Mm, I say, and wipe my lips with my hand. I’m afraid to lie about where I’m from, afraid I’ll get the details and the sounds wrong, that my lying will be transparent. Not from here, I say.
You got an accent like someone I know, she says.
I chuckle. I don’t have an accent, I say.
Everyone does, she says. You just don’t know it. You would probably think she doesn’t either, but she does. She sounds just like you, she says, and inches closer on her knees, her lips nearly touching mine. Right down to the way she moves her tongue, she says. She slips her tongue through the space between her teeth, and between mine.
She takes my hands then and moves them around on her till I am holding up her tits. They feel like sandbags. I can’t believe how heavy they are, and how small the rest of her is. She tips me over backward, my head in the grass, and leans over me. Except for her chest, she seems to weigh nothing, and it feels like nothing to me, her body, even her tits in my hands, the kissing. It’s nothing at all like Couper flattening me out, the heft of his torso, the size of his hands, his legs, opening me up. Weeds are on either side of my eyes, tickly in my ears, and I can hear things scratching along under the brush, under the old, crooked trees, along the stones themselves.
There, Tennessee says, like she’s accomplished something. But when I open my eyes and take my hands off her, she’s pointing to a hole in the grave next to us. It’s maybe eight inches across and goes down so far you can’t see the bottom. Like you could stick your arm in there and shake hands with the dead. What do you suppose that is for? she asks.
She stands up, and in the twilight, I can barely see her. At dusk, you can see things that are far away, black silhouettes on the horizon, the lights from faraway buildings, but not what’s in front of your face.
There! she says again. And there! And there! She spins, her white T-shirt ultraviolet in the weird evening light, and the more she points and turns, with the whole purple sky bearing down on us, the more I realize we’re on perforated ground, like the holes Khaki and I poked in a shoe-box top. There are so many air holes here, for what underneath, I don’t know, that I think for sure we will fall in before we can ever find our way out.
We follow a path back to the stone that says LOOK, where we left the bike and the guitar. She gets us back to the road before it’s fully dark. Country dark is no joke. You can’t see your own feet walking once it’s nighttime.
There are no streetlights out here, but we crunch along the gravel on the side of the road until they start up again, just outside of town, and not far after, the sidewalks begin, the buildings appear. There’s the sound of traffic, the train, trucks going through on the state route.
Parked out alongside the church, an old white Malibu like Chuck had. We must have seen thirty-eight states together, just driving and eating sandwiches, the windows down, the radio up. I spent whole summers in that car. I grew up there.
I peer down the alley between the church and the real-estate office, and a chunk of light comes through, blasting my eye. A headlight, or a train, coming right at us.
Around the corner, we go past an old, converted gas station that’s now Yellow Dog Café, with tables outside and music coming from the open door. The old firehouse, which is now a community theater, with posters up for Our Town and Seussical. Beyond that, the old train station, quiet and stately. Redbrick with barrel planters on the sidewalk.
Come on up, Tennessee says. I’ll make you a drink.
It doesn’t look like anyone lives there. It’s well cared for, like a public building would be, with pink petunias and a swept-clean and white sidewalk. There isn’t a leaf out of place. Not a car out front. No sign of people. The front door opens to a hallway filled with more doors, painted satiny black with gold knobs, and no nameplates or numbers. Tennessee leaves her bike in the hallway and takes me through to a back stairwell that’s all windows, looking out on the black field behind. What I imagine is nothing but flowers, and grass, and, somewhere, train tracks. There are stairs up, to a black door, and down, to another black door.
A sound from the basement like an industrial fan, whirring.
She takes me up.
There’s another woman there, huge with black, bobbed hair and an eye sewn shut. She watches TV, sitting in a leather recliner with an open bottle of beer, but gets up when we come in.
Dakota, Tennessee says. This is Rebecca.
But she doesn’t look at me. She nods at Tennessee and then goes up a set of metal suspension stairs to the room above, which has a mesh floor, like threads of wire, bouncing under her weight.
I think that I’ve never seen a woman so tall, so strong in her shoulders, and yet so wounded, and then remember that I have. That, probably, there are copies of all of us, somewhere. Another me, in another state, living another life.
A woman like Dakota ran a motel we stayed in once. I was nine, the summer after Nudie. We stayed in Colorado Springs for a full week, at the foot of Pikes Peak, the mountain always in view. The woman was tall, tough, and muscled with no chest to speak of, her hair dark like Dakota’s but long, always pulled back into a severe ponytail. Her face, flat and unlined, from sun or smoking, and not made-up. She was alone there, running the motel, which felt strange to me. A woman without a man. Even though my mother worked, she wouldn’t have made it without Chuck. They barely made it on two incomes. But I couldn’t imagine her alone, without Chuck, without me. Who would she be, on her own? It was just the motel woman and her smoke-gray cat, hunting mice from the field. I remember sitting on her front step, a low cement slab covered with green outdoor carpet, waiting for the cat to come back with a mouse dangling from his jaw. He’d present it to her, and then crunch through it. That sound, the bone crunching, like nothing I’d ever heard before.
We usually spent most of a trip driving, not staying in one place for a week. The states I’d seen, a blur from the window as we drove through them, cornfield, sunflower field, mountain range, plains. I don’t know what happened in Colorado Springs. The motel was nice, it was cheap, they liked the town. Maybe they thought they could see themselves there, someday, living a different life, with different names.
My mother spent most of that vacation by herself. She drank, she went down to the motel office to sit and smoke with the owner, she wandered off on her own. Chuck and I went into town; we drove up the mountain, the view outside the Malibu nothing but fog. We walked in the Garden of the Gods, all orange dust and weird needly sculptures that looked like they’d been dropped from the sky.
Of course I sent a postcard. Love you. Miss you. xoxo Rainy.
I caught my mother sitting with the woman. My mother, drunk as sin and uglier than it too, her eyes narrow with gin glaze. Her hair, loose, with its perm growing out so it was straight and flat, darker at the roots. They sat on a bench by the pool, leaned together, their foreheads and knees touching. She held my mother’s hand and stroked it.
I wish I could remember her name.
Tennessee pours me a drink. There’s a bar, against a brick wall, with top-shelf liquors and a wine rack built in. I’m used to Early Times and chardonnay, or maybe a little Knob Creek if Couper splurges, but she’s got a tall bottle of Booker’s, so I take that.
Neat? she says. Splash?
I take it with a splash of cool flat water.
Around us, on the walls, black-and-white nudes of women with old-fashioned bodies that no one has anymore, round heavy breasts, little potbellies, soft thighs, hair. There are no personal pictures. Everything has a low black sheen to it, everything is clean, put away, dusted, neat.
Even the fridge is empty of personality. On my mother’s fridge, so many pictures of Summer, with sweet potatoes on her face, or curled like a fist and sleeping, slick and naked in the tub. Summer with me, Summer with Eli. Summer with suds in her hair and on her chin, a grim prediction no one saw coming.
What do you do here? I ask Tennessee. She pours herself a glass of vodka, neat. I hear Dakota upstairs, the chang
of the mesh floor underneath her feet, the running of water in the bath.
We work, Tennessee says.
I mean, I say. You’re so young. I think about what Couper said. Haylee is only fifteen. This place is so nice, I say.
It’s not my place, she says. It’s Parker’s, she says.
Parker?
Parker Dealey, Tennessee says. My sister.
Parker. Shawn. Gray. Carson. These were her pretend names, androgynous and sharp. I think of her in the blazer, with nothing underneath, her small breasts loose against the fabric. Slim-legged pants and heels. A cigarette. Her hair combed back under a hat. The way she’d careen me into the bedroom, by the wrist, holding on to my knee when I hit the bed, the back of my neck.
This apartment is a long way from her house in South Lake, where I’d see Khaki come in and kick her dirty flip-flops against the wall and leave a scuff. And even farther from the vacant trailer where we found the postcards. There’s no trace of me. Not a souvenir or a memento. I left the postcards inside the Scamp. But I think about bringing them in, stringing them up above the bar, where recessed lights shine directly on the rounded nudes framed on the walls.
Is it just you two? I ask.
Tennessee nods. We tried to let Virginia in, she says. But Ginny had to go.
The clock is loud here, in between sips. When the water stops running upstairs, the apartment settles to just that low hum, coming up from the basement.
We’re all just dead girls, Tennessee says, finishing her drink. Waiting to rise, she says.
I feel the warmth of the bourbon on the top of my head, where, usually, it’s shame and guilt creeping out of my skull. On a good night, a happy night, at a bar with a stranger, with a band, the bourbon hits my cheeks, my chest, it warms me with a healthy, sexy glow. Right now, it’s coming out of the crown of my head like a halo.
I hear her tapping up the stairs before she comes in, all in white, her hair shining like white gold, short like a boy’s and angled in the front to her chin. Tennessee skips out from behind the bar, across the room to her, and I watch Khaki—Parker—take Tennessee’s baby face and kiss her lips, hold her temples.
I brought you something, Tennessee chimes to Khaki. She sweeps her arm around to where I stand by the bar. Rebecca, she says.
twenty-eight
KHAKI
They thought I didn’t remember you being born, you, in the hospital with the mother we shared, but I did. It might be the first thing I remember. You changed the shape of her underneath me when I tried to sit with her. When her belly was big with you I couldn’t climb into her lap anymore. When her breasts were swollen and sore from the milk she’d never give you, I couldn’t lay my head there.
She would shoo me away. Khaki, go play. I’m tired.
She went into the hospital in the middle of the night, and dropped me and Nudie with Aunt Carleen and Uncle Ray. You don’t remember Ray, but I do. He was tall, and handsome. Blond like Doe, like you and me, but prettier than his brothers. He had a mustache he would tickle my face with. He rode a motorcycle and had a deep sparkly purple Chevelle he would show at the fair in Bloomsburg.
When you came home, you came home with them. My mother came home empty. You had a new mother. A tiny shell of a mother who couldn’t have you herself.
They thought I didn’t remember all that. But I did.
I hated you like I hated my own skin.
All that time, you asked me for things. Khaki, show me how to shave my legs. How to light a cigarette. How to down a fifth of whiskey and not throw up. Where to put a tampon. How to kiss a boy. How to fuck and like it, or at least pretend to.
You didn’t want it to hurt. You didn’t want the boys to make fun of you.
I carried the stench of my own father between my legs. On the playground, at school. In the nurse’s office, in gym class, at the beach. Sometimes it hurt to ride my bike.
Nothing would ever hurt you.
Except me.
And you’d never suspect it, because you asked for it.
You can theorize the shit out of what I’ve done. Out of every pretty little doe-eyed beaten-down mommy who took her last breath in my arms. Who felt the gasp of sex and the grip of death in the same blackout moment.
I can tell you it came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
I can tell you it made me feel alive and dead inside. On fire. And quenched.
It did nothing to make me feel whole.
Go ahead, Couper Gale. Write a whole fucking book about it.
twenty-nine
RAYELLE
Rebecca, she repeats back to me. Tennessee brings her a tall square bottle of vodka, and Khaki pours herself a drink.
She looks unreal to me. Like I know her with my innermost heart but wouldn’t recognize her on the street. Because she’s in heels, we’re almost the same height. Her hair, lighter than ever, bright silvery platinum and sleek. Her clothes, a white backless vest and white pants. Shoes, white heels with a thin ankle strap. She’s thinner than I’ve ever seen her, but taut with muscle and strong. The glass in her hands looks small. Her hands, with her arms so thin, even bigger. She could palm a basketball. Or strangle you one-handed.
Who gave you that name? she asks.
I did, I say, but she talks over me.
Couper Gale? she says.
My mouth goes dry and hot. She takes a cigarette out of a case that opens like a book and lights it. They’re black, and strong smelling.
I don’t know what you mean, I say.
Please, she says. I know when I’m being followed.
She motions for Tennessee to pour me another drink. She holds the book of cigarettes out for me to take one. My mind races back to Summersville, to Wrightsville, back home.
All you’ve ever had are names from men, she says.
That’s not true, I say.
You are your father’s junior, she says.
I watch Tennessee fade into the living room, listening, surprised.
Go get Dakota, Khaki says to her.
I didn’t know, Tennessee says, her voice even higher, broken.
You don’t know a goddamn thing, Khaki says to her.
When Dakota comes down, she’s dressed in jeans and a black tank top, and her damp hair smells like vanilla and honey. Khaki rubs her arm, and walks her to the door. She hands her an envelope, then holds her face. Different from the way she held Tennessee’s. She has to stretch up to reach Dakota. I see Dakota’s eye nearly close, as she leans in. Her cheeks, like copper. Her lips, with their comma scar.
Sit down, Khaki says to me after Dakota goes down the back stairs. Let me look at you.
When I thought of myself in the future, I saw myself with her. I didn’t know anything else. The two of us, always together. And then she was gone.
And then we sit, face to face on her leather couch. She pulls my hair around from the back and rakes her fingers through its tangles, smoothing it as she touches it. Her voice sounds flat to me, like a newscaster with no trace of origin. I remember that Tennessee said we sounded alike.
When did you start wearing glasses? she asks.
Yesterday, I think. After the baby, I say.
Tennessee tries to slip out, up the stairs, the way a kid who has pitted her parents against each other watches a fight ignite and then disappears.
Sit down, Khaki tells her, but I watch her stand still, her fingers bunched together. Why are you here? she asks me.
I wanted to see you— I say and stop.
Go ahead, she says. Say my real name in front of her. She doesn’t know it. It doesn’t mean anything to her.
I just wanted to see you, I say.
To see what?
I don’t know, I say. Then, You haven’t missed me? You haven’t thought about me at all? All this time? I say.
I wouldn’t say that, she says. How did you find me?
I shrug. Maybe I’m a cop now, I say, sarcastic. I keep waiting for her to bite, to break a little of the ceramic
mask that covers her face.
She laughs. Her teeth, more perfect and white than I remember.
Oh Rayelle, she says. I know you’re not a cop. I watch one bright yellow fish wave through an electric-blue aquarium behind her. Its body big and flat. I know what happened to you, she says.
How? I say.
I looked it up, she says, louder. I read the paper.
How could you know what happened to me, I say, and not reach out to me?
She stands up then, her face still and cold.
The same way you did, she says.
I watch Tennessee inch along the back wall, toward the door. I notice that there are large vases by the wall, four of them, bronze with black and red veins. When she bumps one, it gungs.
Tennessee! Khaki shouts at her, and Tennessee’s brown shoulders hunch, rounded.
Khaki steps out of her shoes and stands barefoot, small, compact, but a powerhouse of strength in the middle of the room.
You all are like the stupid leading the stupid, she says.
Me? I say.
Tennessee leans on the ledge of the back window, the glass behind her bare, framing the dark.
Do you know why I killed everyone else? she asks Tennessee, who doesn’t answer. Because I loved them, she says. Do you know why I’ll kill you? she says.
No, Tennessee says.
Because you seem to think you know something, Khaki says. But you’re wrong. About everything.
Tennessee folds her arms over her chest.
You know why you’re here? Khaki says to me. She turns in the middle of the room. Her arms and back bare. In her hand, a small gun she must have had concealed in the waistband of her pants. It fits in her palm like it was made to nest there, barely visible.
I wanted to find you, I say.
You are live bait, she says to me.
I swallow hard, with nothing in my mouth. Not a drop of spit. My throat contracts and aches.
You can thank Prince Fucking Charming for that move, she says. He put you out here like a kitten in a pit-bull ring, she says.
What do you mean, I say, why you killed everyone else?
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