Текст книги "First, Body: Stories"

Автор книги: Melanie Rae Thon

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 9 страниц)

She’s the scarred man on the table with his twice-cleaved chest and gouged belly. When they open him, they’ll find things missing. She’s the woman without a name, another body from the river. He knows her. She rises, floating in the dirty water.

Dr. Juste says, “Shove her up there on the slab any way you can.”

This one’s fat. That’s the first thing Sid notices. Later there will be other things: the downy hair on her cheeks, the long black hairs sprouting from her blotched legs, the unbelievable white expanse of her breasts. And she’s dead, of course, like the others.

But she’s not exactly like them, not dead so long, not so cold or stiff. He’d thought he could no longer be surprised, but she surprises him, Gloria Luby, the fattest dead person he has ever seen.

She weighs three hundred and twenty-six pounds. That gives her eighty-three on Sid and the gravity of death.

Dr. Juste turns at the door. He’s lean and hard, not too tall, bald; he has a white beard, the impatience of a thin man. He says, “You’ll have to roll this one.” He says, “She won’t mind.”

Now they’re alone, Gloria and Sid. She was a person a few hours ago, until the intern blasted her eyes with light and the pupils stayed frozen. Sid can’t grasp it, the transformation. If she was a person in the room upstairs, she’s a person still. He imagines her upstairs, alive in her bed, a mountain of a woman in white, her frizz of red hair matted and wild, no one to comb it. Blind, unblinking as a queen, she sat while the interns clustered around her and the head resident told them about her body and its defeats, the ravages of alcohol and the side effects of untreated diabetes: her engorged cirrhotic liver, the extreme edema of her abdomen, fluid accumulating from her liver disease, which accounted for her pain – were they listening to her moan? – which put pressure on her lungs till she could barely breathe – did they see her writhing under the sheets? It was the gastrointestinal bleeding that couldn’t be stopped, even after the fluid was drained from the belly.

She pissed people off, getting fatter every day, filling with fluids and gases, seventeen days in all. If she’d lived two more, they would have taken her legs, which Dr. Juste says would have been a waste because it wouldn’t have saved her but might have prolonged this. Sid wanted to ask what he meant, exactly, when he said this.

She’s valuable now, at last: she’s given herself up, her body in exchange for care. In an hour, Dr. Juste will begin his demonstration and Gloria Luby will be exposed, her massive mistakes revealed.

Sid thinks they owe her something, a lift instead of a shove, some trace of respect. He won’t prod. He isn’t going to call another orderly for help, isn’t going to subject Gloria Luby to one more joke. How many men does it take to change a light bulb for a fat lady?

Later, he may think it isn’t so important. Later, he may realize no one was watching, not even Gloria Luby. But just now this is his only duty: clear, specific. It presented itself.

None, she has to turn herself on. He knew what Juste would say when the interns gathered: Shall we cut or blast?

A first-timer might be sick behind his mask when they opened her abdomen and the pools of toxins began to drain into the grooves of the metal table, when the whole room filled with the smell of Gloria Luby’s failures. But everyone would keep laughing, making cracks about women big enough for a man to live inside. He knew how scared they’d be, really, looking at her, the vastness of her opened body, because she was big enough for a man to crawl inside, like a cow, like a cave. Hollowed out, she could hide him forever. Some of them might think of this later, might dream themselves into the soft swamp of her body, might feel themselves waking in the warm, sweet, rotten smell of it, in the dark, in the slick, glistening fat with the loose bowels tangled around them. They might hear the jokes and wish to speak. Why didn’t anyone notice? There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak – she can’t speak – the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over – she’s closed, she’s done – and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby – bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.

It could happen to anyone. Anytime. Sid thinks, The body you hate might be your own; your worst fear might close around you, might be stitched tight by quick, clever hands. You might find yourself on this table. You might find yourself sprawled on a road or submerged in a swamp; you might find yourself in a bed upstairs, your red hair blazing, your useless legs swelling. Shadows come and go and speak, describing the deterioration of your retinas, the inefficiency of your kidneys, the necessity of amputation due to decreasing circulation in the lower extremities. Extremities. Your legs. They mean your legs. You might find yourself face down in your own sweet back yard, the hose still in your hand.

He doesn’t think about God or ask himself what he believes – he knows: he believes in her, in Gloria Luby, in the three-hundred-and-twenty-six-pound fact of her body. He is the last person alive who will touch her with tenderness.

The others will have rubber gloves, and masks, and knives.

So he is going to lift her, gently, her whole body, not her shoulders, then her torso, then her terrible bruised thighs. She’s not in pieces, not yet – she’s a woman, and he is going to lift her as a woman. He is going to move her from the gurney to the table with the strength of his love.

He knows how to use his whole body, to lift from the thighs, to use the power of the back without depending on it. He crouches. It’s a short lift, but he’s made it harder for himself, standing between the gurney and the table. If he pressed them together, they’d almost touch – a man alone could roll her.

He squats. He works his arms under her, surprised by the coolness of her flesh, surprised, already, by her unbelievable weight.

For half a second, his faith is unwavering, and he is turning with her in his arms; they’re almost there, and then something shifts – her immense left breast slaps against his chest, and something else follows; her right arm slips from his grasp – and he knows, close as they are, they’ll never make it: an inch, a centimeter, a whole lifetime, lost. He feels the right knee give and twist, his own knee; he feels something deep inside tear, muscle wrenching, his knee springing out from under him, from under them. And still he holds her, trying to take the weight on the left leg, but there’s no way. They hit the gurney going down, send it spinning across the room. The pain in his knee is an explosion, a booby trap, a wire across a path and hot metal ripping cartilage from bone, blasting his kneecap out his pants leg.

When they hit the floor, his leg twists behind him, and he’s howling. All three hundred and twenty-six pounds of Gloria Luby pin him to the cold concrete.

She amazes him. She’s rolled in his arms so his face is pressed into her soft belly. The knee is wrecked. He knows that already, doesn’t need to wait for a doctor to tell him. Destroyed. He keeps wailing, though there’s no point, no one in that room but the woman on top of him, insisting she will not hear, not ever. There’s no one in the hallway, no one in the basement. There are three closed doors between Sidney Elliott and all the living.

He has to crawl out from under her, has to prod and shove at her thick flesh, has to claw at her belly to get a breath. Inch by inch he moves, dragging himself, his shattered leg, across the smooth floor. He leaves her there, just as she is, face down, the lumpy mound of her rump rising in the air.

Dr. Enos is trying not to smile while Sid explains, again, how it happened. Everyone smiles, thinking of it, Sid Elliott on the floor underneath Gloria Luby. They’re sorry about his leg, truly. It’s not going to be okay. There’ll be a wheelchair, and then a walker. In the end, he’ll get by with a cane. If he’s lucky. It’s a shame, Dr. Roseland tells him, to lose a leg that way, and Sid wonders if she thinks there are good ways to lose a leg. He remembers the boy on the table. He remembers all the boys. Are those my legs?

He’s drifting in and out. He hears Roxanne laughing in the hallway. Then he sees her at the window, her mouth tight and grim as she sucks smoke.

She wants to know if it’s worth it, the risk, the exchange: Gloria Luby’s dignity for his leg. The idea of her dignity. She laughs, but it’s bitter. She tells him he’s a failure; she tells him how they found Gloria Luby. It took six orderlies to get her on the slab. They grunted, mocking her, cursing him.

He sleeps and wakes. Roxanne’s gone. Even her smoke is gone. He asks the nurse, a thin, dark-skinned man, Where is she? And the nurse says, Where’s who, baby? Nobody been here but you and me.

His father stands in the corner, shaking his head. He can’t believe Sid’s come back from the jungle, nothing worse than shrapnel in his ass, only to get it from a three-hundred-pound dead woman in a hospital in Seattle. Three hundred and twenty-six, Sid says. What? Three hundred and twenty-six pounds. His father looks as if he wants to weep, and Sid’s sorry – not for himself, he’d do it again. He’s sorry for his father, who’s disappointed, and not just in him. He’s been standing in the closet in Sid’s old room all these years, sobbing in the musty dark, pressing his face into the soft rabbit fur. He’s been in the other room, in the summer heat, listening to Sid plead with Roxanne, Just let me lick you. He’s been in the kitchen, watching Sid’s mother fry pork chops, chop onions, mash potatoes. He’s tried to tell her something and failed. He’s stood there, silent in the doorway, while she and Sid sat at the table chewing and chewing. Now, at last, when he speaks to his son, he has nothing to tell him, no wisdom to impart, only a phrase to mutter to himself, What a waste, what a waste, and Sid knows that when he says it he’s not thinking of the leg. He wants to forgive his father for something, but the old man’s turned down his hearing aid. He looks befuddled. He says, What is it, Sid?

The nurse shows him the button to press when the pain comes back. Straight into the vein, babe. No need to suffer. Just give yourself a little pop. Some people think they got to be strong, lie there sweating till I remind them. Not me, honey – you give me one of those, I’d be fine all the time. He grins. He has a wide mouth, bright teeth; he says, You need me tonight, honey, you just buzz.

Gloria Luby lies down beside him. She tells him, I was exactly what they expected me to be. My brain was light, my liver heavy; the walls of my heart were thick. But there were other things they never found. She rolls toward him, presses herself against him. Her soft body has warmth but no weight. She envelopes him. She says, I’ll tell you now, if you want to know.

The blond girl with the spikes on her jacket leans in the doorway. Outside, the rain. Behind her, the yellow light of the hall. She’s wearing her black combat boots, those ripped fishnets, a sheer black dress, a black slip. She says, Roxanne’s dead. So don’t give me any of that shit about risk. He turns to the wall. He doesn’t have to listen to this. All right then, she says, maybe she’s not dead. But I saw her – she don’t look too good.

She comes into the room, slumps in the chair by the bed. She says, I heard all about you and that fat lady.

She’s waiting. She thinks he’ll have something to say. She lights a cigarette, says, Wanna drag? And he does, so they smoke, passing the cigarette back and forth. She says, Roxanne thinks you’re an idiot, but who knows. She grinds the cigarette out on the floor, then stuffs the filter back in the pack, between the plastic and the paper. She says, Don’t tell anybody I was here.

The nurse brings Sid a wet cloth, washes his face, says, You been talking yourself silly, babe.

You know what I did?

The nurse touches Sid’s arm, strokes him from elbow to wrist. You’re famous here, Mr. Elliott – everybody knows what you did.

Roxanne sits on the windowsill. She says, Looks like you found yourself another sweetheart.

Sid’s forehead beads with sweat. The pain centers in his teeth, not his knee; it throbs through his head. He’s forgotten the button on his IV, forgotten the buzzer that calls the nurse. Roxanne drifts toward the bed like smoke. She says, Does it hurt, Sid? He doesn’t know if she’s trying to be mean or trying to be kind. She says, This is only the beginning. But she presses the button, releases the Demerol into the tube. She stoops as if to kiss him but doesn’t kiss. She whispers, I’m gone now.

Sidney Elliott stands in a white room at the end of a long hallway. He’s alone with a woman. He looks at her. He thinks, Nobody loved you enough or in the right way.

In some part of his mind, he knows exactly what will happen if he lifts her, if he takes her home, but it’s years too late to stop.

He tries to be tender.

He prays to be strong.

FATHER, LOVER, DEADMAN, DREAMER

I WAS a natural liar, like my mother. One night she told my daddy she was going to the movies with her girlfriend Marlene. Drive-in, double feature, up in Kalispell. Daddy said, How late will you be? And my mother said she didn’t know.

Hours later, we tried to find her. I remember my father hobbling from car to car while I sat in the truck. The faces on the screen were as big as God’s. Their voices crackled in every box. I was certain my mother was here, stunned and obedient. Huge bodies floated over the hill. They shimmered, lit from inside. This was how the dead returned, I thought, full of grace and hope.

It was midnight. I was nine years old. By morning I understood my mother was five hundred miles gone.

I remember the clumsy child I was. Bruises on my arms, scabbed knees. Boys chased me down the gully after school. I remember falling in the mud. They stole things I couldn’t get back, small things whose absences I couldn’t explain to my father now that we lived alone: a plastic barrette shaped like a butterfly, one shoelace, a pair of white underpants embroidered with the word Wednesday. I was Wednesday’s child. I wore my Tuesday pants twice each week, the second day turned inside out.

Careless girl, the nuns said, immature, a dreamer. They told my father they had to smack my hands with a ruler just to wake me up.

I was afraid of the lake, the dark water, the way rocks blurred and wavered, the way they grew long necks and fins and swam below me.

I was afraid of the woods where a hunter had killed his only son. An accident, he said: the boy moved so softly in his deer-colored coat. When the man saw what he’d shot, he propped the gun between his feet and fired once more. He bled and bled. Poured into the dry ground. Unlucky man, he lived to tell.

I was afraid of my father’s body, the way he was both fat and thin at the same time, like the old cows that came down to the water at dusk. Bony haunches, sagging bellies – they were pitiful things. Daddy yelled at them, waving his stick, snapping the air behind their scrawny butts. They looked at him with their terrible cow eyes. Night after night they drank all they wanted, shat where they stood. Night after night the stick became a cane, and my father climbed the path, breathing hard. He’d been a crippled child, a boy with a metal brace whose mother had had to teach him to walk a second time when he was six, a boy whose big sister lived to be ten. She drowned in air, chest paralyzed, no iron lung to save her. I thought it was this nightly failure, the cows’ blank eyes, that made my mother go.

My daddy worked for a man twelve years younger than he was, a doctor with an orchard on the lake. We lived in the caretaker’s cottage, a four-room cabin behind the big house. Lying in my little bed, the one Daddy’d built just for me, I heard leaves fluttering, hundreds of cherry trees; I heard water lapping stones on the shore. Kneeling at my window, I saw the moon’s reflection, a silvery path rippling across the water. I smelled the pine of the boards beneath me, and the pines swaying along the road. Then, that foot-dragging sound in the hall.

I remember the creak of the hinge, my father’s shape and the light behind him as he stood at my door. This was another night, years before the movie, another time my mother lied and was gone. He said, Get dressed, Ada, we have to go. He meant we had to look for her. He meant he couldn’t leave me here alone. I wore my mother’s sweater over my nightgown, the long sleeves rolled up.

This time we drove south, down through the reservation, stopping at every bar. We drove past the Church of the Good Shepherd, which stayed lit all night, past huddled trailers and tarpaper shacks, past the squat house where two dogs stood at the edge of the flat tin roof and howled, past the herd of white plaster deer that seemed to flee toward the woods.

We found my mother just across the border, beyond the reservation, in a town called Paradise, the Little Big Man Bar. Out back, the owner had seven junked cars. He called it his Indian hotel. For a buck, you could spend the night, sleep it off.

My mother was inside that bar, dancing with a dark-skinned man. Pretty Noelle, so pale she seemed to glow. She spun, head thrown back, eyes closed. She was dizzy, I was sure. The man pulled her close, whispered to make her laugh. I swear I heard that sound float, my mother’s laughter weaving through the throb of guitar and drum, whirling around my head like smoke. I swear I felt that man, his hand on my own back, the shape of each finger, the sweat underneath my nightgown, underneath his palm.

Then it was my father’s hand, clamping down.

I am a woman now. I have lovers. I am my mother’s daughter. I dance all night. Strangers with black hair hold me close.

I remember driving home, the three of us squeezed together in the truck. I was the silence between them. I felt my father’s pain in my own body, as if my left leg were withered, my bones old. Maybe I was dreaming. I saw my mother in a yellow dress. She looked very small. A door opened, far away, and she stumbled through it to a field of junked cars.

The windows in the truck were down. I was half in the dream, half out. I couldn’t open my eyes, but I knew where we were by smell and sound: wood fires burning, the barking of those dogs.

I remember my prayers the morning after, boys lighting candles at the altar, my mother’s white gloves.

Green curtain, priest, black box – days later I was afraid of the voice behind the screen, soft at first and then impatient, what the voice seemed to know already, what it urged me to tell. I was afraid of stained glass windows, saints and martyrs, the way sunlight fractured them, the rocks they made me want to throw.

Sometimes my father held me on his lap until I fell asleep. He stroked my hair and whispered, So soft. He touched my scraped shin. What happened, Ada, did you fall down? I nodded and closed my eyes. I thought about the boys, the gully, the things they stole. I learned that the first lie is silence. And I never told.

Then I was a girl, twelve years old, too big for my father’s lap. I dove from the cliffs into the lake. I told myself the shapes waffling near the bottom were only stones.

I played a game in the woods with my friend Jean. We shot each other with sticks and fell down in the snow. We lay side by side, not breathing. My chest felt brittle as glass. If I touched my ribs, I thought I’d splinter in the cold. The first one to move was the guilty father. The first one to speak had to beg forgiveness of the dead son.

I worked for the doctor’s wife now. My mother’s words hissed against those walls. I knew the shame she felt, how she hated that house, seeing it so close, getting down on her knees to wax its floors, how she thought it was wrong for an old man like my father to shovel a young man’s snow.

But Daddy was glad the snow belonged to someone else. That doctor had nothing my father wanted to own. He said, The cherry trees, they break your heart. He meant something always went wrong: thunderstorms in July; cold wind from Canada; drought. I remember hail falling like a rain of stones, ripe fruit torn from trees. I remember brilliant sunlight after the storm, glowing ice and purple cherries splattered on the ground. My father knelt in the orchard, trying to gather the fruit that was still whole.

Then I was sixteen, almost a woman. I went to public school. I knew everything now. I refused to go to mass with my father. I said I believed in Jesus but not in God. I said if the father had seen what he’d done to his child, he would have turned the gun on himself. I thought of the nuns, my small hands, the sting of wood across my palms. I remembered their habits, rustling cloth, those sounds, murmurs above me, that false pity, poor child, how they judged me for what my mother had done.

I knew now why my mother had to go. How she must have despised the clump and drag of my father’s steps in the hall, the weight of him at the table, the slope of his shoulders, the sorrow of his smell too close. He couldn’t dance. Never drank. Old man, she said, and he was. Smoking was his only vice, Lucky Strikes, two packs a day, minus the ones I stole.

He tried not to look at me too hard. I was like her. He saw Noelle when I crossed my legs or lit my cigarette from a flame on the stove.

He gave me what I wanted – the keys to his truck, money for gas and movies, money for mascara, a down vest, a cotton blouse so light it felt like gauze. He thought if I had these things I wouldn’t be tempted to steal. He thought I wouldn’t envy the doctor’s wife for her ruby earrings or her tiny cups rimmed with gold. Still, I took things from her, small things she didn’t need: a letter opener with a silver blade and a handle carved of bone; a silk camisole; oily beads of soap that dissolved in my bathwater and smelled of lilac. I lay in the tub, dizzy with myself. The dangerous knife lay hidden, wrapped in underwear at the bottom of my drawer. Next to my skin, the ivory silk of the camisole was soft and forbidden, everything in me my father couldn’t control.

The same boys who’d chased me down the gully took me and Jean to the drive-in movies in their Mustangs and Darts. Those altar boys and thieves who’d stolen my butterfly barrette pleaded with me now: Just once, Ada – I promise I won’t tell.

I heard Jean in the back seat, going too far.

Afterward, I held her tight and rocked. Her skin smelled of sweet wine. I said, You’ll be okay. I promise, you will.

I am a woman now, remembering. I live in a trailer, smaller than my father’s cottage. I am his daughter after all: there’s nothing I want to own. I drive an old Ford. I keep a pint of whiskey in the glovebox, two nips of tequila in my purse. I don’t think I know as much as I used to know. I sit in the car with my lights off and watch my father, the slow shape of him swimming through the murky light of his little house. He’s no longer fat and thin. It scares me, the way he is thin alone. He’s had two heart attacks. His gallbladder and one testicle are gone. In January, the doctors in Spokane opened his chest to take pieces of his lungs. Still he smokes. He’s seventy-six. He says, Why stop now?

I smoke too, watching him. I drink. I tell myself I’m too drunk to knock at the door, too drunk to drive home.

In the grass behind my father’s cottage, a green truck sits without tires, sinking into the ground. If I close my eyes and touch its fender, I can feel everything: each shard, the headlight shattering, the stained glass windows bursting at last, the white feet of all the saints splintering, slicing through a man’s clothes.

Twenty-one years since that night, but if I lie down beside that truck, I can feel every stone of a black road.

Fourth of July, 1971. This is how the night began, with my small lies, with tepid bathwater and the smell of lilac – with ivory silk under ivory gauze – with the letter opener slipped in my purse. I was thinking of the gully long before, believing I was big enough to protect myself.

Jean and I knew other boys now. Boys who crashed parties in the borderlands at the edge of every town.

I asked my father for the truck. I promised: Jean’s house, then up the lake to Bigfork to see the fireworks and nowhere else. I said, Yes, straight home. I twisted my hair around my finger, remembering my mother in a yellow dress, lying to my father and me, standing just like this, all her weight on one foot, leaning against the frame of this door.

We drove south instead of north. A week before, two boys in a parking lot had offered rum and let us sit in the back seat of their car. They said, Come to the reservation if you want to see real fireworks.

We scrambled down a gulch to a pond. Dusk already and there were maybe forty kids at the shore.

We were white girls, the only ones.

Jean had three six-packs, two to drink and one to share. I had a pint of vodka and a quart of orange juice, a jar to shake them up. But the Indian kids were drinking pink gasoline – Hawaiian Punch and ethanol – chasing it down with bottles of Thunderbird. They had boxes full of firecrackers, home-made rockets and shooting stars. They had crazyhorses that streaked across the sky. Crazy, they said, because they fooled you every time: you never knew where they were going to go.

The sky sparked. Stars fell into the pond and sizzled out. We looked for the boys, the ones who’d invited us, but there were too many dressed the same, in blue jeans and plaid shirts, too many cowboy hats pulled down.

One boy hung on to a torch until his whole body glowed. I saw white teeth, slash of red shirt, denim jacket open down the front. I thought, He wants to burn. But he whooped, tossed the flare in time. It spiraled toward the pond, shooting flames back into the boxes up the shore. Firecrackers popped like guns; red comets soared; crazyhorses zigzagged along the beach, across the water, into the crowd.

The boy was gone.

In the blasts of light, I saw fragments of bodies, scorched earth, people running up the hill, people falling, arms and legs in the flickering grass, one hand raised, three heads rolling, and then the strangest noise: giggles rippling, a chorus of girls.

They called to the boy, their voices like their laughter, a thin, fluttery sound. Niles. They sang his name across the water.

Then I was lying in the grass with that boy. Cold stars swirled in the hole of the sky. In the weird silence, bodies mended; bodies became shape and shadow; pieces were found. Flame became pink gasoline guzzled down. Gunfire turned to curse and moan.

This boy was the only one I wanted, the brave one, the crazy one, the one who blazed out. He rose up from the water, red shirt soaked, jacket torn off. I said, You were something, and he sat down. Now I was wet too, my clothes and hair dripping, as if he’d taken me into the sky, as if we’d both fallen into the pond.

I whispered his name, Niles, hummed it like the girls, but soft. He said, Call me Yellow Dog.

My purse was gone, the letter opener and my keys lost. The boy kept drinking that pink gasoline and I wondered how he’d die, if he’d go blind on ethanol or catch fire and drown. I’d heard stories my whole life. The Indians were always killing themselves: leaping off bridges, inhaling ammonia, stepping in front of trucks. Barefoot girls with bruised faces wandered into the snow and lay down till the snow melted around them, till it froze hard.

But tonight this boy was strong.

Tonight this boy could not be killed by gas or flame or gun.

He had a stone in his pocket, small and smooth, like a bird’s egg and almost blue. He let me touch it. He said it got heavy sometimes. He said, That’s when I watch my back – that’s how I know. I kissed him. I put my tongue deep in his mouth. I said, How much does it weigh now? And he said, Baby, it’s dragging me down.

My clothes dried stiff with mud. I remember grabbing his coarse braid, how it seemed alive, how I wanted it for myself. I thought I’d snip it off when he passed out. His hands were down my cut-off jeans. He knew my thoughts exactly. He whispered, I’ll slit your throat. I let his long hair go. His body on me was heavy now. I thought he must be afraid. I thought it must be the stone. He held me down in the dirt, pressed hard: he wanted to stop my breath; he wanted to squeeze the blood from my heart. I clutched his wrists. I said, Enough.

I imagined my father pacing the house, that sound in the hall. I heard my own lies spit back at me, felt them twist around bare skin, a burning rope.

I remember ramming my knee into the boy’s crotch, his yelp and curse, me rolling free. I called to Jean, heard her blurred answer rise out of some distant ground.

I remember crawling, scraping my knees, feeling for my purse in the grass. Then he was on me, tugging at my unzipped jeans, wrenching my arm. He said, I could break every bone. But he didn’t. He stood up, this Niles, this Yellow Dog. He said, Go home.

He was the one to find my purse. He took the letter opener, licked the silver blade, slid it under his belt. He dropped my keys beside me. He said, I could have thrown these in the water. He said, I didn’t. You know why? Because I want your white ass gone.

When I looked up, the stars above him spun.

I yelled Jean’s name again. I said, Are you okay? And she said, Fuck you – go.

I staggered up the hill. I saw my father at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. I heard every word of his prayers as if I were some terrible god. I felt that tightness in my chest, his body. I felt my left leg giving out.

I saw what he saw, my mother’s yellow dress, me standing in the door. I smelled his cigarettes. He said, The cherry trees, they break your heart.