by Maud Casey
“The best part of what?” Lindy asked.
“Of everything,” I said.
“Where did you say you were from?” Lindy asked like she thought I was strange, but I knew by then she never asked questions for no reason. After the dishes were done, we sat silently on a neutral bench outside the office, underneath a vast, starry sky, each thinking her own thoughts in the pleasure of each other’s company. After a while I told her my parents were from Iowa and she told me her father was also from Iowa, and we considered that coincidence in an intimate kind of silence until a counselor came and told us it was time for us to go to our rooms.
Each item she finds in the lounge closet, Lindy holds up to us for inspection. There’s a barely inflated volleyball, bungee cords, heart-and flower-shaped cookie cutters, a meat thermometer, a battered game of Chutes and Ladders, a box boasting a tool that peels, cores, and slices apples.
“What are people thinking?” Lindy asks, prepared to provide her own answer. “This is the most useless assortment of crap I’ve ever seen. Check this out.” She holds up a tiny hourglass and places it on the table next to Mary so the sand begins to run down into the bottom funnel.
“Enough already,” Mary says, knocking the hourglass over with one of her feet.
“Candles and a corkscrew. Perfect,” Lindy says, pointing to the sign above the washer and dryer: NO OPEN FLAME OF ANY KIND. NO ALCOHOL.
“Yeah, whatever. It’s your nails no matter what,” Mary says. She holds up a foot for our inspection. Mary believes that whatever happens, look good at all costs. The only time she cried was when she discovered she’d left her favorite lipstick—Rusty Rose—at home. “You can’t get it just anywhere,” she said, then quickly dabbed at her eyes with a Kleenex to catch the running mascara.
I sympathize with Mary’s obsession with what’s right in front of her, what she can see, what she can touch. Here in my third week, I speak carefully, over and around the details of my recent life with Jonathan, which seem beyond truth, beyond words. They are no longer just part of a story I tell, the story of how at the start I mistook jealousy for love. Instead, “Your nails look fabulous,” or “You look a little thin, bony around the hips.” We all talk primarily about the way we look, how we fill our skin. We line up to stare at our faces in the bathroom mirror, apply a tube of half-used lipstick rescued from the bottom of the cardboard box marked Shelter Makeup. We parade around for each other like stood-up teenagers desperate for someone to notice the predicament we’re in, the makeup a silly, useless weapon here where there are no men. Social anxiety exists here like anywhere else where people live communally, lurking under the surface of every exchange. We wander through the rooms of the shelter checking on everyone else, making sure no one has found a better form of distraction, making sure everyone is as miserable as we are.
The first night I was here, a woman called after me, “Hey, Maria, wait up,” and for a minute I felt wrapped in the strange comfort of a familiarity meant for someone else. “Oh, sorry,” the woman said when I turned around, not Maria. I had reached the point where I was willing to settle for recycled tenderness.
Lindy holds up her watch to indicate five minutes until ten o’clock. “I hope there’s an intake,” she says, laughing a little to show she feels guilty for saying it. She counts on the holidays, the season of peak family violence, to keep the counselor otherwise occupied so that the rule that says in our rooms by ten won’t be a priority.
“Nice,” Mary says, “real nice.” She flicks a toenail paring toward Lindy.
Lindy pulls up the legs of her jeans like a man in a suit about to sit down and squats by the bottom of the tree. She puts her finger in the top of the pole where the top of the tree is supposed to fit. Lindy hates to see things unfinished. The half-built birdhouse she left at home agonizes her. She carries the instructions in her pocket, a black pen mark underneath the step where she left off.
The rain has stopped as suddenly as it began. Through the window I watch as Anna wades slowly in her slippers through ankle-deep mud toward one of the courtyard picnic benches. Her two children, a seven-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl, circle her, splashing. Their toy guns shoot suction-cup darts that are supposed to stick but instead fall flat on the wet cement sidewalk. Joan’s dented-head little girl runs out to join them, making a gun out of her own hands, but Joan calls her back. Once she reaches the bench, Anna riffles through her bathrobe pocket for her cigarettes. A counselor rushes over, offering her a light, straddling the other side of the picnic bench, nervously centering the coffee can ashtray on the tabletop between them.
“I hope my husband gets shot so I can walk around in my bathrobe and counselors run after me to light my cigarettes,” Mary says, looking out the window. This afternoon Anna got a call from her mother in the Mexican town just over the border that Anna and her children had fled. Her mother told Anna that her husband had been shot and killed by another drug dealer. A counselor was brought in to tell the children just home from school while Anna hyperventilated in a back room. We all watched as the little girl, her arms still through the handles of her backpack, followed the counselor into the crisis room. When the counselor told the children their father was dead, the boy laughed and laughed. We could hear him though the door was closed. He couldn’t stop laughing. His laughter was like a sealant he sprayed all around the room, covering himself. Nothing more would ever get in.
While Anna smokes, the boy pretends to fall down dead in a puddle. Anna doesn’t seem to notice. She continues to smoke as another woman comes out of her room to scold him. “It was his stepfather, right?” Mary asks Lindy because Lindy knows everything about everyone.
“No,” Lindy says, correcting her severely. “Anna was married to one man her entire life, since she was seventeen.” Lindy still respects the sanctity of marriage.
Jonathan wasn’t my first. I met him in my thirties, when I thought I finally knew what I wanted, when I thought I could offer the most. I was raised to believe that life adds up to something, that one experience meaningfully leads to another and eventually, someday, an epiphany. The irony is that on our first date, we talked about taking a trip to the desert together. We talked about camping out under the stars with coyotes howling in the safe distance, giant Gila monsters asleep on rocks cooled by the night. There was no question but that we were meant for each other, so to talk about taking a trip on our first date seemed natural. Remembering that feeling alarms me above and beyond everything else—that I felt so sure and so right when I was so utterly wrong.
That first night, I invited Jonathan in. While I put water on to boil for tea, he made me laugh by reciting rules for desert living he had learned on an Outward Bound trip. “Always inform someone of the planned destination, route, and expected time of return.” He spoke in a deep, put-on macho voice. “Be sure the vehicle is in good condition and equipped with a sound battery, good hoses, spare tire and fan belts, necessary tools.” “Talk like yourself,” I said, laughing. “Be Jonathan again and let’s have some tea.” But he didn’t stop. “If the vehicle breaks down, signal trouble by raising the hood, tying a cloth on the antenna.” I patted the space on the sofa next to me for him to join me. He leaned over to kiss me. “Breathe through your nose,” he whispered, still speaking in that other voice, “don’t talk, or lick salt if water is scarce.” I shivered with the best kind of pleasure—excitement laced with fear. When I woke up in the morning he was leaning on one elbow watching me. “You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, speaking in his normal, Jonathan voice. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Mary swings her legs, puts her feet on the floor, and starts on her fingernails with the knife. Still on her knees, Lindy sips from the flask she keeps in the inside pocket of her denim jacket, then squeezes toothpaste onto her tongue in case a counselor happens to walk in. She busies herself fitting the top pole of the tree into the bottom pole, then wraps the filler branches like long green pipe cleaners around the sparse areas of th
e plastic trunk. We’ve spent many nights like this, the three of us intent on something useless, waiting for a counselor to tell us to go to bed while other residents try to sleep. We strain not to listen beyond the rattle and hum of the swamp coolers.
I pick up the phone and dial the number to the airport. Lindy smiles at me—she knows about my phone calls.
Apparently it’s been a long day for the man who answers the phone because he just says “What?” Still, the sound of his voice coming in over the line from the real world into the shelter lounge gives me a charge. Like the thrill I got—before Jonathan’s on-the-half-hour phone calls; before he started checking the mileage on the car on the days he left it at home and walked to work and then stopped leaving the car at home altogether; before I started sleeping in my clothes because a nightgown somehow meant I’d been waiting for someone else; before Jonathan became so afraid each time I left the room that he’d flip chairs jumping out of them to follow me; before the beginning when those flipping chairs were the fast, loud proof of his love; before I’d ever met Jonathan, when I would go out to the airport though I wasn’t flying anywhere. I watched the planes boldly defy gravity. From a bench, I studied people gliding on the moving sidewalks on their way somewhere, moving easily between one world and another.
The man’s voice on the phone—coming from out there where he checks luggage or tears tickets to faraway destinations—makes my features sharper. I can feel the way my nose sits on my face and the hairs on my cheek brush against each other. I can hear my life happening, the scrape of Mary’s knife and the clinking of glass Christmas balls in Lindy’s hand. The table under my hand is just that, solid wood, nothing to interpret. The man hangs up. There is no bridging the gap between out there and our unlisted number, our P.O. box address.
Lindy saves the homemade decorations for last, putting them to the side in a pile. She holds a Christmas ball up to the tree, deciding how to arrange them. She hangs another ball on a plastic branch, then pulls herself up from her knees and stands back to take a look. It is only at times like this, when she brushes her hair back from her face, that the yellowing bruise on her forehead is apparent. She walked into a wall trying to get out of her house quickly, before her husband came home from the police station. Once, she bent over in the kitchen to retrieve a dropped napkin and I saw the beginning of the zipperlike knife scars on her back from nights she didn’t make it out in time. When I squinted my eyes, the scars looked like a ritual scarification, deliberate patterns meant to be deciphered. I touched her back without thinking, and she whipped around. “No,” she said through her teeth. “I’m so sorry,” I said, my eyes welling with tears for the first time since I’d arrived, afraid I’d lose my only friend.
She didn’t talk to me again until the next morning. I asked her if I could tell her a story, and I told her about a day when my parents were still alive, when I was a child with my hand deep in the fur of our dog’s coat, sitting on a dock as my parents prepared a boat. My parents laughed at my mother’s soaked tennis shoes, at the ridiculousness of her stepping in the water accidentally, at the joyful ridiculousness of life in general. I buried my fingers in the dog’s fur, smelled the sea air, and looked out at the ocean, endless like my life before me. “That’s not a story,” she said, but she wasn’t judging me, just stating a fact.
I’ve seen my own bruise chart. It’s blank—a line drawn through the front and then the back of an outline of a naked woman—except for an arrow pointing to the outline woman’s wrists. “Self-inflicted” is written in parentheses. The woman’s face is an empty circle without features. The slash marks on my wrist were a tentative rehearsal with a razor pressed into my flesh not hard enough to kill.
The night Jonathan discovered them, he was handsome and staid as a washed-up movie star. It was a month before I left, and I found comfort in the fact that someone this cruel could love me. His pupils pulsed larger and smaller until I felt hypnotized. He held my wrists, and for a moment it felt like a question. “This is no ordinary sorrow,” I answered. His washed-up movie star looks encouraged the actress in me. He fingered the drawer of our bedside table that contained the gun bought for our protection. He was always stilling me with the possibilities, with my own wildest imaginings.
A Christmas bulb hanging from the end of one of the green plastic branches falls suddenly and shatters on the part of the lounge floor that the rug doesn’t quite reach. Lindy pulls her pants up again and kneels to gather the shards of green glass. “I’m destined to spend my life on my knees,” she says to no one in particular.
Mary admires the nails on her finished hand, and I dial my old number with the phone on the hook. Neither of us notices Lindy until she is standing in front of us. She holds her hand out like a child offering something she does not want anymore. A long sliver of green glass juts from the side of her wrist.
For the first time since I’ve known her, Lindy looks at me as if she doesn’t know what to say. An accident like this is like nothing she ever expected or prepared for. “Please,” she says quietly, looking everywhere but where the glass sticks out of the skin between the fleshier side of her wrist and the dangerous web of veins. “Please get it out.” Her voice is small and polite in the face of this small violence.
Lindy has never asked anything from me, and even though what she’s asking is obvious, I’m confused. But I don’t turn my head the way Mary does; I stand up and take Lindy’s hand.
“Get it out,” Mary says as she slides down the couch, away from us. She puts the knife on the floor beside her. “Hurry up and get it out.” She covers her ears as if we are all screaming. Then she is out the door and headed for the office.
I slide the glass out of Lindy’s soft flesh slowly. The glass is barely lodged in her skin, but her fingers curve inward as I pull. The blood follows the glass to the surface and rushes out fiercely, though the cut isn’t very deep. I remember Jonathan asleep after he’d exhausted himself. His breathing was the sound of waves ready to crash over me while I rested in cloudy bliss, my head rising and falling with his chest. I was always amazed to see Jonathan asleep, all that power shut down. The red of Lindy’s blood is electric against the rest of this gray life. I stand and sit her down in the chair by the phone. She has her good hand to her face as if she’s been slapped.
I grab up all the paper towels strewn around the unwrapped Christmas ornaments, press them to Lindy’s wrist, and as she opens her curled fingers we both watch the blood bloom across the white. The swamp cooler makes a noise as if something is trapped deep inside it. “Quiet,” I say to the noise. “Quiet.” My voice sounds as if I know what I’m talking about. I stroke Lindy’s hair, and she closes her eyes. “Quiet.” She seems grateful for the suggestion.
Burn smoky fires in the daytime and bright ones at night. One of Jonathan’s Outward Bound phrases runs through my head. It’s the same one that went through my head the day I left. I considered burning the house down, lit a match, then blew it out because I knew even then that I might want to come back.
When I push Lindy’s hair back from her face, my fingertips brush the sprawling yellow bruise and I trace its outline. She pushes her head into my hand, resting it there. A new bunch of paper towels pressed to Lindy’s wrist, we watch again as the red seeps thick through the white. The blood moves with a purpose, as if it were seeking me out for comfort.
I can already hear down the street the fire engine and the ambulance that come when the counselors call 911. The overnighter is new, and she must have panicked when Mary ran into the office. She walks in, followed by Mary biting her just-trimmed nails. Behind her are Joan and her dented-head daughter, Anna and her two children. The rest of the women are on their way. We all sleep without really sleeping, poised.
“Lindy, come up to the office,” the counselor says sternly. She is young and pretty, and her tone of voice betrays her fear of the blood, of Lindy, of seeing so much of our lives she won’t recover from it. Lindy opens her eyes slowly and looks at me as if
she is about to tell me a crucial piece of information.
“I can tell she really cares,” Lindy says instead, fake and sweet as the put-together Christmas tree. She shrugs toward the counselor, who is fiddling with the knobs on the lounge washer, shutting the door to the dryer competently.
“Press hard.” I give her a new bunch of paper towels as the counselor comes over to help her up. Mary stands nearby, shifting from one foot to the other.
Urgent exhaust rises from the ambulance and the fire engine outside the gate. I imagine someone calling into the shelter from out there to listen to my own urgency—a woman from her burrow in the snow to tell me in her icy language that it is better to dig deep into the frost than to stand around and wait for someone to let you back in. When I go back to my room, I wrap the razor I stole from the office in a wad of toilet paper and flush it down the toilet.
Later that night Lindy knocks on my door. Her wrist is bandaged, as if she’s been rescued. Everyone has retreated to her room except Mary, who slipped out the gate with the paramedics to meet her boyfriend at the biker bar. Lindy and I walk out into the courtyard and lie down in the damp sandbox under the glow of the shelter lights, swishing our legs and arms back and forth, making our own version of snow angels until our borrowed clothes are dark with wetness.
“The sky is like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Lindy says, still lying in the sand. Even though it’s the same black sky that I saw through the window as I lay on Jonathan’s chest hoping his deep, easy breathing would last forever or that it would stop quietly in the night, I know what she means.
On our third date, Jonathan drove me over the state border to prove that we could go anywhere together. The second time we made love, he bit my shoulder and broke the skin. Jonathan said the blood was love when love is everything, and when he said this I thought of how, when we’d driven over the state line, it had seemed for a minute insignificant. Once we’d passed over the line I’d thought—and then put it out of my head in the interest of romance—that the landscape looked just the same. More trees, fields, and small, slanted houses.