Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

My throat hurt. I wondered if Grady’s fever had leaped onto my skin. The light hurt my eyes. It was getting to be day.

  The farmer came outside and loped over to his truck. He was moving fast, but leaning sideways, and I realized he was extremely drunk. A red light went on over his head, like an oven timer. Sometimes I saw things like that.

  He threw two trash bags on the apron of yard that wound around the forsythia bushes and started the truck going down the road before he remembered his son. He dashed back to us there and picked Grady up by the armpits. Grady’s legs swung wide and one of his miniature cowboy boots smacked me on the bridge of the nose. The farmer carried him up high like a king.

  Virgil had a hand over his left eye at the kitchen table. He was wearing sweatpants and his hair had a shine on it. He looked like a statue somebody had just unloaded and left there.

  One of the trash bags was full of little black bricks in plastic wrapping. Somebody had put it in with a bunch of clothes still on the hangers, thick pink shirts with hibiscus flowers sewed on around the neck holes, white shirts with blue threads ticked in them, and like the things elderly teachers wore. The other was all money, individual bills. They were dirty feeling, slick with being touched too much. But they smelled like money, of course. I had not seen that much money all at once. It was a new feeling. I put my head in the bag and breathed for a while. I wanted to show Grady, then recalled he had already been taken. Virgil began strapping the bricks down in a layer under Wade’s baby carrier, and then he sat up at the kitchen table cutting a pocket in the clean diapers with a razor blade, shoving the bundles inside. It seemed just nutso to me. It didn’t seem like an especially inconspicuous way to travel, a man alone with lots of diapers and no baby. I guess he thought babies just canceled everything out, even suspicion and bad acts. I went back to sleep, and when I woke up, all the stuff was cleared out. My brother was gone.

  XXIII

  Hardly three months after the goats and the fire and my disappearing brother, I washed up again on the shores of West Greene High School, where in the mornings, the classroom TVs played a three-minute clip of an American flag waving in a blue sky, which we were supposed to adore. The halls had a hectic, soupy feel I didn’t remember. My heart froze every time someone talked to me. I hadn’t talked to anyone my age all year. I forgot what you do. I felt like my words were made out of bones and hot dogs and nonsense. Maybe I could just do charades all year. I was trying to do the charades of INVISIBLE. I had home ec first period. I didn’t know anyone in my classes that well since I had been held back. The girls in my new class liked to flip through the Butterick sewing pattern catalog to pick out and name their future husbands and children. I was horrified. Maybe my year with Bernadette had turned me into a snob. But I was horrified all the same.

  Clinton and Shayna moved into town, half an hour away, and Virgil never came back, so it was Mom and Wade and me only. Mom went back to work at the hospital. Most of the time she left Wade with Shayna, but sometimes I would get off the school bus and find him crying in the kitchen, with the house empty except for a few squares of twilight roaming the walls. Every time, I thought it was happening all over again. I would ditch my homework and mash up Hamburger Helper for Wade and sing to him about how we had been abandoned to die in the woods, and the grass would eat us up and whisper our names. I don’t know, but it didn’t feel so serious when I sang, even though I knew I was singing to fool myself. But then Mom would get home around midnight with a bucket of fried chicken and act like it was normal, and in fact not say anything about how late she was. I liked Wade more and more. When she held him, he’d turn bright red.

  School had been OK before, but when I went back, I started picking up detentions. I wasn’t trying to be funny. I had gotten used to adults talking normally to me, and forgot that teachers didn’t care for us to be friends. In Western civ, Mr. Mulgrove would call on me to describe the extent of the Roman Empire, and I’d say wasn’t democracy basically Roman? Only he’d interrupt me: “I mean on the map, Miss Stoat.” Everybody laughed. But wasn’t I answering a more interesting question? My teachers didn’t care.

  Most days I played a game. In the game, I was a Soviet gymnast, single-minded and misunderstood, staring into the middle distance on the school bus, in home ec, or wherever. I had been brought here by mistake. I didn’t speak the language or understand the customs, but it was nevertheless my job to make my way. My life was a movie about this. The people I imagined watching the movie sympathized with me, but all the other characters—my mother, Mr. Mulgrove, every boy who muttered “fish” when I walked past their seat on the school bus—had no idea how stupid they looked.

  A normal teenage life, in other words.

  But then the story came out in People magazine. “BIZARRE KIDNAPPING MYSTERY! An 18-year-old’s cries for help unheard? What new forensic evidence may reveal, inside,” it said. They had shot the cover on Bernadette’s porch. Jude wore a bomber jacket and tall boots, with one hand on Mondo’s back as if she could sic him with a gesture. In the background, hanging in the window, I recognized a string of garlics Bernadette and I had braided together to dry the day before all the goats got sick. I had not allowed myself to miss her at all before then.

  At the worst, I had not considered the possibility of an exposé. Apparently, there was a message board where armchair detectives drilled down phone logs and public records, particularly in strange cases like Jude’s, and someone who knew Clinton put the pieces together. People had interviewed Alistair, Doctor Vic, and even Clinton to establish that I had been living at Bernadette’s house while Jude was missing. A timeline crawled the spread, nailing down when I had lived there, when Jude disappeared, and, thanks to phone records, when Jude had called the house for help. Some psych doctor described Bernadette’s mental state as “histrionic and quite suggestible,” hinting that she might have been induced to believe her daughter was not missing, thus taking the tip less seriously than she might otherwise. And, of course, in the sidebar they ran my seventh-grade school picture. My hair was dark with grease. I wore a stained pink sweatshirt and a vending machine angel pendant on a piece of green string. I had smiled in the picture, but it didn’t come from my eyes. If I didn’t know myself, I would believe that girl could do something terrible.

  The article didn’t necessarily conclude anything or accuse me, but it wasn’t hard to see what they were putting together. They interviewed teachers and kids from school, too. “I always knew something was off,” and “It’s no wonder, with her family.” The same psych doctor said: “Unvented childhood trauma can have disastrous consequences. Sometimes, in prolonged suffering, children break from reality. This is called psychosis.” I, of course, had not been reached for comment. This didn’t surprise me since I had been trying my best to avoid mail and telephones. The sidebar noted other victim frauds, like the mom in Orange County who beat herself with chains and accused four invented black men of kidnapping her, and the Swiss writer who invented a childhood at Auschwitz even though he was born too late to live it. I tried to imagine being a mom in California who thought she needed to be beaten to let her sadness exist. In the picture, she was standing in the nosebleeds at a football stadium, perfect blond hair like honey through a prism. Her life didn’t look like a problem. These were people where the middle part of them had been rotted and eaten by something that never saw the daylight. Whatever was in them stayed hidden and got muscles. And once it had muscles, it did all the talking. I saw it. Hello, myself, I said.

  When they asked Jude about me, she said: “I don’t know. I used to go out with her brother. She was a sneaky kid. Once, she watched us kissing. That was weird. She was so little. She just stood there. It gave me the creeps.”

  “Do you forgive her?” they asked Jude.

  “Wouldn’t it be awfully spiritual if I could say yes?” she said.

  I would have liked to go to jail. I actually called the police and confessed. They put Detecti
ve Torboli on the phone. Apparently he was working a double homicide, and found me annoying. I mean, he thought I was crazy. “Honey, everybody’s alive. That’s pretty good, trust me. Why don’t you just get on with it?” But he didn’t understand: I didn’t know how to. All the rest of that year, I couldn’t make any of my old ideas work about why what I did was OK. It had seemed like such an important distinction, that I hadn’t personally kidnapped anybody. The interviewer also asked Jude how she was adjusting to life at home.

  “I hear horses. I hear them running. I could hear them in the room where he kept me. It’s just a sound in the background. Everywhere I go.” My breath would grab at me and stick in my guts when I thought about it, so I did what I had to do to hold my thumb over the sun of it.

  I used food, mostly. I ate to disappear. I ate to float. I had learned this a long time before. It felt like the rock I was born on, the most home of my homes. Trauma? My life didn’t seem exactly as serious as that, but I really didn’t know anymore. The funny thing was: Exactly nobody talked to me about the article. I saw people passing it around in the cafeteria. Sometimes I heard people calling me trauma girl, trash girl.

  It got quiet whenever I passed through a room. I went everywhere in a tide of silence.

  I didn’t call it praying. I didn’t call it anything. And it wasn’t to god, because nobody in my family knew what that was about.

  I learned how to do it in winter, when the snow was flying. I went to the window and saw it soft with my eyes. I saw it all at once. In the edges of the snow and places between were the hills, and hills of sticks poured around them. Smoke came up from farther off in Deep Valley, and also smoke from Bernadette’s house below, where the gray was blown up with blue for a minute before pure dark. I could see the lines very clearly, between branches and sky, and lines in the sky from jets that never thought about us. In between all the snow was edges and edges and edges, which I felt myself pulled into. It was a quiet room in there. My blood was the sound of it.

  Something talked to me in the room. The words were plain and I also didn’t know where they came from. They were answers to questions that I had not asked: Go walk. See that can in the mud? Pick it up and throw it away. Look at the space between the snow. Look a second time. The baby needs a new diaper. There is a part of you that will always live outside your body, in the stars. You don’t have to keep doing this to yourself. Be still. You have never been alone. Wash the dishes for your mother. Sweep the porch out for yourself. Anything you make nice for someone else is made good for you, too. Hold the baby. Hold him. Hold him. There. Be still and let yourself feel it. You are a glory, forever and ever.

  I started taking long walks and picking up trash on the road. I appreciated the feeling of it, and kept going. I washed the floor in the kitchen, and polished the windows with vinegar and newspaper. I told Sissy Pecjak about all the things I stole, and she let me work off the debt after school. A strange thing was happening. Another world bloomed up inside my old one. It wasn’t that anything got better, necessarily. People still whispered about the magazine article, and I still swarmed with shame whenever I ran into Jude or saw her splitting wood when the school bus went by. School was brutal. My mother cut off the hair I had dyed black, so I had a fluffy mullet look, halfway between a teenager and a fortysomething bank teller. But I felt the air on my neck in a way that seemed light and unusual. I don’t know how to describe it. I didn’t fight the fact of what I had done. It was true, and also I could pick up trash on the road and hold my brother. It sounds so small to say it like that, but it lent my life a little motion.

  Sometimes I wrote letters to Virgil. I traced them with my finger on my school desk or the marble pebble school-bus seat, or into the cave of my hand. H-E-Y-V-I-R-G-I-L. G-U-E-S-S-W-H-A-T. M-O-M-I-S-B-E-I-N-G-W-E-I-R-D-A-B-O-U-T-T-H-E-L-O-T-T-E-R-Y-A-G-A-I-N. And also I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U-I-M-I-S-S-Y-O-U-I-M-S-O-R-R-Y.

  March came in with a last big snow. Mom and Wade stayed over in town when the roads got bad, and I stayed in bed until my throat itched. School would be canceled for two days. The house was pale inside from all the scrawny snow light, and exploded with ladybugs. I was excited because I had a new book from the library and I was going to be alone with it at last, so I arranged for maximum pleasure a jar of peanut butter and sleeve of saltines so I could eat and float and read all at once, my favorite combination.

  But as soon as I pulled my chair up to the furnace, the voice said: Go dig out the driveway for Jude.

  I disregarded. The snow was eight inches at least. There was no reason to trifle with it. Someone else probably dug out their driveway anyway. They probably didn’t need to go anywhere. Jude probably liked the excuse to get outside. The snow wasn’t that deep, anyway. They had an all-wheel drive truck and everything was supposed to melt by the end of the week. And what if she saw me? What if she chased me off? What if she called the police?

  Get up. Go dig out the driveway for Jude. Get up. Get up.

  I got back into bed and hoped that moving would shake the voice off of me. I was starting to sweat. I moved my eyes over the book but they didn’t land anywhere. I’m cold, I thought. I’m trash girl. My life is hard and I deserve a break. School is hard. I deserve a break. I need it. The voice went silent in response, which scared me. I peeled off the blankets and shook furiously as I shrugged into Virgil’s old lined barn jacket.

  It was actually sort of warm outside. It was one of those days when the snow feels like cotton all around you. No wind. And as I stomped down through the woods to Bernadette’s house, I rehearsed all the things that Jude might yell at me. It seemed like it would help, to rehearse them, although it only made the moment that I walked up to the drive and pushed my first shovel of snow seem like a showdown, loud in the drama of my heart. Nothing happened, of course. I kept working. After a while, my back got tight, so I knew I was doing an OK job. My breath turned flinty and wet in my scarf, and once I hit a rhythm, I didn’t look up or much think outside the way I was breathing. I started at the road and moved in, feeling the muscles in my forearms burn and pull. I love work. Work like that has sometimes been my only peace.

  It wasn’t until I got near the house that I saw Jude. She was standing on the porch in a big blank sweatshirt ashing a Camel into a coffee mug, with a little shiver bouncing her leg. She wasn’t dressed for outside but it looked like she had been waiting there a minute. We looked at each other for a long time. I felt like this had all happened before. It was like the day I saw her kissing Virgil. Time flowed out, and I wavered in its center. I couldn’t shake the echo. Some part of me got lost halfway out of my body. I don’t know. No part of me moved.

  I waved hi.

  A long second later, she waved hi also.

  I finished the end of the drive and leaned the shovel where I had found it, and went back up into the woods without looking behind.

  Jude ended up doing a few semesters at Carnegie Mellon, but she dropped out to take care of Bernadette. She got her mom through a hospital detox, but it had an unintended effect: The prior news about Jude’s disappearance seemed to finally sink in. Bernadette would call the state troopers, hissing Someone knows where she is, you bastards, all the more devastating because it was true. They did know, and they told her—and then she called again ten minutes later. When Jude hid the phones, it only made Bernadette more certain that the fix was in. She set off in the woods searching and cried in the tub, even though Jude was long since found. She was sure a KGB spy traced her from the hills with binoculars, so she decided to smoke the bastard out, only to kill one of the Creekmurs’ cows. She set out traps on the road with carpet tacks—the postmaster was just about done with her. They even moved her into assisted living in Cranberry, but Bernadette had hotwired a limo and crashed a retired Steelers defensive back’s annual holiday party, so no more of that. These dramas were impeccably timed to scuttle Jude’s midterms or finals.

  Once Alistair got power of attorney, he
hired live-in care for Bernadette. It was no trouble to afford such a thing, but entirely another to keep someone in the position. The nurses generally lasted about two months. Many of them, I’m sure, were not ready for the isolation, how the house could go spooky on you in the night, and how your cell phone wouldn’t work unless you drove to the top of Centennial Hill, in the graveyard. But also, Bernadette, in certain moods, anointed the house with her urine. She laid hexes on her caretakers by writing their names on slips of paper and freezing them in the ice cube tray. One nurse she had successfully poisoned with laurel roots. She still whipped herself in moments of emotion. It was too much.

  Jude was still just about the only black person in that part of the county. She was conspicuous before, but after the kidnapping, people somehow got the idea she was magic, since she had survived such a terrible thing. Ruthie Rush tried to clip a chunk of hair from the back of Jude’s head when she was waiting in line at the feed store. Some of the lesser Creekmurs dug through her trash for tokens or sigils. They brought their sick babies and busted knees and glaucomas around for her to somehow heal. For could she not remove the hurts from the body? And could she not tell them something about living in the terrible lasting moments that would break your heart? And wasn’t she pure, since evil had not burned her away, and wouldn’t the pure one hold the hurt forever? Well. Jude eventually brought out the shotgun to shoo them off her land, and just to hell with it. She had another idea for herself. And that is where I came, again, into her life.

  She called at the house during Wheel of Fortune, which Wade and I enjoyed best. We liked the things people guessed when there weren’t enough hint letters, or when they were too dim to take the hint. They always said something that gave away their inner mind: “HELL SHINE HARDER!” “I PUSH THE PILLS FOR DREAMY!” “DONKY PUNKY!” It was the last week of school, and a little more than a year since Jude was found and brought home. The air had more space in it than usual. More warm motion was shining over the hills.