She veered onto the highway and shot past the flyspeck town and then the two police cruisers stationed at the turn-off to Rand’s base camp. The late sun burrowed in the side window and heated half her face. Poor farmland unscrolled. She passed the Dairy Daughter, the Hi-Style Donuts. Jane had dubbed much of the drive scenery-lite. What, Marilyn wondered, was the scene of Jane’s final escape? It escaped Marilyn. She could only picture dense and mud-stuffed. She wanted to imagine just one open passage and tug as if it were a thread and have Jane tug back. Marilyn wanted the skipping rope they’d bound each other with as cowgirls and astronauts roaming the Allen family’s dishevelled backyard—Roger that, got a Red Planet dust storm moving in, keep together, don’t lose track—to bind still. But she had lost track. Her fault. She’d let Jane go this morning. Let her get taken up with Rand and diving in the first place. Unbound, bawling, Marilyn gassed the car hard. She took a hand off the wheel and rummaged a tissue from the coin tray. She felt woozy, smudged as if stupid with sex. She removed her other hand from the wheel and knuckled the growing bump on her forehead. A horn blared and she grabbed the wheel again and swerved, tasting metal, blood from her bitten lip, soiled breath.
She stopped for coffee and a chocolate bar. Huge clouds massed in the darkening sky. On the road again she passed a farmhouse with a hand-lettered sign in front. FLOWERS 4 SALE. U PICK. She swung around at the first turn-off and parked on the dirt drive. She climbed the wooden porch steps and knocked on the screen door while something, a loose shingle maybe, beat on the roof. There was a slow clopping from beyond the door and then a tinkle of unseen chimes and a middle-aged woman appeared behind the screen. She emitted a few asthmatic noises and her face, blurred by the wire mesh, appeared gaunt and streaked with imperfectly applied foundation and blush. Full auburn bob that might be a wig. A faded pink jersey outfit sacked around her frame. Marilyn understood she was staring. The flowers? she stammered and the woman punched her lips together pow-pow and disappeared back into the house. The shingle, if that’s what it was, tapped like a shoe and finally the screen scritched open an inch. Knobby fingers extended a pair of scissors. Marilyn accepted them. A single swollen digit pointed to her far left.
Past the maples and oak, giant gladioli grew in stiff waves that rendered visible the heady wind. The clouds were bolting and she knelt in the fluxing light. Though the scissors were dull, green liquor soon stained her hands. Dummy. She’d fucked and re-fucked her husband as if sewing a needle through fabric, concealing her doubts—about him, herself, diving, Jane diving, what they were all doing, what were they doing?—like excess fabric, pleats in a skirt. Idiot. She worked her borrowed scissors until she had her bunch—red and coral and white with stamens brushed with saffron and a few buds that hadn’t opened yet. The sky had slowly turned a bruised blue and burnished gold and she seethed at the radiance, as unreachable as Jane. Marilyn would violate her now if she could—prise her best friend open so she could question her, pound the sense back into her, the Jane bunkered tight now as an oyster, lips cyanotic as a winter violet, an aragonite luster at the corner of a closed eye, a single tear like a milky sac.
Her own eyes stung. The air felt grimy, particulate with twittering bats, like a time-travelling echolocation of Jane’s scoffing laughter and riot-act readings when Marilyn needed them post-parents’ deaths. And those teenhood dare-scares—requiring Marilyn to scream strings of suck-mes at some gangly dude ambling past their table in the high-school cafeteria one lunch period. Jane jeering and throwing her own head back mouth agape, gasp-laughing—only to stop laughing and lean forward clutching Marilyn’s arm. Dead serious? Jane had said. That as far as you can go?
Streaks of furious sorrow splayed inside Marilyn now like forked lightning. She dropped the flowers. They lay on the ground like fuses of colour. She wanted to grind and ignite them somehow with her heel. But the sky crushed against her and she crouched once more and snatched up the stalks. She imagined their withering trajectory even as she dandled them.
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