Death is a fantasy, but life—living—is the dream that makes us round dark corners and hide from bullies.
Come out into the light.
Once I reach the light, I know the bully has beaten me at his game. He has taunted me with death and forced me to accept survival. And for those of us who bury the dead and remain on earth, survival is probably the cruelest punishment of all.
An ironic term, survival. For there are no survivors.
31
ON THE MOUNTAIN
I MOVED DOWN THE ATTIC STEPS, into the April room, pulling on tennis shoes. A jarring pulse pounded in my temples and tears continued to flow, but no sound came out. My voice, like myself, was invisible. I knew what I had to do, knew with sparkling clarity how this would end.
The grandfather clock was chiming eleven when I grabbed the keys by the door. I paused, looking toward Maddy’s room. Part of me wanted to kiss his cheek and say goodbye. But the darkness beckoned, and so I quietly let myself out into the inky air stinging my tear-stained face. I bumped my way down the driveway and turned onto Birkham Road, heading toward the wooden sign that Grace and I had passed that June day so many years ago. A car, passing me, flashed its lights and honked. I parked badly in one of the three parallel spaces. The sign at The Point warned me: Overlook closed from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. The sheriff didn’t want teenagers up here drinking or making out late at night. Ironic—no signs foretold of the dangers lurking on a bright summer afternoon.
Out of the car, I began to run. Run as I did by the shore of Lake Michigan, when the wind chapped my face and threatened to knock the breath out of me. Even pregnant, I had strong legs, and the fear, the rage, the hollowness inside propelled me up the hill.
I ran to escape the grief and the guilt, bottomless both of them. My breath came in gasps as I struggled up the mountainous path. I felt chased and yet knew I was the chaser. My heartbeat was frantic; would that be the way this would end? Would I simply be chased into arrhythmia? Silenced by a throbbing embolism? Or would I have the courage to do what needed to be done?
At last at the top, my inclination was to throw myself over my knees, to bend at the waist and suck in air, like the jogger I was. But instead I tilted backward, baring my neck to the sky—the broad, vapid sky.
I felt the first bullets of rain: tiny, cruel pellets dousing my weary limbs.
“I’m here!” I shouted. My arms flung wide and my eyes closed. “Come get me!”
Someone who happened upon me would have thought me insane, for there was no one with me on that cool night—only me and my memories.
“Come get me!” I bellowed again, turni
ng in little circles, my arms pivoting me around.
I was a ready victim, ready to finally be relieved of the chase, the shadows, the pain. Prepared to see Grace, to accept the fate that should have been ours together, the one I was spared. The fate I had to live with every time the sun rose or set. Ready to see Doro and be consumed by those soft motherly arms.
I was ready to die.
Spinning, spinning, turning round and round, I dared my heart to stop. The rain was steady now, and my arms were soaked, my face smeared with sweat and tears and rain. My eyes were closed, sealed tight, not daring to open for dread of what I would see. Or wouldn’t see.
For there was no one there: I was alone. And that was the scariest fact of all: knowing I was my own stalker. Knowing I would have to decide for myself what to do next. I looked ahead at the drop off.
“I’m ready!” My voice was filled with bravado and strength. Was it really mine? For I was weak, trembling, never the strong one. After all, I was not the one who had broken free of the tree.
“Are you listening? God, are you there?”
My shouts continued, agonizing cries choking my tears, until I could scream no more. That’s when I sunk to my knees, slowly, for I was dizzy with the spinning and the shrieking. I sucked in shallow breaths and succumbed to sobbing.
“God, are you there?” I whispered now, desperate to return to the faith of my childhood, to the faith that was given to me.
I expected no answer.
Kneeling there in the mud, I knew I was faced with a decision: to go on or not. I looked around, my contacts clouded with mascara and moisture. There was no boogeyman, no strangers hiding. Skeletal against the stormy sky, taunting me with its height, was the bleached birch to which Grace had been tied. Somewhere in the recesses of its trunk was the fragile print of hands that had escaped; somewhere across the damp ground was the distant memory of legs that ran. Toward me. Legs that saved me.
Holding my breath, I closed my eyes and heard the shot again. Death hung around me, tempting me, daring me. No end to the memories, to the chase. No magic bullet for me, no end—unless by my own hand. I could almost hear God’s laughter at the irony of it all: a survivor, fated to survive. Saved from a demon’s gun—only to surrender at her own hands. I looked straight ahead. Thirty paces to the edge. Could I do it? Could I put an end to it all?
But I already knew the answer.
I knew that amidst the screaming and the crying, there was part of me aching to live. Like a lone red blood cell lost in a night sea of cancer, I had an instinct to go on. To fight. To outrace the phantom stalker.
I brushed a thick clump of dripping hair out of my eyes and, as I did, glimpsed a sparkle, ever so subtle, in the wet grass. Something that still remembered how to shine was protruding from the wormy ground.
Many people have said that their decision not to commit suicide was due to something mundane—like wanting to watch a movie, see how a book ends. One more this, one more that, finding bits and pieces of life that make you go on.
The shiny object was that for me. It made me focus, reach out. I pried it from the clammy clump of dirt and grass: a single gold band.
I knew whose it was before I read the inscription: “Grace from Tuck.”
“I need to talk to you, Jo. I’ve got something big to tell you.”
Something big. Those words had haunted me for four winters. The big something: This was it.
You could say that band saved my life. Or perhaps, probably, it was the hand I felt on my shoulder at that moment.
Without turning, I knew whose it was. Deep inside, I desperately wanted him to come.
“You were married.” I whispered—not as much to him as to myself. “Married.”
Tuck kneeled beside me, reached over and took the band from the tip of my thumb where it was perched. Grace had such thin fingers.
“It didn’t fit her. It kept sliding off her finger, so she’d put it in her pocket. I kept nagging her to get it resized, telling her it would get lost.” He gulped. “Guess I got the last word there.”
I looked up at him. Tuck was not crying; he was calm as his thick fingers scraped caked mud from the metal.
“I didn’t know,” I whispered.
“We hadn’t told anyone but our parents,” he continued. “We were planning to, I wanted to.” He looked up and into my eyes. “She didn’t want to tell anyone else until she had told you.”
“When …” I whispered over the mucous in my throat.
“Valentine’s Day.” Tuck settled himself on the wet grass, still fixated on the ring that he turned over and over, rubbing it as though it would bring a magic genie to him. “It’s funny, she agreed to elope but wanted it to be on Valentine’s Day. Hopeless romantic through and through.”
And so neither of us had the weddings of our childhood fantasies.
“Tuck, how many people know now?”
He smiled—a sad, deflated smile. “Our parents. And now you.” He looked up from the ring and pushed my hair out of my eyes. “Doro knew. I told her a couple of months ago. I told her I wanted to tell you myself one day.” He smiled again—no longer his youthful grin but the half smile of someone who has suffered so intently that smiles become but nervous facial tics.
A long silence hung between us. The rain was not as petulant; it had settled into a rhythmic soaking of the land, the trees, the hillside. Us.
I spoke first.
“Tuck, I have to tell you something …” I stopped. Could I let it go? My secret? Could I really let it go?
He looked at me, his eyes dry, unblinking. His hand moved to my lips.
“You were here. With Grace.”
I’m sure my eyes revealed my shock.
“I knew your plans had changed, and that you were going for a walk with her that day. She called and told me. Grace was so happy she was going to get to tell you our news,” Tuck said. “When the police …” his voice was choked now, almost hushed, “told me, I thought of you. I even asked. Later I went to your house, knocked and knocked …”
I heard those knocks, echoing up the stairwell as I lay in bed, shivering beneath stacks of blankets, Doro sitting on the edge of the bed rubbing my hair. Over and over. The hand on my head. The knocks below. “Let them knock, doll. We’re not here. You don’t need to see anyone right now.”
Tuck continued. “I tried to see you at the funeral. I tried to talk to you. Your sunglasses were on; I think everyone thought your eyes were swollen from crying.” He paused. “There was a distance to you—a pain I could sense.
“I knew it wasn’t all about losing Grace.”
I could feel those large red-rimmed glasses pushing against my cheekbones, pressing on the tenderness and the swelling. I could smell the concealer—what a word—that Doro had applied to my cheek. I could see Doro sitting beside me, protecting me, her hand on my back, moving me through the crowd, away, away. A quick moment with Genia, my hand on hers, and then the hand in the back propelling me forward. Hiding me.
“Doro didn’t want anyone to know. She didn’t want them to know that I was there, that I was—”
“I know, I know.” Tuck’s voice was stronger now, anger running across the words as they came from his lips. Did he really understand? Did he know what happened?
“Another confession. A couple of months ago, Doro asked to see me. She said it was important that she tell me something.”
“And that something was about me.”
“Yes,” Tuck said quietly, his voice steady even as his eyes clouded. “That’s when I told her about me and Grace. Doro said she was feeling old lately. I think she must have had an intuition that she could die, and she wanted someone else to know what happened to you on this mountain. Someone else to be able to help you.”
I laughed, a bitter little screech. “To help me,” I muttered.
“Yes, to help you.” Tuck reached out and took my hand. “She was an old woman, Jo; she was faced with this unspeakable crime that she could barely sa
y—”
“And so she didn’t. Doro sent me away like a child, like the dirty secret I was—to what, to protect me? I don’t think so.” My acidic words were pungent from being locked inside me for too long.
“To protect you and, yes, to protect herself,” he said softly. “I think that if she had admitted what had happened—if she allowed herself to imagine that such a heinous crime could happen—it, well it would have killed her, Jo Jo.”
I dropped his hand and wiped at my eyes.
“It almost killed me, Tuck. Damned Doro! There was no room in her goddam faith for a tragedy like this, was there?”
He gave no answer so I continued.
“There’s no room in her stained-glass sanctuary for words like rape. Or murder.” I was crying again, my voice coming out in raspy whispers.
Again, silence from Tuck.
“I heard the shot, Tuck. It was so close I felt it.” My words could barely emerge over the tears, and Tuck reached out his hand to steady mine. I drew back. “At the end I envied Grace.”
His eyes searched mine then, wild with emotion.
“I envied Grace because I wanted to die. But I survived. I survived so that I could remember and remember and remember.” My fists, clenched, beat on my kneecaps. Sounds as hollow as myself.
I hugged my arms around my chest now and sobbed. Tuck neither touched me nor spoke for a long time. When he did his voice was heavy with angry tears.
“We both survived, Jo. You and I. We both lost something. Don’t forget that I lost something too.”
Looking up, I saw that Tuck was transfixed by the gold ring. His nails had scratched off all the mud so that it looked almost new.
For the first time in the hour that we had been crouching there on the soggy earth, I saw him as a widower. There was a dimension to his grief that was his alone. That I could never know. Grace was his wife. My friend. But his wife.
Tuck spoke softly, still staring at the ring in his hand. “The police said that according to the bullet entry, it was quick. For Grace.” Tears slipped down his cheeks and his voice was a scratchy whisper. “Was it quick, Jo?”
Mt. Moriah's Wake Page 29
