by J. D. Palmer
A thin staircase spirals upwards and I climb it into the heart of the tree. Past a room full of books. My library. My stories. Heroes that let me escape from whatever new home, or school, or upset clouded my early life. My words. Feelings I want to share so desperately with my new friends. With Harlan. But these words are kept behind the stone doors. To get to them I would have to destroy…
You aren’t here to dwell on this.
Farther up is a room divided in half. Outside hangs an assortment of sledgehammers and axes, sticks and baseball bats. Rubber gloves and goggles and boots sit next to the door. And a random assortment of plates and cups and crystal china. Glasses tapered for martinis and wine and beer and old bottles of Scotch. The place to take a memory and, upon walking into the other room, you can practice the art of destruction. Of breaking.
It’s one of my favorite places.
More steps. More spirals. Past rooms that are locked. Past rooms growing smaller. Cozy to claustrophobic. But the nearness of the walls doesn’t bother me here. Not ever here.
One last room. Barely big enough to take two steps. More suited for sitting cross legged on the small pile of pillows. That way you can scan the walls around you. Walls adorned with a million things, large and small. Trinkets and gifts and some things stolen. Everything that ever meant anything to me. The polaroid picture of me and the neighbor boy posing with our bikes. The necklace with the green gemstone that was my mother’s. My first book.
I pull out Steven’s picture. Do my best to smooth it and erase the lines. I pin it to the wall, letting it hang boldly in the center, obscuring a letter from a teacher I got in fourth grade. A letter telling my guardians at the time how much I was progressing.
I have progressed.
I smile at the wolf, trying to ignore the nervous fear that follows me even here.
“Beryl.”
A touch on my shoulder. The tree groans as if it were shaken by a sudden gust of wind.
“Berly.”
If I closed the doors…
No. I flit down the stairs, almost weightless, almost flying. The doors swing shut behind me and I’m in the grass. Bare feet in the sand and the wind and I take in a huge breath.
Harlan has a hand on my shoulder. He removes it as soon as I look at him. His hair is wet, the thick strands pulled back behind his ears to reveal a forehead too lined for someone as young as him. Or maybe it’s just the concern he has for me.
“You okay?”
I nod. Then I grope for the words, battling through the walls in my subconscious, past the part of my mind that feels like it’s underwater. That should I open my mouth to speak, I will drown.
“I’m okay. I’m… I was thinking about Steven.”
His face blanches and he doesn’t look me in the eye. He doesn’t want to talk about it. I think that’s why he’s so frantic to keep moving. If we are rushing somewhere, there is no time to dwell on the pain. On the guilt.
We sit in silence and he doesn’t notice my hand crumpling the piece of paper.
“I just wanted to make sure you were doing okay, you’ve been quiet. More quiet, I guess.” And he gives me his perplexed smile. As if not sure that it’s okay to be worried.
“I’m… Fine.”
Every day a little more.
He nods and gets up. “Okay Berly… I’m going to go check on Theo. Make sure he’s ready to go tomorrow.”
A squeeze of my elbow and then he’s padding off through the trees.
“Berly.” A nickname.
Kind of.
The same name with an “ee” at the end.
I’ve never had one. And Josey gave me this one, one that I think Harlan didn’t care for at first. Until he saw that I liked it. Now I’m only Beryl when shit gets serious.
Beryl. Pronounced bare-ul. A very rare gemstone, I was told, by one of the women I was forced to talk to in the early days. It’s also pronounced like barrel. Something I always pictured rolling around in the bottom of a leaky ship.
When I blew the scraps of paper across the floor to the bleeding man clutching the remnants of his blanket, I half hoped he wouldn’t figure it out. Wouldn’t know my name. He’d shake his head and go, “What are you trying to say?” And I could tell myself I tried as I retreated back into my sanctuary.
But he got it.
Kind of.
And it seemed so much better to be something new, rather than a precious gemstone waiting to be discovered. An orphan rock waiting to be collected. I was all too familiar with the orphan part already.
He named me Berle. Or at least that’s how I spelled it in my head. He renamed me, and it was like a new chapter in my life. One in which I ceased waiting to be discovered by others. Instead, I would try. I would try. I would try.
And I do.
Now that I have a family of my own, for the first time in my life, I know what a blessing it is. I know that I will do anything not to lose it.
Oh Steven. Oh John.
They always told me, whilst in the foster care system, that it was a rare thing to be adopted past a certain age. That we were blessed to be considered by any family, and should consider how open and understanding they must be to want to take someone in. They said that to the dregs, the leftover scraps whom no one wanted.
But it still resonated. We felt like these families were saints, examining us for something special, something ethereal that would allow them to raise us to their vaunted heights.
And gods, we would try.
Gods. Ha.
A habit I’ve picked up from Harlan. He says it under his breath. A lot. As if cursing more than one god, or praying to more than one god, or simply trying to invoke more than one god will carry more weight. Sometimes it does.
Back then I didn’t think I believed in any god. I did my best to stand out. Just me against the world. To be someone worth taking in and making a family with.
Now I definitely don’t believe in God.
The sad truth is, after a certain age, no one wants an old orphan. If people can’t have children of their own, they still want someone impressionable enough to stamp their own print upon.
And if they are trying to be altruistic, taking in the wild strays that no one else will touch… Well, they will only take in something tameable.
I was too wild. Not out of a need to act out. The opposite. I acted out because of a need to belong. I was insecure, and intuitive, and didn’t take well to being treated like a charity case. Or like a child. Or like I was fucking fragile.
I wanted to belong. But only on my terms. So yeah, I had issues.
I look around at my family; Harlan and Sheila and Theo and Josey. The specters of John and Steven.
We were all orphans, some of us just didn’t know it yet.
And if I didn’t belong to a family in the true sense of the word, then this is a family which I understand all too well.
Words echo in my head. And I wish, mostly in the quiet moments when we have stopped somewhere, when there’s that silence that begs for someone to break it, that I could tell them. That I could tell him. Tell him. Tell him.
I could tell him just how much words mean to me. Just how much they crash and reverberate in my head and my soul.
I’m avoiding the truth.
I want to tell him how much of a master of words I am. How I know the difference between beryl and barrel and burl. That I know poetry, that I write poetry… wrote poetry… that I read books.
I am a master of words and cannot seem to use them.
That’s irony. Or a paradox. Or, and I use one of my favorite words… FUCKED.
Someday, I tell myself. Someday I will sing, or tell a joke, or tell a story.
Each day is a number. I’m up to fifty-four. I said fifty-four words in a day. Yeses and nos and that day I said, “We’ll be okay, you know we will.”
I do not despair. Every day is better. Mostly. And if it’s not, I still wake up near people I consider, and I do not say this lightly, my family.
The journey begins. Our routine is almost mechanical. We find a place to call home for the night, we clear it and any other buildings nearby. Food is passed out. We find our spots. Usually not far from each other. Bedrooms are typically avoided, so we end up having an adult slumber party in the living room. Theo the large dad who falls asleep sitting up in the chair, snoring with a hand tucked in his pants before everyone else has even settled down. Josey will read, sometimes out loud, or play a guitar and sing songs. You’d think it would piss one of us off, eventually, but he always seems to sense the mood. He always knows what kind of song to play.
Sheila flits in and out of the room, mostly to go smoke cigarettes, but I think she likes to explore the places. See what kind of people lived there. Or to find their booze stash, if they had one. Then she sits on the floor and disassembles her gun, and any of ours that she says are “fucking filthy,” and cleans and oils them. She complains about doing it, and tells us we shouldn’t be allowed to carry guns if we aren’t going to treat them right, but I think she likes doing it. I think it settles her down. And sometimes she has a little smile on her face, and I know she is thinking of Mickey.
I’m up before the rest of them. I always am. Mainly because I take the last watch of the night. The one that goes from the deepest black to the ever so faint change. Not the emergence of light. A fade of dark. That’s what I’d call it.
I watch it as I sit outside and imagine myself as the sky. I am the sky, and there are only a few stars. Darkness. And Harlan came. And time passed, and then there was a fade. A fade of the dark.
And now, occasionally, the sun comes out.
But I’d be awake before the others regardless. I think it’s the schedule I inherited from the monster, still ingrained in my blood and bones. But it’s my revenge on him as well. I wake to the steady breaths of Har. The time in the night where he truly sleeps. Warm and secure in my arms. And I watch the others. I see Sheila, each night, move in closer to Josey. I watch her in the morning as, still deep asleep, her hand reaches out for someone next to her.
I watch Theo fight. I watch his eyes flutter and cheeks pinch and his mouth twist into a grimace. Arms that rise up and hands that cover his face. I see his relief when he awakens.
I don’t know if what we were before was honest because, frankly, I don’t know if we are honest now. We still cover things up. We still believe that we are so much more unreadable than we actually are. But those moments in the morning, those are honest. We are all hurt. All a little broken. And that’s about as honest as it gets.
HARLAN | 3
WE DRIVE A Prius with almost a full tank of gas and a good charge of electricity. It makes a loud whir when we fire it up, the engine revving unnaturally for a few minutes before settling down and running smoothly. How fortunate. And Josey was right, there ain’t shit past Carson City. But it’s okay, we have a trunkful of guns and Snickers bars and canned soup. Beryl passes out vitamins she found in the last house. Josey starts to laugh when she gives him vitamin C gummies.
“I had a roommate in college, he was a big gamer. He’d play on his computer all day, most of the time he didn’t even go to his classes. Anyways, he started to get sick. Feel ill all of the time. I finally got him to go see a doctor. Turns out he had scurvy. The doctor was completely flabbergasted. I guess he’d been eating only pizza for a couple months. So he bought a shit ton of these gummy bear vitamin C’s, and he’d be popping them all day as he’d play games.”
We laugh the weary laugh of the emotionally exhausted. Low chuckles and mostly grins. Eyes that stare at the floor until the smile fades away.
Beryl gives extra pills to Sheila causing her to raise an eyebrow.
“More for me? You putting me on birth control or something?”
Beryl’s cheeks redden a bit, even as she shakes her head.
“For a… infection. For your hand.”
Sheila snorts and swallows the handful all at once, washing it down with a pull of whiskey.
I guess she, at least, isn’t going to drive today. Not that she could cause any harm unless she fell asleep. Highway 50 is empty. Absolutely empty. We don’t pass but two cars in the next two hours, driving along a stretch of road that’s almost perfectly straight.
It’s sunny, but not as hot as I thought it would be. The wind blowing outside is cold enough to make us roll up the windows. For awhile. The silence is not a comfortable one, and Beryl cracks her window to fill the car with a steady whoosh of white and distant noise.
We hit the 95 and cruise north towards the 80 freeway. The 80 that will take us to highway 93. The last road. The road that will wind its way to my little home town.
I had a secret hope that this Prius, with its full tank, would take us all the way there. An hour into the drive, between Theo’s coughing and Sheila spilling whiskey, I’m praying we need to change cars soon.
Josey senses my annoyance and launches into a few more stories. They’re funny, but too much of the content involves accidental text messages. A drunken voicemail he once left on what he thought was his ex-girlfriend’s phone, but turned out to be his professor’s. An Instagram post that accidentally contained nudity.
Not that I miss that stuff. In fact, it’s crazy how much it feels vulgar to me. Abhorrent. A fad gone wrong. Emoticons and pokes and likes and apps that made artists out of amateurs, videos that showed off items paid for and bodies bought.
That’s not what bothers me. We saw that even as we were a part of it. Our shame was not a secret. We talked about giving it up all the time. What bothers me now, talking about it, is that we were so secure. So safe. And we took it all for granted.
We filled up our time with so much nothingness. Every moment of every day filled with the ping of an email or a text. Checking on who was doing what. The world and what was happening was so accessible. And we embraced filling our day with that because without it… Well then you have time to listen to Theo sniffling. To Sheila mumbling under her breath. To every time Beryl purses her lips or scribbles in the notebook.
“Car up ahead.”
I slow down, gradually pulling the Prius over to the side. I pop the trunk and we clamber out, guns up. Sheila grabs a rifle from the back, swiftly loading it, her movements surgical and showing none of her inebriation.
I don’t give orders. Apparently I don’t need to. Josey and Theo move off to the sides as Sheila climbs on top of the car. She hikes her shorts up as she lays down, legs spread wide to anchor her to the top of the Prius. She winks at me before bringing her eye to the scope.
Beryl is behind us. Scanning the horizon. Waiting for a trap. Ready to catch what we don’t see. My back, always.
I grab a rifle and take my spot fifteen feet in front of the car. We take these positions without speaking, and there is no jostling, no piece out of place. We are meant to be where we are.
The car slows down and stops five hundred feet away. It idles, a distant purr almost lost in the vast loneliness of this place. Everywhere is sun and sand and cacti. And only this, this one stretch of asphalt made by man that divides a land used to death. And we its only travelers.
My heart beats fast. But it’s different, now. I think back on meeting Steven and John, the sheer terror that had me almost at the point of shooting them. I think of Don, and how I almost wasn’t even myself when I met him. I was an animal, fight or flight ruling my brain, and I had no intention of running.
Now. Now I am wary. I will not trust these people until they have been investigated. Until they have proven themselves harmless. I am still an animal, I suppose. An animal bent on survival, on protecting his friends. His family. His clan. But instead of being that animal whose reaction to fear is to attack, I’m now a predator content to circle. To observe whilst claws are unsheathed.
I turn in a slow circle, scanning the road behind us, the desert, looking for signs of a trap.
“Har.”
Beryl says my name and I turn to see a man exiting the car. He stands behind the door, o
ne arm raised to shield his eyes as he tries to see what, exactly, we are doing. He raises it high in an awkward wave.
“Hey!” He yells.
I don’t respond.
“Hey! We aren’t infected!”
He continues to keep the arm up high, waving it back and forth as if he was a kid who knew the answer to a math question.
“Sheila, how many you see?”
“Two, or four depending on whether or not I’m seeing double.” She smiles down at me. “Fuckin’ with ya. The other’s a girl. Young.”
I feel us relax, although I know we shouldn’t. They can still be up to no good. But it seems more unlikely with a man and a woman traveling together.
Or she could be there against her will.
“Cover me. I raise my hand you start shooting.”
Beryl gives me a dirty look as she walks side by side with me towards the man.
“You should stay,” I say, knowing she won’t.
I walk with the rifle down by my side, Beryl with her pistol, slow steps of coiled tension.
There is no more waving and saying hello. Not for now. Not in a world where what someone has hidden might mean your death. Not in a world where taking it too far might be the difference between one of your companions living or dying. We walk with teeth bared. Better to draw a little blood than to spill it all.
The man is having a hushed conversation with the girl in the car. He looks skittish as we approach, throwing both hands up and then pulling them down as if he is about to climb back into the vehicle. Beryl raises her gun and he freezes, slowly coming back outside.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!”
It seems he can’t say anything else at the moment. Tall and thin with black curly hair, the guy can’t be older than seventeen or eighteen.
I stop walking, one hand slowing Beryl. I point to the passenger side. “Tell her to get out of the car.”
“We didn’t do anything wrong.”
