A Gentle Hell (7 page)

“It could’ve been me,” she said. Then she turned and pulled up her mended sweater that she refused to get rid of, the bloodstains still clearly visible on her back, and showed me the scars on her shoulder blades.

“It was me.”

That was when the round of psychiatrists and therapists started. I took her to every place within three hours of our town that I could find. They sat her down on half a dozen couches and extracted the gray matter from her brain. They got her to reveal more to them than she’d ever revealed to me. She feared abandonment because two of her siblings had died, and her mother divorced twice. Not to mention the dog. They laid her childhood out on a map, dosed her with drugs, talk sessions, systematic desensitization.

In response she withdrew further into herself, and started to stand in the open
threshhold
with her hand held out in front of her, waiting.

When I thought about leaving, I thought of her in the translucent white dress, her arms snarled in the branches of the tree. Somehow the image kept me running up the driveway every day for three years to take her hand and lead her back inside.

I will tell you a secret now, the terrible and ugly truth about our neuroses. Our parents and our lovers will tell us that we are afraid of nothing, in order to dispel our fear. They will try to convince us that the dark outside will never crawl through the windows and drape itself over our beds. No, dear, you will never find a rattlesnake in your sleeping bag. Don’t worry, nobody is looking at you when your limbs become hot wires and you trip over the furniture. Hell, you probably already know what I’m going to tell you.

June got bit again.

My car broke down on the way home and I didn’t get back until late at night. When I finally did manage to get home I didn’t find June standing at the threshold of the door with her arm outstretched. I thought immediately of that moment over three years ago, when I’d found her in the field out back with the rabid dog. My pace quickened. When I got to the house I found the front door open and the wind howling through the living room like a cave. One of the corners of the rug was upturned. When the wind lifted I smelled a tepid, coppery smell.

“June?” I called out.

A gasp in response.

I turned on the lights and found June draped over the upturned couch, a lamp shattered at her feet, her chest cracked open, half her face torn. The blood pooled into her navel and congealed in her hair.

I ran to her. Knelt and tried to feel a pulse.

“Oh god, June,” I said.

She coughed and spit up blood all over me. Her eyes shot open.

“He bit me again,” she whispered.

She closed her eyes and became still.

 
This time in the hospital the nurses didn’t have to hold her down for her shots, as she was barely conscious. I kept asking “Is she going to be okay?” so many times that the doctor with the sloping jaw and cat-shaped birthmark on his face asked me to go out into the waiting room. When the doctor came out I cornered him, wringing my hands so hard I thought I might break my wrists.

“She has several broken bones, a punctured lung,” the doctor said, “multiple lacerations in her back and throat. We’ve done the best we could.”

I swallowed hard. If I had her white dress then, I would’ve pressed it again my nose and mouth.

“So she’s not going to make it?”

“We think she’ll be fine,” he said. “We’ve stabilized her.”

I laughed.

“Then what was that bullshit about ‘we’ve done the best we could’?” I said, and laughed again, heady, timorous. “You’re a sick fuck.”

Much to my surprise, the doctor’s face broke out in a smile.

“Can’t disagree with you,” he said.

June stayed in the hospital for seven days. On the eighth day they called me and told me that she could go back home. When they wheeled her out of the hospital in a wheelchair to come meet me in the carport, June was smiling underneath all her bruises and cuts.

“How are you?” I asked. I bent down to hug her. She brushed her crooked mouth against my cheek.

“I feel fine,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

 
When I drove her home I expected her to be limp and sluggish. Yet she kept her head erect against the car seat, and her eyes open. They were bright and ferocious, brighter than I’d ever remembered.

“Are you sure you’re fine?” I asked.

She smiled at me and in that smile I thought I saw the hint of a cold thing, something I couldn’t quite pin down.
Cold like crossing a tile floor barefoot in the middle of the night.
Cold like the slick branches of a bending tree.

June healed fast. She stayed in bed for several days, but soon she was able to walk around, though with a slight limp, and even got up and down the stairs. Though the change in her was sudden, at first I didn’t recognize it. I suppose that’s what happens; you get so caught up in a routine that it’s easy to keep living in the dream of it.

I thought I should’ve felt relieved when June stopped waiting at the threshold for me to return, but instead I felt lost, like something inside of June had fled - all ritual gone.

In fact, she stopped pacing the floor or waiting by the window like the ghost of the curtains. She even spoke of getting another job.

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” she said. “I think it’s time for me to get out of the house again.”

“Wait a while,” I said, looking at the ruin of her face, “you still need a lot of time to heal.”

She consented to staying in the house, though she took to spending all of her time up in the studio that she hadn’t touched in three years. Several times I’d wake up in the middle of the night to find she still hadn’t come to bed. I often rolled over and climbed up the attic ladder to find her at the canvas wearing her bloody sweater, head bent down to the brush, red hair alive,

“It’s four in the morning,” I said, “you must be tired.”

“Oh? I didn’t notice.”

She kept painting, without looking back at me.

Her subjects turned darker and more abstract. She stored away the flowers and children of three years ago and started to paint mechanical creatures, black spheres, spurts of red color that bubbled out of what appeared to be a crack in the universe. She painted amorphous shapes underneath a red moon. I saw her floating across space, and I was unable to follow.

A few weeks later when we went back to the hospital to get x-rays, the doctors found her bones completely healed.

“What god are you praying to?” the doctor with the cat birthmark asked June. “I think I need to switch religions.”

June, sitting on the edge of the examining table in her paper gown, only smiled her cold smile.

When we got home that night she followed me into the bedroom. When I started to undress she grasped my hips from behind and blew cool air into my ear. I found myself unable to move for a few moments, caught in her grip as if encased in a wild tree.

“June?” I asked.

“I feel so strong,” she said.
“Like I could do anything.”

“What’s happened to you?”

She guided me to the bed and pulled my shirt up over my head.

“Do you really want to know?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “I want to know.”

She straddled me and touched her face which was no longer a ruin, but a mass of pink scars quickly fading. Before she spoke she bent down and uttered a low, soft growl.

“I don’t need you anymore,” she said.

 
One night while drifting off to sleep June woke me by appearing by my side and whispering in my ear.

“I’m going out,” she said.

Half-asleep, thinking I was in a dream, I rolled over and kissed her on the cheek.

“You don’t go out,” I said.

“The person you used to know wasn’t me.”

She left. I went to sleep but couldn’t break the cold. I dreamed of her when she was sixteen and nursing the owl that died in her backyard. She scooped it up in her arms and rocked it, whispered hush hush, whispered, “I don’t know how to help you.” She wore her white dress, but it was spattered with blood.

Several hours later I awoke to a presence standing in the doorway of the bedroom. I sat up in bed and saw a silhouette standing in the gray light, three-quarter moonlight sweeping over the floor and soaking into her skin.

“June?”

Without speaking, she crawled into bed beside me and curled up to sleep. I put my arms around her and pressed my face into her hair. She smelled of something musty and thick that I couldn’t quite place.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

In response she only stretched out her body and went to sleep in my arms. I stayed awake for a long time after that, overwhelmed by the smell that emanated from her.

In the morning I found the bed covered in blood and bird feathers. June was gone.

I gathered up the bed sheets to put in the wash, finding it difficult to breathe or swallow as I did so. I called June’s name, but there was no response. I went into the kitchen, stuffed the sheets into the washer trying not to gag, and turned the machine on. When I went into the living room to look for her I found the front door wide open.

I found June on the porch, leaning against the railing with her hair wrapped around her wrists.

“What happened last night?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Where did you go?” I said. “Why is there blood and feathers in our bed?”

“I was looking for him,” she said.

“Who’s him?”

Though she didn’t turn around, I felt her smile. I felt its thin chill spread from her to me.

“The dog that bit me.”

“What were you planning on doing when you find him?”

She turned around and strode toward me. She grabbed the back of my head and kissed me hard enough to bruise. Her eyes were about to swallow the world.

“Bite him back,” she said.

A thin line of drool ran down her chin. I watched it spill past the cusp of her lip and drip down onto her sweater. I grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back. She laughed as I did it, caught the balcony rail behind her and leaned backwards over the edge until her feet lifted off the ground.

“So this is what you’re doing?” I asked her. “You’re trying to somehow personify the dog that bit you? You think that by changing into him you’ll somehow defeat him? Leave feathers and blood in our bed?”

She leaned even further over the balcony, lifting her legs up in the air, and laughed and laughed.

“I’m taking you to the doctor.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I’m better than I’ve ever been. If only you could see.”

“You’re delusional.”

Instantly she pulled herself up on the balcony, her face set into a sneer.

“You would think that.”

“What are you even talking about?” I said, “I just want to help you.”

“You just want your scared little girl back,” June said, and she tossed her hair behind her shoulders. “You want quiet little June stiffening underneath the persimmon trees.
Shivering, wings torn out.
Waiting for you to come home.
Your pet.”