Tomorrow and Tomorrow (28 page)

“‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ he said.

“He told me he still struggles, but he knows that his soul is pure, that we all have pure souls that are untouched no matter how much we’ve abused our own bodies. He told me that despite my own failings—how I cut myself, the drugs—that Christ could save me as well, that I could transcend my limitations because the body is corrupt but the soul is pure. He told me that we’re born into sin, that our bodies trap us in sin, but to never forget that our souls reflect the true God—

“He presented a Bible to me, a printed Bible with a blue leather cover that had my name embossed in gold. He told me to read the Gospels. He pointed them out to me. He told me to pay attention to the words printed in red. This was part of the new curriculum, he told me. He unlocked the door and told me that he’d see me the day after tomorrow.

“I could have said something to the guard who escorted me back to my room. I could have told one of the nurses at dinner or check-in what he’d done to me, but I didn’t. I was terrified. I was terrified that whoever I told would ignore me or wouldn’t believe me and that it would get back to him. I kept quiet.

“That night I read the Gospels out of fear but felt a change—I felt what I believed was the grace of Jesus touching my life—at least that’s what I thought it was, because the feeling was so glorious. I’m far away from that time now, but when I first read Matthew and Mark, and when I read the account of the baptism of Christ in Luke, I felt my life—felt like my chest just melted, like I’d been made of ice but some incredible warmth had broken through. I fell to the floor of my cell and knelt at the side of my bed, not knowing how to pray so I just said the words, ‘Jesus, help me, Jesus, help me,’ repeating His name in a hysteria, and with every word I felt His love overwhelm me. I was converted, that night. I felt protected by a power beyond myself. I reread the Gospels, then began in Genesis and when I next saw Timothy I confronted him about what had happened and told him that I’d report him if he ever touched me again, but his entire demeanor had changed. He smiled and laughed like he, too, was lit with an inner light at seeing me saved. At the end of our session we held hands and said the Lord’s Prayer.

“On his recommendation I was released from the facility and he placed me at Mrs. Waverly’s house. He thought that I might like living there in a community of faith. He introduced me to Mrs. Waverly, who we called Kitty—

“I realize, now. Kitty was the leader of the house but Waverly controled everything. He gave sermons about evangelism. He told stories about mission trips to Haiti and showed slides of past groups of girls in dusty villages. The people living at Kitty’s house were young, mostly college girls, girls who’d moved to Pittsburgh from other cities and other countries, lonely girls brought together because they were searching for fellowship. We were encouraged to socialize with one another, to recruit more people to our congregation but to limit our contact with people who weren’t interested in our faith. We took long hikes and trips to Ohiopyle. I was in love with it all, with the community. Eventually I adopted the name Albion and Timothy called me his sister in Christ—

“It was a Saturday afternoon when Timothy and Waverly visited me in the upstairs room. We prayed together, and Timothy explained what would happen. I still remember how calm his tone of voice was. Waverly crawled into bed and lay there while I went through with it. He kissed me like he was drinking me but fucked me like I wasn’t there at all. I wish I could tell you why I went along with it—but there is no why, that house was my life back then, my entire life. Even now I’m disgusted and relive that afternoon and wish I’d somehow taken control, had somehow done something, run screaming or refused or something, but I didn’t. I went through with it. Timothy took his turn and that was the first time he touched me since trying to choke me back in the center—he took me like I disgusted him. Afterward they prayed over me, these men. To heal me. The diseases in me. Asked God to be lenient with me.

“They visited every Saturday afternoon, and before they started they called me especially beloved, like the disciple ‘loved by Christ,’ but afterward I had to endure their prayers on my behalf and Timothy waiting for Waverly to leave so he could finish. Waverly was quick, but Timothy was violent and some nights I couldn’t help him finish until he hit me. He said he could get me Percocet—he never failed to bring pills and I don’t know if you’ve ever used Percocet but those sessions became the trigger for pills. After, he’d send Kitty into the room with me, to sleep in my bed with me, to make sure nothing happened while I was using. She’d spoon me and hold me like I was her child, sometimes stroke my hair or cry with me. I remember she smelled like ointment and hair spray and I could feel the abrasive skin of her legs touching mine as she curled her toes up close to me. But she would talk to me, whispering to me while we lay together. I learned from Kitty that Timothy had another family, that he was married. He was married again even before that. He had some sort of troubles in his past—”

“When did you move to the apartment in Polish Hill?” I ask her. “That’s where I first started looking for you—”

“Timothy broke my arm,” she says. “Dr. Waverly asked me to move out of the house because of it. He rented that apartment for me, paid for my classes at the Art Institute. Timothy still visited me—there was a café downstairs from the apartment and we’d have coffee, just talking. He apologized for what had happened. He told me he needed to clear up a few things about his life. He stayed late at my apartment almost every night and I let him. He would berate me if I was late coming home or if I was supposed to see any of my other friends—”

“Peyton?” I ask.

“She was the reason he broke my arm. He didn’t like how close we were, said I was trying to make a mockery of him—”

“What happened?”

“There was a morning I didn’t have classes and Timothy made breakfast and told me that he wanted to marry me. He said he was going away for a little while, that he was taking a road trip down south with his wife and that he would return to me a stronger and better man, a free man. We would live together through Christ when he returned, he said. I asked where he was going, but he wouldn’t tell me. All he said was ‘far.’ ‘A week or two, that’s all,’ he said, ‘and then I’ll be back for you—’”

“You’re Timothy’s wife?” I ask her.

“The world ended first—”

“I died that day,” she says.

“I died with everyone I knew and loved.

“I was downtown. I had a fashion photography class that morning, working with lighting. The weather was beautiful like a spring day even though it was October, and standing on the corner of the Boulevard of the Allies, I remember thinking that Timothy had left, that there wasn’t anything I needed to rush home to, no one expecting me, and wanting to go to the Galleria, to the South Hills—to some of the boutiques in Mount Lebanon, anywhere but just home to my apartment, anywhere. I was interested in vintage looks at the time and Mount Lebanon had a location of Avalon that I didn’t get to as often as the Squirrel Hill store. A beautiful afternoon, do you remember? I could spend all afternoon just walking, if I wanted to—

“I had a quick lunch at the Bluebird Kitchen. I remember figuring out which bus to take because I hadn’t made the trip all that often and wasn’t familiar with the route. I remember catching the bus and remember the bus was crowded that day. It was almost too crowded, and I remember second-guessing whether I should even go. I was fearful of what Timothy would think if he found out I didn’t come straight home after class—but I’d already paid my fare and had already worked my way through the crowded bus aisle, threading among people’s legs and backpacks and shoulders until I found a free space to stand. Holding the nylon strap, swaying with every turn. I remember everything, every detail of that bus ride. We inched corner to corner through downtown, more passengers boarding, crowding me farther toward the back. The faces of the passengers are seared into my memory. I have dreams about them—even now I dream I’m still on the bus with them. At the time I remember wondering why so many of them weren’t at work—I remember wondering where they were going. I’ve ridden that bus in the Archive. I feel a desperate need to see those people again, to visit them, to remember them—and they’re there, perfectly preserved because of the bus’s security camera. I see myself among them and wonder why, wonder who they were and what their lives had been before they boarded the bus that afternoon.

“We left downtown—no more stops until the far side of the tunnel. An old woman in front of me was clicking her tongue for a child in front of her. Most people kept to themselves, looking out the windows or into the streams or at their cell phones. I remember riding across the Liberty Bridge, the Monongahela flowing beneath us like a ribbon of mud, the downtown skyline receding behind me. I remember Mount Washington looming like a great and expanding shadow. I remember plunging into the Liberty Tunnel, the smooth tube of concrete cutting through the mountain. The sunlight is cut off, replaced by an unnatural fluorescent glow. The taillights of cars are exceptionally bright. The sound is odd—a reverberation of wind and engines, like a cocoon of sound. The smell is motor oil and stale air. It’s twilight here. It will always be twilight here.

“This is when the world ends. This is when a man opens his suitcase. I remember falling. The mountain heaving. The bus flipped over. The metal screamed. The tunnel had collapsed and the sudden stop was padded by bodies. A jumble of bodies in the aisles, in the seats, finding my face pressed against window glass, my neck bent. So many people died right then—most of us were dead. I don’t know minutes from hours. The terrible pressure. The dark. Movement against my shin—someone else was alive, but the movement stopped. Blood rushing to my head, the pain intolerable. Screams in the darkness. Moaning—like animals moaning, panicked, not like the sounds people make.

“A few who were alive turned on their cell phones and held them out like flashlights. There was room for some of us to move, a few of us who were unhurt, who started picking through the dead. I remember panicking then—it was the only moment I panicked, understanding that I was buried in dead people. I screamed but my screams sounded distant, like I was under water and listening to someone else scream. I remember hands grabbing my legs and pulling me free. I remember screaming until a man’s face appeared in the bluish-white glow of a cell phone and calmed me. This man’s name was Stewart—I can still see Stewart’s face hovering in blue light when I close my eyes. He asked if I was hurt and when I said I was, he asked how bad and where. I told him I thought my leg was broken and his response was, ‘Then you can still help us—’

“We separated the living from the dead. Working in the dark for what must have been hours, reaching out and touching a cold hand, cold faces. Only eight of us lived. We worked until we could no longer hear the voices and didn’t dare to speak until the distant cries from people we couldn’t reach fell silent. The bus was crumpled in a way that left enough room to huddle together near the steering wheel. The glow of cell phones—faces so covered with blood that I couldn’t see who these people were. Stewart told us to turn out the lights, to conserve the batteries, but in the dark the dead crawled around us so we kept the lights on. Someone had a radio, but all we could hear was static. An increasing stink of gasoline. A woman named Tabitha screamed for God to kill her. She dug out her eyes and chewed on her tongue. We watched her bleed to death in the faint glow of our cell phones. The batteries on the cell phones ran out one by one and we lost our lights. Another man, Jacob, began to sing—a rich baritone voice that was like a thread in the dark. We were left with nothing but our voices. I heard Stewart—he was rummaging through what backpacks and bags he could reach, trying to gather together whatever we could eat or drink. He divvied what we had, rationed it out to us. He tried to convince us all to go to the bathroom in the same corner—in a shallow pocket you could crawl to on your belly between two bodies, but no one listened to him and soon our little space was fouled. Stewart was certain that someone was digging through the rocks to find us and we’d listen and hear slides and shifts in the stones and convince ourselves that help was coming, that if we could just hold on we would be rescued. He begged us to be intelligent, to conserve our energy, to conserve our water. He talked about his daughters and his wife and tried to get us all talking about who was waiting for us, to give us all hope. At some point we stopped hearing Stewart’s voice.

“Time dissolves. I’d sleep and I’d wake up but I don’t know for how long or how often. I’d stop hearing someone’s voice or someone’s breathing and I’d think they died only to hear them say something or hear them shift and know they were still alive. There were six of us, after Stewart and Tabitha. We hung on by playing games—word association games. I wondered where the old woman who clicked her tongue was, or the mother and her child—they would have been right near me in the crash and so maybe they were alive, too—and I’d scream and start pulling at the bodies around me, trying to dig through to them, thinking someone else might still be alive, but the others would say, ‘What do you think of when I say the word
sunshine
?’ And I’d say, ‘a park,’ or ‘the ocean,’ and then I would have to say, ‘Jacob, what do you think about when I say the word
ocean
?’ and Jacob would answer until we were telling each other about the beach and we weren’t buried alive at all but were in the sun, or in a park having a picnic, or swimming in the ocean.

“It was only later—long after we’d eaten through our sack lunches and drank through all the water and bottles of pop and thermoses of coffee, long after we grew thin and agonized from hunger and after burning thirst made us desperate—that we gave up hope of a rescue and began tearing at the bus walls with small bursts of our failing energy, listening to the shifting of concrete and stone, hoping we would die in a sudden rush of weight. Instead, a path opened. One of us, a woman named Elizabeth, felt a slight breeze that she thought was one of the dead men breathing, but when she reached out her hand through one of the broken bus windows, she found that her arm could fit through the unexpected gap in the stone. She climbed out the bus window. When she spoke her voice was distant and we thought it was a trick of our ears, but she said there was enough room to crawl. Too narrow for a few of us to fit through—they tried and plugged the hole, wriggling back into the bus, but I was thin, I was one of the ones who could push through the broken window, slicing open my breasts and my abdomen and my thigh on a shard of glass. Once I crawled through, the narrow path opened wider. There were only three of us who could fit through—Elizabeth ahead of us, and a man named Steven in front of me. I was the last. I remember hearing the others screaming after us when we left them. They cursed us. They damned us. They begged us to come back, to stay with them. Pitch-black rock, scraped and bruised, gouged by rebar in the shattered concrete, bleeding. I remember crawling, what seemed like hours of work to only move an inch or two inches. I remember thinking that one of the people we’d left behind would catch up with me, that I would feel their hands grab my foot and pull me back, but no one touched me and eventually their voices faded. We crawled like worms through the earth.