by T. Greenwood
The banging on her door startles her, yanks her sharply from her project. She feels her knees grow weak and she looks around the room, but for what she doesn’t know. (A weapon? An escape route? Help?)
When the knock comes again, the sound is like gunshots, not the tentative knocks of the lady selling Avon or even Robert and Bunk. This knock is aggressive, threatening. Bang, bang, bang. Her hand flies to her chest as though it can keep that cage door shut, keep that wild creature inside. Under her fingertips, it beats and beats and beats. She stares at the door as the person knocks again.
She can see him, his silhouette behind the curtain, shifting his weight from one foot to another. And then he leans forward, his face pressed to the glass, and she feels as though she might vomit. He shields his eyes to block out his own reflection, and his features come into focus behind the sheer curtain.
She stares back at him, because she doesn’t know what else to do.
“Ma’am?” His voice is muffled behind the glass.
She doesn’t answer. Can’t. Moments pass. A minute? Slowly. Time is so cruel, she thinks. So very cruel.
She watches him move away from the door, the dark outline of his body moving up and then down. The screen door on the porch opens and closes, opens and closes. She wonders if maybe Ruby called Animal Control and he’s come to get the babies. But then she hears the sound of something tearing, and her heart starts to pace again, back and forth, like a tiger. Like a terrified and dangerous beast. And then he presses something against the glass. But it’s just a piece of paper. He is writing something, using the window as a hard surface, the way one might use a book or someone’s back. When he is finished, the screen door from the porch outside slams shut again, and she can hear his tires on the gravel of her drive, feel the bass of his stereo, and then there is nothing but the rhythmic aftermath of her own body.
She realizes as she stands that her muscles have been clenched this entire time, that she has not been breathing. She nearly collapses, her limbs like rubber bands that have been stretched too tight. Cautiously, she walks to the door. Even though she knows it is safe, that he is gone now, she distrusts his absence.
She tries the knob, fearful, even while knowing that it is locked. (She remembers the deadbolt sliding into place. She checked it. She always does: at least ten times every evening before she goes to bed. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night to ensure that the deadbolt is turned, that the chain is latched tight. Throughout the day, it is one of her many, many rituals.) And it is locked; of course it is. There was never any real danger. She knows this, but that doesn’t change the way her body feels as though it has just suffered a great trauma.
He has left the groceries in the bin on the porch, just as he has for the last couple of months. She has had at least a half dozen grocery boys, but this one with the fast car is new this summer. She has never seen any of their faces, except for this one’s, pressed against the glass of her window.
She lifts one of the bags out of the bin and realizes he’s left a note on top of the groceries.
Storm’s coming. Brought extra water, candles, and batteries. Need anything else just call the store.
In addition to the usual three paper bags of groceries, there are four gallons of water on the porch floor and a small plastic bag with candles and batteries and an inexpensive flashlight. She plucks the receipt, which is stapled to one of the brown bags, and stares at the predictable list of items: milk, orange juice, oatmeal, ground beef, bananas. She scans the list, searching, but there are no extra charges. It is, to the penny, the same as it is (and has been) every single week. Suddenly the creature in her chest begins to swell, rising upward to her throat, nearly choking her. She swallows hard to push it back down into the place where it belongs. And it resists.
She brings the bag of items into the kitchen first and dumps its contents onto the part of the table that is not occupied by the sandpiper. She studies these ordinary objects as though they are arcane artifacts. And she supposes they are. Proof that someone somewhere still cares that she is here. That she is safe. That she is alive. It makes her feel something between comfort and unbearable shame.
Nessa unpacks her bag as though she is in a hotel instead of an abandoned shack in the woods. She has always done this. For all the years that she’s been wandering, she has always needed to feel settled in, if only for the night. Her mother could live endlessly out of open suitcases, battered boxes, but Nessa at least liked to pretend that she might stay. That her life wasn’t just a series of pit stops, that there was at least the semblance of permanence.
She takes her filthy clothes and folds them, making piles on the floor. She arranges her toiletries (trial sizes pilfered from the drugstore: deodorant, toothpaste, shampoo) on a broken table. When her backpack is empty, she pushes it into a corner and studies her new home.
In the center of the room is an enormous piece of metal equipment, which connects to some sort of chimney. Because the roof is caved in, the chimney stands alone, a freestanding spire made of crumbling brick held up by the benevolent branches of a tree. There is also a wood box whose empty bottom is littered with yellowed newspapers. A stove. She quickly realizes that this must have been a maple sugarhouse at one time; her grandfather had one as well in the woods behind his house at the lake, though it doesn’t look like anyone has used this one in years.
There are some soggy-looking cardboard boxes under the broken window, and she wonders what’s inside. She hopes there is maybe some canned food, something edible, because she is starving. She hasn’t eaten since the diner yesterday. And even then she’d felt bile rising to her throat for hours afterwards. The baby makes it impossible to eat anything without it haunting her later.
She drags the box across the floor; it is so heavy she feels the muscles in her back strain with the effort. She peels back the damp flaps to open it, hoping for sustenance but instead finding magazines. Hustler magazines. There must be a hundred of them. She scans the date on the cover of one of them: 1981. The girl is totally nude save for a yellow plastic visor and a pair of yellow sweatbands around her wrists. She is holding a tennis racket between her legs. Nessa feels her face grow hot and she tries not to think about some guy out here alone in the woods with this collection of magazines and little else. She reaches for the next box and pulls it over. Inside is a lone mason jar filled with amber colored liquid. At first she assumes it must be some sort of backwoods moonshine, but then quickly understands that it is syrup. Of course.
She tries to pry the lid off, which is sealed tightly, almost too tightly. But it finally comes loose in her hand, and she dips her finger into the thick liquid. She sucks the sweet syrup from her fingers, but instead of quelling her hunger it seems to incite it. Her stomach rumbles, the baby kicks. And she sits down on the floor, her fingers sticky, and wonders where she will find her next meal. She doesn’t have any money left. Not a dime.
And so for now, she needs to go out into the woods, see if maybe she can find something to eat. She had noticed some apple trees along the road last night as she was trying to hitch a ride. She wishes she had picked some and put them in her backpack. She tries not to think of Mica’s house, the smell of it. The taste of the syrup pulls her back to that tiny kitchen, to that little oven and the turquoise and black tiles of that counter. Most mornings she would make pancakes. The ingredients were cheap, and the pancakes filled them up. They’d eat until their bellies were bursting. Until even the baby felt fat inside her. She would give anything for a pancake right now. She wouldn’t even need butter.
She opens up the front door of the sugar shack again, just a crack, and peers out. There is nothing but pine and maple and birch trees as far as the eye can see. No apple trees. And certainly no ingredients for pancakes just sitting out there in the forest. She knows she can’t stay here long if there is nothing to eat.
Seeing that it is safe to go outside, she tentatively steps out of the shelter of the shack and peers across the river,
retracing her steps from last night. In the distance she can see the back of the house she saw before and is pretty sure she sees wooden stakes and chicken wire. This means there is a garden. Vegetables. God. Her mouth fills with saliva as she recollects the simple wonderful acidity of a tomato. The crisp green snap of peas. She’ll go tonight. She’ll wash herself in the river, and then she’ll go eat. But for now, she needs to save her energy. To think of things besides food.
She goes back inside the shack, which is darker and cooler even than the forest around her, and spreads her sleeping bag out on the floor. It is still damp from the wet ground last night and so she brings it outside and lays it in a spot of sun to dry. Then instinctually she reaches into her pocket for the note, holds the soft worn paper in her hands and reads it for the thousandth time.
She hadn’t thought she’d need to use it, but now here she is. Her mother is gone. She has no money. The baby is coming whether she likes it or not. It is all she has. He is all she has now. But there is no address, nothing but the phone number. She wonders what he will do when he sees her again. If he will even remember. And she wonders if he can give her back what she lost that night. If he’s been keeping it safe for her.
After the daylight has disappeared, Nessa slips into the river to bathe. It is quiet here with only the rushing water and the sounds of the crickets and frogs. It is like a soft lullaby. She thinks of the words, what the lyrics might be. Rolls them around in her mouth like berries. Like stones. But she doesn’t sing.
Silence is remarkably easy.
Nessa, for whom words are like gems, like beautiful stones, has not spoken a single one in so long she no longer remembers what they taste like on her tongue.
She has always loved words. From the moment she could understand the connection between the letters on the page and the sounds they made, she was enraptured by them. In her room, one of her rooms (she recollects green shag carpeting, a painted bureau the color of sky, Barbie dolls) she practiced the words, watching her mouth in the mirror.
At school Mrs. Marvel, the speech therapist, had her do the same, staring at her lips and tongue in a red plastic framed mirror, learning to imitate the therapist’s own mouth. She tried, struggled to make those sounds. But the sounds never ever matched what she heard in her head, when she studied the letters on the page. When the words slipped out of her lips, they sounded wrong. Garbled. Throaty and swollen. Over time, she learned how to say only what needed to be said. To pretend that she was only shy instead of inept. They moved the first time, and somehow, at the new school no one cared whether or not she could pronounce those elusive words. They didn’t care that entire syllables were inaccessible to her. That certain letters of the alphabet remained out of reach. And that every word she spoke was a tentative creature, coming out only when absolutely necessary.
And then, suddenly, when she was about twelve, it was as though none of it mattered any more. She still could not speak well, but nobody cared. She learned a new language then. Red lipstick on those plump, stubborn lips. She learned the language of hands and hips. Her body able to communicate in ways her mouth never could. Most of the words stayed trapped inside, while the world read her body instead.
She became the book that everyone wanted to read. The forbidden one that was both coveted and hidden, the one to be ashamed of. Still, hands, so many hands, thumbed through her pages, bending her spine until it grew weak. Until the pages were stained and tattered. Entire passages disappearing, ink blurred like the black mascara she wore that smudged under her eyes. It didn’t take long before hers was the story everyone knew, the ending spoiled.
And then they moved again and again, and with each subsequent move she lost more and more words. Spoke less and less. Relied on the cover to tell her story. Let people believe they knew her, just because they were able to hold her. To touch all those worn pages.
But you can only keep poetry imprisoned for so long. And while her throat often failed, her hands were still perfectly capable. She collected the words she couldn’t speak in spiral notebooks. No special journals with locks and keys. No silly leather-bound diaries that called attention to themselves. They were safer this way, camouflaged inside the accoutrements of any student. And inside the notebooks, she wrote the things she wasn’t able to speak. Those stubborn, evasive words. And she shared them with no one until him. And even then, she was reluctant. Words are precious things. She knows this. And she has come to get them back. She will do whatever it is she needs to do.
But tonight there is only one word that matters. Only one word that informs everything she does. Hunger. She is feeling sick and weak. As she bathes in the cold river, carefully rubbing the shampoo between her legs and under her arms, under her breasts which hang like low fruit, she knows that she must eat and soon. That she is in real danger.
She has known hunger before, but never like this. In the city, there was always a slice of pizza left on a table, some delicacy wrapped in wax paper left near the top of the trash. She could always find a loaf of bread, a stick of butter. There was almost always someone willing to exchange food for her attention.
She washes her clothes with the same shampoo, wrings the fabric out with her hands and then lays the wet clothes in a pile on the grass. She will hang them out to dry behind the shack. She gets out of the water and realizes she doesn’t have a towel to dry herself, no clean dry clothes to put on. And so she slips back into a dirty skirt and the cleanest tank top she can find. All four pairs of underwear she has are soaking wet.
She looks at the back of the house across the river. Later, after the lights go out, she will go to the garden. She will scavenge on all fours, pillaging and ravaging. Harvesting, gaining sustenance.
Sylvie is so very tired tonight. Her body is angry, exhausted from the exertion of another day spent hanging by her fingertips from this horrendous cliff. She wonders, sometimes, how much longer she can hold on. There are times when she wishes she could just let go, stop clinging. Stop fighting the inevitable and irresistible pull. But while her body demands rest, her mind resists. Always vigilant, the night watchman standing guard over imaginary evils. She fluffs her pillow, arranges her blankets, pulls the crisp cold sheets up tight to her chin. Tucking herself in, as though she is her own grandmother, making sure she is safe and snug inside. But still, her mind races, her palms sweat. Her heart pounds and there is an electric sort of buzzing as though her brain might short out.
She reaches into her drawer, runs her fingers across the cold metal of the gun, and then rests them on the vial. She touches the corrugated plastic rim of the cap, holds the smooth orange canister in her hand. It immediately brings comfort; even the promise of sleep calms her. She tries not to rely on these, but there are times when she knows that without them the night will be endless. Unbearable. She is careful to take them only at night; she knows that it would be easy to start using them to help her get through her days as well.
She already checked in on Ruby to make sure she was asleep, wondered at the peacefulness of her body, her face. And standing there reminded her of a thousand other nights when she and Robert stood together in that doorway, his chest pressed against her back, their bodies making one shadow on the wooden floor. She remembers he was always the one to pull away first, “Come to bed,” he’d say and reach for her hand, pulling her away, turning off the light. She could have watched them sleep for hours.
She has also already checked the locks on all the doors, something Robert used to do. She has paced the house, looking for vulnerabilities, for cracks or fissures, breaches in the fragile security. Without Robert here, she worries that she has missed something. And so she is vigilant.
Now she pops one, then two pills, under her tongue and swallows them dry, without water. Taking them this way makes her more aware, and, she thinks, somehow more accountable. If she can just get some sleep, she thinks, as the pills lodge in her throat and then make the slow achy descent down her throat, she will have the energy to be a normal mother to
morrow. Maybe a good night’s sleep will give her exactly what she needs. As the time-release capsule begins to dissolve, as her mind’s stubborn resistance to rest also begins to disintegrate she imagines the impossible: a call to Gloria, maybe she could bring Izzy over. They could sit on the back porch and drink tea, talk, while the girls play. If it’s hot, she could hook up the sprinkler, the one that spins. The one that Ruby and Jess used to play in. As the medicine makes its way into her bloodstream, quieting the cacophony of her brain, she dreams other summers. She dreams of prismatic rainbows made from sunlight and a sprinkler. She dreams dirty little boy feet and grass-stained knees. She dreams a wet child wrapped in a towel on her lap. The thrumming of his heart under her fingers, dreams the way she used to press her palm against the soft bone of his chest just to feel that steady, certain rhythm. How that was assurance. Insurance.
As the wild synapses of her brain shut down, as the live wires of her imagination fizzle out, there is only this: Twilight. Mosquitoes. Robert’s warm hand on her shoulder as they both studied the long black eyelashes of his closed eyes. And Ruby, her little girl, playing in the sprinkler, breathless and blissful in the half light.
The narcotic paralysis is so powerful, the depth of this slumber so deep, the crash of glass, the flash of light, and the rustling sounds outside do not frighten her but rather integrate into the landscape of an analgesic dream. Sunlight, laughter, bare feet running across wet grass.
TUESDAY
At the swimming pool on Tuesday morning, it’s not the same boy with the clipboard at the gate. Instead it’s one of the few adults who seem to run the pool and the park. He’s Ruby’s dad’s age, and there’s no way on earth he’s going to let her leave in the middle of swimming lessons. When she tells him she’s not feeling well, that she needs to go home, he shrugs and says, “Sorry, kid. Why don’t you just sit and watch? I can’t make you go in the water, but I can’t let you leave.”
