The Grand Tour

by E. Catherine Tobler

There wasn’t anywhere else I would have gone. I sat beside Rum and took up her hand in mine. She was clammy and hot, and I pulled her coat off so I could unwrap the damp nightgown around her arm. I expected it to be soaked with blood, but it was mostly sweat I found. The bite on her arm hadn’t healed though; it was raw and red and angry as anything. It hadn’t started to sprout hair or anything. I threaded my fingers through hers and bowed my head. I didn’t pray, only hoped for the dog-man to get back here.

  When he returned, he had a woman with him. She was instantly part of this place, and it was as if the place knew her, breathed easier with her inside of it. I could not explain the sigh of breath I heard, only knew it did not come from any of we four.

  Beth kneeled beside the bench and reached for Rum. My hand came up to block hers and she looked at me curiously as our fingers brushed. Her eyes held something I couldn’t understand, but her expression relaxed and she nodded a little.

  “Just want to hold her hand,” Beth said and drew her fingers back from mine.

  I drew back, too, watching her take up Rum’s hand. Here, she shook her head.

  “Not her time,” she murmured. She withdrew and turned to rummage through her cupboards. “Probably going to be changed, but ... Here, take this.”

  Beth pushed a jar into my hands. It was filled with a coiled braid of hair, black as the stormy night that descended above us. Beth told me to wrap Rum’s arm in the braid, but sliding it out of the jar was unlike anything I’ve done before. It was alive, slimy under my touch, pliant like my fingers pressed into a fish belly and not a length of dry hair. I retched while touching it, the scent of death and dirt beginning to fill the caboose.

  The dog-man caught the jar before it could fall to the floor. My hands were filled with the strange braid and I found myself biting my bottom lip, struggling to wrap the thing around Rum’s injured arm.

  “And this. Pour it over.”

  Before I had even finished, Beth was giving me another jar, forcing me to wrangle the braid into some kind of order—was it my imagination or did it struggle as I tried to fold it around Rum’s arm? I grit my teeth together, tucked the end of the braid into itself so it would stay, and took the second jar.

  It was marked “angel tears,” but it seemed more like sewer water. It was cloudy gray and filled with bits of eggshell, branches, seeds. I uncapped it and the smell of honey poured out. There should have been a wetness when I poured; the liquid should have run straight through the braid, but instead it clouded up like fog, streaming light so bright I had to look away. Beth hooked a finger into the lip of the jar and reclaimed it before I could empty it.

  “And this, Dean.”

  The third jar was offered to the dog-man. He looked at it with revulsion, but uncapped it and drank the gray liquid down. It wasn’t liquid against his mouth, either; as I watched, it turned to ash, threatening to choke him. Dean retched, bowing his head close to Rum’s hand. The thick paste that poured out of him smothered the bright cloud, sank into the braid, and bound the entire thing to Rum like a cast.

  “Now, we wait.”

  Joel wasn’t supposed to ...

  He was supposed to be there.

  Supposed to take me, Lucy.

  My limit on waiting ended. I couldn’t, Audrey pressed against my heart like it might explode. I ran from the caboose, the back steps slick with rain. I slid down them more than walking, pushing past Trudy and Norma who were running toward the caboose (and did their lips look swollen from kissing and kissing and kissing or was it a trick of the stringed lights that had flickered on all over the circus?), and running toward the entrance gate. There were as many people as ever, but they parted like water for me and it was only when I’d hit the paved street again that I realized Dean-as-dog was with me.

  He didn’t stop me, so I didn’t care that he came. I ran until it felt like my lungs would burst, until I reached that street where Audrey’s Rambler sat. I feared that it both would and wouldn’t be there. If it was gone, she was done doing the thing she had wanted to do with Joel ... if it was there and she wasn’t yet done ...

  But it was there and she was hunched over the steering wheel, sobbing the way I had sobbed inside the empty tent with Dean. I pulled the door open, not caring that I startled her, and reached for her. She slumped into my arms and clung to me the way I never thought she would, and there was blood—so much blood. Her pants were dark, but stained darker down her thighs.

  At the sight of all that blood, I froze and for a long while, time seemed to spool without end. We would forever hang between all that had come before and all that should have followed behind. If I couldn’t move, we were stuck. But the sun and the moon were never still; they were often eclipsed, but always emerged from those shadows. And how big those shadows! Surely this one was not so terrible.

  But it was Audrey. It was my sister. It was a shadow that had weight and pressed me down until all I could feel was the warm shaking of her against me, until all I could see was the blood soaking her pants. Blood that should not be. This was illegal, we had been told time and again. This was why you didn’t let boys touch you. This was why there were no kisses or dancing unsupervised. This was why you dressed like a proper girl, so that boys weren’t tempted. This is why you didn’t get into a car with a boy. Every single lecture was hollow in this moment. When Audrey looked up at me, her face creased in pain, I knew nothing was so simple as we had been told.

  Big and small in the same moment, deflated, drained of everything.

  “Lu, I c-can’t. J-Joel isn’t ...”

  “He isn’t here,” I whispered, “but I am.” I pulled her from the car as gently as I could. Audrey had a coat draped over the backseat and I stuffed her into it. I belted it closed and kept her in my shaking arms as we shuffled up the street.

  The circus wasn’t far, but it felt like forever. I didn’t know if Beth could help Audrey the way she had helped Rum, but knew I had to try. Dean, even as a dog, didn’t argue with me as we headed back that way. He loped ahead of us at the entry gate and the giantess and angels let us pass inside like they knew us. Audrey was cold and shaking by the time we reached the caboose and she grabbed my arms, shaking her head.

  I guided Audrey up the caboose steps and into the warm strangeness of that room where Beth bundled her up, said it wasn’t her time, either, but that she had nothing more to give me but marmalade. And when Beth pressed that cool jar into my hands, radiating a strange orange light, I just stared. Beth walked away and closed the door behind her, and I looked at Trudy and Norma and sleeping Rum, and had no clue what to do.

  It was like this in stories, I told myself. A person is given a thing and just doesn’t know what to do with it. They either took the thing firmly in hand and did what felt right, or they denied it. But what felt right? How did a person ever know?

  I turned from my sister and friends and started rooting around in cupboards and drawers. I needed spoons, but failing that, anything to scoop, and in the end there were no spoons, only rainbows that flopped over when we held them and long sticks of spicy cinnamon that we all shied from. In the end, I poured a handful of the orange marmalade into my palm and no matter how strange it seemed, fed it to my sister. She swallowed it down with a grimace and I turned to Rum and did the same. I filled Trudy’s palm and Norma’s palm and then my own again and like we were drinking shots of booze at a party we had snuck into, we downed the marmalade.

  With my eyes closed, it didn’t taste like oranges. It tasted like grit, like a far-away red planet that I would never quite walk on, but would still know my way around. It tasted like Jupiter and a moon that vomited water into space, of clouds and the memory of Audrey holding my hand; like the first time I dived into a pool and got water up my nose, and Audrey hauling me out. These strange things calmed me, told me that one way or another, everything and everyone was going to end up where it needed to be.

  “Tastes like beer,” Norma murmured, and I cracked an eye open to look at her, wondering exact
ly how she knew what beer tasted like.

  “Tastes like Norma,” Trudy said, and got Norma’s elbow in her ribs for the effort.

  There came a sound then, a low groan that was almost a growl, and I thought Dean had come back, but this sound emanated from Rum, who had started to twist and turn on the bench, as if caught in some terrible nightmare. We three reached for her and in my panic, the marmalade jar fell to the floor, shattering. Glass and sweet oranges made our footing slippery as we sought to anchor Rum; the harder she bucked, the more we slipped.

  “She’s g-going.” Rum sputtered the words and I didn’t know what she meant, not until her hand closed into my sleeve and she pulled me down. “She’s g-going to d-die.”

  Audrey, Audrey, Audrey, my heart beat.

  “L-Laika,” Rum whispered. Her eyes rolled back into her head—I could see only the whites of them as she struggled to form more words. Spittle flowed from her mouth, as if she were sick or possessed or both. “Going now. Rockets. F-fire. Clouds of fire. There she ... there she ... g-goes.” Rum’s body arched up, as if an unseen hand had grabbed her by the waist. We clung to her so that she would not be taken, lost, but when at last she screamed and reached for something we could not see, we fell back and could only watch.

  The Rum we knew fell away, but it wasn’t the way I always pictured it being in story books. She didn’t shimmer beautifully from one being into another, but rather one was ripped away to replace what she had been. Even the cast that Beth had applied to her arm broke off and tumbled away. The girl who loved running and found amazement in the things we found common was gone. In a splatter of blood and skin, she was gone, swallowed up by the creature that clawed its way out of her—looking not so fierce when all was said and done, for it resembled nothing so much as a tiny poodle, confused as to how it had come to be inside a caboose that smelled like spilled orange marmalade and blood.

  No one said anything. We all sat there, looking at each other but mostly looking at Rum who wasn’t Rum, but a dog the way Dean could also be a dog. And then, an eruption of conversation, me trying to tell them how he’d bit her, them angry because I hadn’t told them, and how did a person turn into a dog anyhow, and how could she have known Laika was going up right then and well, Trudy managed to reason as the argument lulled, Russia was in a different time zone and maybe it was already Sunday there, and Norma screamed that it didn’t matter, dogs didn’t go into space and girls did not turn into dogs and when they finished, Norma was crying in Trudy’s arms, Trudy’s eyes locked to me.

  “Tell us a story, Lu,” she whispered.

  As if a story could banish what we’d seen.

  Rum pressed herself down into the bench and licked the marmalade from my hand. I exhaled a low breath and reached for Audrey with my other hand. “Things never go the way stories say,” I whispered, “but I’ll tell you a story.”

  * * *

  5. In a Barrel at Sea

  The story I told Trudy and Norma was a story about four girls (sometimes five), who weren’t girls at all. The whole night through, they hovered between Here and There, the caboose seemingly removed from both life and death, suspended the way orange peel was in marmalade. Because of that, inside the caboose things weren’t entirely real. Things could be said there that couldn’t be said anywhere else.

  Had someone turned into a dog? That was okay, because bodies did strange things we couldn’t always explain. Messy things, things that made us want to vomit. Had a girl kissed another girl? It was okay, too, because kissing happened. Love happened. Had someone (Audrey, Audrey, Audrey, said my heart) been a mother for a brief month before she realized she couldn’t do it on her own? That was okay, too. There was strength in saying you couldn’t do a thing.

  No one ever had to know how strong you actually were—if they did, they would surely be scared. Inside the walls, you could be as strong as you were and no one would flinch because they’d be too busy exploring their own strength, their own light. Those girls could go into the deepest woods—see there how the wall of the caboose shimmered to show an expanse of trees?—and they’d never be lost because they didn’t need flashlights or breadcrumbs, they trusted their own two feet and hands and their hearts, no matter how clumsy each was.

  They could go to Jupiter and never be lost, because Jupiter, just like Earth, was round, and no matter how far you walked across mountains and over rivers (what kind of rivers on Jupiter? they want to know. All the rivers: methane, lemonade, and one of your heart’s true blood) you were just walking in a big circle and eventually, you’d come back around to where you started. You might not know the place, but there would be something: a scent in the air, the way the leaves rippled in the sun, the way the water soaked through the toe of your shoe. You would know something. Just circles, after all.

  Here, in these four walls packed with a thousand-thousand jars, they could float. A hand could rest in a hand, sure that this connection would remain even when those hands came apart. A mouth could taste another mouth and wonder at the perfection of it. A little girl could go from dog to girl and back again and again, and know that everyone would be waiting each time she came back. How did a person walk with four legs? It was twice as easy and you could cover twice as much ground, but you’d probably be twice as tired when you at last came to rest.

  What if—

  No.

  And the sometimes fifth girl, who was also my sister, wanted to know: But what happens when—

  No.

  Questions were for outside. Inside was for being and floating. See that river and the way it breaks through the mountain? Those four girls who were not girls drank all night. Hydrogen, oxygen, electromagnetic waves. Was that thunder? No. No.

  * * *

  6. Funnel Cloud

  Rum was sitting outside the caboose come morning, poking a small fire with a stick. She wore her yellow nightgown, being that her clothes had been lost to last night’s transformations. The rain had stopped, but the clouds were low and thick. Still, the circus played on. There were shrieks of joy or fright—as it should be, it was hard to tell them apart. Trudy and Norma were out there somewhere, while Audrey slept on. And Rum didn’t look tired or sick. Her arm was unwrapped and looked healed, which I could not explain and did not try.

  “It tasted like home, Lu,” Rum said before I could even ask her. She withdrew her stick from the fire, got a marshmallow, and stuck the sweet back into the low flames. “It tasted like figuring out where I was supposed to be.”

  I still had the taste of marmalade against my tongue; still not the tang of orange, but the taste of a dry and distant world. Like figuring out where I was supposed to be. That’s what it was.

  When the marshmallow was perfect, Rum gave me the stick. She put another together for herself and then said, “I felt Laika go or maybe I didn’t, but there was something. The press of all that gravity in that small space. They just shot her up and ...” Rum’s eyes rolled to the cloudy sky. “She’s up there, either dead or alive and we’re ... alive and I think I’m home and I’m staying, Lu. I’m staying here. Dean says I can. Please say I can.”

  It mattered to her, that I tell her she could, but she already knew. She had granted herself the power last night, maybe even before that—the first time she had run away, from whatever she was running from. She was ready to stop.

  “You can stay,” I said, and her shoulders eased under the weight she thought she still carried.

  “Probably just saying that because ... I mean ... what does a person do with a girl who’s also a dog? Do you think that means Norma doesn’t believe in me anymore?” She grinned and jabbed her marshmallow into the flames. “Dean doesn’t even know, says he’s still trying to figure things out, but then I suppose we all are? How’s Audrey? How’s your sister?”

  She never asked what happened and I never said and even when Audrey joined us at the fire, dressed in clean clothes she said were from Beth, she never told us where she had been. My brain filled in all the details just
like Rum’s had for Laika: a small space with too much gravity.

  Trudy and Norma came back to us with Dean in tow. Rum loaded each of them up with marshmallows, but Norma kept to her cotton candy, pulling tufts from the yellow, blue, and pink beehives she carried like a bouquet. Her eyes rested briefly on Rum, then flicked away, and while I hoped Rum hadn’t seen, the brief downturn of her mouth said she had.

  “Suppose you’re going to want a ride home,” Audrey said to me as she tossed her marshmallow stick into the fire.

  I looked at the faces around the fire: Rum and Trudy and Norma, and though this was only Sunday, they were not the faces that had looked back at me on Friday. These were not the girls who would rather climb into the back of the Rambler and ride home safely. I thought of the body spread in the water, of the strange birds above us, the dog in the dark. Did Trudy and Norma know that Rum was staying? That she had found her home?

  I reached for Audrey’s hand. “Not due ’till dinner,” I said. “We’ll be late, but we can get there, unless you want company.”

  Audrey’s fingers closed warm around mine and I felt the way she was shaking. Way down inside where no one would ever know. “I think I can get there,” she said, soft as the clouds of cotton candy Norma inhaled.

  Before, I wouldn’t have cared, my sister leaving us to head off on her own, but when she did now, it was a strange thing. Was it strange for the moon to always rise opposite the sun, to skirt through its shadow and then away again? It was only natural, what the sky did day in and out.

  Leaving Rum was something entirely different. It was us leaving her in this strange place with its giants and dwarfs and dog-men and angels. I didn’t want to go, not until she held my hands and told me that sometimes, you just have to launch yourself into space. Sometimes you come back down and sometimes you don’t, and either is okay. Gravity was a thing, sometimes with us and sometimes not and fighting it was stupid, and it was that thought I held to as we left the circus and Rum and Dean and Beth and were swallowed up once more by the Philadelphia streets.