by Shannon Kirk
“Please try Gretchen Foulin again,” I say.
He does. And still nada.
“Try,” I hesitate. “Try Foulin and kidnapping,” I rush out before my hives stop me.
Dali shudders, stalls, looks at me. His forehead is dancing between furrowed brows and a twitching eye. “Lucy?”
“You promised to not ask or say anything.”
He winces his chin to the side and swallows, appearing to accept a promise he now realizes he might have made with a devil, and to which he is honor bound.
My heart expands to take up my whole body and is beating inside my arms as Dali types.
Just like Mom said, there are no kidnapping reports involving anyone with the last name Foulin. I walk away from Dali, cradling my skull, so completely disappointed at finding nothing. And now I’m startled by how disappointed I am. I don’t know what I expected to find. What specific answer about myself I thought was going to be so easy to uncover once I finally got the guts to look. But I know for sure, like an unrelenting need, I must find the truth. Right now, though, I have no other clues, or none I’m willing to tackle tonight, and I’m exhausted, wishing my heart would slow the fuck down before I puke. There is that metal box Mom keeps, the one I’ve never opened, that she guards like an archangel, guarding the meaning of life.
I could expand on what I’m thinking and say all this to Dali, who I feel waiting for me to turn and speak, but I squat to the floor, still cradling my own head. I could tell him about the metal box, ask him his thoughts. I could take out my contacts, show him my violet eyes.
There is one thing tonight did prove. To sum it up, finding nothing on the name Foulin, confirming my suspicion that the name has no apparent origin in a country unfriendly to women, means my suspicion is true: Mom lied. I’ve studied her construction of lies for years, and now I’m sure, Foulin and the way she told me, wanted me to be distracted by the name, yeah, Foulin is a fucking lie. Proving Mom a liar to me about me, that was the one item on my pick list of items, the core angst I have, that I wasn’t sure I was ready to face. But now I know. I know in my jellyfish guts.
And I can’t go further than that tonight. Can’t open any more boxes, real or figurative.
Not tonight.
I turn around to Dali.
“Lucy, what is going on? Why would you have me look up kidnapping? And what is this with your eyes not being blue?”
“My eyes are my eyes, Dali. Please don’t say anything.”
“Come on. I’ll drive you home. You’re too upset. I can’t let you leave like this.”
This is kind of Dali, I know. But I can’t have him driving me home. I bolster all the strength I have left tonight to make him think I’m fine to ride home alone. I switch to a false levity. “Oh, you think I’d be caught dead in a truck with a turkey on top?” I’ve been teasing Dali all summer about his tiny red truck with the Dyson’s mascot turkey on the roof. The truth is, I love that damn truck. I would gladly be caught dead in such whimsy.
He flips up his hands and smiles, knowing best not to push.
I could tell Dali where I live, that I lied on the employment form. I could tell him the bargain I made with myself to control Gretchen Sabin’s creepy lurking so as to stay in Milberg. I could tell him how my life is a lie. I am a lie.
But right now I’m grabbing my backpack out of my cubbyhole, and I’m walking to the back door toward the bike that used to belong to the Sabins’ old renter, the vanished one. And my mouth is sealed.
Core strength, I’m finding, the kind to withstand hurricanes of hurt from your closest loved one, is not available like an easy-peasy bag of quick-set cement. It doesn’t magically appear when you start your period, and thus your womanhood, or just like that when you want, when you imagine you need adult fortitude. No. Core strength and conviction require me to slow down. Require layers of rebar and steel mesh, after finding ground of granite rock bed, and waiting for framing and then the setting of concrete, the kind that takes hefty mind machines to mix. I’ve done some groundwork, I’ve set what should be an achievable, albeit difficult, goal: living in freedom and truth. It’s just I need to calm and set, wait for the frame of my strength to find shape. No more work tonight.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A whole summer has passed. All of July and now most all of August, and life has been generally okay, with an undercurrent of odd and awkward patches. Gretchen and I are like two adversaries, stuck on a deserted island, who must cooperate in order to survive. I can’t say our time together is wholly unpleasant, although most often it is horrible or horrifyingly creepy. But I do enjoy constructing puzzles. The hypnotic rhythm, the satisfaction, the meditation, the reward of making a disconnected picture come together.
Not once have I mentioned the puzzles Gretchen gifted to troll me; they remain under my bed. With her, I have to constantly set stark and deep and definite boundaries. I am always making rules of engagement and pushing back on her aggressive stares. One rule is that I will not go inside her house, and she may not come into mine. I require we meet in the out beyond, where I can bring my easel and case of paints, and she can do her puzzles on a quilt. We usually end an afternoon in a sort-of-civil Scrabble match that actually often ends in her screaming and me storming off. I warned her to never come to my window again or we’d move.
She hasn’t tried to sneak up on me at Dyson’s again, and frankly, she never, ever goes to town, that I know of. So all her prodding to go bike riding for snickerdoodles when I first moved here, I’m not sure what that was about. It might have been her way of trying that out with someone, and when I rejected her, she came up with a new game in her mind.
I’ve watched Jerry bring home bags of groceries from Boston, which I suspect someone else places in the trunk for him. And I’ve watched Gretchen carry them inside. Jerry drives to town early in the mornings, I notice, and comes home with to-go coffee and a wax bag of snickerdoodles, which Gretchen leaves the house to take out of the car for him.
Anyway, because she doesn’t go to town, and apparently Jerry doesn’t talk to anyone, nobody knows where I live—I never corrected the address of my falsified employment application—nobody knows I have any connection to Gretchen or Jerry Sabin. Except Dali, but it’s been a month since the night I asked him for help, and I haven’t been ready to discuss any more with him, and he hasn’t pushed. We just sit together during breaks under the lace-throwing tree in a silence I’d equate to medicine, medicine for me, and medicine for him too. It’s possible, maybe, he knows where I live and isn’t calling me out, because I think he might have followed me home that night I left so upset—he may have trailed me to make sure I was okay. Maybe.
But I trust him to keep my address a secret if he did. Like a true Jenny, he’s willing to accept who I am as is and the little I can offer. I own my secrets; he owns his.
Also, at Dyson’s, four times this summer, I’ve had to duck and run to the back room when bearded-man Dr. Nathan Vinet came in. Nathan’s son, Thomas, he’s around town all the time, so I lurk in the shadows of the eaves when I leave Dyson’s, find my bike fast, and race home. But I’ve avoided both of them so far this summer. I work a scattered schedule of part-time hours, so he can’t have tracked me, if he’s tracking me.
School is going to be a challenge, but not impossible, because Gretchen won’t be going. Dali advised that Gretchen, as I suspected, indeed has no friends. Apparently, people consider her a freak but stay away from her, which is easy, because she’s never away from her brick fortress, anyway. They think she’s cursed and can cast spells or is otherwise bat-shit crazy. And the “spell” she had a few years ago. Well, the spell got her expelled, for “the safety of the students.” According to Dali, she freaked out at school and stabbed a girl in the back with a No. 2 pencil and then stood on a chair and screamed about how the girl was screwing the devil in visits to hell each night.
Word is, after her hospitalization, Jerry Sabin chose to allow Gretchen to educate herself through onli
ne courses. Nobody understood the structure, the management, the oversight of such a situation, because he wasn’t homeschooling her, so the local coalition of homeschooling parents couldn’t certify his curriculum was on the up-and-up. But then again, nobody cared to push too hard. Gretchen was gone away from their kids, and that’s all that mattered.
So to sum up, seems some of the kids in this town really do believe all the Blair Witch crap about Gretchen and the brown hermit house behind Gretchen’s brick fortress. I’ve told Dali whoever believes the Blair Witch crap is immature, and he agrees. But I can’t get into any of that, so I work at Dyson’s, sit with Dali on breaks, go home, read at night in my room with Allen on my lap, and meet Gretchen in the out beyond for blips in the in-between daylight times. We’re not together all of the in-between daylight hours either. Gretchen naps a lot during the day. The bags under her eyes are often black and frankly, fixed now, having gotten worse over the summer. She says her face looks tired because she can’t stop doing puzzles and can’t sleep.
Mom still won’t look at me. In fact, if she catches sight of my face straight on, she definitely winces. We live on separate islands in the same house. Her limited sentences in my direction are terse, using the least number of words possible for a complete thought: “I’ll leave tuna casserole for when you’re done with work”; “I’ll be in my room, working on my book. Be quiet”; “Cash your paycheck, put the money on the counter. I’ll stow it in the metal box.”
Today is the start of our last week of summer vacation. I’m on my way to the out-beyond field to paint while Gretchen does a puzzle. In walking through our red-turquoise galley kitchen with my easel and paint case in hand, I pass Mom buttering toast by the stove. She doesn’t look up, as I turn sideways to slip past her. I say nothing and take great care not to allow the long apex of the easel to brush even a hair on her—don’t want any eruptions. She doesn’t move to open the door for me, so I juggle all my stuff and bumble my way out.
It’s been like this all summer between us.
A whole summer of not talking with Mom, a whole summer of Mom imposing her steel, ice silence, her mood, is the longest we’ve ever lived through one of her cold spells. But that’s not the only thing that’s different about this cold spell. Normally, I’d sweat this tension, suffer hives, and cry alone at night. I’d find ways to make her relax, fall on myself to make sure she knew I knew she held all the control. I’d make her big, happy, homemade lasagnas and plated chicken masterpieces, displayed like artistic sculptures on heated plates with perfect garnishes. I’d cook her reassurances. I’d serve my subservience. But ever since Dali proved my worst fear, that our life is a lie and the lie is subdermal, I’ve been living with a low-grade, growing anger in the very center of myself. Like I’m some iceberg, staring down the hull of a boat I aim to gut. So perhaps it’s possible this cold war steeling the air between me and Mom is a mutual division between us. Perhaps this time, I’m holding the line too—and I note, I haven’t erupted in hives this summer, despite her chills on me. I know my reason for being cold, and I suspect Mom knows I have a reason and knows she’s not the only one to divide us this time. Maybe she’s guilty. Or maybe she’s frightened. I still don’t have the resolve to discover more.
Gretchen and I are in the out beyond. I’m standing at my easel with a canvas, painting the fern garden that I imagine is full of fairies. My case of paints is open and on the ground. Gretchen’s sitting on a quilt, working on a puzzle of leg bones. She’s again in her apple-print sundress, clean and crisp, like always. I know she wants me to ask why she wears only this dress. I don’t ask; I don’t give her inches.
“My dad didn’t break his leg in a rock trap,” she says. “I was mad when he said that to you. You don’t need those details.”
All summer, Gretchen’s and my relationship has been in bursts in this field, blips of time during the day, when I’m not working at Dyson’s and she’s not napping. So Gretchen hasn’t had much of a chance to say weird things to me. And when we do meet up in daylight hours, once she gets into a puzzle, she’s transfixed. She’s always brought a puzzle with her to our meetings in this field, so we actually don’t talk much.
But she’s agitated today. She’s mentioned twenty times how I start school in a week. This is the first time she’s abandoned a pile of puzzle pieces to say much at all.
“What?” I say, dropping my brush away from the canvas. A plop of green acrylic hits the toe of my sneaker. I lower my other arm, which cradles a palette with a well of water in a cup holder. The water spills over the edge and onto the grass.
Gretchen stares into the wedge of woods where the trespassing signs and electric fence and traps start.
“I could show you,” Gretchen says, still looking to the woods.
“Show me what?”
“Where, how, Daddy really broke his leg.”
Gretchen’s expression is stone. And her skin isn’t pulsing. The bags under her eyes are so deep, her face is like a rotting jack-o’-lantern. Her typical loose hair is limp.
“There’s so much you haven’t seen in the woods yet, Lucy. So much you don’t know. Don’t you want to see where Daddy really broke his leg?”
“Just tell me, Gretchen.” More green plops on the toe of my sneaker. More water spills from the well in the palette, which is basically vertical, since my arm has gone slack.
How did Jerry break his leg? Why would he lie? I remember Gretchen seemed bothered when he explained the rock pyramids. Why does she want to drag me to her creep-ass mosquito forest?
Gretchen looks down at her puzzle and shakes her head. “Nah. You have to see.”
I stare at her, she stares back, and neither of us blink, because this is a standoff. It’s feeling like I need to set another rule. I tighten my arm back up, making the palette horizontal again. I raise my green-drenched brush and dab paint where I’m painting thick ferns.
“Well, I’m at Dyson’s in about a half hour, so if you’re not going to tell me, then I guess I won’t find out,” I say. “In fact, I need to get ready to go to work now.”
“Do you know who you are, Lucy?” Her eyes seem vacant, and she casts them, in a somewhat lethargic manner, back to her puzzle. She strokes a piece. Meanwhile, my entire insides have flared awake, and I could shoot off like a rocket.
“What?”
“Nobody knows you and Susan live here. Some people might have a vague awareness Daddy and I have renters, but everyone’s too consumed to track the comings and goings of transients, like you and Susan, and tourists. But will that change once schools starts?” She doesn’t appear lethargic anymore; now she’s like an overpopulated beehive on a weak branch, full of nervous anger. Her eyes are beaded, her body twitching, skin pulsing. She’s huffing short exhales through her nose.
Why is she so confident nobody knows we live here? Why is she desperate and angry?
“I’m leaving for work.”
“I think you should call in and come see where Daddy broke his leg for real.”
I can’t give her an inch. I can’t let her get a rise out of me. She’s fucking with me and wants to scare me in her horror woods full of rumors and mosquitoes—this game is actually one-sided: Can she make me flinch, not who will flinch first. Am I focusing too much on her crazy world and not the fact she questioned my identity? My real life? Did she ask if I know who I am?
Why do I put up with this craziness? Why do I meet up with her? She feels like a tempting game. Or she and I are a tempting game. Two trains about to collide. A beautiful horror. An irresistible, bad, bad addiction. I can’t look away. Who else do I have in my life, anyway? I’m no prize. My own mother is a liar and winces to see me. Nobody knows we live here. Dali kinda does, but he’s about to leave for college. Do I know who I am? Yes, I know who I am. But I don’t know who I really am. I’m not sure I have the core strength to find out yet.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I packed up my paints, folded my easel, and when I hurried past Gretchen on th
e quilt, she bit at me, chomping on the air, and then forced a haunting laugh when I jumped. As I fast-walked to the uphill path between the fairy fern garden and the cattail patch, she kept watching me. I played at ignoring her, even though chills shook my arms. I nearly dropped all my paints.
I’m at my register at Dyson’s. Been here a half hour.
“Lucy,” someone says behind me, across at the other register in the center circle, the one to my back. I turn and see Mom, checking out with the other counter girl.
Why didn’t she come to my register? She’s buying flounder and a block of swiss cheese.
“Mom?” She hasn’t come to Dyson’s once this whole summer. She’s left me notes to pick things up and bring them home in my backpack. And actually, why is she even here? She’s always so strict about not being seen together in public.
“Lucy,” she says. And now the other counter girl is leaning to the side so Mom can see me straight on. I’m ignoring my own line of customers. “I forgot to grab olive oil. Can you please grab a bottle? You have your backpack with you, right?”
“Yeah. No problem,” I say, but I can’t hide the confusion in my voice or on my face.
Sandra had commented when I clocked in, “Mutha natcha’s bitchin’ with wind taday.” So the two store doors that are typically open in the summer are shut. Which means every time a customer comes in or out, a bell jingles. As I go to ask Mom if she wants me to grab anything else from the store to bring home, the bell jingles. I reflexively look to the door.
It couldn’t be worse. My greatest fear is true.
In walks Dr. Nathan Vinet with his son, Thomas, the two damn people I’ve been avoiding all summer. Of course they waltz right in on the first day Mom comes to visit. And the first time all summer she’s looked me dead in the eyes and not winced.