When We Were Animals (21 page)

Hair like hay and her skin like paper. But her mouth was the worst part. It was the start of a dry passageway that went all the way down into the dry sack of her belly. The girl was her own abandoned mine shaft.

She wore no clothes, but her body was half covered by a burlap sack. The burlap was stuck to her. It and her skin and the earth had all melted together and frozen. She leaned, half sideways, against the cave wall. It was an awkward eternity.

She must have been cold. I tried to pull the burlap up to warm her, but it turned to dry shreds in my hands.

I had never
seen death so up close. She was dried like a mummy in a museum, and I wondered who she had been in life. She was small—young, like me. I wondered if she had had friends like mine or enemies like mine. I wondered if she came here to be alone, as I did. I wondered if this meant that I was now friends with death itself.

The other thing it meant was that I was no longer just a girl. It was the beginning of awful discoveries.

It was the start of everything that came after.

I told Mr.
Hunter
that I was mapping the mines, but I didn’t tell him about the dead girl. When I told him, I watched him closely—expecting that he might scold me or try to persuade me to talk to my father about my self-destructive habits. But he didn’t. He leaned forward, in the dark of the auditorium, and he said, “Is it beautiful there?”

“That’s not the right word,” I said, because it was something other than pretty.

I liked to tell him things, because he seemed to comprehend what things meant even before I tried to explain them. I felt no need to apologize for myself to him. I told him my stories, and his eyes went distant—as though he were recalling some long-ago memory. Sometimes his eyes even glazed over, and he would turn his head away. Sometimes his breath smelled of alcohol.

At dinner one night, I asked Margot Simons about Mr. Hunter.

“What’s he like?” I said.

“How come?” she asked. “Have you got a crush on him?”

I held my knife in a grip that whitened my knuckles. I imagined driving the blade between her ribs.

After giving my father a playful glance, she responded to my question.

“We don’t see each other that much,” she said. “Mostly he doesn’t hang around with the other teachers. But I like him. There’s something about him. Did you know he didn’t grow up here?”

“I know,” I said, eager to show off the priority of my alliance with him. “He’s from East Saint Louis.”

“But,” she went on, “he doesn’t seem entirely like an outsider. Does that make sense?”

It made perfect sense. But I didn’t like that her evaluation of him was so parallel to my own.

“Miss Simons,” I said, changing the topic. “Did you know that my mother never went breach?”

“Yes,” she said, making her voice hard like a wall. “I knew that.”

“So my father told you? He told you she was unique? Isn’t it interesting that she was unlike everyone else?”

“Yes, it is,” she said again. She did not know the right way to respond. She looked helplessly at my father.

“I thought I might be unique, too,” I went on. “I thought it might be in my blood. Do you think things travel that way? From generation to generation? Through the blood?”

My father’s fork clattered down on his plate.

“Lumen,” he said, “that’s enough.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “sometimes the world isn’t as honest a place as you would like it to be.”

And then dinner was over all of a sudden. My father asked me to leave the table, and I did. There was a quiver in his voice when he said it, and Margot Simons wore a hard scowl that I knew later would melt into miserableness, and I felt tremendously sorry for her. Her lipstick was smudged at the corners.

I should have been kinder. To my father, to Margot Simons, to Peter Meechum, to everyone.

In English class, Mr. Hunter taught us
Wuthering Heights.
Violent Heathcliff. The smoky moors. Child Cathy tapping at the window, wanting to come in.

He evoked that scene for us. He said, simply, “There is a difference between being inside and being outside,” and we knew what he meant. We all nodded our heads, and our eyes grew unfocused.

When you are at a certain in-between age, you believe that adulthood is all about exclusion. You believe that what makes adults adults is that they are legitimized in their suspicions and hatreds. You exercise your own condemnations, and you believe this is the key to growing older.

And what do I believe now—me, a mother and wife, a woman who keeps her past concealed from her adoring husband? Is there something of that mine-dwelling girl left in me, who stalks her husband from makeshift blinds? Or has that girl grown into someone else altogether, naked to hurt, diminished by love?

W
hen my husband goes to work in the morning, I leave our son at the neighbor’s and drive to our family doctor. There is nothing wrong with me, but Jack insists that we have regular checkups. So I sit in a cold room wearing a paper smock and smile up at the doctor and the nurses, and I try my best to do exactly what they ask of me. I breathe when they tell me to breathe. I lie back. I answer their questions.

Sometimes I wonder if they will find something awful in me. I imagine the doctor taking me into his office, closing the door, sighing heavily, and diagnosing me with evil growing behind my sternum.

I would assure him that no, it’s not growing, it’s always been there. The same exact size, the same exact shape. In fact I’ve learned to live with it, my evil. There is nothing to be afraid of. I am a loving wife and mother, a perfectly normal person.

To the doctors, you are a body tainted by imperfection. The only question they ask is how far you have strayed from the ideal. That’s why white and red are the colors of the medical world. White is the pure self, and red is the damage. That is medicine.

But I am declared perfectly healthy.

My doctor says, “You get an A plus for today.”

I grin with pride.

Afterward, I pick my son up. He rushes to greet me, clutching at my leg as though I were the only thing standing between him and rude death. I put my palm on the top of his head.

“Mommy,” he says to me in his little voice.

He is white and I am red. But one day he will be red, too.

I take him to our neighborhood park, where he likes to fling himself treacherously around the monkey bars. I sit on a bench and look at the cloudy sky through the tree branches overhead.

People like to run around the perimeter of the park, and one of those runners collapses on the bench next to me. Breathing hard, she removes the cap from a bottle of water and upturns it to her lips. The plastic bottle crinkles. I keep my gaze focused on the sky.

“I know you,” she says.

Only then do I realize it’s Helena, the art teacher who recently moved from California and likes to sit on my husband’s desk.

“You were at the community league meeting,” she says. She wears tight leggings with a stripe down the side, and I can smell her sweat, sweet and pungent. “You know what? Somebody told me I work with your husband. It’s Jack—right?”

“That’s right.”

“How funny! I teach art.”

“No school today?” I ask.

“Part-time,” she says. “So what are you doing here?”

“I’m with my son.”

“Oh,” she says, looking around. “Which one is he?”

“He’s over there somewhere.”

She laughs. Her teeth are amazing. Her hair is tied up in a ponytail. Her skin is healthy and brown.

“I do ten circuits three times a week,” she says. “Trying to get in shape. I’m getting married in August. My fiancé—he’s why we moved out here, for his job.”

“Congratulations.”

“Anyway, your husband, Jack, he’s so great with the kids.”

“Is he?”

“Such a sweetheart. They all love him. I mean, there are some awful ones, obviously. Like that Nat girl. Im
poss
ible. You don’t even know. The nastiest little thing you ever saw. I’m surprised they haven’t expelled her yet. Did you know she left a used tampon in one of the teacher’s desks? I mean, who does that? Revolting.”

“Maybe she’s looking for someone to beat her up a little,” I offer.

Helena leans back and looks at me for a moment, then she laughs again with all those white teeth of hers.

“I like you,” she says. “You’re funny.”

I smile graciously.

“I better get back to it,” she says. “Gotta keep up the stride. But promise me we’ll talk again.”

“Okay,” I say.

And then she’s off, running loops around our little park. I watch her without looking like I’m watching her. I wonder what she eats. Probably oats and grains, radishes and kale. I imagine she has many recipes for quinoa. I pick at my fingernails. I suppose if you cut her, her blood would shimmer a bright, healthy color.

It was spring.
The world had thawed, melted, and dried out. Summer was ahead of me, followed by two more years of high school—followed by what? It was impossible to speculate. They said I was destined for so much.

I returned to the mine—I did—to visit my friend Death, who had brittle wheat for hair. I wondered, briefly, if I should report her to the authorities. Then I decided not to. Half buried in the earth, her skin dried to papery thinness, she had been there for many, many years. Whoever might have been looking for her once was looking for her no longer.

I wondered also who she was and if there were some way I could find out. But there was no one I could ask without disclosing what I’d found. And I didn’t want to do that.

She belonged to me.

I went to the public library and searched archived newspapers for any clues about who the dead girl used to be. But I had no idea how long she had been there or what she had looked like before she had died. I couldn’t even really tell how old she had been.

What I did learn was that girls disappear all the time. They just vanish. I wanted to cut out all the newspaper photos of those lost girls and make a collage of them on my wall. But how much of a memorial did my life have to be?

In May Peter
began to talk of getting back at Blackhat Roy. “He can’t just come back here like that,” he said. “He can’t just grab whatever he wants. He hasn’t earned it,” he said. “I’m going to stop him,” he said.

In the afternoons we had sex. I closed my eyes and liked the feeling of the sunlight from the window on my skin. Afterward I felt warm and blanketed, and I pressed myself into his arms. He compared me, in abstract terms, to the world at large. “You’re the best, truest thing I know. You’re not part of all the nonsense. You’re above it.”

In school, Blackhat Roy seemed to want to tear down to dust all the things that people like Peter spent so much elaborate energy erecting. I began to think of his viciousness and Peter’s benevolence as two tides of the same shifting movement.

“You know what?” Roy said. “I’ve been watching you. Mostly everyone else looks right past you—like you’re nothing to worry about. Your smallness, they think that’s all you are. But I know different. I’ve tasted you. You’ve got some meanness in you, Lumen Fowler, just waiting to get banged out.”

He grabbed my arm up near my shoulder, and he squeezed it hard, as though he would drag me to the ground right there in the hall of the school. But then he smiled and let go and walked away. My breath returned, trembling, and for the rest of the day I found my mind was unable to focus.

And yes, it wasn’t like Peter Meechum at all—not like him, with his concentrated and generous adoration. Roy was something else. Brutal. Unapologetic but also unwaveringly true. You needn’t have worried about social convention around Blackhat Roy. You could drop it all—and sometimes you could almost get the impression, when speaking to him, that you were seeing the world as it actually was.

And there I was, in the emptying hallway of my school, my chest burning—as though Blackhat Roy had persuaded me to open my mouth and swallow a burning ember, as though he had talked me into it somehow.

And now I could feel it, the searing in my lungs and my stomach and other places, too.

I walked into
the woods. First I went to the lakeshore, where the sun was low on the horizon and dappled the surface. Then I walked to the quarry, where everything was still but the little rivulet running into the mine. It was wider now, with the season and the melt from the mountains above. There was no one around.

The light grew richer, more full of gold. The sun would set soon. I walked farther, but it was between moons, and I got lost. If I wasn’t nosing my way by instinct through the landscape of the moonlit night, then it seemed I was just wandering.

For a long time I went around and around, the sun getting closer to setting, until I climbed to the top of a very high ridge to get a better view. But on the other side of that ridge, I discovered an industrial park—low glass-and-metal office buildings with trapezoidal parking lots between them. I had somehow stumbled upon a back route into civilization. What’s more, I recognized the office park. It was in one of those buildings that my father worked.

This was clearly a sign, and I clambered down the opposite side of the ridge and went in search of the meaning of things.

When I found my father’s building, I realized the sun was just at the right angle in the sky to show me the insides of the place. I could see him there in his office, bent over his desk, examining some complex paper chart against a spreadsheet on his computer screen. The last time I had visited his office was many years ago when I was too sick to go to school. I must have been eight years old, and he had sat me in the break room with coloring books, and everyone was very nice and seemed to want to talk to me all day.

It would be different now, I thought. His colleagues, they would not know what to say to me now that I had grown into a young woman. People fear those curious interstitial creatures who are neither children nor adults.

So I did not go inside. Instead I sat on the low curb, feeling the coldness of concrete, and watched my father work. I felt alien in that place, watching as the sun went down and the workers began looking at me as they came out of the offices and climbed into their cars. I could smell the oily exhaust of their engines coming alive. I could hear the lonely sound of tires poppling against the surface of the parking lot.

Finally my father came out and saw me. He asked me what I was doing there, and I told him I was waiting for him. He asked how long I had been there, and I told him an hour. He asked what I had been doing—just sitting and watching? Sitting and watching, I replied.

“Sometimes, Daughter,” he said, “you are unfathomable.”

I liked it when he called me Daughter, and he put his arm over my shoulder, and we walked together toward his car, and for a sliver of a moment I remembered what it was like before things went bad, and I wondered if it would ever be like that again.

That was the
same time that Blackhat Roy Ruggle began parking in front of our house. He had a car now, an old Camaro, once red but now a faded, patchy orange, and it was sitting silent near the woods across the street when I was going to bed that night. I stopped cold when I saw it from my bedroom. I could see the silhouette of Roy’s head, backlit by the street lamps, through the rear window. Cigarette smoke rose from the driver’s window, and as I watched, his arm reached out and flicked ashes onto the tarmac.

This was the first time. There were others. I meant to confront him, to march out to his car and tell him he did not scare me—but whenever I approached, the Camaro growled to life and sped away.

Sometimes in the morning I found a collection of cigarette butts on the street or a smashed soda cup, the plastic straw twisted into anxious knots. Sometimes I could hear the distinctive sound of his engine pass by without stopping, a high-pitched rumble while approaching and a lower-pitched one departing. I knew this was called the Doppler effect, and in my imagination, I pictured explaining the phenomenon to him, sitting in the passenger seat of the Camaro, maybe drawing a diagram in ballpoint pen on the back of a paper fast-food bag, and him—the all-at-once light in his eyes as he understood—smiling. Sometimes I turned off the light in my bedroom and watched him through a slit in the curtains. He could not have seen me, but he seemed to be looking right at me.

There was nothing I could tell from his dark form.

Maybe he was angry and plotting revenge over something I had done.

Maybe he was sad, like the rest of us.

My father wondered
where I was going those afternoons and evenings. He did not ask about it directly. It was not his way. Instead he said things like, “Boy, you’ve been keeping late hours,” or “Do you think you’ll be home for dinner?”

The house was quieter in those days. We were too aware of each other—like two guarded animals circling each other on a solitary hill. We had sniffed out all the shifts that had occurred in both our lives, and we were keen to them. It wasn’t anger or discomfort or fear—just a heightened sensitivity to certain silent currents that seemed to ebb and flow through the house.

We didn’t avoid each other. In fact, more frequently than I had in the past, I did my homework downstairs, spread out on the floor, while my father read the newspaper and drank Earl Grey tea. But I was distracted. I couldn’t help but be watchful, listening for the fluttering sound of the newspaper pages turning, the sound of his teacup clattering against the saucer as he lifted it and set it down, the sound of his hand running across the scruffy line of his chin while he read.

Sometimes I would listen at the door to his office when he went in there to talk to Margot Simons on the telephone. I couldn’t hear particular words, but I didn’t need them—I was listening for cadences, certain lilts and tones that might speak to who he really was when I wasn’t around to discomfit him.

There’s something else
I remember—from a long time before that. When I close my eyes, I can see it still.

My father, he looks the same as ever in my mind, no variations. That magisterial jawline, that long face, those rough hands.

In my memory, he sits on the edge of the couch, and I am caught between his knees. I have a splinter in my finger, and he has fetched the tweezers from the medicine cabinet. He has a monocular magnifying glass wedged magically in his eye—I don’t know how he does it. I can’t get it to stay in my eye when I try. He switches back and forth between two instruments: the tweezers and the blade of his pocketknife.

I writhe in panic, but his knees tighten around me. They hold my little body still. I am pressed between the muscly levers of his legs, and I am safe.