“No, I don’t. I don’t, Shawny.”
“Here,” she said, tilting her head up, so that she could aim the barrel at the roof of her mouth. “So it goes right up into your brain. For sure, you’ll die this way.” She put up her hand to stop me from coming closer.
“It’s not funny, Shawny. Put it down!”
“If you come any closer, I’ll flip the safety and pull the trigger.”
“Shawny, it’s not funny.”
“Then you’ll have a big mess to clean up.” She took the gun out of her mouth and pointed it back at her temple, and tilted her head toward it, and smiled. “The least people can do is kill themselves outside.” She smiled and looked at me with the saddest sort of eyes. “Suicide is like falling in love. Did you know that?”
“You want a drink? Because here’s your drink.”
“When you try to explain why you’re in love with someone, you give a big long list of everything you like. He’s cute, he’s got green on the inside of his brown eyes, he makes me laugh. Whatever. But everyone knows you also mean this mysterious, extra element. That’s the thing that makes it love. With suicide, you could also give a big long list of reasons: My parents are fucking assholes, the world is a piece of shit, my boyfriend was just sitting in the back of a truck with another girl. But if you understand killing yourself, you know it’s the mysterious element beyond. It’s the extra thing that matters. That other stuff doesn’t really matter at all. I’m not sure people realize that.”
“Shawny, maybe I should call someone.”
“Don’t come closer to me. If you know about this extra thing, then you can do it. Kill yourself. Just like if you know about the extra element in love, you know you’re in love. You either know about it or you don’t.” She shrugged. “I know about it.”
“Shawny, we’re young. And you know, everyone says we’re so hormonal and emotional and—”
She smiled one of her sad smiles and her eyes were watery and blue and looking into nowhere. “Don’t do that to me, Libby. That’s a lame-ass thing to say.”
“I’m not trying to be lame.”
“Well, don’t make this less than it is.”
For a while I watched her. Then I said, “I just want to sit next to you. Can I sit next to you?”
She made room for me, and at first I sat on the edge of the bed next to her, but then I put the drinks down on the floor and leaned over and rested my head in her lap. It was the strangest thing. All of a sudden I didn’t care what happened. I was too hazy and calm to care—too drunk, too tired.
She stroked my hair with her free hand, and every once in a while touched her finger to my temple, the same place on her own body that still had a gun pressed against it.
“Bet your arm is getting tired.” I was trying to make a joke of it, to make her smile.
“That’s the thing,” she whispered. “I hold it up until my arm is shaking, till I can’t—I really can’t—hold it up more. Or until the roof of my mouth gets raw.” I didn’t move my head, but I could tell she was crying. “That’s messed up, isn’t it?” When I didn’t answer, she grabbed my hair, hard, and yanked it back toward her stomach. “It’s messed up, isn’t it? Isn’t it?!”
“Hey! Shawny!”
She pushed my head back where it had been and held me down. “Never mind, you don’t have to say it. I know it is.” Her voice was calm again, back to a whisper. “Here, I’m going to do something. Don’t move. Just feel.”
There were tears sliding out my eyes from how much my head hurt, a circle of pain where she’d pulled my hair, but I bit my lip and closed my eyes and concentrated. The gun wasn’t cold or warm, which made it feel like nothing. It felt like it was already part of my skin except for a hardness, a force against my head. But I knew she didn’t mean the feel of the gun. She meant how it felt to be her, or someone like her, who was that ready. That sure.
I breathed out. “Life is so, you know, unexpected. And things can change. And they can change in big, good ways. Shawny, please don’t—”
“I’m not going to pull the trigger. On you.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“There’s a perfect space for it on your skull, isn’t there? It’s like a gun belongs there.”
“Shawny, if you’re not around, you’ll never know about the big, sudden turns.”
She said, “I’m counting on that.” Then she put the gun to my lips, but I kept them tight against the barrel and wouldn’t let it inside my mouth. Then she put the gun to the side, and I turned my head so I could stare at it, and we were both looking at it, and she said, “That’s what I’m counting on. I’ll wait as long as I can.”
FOUR
A person shouldn’t raise a kid in a place like this, I know that.
I walk around with Amber in one hand and try to clean up the place with the other. Pick up Kay’s coffee cups, stack the mail, wipe the counters. It doesn’t help much; it’d be so much easier to start someplace new. In an apartment in town, mice wouldn’t leave black shit everywhere, spiders wouldn’t fill the corners with webs, the freezer would actually freeze things, the cat litter box wouldn’t be stinking. The carpet in the living room wouldn’t smell like pee, the wallpaper wouldn’t be peeling, the countertops wouldn’t be all stained.
I’m not awake yet, so I’m feeling pissy. Amber got me up too early. It’s not her fault but it’s still too damn early. Fuck you, I say to everything: the pea-green carpet, the brown couch, the sticky kitchen table with its white top and made-in-the-seventies gold zodiac signs. Fuck you to the pile of laundry that’s not clean anymore because the cat’s been sleeping in it, and to the cat’s full litter box, and to Tess’s cat.
My dream house is a two-story thing, with wood floors, peach-and-gray furniture, cream-colored walls, a big grassy lawn, a white picket fence, flowers all over the place. Not too big, actually. Not too fancy. But tidy and clean and pretty.
It’s like there’s too much to do so I can’t start, which means there’s nothing to do and so I’m bored. I walk into my room and slide onto the bed and put Amber on my tummy. It’s nice here. I painted the walls a light peach and put down a gray carpet remnant, which I got new and which covers most of the green stuff, and I keep the spiders knocked down and everything has a place.
When we were kids, Tess and I were always fighting about sharing a room, mostly because Tess was a slob. One night Kay’d had enough and she nailed up some boards and a big hunk of plywood, and then most of the room was separated. My half of the plywood got painted peach. Tess left hers alone, even though it had a spray-painted fluorescent orange streak across it.
Amber’s stuff has all been in my half of the room, but now that Tess is gone I guess I could move everything over. I could paint her side pink or something, to match the flowers on the bassinet, which is real cute, lacy and all. But I don’t have any paint, and no energy to go get paint, and I’ll get around to it but not today. And so why even start cleaning the place out? I can’t even move her stuff over because the white dresser with a changing table on top is too heavy, and since I can’t move it till Kay helps I might as well not do anything.
Once Derek asked me to move in with him. We were lying in his bed after sex and I was looking across the bedroom into the rest of his cruddy trailer, at his piles of laundry and empty beer cans stacked into a pyramid on the coffee table. What I thought was, No way. What I said was, “Derek, you don’t want me and all my junk in here cluttering up your life,” and he said, “Yes, I do,” and I said, “Naw , you don’t.” What I’m thinking now is, Maybe that was my chance.
Because how can it be worse than this? I can’t believe that I pay for this—pay Kay two hundred a month for rent. I gotta get my finances together. There’s rent, car payment, car insurance, gas, half the groceries, and now diapers and formula. And I’d like to get the long distance back on the phone now that I have someone to call if I ever hear from Tess, but Kay turned off the long-distance service a long time ago to save
money and I can’t even call out of here, which is ridiculous. Maybe I should get a cell phone, but my paycheck comes in at about two hundred a week after taxes, so it’s supposed to be one paycheck covers the car, one covers food, one covers rent, and I’m supposed to live on the rest and save to get out of this place and so there’s no way I’m going to get a cell phone. Shit.
I wish there was something to do. Derek’s at work. In high school, I would have called Shawny, but Shawny is dead. And of course there was always Tess. By now, I’d have gone and pounced on her bed and we’d get ready to go lie in the sun, or drive in to Lamar, or at least watch a movie.
I close my eyes and send her a thought, a message. Ohmygod Tess, I miss you. What if you’re not safe and please come back. Tess, call me. Tess, your baby!
Time just goes on and on. When Amber bursts into her series of waaaa, waaaaa, waaaaas, I take her on a drive. First to Lamar, and I drive down by the park to see if any moms or kids are out, but there’s just a bunch of teenagers hanging around in their falling-down pants, acting stupid because there’s nothing better to do. I drive on to Derek’s place, which is on the other side of Lamar, even though I know he’s not there. In the screen door of his trailer, I leave a note:D on’t you think
E verything could be
R eally a grand adventure?
E asy to say and hard to do, but here’s a bunch of
K isses for you
Derek doesn’t have a good name for that sort of thing. And he doesn’t even like it; he thinks name poems are something little girls do. Which is true—I’ve been doing them since the second grade. But I argue that all this has made me smarter, because for one thing his name has taught me a bunch of “K” words. There’s not many of them and I was having trouble right off the bat, so I hauled out the dictionary and learned things like kisan, which means peasant, and kith, which means friends, or somebody who feels like kindred. Which got me to thinking, as I told him, who are my kith? Maybe kisans, or knights, or knaves, and questions like that maybe are my koan, which, as I explained to Derek, is a question that you think on for a long time.
My koan is this: Do I love him or not?
I make myself a list to try to figure things out.
One, Love is when you miss a person when you’re not with them and you’re happy when you are.
Two, Love is when he’s in your daydreams.
Three, Love is when you want to protect him.
Four, Love is when you pay attention.
Five, Love is that extra, mysterious thing.
I look at Derek’s trailer. I look at Amber. I chew on my fingernail and look off at the sky. I don’t know. I don’t want to be alone. But I also don’t want to pretend that Number Five is there when it’s just not.
HAVING GOOD TIMES IN DURANGO, the postcard says. There’s a picture of the other part of Colorado, the part with snow-topped mountains and trees, and Tess has drawn herself in, a little stick figure sitting on the top of a mountain.
Her tiny handwriting fills the other side: Hey, I got a job first thing—clean hotel rooms and waitress—free room and min wage. Come visit! I’ll pull a cot into my room and show you town. My boobs hurt like hell but the meds help. I can drink all the beer I want again! It feels so gooooood to be away, to be free.
P.S. How’s your little baby?
P.P.S. I’m sorry. And I know that being sorry is never going to be enough.
There’s something else inside the post office box, too. A letter addressed to me from Simon Frazier.
Need to talk to Tess. It’s important. Have her call me.
That’s all it says, in scratchy guy-handwriting that tilts backward on a torn-out piece of lined notebook paper.
I stick both letters in Amber’s car seat and I think, Man, kid, you just happened, one moment of sex and look at all the things going on because of you: Tess writing me, and Simon writing Tess, and on and on. The health teacher was always telling us that more kids are born to single moms in rural areas than in inner cities, contrary to popular belief, and that a third of the girls in the room would be pregnant before we graduated, and that she wanted more than anything to keep that from happening, because it was easier to prevent a baby than raise one, but that it was going to happen anyway because it was easier than we thought to make a mistake, and she was right, it did happen.
And furthermore, one little baby happening was probably what killed Shawny, because it’s all related in this weird way that confuses me. Shawny left school and moved to California with Miguel, and about a year after the baby was born she went outside, into their back yard, and took a gun to her mouth, to the inside of her mouth, and pulled the trigger. Postpartum depression, her mother told me. Stress, her father told me. And I thought, No: she was waiting for something to change. And something did. And it wasn’t enough to compensate for Number 5, that extra element. And then Shawny could know for sure that even a big change wasn’t enough. Not even a baby could fill that empty space, and so in a way, the baby did kill her.
And it’s all related even more, because I was missing Shawny like crazy when Tess told me she was pregnant, and Miguel had just moved back to Colorado with his son, and of all places he moved back into Shawny’s house—the one she’d grown up in—because it was empty and available and cheap. And I had to drive by that place all the time on the way into work, and I had to watch while kid things appeared on the lawn, and I had to keep hoping that someday I would drive by and, huh, Shawny would suddenly be there too, and then I’d realize, Nope, she’s not ever going to be there. And then Tess told me she was pregnant. And that she wanted an abortion. So maybe Amber is alive because Shawny killed herself because of Juan and my sister left because Shawny killed herself and now Tess is writing me a postcard from a mountain town because of all of these things.
None of this makes any sense, but all these elements are connected in my mind, and if I hold it in my brain I see a web of connections, and electricity seems to be zapping from one to another, binding them together.
On the drive home I go the back way so that I can cry hard and not get in a wreck, and there’s Ed’s place and his tire house and his bees, and there’s the pig farmer who has the pigs I always hear when they’re slamming the metal covers of their feeders, and there’s the gully where old-timers used to dump their trash and where Shawny and I used to go look for treasures, like old blue bottles or old forks or ceramic jars and evidence from other lives, and I bet those gone-for-good people had their own troubles and I know I’m not the only one but still it really hurts, it really does hurt to have your sister send you a postcard about her new life that doesn’t include you.
It’s not fair that Tess didn’t tell me, in that real, honest way, that she was leaving. She knew that it wasn’t fair too, which is why she didn’t say a word until she handed me Amber, climbed into Clark’s truck, and yelled “Goodbye, Libby, goodbye.” Waved and smiled, and surprised me with that look of hers, the one that meant she was leaving, heading straight out, and that whether or not I chose to believe it, it was her final goodbye.
Miguel is sitting outside my house, leaning against the screen, and Juan is standing next to him, throwing rocks at my marigolds. Juan looks like his father—thick black hair that stands up a little, a round face, dark eyes that look like they’ve seen too much.
“Thought we’d come on by to see this nuevo bebé,” Miguel says when I get out of the car. Lucky for me that even when I’ve been crying there’s not much evidence and no one can ever tell.
“Lib-eeeeee,” says Juan. He hugs my legs and then backs up so he can throw a rock at my knee.
“Ouch! Cut it out, Juan. I was just going to make you some cookies.”
“With moons?”
“With moons. Do you want to see my baby? She’s asleep.” I kneel down and turn the car seat so they can see Amber’s face. The wind is blowing, as usual, so I have to turn it so dust doesn’t blow right in her face.
Juan considers her for a minute. “I�
�m not a baby. A baby is zero years old. I’m two.” He holds up three fingers. Then he bends down to pick up a rock, so I hold up my hand to stop him.
“Throw ‘em at the flowers,” I say. “The flowers can get knocked to pieces for all I care.”
“She’s cute,” Miguel says. “Qué linda.”
“She’s ugly.”
Miguel shrugs a little. “Okay. Most babies are. But beautiful too, because you can imagine the possibilities.”
“That’s a nice way to think of it.”
For a while, we watch Juan throw rocks at the flowers and we talk kid stuff: Juan’s potty training, Amber’s yellow shit, the time Juan threw up in his baptismal water, Amber being up all night.
Then Miguel says, “There was a car last night, parked between your house and mine.”
“Yeah, I know! You saw it?”
“It was closer to your house. He let out a dog.”
“Who let out a dog?”
“It was a VW bus.”
“Ed Mongers doesn’t have a dog. At least, I don’t think so. I never saw one.”
“Doubt it was Ed. Other people drive those things too, you know.”
“Someone left off a dog?”
“I was out anyway, with a flashlight, checking my—”
“—marijuana?”
That causes him to pause. “You know about that?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, anyway, I was watching this car, and then a guy gets out, dumps a dog, and drives off.”
“Where’s the dog?”
“At my house. She’s a mutt. Pretty ugly, actually. She ate a bunch of grass, and then walked inside my house, onto the carpet, and threw it all up.”
“Are you going to keep her?”
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