Текст книги "First, Body: Stories"

Автор книги: Melanie Rae Thon

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 9 страниц)

3 HOME

November again. Harvard Square. I called Adele. Not the first time. One ring, two – never more than this. If my mother loved me, she’d pick it up that quick.

Don’t be stupid, Clare said.

No answer, no surprise. Coins clanging down. Jackpot, Clare said.

I saw Emile across the street. He was a Latino boy with cropped hair, reaching for his mother’s hand.

Then it was December third. I remember because afterward I looked at a paper in a box so I’d know exactly when.

One ring. My mother there, whispering in my ear.

Now you’ve done it, Clare said.

Past noon, Adele still fogged. I knew everything from the sound of her voice, too low, knew she must be on night shift again: nursing home or bar, bringing bedpans or beers – it didn’t matter which. I saw the stumps of cigarettes in the ashtray beside her bed. I saw her red hair matted flat, creases in her cheek, the way she’d slept. I smelled her, the smoke in her clothes, the smoke on her breath. I remembered her kissing me one night before I knew any words – that smell: lipstick and gin. I heard Clare sobbing in the bunk above mine, her face shoved into her pillow, and then our mother was gone – we were alone in the dark, and if I’d had any words I would have said, Not again.

Who is it? Sharper now, my mother, right in my hand. A weird warm day, so the Haitian man was playing his guitar by the Out Of Town News stand. He’d been dancing for hours, brittle legs, bobbing head. You never saw a grown man that thin. Sometimes he sang in French, and that’s when I understood him best, when his voice passed through me, hands through water, when the words stopped making sense.

I wanted to hold out the phone, let my mother hear what I heard. I wanted to say, Find me if you can.

It’s me, Nadine, I said.

I heard the match scrape, the hiss of flame burning air. I heard my mother suck in her breath.

Your daughter, I almost said.

Where are you?

I thought she was afraid I might be down the road, already on my way, needing money, her soft bed. I saw her there on the edge of the bunk, yellow spread wrapped around her shoulders, cigarette dangling from her lips. I saw the faded outlines of spilled coffee, dark stains on pale cloth, my mother’s jittery hand.

Not that close, I said.

Muffled words. I thought she said, I’m glad. The Haitian man kept jumping, dreadlocks twisting, pants flapping – those legs, no flesh, another scarecrow man. Dollar bills fluttered in his guitar case, wings in wind. Un coeur d’oiseaux brisés, he said, and I almost knew what he meant. A crowd had gathered to listen, two dozen, maybe more, all those people between us, but he was watching me; I was watching him.

I’m glad you called, my mother said again.

And I swear, I knew then.

Je ne pleure pas, the Haitian man said.

For a moment both his feet were off the ground at once. For a moment his mouth stayed open, stunned. He was a dark angel hanging in blue air. I saw his heart break against his ribs. For a moment there were no cars and no breath.

Then every sound that ever was rushed in. Horns blaring, exploding glass; ice cracking on the river; On the ground, motherfucker – all this again.

I said, Clare’s dead.

Tell me where you are, Nadine.

Fuck you, Clare said.

The Haitian man fell to earth. I heard the bones of his legs snap. He wouldn’t look at me now. He was bent over his case, stuffing bills in his pockets.

The voice came over the phone, the one that says you have thirty seconds left. I said, I’m out of quarters. I said, Maybe I’ll call you back.

That night I found a lover.

I mean, I found a man who didn’t pay, who let me sleep in his car instead. He told me his name and I forget. Fat man with a snake coiled in the hair of his chest. I kept thinking, All this flesh. When he was in me, I thought I could be him.

Clare said, I tried to come home once, but the birds had eaten all the crumbs. There was no path.

The next night, another lover, another man with gifts. Two vials of crack we smoked, then heroin to cut the high. Got to chase the dragon, he said. No needles. Clean white smack so pure we only had to breathe it in. Safe this way, he said. He held a wet cloth, told me, Lean back, made me snort the water too, got to get the last bit. When he moved on top of me, I didn’t have a body: I was all head.

Then it was day and I was drifting, knowing that by dark I’d have to look again.

Emile appeared on Newbury Street, shop window, second floor: he was a beautiful mannequin in a red dress.

Listen, you think it’s easy the way we live? Clare told me this: I never had a day off. I had to keep walking. I could never stay in bed.

So she was glad when they put her in a cell, glad to give them all she had: clothes, cash, fingerprints. She said, I knew enough not to drink the water, but nobody told me not to breathe the air.

No lover that night. I found a cardboard box instead. Cold before dawn, and I thought, Just one corner, just the edge. When the flames burst, I meant to smother them. I felt Earl, his cool metal grasp. Get out, he said. Ashes floated in the frozen air, the box gone that fast. Clare said, Look at me: this is what they did. Later my singed hair broke off in my hands.

In the morning, I called Adele again. Tell me, I said.

I thought she might know exactly where and when. I thought there might be a room, a white sheet, a bed, a place I could enter and leave, the before and after of my sister’s death.

But there were only approximate details, a jail, stones, barbed wire somewhere.

No body. She meant she never saw Clare dead.

Clare said she tried to get home in time, but the witch caught her and put her in the candy house instead.

Busted. Prostitution and possession.

Let me answer the charges.

This is Clare’s story.

Let me tell you what my sister owned.

In her pocket, one vial of crack, almost gone. In her veins, strangers’ blood. She possessed ninety-six pounds. I want to be exact. The ninety-six pounds included the weight of skin, coat, bowels, lungs; the weight of dirt under her nails; the weight of semen, three men last night and five the night before.

The ninety-six pounds included the vial, a rabbit’s foot rubbed so often it was nearly hairless, worn to bone.

Around her wrist she wore her own hair, what was left of it, what she’d saved and braided, a bracelet now. In her left ear, one gold hoop and one rhinestone stud, and they didn’t weigh much but were included in the ninety-six pounds.

She possessed the virus.

But did not think of it as hers alone.

She passed it on and on.

Stripped and showered, she possessed ninety-one pounds, her body only, which brings me to the second charge.

Listen, I heard of a man who gave a kidney to his brother. They hadn’t spoken for eleven years. A perfect match in spite of this. All that blood flowed between them, but the brother died, still ranting, still full of piss and spit.

Don’t talk to me about mercy.

The one who lived, the one left unforgiven, the one carved nearly in half, believed in justice of another kind: If we possess our bodies only, we must offer up this gift.

You can talk forever about risk.

New York City, Clare. Holding pen. They crammed her in a room, two hundred bodies close, no windows here. They told her to stand and stand, no ventilation, only a fan beating the poison air. And this is where she came to possess the mutant germ, the final gift. It required no consensual act, no exchange of blood or semen, no mother’s milk, no generous brother willing to open his flesh.

Listen, who’s coughing there?

All you have to do is breathe it in.

It loved her, this germ. It loved her lungs, first and best, the damp dark, the soft spaces there. But in the end, it wanted all of her and had no fear.

December still, Clare eight months dead. Adele knew only half of this.

You can always come home, she said.

I went looking for my lover, the fat one with the car, anybody with a snake on his chest.

I found three men in the Zone, all with cash – no snakes and none that fat. Tomorrow I’d look again. I wanted one with white skin and black hair, a belly where my bones could sink so I wouldn’t feel so thin. I wanted the snake in my hands, the snake around my neck; I wanted his unbelievable weight to keep me pinned.

Ten days in a cell, Clare released. Two hundred and fifty-three hours without a fix – she thought she might go straight, but it didn’t happen like that.

She found a friend instead. You’re sad, baby, he said. She dropped her pants. Not for sex, not with him, only to find a vein not scarred too hard. When your blood blooms in the syringe, you know you’ve hit.

Listen, nobody asks to be like this.

If the dope’s too pure, you’re dead.

This is Clare’s story. This is her voice speaking through me. This is my body. This is how we stay alive out here.

Listen. It’s hope that kills you in the end.

On Brattle Street I saw this: tall man with thick legs, tiny child clutching his pants. Too beautiful, I thought, blue veins, fragile skull, her pulse flickering at the temple where I could touch it if I dared. The man needed a quarter for the meter. He asked me for change, held out three dimes. A good trade, I said. He stepped back toward the car, left the girl between us. I crouched to be her size, spoke soft words, nonsense, and she stared. When I moved, she moved with me. The man wasn’t watching. I wanted to shout to him, Hold on to this hand. I wanted to tell him, There’s a boneyard in the woods, a hunter’s pile of refuse, jaw of a beaver, vertebrae of a deer. I wanted to tell him how easily we disappear.

That night I found Emile sleeping in a doorway. Shrunken little man with a white beard. No blanket, no coat. He opened one eye. Cover me, he said.

I held out my hands, empty palms, to show him all I had.

With your body, he said.

He held up his own hands, fingerless. I froze once, he said.

In the tunnel I found the Haitian man. Every time a train came, people tossed coins in his case and left him there. Still he sang, for me alone, left his ragged words flapping in my ribs.

Listen, the lungs float in water.

Listen, the lungs crackle in your hands.

Out of the body, the lungs simply collapse.

For my people, he said.

His skin was darker than mine, dark as my father’s perhaps. His clothes grew bigger every day: he was singing himself sick. By February he’d be gone. By February I’d add the Haitian manchild to my list of the disappeared.

But that night I threw coins to him.

That night I believed in the miracles of wine and bread, how what we eat becomes our flesh.

It was almost Christmas. I put quarters in the phone to hear the words. Come home if you want, Adele said.

Clare made me remember the inside of the trailer. She made me count the beds. Close the curtains – it’s a box, she said.

Clare made me see Adele at the table, the morning she told me she was going to marry Mick. It’s my last chance, my mother said. I wanted the plates to fly out of the cupboard. I wanted to shatter every glass.

I smoked a cigarette instead.

I was thirteen.

It was ten A.M.

I drank a beer.

I felt sorry for Adele, I swear. She was thirty-four, an old woman with red hair. She said, Look at me, and I did, at her too-pale freckled skin going slack.

I thought, How many men can pass through one woman? I thought, How many children can one woman have? I tried to count: Clare’s father and Clare, my father and me, two men between, two children never born whose tiny fingers still dug somewhere. She didn’t need to make the words, I feel them; didn’t need to touch her body, here. I knew everything. It was her hand reaching for the cigarettes. It was the way she had to keep striking the match to get it lit. It was the color of her nails – pink, chipped.

If she’d been anyone but my mother I would have forgiven her for what she said.

I can’t do it again. She meant she had another one on the way. She meant she couldn’t make it end. So Mick was coming here, to live, bringing his already ten-year-old son, child of his dead first wife; the boy needed a mother, God knows, and I saw exactly how it would be with all of them, Mick and the boy and the baby – I could hear the wailing already, the unborn child weeping through my mother’s flesh.

Clare made me remember all this. Clare made me hang up before my mother said the words come home again.

Storm that night, snow blown to two-foot drifts; rain froze them hard. Forever, Clare said.

She didn’t know which needle, didn’t know whose blood made her like this. She didn’t know whose dangerous breath blew through her in the end. She told me she had a dream. We were alone in the trailer. Our little hands cast shadows on the wall: rabbit, bird, devil’s head. She said, Someone’s hand passed over my lungs like that.

I wanted to go home. I didn’t care what she said. I saw the trailer in the distance, the colored lights blinking on and off, the miles of snow between me and them. I saw the shape of my mother move beyond curtain and glass.

It’s too late to knock, Clare said.

She made me remember our first theft, Adele’s car, all the windows down, made me see her at fifteen, myself at ten. We weren’t running away: we were feeling the wind. We drove north, out of the dusty August day into the surprising twilight. I remember the blue of that sky, dark and brilliant, dense, like liquid, cool on our skin. And then ahead of us, glowing in a field, we saw a carnival tent, lit from inside.

Freaks, we thought, and we wanted to see, imagined we’d find the midget sisters, thirty-three inches high; the two-headed pig; the three-hundred-pound calf.

We wanted to see Don Juan the Dwarf, that silk robe, that black mustache. We wanted to buy his kisses for dimes. We wanted him to touch our faces with his stubby hands.

We wanted the tattooed woman to open her shirt. Pink-eyed albino lady. We wanted her to show us the birds of paradise on her old white chest.

We wanted to go into the final room, the draped booth at the far corner of the tent, we wanted to pay our extra dollar to see the babies in their jars: the one with half a brain and the twins joined hip to chest. We wanted to see our own faces reflected in that glass, to know our own bodies, revealed like this.

We wanted freaks, the strange thrill of them.

But this is what we found instead: ordinary cripples, a man in a violet robe promising Jesus would heal them.

We found children in wheelchairs. We saw their trembling limbs.

We saw a bald girl in a yellow dress.

We saw two boys with withered bodies and huge heads.

We saw all the mothers on their knees. We thought their cries would lift this tent.

Busted driving home. Adele knew who had the car but turned us in. That’s why I left, Clare said.

I’m waiting for you on the road.

You could be anyone: a woman with a blond child, or the man in the blue truck come back. You could be the one who wants me dead. We meet at last.

I’m not trying to go home. I’m heading north instead.

Clare’s tired. Clare’s not talking now. If you’re dangerous, I don’t think she’ll tell me.

I see swirling snow, pink light between bare trees, your car in the distance, moving fast. I speak out loud to hear myself. Clare’s gone, I say. But when you spot me, when you swerve and stop, she surprises me. She says, Go, little sister, get in.

She whispers, Yes, this is the one.

I don’t know what she means.

If you ask me where I want to go, I’ll tell you this: Take me out of the snow. Take me to a tent in a field. Make it summer. Make the sky too blue. Make the wind blow. Let me stand here with all the crippled children. Give me twisted bones and metal braces. Give me crutches so I can walk. Let my mother fall down weeping, begging the man in violet robes to make me whole.

THE SNOW THIEF

MY FATHER FLED without waking. Snow fell. The ghost of an elk drifted between trees. Mother called that November morning. Gone, she said, as if he might be missing. He was sixty-nine, still quick and wiry, a tow-truck driver who cruised county roads rescuing women like me.

A single vessel ruptures; blood billows in the brain. That fast. Impossible to believe. Eleven years since he’d caught me with his friend Jack Fetters in the back seat. No one could blame his bursting artery on me. No one except my father himself. He filled my one-room flat on Water Street. I smelled smoke in damp wool, saw the shadow of his hand pass close to my face.

Simply dead. How could this be? He’d wounded the elk at dawn, tracked it for miles down the ravine. Near dark, the bull became an owl and flew away.

Lungs freeze. Hearts fail. It’s easy. I know it happens everywhere, hundreds of times a day, to daughters much younger than I was then. Still, each one leaves a mystery.

As my father slipped into bed that night, he said, My shoulder hurts. Could you rub me?

And Mother whispered, I’m too sleepy.

It drove her mad. Over and over she said the same thing: I was going to rub his shoulder in the morning.

I thought we’d lose her. She kept asking, How could I sleep with your father dead beside me? I remember how suddenly she shrank, how nothing she ate stayed with her. My brother wanted to put her away. A home, Wayne said, for her own safety.

One night we found all her windows open, the back door flapping. We caught her three miles up the highway. She stood in the middle of the road, as if she’d felt us coming and had paused to wait. Our headlights blasted through worn cloth, revealed small drooping breasts and tense legs, bare feet too cold to bleed. She wore only her tattered nightgown. No underpants beneath it. Nothing.

She wouldn’t ride in the truck. I gave her my coat and boots. I wore Wayne’s. He had to drive in stocking feet. Mother and I walked together, silent the whole way. I held her arm to keep her steady. But this is the truth: she was the one to steady me. It made sense, this cold – a kind of prayer, this ceaseless walking.

When we got home, she let me wash her feet. I told her she was lucky, no frostbite, and she said, Lucky?

Then she slept, fifty-six hours straight.

The doctor said, She needs this. She’s healing.

I washed her whole body. She hadn’t bathed for twelve days. My mother, that smell! Air too thick to breathe, tight as skin around me.

She woke wanting sausages and steak. Eggs fried in bacon grease. A can of hash with corned beef. She ate like this for days and days, stayed skinny all the same. It’s your father, she said. He’s hungry.

He took her piece by piece. For thirteen years my mother stumbled in tracks she couldn’t see. Every year another stroke left another tiny hole in her brain. I thought of it this way, saw our father standing at the edge of the pines, his gun raised. He was firing at Mother; but it was dusk, and since he was dead, his aim was unsteady. Each time he hit, she staggered toward him. He was a proud man, even now. It was his way of calling.

In the end, he defeated himself. All those scars left spaces empty. She forgot why she’d gone to the woods and who she wanted to find there. She loved only her nurse, and almost forgot my father, and almost forgot my brother and me.

I caught the pretty boy smoothing her sheet. Thin as an angel, this Rafael, so graceful he seemed to be dancing. He held her wrist to feel the pulse. He checked her IV. He said, What a beautiful way to eat.

He loved her too. How can anyone explain? He wasn’t afraid of burned thighs or skin peeling. He touched her feathery hair, sparse and fine as wet down on one of the unborn chicks my brother kept in jars of formaldehyde the year he was fourteen. Specimens, he called them, his eighth-grade science project. Every two days he cracked another egg to examine the fetus. I hated myself, remembering this, seeing my own mother curl up like one of these. But there they were, those jars of yellow fluid, those creatures floating.

I stroked her arm to make her wake.

What do you want now? she said.

To say goodnight.

Not goodbye?

Not yet.

It’s not up to you, she said. She was seventy-seven years old, seventy-three pounds the last time anyone checked.

What did I want?

I wanted her big again. Tall as my father. Wide in the hips.

Think of me as a child. Once, when I was sick, my mother sat three days beside me, afraid to sleep because I might stop breathing. Sometimes when I woke I smelled deerskin and tobacco, felt my father’s cool hand on my forehead.

I have this proof they loved me.

What went wrong?

I turned fifteen. Jack Fetters said, Someday, Marie. Jack Fetters whispered, We’re not so different as you think.

He was a guard at the state penitentiary. He said, Man goes crazy watching other men all day. His wife, Edie, had some terrible disease with a jungle name. Made her arms and legs puff up huge, three times their normal size. Jack Fetters said, Sometimes the body is a cage. They had a little girl just five, another seventeen, four boys in the middle. The one I knew had found his profession already: Nate Fetters was a sixteen-year-old car thief.

I thought, sooner or later his own daddy and a pack of dogs will chase him up a tree. Would Jack Fetters haul his son back to town, or would he chain the animals and let the thief escape?

A trap, either way.

I liked that boy, Nate Fetters. But he never noticed me. It was the father who touched my neck under my hair. It was the father I slapped away. The father who kept finding me. After school, at the edge of town, throwing rocks down the ravine. The patient father. Someday, Marie.

Was he handsome?

How can I explain?

He was the wolfman in a dream, a shape-shifter, caught halfway between what he was and what he was going to be. Even before I unbuttoned his shirt, I imagined silvery fur along his spine. Before I pulled his pants to his ankles, I saw his skinny wolf legs. I knew he’d grunt and moan on top of me. Bite too hard. Come too quickly.

This part I didn’t see: a car pulled off the road, a back seat – my father with a flashlight, breaking glass above me. I never guessed my own belly would swell up huge like Edie’s legs.

Wayne sat on the window ledge. Our mother’s room. Another day.

She’s worse, he said.

At last, I thought, it’s ending.

But he didn’t mean this.

He said, She promised that little fairy her damn TV.

I knew Wayne. He wanted the color television. He figured he’d earned it, living with Mother. Thirteen years. I’ve done my time. That’s what he’d say.

Her eyelids fluttered. She was asking God, What did I do to deserve children like these?

Listen, I felt sorry for my brother. He was soon to be an orphan. Just like me.

Once we hid in the ravine, that dangerous place, forbidden, where fugitives dug caves, where terrified girls changed themselves to pine trees. We buried ourselves under dirt and damp leaves. We couldn’t speak or see. We couldn’t be seen. God only glanced our way. If he saw the pile of leaves, he thought it was his wind rustling. He turned his gaze. He let us do it. He let us slip our little hands under each other’s clothes. Warm hands. So small! Child hands. So much the same. God didn’t thunder in our ears. God didn’t hurl his lightning.

But later he must have guessed. He came as brittle light between black branches. He was each one blaming the other. He showed himself as blindness, the path through trees suddenly overgrown with thorns and briars. He came as fear. He turned to root and stone to trip us.

The man on my mother’s window ledge had split knuckles, a stubbled beard, bloated face. He said, It’s late. I work tonight. He said, Call me if there’s any change.

First love gone to this. If I said, Remember? Wayne would say I’d had a dream. He’d say I was a scrawny brat. He’d say the closest thing he ever gave me to a kiss was a rope burn around my wrist.

This is how God gets revenge: he leaves one to remember and one to forget.

The boy I loved had been struck dead.

At twenty, Wayne said, This whole town is a penitentiary. He meant to climb the wall and leap. No barbed wire. No snags. He moved up and down the coast, Anchorage to Los Angeles. He wrote once a year. Every time he was just about to make some real money. But after our father died, Wayne came home to Mother, safe, took a job with Esther McQuade at the 4-Doors Bar on Main Street. It’s a good business, he said. Everybody has to drink.

Six months later, he married Esther’s pregnant daughter. Some kind of trade. He said, I know this first one’s not gonna look much like me. Now he was Esther’s partner instead of her employee.

But he was still jealous, thought I must be smart and lucky. Because I went to college, two years. Because I got as far as Missoula and stayed. Eighty miles. I wanted to tell him, No matter where I go, I’m just the same.

Did he blame himself for Mother’s last accident?

I never asked. I knew what he’d say. Just because she lives in my house doesn’t mean I trot to the bathroom with her.

She spent two days in bed before she told him. A tub of scalding water, thighs and buttocks burning. She was ashamed. I just sat down, she said. I wasn’t thinking.

By the time she showed him, the skin was raw, the wounds infected. She couldn’t ride a single mile. The doctor who came to the house gave her morphine. He said, How did you stand it?

And she said, I forgot my body.

This doctor was a boy, blinking behind thick glasses. He couldn’t grasp her meaning. Mother said, Go ask your father. Maybe he can tell you.

The doctor shook his head. No way to help her here in Deer Lodge. He said, We’ll have to fly you to Missoula.

Yes, she said, I’d like that. She meant the ride, the helicopter.

Now this, three weeks of antibiotics and painkillers pumped into veins that kept collapsing. She had a doctor for each part of her: one for skin and one for brain, one to save her from pneumonia. But all of them together couldn’t heal her whole body. The neurologist rubbed his clean hands as if they hurt him. He stood near the window – gray light, white jacket, all I remember. He tried to explain it. Common with stroke victims, immune system impaired, the body can’t fight infection. He said, It’s one thing after another, like stomping out brush fires.

We were alone at last. I smoothed her hair. She curled into herself, tiny bird of a woman, still shrinking, becoming my child, my unborn mother. I leaned close to whisper. It’s me, I said, Marie, your daughter.

Rain hit the glass. Then Rafael appeared, off-duty, wearing his black coat draped around his shoulders. He washed her face. He said, She likes this. See? She’s smiling. He said, Go home if you’re tired. I can stay awhile.

His coat was frayed, not warm, not good in rain. Maybe he had nowhere else to go. No house, no room, no bed, no lover. Maybe this was the reason for his kindness. Who can know our secrets?

I saw my father in the parking lot, gun propped against a dumpster. He searched his pockets. Found no bullets. He knew Rafael was with my mother. So close at last, and he’d lost her all the same.

I meant to go home and bolt the door. But rain turned to sleet, sent me spinning. One wrong turn and I found myself at the Bearpaw Bar on Evaro.

Animals hung. Buffalo, moose, grizzly. This last one had its hide attached. I thought their bodies must be trapped behind these walls. I told the man beside me I’d break them free if I had a pick and axe. He had pointy teeth, a glad-dog grin. He said, Where were you when they locked me down in Deer Lodge? His skin was cracked, a Badlands face. When he smiled that way, I was afraid the scars might split open. This Tully bought my third beer, my first bourbon. He gripped my knee. He said, I like you.

By the jukebox, two sisters swayed, eyes closed, mouths moving. Sleepdancers. My father leaned against the wall, watching their smooth faces and the dreamy tilt of their hips rolling. I passed him on my way to the bathroom. His coat was wet. I smelled metal and oil, a gun just cleaned, grease on his fingers.

Too many beers already. I knew how it would be, how I’d follow Tully to the Easy Sleep Motel, take off my clothes too fast to think.

But when I saw my father, I had hope I could be saved. I thought, I won’t do this if you’ll talk to me. I said his name. I whispered, Daddy?

He didn’t hear. Deaf old man. He looked away.

Listen.

They never brought my son to me. They let me sob, sore and swollen. They let my breasts bleed milk for days.

In every room another girl, just the same. In every room the calm Catholic women said, Gone, a good family.

Listen. There were complications. Narrow pelvis, fetus turned the wrong way. They had to cut my child out of me. Days later, they cut again.

Infection, the doctor said. It has to drain.

One slip of the knife. And a girl becomes a childless mother forever. It’s easy. The good women promised, No more accidents. Between themselves they murmured, It’s a blessing.

Listen.

No father lets you tell him this.

In the bathroom, I tried to see myself, but I wasn’t there. I was black eyebrows and lipstick smeared. The rest of me was hidden, inside the wavy glass. I imagined opening a door, falling on a bed. I saw the marks my mouth would leave, bright blooms on scarred flesh. I saw a spiderweb tattooed on Tully’s hairless chest.

What did I care if some old man judged me?

Listen. I’m snow in wind. No one leaves his imprint.

I went back to the bar, another beer, a third bourbon. Tully’s hand moved up my leg. I’d hit black ice, locked my tires in a skid.

And then, a miracle, an angel sweet as Rafael sent to rescue stranded women. God spit him from the mouth of the buffalo head. Skinny boy in black jeans and leather. He pulled me off my stool. He said, Maybe we should dance.

The old man shot coins into the jukebox. My friend, after all. They were in this together, partners, a father and son with a tow truck, saviors with a hook and winch sent to pull me from the ditch.

Those thick-thighed sisters took care of Tully. One lit his cigarette, one stuck her tongue in his ear. They’d fallen with the snow, melted in my hair. They were my strange twins, myself grown fat. Their nails were long and hard, their lips a blazing red. Angels, both of them. You never know how they’ll appear.

That boy’s big hands were on my back. He whirled me in a dip and spin. His leg slipped between my legs.