by Amy Gentry
Vi
woke up at seven in the morning with a stiff jaw and sticky yellow stars behind her eyes. Will was still passed out beside her, snoring and rasping.
For a moment she didn’t remember why her jaw hurt. Then she stepped into the bathroom and saw the shower curtain half pulled down and the shampoo bottles arrested mid-roll in the tub, remembered his hands holding her neck against the wall under a rain of water. When he’d released her, she’d grabbed at the curtain blindly to keep from falling, with predictable results. She’d stayed huddled there, listening to the sound the water made hitting the plastic curtain over her head, waiting for him to come back and yell at her for the mess she’d made. He never came.
It was the first time Will had hit her, but not the first time she’d thought he was going to. She was already intimately familiar with the song he’d sing when he woke up after a night like last night. How could he trust her, with her past? Dancing for all those men—women too—more than dancing. That was the first verse. Then came the chorus, in which he avoided last night’s sour names, just cried and swore he’d never believe he was enough for her. Second verse, same as the first. Then, best of all, the bridge: Didn’t she understand he’d been betrayed before? He was a virgin until he was twenty-two because his college girlfriend said she wasn’t ready, but then it turned out she was sleeping with someone else. He’d been a perfect gentleman, and she’d betrayed him.
Vi always pretended she was hearing it for the first time. He’d cry and cry and beg for forgiveness, but somehow, it would still be her fault. And his memory of having apologized and groveled and told her the humiliating story once again would only make the next time worse.
She went back to the bedroom and looked at him. Will was beautiful in repose. He had a jaw like a statue’s, hard and rounded at the same time, and his bluish whisker shadow made his skin look like marble. She imagined putting her hand on him where his had been on her, just under the jaw, then leaning down and squeezing hard.
His eyelids, almost translucent, fluttered, and she suddenly put a hand to her own tender jaw. The bruises were forming just under the jawline, where they could be swaddled in a scarf or turtleneck. No one would have to see.
Almost as if he knew just where to grab. Almost as if he’d done this before.
The bathroom took only a few minutes to clean up. He would cry, yes, and apologize, but he wouldn’t want to see any reminders. He’d want to have sex first thing, when her breasts were still slick with his tears, and she would accommodate him gently, lovingly; there was, even now, a calculating little twitch in her groin at the thought. She lay back down in her underwear and carefully arranged herself in bed next to his still form, draping the sheet over them both, tucking them in. She closed her eyes. She wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep, but that was fine. She used the time behind her eyelids to make a plan.
The plan involved Seattle. Will had been booking gigs there to get her out of town. He was worried she’d fall in with her old crowd again, Lina’s crowd, even though none of them would talk to her after the breakup. Most of them she hadn’t known well in the first place, so when she was out playing gigs with Will and saw them once in a while, it wasn’t strange for them to pretend they didn’t recognize her. She did the same.
It didn’t happen much, though, because they weren’t playing lesbian dive bars anymore. Will had called up two of his old band mates and said, “I have a girl singer.” Vi’s haunting vocals were laid over electric guitar, and she was singing lead, not backup. The lyrics sounded to her like badly written suicide notes, but you couldn’t hear them all that well, so it didn’t matter much. Will was right; people liked to see a girl fronting a band. It didn’t seem to matter what kind of ripped-up clothes she was wearing; their faces turned up toward her like flowers, like she was an angel of light. And sometimes she really felt like one. The stage lights bleached out her eyeballs under the lids so she felt like she was staring straight up into heaven, and if the lights left dark splotches in her vision after she opened them, it just meant she had to look at the world around her a little less.
The band was called, depressingly, Midnight. But after a while it became clear that people were showing up for Vi, and in a moment of inspiration, Will suggested they change the name of the band to Gretchen at Midnight, after some children’s story his mom had read to him when he was little. She was ready to say goodbye to Vi by this time anyway, and, just as she suspected, people started calling her Gretchen. She liked it. Gretchen was a healthier name than Violet, and Gretchen was a healthier girl, not a night bloomer but a bright yellow flower. Her hair grew longer and she started bleaching streaks into it, and the blonder it got, the better it looked with the dark T-shirts and jeans she wore onstage, and everything was more or less fine.
At least, it was in a holding pattern until she slipped and said something stupid that exposed her, lethally, two different ways at once. Dave and Len were talking about hitting up strip clubs after a gig, and they mentioned the Black Rose. A little high off the crowd that night, she cracked a dumb joke about the dykes who went there for fresh fish, and Will, with his occasional radar for such things, looked at her with a sudden, uncanny flicker of recognition and said, “How do you know?”
She didn’t bother denying it; he’d kissed the tiny black rose on her rib cage a hundred times without knowing what it stood for. Now he stared at her and she felt the tattoo burning under her T-shirt, its meaning suddenly unmistakable.
It was over, a fact that she knew right away and he, dangerously, didn’t. From that point on, whenever she stood on the stage glowing like a street sign, he didn’t see Vi anymore, he saw Starr dancing under the hot lights, Starr who should have been long gone. After shows, no matter how happy he seemed with the band’s share of the door, he said, “Every single person in that room wanted you.”
She just shrugged, because wasn’t that kind of the point?
At first it turned him on. When they got home, he’d grab her hard, lift her shirt and rub his thumb over the tattoo until the skin under her left breast was bruised and raw, fuck her like he was trying to own her from the inside out. Useless, she could have told him; nobody owned what was in there, not even her. But it wasn’t long before disgust eclipsed desire, and then his eyes went black, and fucking her wasn’t enough, he had to get in some other way.
The shower rod had broken, and she could feel more breakage on the way. It was time to get out, but her next situation had to be something different. No more Linas, no more Wills. She was done playing a rag doll, whether she got tucked in at night or thrown against the wall.
Anyway, the band was starting to get too popular. At almost every show now, she saw a few glowing rectangles held aloft to record, and she didn’t like it. She knew she’d have to plan tight and move fast, because these days Will never let her out of his sight for long. When they were all on the road together, he played her guardian angel, meaning she and Will had a cheap motel room while the rest of the band crashed on sofas. One day soon he’d start making her crack the door open while she peed, and she’d never be alone again, not even in the john.
She started drinking a beer with the band before the show, in the round on the house that took the sting out of dismal pay. Will liked her taking part in this pre-show ritual; he’d warned her enough times, crushing his fifth or sixth empty while she kept herself sharp, not to act any better than she was. The tide would eventually turn, of course, but she thought she knew approximately how much longer she could drink with the guys before that happened. She snuggled up closer to Will to buy herself a little more time, ignoring Dave and Len as much as she could with them all crammed into a booth together, and made sure everyone saw her hit the ladies’ room just before they all went onstage together. Will laughed and said it was stage fright, but when the time was right, missing this step would give her an excuse to disappear immediately after the set.
Every time they played Seattle she felt like a kid on a swing,
scanning the ground as she whooshed forward, looking for the perfect moment to jump off. She didn’t know exactly who she was looking for until she saw him: a man in the audience at the Ploughman she’d seen before, always alone. Just a man, but that night onstage, as the hot red lights lay on her face like a mask she could slip out from under, she sensed him like a wet stain on the front of a blouse, felt him watching her, and when she saw his dark face ringed by lighter faces, a hole in the pale crowd, she knew. She closed her eyes, let her voice hover in the alto register for a few lines, and then reached out for him with her soprano, scaling the stage lights with her voice and bursting upward into the quiet dark at their center like a surfacing diver.
That night in October, with the mantle of drizzle descending again, a curtain that wouldn’t lift for the next seven months, she jumped.
6
By the time I get home, I’ve forgotten all about the video and Gretchen Farber, because she’s gone, Julie is gone.
I want to scream at Tom for letting her leave the house. Of course, he doesn’t know about the miscarriage, he doesn’t know she’s supposed to stay off her feet for twenty-four hours. He doesn’t know she might be bleeding, she might be hurting. But still—when I get home, she has been gone for five hours with no word, and he is frantic. We drive up and down Memorial, stopping in coffee shops and stores, asking if anyone has seen her. One barista at Starbucks says he thinks he saw her get into an SUV outside.
We aren’t so crazed that we don’t think of Jane, out somewhere in Tom’s SUV. When Jane’s phone goes straight to voicemail, the way it does when it’s dead, that’s when the scenarios begin to spiral out of control. Some men from Mexico have been looking for Julie and have finally found her, perhaps when the girls were together, and they’ve taken both of them, or it was Jane who picked Julie up, but they were T-boned at an intersection and are now lying comatose in a hospital; catastrophic scenes tantalizing because they’re impossible, like lightning striking twice in the same spot. I yell at Tom and Tom yells back and then we hug each other tightly, and Tom calls the police. He’s on hold with them when the two girls finally stumble into our kitchen after dark, sopping wet and giggling like mad.
It’s the laughter that unhinges me. For the past four hours, since I came home to find both girls gone, I have been sitting at this kitchen table believing with a morbid certainty that this is my fault. That going to Julie’s therapist and, worse, meeting with that Mercado person, some crank who got my work number off the faculty website, was a betrayal that meant I was unworthy of having Julie back. As I made my way through the list of Jane’s friends—Bella, April, then further, to friends she probably doesn’t hang out with anymore but whose parents’ numbers we have—and Tom shouted between hold times at Detectives Harris and Overbey and anyone else who would listen, I knew, deep down, that they were gone because of me.
And now they are here, and they are laughing.
“Where have you been?” I ask quietly.
They’re still in their sister bubble—Julie and Janie, Janie and Julie, just like old times, though Julie, already detecting something wrong, has started to sober up a little.
“Oh my God, so many places!” Jane puts a hand on Julie’s shoulder to steady herself.
“You could start by explaining why you’re soaking wet.”
“Oh,” she says. “Yes. That was mostly an accident.” There’s something a little hectic in Jane’s voice, but I’m in no mood to listen to it. She can see my expression, though. “You tell her, Julie. She likes you.” She explodes into nervous titters.
Julie starts to explain. “The traffic was bad on the way home, so we stopped to eat. And then Jane wanted to show me the sculpture garden, but it was already closed—”
“We jumped the wall,” Jane says. “I’ve done it a lot, but this is the first time I’ve ever been chased off by a security guard!” She’s giggling again. “So then we went to that big fountain in the middle of the roundabout in Hermann Park—”
“We wanted to make a wish.”
“—and things got a little out of hand. And we went swimming.”
“She was taking money out of the fountain!” says Julie, starting to laugh a little again.
“Well, I didn’t have any change. I didn’t think the wishes would mind being recycled.”
They’ve already forgotten the expression on my face that stopped them in their tracks a moment before. In their minds they’re still tumbling together into the broad bowl of the giant fountain, chasing each other through the arcing spray while cars honk all around.
It’s too much to bear. I get up from the kitchen table. I don’t even know what I’m doing or which one of them I’m moving toward, but Julie sees me coming and melts into the door frame. Without breaking stride, I slap Jane’s cheek.
“Anna!” Tom shouts.
“What were you thinking?” I demand. “We must have left two dozen messages. What the hell happened?”
Tom crosses over to where Julie is hugging the door frame and puts one arm around her. He is not standing between Jane and me, but he looks like he is ready to be in an instant.
Jane holds her hand to her face, stunned. “You hit me.”
Baby, I’m sorry is what I mean to say, but harsher words come out: “You owe your father and me an apology.”
“You hit me,” says Jane. “You fucking bitch.”
“Jane.” Tom steps in with a warning tone.
“My phone must have died! Jeez, I’ll look if you want.” She fumbles through her bag until she finds the phone, pushes the “on” button, and waves it around. “See? Dead!”
“It’s your responsibility to keep it charged, always. You know that.”
“Since when do you care?” Jane drops the phone back in her purse. “This isn’t even about me. I’ve been five minutes late before and you haven’t even noticed.”
“You’re five hours late, not five minutes,” says Tom. “We had no idea where you were.”
“I miss dinner all the time,” Jane says. “Nobody’s ever hit me before. Hell, nothing I do around here raises an eyebrow.” She laughs. “Why is it different when she’s with me? Is it because you’re afraid something will happen to the one who matters?”
“You can take care of yourself,” I spit.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You let her go once!” I’m yelling now. “You watched her walk out the door!”
Jane’s eyes widen. She comes over to me, close enough for me to feel how much taller than me she is. She raises a hand, and for a moment, I think she’s going to slap me. Instead, she points to Julie.
“Blame me if you want to, but don’t forget, she’s standing right over there. You can ask her whatever questions you want.”
My eyes follow the pointing finger, and for the first time, I notice Julie’s hair, which is wet and plastered to her head like Jane’s but starting to dry. I see the short, feathery red cap, fluffed upward at the hairline by a cowlick, and for a moment, I can’t even speak.
“I told you she would freak out,” Jane says, but nobody pays attention now.
“I’m sorry,” Julie whispers.
“Why—” I take a step toward Julie, reach out a hand, and tentatively touch the place over her ears where her long, silvery-pale hair used to be. I ruffle the side hair, pull it forward, check that it’s real.
Then I start crying. I can’t help it.
“I can’t believe this,” says Jane. “She’s the one who left the house today without telling anyone where she was going. She’s the one who disappeared. Not me. Not me!” There’s a bandage on Jane’s left ring finger that has come loose and is flapping around. When she sees that no one will try to stop her, she doesn’t bother stomping, just rushes upstairs and slams the door to her room.
Julie follows, but slowly, one foot in front of the other, wading through my grief like it’s a current in a flood, like she might lose her footing and be swept away. She looks as if she ha
s lost more children than I can possibly imagine.
My mother slapped me once.
The summer after fifth grade, Angie Pugh invited me to spend part of my summer vacation with her family in Northeast Harbor. My mother, who had strong ideas about raising girls, reluctantly agreed, but I had outgrown my swimsuit, and shopping for a new one was torture. She stood behind me in the corner of the dressing room, watching with a frown as I tugged each suit over my newly widened hips. The suit we finally picked out had polka dots and a full, ruffled skirt that hung halfway to my knees—I had maxed out my growth spurt the year before and would never be an inch over five feet.
The first day of my vacation with Angie, she made a face at the polka-dotted suit and said, “Here, take one of mine.” She opened up a drawer full of bikinis from the juniors’ department, bathing suits my mom would never even let me take off the rack. I tried a crocheted bikini with a halter top and beaded hip ties that clicked when I walked. Angie looked at me appraisingly and said, “Now I get what it’s supposed to look like.” She sounded jealous, but only a little; after all, she was the one with the vacation home in Northeast Harbor, and I was the one with the Catholic mother.
For ten days we played tetherball and Ping-Pong, walked to the old-fashioned soda fountain for Coke floats, told each other ghost stories under the covers with a flashlight. At the end of the vacation I gave Angie her suit back, but I hadn’t thought about the tan lines. My mother, who did not believe in knocking, came in while I was changing.
As I cried from the sting, she yelled, “Do you know what the men who saw you were thinking? Do you?”
I didn’t believe her. To me, it was just a body. But when summer ended I found out that to the boys in my school, the men in the streets, to anyone who looked, it was more than that; it was an open book full of horrible secrets, a dirty magazine anyone could paw through. My mother never hit me again, but I hated her for being right.
My mother died before Julie’s hips ever filled out a skirt. She never saw me get my first heart-stop—that moment when you look at your girl in a certain light and see that she’ll eventually become a woman, and it reminds you of every boy who put a pencil up your skirt when you walked ahead of him on the stairs, every man who stared at you at the bus stop, every honk on the street, every leering comment. You remember being alone, gloriously alone, reading a book in a sundress, feeling the grass prickling your thighs and the sun on your forearms, and then realizing that you weren’t alone at all as a man you were ashamed to feel afraid of walked up and asked if he could put sunscreen on your back. You look at your daughter and it all comes back, every microsecond when you felt that twin surge of shame and fear, but this time it’s outside of you, happening to a body that feels like yours but doesn’t belong to you, so there’s no way to protect it.