“I don’t know what you expect me to say.” I roamed the room, adjusted the curtains. I examined the few objects of my mother’s affection—a silver comb, a book—and set them down. “Do you expect gratitude? A thankyou note?”
“What I expect is for my daughter not to crawl into my fucking bed.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Crawling into your bed? What bed? This bed? I have my own bed.”
“I see you.” Ellie sat up, wrung her hands. “I also know about that underwear model you hired. Are you so intent on ruining your brother? Of breaking whatever’s left of his heart?”
I went numb. “I don’t have a brother.”
“Is that the story you’re telling yourself this month, Kate? Sometimes I think your lies, and that life you’ve created in your head, keep you alive.”
“The life you created for me,” I said. Remember the car ride, the lamb mask? I do. My life has always existed in between two homes in ruins. I’m Pompeii. I’m the second Vesuvius. They didn’t see me coming.
“You’re ungrateful and unworthy of my love,” Ellie said.
Doctors will later tell me that after Lucia’s death, after Jonah told me he wished he’d had the strength to kill me instead of her, I blotted him out. I made it such that it was as if he ceased to exist—a family of four reduced to three (subtraction). While I might have loved my mother once, my devotion to Jonah was a constant, and the morning I stood over Lucia, clutching a belt and rage in my two hands, I saw an unrecognizable look wash across his face: disgust. A common thief, I stole Lucia’s last breath, held the bounty in my hands, and he hated me for it. Hated that I’d extinguished possibly the only woman he loved, a woman whom I paid to love him, but then she fell in love with him anyway because that was Jonah. You attached yourself to him.
No one needs to finish me off in a sink, in a pool, or in an apartment in Manhattan, because I’ve been gone this whole time. Yet, I breathe, and as you grow older you become accustomed to that too. Hurt wounds you, it alters the shape and swell of your heart, and his hate was one I couldn’t bear.
“I think you need to rest,” I said to Ellie.
“I’ve been where you are and I’ve seen what you’ve seen and worse, and let me tell you this: there is no light in the dark. There’s no nobility in living in perpetual blackout. The last thing I need is rest. The clocks in this house remind me time is running out. The joke’s on me, apparently, because I discovered that I could be happy and it’s all too late. That’s the one luxury you have, Kate. Time. And you don’t even care.”
The tragedy wasn’t that she thought happiness existed beyond her reach; it was the fact that she believed it existed at all. Weren’t we proof that we were generations of a family that had everything we needed but nothing we wanted? And my mother was wrong—I did care. I always cared.
“I followed you into the dark and you left me there,” I said.
The day after Ellie died, I woke with scratches on my face and most of the furniture gone, and what was left of it had been rearranged. My dresses covered every inch of the floor, as if tangled together they’d formed a kind of carpet. I spent an hour unknotting sleeves, and removing clocks, combs, and shattered light bulbs and lamps from the confines of my dresser drawers. I couldn’t take it anymore. Not one minute, not one day. There was a moment I thought about dying. Who was I kidding? I constantly thought of it. My days were a book where the space between words was infinite, and the words composed a single sentence typed over and over: You were once here. Once you’d been a small girl nearly drowned in a pool and stolen from her bed, and now you were a woman whose thighs didn’t touch and you let parts of men crawl into the gap and rest there.
“You were Motel 6, flashing Vacancy in neon green. What kind of woman is that?” I said, as Kate. “I said, what kind of woman is that? I said—”
“I’m not deaf; I can fucking hear you. Hard not to,” I said, as Gillian.
“I think you should leave.”
“A little too late for that, don’t you think? If you keep at this, Kate, it’s going to be one long life.”
“You’re not real. You’re an imaginary friend. A voice in my head,” I said, as Kate.
“Really?” I laughed. “Tell that to Alice. Tell that to yourself. You’re the story and you’re tragic and simple and perhaps beautiful, but you’ll never know this. You’ll only realize it when someone else writes about it, and you read a story with a hint of nostalgia. This person sounds familiar, until you realize that person is you, and you’re a character in a story rather than a real person who didn’t have a beautiful life. This is your life. Not mine.”
I thought about the pills under my bed. I could take them, two by two.
“Suicide again? Kate, you’re starting to hurt my feelings.”
“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up,” said both of us.
“Do you honestly think, even for a moment, that Jonah would love you if it weren’t for me? Your love is a return-to-sender, an address-not-found. A no-one-lives-here-anymore,” I said.
“I don’t know any Jonah,” I cried.
“How convenient for you,” I said.
I ached for the pills, the whole bottle. The pills, now in my hand. How did they get in my hand?
“Take them or shut up about it.” To another, a distant voice in the background: “Do you really think our girl is the blood-in-the-bath type? Keep moving, nothing to see. You’ll have your time. Isn’t that right, Kate?” I said, as Gillian, as Lionel.
You were once here.
Now you’re alone in the deep dark. You reach for James’s credit card, rope, and matches. You call a motel and book a room. You know what to do.
ANIMAL KINGDOM
2013
WHEN I DREAM about Ellie, she’s always asking me for things she doesn’t need. She’ll stomp into my room and ask for socks in the middle of a heat wave. She’ll demand an avocado even though she’s allergic. Once she asked for bobby pins with the plastic tips removed, and when I asked about this strange request, she said only, “I need to get into things.” When I pressed her she said, “The only solace you offered me in life was pills and a pillow.”
I dutifully comply with every request. I make small piles on my bed of pins, ripened fruit, and folded socks. Clusters of nail clippers and passages she loved torn out of library books, folded neatly in three. Her visits comfort me because I have something she might possibly need.
This is what I learn a few months after my mother dies:
1.I could have loved her shamelessly, recklessly, so much so that the enormity of my heart overwhelms her, breaks down her resolve until she crawls into my bed and lies beside me, one hand over my quick-beating heart. She whispers, Quiet, girl.
2.That night she put me in a car and wore that lamb mask, I could have bolted back into the house. I could have burst into Tim’s room and told him what my mother intended to do.
3.I could have said, Go home to your wife, my mother, James, when he buried his face in my hair.
4.Don’t ask about love. Don’t even risk it. “Did you love your daughter?” I asked Ellie once. It would take days to understand the shape her face made when she said, “Will you love your daughter?”
5.I could have spared Jonah’s life when he came back right before the funeral, staking his claim on my mother’s heart after I’d broken it. I could have shared her, but instead I viewed my mother’s love as a territory I could occupy even after I’d scorched all the land and burned down the trees. I miss Jonah, but he had to go. Unlike my mother, he doesn’t visit. Instead, he remains, mouse-quiet, in the basement. Get to scraping, I said one evening in his room; I pressed a knife against his face and at the end of the evening I made cuts. All neat and tidy in that cooler. Instead, I speak for him, give him a part of my life, as reparations, so to speak. Admittedly, it’s lonely in this house.
Love is a country you don’t know exists until you reach it. When you’re finally here, you plant your flag,
but still you remain lost.
“HEY, KID. I’M on a pay phone. Can you believe they still make these things? It used to be a dime to make a phone call, now it’s a buck fifty to get a dial tone.”
“Minnie?”
“No, it’s the repo man. Of course it’s me. Who else would it be?”
“What happened to your phone?”
“It died. Although I don’t understand how phones can actually die when they can be recharged. It’s all very dramatic to me.”
“Where are you?”
“Home. Things got crazy with the Colombians, and I finally realized I’m too old for this shit. I need beaches, not a banana republic. How are you holding up?”
“Oh, you know me.” I wrap the phone cord around my finger, and it occurs to me that I might be the only person in a ten-mile radius that has a landline. I still use the phone from my childhood—a powder-blue pushbutton, which never ceases to form a tangled web around my body. I remember thinking that I would pick up the phone and somehow Tim would answer, whispering the directions back to our house in code, and I would pack my backpack and escape when everyone was asleep. I would be Kate again. I would have my books, my blue dresses, and my blue bathing suit back. Gillian would be safely tucked away in my head, not unleashed onto the world like some kind of sickness.
Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the stories in my head.
“I should’ve come home when I heard about Jonah. Who just up and abandons their family after a funeral? Even your rotten father had the decency to show up. Have you heard from him?”
“James?” How he kissed the soft patch of skin behind my knees and took my hair in his mouth and let it rest there . . . Why didn’t anyone understand that memories are the things you don’t want to see, a whole continent you need not revisit?
“God, no. Everyone in town knows James is at home baking pies and getting drunk. He never left, my dear. He never drove that car you spoke of farther west. The farthest he got was the liquor store. I meant Jonah.”
“James is here? Of course he is. I imagine Jonah’s on an island somewhere, finding new ways to spend what’s left of my mother’s money. He’ll resurface; he always does.”
“I’d like to see you, or what’s left of you. Word is you don’t leave your house much these days.” The caution in her voice, the way she draws the words out, is palpable.
“My mother’s ashes are in my bedroom, in a box. Should I be working the farmers’ market? Making the town rounds so everyone can go home and tell their families that Kate’s okay? That they did their duty in ensuring I won’t crack up? That they need this small satisfaction to make their lives worth living? Tell me, what is that shit?”
“It must really be terrible having people in your life who care about you. Listen, kid. Your mother died, your father’s a wreck, and your brother—who, in my opinion, is not playing with a full deck—went AWOL. You’ve lived in this shithole town your whole life and you’re asking people, your neighbors, your friends, not to be concerned?” Minnie bellows. Her voice is the boldest it’s ever been.
“I don’t have any friends.”
“And here I thought the idea of a cell phone dying was dramatic.”
I fall into a fit of laughter.
“Now there’s the girl I used to know,” Minnie says. “Look alive, Kate. I’ll be there in ten. You know how I take my coffee.”
I REALLY LOVED Jonah. After two months of keeping him bound in the basement, I cried with him and held him all the way to his last breath, to home. His last word was Lucia. I’m trying to forgive him for that.
Jonah, will you forgive me for ending your life, for breaking the only trust that children have? Will you remember when I was kind? Is that true, really? Was I ever kind? Afterward, I was surprised how much it hurt to lose him, and how that hurt failed to recede with the passing of each day; in fact, it grew stronger, inverting how time has a way of removing color and sheen. In the weeks that followed, I scrubbed every inch of my home except for the rug where we last lay and the blankets he used to sleep on. Sometimes I sleep on the floor, cocooned in his scent because I’m frightened it’ll fade. I grip counters with my hands. I keel over in dark bathrooms, and bite down on my lip so hard I don’t notice I’m bleeding. I watch a television show where the voiceover tells me that grief is like the ocean: it’s deep and dark and bigger than all of us. And pain is like a thief in the night. Quiet. Persistent. Unfair. Diminished by time and faith and love.
Sometimes I open my door and expect to see Jonah, a white star bolting from the other room. I ghost my home thinking that he’ll somehow appear, from ether, from air, and it’ll be a secret that he’s come back, even for just a little while. Even if it’s to lull me to sleep, even if it’s to tell me that he understands that there was nothing else I could have done. I fill these rooms with the sound of his voice as I remember it, but still he remains mute in that cold box. Even Ellie comes flittering in with her requests or demands. She knows how it is, the defect of our lineage. I only have to assume that he’s angry. Jonah, what else could I have done? The police were closing in. They’d find your collection of the dolls we’d stolen—playthings, really—from which I’d removed all traces of my existence, and they’d take you from me. I couldn’t have them strap you to a chair and fill your head with shocks or your body with poison. You deserved to be taken home and buried here. Artists and their work are always revered in memoriam. Remember that awful The Kingdom of Limbs installation? The real thing, I said once, holding you close, is always much more powerful than its representation. “What did I tell you about getting sloppy? How many times did I have to tell you?” I say this aloud, in my house, and I am so alone.
In time Jonah will see why I had to do what I’ve done. He’ll understand my sacrifice and he will thank me.
MINNIE GASPS. “HOW are you pregnant?” She does what women aren’t supposed to do—she leans in and touches my stomach, uninvited.
“Jesus, Minnie, thanks.” I remove her hand and turn away.
“Well, at least we know why you’ve been shacked up all this time. The more pressing question is with whom?” Minnie says, coyly.
I divert my eyes. “No one you know.”
“I thought you didn’t want children.”
“I didn’t. It just sort of happened. And then my mother and Jonah . . . left. By the time I got around to doing something about it, it was too late.”
“I’m pleased as pie, but are you ready for this? After all that’s happened. Where’s your boy? Is he here, in the house?” Minnie takes a sip of coffee, and I notice the mug shake. Minnie’s afraid. The more she laughs and rearranges her hands on her lap, brings the mug to her lips and sets it down, it occurs to me that she’s not actually drinking the coffee. She looks occupied, staring at me as if she’s trying to sort something out.
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I just got back from spending two months in Cartagena with coked-up Colombians who had enough guns to supply a small army. I found fucking bullet casings between the sofa cushions. So let’s just say that my retirement wasn’t what I expected. Then I come home to discover you’re pregnant because your pants are too damn tight. You could’ve told me on the phone, you know.”
“I never thought I’d keep it,” I say, and in a softer voice I tell Minnie the boy is no longer here. The boy is gone. What I don’t tell her is that the boy is actually a man who used to occupy half of my mother’s bed. Never give away the coordinates, Lionel whispers. The headache dulls at the back of my neck and slowly begins to spread like sickness. I feel something stir in my body and I know that what I need is silence because I can’t go on like this. I need all of me here for my daughter. She can’t know about the others, the infestation. How do I know it’s a girl? Of course it’s a girl. We are always girls.
“You know I knew your mother since she was a child,” Minnie says.
“J
onah told me,” I say.
“Oh he did, did he? That kid is the kind who picks up a book, reads the page, and assumes he knows the whole story.”
“Minnie, don’t. He was trying to help me make sense of things, of her. How she was.”
“How would Jonah know how Ellie was? He wasn’t even there. I was there, and I wish you would have known her then. Before her mother and her grandfather’s money ruined her. You needed a compass to find that old man’s heart. I spat on his grave when he died, I did.”
“Why do you hate him so much?” I could feel her kicking.
“Your great-grandfather? That man came out of the womb with coins in his mouth. He had a taste for all kinds of metals.”
“I mean Jonah.”
“I woke one night, late, and I could hear him on the lawn. I could hear the bat come down hard on my pup’s flank and all his bones crack. And there’s your little angel with blood on him, smiling. Said something about mange. He dropped the bat and left, like it was nothing. There was a dead animal on my front lawn and that fucker whistled home. I called your father, said some things—back then I had a kind of influence on people—and next thing you know Jonah walks by my house, real slow, with bruises on his neck. I’m just sitting there, drinking lemonade, and you know what he says to me? I won’t forget you. It was his way of keeping me away because he knew things. He knew I’d followed your mother after she left your father; your real father—long story, not much of a payoff—and he liked you. No way was I going to ruin that. No way was I going to take you from him. He wouldn’t permit you to stay in Nevada.”
My body goes cold. It was never James who kept me from my father. It was Jonah?
As if reading my mind, Minnie says, “James knew everything. Not at first, but in time. Your mother was difficult, a colt that had been kept in a barn now allowed to run in the field, and James made his entreaties. That man put on a good show, but he was fucking weak. But she didn’t want to leave, and Jonah, well, Jonah was like your great-grandfather—it shocks me that he doesn’t have the blood in him—always getting his way.”
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