Marilou Is Everywhere Page 13

  In a different hospital, they found another black girl who said she wasn’t who she said she was. She had also been dumped in a courtesy wheelchair, although all she needed was a dose of Narcan. They had kept her on psych eval for a week because she had self-administered cuts on her arms and claimed no knowledge of the United States of America. Instead she insisted she had come from another world. You think this place is real, but it’s not, she said. This is a display, like fireworks. Very pretty. But not real. She nevertheless proceeded to give the police a full description, address, and Social Security number for her ex-boyfriend, and advised them as to which drawers in his mother’s china hutch hid his kiddie porn hard drives. Detective Torboli made the arrests. Her information closed down a handful of small-timers. When he went back to tell her the outcome, she had discharged herself and disappeared. He found her months later living in one of the halfway houses. She was running a fierce shadow business doing manicures for the other girls. She had made a detailing paintbrush out of her own hair taped with exquisite precision to a golf pencil, and she accepted cigarettes, Red Bull, or dish chores in payment for her art. All the fractional housing girls lit their smokes and picked their eyebrows with landscaped fingernails of painted tigers and pink lightning. She thanked Detective Torboli for what he had done, although she maintained that everything was a dharma, and all dharmas should be regarded as dreams.

  I did not say what I was or wasn’t. This was a parlor game. Like the day we played charades: Bernadette made the slips of pink paper for the punch bowl, and they said things like JUNKIE, FARMER, SCIENTIST, KING KONG. CHER. She got drunk. A little too early in the afternoon, but the day was warm and I could not really argue with gin and ice and gin. It was my time and I felt fat. A rose is. The dew of a frigid October. Buster Keaton’s beautiful eyes. I said there was no way to act this one out. HERACLITUS? Who the hell? She tried to charade it by putting her arched pale foot again and again down on the red-and-blue carpet. I did not of course then know the old thing about the twice-stepped-in river. Mine were too simple: SUNSHINE, SHOTGUN, FRYPAN. No challenge, said Bernadette, although I maintain sunshine is difficult to act out. How? Do you point to the sky, to your arm, your heart? I pulled another pink card. It said OCEAN. According to the impossible rules I had to show the broken strip of film from my childhood and hope it telegraphed something guessable. Which was all: hay dazzle, green fire, a black bird guzzling up the gasoline where it spilled. Most mandatory days on holidays, having fun with the whole family. Spending time together, the muscles clank. You pay out the chain into a depthless lake, but the bottom is so soft you miss the glitch when the anchor hits. I said who is Buster Keaton anyway. Bernadette said he was very athletic. But neurotic.

  She liked to trick the gas men, when one of them needed to come down to the house to check some surveyor’s mark or when they stood there in the edge of the maples to smoke. Come on down here, she’d say. Have you some lemonade. This is my girlfriend Ann Richards—and she’d push me into their work-burned hands. Oh yes, me and Ann Richards, we are having a beautiful Sunday. Monday? Have it your way, I’m not bothered. They bore it decent. One of them would stand around talking about happy nonsense with his gloves shoved down in his back pockets, pinging his eyes between the two of us like he could almost smell the trick. The foreman sometimes left a box of doughnuts.

  Once, I told Bernadette it was my birthday, just to see what she would do.

  “My god, is it January already? Of course. Of course. Goodness. We’ll have to tell your fortune immediately. There’s no better day, really. The birthdays are how you can really know.” She put her thumb over the sun and frowned. “I wish you’d said something a bit earlier, Ann Richards. We’re losing the light already. We’ll have to hurry to do this right.”

  She sat me at the table and brought out a photocopied piece of paper with a circle and pentagram inside it. She bid me close my eyes and then snatched a clot of hair from the top of my head and put it in the middle. It looked like a strange filmy root. I was afraid to breathe too hard and set it scouring off the table, except of course it had come from my own head and more could be gotten. In her left hand, she held the pendulum with the clear column of quartz at the end, the string trained around her index finger. With her right hand, she pressed down upon my shoulder and felt around on my face.

  “OK, I’ve got it. What do you want to know about yourself?”

  “What will I be?”

  “Be? Be? Nope. Too tricky. Start with something little.”

  “What will happen to me tomorrow?” The pendulum took up a little orbit. Bernadette placed her finger here and there on the chart. At one point, it swung back around the other way.

  “Tomorrow you will cross a river. From the other side, you will see the truth.”

  “Will I ever fall in love?”

  “Yes, one time. But it will be all you need.”

  “Am I good?”

  “Sweetie,” she said. “Of course.”

  “What will I be?”

  She took a long time. She touched my chin and nose and wagged her fingers back and forth over my forehead. Her face soured, and she checked those places again. The pendulum danced all over. She shook out her hand and resumed. It really was my birthday. I hadn’t told anyone, but I was sure that it would make what she said especially true.

  “What is it? What is it saying?”

  “You will be a moth.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, I don’t know! I only know the answers. I don’t ever know why they are right.”

  XIV

  Dark came on earlier. The blue light had a glassy depth to it. Bernadette said it was the hours before the moon rose that made the color reverberate in its vaulted bowl over us. The first stars were scrawled in, and Virgil was late getting me. When I called at the house nobody answered. I had already shut down the house for the night, but Bernadette kept me company on the porch wrapped in a blanket. She had a little cigar. It looked like she was smoking a child’s finger. I wasn’t wrapped in a blanket because I was certain Virgil would be there any second.

  But the night got deeper and instead the lights over the barn eaves up and down the road began casting down orange in the dark with the moths churning up in them. I didn’t want to go inside because that would mean something had gone wrong with Virgil and I was admitting that it was a little scary. He had never not come to get me. He had never even been late. I walked out to the road, to see if I could spot his headlights.

  And I had never been in Bernadette’s house through the night before. I usually left when the light was still bending down hard upon everything. I walked a little ways up the gravel toward the road like that would make me hear the truck coming. I had my grocery sack with my things in it—a set of coins we’d found behind the bookcase, and a bag of orange peels I was drying out on the radiators as a project. But the night made its one sound, shiny shiny, and the silence jingled with nothing to sop it up or get in its way.

  When I turned back to the house, I felt like I saw it for the first time. It was a lantern on the slope and inside the crud of fingerprints and handprints just looked soft yellow everywhere. It was something else. Beautiful. As I had never truly seen it before, I felt somewhat shy now to walk back up to it. But I sat at Bernadette’s feet. I had told her that I was supposed to have a sleepover at a friend’s house, and the friend’s mom was just late. She suggested that maybe I should call my friend. I didn’t feel like reminding her that I had already called twice. I had listened to it ring through.

  “You seem worried,” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “There’s nothing for me to worry about.”

  “That’s not how it feels.” She put her hand on my back. I tried hard not to tense it up. “I can feel it right here.”

  “I’m fine!”

  “I really do wish you’d tell me, honey. I can tell. It’s been har
d for a while. You’ve been different.” The first two tears fell straight from my eyes because I was looking down. The shame of it, to cry for being given a mistaken kindness, made me lose my iron. I pressed my jaw down hard against my chest.

  Shayna didn’t find Jude’s disappearance mysterious. She said the girl got pregnant and split for terror or died bleeding on the linoleum of a doctor’s home kitchen, or she was sick in the head for all-time reasons that will be known as classics forever: Teenage! Teenage! Teenage! And what else is there? I knew it. I wrote the things to myself on my legs high up where my shorts covered. L-O-V-E I wrote with a safety pin, just lightly so it was a pale scrape. I never could draw my own blood. Even teenage, I wasn’t that kind.

  But also what I thought about it was: We were the same as animals anyway. And an animal leaves its home for its own compelling reasons. Didn’t I? The logic runs on a track small as a toy train, just around and around. I can neither confirm nor deny. But I guess this is what makes me true rural.

  I would have been Jude a million times if you had asked me every day of the million. Gravity did not knit her so hard to this earth, I thought. Even disappeared and tortured, I wanted to be her and not myself. Jude, it seemed to me, had projected her personal world into the world so hard that it pulled her inside out. I had to love that kind of trouble from a distance because I couldn’t make it mine. Now, that’s a sick thing to say. But it was true that I envied something I so totally misunderstood.

  Bernadette rubbed her hands against each other and laid them on my back. I felt like I was being prepared for a mythic journey. I would get to go somewhere dangerous alone trusted as an envoy, maybe that was the feeling. Though I was light I was not often lifted up, any part. She took the shawl off her own shoulders and laid it on mine. It got colder.

  That was the night they arrested Virgil, although I wouldn’t know about it until later. A car wash attendant found a wallet and cell phone wedged under the trunk mat in Amber’s car when she had it detailed. Both were Jude’s. It made sense—the girls had been in a hurry to get away from the campsite and thrown their things into the cars to sort out later. She brought it right to the police, wrapped up in a Giant Eagle bag. Just like that, the theory of Jude the runaway was dead. Suddenly, it seemed wrong to them how much talking Virgil had been able to do on his conviction that Jude had run away. Just the week before, he told the detectives how Bernadette beat her daughter. He had seen it under Jude’s clothes. Still he loved Bernadette. She was almost more a mother than his own mother, even if she had some harsh ways. The police had been about set to stop looking for Jude entirely, not that they ever had much to go on. So when Amber found Jude’s things, the case shaped up all of a sudden.

  And it was more than this: Virgil had apparently stolen Bernadette’s Tiffany silver at some point over the summer, and tried to sell it to the very same antiques dealer who had appraised it for Bernadette the year before. The dealer recognized an irregularity in the dessert forks. When they pressed Virgil about the silver, they caught him in some other lies. I don’t know what about, but it looked pretty bad for him.

  I didn’t know any of this then. Instead, I was feeling very sorry for myself, forgotten and feeling it in the pit of my stomach, which was suddenly as empty as a bell. What would I do if Virgil never came? I sat there trying to figure how I would make my way through the dim woods. I should be no fool about darkness since I grew up in that place, but it had always a waiting kind of silence to it and I never much liked going away from the house when night was soaking through the trees. Bernadette was shivering. So was I. Actually, I was furious. Where were they, any of my family? Bernadette’s house was feeling more like home, and it’s true that I loved it, but some part of me was also waiting for them to say enough and drag me back. Who would let me do such a thing? They didn’t care, and here was the proof. In my mind, I snipped the threads between us. I wouldn’t concern myself with them any more than they concerned themselves with me. So I let Bernadette bring me inside. Her hand on the back of my shoulders, it was somehow clearing out the space before me for me to move through it. Easier than usual. We went up the stairs, past the bathroom and the boxes of junk in the hallway and the night with no curtains was shuddering in at us with the drafts, the huge dark air wandering through my ribs. It didn’t make a difference. It was a spell. I’d ruin it to speak and so I didn’t.

  Jude’s room still had the police tape blocking it. I had ducked under it every time I’d snuck in to steal her clothes. Bernadette pulled up the tape at one edge and it fluttered down, so we were in. The room smelled sort of wet. A window was open. I watched her pull the bedding up. Jammed under the pillow there was a paperback painted green on the page edges. I sat in the shallow divot and then gave over everything, everything. I mean that I lay down. Like you would lie down next to a river and die. Bernadette closed the bed over me and who were we in that moment. I beg of you, I beg of you. You tell me. You tell me. She plugged in a night light shaped like a seashell. I closed my eyes and saw the usual thing, the red and blue temples, before I went to sleep.

  XV

  The year I went back to school, I had a therapist for a little while. She was free, or she was free for me, anyway. A People magazine story had made me famous, temporarily, but not in a way I liked or could manage. I didn’t know how to go back to living with my mother as if the rest of these things hadn’t happened. I knew I wasn’t doing a convincing job of being a person, just from the way that the teachers looked at me, but I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. The guidance counselor drove me to the therapist herself, and dropped me back at the school afterward to ride the activity bus home. She sent me home with papers that made it seem like I was in detention. I didn’t realize until later she was covering in case my mom wouldn’t let me go to therapy. Which just shows how little she understood my situation—I had been signing my own report cards and permission slips for years. She seemed to enjoy feeling like she was doing an outlaw thing in helping me. She had this very tense, serious way of asking if I wanted to pick the radio station. If I played along (shyly brave, terse/poetic), she’d get us cheeseburgers on the way back.

  I liked going to the therapist. I got the sense from the building that other people were paying a lot of money to sit there and look at the black-and-white photographs she had hung in the beige chill of her office.

  It was a strange building. The outside was tiled up to the roof in green, something that looked like it had been chipped off of a seashell. Every other building on the block was an old-age home. Every building, including Dr. Holden’s office, had a parking loop in front like a hotel, and somebody was always waiting desolate there to be picked up. They wore loose pastel clothes but you could still see the bodies underneath them had been squashed in evil ways to look old and flesh bubbled out wrongly under armpits and over guts. I loved it, walking in there. No matter what else I could feel the essential column of my body under me, the muscle in it, the rightness of the gristle and bone which stood me up straight on one end and pushed me around the skin of the earth in a more or less decent way.

  For some reason, the walls and ceiling were covered with the same brown carpet they used on the floor. Dr. Holden had long gray hair, very pretty. She wore large necklaces with chocks of amber suspended by rope and wire, earrings like little yellow eyes dangling from under her hair. She wrote on a yellow legal pad while I talked. Sometimes she didn’t write anything, but watched me. She reminded me of someone I liked, and I couldn’t figure it out for such a long time. It didn’t matter what I said. Her face never moved.

  I told her about all the lipsticks I stole throughout my life, Shayna, the way I used to flash the cars that drove by. It felt like I told Dr. Holden the same things every session, but we both knew there was something I refused to say. Every time she asked me to turn out my pockets, I had the same inventory, the same magical traveling penny that showed up there and lay under all of my thoughts, and no matter how
different and particular I felt myself to be, it seemed I had only really one fact about myself, which was what I had done to Jude. And I wouldn’t say it. I know it isn’t supposed to work this way, therapy, but I found it depressing that there was nothing else to my life but its own straw and dust and stuffing.

  Sometimes she let me talk about things that didn’t go anywhere. I told her how I had always seen an emptiness in everything, calm and almost friendly. It rang and rang like a white room. And sometimes it made things sparkle in unreliable ways, and how people smiled in the grocery store seemed suddenly troubling. Sometimes she asked me about Virgil, but with Virgil I only talked about how smart he was at whistling, his made-up preacher voice.

  I thought I would shock Dr. Holden by saying how much I loved living with Bernadette. I loved watching Jude’s skirts luft down around my legs as I sat under a crabapple to read the dirty yellow copy of Miss Lonelyhearts I had found by the bathtub, letting my hand dream through my hair precisely, so exactly unlike Cindy in the doing. I loved the stains the tumbled crabapples left on my skirt—or I loved not caring about them because I was so beautiful that they didn’t matter or in fact made me more so for not caring. I could fill my mouth with grapes to almost choke me, and be laughing with the sun in my hair. I loved being hungry because I could eat cheese and guava sandwiches until their lust was gone. The lust moved to other things, even water. Even plain, cold water. I loved the empty pillow in my head listening to Bernadette’s jazz records, I loved that my little tits were just a handful of porridge. I loved how Panda Jane followed me through the fields. I loved the grain of my sweat sparkling in my hair after we had been hauling the wood or bent into the earth pulling chickweed. I loved finding what I loved. I found it by echo. Mine, mine, mine, I would think. This world is mine. It is mine. It is mine.