Circle Nine

by Anne Heltzel

  Pay our respects?

  In Circle Nine. They stole her away. They have her now, but we can say good-bye.

  Part of me is angry. Can we never be rid of Amanda? Because really, this is what I wanted — for her to disappear, so I can have Sam back, all mine, for good.

  I want you there, he says. It’ll be fun. A day trip. He knows I hate being here for too many hours on end.

  We pull on rain gear. It’s blustery and cold. These feelings are somewhat foreign to me; I used to notice them, but somehow they never touched me. I could feel the cold on my skin without feeling it sink deep below. It is as if a protective orb has always surrounded me until now.

  I shiver as we step outside our home. Sam clasps my hand, and then we are off into the impenetrable world.

  We crouch hidden behind an angry marble tomb many yards away from the crowd.

  It’s a mausoleum, Sam says.

  Like for the Egyptians, I say back. Sam shakes his head. He ignores me. He clutches a colorful strand tight in his palm. It’s one of her bracelets, one she always wore. The lucky one.

  Where did you get it? I ask him.

  She gave it to me, he says.

  When? I press. Amanda wouldn’t have given up the lucky one.

  I took it, he admits. When she died. Look, it’s not like she needs it anymore.

  I nod. I try to stretch my legs out, but Sam stops me, puts a firm hand on one knee.

  We have to stay hidden, or they’ll see us, he tells me. We’ll get in trouble.

  I don’t want to hide. I want to run up past the gravestones over the grass burst through this crowd of people we don’t know jump into the wet soggy earth with Amanda. Who are these people who cluster around her? Who is that overweight man all in black patting that little boy’s shoulder? Why are they here? Amanda was ours. We do not know these people.

  I’m sad, Sammy. I rest my head on his shoulder, where I feel that he is tense.

  Why?

  Because she’s gone.

  She isn’t gone, Abby, he says. Amanda is not dead.

  I am confused, but I don’t say anything. How can she not be dead? She can’t talk to us anymore; she can’t dance in circles or play word games or laugh or kiss Sam when I’m not looking or try to kiss me, too. My anger boils up. I can’t think like this. There is no reason for me to think like this, now that she is gone.

  Sam, I ask, why are we here? Why do we need to see her again? We’re OK on our own.

  She wanted to go to California, Abby, he says dreamily. That’s where she always wanted to go. Let’s go to Cali just as soon as we can. We’ll bring her with us. He has tears in his eyes all of a sudden, and his voice sounds gruff. Rage flows through me at this. He can’t love her. He doesn’t. But maybe he did. Maybe he did love her all his life like she said. What does it mean? How could he love us both? Why is he trying to keep her alive? Why won’t he let her go?

  I never want to see Amanda again. I am a pillar of locusts and vultures and poison and everything bad. I think of her funeral pyre. She is now all burned up so she fits in a small metal jar. I wonder how it was done, if there was a special ceremony for that. I feel at once regretful that we missed it, happy she is gone, sad she is gone, and guilty for feeling happy at all. I am a big, fiery mix of emotions, a column of fire to match her own.

  We wait there long after the Circle Nine people have gone, and they have dumped dirt in Amanda’s hole. My legs are cramped and for a while, I take a nap in Sam’s lap. When he nudges me to wake up, my body feels stiff and tired. It’s long-dark, I can tell from the richness of the shade of black cloaking us. We walk to Amanda’s hole and stare at it for a long time. Sam mutters words I can’t understand. He paws at the earth.

  Maybe she will need it, he says. Maybe it is like the Egyptians. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken it. Sam digs and digs with his hands. He wants to give the bracelet back. Sam digs a tunnel to Amanda. I imagine him crawling through it, as if Amanda is China. My heart is thumping hard in my chest. But suddenly there is a noise and then a light, and we are running off into the night, finding pockets of darkness to conceal us. We are panting by the time we get back to the cave. Inside and outside, the world is a muddled mess of dim and dark and gray. Sam still has Amanda’s bracelet tucked into his palm. When he opens his hand, I see that he’s left crescent moons in his skin, he was gripping it so hard.

  It’s OK, he says, but it sounds like he’s talking mostly to himself. It’s OK. She wouldn’t mind us having it. She wouldn’t mind. He carries the bracelet over to the corner and sets it carefully on a small ledge there. He rummages around the rest of the cave-palace. He returns with some of her things: some clothes she kept here, a toothbrush. He sets them by the bracelet.

  A shrine, he explains. She would have liked that. She liked attention. He looks proud of himself, but I only feel sick. She will always be here. She invaded our space like locusts and won’t ever leave, even in death.

  We are making dinner together, Sam and me. It has been so long since we’ve done it. Sam lights the stove, and I pour glasses of wine fuller than I should. We cook mutton and eat it together at a long oak table, where we sit on either side in high-backed thrones, far away from each other so we have to shout our conversation. The meal is delicious, and I am so happy because Sam is in a good mood. He is so rarely in a good mood anymore. Ever since Amanda . . . but that is finished, and we don’t speak of it.

  Amanda’s shrine is in the corner still, and we fixed her a plate, too, setting it carefully by her belongings. She hasn’t touched it. Sam looks a little worried, but I can tell he is putting on a brave face because the atmosphere is so jolly and he doesn’t want to ruin it. Afterward, we curl up together, drunk and full, and the cave is filled with our laughter, lit from within by a rainbow aura. It is like old times.

  Yesterday, I had another one of my dreams. The same woman, the same girl. A man this time, too. They’re getting clearer, and I can make out very specific facial features now, and so my sketches are more detailed than ever. When I showed Sam my new sketch, he was enraged. I would not use that strong of a word unless I thought it were true. He tore it in half, and I nearly cried. I used to think he gets so angry because he is afraid I would leave him to try to find these other people. He must know that no one could take me away from him. But if he doesn’t, it means he’s afraid of something else. And so I can’t help but think he might know something he isn’t telling me. When he looked at my drawing, his face was ashen. Maybe Sam is right to be worried. After all, they are from Circle Nine.

  His anger, though, makes me angry. Ever since Amanda died, my itch to know who I am has grown, as if the shock of her death brought something in me alive. The pain in my head doesn’t stop me; I push through it, along with the danger of Sam’s fury and of Circle Nine. I am hungry for clues. I suspect this angers him more than anything else. But after all, he hid my little journal so long ago. If he is hiding something else, I must find it. But along with these thoughts races a parallel line of thinking that shouts in my ear: no, no, you are betraying yourself by doubting him! He is your only ally. I don’t know truth from anything else. I realize now that I never had a concept of truth, only of instinct. I must try to trust my instincts. There’s just one thing I need to find out, above all else — even if my identity remains elusive, I need to find out who the people in my pictures are. Why Amanda reminded me of Dream Girl. How it all connects.

  I eye Sam from across the room, where I am dusting Amanda’s shrine. (I like to keep it clean.) He is reading a book and writing in his journal. He is sitting in the leather chair, which has brass studs lining its bottom edges and arms, and his feet are propped up on our ottoman. He smiles at me, and I smile back quickly before I resume my polishing.

  I am suspicious of Sam and the way he’s been acting. I wish I could help it. I feel guilty. When I try, I can swat my suspicion away and not think about it. It’s easiest when he’s happy and we’re like we used to be, like tonight. But even now, I
think of it.

  This one was so awful that I wake up shaking with my mouth open in a wide-mouthed grimace because I’m unable to scream. I feel his arms tucking around me as he whispers shhhh into my ear.

  What this time, baby?

  Another fire, I gasp. And two others.

  Who was it? Did you see them this time?

  A man and a woman, Sammy. Dead. Their eyes were lifeless, their faces burned. They were wrapped all around each other, intertwined like we are now. They were dead, but then the woman reached out to me, made a grab for my hand. I looked into her eyes, and they were mine.

  What do you mean, made a grab for you?

  My wrist. But I was very small, just a little girl. Her fingers broke off where they touched me, crumbled to dust. I ran to a dark space under a cupboard and hid.

  How old? He pets my hair.

  Eight, maybe. Nine. Sammy, I think they were my parents. I think they didn’t want me to leave.

  No, baby. You and me, we don’t have families.

  Not anymore, you mean.

  No. Never. That’s why you can’t remember anything before me. You’ve always belonged to me.

  Then why do I dream these things? Who are these people? Who is that girl? I challenge him because something in me says I know different.

  Was she there, too? His tone is sharp.

  No! I say. Just the other times. The times I’ve told you about.

  OK, he says soothingly. Back to bed, mija. Forget all that. Soon he is snoozing.

  But forgetting has always been my trouble. I don’t want to forget; I want to cling to these memories and dreams, which come nearly every evening now, much more often than I admit to Sammy. Something in me makes me hold back from him. They’re more real to me when he can’t just explain them away. They’re more real than anything I’ve ever known. Sometimes, and then it scares me, they’re more familiar to me than Sammy.

  I don’t know Sammy all the time anymore. I look at him sometimes and I see this foreign person, this being other than myself. He didn’t used to be a separate being. He was as much of me as my arms and legs. Tearing him away, I used to imagine, would cause too much bleeding for me to stay alive. Now I think I could stay alive. But I wouldn’t want to. I miss feeling sewn together, and the times I don’t feel it I know I am more alone than anyone else in the universe. So I hold on to him as tight as I can. Even so, the more I realize I could maybe survive without him, the more I turn toward these memory-gifts. And the more memories I invite in, the more my headaches improve; the pain in my head is a barrier that’s crumbling, leaving me freer than before.

  These changes tug at my world and make me fight with Sam and make things bad between us, and the dynamic shifts every time just slightly and I fight to get it back but it’s so elusive. How could things have once been so perfect? I see the world now in all colors and shades of darkness and light, and the darkness mixes with the light until it’s indiscernible, where before the only dark was outside our home and the only light within. Something awful has happened to change me. And with it came the girl with the black hair and these people, my parents, and they’re poking their way into our home and my head. Nothing is safe from my nightmares. I am not safe; I don’t know what is real and what is imagined. Sammy is my only voice of reason, but sometimes the darkness takes him away, too, and then I have only myself. I can feel a gap opening between Sam and me like when Amanda was around, but this one has nothing to do with jealousy. I will stop telling Sam about my dreams. I’ll figure it out on my own.

  It’s been weeks of this mourning and not mourning because Abby, she’s still with us — don’t you see? Soon we’ll go out West and it’ll be OK. All three of us! That’s what she wanted; we’ll give it to her. And nervous agitation and nightmares, so I convince Sam to change things up. We can only take so much of our old routine, and everything feels stale now anyway. I once loved the long, languid hours of it, but now it only makes me sick with unease. My stomach has turned more nervous, and I’m always sick, sick with constant pains that keep me in the bathroom forever and because of it, my appetite has shriveled up into a walnut, old and weathered. I am desperate for change.

  So I tug Sam’s arm and whine until he agrees. We are to go to the cinema. The word is delicious in my mouth. He agrees and I am like a child! I am so excited. But there’s also the thrill from the danger of it. We are going to the cinema, which is in Circle Nine, which of course is horribly dangerous. Sam hopes, I think, to drive away my restlessness with one night of recklessness.

  I dress up sexy for the occasion. Amanda has left behind a black slinky something that isn’t quite a dress, more a bandage that wraps my body tight to the thighs as if everything above that is one big sore it needs to protect. Sammy won’t be able to see it much, though, because it’s black night out, so my dress and the air around us and everything we see will blend into one black haze. That’s why Sammy agreed, anyway. The cinema is a night thing we found out about in the layers of newspaper that wrapped our fresh fish dinner the other night. It was printed in ink: outdoor night cinema on the big screen, given by a local documentary film club — and the ink rubbed off on our fillet’s underbelly as if we were meant to eat the headlines, too. And so Sammy has agreed because in the night we are more protected, and it is likely we will be safe from the horrible things that haunt Circle Nine in the day. Which is why we go for food and our other things we need mostly just in the night. And now our Date will be in the night, and we’ll be like a normal couple, the kind we read about in Sam’s novels. I hope the cinema will become a regular thing.

  I slather on lipstick, the pink stuff, and put green sparkles on my eyes. Traces of Amanda on my face. When I am done my eyes match my peacock-feather boa. Sam looks at me and part of him smiles, but then he removes the boa and makes me wipe my lips on the fabric of his dark sweater, where the pink turns into nothing but a greasy smudge.

  If you want to go unseen, he says, you’re hardly trying.

  I just got carried away.

  Then we are walking through the trees for fifteen, twenty minutes until the trees break and we are on the border of a beautiful wide park. I can feel Sam’s hopes for me waxing in every step. He thinks this film will cure me of my nightmares and make me docile again, content with only our little nucleus. But when I see the rows of people stretched out in an ocean before us, I am anything but. I am more intoxicated by Circle Nine, even if I am still frightened as ever. I pause.

  Is this the same place as before? I ask him.

  What do you mean, before?

  Before. With the fire. Are we in the same town?

  No. I feel Sam’s hand clench mine tight. We’ve left that place behind. We’re somewhere different now. This is the town I go to for food sometimes. The town where Sid lives, you remember?

  But where? I only want to get my bearings.

  North, Abby. North of there. Don’t worry about it. Let’s go before we’re late.

  Sam clutches my hand as I move forward, drawing me back toward the trees.

  We stay here, he says. He points to a grouping of rocks just outside the trees, far back from the crowd. Crowds are dangerous, he reminds me. So we keep our distance.

  As the film flickers on, there’s nothing I can concentrate on so much as the people in front of me. They turn their attentions to the screen, but if I look closely, I can see more than that. There are girls scooted backward between their boys’ legs, couples like Sam and me. And they curl into each other like we do. They don’t look so dangerous.

  There are groups of girls my age laughing with each other. There are picnic baskets spread at their feet, and they reach for cheese and crackers at the same time, brushing knuckles without taking their eyes off the screen. It’s an intimacy I can’t have with any girl. It’s something I could never have had with Amanda, who was always too cunning to relax into me, threading her affection with mine like these girls do, even when we were getting along. It’s something I think I might feel with the
girl from my dreams.

  I try to think about the movie and enjoy Sam because that is what I came here to do. It is our big Date. But somehow I feel sordid and sick again in my slinky dress and heels. The other girls are wearing jeans and cotton shirts and they look lovely, and it is I who is the ugly thing here, not Circle Nine. I make big efforts to stop thinking; thinking so much all the time is what Sam hates most about me. And so I bring my eyes to the screen. It is a documentary.

  A selection of short films, Sam whispers in my ear. He has found a program which has drifted from somewhere along this summer breeze.

  Which one are we on? I ask.

  Birdcalls America, he says. I am transfixed for a while as I watch a man in a kayak paddle across a long, wide stream, probably very dangerous, with creatures that would gobble him alive, in search of the elusive ivory-bellied woodpecker. He finds him without much trouble, although he’s whispering most of the time so as not to disturb the bird, and so the camera doesn’t pick up much of what he says and I barely know what’s going on. Then after his victorious moment in which he wades across the stream (and I’m not so much frightened anymore as exhilarated) and snaps a shot of the woodpecker, and then becomes famous across bird-watching circles in America, the screen fades out.

  Then on again.

  The Forgottens: A Story of a Lost Youth.

  I sit taller on my rock.

  It is all about no ones, kids like Sam and me, without families or attachments. That’s what we know.

  But these kids were born with families who were ripped from them, either in tragic accidents or circumstances they couldn’t prevent, like poverty. Or maybe some were abandoned by parents who were sick.

  Suddenly a flash enters my skull. It sears in pain. I am trembling. I can feel Sam go stiff beside me.

  Let’s go, he whispers.

  No. I refuse. I stay put. He knows he can’t yell because we are close enough to the people to cause a scene. So for once, I have my way.