Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  “Mom, stop it.”

  “Hmm? Whatever you say, sweetie lamb.” And then, as if it had just occurred to her, she dropped her hand on my shoulder and traced the same circle again. I pinned my jaw in and tried not to flinch. How had my mother been back a whole week and not sent for me? My mother? How come nobody told me about Virgil? I always became a mind reader when I was sad, so I could hear it just then, how Clinton must have told Mom I was spoiled and thought myself better than them all of a sudden, gone down the road to listen to operas and eat figs, whatever I imagined him imagining me doing, except did Clinton even know what figs were, I couldn’t be certain. Would he have thought opera? He wouldn’t. But it was true. Bernadette put vinegar and black pepper on figs, and I liked them that way. I adopted the opinion that Nessun Dorma was beautiful and to hell with what it meant.

  I had started to think that all the emptiness I saw in things was not bad but a holy place. Maybe it was fucked up that I couldn’t give myself permission to think that kind of thing unless I was being this slippery person I invented who could disappear in so many ways and yet feel more solid than my disappearing self, and who was the opposite of the real Jude, who was also gone. Who was in danger. And then I thought again of the phone call. I petted and nursed all my reasons: It wasn’t my business. Jude had meant to call her mother, and that’s what she got. It wasn’t my fault that her mother was impossible.

  My shoulder felt red and stinging in the place where Bernadette kept tracing on it. Anyone who looked at us would assume that she was comforting me, but it was a comfort I didn’t want. It burned. I fought myself to stay there under her hand, and bit my lip to keep from flinching away. The moment the movie was over, I jumped up to turn off the TV. A white repeating line skipped left to right across the screen.

  “Oh, don’t turn it off! I love this part,” Bernadette said. “Oh, it’s just so sad and so true.”

  Jude’s room felt haunted that night. Oh, listen to me: I was haunted that night, but I always attribute my moods to the air. On the pillow, someone had left a box papered in blue and gold. I opened the card: JUDE. I hadn’t even let myself know how much it hurt to watch my family opening presents without me, and it all came out just then. My throat tied itself up. It didn’t even occur to me that this gift might be for the real Jude, and not me. I didn’t recognize Alistair’s handwriting, and why would I?

  I lifted out a hand-painted bowl. Inside, cats, goats, and rabbits danced around the sun. On the outer rim, a night sky prickled with stars. There was a note wrapped in pink tissue, which I also opened.

  Dear daughter:

  Do you know the definition of faith? I thought I did. For all my life I have served the idea that faith and hope are continuous. Recent events have persuaded me to visit the dictionary, however. Suffering makes familiar words taste strange, I suppose. In any case, I found that faith is defined as “possessing a complete certainty,” or in some variants, “acting upon a complete certainty.” It occurs to me, truly, how tremendous a task that is for us here on Earth. I don’t know how to do it. I am prey to superstition and misery. I have told others that if they could get quiet enough, they would hear within themselves the voice of the eternal, and all would be peace with them. I had no idea what I was asking them to do. In fact, I am ashamed that I ever considered myself qualified to give such advice. Only now have I become truly qualified: My heart is broken. I am listening for the eternal. I seem to think that if I bring you this gift, you will have to come home and receive it. Maybe I’m a fool, but maybe, in fact, you will. Maybe you will read these words. I hold the thread of that moment lightly in my hands, even though hope is a little less than “complete certainty.” But in writing this, I am perhaps keeping a part of you alive: The part of you that reads it. Here is my certainty. I know that giving thanks proves God’s presence—otherwise, there is no one to thank. Please, enjoy this gift. It reminded me of your favorite story (the rabbits).

  Love, Papa

  The shame rode me around the room. I hung somewhere just outside of myself, crying for all of time. I saw Virgil looking up to a sign in the blue. I saw him drawing a cross against the bare sky, just a little one with his pinkie. I didn’t know what it meant, except that it was a warning. Everything saw me. All of this world is a witness. I put the bowl away in the closet, under heaped clothes. It seemed to hum in my mind, in a way I couldn’t stop hearing. The letter, too. I hid them away so they couldn’t see me. And still, I felt the eyes of them gleaming from the dark.

  XIX

  It was a warm, strange day. The sun was on my shoulders and I felt confused about it before I figured out what it was. I had thought it was some sort of mammal landed on me, flung out of the sky.

  I stood by the window and watched an icicle with the sun pouring through it. It went bright as an arc flame. I made it a game—I burned my eyes on it, then brought the roving purple spot around the valley, tracing the places where the hills and sky met. In the yard, the goats roamed in a circle. Wide, though they could not get out of it. Ann Richards went toward the road and skirted there with her head pinned hard against her shoulder. The other goats were walking like that, too. They were coming over the lawn, on the long rip of snow the wind had carved up ornamentally.

  Bernadette was pickling gooseberries—where had she gotten these gooseberries?—and the pink pepper fumed up into the air and the vinegar was like a bolt thrown through my nose. She was horribly, horribly drunk. I didn’t even care to try and stop her anymore. She had burned her hand on the saucepan and taped a paper towel over the puffy skin. She was being impossible and I was sick of it. She had been seeing William Holden movies all over the place. I kept pulling her face out of the steaming fumes on the stove where she claimed to be watching The Wild Bunch. “Baby, why are you at the window? What are you watching?” she asked me.

  “The goats are playing. It’s—I don’t know. They’re waltzing. Come look.”

  They were still going in circles, the goats. They all had their heads wrenched down to the side. Butter and Dirtbike did tight spins like jewelry box ballerinas. They looked like people who had to pretend, for whatever reason, to be goats, but could not bring enough naturalness. They reminded me of how in cartoons, you whistle to seem innocent if you’ve done a bad thing, or when there’s a bad thing you want to do. Dolores chased her tail again and again until she fell down. Maybe they were dancing. I really didn’t know anything.

  I thought Bernadette would find it funny. There was so much I thought terrible that made her laugh. She loved really terrible things. But she sank to her knees by Dolores, gentled her, pulled the goat’s lower eyelid down from the eye and looked into the skin. It was white, like a sliver of eye had come off. Before I could think Bernadette ran back into the house. Dolores was vibrating, very gently, but the quiver kept her from getting up. When I went back in Bernadette had the phone off its cradle already, calling the veterinarian. She was crying. Hurry was all I heard. I put on a real coat. I figured it might be a long time we were outside with them, but I had no idea.

  Doctor Vic pulled his truck right up on the grass and pulled on his gloves. They dimpled from the dark hairs on the backs of his hands. It was a dainty gesture. Everything that happened, I was seeing it wrong.

  Doctor Vic called them together in a pen. Hey pretty, hey pretty, he said to them. Get on over here, pretty girl, right there is just fine. And took out his pen flashlight to look under their eyes, like Bernadette had. The truck was still running. He put on a sterile face mask and gave one to Bernadette. He brought out a black bag, a case from the bag, and assembled five needles on the driver’s seat. They had neon green plungers. I remember because it was the only color I saw all day.

  Bernadette held the goats for their shots. I tried to pet on Ann Richards, but Doctor Vic held me back with a stiff arm. I don’t remember any of the things they were saying, only the tone. It was like TV voices bleeding through a motel wall. Ber
nadette had gloves on also. Nobody offered me any.

  Again I thought to find a way to be helping by bending my body over the goats like they did. Bernadette couldn’t look at me.

  “Go inside,” she said.

  “The time for that is gone,” Doctor Vic said to me. “Enough, OK?”

  I wanted to be useful. I made more coffee. When there is nothing else to do, I believe somebody should make coffee. But that day, my hands had died off at the wrists and I couldn’t do anything. I looked at the percolator and tried to remember its deed in all this. What part of it was a mouth, what part of it would talk to me. The radio had flown into a patch of weather static. It was all around me, the snapping fuzz of that sound. I stood still at the sink, trying to feel it. It scattered against my hair and against my throat, which was wet because I was crying again.

  I filled a thermos and brought it out to them. Doctor Vic was pulling apart the round bale in the feeder with his hands. He had gone crazy, I figured. The bale was a darker brown inside, and the sun bleached the crust. But I didn’t know about hay. This would sound impossible to some people, I know. The Stoats are mowers. That is all a Stoat is good for. Nobody should know hay if a Stoat does not.

  “This is your problem right here,” Doctor Vic said. Bernadette had taken off her gloves, but she was warming her hands on the back of her neck. She looked down into what he held. The hay was foxed through with black speckles. It was mold, although I didn’t understand this until later. “This bale hasn’t been properly changed for months. It’s listeriosis, all of them.”

  “What do you think?” she asked him. They were still not looking at me. The hay was my job, and we all knew it was.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  XX

  It was like somebody had put out an alert on the radio. For all I know, that’s right.

  The trucks pulled alongside Doctor Vic’s, and when there was no more room, parked along the road with two tires hanging off the edge, where it rolled away and down to the field across from the house. They had thermoses, too, and splits of wood from their own supplies. Doctor Vic picked a spot away behind the barn, across the crick which was black, like it went down for miles. He indicated for them to lay the fires there. They passed the wood hand from hand in a chain that went up to the road. Damon Wise, Buddy Metheny, Marlon Whipkey, Asa Gehoe, Mark and Wyatt Tedrow. Even Clinton. He looked like anyone I didn’t know. If he saw me, he didn’t signal it.

  They were not all men. There was Janice Creekmur in tan coveralls with her hair clipped to the plastic band of a ball cap and Shauna Minor in just a flannel jacket, smoking a cigarette hung from her lip. Their cheeks were planed in shadow and their lips clutched upon their teeth. I looked for some mothering there, and got nothing but stone.

  Clinton stood by where they laid the wood, tenting a piece just so here and there. I stared until he looked up, but there was nothing in his face for me, so I stayed away. Kayla waved to me but then dropped her eyes away. Even Melda McConaughey was there. She wore a plush pink coat that looked like it could hardly be warm enough. But she passed the wood up from the trucks just like the rest of everyone.

  They knew what to do without speaking. Once they had got the wood laid, Shauna went along with a stack of newspapers in one arm, crumpling paper in her other hand and stuffing it in where it could light and catch. Have you never seen a row of men go down to the earth on their sides and kiss and kiss at the air, and it was dark by then but their faces began to bloom orange as each flame caught. People, when they passed her, touched Bernadette at a place in the middle of her back. Not long, but often. She had folded her arms upon herself and pressed a clump of tissue against her face.

  I was useless. The whole thing looked like a party someone had sucked the air out of. Mark Tedrow had turned the water troughs over to use for benches. You might as well point your feet to the fire, I suppose. Well. And might as well admit there was whiskey in the thermos Janice Creekmur passed down the line. I didn’t presume to try and take any. I was too ashamed. It was for the people who were working, and I was not working. Mondo came and sat on my feet. He let me drop my hand through his fur, which was dirty and left a powder on my palm. But he eventually left me also. I could only be given so much. I left the circle of light and went back into the kitchen. It hurt too much to keep lying. I knew that whatever happened when I told the truth would hurt, too, but it didn’t seem possible anything could feel worse, and so in some way, I passed through a door in the air. Some part of me picked up my feet and carried me out of my silence.

  I called the police. The house was strange inside, so bright and empty around my voice. I told them about the phone call, Richard Klink, the horses, everything I could remember. I was a concerned neighbor who had dropped by and happened to overhear the phone call, I told them. I made it sound like it had just happened that day. I didn’t give my name in case they realized that Virgil was my brother. As soon as I hung up, I called Alistair. I told him what I had told the police, and suggested he call them himself to confirm that I wasn’t phoning in bullshit. I waited a long time for him to speak.

  “Cindy Stoat. Weren’t you at the house the last time I visited?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You left before I could say hello. You ran out in such a hurry.”

  “I had to get home for Christmas.” Why didn’t he sound angry? It frightened me. A prickle crept up between my shoulder blades and plucked at the cords in my neck.

  “Certainly. You spend quite a bit of time with Bernie, it seems.”

  “I didn’t figure she should be alone.”

  “Cindy, perhaps you can tell me: Just when did Jude phone the house?”

  “Two months ago. About.” Really, it had been more like three. As much as I tried to pretend otherwise, I knew this exactly.

  “I see.” He held his breath. Or I did.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have no doubt of that.” And he was gone.

  I wanted to sleep for a long time, and considered it. But the greater part of me insisted that I watch everything else happen.

  Nobody had stayed with the goats. They cried in little ways that I could hear. I can’t think about it, ever. When I got close to them, someone at the fire stood and stared, maybe ready to up and remove me physically. I didn’t understand that people could catch what was killing them, that it was dangerous. But I knew it was my task to watch it all. Maybe I can be forgiven some other things if you understand this. I did not go in the house all night, and I didn’t speak. Bernadette came out with a .22 rifle and I watched as she shot each goat in the back of the head. The last of them were paralyzed, and their legs shook from the blasts. I watched. I watched the blood paint parts of them black. I thought my breath would shatter me. And I watched Mark Tedrow lay each goat on the tarp which he carried between himself and one of the other men. The goats slid into the fire. And I watched the women in coveralls stir the coals with a rake as the wood came apart into gray stones. I watched as they turned the wood over, over. And the smell of burned wet leather from their boots where they stood too close to the heat. But what was most terrible, and which I’ll never forget, as the fire began to go in on the goats’ carcasses, was how they seemed for a moment alive again. It was just the idea of a shiver, the way a hand twitches just before the phone rings. What was really the fire settling in and beginning to fuse their bones looked like breath returning. I thought Ann Richards and Panda Jane and Butter and Dirtbike might get up and walk out through the flames, and it seemed possible to me that we were all mistaken, none of the goats had died at all but each one of us people had, and we would stand around in the cold like this while in the other world they went on grazing, standing on cinder blocks. And maybe the fire wasn’t a fire at all but the window where we could see into the other world, the better one. The true pure gold one. Of course we couldn’t live there, it would
burn us up, but we could see it in places where it sang through. It seemed possible, but then of course their joints began to crackle in the heat and the snapping fat rendered out and fell in dark drops that flared up when they hit the wood. The whole thing flared up. My face shrank in the heat, and when I looked away I saw the wild green blur I had burned on my eyes.

  When the sun came up again, the faces grew more lines. I had no sense of the hours. It was the first time I had seen an unlovely morning, a morning which did not actually chase away all the night mood. The faces loomed up from their collars like to float away over the foothills. It was a bad thing, and I saw it again often. I would see it in all the murk of the world.

  And when the cop car pulled up with its lights going but no siren, because of course there were no other drivers to get out of the way in the far place where we were, I thought completely that I would be arrested. If not for obstruction, then for basic wickedness and lies. Or possibly we would all be arrested for burning the animals. Surely there was something to arrest us for. Meanness of spirit and smallness of teeth, bad life, too dreamy, fat chin. Doctor Vic went to the officers. He hiked up his jeans to pull himself up into an official posture for explaining all this, but they stiff-armed him back. I was too far away to hear. They threaded through the crowd and pulled Bernadette out toward the cruiser. She was shaking her head and sweeping them away with the flats of her hands, but they placed her in the front seat and pulled away. When I got in closer, Janice Creekmur said, “They found her. She’s alive.” I started laughing. Not because I was happy exactly, but Janice spoke it over my head like she was looking upon a wheel of truth churning eternally in space. “Shut up,” she said to me. Before the cops pulled up, I had actually forgotten all about my phone calls. I never imagined it would end so fast. They were taking Bernadette to Pittsburgh. Jude had been Life Flighted there just moments before.