Jane had never actually said, Your mom is crazy mean and your dad flirts with me too much. Marilyn had never actually said, Your parents don’t care how smart you are, they think good grades make you stand out too much, make you pray less, might scare off the Great Charming One.
She slammed her drink. Rise the fuck up. She felt terrible, ugly. Blaming the Allens. Blaming her own parents. Rand. Might as well lock herself in a box. Sloshed, she tucked her legs under her on the couch. Good times. Middle of a weekday, Rand at work while she fell behind on her own projects. Outside the living-room window her street commenced its goosestep through the mad season of mid-September, a cold-hot march before the leaves on the trees detonated with final colour, sacrificing themselves to the ground. She examined her drained glass. Salut stranger. Arise too Marmalade and Panda, Jane’s family cats batting a crippled mouse between them on the kitchen linoleum. The old neighbourhood creek swollen with snow-melt—back in the years when winter meant heaps of snow. Arise even the two young women parting on a busy sidewalk on a watery, windy day in spring. Call me you bitch. Marilyn would take even that back in a second. Even the one whole summer when she and Jane were nine and spirited a rusty trowel from Mr. Allen’s rickety toolshed to cut small disks of grass from the Allens’ backyard and bury treasures beneath the lilac bushes—a gnawed-on ballpoint pen found by the side of the road, scraps of paper with single words written on them, Hi! Ribbet! then carefully folded over, an inexpensive earring pilfered at scorching risk from Amy’s dollar-store jewelry box. Marilyn and Jane carefully concealed their handiwork, resetting the browned parcel of sod so it reknit into the woof and warp of magic-carpet rides over a vast cave of wonders they whispered about on frequent sleepovers.
Marilyn set her tumbler on the coffee table and stood and hitched her pants. Rise up now. Please. Come the fuck away.
Fuck. She toddled down the stairs. Past her neglected office to the front door she went. She put her ear to it. Footsteps clipped along the sidewalk beyond the wrought-iron gate. Surely no one she knew. Or wanted to know. No one searching for her lost in her ridiculous tower of a townhouse. No Jane to the rescue—all this time Marilyn hadn’t realized how much Jane needed saving, needed Marilyn’s help. Jane, Jane, Marilyn thought anyway. She peered through the peephole but it was like looking through a fun-house distortion—zippy cars in candy colours and tidy shrubs and pert birds dispersing for somewhere better. Who knew where? Who cared. It made no sense to think but she thought if she could sleep some more it might help. Apparently she’d forgotten how. Or she needed more something-anything but she’d forgotten what. Something before her very eyes she couldn’t yet see.
She lay on the bed. Drifting. The sky waxed to a blue-black filling her window. Way out and beyond, stars coursed the night’s channels like an overlay of light and motion both there and not, laws inscrutable, anarchic. She recalled a time when she lay on her stomach in the submerged mouth of a river cave with some heavy current of crystalline water blowing past. She’d pulled some major deco, so a very nice narcosis was blowing her brain. Zoning, she gazed at the gravelly bottom. Suddenly, two pebbles detached themselves from the beige surround and looked at her. The freshwater flounder was slightly smaller than her bare hand. She reached out and tapped near it. The little fish lifted. Anything could happen. She tapped some more in a semi-circle around her and fish after fish rose like tiny perfect puffs of smoke. See you. You too.
Part Four
28
Twenty-three hours in the truck hauling the trailer south down the continent. They took turns piloting through flotillas of space-station-sized rigs to the tune of all-night-radio crazies, caught pee breaks at service centres the size of towns.
When they arrived it was dark. A shower would be good. But first they swung into a small lot and strolled to the river. The air vegetal and thick, the moon full. Two owls screeched at each other through the moss-bearded cypress and pine. Standing on the high bank she couldn’t tell where water began, it was that clear. Like transparent air though less so when the polluted vernal run-offs mucked the aquifer. At least the water still existed. There was that. Still clear for now in fall. She thought if she could shock to stillness the bass and mullet and gar schooling below, she’d be able to count each overlapping scale. Clarity. A hundred million gallons a day gushed from the three spring caves here—Little Devil and Devil’s Ear and Devil’s Eye—that lay beneath the surface. Intending to scoop some of the water, she clambered a few steps down a short ladder that descended to the basin, but mistaking one element for another she soaked her foot. Deception. She’d forgotten. Been away too long. Rand and the owls hooted at her.
Several weeks before, in what already felt like another time in a faraway land, she read the updated online fatality list. She read the forums.
HOW I WANT 2 GO.