In the kitchen where I remember a wadded-up ball of bread in my shaking mother’s hand, James makes an attempt at familial love by squeezing my shoulder. My body is a house that collapses inward, caves in. No survivors. Just a slice of light from the window above, a dam of water breaking, and the rush of waves careening in. “You’re touching me,” I say.
“I just wanted to see how you are,” James says.
“Complete,” I say.
The following day, I hear them.
“The body isn’t even cold,” James says.
“I thought the body was burned,” Gillian says.
“So now you want to be touched.”
Something in me seizes.
AT DAWN, I wake and select an outfit from one of eight shirts, ten pants, fifteen socks, forty-two pairs of underwear, two bras, and two pairs of shoes. I launder and fold my clothes neatly into drawers with sachets separating the layers. Mostly, I wear blue.
It takes me forty-five minutes to walk the 2.22 miles to the bakery, where I tie a white apron over my blue outfit and make cakes in the shape of eighties cartoon characters. I make and pipe the cakes by hand even though every shop in town now uses industrial mixers—giant machines that sift and mix ingredients. It terrifies me to think of a mass production of buttercream Smurfs, tubs of multicolored dye for Rainbow Brite’s hair, and I indulge in this lamentation with my boss, Minnie, daily.
Minnie makes her rounds about town, sniffing out her competitors and reporting back all the sordid tales of their mediocrity in excruciating detail. “Bunny Blake’s got an apple-pie display in the window. That low-rent charlatan was making a butter crust before she met me. She’s gone fat, you know. Got high on the supply. Don’t get like her, Kate. Fat in all the wrong places.”
I’ll keep that in mind. Sifting flour, creaming butter, and making vanilla extract from scratch, the precision of baking cakes comforts me. Right now I need to follow an outline. I need to color in the lines. This is how I get through my days without screaming. At night, I bite into my pillows and swallow some of the feathers.
In a small voice Minnie says, “You know I’d kill her. I would. With my hands. I’ve never met the woman but I heard the stories. That’s not right what she’s doing, feeding on a dead woman’s leftovers. I made the cake for your mother’s wedding, you know. She was a terrible baker, bless her heart, but she had good taste. Ellie was exacting about the things she loved.”
I nod, crack eggs, and mix in the dry ingredients.
“Funny how she wanted it blue,” Minnie says. “She wanted the whole charade blue, right down to the napkins and frosting. Look at you now, all freckles and red hair dyed blond. You look just like her.”
This is how I mourn my mother: I wear the color she was burned in. Let my hair grow to my waist. Refuse to cut it. I grip the counter with my hands. Don’t cry. Don’t eliminate. Never conceive of a love so deep it threatens to complete.
My grief has yet to take form or shape; it’s a wound that never closes or heals. It’s mammoth. Every day I wake to that word and at night collapse into bed with it. Grief comes like swallows. That’s what it’s like to love someone more than yourself, when what you can feel can only be described as mammoth. Even then, the word doesn’t fit. This is why I can’t be around people. They make my grief small, reduce it to less than the sum of its parts—who gives a fuck about wedding cakes and blue napkins—when it should be sweeping, large, and as dark as the ocean. This is why I cry in cemeteries—the only place where it’s acceptable to be a wreck. It hasn’t been a month and people ask me if I’m better yet. In response, I tell them about this article I read. Charles Manson is getting old and he’s worried about the environment. The scar of the cross on his head has healed and he’s just like the rest of us, frightened of climate change.
Minnie wonders aloud if she’s gone too far? Said too much? “I know how you love, but I also know how you grieve.”
I steady myself. “No, this is good. I need to hear this.”
Minnie lays a hand on my shoulder and says, “You don’t need to be here, kid. You can go home.”
I consider a playlist, music for torching. “No, I need this.”
Sometimes I feel like a vampire.
Come nightfall, I visit the barnacles. They’ve set up shop on the surface of a giant rock in front of the ocean, and this is where I stand most evenings, watching. I run down to the shore and the trees shake from my velocity, never quite resuming their former shape. Don’t ask me to explain why I do this; something about uneven surfaces and permanent attachments pleases me.
The sun settles into the horizon, painting the waves red. Once, I spent an hour watching a public television special on the feeding habits of barnacles. They’re tricky, sessile, set on feeding on anything in motion with their spindly, sticky legs grabbing at things. Determined to drain every bit of life from their host.
Observe the multiplication.
Consider this: Imagine trying to make a life for yourself and there’s some faux mollusk trying to leech it away. Survival is now predicated on discipline—how you notice the drift and cleave, and how fast you’re able to cut it off and push it away. If you don’t, you’ll become lost, unable to locate any semblance of your former self.
A seduction based on legs wrapped around a body, tight. A life boxed in, a constant suffocation, and a realization that there’s no way out—this is what Ellie’s marriage must have been like.
The air is cold now. As I fall asleep I see her body framed in a box. A column of flames swallows her home.
A man waves to me from the lawn. He stands there, one hand patting the side of his thigh while the other is cupped, slowly twisting and turning from the wrist, a wave that reminds me of beauty pageants and tiaras. I open the window and lean out, stare back.
“I think you have the wrong house,” I shout, although something in me knows he doesn’t. He’s exactly where he’s meant to be. From my window I can see that he’s a scruffy, beautiful boy with a mop of blue-black curls trailing down his neck, and an alabaster face.
“We have a lot in common,” he says. “Why don’t you come down and we’ll talk about it.”
“I’m sorry. Do I know you?”
“Let’s say we have a common interest,” he says. Bicycles fly down the sidewalk, mail is being delivered, and weeds are yanked from flower beds. He smiles and says, “It’s the middle of the day, Kate. Public place, lots of witnesses.”
“How do you know my name?” I open the window wider, so wide that the possibility of me falling out of it becomes real.
“My friend Lionel, he’s good with names; he helps me keep track. He’s my table of contents. Aren’t you even the least bit curious why I’m here? What I’ve got to tell you? Because if it were me . . . I’d be interested. I’d already be down here, asking what’s what. Because Kate, I have a lot to tell you. I know things, things about your father. Your real father.”
I run downstairs, almost fall down them.
Closer up, he’s beautiful in a way that’s disturbing. Something about his face, the symmetry of it, reminds me of an unfinished painting. Bushy eyebrows, curls falling over his eyes, wide and blue—his is a face that commands one to stare, to get lost in it. Sometimes I wish I carried that kind of beauty.
“Who are you?”
“You have knees like my sister. Bruised. But I know you’re not like her,” he says. “I’m Jonah. I came a long way to set things right. To clean.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let me tell you about my sister, Gillian,” he says. “The woman fucking your stepfather.”
“Your hair,” I say.
“Is familiar,” Jonah says.
I TOOK THAT woman, my stepfather’s whore, from her home while she lay sleeping. The thermostat was set to eighty degrees, yet she cocooned herself with a pile of wool blankets, the kind that makes your skin itch. Wasn’t she hot, even in the slightest? Didn’t her underclothes cling in all the wrong places? Di
dn’t she want to claw and scratch her calves in the middle of the night? I got sick just looking at her, all moth-like and rapid eye movement. I spent an hour watching Gillian sleep. I monitored the steady rise and fall of her chest under those blankets, and how she rarely shifted from a fixed position. I observed, with disgust, the wrinkled dresses and balled-up T-shirts covering the floor of her closet. How she allowed bits of food to settle into the carpet, to the point that her room smelled of sweet rotting fruit, is something I’ll never comprehend. She owned garbage bags, bins, and cleaning products (bleach! ammonia! hydrogen peroxide!), but it was clear that she never used them. Dust collected around the caps, and the childproof plastic remained intact. Were these products for show, an act of mockery to those who believed in an unsullied home?
Believe me when I say that I considered dumping her in a Hefty bag with a bottle of bleach, a pack of matches, and some rope. She got me so mad! But I’ve learned it’s important to stay the course, see things through, as it were. So I pulled that shiny needle out of my coat pocket, and, with a prick, I made her all mine.
“Do you hear that, James?” I said aloud. “She’s mine.”
WHEN I WAS ten, James told me that teeth were accidental stars God drilled into my mouth. Thanks, God.
When I was eleven, I walked in on my mother punching the Orion’s belt out of James’s mouth. The surgery was painful. The recovery was riddled with obligatory blow jobs, about which my mother complained to a woman who was not her friend.
When I was fourteen, James purchased a wire cage for those stars. My mouth was suddenly a chicken coop.
When I was twenty-five, I watched a pigeon nip at its wing until it could no longer fly.
When I was twenty-nine, I thought I felt something that the books described as love, but it wasn’t. Instead, it was a pain I hadn’t yet registered or recognized.
When I turned thirty-seven, I leaned into Gillian’s hair, took a bite of it, and said, It’s my birthday! Make a wish! I’m about to light all the candles.
I leave a room blazing.
THE WOMAN ON THE HOTEL BED
2013, 1985–1989
MEN PREFERRED ME blond, rich, and on the verge of expiration. I was someone before my hair caught on fire: a woman with a pedigree who glamorously slummed it, the owner of black diamond earrings and forever-bruised knees. A daughter whose heart once broke in four places when my mother called me an expensive parking lot, trash taken out on Wednesdays. Even after that strange woman with the butter breath and wild eyes tied my ankles so tight the slightest movement made my skin scrape and burn, even after the flames singed my hair charcoal—even then, I never considered an apology, a final cinematic plea for forgiveness.
I wasn’t the woman who barged into that house and rearranged the furniture. The house was run-down and flashing No Vacancy long before I pulled up in the driveway and made my demands.
When that woman yanked the sock out of my mouth and said, “Tell me why you did it,” I coughed through tears, “I . . .” Mind changed, sock shoved all the way in, lights out, door locked, and the woman soft-knuckling the window, waving her goodbyes.
Somehow I managed to escape before any real damage was done.
I wasn’t always this way. I wasn’t always the lightbulb hanging over a man’s bed.
WE COULD START the story with me, Gillian. That’s one way to go about it. The story of the home-wrecking whore who got her hair caught on fire and managed to survive. Managed to shake free from the ropes and jump out of a window. Do you know what it’s like to feel your skin burn like paper, to see glass cling to your body? I heard the sirens and smelled the smoke, but you should know that my story begins and ends with my brother, Jonah.
Jonah’s not a man, not yet. In the literal sense of the word, of course, of course, with his license to buy booze he’ll never drink and rent cars he’ll never drive because he walks. But to me he’s a thirty-five-year-old boy with uneven arms from a car accident we don’t talk about. Holes in his arms that are slowly closing up, needle marks everyone wishes they could drywall. Points of entry, Jonah once called them.
In his sleep he talks about a girl called Lucia. In his sleep he’s always talking about girls.
WHEN JONAH WAS eleven he told me that he drew circles around his body with chalk, marker, whatever he could get his hands on, and he’d ask me why people traced outlines around dead bodies. “That’s a myth,” I said. “Chalk upsets the integrity of the scene. Cops take pictures.”
One night after our father came home drunk, Jonah snuck into our parents’ bedroom, and, with string, made an outline of our father’s body. He took all the paring knives out of the kitchen drawer and arranged them around the body, the blades pointing toward his sleeping father. Mother smiled, smoothed his hair in all the right places, and said, “Look at you, saving me.”
“Take pictures,” I said. Sometimes I wrote stories about small children murdering their parents. Sometimes I read these stories to Jonah out loud. But they were just stories—words stranded on a page.
Back then, Mother held Jonah longer than she should. She was always grasping at things, and he seemed to be the one constant, the one thing that would allow for her fierce attachment. Theirs was a love that made him grow and forced her to retreat. When he wandered off, which he was prone to do, she would trail behind, tidying up. When he caught a bird by the legs and squeezed it, hard, Mother begged him to let it go. There was tetanus, rabies, and multisyllabic illnesses to consider, treat, and manage. “Sixteen shots to the stomach,” she said. “Needles as long as your arm,” she said. But he didn’t acquiesce, rather he stared at her with eyes that were a chilling blue, and said, “Do you think it can feel me?” The bird thrashed and Jonah’s arms were clawed but still he held on. Mother later told me she was awestruck, admired Jonah (so fearless!), but I never understood it—how Mother didn’t shake the crazy out of Jonah and lock him in his room. But that was our mother: always wanting to be the thing she created, never what she was.
After a few moments, Jonah let the bird go. Said, “I’m bored with this. Do we need to go to the hospital now? Should we go in the car? But wait, you can’t drive.”
When I was sixteen and back from a short stint at a boarding school out east, Jonah said, “You’re adopted.” Over the past year I had whittled down to bone and was horrified by the prospect of this smooth, buttery cake adding a layer over my slight frame. Was it possible to gain weight by proximity, by standing next to the thing one was desperate to avoid? I felt old. But I was small, like sonnets, and I believed this to be a good thing. Woman as integer. The kitchen was quiet save for Jonah’s steady breathing. Our father was on a plane to who knows where, coming from who knows what, and Mother was in the bedroom, buying skirts from catalogs.
“It’s not my fault you’re a loser,” I said.
“Try putting something in your mouth, give it a new sensation. I’m talking about things that are edible, although that’s debatable.” Jonah reached for a muffin, a blueberry one, which was cruel and calculating because blueberry muffins were my absolute and unequivocal downfall, the one thing that could bring this elimination game down, tip the scales as it were, and he knew this. Look at that fucker tearing into the muffin like some barn animal. It wasn’t even a muffin-top tease—it was a full-on assault, down to the burned ends and crumbs on his plate! As he reached for another muffin I realized I hated him. This was more than the normal sort of hate that transpires between siblings who, say, dodge one another between classes and deny each other’s existence in the confines of fluorescent hallways and cafeterias. Rather, this was a body gone numb, a loathing that rises up your throat, the kind that makes you feral, where I could imagine stabbing my brother with a fork because he devoured what I desired. Look at his mouth, all gruesome and covered in crumbs!
“At least Mom didn’t catch me getting off. Oh wait, that was you,” I said, sipping hot water.
“She probably liked it. Probably the most skin she’s seen in
months. Now I get why Dad put the clamp on porn. Looking through people’s windows and barging into their rooms is far more interesting. You get the unscripted version of things.”
“You’re totally sick.”
“I’m not sick and stop saying totally.”
Upstairs a door creaked. Mother shouted: “What’s with all the yelling?”
“You’re adopted. We picked you from among the children in an orphanage in the Dakotas. You know they had children in cages back then? You were filthy and ate your hair but we took pity on you, loved you anyway. Or that’s what Mom told me. No one told you until now because we didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but someone has to put an end to it. Someone needs to wipe the tears. Come on, make with it, Gillian. Show me sad.”
“Shut up. Shut your mouth.” He’d been on this kick for weeks, talking about bloodlines and lineage, and Mother had said, Well of course you’re not adopted. Who would tell you such a story? Behind me Jonah stood with his finger over his lips. I knew how far he could go, which secrets to reveal and which to keep, so I shook my head and had said, Never mind, never more. Jonah had a way of crawling under your skin and settling there. Altering the way you felt things.
“You’re not our kind,” Jonah whispered to me while he thought I slept. “But maybe that’s a good thing.”
A decade later I reminded him about the argument, to which he replied, “Of course you’re our kind. What does that even mean, our kind ? Who else’s would you be?”
“WERE YOUR KNEES always like that? Bruised?” Jonah says, leaning into me in a way that feels like an intrusion. It’s a month after the hotel room incident and I cut my hair short to hide the fact that parts were burned. What right did he have to my knees? Jonah continues, “It’s a good thing that Ellie’s dead. It’s good. She’s gone one-way while we’re still scrambling for our round-trip tickets.”
Follow Me into the Dark Page 2
