by Amy Gentry
She swam toward the red, she fought red-ward even though the black was trying to swallow her like a diamond, it was wrapping eyeless tendrils around her ankles and dragging her gently down, it was surrounding her with silent caws and carrying her into a blue-black sky. But every time she rested into its softness, she heard Charlotte screaming. Then there was a blow and the screaming stopped.
Then another noise, a mewling, that didn’t sound like Charlotte or like anyone. Was it her? Her tongue was dead in her mouth, a dead bird with blue-black wings. The noise went on, a gurgling and then another thud that she felt inside her eyelids.
If she concentrated every red particle of energy to her fingertips, she could just feel the ground. It was slick and hot and red; she could feel the red stinging her fingertips. Or maybe it wasn’t a feeling but a smell, a pointed smell that was both clean and dirty at the same time. It was the smell of losing a tooth, which was also a taste, warm electrified metallic.
She tried to pull her fingers back but the birds had all been clubbed out of the air one by one and she must be made of them from head to toe. So her dead-bird fingers rested in the electric red pool that smelled like teeth.
There were words being said, a litany, a prayer. They were being said in a voice she knew well, John David’s voice, but they were angry. Maybe they were God’s words, and it was God who was angry.
“You little shit. Goddamn little shit” were the words said over and over again.
The bird in her mouth twitched and she knew it was alive after all. It wanted to scream. She clamped down hard.
“What am I going to do. What am I going do. What am I going to do.”
Thumping, retreating, ascending, and fading. He ascended into heaven. He had rolled the stone away and now He was climbing the basement stairs into the sky.
She opened her eyes.
Charlotte lay crumpled before her, upside down, four feet away, staring at her through eyes filled with blood.
She stared into Charlotte’s upside-down eyes. They seemed full of wisdom.
Charlotte was trying to tell her something. Charlotte was the brave one, Charlotte was the smart one. She had even stolen the wicked little blade from John David’s trash can to saw through the duct tape.
No, that was Julie who had stolen the blade.
Charlotte wasn’t looking into her eyes after all. She was looking at Julie’s right hand, curled an inch from her face. She was staring at something Julie could feel lying under the back of her hand, digging into one knuckle with a sharp corner. A wicked little corner.
When she moved her hand, the blade scraped the floor underneath and then there it was, a cold slice of air a few inches from her face, doubled and blurred but unmistakable. Her left hand slid toward it, fingertips dragging electric trails through the red liquid that was even now less hot than it had been, even now just barely warmer than the air itself. Her bloody fingers closed around one side of the blade.
Feet appeared on the stairs and, next to them, the head of an ax.
For just a moment, she squinted her eyes shut again. Just to remember what life was like when she didn’t know that Charlotte was dead, and she was next.
An unexpected noise of retching came from the corner. She opened her eyes and John David was on his knees, facing away from her and Charlotte. He was not praying. A puddle of vomit snaked away past John David’s knees toward the place where the blood was, where she was.
Before the puddle reached her, she was up on her feet. She hardly knew how she got there; her head was like a cinder block, but she stacked it on top of her body and stacked her body on top of her legs and then she was standing, towering over the broken doll that was Charlotte and the hunched figure of John David groaning in the corner. He spat, groaned again, and gasped for breath. A wave of dizziness swept over her suddenly, the red coming back to cloud her vision with blue-black dots swimming around the edges, threatening to rise up again like smoke. She put a bare foot out to steady herself, and the noise made the emptied-out John David whirl around on his knees, one hand still on the ax handle, one foot already making contact with the floor to push himself to standing. But as he pulled the other foot up, the heel of his boot came down in the snaky trail of vomit and his boot shot out from under him like a Russian dancer’s, and he landed hard on the hand still holding the ax, so hard that his full weight crushed his fingers between the ax handle and the floor and he yelped in pain.
She stood, holding the razor blade out in front of her, but as he scrambled for purchase on the floor that was slippery with so much blood and vomit, she gave a cry and ran up the narrow stairs, not quite on all fours because she was still clutching the razor in her left hand but almost, using her arms like in dreams of running on all fours, some kind of throwback, maybe, to a time when hands were useful for something more than holding a feebly small razor blade that, although wicked, was nothing in comparison to the vast, smiling cruelty of an ax. Her knees, her everything, was slippery with blood.
“Esther! Esther!” The voice was behind her, beneath her, but how far? “Esther, come back! I won’t hurt you!”
She was at the top of the stairs, and he was at the bottom. She looked at him there, so tiny, and saw the beginnings of a bald spot coming out at the very top of his head. She had never been taller than him before.
“Esther!” he cried again, but his hand was still on the ax, choked up now near the head. His voice grew wheedling. “I never meant to hurt you, Esther. Charlotte was the bad one. I only knocked you out so you wouldn’t have to see.”
“My name’s not Esther,” she shouted, but it came out in a whisper.
“No,” he agreed.
She was shocked.
“It’s Ruth. For you have seen much.”
She stood stock-still.
“Ruth,” he said, “you have passed the test. You have made a blood sacrifice.”
His tone had lost its frantic edge and grown soothing, honeyed. “You did the right thing, Ruth. She tried to run away, and you stopped her. Now we can be a happy family again, just you and me.”
“I—”
“You called for help. She overpowered you, and you called for help. And I came.”
Although her head was swimming she knew that was not what had happened at all.
She shook her head to clear the cobwebs. “My name is Julie.” That was the only thing that made sense, but it made his hands tighten around the ax handle. She turned and ran just as he sprang up the stairs after her.
His legs were longer than hers, but she darted around the corner just as he reached out to grab her ankle, the ax handle clattering clumsily against the stairs. She got around to the other side of the kitchen table as he appeared at the top of the stairs, but then realized she had pinned herself against the wall. He held the ax with both hands, shifting its weight from one to the other as if he enjoyed the feel of it in his palms. “Don’t make me kill you, Esther,” he said.
“I thought my name was Ruth now,” she said, this time forcing the words to come out loud and strong.
“Whoever you are!” he yelled. “Don’t make me kill you, because I will if I have to, but God does not want you dead.”
“God is shit,” Julie said.
“God is love, and you are shit,” he returned. “Never forget that.” He slammed the ax blade into the middle of the table, and the Formica cracked down the center with the blade stuck in it. She grabbed the table from her side and shoved as hard as she could, just hard enough to make John David fall on his ass, the ax still in the table, and she almost laughed at how funny this was, but now John David was scrambling along the floor after her, grabbing for her ankles with his bare hands, knocking aside the chair she threw back at him until finally she was at the door.
She managed to get one foot onto the concrete step before a hand grabbed the pitiful bedsheet that was still tangled around her like a robe. She tried to slam the screen door behind her, but it bounced on his arm. She leaned back as hard as she c
ould, hurling her entire weight against the door. His hand jolted loose for an instant, but then the fingers gripped her upper arm and squeezed hard.
“I’ve got you,” he said, panting, and his hot breath warmed her cheek through the screen door. “I’ve got you.” He leaned hard on his side of the door, and she could feel his weight through the mesh, curiously soft and intimate against her own, and what a time to remember his bulk on her, what a time to remember those nightmare communions, what a time to suddenly feel more his than ever, in this moment of almost-freedom, of failed freedom.
“What happened here is your fault,” he breathed through the mesh. “You aren’t Ruth. You aren’t Esther. You’re nothing.”
But in her bloody hands, something wicked still remained.
She slashed blindly with the blade at his fingers, and when they opened, she ran.
Nothing nothing nothing
Nothing nothing nothing nothing
Nothing
She ran to the rhythm of what she was.
There was something, though, curled right up in her core, and every pounding, naked footfall sent shock waves through her legs to say hello to it.
Goodbye, she told it.
I don’t care, she told it.
You’re nothing, she told it. But she knew she was wrong.
She remembered a distant promise of help—peaches in syrup, canned corn—and ran hopelessly toward it. Every ounce of effort went into not tripping on the uneven sidewalks or getting smacked in the face with low-hanging branches or tangling herself up in her sheet, which was trailing. She could not take the time to look back and see if he was ten steps behind, twenty, or none; one fall, and his hands could close around her throat, bloody hands she’d slashed open herself with the wicked little blade, the same blade she’d used to commit the sin that could never be erased. Oh, Charlotte. Poor, poor Charlotte.
She ran through the old Houston neighborhood of hunched brick houses concealing God knows how many pulped skulls and ruined little girls, houses with who knew how many buried secrets in the backyard, zigzagging crazily around corners. The quaint old fairy-tale curves of the houses with their thick climbing vines nauseated her, and she ran past them in search of the larger streets that would signify civilization, and possibly help. But the streets were eerily bare—was it too early, even, for morning walks?
She emerged from the stifling neighborhood onto a corner with a stoplight and paused to catch her breath. A small park lay on her right next to a long, rectangular building with a covered walkway running its whole length. She recognized the sculpture on the lawn, a canal of rusty metal sunk into the grass in a random, nonsensical pattern like a dropped ribbon, and vaguely remembered visiting this museum on a long-ago field trip.
Looking around, she realized that it wasn’t morning after all; though the light was at half strength and she felt that she’d lived through a long night, the colors weren’t right for sunrise. The sky was a dingy, opaque white that made her feel as if she were still indoors, just in a bigger room. The trees loomed large, so dense and saturated with green, the color seemed to bleed off the edges of the leaves. That and the fact that the trees were absolutely motionless in the dead air made them look like fake trees on a stage set, or in a dream. She ran into the empty street and, craning her neck to the right, saw a freeway.
Then she saw it, towering above her, taller than the trees, taller than the lampposts. Missing: A girl, blond, beautiful, and pink-cheeked.
It wasn’t her. Nothing like. She looked at the billboard and then down at herself, barefoot, filthy after months in the dark with him and the things he’d done to her. And now she had the something that wasn’t nothing curled up in her gut to remind her of those things. To remind her, too, of what she’d done to Charlotte. The girl on the billboard knew nothing about that. She was perfect.
The next moment, as if someone had ripped a Band-Aid off the sky, a wall of rain fell down. In a few seconds it made a river that flowed past her bare feet and hid the billboard almost completely.
She started running again.
By the time she got to the food pantry, the rain had slackened to a drizzle like laundry being squeezed out, and the sun was poking out from behind wet-flannel clouds, making the last drops sparkle in midair. The ground was already starting to steam, but she shivered in front of the thin plywood stall. It was padlocked shut.
“If you need anything,” the woman with the peaches had said. She needed lots of things. Her stomach swam with the sickness that could attack her at any time of day, especially when she hadn’t eaten. The only thing that kept her from vomiting was the thought of being found on her knees on the concrete, alone, in front of the pantry stall. She circled around behind it.
A figure leaned against the back of the pantry stall, sheltered behind it on the concrete slab, smoking a cigarette. The woman heard her and swiveled her head slowly in her direction, as if she anticipated being bored by the sight. She took her in from head to toe with a long look, exhaled, and waited with the cigarette held between two fingers down by her knees. She seemed like she was used to waiting.
Suddenly the woman snapped to attention and took another, quicker drag off her cigarette. Then she leveled it out in front of her, pointing. “Wig Girl!” she said. “I know you. You’re that wig girl. Where’s your wig at?”
The girl opened her mouth to say something, but just then the cigarette smoke from the woman’s outstretched hand caught the breeze and drifted toward her. The rush of nausea it induced sent her to her knees in the mud, and she puked into the long, wet grass behind the wooden stall, but there was nothing to puke, just acid that burned her throat. Afterward she couldn’t see anything but green and yellow flecks for a while, and then there was a moment of blackness before she felt a warm hand on the back of her neck.
“Wig Girl, you don’t look so good,” the woman said as she helped her to a sitting position on the concrete. The flecks cleared, and she saw the woman’s face more clearly. The weave was gone, and the woman’s short black hair shot back away from her face in stiff little flames. “My name’s Janiece. And your name’s about to be Mama, if I’m any judge.”
The girl breathed in and out, taking long gulps of the now smoke-free air. “I ran away,” she said, and then paused. She couldn’t think of the words for what had happened. She’d lied. She’d killed. She’d tried to be good. She’d failed.
“Yeah, I got that,” Janiece said. “You got people you can go to?”
She shook her head.
“You need some clothes? A place to stay?”
She nodded.
“You need to get rid of that?” Janiece pointed.
For a moment she was confused.
“Whose baby you having, honey?” the woman asked a little more softly.
The retching came from so deep within her this time that she thought she would be torn to pieces. Except that wasn’t even a possibility. To have pieces, you have to be something.
Janiece watched her as she came up wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Okay, then, never mind about that. You need some food in you either way.”
She looked mutely toward the food pantry behind them.
“Oh, hell no,” said Janiece. “Rhonda’s a nice lady, but one look at that four-months-gone belly and she ain’t letting you out of her sight. They got a room for you.”
“A—room?”
“Look at that, it talks! Yeah, they got a special room with a special movie. They’re Catholics, understand? You don’t want to mess with Catholics in your condition, shit.”
“She said—if I needed—”
“If what you need is a lecture on keeping your legs closed. And I ain’t saying you don’t.”
“I need—” Every word felt pulled from a bottomless well. Sometimes the bucket hit water, and sometimes it went down and down and dangled in space.
“I know what you need, and I can tell you right now, you can’t get it—not without a bunch of papers signed by y
our folks back home. Hell, it’s probably someone there did it to you in the first place.”
Home.
You’re nothing.
“Come on. You’re coming with me.” Janiece helped her up and sighed. “Whoever did that to you, I hope he rots in hell, because getting it out is going to be a whole lot of trouble. Money too.” A sideways glance. “But we’ll talk about that part later.”
She thought about hell. She thought about heaven. She thought about what was inside her, the life, the heartbeat. Then she thought about John David, his weight on top of her again and again. She hadn’t crawled out of the hole after all. It was inside her. Its name was Esther.
14
In 2002, a rock climber named Ryan Hartley scaled the Transco Tower using a small pick. When he reached the thirtieth floor—almost halfway up—he jumped.
On his broken body they found a note protesting the war in Iraq. Presumably he chose the Transco Tower because it was a symbol of Houston’s oil boom: sixty-four stories of silver-black glass thrusting heavenward, alone in the middle of a retail and residential area, the tallest skyscraper ever built outside of a central business district. Pure energy shooting out of the center of the earth, as if a geyser of oil could be caught, purified, and transformed into a prism of light. As if anything could be that pure.
Opposite the tower, across a rectangle of grass, stands the Water Wall fountain, a horseshoe-shaped artificial waterfall exactly sixty-four feet tall, each foot representing one floor of the Transco Tower. Once, we took the girls there after Christmas shopping at the Galleria. Jane, three at the time, pulled away from my hand and ran up to the edge of the water, and Tom took off running to catch up with her. Adventurous Jane stopped right at the bottom of the steps and looked straight up at the curved wall. Then, dizzied by the rushing water, she took a step forward. Her legs buckled under her. She sat down and let out a wail.