Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  I could just wait through this like I’d waited through everything with Lyle. I could separate from my body and stream out the window and take a walk through the fields. I could try to remember that night when I’d felt an affection toward Stringy, when my cells were pulsing with hope. But the baby kicked and rolled. I felt light-headed. Then his rough old hand was on my thigh as he lowered himself toward me and I put my foot on his neck and pushed.

  “What the hell?” he said. “You fucking kicked me, you little shit.”

  “I don’t want it,” I said.

  “Get out, then,” he said. “Walk home and think about what you did.”

  He talked to me like a bad dog. He came so natural to it, and I wondered how many other girlfriends he’d talked to like this. He leaned over me and pushed the door open. I got out and looked up at him. “This is the way you are,” I said. “You’ll never be another way.”

  I WALKED ALONG the canal back toward the small lights of town. It was quieter than quiet, my feet crunching the sticks on the ground the only noise. I felt a low ache in my stomach. Twenty-five weeks, I recited, the size of a cauliflower, her wrinkled skin beginning to smooth. Your baby is enjoying a new sense of equilibrium, the knowledge of which way is up and which way is down. I hoped the baby had no knowledge of which way was flat on my back in a dirty lawn painter’s truck.

  The pain deepened in my groin and I sat in the dirt. I was still two miles from Cherry’s.

  I called her on the cell phone and she answered on the first ring. “Fine,” she said in a huff. “I’ll send an angel.”

  PERD’S VALLEY PEST truck pulled over next to me.

  Cherry’s angel: Lyle, tan and healthy, thriving really, apart from his eyes, which had taken on a glazed wonder like he was in a trance. He sat behind the wheel, biting down on a toothpick. “Get in,” he said. “Got Cherry in a state of worry.”

  “She’s not worried.”

  He grunted. “How you found yourself out here, that’s the real question,” he said.

  “Stringy parties at Tent City. I changed my mind, decided not to go.”

  “First wise decision you’ve made in a long time.” His shoulders softened. “You hoping for a reconversion? It’s not too late, you know.”

  I opened the door and hefted my way inside. Here we were, a family. The thought stung but I held it. What if he wasn’t my cousin, what if we were in love, what if I’d wanted all of this? What would the ride feel like then? I could barely imagine. “Go to Grampa’s grave,” I said. “I’ve been missing him.”

  Grampa Jackie’s grave, the small stone marked with a flag where Cherry wanted him buried in the middle of our family field, of the orchards he loved so dear. My mother thought it was sick to bury him there. He had killed himself on account of those orchards. The depression that leaked its way from the soil into his living body when nothing came from the vines, when the prosperity he’d known was gone. But there he was. Lyle and I had made it a habit as children to walk out there, sit near the grave and remember Grampa, try to decide who he had loved the most. And Lyle knew. Grampa loved me the most, something so obvious I barely had to hint at it. I wanted to go there then. To be alone with Lyle, and let him really see me next to Grampa, remember that before everything, we had been another way.

  We pulled to the side of the field. “You know,” I said, “you can just be you right now. Vern isn’t anywhere near.”

  “Just a few minutes,” he said. “Can’t be out here all night.”

  The moon was a sliver and the stars wild. I reached forward and grabbed the back of Lyle’s shirt to guide me as we stumbled through the patchy scratch of stump and stick, the greenless vines. We disappeared into the fortress of field like passing through a curtain.

  Lyle stopped suddenly and I walked into him, our bodies pressed for a moment. I smelled the back of his neck and felt a sharp remembering. I sat next to the faded flag that marked the spot. In the small moonlight we wiped the dirt off the grave.

  “The baby’s the size of a cauliflower.”

  He lay down on his back.

  “You hear me?” I said.

  “I’m not a perfect person,” he said. “But Pearl thinks I am now. And Vern thinks I’m the next big thing. Next pastor after him.”

  “What if there was a god who wanted us to ask questions,” I said. I lay down next to him. We didn’t touch. I knew that this way of being with him would never happen just this way, ever again.

  “The Birthing Day is going to be bigger and more powerful than anything Peaches has ever seen,” he said. “I don’t know why you can’t just offer that baby up to the church like all the other girls. It’s the easiest way. This is about saving Peaches. This is the ultimate unification. Vern said no one knows the meaning of community anymore. That we’re going to redefine that totally. Isn’t that exciting to you?”

  “He could have asked, ‘Hey, girls, do you want to be a part of this divine plan and get pregnant by a family member and then just hand that baby over?’ He never asked. Neither did you.”

  He sat up. “Hey. Don’t say that. Don’t make me out to be some kind of bad guy. You and me both know Vern’s orders are the ultimate order. If God sat right here in front of you and said eat your own foot, you’d do it. Vern said girls are too emotional and that less information is easier. You’d make something out of it that wasn’t even real and here you are doing just that, proving him right.”

  “If God asked me to eat my own foot I’d hope I’d realize he was no God.”

  “If you won’t comply, it might be better for both of us if there just wasn’t a baby at all,” Lyle said, standing.

  “Little past that,” I said.

  He picked up something heavy. “Maybe not.” He held a rock the size of a grapefruit over me. “Something could happen. An accident.”

  “Stop messing around,” I said, sitting up, turning my belly away from him.

  “It would be no more shameful than what you’re doing, denying where that baby came from,” he said. His hands quivered and his face screwed up. He dropped the rock to the ground next to me. “Taffy’s didn’t take. That’s on me. But you were shot. Now here you are denying it in front of everyone.”

  Taffy. I wanted to tackle Lyle to the ground and beat him senseless. I felt protective over her like a little sister. I could just see her under him, eyes so hopeful, grateful probably. It made me sick.

  Lyle groaned, he was in full freak-out. “I wish you didn’t exist,” he said.

  But my body did exist and was only growing bigger. I would only keep existing more and more, and then when the baby came she too would exist, angering men and boys all on her own. When did this end? I wondered. “Well, I do.”

  “You can’t have this both ways. You can’t be playing for the infidels and thinking you can stay in the fold. You have church property in you now, but as soon as that baby’s out he’ll do away with you and no one will go looking.”

  “You think no one will care?”

  “Did anyone care when your mother disappeared?”

  I knew the answer.

  I left him there in the fields, walked back to Cherry’s, dead-bolted the door behind me. I imagined the rock crushing me and I lay there holding the paper with my mother’s address on it. I imagined twenty different ways Florin might be asking Daisy to take me there.

  Chapter 20

  Florin typed the Turquoise Cowboy’s address on Alibi Drive into her computer and it pulled up not a home but a place. A little square photo at the bottom of the map showing a squat beige building with blacked-out windows with PONY CLUB on the outside in faded green lettering.

  “Your mom’s a stripper,” she said.

  “What would you do if your mom left you like this?” I said.

  “Hate her forever,” Florin answered. “Never speak to her again.”

  “But you know that’s not true.”

  She bit her nail. Looked at the screen. “Sometimes I don’t know why we care about th
em at all after the things they do to us. There must be something to this mother-daughter thing. Some kind of binding spell.”

  “They don’t deserve us,” I said, trying it out. It was something my mother liked to say about Cherry to her boyfriends, that Cherry didn’t deserve a good daughter. I never told her I saw it the other way around most the time—that Cherry didn’t deserve a bad daughter. “Good daughters like us.”

  “But if Daisy up and left, I’d be the same as you. It would eat me alive.”

  “Please talk to her,” I said.

  She disappeared up the stairs to her mother’s room and was gone a long while. I fingered the stationery on Florin’s desk, Ain’t nothing finer than a call with a Diviner . . . the pens in a cup with satin roses taped to them, and tore each flower off in a fit of nerves. It panicked me to think that since my mother had left, she had already missed nine of my lives. We would never be the same as we were that day in front of the church in the photograph, even if she came back tonight, even if she appeared before me from thin air. She had already missed so much.

  Daisy came down the staircase in white silk pajamas, her hair pulled up in a bun with chopsticks. She wore a clear plastic mask over her face. “My compression mask,” she said. “Don’t be alarmed.”

  I pulled skin from my cuticles.

  Daisy pressed her lips together. “You really want to go stare down ugliness?” she said to me. “You really can’t let well enough alone?”

  “Nothing about this is well enough,” I said.

  She took a deep breath. “I don’t know if I can,” she said finally. She gestured to the door. I realized Florin was looking at her mother with an expression I’d never seen. Then I realized what it was: hope. She wanted this as much as I did.

  I WAITED ALL day at the red house for fear that if I left, Daisy would flat out say no and my plan would slip away. I took a few calls and when I wasn’t on the phone I sat next to Florin and we looked at Internet pictures of Reno, casinos and lights, strip malls and event centers. Desert plain everlasting, hilled mountains cactus-spotted with straggled trees.

  She went to the weather page and both of our mouths fell open.

  “You have any warm clothes?” she said, pointing at the snowflake on the screen. February, cold and possible snow showers. “Been in this hellhole so long I forgot it’s winter.”

  “I’ve never seen snow in my life,” I said.

  “They’re gonna do a documentary or something on you one day, cult girl. What next, you’ve never seen the ocean either?”

  I looked down.

  “Oh my god.”

  WE WENT INTO the attic and filled a duffel bag with old clothes and sweaters of Daisy’s, a puffy winter coat. “She used to love skiing,” Florin explained, putting ear warmers over her dark hair. We dressed up in the clothes, bags and bags of beautiful wool sweaters, soft cashmeres. Long cardigans that dusted the ground.

  “Look at these,” Florin said, holding up a strange pair of jeans with a high elastic panel at the top. I recognized them immediately from my magazines. She tossed them at me and I put them on. The band stretched over my stomach and cradled it. They were the best invention I’d ever encountered.

  “Maternity wear,” I said. “The real thing.”

  “You can have them. No one’s getting pregnant around here.”

  It was dark out the windows by the time we went back to the entryway and sat at Florin’s desk. She messaged a boy she liked and a girl she liked and giggled softly to herself. I felt miles from her when she messaged her friends on the computer. Those were her real friends. I had just happened to her.

  Daisy finally emerged from the stairs dressed completely in black leather. She stared at the door with determination. I thought of the time I saw a gymnast at the end of the vault runway on Cherry’s TV over the summer, her face steely with intent. That was Daisy now, her gaze narrowed, her step a force. We followed her out without a word, afraid to break the spell. We got in the car and she clicked her seat belt. She put on lipstick in the rearview mirror with a shaky hand. Then she blazed down Old Canal Road, her hands a strangle on the wheel. I sat in the back and Florin sat eyes closed next to her mother. I wondered if she was praying.

  We neared the turnoff for the on-ramp where Wiley Stam was stationed with his shotgun, the orange glow of the tip of his cigarette in the dark. He threw it to the ground as we approached.

  I lay down on the floor of the back seat.

  “What’s this character doing out here like the goddamn Wild West?”

  “Mom, slow down,” Florin said.

  “These pigs,” Daisy said. “Think they own this town. Well, they don’t.” She bore toward Wiley, who stood pointing the gun at the car. Florin screamed and ducked and Wiley threw himself out of the way. We sailed under a banner that read: EXIT PEACHES AND ENTER HELL.

  “Ride on, motherfuckers!” Daisy whooped out her window into the night.

  “You almost killed him,” Florin said, breathless.

  “Well, hon,” Daisy replied, “I believe that’s what men like him would call asking for it.”

  Chapter 21

  The road stretched out ahead. I was glad for the dark of Highway 99. I didn’t have to see Peaches slip from view, didn’t have to see what was beyond the highway, to the side of it. I didn’t want to know everything. I thought about how faith worked. I wondered, looking up at the endless black of starry sky, if God was someone I hadn’t begun to know, but could one day. If God was nothing like Vern. If God was something separate, something not religious at all. And while I imagined the car being swallowed into layers of other realms ending of course in hell, I let it go. While waves of fear tried to consume me, to tell me I couldn’t withstand this, I found myself smooth as stone. I was only a body moving through space. I let it go I let it go.

  Daisy decided that to keep herself in forward motion we would have to listen to her affirmations CD on repeat the entire way. My legs are safe, they are on my body. My arms are safe, they are attached and able. My head is a mountain, unmovable, unshakable through any season. Just when it would almost lull me into sleep, the voice would get excited. No snow can defeat me! No wind, rain, or ice! Unshakable I am! It went on and on until I wondered if the voice would drive us all mad, cause Daisy to steer off the road and into a ditch to end it. That’s when I remembered one of my mother’s boyfriends, Boss, a name I was sure he had self-founded, but he claimed his mother chose it. He was one of the nicer ones, wasn’t curious about me, but was obsessed with my mother. He wrote her long letters in tiny crooked script, total mania. She would smoke a million cigarettes while she read them, exasperated by his love. It wasn’t ideal though, because my mother didn’t love him the right way. I heard her tell Cherry that she wanted to be attracted to him, but just couldn’t figure out how. Close your eyes, Cherry had instructed halfheartedly, but my mother said she didn’t have that kind of imagination. When she finally ended it with him, really ended it, he drove off the very highway we were on, the 99, into a ditch, and died, which is how I suppose I knew such a thing could happen.

  He killed himself over me, my mother pondered aloud for weeks. Over me. Almost like it made his love finally real. Almost as if he was the love of her life.

  WE STOPPED HOURS later in Citrus Heights near the Sunrise Mall where the air was suddenly winter crisp. We piled on the sweaters and coats. I wriggled into the maternity jeans. The cold was nothing I could remember. It was about one in the morning. Daisy didn’t move.

  “Go in and pee, girls,” she said.

  “What about you?” said Florin, looking at her mother.

  “I’ll stay here. I don’t have to go.”

  “Mom,” she said.

  “Go.”

  In the mini-mart Florin bought huge bottles of water and I drank two in what felt like a single gulp, expensive water in a fine blue bottle with a snowcapped mountain on the label. I drank the water, I drank the water. I stood in a strange town I’d never been to and nothin
g happened.

  The man working, old in a fleece sweatshirt, sort of smiled at us, looked at my belly. He handed us hot dogs and said, “Free for you.” I ate mine in three bites and felt energy rush back into my body, the dull headache that had lingered for so long it had become a normal state of being, gone. How lucky I was to be here.

  We asked for another and brought it to Daisy, who ate it delicately like she could hardly be bothered with hunger. Her scars agonized under the bright light of the parking lot, but she was still beautiful, and I thought, What pain. Life was pain and this was mine. Was it more or less than anyone else’s?

  “I don’t want your hopes to be way up here,” Daisy said to me, tapping the roof of the car. “Because who knows what your mother’s gonna want to do.”

  Daisy rolled down her window and poured yellow liquid onto the street from an old paper cup. She’d peed in the car. We didn’t say anything about it.

  “I’m her daughter,” I said. “That has to mean something.”

  Daisy turned the key in the ignition and soon we were back into the between space of the highway, where life was paused. I had never been on a road trip and I liked this feeling of floating.

  “You know,” she said, turning down the affirmations CD. “You might not believe in past lives, but you and your mother have been traveling together for a long time.”

  “Here we go,” Florin said. “She’s been dying to tell you this.”

  I leaned forward in my seat.

  “Once I met you I saw it all come together.” Daisy tapped her forehead. “In your other lives, though, you’ve been sisters mainly, and you’ve even been her mother.”

  “Maybe,” I said, not sure if I believed her but wanting to hear more anyhow.