by J. D. Palmer
Presents…
A hard thing to come up with when you all live together. When there are no malls or shops or an internet where you can order something at the last minute. It makes you work harder.
And I fall victim to getting excited for it. I’ve had holidays, Christmas days where the foster family would either shower me with presents or would explain why they don’t give any. The home where we crafted gifts for each other.
But never from people that meant something.
I know I shouldn’t be excited. But…
I know that Josey has a song. And Sam has been carving something, little peels of wood beneath his chair and on his shirt and pants. I am worried that Sheila is feeling festive. I caught her with a tray full of bullet casings and some old necklaces.
A cake is being made, somehow, an experiment with a dutch oven on the wood stove that has resulted in two botched tastings with an eager Theo.
Momma Kay has an apron on and is humming and bustling in the kitchen as she prepares a dinner for the night. Even she, as frugal with supplies as she is with her humor, has decided to go for something special.
I look to the door. Harlan’s boots are gone.
Of course they are.
A track that wouldn’t be hard to follow. Swept away every few days, or filled in by another tantrum of snow, but always the same circuit. Down the hill and along the creek. The tree line. Out and to another hill that looks north. Then an arc out towards the road and back. Pushing the perimeter out a foot at a time. As if by challenging the boundaries he might break winter’s hold on the land.
I pull on my own boots and coat and slip outside. It’s so cold. The wind isn’t blowing hard, but it feels almost physical, like a solid wall of frost slowly wrapping you in layers.
I follow his tracks, toes pointed straight and strides long. And it doesn’t take me long to catch up to him. He’s standing by the frozen creek, shoulders hunched. I think he’s talking to someone, or something, so I freeze.
After a second his head lifts. “I’m messed up, Berly.”
I slowly make my way to him. Eyes that won’t look at me. Eyes that are red-rimmed from lack of sleep.
“More than…” I wave my hands and I know he understands. We don’t need a lot of words to communicate. Usually. But now he seems confused.
“More than I should be? I don’t know. I don’t know.” His shoulders heave and he looks off to his left and his face contorts. “I see a little boy. I see him all the time.”
I don’t know how to respond to this. I know he thinks about his kid all the time. I didn’t know that it haunted him like this. Even as depressed as it makes me, I’ll say it. I’ll lie if I can make him feel better.
“We’ll get you home. You’ll see them.”
He snorts. “But what if they see me?”
“I see you.”
The words slip out, something that hasn’t happened to me… in a long time. He turns to look at me, quizzical.
“What do you mean?”
I don’t say anything. This is too close to a conversation I forbid myself from having with him. One in which confessions are made. How I feel about him. My fear of him getting home. My thoughts on Jessica. The meaning of all that. I’ve already told him what an idiot he is being, dwelling on things that are out of his control. After what we went through with… Stuart… what can be pulling him under like this?
I don’t tell him that what he has become, even if it makes him a killer, to me is a better version of himself. I don’t tell him that I do not regret the lives I have taken, or that I would easily do it again.
I don’t tell him that while I don’t enjoy killing, the victim I used to be is gone, and the new version of me stands a little taller.
So I comfort him as we always have comforted each other. In silence. In being with each other. And eventually, slowly, he tells me about what happened in Mackay. He tells me in fits and starts, often pausing for long minutes, his eyes looking out over the dark blue evening as if the answer resided somewhere in the mountains. But he tells me everything. And he doesn’t cry. But I hear the release all the same. The words breaking a spell that, in a way, he himself cast. And when he’s done we walk back to the house, together, both our steps just a little lighter than before.
It was a surprise, at least for me, the straw that broke my metaphorical camel back. It wasn’t Harlan. It wasn’t Sheila. And I would have figured one or the other would have been it. It wasn’t CD, or Momma Kay, or the gentleness and love that they gave me. And it wasn’t the end of our journey… Jessica… which is what I had always suspected.
The final straw was with Felicia over something trivial.
After our trip outside I walked Harlan upstairs. He squeezed my hand and then fell into the bed. I don’t know if to sleep, or just to be alone, but either way I wasn’t going to travel far. Not just then.
So I sat on the stairs with a book. In full view of everyone who happened to be at the fire. And maybe, because I’m so quiet, they made a common mistake; either I’m mentally deficient, or I don’t listen.
“She lives, and breathes, and worships this man. I mean, what kind of life is that? How scarred she must be to still want his approval.”
That was the sentence. That was what Felicia said, not meaning to include me but only using me to make a point.
And there was a pregnant pause, the moment where Cristen and Wren hushed her, glances cast my way. The brief silence as they wait, looking to me to see if I had heard. Felicia doesn’t bother to slow, confident in my inevitable silence.
“And he’s not even with her. He’s trotting off with the first ray of sunlight for some other woman. But she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t understand.”
A click in my head. The breaking of tenuous glass separating survival and emotion. Before, if there was danger, I’d circle. Trusting my gut, eying Sheila and Theo, making sure my pack saw me before I went in for the kill. But I am on some other plane now, a realm that is pure, raging, recklessness. The heart, I guess.
Fifteen steps to Felicia that I cover in seconds.
“You… Bitch.”
And I grab her by the throat and drive her back against the wall. I push her there and no one stops me, and such is my ferocity that Felicia is completely caught unawares.
“You don’t know who I am! YOU DON’T KNOW WHO WE ARE!”
And inside of me the rampike shivers, the entryways opening on every level. But not the door that has been barred off. I don’t touch it. I can’t.
But the fire does.
The phlegethon consumes me, rippling and roaring and tearing apart my inner sanctuary. The flames of anger sweep through me, engulf me… and burn the motherfucker to the ground. Everything goes to ash and dust in a volcanic instant. And with it, with every wisp of smoke, I hear the voice of the monster telling me not to say a word. “Don’t say a thing, or else you’ll know such suffering as to make all else joy.” Then that too is blown away in a nuclear wind, erased with all else.
“You know nothing of pain. YOU KNOW NOTHING OF SUFFERING!”
She squirms beneath me, unwilling to meet my eyes and, perhaps, my hands are uncomfortable around her throat. Perhaps painful. Fuck her. This has gone on too long. If I am warped, misshapen, at least my eyes are open. The words flow out of me in a torrent, a deluge that I have no control over.
“You had something stolen. We all did! But now you want to steal from me? From us? Why? WHY?!”
My voice is smooth, gathering strength, growing louder than it ever has been. Freed, once and for all, from the bonds that bound it. Uncertainty gone and with it the pauses and the stuttering.
Silence fills the room but I have no desire to master myself. To show compassion to this woman who so degrades what I have been through. But the anger drops to a whisper, one that fills the room but is still quiet. Intimate. The voice reserved for those people you are about to kill.
“We do not exist without each other. There is no worship, yo
u bitch, there is only fragments pieced together. Stitched by love and trust. And not to be ripped apart by a person such as you. I will kill you if you try.”
Squirms from her, but her eyes are closed. Gasps for breath. Her shoulders hunched, arms locked in front of her. Powerless, hopeless, afraid. The same fear, I realize, as the day she, too, was violated.
If there was a fire inside me that raged unchecked, seeing Felicia like this is the rain afterwards. She is a victim, as we all are. A demon because she has been demonized.
I could be looking into a mirror.
I don’t let go of her. Hell, she’d fall down. But I relax my hold on her throat.
“Our ghosts are our own, Felicia.”
Eventually, after a moment, I feel Theo’s hands on my shoulders. And I step back, and let her breathe, and I feel the huge recess in my soul where my sanctuary has burned away. My past has burned away. Where the good, and the bad, and the indifferent are now nothing but a smoldering depression. The pictures, papers, snapshots of times in my life. A tasseled bike. Steven’s drawing.
Gone.
Only ashes left. Only the dust of memories that had been my lone spots of joy for so long.
And then I look up. Harlan leans over the railing. He doesn’t move to come to me. But his fingers make a fist in front of his face, and then he blows the scraps of his name out into the air, and I would be a fool to not understand.
“I see you,” I say.
“I see you, too.”
So easy to be invisible for so long. And I spent most of my life hiding in the in-between area that resides in shadows and mirrors. But surety, if only experienced once, can be a miracle.
Everything changed after that week. Harlan started eating more. Sleeping more. He started smiling again. And I… Well I found my deepest anger. I knew what I could lose and now knew I wouldn’t shy away from protecting it. The divide between that which kept me safe from the world, and that which kept me from truly living in it… Gone. Cold reserve mixed with the heat of… Is it passion? Is it just truth? I don’t know.
But Harlan saw it. And something changed in him as well. Maybe we both needed to be jostled out of our current states of guilt, anger, jealousy. Maybe, just maybe, we were the two people in the world who should know how to live in the moment, but were both too stubborn to do it.
I didn’t end my feud with Felicia. I should have tried to bury the hatchet, but I was so close to something new. Something I hadn’t had before.
So fuck it.
I had wanted to lure Harlan away. I realize that now. I had wanted to keep him from Montana, and whatever awaited him there so that I could keep him to myself.
I realize now that I am along for the ride.
If he is willing to grant me that, then I will give him his happiness. And, I suppose, I will give myself that same permission.
CD wants me to wear a dress. Stuart wanted me to wear a dress. Felicia would say that women only do that for the pleasure of men.
I want to wear a dress for Evelyn. A little girl who only wanted for someone to look into her eyes and tell her she was beautiful before she died. And for Harlan. I want that look. I want that look in his eyes before I die, or disappear, or take another road.
Because, I think, only half-lying, that I can take another road now.
If that’s what it comes to.
So I slowly put on makeup, talking into the mirror as if I’m talking to that little girl of Jimmy’s, warning her of too much of this and too much of that… As if this world can have that.
Then I slide out of my thick black pants and three layers of shirts. And I put on a dress. I put on a dress loaned to me, and I do it in spite of Stuart. In spite of CD. In spite of Felicia.
And I walk out to celebrate this holiday with my family.
HARLAN | 31
WINTER EQUINOX. JOSEY had campaigned for a new holiday name since we weren’t celebrating Christmas. Or Hanukah. Or Kwanza. “If we are celebrating something new, something for this goddess, shouldn’t it have a name?” I think everyone was on board until he joked, “Clitmas?”
Felicia did not take that one well, and only the intervention of Momma Kay prevented bloodshed.
Almost like a holiday with family.
I try my hand at playing cards. I interact with the others, and spend my time on watch or next to CD listening to old stories. I play with the boy. Brody. I work with people rather than alongside them.
It helps. It does. I can feel the lessening of tension in the men and women around me. I didn’t know just how much anxiety my angst caused all the others.
But it feels like a sham. Like I’m a bad actor going through the motions. It’s better this way, I know that. But I remember what Mickey said about the downfall. About how he liked it, and how he thought I liked it, too. Depressing to realize he was right. Depressing that I thrive so much on chaos, and fear, and those things that also haunt me in my sleep.
Josey tries to teach me a new chord on the guitar. An ongoing process that, after almost two weeks, is already doomed for failure. Sheila laughs every time I hit a discordant note, and for some reason the rest of the women find the whole thing entirely too funny. Perhaps it’s the way Josey is teaching me.
“Don’t use two fingers when one will do, Har.”
I strum listlessly, slowly contorting my fingers to go back and forth between the two chords as Josey improvises a ditty for my dissonant tune. He even tweaks his voice to go off-key with every one of my mistakes. Apparently it’s hilarious.
I keep at it. Partly to try to get it down so that I can end the lesson for the day. Partly because laughter is rare, and I’ll be the butt of a joke if it means filling this room with a little more warmth.
Gradually the laughter fades away. There is silence. I look up to see everyone staring over my shoulder, eyes wide. Even Josey’s face looks poleaxed, his mouth slightly open and eyebrows arched.
I turn around, almost dropping the guitar. A woman stands in the doorway. A red dress. Hair flowing wild and free down to her shoulders. Freckles almost lost in the blush suffusing her cheeks. But the chin is raised, ever so slightly, calmly taking in the room that has lost its collective voice.
“Beryl?” I manage to croak. And I don’t know why I asked. But apparently it was the right thing to say because a slow smile spreads across her face. A shy, lopsided smile that makes the angel somehow more mortal, and somehow more beautiful.
“Fuckin’ A, Berly, I’d do you,” Sheila says. And for once I’m thankful for her crassness, for it gives me a second to recover.
Sounds come back into the room. Words are said, although I don’t hear them. The guitar is lifted from my hands and Josey claps me on the shoulder. He says something about getting dressed.
Suddenly, the day takes on more meaning. As if the holiday had only been a rumor, but suddenly Beryl has cemented it. Taken it to a new level. Josey borrows from Sam and wears a bolo tie and looks every bit the cowboy. There is nothing that would fit Theo except for an old, old Hawaiian shirt of CD’s. It’s hilarious and fitting in both the literal and physical sense.
Sheila wears a man’s blazer with nothing underneath. She says, mockingly, that she’s wearing it to take it back from men and that the new world will have no constrictions on wardrobe. No one says anything.
A shirt is laid out on my bed. And a clean pair of pants. A note from Momma Kay.
A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it. —Jean de la Fontaine.
It makes me sit down. First, because damn her. Damn her for seeing through me straight to my weakness. And second, because… Well… Quotes from people are a rarity now. In the past something easily found on the internet and pasted into a text truly held little meaning. Now, inscriptions such as these either took time to find, or have been engraved on a person’s heart.
There is something pure, and important, and touching in that.
So I dress in a nice shirt. And I don’t wear a tie, because I still
can’t stand things around my neck, and, well, though I can catch the spirit of things… I’m still truculent. But I vow to find a book of poetry and start memorizing.
And then it’s dinner. Early, before we lose light. A spread on the table that is far more bountiful than any of us could have expected, including the cooks. Freshly baked biscuits. Mashed potatoes made by Theo that look to feed thirty. Venison seasoned with too much garlic.
Things made with love in trying times.
And the moment of silence before we eat is not asked for, but given as we all reflect on past holidays. Past times with families and friends that did not look that much different from the scene in this room today. Sadness and heartache mixing with thankfulness.
It is uncharted territory, this new holiday that doesn’t have a name. But there is wine, and talk, and laughter. And unity. There is common ground at this deepest point of winter: we aren’t dead yet, we shall prevail.
As uplifting as it is, I can’t wholly enjoy it. I feel too guilty. Cheating is what it was called. Before the downfall. And it seems worse now. I can’t stop looking at Beryl, can’t stop admiring not only her new confidence, her voice, but everything else she has retaken.
Her body.
Her confidence.
Her desirability.
Cheating.
It’s the last thing I have. Nobility. I am an errant knight, a Don Quixote, battling windmills perhaps, but I am an arrow pointed true.
Or am I?
She is so beautiful. And I’m so in tune with her. Every look, every glance, every comment. I know how she feels, and she knows me, too.
And a new, different proximity. Walls are down. A dare, of sorts, and now I don’t know how to react. Nobility has its limits, I guess.
I leave. I flee. Lest I become something I hate even more.
Down the path in the dark. The cold a hard slap after the warmth of the fire, the warmth of all the people. Of her.
Down to the creek and then along it, to the treeline and then up the hill. Breath misting in the dim light. Stillness. Cold.