An Untamed State (36 page)

Lorraine wrapped her arms around me, kissed my cheek, her lips warm and moist. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you are.”

I could barely stand. Lorraine helped me to my feet and I leaned against her. We moved slowly.

“One step at a time,” Lorraine said.

Outside, the sun was bright and high. I held my hand over my eyes. Michael and Glen stood next to Glen’s truck. Michael was haggard, his eyes red, dark stubble covering his face. He had been crying again. He held a blanket in his open arms and I walked into him, let him wrap the blanket around me. We sat in the truck bed and Glen and Lorraine sat up front. I was so tired, so hungry. I leaned against his chest and he kissed the top of my head. At the farmhouse, Michael carried me inside and Lorraine told him to take me to the kitchen. There was a large pot of something on the stove and she ladled it into a bowl and sat across from me. Michael hovered, his body humming with nervous energy.

“You’ve got to eat,” Lorraine said.

I shook my head frantically. “I want to be empty,” I said. “Please.”

“This is just soup,” she said. “It won’t make you feel too full.” I looked at the bowl, a thick broth of some kind. Lorraine filled a spoonful, looked at me sternly. I pursed my lips together. “I really do not want to force-feed you,” she said.

“Please don’t.”

“That was a bad choice of words. This will be good for you. I know you’re hungry. You’ve gotta eat.”

I was desperately hungry. I wanted to bury my face in the soup but I finally felt hollow enough to not feel those men and what they did to me. I didn’t want to lose that.

“This soup is made from fresh beef, hearty stuff, and vegetables you helped pick,” Lorraine said.

I wrapped the blanket around myself more tightly and remembered the first time Glen told me we were eating their livestock. “Circle of life,” I said, quietly.

Michael started laughing, a deep, chesty laugh that made me want to smile. He pulled up a chair next to me. “I knew you were in there,” he said. “I knew it. Please baby, eat just a little.” He sounded so mournful. I nodded. He clapped his hands together. “Hot damn.”

Lorraine fed me slowly, treated me with such kindness, kindness I needed greedily. The soup was delicious, silky and warm and full of flavor. It had been so long since I had eaten anything, days. Each time Lorraine told me to open my mouth, I did. Each time she told me to swallow, I did. When the bowl was empty, she asked if I wanted more and I nodded. She tried to make me eat some bread, too, but I refused. That would have been too much. After Michael washed my bowl, Lorraine told him to help me up to the bathroom. I leaned against my husband as we walked up the stairs. He leaned down and whispered into my ear, his breath tickling my neck. He said, “I love you.” I didn’t want to talk but I squeezed his arm so he would know some part of me heard him.

Again, Lorraine shooed him away so we could be alone. I sat on the toilet as she ran a warm bath. I was mute. When I refused to remove my clothes she said, “No problem.” I stepped out of my shoes and climbed into the bathtub in my jeans and T-shirt. The water held my tender skin and quickly bloomed pinkly as the fresh blood from my feet fell away from my body.

“You are safe,” Lorraine reminded me.

The second time she tried to undress me, I raised my arms over my head and she removed my soaking-wet shirt. She helped me out of my jeans, my underwear. It was terrible to be so naked. I pulled my knees to my chest, hugged myself, lowered my head.

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “Please don’t look at me. You shouldn’t have to see this.”

Lorraine began gently scrubbing my back with a soft washcloth. The scent of apples filled the bathroom. She pulled my arms open and washed all of me. She said, “You have nothing to be ashamed of.” She said, “Your body will heal.”

“I’m no good anymore. I am dead.”

Lorraine squeezed my shoulder. “There’s so much good in you, it can’t possibly be gone. And I believe you feel dead right now but you won’t always.”

We sat there for a long time, Lorraine saying kind, necessary things.

T
he following night, my husband and I lay in bed. I reached for Michael, rested my hand against his bare arm. “Are you going to leave me?”

“What?” he asked, his words sticky in his mouth.

“Are you going to leave me? Because if you are, I’d rather you do it now.”

“That’s ridiculous.” He growled. “Don’t ever ask me that again.”

I slid toward him. A thousand tiny hooks pulled at my skin. I clasped the back of his neck and pulled his mouth to mine. I kissed him softly, so softly. I took in his breath, traced his lips with my finger, tried to memorize their softness, their shape. I kissed him again, harder. I thought, “This man is my husband,” and repeated those words silently so I would not forget, so I could love the man I was with despite the men who were with me. He responded shyly, kept his hands to himself. I pulled his arm around me, my tongue inside his mouth, tried to remember the taste of him and forget the taste of too many others.

Michael gently pulled away, held my face in his hands. “What are you doing?”

I pressed myself against him, his thighs to my thighs, our hipbones pressed together. I loved his body, how much bigger he was, but in that moment, I hated his body and how he could drown me. I kissed his neck, pulled at the skin softly with my teeth. He moaned softly, found my lips again. I tried to relax, tried to ignore the panic, the way my skin ached. I ran my fingers through his hair and rolled onto my back, pulling him on top of me. He was so heavy; he was pressing me through the mattress. Michael slid his hands beneath my tank top, pressing his fingertips against my ribs. He dragged his lips along the curved bone of my chin to the hollow of my throat, down between my breasts. I gritted my teeth. I needed to give him this. I needed him to stay with me more than it would hurt to do what needed to be done to make him stay. This was my new ransom. I braced myself for the pain. I thought,
“I will show you what I can take.”

“Is this okay?”

I lied. I spread my legs wide, tried to push his boxers down. He put his mouth on my nipple. He kissed the constellation of fading bruises along the underside of my breasts, my navel, just above my pubis, tried to kiss me between my thighs.

“Don’t do that,” I said. “Just fuck me.”

He laughed, kissed the flat of my stomach. “That doesn’t sound like you.” I fought my body’s urge to start shaking. I was so tired of fighting.

I pressed my hand to his shoulder. “Please,” I said. “Let’s just do this.”

Michael crawled back up my body, stretching himself alongside me. He kissed my shoulder and inched my thighs apart with his knee. An ugly sound trapped in my throat and Michael pressed his lips against mine so hard, my lips swelled. I opened my mouth to his, to him, to holding on to him.

He slid his hand between my thighs, stroking me softly. I squeezed my eyes shut, tried to keep my legs open. I covered my eyes with my forearm so he wouldn’t see the truth of the moment. Hot tears fell down my face and into my ears. I tried to make myself go through the motions, raising my hips to meet his fingers, trying to feel to forget to fight to feel.

His fingers stilled. “I don’t want this.”

I sat up on my elbows and glared at him, my hair falling in my face. “Really? Are you kidding me?”

“I know when my wife wants to make love.”

I pulled the sheet up around me. “Right. And now I am damaged goods.”

His brow wrinkled. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“Then fuck me, Michael. Jesus. I am throwing myself at you.”

Michael held my wrists and pinned them over my head with one hand. He knelt between my thighs and I stopped breathing, preparing myself for him to force himself inside me, for all the ways it would tear me apart. “Is this what you want?” There was an edge to his voice. I finally felt a pang of desire so sharp and pure it disgusted me.

“This is exactly what I want,” I said, angrily. I tried to wrest my hands free, tried to make him fight me, take me. I tried to make him into a different man. “I need this. I don’t want you to leave me.”

I pushed him onto his back and started sliding down his body, wanted to offer him something, anything, my mouth, my hands, but he grabbed me by my shoulders. “Mireille, no. Not like this. That’s enough.”

The relief I felt was sudden and complete. I quickly pulled my clothes back on and turned away from Michael. I listened as his breathing slowed. The distance between us expanded steadily. “I hate you for saying no.”

“You won’t always hate me,” Michael said.

After he fell asleep, I hid in the bathroom and I lay in the bathtub. I smelled TiPierre and the Commander and the others, the sharp stench of them. Their bitter sweat ran down my neck and into my eyes and my mouth, the taste of it fresh with their own barely controlled rage. I felt TiPierre’s greedy hands grabbing at my breasts while he fucked me, how there was no elegance to how he used me. I thought about the Commander and his cruelty, the calmness of it, how assuredly he assumed he had a right to my suffering. As I slept, I was consumed by the dreams of the woman I had become.

I was kept in a cage inside a cage inside a cage. I became an animal, baring my teeth, throwing myself against the bars, ignoring the pain. I would have broken my own body but the cage became smaller and all I could do was rock back and forth, hissing. Men who were also animals, poked at me with sharp things. They bled me for sport. They fed me bloody meat I tore with my teeth and fingers. The meat was slick and bland in my throat.

I was kept in a glass box inside a glass box inside a glass box. I could see everyone I loved and they could see me. They were happy. They smiled at me as they walked by my glass box inside a glass box inside a glass box. I tried to shatter the glass with my fists and only shattered my bones. I stripped myself naked, pressed my body to the glass. I forced those beyond the glass to bear witness.

I was suspended from an iron bar chained to a vaulted ceiling inside a room inside a room inside a room. The muscles in my arms unraveled. My bones stretched. I grew longer. I grew longer. No matter how hard I swung my body, I never reached a wall.

I had no choice and in that there was freedom. There were seven angry men with tightly muscled, long, lean bodies. Their skin was dark and shiny slick with sweat. They used me in the worst ways they could imagine. I had no choice so I surrendered my body to it. The more they hurt me, the harder I came. The more they hurt me, the more I changed, the more I became what they wanted me to become. They left me gaping, open, wet, wanting.

I woke up thrashing wildly, Michael staring at me, finally seeing me for the stranger I had become. I hated him for the look on his face, too.

Lorraine and I sat on the porch drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes. It was our morning ritual. Glen and Michael were in the barn doing some maintenance on milking machines.

Lorraine looked at me hard, the way she often looked at me, with a slight trace of confusion, some bemusement.

“You’re not ready to go home,” she said.

I watched a perfect stream of gray smoke leave my lips. I shook my head. “Oh, I’m never going to be ready.”

“But you’re going to leave with him.”

I picked at a torn cuticle and thought about how I no longer smelled the manure on the farm. “I love him. I don’t want him to leave me. He’s completely fed up already.” I swallowed the urge to cry. I could not cry—not over this.

“That boy isn’t going anywhere. He’s not acting right but he loves you and he is true.”

“He needs me to go home with him. He needs his wife and things to go back to normal. My son needs a mother.”

“I’d say you’ve still got time to be thinking about what you need. This is just the beginning.”

I nodded and we continued rocking, sitting in silence, smoking her Parliaments. At some point she reached for my hand with her arthritic, reddened fingers. Her skin was dry but warm. I did not pull away.

I don’t know what Lorraine said to him but that afternoon, Michael flew back to Miami. He did not say goodbye, nor did I. He left a note—his first honest words since I was returned—“I love you. This is so much bigger than me. I don’t know if I can do this.”