by Averil Dean
I swallow. “She worked a lot.”
“So she worked a lot, laughed a lot. Cried a lot?”
“She had reason to cry.”
“Cried in bed, maybe?” Her voice is quiet. “Didn’t want to get up? Didn’t want to eat sometimes?”
I get up and go to the window. Outside, the rain has stopped. The sidewalks are glazed with water and the tree branches slump toward the ground. My mother used to say that Vashon was an exhausting place to live. Rain and more rain, low gray skies pressing down. She wanted to live in San Diego, where it was sunny all the time. No one could be sad in San Diego, sugarplum. We’ll move there someday. We’ll lay on the beach and get fat and suntanned, won’t that be the life?
But she was so pale when she died.
“You don’t need to know what was in the file,” Molly says. “Words the medical people tell each other, labels, diagnoses. That’s their language, you don’t need it.”
I turn back, and allow myself a closer look around the room. The tiny refrigerator is covered with a child’s colorful drawings, decorated with glitter and dried macaroni, each one signed with blocky letters in the corner: SUNNY. There are flowers on the table, crammed to overflowing in an old mason jar. A dreamcatcher over the bed, and on the bedpost, a winter cap adorned with jaunty pom-poms.
Signs of friendship, of an outdoor life. I wonder whose scarf she is knitting.
“What do you know?” she says.
What do I know. What do I want to know? If I understand the forces that brought me here, if I begin to parse the blame, I might stumble to an unavoidable forgiveness. Toward Ray, but more dangerously toward myself.
I want to do the right thing.
Oh, the right thing. Okay, Michael.
I stub out my cigarette, then hers. I bend to kiss her cheek. As I move away, she grasps my forearm and pulls me back. Her fingers are surprisingly strong, the way an old woman’s can be sometimes.
“Alice,” she says. “It wasn’t your fault.”
* * *
There are no streetlights in the cemetery—no lights at all, as a matter of fact—but I know the way. Through the curved wrought iron gates and the weathered brass lettering set into a large stone rectangle. Past the stately trees, down the pale gray path that winds like time from old to new. My shoes crunch against the gravel and my breath rises in small, smoky clouds from my nose.
How many times have I circled this graveyard since Nana came to rest here? Nana, then my mother. I’ve never been here after dark and it feels like illicit behavior, but also as though I am seeing things clearly for the first time. I look up to the night sky. The bare branches rock like fish bones on the surface of an inky sea, and beyond them a fish-hook moon. The gravestones rise up to meet me—old friends whose names are dear and familiar, though most of them had been here for decades when that football player caught my mother’s eye. I’ve written entire stories based on these names, populated books with the people I imagined them to be, given them life again, and passion, and death. The dead are more alive now in my mind than they ever could have been when they were walking, as I am walking, under the moon.
I wonder how much of my life is real and how much make-believe. I have imagined since I was a child that my mother died because of Ray, that he all but murdered her by throwing out her inhaler in that last, terrible fight, then lay there as she suffocated trying to get to the door. But his face tonight—a hated face, unintelligent, clumsy—was full of confusion when our eyes met. Nothing of what I understood about my mother’s death was present in his expression. I had expected fear from him, an acknowledgment of guilt for what he’d done to my mother. But there was nothing. Just a blank white space where the information should have been.
The rain is back, a delicate patter on the gravestones and gravel path. I recite the names of the dead as I pass, though the letters are smoothed to illegibility by time and darkness: Sylvia Rosen, whom I immortalized as a murderess; Zacharay Filch and Francine Turner Wolfe, two characters from Zebra Crossing; Charlotte Aberdeen, the protagonist from my first unpublished short story. I pause at her grave for a moment, pluck away some pine needles and wonder again about who she was and how she died, eighty-seven years ago, at the age of twenty-five. My mother’s age, too, on her last day.
At the end of the lane, tucked aside like an afterthought: Michael John Keeling. No epitaph, no embellishment, just a name and two dates on a small brass plaque.
Not your fault, Molly said. But she doesn’t know me really.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. My voice is lost in the thrum of the rain.
I leave Michael and continue on, past a wall of shrubs, to the newest section of the graveyard, where my mother and grandmother lie side by side under the manicured turf. I clear their headstones and sit down on the iron bench where I have sat so often before.
Juliette Larimer
April 9, 1954–November 2, 2000
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.
Anna Jane Croft
June 16, 1976–July 25, 2001
Where there is much light, the shadows are deepest.
My mother’s grave has tilted a little since the last time I was here. The top no longer lines up visually against the boxwood shrubs behind it. I wonder abstractedly how to correct it.
I’m lost. I don’t know what to do, how to fix this and make things right.
I take a lighter from my pocket and find the stub of a roach. I smoke the last couple of hits, watching the flame pop in the darkness, disappear, flicker back to life. I graze my fingers through the light that springs up between them, slide the flame over my palm, down my arm and hold it to the inside of my elbow. The pain is a long time coming—a slow itch, a creeping hurt, then at last the burn and my body snapping apart, asserting its instinct against my will. I turn my arm to see the faint, rosy circle in the blue-veined whiteness of my skin. Another point tallied in my favor.
As the pain continues to smolder, I think of the foster system, that nightmare world where things fell apart and got lost, where bones were broken, and promises, and innocence. Seven years in hell, and after that a hollow aloneness where my stories have spun like wind chimes in the desert.
This is where I’ve been, all this time, but what part of it is real? What have I understood correctly and what is imagined?
Bipolar...
Ray’s word flashes before me, slithering white at the corners of my mind. A frightening word, one he’d clearly assumed was understood between us. He had offered it as an elaboration to something already understood.
Bipolar. It’s the word more than anything else that shakes me, because it’s not something he’d come up with on his own. It’s a medical term. A diagnosis.
What else don’t I know about my mother? Michael would have said she was no different from any of the other souls who rest here. She was human. Flawed, maybe angry. Certainly she had cause to be. Knocked up at fourteen, a mother at fifteen, a daughter who’d been forced by Nana to live with the product of her sins. She was moody. Quiet for months at a time, then full of sudden wild energy. But I was wrapped up in my games, immersed in my own small world, and I never saw the patterns in hers.
You were just a little kid.
I was. Just a kid, and so was she. A child thrust prematurely into an adult world, ill-equipped for what she found there.
Bipolar disorder. Batshit. A fucking lunatic.
She probably tossed the inhaler herself.
A finger of cold air creeps under my collar and trails down my spine.
She probably tossed it out herself.
But if that were true, then it meant—
I stare at her grave and feel the cold crystallize in my chest.
She wanted to die. She left me deliberately. Took herself away and left me here alone. She didn’t love
me enough to stay here and give me a home. She didn’t love me enough to live.
I sit with this thought, and the truth of it claims me like an icy sea—inescapable, vast, a truth so big and dark and bitter that for years I’ve clung to the nearest of the debris with the tenacity of a drowning man.
Now I understand why Amanda failed to rise to my prompts about her home life, why there are flowers in the front yard when for years there was only decay. I understand my mother’s habits and Nana’s protectiveness—and the absence of knowledge that a crime had been committed on the night my mother died. I saw nothing in Ray because there was nothing to see.
He is innocent. Ugly, stupid and mean, but innocent of this particular crime. The only one that matters to me.
And I almost—
Jack is so close now to the man I wanted him to be. A killer. I sought him out, wound him up, made him dependent on me, sensitive to my opinion. I could say to him, Look what this guy has done to you. Look what he’s done to me. How can you call yourself a man and let this miscreant live?
There was a moment during that last fight when I almost said that very thing. The words had hovered in the space between us, an expectation had been raised. Jack had stood there wired with his hand on my throat, searching my face like a soldier waiting for orders. But again...I couldn’t pull the trigger.
Relief floods my body, so strong I have to wrap my arms around my stomach to keep from vomiting. I rock forward and back, gulping the cold air, remembering the weight of the gun in my hand and the smooth expanse of Ray’s chest. The trigger felt so small under my finger, the juicy flow of humanity so easily pierced. I almost killed him.
Almost.
But not quite. Michael did save one of us, after all.
I get to my feet, stiff and heavy with cold. I stare down at my mother’s tilted headstone, and Nana’s, straight as a pillar.
I want to go home.
* * *
By the time I close the front door behind me, it’s been forty hours since I’ve slept. A bone-deep weariness drags me toward the earth, as though Death himself has wrapped his fingers around me and begun to tug.
I go to the bathroom and run a tub. Peel off my clothes a layer at a time: sweater and shoes, jeans and socks and T-shirt and bra and underwear. I stare at my reflection, my grandmother’s silver cross hanging silent and heavy between my breasts. The weight of it has always comforted me, but tonight it clings to me like a slug and the chain around my neck feels repellently sticky. I grab the pendant and jerk it over my head, not bothering with the clasp. I toss it on the counter. Then, after a minute, take the wooden box from my closet and lay the necklace inside.
When I drag myself out of the tub half an hour later, I’m so tired I can barely move. Dawn is hours away, I won’t make it.
I lie down and pull the covers over my head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I dream that I am drowning. I’ve been standing on a riverbank, but it’s not like any place real, more like the edge of the cliff at the white motel. Far below, a brown river seethes and roils, bristling with flotsam. In the dream, it’s been raining for years and though I know the bank is unstable, I keep edging closer, looking for something in the river. Something important.
Without warning, the ground beneath my feet begins to slide, as though the whole riverbank has turned to oil. My stomach heaves. I feel the drop, the inexorable fall, the inevitability—and I am in the river.
The water is filthy, warm and coated with thick bubbles. A snake floats past. I’m not sure whether it’s alive or dead but I know it’s poisonous. I aim for shore but the water is so thick and full of debris that I can’t get my limbs moving through it. It’s all so heavy. As I look across the surface to the distant bank, another realization hits me. The flotsam choking the water is not wood.
The river is full of bones.
My body begins to sink. I am underwater, drowning in a river of blood.
I open my eyes.
Someone is here. A man. He’s on top of me, a wall of muscle lying on my chest. My legs are pinned under his feet, my wrists shackled by his fingers. His hand is over my mouth.
I draw a shallow breath and scream. The sound is strangled, muffled under his hand as though I really am underwater. My heart leaps. I begin to buck and kick.
“Where have you been?” he says against my ear.
I close my eyes. Jack. Relief pours though me, rinses the strength from my limbs. I wait for him to roll away and let me up.
But he doesn’t do that. He rises to his elbows, a faceless silhouette in the dark. His shoulders loom over me; his legs against mine are bare. When he speaks again, I smell whiskey on his breath, thick as gasoline.
“Where’d you go, hmm?”
I shake my head. He’s asking a question but won’t let me answer. Like he knows, like he already knows.
He releases my wrists and slides his free hand between us, jerking at the hem of my tank top, groping for my breast. His cock is hard against my hip. When I try to pry his fingers from my mouth, he grabs my hand and holds my arm in place with his elbow. He forces my thighs apart with one knee.
“This is how it is?” His voice is a sibilant hiss, with a drunken softness in the consonants. “You won’t even lay here and spread your legs for me?”
With his other knee, he digs into the bed, working his way between my thighs. He pinches my nipple and clamps his hand over my cry of pain.
“Tell me where you were tonight,” he says. “But you better tell me now, because I’m not going to ask again.”
He leans over me till we’re nose to nose. He lifts his hand from my mouth.
“Five seconds,” he says.
Relax, I think. This is Jack.
“Wait—”
“Tell me now.”
“Just wait—”
He slams his hand over my mouth. My teeth tear at my lips.
“I don’t want to fucking wait,” he says.
It’s Jack, I think again, as if this will save me. This is Jack, it’s okay for him to be here, he’s been here before, it will be fine, this is Jack...
He reaches between my legs and yanks my underwear aside.
“We never talked about this, did we?” he says. “But I bet it’s in the repertoire. You won’t even have to get your hands dirty.”
My heart careens against my ribs. My stomach sinks, then lurches upward as though we are riding a roller coaster in the darkness.
Jack has always known the way when he leads me to these places. But tonight he’s lost, bluffing, clumsy with need and anger. He’s too heavy. His hands are too hard. Under the weight of his body, I begin to struggle for air. I want him to get off, let me get a breath, slow down and give me a chance to follow.
He does none of those things.
He spits on his fingertips, smears this over his dick, and plunges inside me.
This is Jack, I think helplessly, this is Jack, this is Jack...
“Always playing, aren’t you. You think this is a game?” His head has been turned but now he looks at my face, my wide-open eyes. “Stop looking at me, fuck you—”
He lets go of my mouth. Withdraws for a second to flip me over. Then he’s back, between my legs, back inside me with his hip bones sharp against my ass. I sob his name, plead for him to slow down.
“Wait, wait—”
He cuts me off, his hand back in place to silence my cries and keep me from scrambling away. I curl my arm at my side, push up hard, trying to find some space for myself beneath him. It feels as though I’m trapped in the rubble of an earthquake, pinned beneath a collapsed wall. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.
“I waited all day. Waited for you to call. Waited for you to come over. But you had someplace else to be, didn’t you. Some other game
to play.”
His thrusts grow harder, a bludgeon against my cervix. There is no room to adjust. No slowing him down, no pleasure in this pain. He is everywhere, crushing me. I can’t get my knees under me, can’t get a breath. In full panic mode, I gather my strength for one final push to get him off me. I bite, try to buck, reach back to rake my fingernails along his flank.
He crushes my forearm with his hand, presses me into the bed.
I can’t breathe.
This is Jack...this is Jack...
The room begins to spin and collapse. Pinpoints of light burst in my eyes. I can’t fight anymore. He is huge, monstrous inside me, his nose at my cheek, one hand over my breast. It’s like a dream, a nightmare.
This is Jack, this is Jack, this is Jack...
He releases my mouth and I gasp. The air brings me the sweetest high, warm and liquid, an instant balm inside my aching chest. I gulp it like tequila and feel a similar flush of relief.
“That’s it,” he says as if to himself.
His thrusts lengthen. He pushes my thigh aside to give himself more room.
“I saw you tonight. Didn’t expect that, did you? What were you doing in my house that day, sneaking around?”
He pushes my hair aside, but small tendrils cling to my tears and fall into my mouth. The pain takes my breath away.
This is Jack, this is Jack...
“And what...the fuck...were you doing with him.”
His voice breaks, he’s crying. His cheek is wet, feverish against mine. He buries his nose at the side of my neck and inhales, wraps his arm around me as if one of us is drowning.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I tell him, but my voice is only a whisper and he’s too far gone to hear.
He comes inside me, crying, calling my name.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jack’s arm is heavy as a door across my chest. I lift it away gingerly so as not to wake him. But his breathing is thick and drunken, and he doesn’t stir when I swing my legs over the side of the bed and pick across his discarded clothes to the bathroom.