We drove home, and I felt my sense of attention deepen. I wanted others to have trouble recognizing who I was and what I desired. This was the way a person should live, in obscurity, unrecognized. I thought of my physical body, the burn marks on my face, my long hair, my Cherokee blood. I needed to adapt to my environment, to blend in.
That night George asked me, “What happens when someone close to you dies?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do people deal with it? Do they die too?”
“Sometimes they do,” I said. “Maybe sometimes a part of them dies on the inside. But we can’t worry about any of that. I don’t want to sit around worrying about people dying.”
“I want to figure it out.”
“You can’t,” I told him. “People live and die. Death is quick.”
In our room, George and I felt Rosemary’s presence between us like a swollen river. It was as if we sensed the pull of some force confirming the uncertainty of life. Nothing would change that.
“I’m reading something to help my inner peace,” he said, and began reading to me: “Alashir’s father, a highly intelligent, quiet man, often discussed Christianity and the Ego in great detail with him. One night, after Alashir had returned home, his father peeked in through the bedroom door to watch him perform a meditation and breathing technique—the Bhastrikā, bellows breath (a Hatha Yoga relaxation technique that involves breathing slowly in and out through the nose). His father, who was suspicious of what he saw, fled back downstairs with his asthma inhaler in his mouth with the assumption that Alashir had been brainwashed. Alashir talked about hallucinations, his visions of water and animals, not to mention simple throat and head cleansing—the ujjāyi and kapāla bhāti respectively. Alashir could quote Sanskrit terms and cite whole verses from Sanskrit literature.”
George looked up at me, waiting for a response.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“No response?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ll think about it one day,” he said. “Your body and mind will merge. Try to meditate, I think it will help you.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything.”
“The best thing you can do is empty your mind. Maybe that’s the only way to be close to God. Maybe we only have ourselves.”
“Rosemary wanted to die,” I said. “Nobody did anything wrong. You don’t understand. Nobody understands.”
“Well, she stole money from Harold. She stole from her work. She stole all the time. I think Harold and Agnes feel terrible about it.”
“They do,” I said. I started to laugh and couldn’t help it. George looked a little afraid.
I went downstairs, where Agnes had fallen asleep in the chair with a magazine on her chest. I saw the light on in the hall leading downstairs to the basement. This had become my routine, checking things before bed. I checked the front door and back door to make sure they were locked. It was a nightly ritual. Not just checking but touching the knobs. In the kitchen I checked the burners on the stove to make sure they were off. I touched the dials, all four of them. I went to the back door and checked it again, touching the knob. Somehow doing the routine made me feel better about going to bed. I’m not sure how it started, or why it started, only that it began sometime after Rosemary died.
I put my hand on Agnes’s shoulder and nudged her awake. She opened her eyes and blinked. She squinted at me.
“I must’ve drifted off,” she said.
“I don’t know who I am,” I told her.
I felt her hand on mine. She looked at me and smiled.
In the weeks that followed I shaved my head into a Mohawk and kept wearing eyeliner, even around the house. For the remainder of the time I stayed with the Troutts, I thought of them as family. Despite everything that had happened, it was better than staying at the shelter, better than any of the other foster families I had stayed with.
As the weather grew warmer, Harold helped me build a tepee in the backyard, where I spent most of my time. George grew more distant and retreated to his typewriter. I started writing my own stories, about Indians and monsters, about brainwashed killers, about mysterious deaths in a mythical Oklahoma town. I mostly kept to myself the rest of my time at the Troutt house. From the tepee I emerged every so often like a horse in the country, like a wavering flame, visible for miles, bracing myself for what was to come.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my family for all their patience and support. Thanks to my editor, Mark Doten, and to Abby Koski, Rachel Kowal, and everyone else at Soho. Thanks to the editors at the Pushcart Prize and to the editors who first published excerpts: Diane Williams and Bradford Morrow—my heroes, both of them. Most of all, a very special thanks to Caroline Eisenmann, my agent, who spent countless hours reading and making suggestions, whose wisdom and guidance helped shape this book to become what it is.
For book club discussion questions on
Brandon Hobson’s Where the Dead Sit Talking,
please visit bit.ly/wherethedeadsittalkingbookclub
Where the Dead Sit Talking Page 20