by Dan Chaon
Still, it was not a terrible life. She had made a place for herself in the world, and though it might not have been what the teenaged Wave would have wanted or expected, she had done her best. If she could send a message back in time, that would be all she would say.
I did my best. Sorry.
—
Both Wave and Kate had fucked Rusty. Kate did it first. Then Wave—twice. Then Kate again, three times. It was not a big deal, they decided. It was just something they were experimenting with, and it was especially fun to talk about it, to compare notes.
For example, he liked to have his long hair pulled. He would put his head down and tent his hair over their faces and say, “Yank my hair.” And then he’d say, “Harder. Harder!” Until they were afraid they’d come back with a handful of scalp!
For example, he was uncircumcised, which neither of them had ever seen. Wave thought it had a strange smell that she didn’t like. Kate said she thought it was interesting. Kinky, she said.
Once, with Kate, Rusty had started crying, and he pushed his face against her stomach and rubbed his nose into her belly button, and she couldn’t believe how warm the tears were when they hit her skin, almost hot, she said. He had started to tell her about his mom, and then about the foster family he had when he was a kid and how they all died in a fire, but Kate told him that she didn’t want to talk about anything depressing after she’d had sex.
“I do think he’s evil, though,” Kate said. “He gave me a hickey that won’t go away. It’s like a scar.”
“That’s not a hickey,” Wave said impatiently.
—
And anyway it had all ended almost two months ago. They had, all three of them, decided that it would be better to go back to being cousins or whatever they were, and there wasn’t any discussion about it, it just happened, and Kate and Wave both thought that this was the best way possible for it to be concluded. Though they also both agreed that he was really good in bed.
Still, they thought about it, a little. Like that morning, they both sat in lawn chairs drinking Tab and listening to the radio, and Rusty had coaxed Dustin into playing Frisbee. Rusty was a really good Frisbee player, and Dustin was an uncoordinated and easily frustrated thirteen-year-old, so it was not much of a game.
But it was fun to watch Rusty’s legs—the calves were thick and you could see the sinews go taut when he jumped, and his bare feet had a weirdly knotty, prehensile quality, like an ape’s feet, and that seemed weirdly hot.
And then Dustin missed catching the Frisbee and it hit him in the face and he got a nosebleed, and he was embarrassed and angry, and Rusty said, “I didn’t do it on purpose!” and “I hope you’re not going to run and tattle on me. Don’t be a baby!”
So then they had to get out the first-aid kit and find a towel to stanch Dustin’s nose and Rusty went off somewhere. Kate put ice in a dish towel and pressed it to Dustin’s face. She gave Wave a significant look.
As twins, they used to have fantasies about having psychic powers. Could they read each other’s minds? Were they exquisitely empathetic toward one another’s moods? Would they know, even if separated by great distances, if the other had died?
So far, the evidence suggested: probably not. But Wave caught Kate’s look as they bent over the wounded Dustin, and their eyes met, and Kate mouthed silently:
Rusty has mescaline
And Wave understood her perfectly.
—
Years later, when Wave was trying to make a living doing palmistry and tarot readings on the streets of Portland, she would occasionally have actual psychic glimmers. Just enough to make her feel like she wasn’t a complete fraud.
She was eighteen when she moved to Portland, and the truth was she had been having some trouble distinguishing one reality from another. Her old life rippled like a mirage in the distance.
Sometimes, she blamed this confusion on the trial. Kate and Dustin had said things—had recounted things—that she didn’t think were true. The authorities had questioned the three of them for many hours over the course of several days. There was a social worker and two policemen, and when they told her what Kate and Dustin had claimed, she said, no, of course not, that’s ridiculous!
And they seemed displeased. They wondered if maybe she had blocked it out. “That’s very common in traumatic situations,” the social worker said. “The mind will create a buffer. But if you concentrate, you may discover some memories—maybe just fractured images—that you didn’t know were there before.”
“Waverna,” said one of the policemen ruefully. He cleared his throat. “Did you ever have sexual intercourse with Russell?”
“No!” Wave said, and she felt her face flush. “How disgusting!”
—
Of course, it wasn’t just the interrogations. It was the news reports, it was that photograph that was reprinted everywhere, it was the interview on TV that she had refused to be a part of.
After Rusty was sentenced, she remembered, they had lived with Grandma Brody for a while, but her mind must have created some sort of buffer, because to this day she couldn’t recall how she’d managed to arrive in Portland. Hitchhiking was involved, she remembered, but she couldn’t picture any of the people she rode with.
Then she was living on the streets. Sleeping sometimes in abandoned squatter houses, or in parks under bridges.
And then there were the times when she would set up her blanket along the streets where there were bars and some drunk would hold his palm out to her and she’d run her fingertips along the seams of his hand and a jolt would go through her. Like you got when you hit your funnybone.
There was this one old guy she remembered. So awfully sad, she felt it. As soon as she touched him she saw that he would die before the year was out. She saw that he had no future, that nothing more would happen to him except drinking and loneliness, and that no one except her would feel him passing.
“What is it?” he’d mumbled blearily. He’d given her a ten-dollar bill, and he grinned because she was touching him so gently.
“Nothing,” she said. She hesitated.
“I think you’ll be lucky in love,” she said. And she knew that he would give her more money if she kissed him.
And then she saw that the man looked exactly like Uncle Dave. Uncle Dave, alive again, sixty-four years old.
—
Uncle Dave sat back in the lawn chair and spread his knees wide the way men did—like they’re ready for a blowjob, was how Kate put it—and he gave his cigarette a couple of little flicks. Wave sipped her Tab.
“I don’t know,” Uncle Dave was saying. “My dad? Lived until sixty-four. And back then that wasn’t considered a short life span.”
Wave watched as he ground his bare toes into the grass ruminatively. “Sixty-four seems like enough, I guess,” he said. “If you live it right.”
She had been sitting in the sun outside of the camper, reading, and he’d ambled over and flopped down in the chair next to her. It was early afternoon, but he was already flushed and cheerful with alcohol. She could smell the beer emanating off him.
She wasn’t sure what had prompted this musing on mortality, but she hadn’t been paying close attention.
“How old are you?” Wave said after a moment, and he looked at her wistfully. “Thirty-six,” he said. “Oof.”
“I’ll bet you’ll change your mind when you get closer to sixty,” Wave said.
“Ah, you’re right.” He smiled, and she watched as he thoughtfully crushed his beer can.
“I can read your cards for you if you want,” Wave said. She had been interested in tarot cards for almost a year by that time, carrying them around with her wrapped in a scarf that had belonged to her grandmother. Uncle Dave’s mother. She had gotten to the point where, when she turned a card over, a little movement could be felt in the back of her mind.
“Mf,” said Uncle Da
ve. “You kids and your hoodoo shit. You know, when Rusty was in high school we had to go in and talk to a counselor about him drawing them pentagrams all over the place. He just about got kicked out of school. And I said to him, what’s the point of it? You know it’s not real.”
“I know,” she said agreeably. “It’s just for fun.”
“It’s always just for fun,” Uncle Dave said. “Until it ends in tears.” But he didn’t say it with any degree of seriousness. He was so much nicer than her own dad.
—
Wave knew the basic facts of Uncle Dave’s biography. She knew that he was her father’s younger brother by three years; that they had grown up on a farm in Iowa; that he had always been the little one, the wiggly one, and while her dad was tall and rangy, Uncle Dave was compact and muscular as a gymnast. She knew that their father had died when they were young and that Uncle Dave had become a troublemaker as he got into high school. He had been sent to a juvenile-detention place because he had nearly killed another boy when they were fighting.
She knew that he had been to Vietnam, that he had been sent there when he was nineteen and he had fought in battles, and she knew that her aunt Colleen, who was her mother’s younger sister, had begun to write him letters and they fell in love.
The pasts that adults carried with them had a kind of blurry, swimmy quality, Wave thought. Maybe this was because it was impossible to imagine so much time passing—as a teenager, you knew the difference between thirty-six and sixty-four intellectually, but at the same time you didn’t really have any concept of how it might feel to live that long. And maybe it was because the past itself seemed so ridiculous, so stupid in its innocence. She had seen pictures of Colleen and Vicki in their embarrassing 1968 hair. You couldn’t help but feel that they were idiots for wanting to look like that. You felt a little sorry for them: all the stuff that was going to happen, that they were ignorant of.
And so she watched as Uncle Dave rose and trudged toward the house, where her mom and Aunt Colleen were bickering. No one knew that all of them would be dead before the weekend was over.
—
Once, when she was in her late twenties, Wave got a postcard from Kate. What happened to us? it said. She imagined that this was supposed to make her feel guilty, that it was a call for reconciliation of some superficial sort, but maybe it was a legitimate question.
What happened to us?
It was a question that interested her. Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination—that, in fact, we were only peeping through a keyhole of our lives, and the majority of the truth, the reality of what happened to us, was hidden. Memories were no more solid than dreams.
Her friend Riordan had once tried to convince her that something was wrong with her. “Losing time,” he said, and held out his pipe. “That, to me, is a sign of a serious illness. You mean blackouts? Because…”
They were sitting under a bridge and there was a slow, chilly Portland drizzle falling. “Not at all,” she said. “I don’t think anybody really remembers the truth of what happened to them. They just remember the pieces that fit together logically.”
What happened to us? She drew smoke, considering the question. Was it possible that we would never really know? What if we were not, actually, the curators of our own lives?
—
For example, she thought that she remembered that night, completely vividly. That night: the night before the murders. Their parents and their aunt and uncle were partying again, and Dustin was in the trailer, reading, sulking about his swollen nose, and suddenly Rusty and his friend Trent showed up in Trent’s car. Kate and Wave were sitting in lawn chairs, smoking, and Rusty called out to them from the car.
“Hey, foxy ladies! You want to go to a party?” And they got into the backseat without bothering to tell anyone they were going.
But it wasn’t a party, not exactly. Not what they expected. It was a trailer house, in the part of town that Wave considered shady, and the only other person there was a girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, though she was wearing a halter top made of some kind of silver metallic material and smoked cigarettes as if she’d been doing it for some time. She said her name was Montgomery, and she took Wave’s hand like they were girlhood friends.
“Come on,” she said. “You can help me prepare the peyote buttons!”
Montgomery opened a plastic container and there were the buttons: round, fleshy dried chips that had once been a part of a cactus, wrinkled like disgruntled babies.
They had to break them apart very carefully, Montgomery said, to remove the seeds.
It appeared that this was women’s work. Montgomery and Kate and Wave sat at the kitchen table, while Rusty and Trent looked through the record collection and argued about what songs to play.
Meanwhile, they put the peyote into a pot with some water to make a soup. They stirred it and Montgomery talked about her interest in becoming a veterinarian. “I want to help animals,” Montgomery told them. “I feel like I was put on this earth to help God’s creatures.” They watched as she stirred the boiling peyote with a wooden spoon. “Okay,” said Montgomery, and she lifted the spoon and blew on it a few times and then held it out toward Wave’s mouth.
“Taste it,” she said.
—
For a while, it didn’t seem like it was going to hit. The bitterness touched all corners of their mouths and tongues, and it lasted, and the task was to keep it down. “I think I want to go home,” Wave said. “I really just want to puke and go to bed.”
But Montgomery put her small freckled hand gently on Wave’s forearm. “Just wait a couple more minutes,” Montgomery said. “Don’t get uptight.”
In the next room, Kate and Rusty and Trent were involved in a conversation about a book that Kate had read, which was supposedly a true account of a five-year-old girl who had been abused by a cult of devil worshippers, tortured, imprisoned, and used most evilly as an instrument to raise Satan himself, according to the book’s back cover. Michelle Remembers, the book was called, and Kate was fascinated by it. A troubled young woman begins to visit a gentle, compassionate psychiatrist, and finally the long-buried memory of a childhood agony comes screaming forth with terrifying clarity. Kate liked to wonder if she herself might have repressed memories, too.
“That book is such bullshit,” Rusty said. “That chick doesn’t know anything about Satan.”
“Like you’re an expert,” Kate said. And despite the complaints she had made about Rusty giving her hickey scars, she was sitting very close to him, practically on his lap, Wave thought.
“I know enough,” Rusty said. “I can smell lies when I see them.”
“They couldn’t publish it if it wasn’t true,” Kate said. And Wave watched as Kate did her thing of leaning her head against Rusty’s arm as if by accident. “There are laws,” Kate said.
Meanwhile, Montgomery lit a cigarette and looked at Wave, considering. “Are you feeling okay?” Montgomery murmured.
“I don’t know,” Wave said. “You’ve done this before?”
“All the time,” Montgomery said. “It’s not unhealthy or anything. Peyote is a plant of the earth; it’s all natural.”
“Is that guy Trent your brother?” Wave said, and Montgomery scoffed.
“Not hardly,” Montgomery said. “I’m running a Dungeons and Dragons game, and Trent and Rusty are players, and I’m the Dungeon Master. I don’t hang out with them much otherwise.”
Wave tried to take this information in. But abruptly she felt the first golden-brown glimmer of the peyote, and her brain began to flex. Suddenly, her peripheral vision came into view, much more sharply than her frontal vision.
“You want to see what a real Satanic ritual looks like?” Rusty said. “I can show you.
”
At this Montgomery looked at Wave and raised her eyebrows skeptically.
“He doesn’t know anything about the dark arts,” Montgomery said. “He’s such an idiot.”
—
In a lifetime, maybe there is only one true experience of bliss, and maybe this was Wave’s. The peyote came forward in a surge and she heard herself say, “Oh!”—the way an actress would portray a sudden realization. “Oh,” she said, and then she wasn’t altogether in her body.
She was aware that this trip to Yellowstone was going to be so awesome, that they would all grow closer and reveal beautiful human things about themselves, and they would never forget it. Kate would start acting more like the funny, goofy sister she once knew, and they’d have to have one big argument, but it would cure things; and Dustin would have a moment of surprising bravery and heroism; and from underneath Wave’s mom’s goody-goody exterior would emerge her true neurotic and controlling self, and Aunt Colleen would confront her, and Vicki would realize how awful she was and run out into the night, sobbing.
And there would be a moment when she and Uncle Dave were alone together and she’d gently touch the stump where his arm was amputated, the soft, smooth-scarred skin, the healed mound that seemed like the body part of something otherworldly, and he’d be moved by the tenderness of her fingers and lean down and kiss her, and then he’d pull away and so sadly tell her that this could never be, and she’d understand and nod gravely and a single tear would fall silently down her cheek.
And her dad was the one who’d die at the end, tragically. He’d be the actor that nobody really cared about but then when he died they’d feel bad that they didn’t care.
—
She looked up and Trent had his arm around Montgomery, though he must’ve been over six feet and she could hardly be five, though she couldn’t weigh much more than her clothes.