“I don’t want to be bothered.”
I walked slowly down the sloping aisle between the empty seats, which always made me feel like a bride, and when I got to the stage he told me to sit, so I sat on the stage near him, but I kept my distance, my legs dangling over the edge, as his were.
He smiled a strange smile at me, and I didn’t know what it meant, and I waited for what would happen next.
“I want you to tell me about it,” he said. “The breaching.”
“Tell you?”
“Tell me what it’s like. You know I didn’t grow up here. I didn’t experience it myself.”
It felt like such a personal thing for him to be asking in such a direct and unapologetic fashion.
“I want to know,” he said simply.
“Why me?”
“Lots of reasons,” he said. “The main one is that you want to tell it.”
I didn’t enjoy being fathomed like that.
“I better go,” I said.
I stood and started to walk back up the aisle. I wondered what he would do. If he would demand for me to halt or seize me from behind. But he did nothing at all.
I was halfway up the aisle when I stopped and turned and saw him still sitting, unmoved, with a bemused look on his face.
“Where are you from?” I asked from my safe distance.
“East Saint Louis.”
“What’s Missouri like?”
“Actually, it’s Illinois—it’s across the river from Saint Louis.”
“Oh.”
“The mighty Mississippi. It runs brown with mud.”
“Oh.” Each word I said sounded smaller in the dark.
“Normal.”
“What?”
“You asked what Missouri’s like. It’s normal. Illinois, normal. Saint Louis, normal. East Saint Louis, normal. Partridge Street, with its kids riding bicycles before dinnertime—normal. So much normal you could choke on it.”
There was a roughness to him always, as though he were constantly chewing on some bitter root. He was someone who seemed to have little tolerance for things. His demeanor suggested I could stay or go as I pleased. So I stayed.
“It’s like a highway,” I said, feeling for a moment like I was standing alone, speaking to myself. “The breaching. It’s like a long highway in the desert, and you can’t see the end of it, and you can see everything for miles in every direction, and there’s nothing but you—and maybe that’s a good thing, or maybe that’s a bad thing, or maybe it’s both. But it’s just you and your guts in the middle of a desert.”
I waited for him to respond, but he said nothing at all. He just leaned forward a little and waited for me to continue.
And that’s how it started between him and me.
*
Sometimes I tell myself stories still. During the days, when my husband is at work and my son is at school, I walk through the house tidying things and listening to the tales my voice has to tell.
“There once was a man, just like you and me,” I say, “except that at night he liked to remove his head from his shoulders and keep it in a wicker basket beside his bed.”
I straighten the pile of coasters on the coffee table and am gone out far in my imagination.
Lola King, who has let herself in by my kitchen door, startles me.
“Who are you talking to, sweetie?”
“Oh,” I say. “No one. Just doing some cleaning.”
“You’re losing it,” she says. “Let’s us girls have a couple Bloody Marys and go put dirty magazines in Marcie’s mailbox. What do you say?”
Lola is lawless. She sees me as the innocent she delights in corrupting. I wonder what she might look like running wild in the woods, naked under the moonlight, tearing at life with her painted fingernails.
She tells me stories about her life before she came here—in New Jersey, where her husband was acquainted with some bad men who sometimes cleaned their guns at her kitchen table. She means to appall me, so I widen my eyes and shake my head slowly back and forth.
We all have stories to tell. Our demons are sunk deep under the skin, and maybe we use stories to exorcise them—or at least know them truly.
*
Beggar’s Moon came at the end of February. I went into town—but different parts of the town, the places where the others never went. I ran until I was out of breath, my burning lungs heaving for air while I stood naked and alone in the middle of an empty supermarket parking lot. There was an unearthly luminescent glow coming from the supermarket, and I walked toward it until I stood on the sidewalk in front of the massive plate-glass windows. Next to me was a recycling bin filled with empty beer bottles. It gave off an acrid smell that I found comforting. The rear of the store was dark, but they had left the overhead lights on in the front. I pressed my palms to the glass, wanting to feel the nighttime haunt of a place that the daylight had seen all populous.
Surely spirits lingered. Surely they moved slower than bodies, always half a day behind their corporeal counterparts. I knew this to be true, because I felt my own spirit still alive somewhere in the daylight, left behind in the comfort of my bedroom, reading a book or calculating trigonometry. My spirit was graceful and true—something to make my father proud.
I felt it alive somewhere. Somewhere else.
There was a sound behind me, and I turned. It was Roddy Ewell. We knew each other from school. He was in the grade below me, and he was small, too. I had wondered, the previous year, if he might ever consider being my boyfriend. Though it had been a long time since he had crossed my mind at all.
He casted a splay of shadows beneath the humming lamps of the parking lot—as though his own spirit were manifold and on the escape.
“I followed you,” he said.
“Why?”
“How come you don’t run with everyone else? It’s not natural.”
I turned my back to him and gazed through the plate glass into the empty store. There was a delicate magic to empty places. I wished myself inside and wondered what it would take to break the window with my head.