Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  I closed my eyes and tried to see what I imagined Jude was seeing, from inside the castle of her being gone. The dark in my head was buzzing and green. It was air all around me and in my mind. Anywhere else. I kept trying to imagine a bad oblivion, and my mind wouldn’t let me. There: So I was jealous of her. That was the problem. Take me instead, I begged the air. Maybe the shimmer that took her was still hungry.

  It got dark like the life ticking out of something. The clouds were whipping past the sun. The sky got rounder, and there were soft spots higher up where I knew it was being space and that’s all. My stomach hurt. I hadn’t eaten. I peeled myself up with my cold muscles hammering against each other.

  I would have gone back that minute, but I couldn’t figure out where I was, and I was furious at myself. I walked along fast and low like a beetle though I had a stitch drawn up through my ribs. I kept turning to look behind me, to see if there would be a certain angle that I recognized, a familiar way the trees flushed up in the sky.

  I stopped in a place where an oak had grown a little dent on its side and slid myself in so it pressed my arms hard against my sides. Would it be better for him to find me or would it be better for him to not?

  In some stories, the person who is lost gets more lost because they’re looking, the people looking for them only find the places where they were. I followed the crick until it went out of sight, and then I walked back to see if I could find the same spot I had been in. I wasn’t sure. The ground was uneven all over. The trees moved against each other while I walked like a strip of repeating wallpaper. I listened hard for road sounds, and I didn’t hear any. Only ten or so cars went by our place every day, on average. I knew this because I counted them every day. I had a little bookkeeping ledger I found in the closet where I marked the day and date and each car and its time and color.

  I saw his hat first. A figure was coming toward me along the brambles that were all a green dust. “Cindy, Cindy. Come on,” it said. It was Virgil.

  I looked around for the five dollars. I thought I had been holding it the whole time, but it was gone. I thought of the five dollars sheltering in a hidden root tent, shuddering in the wind alone like that. It made me cry. I cried to think of anything being alone, even if it could not draw a breath. Virgil let me up over a little bit of scree, and then we were on a tractor path that turned this way and that way, and off of it was the gravel piece that went down to our mailbox on the main road. I had not even been very well lost. We were home hardly any time later. He did not ask me what had gotten into me. He didn’t tell me what I should have done instead.

  Clinton was standing by the door when we got there. Inside it was so dark it was flat, just whatever path where I walked that kept making itself. Virgil steered my shoulders away to the bathroom. He had me wait outside while he got the hot water there, and then he stood outside while I got in. He said he would stand outside until I was done and make it so nobody would bother me. So I sat a little while watching the sad scummy white my skin turned in the water. My hairs floated in that slow, darting way. I was very surprised. It cost too much to make so much hot water for a bath, and we almost never did.

  “She was nuts. Grade-A crazy,” Clinton was saying. “We wrestled around, she was out the door. That’s all it was.” They were talking outside, trying to whisper.

  “I heard enough about it,” Virgil said. “I’m done.”

  VIII

  The day after I had run away, I decided to not talk, maybe never again.

  But running away made everything worse, of course. It made plain all the things that I tried not to think about. I worked very hard not to think about Clinton, but there wasn’t much else to think about since it was the early summer when every day had eight or nine eras to it, and no hope of going to school. I could smell him stooping around the house. With Virgil down the road every day, it left it so Clinton and I were once again watching the noon lottery draw while the day shot down on us from high up. I got so sick of Clinton I would go stand in the exact opposite part of the house from him. Or if he was in the middle of the house, I would crawl under the porch with the dogs, where the dirt was silky.

  So I had decided something. I got up early before Virgil left to go to Bernadette’s. It was still dark and I sat in the passenger seat with my stolen candy and my magazines and read by the light of the dome lamp. I had never been allowed to sit in the cab before, so it was quite shocking to me that I had done this. I was reading the names of lipsticks in a catalog and thinking about what I would like to do wearing each one. I would like to be in a city. I would like to stand on top of a skyscraper. I would like to eat a little poached fish, whatever that was, in the company of a man with smoke leaking out of his mouth. Coral. Coral. I said the word and half saw these things. I trailed my fingernails over my arms and my mind fled.

  I think I scared Virgil. He jumped back when he saw me there saying coral and coral and dusky berry.

  “Bunny, you go back in the house.”

  “No,” I said. Had I ever said it before? We don’t know.

  “I’ll come home for lunch today and check on you. How about that?”

  “No.” I said it with my whole body. I said it like a witch would say it. “I’m coming with you. I’m not staying here with him.”

  “OK,” he said, and sighed. “I’ll take you to Bernie’s. But you can’t go upstairs. Not for anything. Not at all. You get me?” When he started up the truck, I glowed in my victory.

  We got down off of the ridge in stages. Something felt scary about being in the little room of the truck. The way Virgil took the turns, sometimes we slid out into the middle of the road. I had never noticed before, but he wasn’t a very good driver. I was always in the pickup bed on my back watching the leaves wash over, looking up at the white breaks where the sky fell through. Virgil sat forward and jigged the wheel back and forth with little jerks, with his thumbs pointing right up in the air.

  The road bottomed out and we went around a turn past my old elementary school. It looked like it had shrunk down since I remembered. There was a trailer attached to the side by a rotting wooden ramp. Some saplings were vowing themselves up into the air in the middle of the baseball diamond.

  Bernadette’s house up close was bleaker than it looked from the road. The windows had tails of black grit up their centers like they’d been scorched, and a part of the apron porch fell away from the house. Or possibly I had been thinking so hard of Jude, witches, fern spells, that just seeing the house in front of me felt like something watery from the silent and dead place where my mind liked to go. The side yard was eaten down to the clay by a pack of goats penned in with wire wrapped around cinder blocks, and more cinder blocks had been stacked up into angular islands here and there. A goat stood on each one, seven that I could see. They were healthy, tremendously beautiful goats. They stood still as if I wasn’t watching them, and maybe I would just go away.

  We stood awhile looking into the dark screen door. A stack of newspapers under the porch swing had molded into a column with a green fume along the edges, and there were trays of orange fruits with the pits slashed out of them drying in the open air, like shrunken hearts.

  “Bernie!”

  Virgil slipped his hand through a slit in the screen and snapped the latch up, and we walked into the gray dark. The rooms were big and fell away from the sunlight even without the curtains. There was a heat like something carried around in a pocket a long time with too much human use to be any good. Virgil was already through to the kitchen. I put my hand on a chair back to find my way forward. It was warm to the touch, like it had a fever.

  I had never seen so many things in a house before. I felt like the floor was about to roll away beneath me. There was only a little aisle between the grocery store circulars and plastic Santa statues and boxes of microwave bacon cookers. Trinkets and plastic bags went down in layers. Sometimes my foot crunched on a hidden thing and
the sound was sick in my stomach. And everywhere was the evidence of superstition. An old much-faded poster taped to the back of the mudroom door showed the arrays of the I Ching, with grubby shadows where a hand had consulted, over and over, the ideograms. I could hardly see through the kitchen window, where the concrete mucilage tamped around the frame had been studded with crystals, railroad pennies, the little rigid birds from inside sand dollars. It was hard to look a long time at anything. Everything had the intelligence of objects handled much, the sparkle of that. Above the door the saints Anne, Bernadette, and Pio on their trading cards, Pittsburgh Pirate Dock Ellis on his, and AFL-CIO buttons dug into the soft wood. Tin stars. There was laundry, too, or clothing, at least, on everything in soft, saggy piles. It felt like walking through a melting gut. Spider plants, a scummed jug of Carlo Rossi, a toppled pair of riding boots with a sky-blue tempera stripe painted up the side. There were twin figures in a set of small boxes tacked up on the wall. I didn’t even know that they were all ornamental salt-and-pepper shakers. I had certainly never heard of such a thing. They had stupid, inconsiderate faces. They didn’t look like they were meant to be of any help. Virgil dropped down in front of the sink cabinet and got out a bucket and a scrubber. I picked up a mariachi and his girlfriend and wondered at the holes in the tops of their heads.

  “We’re going to get things cleaned up around here. Help me get all this picked up. But you got to be quiet, and you can’t go upstairs.”

  I smiled because I had never seen him tidy a house.

  Virgil was bagging all the obvious trash, but what was trash wasn’t so obvious, except for the Sno Ball wrappers he was punching down into the garbage bag. He looked unnatural working inside. The way he bent over I saw he was getting some belly slub under his T-shirt, and his cheeks were full from focus. Maybe it was a look he shunned from his face, but he seemed younger. Or maybe it was the impossible task. I stone stared around at all of the junk. Embroidered pillowcases, a bowl of ash, white plastic poodle barrettes, slide projectors, hubcaps, baby blocks. One low table carried five statues of peacocks. What are you going to do about a thing like that? I arranged them so they were all pointing their heads together in the middle, then gave up and stirred them randomly around with my hand. I picked up the bowl of ash to help dump it out.

  “Nuh-uh, wait, wait,” he said. “That’s probably for something.”

  “For?”

  “I don’t know. It looks important.”

  “It’s burned-up garbage, Virgil.”

  “Trust me. Anything that looks like garbage is probably, like, her conjure shit.”

  “Oh, so like these?” I held up a Hostess Sno Ball with a bite pinched out of it, and a dizzy ant wandering its landscape.

  “Fucking, fucking, I don’t know. Just help me. Just try.”

  Sometimes I was actually a good cleaner. I knew how to feel the edges of things for invisible smut, and I liked how I could put part of my mind away from me in a high flat place and collect it later. I liked how after, my lower back felt tight, like a punch. The place had not been cleaned in a long time, and as I moved things around, even as quiet as possible, the dust foamed up into the light. It smelled very living, like the shade on a lake. And I felt very aware that this was the air that had slipped into Jude’s lungs and mixed with her blood and become her. I could sort of understand why she might want to run away. The house felt heavy, like it could fall into the earth.

  There were books everywhere, in stacks, slanted against each other up the stairs, and some facedown on the spine of the sofa. Gone with the Wind, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Edible Appalachian Foraging Plants. Man and His Symbols. They were all in the fussy plastic coats of library books. I looked in the endpapers and saw they had been due two Januarys ago, which delighted me.

  The best thing about that first day was I found a nest of boogers on the wall next to the sofa. If that was true, I thought, the rest of the witch things Virgil had said must have also been real. I was going to scrape them off with my fingernail, but then I decided they might of course be an important magic thing, a piece of work, so I washed very carefully around them with chore water instead.

  A stack of cereal boxes had toppled off the refrigerator. Each one, when I opened it, had about a mouthful of cereal so stale it hardly snapped in my mouth. I ripped out the bags and flattened the boxes. I found a bunch of plastic bags under the sink and started putting like with like. Under the sink, I found eight or so glass bottles with the labels ripped off. The air in them was hot and fat. I held one over my face and got a needle of it on my tongue. It felt alive somehow, like it was still fighting after I swallowed it, and right away I panicked that I must have poisoned myself. I couldn’t hear Virgil anywhere in the house. I was about to yell for him that I had been poisoned but then saw that one bottle’s label had fallen under the few at the back and it said Gilbey’s Gin so I knew I wasn’t going to die but also that I shouldn’t tell him what I had done. Since Virgil was not a drinker, I thought it might upset him that I had tasted some.

  I was standing tiptoe on a kitchen chair to wipe the dust off the molding that lined the kitchen and something in my guts switched. My lower back went hot and I felt in my face the cool lines of bile rising through my spit. I had to grab on to the wall and then the cabinets to get myself down. It was all too light in my head, but not in my legs, which were rotten of blood and held me stooped over a minute before I realized I was about to shit myself.

  I didn’t think to go outside and shit in the garden, although in retrospect it would have been the better idea. But the goats frightened me too much. They weren’t afraid of me. Their eyes were yellow with square holes in the middle. I knew there wasn’t a bathroom on the first floor because I had walked through all the rooms, not cleaning exactly but just seeing what was there, and I knew it was important not to go upstairs, but I did. I had to climb over boxes of naked baby dolls and tinsel and videotapes and light-up palm trees and plastic sandals. I choked up my steps as much as possible and skimmed my feet so the slats wouldn’t groan.

  An enormous exhaust fan stood at the top of the stairs with a long pull chain. It had been roaring like that forever. The sound made me think like a fly, like I was something to be sucked up into nowhere, although the breeze it made was a small thing.

  I found the bathroom first of all. I undid my shorts and they hit the floor the same time as my shit filled the toilet. I also felt a beautiful relief. It felt so good to let the sick spill out of my body. My lower back felt dry and fine again, my sweat dried, and I wanted to sit there forever in wellness. There was a church newsletter in the stack of mail and magazines next to the toilet and I read a recipe for tuna noodle casserole with potato chips on top.

  The knock was polite and hesitating.

  “Is that you in there, honey?”

  “Yes,” I said. And panicked that I should have said nothing instead. But then, would she have come in to check on me? Where was Virgil? I had forgotten all about Virgil making me promise to stay downstairs. I wondered if she was maybe dangerous. I knew people could be bad news if they were sad enough. My shorts were still on the floor circling my feet.

  “Do you need help?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine. Sorry. I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  “You didn’t, honey.” And then: “Jude, honey. I didn’t mean any of those mean things I said.”

  I didn’t say anything at all. I weighed it out in pieces. The floors were pine painted clear. On the far wall a Metropolitan Museum poster of a silhouette flown flat across the sky with its heart thudding crudely. The afternoon must have been winding down because a stab of light flew into the room through the door crack. The doorknob was shuttling.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “What did you say?”

  “Why are you hiding from me? Why are you hiding? Are you scared?” she was hissing. “I’m your mother. Why are you hiding?” Ther
e was more that she said, but I didn’t hear it because I was going oh shit oh shit oh shit. Something was pounding on the doorjamb. It wasn’t locked. But she was hitting her fist there and sobbing. The sound was a drowning thing. She breathed in big shaky gulps. She rasped like ripping a sheet of paper in half. “Baby, baby. Honey lamb. I am so sorry.” And then her steps shunted off away. Floorboards sprang on the other side of the house, or maybe it was the bed. It sounded like she had thrown herself down on it. And then it was nothing.

  I cleaned myself and put my shorts on again. They felt heavy and damp like they were made out of animal skins. I washed up for a long time because I didn’t know, I was afraid she would be hiding to jump out and grab my throat. I even ran the bar of soap on my armpits and splashed water in them until my skin squeaked. When I left, the hallway was empty. The utility fan tolled on like an alien headache.