In This Light (14 page)

I nodded.
I’ll go
, I said.

He nodded too, and that was the end of it.

But I didn’t go. I hitched to Kalispell, went to six restaurants, finally found a job at a truck stop west of town.

That night I told my father I needed the truck to get to work, eleven to seven, graveyard.

I knew he wouldn’t speak enough words to argue.

I married the first trucker who asked. I was eighteen. It didn’t last. He had a wife in Ellensburg already, five kids. After that I rented a room in Kalispell, a safe place with high, tiny windows. Even the most careless girl couldn’t fall.

Then it was March, the year I was twenty, and my father had his first heart attack. I quit my job and tried to go home. I thought he’d let me take care of him, that I could bear the silence between us.

Three weeks I slept in my father’s house, my old room, the little bed.

One morning I slept too long. Light filled the window, flooded across the floor. It terrified me, how bright it was.

I felt my father gone.

In his room, I saw the bed neatly made, covers pulled tight, corners tucked.

I found him outside the doctor’s house. He had his gun in one hand, the hose in the other. He’d flushed three rats from under the porch and shot them all.

He meant he could take care of himself.

He meant he wanted me to go.

I got a day job, south of Ronan this time, the Morning After Café. Seventeen years I’ve stayed. I live in a trailer not so many miles from the dirt road that leads to Simone Falling Bear’s shack.

Sometimes I see her in the bars—Buffalo Bill’s, Wild Horse, Lucy’s Chance. She recognizes me, a regular, like herself. She tips her beer, masking her face in a flash of green glass.

When she stares, I think, She sees me for who I really am. But then I realize she’s staring at the air, a place between us, and I think, Yes, if we both stare at the same place at the same time, we’ll see him there. But she looks at the bottle again, her loose change on the bar, her own two hands.

Tonight I didn’t see Simone. Tonight I danced. Once I was a pretty girl. Like Noelle, shining in her pale skin. It’s not vain to say I was like that. I’m thirty-seven now, already old. Some women go to loose flesh, some to hard bone. I’m all edges from years living on whiskey and smoke.

But I can still fool men in these dim bars. I can fix myself up, curl my hair, paint my mouth. I have a beautiful blue dress, a bra with wires in the cups. I dance all night. I spin like Noelle; I shine, all sweat and blush and will.

Hours later, in my trailer, it doesn’t matter, it’s too late. The stranger I’m with doesn’t care how I look: he only wants me to keep moving in the dark.

Drifters, liars—men who don’t ask questions, men with tattoos and scars, men just busted out, men on parole; men with guns in their pockets, secrets of their own; men who can’t love me, who don’t pretend, who never want to stay too long: these men leave spaces, nights between that Vincent fills. He opens me. I’m the ground. Dirt and stone. He digs at me with both hands. He wants to lie down.

Or it’s the other way around. It’s winter. It’s cold. I’m alone in the woods with my father’s gun. I’ll freeze. I’ll starve. I look for rabbits, pray for deer. I try to cut a hole in the frozen earth, but it’s too hard.

It’s a bear I have to kill, a body I have to open if I want to stay warm. I have to live in him forever, hidden in his fur, down deep in the smell of bear stomach and bear heart. We lumber through the woods like this. I’ve lost my human voice. Nobody but the bear understands me now.

Last week my lover was a white man with black stripes tattooed across his back. His left arm was withered.
Useless
, he told me.
Shrapnel, Dak To.

He was a small man, thin, but heavier than you’d expect.

He had a smooth stone in his pocket, three dollars in his hatband, the queen of spades in his boot. He said,
She brings me luck.

He showed me the jagged purple scar above one kidney, told the story of a knife that couldn’t kill.

The week before, my lover was bald and pale, his fingers thick. He spoke Latin in his sleep; he touched my mouth.

It’s always like this. It’s always Vincent coming to me through them.

This bald one said he loaded wounded men into helicopters, medevacs in Song Be and Dalat. Sometimes he rode with them. One time all of them were dead.

He was inside me when he told me that.

He robbed a convenience store in Seattle, a liquor store in Spokane. He did time in Walla Walla. I heard his switchblade spring and click. Felt it at my throat before I saw it flash.

He said,
They say I killed a man.

He said,
But I saved more than that.

He had two daughters, a wife somewhere. They didn’t want him back.

The cool knife still pressed my neck. He said,
I’m innocent.

I have nothing to lose. Nothing precious for a lover to steal—no ruby earrings, no silver candlesticks.

In my refrigerator he’ll find Tabasco sauce and mayonnaise, six eggs, a dozen beers.

In my freezer, vodka, a bottle so cold it burns your hands.

In my cupboard, salted peanuts, crackers shaped like little fish, a jar of sugar, an empty tin.

In my closet, the blue dress that fooled him.

If my lover is lucky, maybe I’ll still have yesterday’s tips.

When he kisses me on the steps, I’ll know that’s my thirty-four dollars bulging in his pocket. I’ll know I won’t see him again.

He never takes the keys to my car. It’s old, too easily trapped.

But tonight I have no lover. Tonight I danced in Paradise with a black-haired man. I clutched his coarse braid. All these years and I still wanted it. He pulled me close so I could feel the knife in his pocket. He said,
Remember, I have this.

I don’t know if he said the words out loud or if they were in my head.

When I closed my eyes I thought he could be that boy, the one who blew himself into the sky, whose body fell down in pieces thin and white as ash and bread, the one who rose up whole and dripping, who slipped his tongue in my mouth, his hands down my pants.

He could have been that boy grown to a man.

But when I opened my eyes I thought, No, that boy is dead.

Later we were laughing, licking salt, shooting tequila. We kissed, our mouths sour with lime. He said we could go out back. He said if I had a dollar he’d pay the man. I gave him five, and he said we could stay the week for that. I kissed him one more time, light and quick. I said I had to use the ladies’ room.

Lady?
he said, and laughed.

I decided then. He was that boy, just like him. I said,
Sit tight, baby, I’ll be right back.
He put his hand on my hip.
Don’t make me wait
, he said.

I stepped outside, took my car, drove fast.

Don’t get me wrong.

I’m not too good for Niles Yellow Dog or any man. I’m not too clean to spend the night at that hotel. It wouldn’t be the first time I passed out on a backseat somewhere, hot and drunk under someone’s shadow, wrapped tight in a man’s brown skin.

But tonight I couldn’t do it. Tonight I came here, to my father’s house, instead. Tonight I watch him.

He’s stopped moving now. He’s in the chair. There’s one light on, above his head. I can’t help myself: I drink the whiskey I keep stashed. It stings my lips and throat, burns inside my chest. But even this can’t last.

I don’t believe in forgiveness for some crimes. I don’t believe confessions to God can save the soul or raise the dead. Some bodies are never whole again.

I cannot open the veins of my father’s heart.

I cannot heal his lungs or mend his bones.

Tonight I believe only this: we should have gone back. We should have crawled through the grass until we found that man.

If Vincent Blew had one more breath, I should have lain down beside him—so he wouldn’t be cold, so he wouldn’t be scared.

If Vincent Blew was dead, we should have dug the hard ground with our bare hands. I should have become the dirt if he asked. Then my father could have walked away, free of my burden, carrying only his own heart and the memory of our bones, a small bag of sticks light enough to lift with one hand.

DORA’S DISAPPEARED AGAIN
. I see her lying in the field, in the abandoned refrigerator. She’s not sleeping and she’s not dead: she’s between these places. And though I’m afraid for her even now, from this distance of years I can tell you Dora Stone is going to live.

The first time it happened, she was five years old, thirty-six pounds. While Mother dozed in the shade of her striped umbrella, Dora wandered up the beach, into the cool waves. She felt sand shifting under her feet, her small body sinking in the tug of an undertow. One man up the shore was close enough to save her. One fat white man burned red seemed to stare. But he didn’t come. Was he blind behind his glasses, or was he curious, wanting to see what the child might do?

She wasn’t that deep really. She wasn’t going to drown. She was her own voice whispering in her own ear,
Just walk out.
Mother found her, safe and dry, so Lily’s fury, stripped of fear, was pure, and the slaps were quick and hard, familiar— Dora knew how to let them fall: no crying, no ducking. The sting went away soon enough, and Mommy was sorry in the dark; Mommy came to Dora’s room and lay down beside her in the blue bed. Mommy cried and held Dora, stroked her precious body, touched arm and neck and thigh as if to be sure the child was all there. She said,
What would Mommy do if she lost you?

These are the bodies Lily’s lost already: the husband with another wife and two sons; the mother shrinking in the bed, wrinkling into the sheets till she was gone; the half-man down the hall, her father, lost; her own unknown self. She’s not fat but blurred, lost in her body: drooping breasts and buttocks, spread white belly—lily-white Lily Stone, not a flower now though her skin is still petal soft and that pale, that easily bruised. Don’t touch Mommy too hard, don’t hug her too close, but she can touch you where and how she wants, can slap your head on the beach or swat your butt, can come to your room and lie beside you in your little bed, her breath wine sweet, her body a weight and heat that fills your room till you blur too, into her,
precious baby
, the place that is yourself and not yourself has disappeared, but you don’t look at her here, and she’s come to this room so many times you’re not scared—why would you be scared of your own mother, who only wants to lie this close? Yes, it’s hot, but you’re used to that, so you let her sleep and do not tell her of waves or undertow, do not speak of sand, though you feel them in your body now, in your body that remembers everything, the pull and lick, the ground beneath you slipping. You do not speak of the burning man. He’s yours. You keep these places to go alone: the water, the blind man’s eyes, the stranger’s hands.

The next time, Dora’s six, tied in the closet, forgotten by twelve-year-old Max, her cousin and best friend, who has used his favorite knot, the Lazarus loop, so called because a person has roughly the same chance of escaping it as she has of rising from the dead.

It will happen again. Dora’s bike is in the reeds by the canal. But eight-year-old Dora is gone. Or she’s eleven, drunk on beer with Max, who is no longer allowed in their grandfather’s house. They dance in the back of the truck, radio blaring, doors flung open, yellow light spilling into the swamp. The man in the song says he’s a razor he’s a rifle he’s the water and Max says,
You’re dangerous, girl.
Hours later, in the still dark, Dora wakes groggy and mystified on her own front lawn.

In the morning she’ll learn of the stolen truck, Max’s escape from the Alpena School for Boys, a string of gas stations robbed from Michigan to Florida and one attendant shot in the hand,
So if you know, little girl, you better tell us where.
Armed and dangerous, sweet tender Max, shaved almost bald—Max, whose dirty fingers snarled your long hair when he pulled you close. You should have known.

She’s seven, she’s twelve, she’s fourteen, she’s gone.

I see a dark-skinned boy on a bike riding toward the refrigerator in the field. He doesn’t know what’s in it, but he spots the silver bicycle sparkling in the grass. He can’t believe what he finds. He’s only a child, but he knows she’s dangerous to him. He doesn’t check for breath or pulse, doesn’t lean close to see she’s just a girl. He’s smart enough not to touch. He flies across the field, pumping harder than he thought he could while the sun blazes and spits in the bleached white sky.

I’m Dora. I’m the girl in the refrigerator. I’m the girl in the closet. I’m the girl who’s left her bike in the reeds by the canal. I can’t be found.

I know you’re afraid of where I’m going when I tell you this. I’m afraid. But I can’t stop. Forgetting is the first lie, a little death. I won’t abandon myself piece by piece. I know what happens to wicked runaway girls. You find us in rivers of grass, or floating in ponds. You find us under our own beds or stuffed in the hedges of our own yards. You find our shoes in trash heaps. When we surface at last, you give numbers to our bones. But this isn’t one of those stories. See, these are my hands. This is my voice talking. As long as you hear me, I’m alive.

One night my father forgot to come home. Max forgot the boy with the bullet in his palm, forgot a woman pushed from her truck to the road. Max says,
I never did nothin’ wrong.
My grandfather sits in the wheelchair upstairs, touching his right hand with his left, trying to remember when his body had two sides and the words that might explain. Mother says,
Just a bad dream, baby.

They leave me to remember it all.

These are the rules:

    Don’t sit in the sun.

    Don’t ride your bike on the road.

    Don’t walk by the canal.

Everything here is dangerous: heat, wind, days of rain— this water wants to rise, wants to take back this ground; waves want to splinter boats and wash dark bodies to the shore. Grass cuts your hand if you grab it; leaves tipped with poison pierce your clothes. The alligator in the sun looks harmless as rubber, a truck’s blown tire, only the eyes moving, but one flick of the tail and you’ll be in the water, legs broken, back numb.