Tied Within

by Rasmenia Massoud

  It doesn’t matter, so I close my eyes because thinking about it too much, it’s a mindfuck.

  “It isn’t fair,” a younger version of me said.

  “What’s fair?” Indra narrowed her eyes, leaned down and put her hands on my shoulders. She squeezed. Hard. “Nothing is fair. Nothing will ever be fair. There is no fair. Take that word out of your vocabulary. It's useless.”

  “Why do you have to go? Why can’t you just stay here? Or take me with you?”

  “Because you’re a kid.”

  It didn’t matter how much I cried at her, how much she cried with me. I threw myself at her, put my arms around her, pulling her tighter, closer, as though I could make myself disappear into her and make her the safe place she used to be.

  She tried to explain it to me as best she could, as much as she could. As many times as she said, “Me and Aunt Stacey are driving each other crazy,” or “There’s no way in hell we can get along,” I couldn’t hear anything except that she was leaving me.

  I couldn’t see anything except for a piece of myself being removed. A piece that I would still be able to feel, but wouldn’t be able to touch.

  Like a phantom limb. A real mindfuck.

  A month later, when Aunt Stacey came to the school and pulled me out of class, her face blotchy and red, her eyes watery and puffed up, she refused to explain to me what Indra had done to herself. She used phrases that everyone uses, but none of them were really the truth.

  “She’s passed away.”

  “Accidental overdose.”

  None of those things were what happened. I knew that. I tried to tell Aunt Stacey, who responded to my sister’s overdose by taking me to a therapist. I tried to tell the therapist how there was no accidental anything, that the images in Indra’s mind got worse and worse every time they flashed through her mind until they killed her.

  That the way memory shows you things, it just isn’t fair.

  It’s a real mindfuck.

  Bronwyn’s screaming brings me out of sleep. Before I can process anything, something hard hits the top of my skull. I open my eyes to a confusing flurry of arms, feet, and hands. I start to pull myself up when someone grabs me by the armpit and I hear Bronwyn scream again. It’s her who’s grabbed me and pulled me up. Now on my feet, eyes open, I have a clear view of the two guys from the Nova, kicking Dominic as he struggles to get to his feet.

  14. NEW DAMAGE

  WHAT’S HAPPENING IS a screaming, sleepy, blur of shouts, kicks, and fists. For a moment, Bronwyn and I cling to one another, shaking and screaming. Then we lunge at them. Dom still hasn’t made it to his feet. The Nova’s driver is holding a half-full bottle of something that looks like cheap bourbon. Both of them reek of alcohol. I throw my small amount of useless weight at the driver, who stumbles backward. I don’t know what to do. I’m panicked. I can’t fight. I yell and swing my fists around, hoping to hit something that won’t hit me back.

  There’s the sound of glass breaking. The Nova’s passenger runs out of the bus, calling us losers again as he goes. The driver pushes me away and I land on my ass on the floor of the bus. For an instant, I see Dominic up on his feet. The driver swings at him, the bottle still in his hand and I don’t understand what’s happening.

  There is a look of horror on the driver’s face as he drops the bottle. It clangs and rolls on the floor of the bus.

  Dom’s hand goes to his neck, then he drops on the floor next to me.

  Bronwyn screams.

  The Nova’s driver runs out. I hear them shouting outside, then the sound of a car’s tires grinding on the gravel as the engine revs, then begins to fade away.

  I grab Dom and shout at Bronwyn, “Go get help!” She doesn’t move. “Theresa! Go get somebody!” I’m shrieking. Hysterical. The voice coming from my body, I don’t recognize it. It belongs to a stranger. A terrified stranger.

  She staggers out. I look down at Dom, try to cover his neck where the blood is coming out. He’s making thick, wet, choking sounds, his mouth opening and almost closing like a fish trying to get air.

  “Dom… Dom… it’s okay.” The stranger’s voice coming out of my body is sobbing. “Dom, Dom… please, please… wait. Just wait. We’re getting help. Just wait.”

  I’m holding his head in one hand and trying to hold the blood inside of his neck with the other. What I see in his eyes is fear and impossible sadness and a goodbye no one is ready for.

  What I see is something inside my best friend moving further and further away from me. I sit there helpless, holding his poor, scabby Mohawk head, my hands covered in his blood as everything inside of him that ever talked with me, laughed with me and nagged me slips away off into some distant dark where I can’t follow or reach to touch him or make him hear me.

  All I want is to make him hear me.

  Bronwyn comes back. It only took her a few minutes to run back to the 7-Eleven and call the police. It might as well have taken several hours. She enters the bus and says nothing. She falls to her knees and helps me hold on to what had been our best friend moments before.

  That’s how they find us, when the red and blue lights appear, when the sounds of voices and static coming through police radios enter this piece of shit bus and shake the silence.

  15. THE DAY I TRIED TO LIVE

  THE LAST OF the day begins to disappear behind the mountains. To the west, the sun setting behind the Rockies creates an illusion of a great love-colored inferno that threatens to incinerate us all if not for the great, jagged wall of rock protecting us. I take my time, moving slow through the parking lot of the Broken Arrow greeting card company. Across the highway, the lot at the IBM building is still full of cars.

  My rusty orange Datsun 210 is the ugliest, saddest car here, though I know none of these other people are as proud of their vehicles as I am of mine. Aunt Stacey loaned me five hundred dollars. “You can pay me back after you start getting regular paychecks,” she’d said.

  Then she made me promise never to hitchhike again.

  In all the years I’d lived with my mother’s sister, I never really knew her until my best friend died. When she picked me up at the police station that night, I tried to show her the blood under my fingernails. I don’t know why. I thought I could make her understand something, though I can’t remember what it was.

  Her mousy brown hair had been clipped up in one of those plastic clips but had started falling out so that plastic and hair hung crooked from her head. Her flannel shirt and sweatpants looked as though she’d just picked them up off the floor and put them on. Purplish-gray circles under her eyes, she put her hand over her mouth when she saw me and burst out crying when I showed her my fingernails.

  She touched my cheek where it had started to bruise and I looked at her. I almost didn’t recognize her.

  I’d never seen the human being living inside my Aunt Stacey before that moment.

  That night must have been when Aunt Stacey saw me for the first time, too. From that night on, she stopped sending me to the therapist alone and started going with me. It’s strange how easy it was, once we tried, to just spend time being broken together.

  When I told the therapist and Aunt Stacey that I didn’t know where to look for the future, they did that concerned adult thing. That attempt at guidance thing. It’s hard to explain to people who already know who they are and what they like that you have no fucking idea what you want to do with your time because you don’t know how to like or dislike a thing, or how to do anything.

  So, Aunt Stacey said we should try a whole bunch of things, that something was bound to stick.

  We went to the library. To movies, museums, and to job fairs, which were miserable. She brought weird pamphlets home that I usually didn’t read because they were cheesy and uninteresting, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so I always thanked her and feigned interest, then sat down at the kitchen table with my pamphlet pile. But, instead of reading them, I’d scribble all over them because they were too corny and
boring to read.

  “What’s this?” Aunt Stacey held up one of my scribble pamphlets.

  “Oh. I, uh… you know. It’s just a doodle.”

  She flipped it around. Moved it closer to her face. Then farther. “It looks like a bear.”

  “It’s a bear. A bear making pancakes.”

  She set the paper down on the table. “Looks like you’ve got a bit of a hidden talent after all.”

  I picked up the drawing and instead of a whooping, woo-hoo, a-ha, eureka moment, I slapped the paper against the table and said, “That is so fucking punk rock.”

  “Watch your mouth.” She gave my shoulder a squeeze and walked away.

  A couple of months after Dom’s funeral, Bronwyn came over to invite me on some camping trip in the mountains. When I opened the front door, she wore the biggest smile I’d ever seen on her face. A smile bigger than Theresa ever tried to get away with.

  Standing next to her, looking as purple and adorable as ever was Sparrow. Her perfect, petite Sparrow hand had its fingers interlocked with Bronwyn’s.

  Something almost like sadness, but not quite, hit me, ran all through me then back out again and then I smiled right along with them.

  Not sadness. Maybe wistful with a drop of amusement. Poor Dom. He just didn’t see that Bronwyn had a better chance with Sparrow than he did.

  Sparrow, in all her petite purple perfectness wasn’t really a Sparrow after all, but a Tammy. I went camping with these two girls who used to be Theresa and Tammy. It was almost cold, but not quite. That last weekend of warm you can take advantage of before shutting yourself indoors to watch the leaves fall to the ground from behind a window.

  A lot of the people I met on that trip had decided to be new people, too. I was introduced to people with mysterious, ancient and animal names. Raven Silverfox. Artemis Crystal Leaf. Lavender Black. Someone asked me my name. I made it a point to mention that I’d always been an Ivy and likely always would be.

  “Many people like to choose their own name once they enter the Craft,” a guy with a blond ponytail told me.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Everyone here is Wiccan,” he said. “You know, neo-pagans. Witches.”

  “Oh. Right. Yeah. Neo-pagans,” I said, wondering how those were different from neo-Buddhists. “So what’s your Craft name?”

  He shrugged. “I’m just Michael. We don’t all do it.” He smiled and gave my plastic cup a light tap with his own. “Anyone can be whoever they want here.”

  It was the strangest camping trip I’d ever been on. There was chanting and singing in the woods, some weird wine made from honey and lots of talk about gods and goddesses.

  In the light of the bonfire, I watched Bronwyn and Sparrow. Watched the last fragment of all that was before in my life slowly morphing, changing shape and becoming a life I didn’t recognize. More than that, I got a sense of what it must have felt like to be Theresa, to be surrounded by people you just can’t fit with, all the while knowing how nice it might feel if you could.

  I’m unlocking the door of my prized shitty Datsun. From the corner of my eye, I see someone stride past my car, and approach the small green pickup that’s parked next to me. There’s a brief moment where our eyes meet. Everything outside our view of one another vanishes for one quick flash, then we’re just two people standing in the middle of the parking lot again.

  “Hey, you look familiar,” he says. “Did you start recently?”

  “Yeah. Today’s my first day.”

  He squints, tilts his head a bit in an effort to recall where he’s seen me before. I don’t need to tilt or squint. I’d remember those clear gray eyes for the rest of my life.

  It’s too hard to forget the weight of shame that a pair of eyes can put down on you.

  I open my door. Toss my bag on the passenger seat. I stand up straight again to face my shame.

  “Wait, I’m sure we’ve met before. Did you used to go out with Micky Ruiz?”

  “Never heard of him.” I reach in my pocket for my cigarettes, then remember I decided to quit. “I think we met before.” I point at the highway, at the flow of cars heading south toward the city, toward the place where I’d almost lost the shirt baby. “I think we met just a couple miles that way.”

  “Oh, shit… that was you? The fake baby hitchhikers?”

  “Yeah, um… look, I am so sorry. You know, stupid pranks, dumb ideas… really, I’m sorry.”

  He shakes his head, surprises me with a tiny laugh. “Nah.” He waves his hands in that gesture that says, “stop, enough”.

  “It’s no big deal,” he says. “We all do stupid stuff. It was a while ago. I’m over it.”

  “You were so mad…”

  He lifts his baseball cap, scratches his head and puts it back on. “Doesn’t do any good to dwell on things and stay mad.” He smiles. “Unless you’re planning on pulling some fake baby scam later, or something.”

  “Oh, uh… no. That was a really a one-time only scam. I mean, no, I’m not scamming anything later, or anymore.”

  “Good. I almost didn’t recognize you. Didn’t you have purple hair, or something?”

  “I think it was puce.”

  “You look much better as a blonde.”

  Everything outside of our view of one another vanishes for one quick flash, then we’re just two people standing in the middle of the parking lot again, but now we’re two people laughing, grinning.

  He walks around my little car, holds out his hand. “Let’s do it right this time. I’m Lance.”

  “Ivy.”

  “So, you just started today? Where are you? Upstairs in the office?”

  “Yeah, I’m just an office lackey, but they liked some of my work that I brought to the interview, so I’ll probably get to do artwork for some of the cards. I’m still taking art classes, so we’ll see. I figured it was worth a shot.”

  “It’s definitely worth a shot. It sounds a lot more interesting than working down in the warehouse with all of us peasants.” He takes a few steps backwards. “Hey, what time do you take your lunch break?”

  “Around noon.”

  “Cool.” He jingles his keys. “You wanna have lunch with me tomorrow? I can introduce you to all the warehouse guys.”

  “I do wanna. That would be very cool.”

  Lance opens the door of his little green truck, turns to me one more time and points at me. “Noon.” That smile again. “Don’t forget.”

  I think of how nice it is, to blend in with unexceptional people in that banal, work-a-day banter. Like regular people. With shoes. Then a thought occurs to me that nice can turn to annoying or dull if a person isn’t careful, or stops paying attention.

  A few days after I finally had my own car, I came back down to Boulder, to look at the bus where Dominic died. The bus was gone, which I suppose gave me something like a sense of relief, but also left me unsatisfied, so I went over to the Pearl Street mall, thinking I’d go walk around for a while.

  Chris was strumming his banjo with his little ferret Oscar, just like he was that night when I lost my best friend. He’d recognized me, and asked where my friends were. I couldn’t answer. I had no friends now. No parents and no sibling.

  I couldn’t answer, so I began to cry.

  “There’s nothing the dead can tell you that the living can’t,” he’d said to me. “World is indifferent to your feelings. World has no responsibility and no reasons why a serial killer can randomly create orphans and then disappear, and no antipathy for assholes who get drunk and kill, then go free a couple of years later. You gotta look for joy, not reasons and explanations.”

  I didn’t tell any of that to my therapist, or to Aunt Stacey. They wouldn’t understand and it felt good to keep something for myself.

  When I get to the mall, Chris is already there waiting for me in our usual meeting spot in front of the falafel place, tuning up his banjo. He greets me with a hug and asks me how my first day as a working stiff went.

 
I pet Oscar’s little ferret head. “Aw, you know. Sitting in a cubicle. Smiling at people. Office stuff.”

  “Cool. You like it?”

  I shrug. “I dunno. I think I made a work friend. It’s a good thing for now, I guess. And it seems to bring Stacey some peace.”

  “That’s good.” He adjusts his hat. “That kind of stuff is important. I mean, for now.”

  “Yeah. For now. So... did you bring it?”

  He grins. “Did I bring it? Of course I brought it.” He hands Oscar over to me, then leans down to dig around in his big, weird canvas bag. He stands up and hands me a wooden box. “I never really got into it, but I can teach you the basic stuff to get you started. The rest you gotta do on your own. Make it yours, okay?”

  “Okay.” I open the box and remove the harmonica. It gleams white and silver reflections under the street light, enough that I can make out the name Hohner clearly. “Damn. It’s beautiful. Like it’s full of possibilities.”

  “It is. That’s the kind Dylan uses, you know.”

  “All right, then,” I say. “I’m ready. Let’s get started.”

  WAIT, JUST ONE MORE THING BEFORE YOU GO

  THIS STORY IS a work of fiction, but like most fiction, is the result of several shards of broken memory and experiences that have occurred in the real world. Sadly, my mother’s cousin and his wife were murdered in 1977. Ivy and Indra do not exist in any reality, but their trauma does. A single act of senseless violence is like tossing a stone in calm water. The ripples flow outward and seem to disappear, but that stone remains beneath the surface, leaving that body of water forever changed in a way that goes unseen deep below.