Beauty of the Broken

by Tawni Waters

  Sometimes Iggy comes to visit. When he’s there, I feel like maybe the world isn’t spinning so much. I never want him to leave, but Momma says he has to go to work. So he goes to work and I wait for him to chase the ghosts away.

  On Halloween he comes into my room looking scary. He’s wearing a black cape. His teeth are sharp. He has blood on his face, like that day. “Hey, Sis,” he says.

  I start to scream.

  Momma comes running. “Iggy, just go to work,” she says. And he does. I look out the window, watching him walk down the driveway. “Iggy, come back,” I say. His cape flutters in the wind. He doesn’t turn around.

  I keep looking out the window. All kinds of spiders and witches and vampires come to the door. One boy has an ax in his head. Something buried deep inside me whispers it’s all pretend, but I don’t believe it. It’s not pretend. Bad things really do happen. I close my curtains and hide under my blankets, hoping the mean things won’t find me. And then I remember they can’t find me because I’m not real. I left the real me down by the river.

  I know this because I’m not the same me. I used to be full of spring, and now I’m full of winter’s rot. I like things neat now. My shoes are lined up in my closet just so, and when Momma saw the way I arranged the clothes in my dresser, she said, “My, Mara! You’ve turned over a new leaf.”

  “I liked my old leaf better,” I told her.

  For a long, long time, I lie in my bed. My chest hurts. Finally, the sky gets dark, and all that’s left is the wind.

  “Shh,” I whisper to the wind, the way Momma did when I was in the hospital. “Shh.” I put my hands over my ears, but the noise gets louder, like the sound of a train passing two feet in front of me. My heart begins to pound. Bangbangbang! Elijah’s face is so close. I can see the red veins in his eyes and the blackheads buried deep inside his pores. He’s looking through me, staring into the rocks that are shredding my back as he grinds, grinds, grinds inside me.

  I can hear my voice, the way I sounded that day. “No, no, no.” It is a whimper, the saddest sound I ever heard, like a dying puppy. He doesn’t listen. To him, I’m not a person. I’m not even an animal. I’m nothing.

  This memory closes in on me as thick, choking darkness closed in on Jesus when he died. At noonday it became as night. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

  Run. Run. Run. I stumble toward my bedroom door, but I can’t run far enough to get away from this. Because it’s inside me. Wherever I go, it will follow me.

  And then I come up with a plan.

  Run. Run. Run. What is death if not running? It’s the one way to get away from me. I’m ugly. I’m sin. I’m the devil. I deserve to die.

  And so I stumble to the bathroom, fumble with the latch on the medicine cabinet. My hands shake. You wouldn’t believe how ugly I’ve become. My face is skinny. My eyes are swollen. And my hair—what a sight. I try to smooth it back, but it won’t stay. It’s rebellious as me, my momma used to say. I wonder if they’ll have one of those funerals with the dead person on display. I should at least try to look my best.

  First I smear on a thick coat of Momma’s lipstick. Candy-apple red. It makes me sad to see it spread across my swollen lips. I will miss that woman.

  The lipstick’s done now. But this hair! I grab the razor blade that gleams on the second shelf. It cuts right through the skin of my middle finger. It hurts, but it is a sweet pain, the kind of pain you want to hold on to. The kind that makes you forget to hurt inside. I lift the razor to my hairline, dripping blood over my tangled curls. Slice. The curls fall away.

  It’s hard to shave off your hair without also cutting your scalp. Hot pain sears over my head, and a tiny river of blood trickles along the bridge of my nose. I wince, but I don’t let that stop me. Golden tangles fall to the tile by my feet, like so many sheaves of wheat. So much hair! I never knew how much hair I had until I saw it all lying on the floor.

  I look into the mirror. What a relief. Those rebellious curls are gone. All that’s left is a smattering of bristles protruding from my scalp. I look like a hedgehog. A hedgehog that got run over by a car maybe, judging from the way I’m bleeding. It stings. More than that, it hurts, deep down into my brain. I drop the razor blade and clutch my head in my hands and make the dying-puppy noise I made by the river.

  The door creaks open, and it’s Iggy, glowing in the moonlight. His see-clear-through-you eyes are shining. He kneels beside me, wrapping me in his strong arms.

  I’m a baby again. I remember what it’s like to be held and rocked in a warm set of hands you think were made just for you. I remember what it’s like not to worry. I remember what it’s like to bury my head in love and cry, cry, cry. God, how I cry against Iggy’s chest. He’s talking to me, but it might as well be chickens squawking.

  The moonlight melts my brain. My thoughts blur away into a buzzing haze of sleep.

  • • •

  I wake up in my bed. I’m alive. Iggy is lying beside me, softly snoring. His arm is draped across my belly. I watch the sunlight fall over his face, thinking about the way I used to believe that I was his angel. Last night, he was mine. I bend to kiss his face, loving his freckles, his smell, everything about him.

  My brain’s back. I don’t know why, but I can think straight again. Maybe cutting my head made all the crazy leak out. All I know is that for the first time since the river, I can look around me and see things for what they are. My drawings are hung up all in a row. This is my quilt Grandma made me. And there’s Iggy, my beautiful brother, sleeping beside me.

  Last night comes rushing back to me, and I remember the way he held me. The way he saved me from myself. “Thank you, Iggy,” I whisper. Then I holler, “Momma!”

  She comes running. I must be a sight, because she just says, “Oh, baby,” over and over.

  She wraps her arms around me, and I hug her back. “It’s okay, Momma,” I tell her. “I’m back.”

  She pulls away from me and looks into my eyes. She must see what I’m saying is true because she says, “Thank God. Oh, thank you, sweet Jesus,” and she wraps her arms around me again. She rocks me back and forth. I can feel her breath in my hair. “They’ll make him pay, Mara,” she tells me. “Don’t worry. They’ll make him pay for what he did to you.”

  “Who?”

  She pulls away from me and looks at me like maybe she isn’t so sure I’m not crazy after all. “Henry,” she says slowly, as if I’m stupid. “He goes to trial next month.”

  I feel like someone hit me in the face with a sledgehammer.

  “Wait,” I say, trying to catch up. “Henry’s going to trial for what happened to me?”

  “Of course,” Momma says. “His shirt was covered in your blood. You told the police he did it.”

  I stare at Momma in horror. I don’t know what to do. I want to tell her it wasn’t Henry, but if I tell her the truth, Elijah will show Daddy the picture, and I’ll get stoned in the street or maybe hit in the face with a two-by-four. I imagine Henry, one of my only friends in the world, huddled in some jail cell. I know I should do something. But I’m so scared, I’m frozen. I am afraid if one more awful thing happens to me, I will never be okay again.

  “Mara?” Momma asks. “Are you all right?”

  “Where is he?” I whisper.

  “He can’t hurt you, honey. He’s in juvie until the trial. And the DA says after that, he’ll be locked up for a long, long time.”

  “Oh, Momma,” I say. And I start to cry.

  CHAPTER 24

  COME IN,’ SHE SAID, ‘I’LL give you shelter from the storm.’ ” Xylia’s voice slides out through the morning air, thick and rich. I imagine it has substance. Not solid, like concrete or wood. Not even liquid, like water. But weightless, like fog. It’s green, her voice, the color of a lone grass shoot peeking from frosted soil at winter’s end.

  Inside my head, we’re sitting in her room, searching for a way to make sense of my broken heart, of the snakelike gashes slithering over my scal
p.

  “Mara? Mara Stonebrook?” Ms. Elibee’s voice snaps me out of my daydream. It’s my first day back at school. I keep forgetting I’m here. I look up at Ms. Elibee. Her skin is freckled, so white and thin you can see her veins.

  “What do you think man’s purpose is?” she asks.

  “What do I think man’s purpose is?” I repeat the question, buying time, wondering why she asked it.

  Elijah snickers from the back of the room. I can’t see him, but I’d recognize that laugh anywhere.

  When he saw me this morning, with my white head scarf, he grinned as if he knew he’d won. I just looked away.

  My stomach tightens. And I understand that Ms. Elibee asked her question because new teachers always ask questions like that. They still believe that they’re shaping minds, not just plodding through an endless string of exhausting days like the rest of us.

  Ten years from now she’ll know better than to ask those questions. She’ll see a picture of herself drawn on a bathroom wall somewhere. She’ll have pointed boobs and wild spirals of hair, with some ugly words underneath. It’ll dawn on her then that she’s not making a difference. Her students may remember her flat chest, her pasty white skin, the way she wheezed when she got excited over her subject matter, but they won’t remember what she had to say.

  And right then she’ll take a black Magic Marker out of her purse and scrawl an even uglier word on the bathroom wall. She’ll tell those ungrateful shitheads what she thinks of them. From that day on her grading standards will be tougher. She’ll start writing woebegone poetry instead of trying to change the world. She’ll die without a thank-you.

  I think all of that as I repeat Ms. Elibee’s question. I feel so sorry for her that I come up with an answer just to please her. I say, “Man’s purpose is to boil things down.”

  Elijah laughs again.

  “Elijah, please,” she admonishes, but I guess she doesn’t like my answer, because her eyelids droop. Still, she’s a good teacher, so she stirs the hope in her heart, lifts her eyelids, and asks, “And what do you mean by that, Mara?”

  “We try to boil things down, to make sense of everything that’s going on around us, even though nothing really makes sense at all. We try to find the good in the bad, pretend the chaos leads to something meaningful. Something logical.”

  Ms. Elibee looks very confused, disappointed, like a little girl who got underwear for her birthday when she really wanted a pony. I keep talking.

  “When something really bad happens, we try to say, ‘Oh, that wasn’t so bad.’ ” I want to tell her about Iggy’s brain, about Momma’s jaw, about the rape, how I try every day to understand how such horrible things can really happen. I want to tell her too about Henry, about how I stay up every night trying to excuse myself for not telling the truth. Each morning I promise myself today will be the day I set the record straight. And each night I go to bed sick because I haven’t done it.

  I can’t say all that though, so I come up with something else. “Like when we talk about how God gave us this continent, and how the courageous whites subjugated the dangerous Indians. But what was courageous about butchering Indian babies? We boiled what happened down to make sense, so we wouldn’t have to feel bad about what we did. Man’s purpose is to boil things down.”

  I glance around at my classmates. They look at me like I am the carrier of some oozing blister disease. I hold my breath, feeling a blush spread over my cheeks. Then I look at Ms. Elibee. She understands what I said. I can see it in her eyes.

  “Thank you, Mara,” she finally says, full of heartbreak and meaning. “Thank you.” I don’t just like Ms. Elibee after that. I love her.

  This afternoon I walk into the house thinking about the way Ms. Elibee said “thank you” to me. Momma’s in the kitchen, rolling out a crust. She smiles, and I smile back.

  “Hi, Momma,” I say, opening the fridge for the first time in a long time.

  “Hi, honey. How was your day?” She wipes flour from her hands onto her apron.

  I pull out an apple and bite into it. “The best day in a lot of months,” I tell her, and she looks like maybe she’ll cry. I run to my room before she can.

  Later, I’m standing at the window in my bedroom, running my fingers over the soft stubble of my hair, watching a cedar sway in the wind. The house is quiet. I’m thinking hopeful thoughts about the way my hair is growing back. Maybe I can heal.

  But then I remember Henry sitting in some cell, waiting to go to trial for what he didn’t do to me. I think about the way he picked me up and told me it would be all right. I want to be happy again, but I can’t. I can’t be happy when Henry’s going to spend a long, long time in jail. Momma said they were trying him as an adult. I imagine fragile Henry in a prison full of killers and rapists. Real rapists. Not people like him who got accused of something he didn’t do. I feel dizzy imagining what they will do to him. But if I tell the truth, Elijah will tell Daddy what I am, and Daddy will kill me. The thing is, I keep thinking if I don’t tell the truth, he’ll get off anyway. The hospital did a rape kit. Won’t that show he wasn’t the rapist?

  There’s a knock on my bedroom door. “Come in,” I say.

  “Hey, Sis,” Iggy says, smiling.

  “Hey, Iggy.”

  His see-clear-through-you eyes aren’t there, which makes me sad, because I need to ask him what I should do. Smart Iggy would know. A voice inside me says, Smart Mara knows. I hate that voice right now.

  “Knock-knock,” Iggy says.

  “Who’s there,” I ask.

  “Panther,” he says.

  “Panther who?”

  “Panther no panths, I’m going thwimming,” Iggy says, and he laughs so hard, he doubles over.

  “Good one, sport,” I say, but I don’t laugh. I wonder if he is trying to answer my question.

  Do what you have to do, no matter what, the voice in my head says.

  Shut up, I tell the voice, but it doesn’t. Do what you have to do.

  “Get it? Go thwimming?” Iggy asks.

  “Yeah, Iggy.” I touch his face. “I think I do.”

  I left me by the river. I’m going to find what I lost.

  CHAPTER 25

  I’M NOT SURE I’M READY to go “thwimming,” but I at least have to face the river, so I decide to go fishing instead. I walk toward my and Xylia’s special spot, to the place where Elijah raped me, thinking if I can stand there alone, I can make it mine again. If I can stand there alone, I can find the Mara that I left behind and take her home.

  Carrying my pole and some hooks, I remember the way Henry talked about a God of love, and moonwalked across the cafeteria, and told Elijah God would never burn us.

  At the river the rocks are the same. The reeds are the same. The water is the same. But it doesn’t feel safe the way it used to. I walk around, searching for my backpack, which still must be here somewhere. I’m starting to think it washed away when I find it huddled in the reeds, half buried in the mud. I remember tripping on it, falling, and the memory makes me want to run. But I don’t. I look at that backpack until it doesn’t scare me anymore.

  “Fuck you, Elijah,” I whisper. “You took my soul, but you don’t get to keep it.” I’m not sure if I believe the words when I say them, but I say them anyway. I can’t quite touch the backpack yet, so I get my rod ready, dig in the mud for some bait. Soon a wriggling worm is impaled on my hook. I think about Elijah smashing the worm with his boot, and how I cried. I wonder what the difference between me and Elijah really is. He smashed worms. I impale them. Tears don’t mean much if I do the same thing he did.

  My hook plops in the water, creating little ripples. Even though it’s late fall, the sun’s warm on my shoulders. I stare into the green water and wait. For what, I don’t know. For a fish, I suppose. For something. The top of my head starts to get hot as I wait and reel, cast again, reel some more.

  Soon I forget to wait. I forget to think. I forget everything. So it takes me by surprise when there
’s a sharp tug on my line. I stumble forward, almost losing my pole.

  I start to wrestle with a fish that is so strong, I’m panting and sweating and reeling like mad. When his silver back breaks the top of the water, I say, “Holy shit on a stick!” The fish is practically as big as a shark. It’s none other than Paul Bunyan himself.

  “Holy shit!” I cry again, and I reel harder and faster.

  Paul Bunyan fights so hard, he yanks the line back out, but I’m not letting him go. Before long he’s flopping in my net on the muddy shore, gasping.

  “Holy shit on a stick!” is all I can say.

  Paul Bunyan stares at me, desperately. His thick gills lift and close. His skin sparkles like a rainbow in the sun.

  I stare deep into Paul Bunyan’s eyes. They are like tiny mirrors. I see two miniature me’s reflected back. He gasps again.

  “Holy shit on a stick, Paul Bunyan.”

  I hold him against the ground and yank the hook from his jaw. It bleeds something awful, and I feel terrible for what I’ve done, looking at his small teeth.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper. I lift the net and kiss him right on his fishy nose, and then I plop him back into the water. Off he swims, leaving a tiny trail of blood behind him. As he disappears into the murky green, I sink to my knees.

  “Did you see that, Henry?” I imagine the way he laughed when he caught the toilet seat. “I caught Paul Bunyan.”

  I hear Henry say to me, “Paul Bunyan is a piece of God.”

  Things become clear. It’s as if I’m looking down from way above. I don’t think I will ever fish again, so I leave my pole there leaned up against the rock. Another worm is dead, and isn’t that enough killing for one lifetime? I go back to the backpack. As I bend to pick it up, I notice a bit of metal next to it, glinting in the sunlight. I wipe the mud away from it and gasp. Xylia’s ring. It’s coated in grime, so I take it to the river and kneel to wash it. Cool water flows over the Virgin’s face. When it’s clean, I see that it’s scraped, but still there, smiling kindly. I close my eyes and slide the ring on my finger, remembering the way I felt when Xylia gave it to me. Like the most precious thing in the world. The ring is proof that I’m not what Elijah made me that day. I’m not an abomination. I’m a girl who is loved.