Follow Me into the Dark

by Sullivan, Felicia C. ;

  “How do you know I haven’t already gone beyond my limit?” I said.

  Cassidy’s eyes widened. She leaned toward the cigarette but paused. “Now you’re in the game.”

  “I ALWAYS KNEW you liked to be tied down,” Cassidy says now, during visiting hours. Leaning in, she examines my face, all of it. “You quiet types are kinky that way.”

  “They say it’s for my safety.” It’s been two years since I saw Cassidy. Her hair is shorn to the ears, like Mia Farrow, she says proudly. The bruises are long gone, replaced by a body freckled and brown from the sun. More than anything I want to hide my arms under the sheets and drape a curtain over my face—all to hide a body that’s been kept in a preserve. “It’s been a while.”

  “I never told you what happened out West,” she says. “You should know what happened. You need to know,” she says, grabbing at my restraints, fingering the metal of the buckle that I’m desperate to lick. “How to get out.”

  Cassidy tells me about a man playing the guitar with gold in his hair, like the summer of love. He strums Paul Simon and Bob Dylan because he’s going to be a star, and tells her that she is his sweet girl. They live on an old movie set out in the desert called Eden (sound the alarm, she says), where they’ve a handful of cattle, chickens, and cats that take care of the mice. Thirty of them live on the land, sing songs, read poetry, and talk about a world where everyone lets the shackles fall from their ankles. During the day, the women cook and sew and clean, and the men smoke joints and fuck the new girls. Baptism, they call it. Bringing the pigs home, they say. At night, they eat out of clean bowls and move from one body to the next like a game of musical chairs. Soon Cassidy becomes the mare, when she just wants to be the sweet girl who hums out of tune. She empties her pockets for the leader—whom they all call Father—all for semantics, for the desire to be small and pure and clean. But the only thing that changes is her name—they’ve given her a new one—and she can’t keep the old and new nicknames straight. When Cassidy stops pressing money into the Father’s hands, he has new chores for her to do: men to bring into the family and houses in the country ripe for thievery. One particular robbery gone wrong made Cassidy flee.

  “How could we possibly know that the fucker would be home?” Cassidy says, lighting a Camel, smoking it. She tells me about a baseball bat, blood (so much, you wouldn’t believe), and their footprints all over the mudroom. “Not the kind of shit you want to leave behind. So I bolted. I ran through the trees to the road. I had to blow some trucker from Barstow to give me a ride across the state line.”

  “My God, Cass. Why didn’t you tell me this? I could have done something.”

  “What would you have done? Driven down with that husband of yours who would’ve given me a lecture all the way back to town? And remember that day you ran off with my car?” she says. “Left me with men who did the things they felt entitled to do. And then you left me again when you had that child. How could I trust you; you always leave.”

  I close my eyes. The waves recede. “You seemed . . . free.”

  “Oh, honey. I’m a fuckup with a bank account. Getting balled by men isn’t free, sweetie; I know the game, and it’s one where we’ll celebrate our minor victories, but we’ll never win. Not really. Freedom is having cash to bandage the wounds and run. Freedom is saying we’re getting the fuck out of here today, Ellie. I read your chart and they say you’re crazy, bonkers, off your rocker, but I don’t buy it.”

  “That’s not possible,” I say. “I see now what I’ve done to Kate. I understand why I need the pills.” Suddenly my face is a river. I’ve outlived my best-by date. I accept that I will never scramble eggs. I will always burn or break toast. My skin will itch and blister after a man touches it. There will always be marks and stained sheets. I will never understand the nuances of dinner parties, where conversations require constant costume changes. I will never gnaw down to the bone. I will be cautious of birds. I will live in a series of homes and never see the deed. I will pin butterflies to the walls of my room to replace the mirrors that have been removed. The days will continue to leave their scars. I will never take my own life because I can’t bear the thought of writing the note. Instead, I’ll let others leave their marks. I’ll open the Bible and read the book without understanding the story. It doesn’t matter. In the end, the men will save. This is what I was told. What I needed to know was this: my role was to own the books and believe. Men would do the work.

  I think of my house and I see my daughter reaching for me as I fade and fall out of the frame. All I’ve got is a mouth that has a taste for metal and a desire to leave my three-year-old daughter and go.

  “They tell me I’m getting better,” I say.

  “I don’t think you were ever sick to begin with. So you realized you didn’t want to be a wife and a mother—believe me, you wouldn’t be the first.”

  “But Kate . . . the bleach.”

  “Momentary lapse of reason. I nearly beat a man to death for what? Pocket change? Because a man told me to? I’d say, under the right conditions, otherwise normal people are capable of doing just about anything. And what’s normal, really?” Cassidy says, her face only inches away from mine. I can feel her breath on me; I can smell the meat.

  The unbuckling of leather—guards, not belts—the crinkle of cotton pulled on and draped over, the fastening of buttons, the buzz of a door, the cool hallway and diverted eyes, the doors that unlock, the light that threatens to blind.

  “Let’s go,” Cassidy says, folds my hand in hers. “Let’s run.”

  We run.

  LEAVING NEVADA

  1977

  WE DRIVE THROUGH Nevada. It takes a day to travel to a town so hot that corpses crawl up out of their graves because even the six feet of shade isn’t cool enough. We joke about eating cactus and rattlesnake, picking scales and spines out of our teeth with nails we’ve grown too long, although we secretly know we’re the kind who will settle for a ham sandwich. At least I would. We pass a smoke between us and talk intellectually about tumbleweed as if it were the one thing on this trip we’re meant to see. I roll down the window, lapping up the dry heat with my tongue. At a pay phone on the outskirts of Tonopah, I call Tim and tell him I’ll be gone for a while. I call my mother and tell her to go fuck herself.

  Cassidy laughs and rattles dimes in her pocket. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

  I feel the elastic band on the underside of my shorts and say, “Yes, it does.” But as soon as it does, it doesn’t. I think about Kate, in parts, but not the whole of her. I see her eyes, sometimes blue, often gray, but I can’t make out the shape of her face or the body of a child leaning toward its mother, grasping for what’s warm and familiar. I can’t fit her in the frame, so as we drive I think about her hands, the smooth, webbed skin between her toes, the deep curve of her bottom lip. This part, the missing, doesn’t feel so good, but I don’t tell Cassidy this. Instead, I unfurl a map and tell her to head farther west. I want California.

  “I’ve seen California,” she says, “You don’t want that.”

  I’m coming back, Kate. You have to know that I’m trying to get better so they don’t take me away again. I’m trying to swallow all this sadness so they don’t suspect me again, but there’s so much of it. A woman is a dam, breaking. California is all for you, Kate.

  In Tonopah, you can still get a hamburger for fifty-five cents, and for a dime you can play all the Perry Como songs your heart desires on the jukebox in the local luncheonette. One of two local radio stations plays gospel songs, although at midday everyone seems drunk on hooch passed around in old Coca Cola bottles.

  “Fuck me,” Cassidy says. “We’re not in Kansas, Dorothy. We’re in 1950.”

  “Good thing we’re white,” I say. “Good thing we blend in.”

  For a moment, a blankness falls over Cassidy’s face, like a dark curtain that no one can see through. She’s a ghost town, an uninhabitable country. I’ve seen that look before. When I was seventeen, we wer
e both at a sleepover at Kit Ryan’s house. I woke in the middle of the night and stole boxes of cookies and cake mix out of Kit Ryan’s kitchen. My home was one free of sweets, and I desperately wanted an Oreo cookie. Prone to night terrors, Cassidy rarely slept, and she found me with my bounty. Same blank stare like the one she’s giving me now when she called me the Nabisco thief. When Kit woke the next morning, she and her mother whispered in the kitchen, and all I could remember hearing is Kit, annoyed, saying we probably ate them all because who would just break into a house and steal all the biscuits? When I got home that night, I arranged all the loot in my closet and ate every last morsel. Every chip, every crumb.

  In a small voice Cassidy says, “Good thing.”

  At the front desk of the Motel Tonopah, a sign reads, Voted Worst Motel in the World. Annie, the proprietor, greets us in a sweeping floral muumuu and a bushel of red hair. Pointing to the sign, she says with pride, “You read right. This ain’t the Shangri La, ladies. We got none of that fancy-smelling bar soap and amenities. You get five channels on the television, and you’re lucky to even be getting a television on account of me experiencing some downsizing. You keep your rooms clean because I ain’t your damn maid or mother; I already got four rotten kids sucking on my teat. And I don’t want to find anything funny on those sheets, if you know what I mean. They get washed once a week, on laundry day, so consider today your lucky day.”

  “You got a boy my age in that rotten bunch?” Cassidy asks.

  Annie scowls. “That’ll be ten dollars a night, paid in advance.”

  I wince from the heat, or perhaps it’s the lone fan blowing dirt in my face.

  After Cassidy pays the bill, I say, “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  Cassidy rolls her eyes, “What do you want, Ellie? The Four Seasons and malts?”

  “I didn’t realize clean sheets were a luxury.”

  The room! The room is a comedy of errors, straight out of an Albee play, all theater of the absurd. On the television screen, a taped sign reads, Do Not Adjust Television Antennae. On the toilet seat, someone has scrawled, Flush after Every Other Elimination. Water Don’t Grow on Trees. Taped to the bathroom mirror, a sign reads, Do Not Use Towels or Wash Clothes to Clean Cars, Windshields, or Vaginas during the Time. Beneath the sign is a large arrow that points to a cardboard box on the floor filled with oily rags. Taped onto that box is another sign: Use Me.

  “You think they got cameras in here?” I say.

  “This is back-ass Nevada. They’ve probably got holes drilled in the walls. They’re probably watching us right now. They’ll use the good towels to clean up the evidence.”

  “I’ve read about hotels like this.”

  “I’ve lived in hotels like this,” Cassidy says, flushing the toilet twice and shoving one of the clean rags between her legs. When I gawk, Cassidy shrugs and says, “Evidence.”

  The blood is a torrent, drowning everything in its wake. Through the red foam that sweeps across the hospital bed and spills over the tray tables, I see my husband collapse against a wall, and then a head. A swatch of pale blond hair and eyelids shuttered white. Then a fist burying itself in me as if it wanted to crawl back to where it had come from. Then come the gurgle and scream, and then Kate, white hair darkening in the sea, rolling deeper and deeper underwater.

  Cassidy snaps her fingers in front of my face. “Earth to Ellie. Did I lose you to the little green men from up there?”

  Be normal, I think. “More like the green shit growing on the walls.” Next to the black-and-white television set, mold spores spider up the wallpaper, and the corner of the room teems with miniature mushrooms. “Don’t take off your shoes,” I warn.

  “I wonder if old Annie’s got a sign for that,” Cassidy laughs and sprawls out on the bed while I wonder whether Clorox could make this room habitable, bleach it to the bone. I want it to be winter. I want to feel what it’s like to drive through snow. But I remember the sun and the fact that my license was taken from me.

  Cassidy says, “I thought we’d go out. Let’s get wrecked.”

  “No cactus or rattlesnake? You’re not even in the least bit hungry? Because I’m starving.” I cover the lower half of my bed in Saran Wrap. I’m starting to see inkblots on the wallpaper. I blink them away. Focus on the task at hand.

  “I’m working up to it. Once I get a little drink and boy in me, I’ll be ripping the heads off live snakes and picking needles out of my hair. That’s my kind of night. I hope you’re not wearing that shirt. No one will fuck you in that shirt.”

  “I met my husband in this shirt.”

  “My point,” Cassidy says. “Wait, is that plastic wrap? Are you wrapping your bed in plastic wrap?”

  “There could be lice on this bed; I’m not taking any chances.”

  “You think you’re taking this germaphobe thing a little far? Maybe I shouldn’t have broken you out of the loony bin,” Cassidy teases.

  “That’s not funny,” I say. After a while, “I hate gross things.”

  We move like fog in the night. The road ahead of us is dark and we make a game out of kicking beer cans and rifling through our empty cigarette packs. Tonopah is the sort of town where everyone draws their curtains to one side and gathers around a couch to watch the black-and-white television. Cassidy talks about group sex and cult blow jobs. There are no street signs.

  “There’s a difference between wanting it and having it taken from you,” Cassidy says. “From being on top to waking up with a knee pressed on your back. When I came home, nobody even noticed I’d left. But they all talked about you. How your husband put you in the nuthouse.”

  “He was right to do that,” I say.

  “We’re not crazy is what I’m trying to tell you,” Cassidy says. She grabs my hand and squeezes it two times. “We’re not.”

  I see a coral snake wrapped around Kate’s mouth. Her eyes are lidless, white, and wide. The snake hatches an egg in my daughter’s mouth and she chokes. “Of course not,” I say, knowing that the pills have made their exit and the shadows will become voices will become people will become shocks will become Kate. I will return.

  “I’m not so sure,” I say.

  Cassidy looks around and asks, “Where are we?”

  “Back-ass Nevada.”

  It’s ladies’ night at the Motel Tonopah, but men try to buy us drinks anyway. Everyone asks us where we’re from and Cassidy says, “Sun, moon, and stars, baby.” She drinks whiskey neat and licks her lips so much they get dry. Her hair is longer now; it covers the scars on the back of her neck. But every now and then I see her touch them, like habit, and I think about our day at the lake and all the hope.

  A fat man named Fred sits next to me and he smells of raw onion and tobacco. I turn my back to him so he’s left talking to my hair. After a few moments he grunts, “Queer as fuck,” and moves down the bar. A woman walks in with a fox skin draped around her neck, and Fred pulls out a chair and buys her a drink. Boys play quarters on a table filled with chipped glasses. Fireflies dart in and out of the windows while two men haul out a broken jukebox to hock but no one pays them any mind, and the bartender drinks gin straight from the bottle. Somebody orders food but nobody eats it. A man yells, “I used to be in shipping. I used to move things.”

  I remember the bleach, the sting of it. I remember brushing Kate’s hair out of her eyes. I remember the smallness of her hands. She’s so small; she won’t always be this small. One day she won’t be the thing that fills my hands. Her body will spill over.

  Eyeing the jukebox men holding court across the room, Cassidy jumps out of her chair. She’s a woman who loves things in twos, who forever desires to be in French films she’s never seen and travel to places her parents abandoned her for. I want to shake her. I want to tell her that people always leave.

  “Nothing deep,” Cassidy says, unbuttoning a button. Strands of her hair cling to her neck, all slicked with gloss and sweat. “What do you think of those guys? The ones with the box?”<
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  “You’ve never had a more receptive audience.”

  Cassidy comes closer, leans into me, and bites my cheek. “That day when I first met you at the carnival, I had you pegged; I had you made. You only have eyes for me.” She sticks out her tongue and I watch her run to the men.

  Outside, thin snakes dangle from a tree like livewire. Stars paint the sky silver. The first month I couldn’t feel Kate, I only knew that cells were thick in the business of multiplication, and as a result a person would take shape. A person I wasn’t ready for, but it didn’t matter. Women are born to serve and breed, and when we fail at this, what else is there? What is it that we can do that men can’t? We bring their screaming mouths into this world only to be told by those mouths, now grown, that we’re lesser than. Only good for being on our knees, backs, and perched over stoves. We’re told, You’re smart for a woman, you’re mouthy for a woman, you’re brazen for a woman. They tell us we’re dangerous and emotional, prone to hysterics like landmines, and I wonder, if this is true, why aren’t they afraid?

  Why was it that I was the only one afraid of this person occupying my body?

  During the months that followed I prayed for a fall, a kick, or the will to plunge a hanger all the way in, but I was afraid that losing my daughter would hurt me in some unimaginable way, so I stayed home, locked in my room. Removed all the hangers from the closets. Took the cords out of the phones. Every night my husband would come home and return the hangers to the closets and plug the phones back into the walls. Every morning I’d wake to the same nightmare all over again. I prayed for amnesia.