by Samuel Ligon
I get sort of lost in my imagined conversation with her, driving in traffic so early on the Southern State Parkway toward Kennedy Airport and my next motel and a few hours rest. It’s a good feeling, knowing what I gave her, knowing she’s alive and has so much in front of her, babies and love and who knows what all. A sort of infinity there.
Nikki
We don’t have air conditioning, and even this close to the ocean it must be eighty degrees upstairs. Alina twitches and kicks and I keep waking, snatching pieces of dreams through tequila fog and my headache, though dreams have nothing to tell me. I was stupid to try to get money from Mark, stupid to sink into black emptiness with him, as though I deserved that escape. In my half sleep, I’m still deluding myself, still hoping he’ll help us, when he has no reason to help after the way I treated him, the way I felt something between us and then clawed after money, betraying us both. Alina twitches and kicks, and I know how wrong I was to try to play him, when he seems like the only person I want to know besides Alina. Another delusion, the user part of me making me believe I could have feelings so fast.
A car door slams on the street, jerking me fully awake. I run to the window, but it’s just Cathy Hayes coming home from the bars.
I get back in bed and drift into sleep. I wake in a panic, remembering my failure to kill Cash at Duval. What if I show the same weakness with Burke? What if he kills me and takes Alina and does what his brother did, and I’m like, that will never, because that can’t ever—and that’s when I know we’re leaving in the morning. No more waiting. No more trying to find a way out. I can hardly believe how stupid I’ve been. We’ll leave in the morning, even if we have to run forever. Sweat pops and cools on my forehead, runs in a line down my side. I concentrate on breathing, waiting for the relief of escape to settle over me.
She’s so beautiful in her sleep, so peaceful, even when she twitches and kicks, as if her body knows there’s a reason to run. Or maybe those are just my genes in her legs exercising themselves, priming her. I hope she won’t have to run her whole life like I have. But at least she knows how. At least I gave her that. Besides, maybe running’s all anyone does, until we finally get stopped or can’t run anymore, everyone finally run down like a clock that can’t be wound again.
Alina
I wake up early like when I was little, my mother snoring beside me, sleeping off whatever she did last night with Cynthia’s boyfriend, liquor and cigarettes and sex and everything else. The whole room smells of it. She’s so beautiful—even with her mouth open and her hair in tangles, the faint crow’s feet and lines on her forehead smoothed out with sleep—and it makes me feel better, a little, to look at her asleep, even though today’s the day he was supposed to come to Interlochen and now I’ll never see him again, which I don’t want to spiral into. But another part of me wants to hold onto that, not the loss, exactly, but just what he meant to me, which I’m not even sure what he did mean, except I was in love with him and shouldn’t have been. Nobody knows that, though, except Ashley. I can hold that feeling to myself or take it to the beach and bury it. And even though his ashes would probably never find their way from the Sound all the way around the island and into the ocean, I can bury my part of him in the sand so that the same water his ashes are in might somehow wash over the part of him I have.
On the beach so early there are fishermen and old people walking and some yuppies jogging before work, but hardly anyone. Mist comes off the ocean, the city behind me, and it’s not hot yet, the ocean loud and the wind blowing and old people walking dogs. I never understood how people could tell if the tide’s coming or going just by looking at it, and I can’t tell if it’s coming or going now, but I walk on the hard sand below the high tide line, my hands wrapped around Kyle’s wooden man in the pocket pouch of this poncho hoody he gave me from Guatemala. I walk toward the sun coming up way down the island toward Montauk, past the rich people in the Hamptons, and further out England and Ireland and France, where it’s already night probably, and further still China and Japan, where it’s another day entirely, and I think that’s what being dead must be like—another day entirely.
I hold his wooden man in my pocket pouch like a mother kangaroo, walking him on the beach. Maybe his ashes floated around Manhattan and into the ocean drifting toward Long Beach, where I walk with this feeling of him in my hands.
That liquor smelled so awful coming from her, sour and sweet, filling her room. But she did cry yesterday at Kyle’s, and also her mother dying and whoever my father was, and Kyle and how awful it would have been, really, if he had come to Interlochen—how nothing would have happened like in my dreams, or if it had, how horrible that would have been, and how maybe that stink coming from my mother, the liquor and the story of her mother and her tears in Kyle’s studio, maybe that was her grief coming out. But then she went after Mark. Probably looking for more Interlochen money, when I’m not even going back. Or maybe just proving to herself and the world, like she always does, how beautiful she is.
The sun behind people on the boardwalk turns them into silhouettes. They walk alone or in pairs, cardboard cutouts, but mostly alone. With a dog maybe.
Like any kid I thought she’d find a guy she liked so much she’d marry him. I’d like him too, and we’d be a family, and they’d have other kids, my sisters and brothers. But she never did. And I don’t know if there’s something wrong with her because of that, if she thinks she’s better than everyone, so full of herself, and just won’t ever settle for less than best. But that’s a lie because of Kyle. Because he was the best. Because there’s no way she’s finding someone better than him, which is what’s so sick about her going after Cynthia’s man.
I don’t have to bury him today if I don’t want to. I’ve been looking for a spot in the sand that seems right somehow, where the tide would wash over and take these feelings out to his ashes, but I don’t have to do that today if I’m not ready to. Over the sound of the ocean I hear the whistle of the Long Island Rail Road, the cries of gulls and other birds, but mainly just the sound of the tide, the endless movement of water, which will always and forever remind me of Kyle.
Nikki
Even though I don’t believe in dreams, I dream of that spot Downeast Maine where George and I camped all those years ago, when I was so young and had just run from Manchester and was finally free of my mother. I take an image of us on the beach at night into my dream, or us sitting on a log by the fire kissing or walking down by the water under the stars, that feeling of knowing everything was about to begin or had just begun, Alina in my memory or dream waiting to be born, because we didn’t use birth control those few weeks we were together and I didn’t care, didn’t want to stop a baby from coming out of everything I felt for him.
We couldn’t get enough of each other. I fell asleep touching him and woke reaching for him, and because we never had time to use each other up, I never have in my memory either—even though I hated him for leaving me on the street in Providence like he did. Even though I never heard from him or saw him again. But I never quite burned him out of my mind either, that week in Maine like the beginning of time, certainly the beginning of my life it felt like.
In Providence, I kept waiting for him to return with a good reason for having left, and then tried to cover that hole with hatred from the hurt. But even if something bad did happen to him, or if nothing happened, if something just went wrong and he disappeared, in my sleep or near sleep we can be at the beach together or in our tent, wanting a baby for the first and only time in my life, to create something beautiful out of all that love. And it’s Alina of course, Alina, who, like him, I never grow tired of looking at or touching, those moments of fullness and potential and surrender stretching out with me in a dream forever. But he turns into Mark again and again, and I hate myself for this feeling in my guts, for having taken something there was no time to take, knowing I was only doing it for Alina. But losing myself like I did—
allowing a kind of surrender I didn’t have a right to and can’t afford—feels unforgivable, a weight I can’t stop dragging even in my dream.
Mark
I kept tasting Nikki’s skin under beer and tequila, practically seeing her in my aunt’s backyard. There was nothing I could do to help her if she was just going to run, and no way to come up with that kind of money so fast, but I kept tasting her skin, even as I felt the loss of Cynthia—not just her death, but everything we’d lost so many years before and never could have gotten back and never should have gone after again in the first place. I tried to forgive her for her involvement with Kyle, her love for Kyle, knowing it wasn’t mine to forgive, sickened by this feeling of ownership and almost regretting trying to block her feelings for him, but whenever I thought of them dead together, I felt another stab of jealousy, and then I’d smell Nikki and taste her skin, afraid and exhilarated by the way she was infecting me, Cynthia saying, “What, so you hate me for loving Kyle? When you’re already—whatever you are with this Nikki chick? At least what Kyle and I had was based on more than money.”
“What about the baby?” I said.
“You don’t know shit about the baby,” Cynthia said. “You don’t know shit about shit. Go help Nikki if you’re so desperate to be a doormat.”
There was nothing I could do to help Nikki though. I was sick of everything being finally and forever about money, which got me wrapped up wondering who would get hurt if Kara was paid again. What did I care if she got another bag of cash? I’d known she wanted to keep her baby that day at the lagoons, and I scared her out of it with threats I would have delivered on. Why shouldn’t she get paid, over and over and over again?
I considered calling Liz to tell her I’d contact Kara, thinking only of Nikki really, how she was playing me for money I’d never be able to get and how I almost didn’t care. But the way I kept tasting her skin on the patio and later, waking from sleep, made me afraid to help her—because I was so small—knowing part of me would expect something in return, everything, knowing that whatever was between us would amount to just another transaction, and how I wouldn’t get enough out of the deal to make it worth my time or risk. I’d never be able to give her enough, either. The only thing to do was forget her and walk away, the only thing to do and exactly what I would do. But the taste of her skin, even in my sleep, the smell of her, awake, asleep, everywhere. . . .
Burke
I get sort of lost in my imagined conversation with her, driving in traffic so early in the morning. “I really do understand,” she says, touching my face. We’re on lounge chairs pushed next to each other on the beach, the sound of waves washing up around us. “I’m just sorry for everything you’ve had to go through,” she tells me, and I say, “I know you are, baby. I know everything about you.”
We look at each other a second, her touching my face and sort of looking into my soul, and it’s so intense, her studying me like that, all these minutes passing as we look at each other, and she finally says, “How come you love me so much, baby? Me just a whore,” and I say, “Because you’ve got a pure heart is why. And a pure pussy and ass.”
She laughs—“Naughty”—pressing her hand into my bathing suit.
“But, really, baby,” I say. “Because you seem like a real human being is why.”
“I love you, Daddy,” she says, “I love you, Burke,” because she knows my real name now, and I say, “I know you do. I love you too, Cinnamon.”
But, then—that ain’t even her real name. And I don’t even want to know her real name. And I think, Fuck the hotel. Fuck the airport. Fuck sleep. And fuck that Cinnamon too, never telling me her real name, just a whore of Babylon like all the rest.
24
Maryellen
Children are a blessing and a curse, a blessing mostly, but the strength of the blessing making their power to hurt—you or themselves or the both of you—a curse maybe worse than the blessing. I never favored one child over the other, though both kinds, good and bad, will break your heart. I don’t know what caused Burke to get into such trouble growing up, but I do know that a boy needs a man in his life. Billy Wayne was not much of a man for Burke, not much of model. At least, not the good kind.
Cash took after me, sweet and joyful and kind until they killed him over drugs down in Austin. I thought he was just getting his wildness out down there, that being close to the capital and the university might do him some good, just by being around those kinds of people. He was the smart one, the one with fire in his belly. I figured he’d go to college himself someday.
After Billy Wayne left, my mother took us in and helped raise the boys, but she also held them back, always telling me not to put ideas in their heads. I told them they could be whatever they wanted—an astronaut, a doctor, the president of the United States. Burke cared for Cash as much as I did during those thin gravy years, loved him and looked after him and was nearly as devastated as I was when they killed him. He tried so hard to make up for my loss and be a good son, but there was nothing he could do to kill the pain and emptiness, no way for a man to understand that kind of loss even if he is from the same womb. You start to feel memory there only for the one they took, as if the lost one’s the only one been inside you. Still, Burke and I became closer as result of my loss. I saw how hard he tried, working at that Denny’s, out on the straight and narrow.
There was a girl Cash had at the end that he showed pictures of and told stories about, a Yankee girl from a broken home. You can read true love when you see it, and the way he talked about her, I knew that’s just what he had. I was grateful that he got to taste a love like that. Given enough time, she probably would have saved him. They’d have saved each other, grown into their love and had children and moved away from the people in Austin trying to poison him, raised up a family and lived their lives in love, just like a fairy tale. That was the destiny I imagined in my dreams. My fairy tale, too.
Nobody knew Cash wasn’t Billy Wayne’s, that I’d also tasted true love. We only had one month together before they shipped him off to Vietnam, where he was probably killed, like so many of them were. Burke was two and Billy Wayne was gone most nights and I met a man stationed at Fort Hood, though we never had any contact after he left. Years later, when Cash talked about Nikki, I knew James and myself might have saved each other, too, given enough time and another set of circumstances. But I lost him before we got the chance.
All my memories and hurt over James came back when I lost Cash, became larger than they’d ever been, as if my love for him was growing through Cash’s death, some kind of link through Cash to him on the other side. For a while it was as if I was no longer among the living myself, though I tried to hide my pain from Burke, tried to support him in his loss, too, because he’d always looked after his brother, always loved him, even if he did have a rough patch during his teen years and became what he became, nearly dragging Cash down with him. I knew Cash turned out well not just because of James’s blood, but because of Burke being a father to him. That broke my heart to think, that Burke had sacrificed his childhood to father his brother. And for that brother—the one with all the real potential—to be snatched away just piled waste on top of waste.
I saw Burke change after Cash died, saw how hard he tried when he came home from Huntsville. Saw him turn into a better man than his daddy ever was. He’d never become Cash. He knew it and I knew it. Anyone would have known it. But he did become a better man. His love for me grew as mine grew for him, as mine grew for James, the result of all that loss. Even if he’d never amount to more than a short order cook, Burke did learn how to love, Cash’s final gift from the other side.
Burke
Sometimes things work out better than you can even dream, one of the many surprising things about life and more proof of the guiding hand directing everything to a fateful purpose. I park the car and walk the boardwalk, then down to the beach and back to the board
walk, where I sit on a bench smoking and drinking coffee and ruminating and flipping through pictures of Nikki and Cash and looking at the water, or off to the west, the towers of the city, the rat’s nest so miniature and harmless from this distance, almost fake looking, the sky a perfect blue and cloudless, a train whistling behind me and the ocean crashing and people living their beach lives, which some of them might deserve to live, but which at least one of them don’t, having murdered my brother in cold blood. I’m just easing through these morning hours, knowing I’ve got plenty of time to scope her house and break in and hide myself for her return from work, when I’ll maybe tie her up like she tied Cash and cut off her clothes and lay down the death by a thousand cuts and watch her bleed like she bled Cash, but a lot slower, her begging for life, not at all like Cinnamon, but crying and begging and me resisting the temptation to give her back her miserable life, fighting that, or maybe deciding, based on what she says or does, to let her live, or to watch her bleed, depending, and then flying out of John F. Kennedy airport to San Diego or Puerto Rico, to settle on the beach with all that broad assed Puerto Rican cooze and all my money. But I know I got a hell of a lot more planning to do—because I have to get that pile of cash before any bleeding can happen, and I’m thinking after I smoke one more cigarette and finish my coffee, maybe I’ll call her up, two days before I said I’d be in New York, to see if she’s got the money together and to make plans for the exchange, to scare her into action and see if she’s got the cops involved, maybe just to talk and then watch her house, to see if I can see when she picks up the money and brings it on home—the moment I’ll go into phase two, tying her up and bleeding her—when I’ll be goddamned if she herself don’t walk through one of them netless volleyball pits down on the beach, carrying flip flops and heading toward the stairs up to the boardwalk not ten feet from the bench I’m sitting on. I rub my eyes and want to pinch myself to make sure this ain’t a dream, she herself walking right toward me on what might now indeed be the day of reckoning, everything changing so fast, like she’s ready for it too, surrendering to her destiny, my blood racing and not knowing if I should say anything or not, but her walking up the stairs looking right at me, like she’s coming for me almost, then looking away, and I can’t tell if she’s scared or not, the sun behind her, but she don’t seem scared, and as she turns to walk east on the boardwalk away from me I call her name.