The Cassandra

by Sharma Shields

  “This is so kind, Tom. I’m really touched.”

  He scooted closer to me, sensing my awe, and said, lowly, desperately, “Tell me who did this to you, Milly. You don’t deserve this. No one does. Tell me who did this and I’ll speak to them personally.”

  He cracked his knuckles. He sought more than just conversation.

  I closed my eyes against the tumult of rising tears. I was overcome with the goodness of some people, when the rest of us were so terrible.

  Part of me wanted to tell him, to see if he could, in fact, enact the revenge I craved, but another part of me knew that Gordon would overpower him, destroy him in an even more violent way than he had destroyed me.

  “Tell me,” he said, in the same breathy tone of, I love you.

  “I don’t remember.” I felt exhausted by the request. Stop asking me for things, Tom Cat. “But please thank your mother and sisters from me.”

  I hugged the book to my heart. I didn’t think I’d ever open it, feeling like religion was a distant planet I never wished to visit, but I cherished it, nonetheless. I saw it as a gift from a past life, a relic of hope that no longer lived in me. I didn’t want to marry Tom Cat now, no matter his intentions, but it warmed me to know that I was adored, that I’d been close to whatever dream this country tried to foster in young girls.

  Tom Cat reached his hand up as though to stroke my hair but then remembered himself. His palm hovered beside me, shaking slightly at the edges, a fragile dragonfly, and I leaned closer to it as if it were a warm fire, something I admired but understood I could never touch.

  CONGRATULATIONS

  Just after the New Year, Beth visited me in the hospital and stood beside me nervously, jostling from one foot to the other. I rested in a rocking chair, reading the paper. The staff urged me to sit there instead of in my bed, just to shift my muscles from one position to another, and I enjoyed it, even if the rocking chair was so close to my cot that I brushed my knees against the sheets as I rolled my heels to and fro. Reading no longer hurt me. They offered me sewing materials and knitting needles but I refused them; I only wanted the newspapers. I was trying to find any information at all about the hibakusha, the people I knew intimately from my time at the river, but there was only a small snippet about a Hanford scientist being sent to Hiroshima for research.

  Not to help them, I thought, but to study them.

  At one point someone brought me a paper from New York City. I saw one line in it that alerted me to the presence of the dead but not the survivors.

  The United States Strategic Air Forces reported yesterday that 60 percent of Hiroshima and 40 percent of Nagasaki had been destroyed. “The destructive power of these bombs is indescribable,” the broadcast continued, “and the cruel sight resulting from the attack is so impressive that one cannot distinguish between men and women killed by the fire. The corpses are too numerous to be counted.”

  The bombs were declared a success. Of course they would be. The destruction of anything was a success, so long as the perpetrator was an empire of men.

  I wondered about Dr. Hall. How did he feel about it all? Was he ecstatic? Remorseful? Knowing him, I figured a mixture of both. He never visited me, but he did send a card, Get well soon. The actress Hazel Dee signed it, too. She had stamped the card with a kiss, and the red pucker of her lipsticked mouth reminded me of entrails. I could smell her perfume when I opened or closed the card. I gave it to a nurse to throw away.

  Now I absently took Beth’s hand. I loved her and hated her both. There was no need for hello or small talk. I continued to read but eventually grew impatient with her fidgeting.

  “Why are you such a nervous Nancy today?” I asked her querulously.

  “I brought someone along with me,” she said. “My fiancé.”

  “Fiancé?” I dropped the newspaper and rose from the rocking chair. She held my elbow to steady me. “Who in the world?”

  She gazed excitedly out across the hallway, over the white cots and IV bags and quiet patients and busy nurses. She lifted a hand and beckoned a dark figure from afar.

  I followed her gaze.

  I didn’t think she was capable of it. I really didn’t. I was sure she had rejected his proposal.

  I was wrong.

  I was wrong because he was a man who knew how to be charming, perfect, when it suited him; he could turn his violence on and off like a switch. He knew how to trick a woman he admired, even a woman as brilliant and kind as Beth, and he’d been patient in his courting, precisely manipulative.

  Aufhocker. Shape-shifter.

  Gordon sailed toward us. Gordon’s body, at least. Huge, towering, dressed in navy suit trousers, a crisp white shirt, a thin navy tie. He was trying to make a good impression. In his big fist he gripped a heart-shaped box of chocolates. For me, I presumed. But it was his countenance that terrified me.

  It was the decapitated buck I’d seen more than a year ago at the river, its head shoved over Gordon’s face and throat. The blood from the beast’s neck marred the fabric of his otherwise clean shirt. Did Beth iron his clothes? The dead eyes grinned out at me as Gordon advanced. Through the gaping stag maw, behind those blunt teeth, I could make out Gordon’s nose and smiling mouth. It was a hideous mask, evil and crude. It moved stiffly atop Gordon’s person like a papier-mâché puppet.

  I backed away, pressing my spine against the cold hospital wall. I clawed at the plaster, whining.

  “Milly,” Beth said, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

  Be still, damn it.

  My speech had improved in the last several months. It wasn’t normal yet, and I suffered terrible lapses from time to time, but I had regained almost full capacity of my vocabulary and syntax. But now I was trapped. The buck floated toward me, stuffed atop this man’s powerful torso, and I bellowed.

  You know I will.

  “Stop him,” I tried to scream. “Help!”

  You know.

  No words came out. I was as hoarse as if I had laryngitis. I began to sob. Beth grabbed me and tried to hold me close but I gnashed my teeth at her and pushed her away.

  “Someone help us,” Beth cried.

  The buck came forward and hung over me with his dead eyes glinting, the mouth within the mouth issuing clucking and shushing noises. The callused fingers stroking my arms were familiar and I shrieked as they brushed my skin.

  I will.

  He was holding me, too, now, whispering to me gently through the buck’s ugly straight mouth, and I buckled and screamed. It was Gordon’s voice. I buckled and fought with revulsion and confusion.

  “Why is she acting like this?” Beth demanded, desperately, eyes wild. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I’m a man,” the buck said in Gordon’s voice. “And look what a man did to her.”

  Two nurses were on hand now, pulling the figure of the buck-man away, pulling at Beth.

  You know I will you know I will you know I will you know I will you know I will you know I will your mom and sister you know I will you know I will you know I’ll kill you.

  “What did you say to upset her?” a nurse said accusingly to Beth.

  “Nothing! I wanted her to meet my fiancé. But when she saw Gordon—”

  I shrieked so loudly the room shook. Footsteps descended from all directions, an earthquake moving toward me.

  “Get them out of here,” someone said.

  Hands took hold of me, pushed me onto the cot, strapped me down. Someone shoved a wet rag between my teeth. I shrieked deep in my throat. A nurse administered a shot of something to calm me down.

  “We don’t want you to hurt yourself,” she said.

  I looked frantically at all of the serious faces crowding the bed. No Gordon. No Beth. Whatever was in the shot worked quickly. My body relaxed. I was in the water of the big river, steered by a peaceful current.

  “You can’t bang your head on the wall like that again,” a nurse scolded me. “You’ll undo all the good work we’ve done.”

&nbs
p; The crowd dispersed. I was okay. I didn’t remember slamming my head against the wall, but my head ached.

  The words came easily now, shaken loose by physical pain. “Is he gone? Did he leave? Where is Beth?”

  “They left together. She was very upset. That was no way to treat your best friend, you know. And no way to treat your rescuer.”

  “My rescuer?”

  “That man. The man that was with her, the fiancé. He and a young woman found you.” Kathy, I remembered. “He was the man who carried you here safe. You would have died in the sagebrush without him, your brain was bleeding so profusely. He deserves a parade, that one.”

  “A parade,” I repeated.

  I laughed and sobbed uncontrollably.

  PUSH OFF

  Joanie put my small suitcase on the edge of my bed. “There you are,” she said. “All packed.”

  I wore my good shoes, but I noticed now how loose they were, how my feet slid and seemed unable to find purchase. I’d lost weight and muscle, even in my feet. I couldn’t look down at my legs without remembering Gordon and the river.

  “It’s time I leave,” I said.

  “Godspeed,” Joanie said, and then embraced me. “We’ll miss you, Mildred. Take good care.”

  I took up my suitcase and bid the nurse good-bye. She asked me if anyone waited for me and I told her yes, of course, that Beth herself was coming, and she said, “Oh, isn’t she just the loveliest?”

  The truth was, I hadn’t told Beth. I hadn’t told a soul about my departure. I wasn’t sure what I wanted. There was no place for me to go. Hanford, with all of its flaws, had felt like home to me, but now that home was broken.

  Nonetheless, when I left the hospital, I walked through the hills of Richland in the warm spring sun with my eyes on Rattlesnake Hill.

  … when it all becomes too much.

  I made up my mind where to go. If I walked at a good pace, I would get there by midnight.

  At one point a bus filled with men pulled up alongside me. The driver wrenched open his door and said to me, “Heading to Hanford? Get in, we’ll drive you there.”

  “No thanks,” I said. Who knew if Tom Cat was on the bus. Or Gordon Nyer. The thought of seeing either of them crumpled me. “I’d rather walk.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  The bus accelerated and covered me with a fine dust. It didn’t matter. The wind was terrible, anyway, and I clutched a kerchief in my fist so I could wipe my eyes clear.

  I was made of wind and dust. I could have floated clear to the ocean.

  This is where.

  The most beautiful time of day here was when the sun had mostly set, and all of the bare hills turned the fiery color of gemstones. I’d left my suitcase in a patch of sagebrush some miles back. It’d grown too heavy. I’d walked the crossing to the northeastern side of the river, my target the White Bluffs. My pretty shoes wore giant blisters into my toes and heels. Given my hospital lacuna, I hadn’t walked this far in months, but it was good for me to ache, to hurt, to move.

  It was, I assumed, my last day here. I was ready to become what I had seen: the broken body on the earth below, the organs spilled like garnets and rubies all around me, the transformation to a new or absent selfhood.

  I arrived after the sun had set and the stars had risen and the wind had quieted to a mere stiff breeze. I walked to the very edge of the cliff face, still huffing from the climb, and then went down on my hands and knees. Beneath my palms, the eerie white sand was warm and comforting. The Columbia slid smoothly south, the currents like deep green scales on a leviathan’s spine. On her shore the waters frothed and separated and Fat Man’s ghosts came out of the waters and stood watching me with their melted, eyeless faces, their heads and shoulders covered in dark ash, waiting.

  This is where you must jump when it all becomes too much.

  I stared down at them. I wasn’t far from them here, but there was still this distance, myself looking down on them from this white cliff. And the distance from here to Japan, to Germany, was even larger. It occurred to me that the distance from one human being standing beside another was just as incalculable. It is happening to someone else, but not to me. From that dark gap in our imagined spaces, indifference was born, and cruelty, and murder.

  I can leap over that distance.

  My legs felt strong enough, even now. One leap and no one would ever know anything else. My secrets about Gordon and Hanford and my own complicity would be over. I would never have to leave, never have to expect anything else of myself. I was so sick of expectation. Nauseous with memories and hopes. The sand, the water, the wind, the snakes, the furred creatures. If I rotted here, they would take me over. I would become part of them, still moving beneath the starlight. It would be a more graceful existence.

  I wiped my eyes with my wrists and they came away stained with tears.

  I turned away from the cliff. I could feel all of the eyes of the dead on me and I thought, What else could I have done? I talked about you, I did. I warned Dr. Hall. Do you think you can blame me? I love you as I love myself and I hate you in the same way, too.

  I took ten paces. I meant to pivot and run and leap, aiming for the river. I would sprout wings mid-flight. I thought of my little suitcase, alone out there in the wind and sage, my few clothes in it, the Bible from Tom Cat’s family in Tonasket, no finery, just modest objects of everyday life. I felt I owed those objects an apology.

  I swiveled, facing the river again.

  This is where you must jump when it all becomes too much.

  There would be a rush of clean air. A moment of terror, an attempt to scrabble against nothingness and rise again. An impact. The scattering of glittering wet stones. And then … silence. The perpetual hush.

  I closed my eyes, tensing my legs.

  “Please don’t do that, Milly,” a voice said.

  I opened my eyes and turned.

  There was Tom Cat.

  “Beth found out about your discharge. We’ve been looking for you all day. Please come home with me, Milly.”

  I pulled my eyes away from him, back to the starlit canyon.

  “Leave me alone, Tom.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. He moved toward me then, and when I glanced at him I sensed the dead meadowlark in his rib cage, fluttering. Let me out. “Beth begged me to search for you. She said you’ve come here before.”

  “Tell Beth I love her.”

  “She’s worried for you. She loves you, too.”

  “She feels sorry for me.”

  “She’s your friend. Like me. I’m your friend, Milly.” His voice grew thick with emotion. “I wrote to my mother about you again. I want to be with you. Please.”

  I stood at the edge of the cliff. One great leap and I’d be free of pity, of visions, of weddings, of everything. The wind licked at us warmly. She whispered to me, Soon soon soon.

  “Come on, Milly,” he said. “I’m not going to let you do this.”

  “Leave me alone,” I said again, and I tensed my legs, readying myself.

  He gave a cry then and lunged for me, pouncing, just like a dog would, and I tripped, shouting. He caught me around the waist and pulled at me, and for a moment I mistook him for Gordon, waltzing with me at the Safety and Security Dance, and I twirled with him like I would with a lover, even resting, briefly, head against his chest, and then, recoiling, the pain of his touch everywhere outside and inside of me, a branding iron pushed into my womb, my ovaries, the rattlesnake entering me, striking out, the hot sticky venom. I cried out in agony, slipping from his grasp.

  “Don’t touch me,” I screamed, and I hated him and everything I’d ever wanted from him: marriage, children, status, companionship, joy.

  I wheeled around and shoved him, furiously. He windmilled his arms, then sailed backward off the cliff and into the starlight, mouth gaping, brow lifted in astonishment.

  Solemnly, trembling with rage and strength, I watched him, not yet fully aware of what I’d don
e.

  He seemed to hang there in the firmament, suspended by our espoused shock and regret, time slowed in horror, and I cried out and stretched my arms open to him.

  Come to me!

  But he plummeted, howling in terror down the cliff’s carapace. My eyes shot elsewhere, to the Big Dipper, large enough to hold an entire city of dead bodies. My mind squalled.

  Scoop me up, scoop up everything in the river, clean up the whole mess of us.

  There was a crack, the splitting of a rotten melon, and when I gathered my courage and looked over the edge I saw Tom Cat’s broken body slamming against the rocks and spilling into the river, his rib cage cracking open and the organs pouring out like ripe fruits all around him. The meadowlark fluttered to life, lifted from the wreckage, and flew west across the water.

  Murderer.

  The dead in the river came forward to huddle against Tom Cat, to fawn over him or feast on him, I couldn’t tell. I crouched down in the sand. They dragged his corpse and ruined organs deeper into the current. The big muscle of water flexed around him, pushing him smoothly south. He would eventually see the ocean, I thought; I likely never would. I turned and limped down the hillside. I ignored the snake who coiled in the grass, rattling its sorrow, and when I witnessed dirty fur keeping pace with me in the underbrush I quickened my stride and kept my eyes on the eastern horizon until there was nowhere left for an animal to hide.

  Murderer.

  My desire to jump had vanished after seeing Tom Cat fall. It was as though he had taken my place in the falling. It was not that two wrongs do not make a right, but there was a relief that something horrible had happened and I was solely, directly responsible for it. I’m as awful as I’ve always assumed. I had something of my own now to regret deeply, a new awful secret, and it was my responsibility to ferry the weight of such a secret now. To exist—painfully, regretfully—was to apologize.

  I walked and walked through the night. I found my little suitcase right where I’d left it. At dawn I accepted an offered ride on a passing cattle car. In the eye of a storm of loquacious men, I sat filthy and quiet. In Richland, I prowled the streets for most of the morning. Eventually I entered a simple brick building facing the park and gave some cash to an elderly landlady for a modest apartment. It was no more than a small room, really, with a kitchenette and a shared bathroom down the hall. The landlady asked what I did for a living and I told her I worked at Hanford. She lowered my rent by half.