Marilou Is Everywhere Page 16

  “Can I help you?” Darienne asked at last.

  “Why, yes,” the woman said. “I’m here about a missing-persons case. Jude Vanderjohn.”

  “OK. Do you have information for a detective, or something like that?”

  “Something like that,” the woman said. She had a deep chuckle. “You see, I’m Jude Vanderjohn. I’m not missing anymore. You can stop looking for me.”

  No fool, that Darienne. She led the woman to an interview room, and locked her in. By the time Detective Torboli arrived, the woman was beginning to protest her treatment by singing “We Shall Overcome,” stamping her loafers upon the linoleum and holding both fists in the air.

  According to her driver’s license, she was Jeanette Rush of Crucible, Pennsylvania, not that she was tricking anyone anyway. Jeanette Rush was strictly Caucasian and middle-aged, no matter what she said to the contrary. She told Detective Torboli she had been abducted by “a big black buck” and made to do “un-Christian things,” which she described with uninterruptible zeal. As she made her litany, the detective flexed his toes in his shoes, a strategy he adopted for retaining a sense of the real when it was otherwise hard to come by.

  “I suppose you can just give the reward money to me now,” she said. “Haha!”

  “I’m the missing black girl,” she also said.

  “It’s been so hard for me,” she also said. “I’m weary to my heart.”

  XVIII

  I had been folding paper cranes in Bernadette’s bed when the car pulled up. It was Christmas Eve, but we weren’t going to do anything to celebrate that night because she thought it was Christmas every few days, and I was feeling a little bit fat from all the toffee. At first, I thought maybe the car was someone’s relatives lost without their GPS. In the country, unexpectedly pulling your car up in front of someone’s house is almost as invasive as walking right in and helping yourself to a plate of dinner. I crouched by the window. Alistair wore a duster coat. His wheeled suitcase stuttered behind him in the snow and gravel. He doubled back with a crate of wine and a turkey. He pulled one of the bottles from the crate and presented it to Bernadette. “Beaujolais!” she said. It sounded like a salutation or a blessing. She cooed over the bottle like it was a newborn.

  I had never expected Alistair to come back. Didn’t he know we had a whole world without him? To me, it was just simply not a thing fathers would do. I had never seen my own father, for example. Once, he called the house and I picked up. He said, “Oh. Oh shit,” and asked me to get my mother.

  Going by the notes of their voices, Alistair and Bernadette were happy to see each other. It was like their last fight had never happened—and for Bernadette, I guess it hadn’t. For the first time, I considered the possibility that Bernadette’s forgetfulness made things easy for people other than myself.

  This was obviously no afternoon drop-in. My mind fizzed. Even if I stayed, I would have to excuse myself eventually or explain the whole arrangement to him. And if I stayed, I had no idea what sort of things Bernadette might say or do.

  I wrapped myself up in the warmest things I could find—a fur coat, an oxblood sweater, and mudded-up Walmart snow boots—and went out the back door and into the twilight. Toward home, because I really didn’t have anywhere else to go. I believe Alistair saw me slipping away, but I didn’t care, and couldn’t think of a better idea.

  My muscles were getting tough from all the farm chores. I picked my way up the hill with only a little sweat freezing on my scalp. Part of me felt very sorry for myself, and part of me enjoyed the romance of sudden exile—alone, in the woods, on Christmas! It sounded sorrowful in the exact way I liked. I couldn’t remember why I had ever been afraid to walk in the woods at night. It was all creatures, and I was a creature. Everything was legal between me and the rest.

  And maybe, although I would not have said so at the time, it felt a little beautiful to go out in the world without trying to hold my face a certain way and act how I thought Jude would act. I was empty of all that. It felt good breathing, and gaining the top of the hill I started to recognize little places in the woods where I had played, like the tree I liked to climb and the ledges where mosses drooled down underneath. My favorite pretend game was being a sea monster, and the rush of trees in the wind crashing like waves. Myself! I didn’t mind it. Now that I was in our woods again, I felt like I had come a long way. When I stopped and turned back, the lights at Bernadette’s were still near, but small enough that I could wink them out with my thumb.

  I heard the music before I crested the hill. Just a far-off small music with voices in it and all like that. Party sounds, whatever those are. I’m sure you know them. Why are they always the same? Every party I’ve watched from the outside has sounded like the people inside had turned into music. I wondered if Clinton had the TV turned all the way up, watching some black-and-white movie.

  But in fact it was an actual party. I saw it all in the yellow squares of the windows. Clinton held a shot glass up to Shayna’s lips and goosed her in the ribs as she tipped her head back to take it so the tequila went all down her shirt. Blond You and Black You were inside the house, which was unusual, and they were playing a little rough, busting into the table legs, trying to get at the ham. There was an astonishing amount of food on the table, though it looked like they’d already been eating it a long time. And in the middle, my mother. My mother, with a yellow paper crown slipped down over one eye. The lamp burned over her head. She ate up all the light in the room.

  Oh shit,” Clinton said.

  “Oh my god,” my mother said.

  Shayna poked at my blond roots with a clammy fingertip. “Wow. You should let me touch you up. Although I gotta say, it’s a look.”

  No one had gotten up until Shayna pulled off my coat and rubbed her hands all over my shoulders to warm me. Then my mother came and hugged me hard against her. She had to reach up a little. Had she always been this small? She had one of those hairdos that looked like clouds, and I could tell she had just dyed it because the fuzz hairs at her temples were vivid, the way they aren’t in nature, and even though it was winter she was wearing shorts and little high-heeled bronze sandals. She looked fine, perfect, wonderful. She looked like something was wrong with me. I closed my eyes and some tears melted out, although I didn’t mean or want them to. She smelled, as always, like bread, copper, and hair spray.

  “My only, only, only,” she said. “Baby girl, oh, I missed you. Let’s make you a plate. You look skinny!” Clinton made a face like: That’s not skinny. And I wasn’t. I actually never was. I was embarrassed for Mom, the way she tried to flatter me.

  But she put together some ham pieces with globes of fat on their ends, and scraped up mashed potatoes, scummy green beans, and Jell-O salad from the bowls. I was trying to tell how long she had been back based on the housekeeping. I guessed at least a week: The moldings gleamed and the windows were mirrory, without the feathered fingerprints we left from poking out at the world. Even the junk mail had been stacked in a wicker basket under the table.

  “Where’s Virgil?” I said. They stopped. Everyone looked to Mom.

  “Well, honey,” my mother said, “he’s in jail.” Her eyebrows were all the way up. She looked at me like my asking was more outrageous than what she had just said. “Or didn’t you know?”

  “He’s in jail?”

  “He’s been in, shit, two months?” Clinton said. “Thought you’d’ve heard. Everybody was talking about it. It was after they found that girl’s wallet. It’s all bullshit, of course. Everybody knows what she was up to.” Shayna skimmed her eyes away to the ceiling.

  “How was I supposed to hear about that?” My mother rolled her eyes and snapped the ash off her cigarette. The ashtray was full of them, Camel lights with wet pink gloss on the ends. “And when did you get back, anyway?” I asked her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Clinton answered for her: “You was
the one who left.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me Mom was back?”

  Clinton held up his palms like: You got me. He shrugged.

  A glacier built around the moment. And then I sat down. I ate the food because I couldn’t think of a single other thing to do. I sank down through my own water. It closed up over my head and down I went. They were on talking about something else. The longwall mine broke the water table under Duke Lake, which had become a field of mud. Someone was arsoning cars on the back roads around Hundred. Edna Mae’s house was full of snakes, and she wouldn’t let anybody in to help. Somebody sang a bad anthem at the Super Bowl, and people got fat, and I had forgotten it was like this. Always, always, always. No matter the event, talk would flood over it and hurl it away. Bernadette’s was also flooded with talk, but it was different. We named where our feelings lay in our bodies, and were they: heavy, feathery, choking, chilly, staticky, thrumming. Name it, she told me, and it won’t own your ass. Just then my mother was talking about a diet in Parade magazine where you pray over your food to bar the calories’ entrance. I dropped my eyes under the table. I was ashamed of something I didn’t quite understand at that time, which was: My mother was not very smart. It wasn’t just that she had never heard of Tintoretto, because who gives a shit about that? But there was some flavor of stillness in her gaze. She did not see any worlds beneath this one. This was a rude new understanding, and I did not care for it at all.

  That’s when I noticed the baby. It was sat in its car seat on the floor in the kitchen like groceries someone had forgotten to put up. Also, nobody was talking to it or looking at it. It was Mom’s, I knew right away, although I couldn’t say how. The baby looked like it had been carved out of a potato, except for the motion in its face.

  When it was time for presents, we moved along to the living room, which had gone chilly from being empty, the way rooms do in winter. Clinton got Mom a shrink-wrapped basket of lotions packed in red crinkle paper. Shayna got her a trio of jewel-tone nail polishes. Mom had new binoculars for Clinton, grippy socks and scratchers for Shayna. I liked the names. Cash Time. King of Cash. Buckets of Cash. Wild Cherries. I didn’t understand that there was no present for me at first. “You girls can share,” my mother said when she caught me eyeing the lottery tickets. I looked around, and everybody inspected their hands. The air fell apart. I wondered if we might address this awkwardness, but Mom only sighed, smacked the tops of her thighs, and walked off to skim a little more tequila out of the bottle. Shayna whispered, “My present to you is a makeover, you goober freak.”

  The rest of the day we tried to scoot into formations with each other, but it was hard. I sat and investigated the baby. When I put a finger on his forehead, it left a white mark for a moment, before the blood rushed back in.

  I snuck away to my bedroom, but it had withered somewhat, a dried-out place. I could not believe how carelessly I had left my broken-necked doll there in the dark. She was flung into the corner, in a pose of cartoon despair. I held her to me and tried to warm the aloneness out of her, but she stayed cold against my chest. At that moment, Virgil was in a brick room called a jail. I wondered, for some reason, what he would do if he caught a cold in there. Did they give you tissues? And I imagined my brother pinching the top of his nose, looking up at the ceiling, where I was watching him. I swear he saw me, and it was the real thing. His eyes were wet. And mine, too. Mine, too. I was crying.

  Most of the time, my mind knew I was doing something wrong by being Jude, but I didn’t usually allow my whole self to know. At Bernadette’s, everything was easy. If my mind got loud, all I had to do was ask about Redondo Beach and off she’d go. Once, I hurt Bernadette’s feelings by spitting out a bite of pancake—there was a thumbtack in it, to be fair, but she was much insulted all the same. All I had to do was leave the room and wait thirty seconds. When I came back, well, hello honey lamb, and where have you been? None of that worked here. I knew I could get Virgil out of jail if I told the truth about the phone call. And I also knew I could not tell the truth. I was too miserable about myself, too afraid to show what I had done. The feeling tilted upon itself and began to spin, and I could not allow it to pick up speed, to pick me up and fling me. I slammed the door and went to wash the dinner dishes because I didn’t want to show that my hands were shaking.

  While I washed up, Mom and Clinton and Shayna watched a kid movie on television. It was about a girl and an orphaned dog. Mom and Clinton passed a bag of pork rinds between them and if they felt any distress for the girl or the dog, it was not breaking the surface. The TV was new, and so large that it felt like it was trying to engulf you, which they enjoyed.

  By the time I was done, Clinton had changed the channel to some old football game. Shayna pulled me onto the couch and shared her blanket. Nobody was saying anything about the baby, about Virgil, about where did I get a fur coat even. About Bernadette, about Jude, about the numbness in your belly that lets you eat until you disappear. The crowd in the background of the game was like a snow of sound. I believe the football drone should be made a medicine, if anything should be made a medicine. I know I would take it every day, if it was a pill.

  I stayed for three days. Shayna and I saw the talk shows. I let her fix my roots. We bundled up to walk to Pecjak’s for something to do. Mom was into making chili “Texas style,” which only meant she simmered it until it was dark like a scab. That’s where she had been, apparently. Texas. The baby’s name was Wade. I thought that was just the most bedoomed name I had ever heard. Wade stayed in his car seat in the kitchen most of the day. As if by fairy magic, I knew not to pick him up or chatter at him. I know that sounds cold, but I figured I had got through it myself, and he would have to do the same.

  My eyes bent in a weird way without Jude’s glasses, which I had hidden in my coat pocket. I tried to slip back into being Cindy, but I wasn’t sure I remembered the right way to do it. Wasn’t I a sloucher? Didn’t I play with my fingers and mumble, or was I remembering this all wrong? I sassed back at Shayna so much she started calling me fireball, but not in a mean way and it felt nice.

  From our back fence I could see down to Bernadette’s house. Over the day, I spied from there so often Mom thought I was sneaking cigarettes, and said I might as well smoke honestly. So I smoked, too, and prayed my eyes down into the valley to disappear Alistair’s car. When it was finally gone and stayed gone for a few hours, I chanced it and went down into the woods. I didn’t say a word of good-bye to my family.

  I picked up a stack of cordwood on my way into the house. I wanted it to look like I’d been working outside all morning, long enough that she might have forgotten the interruption in our routine. It had occurred to me that, with a few solid days in the house, Alistair could have finally convinced her that Jude was missing, and my magic might be over. My hope was to slip back into the rhythm of things without rippling the surface—if I made my presence quiet for most of the afternoon, I figured I’d be safe. I waltzed in and took care to stoke the stove and stack the wood without speaking, just like I would on an ordinary day. The house smelled wrong, like milk in the back of a mouth. Bernadette wore an entirely new outfit: tufted slippers, a fuzzy purple sweater, wide-legged pants of black silk. A pouch of her belly leaped out over the waistband. Her cheeks and nose were bright red. She didn’t look up.

  There wasn’t much visible evidence of Alistair. He had forgotten a razor on the sink, was all. But I detected a new note in the silence. There was some sulk in it, like waiting for the other person to apologize. I found all twelve bottles of wine empty and rinsed clean in a way that seemed a little self-righteous. I guessed they had ended with a fight. Trash had spilled out the top of the can and again, somehow, there were dirty dishes in the oven.

  “Baby, hurry. We’ve got to get started if we’re going to make it through this box set! Get in here.”

  “Box set?” I hoped if I began talking from offstage it would help me come slowly into
focus again.

  “This William Holden box set you got me. Come on, you said. You said we would watch it today and tomorrow and tomorrow. And where are the horsetails?”

  “What horsetails?” And what were horsetails, I wondered.

  “The ones you said you’d get for my tea.” I propped myself in the doorway. “Oh god, don’t tell me you forgot.” She clucked at me and moved aside on the couch so I could position myself for what turned out to be Invisible Stripes. Alistair must have gotten it for her. Bernadette petted my shoulders like always, but I got an itch on me like I was going to shake apart if she kept touching me like that. I shrugged her off the way a horse shrugs off flies. But her hand was back again a moment later. I tried to sit through, but she kept rubbing the same circle on my shoulder, and the spot got warm and irritated. There was something needy about it. I shook her off again. She resettled her hand right away.