In Her Skin

by Kim Savage

  “The girl turns the big old stove to four twenty-five. For good measure, she twists the numbered knobs on the front too, which go click-click-click. Nothing happens except a smell the girl associates with her mother cooking, so she thinks that must be right. From a deep drawer, she takes out a hand mixer, a shiny bowl, a cake pan, and a spatula. From the pantry, she takes out cake mix, and from the refrigerator, eggs and butter.

  “She waits. A minute, two. Lets the darkness within rise and meet her. From the living room, the TV roars canned laughter.

  “‘I want to bake,’ she calls to the friend. The friend jumps up with a cheer.

  “The girl reads the box of cake mix. ‘It says we need oil. Can you get it from the top shelf?’

  “The friend is small and stands on her toes to reach. The girl holds the hand mixer by its skinny neck and swings it like a bottle. The crack against the back of the friend’s head is swift and pleasing. The friend staggers, stunned, her eyes unfocused, inexplicably smiling. She says the girl’s name like a question. The oven dings. The girl walks wide of the staggering friend, who is reaching for her, and opens the oven door with a squeal. The friend teeters; her back is small. The girl grasps the back of the friend’s pajamas and shoves her headfirst into the oven, knocking the door partly closed with her knee. Holds her there. The friend barely struggles. The girl doesn’t know if she’s doing it right, but the smell of gas is strong and the friend stops struggling after a minute. Slowly, the girl drags the friend from the oven (so light! Filled with sawdust, this friend) and lays her on the floor back in the parlor in front of the TV. The girl considers the open wall; peels back the plastic. It is a lovely nook, a place the girl would like to hide in, if she needed to. Folding the friend makes her fit. The girl tapes the plastic back in place. Behind, the friend is a rosy blur.

  “The girl follows the slug trail of blood back to the kitchen. She is getting a dull headache. Holding her head, she closes the oven door and reaches for the oil. Measures the oil, cracks the eggs, pours the powdery mix into the bowl. She cleans the friend’s blood off the base of the hand mixer with a paper towel and mixes the cake, a soft whir over the noise of the Disney show. She moves the bowl to a different counter so she can watch the show at the same time. When the characters do something silly, she laughs, even though it is a show she’s already seen. When the mix is poured and the cake is in the oven, she returns to the window, leaving the mess on the counter, because she is nine. Her parents have ordered dessert, and it has arrived, and they are sharing the small cup of crème brûlée. This is the girl’s favorite dessert, and she can taste the caramelized sugar in her mouth. They must hate her, to do this to her. To leave her alone with the memory of burnt sugar in a house smelling of gas and chocolate and blood.

  “The girl remembers the cake. She turns on the oven light and peers inside, but it tells her nothing. She tries taking the cake out, but because she is nine, she forgets oven mitts and burns her palms, dropping the cake upside down on the floor. She runs her hands under cold water until they turn numb, and this is how they find her.”

  The only sound is my ragged breathing as it slows to nothing. Temple gazes at her open hands, tilting them, as if they still shine with burns, and continues:

  “The girl shows them her hands, but they ignore her. Shouts about the gas, running to throw open windows that will be barred in the months ahead. The mother hammers at her cell phone but it is dead and she blames this on the husband. At the same time, they see the cake on the floor. They want to know where the friend is. The girl points to the parlor. The father stares at the girl for a moment, recognizing that the light in her has gone out, while the mother rushes to the parlor yelling for the friend. The mother grows quiet. The father comes toward the girl. The mother calls the father’s name, unsure, trembling. The girl’s hands hurt. She holds them out for him to see. Her eyes are dry. The father rips his eyes away from the girl and joins the mother in the parlor. The girl twists the faucet back on and sticks her hands underneath.

  “Above the gush of water, the sound of plastic ripped from plaster.

  “The screams come and come and then stop, a hand over a mouth. Open windows, dining people. The danger of it. There will be no time for screams.

  “Windows are shut. Hammering, the dragging and placing of heavy furniture. The smell of wooden floor cleaner. A building permit sticker repositioned prominently in the window. The girl’s hands are finally bandaged and she is put to bed. Nerves are soothed and phone calls are made.

  “The girl smiles, listening to her parents speak to the police officers below. This time, she is sure they will not leave her again.”

  * * *

  You kick your feet and jump off the bureau, pulling the shirt you’re wearing over your head, hair spilling over your back. Fully aware of your nakedness, as you dig too long for a big T-shirt to pull on. When you rise, you flip your hair back to perfect and sigh.

  “Now it’s time for you to tell me a story,” you say.

  “You know my story. Your father hired a private investigator and he pulled everything on my life in Florida.” If you have a shred of feeling for me in your heart, this is the time for me to find it and use it. “You know exactly how much my life sucked.”

  “I understand completely. On her own, Jolene Chastain has nothing. She needs food. Clothes. A place to live. A phone. A computer. An education. She got these things, plus something she didn’t know she wanted until she had it.”

  I say nothing.

  “And what would that thing be?” you tease. “C’mon, say it.”

  “Temple…,” I say softly.

  “That’s right! Me! Your soul mate.” You grab my hand and drag me into the bed. My heart races. We’re head to head again, this time, in your bed, and you aren’t letting me go anywhere. “Now I want that story.”

  We lie for a while. You are patient when you know you’re going to get something. Every time I blink, I see Vivi reaching high on her tiptoes, a smack to the back of her head, blinding pain, starfish hands reaching out for a mother who isn’t there.

  “Vivi? The story.”

  I swallow thickly. “I always knew she would die.”

  “The year, please.”

  “What?”

  “When did she die?”

  “You already know this. You know everything.”

  “Tell the story properly, please.”

  I exhale hard. “It was 2016 when she died.”

  “When she died, or when she was killed?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  “That’s an important distinction, wouldn’t you say? Isn’t that the point of the whole story, Jolene Chastain?”

  You wrap your arm around mine and snuggle against my shoulder. What have I gotten myself into? The sensation of falling, into the bed, through the bed and through two floors, through the room below where the real Vivi’s bones are encased in a wall, past her bones and through the earth, to its molten core, where you and I will burn together. Wolf couldn’t have saved me from the streets, or even the Last One, but he could have saved me from you.

  Wolf is gone, and I am a fool.

  “It was 2016 when my momma’s last boyfriend killed her,” I say. “My life was about keeping her alive. She had my love, and still she thought she should die. Every drug. Every scheme. Every boyfriend was laced through with danger. But this story is about the one thing that finally did kill her. He had a name, but I’m not gonna use it, because he doesn’t deserve a name. I call him the Last One.

  “In the end, I believe Momma wanted to live. Otherwise she wouldn’t have tried to escape. While she didn’t care about her own life, she cared about mine. When she started to realize that the Last One would take mine, too, that made her ready to run. But he cut her down.

  “The weekend before I left, we made a good score. He wanted to celebrate. She never saw him touch me until that night.

  “You’re wondering why I didn’t tell her. It would have made he
r run with me sooner.

  “But it wasn’t like that. We needed enough money to get away first, and besides, she wasn’t in any shape to leave. She was still getting clean off meth, tapering her doses, and a mess so much of the time. Sleeping, depressed. He took advantage of her sleeping to come to me, and it was everything I could do not to kill. I kept a knife under my pillow so I knew it was there, and when he was on me, I’d fantasize about plunging it through the hard gristle of him, then a pillow of blood as it pierced the heart, a whoosh. I’d slip out from underneath his still body and walk away, like Carrie White, covered in his blood, strong and straight-backed and avenged.

  “But killing boyfriends would’ve given us another problem.

  “So I sent myself to another place to get through it. I focused on weaning Momma from using every day to twice a week, from a quarter gram to an eighth of a gram, and pretty soon she’d be clear. The Last One didn’t care: he was glad for it. Thought she was useless high. But she took so long to come out of it, ate and slept so much it pissed him off, and pretty soon he’d carved Momma out of his scams so it was him and me, operating as a team, or what he thought was a team, since my eyes were only on the money.

  “Arrangements were made online. I’d wait, alone, watching the TV but really listening to the sound of the highway outside—there was always a highway right outside—behind the heavy curtains. The sound of cars rushing by was the sound of escape. A flash of headlights through the curtains, a careful knock on the door. I always had to be something different, a call I had to make on the spot. If the mark had a squirrelly look to him, it meant that this was the first time he had done something like this, and he needed proof that I knew what I was doing. The ones that asked my age straightaway wanted a young girl, so I’d tell him I was nine, but an early bloomer—there was something magical about single digits. They were the same ones who wanted to get down to business right away, and were the hardest to stall. They were the reason I had a code phrase—‘Would you like to take a shower first?’—that meant Mad Daddy needed to burst into the room that very second.

  “Mad Daddy was part of the act, of course. The Last One would bust in hollering, claiming my addict mom had set the whole thing up and he knew nothing about it. Naturally, pictures would be taken. Threats made. Money handed over.

  “Sometimes I got mine. I knew the Last One liked to watch from next door on a video camera he set up, so I did obnoxious things to the camera behind the mark’s back. Flipping the Last One off, for example. He knew there was danger for me, being alone too long. Not from the mark, who would look around the room like he didn’t know how he got there and then grow sad. These were the ones that cried hardest and paid fastest. The one with a glint in his eye when he saw no adult had bothered to attend the ‘transaction’—these were the ones to fear. They saw a girl alone and they thought, jackpot.

  “But the kind of mark didn’t matter to the Last One. He only had to swoop into the room and cash in on our double payment: first, the arrangement fee collected online, second, the extortion fee, which could go on forever, since we had the mark’s personal info. A payment plan for sin, he called it. Anyway. This one time toward the end, we made a killing, because the mark was what they call a ‘public figure,’ with a lot to lose and deep pockets. A guy with pale hair and a wife and seven kids. He was a politician for one of those states where the people all call themselves Christian but have lots of wives and whatever. Point is, the guy had to pay whatever we asked for or kill himself out of shame, which he did anyway one year later. The Last One got so drunk celebrating that night that he stumbled in and forgot Momma was in the bed next to us. Making noise about doing to me what the marks never got to, and for that he was The Man. I remember laying there thinking about a new fantasy, the scene in one of those Silence of the Lambs movies, not the first one, but maybe the second or third, where they train the pigs to eat the bad guy’s face off, and how perfect a fate that would be for him, and wondering where you’d get such pigs.

  “That’s when Momma woke up.

  “I saw her first, her eyes wide in the stripe of parking lot light coming through the parted drapes. She blinked and blinked and then sat straight up in her bed, and I flinched underneath him, because I knew the jolt must have hurt her head. She screamed, grabbed the back of his shirt, and tore him off me, and he swore like I’ve never heard anyone swear, staggering around the tiny room, banging into a desk and knocking over a lamp, and I scrambled up and pulled Momma away, because I knew that he would kill her. He was drunk, really drunk, and couldn’t get his balance, and when Momma screamed for me to get into the bathroom and lock myself in, I did.

  “He hurt her bad that night, though by some miracle of God he passed out before he killed her. We moved on to a new hotel, and the scams ran the same. But after that night, a switch flipped inside the Last One. He stopped touching me. He got panicky, using the money to buy us dumb presents like a big microwave for the hotel room and a bracelet for Momma with little glass beads, each one with some special meaning. She took it and thanked him but didn’t mean it, and once he left, I watched her whip it against the bathroom sink until each bead had starburst cracks. On my birthday, he brought home a cheesecake from a factory that made only cheesecakes, any kind you could think of, and my cake was called Death by Chocolate and I kept thinking Death by Flesh-Eating Pigs. Momma stopped using altogether, though she didn’t tell him. She pretended to sleep all the time still, but mostly, she watched. She skimmed money off our grocery allowance, and that money went inside the cookie tin. It was unsaid between us, what she was doing, because she wanted to keep me safe, but I knew. It wasn’t easy. He watched her closer than ever. It wasn’t her that was so valuable to him, of course: it was me. The hotel scam brought in more money than any scam before, and he’d learned that we could run it without her. I guess that’s why, when he found the hidden money, and the name of the shelter we were leaving for that same night, he beat her to death.

  “After Momma was gone, there was a buzzing around me, black insects, I imagined, that crusted my eyes and nose, a rot that could take me out of this world if I let it. I had to act fast. Momma had spent most of her life trying to die, but I had spent most of mine trying to live. I took that whorl of black-winged rage and pain and sucked it inside, let it fill up my chest and lungs. My back got straighter, my eyes clearer, my mind sharper with their humming inside me, and I controlled that rage, converted it into something powerful. It led me to my escape.

  “The last time he touched me was six weeks before he killed Momma: enough time to convince him I needed to buy a pregnancy test.

  “The thing about the Last One is, he’s a con. A con is always thinking about their next move, the longer term, three steps ahead, when they should be thinking about the here and now. Instead of thinking, ‘I’m giving Jolene a chance to escape,’ the Last One was thinking about where he would dump my body if that stick showed two pink lines. Or, if there was one pink line, how this was a wake-up call to get me birth control, and where was the closest free clinic? And also, since Patty was out of the picture now, wasn’t it time to get back to our old ways? He fixed on these things as I slipped the keys out of his pocket. He fixed on these things as he asked the gas station attendant for the Early Result pregnancy test. He fixed on these things as I slid into my seat on a Greyhound Bus bound for Boston with half the money from that last scam, and the driver pulled the door closed.”

  “You became Vivi to hide,” you murmur, breathing deeply.

  “Yes.” No. I became Vivi to have a family. To have you. But I cannot say these things because you’ll see me as weak, and to be weak around you is the most dangerous of all.

  “The insects—that feeling. It’s still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “In your chest and lungs and—”

  “I said yes,” I snap.

  You smile. “Then you’ll need to control it.”

  “I can control it. Most girls would have crumbled. I let
it lift me. It’s what drove me to escape.”

  “It will also destroy you if you don’t learn how to use it.”

  I roll to face you. “How do you know this?”

  “I have it inside me, too.” You wet your lips. “And I can teach you to use it.”

  We move to my room and climb out the window left open by Wolf, you first, to the roof. I didn’t know you could get to the roof from the fire escape; I only considered it as a way down. It’s windy on the tarred roof, but you bring the plaid blanket that you gave me a few long weeks ago, when you first gave me your warmth, and you have climbed up here before. We wrap ourselves in it and lie on our backs, your leg slung over mine, owning me. The sky is full with city light, and dark clouds pass, close and fast.

  “I’m going to go quickly. If you don’t get it, I’m not going to explain it to you,” you say, and I am not patient with fools, either.

  “That feeling is your power. That’s what lifted you out of that crappy hotel room away from your dead mother’s boyfriend when most girls would have clung to him because it was all they knew. That’s what drove you out of Tent City and into our home. And when they come for you—the doubters and the cops and whoever else figures out you aren’t Vivi, and they will—you need to use that power to stand your ground. Pretending you’re Vivi isn’t enough. You need to get rid of them. That’s where your rage takes over.”

  I sit up on one elbow. “Get rid of them?”

  “You should be prepared to. Selectively eliminating threats is completely realistic. But you have to practice. Use your rage when it isn’t necessary. The most effective predators attack prey without an immediate need or use for it. It’s called surplus killing. Think of wolves killing a whole henhouse of hens and eating just one. They’re not killing for the fun of it. They’re honing their reflexes, their skills. You need to exercise your rage, or it will get dull. I do this myself, and I can help you do it, too.”