S
ylvie hears the truck pull up and peers through the shade. It’s Gloria. The passenger door of the truck swings open, and Ruby gets out. And for a moment, she fears that something has happened. Why else would Gloria be bringing Ruby home? But there is Ruby, and she is fine. She is safe. Gloria goes to the back of the truck, lowers the tailgate, and unloads Ruby’s bicycle. Then she starts unloading bags of something, carrying them to the side of the house.
Ruby opens the front door without knocking. She simply slips her key into the lock and turns the knob. It always stuns Sylvie how simple entry can be.
“What is she doing?” Sylvie asks. “What’s in the bags?”
“It’s sand.”
“Oh,” Sylvie says, remembering the supplies sent by the grocery store, and peers out the window at the bright blue sky.
Gloria comes to the doorway again and stands at the threshold, as though uncertain if she should go any farther. “Hi Syl,” she says.
Sylvie pauses and then reaches for her hand. “Come in,” she says and forces herself to smile. “I’ll make some tea.”
She is aware of how ridiculous this is: her best friend, walking across the kitchen floor as though it is littered with glass. Gloria, who used to come into this kitchen and help herself. Who used to throw open the cupboards and refrigerator doors, who used to pluck cartons of ice cream from the freezer and eat straight from the container. Gloria who helped paint these very walls one Sunday afternoon. Who molded and shaped and fired the dishes that live inside the cupboards. Who has listened to every complaint, every bit of joy that Sylvie had to share at this table. Gloria, who has drunk gallons and gallons of tea in this very spot. And still, she doesn’t belong here anymore.
Sylvie is trying so hard, but it feels like swimming upstream. She is so out of practice. She has forgotten the lovely rhythms and cadences of women’s conversation. Of the pleasant silences. She has forgotten how to share a space, a story, a moment with another person. She feels clumsy and awkward and foolish.
“Ruby says Robert’s down south visiting Larry?” Gloria asks, sitting down tentatively in one of the kitchen chairs, as though she doesn’t trust its legs to hold her. “Is he worried about the hurricane?”
Sylvie nods. “He says they’ve evacuated a lot of houses on the island, but that he and Bunk are going to stick it out. Larry’s dealt with this before.
Isabel,
I think. That was the last one.”
Gloria fiddles with the sugar bowl that sits in the center of the table. “We’re not supposed to get much here except some wind and a lot of rain. I’m worried though about you being so close to the river.”
Sylvie thinks about the quiet stream that flows behind her house. It’s hardly a river here. It’s barely more than a creek. It is harmless.
“You could come stay with us for the weekend, you know,” Gloria says hopefully. “It might be fun. We’ve got hurricane lamps if we lose power. It’d be nice to have all of us girls together.”
And for a moment, Sylvie tries to imagine it. She dreams herself getting into the passenger seat of Gloria’s truck, Ruby squeezed between them. She tries to imagine the bumps beneath her as they roll down the road. She tries to dream herself through the rickety front gate of their house, into the foyer where boots and sneakers all lie in a smelly heap. She tries to remember the feeling of the air inside, the scent of it. Clay and cinnamon and candle wax. And for a few strange moments, she thinks she could actually do it. She could just nod her head
yes,
pack a suitcase, and follow Gloria out the door. She could leap back into her old life, without more thought than she would stepping into the tub after a long day.
Gloria reaches across the table and takes Sylvie’s hand. Sylvie looks at their hands together at the center of the table and for one moment is unable to differentiate between the two. They both have long fingers, slender wrists, though Gloria’s hands are dark from a summer spent in the garden and her own are the color of milk. Gloria wears clunky silver and turquoise rings on nearly every finger, including her long, boney thumbs. Her hands are splattered with clay, and her watch battery is dead.
She dreams herself inside that kerosene lantern house, onto the front porch where they might sit together and watch the rain as it falls around them. And she tries to remember how this feeling (of friendship, of sitting with another woman, another mother) used to be almost enough to make her feel safe. But then as Gloria squeezes Sylvie’s hand, wanting, demanding, waiting and urging, her mind clicks, as it always clicks, into that strange overdrive. The engine in her chest restless and revving.
Here is what would actually happen if she were to walk out her front door to the truck. Once inside the cab of the truck, she would feel trapped. Watching the world buzz past her in the window would make her nauseated, turn her stomach, make her feel as though she can’t breathe. But she would have to pretend that everything was okay, because why wouldn’t everything be okay? Is she insane? And she’d feel like a fool asking to turn around and go home. And even once she was able to free herself from the confines of that truck, she’d suddenly be on display. She would belong, in a single moment, to the world, and the world would want from her. Grover wanting to hug her, Neil wanting to kiss both her cheeks. She already knows that her bones are not sturdy. She can’t trust her legs to hold her up. (This is how it happened last year—that wild slow collapsing. It started at the ankles. It spread to the hips.) And Gloria would watch her and wonder what terrible mistake she’d made. And when the power went out, it wouldn’t be coziness and comfort she would feel as Gloria flicked the key to the lamps and turned up the flames, but
fear.
Fear of fire. Of the crackle and hiss of the tiny flames. Fear of darkness. Of powerlessness. She wouldn’t be able to sit with Gloria on the porch, on that beautiful broad porch where they used to share their secrets, their shames. Instead, she would start to tremble, the storm entering her body. She would be electrified, a rod collecting all the storm’s energy, and she would become dangerous.
She can’t bear the frustration, the humiliation, the terror. She can’t bear that she has failed in every conceivable way: as a wife, as a mother, as a friend. She is pathetic and she knows that at some point Gloria will understand this, and then there will never be a moment like this again, a moment when Gloria looks her in the eyes and really believes that she can be saved. That she is even worth saving.
As if sensing the danger lurking underneath her skin, running through her veins like something toxic, Gloria releases her hand. She has given Sylvie all the time she has, with only so much patience for her reticence, for her resistance.
“I guess I can’t make you leave,” Gloria says, shrugging her shoulders, and Sylvie senses a hint of anger in Gloria’s voice. Of frustration. Of resignation. Perhaps Sylvie was wrong; Gloria has
already
given up on her. What was she thinking? She is a lost cause.
“Would you at least like me to bring Ruby to my house for the weekend?”
Sylvie’s eyes sting, and all of a sudden it feels not like Gloria is making a generous offer but rather challenging her. Saying,
I am better than you at this. Ruby deserves better. Than you. Than this.
It makes Sylvie’s shoulders stiffen, her chin jut forward in defiance.
“We’re fine,” a voice says. But it’s not her own. It’s Ruby, standing in the doorway now.
“Are you sure, honey?” Gloria asks, as though she’s the mother. As though she’s the only one capable of taking care.
“We’re fine,” Sylvie echoes, sensing this is what Ruby needs right now. That this is what she’s asking for, and Sylvie wants to give it to her. And somehow, for this sliver of a moment they are allies. They are in this together: a team, soldiers in the same war. But then just as quickly, Ruby slips away, slinks from the doorway and down the hall. Sylvie and Gloria listen as her door closes shut.
“Let me know if you change your mind,” Gloria says, rising from the table. “I put the sandbags out in the driveway. I can help you put them up against the back of the house . . .”
“That’s okay. Ruby can help me,” Sylvie says. “Thank you.”
Sylvie stands up and moves toward Gloria. She opens her arms, tentatively, and Gloria’s eyes fill. Sylvie leans into her, squeezing her own eyes shut at the familiar smell of clay and Gloria’s shampoo. The hug briefly, awkwardly, and then Gloria pulls away, wiping at her eyes with the back of her wrist.
“You call me if you need anything. I can come get you. It’s not a problem,” she says.
And Sylvie nods.
As Gloria walks out the front door, Sylvie feels an impossible urge, the improbable urge, to change her mind. To just follow her. To go. To
let
Gloria take care of her. To ride out the storm together in that big safe house. But it is too late. It is always, always just a few strokes of time too late. And so instead she reaches for Gloria and squeezes her hand. “I’m sorry,” she says. It’s all she has left. Apologies for what she has become.
N
ow that she has been discovered, Nessa worries that it is only a matter of time until Ruby tells someone that she’s here. Nessa trusts her, yes, but she is still only a child. Nessa tries not to think about what will happen to her if she is caught. To the baby. She’s been on the run for almost two years now; she knows she can’t run forever. And she still has two months until she is eighteen. Before she can stop feeling as though she is being hunted. She should be running
away
from here, she knows this, but the pull of this place is almost too strong to resist. Even though there was safety in distance, safety in the miles she put between herself and her past, between herself and the night she left here, she knows that nothing could be forgotten or forgiven until she came home.
Home.
Again, that silly word. What does that mean now with both her grandfather and her mother gone? It’s simply the last place where she had a bed she didn’t share with anyone else. The last place where she had a schedule, a routine, places to be, where she had a semblance of a life.
Her mother had brought her back here, to get her out of the city, as though things might be different. She seemed to think they could become different people here, as though they could both change. Even with her grandfather gone, it seemed like maybe her mother had been right. That this was exactly what they had needed. But it only took one night spent out at the bar instead of in front of the TV before her mother brought someone home with her. Before
two
became
three
again. Before everything was exactly the same as it used to be. It didn’t matter that they were here, that they were home.
It wasn’t so long ago, but the memories are hazy. All of it like some sort of underwater dream, filtered through a watery lens. Her bedroom in that apartment above the salon was a tiny room off the kitchen; this she remembers. Her mother’s new boyfriend, Rusty, liked to eat bacon sandwiches for breakfast. And so she awoke to the crackle and hiss and strong scent of bacon frying every morning. That and the smell of weed. Her mother worked second shift at the Cumberland Farms, and so she slept in most days. Those mornings Nessa and Rusty moved side by side, soundlessly in the kitchen as she got ready for school, and he got ready for whatever it was that he did. She never really knew. He worked off and on, but mostly he was a fixture in their apartment, joint in hand, Xbox on the TV, a bobbing head. A scruffy beard. The funk of a dirty towel in the bathroom. And it was only a matter of time before her mother started using again as well. She tried to hide it at first, but, as always, gave up these efforts to conceal the obvious.
And so Nessa stayed away. She slipped away before her mother woke up each morning and came home late at night when she was at work. She tried to ignore the mounting evidence on the coffee table, in the trashcans, in her mother’s rheumy eyes.
She might never have found him if she hadn’t been looking for somewhere else to go. She knows now she was drawn to him not out of desire, but out of necessity.
Nessa met Declan at school.
He came to talk to her English class about poetry; he was a real-life poet. He had an accent, though it was faint. It just played with the edges of his words. It was the accent of someone whose parents were immigrants. Just an inherited slant to the words. Almost imperceptible. But Nessa, who barely spoke herself even then, was keenly aware of the patterns of other people’s speech. It became more pronounced as he read his poetry from the paperback chapbook he brought, the one he kept shoved in his back pocket. She remembered thinking that was an odd way to treat your own words, as though they were printed on a takeout menu or a Xeroxed program for a school play. A lot of things about him made her think he was careless. She should have known.
She recalls tree bark, the scrape of it against her back. When he found her after school that day, sitting under the tree where she liked to read, he’d come so close, she’d pressed her back against the bark. He’d been eager like that from the beginning. She was unaccustomed to this forwardness; it frightened her. But even as she began to walk away from him, mumbling something about going home (
home,
that meaningless word), instead of letting her go, instead of watching her walk away like all the other hungry boys would have done, he’d moved to walk with her. This had startled her, but made her wonder if he might be different somehow. If she didn’t have the same sort of power over him that she seemed to have over the others.
He might have sensed that she was lying, because as they walked, he didn’t ask her where they were going (she didn’t know). And he didn’t look confused, bemused, when she walked him in circles, stopping right in front of that same tree an hour later. He only shook her hand, and said, “If you’d like to give me some of your writing to look at, I’d be happy to take a peek.”
And this, this more than that wild longing in all the other boys’ eyes, was what made her nod. He wanted her
words.
He had asked for her voice. He cared about what she had to say, not just the way her lips moved around the words.
He didn’t come back to the school again. But she met him every single day that fall. She watched the seasons change through the windows of his beat-up Honda, the one whose headlights sometimes failed, and through the windows in the drafty converted barn where he lived.
Because she didn’t get home from work until nearly midnight and slept until ten or eleven every morning, her mother also didn’t notice that Nessa wasn’t sleeping in her own bed anymore. Her mother didn’t notice the marks on her neck, the plum-colored bruises from where he sucked at her throat, as though he could heal her voice, a leech bleeding out the poison. Her unfocused eyes weren’t trained on Nessa anymore, only on Rusty and whatever Rusty brought home for her. Whatever vials and baggies littered the secondhand coffee table.
Most mornings, Declan would drop her off a block away from the school, and she could still smell him on her as she walked through the fallen autumn leaves to school. She didn’t have any friends. Not a single girlfriend to tell about the way they slept curled around each other like slugs in the barn loft, like runaways, in the drafty building.
Perhaps she was practicing even then.
She also had no one to tell about the way he refused to kiss her or even look at her as he fucked her. She had no one to tell, no words to explain the way he sometimes wanted her to do things that made her feel ashamed. That sometimes those things hurt her.
And so she got out of his car each morning, a block away from school, as though he were just her dad (though he wasn’t quite old enough to be her dad) and walked alone, in the cold silent autumn mornings, to school.
He was careless. Careless with her, careless with his words. He never thought beyond the next sentence. Perhaps this is a poet’s way, she thought. To worry about life one moment at a time, one line. Never seeing the stanza until it forms. The shape of the poem creating itself,
accidental.
He treated her like a child, a little girl. But then again, she
was
a little girl, wasn’t she? She couldn’t remember anyone ever telling her that she’d grown up. She still wore her hair in two pigtails. She still slept with a teddy bear on the nights when she did go home. She still liked to drink chocolate milk and watch cartoons and she preferred to sleep with a light on. It was as though only her body had transformed, and even then, she didn’t really look like a woman, but just some sort of approximation of a woman. And she certainly didn’t feel grown.
He was careless, because, in the end he didn’t care. Not really. He was made up of words, but behind the words was nothing. He was nothing but a bunch of pretty syllables and sounds. He was assonance and consonance, a meticulously metered line, reliant only on rhythms designed to please the ear. But the words themselves, all those pretty words, were meaningless.
She might have left anyway. She might have fled into the darkness, directionless save for the vague notion of getting
away.
She can’t say now whether everything that happened that night precipitated her departure or simply expedited it. It doesn’t matter really. What matters is what happened.
It sits in a quiet corner of her mind like a naughty child, sequestered to an endless sentence of time out. This memory, like so many of the others. The room where she keeps them made not of walls, but only of corners. Of angles, of shadows providing dark places where the punishing thoughts reside. She has never spoken of that night, because after that night she stopped speaking altogether, her voice lost. Or stolen. Does it matter? It seems the most precious lost things are beyond retrieval now.
She ran away from him, but it didn’t matter; there were so many others. They blur together now. The boy she sat next to on the bus on her way out of town (the college boy with the soft sweatshirt and cold hands) the one who shared her overhead light because his was broken, the one whose thick tongue probed inside her mouth as though searching for something he’d lost. The guy she met in the motel swimming pool, the one whose father owned the motel. The one who took her to the rooftop and set off firecrackers that made her ears ache and her eyes sting with their beautiful explosions. The man who gave her the job doing dishes in exchange for a room to stay in a stucco building behind his house. She was cold that night; the space heater was on the fritz. And so she’d gone to him, and he’d let her into his warm bed. The others are just a collection of vague details: grass-stained jeans, tanned feet, a canvas tent, music at an outdoor concert. The taste of greasy Carmex, of peppermint, of coffee and clove cigarettes. Naked skin and sinewy muscles. Short flat fingernails and cheeks as rough as sand. When she remembers the journey across the country to LA and then up to Portland, it is the men she remembers, but they are a blur of hands and hips. Lips and throats. All of it twisted into dirty sheets riddled with cigarette burns like bullet holes. And then there was Mica.
He found her in the park, like a feral kitten, and brought her to the big falling-down house with the slanted floors and tall, cracked windows. The house with the living room that was so cavernous and empty you could roller-skate there. The place where people came and went, where the attic was filled with pot plants growing under humming buzzing lights. The hydroponic lullaby bringing the deepest sleep she’d had in years. Since she was a little girl.
Home?
But then later as her belly began to grow, as she swelled (with happiness, with love, with this life inside of her), she could feel Mica slipping away. Rolling away from her hands as they tried to hold on. Sitting too close to the new girl who joined them for dinner that one night when Ryan made mutton stew. Dancing too closely with Francesca (Jessica, Monica) at the concert in the park, while she sat, her belly like a giant anthill, like a dormant volcano, like an impassable mountain. He became every other man, just a fading recollection, an impression leaving only the vague scent of patchouli and grass and sex on her hands.
The thing about silence is that instead of explanations, instead of questions, instead of pleading or complaining or yelling, your only option is
doing.
Saying is one thing, but without words to fall back on you are required to act. Silence necessitates action to get your point across. And so instead of demanding to know who had left that black hair on her white soap in their shower, instead of begging him to love her and his baby, instead of yelling at him, chastising him, unleashing her fury in a meaningless string of syllables, she said nothing. She simply got out of the shower, wrung the water from her hair, put on a clean sundress, put the rest of her clothes in her backpack and stole his pitiful stash of cash. And then soundlessly left. Her departure the quiet period at the end of this particular sentence. He would have to read her absence in the empty drawer.
She’d reached the end of the world, or so it seemed, and good pinball that she was, her instinct was then to just go back. It was simple physics really, this rebounding. But she knew that heading back the way she had come also meant returning to the same merciless bumper that has sent her flying in the first place. This time she would ready herself. This time she would aim; she would move with purpose. With direction.