Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  When it got around that Bernadette had filled up her house with infomercial junk, many were scandalized, and by this I mean delighted. Some had been waiting for her fall quite a long time, especially after the gas deal. It’s hard to like a libertine if you can’t remember the last time a rule has ever been bent for you, and where I come from, just about every woman is jacketed in iron about what’s real and expected and possible, and what you had better look like, and how nice you had better sound. Bernadette had lived so loose it was like she just shrugged off bad luck entirely, and so when it finally found her, it was the kind of thing people discussed with savor and joy. That was the carnival feeling at Pecjak’s, the day we first heard the news. I know it sounds cruel, but no less do people rejoice in that way. If trouble found Bernadette at last, it meant there was a law. It meant nature would assert its levels. My mother would have crowed over Bernadette’s wet brain if she’d been there to witness it.

  My mother didn’t care for any of the back-to-the-landers, but she began her disdain for Bernadette in earnest when Jude and Virgil were dating. For one, Virgil never brought Jude by our house, and for another, he ate dinner at Bernadette’s every night he could manage. He’d come home talking about tarot cards and how the death card is really about transformation, and how the divine feminine is ever alive. And he stunk like myrrh, and he started using new words and knowing of mysterious customs, such as the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. He was talking about college, psychology or something like that. But what really did it was Bernadette would let him sleep over, in the same bed as Jude, and make them lemon pancakes in the morning like that was a sane, average thing to do for teenage lovers. That just wasn’t real in my mother’s view. She called Jude a jezebel and a jiggaboo. She feared for Virgil’s idiocy.

  My mother was the kind who would be very offended if you called her a racist. She talked about it all sideways at best. The most you could get out of her was: I don’t approve. And she trusted she did not need to speak any further on the subject. As, generally, she did not. Whoever she was talking to usually knew exactly what she meant. Her disapproval met in the air with the disapproval of whoever she was talking to, and the two silent moods married and had their own life, in the air all over us, in the water, in the mind. That was the trick to it, never having to say what you actually meant. Nothing is real if you don’t have to say it.

  The paper ran at least a daily sidebar on Jude’s disappearance. Most people had noticed Jude’s absence at the wedding already, and had long settled down into gossipful reckoning by the time the actual investigation started. Melda McConaughey told anyone who would listen that Jude was dead, that she, Melda, could feel it, and could see the flashes of the underworld through a portal into Jude’s mind: limbs heavy with fruit, tossing in a black wind. Oh, Melda.

  Or possibly some people didn’t even think on it so kindly, if that could be considered kindly. For some people, Jude had gotten herself into whatever trouble had swallowed her up. Believers of this notion spoke in sweet and pitying ways. They said “drugs.” And there was that baggie of weed, after all, as they were pleased to point out, never mind that Jude only had it because, as Kayla confessed, the rest of them were too chicken to buy an eighth themselves. What people meant was Jude was a brown girl, and that bad things happen for a reason. Clinton was one of these. Suddenly he had a memory of Jude as a drug dealer. She sold people pills out of the library, he said, and had once offered him a stamp bag which he had the good sense and fine character to decline. “She had a pager and everything,” he’d tell anyone. Anyone would listen. Never mind nobody on earth had used a pager in fifteen years, except on reruns of Law & Order, Clinton’s favorite show.

  And what bad luck of hers, to turn eighteen just a month before. Even the sentimental machinery that found lost children wouldn’t work on her. With babies, it was all flyers and AMBER Alerts scrolling across the digital bank displays. With Jude, it was that JanSport with the vodka bottle in it. The Post-Gazette’s advice maven, Dotti Eisengart, even wrote an Op-Ed bemoaning the lagging investigation. Miss Vanderjohn was no delinquent, she claimed, unlike so many young people in the rural areas who “landed askance of god’s laws.” But the local police force was already small and aggrieved. A scolding didn’t incline anybody to look any harder, and neither did the implication that the rest of us died primarily of our own trashiness.

  And anyway, what could the police do? It fell to the family of the missing to make a show that would keep the news cameras hovering around. Alistair had his billboards and his endless five-minute interviews with morning-news human-interest anchors, but Bernadette was in another world altogether. And, to be honest, although no one cares to admit it, I think we just weren’t looking that hard. The year before, a sixteen-year-old white girl disappeared from a sleepover in Star City, West Virginia, and you could almost feel the hum of panic in the search party. The school district canceled classes for a week so students could aid in searching on foot. In Jude’s case, nobody knew where to search and it was summer vacation anyway—but that wasn’t the reason nobody looked for her.

  The girls from the camping trip finally admitted that Jude might have run away after all, which Virgil had been claiming all along. It was something of a theme with Jude. She endured Greene County the way someone might endure a community service sentence. When the detectives examined Jude’s room and determined from the empty hangers that about two full duffels of clothes were missing, it seemed possible. These had not been found in her car at the towing station, and neither the bartender nor the fentanyl addicts had mentioned anything about the girl they had seen carrying luggage, but possibly Jude had sent them ahead. Possibly she had meant to leave without fanfare, even though this seemed not to square with the events of that day.

  Alistair Vanderjohn knew nothing of Jude’s plans, apart from having invited her to visit awhile in Rochester on her way out to Vermont. He had last spoken with her the day she had gone missing—Jude had called him on her cell phone to keep her company while she waited for the tow truck, and had told him the whole drama while she skipped stones in the crick behind Burchinal’s. Naturally she was furious at first, but by the time she hung up, the whole thing seemed funny to her and she didn’t sound troubled to him. He did not know whether she had gotten into the tow truck, or some other vehicle. Their closing was brief. She cut him off to say her ride was there, and then the muffled, windy good-bye, and then nothing.

  Some held it suspicious that Alistair had not known of his own daughter’s disappearance. The two were apparently quite close; Jude usually called him three or four nights a week, and wouldn’t he become somewhat concerned to hear nothing? Yet it didn’t trouble him. He said she sometimes got caught up in a mood or enthusiasm like any teenager, and he did not care to read much into it. As to her plans of running away, he had never taken them seriously. “Living in an isolated place can be quite painful. And wonderful, of course. Bernadette made clear that she wished to raise Jude in nature, and I see the wisdom in that. But it has not been easy for her. Not at all. And we do talk about that often.” And what, exactly, was that supposed to mean, everyone wanted very much to know. But it was clear enough: Alistair also knew how hungry she was to be someplace different, hungry enough to leave without a word of good-bye.

  Besides all that, Bernadette had apparently been drinking quite a lot. She kept a gas station travel mug near all the time, and whatever was in it was red. She tried to be very casual, but if you paid attention, you could see how she followed it always with her eyes. Very gradually, she had stopped going out on her own. Every few months Alistair brought her around to the doctor, the feed store, the library, and wherever else, but the trips got more difficult as her memory shrank away. I don’t know if he ever tried to sober her up. I always figured they split up because of her drinking, but I guess he still couldn’t resist trying to help her, no matter how impossible it became. She had apparently advanced on the shores of not
this world completely. The doctors said it could be a brain tumor, cancer, anything that made her forget, but the drinking had some part in it, and was also likely why she refused all treatment. By the time I came around, her forgetting had worked itself in a loop. She could remember all the words to “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and the names of all the Paul Newman movies, and she could even quote passages of Being and Time, split right from her memory. But she couldn’t remember whether the oven was on, if the eggs had just been set to boil or were cooked into chalk, and because she was also proud and afraid, she would never admit that she’d meant to do otherwise. We ate a lot of raw eggs. Once she had cracked them, what did it matter? She claimed to feel wonderful. She had not been to the doctor in twenty years, which she credited to cold showers and aromatherapy and shadow work. And truly, her health was undamaged otherwise, apart from high blood pressure and a problem she described as “glass in the knee.”

  But the mind was another matter. Bernadette believed that an angel was sleeping in her bed. She believed there had been a series of ravagings in the tristate area. She believed her Tiffany silver stolen, and accused the last person she had seen that day of taking it. Sometimes she accused others: Jimmy Carter, Ricardo Montalban, Doris Day. Jude she sometimes accused also. Jude was hiding from her. She found it most childish.

  She believed a quality of sunlight was capable of healing welts on the body, although she would not let on where the welts had come from. They were a rude pink shine on her arms and thighs. She believed in signs. She believed it was late May, even as the days were swelling to the full-throated height of summer. She sunbathed naked by her mailbox, apparently, until Virgil or another neighbor came along to wrap her in a blanket. She always had her travel mug nearby.

  Bernadette said she had seen bears roam the property line, churning through the fizz of heather and forsythia scrub. This was not unusual, taken on its own. Somebody saw a bear every summer, although often, once they had sobered, they demoted it to catamount or coyote. Bernadette reinforced her fence lines with woven wire and hot strands. She worried for the safety of her goats. She kept a shotgun by the front door and vowed to get the bastard. She laid traps desultory and literal: a plate of honey sandwiches on a stump in the side yard. When Alistair tried to help, she apparently confessed that she felt simply awful: She had, after all, invited the bears, and communed with one sexually, and so she knew she had brought the whole miserable trouble upon herself, as usual.

  Bernadette believed she had a constantly praying heart. She believed nothing bad would come to her. She believed she was still young in the eye of the universe. She believed the smell from her sex was a reliable perfume and dabbed it here and there. She was a witch, and she believed she could call hellhounds down to wail in the valley and do as she bid. She believed it unnecessary to consult any calendars. She believed all cops had been criminals in the last world.

  She did not believe that Jude was gone. Hiding, she always called it. Detective Torboli interviewed her often. I usually watched from the top of the stairs when he came around. The top of his head glowed like the white inside a polished gem. Bernadette always wore something special and baked banana bread—he was handsome, and I think she must have liked the attention, aside from his dreary questions. She wasn’t worried about Jude, not one slice, she told the detective, while they gazed over their coffees. Jude had developed the most astonishing skill—she could hide inside an object, locked up entirely. She could hide inside her old black-frame glasses. She could hide in the trunk of a tree. But she always—Bernadette shrugged as she said it—came back.

  VII

  It was a handsome Saturday. It had rained for a week but the mud was getting dried out and all the drains in the house smelled like living green mud. The ladybugs were millions. They got in my breakfast and down my shirt, they died in waves. I wasn’t to do much chores around the house, but Clinton had me sweep them up with my hand onto a piece of notebook paper and throw them out in the yard where we threw things.

  Virgil had not been home at all for a few days. Once the detective was able to convince Bernadette that her daughter was gone, she went mad with grief. Virgil worried she’d cut herself up or drown in the bathtub, so he stayed around the clock. And Clinton didn’t say about it, so I didn’t say about it, and the green fur was coming back up in the divots, tender and new and shivering from all the effort. I was to want myself a little nice time, maybe. The sky looked blue with an echo in it, like it was a bowl really, and I could feel that the earth was truly round, other teachings no matter.

  The fish fry was happening already and I was anxious to get going. I was afraid Clinton had forgot. The fish fry they did only two times a year and I loved it because the air shimmered up and we didn’t eat much hot food, and I could watch all these grown people and see what they did and how they spoke to each other. I had a mad curiosity about people, even though they frightened me. It was nice, when something big was going on, that I could slip around and not be noticed, and get my fill of what they looked like, what people’s knees looked like with the fattish dimples riding on top, how they looked at each other when they liked each other. I liked the things about how people put their clothes together. I liked their white leather purses and the lines around their mouths where the lipstick was darker and ragged. By now, of course, I know I was so curious because I was primarily curious about myself. I could see my outlines in what I wasn’t that other people were. I had pink cowboy boots with a curtain of scallop fringe along the sides. Sometimes I saw the scoop of how I walked along in a grown-up woman, and I realized that my hips were able to switch a way I couldn’t have done before. It was exciting on some days. Other days it made a sad soup in my throat.

  I knew the fish fry was that day because the calendar we had, the only one, was the one the volunteer fire department handed around with pictures of red unbelievable and fast cars. Clinton had, for once, taken off his glasses while he slept and the way his face was pale, without the usual red furrows, frightened me. I put my fingers in his mouth. His tongue had gone dry in patches. The other parts were silt velvet.

  Clinton swung a hand at me and missed.

  “Goddamn, chickie. What? What?” He squinted around to smell me.

  “It’s the fish fry,” I said. He wouldn’t move, so I got his billfold out from the pants that hung jacklegged on the back of the chair and took out five dollars.

  “Oh, all right. You gonna be a thief now.”

  I shook my head.

  “Gonna be a little sneak thief.” He talked like it was a game we were going to play.

  I shook my head again and put a hand on the door, because I didn’t like the sound of what he was saying.

  And then I was on the floor. My tooth hit through my lip. Clinton had come across the room at me and pulled himself down on both of us, collapsed us both. His fingers dug into my ribs like a tickle, and like a tickle I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to laugh. My neck froze in a hard line.

  “I got a thief right here,” he said hot in the hair behind my ear. “I caught one.”

  Other times when Clinton held me down, I bit him. I had once bit a shred off of his neck. Shaving, he told Mom. But I couldn’t find a place to bite with my nose caving up against the floorboards, lacquer caramel dog hair down in the cracks. He was vined around me and had my arms pinned back.

  The laugh that came out of me was a round, wobbling thing. It was a balloon I could set on fire and send out over the county to give somebody an idea. It was a shiver. I hated it and tried to scream through it but it sounded like laughing still, no matter what I did. He dug his fingers down and plucked at me.

  Something winched up in my belly cut itself loose. My front was warm. It was piss. It hissed under me hard. Clinton paused, moved one of his hands under me to feel the floor.

  “Oh, god,” he said. “What you have to do that for?”

  I was wearing
the pink jean shorts that were my favorite. The dark part looked like a lake’s edges, but then the piss fled out and blurred into a circle. Clinton hauled himself off me to see and I rolled, like that, all of one moment, out from under him and out the door and through the dog run where the mud was still slick from their always bothering it and mixing it in with their turds all day and the last snow in the shades leaving crusts around them like craters, just holes that went down somewhere, and I ran down the road while the sun put its flat part along my back like a good thing.

  I had his five dollars in my hand running behind me. In the wind my running made it like a flag. When I turned around there was the rushing sound of the breath I took and nothing else, except birds and a wind in the branches looking thicker by the day, so leafed they were exhausting to see because so pretty.

  A little harder I heard a stream going nearby like a dime-dime sound, the sound of peas dropping in a tin bowl and rolling. The back of my shorts was messed. Pee went dry on my legs and then it started to leave like a dust from where my legs rubbed together. I was happy to have the grit coming off but I wanted to be clean.

  The crick came up around me when I sat in it. It was cold like needles and my blood rang away to warm me up. My shoes filled. The water lifted my feet a touch here and there. It felt good to let my legs go do that and get heavy.

  I decided to die in the wilderness. I saw that if I could sit down in the leaves I’d be warm a little while, although I partway knew this went counter to my suicide. I practiced arranging the face of death upon me, how I would be discovered. And reached up to twine my hair around on the ground a bit more prettily. I did this kind of thing often. I would imagine being watched in my sleep and pillow my head on prayer hands so whoever could see me would think: What an angel on earth. I did the same thing in the leaf bed, except elevated to permanence. When I closed my eyes, I saw fat black grapes, a green exploding fountain, a landscape I could never share with anyone. Daylight was like a white block of air that moved around the earth suffocating everything but the ants and the ladybugs, the things so small that their shells were like bunkers. Ticks suck on everything because nothing can get inside them. I thought I might feel one crawl my scalp, and swatted but of course I couldn’t tell. I would be cold when they found me. The blue would brush in on my lips. And why, why, why is what everyone would cry at my funeral, all except my mother, because she’d know. She’d know it was because she abandoned us. And her knowing would be a darkness that would never leave her. A cloud of blackbirds broke and turned above me, and I knew her shame would be like that. So perfect in its intelligence that it could toss it in the air, wheeling and fluid.