The Shadows Behind

by Kristi Petersen Schoonover

  I’m afraid to say anything, so I don’t.

  He struts into the living room and hands me the beer, then settles down on the floor across from me. “It’s a burn scar, by the way. Really old. It was back when I first started training.”

  I flush with embarrassment. “I—I didn’t mean to stare.”

  “Didn’t know you were. Just everybody asks when I wear something short enough to see it, so I figured I’d get it out of the way.”

  I bring the bottle to my lips and can barely get past the smell of it—like rug shampoo and cat piss. I don’t sip and say instead, “Weren’t you afraid after that?”

  “Sure. Was I supposed to give up? I’d already told myself the fire thing wasn’t something I was going to fail at.” He sips his beer and reaches for his cigarettes. “Every fear you have you can pretty much trace back to the fear of failure. All fear is rooted there.”

  I’m skeptical. “Fear of spiders?”

  He shrugs matter-of-factly. “Fear of the failure to protect yourself.”

  “Okay. Fear of . . . sleep.”

  He lights his cigarette. “Fear of the failure to be impervious. When you sleep, you’re vulnerable.”

  I think about the hula girls, how they’re a defense mechanism and nothing more. But a defense mechanism—that’s a manifestation of fear. The hula girl who chased me out of my apartment—her, too. But fear of what?

  “And you’re sitting way up there. I don’t bite.” He pats the floor. “Come down here.”

  I feel a flush. I join him, kneeling sideways.

  I can see the bulge in his shorts.

  Oh my God.

  This moment is here.

  I try in vain to suppress a nervous smile.

  He shifts closer. “Don’t be afraid of me.”

  “I’m just—”

  He sets his burning cigarette in the ashtray. “Remember before, when I was talking about fire and water? How they need each other?”

  “Yes,” I say. Not that I care at the moment.

  “Comes from Hawaiian legend. There’s many variations. But there’s one that says Pele, goddess of fire, was actually married to Kamapua’a, the god of water.” He inches forward.

  Our knees are touching.

  Small shocks travel up my legs.

  “Story says Pele got mad at him, chased him out of their home with lava all the way to the sea.” He reaches out and takes my hands. “But it’s the lava, its collision with the sea, that creates more land. Makes the island grow.”

  His hands. I could write novels about his hands, forceful with a fire knife but tender now, rough but gentle as he manipulates his large fingers between mine.

  “Chase me to the sea,” he whispers, and then his mouth smashes on mine.

  His tongue butterflies between my lips. I’m overwhelmed by the taste of hops, the smell of beach sand and the white gas they use in his knife. Hot fireworks of want explode inside me in places I never knew existed as he bulldozes me to the floor.

  Our beers spill. The ashtray goes flying. Something plummets from the coffee table.

  Oh, God my wig. My wig is going to come off.

  His weight bears on me and forces the air from my lungs, but I suck hard and sounds I don’t recognize escape the back of my throat because this feels right and wonderful and amazing and all sorts of other words I couldn’t really fathom until this moment.

  “I want to be inside you right. Now.”

  Nothing excites me more than this. I watch him as he hefts off me and straightens up, wrestles with his shirt, throws it over by the glass sliding door that leads out to a small patio.

  In the window stands a familiar figure.

  Only it’s not a hula girl this time.

  It’s Izzy, her eyes glowing like hot coals.

  I scream.

  He leaps off me. “Oh God. Did I hurt you? Shit!”

  “No, no—it’s not that it’s not that it’s not that, there’s just . . .” There’s what? What the fuck do I say?

  She’s gone.

  He grins. “Oh . . . you’re a screamer. When you get worked up.”

  “Yes,” I lie. Eager to distract him, I sit up and work out of my tank top. I’m not wearing a bra.

  He crawls back to me, runs his hands up my legs, using words like smooth and soft and that it’s like I have no hair.

  I try to quell the rising tide of fear, but he keeps going, furiously fingering the button and zipper on my jeans. He lifts me off the floor and works them down to my knees, then does the same with my thong and gasps. “You shaved!”

  My breath catches in my throat. Oh, shit. “Is that bad?”

  “No.” His eyes meet mine, and he looks amazed. “I’ve never been with a woman who shaved and that’s . . . something I always wanted. That’s—” he stops.

  He’s looking at me—well, not me.

  At the top of my head.

  Panic grips my soul. The warm flush throbbing in every corner of me abruptly halts.

  “Your hair is crooked.”

  “Um . . .” Tears well up in my eyes. I can’t stop them. “It’s—it’s a wig.”

  Under my tense fingers I feel his arm muscles have gone taut and still.

  There’s a long moment. The only sound is the whoosh of the central air kicking on and the quiet hiccup of the tears I’m trying to control.

  “It’s okay.” He shifts slightly off of me, puts his head down on my shoulder and wraps his big arms around me. “It’s okay. Cry it out. When you’re done, you can tell me.”

  When I open my eyes between jags I see Izzy in the corner, but I know she can’t get to me because he’s between us. I want to tell him the whole thing, everything, but I can’t, not now when I know that the best I can hope for is these last few moments before it’s a sure thing that this won’t finish, that I’ll have to leave and go back to my apartment, forced to hold on to only a few tactile memories and the fear that he’ll tell everyone. That I’ll become some backstage failed sex story shared with the other performers over a few beers while Izzy tortures me in every waking moment, in every hula dancer glass, clock, picture frame and bathing suit in my house.

  I’m finally cried out. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be.”

  “I have—it’s alopecia. It means I have no hair. Anywhere.”

  Stillness again.

  “This is a bad thing because why?” His hand pets my shoulder. “Don’t women spend fortunes on Brazilians? Razors? Nair?”

  “But I’m bald.”

  “I don’t care,” he says. “Personally? Can’t stand a hairy woman. This guy right here? Left women ’cause they were too hairy. I know. I’m a bastard. Just a thing I have.”

  I let this sink in. “What?”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Can you see what?”

  “You. Bald.”

  I bite my lip. This is the one step I’m not sure I can take.

  He lifts himself, rolls off me, and sits up. “Take it off.”

  Something comes over me, a peace I’ve never felt before.

  He holds out his meaty hand. “Come on. Take it off.”

  I do.

  He gasps and for one second I think it’s in horror. He reaches up and touches my head. His fingers tickle and it’s sensitive—no one’s ever touched it before. I don’t know whether to scream or wince.

  “You’re perfect.”

  I blink in surprise. I’m not sure I’ve heard that correctly. He can’t mean that, can he? What the hell is going on here? Is he real? Is this actually happening? “Really?”

  “God yes.” His breath is hot in my ear. “Bed.”

  He stands up and yanks me to my feet and into the adjoining room, eagerly splays me naked on the bed, mounts me. I wait for the pain—like the stabbing of knives—that Izzy told me girls have when they have sex for the first time. Strangely, it doesn’t come. All I feel is an odd sense of fulfillment, completeness.

  I see Izzy in the doorway. Glaring.


  But the whole world is different now. He’s inside me, pounding, using words like tight and I feel beautiful and bold. I peer over his shoulder at her and feel remorse; that trophy, now, seems like a meaningless trinket, its value squat. It should’ve been hers. I never should’ve taken it from her. Never should’ve done what I did. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  Toke hesitates for only a second. “What?”

  “Nothing.” I shift so I can look into his eyes, wide open and boring straight into mine, unwilling for even a softening of her malignant stare to miss the thrill ride that is Toke.

  There is fire and water, and no more fear.

  ~~**~~

  When I wake up I’m not sure where I am at first, and then it all comes back: this is real, it’s not a dream. I lift my head slightly and take in the room, but mostly what catches my eye is the trail of clothes that seems to wind from the living room into his bedroom. There’s a pile just beyond the doorjamb—my green tank top, his navy shorts. Just south of that are my panties, and south of that is—

  My wig. My wig that’s never spent an unkempt night and always right next to me so I can put it on before I even get out of bed. There it is, on the floor, a tangled mess. In this context, it seems like any other piece of clothing—something I can wear or not, something I could live without while it sits in the hamper for a couple of weeks until laundry night rolls around. I look at Toke, who’s on his back, mouth slightly open. There’s something almost innocent about his expression. He fell asleep with my hand in his, or maybe he grabbed it in the middle of the night. It’s warm, solid.

  I feel something I’ve never felt before.

  Safe.

  I hear Toke move next to me. “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Crap.” He rolls on his side, snatches something off the nightstand—his watch. “We gotta go to work.”

  Work. That whole life full of all-you-can-eat pineapple and rib platters and making sure the chocolate volcano desserts are smoking properly seems like it isn’t mine. I sigh.

  “We gotta.” He shifts so he’s over me. “No choice.” He leans down, kisses my neck.

  Inside me, things wake up, and this surprises me, since I’m also feeling a dull, raw ache to the point where I’ll probably have to hit up the ibuprofen I keep in my bag for emergencies.

  “Of course, I’m willing to stay here all day. If we don’t want our jobs anymore.”

  I laugh, because at that moment I could easily say, Yes, let’s quit. “Remember when you said you’d get me an audition to be a hula girl? Did you set that up yet?”

  He stops and his eyes bore into mine. “Not yet.” He touches my cheek, strokes it with his thumb. “Why—change your mind?”

  I nod. I know what I have to do now.

  “There’s something I have to confess,” I say, but I’m suddenly overwhelmed by the need to pee. “I just need to use the bathroom first.”

  There’s a long silence. Then he says, “Okay.”

  I go into the bathroom and lock the door. You can tell a lot about a guy from his health and beauty aids. The shelf across from the toilet is crammed with cans of shaving cream, aftershave, and contorted tubes of hair gel. There are pumps of styling mousse and extra hold spray, nose hair scissors, tweezers, and a grubby electric clipper. A Kahiki Moon plastic souvenir cup explodes with several different kinds of razors.

  I sit on the toilet and feel the urge to pee, stronger now, but nothing comes out. I don’t remember Izzy talking about this. What if he broke me?

  A trickle comes out. I scuttle back a little on the seat and look in the toilet, half-expecting and terrified to see that it’s red, but it’s normal, just very yellow, almost brownish. But there’s definitely something just below my bikini line that isn’t normal.

  A hair. A curly, black hair.

  It must be one of his, I think, but when I go to brush it off, it doesn’t move.

  It’s a hair. It’s mine.

  I stand up, wipe myself, and grab the tweezers off his shelf. I pluck the hair and look at it, astonished. Where did this come from?

  I fold it into a piece of toilet paper and chuck it into the overflowing garbage can. An irrational thought strikes me that he might find it, so I tuck it underneath some tissues and an empty shampoo bottle sprinkled with discarded Q-tips.

  I wash my hands and think about how I’m going to confess. I look in the mirror and slowly mouth what it is I’m going to say . . . where am I even going to start? Do you remember when you told me you turned down a girl for that job? Well, I think she might be the one who drowned herself in the pool and now she’s haunting me? No, holy crap. That sounds insane. Do you remember that trophy? Well, when I was little, my dad wanted me to be perfect, and there was this girl and she had the most lovely hair and she should’ve been the Pineapple Princess but I was young, you know, young, and I just—I just wanted acceptance and so I cut off her hair, and that’s how I won . . . yes. It’s a start, anyway, a start that is the truth. A terrible truth, but one that, somehow I know, I don’t have to be afraid to share with Toke.

  I notice a long, black hair in the center of my head. Then another.

  I look more closely. There’s a third.

  There’s a fourth. A fifth.

  I seize the tweezers again and pluck them.

  There’s another. And another. And another.

  Suddenly, the hair is everywhere. It’s sprouting out of my nose and my ears, from the top of my head. I look down at my arms and legs and it’s there, too, and above my bikini line. I’m filled with sheer terror. I scream.

  Toke starts banging on the door. “Hailey? Hailey!” Bang bang bang. “Unlock the door!”

  But I can’t. I know I can’t.

  “Hailey!”

  Izzy, burning-eyed and ferocious, appears in the mirror behind me. Her hair is wet and grimy, she’s covered in mud and soot, and when she throws her head back and laughs, her open mouth is a filthy, black pit.

  Apology not accepted.

  ONCE, THE WORLD WAS

  DARK ENOUGH FOR SLEEP

  I do not like the dark, but Mama makes me wear eye patches to bed.

  She says it’s because God made our thin eyelids in a time when the night was not an indigo gloaming sliced by the downtown sodium lights, and it is better to sleep in the true dark.

  “It’s deep and restful.” She shoves the blankets beneath my mattress so tightly I can barely move. “Noise won’t wake you up.”

  I do not tell her that sometimes it isn’t the noises that wake me but the sense that someone is there. Or the memory of the movie with the reanimated baby chomping on a rat, which was on the television the night Mama and her boyfriend, Dillon, brought home my new little sister.

  I do not tell her that I prefer that to the dark.

  Until the night I slip off the eye patches and see what Dillon is doing to my sister in the pale salmon light.

  Now I wish I lived in that time when God made people with thin eyelids, when the world was dark enough for sleep.

  UNDER THE KUDZU

  W ilson had heard that his hometown had been consumed by kudzu, but he hadn’t expected it to be this bad.

  The invasive, ivy-like vine and its large-lobed leaves had transformed the landscape. A burnt chimney kept watch over a kudzu-choked field; it reminded him of a strange land’s guardian tower in some fantasy novel. Telephone poles loomed like wooly creatures with outstretched arms, and partially devoured signs announced SPE LIM and an obscured number. When he drove past the old mine where he and his friend Jimmy had often played, he saw the entrance was shrouded to nonexistence. He’d never gone into the mine—he’d never had the guts—but Jimmy had; Will mused that, in fact, Jimmy had probably been the last intrepid teen to explore it. Today’s area kids probably didn’t even know it was there.

  The center of town was, oddly, deserted—it was July and it was hot, but in his opinion, not hot enough that people wouldn’t be out and about.
Still, it looked as though things had been closed for a while: he spied a half-consumed car in the Safeway parking lot, and the kudzu had engulfed the side of Pickins’s Movie House, the marquee of which sported some broken letters and holes. The sidewalk at Cornflower’s Drugs was green, and kudzu had even tentacled around the two coin-op kiddie rides out front that had been there forever: the fire truck, which probably hadn’t been painted since he was a kid (he could see gray instead of red patches between the leaves), and the sun-faded alien spaceship.

  It did look as though the drugstore was still operating—there were uncovered cars in the parking lot—but the interior’s fluorescents weren’t on.

  It’s Sunday, he thought. They were never open on Sundays anyway; maybe that hasn’t changed.

  Where was everybody?

  Will licked his lips: his mouth was dry. He’d drained the two cans of ginger ale he’d brought two hours into the long-haul drive from Maryland, and he hadn’t stopped to replenish. He remembered how, on hot days, he and Jimmy would skip buying soda at the movies so they’d have enough money to hit Planket’s Creamery for Icees—

  Of course. Everyone was probably at the creamery.

  But Planket’s didn’t seem to be where he’d thought it was. The sign was there, and it looked polished, as though it’d been recently replaced; the parking lot had also been repaved—the burnt-nuts-and-plastic smell of fresh asphalt permeated his car. But when he pulled in, all that was in Planket’s place was a large green—

  Wait. That was Planket’s.

  It was covered in kudzu.

  There were three other cars in the lot. He pulled up next to one and stared at the massive carpeted hulk in front of him.

  He could see the door, and a couple of kudzu leaves partially covered an old MasterCard logo—that 1970s tan and orange circle thing. His parents had had one of those cards, and whenever they’d whipped it out it meant something magical was about to happen; a long-desired dream was about to come true. Pinpoints of white fluorescent bled through slivers between the leaves: Planket’s was open.