“My mother’s dead,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “My father’s gone, too.”
“I forgot that.”
“I know.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“People saw you. Running.”
“You went to the dance?”
“No. I was looking for you.”
I turned and went to my secret place, my cistern. He followed me there, but I didn’t care. I had stopped hearing the world. In my head were confused, inarticulate voices. They babbled and boiled, and I drowned in them. My mother was a dead girl. There was darkness and dust and Blackhat Roy. You sometimes go wild, and you sometimes want that wildness shackled.
We faced each other, and the wind whistled up from the pit. While he looked, I undid my prom dress and let it fall to the ground. Then I took off my underwear. We’re all of us naked one way or the other.
My mother was calling my name from the deep wells of the earth, and I was rotted from the inside, and my mind was a gemstone mired in murk, and I would torture the impurities out. I would sweat them out, I would bleed them out, I would suffer them out, I would exhaust them out.
For there must be order. There must be balance. For every sin, a punishment. For every shameful act, a suffering. For every impure bite, a pure tooth knocked loose.
Otherwise, what was it all for?
The earth knew, whose days and nights were perfect tides of light.
The moon knew, whose pocky face had waxed and waned by untransgressible law for billions of years.
I knew, who was yet still a girl.
Chapter 13
Do you want to know who I am?
Do you want to know what I do?
I live next door to you with my husband and my child.
I have done such things as would shame the devil, yet I keep my front yard tidy, the trash bins lined up neatly on trash day.
I attend the meetings of the PTA. I offer to bake cookies.
At night, after everyone is asleep, I creep downstairs to the kitchen table and write down my memories. They are the stories I tell myself when I can’t sleep. Like fairy tales—or the mythos of a lost culture.
I was an excellent student.
I am an excellent member of the community. I never spit, and I always put my waste in the proper receptacles.
Do you know what else I do?
I sometimes walk out into the night. I walk down the middle of the deserted street. Our neighborhood is always silent at this hour—we comprise wholesome families. I feel the chill, as I did not as a girl. Maybe as you get older you grow into new kinds of dis-ease. Maybe death is the ultimate discomfort.
I walk to the park, which is deserted except for four teenagers who scurry away when they see me. The air they leave behind smells of marijuana. On the ground is an empty plastic bag and a box of matches with the name of a bar on it and an illustration of a woman sitting inside a massive martini glass.
The playground equipment is still and skeletal, unhinged as it is at this time of night from the fuss of child life, illuminated by what we used to call a Pheasant Moon.
I am alone. I am in love with my husband and my boy, but I am still alone.
Sometimes you want a hand over your mouth—you want to be hushed. Other times you just want to burn till there’s nothing left.
*
When Jack finally comes, he does not speak for a while but instead just paces back and forth outside my cell. I watch him, feeling sorry that he has a wife whom he has to fetch from jail. He is a good man. All the other men in our neighborhood have wives who are properly aligned, who know how to stay indoors.
“You broke into that woman’s house,” he says finally, using his hands to show the concreteness of the facts. “You opened her kitchen window, and you climbed in her house when nobody was home. You did these things.”
These things and others he knows nothing of. My past is sometimes so noisy in my brain. I can only remain quiet.
“Ann,” he goes on. “Ann, Helena and I—we just work together. Sometimes I see her at school. Sometimes we talk. You know there’s nothing between us. You know I wouldn’t do that, don’t you?”
“I know.”
“Then why—”
He stops himself. You can see the restraint in his thin, sealed lips. He does not like to ask me why. He fears both the answer and the absence of an answer.
“They said…” he continues, almost pleading. “They said you took a jar of wheat germ.”
I smile a little to show him that everything will be all right—that things will always be all right—but he does not smile back.
“It seemed important,” I say.
Now he approaches my cage and puts his fingers on mine as they grip the bars. He looks at me as though he knows me and understands me and will be my ally forever.
“Ann,” he says, “you have to be better. You have to be.”
I would like to explain to him that there are worse horrors by far, that we will endure—but I don’t. Instead, I just say: “I know.”
*
I stood before Roy—a naked little offering that he did not accept.
He seemed ashamed to see my body. And when he looked at my face, all he saw was the line of stitches.
“I did that to you,” he said, swallowing hard.
Absently, I put my hand to the wound. When I brought it away, I noticed that my fingertips were coated with the peach-colored dust that Margot Simons had shown me how to use earlier.
Roy stepped away from me, as though I were difficult to be near. He moved to the other side of the pit and stood before it, gazing at me across that impossible depth. Then he looked down into it. I wondered what he saw there. Maybe he, too, had lost things to the earth. But I was unsettled by something in his eyes that was near to longing.
I was cold, and the gravelly ground bit into the soles of my feet.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“You know something?” he said without looking up. “I liked your room.”
“My room?”
“It was a nice room. I wonder if I would have been different if I grew up in a room like that.”