by Shannon Kirk
“Nobody asks questions of people in diners at midnight. Everyone wants to be left alone. So don’t engage,” she said as she opened a grease-smudged door on a streetcar diner.
I yawned in response.
She found a green booth. That’s what I remember of the setting, a green booth in an otherwise silver space. I dragged myself to my side, fighting my eyes to stay awake.
“Do they have cake?” I asked, after reading the menu.
She looked at the counter. I followed her eyes.
“Does the menu say there’s cake? Do you see cake on the counter? Aren’t those pies?”
“Um?”
“Can’t you read? Don’t I teach you?”
“Why are you mad, Mom?” My face burned, and a scratchiness crawled on my neck.
She closed her eyes in such a tight way, her whole face accordioned.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said. “I hate that we can’t have a real birthday for you. I’m sorry.” She rubbed her temples and then lowered her head to look up under the rim of my bucket hat. “Oh, baby, I’m sorry. I’m stressed.”
I didn’t know why she was so stressed. My whole life had been on the run. Back then, I thought our lives were normal. I hadn’t yet gone to any schools, so I had no context. We ordered our food; she let me get whatever I wanted. So I asked for a cheeseburger and a milkshake and a large order of onion rings. She smiled and ordered the same.
A woman with a sheepdog came in, and that’s when the night turned back to black. I’d never seen Mom slide so far into a booth so fast. Never saw her physical fright so deep as when that dog trotted in. Except maybe today when Gretchen said her name was Gretchen.
I didn’t know what to do because I thought he was a really cute, fat, fluffy dog, nothing to be afraid of, unless you’re afraid of shag carpets. Things got worse because the dog came straight up to me. I couldn’t help but pet his Chewbacca face. His big, round, black eyes looked out at me through strands of white fur. The whole while, Mom shrank herself in a corner of the booth. Maybe I was supposed to be afraid of the dog, like Mom—that’s what I questioned. I didn’t know. The dog’s owner turned after reading the specials board, I guess not finding what she wanted, and poof, they were gone. My hand was slimy because the dog slobbered while I petted him, so I dragged my fingers on my jeans to wipe them clean while the waitress served my order.
As I went to pick up my burger, Mom shot up from her coiled crouch in the corner, her back straight.
“Gah,” she said, as if spitting down upon me.
I looked up.
“Do you think, Lucy?”
“What?”
“You do not realize, do you, you’ve contaminated that whole bun with your disgusting hands. You just petted a dog.”
I dropped my meal.
“I, mean, really. What germs might be on there? Do you know?”
I didn’t know. I was ten.
“We’re leaving,” she said, while sliding out of the booth and throwing two twenties on the table. As I walked behind her, the itching on my neck turned into a fire red, so I pulled the hood on my hoodie over my scalp because I didn’t want her to see what felt like popping skin. I had learned and was learning, especially by ten, that if Mom got set off on something, it was best to shrink myself and hide.
Two mornings later, I woke to find she’d decorated our apartment’s dining room as if cartoon characters were coming for a fabulous birthday breakfast. Hundreds of strands of streamers formed a raining rainbow from the ceiling, and a red and purple and blue two-part cake was perched on a stand in the center of the table: a large number one and a large zero, ten was my cake. We never discussed the diner-and-dog incident again.
Now, I run to my little white bathroom as nausea rises in my throat. Doubled over, I try to calm my breath and feel the familiar hives that erupt sometimes when I feel this way, when my heart is full of jellyfish, my brain full of hummingbirds, and my throat full of bile. No hydrocortisone will fight this flare of hives—these are from the mind. Looking in the mirror, this case is bad: my face is popping with stress welts, the horror of which is added to the mosquito bites and blood splashes from me smashing the full-bellied suckers.
I rip out of my smelly jelly T-shirt, out of my black stretch-cotton pants, kick off my slides, turn on the shower, and focus on washing all the bug blood and mind hives off my body.
CHAPTER NINE
After my shower, I went to my room, changed, and cuddled up and napped with Allen. At some point, Mom called my cell from her bedroom and said only one sentence: You’re on your own for dinner. What this meant was I’d have to eat the remainder of the shitty orange peanut-butter vending-machine crackers in my backpack and wash the orange dust down with one of the comped Cokes in the turquoise fridge. We haven’t, obviously, gone to any stores to stock up yet.
It’s night now.
I’m lying in bed, my stomach half-full. Allen is purring and snoring next to me—I had cat food for him, lucky jerk. My window that looks upon the out-beyond field is open. There’s a screen, thank goodness, so no army of mosquitoes can launch a second attack. The wind is high and loud, and this is calming, washing away the interior terror with Mom. Also, when the wind takes a pause to inhale, night crickets sprinkle the lull with chirps that sound like string instruments and heartbeats. And the pond below my window must be infested with bullfrogs, who add echoes of bass horns. An owl hoots here and there. With every minute of these sounds, wind ruffles in and tosses the curtains and then Allen’s fur, then the little hairs on my arms, and I calm more. The clean air smells like the color of light green. I melt.
I’ve launched into a book I found on the shelf by Susan Barker, The Incarnations, about two soul mates who basically can’t separate despite having different lives and bodies over thousands of years. In some lives, they can be pretty terrible to each other. I’ve dozed off a couple of times, but I keep waking because the atmosphere of my reality is so intoxicating and the world of my book so compelling. A perfect night, but for the thing with Mom. The thing that could upturn the peace I’m feeling tonight at dawn. So this is another reason I keep waking, so I can savor the night and the book as long as I can.
Midnight, the moon is high and bright, pulsing in gray shadows and bright white. If the moon’s gray-white pulses were shades of red, I’d think the moon had the same skin as Gretchen. Wind whooshes and whistles and rolls imaginary pebbles in the air, crinkles leaves. I’m calm. No hives. Something about this place, the permanence of the moon in my window, like a framed painting. The force of the constant wind, its tendrils trailing through the air like giant, flying, invisible jellyfish: indestructible. The immovable field of the out beyond. The solidity of the house. Like nothing can shake this, move this.
I think of Jenny. I think of being ripped from her and ripped from a different friend, whose name I can’t even remember now, from the previous school. I think of my transience and how I’m a scar in the moonlight, a blemish to a moon that won’t budge. I’m an insult to the faithful wind that weaves and slides and shimmies, never leaving, as if this hillside and the forest beyond are under a dome or a cloche or a glass bell. This house could be the subject of a beautiful snow globe. We could have everything here. Things could be perfect and permanent.
Two years ago, Mom stopped homeschooling me. A girl in my first-ever school had a group of four close friends; they’d been together since kindergarten. They called themselves the Fives, and she was clearly their leader. She played soccer, and her mom was in the PTA. I used to watch the girl hop in their Range Rover after school, and her mom, who was her older clone, sometimes handed her an after-school cupcake and then put the hazards on and got out of the driver’s side to brazenly, with no shades on, hand out whatever extra cupcakes she had to whoever passed. The girl was super sweet and kind to everyone; I studied her behind my blue fakes. One Monday while we waited for English class to start, I overheard her telling the Fives how on Saturday she’d gone to an aunt’s baby shower
and ate blue cake, and on Saturday night, she and her cousins slept at her grandmother’s house and ate homemade doughnuts and carved pumpkins. She seemed so gold, so natural, in doling out her weekend facts, as if her home-life stories were normal and frequent and not extravagant, unattainable luxuries. I didn’t understand any of her words or any of the places she spoke of. She was aglow with a sustained peace that itself was a whole new state I’d never known existed.
She smiled at me a couple of times when she caught me staring. She didn’t know why I stared; I stared because her life was so foreign to me. I didn’t understand who she was or how she could live so free. How did she walk like that, stopping and waving and smiling to everyone along the way, with her real eyes and no contacts, while I lowered my head and ran fast to enter whatever used car we’d acquired by barter or cash. How? How did her mom stand exposed, doling out cupcakes without sunglasses on, while I’d join my shaded, shrouded, shoulder-scrunched mother in the rear, rear of the pickup line. How? And I’ve realized now, I stared because I wanted what she had. The confident glide, the easy smile, the consistent group of friends—or at least one, a Jenny—the family parties so frequent they were like cast-off pennies, the silly laugh, the whole package of feeling whole that comes with the comfort of knowing you’ll wake in the same bed tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.
Whenever we run, I always make myself believe we move to a new moon, a fresh slate where I’m not a scar yet. And I want to keep this current picture-frame moon, even if it means accepting strange neighbors. I’m exhausted from centering myself under new moons.
A clatter erupts outside, as if wood logs or something heavy is rolling. I think of the bear den Jerry warned about. But then a sudden rap-rap on the casing outside my window jolts me, and when I look, rising up from below the window and staring in at me is Gretchen’s pulsing, red-white moon face. She stares through the screen, and I can’t tell if she’s smiling or not. I’m about to scream, but I bottle the noise, because if Mom finds out about this second window visit, I won’t be able to force a stay.
I walk to the window and stare back, somewhat in a standoff. I do so desperately want to be settled. I’m digging in in my own mind, which is itself a betrayal, even though my true desperation is the center of my own self—and how can I deny truth to myself? How? I’m bad for having this truth, for wanting this and admitting I want this, and so the level at which I want this must be kept a secret. I hate me for being untrue and secretive with Mom. And I’m scaring myself by how much I think I’ll do to ensure we stay—when I don’t even know what that means or what I’ll agree to endure. But something. There’s something I’ll have to endure for this betrayal. A trade, a barter, perhaps, with the whims of the universe.
As I step closer to the window, I’m accepting something, some quiet warning in the back of my mind, blinking. As I look on at Gretchen’s face through the mesh of my window’s screen, both of us standing here staring and silent, I extinguish an early-forming flashing, a red whirl wishing, I think, to blare. Soak this in, brace yourself, you need to stay. Allen is happy in this environment and purring on my new coral-print pillow. I want to work at Dyson’s, which I won’t need Mom to drive me to, because we’re close enough to bike. I want this town. I want this rental. Mom can’t know about Gretchen’s night visit.
Gretchen smiles, showing all her kernels of teeth.
“Didn’t mean to scare you, Lucy. Saw your light on and wanted to do a puzzle with you. I’m going to miss you while I’m at camp. It’s a new Stave, the puzzle, called Waiting for Nightfall. Eight hundred pieces, four thousand dollars.”
Gretchen is a definite boundary jumper.
Also, to see my little pin light on, she’d have to have walked all the way down the windy dirt road from her house and around to the side of mine. What?
One of the important things I’ve learned in being on the run: set clear boundaries early with people, especially the boundary jumpers, the people who assume levels of intimacy they haven’t yet put in the time to attain. The people who say they’ll miss you while they’re at camp when they’ve only met you that same day; the people who ply you with unnecessarily specific details about a puzzle’s manufacturer and title and pieces and price while they stare in your window at midnight. Holy fucking shit.
I swallow my fright, stiffen my composure, build the emotional moat around myself I’ve had to build so many times, bend so my forearms rest on the sill, and now only the screen separates my face from Gretchen’s. I look straight in her blues with my naked violets. I’m banking on the black mesh to wash away whatever color she’s seeing in my true eyes.
“Gretchen,” I whisper, “don’t ever come to my or my mother’s windows again. If you do, we will not be friends. Understood?”
“Oh gosh, yes. I’m so sorry,” she says, and starts crying. “I . . . I . . . I . . . I’m so stupid. I don’t . . . ugh . . . I don’t have any friends, and I don’t know . . . I . . .”
This blubbering crying is the boundary jumper’s classic manipulation, or maybe she’s sincere. Seems the crying came too fast to be real, though. I do think I can, and I do want, to cobble together a safe friendship with this girl. She seems so bad to want it too. But we’re going to need to work on the contours, and she’ll need to understand boundaries. Either way, when you’re on the run, boundaries must be dredged deep and fast and clear, regardless of the boundary jumper’s emotions or intentions.
“Gretchen,” I say with my mother’s icy tone, because ice is necessary to set the fence, “your tears won’t change this rule. Go back to your house, stop lurking around mine. When you get back from camp, we’ll talk about how to be friends.”
“Okay, okay,” she says, sniveling and backing away from the window. “Good night. I’m glad you moved here, Lucy. You’re so cool.”
“Good night,” I say, and close and lock the window and draw the curtains.
I remain fairly pissed off at Gretchen for making it so I can’t listen to the sound of wind tonight. I look forward to listening while she’s away at her jigsaw camp.
CHAPTER TEN
MOTHER
Mag, as her loved ones call her, a loving nickname she rarely hears anymore, has violet eyes. An uncommon mutation, like the long-ago Alexandria Genesis myth, and like Elizabeth Taylor. And her baby girl, at first she couldn’t tell, but as she neared age two, she started to see that she, too, had violet eyes. She caught her mother’s mutation. The violet of their pupils is not albinism, which is the reason for some violet eyes.
She could have named her purple-eyed baby girl Elizabeth, after Elizabeth Taylor. She could have named her Alexandria, after the myth. She didn’t. When it came time to fill out the birth certificate, and high on birthing endorphins, Mag told the nurse her baby’s name was the name of a girl she’d grown up with at the Triple C camp: Laura. She respected Laura’s style, her biting wit, her oddities, her damaged independence, her fierce competitive fire. Laura’s outrageous, accidental shooting of the camp nurse in the ass with an arrow, which she’d learned was no accident at all—benevolent as it was, the act, if not the victim, was intentional. She also respected a danger they shared in secret, and how that secret came to be. Laura was a symbol of the dark and light of Mag’s adolescence, a person who had become both challenge and motivation. Seemed to her in her cloud of postbirth hormones, such was having a child: challenge and motivation. And so, she named her baby girl Laura.
But now, in moments of untethered dramatizing of her life, Mag hates herself for naming her baby girl Laura. As if naming her Laura unleashed a tragic prophecy, like whatever it was that happened to Laura. Illogical, yes, she knows, but in the way she listens to the universe in drives around the country in a beast mobile, at least consistent.
As for herself, she thought of her own name as a nickname started at the Triple C: Magpie. It was this nickname big sis Carly contorted into Maggot or Mag for short. Mag wasn’t her real name, but the loving nickname was who she thou
ght of herself, because love is what she knew. Love is what Carly and her three other sisters bathed her in through childhood.
Mag had been going to the Triple C every single summer, like all her sisters. And, just like big sis Carly, when she aged out, she became a counselor. Several other girls did the same, so they’d become a tight sorority over the years. Ass-shooter Laura, she was among them.
In the summer of 2003, Mag was twenty and working as a lead camp counselor. Carly was visiting the camp for a week to celebrate her birthday (turning thirty-one) and to deliver some news. Over the course of the week, drastic events and news kept changing Mag’s life, one after the other, so by the end of the week, Mag’s life, which had been a smooth spinning top, became a top toppled on its side and rolling off the earth.
The first drastic thing was at the start of Carly’s visit. Carly, whose birthday celebration would be at the end of the week, hadn’t yet delivered whatever news it was she intended to give. Mag and Carly were roaming over to the breakfast hall, a long logwood cabin, when Marianne, the camp director and former camp nurse, whom Laura had shot in the cushy tush so long ago, came running up to them.
“Laura called. She took the last two days off, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Mag said, affirming an obvious and innocuous fact. “So?”
“So, she just called and says she’s not coming back. She was set to be back last night. Said her aunt died and she has to move to Wyoming.”
“Wyoming?” Mag said, looking askew at Carly.
“She never mentioned Wyoming. And what’s with this aunt? Who?” Carly said.
“Don’t know,” Marianne said, flipping her hands in the air. All three women looked to each other and shared confusion.
“Weird,” Mag said, her mouth slack in shock. She’d been sharing bunks with Laura for twelve whole summers. The group of girls who’d done the same, they were all like family to Laura, an only child whose parents boarded her during the school year and sent her to the Triple C in summer. And above all that, Laura and Mag had shared a secret and a secret competition since age fourteen. Nobody else at camp had anything like that with Laura.