by Sonja Yoerg
“Where were you? I’ve been waiting hours!”
Warren took a slug from a Pepsi can. “Went to see The Last House on the Left. At least one of us did.”
Lester covered his face. “It was too scary.”
“You went to a movie? What about me?”
Warren put the car into gear and headed for the exit. “You wanted to go shopping. Don’t be a crybaby.”
She sat on her hands to stop herself from smacking the back of his head. Another dictionary word popped into her mind: “asshole.” She’d been surprised to find it there between “asserveration,” which she gave up on, and “Assur,” an Assyrian war god. Asshole, asshole, asshole. She’d never said it out loud.
A paper bag rustled. Warren stuffed French fries into his mouth. They had gone to McDonald’s!
“Did you get me anything? I’m starving.”
“Here.” Warren handed her a milkshake. Chocolate. Her favorite was vanilla.
“Thanks.”
“And we got you fries, but Lester forgot they were yours and kinda ate them.”
Lester gave her the red paper carton. “Sorry.” At the bottom were a few broken fries drowned in ketchup.
She put the carton on the floor and slouched, her knees against the front seat. She pulled the crinkled paper off the straw and took a long sip. The engine growled as they sped down the freeway on-ramp. “Riders on the Storm” started playing on the radio, the spooky chords mixing with the engine noise. Warren turned it up so loud Lester couldn’t hear himself singing and stopped.
Thrown into this world. The song had it about right. She let the breeze from the open windows whip her hair across her cheeks, wet with tears.
• • •
Warren parked in front of the garage and Alison ran inside, her complaints about her brothers perfectly lined up in her head. A VW wagon was on the lift and her dad was underneath, his forearms up in the guts of it. Hoses, shafts, valves and other parts lay scattered on the concrete floor around him, everything dark and greasy, including his tools—and him. Cars were like animals with grease and oil instead of blood. On the outside they were chrome and glass and shiny paint. On the inside they were ugly and mysterious. She knew they were only machines, but that’s what bodies were, too. If she saw inside, deep inside, she might not be able to look away.
Her father didn’t like interruptions when he was in the middle of a job, so she went straight past the reception desk, through the office and into the house. She found her mother at the kitchen table trimming green beans.
“Hey, Mom.”
She didn’t react. The beans reminded Alison how hungry she was. She opened the bread box, talking as she did. “You won’t believe what Warren did.” She pulled out two slices and took the peanut butter from the upper cabinet, unscrewing the lid on the way. She crossed the room to get a knife and stopped in front of the table. “Mom?”
Her mother nodded slightly, head bent.
“Mom! Aren’t you listening?” Her mother, a pro at vegetable trimming and countless other supremely boring jobs, was working like she was half asleep. The hammering anger in Alison’s head cooled. She picked a bean off the pile and put it in her mouth. As she chewed, she peered into the bowl of trimmed beans. There were lots of bean ends in there.
“Mom?”
Her mother looked up, but not exactly at Alison. “Did you say something about Warren?”
Alison got the knife and started making a sandwich. “He left me at Gaynes for almost three hours.”
“Three hours.”
“Yeah. They went to the movies.” She sat down across from her mother, who’d started in on the beans again.
“Why were you at Gaynes?”
Maybe her father hadn’t told her mother she’d gone to Burlington. “Dad gave me money to get some clothes.”
Her mother paused. “Did you get what you wanted?”
“I got a dress and two shirts. And a bra.”
“So that’s good, then.”
Was it? Alison didn’t feel close to good.
It was as if no one was seeing her, or they were seeing her and not caring. She was like a ghost, but inside she was so alive with thoughts and feelings and fears. Worse, she couldn’t figure out how it’d gotten this way. A year ago her mom would’ve done something about Warren abandoning her, like she’d done when Alison was nine. Warren was supposed to wait for her after school and help her carry home her science project. Instead, he went into Adams and goofed off with his friends. Their mom went ape and grounded him for a week.
Alison wanted to shout at her mother, be loud enough to matter, or crawl into her lap and get closer, help her come back to the way she’d always been, help her remember how they’d fit together so easily. But she was terrified that if she did crawl into her lap her mother would just stand up and Alison would fall to the floor like a dinner napkin that had been forgotten.
7
Carole
Alison stood in front of her holding a shopping bag, talking about Warren, about money, about movies. She talked about clothes, Gaynes. Pains to stay in the lanes. Alison was upset worried confused angry.
Carole saw her daughter from the bottom of the ocean floor. The weight of the water pressed on her eyes, her lips, her chest. Alison’s words were falling stones. Carole reached to grab them, to hold them, to put them in order. It was so hard, the stones so heavy. The words kept coming. Her daughter’s face was before her, her lovely, dear face, and she could do nothing to help her. Not now, not while the voices were drowning her out, burying sense and decency and love.
If she could explain it to Alison, she might understand. But there was no explanation. The words didn’t line up. They sank. To the bottom. Autumn got ’em. She had to try. Find words for Alison’s words.
“So that’s good, then.” She wasn’t sure what she meant. The words reached Alison, and Alison wasn’t sure, either. She left with her shopping bag.
Carole was alone in the kitchen. The size and weight of the ocean was unbearable.
• • •
A heavy, insistent rain drummed on the metal roof, overrunning the clogged gutters and splattering onto the concrete sidewalk below the open bedroom window. Carole had been awake awhile, listening in the dark for sounds creeping toward her from beyond the quiet of the house, whisperings below the sound of the rain. It could have been the hum of the refrigerator or crickets deep in the woods. Did crickets chirp in the rain? It was nonsense, she told herself, to strain to hear something so quiet, so far off, as if hearing would draw them nearer, out of the dark. As if she even wanted that.
Walt lay facing her, his arm solid and warm across her belly. He’d made love to her when he’d found her awake earlier, slow, careful love, as was his way, and her desire. And a necessity, she supposed, in a small house with children and thin walls. She preferred it simply because that was how it was for them and needed no other reason. Walt wasn’t an overly affectionate person, and neither was she; still, they knew what it meant to have each other and to find it right and good. But over the last few months, a gap had opened up between them, because she was tired and couldn’t think straight, because the voices pulled her so far inside herself that there was no room for him. Making love helped, but only a little. Lying in his arms, she’d almost told him about what happened in the post office, but when she played the conversation in her mind, there wasn’t a version of it that didn’t frighten her as much as the event itself. As long as she kept it inside, it might remain small, invisible, unreal.
Insomnia was as much as she would admit to, and she held on to a thread of hope that lack of sleep was all that was wrong. In a week, or maybe two, she might ask her doctor for sleeping pills. But that was as far as she would go. She would not end up like her mother, locked away, and her children would not end up as she had, abandoned, especially Alison, who needed her most. Car
ole, of all people, knew how that felt. No matter what adults say, what reasons they give, a child always blames herself. And Carole could not bear it if she did that to Alison.
Carole lay listening to the rain, weary but not sleepy. Her thoughts were glass shards. She pulled the coverlet to her neck despite the heat and tried to link up her thinking with Walt’s snoring, steady as the rain. Perhaps she dozed.
Roused by sounds, she sat up. Someone had left the television on. How could that have happened? She and Walt had gone to bed after the boys had come home, long after she’d said good night to Alison and switched off the attic light. Maybe one of the boys had gone down later? Warren, it would have been. Once Lester fell asleep, he was out until the morning like his father. Warren could’ve at least remembered to turn the set off.
Carole got up, pulled on her robe and made her way to the hall and down the stairs, navigating by memory more than by the dim glow from the bathroom nightlight. The last three steps were blind. She paused at the bottom and peered into the living room. It was dark inside but the voices from the television were clear. She reached around the corner, turned on the floor lamp and walked over to the set. The screen was black. Something wrong with the picture, then. She twisted the on-off button to the left to turn it off but it wouldn’t go. Confused, she turned it the other way. The screen flickered and buzzed as it warmed up. She switched it off, her fingers trembling, and backed away from the set.
The voices grew louder, as if her realization that they weren’t coming from the television had given them power, made them bolder. Carole put her hands over her ears and pressed hard, heart pounding. She strode across the room and into the kitchen, circled the table and entered the living room again, crossing to the couch, hands clamped to her head, fear and dread and confusion tying up her muscles, legs stiff shoulders in knots skin stretched tight across her arms tingling. She paced back to the kitchen around the table to shut out the voices but there was no escape. She paused at the back door outside there was space to run away from them. Them. How many? Several dozen speaking at a distance softer and louder but never more distinct. They didn’t want her to hear. They were talking about her. She couldn’t hear the words the accusations but she knew. They’d gathered because of her. Of what she was.
She’d heard them for weeks now, maybe longer, and dismissed them, telling herself they were from a car radio in the garage, or the boys’ stereo. They weren’t actually voices, only ringing in her ears because she was exhausted. Since spring she’d only slept a few hours most nights. A little ringing was understandable. She’d tried not to dwell on it, forgetting how often it had actually happened. She’d denied the reality of the intrusive voices and thoughts winding like twine around themselves, cinched tight in a binding knot. It had happened seldom enough that she could pretend it hadn’t happened at all. The incident in the post office was the hardest to explain.
Now the voices were no longer muttering but louder closer definitely inside her head. Left of center near the back. She placed a finger on the indentation at the base of her skull half expecting to find a hole.
Until recently, she’d never questioned that the workings of her mind were different from anyone else’s. She had assumed she was sane. Isn’t that what everyone thought? She was awkward perhaps. Shy always shy. But sane. Her mind judged the time, held the memories, weighed the befores and afters. It contained her experiences, serving them up as lessons vignettes parables, some shining in the light some hiding in the shadows. It held the peaks and troughs of her emotional seas, all of it hers and hers alone, except what she chose to share. She was a wife a mother a sister a woman a daughter, full of the stories the birthdays the anniversaries the tragedies the betrayals the joys the kindnesses. All of it was there. Somewhere.
But now something else was there, too, intruding inspecting unearthing unraveling. Her mind’s walls had been breached. She had become inhabited and could not control what she knew, or what she chose to know, the larger danger. Terror rose in concert with the voices inside her, a vicious thunder rumbling from edge to edge to edge back and forth rolling swelling crashing bigger louder stronger worse and worse and worse.
She found herself in the living room standing over the coffee table, her breath coming in gasps, her skin so tight over her flesh that she clutched at her forearms to pull it off. She fought the urge to scream to overcome the voices shout them down, as frightened of disclosing her crumbling sanity to her family as she was of the voices themselves. Lowering herself onto the couch, Carole strove to even out her breathing. She hummed a single note, quietly, as she had done to calm her children as babies, forced the humming into her head into her mind’s crevasses her tongue thick against the back of her teeth her throat an engine of the hum.
She hummed who knows how long. Her heartbeat slowed and the mumbling voices retreated a little. She pulled her nightgown over her knees and tucked her hands under her legs. She rocked and hummed, rocked and hummed. Her inner voice, the familiar one, rose unsteadily. She rocked and hummed.
There’d be no more sleep for her tonight. She would wait here for morning and keep the voices at bay by humming and rocking, and by thinking of her family asleep in the rooms above, and, of course, of her mother, who might be awake this night as well, humming and rocking within the hard walls or lost in a sedative fog, unaware of what she might have bequeathed to her daughter.
Her mother. Her mother was inside her. Her father, too. Dormant for so long, now coursing, bathing every cell in the loathsome certainty that despite her strongest hope and best intention she would forsake all she loved.
8
Solange
Solange sat in the chair in her room. Late afternoon sun spilled through barred windows onto the wall behind the bed, shapes pulled long from one corner, the lowest ones seeking the floor. Light pooled and stretched along the planes surrounding her. Time stretched, too, but not evenly. Not in here. In this room time was so insubstantial it gaped, like a pie dough rolled too thin, with drooping holes that could not be closed, days falling through, weeks, months, years. Memory was supposed to be a line that traced a waning but orderly past. First one thing, then the next, building on itself, like a train track, each minute a solid wood tie laid down, secured, then the next hammered into place. You were supposed to be able to look back on it and witness the inexorable reach of your life, each moment growing smaller in the distance, inching away hour by hour, day by day, tie by tie, to the vanishing point of your own consciousness. You couldn’t remember everything, Solange thought; nobody could, but for most people the track was there, and it obeyed the march of the days you had lived. But she had no time track and her memories had floated off, as ephemeral as pollen on the wind.
She had great big gaping holes in her recollections, years and years misplaced or shuffled, many more forgotten than remembered. Her past was so riddled with holes, and so frail, she could not examine it without more holes appearing. This made her desperate, and profoundly sad, for she sensed her life had been so important to her once—brimming with passion, hope and love—and now she was terrified to lift it by the edges and peek underneath, lest she fall into the timeless black and disappear altogether.
On rare occasions, a cherished memory came to her, sudden and complete, and evoked such pure feeling that she accepted the memory as real. Her heart was a balloon, filled to bursting, and she wept with gratitude. These few, sweet memories pinned her to this earth. And so, too, did the painful ones. Those, it seemed, would never leave her. They would be there when she’d forgotten her own name.
• • •
Solange dove from a granite boulder, slipping under the skin of the lake like a knife opening a letter. She swam from the shore, keeping her legs high in the water to avoid the layer of mush at the bottom. Her strokes were long and unrushed, slicing through still water as if she’d been born to it, which, in a sense, she had. Soon she was not a girl swimming from shore, but of th
e lake itself, liquid inside liquid. The silted floor fell away beneath her.
Halfway to the island she paused. From the land behind her came the muted sound of axes falling on wood. Her father and her brother spent the fine months scavenging driftwood and felling small trees. They’d stack the wood on the houseboat and carry it to the shore towns to sell, along with whatever else they could find that might be worth something. Years ago, long before Solange was born, the houseboats and barges had carried lumber up to the seaway. But they’d run out of trees, or near enough, so now her family and the other lake dwellers were having a hard time making a living. Her grandmother was an Abenaki healer, and her mother had dabbled in it, too, collecting herbs and roots for potions fewer and fewer folks believed in. The wealthy from New York and Boston were buying up the shores and islands and building huge houses and docks for yachts they visited twice a summer. There was a lot of talk about who could or should do what on the lake, and who mattered more: the people who’d always lived here or the people with all the money. She could see both sides, though she didn’t tell her family that. It wasn’t anyone’s fault the trees didn’t grow faster than they could be cut down, and if out-of-staters wanted to buy land and build houses so they could enjoy the beautiful place she called home, well, who could blame them? People argued too much about things they weren’t likely to change. Most of the talk buzzed around Solange’s head like a bee and flew off.
She treaded water for a time, her face to the sky, the water cool and slippery around her legs and warm and soft on her shoulders, then swam out again toward an island no one had bothered to name.
• • •
The parallelograms of sunshine on the walls of her hospital room shifted. Time slipped sideways and another memory thrust into her consciousness. Solange lost herself to it.
Muted evening light fell through the dining room’s windows, which stretched from the polished oak floor to the elaborate coffered ceiling. Outside, the sky was a pewter dome. Solange heard the lake groan, complaining of the weight of ice, a mournful sound carrying hope of winter’s end. Her restlessness grew, coiled like a snake inside her, whenever she heard it. The ice would break in time, and with violence. This was nothing new to her, Vermont exploding into spring, but this year she longed to experience, rather than observe, the change. The groan of the lake ice was the earth tuning for a song she was desperate to hear. She had no idea what it meant beyond her own feelings, which she both trusted and feared.