I wish the men would stop talking. I wish the men would stop crying. I wonder why the men are crying.
—
The warmth of a wet washcloth. The smear of ointment. The clean smell and gentle press of medicated gauze, the zip of white tape. The men are no longer crying. There is a woman now. She is not my mother.
—
I wish I could open my eyes.
I don’t want to open my eyes.
I hear the sound of crying again and now I recognize that it’s me, I am crying.
Now it’s a woman’s voice and a man’s voice and the night is moving fast. I’m bobbing up and down on a sea, dark above me, dark all around. Dark inside me.
The woman says, “I’ll kill him myself.”
The man laughs, but not in a cruel way. “Who couldn’t see this coming?”
The woman says, “Not the fucking teenager in the backseat, that’s for sure. Dear God, we are going to need junk food. Lots of junk food.”
—
The sea shakes. The voices get farther and farther away and then there is nothing for a long time. Then the sea shakes again and something grabs my leg. I want to yell, but I can’t. My mouth is filled with wet stones, like before, the very before. Before Creeley. My mouth stones have come back to me.
The man says, “She’s still pretty out of it, but her dressings look good. She’s gonna have a shitload of trouble walking for a few days, though.”
The woman says, “You asshole, did you eat all the Cheetos?”
The man says, “Did you catch all that about her friend, what was she saying? Like, her friend’s a vegetable or something.”
The woman’s voice is sad. “I had to stop listening.”
I stop listening.
—
The woman and the man have left again. Rain spatters on the sea. I have to go to the bathroom.
I have to go to the bathroom. No one answers, because I have not said it out loud.
I feel around with my hand and familiar pain shoots up my arm. I’m in the backseat of a car, ridges of the fake leather under my fingernails, a square, unlit light in the drooping fabric of the ceiling. I push myself up and blink. I have to go to the bathroom. All I can see from the window is blackness, shadowy trees.
Gingerly, I ease over to the car door, bite my lip to keep from crying out, and push the door open, feeling the stretch and heat of my torn arms and an odd burning on my stomach. I haul my leg out and lean forward to stand up. As my toes hit the ground, lightning cracks through the soles of my feet.
I pitch forward, smashing my mouth and nose into hard dirt. I wail, inhaling dirt, and start to choke.
Hands roll my body over, brush dirt and stones from my eyes and mouth. I blink.
Linus’s wrinkled, sun-leathered face. Tanner’s shit-eating grin. The matching connect-the-dot freckles on their faces.
I spit dirt from my mouth. I have to pee. I move my hands, pat myself so they’ll know what I mean.
They burst out laughing. “That’s going to be pretty painful.” Tanner grins.
—
Linus pushes the bucket underneath me and spreads my legs. My ass is on part of the backseat. Linus pulls an ugly pair of sweatpants off me. She glances at my thighs and then looks up at me, her face surprised. Of course. How could she know about those scars? She only thought I had them on my arms. “Girl,” she says, but nothing else. She sighs.
She apologizes about the pants; they were the first things she grabbed out of her backpack when she and Tanner went to my room, looking for me. She didn’t know at first what Hector and Manny and Leonard were doing, she tells me, so she got angry, pulling them away, roughing them up a bit. Linus is a strong woman.
Linus says, “Then I saw they were crying. And drunk, too, but trying to clean you up as best they could with paper towels and handkerchiefs.” She tells me they were all dressed up for the opening but came back when I never showed.
My pee spatters into the bucket. Linus waits until I’m finished and then hands me a tissue and empties the bucket by a tree. She tosses the bucket into the trunk of the car.
“Stepping in the glass, that was a nice touch, Charlie. You’ll be paying for that for days.” She jimmies the sweatpants back up my shivering legs, heaves them up my ass, and pulls them to my waist. She eases me back into the car.
“Your friend Blue said you might be quiet for a while. I have to say, it’s a little unnerving.”
Her smile is sad and resigned. “We’re at a cemetery in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Did you know Tanner is my brother? We stopped off for a quick visit with Dad.” Farther away, in the blackness, Tanner is kicking a tombstone and spitting on the ground.
“We didn’t really get along all that well with old Dad.”
She wipes her face, hard, with the palms of both hands and then calls out to Tanner, tells him it’s time to go.
—
Tanner glances at me in the rearview mirror, the corners of his mouth salty with potato chips. “It looked worse than it really was.” He works the salt from his mouth with his tongue. “Remember? I’m studying to be an EMT? I had my practice bag with me. Fixed you right up.”
The sky rolls by the window, black dotted with thousands of snow-white stars. I wonder what time it is. My hands drift under the sweatshirt Linus dressed me in, skim over the bandages there.
I am Louisa now. I have no room left.
—
I feel hollow, but not from hunger. I try to locate something in the hollowness, but I can’t. My back aches from lying on the car seat. All of me aches. I sit up, ignoring the sparks of pain tearing across my stomach. Tanner has fallen asleep. His head lolls against the rolled-up window.
Linus clears her throat, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “Riley’s dealer Wendy stole your money and trashed your room. She followed your friend home after you took off. Beat her up pretty good. That skinny guy on your first floor—guy with a lot of books? He’s taking care of your friend. Riley and Wendy stole somebody named Luis’s car, bought some more drugs who knows where, and started driving out to the casino. After they cleared out the True Grit night deposit, that is. I mean, you know, he’s been stealing for months, too, to buy his shit.” She tightens her fingers on the steering wheel, keeps her eyes on the dark road.
I think of all the times he gave me money and I went to Wendy’s house for him. How Julie was so worried about the register being low on count. I close my eyes. I’m so ashamed.
“He goes on benders, our Riley, though he mixed in a lot of other shit with this one. He’s a chipper, but I bet you figured that out, right?”
Riley’s cherrywood box. The minuscule crystal-filled bags, the eerie, burning plastic smell.
“They didn’t make it to the casino, Charlie.” Linus nibbles a Cheez Doodle. “Riley flipped the car. The skank is pretty hurt, but Riley, being Riley, is pretty much okay. He always seems to come out on top, that Riley.”
—
Outside the diner, a pink dinosaur with peeling paint growls, his mouth missing teeth. I’ve been seeing a lot of kitschy roadside things from the car window as we drive: dinosaurs, robots, rocket ships, bulbous-headed aliens. Is that what New Mexico is? Fake dinosaurs and aliens? Land of the lost.
I watch Tanner and Linus through the car window. They’re sitting in a booth. He chews a hamburger and talks on his cell phone. Linus stirs her tea and writes in a notebook. Once, at the coffeehouse, she told me she journals every day, “to keep things straight in my head.”
I wonder if they’ll bring me something to eat or if Tanner will give me more pain pills. Linus doesn’t want him to; I heard them whispering when they thought I was asleep. But I do want them; I want to keep myself formless, adrift. I don’t want to land yet.
The sky here is different than in Tucson, a brighter blue, almost candyish. The clouds seem to hang in it so gently, like puffs of smoke. The car is thick with the smell of snack food, sugary soda. A fly creeps slowly across the ceil
ing. I think of Riley in his kitchen, his terrible stranger’s face. The ache rises up in me again, howling and angry. I press my hands hard against my eyes.
—
Linus is in the passenger-side seat now, sleeping. It’s night again. Warm desert air trickles into the car. I wet a finger in my mouth and stick it into the empty potato chip bag, suck on the salt, think of Jen S. that night in Rec, when she sucked salt from the popcorn bowl. That all seems millions of years ago. The clean hospital, a nice doctor, a warm bed. Now I’m back to where I was: drifting, hurt.
When they realized they’d forgotten to feed me, the only place they could find was an Allsup’s with dehydrated, suspect burritos. Tanner brought out a bag of potato chips and Gatorade, pretzels and Coke.
Tanner inhales deeply. “God, I love New Mexico. If you thought Tucson was a freak show, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “You feel dizzy? We’re going up in elevation. You’ll feel better after a few days. Keep drinking the Gatorade.”
—
Whenever I see them in my head, in the kitchen, I try as hard as I can to black them out, but the heat starts up again inside me, the shame, and there they are, pushing at each other, her wet mouth smirking at me and Riley turning around, so drunk, and something else, too, and shouting at me, telling me—
I do cry a lot in the backseat, my face against the window, Linus and Tanner up front, watching the road. They don’t say anything, just let me make noise. I drift in and out of sleep, my face rolling against the vinyl seat, my feet throbbing, the pain cresting and receding like an ocean wave. Murmurs from the front seat reach me slowly, as though through a long tunnel. Words funnel around me: treatment center. Messages. Mother. Riley.
Riley. Riley. I bury my head in the seat, sobs backing up in my throat.
And, creeping in, like mice after a house has gone to sleep: Ellis. How she felt before she did it. This ocean of hurt and shame. The one she was drowning in.
And I let her drown.
—
I wake, dimly aware that the car has stopped. Tanner gets out, stretches his legs. Linus unbuckles her seat belt and smiles back at me. “Up, up, kid,” she announces cheerfully.
An elderly man in fuzzy slippers waves to us from a wide wooden porch at the top of a dirt-and-gravel driveway. There are dozens of wind chimes hanging from the rafters of the porch, tinkling like glass in the slight breeze. It’s much colder here than it was in Tucson. I shiver in the backseat of the car, watching them all.
The man is in a teal bathrobe, drinking a glass of wine. His hair sticks up like white tufts of cotton. Tanner and Linus cross the driveway, hug him deeply, and return to the car for me, the man following slowly behind them. He stoops down a little bit as they extract me, his eyes as curious as a bird’s.
“Oh, yes,” he murmurs. “Oh, yes, I see. Oh, dear.”
The house is warm as Tanner and Linus bring me in, helping me down a hallway to a small room with a single bed and one window. I take in the large, ornate wooden cross on the wall. I think of the cross I stole from Ariel. I’m glad I returned it, even if I never told her it was me.
They arrange me on the bed and drape a blue wool blanket over my body. Tanner presses two pills onto my tongue, holds a glass of water to my mouth.
Through the curtainless window, I can see the sky and its deliriously fat, white stars. I sleep for two days.
—
On the third day, my feet throb less when I set them on the floor. I hobble, dehydrated and dizzy, down the hallway to find a bathroom. Large framed photographs line the adobe walls, black-and-whites of people, old adobe churches.
In the bathroom, colorful crosses and fragrant bundles of sage have been tacked up. Plump rolls of soft toilet paper are stacked in white towers next to the toilet. There is no shower, only a deep, deep tub. I sit on the toilet, touch the gauze on my arms, my stomach. I think about peeling it off and looking, but I don’t. I stay in the bathroom for a long time, listening to the silence, watching a moth flutter on the windowsill. I think this is the most beautiful bathroom I’ve ever been in. I never thought a bathroom could be this beautiful. That someone would take the time to make it so calming, so pretty.
The old man is at a long pine table in the main room, holding a newspaper very close to his face. There are bowls of plump fruit and nuts on the table, a platter with a baguette and a plate of creamy butter. He looks over his glasses at me.
“Coffee?” He pours me a cup from a French press, nudges a carafe of milk across the table. “The milk is warm, if you take milk. My grandchildren are feeding the horse.”
I slather a piece of baguette with butter. I’m hungry now; my stomach makes fierce noises. I bite the baguette; it’s so light and crispy, it shatters against my sweatshirt, leaving me showered in crumbs. The old man laughs. “Happens to me all the time. I’ve never been ashamed of making a mess when eating.”
I brush the pale crumbs away. The baguette is pillowy inside, moist. The house is silent except for the sound of my chewing and the occasional rustle of the old man’s newspaper. Gradually, I realize it’s quiet outside, too. Strangely quiet. No cars, no voices, nothing.
“Did you know Quakers believe silence is a way of letting the divine into your body? Into your heart?” He shakes out the paper and leans in close to me. His eyebrows are like sleeping white caterpillars. “I’ve never been afraid of the quiet, have you? Some people are, you know. They need tumult and clatter.
“Santa Fe. High desert country. Isn’t it beautiful? I’ve been in this house for forty-two years. This wonderful silence you can hear—what a funny thing I have just said—makes it the most divine place on earth. To me.”
He reaches over and curls his hand around mine. His skin is dry, dusty.
“It’s a pleasure to have you in my divine home, Charlotte.”
I feel the press of hot, grateful tears in my eyes.
His name is Felix and he’s Linus and Tanner’s grandfather. Linus leads me around the house, pointing at paintings on the walls, sculptures arranged in corners and in the backyard, a huge expanse that looks out over rolling hills and the horse’s stable. She takes me into a cavernous building flooded with light streaming from the skylights in the ceiling, where various canvases are hung on the walls and cans of paint, buckets of brushes, and industrial-sized containers of turpentine abound. Canvases are stacked three deep against some of the walls. A loftlike space has been constructed at the far end; a table with an old typewriter and a plain chair sit on the upper deck. There’s a wide stairwell leading up to the loft. Beneath it are cluttered, top-heavy bookshelves. A young woman works quietly at a high pine table in the corner of the studio, sorting slides, holding them up to the light and studying them before placing them in different piles. “That’s Devvie,” Linus says. “His assistant. She lives here, too.”
I limp around the studio, touching Felix’s things gently, the pencils, the stray pieces of paper, the jars and tubes, the amazing and voluminous detritus: birds’ feathers, stones of various sizes, old animal bones, wrinkled photographs, postcards with loopy cursive bearing exotic postmarks, a red mask, boxes of matches, heavy cloth-covered art books, jars and crusted tubes of paints, so many paints. One table has a series of watercolors on paper strewn about, slight and gentle washes of purple, conelike flowers. Another table is just books, heaps of them, open to different images of paintings and drawings, five or six Post-it notes pressed to each page with words like Climate of the palette, Echo/Answer, Don’t lie. The floor is layered with old paint; I trip on a pair of battered clogs.
I look again at the canvases on the walls; I want to say they’re sunsets, but they’re not so literal. Something deeper, something inside the body, a feeling? Isn’t it beautiful? Felix said to me. The colors are doing something together, I’m sure of it, I can feel it; playing off each other; some relationship is being described that I can’t put into words, but looking at them excites me, fills me u
p, blunts the ache. I look at Felix’s art supplies and wish I could do something right now, make something of my own. I remember what Ariel said at the art opening about Tony Padilla’s boat-paint paintings: Colors by themselves can be a story. Ariel’s paintings were a story beneath a surface of dark and light. I smile shyly at Linus.
“Yummy, yes?” She claps her hands, giddy.
—
Felix pokes the meat on the grill like it’s still alive. Smoke froths his glasses and he rubs them on the edge of his shirt. I look at his gnarled fingers, the thickness of his wrists and knuckles. His skin is flecked with the faintest remnants of paint.
We’re gathered around a long wooden table outside. The air is crisp. Tanner has lent me a fleece pullover. Linus is slicing a pungent white cheese and Tanner is carving slices of avocado. Devvie, the assistant, is in the house, fixing drinks and feeding the ancient, limping wolfhound. In the distance, the horse whinnies inside the stable. Strange sounds come from the dark desert beyond us. Whoops and whistles; rustling and bickering.
Felix slaps the glossy meat onto a platter and sets it on the table, flicking his napkin over his lap. He looks at the sky. “Probably one of the last times we’ll be able to be out here like this.” He glances over at me. “December is when we get the snow. It’s the most beautiful month here.”
He looks over his glasses at me and takes a long drink of wine, sighing appreciatively after he swallows.
“This heartbreak,” he says, sitting at the table, placing a napkin on his lap. “And I don’t mean what happened with that young man, because those things, they come and go, it’s one of the painful lessons we learn. I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don’t know how to be. If that makes any sense?”
He takes another sip of wine. “Everyone has that moment, I think, the moment when something so…momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.”
Girl in Pieces Page 27