by Barbara Bell
I wake in a big room. It’s stuffy. I hear a TV.
I try to move but can only turn my head. One of the prison guards is talking to a man in a white coat. Now a nurse looks in my face, turns, and says something. The man in the white coat approaches and leans over, staring at me. Above my head is a bag of red fluid. I follow the red tube that comes out of it, seeing it go down into my hand. A wad of bandages circles my wrist.
The doctor and nurse disappear from view. I try to shift, but sense how I’m strapped in place. My head lolls to the side. I see beds lined up in a long row. The women in them are staring blank-eyed at the television that’s bolted up in the corner.
The nurse reappears and squirts water from a bottle into my mouth.
“That’s good,” she coos.
I hold it on my tongue.
Then I get a picture in my mind of Ben slumped on the ground with five holes in him. I see Kat, her neck stretched, her face bright red. Then something floats in.
No. There’s no one. Nobody. No.
I spit the water in the nurse’s face.
She doesn’t move. I can see she wants to slap me. But everyone in the room is silent, watching. She walks off, wiping her face.
I lie still. I don’t struggle. I’ve had a lot of training for this kind of thing. I can feel how they couldn’t strap my wrists. Too much damage. Instead, they have me bound mid-arm. I press my forearms back, slipping the straps toward my elbows. I reach wrist to wrist, working through the bandages and gouging the stitches out. I rip off the IV and blood feed.
So this is happiness, I think, feeling my body go light. And I find that I’m smiling. Funny how happiness isn’t all that hard when you know what you really want.
My blank-eyed neighbor screams. They come. I try to fight them. The blood makes my arms slippery. The doctor pulls the blanket and sheet off one side, yanks up my gown, and spears my thigh with a needle.
Now I’m floating again, seeing Ben. I want to tell him how much I love him and how everything that happened is forgotten now. It doesn’t matter anymore.
When I wake once more, my hands are enclosed in mitts and I have a tube taped in my mouth. I swing my head side to side to get it out. I try biting, but they have something rubber between my teeth. I scream and thrash. The doctor and nurse consult. I get another shot, but it doesn’t put me out, just keeps me groggy. The nurse comes in with Cynthia. Her eyes are red. She sits by the bed.
I look away.
“Becca,” she says. “Josh is a wreck. Burt broke down and cried in my office. You’ve got to stop this.”
Because of the stuff in my throat and mouth, I can’t explain to her about the little house I built. It’s made of white stone and sits on a rise above a river. In this house, the dead are stacked deep.
On the bottom is Mama, still fat and wedged into her slot. Then Mandy. Beloved friend.
Ben is stacked but still breathing. He’ll always sleep half-awake.
Then my lovers lie in slumber. Dear Violet, in a light sleep, tossing and turning. And Kat, my fairest love, trembling from her dreams. Above Kat is Miriam, murdered by her vicious lover as she slept.
In the top slot is the freshest body of all, laid out like a doll flat on her back. Across her stomach on the left side is the scar she mistook for an appendectomy. I smile, remembering her confusion. I find myself reluctant to leave her side because I miss her so deeply. She is the one I loved best.
Her skin is white now, bleached but pliable. Her lips I find to be soft as I touch mine to hers. They are dead, though. No mistaking that.
I glare at Cynthia. I throw my head side to side. She cries some. In time, she stands, squeezes my arm, and leaves.
The next few days are bleak. They drug me up, feeding me through the fucking tube. Eventually they wear me down. Eventually I begin to let them feed me. Ben’s basement again. I expect them to give me a new name and teach me to give pleasure to men.
But in my head I go for long dreams, floating down the river. Listening to the sound of wind and leaves.
They keep interrupting. The orderlies unstrap me for short periods while in the custody of some hefty guard watching me like I’m a criminal or something, like I’m a prostitute gone bad. I try one more time when I’m peeing by myself in the john. I wreck my wrists, opening the wounds that have just knit together. I can’t get in deep enough. And I wedge myself as tight as I can beside the toilet.
I think of the statue of the sad woman that Mandy and me adorned with a hat years ago. Her face was turned to the side. And she was turned at the waist also, as though having thought to move in that direction, but maybe had decided not. Perhaps she knew that no direction would satisfy, and that all her suffering had come to nothing.
I curve my arm around, rocking and drooling, clutching my legs up tight beneath. That’s when my guard opens the door and his face goes red like he’s angry, not sad at the sight of me in such a sorry condition.
The guard grabs me by my ankles and drags me out. We roll around on the floor in a red embrace until they hit me with another syringe.
And so I dream and drift once more to sleep. I walk to the edge of the river. I unbutton my dress and let it drop. When I step forward, the water is cool. I let the current take me.
On the far bank now, the shadows have lengthened. The night-jars have come out, swooping and diving, and the sun has bleached the cypress golden. Someone has propped me on a willow branch, swaying as the willow sways, and high in the upper limbs, the peewee calls, pee-a-wee.
“All right, Clarisse. Wake up.” A hand is gripping my chin, shaking my head. “You’ve got company.”
My eyes open a slit. The blood drip hangs above me again. The tube has returned to my mouth. I jerk my head out of the nurse’s hand. When she steps back, I see Cynthia.
A nurse walks by with a tray of food for the woman in the bed next to mine.
That’s when I notice him. He’s sitting quiet beside Cynthia. He’s wearing a Chicago Bulls cap and sunglasses that are familiar to me. Then I remember. That’s Becker’s hat. It’s Becker’s sunglasses.
The fucker. Nobody gave them to him. Tears are running out from beneath his sunglasses. I glare at him.
Cynthia leans forward, lying her hand on my leg. “Your brother’s here to see you, Becca. You remember Vin.”
I shake my head no. It’s a trick. Vin was bigger-boned. He had darker skin. And he’d be older now. Do they think I’m stupid?
Now the fake Vin stands and sits beside me on my bed. I turn my head away.
“Look at me, Becca.”
I know that voice. It’s not Vin.
“Becca.” He takes hold of my head and forces me to turn toward him, his hands trembling. He takes off his sunglasses, and I stare at him, remembering. It’s Violet. After all these years, she’s come to get me. I see that her neck isn’t separated from her head. Bates lied to me.
“I didn’t mean what I said in that interview. I’ve been sick to death with wanting you, to see you, to talk to you. I’ve been such a coward. I’m so ashamed. I made a terrible mistake.”
I stare at her, seeing how pale her skin, the dark lines beneath her eyes.
“Do you know me, Becca? Do you know who I am?”
I keep trying to remember, thinking about flames and how they shoot higher and higher as the two-room burns, how I worry for the willows that they’ll catch fire, and how Vin and me have to keep moving back because of the heat.
She starts crying and lies her forehead against mine, whispering. “Please stop hurting yourself.”
I sense her hands rubbing my head.
Now Violet sits back and turns to Cynthia. “Get the nurse.” She stares at me. “You’re going to eat now.”
When the nurse comes, Violet says, “Please take out the tube. She’ll let me feed her.”
“I’ll have to ask the doctor. He’s not here.”
“What have you got to lose?” Violet says, not mean but soft, like someone might be dying nearb
y.
The nurse leaves and I see her pick up a phone. Then she’s talking on it, gesturing.
Violet leans close to my ear, talking low. “I should never have listened to you that day. I’m such a stupid shit. Nothing could be worse than this.”
The nurse returns with a tray. She sets it down and leans forward, releasing the strap behind my head, peeling away the tape. As she separates my teeth, she steadily pulls the tube out. I start gagging.
Violet waits, then lies a bottle against my lips. “I want you to drink.”
I lie still, staring into her eyes, remembering pictures that someone showed me a long time ago of a woman in a Dumpster, another piece of trash thrown out. How did she awaken from her silent death? Did the Dumpster prove fertile for the quickening of limbs? I throw buttercups upon her gentle grave. And I lie her beneath the willows. I wet her eyes with the river.
Violet squirts liquid in my mouth. I hold it there, trying to remember how to swallow.
“You can do it.”
I choke on it, but get it down. A burn starts in my stomach.
“More,” she says.
I swallow another mouthful.
She hands Cynthia the bottle and takes a bowl and spoon. “You’re going to eat some soup.”
Cynthia props up my head with a pillow. Violet offers me a spoonful. I shake my head no.
“Just a little.”
We wait.
“Just a little,” she repeats.
I open my mouth and I swallow, following its course to the fire that is my stomach.
“Again.”
She keeps feeding me until I shake my head no.
“Okay. That’s good for starters. But now you have to do it on your own. I can’t come every time. You can do it for me. Remember that I want you to eat and to drink. And I want you to leave your wrists alone. Let them heal.”
Violet hands Cynthia the spoon and the bowl and holds my head in her hands again.
“They’re going to make me leave soon.”
I shake my head, but she holds me still.
“Shh, Becca. I’ll be back. But you have to eat and get better before I can come back.”
She leans forward, hesitating, then touches her lips to mine.
Her scent comes over me and she lies her forehead against my cheek, crying. Then she sits up. “Before I go, I want you to talk. I know that you can say my name.”
I stare, trying to memorize her again, because I sense I’ve forgotten something.
“Say Miriam, Becca.”
Vin sleeps by the river, but I’m awake. And the moon lights the mists silver. The live oak rustles, high on the rise and lit from behind.
“Miriam, Becca. Say it.”
The river of a sudden flows heavy, having broken loose from some northern freeze, carrying its Dumpsters full of bodies. And I hear my voice whispering, full of mud, full of wormtree.
“You say, ‘One clover. One bee. And revery, revery.’”
And now it’s like when you’re in the box and first you’re whispering. Not long after that, you’re screaming, but you don’t know why.
It’s the fire having leapt into the willows, spreading to the tupelos. The nurse and the doctor scurry like rats on a log. I see another needle. Cynthia gets between them and me, gesturing.
The ‘gators climb out of the river and drag me in.
Violet’s laid her body over me.
Kat loved for me to plait her braid. I’d lean her back in a chair, still naked from the play, still scared some, and always like she was, a little sad. Sigh no more, I’d say in her ear. I’d recite it for her as her hair fell free.
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then, sigh not so
But let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.
And all the time I brushed her hair over my fingers. With each turn of the plait, I loved her more. With each wind about, I kissed her neck. She smelled of scented lotions and semen. Of roses and sweat.
Mama smelled of river-washed cotton. Her breath was heavy with milk, and her fingers were shaped like sausages, but smelled of rain.
So when it rains, I think of Mama. How she loved thunder and wind. We’d sit on the porch watching the storms come in. She’d take off her stretched-out shoes and her knee-highs, already fallen down to her ankles. We’d run out and get drenched. I’d stomp puddles. Vin would slide along the grass, buck naked, showing off his white ass.
Our bodies and minds are made from a thing so fresh, so fine. But we regress to that which wilts, folds down, and disappears.
So I live inside the river now. If you want to find me, you look for me here. Above me, I see cottonwoods atremble. I see trapjaws dropping off logs. I see the willows draped over.
How they sway. How they sway.
A guard comes and gets me from my cell, leading me to the visitor’s room.
It’s Miriam.
I stare. Cynthia told me that she was going to come, but I didn’t believe her. She told me that Miriam had seen me in the hospital, but I didn’t believe that either.
I gaze at Miriam, trying to remember that feeling I used to get whenever I saw her. That something in my heart. But I’m not all the way alive just yet. I’m still carrying around the body of a dead woman.
Neither of us says a thing for a long time, and I feel myself floating, like on that raft. I put my hand on the glass separating us. She takes off her sunglasses and I see her eyes.
I have to admit, she looks pretty damn bad.
“You’ve got to eat more. I told you about that,” she says, tears starting to run down her cheeks.
I don’t say anything. I hang up in the air, knowing how close she is to me, and that she isn’t some dream I use to bring myself suffering.
Miriam swallows and looks down. “I fucked you over bad, Becca. I owe you an apology.”
“No, Miriam. Let’s not waste these few minutes on that.”
She nods, wiping her cheeks with her hands.
“I want to tell you a story. You’ve always wanted me to tell you things. I want to tell you about Mama.”
She’s looking up at me now, crying.
“Well, as you can see from the picture, she was fat. Mama couldn’t read a word, and we were poor, but she gave Vin and me something that was better than all that. You know, everybody thinks it was your interview with Oprah that did me in, and I have to admit, it was pretty bad. But you didn’t start it.”
Now she puts her head down for a minute and sobs good and hard. I wait until she’s looking at me again.
“I don’t know when it started, but I do know that it was the fire that night that’s gotten into me so deep. That and Ben’s basement.”
I brush my hair out of my eyes and look down.
“Anyway, Vin woke me up. There was so much smoke. We all slept in one room on a big mattress next to one another. Vin and me shook Mama. We hit her and kicked her, trying to get her to wake up. She wouldn’t wake up!”
I pause for a moment, wiping my eyes. “Because of the smoke, I guess. We each took an arm, pulling hard. She was too heavy. Vin and me couldn’t budge her.”
Now I start crying. “I lay down on top of her like I was going to keep the fire off, and I could hear her heart still beating so strong and hard. I wrapped my arms around her neck and told her I would never leave her. But Vin, he was bigger than me. Vin dragged me off her. I fought him. I tried to break his face. He wouldn’t let go, just pulled me out of there.” I have to stop for a bit.
“I always blamed myself for her death. And Vin, of course. We weren’t strong enough. It was my fault.”
She leans forward and places her hand on the glass, looking like she’s going to say something.
“No. Let me finish.” I try to blow my
nose, but it’s impossible. Ben broke it so bad that no air can get through.
“The real kicker is that nobody came. We were just the rats that lived down by the river, eating out of their Dumpsters. Vin and me sat and watched the whole thing burn down to nothing.”
I wait for a bit, trying to compose myself. “But that’s what I want to tell you. I’ve spent my whole life doing crazy things like jumping off of bridges because when it came right down to it, I knew nobody would come.