by Joshua Furst
The world began to soften around the edges. The lights grew brighter and the shadows sank darker. Sounds Cheryl hadn't noticed before—cars roaming the streets, floorboards creaking in the house next door, crickets coming at her from all directions—now echoed like they were on reverb. The rustling she'd heard earlier started up again in the branches above her head. Something up there was restless. The sound faded away, then returned louder, closer, more frantic. There was a crack and a scampering and she saw a shadow fly toward the eaves of the house.
“The squirrels are all worked up about something, huh?” she said.
Jarod shrugged. “It's gonna rain.”
“You learn that on the Discovery Channel?”
“Animal Planet. The Discovery Channel does, like, science shows and shit now.”
Hilarious. She was definitely stoned. And not too far below his new surface the same gooey Jarod was still there.
The air was thick, but no thicker than usual for summer in the Midwest; it hung there, stagnant and heavy. The clouds floated high and wispy above them, long thick ripples, gray against the black night. What were they? Cheryl had learned their name in sixth grade, but this knowledge had floated away a long time ago. “It doesn't feel like it's gonna rain,” she said.
Extending his neck like a turtle out of the cove of his sweatshirt, Jarod shot an arc of spit through the space between his two front teeth and then recoiled back into hiding.
For a while, Cheryl just watched him, contented, pleased to be here in the relatively safe and tranquil place that was his backyard. Then something changed and his mother's sour face began to hover over her, whispering, telling her, You're not wanted here. She reminded herself, it's just the pot. Her brain tingled as the drug's creepers slithered through her consciousness, curled around and strangled the good feelings she'd had.
She needed to move. To go somewhere and come back a different person.
“You want a beer?” she asked. She stood and stretched, her arms over her head, her t-shirt pulling up to expose her navel.
Jarod gave her that shrug of his.
In the kitchen, she spaced out on the refrigerator magnets. Jarod's mom was a fan of the plastic foods: a burger, a tangle of spaghetti, a Coke bottle out of which tumbled a flood of frozen brown liquid. There should have been a splat of fake vomit somewhere but Cheryl couldn't find one. The fluorescent light above the sink was freaking her out. This house was a dank place. The only thing that grew here was sadness.
When she returned to the backyard with the beer, it was drizzling, just as Jarod had predicted. She handed him his can and plopped down next to him. One sip from the beer, and she realized she didn't want it anymore. She set it by her foot. The rain was so soft and warm she could barely feel it.
She lay her head on Jarod's shoulder and stared off into the nothingness.
After a while, her senses sank back into her body. She could smell the clean, earthy fragrance of the mud. Water tapping on the roof. The rustle of leaves like a thumb flicking along a deck of cards.
“What are you gonna do?” she asked, not knowing quite what she meant by the question or why she'd felt the sudden urge to ask it.
He tipped his head and his cheek grazed against her forehead.
“I, uh … You've got a thing with Trent.”
Holding herself still, she registered the slight upturn in his confidence. If there were a moment to admit the damage she'd done that night, this would have been it. Instead, she said, “I mean about your mother.”
He shook her off his shoulder and sipped his beer.
“Mike thinks I should join the Marines with him,” he said.
She couldn't tell how serious he was—the glum expression on his face didn't give anything away—but she'd never seen him display a sense of irony. He was gullible. He leaned toward the literal.
“That's a stupid idea.” She wanted to say, You should come with me. We'll run away somewhere where the winters aren't twenty below like they are here. We'll go to New Orleans, just like in the song. But it was Trent who'd played the song for her.
“I heard they'll give you ten thousand bucks just for signing up,” he said.
“Yeah, and then the next week they send you out to get your head blown off.”
He shrugged. “My mom would like it. She could go to the doctor.”
“Don't you have to be eighteen?”
“Technically. But what are they gonna do? They're desperate.”
Cheryl took his hand and pulled it into her lap like a mother holding her child away from the flames. “It's a bad idea,” she said.
The way he gazed at her, his eyes glassy with fear and longing, she was sure he'd do whatever she told him to, be whatever she asked him to be. But then she'd be responsible for what he turned into. He had no willpower of his own. She was going to have to make a decision now, it didn't matter if she was ready or not.
“Are you still stoned?” she asked.
Reluctantly separating his hand from hers, he dug in his pocket for the bag of pot.
She knew she should stop, allow whatever this new thing was with Jarod to remain hypothetical, unreal and deniable, but she didn't want to. She'd done so much damage already tonight that a little more wouldn't matter. You can't ruin something that's already ruined.
There was just one more thing she had to know. “Do you miss your dog?”
He shrugged and shrank back into his sweatshirt. She thought she saw his eyes well up, but he'd hidden his face and she couldn't be sure.
“Don't do that, Jarod … I mean—”
“What do you think?”
It was important not to prompt him, to hear it from him without giving him the answers.
“I mean, why didn't you stop them?”
“It was just a stupid dog,” he said.
His hands shook as he crumbled dried leaves into the rolling paper cradled between his fingers and she decided this was proof enough.
They stood pressed up against the screen door, under the small aluminum awning that jutted out over the concrete step. The rain was still falling lightly. Neither of them said a word as they smoked, and when the joint was spent, Jarod packed the roach with the others at the bottom of his bag of pot.
And then she had her arm around his waist. She wasn't sure if she was destroying something or creating something, but whatever she was doing, it felt good. For the first time in she couldn't remember how long, she felt okay with herself in the world.
Pulling Jarod by the belt loops, she slipped her hand under his sweatshirt, then his t-shirt. She ran her fingers across his oily back, traced the contours of his ribs.
He was pliant, neither resisting nor reciprocating, and when she kissed him, he melted like water in her hands.
“Let's go inside,” she said.
Then, for a long time, neither of them moved.
LATE AT NIGHT, even now after all these years, I lie awake thinking about her. Rewinding and reviewing. Staring at the scattered details like they're cryptograms, like if I find the right piece of missing information, I'll suddenly know where she's gone and what she's doing and how to bring her back home. Everything I'm missing will be revealed.
I see Cheryl and Jarod moving sideways, stumbling over each other's feet, kissing. They rove around the dark mildewed room, two clumsy dancers, unable to synchronize their internal rhythms. One of them slips—it's Jarod, I think, his leg caught in a tangled pile of clothes—and then they're both sprawled out on the mattress, tongues still entwined, limbs curled around limbs.
They're upstairs. Back in the bedroom where she first gave herself to Trent. Jarod's mother is shut into her dark cell, directly below them, snoring, periodically moaning in pain.
Cheryl can hear her, which means it's possible she could hear them shuffling awkwardly on the oily sheet, could hear the shoes dropping to the floor, the groan of the mattress, the creaking wood of the bed frame as they roll onto their sides. When Cheryl unbuckles Jarod's belt, the steel jangl
es like a door knocker. How much noise would it take to wake the woman? How much would it take to rouse her from her bed and send her hobbling up the stairs?
“Shhh.” Cheryl grins at Jarod. Then she whispers, “Have you ever done this before?”
He mumbles, “Sure,” his lip trailing along her neck. But he doesn't know what he's doing. His hands are everywhere and nowhere all at once.
She doesn't care. She's not here for him. She's here to decimate her love for Trent, to plaster over the wounds before they fester, not because she thinks she can heal herself but because if she doesn't cover them with something, she'll pick herself bloody and return to him begging for more. Loving him was supposed to fix everything. It didn't. It just added another problem to the list. She's beginning to understand: love doesn't solve anything. Love distracts and disarms you, it whispers and lulls you into a false calm, leaves you unprepared for the next blow when it inevitably comes. She's courting numbness now. She's egging it on.
Outwardly, she's soft and tender, running her fingers through Jarod's short hair, touching the base of his neck, ever so lightly, watching as his body reacts.
He's in pain too. He too is an aching wound. He winces at her every touch. His mother's an unrelenting mess of needs. Just like mine, Cheryl thinks. Just like mine except with mine there's no physical ailment, just an incessant attempt to suck me back in. Jarod's mother can't do a single thing without his help. He constantly has to be ready, one ear cocked in case she starts bleating out his name. He has to work and cook and clean and he has to rub ointment into her knee. When she's out of Kools, he has to go get them, and if the Mobil station is out of the 100s and he returns with the king size, he has to listen to her berate him. But these aren't the demands that caused his abrasions. These things are easy. These things can be accomplished. What defeats him is the weight of the feelings she throws at him, the diamond-hard gallstones she's constantly flinging, too many to catch and too large to hold. There's no place to put them. They pile up in his arms and around his ankles. They're heavy. They're ugly. And though he knows he's supposed to take them away, he has no idea where to dump them. They chafe and burn and make his skin blister. She doesn't give him her joy—if it exists at all, she keeps it locked up, hidden behind her need. His joy goes there too, snatched away to carve room in him for another load of sadness. The sadness never ends. No matter how much of it he buries in the backyard, under spent marijuana leaves and empty beer cans, she's right there to heap another, even larger, pile into his arms.
Cheryl identifies. She recognizes herself in his behavior. He is like me and I am like him except I ran away, one day I asserted my right to refuse, and he's still here taking it, he still believes, despite all the evidence, that there's some way for him to fix her, is what she thinks. If, somehow, she can take some portion of his pain and hold it in the place where she used to tuck mine, her guilt might subside, she, maybe, just maybe, could live with herself.
Caressing his bony, pimply ass, running her fingers through his pubic hair, this is all part of her attempt at atonement.
And lying here in my bed, listening to her cries, I want to scream: Cheryl, I understand. I'd say I forgive you, but there's nothing to forgive. I don't hold anything you've done against you. You were merely trying to save yourself But even if my voice could carry all the way to the place, wherever it is, she's gone, she'd just think I was trying to trick her.
They're naked now, except for the tattoos and piercings. It's almost impossible to stifle the animal sounds rising in them. “Shh,” she says again, as much to herself as to him. “What would your mother say if she caught us?”
When she fucked Trent on this bed, they moaned and grunted, Cheryl screamed when he bit her shoulder. They didn't care. They were relenting to a chaos bigger than themselves. But this, here, with Jarod is different. She knows he won't save her or transform her life. He might think she can perform these feats for him, but that's because he's naive and confused by the new sensations flooding his nervous system. She's not even going to try.
He's discovered her breasts, and they enthrall him. He cups them, traces their shape with his palms. He squeezes. His fingernails are ragged and dirty. Then, lunging in, he begins to suck, all lips and no tongue.
“You better not give me a hickey,” she says, and she believes for a second she'll return to Trent. If he were to discover what she's done with Jarod, he'd hit her. He'd hurt her. And she'd accept whatever he threw at her. She'd think it was exactly what she deserved.
Jarod's on top of her, slipping back and forth across her pelvic bone, stabbing at her abdomen, the fluid leaking from the tip of his penis, drying into a tacky glue in her pubic hair. He's digging for treasure in all the wrong places, mashing the folds of her vagina first one way, then the other. Things get caught down there. It stings. If she weren't so worried about his mother downstairs, she'd yelp. Instead, she bites her lip and tries to make her winces look like smiles. She balls the sheet up in her hands and squeezes.
The sensitive skin is pinched suddenly tightly, like Jarod's clamped a binder clip across her clit, and she lets out a muffled howl. He freezes, mortified, on top of her.
“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
He holds himself on stiff arms, waiting for directions, hoping she won't demand he give up. His tongue is twisted against his top row of teeth.
“Shh,” she says.
“Sorry.”
She whispers. “Be careful. It's sensitive.”
“I'm sorry.”
When Trent asked, she told him, “Yes. It's yours. My pussy belongs to you.” She hadn't been lying, but she'd been wrong. He'd just been visiting. Scrawling his name. Now, as she snakes her hand into the crevice between her legs and peels her labia apart, she relinquishes what's left of her belief in him. Even if he tries, he won't get her back.
For a moment, she feels the emptiness. Then, holding Jarod's penis steady with her free hand, she slips him inside herself. She peers up at him. A smile flashes briefly across her face but she can't hold it for long; it doesn't hide anything anyway.
His eyes are shut. He's concentrating. When he moves again, it's with extreme care. She's no longer there—she's an idea in his mind, and this makes things easier; all she has to do is relax and wait.
He slides back—a centimeter? Half an inch? An infinitesimal shifting inside her and she wraps her arms around his shoulders.
She thinks to tell him not to come inside her, but it's too late. He slams forward and collapses. It's over in seconds. He's whimpering now, like a puppy that can't find its mother.
Rubbing his back, holding him as he pants, she runs through the calculations in her head. She hopes she'll be okay, but she's not sure. She doesn't want to end up with Jarod's baby.
He curls around her, kissing her collarbone, already confusing her with the release she's just helped him achieve.
“Let me up,” she says. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Quizzical, yearning not to let her go, he releases her and she tiptoes off to wash him out of her. She feels old suddenly, broken, almost like a grown-up. She's sick of being pissed. The sadness is hard enough without making it harder.
She's alone.
She can't give herself away.
Lying next to him later, spooning under the sheet, she feels tenderly toward him. His touch is a comfort, but this changes nothing.
She's still alone.
And when, the next morning, his mother's voice found its way up the stairs—“Jarod? Honey? Where'd you put my aspirin?”—jarring Cheryl out of an anxious sleep, she knew it was time to run away again.
She was too tired, though, and like me, she had nowhere left to go.
I DIDN'T KNOW exactly where Jarod's house was. It had to be less than half an hour's walk away, and I was sure it was west of the river, in a neighborhood that was flat and pallid and gray. Somewhere in the span just north of Cedar-Riverside. A place where the houses were crushed up together, in need
of new paint jobs, where the lawns were choked with weeds and wrapped in chain-link fencing.
This was enough for me to go on. I'd head for the vicinity in my mind and troll systematically up and down each street. There'd be a sign—I knew there'd be a sign—and when I saw it, I'd stop. I'd call Cheryl's name and she'd come running.
What else I'd find there, I wasn't quite sure.
Maybe she was sunk in that harrowed place where the world loses its mass, where the void inside expands and causes hidden corrosion, that place where the people sitting next to you become translucent, half-beings, organisms as simple and motiveless as flagellum. She was curled on the battered couch in Jarod's living room, her head propped on the arm, staring sideways at the dead-bolted and barricaded front door. The TV was off. She was no longer an active agent in her life. She was waiting for the body slam of the future.
Earlier that morning, Jarod had told his mother everything, just like he always did, and she'd responded with an irritated wave. Rolling over in bed, she'd pulled a pillow across her head. Now, I was sure, he was far away, unpacking cartons of mixed vegetables in the frozen-foods aisle of Rainbow Foods. He was jittery, trying to forget that he'd betrayed Trent without tarnishing the glow of what he'd done with Cheryl, torn and reeling and confused by how this thing he'd wanted so terribly much could turn him into such a paranoid wreck.
And his mother sat guard, now, in a wobbly kitchen chair that she had dragged into the room with Cheryl, her bum leg thrust out straight in front of the door, her fingers prying the venetian blinds apart. She was searching the street, not for me, but for Trent. Trent with rocks in his hands, ready to smash the windows. Trent returned to claim what wasn't and had never been his.
