There’s Earl. In the kitchen doorway. The gun in his hand.
SIXTEEN
I was bleeding when my mother found me. Ray was dead and I was leaking. The slice I opened up below my navel gushed as if it had been waiting for me to open it up all my life. Tumor. Baby. Whatever. Cut it out with a kitchen knife. It was crazy. And by it I mean I was. I know that now, but digging into my abdomen seemed like an option, as many things do, after weeks of doing harm. Ray’s broken heart. My beastly one. No sleep. No food. Alcohol. Cocaine. Then some more cocaine.
That day, the 911 day, her nails were done in an appropriately dark pink, her hair was up, pulled back off her face in a soft bun. Then there was me, struggling to flush the toilet, thinking, No one has to know. No one has to know what we tried to do. Don’t look, Mama. I’m sorry, Mama. I was wearing black jeans around my calves. A turtleneck with a hole just above the cuff where I’d tried to dig an escape tunnel for my fidgety thumb. My black hair was toilet-water wet.
She made me dial 911. Press numbers red. She said, “I have to check on Ray.” She was back pretty quickly, maybe Ray was already gone at that point, and snatched the cordless away as the ringing was answered.
“My daughter’s hurt. She’s lost a lot of blood. Her brother is … he’s worse.”
My mother made me throw up again. Shoved her fingers down my throat and then pressed a towel to my belly while she waited for the paramedics to arrive. When they did arrive, she told them what was going on, how long I’d been bleeding. She said, “My daughter is an addict. Like her father. I don’t know what she’s on.” I lay still, half glazed under her hand, looking up at smooth chin, nose, and perfectly curled eyelashes, recognizing myself for the first time in her. Her cheekbones mine. Her lips mine. I didn’t know she knew I was using. I thought I hid it well.
I came to again in the ambulance. One EMT and my mother. The EMT was working hard. My mother sat statue tall. Her hands folded over her knees. She looked all grown-up. Like I had finally pushed her into adulthood. Calm and smooth and cold to contrast with the dark, almost black smudge of blood I’d left over her breast right where her heart was supposed to be.
At the hospital they lifted me out. Rolled me down fluorescent-lighted hallways; I watched my mother follow and stop at the front desk. She’s explaining my mess. She’s still with me. I’m not alone. I focused on her heart stain until she disappeared from view.
Blood. Turns out it holds us together. Inside and out. Whether we want it to or not.
And now I’m staring at George. Someone even more successfully gutted than I. He is twitch-faced and fading. Insides oozing closer to my feet.
Earl and I are statues. Freeze-framed. Earl remains in the kitchen doorway, and I can feel the diner’s front door on my back. George lies between us, a border neither of us wants to cross, and he is the only one bothering to move and he’s jerking around, his brain firing out commands that make sense only to one limb at a time. If I could slice into his brain, I’d find the scene being played out over and over like something at the cinema. Me, a china doll. Dark hair without a drop of blood left in my face, skin turning to crisp porcelain that the slightest ill will could shatter. I turn my attention to Earl. His face is shifting, an arched eyebrow, twisted-lip anger. The gunshot still rings in our ears. An alive thing.
Earl opens his mouth to speak, and I wait for the hot lava to spill out.
“I didn’t know I was going to do that,” he says. Earl tries to drop the gun, but it’s hooked into his hand like a sixth finger. He has to shake his whole arm before it thumps to the floor.
“It’s good, Earl. He would have hurt you.”
And George begins to scream.
A hurt-animal sound at first, but it changes, becomes thicker and darker as if he is trying to breathe but the inhale won’t come. He huffs air out and wheezes it back into his lungs, a little stream. I see his belly expand and retract under his clothes, his torso swelling. It’s grotesque—the blown-up dome of his body one second and then all of it caving in, making a hole of him. His mouth puckers, and for a moment he controls his breath, and in spite of the gore, I wonder if he will live. Then he is choking. The back of his head lifts off the floor and his eyes squinch shut before opening wide to match his sudden howl of a mouth. A black something, thick as tar, rises up from his throat. His teeth drown in the darkness and his screams are muffled. Then it floods out of his mouth. It pours onto his cheeks and a steam rises off him. The black liquid hits the floor and bubbles over. It mingles with George’s blood, sizzling and becoming less viscous as it finds direction and flows away from me toward the kitchen doorway. Toward Earl.
Earl is too calm. He doesn’t see what I see. It’s not real. But then the dark blob disconnects from George, gaining a snakelike beginning and end, and Earl drops to his knees and puts out his hands.
“No! Move, Earl. Move!” But he stays exactly where he is as the black slithers toward him, a body now more than a liquid.
I step forward, moving up next to George. I don’t know what I’m planning to do, but there is sick in my throat when he lets out a low, weak whine. More a release of trapped air than an expression of emotion. His arm jerks forward, his hand shoots out toward me, but I’m too worried about Earl to avoid whatever I’ve got coming.
But then, nothing. George is dead, and his curled hand thumps its knuckles against my boot and lies still.
The black substance has reached Earl and Earl lets it coil up, closing his palms around it.
“It’s okay, Emma,” he says.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. The good parts and the bad parts?”
Earl is rolling the substance into a tight ball.
“Is it hurting you?” I ask.
He shakes his head no and opens his palms to show me a shiny, perfect ball. He moves his hands again, pinching and poking until he’s given it a body and two shiny black wings. It glistens in his open palms. Earl leans in and whispers something to it and then holds his arms above his head and lets go. The object flutters and rises, catches a breeze, and floats over my head and out the diner door.
Time passes. We do not speak, we do not move. I’ve chewed the inside of my lip raw, my whole mouth tastes of a self-inflicted wound. Blood sweet. Salt hot. Reassuring.
The shock begins to ooze away. My body is bruised down to the bone, but nothing has gone as deep as George’s gunshot wound. He’s the one bleeding a thick, syrupy red.
“What the fuck was that?” I ask.
“We don’t have to worry about him anymore,” Earl says to me. “We can just take care of each other.”
I smooth the hair off my face only to find that my palm slides a little too smoothly over my forehead. It’s red, sticky. My clothes have bits of George on them. I look at George’s body and see that his belly is caved in, head then neck then ribs then just the layers of his clothes cradled by jutting pelvic bones.
The world’s beginning to bend, floor moving away from my feet. Quickly I sit down, head between knees. I will not pass out.
Earl sits next to me so both of us are facing George. I examine the way the blood pools into the cracks of my knuckles and the calloused skin on the heels of my hands. How would it taste?
I look long and hard at George.
“What do we do?” I say to myself.
“I love you, Emma,” Earl says.
“You don’t know me, Earl.”
The sick comes up and I run for the door. Out of the diner, past the Jeep to kneel in the clean white snow. I expect it to be more of that black, and am relieved when it is just bile and my last few bites of food. I dig my hands in until my fingers claw pavement and scoop up snow to clean my hands, my face, the front of my jacket. I scrub my fingers red and raw. The knees of my jeans are soaked through with melted snow. Against my belly scar the snow burns deeper.
I walk on unsteady feet back into the diner.
There’s a ridiculous host of items spread out around George’s
sprawled body. A box of bandages, medicated judging from the yellow pad on one that Earl’s abandoned. A fully unrolled Ace bandage. Two rolls of paper towels, both unopened, but the plastic wrappings for three others are near a mountain of sopping red paper Earl has been using. The floor under and around George has taken on a red tint deeper and darker where the blood has pooled in the cracks. The stench is horrible, worse than blood and sweat. It’s an inside smell. Private, kept safe until now. Intestines. Hurt-brown-goo bits and blood mix.
“Earl, please stop,” I whisper as I move closer. I can’t tell if Earl can’t hear me or if he’s just ignoring me. “I said stop!”
“We always clean up our own messes,” he says, like he’s been taught to say it by his mom along with please and thank you.
“Leave it,” I say.
“We don’t have to leave anything anymore!”
“What did you say?”
A new odor emanates from George’s body. An intolerable and entirely human stench that even stubborn-faced Earl can’t help but wiggle his nose at.
It’s all about breathing: Inhale. Exhale. A body must take life in, letting it back out in equal measure. George is done with all that. Done with making. Done with destroying. Are the two always comparable, I wonder. George and I have something in common, though. I see that now. Both of us baking up dark tumors of sourness and hate. The good parts and the bad parts. There was no good in George, and if there was, it was Earl. And what does that mean for me?
There was never a baby in me. My body had never made anything good.
The nurses were whispering when I came to in the hospital bed post-surgery, post-everything.
“She thought she was pregnant. Poor girl thought that horrible lump was a baby. Can you imagine?”
Ray and I felt good. We had made a decision. We would take as much in as our bodies would allow and then we’d drift into death before any doctor could cut me open and prove that our baby wasn’t a baby. And having that plan, a real and immediate suicide pact, was so much more powerful than any fumbling along we’d done in our lives up until that moment. It carried us through. I was so high. So close to blacking out when I decided to show Ray what I’d made for him. I wanted him to have a look at our baby before he died. See how much we loved each other. It doesn’t make sense; I know that now. But then, it did. I’d taken so much from him and this was what I could give back so I wrapped my fingers around the X-Acto knife Ray used for his art projects, lifted my shirt, and pushed in. It didn’t hurt at all. Not at first. The drugs made me numb and it was like watching someone else slice a piece of pie. My skin splitting neatly open. I lifted the knife away and pushed it into the round of my belly again before swiping backward so I’d have a neat slice of cake I could easily plate, but then the blood started to run out. Thick as oil. The cut began to sting, and when the pain caught me, it was so strong that I screamed, my eyes opening wide, my body propelling me toward the bathroom.
That action. That slicing open is what saved me. Without the pain I would have gone under and stayed under like Ray, though even without the pain, my body might have fought it more than Ray’s body did—they said later he’d been dead a long time before my mother heard me screaming—because he’d prepped himself for the day. His body was hollowed out from sorrow and days of not eating and so it soaked up everything we gave it and greedily kept it all down. The drugs did their work and he overdosed. Gone while I was still dreaming up next steps.
Now I’ve got a new decision in my mind, and a warm spot in my chest to negate all the cold empty just below my heart. Past experience should tell me not to trust this feeling, but it feels so much better than anything else in these hills.
Earl is staring out the diner window, considering the sky as I consider him. The good side of his face is all I can see, and he looks brave and solid and stoic.
“Don’t you see?” he asks me. “We never have to leave. We can stay just like I wanted,” he says, and outside, on top of the Jeep, crows are gathering.
Right here and now. I have Earl. The closest thing I’ll ever have to a son. We will be free before it all catches up to us. We will make each other whole.
SEVENTEEN
“Emma!” Earl’s excitement is clear. “We don’t have to leave.” He turns away from the diner window, his hand spread out like a fan over his scar.
“Don’t talk crazy.” The peace I felt moments before is gone.
“George is dead. It belongs to me. We can be us here.” He sweeps the air around him into a one-armed hug, as if to gather up the land, the bodies, the diner, and me.
“Earl, we have to get out of here. I don’t want to stay.”
“We’ll bring the supplies in from the Jeep. Clean up all this.” He waves George away with his hand, pushing him out of the little world he only just gathered up for us. “In the summer, the ground is soft. We can grow food.” He’s gleeful, childish in a way that’s frightening.
“You don’t mean this,” I say. My voice is weak. I sound distant even to myself, like an old tape recording, all garbled, rip-shredded out of the plastic case and scattered along the side of the highway.
Earl moves toward me, curls in, wraps his arms around my waist, presses the top of his head to the underside of my breasts. His request reminds me of some other time, some other person, and I shove him off. His hands unclasp at the small of my back, pull free of each other with a sucking noise.
“What’s wrong?” Earl asks, as if my behavior is truly incomprehensible.
“There are dead bodies here, Earl. More than one!”
The puzzled look remains on his face.
“Look, Earl, if we stay here, your body is going to start to change. Not this year or next, but you will hit puberty and you won’t be happy with what that brings. If I can get you out of here, I can get you to a doctor. They can get you testosterone or whatever.”
“But it doesn’t have to be a hidden place. We can bring people here. People like us who need a place.”
And for a moment, I see it. A quiet place up on a hill. The diner full in the morning. Tents erected on the parking lot. A shelter. A home. It scares me how clearly I can see it.
“If it’s ours, it isn’t a trap. We could come and go.”
“It’s a dead place, Earl. We’d be snowed in all winter. There’s evil here. I felt it as soon as I arrived.”
“That was George! We can change it now. What did your daddy tell you? You have to want the evil. Well, we don’t want it! We won’t let it in.”
“We are not staying, Earl. We can try to be a family, but we can’t do it here.”
“Please, Emma. Please.”
“You’ll like the real world. They can help you there,” I say, and gesture to his face.
“Can they fix my scars?” he asks. I do not answer, but he takes my silence as confirmation of his truth. “I’m a made-up thing, Emma. They can’t fix me.”
“I’m not saying you need to be fixed.”
“We’re staying.”
“Earl!” I shout, and he jumps. “You don’t get it. I’m the evil thing! I don’t have to want it or let it in. It’s me. I ruin everything.” I think of Ray after I had Coach Matt chased out of town. How we folded into each other even more and the real world faded away. There was just Ray and Emma and our ideas became powerful, credible—the stories we told each other were the only stories. And then Ray was gone. Story over.
* * *
I pull an old can of lighter fluid off the shelf, thinking it will get his attention. I open it and point it at the countertop. Let go. Squeeze. Let go. The tin clanks in and then out in a rush to empty then fill its own shape. I turn and squirt it in a wet S on the floor before I look at Earl. Hand to face, mouth open slightly, eyes wide enough to show the full-moon round of his irises. I spread the stream of lighter fluid wider, letting it arc across the room.
“Don’t!”
“We’re leaving. You and me. Us. If I have to burn the last bits of it down to get you ou
t of here, I will. We have to start fresh. It’s our only chance.”
I open a new can and toss the old one into the empty circle of floor I just came from. I dump at least half directly on George. It fizzes in his wounds. There is a book of matches in my pocket. I pull it out and light one. I drop it on George’s chest and the flames snake across his surface, flowing like little rivers. For a moment the liquid is the only thing that burns and it is a controlled burn but then the smell of hot flesh mushrooms up and hits me in the face. One of the little rivers of fire snakes down George’s side and onto the floor of the diner. Panic rises in my chest.
“You’re ruining everything,” Earl says, sounding sorry for me. Like I’ve lost it, like I’m the one ready for the straitjacket. He takes a step toward me and then sideways as if to step past me. He’s taking his sweater off and I can tell he’s going to try to put the fire out. Somehow use his sweater to smother something already set in motion. I move fast, aim at his toes, let lighter fluid barely hit. He drops the sweater and the flames rush forward as if they know it’s there. It catches quickly and Earl backs toward the door.
The fumes themselves are strong, burning my throat and pushing up into my brain. They trickle down throat to chest to belly, pulsing now behind my scar. My body is flammable from the inside out. “Leave the diner,” I say, and watch his face rebuild as he decides what to do.
“I can’t.”
“I’ll take you with me. We’ll stick together. I’ll make this right. I promise.”
I’m still working my way toward the door, and as I back out, Earl follows. We make our way out into the snow. Earl, looking antsy and uncomfortable, moves back behind the gas pumps. Will they blow? The fire will never get that big, still I should move the Jeep. I’ll save Veronica if I can, but it will take too long to hook the winch up right now.
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