The Shining Girls A Novel

Kirby

3 JANUARY 1992

‘You should get another dog,’ her mother says, sitting on the wall looking out at Lake Michigan and the frosted beach. Her breath condenses in the air in front of her like cartoon speech bubbles. They predicted more snow on the weather report, but the sky isn’t playing.

‘Nah,’ Kirby says, lightly. ‘What’d a dog ever do for me anyway?’ She is idly picking up twigs and breaking them into smaller and smaller pieces until they won’t break any more. Nothing is infinitely reducible. You can split an atom but you can’t vaporize it. Stuff sticks around. It clings to you, even when it’s broken. Like Humpty Dumpty. At some point you have to pick up the pieces. Or walk away. Don’t look back. F*ck the king’s horses.

‘Oh, honey.’ It’s the sigh in Rachel’s voice that she can’t stand and it provokes her to push it further, always further.

‘Hairy, smelly, constantly jumping up to lick your face. Gross!’ Kirby pulls a face. They always end up stuck in the same old loop. Contemptuously familiar, but also comforting in its way.

She tried running for a while, after it happened. Dumped her studies – even though they offered her a sympathetic leave of absence – sold her car, packed up and went. Didn’t get very far. Although California felt as strange and foreign as Japan. Like something out of a TV show, but with the laugh track out of sync. Or she was; too dark and f*cked up for San Diego and not f*cked up enough, or in the wrong ways, for LA. She should have been tragically brittle, not broken. You have to do the cutting yourself, to let out the pain inside. Getting someone else to slice you up is cheating.

She should have kept moving, gone to Seattle or New York. But she ended up back where she started. Maybe it was all that moving when she was a kid. Maybe family exerts a gravitational pull. Maybe she just needed to return to the scene of the crime.

There was a fluster of attention around the attack. The hospital staff didn’t know where to put all the flowers she received, some of them from total strangers. Although half of those were condolence bouquets. No one expected her to pull through and the newspapers got it wrong.

The first five weeks after were full of rush and people desperate to do things for her. But flowers wilt and so do attention spans. She was moved out of intensive care. Then she was discharged. People got on with their lives and she was expected to do the same, never mind that she couldn’t roll over in bed without waking up from the jagged spike of pain. Or she’d be paralyzed with agony, terrified that she’d torn something when the painkillers suddenly wore off as she was reaching for the shampoo.

The wound got infected. She had to go back in for another three weeks. Her stomach bulged, like she was going to give birth to an alien. ‘Chestburster got lost,’ she joked to the doctor, the newest in a series of specialists. ‘Like in that movie, Alien?’ No one got her jokes.

Along the way, she misplaced her friends. The old ones didn’t know what to say. Whole relationships fell into the fissures of awkward silence. If the horror show of her injuries didn’t stun them into silence, then she could always talk about the complications from the fecal matter that leaked into her intestinal cavity. It shouldn’t have surprised her, the way conversations veered away. People changed the subject, played down their curiosity, thinking they were doing the right thing, when actually what she needed more than anything was to talk. To spill her guts, as it were.

The new friends were tourists, come to gawk. It was careless, she knows, but oh so horribly easy to let things slip. Sometimes all it took was not returning a phone call. With the more persistent ones, she had to stand them up, repeatedly. They would be baffled, angry, hurt. Some left shouty messages, or worse, sad ones, on her answering machine. Eventually she just unplugged it and threw it away. She suspects it was a relief for them in the end. Being her friend was like going to a tropical island for a little fun in the sun, only to be kidnapped by terrorists. Which was something real she saw a news piece about. She reads a lot about trauma. Survivor’s stories.

Kirby was doing her friends a favor. Sometimes she wishes she had the same options on an exit plan. But she’s stuck in here, a hostage in her head. Can you give yourself Stockholm Syndrome?

‘So how about it, Mom?’ The ice on the lake shifts and cracks musically like windchimes made of broken glass.

‘Oh, honey.’

‘I can pay you back in ten months, max. I figured out a schedule.’

She reaches into her backpack for the folder. She worked up the spreadsheet at a copy shop, in color and with a fancy font that looks like script. Her mother is a designer, after all. Rachel gives it due diligence, reading carefully down the rows as if she’s examining an art portfolio instead of a budget proposal.

‘I’ve paid off most of my credit card from travelling. I’m down to a hundred and fifty a month plus one thousand dollars on my student loan, so it’s totally do-able.’ Her school did not give her a sympathetic leave of absence on her debt. She’s babbling, but she can’t stand the tension. ‘And it’s not that much, really, for a private investigator.’ Normally $75 an hour, but he said he would do it for $300, a day, $1,200 a week. Four grand for the month. She’s budgeted for three months, although the PI says he’ll be able to tell her whether it’s worth pursuing after one. A small price to pay for knowing. For finding the f*cker. Especially now that the cops have stopped talking to her. Because apparently it’s not healthy or helpful to take too much interest in your own case.

‘It’s very interesting,’ Rachel says politely as she closes it up and tries to hand it back. But Kirby won’t take it. Her hands are too busy, breaking up sticks. Snap. Her mother sets the folder down on the wall between them. The snow immediately starts soaking into the cardboard.

‘The damp in the house is getting worse,’ Rachel says, closing the subject.

‘That’s your landlord’s problem, Mom.’

‘You know what Buchanan is like,’ she laughs, wryly. ‘He wouldn’t come out if the house was falling down.’

‘Maybe you should try knocking out some walls and see.’ Kirby can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. It’s an internal barometer of putting up with her mother’s crap.

‘And I’m moving my studio space to the kitchen. There’s more light there. I find I need more light these days. Do you think I have Robles’ disease?’

‘I told you to get rid of that medical book. You can’t self-diagnose, Mom.’

‘It seems unlikely. It’s not like I’ve come in to contact with river parasites. It could be Fuchs’ dystrophy, I suppose.’

‘Or you’re just getting older and you need to deal with it,’ Kirby snaps. But her mother looks so sad and lost that she relents. ‘I could come and help you move it. We could go through the basement, find things to sell. I bet some of that stuff is worth a fortune. That old printmaking kit must be worth two thousand dollars on its own. You’d probably make a heap of cash.

‘You could take a couple of months off. Finally finish Dead Duck.’ Her mom’s work-in-progress is, morbidly, a story of an adventurous duckling who travels the world asking dead things how they came to be dead. Actual sample:

— And how did you die, Mr Coyote?

— Well, I was hit by a truck, Duck.

I didn’t look when I crossed over the street

Now I’m a snack for scavenging crows to eat.

It’s too bad. I’m so sad.

But I’m glad for what I had.

It always ends the same way. Every animal dies in a different gruesome way but has the same answer, until Duck himself dies and reflects that he too is sad, but glad for what he had. It’s the kind of dark pseudo-philosophical whimsy that would probably do very well in children’s publishing. Like that bullshit book about the tree that self-sacrifices and self-sacrifices until it’s so much graffiti-ed rotting wood on a park bench. Kirby always hated that story.

This has nothing to do with what happened to her, according to Rachel. It’s about America and how everyone thinks that death is something you have to fight, which is weird for a Christian country that believes in an afterlife.

She’s just trying to show that it’s a normal process. No matter how you go, the end result is always the same.

That’s what she says. But she started it when Kirby was still in ICU. And then ripped it all up, pages and pages of adorably grisly illustrations, and started again. Over and over with these stories of the cute dead animals, but never finishing it. It’s not like a kid’s picture book even needs to be very long.

‘I take it that’s a no, then?’

‘I just don’t think it’s the best use of your time, honey,’ Rachel pats her hand. ‘Life is for living. Do something useful. Go back to college.’

‘Sure. That’s useful.’

‘Besides,’ Rachel says, her gaze dreamy, looking over the lake. ‘I don’t have the money.’

It’s impossible to push her mother away, Kirby thinks, letting the crumble of sticks fall from her numbed fingers onto the snow. Her default state of being is absent.