PLEASE STATE YOUR EMERGENCY
By
PERRY W. HUNGERFORD
A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE MASTERS OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2018
1
© 2018 Perry W. Hungerford
2
To Ryan Wynne Taylor
3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank everyone at MFA@FLA, especially Jill Ciment for telling it like it is, David Leavitt for holding it together, and Padgett Powell for keeping me on my toes.
Additionally, I’d like to thank Jacob Guajardo, Charlie Sterchi, and Chloe Lane.
4 TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………….4
ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………….6
CHAPTER
1 SISTER GOLDEN HAIR SURPRISE.……………………………………………………7
2 LIFE GOES ON……………………….………………………………………………….37
3 ALIEN, ABDUCTION……..………….……..…………………………………………..61
4 THE RAT POOP THEOREM…..……….………..……………………………………...86
5 STUNNED……..………………………….…………..…………………………..…….100
6 DELIVERANCE À LA MODE……..…….……………..……………………………...120
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH………………………………………………………………...... 137
5 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
PLEASE STATE YOUR EMERGENCY
By
Perry W. Hungerford
May 2018
Chair: Jill Ciment Major: Creative Writing
This novel follows Hope Robinson, a young woman from Greenville, South Carolina, who is graduating from high school during the Great Recession. Throughout the course of the book, she gets tangled up with a gang called the Momma’s Boys. They first attack Hope in downtown Greenville and cut off her hair, but the real trouble begins when they abduct her mother. When Hope finally tracks down her mother, she uncovers the truth about the gang and it is not at all what she expected.
6 CHAPTER 1 SISTER GOLDEN HAIR SURPRISE
Hope Robinson stood on the porch in the late afternoon, stack of résumés in hand, and rocked back and forth on her size-eleven feet. Down there, inside those weathered Chuck
Taylors, she had long, damp toes crowded together like boiled peanuts. The longest toe looked like it could have held three big seeds, ready to be sucked out, while the pinkie toe looked more like one of those swollen little peanuts that only had one seed. On those large, sweating feet she rocked.
Hope was waiting for her mother to get ready so she could catch a ride downtown to apply for summer jobs. Hope might have been eighteen years old, but she didn’t have a car of her own and, if she didn’t have to, she preferred not to walk downtown. It only would have taken twenty minutes but the blocks in between were rough territory. Grown men rode bicycles on the side of the road, the seats too low and the frames too small, crunching over the broken glass of liquor pints. The sound of their rusted, squeaking chains was the sound of going nowhere very slowly. It was May of 2009, well into the Great Recession, and the national unemployment rate was 9.4% for adults and 22.7% for teenagers. The world Hope had grown up in was not the world she was becoming an adult in.
She heard her mother moving around inside, taking forever to get ready for a dinner-date with a man she’d met on a website called Rich in Love. Hope twisted her résumés into a telescope and brought the telescope to her right eye. She looked at an apple-headed Chihuahua wandering the sidewalk and kids playing basketball across the street and then her gaze drifted up to the graffitied water tower that overlooked the entire neighborhood of old mill village houses.
The houses had been renovated in the ‘80s and had originally attracted white, middle-class buyers who appreciated the history and charm, and also the metal yard art that had been created
7 by a local artist and placed on street corners to add personality, sunflowers in copper and steel, the faces of which seemed to absorb sunlight and reflect the brightness tenfold, catching the eyes of little kids on pogo sticks and knocking them to the ground, temporarily blind, but the neighborhood had suffered ever since the recession hit, just like the greater city of Greenville,
South Carolina, had suffered. The sunflowers had been uprooted, stolen, and sold for scrap long ago.
Through the paper telescope, Hope saw foreclosure signs up and down the street. This was not a good time to be “entering the world.” That was how her teachers put it, at least, as if graduating from high school meant that a big door was going to open and all of the students would walk through together, hand in hand, heads lifted, and suddenly enter an entirely new arena. Hope knew it wasn’t true. There was no walking from one world into another. It was all the same world, like a football field, and if you craned your neck you could see from one end to the other and know everything there was to know. If you had your eyes open, there really weren’t any surprises. Some people craned their necks and refused to believe that what lay before them was all there was, as if that weren’t enough, as if, for life to be bearable, there needed to be something more. Those were the ones who believed in doors to other worlds.
Hope had believed in them, too, when she was younger and still reading her children’s
Bible, with the coloring pages at the end of every chapter, and wishing that she could move through a door and be back to the life she’d known for her first eight years, with a family that was whole, or at least appeared, in her innocent understanding of things, to be whole. In those eight years, she had known what it was like to go to bed and have both parents in the house, the two of them nearby, at her service, and if she ever woke up from a nightmare at least one of them would come to her. Once she’d had been a terrible dream, something about a dog’s tail getting
8 chopped off in a screen door, and both of her parents came into her bedroom that night and rubbed her arms and said how amazed they were at the number of tears she could produce. They distracted her in that way, counting the tears that snaked the length of her face, pale and delicate then as if molded from sugar cookie dough, and eventually she calmed down and went back to sleep. That was the only time she remembered them both being there. Not long after, her parents divorced due to a general unhappiness that had been, for years, a dull and nagging pain. Hope’s father moved to Texas hill country, where he lived in a yellow house with a propane tank, a
Mexican girlfriend named Maribel, and a pack of dogs. Hope eventually outgrew the children’s
Bible and visions of alternate realities. She quit kidding herself and believed that the only real things were the things you could see. It was a survival tactic.
In truth, she wasn’t broken-up when the recession hit. Growing up with a single mother was a surefire way to make a child suspicious of stability, like the whole thing could collapse at any minute, and, more often than not, it did collapse. Only a matter of time. Another thing about growing up with a single mother was that it made a child prepared for hardship in a way that other children were not. Hope wasn’t the type to whine or complain or cry out in frustration, even if frustration was what she felt. She thought her job was to be tough, because her mother had been tough in those long years of solitary child-rearing. As Hope waited on the porch, she knew her mother was probably inside, applying more lipstick, dabbing it with toilet paper, using her finger to smudge the color that went outside the lines of her lips, then applying more lipstick.
It wasn’t really about getting the makeup perfect. It was more about taking time to think things over in her head, anticipating what the date might be like, if the man would be a good one, a rich one. They were never both.
Hope called, “Are you ready yet?”
9 Her mom called back, “One second,” but the calmness of her voice said otherwise.
Calmness meant, I’m taking my time, sister, I’ll be out when I damn well please.
The sun moved behind the water tower and Hope lowered the telescope of résumés.
Everything rested in the blue shadow of the tower and Hope felt the coolness of it on her skin, a relief from the heat of May. She had long, blond hair that made her neck sweat. Her hair was parted down the middle so that it fell like two curtains on either side of her face, much like the older Brady Bunch girls, although she wouldn’t have appreciated the comparison. She liked her hair not because it was pretty but because it was a thing she could hide behind. The kids playing basketball across the street looked at her every so often and she imagined that when the hair fell it front of her eyes, they could no longer see her. The kids, Ben and his little sister Easy Beth, shortened from Easy to Beat, a nickname that came to be because she was so unbearably bad at the game Horse, liked it when Hope used to play basketball with them. She he had gotten so tall so fast, standing six-foot when fully upright, that she had been able to lift Easy Beth overhead and let the little girl dunk the ball, with her brother shouting, “Swish!” below them, like an ant.
But Hope had quit playing in recent years. She didn’t even know how old they were anymore, probably seven and ten, and she didn’t want to be seen playing with them. They had a cheap basketball hoop with an unstable, plastic base. Whenever they hit the backboard, the whole thing shook. They’d collected cinder blocks and put them on the base to keep it weighed down, but the hollow spaces in the cinder blocks were filled with straw and leaves. A couple of times Hope had seen packrats emerging from the nests, as if leaving for work.
She didn’t wave at Ben or Easy Beth, who stood across the way and passed a Slim Jim back and forth, chewing with their mouths open. They didn’t wave at her, either. They seemed to understand that she had surpassed them in rank and was closer in status to their parents and
10 teachers. Hope liked that, the palpable shift in power. She heard a ruckus coming from their house. It sounded like their father had broken a lamp and was cursing the pieces. They didn’t bat an eye. They must have gotten used to the change in him since he’d been laid off from the Pepsi
Distribution Plant. His car was always in the driveway now.
Hope’s mom finally came outside and locked the door behind her.
She said, “Ready?”
“I’ve been ready for fifteen minutes.”
Her mom hissed, teasing.
She wore a loose dress that was tie-dyed shades of blue and clinging to her skin was the smell of peppermint oil. Instead of spending money on expensive perfume, she preferred to squeeze drops of peppermint oil into her lotion. Once she rubbed the lotion on her arms and legs, she smelled fresher and cleaner than any perfume. By normal standards, Jean Robinson was a tall woman also. In her sandals, with a modest heel, she stood 5’ 10”. Hope had never worn a pair of heels in her life and had no desire to do so. That afternoon she wore her red and very flat Chuck
Taylors. The laces were brown from school hallways that were covered with sand, leaves, hair, weave, spilled hot dog chili from the cafeteria, bits of onion, broken nails, mayonnaise packets stepped on and exploded, and the occasional fake gold hoop earring that had been torn loose in a fight. Hope had been in those shoes for nearly six months straight. She thought it looked cool how the heels had worn down.
She also wore a black, youth-sized T-shirt and a pair of cut-off shorts. The T-shirt rode up to show her bellybutton, which was typical of most clothes because she was so tall, and screen-printed on the front of the shirt was a green alien head. It was the employee’s uniform at a laser-tag place called Invasion. She’d gotten the shirt for a dollar at Thrift on Main and wore it
11 more than anything else, which was how she ended up being named “Most Likely to be
Abducted by Aliens” in the yearbook, a thing she didn’t even order because it had cost seventy- five dollars.
Her mother said, “Don’t you think that’s a little unprofessional?”
“It’s me.”
“Well, honey, they’re not looking for you. They’re looking for an employee. That’s not what you want to hear, but that’s the truth.”
“Is that what you’re going to wear?”
“Unlike a job opening, going on a date requires you to be yourself. Supposedly.” Her mom looked down at her dress. “This has personality. It says things. It speaks. It says I’m fun- loving. I like piña coladas. I like walks on the beach.”
Under her breath, Hope said, “Like we even go to the beach.”
Her mom didn’t miss a beat. She smiled and cocked her head to one side like she was posing for a glamor shot. When she smiled and looked you in the eye, even if the look was purely sarcastic, she looked young again, like she did in the old senior portrait that hung in the living room, with cheeks like sunny fruit and hair combed long and silky. In describing her youth, she’d told Hope that back then her favorite piece of clothing had been a pair of Levis with
Yosemite Sam embroidered on one of the back pockets. She had a whiskey-colored suede jacket and a pair of lace-up moccasins. She and her friends had gone on long drives, listening to the band America, and once Hope was older, her mom finally included details of them smoking pot inside abandoned houses. They’d gone into decrepit general stores, gas stations, and even barns.
There was one barn, she said, where her friend Harry Simms had fallen through the rotten floor
12 and pulled himself up with a rat clinging to his ankle. “Did you see the size of that mother?” he’d said. “That was a mean-ass mother if I ever saw one.”
When she told stories, she started off telling them for Hope, as entertainment or as history, and throughout the course of the telling Hope could sense a shift in which she started telling it for herself, remembering what it had been like to be young and reckless and fearless.
Once the story ended, it must have been like looking in a mirror and realizing that there was a widening gap between how she looked on the outside and how she felt on the inside. That music, most importantly, had stayed with her. That’s why, when Hope made the comment about them not going to the beach in a while, her mom smiled and replied, “That’s because we’re in financial straits, sister golden hair.”
Sister golden hair was Hope’s nickname, taken after the 1975 song by America.
Hope knew that she had sounded like a brat. She started to say something but her mom, lifting her hands to ward off any smart aleck comments, said, “Nobody said you had to change clothes. Let’s just drop it.” She unlocked the car and got inside. “I can’t promise I’m not going to say I told you so later, when you finish the rounds and say you struck out, because I just might say it. You can’t get mad at me, either, because I’m telling you now.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
“You’re welcome.”
Hope’s mom had been laid off from her job at the regional Special Olympics office about a year earlier and had decided to best thing to do was find herself a rich man. Initially, she’d tried to find another job but only ended up at as an aid in nursing home for a brief stint, which she claimed to have quit because the staff abused the elderly, flicking them and leaving bruises like
13 leopard spots on their thin-skinned arms. Hope knew the real reason why she quit. It was because the job felt lowly. “Lowly” meant she had to wear a powder blue uniform and tend to old people reeking of death, a smell that permeated the entire building, a smell like soft cheese that built in the back of their throats and then wafted out of their hanging mouths to mix with the lemon- scented disinfectant.
Ever since, they had been living off money that her father sent. He had a steady job working in hydraulics and had kept up with his regular child support payments until Hope turned eighteen. He also sent alimony. What that didn’t cover came out of savings. The day the savings dried up was going to be the day they dipped into Hope’s college fund. At first, Hope was upset that the money, her money, was at risk. Then she realized it would go to utility bills and taxes and groceries, all things that were required for life as she knew it to continue. She had never thought about those expenses before, how much money it took to keep the boring, everyday basics going, like the soap in the bathroom and the milk in the fridge and a working light on the front porch, aswirl with moths on warm evenings, and once she had accepted the hard truth of money, she grew up a notch. Money was not the childlike vision of yachts, hot air balloons, and gold toilet seats. Money, for real people, was tinfoil. It was gasoline, dog food, and Pepto
Bismol. On one end was the rich, with the in-your-face excess, and on the other end was the poor, with the in-your-face lack. The lucky ones were somewhere in the middle, where money was not in-your-face but rather floating somewhere in the background, simply providing comfort and sustainability.
Hope and her mother were lucky to have something to fall back on at all. Lots of people didn’t have anything, just got laid-off and then woke up a few months later to a foreclosure sign in the yard. They were all over the place. The signs were white. The letters were red.
14 Hope could have asked her mother about her date, what he did for fun, if he had kids of his own, what his name was, but Hope didn’t really care. She knew that meeting a rich man was one way of rebounding in bad financial times, but she never wanted to be in that position herself.
She’d received a note from one of the guys at school, a redneck junior named Bud, asking if she wanted to have some fun with him because, hey, carpe diem. She hadn’t responded. She’d received offers from some of the black guys on the basketball team before, too, guys who were attracted to her height. Offers came in the form of polite inquiries as to whether or not she was going to the homecoming dance, a gentle probing, so to speak, and the less-polite hollering of
“White bitch!” and “Hey, Tall!” from the hallway. She never engaged with them, though, because she was afraid of how big they were down there and she could also never tell if they were dirty or clean, although that was something she never would have admitted out loud. She didn’t choose to be racist. Hers was the common, silent racism that slept in everyone.
The only note she ever answered was from a guy named Pierce Mullins who practiced with his slingshot in the parking lot, his friends throwing eggs in the air and Pierce targeting them with a small piece of gravel. He almost always missed but there was one time when she had been looking at the perfect moment, when gravel made contact and an egg burst over a row of cars, splattering windshields and then frying in the sun. When he wasn’t shooting eggs, he was forever tucking his shirt into his pants, liking it to be tight, and he had an antiquated way of talking sometimes, a thing he had picked up from watching old westerns. She thought of him as an Earp brother in the modern age. The note said “Are you in need of an escort to Cole’s tonight?” and she’d said yes. He picked her up in a ’98 Toyota with a tape deck and rolled down his window to say hello to Hope’s mother, who waved from the front porch, saying, “Y’all have fun.” Hope waited for him to roll the window up and leave, but he called, “What about you, Ms.
15 Robinson? Do you have plans tonight?” Her mother, playing the character of an old crone, said,
“Oh, me? Just piddlin’ round the house.”
On the way to the party, he said, “She seems pleasant.”
“Yeah,” Hope said, “I like my mom,” and, for the most part, she genuinely meant it. The tiny part that didn’t mean it was the tiny part of her that wanted to be distant, that was distrustful, that wanted to instigate miniature rebellions to remind her mother that she, Hope Robinson, was an independent creature who could no longer be dressed and bathed and put to sleep with a
Berenstain Bears book. It was only natural.
Pierce said, “I distrust people who hate their parents. Have you noticed everybody hates their parents? I don’t get it.”
Hope watched the green of the streetlights move across his face.
“My dad’s gone,” he said. “It’s just me and my mom.”
She thought, Me, too.
At the party, bottles of forty-ounce malt beer were smuggled in backpacks and smoke was blown into the faces of pets, a pair of ferrets that play-fought in a greasy ball, and the bottles were later emptied and spun. It was later in the night that Hope went into a bedroom with Pierce and locked the door behind them. She’d felt things that she’d never felt before, good and surprising waves of adrenaline that started in her abdomen and rippled down to her sex. The power of those waves was, at times, almost frightening. Her first orgasm came from Pierce’s hand and it brought the world into sudden clarity, or maybe not the world itself but, rather, her role in the world, completely clear and present, just for a moment, as if she was holding a sign that could be seen from space, a sign that said THIS IS ME, and then the feeling faded away, like
16 watching a newspaper delivery boy disappear into the early morning fog, and afterward she could barely remember what it had been like, wondered if she would ever feel it again.
Her mother could rely on men, but Hope didn’t want to. She wanted to make her own money. Pierce had left school without warning. Hope wondered if he’d been expelled for breaking an egg over the wrong car, maybe the principal’s, but word would have spread throughout the student body if that was true. She heard from Cole that Pierce had family trouble and when pressed for more information, he just shrugged, saying, “I don’t know, man, he didn’t really talk about it.” Lots of kids had been dropping out of school, more than normal, but she had never suspected that Pierce would be among them. She couldn’t imagine why. He was smart without trying. He had friends.
They parked in a free lot downtown. Hope’s shirt was completely clean but her mom pretended to pick fuzz off the shoulder anyway, a way of touching her briefly before they parted, of wishing her well. They agreed to meet back at the car at nine o’clock, if not sooner.
Her mom said, “I’ll call you if it’s going to be later, but if I don’t call you then we’ll just stick to nine o’clock. Don’t be surprised if I call you, but don’t be surprised if I don’t call you.”
“Alright.”
“If I do call, it means I’ll be late.”
“I heard you.”
“But we’ll see how it goes.” She studied Hope’s face and then covered her eyes. In her put-upon way, she said, “You really shouldn’t do that.”
“Do what?”
17 “Make that face. You remind me of your father when you do that. That’s why he has such terrible wrinkles around his mouth, from making that face. I can barely look at you.”
Hope had no clue what face she was making, which made the comment even worse. To a child with married parents, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing to be compared to your mom or dad, but to a child with divorced parents it was the biggest insult there was to be compared to the absent parent. It was like saying, “You remind me of that bastard who took a decade of my life and then moved off to Texas and, seemingly overnight, found his own happiness in a plump
Mexican jewelry designer. I bet he humps her with the dogs surrounding the bed, those dogs looking up at them with their mouths open and drool slinging on the floor and then all of them howling together on the cusp of climax. That’s who you look like.”
Hope said, “What a compliment.”
“That wasn’t a compliment, honey.”
“I was being sarcastic.”
“I know.”
“Whatever,” Hope said. “I’m going.”
“Say it back to me.”
“What?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“Mom.”
“Unless it’s a little later. I just want to make sure we’re all clear so nobody is unclear. I don’t want anybody stranded downtown with all the freaks on the loose, and don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about. The freaks could survive a nuclear attack and they’d still be scurrying over the rubble and spreading their shit like cockroaches. You think I’m joking, but
18 it’s the truth. There’s something about it on the news every night. Gangs stealing cars, shooting people. They’ll probably try to kidnap the mayor’s baby for ransom.”
“Does the mayor have a baby?”
“No. Maybe. Hell if I know.”
If Hope hadn’t just been insulted, she would have laughed, but she tried to maintain a neutral look on her face so her mom wouldn’t get the pleasure of seeing her amusement. Really, though, Hope was glad for the rendezvous because it meant her mother wasn’t going to sleep with the man on the first date, which grossed her out, quite frankly, but on the flipside it meant that she would have to sit in the car with her mother on the ride home. She would either be brooding about how poorly the date had gone or giddy at the success of it. Both got on Hope’s nerves.
“In case you’re wondering, we’ll be at the Busy Pig.”
Hope adjusted the strap of her purse and perched the résumés on the sharp ledge of her hip. She knew that her mom was trying to show off, because the Busy Pig was one of the few cool places left in Greenville, a charcuterie, but Hope had a mission of her own to accomplish.
She said, “Seeya,” and set off.
Downtown was about twelve blocks long, with stone and brick buildings lining Main
Street, and running through the heart of downtown was the Reedy River. Trees rose to the height of the buildings and in an attempt to inspire friendliness the trees were strung with Christmas lights. Shoes were thrown up into the trees, too, living among the branches like birds, and Hope had heard from one source that the hanging shoes marked a drug deal spot and, from another source, that, depending on the brand of shoe, they marked gang territory. She started at the north
19 end of Main Street and worked her way south, looking at the shoes overhead and wondering if she was going to accidentally walk under the wrong pair and get cursed.
Her high school wasn’t that far away and while some kids were always skipping class and wandering around downtown, she didn’t see the point because there wasn’t anywhere to hang out, except beneath the sketchy bridges that crossed the Reedy River where perverts lay in wait, jerking off, and the bedrolls of homeless people were tucked away, their versions of burning bushes tangled with gray plastic bags reading THANK YOU COME AGAIN. The record shop and bookstore and vintage clothing store had all shut down. There was an underground coffee shop, with acrylic paintings of bell peppers on the walls, but more and more it was being overrun with middle-aged professionals. Aside from the typical office spaces for attorneys and real estate firms, there wasn’t much left except a handful of restaurants, mostly international ones. The Thai, Italian, Mexican, and Greek places were all family-run businesses that wouldn’t have invited an outsider in, especially not during those times. Hope figured they had managed to hang on during an economic crisis because many of them had already experienced hardship, whether it be immigrating to America or already being American and looking different or talking different or acting different, “different” being something as big as praying in a language other than English or as small as kissing an acquaintance on the cheek instead of shaking hands. In a place that was mostly white people, then black people, she could have been tricked into thinking the city was a real melting pot based on the smells coming out of vents, the garlic and ginger and oxtail. As Hope walked, she saw olive-skinned cooks leaning against brick walls, smoking, with cotton caps tucked under their armpits. To one she asked, “Hiring?”
He blinked at the ground, brooding. “Barely hanging on.”
“Maybe there will be an opening.”
20 “Doubt it.”
“Maybe somebody will quit?”
“My life’s one long smoke break.”
“In case anything changes,” she said, not really sure if his last remark was earnest or a joke, “I’ll give you my résumé.”
“When it ends, I’m dead.”
She held out her résumé, which only had three bullet points on it, including her volunteer work for the regional Special Olympics, which she got roped into when her mother worked there, her short-lived involvement in the photography club, which she quit because members only took pictures of pigeons on power-lines, and her expected graduation date, which was only a few days away. Hope figured a bare-bones résumé would normally be a bad thing, but she wondered if it wouldn’t give her a competitive edge in the current climate, considering that an employer could pay somebody without any experience a lot less money.
The cook just looked at the end of his cigarette, going cross-eyed as he inhaled, and the burning cherry was reflected in his pupils. The dark came over the horizon and rolled down Main like a gas leak.
A door in the alleyway opened, steam flooding out, and somebody said, “Get your skinny ass in here, Zehad. Or would you rather me call your mother and tell her what a lazy son of a bitch her son has turned out to be?”
He ground out his cigarette with his heel of his black, rubber shoes.
He said, “I’m dead,” and then went inside.
Hope didn’t want to be dissuaded from her mission by one depressing encounter, so she kept stopping in places that were still open. And people kept turning her away. They were weary-
21 eyed owners, managers, and shift leaders. They glanced at the door, saying, with their eyes, “Get out,” and saying, with their mouths, “Good luck.”
If such a thing as luck existed, it was spread so thin it was barely there it all. If anybody knew luck, it was the children who crouched on their hands and knees in the playgrounds of the after-school programs downtown, on those squares of red mulch surrounded by iron gates, getting a closer look at ground-level miracles. Maybe children, oblivious to issues of the economic world and sensitive to issues of the natural world, felt some of that luck when they saw inchworms inching over potato chip bags or crows holding plastic straws in their mouths. The luck of seeing something alive and pretty among the trash. The last time Hope had known luck was at that age. Not since then. When adults were on their hands and knees, they weren’t looking for beauty, not anymore. They were crying with their eyes shut. They were pulling out handfuls of grass that wouldn’t be theirs for much longer, because of a foreclosure sign in the yard.
Maybe luck wasn’t a thing you ran out of, after all. Maybe it was a thing you grew out of.
As evening settled in and Hope still hadn’t found a promising lead, she twisted up her stack of resumès and threw them into a trashcan. Some of the streetlights turned on and others didn’t. In the display windows of closed businesses, she saw step-ladders and dust bunnies and cardboard boxes full of mannequin parts. Their eternal plastic gathered dust. Their blank faces seemed to say, “I have never lived, so I will never die.”
Hope was frustrated to have spent a few hours wandering downtown without anything to show for it and would have liked to go home already. She was almost finished with high school and the summer was her last chance to save up money before going to college next fall. She didn’t know if a degree even mattered anymore. Teachers claimed the experience was good for
22 figuring out who you really were, but Hope knew college was only good for killing time. It bought you four years, maybe five if you switched majors. It came with food, shelter, and a community. It was everything you could ever ask for, except for the fact that it would end and all of those people you’d marched with, hand in hand, heads lifted, would suddenly let go and wander aimlessly like chickens with their heads cut off. Your head would be cut off, too, and those feathers on the ground would be your feathers.
No one knew if the economy would be recovered by the time she would graduate from college and then, in the event of a long, drawn-out recovery, she’d be back where she started.
She felt like she’d been sitting in a desk for most of her life, with her heart at rest, unable to feel it working or trying or fighting. What Hope really wanted, without even realizing it, was to feel her heart at unrest.
She still had time to kill before her mom’s date finished. There was a twenty-dollar bill in her wallet, which she had stolen from her mother’s purse a while back, on a whim, to see if her mother would notice. She hadn’t.
The ice cream parlor was empty and a middle-aged woman worked the counter alone, wearing a look on her face that said she’d never expected to end up middle-aged and serving ice cream, with an apron knotted around her waist, accentuating her love handles. Hope paid three dollars for a small cone. She ate it outside, slouching against a brick wall, and strands of her long hair fell forward and stuck to the ice cream. She brushed the hair away and continued licking the cone with her tongue, which was, like almost everything else about her body, long and narrow.
Most people never saw the shape of her tongue, because it was rarely on display, but earlier that week at school ice cream sandwiches had been passed out to all of the seniors after they’d had their graduation ceremony rehearsal and a black girl had noticed Hope’s tongue. She rounded up
23 the attention of her friends, which included “Funniest,” “Best Hair,” and “Most Likely to be a
Billionaire.”
“Look at that tongue.”
“That’s reptilian.”
“No, no, I’ve got it.”
“What?”
“Alien tongue.”
“Alien is a reptile.”
“The fuck are you saying?”
“I said it once.”
“Say it again.”
“Shit.”
Distracted from the original issue, they had gone back to their own ice cream sandwiches and Hope didn’t have to say anything at all. That suited her just fine. They didn’t want to cause harm, but they did want to see you blush or get flustered or say something they could use against you. Her tactic had always been to remain silent and wait for them to move on, which, for the most part, had worked pretty well.
By the time Hope finished her ice cream, her tongue was pleasantly numb. She decided to walk back to the car early. It was parked on a street that ran perpendicular to Main, a few blocks up. A number of major construction projects had been halted when the recession hit and the skeletons of unfinished buildings towered on side-streets. The skyline, normally punctuated with the Landmark building, One Liberty Square, and the Bank of America building, was now ugly with tarps and I-beams and scaffolding. There were at least six cranes left unmanned. Hope
24 thought they looked like dark arms rising from the city with rusted, bent elbows. Not piercing the sky, but holding it up.
She passed a construction site surrounded by a chain-link fence. There was a big banner held to the fence with plastic zip-ties. The banner was part of the “Bright Future” campaign that the city had started in June of 2007, exactly six months after the recession began. It was greeted with a mixed reception, meaning the wealthy people in Greenville who weren’t affected thought it was a “thoughtful approach” to the people’s problem, while the wealthy people who were affected thought it was patronizing, and the middle- and lower-class people who were suffering thought it was, for the most part, entirely useless. The city continued the campaign because it was supposedly good for the psychic healing of the community. This particular banner had a picture of school children holding hands and above the children it said, “Hope is alive and well.”
It was strange to see her name used in that way. Sometimes people thought her name was supposed to inform her personality or have some larger significance, but that didn’t seem fair at all. Her chemistry teacher was always asking why Hope didn’t smile more and she thought,
Because I hate this class. It was hard to tell if he thought her name warranted that she smile more, or if she should simply smile more because she was a girl. Either way, whenever he’d said that, she always flipped him a bird in her mind.
It had been her father’s idea to name Hope after his grandmother, Ina Hopewell
Robinson, a woman who’d lived her entire life in the Blue Ridge mountains, just forty minutes north of Greenville, where the hills amplified into something bigger and bluer, and the valleys were tilled for corn, tomatoes, and tobacco, old arrowheads turned up from their resting places in the earth. Black bears, bobcats, and wild turkeys lived in the woods and so grew blackberry, blueberry, and wild strawberry. There were fresh pine needles, zinging on the tongue, and
25 sweetgum twigs that were good for freshening the breath. Morels and chanterelles grew softly from the earth. It was technically on the edge of Appalachia but nobody would have called it that. They would have just called it “Blue Ridge” and talked about the last time they’d heard a panther scream, which was sometimes a lie and sometimes not, a hard thing to distinguish with those people up there who were good at telling stories and grew dreamy over time from the hard work and sun and isolation. Hope’s father had given the entire name, the first and the last, the
Hope and the Robinson, and he wasn’t even around to see what became of her, his only daughter.
Ultimately, she thought names in and of themselves didn’t carry significance. It was the sound of the name that mattered because it was that familiar sound you always turned toward, even when called from the unfamiliar dark.
As Hope walked, she heard someone say her name.
“Hope.”
She turned and saw Pierce Mullins, the guy who had taken her virginity, the guy who had practiced shooting a slingshot in the parking lot, the guy who had dropped out of school without explanation. He was wearing an undershirt, with yellow armpits, that was tucked tightly into a pair of black jeans. Stuck into one side of his braided leather belt was an 8” knife sheath, black, embossed with a desert rose. No more slingshot, no more toys. It was strange to run into him now of all places, in this dead zone, and looking like he was ready for a saloon fight.
He said, “Your hair’s gotten long.”
She wasn’t going to let herself be charmed. She touched the bottom of her hair lightly, feeling the ends that she combed with conditioner each night to keep them smooth.
“It’s very becoming,” he said. “It always was, I mean.”
26 She didn’t know what to say. It was hard to make small talk, especially when it had been so long since they’d seen each other and she was thinking about the way he’d made her feel at that party, in that bedroom, she didn’t know whose, Cole’s sister or brother, and that pleasure seemed even further away know, like a thing she might have imagined rather than a thing that really happened. There were specific moments of their intimacy that she’d replayed in her head more than others, like how he’d said, during the act, “You’re so pretty,” and how afterward he’d brought her clothes to her so she didn’t have to get up naked. He had a thick trail of hair starting at his belly button and going down, a sharp V that was both beautiful and aggressive. It wasn’t that she loved him, she wasn’t like those girls who fell madly in love at the drop of a hat, because, if anything, she resisted love, but she still would have liked to think fondly of that night instead of letting it turn sour like it had. The memory seemed like a copy of a copy of a copy and she didn’t trust it anymore.
His hands were in the pockets of his jeans. He said, “Are you on the prowl?”
“I was looking for a job.”
“It’s kind of late for that.”
She didn’t know if he meant late in general or late in the day. She guessed the latter. “I started earlier,” she said.
“You’ve been taking the air.”
She nodded.
“Me, too.”
She said, “I’m going this way.”
“I can go that way.” Then, seeming to sense her unease, he added, “This area can be dangerous.”
27 “That’s what my mom says.”
“How is she?”
“She’s looking for a rich man.”
“I imagine those are hard to come by these days.”
“No more child support since I turned eighteen.”
“You’re lucky,” he said. “For her to be present in the flesh. The spirit dwells in the flesh and once the flesh goes, the spirit goes.”
Hope glanced at Pierce and realized that she alone felt the awkwardness. He was somewhere else in his head, unperturbed by the immediate world.
She wanted to ask why he’d dropped out of school, if what she’d heard about family problems was really true. He never seemed like one of the kids who would say screw it and not come back. Some of them joined the Army, while others were just disenchanted potheads, burnouts, and thugs who figured their lives would turn out the same whether they got a high school diploma or not. They had living rooms with beige, fake leather couches and ashtrays stolen from Waffle Houses and toddlers sleeping in dog beds. You only had to lift up the couch cushions to find crushed packs of Marlboros, Taco Bell receipts, and shotgun shells. There were custom stickers on the back of their cars that said things like Rest in Peace Baby Stephanie, with the dates of birth and death. The kids who dropped out were the ones who broke into the half- finished housing developments that sat just outside of the city limits and took the copper wiring out of the ceilings and walls and sold it for scrap. They drank energy drinks for breakfast. They thought cheese puffs tasted like real cheese. Hope thought Pierce wasn’t anything like them, but just then, in the dark of downtown side-streets, she wasn’t sure if he had ever been the person she thought he was.
28 She asked, “Why’d you drop out?”
“It’s funny that you ask me now,” he said. “You never got in touch with me. You never reached out before, asked why.”
“Was I supposed to?”
“It would have been nice.”
“You could have gotten in touch with me.”
“I was…” he said, dropping off. When he found the word, or the word found him, he returned. “Consumed.”
He’d grown a mustache but the only hair on his cheeks grew from a small mole. She didn’t like how he was trying to make her feel bad. There was something he was holding back.
That’s what all this was about.
He said, “My mom was sick.”
Hope knew it was probably pointless but she felt like she needed to say something. “I hope she’s alright,” she said, knowing that if his mother was alright, he probably would have returned to school by now.
He said, “She’s not,” and then smiled, an attempt to override some other molten force. “I missed you,” he said. “Talking to you, seeing you.”
She avoided his eyes and the discomfort they brought, not because of their past but because of something else that she couldn’t quite name. He was extraterrestrial beneath the streetlights, skin yellow, eyes black, hands large, fingers long and swollen like he had been walking for a while. She didn’t say anything because she wasn’t necessarily glad to have run into him. The hours-old dampness at her armpits was beginning to bother her.
29 They had reached the end of the chain-link fence. There was a gap in between the fence, which marked the edge of the construction site, and an empty brick building whose facade was covered in the old flaking paint of a Pepsi advertisement that read “Born in the Carolinas.” When
Hope lifted her head again, she realized that Pierce had stopped walking. They stood that way for a moment, apart, looking at each other, waiting for someone to speak or to move, and then he finally came to her. She thought he might try to kiss her. Time had passed. She had questions. It wasn’t what she wanted.
Instead of going for a kiss, he put a hand over her mouth and pulled her into that alley between the chain-link fence and the old brick building. The hard-packed gravel and dirt crunched beneath their feet as Pierce pulled Hope into the dark corridor that was, in her imagination, endless. Death was sometimes portrayed in movies as a person’s soul moving through a tunnel and toward a bright light, but were there people who moved in the opposite direction and went toward complete and utter darkness? It must have been an endless descent because if it was not endless that meant there was a door and what existed on the other side of that door was something Hope didn’t want to believe in. In reality, the alley was not endless.
Pierce only pulled Hope, writhing, about ten feet into shadow so they would be out of the way in an already out-of-the-way place. Dust swirled around their feet. It rose and hugged them and then passed in front of the hideous orange and yellow lights with the deadly elegance of noxious gas.
Hope was taller than Pierce by an inch or two, but she couldn’t overpower him. There was a part of her that expected to break free, that she was entirely capable of breaking free, but she felt weaker than she had ever felt in her life. She was tall and slender and at eighteen years old her arms were merely long bones. Pierce had strong hands, maybe from the slingshot or from
30 who knows what else. It was clear there was more to him than Hope could have ever expected.
He was cold to the touch, like a creature that needed to lay out in the sun each day to thaw the blood. He hadn’t felt like that before. Before, he had been warm. It, the warmth, had spread.
Pierce breathed hard through his mouth and Hope breathed hard through her nose. She started to scream into his hand, her lips burning with the sweat and salt of his skin, but then she heard the knife being pulled out of its sheath, a whisper of steel against leather, felt the blade against her throat and realized that it was in her best interest to go along with this thing, whatever it was, because that was the only way it might turn out okay for her. “Okay,” of course, meaning not dead.
Pierce said, “Don’t fight back.”
It only took a split-second for Hope to learn that if there was a blade held to the soft and tender gooseflesh of the neck, it was impossible to think about anything except that blade and how far away it was from an artery and all the worldly things she would leave behind if the blood left her body, all the life she would not get to live.
He said, “Acquiesce.”
She nodded.
In a letter her father had written a couple of years earlier, he’d described how one of his and Maribel’s dogs had been bitten by a rattlesnake out behind their house, striking from the desert scrub, and how he’d cut the snake’s head off and then brought the decapitated body inside.
Maribel had taken a knife and cleaned the snake, cutting the meat into strips. What a shock it had been, hearing that she knew her way with a knife. She had dipped the strips in buttermilk, flipped them in a bowl of flour, and the fried them in a pan. Her father wrote that Maribel knew all kinds of tricks like this, that she could make a good meal out of almost anything, and in the garage,
31 which doubled as her jewelry studio, she had a whole bunch of rattles spread across her desk.
That was her inspiration, he said, her motif.
Hope wished she could have been like a snake just then, wished she had access to the venom that bubbled deep within. It was produced by all living beings and some tapped into it and others didn’t. The girls who fought in the high school had found their venom, like Bonita and
Dee Dee, both of whom had gotten on top of a long table in the cafeteria, kicking off the trays of square pizza and strawberry milk and swinging switchblades at each other. Bonita had skated her blade down Dee Dee’s face, saying, “I’m funna unzip you, bitch.” There was a reserve of it in everyone, but some people accessed it more quickly than others. Some never dared to dip into that part of themselves and they could either be called weak or brave, just like those dipping into the well could be called weak or brave. It was not one or the other. The hero held a switchblade and the hero was empty-handed. The hero was not real at all.
In the alley, Hope was thinking, Is this real? She saw everything with her own eyes and had no choice but to believe the boy she had lost her virginity to was covering her mouth, holding a blade to her neck, and saying, “You can’t imagine what it’s like.”
She said, “Pierce,” into his hand.
He spoke slowly, as he always had, but there was an urgency below the surface. “There are things you think you can imagine, terrible things, but it’s never like the real thing.” There were tears in his eyes. “A part of me has been lost and I know I can’t get it back, but I’m trying to come to terms with these conditions that have been forced upon me. I must accept the shadow of absence. I’m living day to day. I’m listening for each day’s direction. My actions are those of an obedient son.”
32 He took a breath. His jaw was set hard. “I’m going to move my hand,” he said, “and you’re going to be quiet as a church mouse.”
He moved his hand and Hope couldn’t help herself. She said, “You don’t have to.”
His eyes darted back and forth, searching each of her eyes separately. He said, “Have to what?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
She whispered, “No.”
“What do you think I’m going to do?”
She was thinking, Murder. She was thinking, Rape. But she couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud.
“Never mind,” he said. “You’ve promised silence.” His fingers drummed the handle of the knife. He said, “Remove your shirt,” and gestured the knife toward her face. Her chest shuddered. She dropped her purse and when it hit the ground, her cellphone bounced out. She glanced at the screen and saw that there was a missed call––her mother, who had been calling to say that she was going to be late. Pierce quickly scooped up the phone and bag, tossing it over his shoulder. He gestured for Hope to keep going. She took off the alien T-shirt and when it passed over her head, covering her eyes so that she only saw blackness, she was deeply afraid. In these past moments, she had nearly forgotten that she had a mother and to be reminded of her, and of her outside life, was a shock. She held the shirt toward him. She was hunched over, embarrassed to be half-naked like that, and wearing a worn, cotton bra. The knuckles of her spine were like the humps of a sea-dragon breaking water. It was the worst kind of nakedness she
33 could imagine. Pierce took the shirt and packed it into her mouth with his thumb. Her tongue went dry. She tried to swallow and gagged.
He warned, “It’s a terrible thing to drown in your own blood.”
He spun her around and pushed her into the brick wall. He kicked her feet so she spread them apart more. She thought he really was going to rape her then and didn’t understand why.
She had never done anything bad to him. She’d never even been impolite. That was the mind of a young woman born and raised in the South, to assume that because something bad was happening to you, you must have done something to warrant it, you must have done something, yes, you must have, because that is the only way to make sense of things sometimes, the only kernel of logic in an experience that is otherwise illogical for a young woman brought up in relative safety and comfort. Hope grew up eating Lucky Charms, for Christ’s sake. She owned shoes. She went to the dentist. She had sat in a hot tub before. She had flown a kite. She had taken a field trip to the state capitol. This did not fit the vision of America that she had been taught, and the way she tried to justify what was happening was by wondering, for a fleeting moment, if she had done something to deserve it. But then she thought, No, I don’t deserve this, I don’t.
She expected that she would have to surrender to his unwanted hardness. What pair of underwear she’d put on that morning escaped her. Probably a pilled pair. A stained pair. An embarrassing pair. Hope closed her eyes and waited for it to be over. Maybe she could have done more. She could have screamed, at the risk of being stabbed or having her throat slit, or she could have tried to get away again. The truth is that there is more than one way to survive any given situation.
34 Hope felt Pierce grab her hair and wrap the long bond rope around his knuckles. She thought it was only the beginning, that it was part of the fantasy he was making come to life, but the next thing she heard was him cutting her hair with the blade. The terrible surprise of it made her twist away without thinking. He put his knee into her back, pinning her, and worked something up from the back of his throat, hawking spit in her hair. Hair was easier to cut when taut. It was easier to cut when wet.
Pierce said, “This is about more than you and me.”
Hope’s breasts were pressed flat against the brick wall, but her head was pulled back, skin stretched across her face, eyes watering. She felt cool air on her neck and knew what it meant. She tried to look at the ground but couldn’t see well because of the shirt half-packed into her mouth and half-hanging out, but if she could have seen she would have been looking for the mound of hair, expecting it to fall in chunks as he worked through it, going through periods of sawing with the knife and then hacking. The hair never fell on the ground, though. It was still in
Pierce’s hand, wrapped around his knuckles.
When he was finished, he ran the ragged hair under her nose. Back and forth, brushing, tickling. When she inhaled, some of the hairs went up her nose. She tried to snuff them out. She smelled her own hair. It smelled of sweat and also the exhaust of cars, probably from walking around downtown all day and being around the bitter Main Street traffic. She didn’t want it to be the last thing she ever smelled. There were so many other things. There was the smell of early summer, barnyard and caterpillar and crabgrass, sweet and green and benevolent, that came through the windows on an afternoon drive, sky marbled with impending storm, the radio coming in clear and then fuzzy, clear and then fuzzy.
35 Pierce took a few steps back and planted himself in the alley’s opening, his departure as imminent as full-dark. “I’m not going to kill you,” he said. “There are already too many dead, too many dying.”
36 CHAPTER 2 LIFE GOES ON
Hope lunged through the night like a milk-faced giraffe. She went as fast as she could, thinking it was a way to protect herself. Nobody else would try to attack a person moving that fast because it would appear that she was already chasing something of her own or running from something of her own. She was busy. She was consumed. Her shirt smelled of spit. Cropped hair bounced in front of her eyes. Strands caught in her eyelashes and she brushed them away. Her heart hammered. Adrenaline overflowed. It was a relief to regain movement and, in turn, regain freedom. There was comfort in motion. Animals felt it roaming their territories. Birds felt it when they flew. If anyone had come at her suddenly, she would have howled. It would have come out of her and gone right up to the moon.
But there was no moon. The sky was gray above downtown, tarnished by city lights. The moon knew better than to be out on a night like that. If it had been out, people would have stolen it. It would have been pistol-whipped. It would have been run over with a car and it would have burst and dribbled into the gutters. It would have been put in the microwave and kids would have gathered to watch it expand and then collapse. It would have been covered with gasoline and somebody would have lit a cigarette, taken a drag, and then flicked with thumb and middle finger. It, the moon, would have been harangued to death. It would have been taken to the corner of the playground and spat on and called “fat ass.” It would have been locked in a shed and starved. It would have been put on a stick and deep-fried. It would have been broken up with a chisel and hammer and sold at flea markets. It would have been rolled down a hill and sunk into the deep jade of a lake, destined to rest down there in the perfect, quiet, still darkness. That last one wouldn’t have been so bad.
37 Hope went to the nearest open business, a drug store called Around the Clock. It was well-lit and empty. There was a telephone. That was all she needed. When she pulled open the door, the suction of air caused all of the old church fans hanging from the ceiling to spin. The fans advertised Turpentine, Pine Needle Bath, Diuretic Capsules, Distilled Witch Hazel,
Aromatic Spirit of Ammonia, Essence of Peppermint, Pure Glycerin, Lactated Pepsin, Linseed
Oil, Epsom Salts, Snake Oil Liniment, and Camphor. Seeing all of them twirl made Hope dizzy.
She went up to the counter, hands seeking something solid, something she could lean on. Her eyes landed on the beige telephone. It was mounted on the wall and its long cord was tangled into a fist-sized knot.
The old pharmacist said, “Are you alright, dear?”
She shook her head.
“Would you like some water?”
“Phone.”
He said, “Of course,” and reached for it weakly. His fingers were like sticks of butter beginning to melt.
She stared at it and swallowed, her spit having turned to glue. He picked up the receiver and offered it to her, the knotted cord sagging across the counter. Hope pressed the cool, plastic phone hard to her ear and held on for dear life, as if it might be ripped away at any moment.
Dialing 911, it dawned on her that the trauma was real and that it was not over yet.
The operator said, “Please state your emergency.”
There was an audible weariness and disappointment in that sexless voice. No, Hope thought. You’re supposed to sound concerned. For me. She didn’t want to be written off as one more meaningless call because it was her life, her reality. The trouble in the alley was the first
38 real trouble Hope had ever known. The difference was physical. She felt it concentrated in her shoulders and dripping down the arms and into the trembling hands. “It” was the fragility of life.
She wanted to get all of that across but she only managed to say, “Mugged,” before the operator interrupted with a robotic slew of questions.
“Is the attacker still present?”
“Was a weapon involved?”
“Did you suffer any injuries?”
“Did you get away safely?”
“Are you in a safe place right now?”
“Where are you?”
Hope looked at the dirty laces of her Chuck Taylors on the drug store’s checkerboard floor. Alien sprigs of hair fell into her eyes. She answered all of the questions in as few words as possible, saying that she was in a safe place and was not hurt, but it was hard to concentrate because in the background she heard the low, insectile hum of other operators talking to other victims, witnesses, and confessors. One operator said, “Did you try holding it upside-down?” and another said, “Is there a pulse?” and another said, “Who is screaming?”
Distracted, Hope had missed the operator’s last statement. There were so many worlds operating at the same time, side by side, and it was disorienting to see one and hear another.
There was yet a third––the world that she felt, still in the alley.
Hope said, “What?”
“Ma’am?”
“I’m here.”
“Responders are on their way.”
39 “How long will it take?”
“I can’t give that information.”
“I––”
The operator hung up and Hope held the receiver to her ear for a moment, listening to the dead tone, thinking, Is that all? She felt let-down, like she had expected the voice on the other end to take the problem away and leave her unburdened. Hope passed the receiver back to the old pharmacist. She thought that maybe nobody would ever take it away, that it would always be hers, a thing she would carry throughout the rest of her life, packing it and unpacking it in all the future moves she would make, like a trinket wrapped in newspaper that would rest on a mantle, always in eyesight. Her ear hurt.
Hope was thinking that maybe she should call her mother’s cellphone. If anyone could unburden her, it was her. But Hope didn’t want to do that to her mother and, besides, Hope didn’t even have herself sorted out yet and thought it best to talk to the police before letting anyone know what had happened. The longer she waited, the better. She knew her mother would be upset that one of the freaks had struck, worst of all a freak who Hope had known personally, intimately, and delaying the news would buy her a little more time of thinking everything was normal. It was one small thing she could control.
When the flashing red and blue lights appeared, the old pharmacist took Hope’s hands into his own and said, “Bless you.” Then she met the police outside.
At first, she looked up and down the sidewalk first to make sure there weren’t any human-shaped creeping shadows. She stood below the neon RX sign, one of the drug store’s modern touches, and beneath that cherry-red light the contours of her face were defined by
40 burgundy shadow. In that moment she could have been mistaken for a goblin creeping from one place to the next, looking for somewhere to hide, but the coast was clear because, as it always has been and always will be, the arrival of cops made all the cockroaches scurry.
Two officers got out of the patrol car. The first was fair-skinned Bobby Duncan. He was in his mid-twenties, lean and muscular, and he was covered in a fine spray of freckles. The second was Officer Skye De La Rosa. She was a little older than him, hovering around five-feet tall, and her cheekbones shimmered with heavy bronzer. De Le Rosa introduce herself and her partner as “Double-D.”
Duncan took out a notepad and a pencil.
He said, “Ready to answer some questions?”
Hope nodded.
First he wrote down Hope’s name and her contact information, using her mother’s cell phone number instead of her own, stolen number. Hope didn’t have any credit or debit cards and, as it turned out, the good thing about not having any money was that you didn’t have anything to steal. He asked if she had activated a tracking program on her cellphone and when Hope said no, that she didn’t even know it was an option on the phone, Duncan said, “Shoot.”
Hope hated herself for that, thinking that if only she had turned on the tracking program it would have led them straight to Pierce. They would have been looking at calls bouncing off cell towers and they would have nailed him. If only she’d turned it on. If only she knew it had existed. God, she felt stupid, and it was one thing to feel stupid all by yourself, which wasn’t so bad, but it was something else entirely to feel stupid in front of other people, to have them looking at your face as you were trying to hide everything you were feeling, to protect yourself from feeling pathetic and childish. She didn’t want to let them into her own, private world.
41 Duncan touched her forearm.
“It’s alright,” he said. “You’re safe now.”
She didn’t realize how bad she’d been trembling. She watched his thumb sink gently into the skin, felt the warm-blooded touch of someone who wasn’t out to cause harm. He had those faint freckles on his hands, like stars, and deep wrinkles at every knuckle and nails nearly cut to the quick. She thought how good it would feel to always be in safe hands.
Officer Duncan asked her to tell them what had transpired. “I want you to tell it exactly as you remember it,” he said. “Any little things you can remember, like maybe he had a funny accent or tattoos.”
When she described what happened, how he’d pulled her into the alley, packed her mouth with her T-shirt, and cut off her hair, the officers looked at each other.
De La Rosa said, “Sounds like the Momma's Boys.”
Duncan said, “How many is it now?”
“A half dozen?”
“That sounds about right.”
She leaned in for a whisper, saying, “And that’s only what’s reported.”
Hope said, “Who are the Momma's Boys?”
De La Rosa said, “The question isn’t who they are, but what they are.” She hiked up her pants.
Hope looked from face to face, failing to understand.
Duncan said, “Semantics.” He cleared his throat and adjusted his hat, seemingly to remind himself that he was a professional, and said, “What she means is, we’ve seen this sort of thing before.”
42 De La Rosa sucked her teeth. Deep-voiced, she said, “You ain’t lying.”
Hope didn’t know if that meant Pierce was a serial hair-cutter or if they were simply saying they’d seen other, random attacks. They weren’t very forthcoming with information and she found herself stepping closer to them, wanting to be debriefed on the Momma's Boys, whoever they were or whatever that was.
She said, “I’m not the only one?”
Duncan raised an eyebrow, like, This is all the information I can give, there are policies in place, ways of going about things, protocols, so don’t probe any further. He reminded Hope of certain boys she’d grown up with that wanted to be everyone’s protector, boys who tried to maintain justice on the playground and would say, “Can’t everybody just get along?”
He got into the car and started typing things into the computer, leaving the door open so that mosquitoes flew in and out. He swatted at them every now and then, without looking. He called to De La Rosa, “Let me know what you find at the scene,” and she said, “Way ahead of you.” She walked over to the alley, swallowed up in the darkness, and Hope was left, momentarily, to her thoughts. She reached out and touched the police car, just to be reminded that she was safe and the physical world still existed.
She’d never heard of the Momma's Boys before, but clearly they were a group who had shorn women. She wondered if there was a connection between all of the people they attacked, if
Pierce did this to girls he’d gone to school with, girls with blond hair, girls with long hair, girls he’d slept with, or girls that were taller than him. It was crazy to think that this was the same guy who innocently shot gravel at airborne eggs in the school parking lot, but, then again, Hope figured there were only really two main types of people in the world. There were the people who basically stayed the same their entire lives, and there were people who changed. Oftentimes what
43 caused that change was a traumatic shift of events, something external that forced the tectonic plates of the internal world to move. Something had happened to Pierce and based on the brief, charged conversation Hope had with him in the alley, it must have involved his mother. That would be more than enough to change a person. Hope couldn’t imagine what her life would be like without her own mother, the one present and reliable person in her life, and she couldn’t imagine what a person could be driven to do when the very thing, the very person, you loved the most was taken away. It could, she reasoned, turn you into a monster.
And who were the other boys?
De La Rosa returned from the alley with a baby pacifier. She had used a pencil to pick it up from the ground. The nipple was dark orange, the color of cheap orange juice. The rest of it was white. It was an object that would, under normal circumstances, radiate innocence.
She said, “Just as I thought.”
Duncan didn’t look away from his computer. He said, “Pacifier?"
“Yep.”
“Bag it up.”
De La Rosa dropped the pacifier into a paper sack and then wrote an identification number on the outside of the bag with a Sharpie. She said, “You see him drop this?”
Hope shook her head, confused about what was unfolding. At first, she thought this was a random, singular attack and she was going to be the center of attention. Now, she was finding out that she was only a piece of the puzzle.
Hope picked a hair off her tongue. She asked, “Is it a gang?”
De La Rosa said, “You’re catching on.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
44 “Send it for prints.”
Hope was confused because she had already given them Pierce’s name. There was no mystery as to who committed this crime. Why were fingerprints necessary?
De La Rosa must have anticipated Hope’s question because she said, “It’s procedure.
We’ll have to get your DNA sample, too.”
Hope was beginning to wonder if they were actually going to get Pierce, even though it sounded like they’d encountered this type of attack before and even though Hope said that she knew her attacker and had been able to provide his full name, age, physical description, and that he’d driven a ‘98 Toyota Corolla in sandrift pearl. She’d never been to his house before and couldn’t provide an address, but she figured that didn’t matter much because it would probably be easy enough to figure out with their computer systems. Even without all of that technology, they could just look it up in the phone book. All of this was known. Yet, the police were standing right in front of her. They were not, as she had expected them to be, in hot pursuit. She didn’t realize that the way things were supposed to be done often prevented things from actually being done.
“Just tell me,” Hope said. “What’s really going on?”
De La Rosa said, “You want to know what I think? I think these young boys are running around town harassing women. I think their mommas didn’t teach them right, probably never had any discipline. I think you’re lucky that nothing worse happened, if you know what I mean.”
The sound of a gunshot crackled from the car radio, followed by a call for back-up.
“And here I thought it was going to be a peaceful night,” De La Rosa said, getting into the car. “I don’t know why I ever get my hopes up.”
45 Hope perked at the mention of her name, the same way a dog cocks its head when being spoken to. In this stressful time, it was a tiny source of comfort.
The officers said that they had to leave and would be in contact with Hope shortly to finish getting a statement and perform a cheek swab. Hope asked how they would get in contact with her, considering that her cellphone had been stolen and there wasn’t a home phone, which had been an attempt to save a little money, and they told her not to worry, they’d stop by soon, they’d get to the bottom of it. Then she was alone. There was no foot chase through the streets, no hopping fences, no climbing fire escapes, no leaping into dumpsters, no cornering Pierce in an alleyway and pushing him into a brick wall and pinning a knee against his back and whispering into his ear, “This is the end of the line, pal.” Hope didn’t have to go to the station and wait under crummy lights and drink burnt coffee. She didn’t even know what burnt coffee tasted like.
That was it, right there on the sidewalk. That was all.
She looked up and down the street and didn’t see anyone else. Above, there was a bird’s nest inside the little half-circle of the R in the RX sign. If a bird actually lived there and if the bird laid eggs and those eggs hatched, those chicks were off to a terrible start. What kind of life would that be? The nest would be hot from the piping neon and they’d be introduced to a world entirely washed in red, like the old opium dens with had red silk lampshades that made it appear as if everyone’s inner devil had been turned inside-out, or like the modern-day drug dens where people screwed in red party light bulbs that smelled like burning plastic, but mostly Hope thought it sad that red would be the color of the world for innocent little creatures. The good world was green and the green seemed so far away.
*
46 The pharmacist insisted on giving her a ride, saying, “No more frights for you.” He closed the pharmacy early and drove Hope to the Busy Pig. She said, “Thank you,” and meant it, because on this night of all nights she understood the rarity of a stranger’s kindness. She sat straight-backed in the passenger seat, her head nearly touching the roof, and caught the stack of retirement home brochures that slid off the dashboard when he turned. The covers depicted old people smiling in front of clubhouses. They rode in golf carts to onsite restaurants. They played bridge in game rooms. They sipped sangria on Fridays and slow-danced to Bobby Darin. The old pharmacist glanced at her lap, where all the brochures sat, and looked embarrassed.
She opened the brochure at the top of the pile and saw floor plans for apartments. “Looks nice,” she said.
He smiled. “I like the idea of being around other people.”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
He rolled to a stop outside of the Busy Pig. Groups of people were leaving the restaurant and walking to their cars. They were an entirely different breed. They wore Ralph Lauren polos, khakis, belts with embroidered palmetto trees, and loafers. They wore pearls, silk blouses, and designer jeans. Some of them didn’t take big financial hits and others who did take hits but wanted to hide it resorted to credit cards to keep up appearances.
Hope started to get out of the car.
“Just remember,” the pharmacist said, “time heals all wounds.” His eyes were like drops of indigo food-coloring in Ensure. “I don’t know if it’s true but that’s what they say.”
She shut the door behind her and watched people streaming by. Hope felt safer being among a crowd but knew she was different than them. They glanced at her and looked away, as if she were infected.
47 The Busy Pig was on the bottom floor of a four-story building. Offices above overlooked the Reedy River. Even though it was polluted from the old textile mills, which used to dump dye into the water and turn swimmers unnatural colors, the water was still a pretty thing to look at, the way its surface shone black in the night. Hope could hear the sound of the thirty-foot falls not too far off, leading into Cleveland Park, and the water continuing on through the woods, fields, swamps, and wetlands all the way to the Atlantic. It was the same water but it changed names as it worked its way across the state––Reedy, Saluda, Congaree, Santee.
The restaurant was dark inside. The exposed light bulbs that hung from copper wiring, with filaments artisanally twisted into intricate shapes, didn’t give off much light. There was a long bar and high-top wooden tables with stools. Almost everything was recycled and restored from industrial sites and old buildings. There were charcuterie boards left on tables that hadn’t been bussed yet, remnants of cheese and cured pork and pickled okra, and the empty cocktail glasses contained an inch of melted ice with the hint of rye whiskey, iceberg of lemon rind. It was no wonder that this restaurant survived when they made use of the entire animal. The Busy
Pig’s motto, painted in gold lettering on the front window, was “From the Rooter to the Tooter.”
There were a couple of people drinking at the bar and mostly staff, wearing denim aprons, buzzing around to begin closing. Hope saw her mother at the end of the bar. She and her date were mid-kiss. Hope didn’t want to walk over there but knew she had to. She stopped about five feet away from, not looking at them directly, the soft and awkward meeting of middle-aged mouths, and Hope kept her eyes on the ground and waited to be noticed. Her mother looked different than the women she’d seen outside, the ones going home. Her hair wasn’t slick with product and her clothes looked like they’d been washed a hundred times instead of the outfits that had only been dry-cleaned twice. Hope looked down because she was ashamed of herself
48 and also because she didn’t know the man and didn’t really want him to be involved in something that was a personal matter. He had a hand on her mother’s shoulder and was massaging the muscle with his thumb. He noticed Hope first. He pulled away and said, “We’re finished, thank you.”
She said, “I don’t work here.”
Her mother looked at Hope, her face moving from confusion to recognition to concern.
She saw Hope’s hair and knew that something had gone wrong, that Hope never would have appeared like that unless something had gone wrong. She got off her stool and smoothed down the front of her dress. The date was over, which was another thing she felt bad about, interrupting this moment that belonged to her mother, that was supposed to be hers alone, or not alone, but hers and this man’s, and she’d ruined it, cut it short, turned it upside-down.
“Hope?”
Hope didn’t say anything at first. She wasn’t sure how to begin and then a second passed and it was even harder to find the right thing to say and her mother’s anticipation had grown immensely. The pressure was infinite. It was the only moment of the entire ordeal that Hope thought she might cry and really didn’t want to because that man was sitting there, a complete stranger, with his fuzzy, near-bald dome and a pair of glasses with clear frames pushed all the way up his big nose and a pen stuck in the breast pocket of his Oxford shirt. It wasn’t the knife or the shearing or the betrayal of Pierce that upset her, not anymore. It was the look in her mother’s eyes. There was such unflinching love that Help felt entirely overwhelmed and undeserving. She felt so lucky to have a person in the world who would look at her that way, a person who cared what was about to come out of her mouth more than anything else, and she also felt close to sobbing because she was hurting that person by giving this news. Hope’s mother, like Hope, was
49 a cherry cordial. Her heart was sweet, was liquid. The rough exterior kept everything from spilling out on the floor.
Hope said, “I was mugged and he cut my hair.”
She was on the verge of losing herself, as if a second pair of eyelids had lifted and revealed her normally hidden child’s eyes. The child wasn’t self-conscious like the young woman. The child couldn’t help but show that she was upset. Hope couldn’t tell if the child was separate from her, like a smaller Russian doll tucked inside, or if she was the child. She wanted to be separate, with all her heart, but she knew that she wasn’t. She knew her mother could feel this and she hugged Hope and held onto her, and said, “It’s going to be okay,” because it was the only true thing she could say in that situation. Hope could smell the salted meat and alcohol. She could smell the dentist’s soap. He must have showered right before they’d met for dinner. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow and his forearms, strong from pulling teeth, bulged.
He got off the stool and said, “I can see something’s happened. I don’t want to get in the way.”
Hope’s mother didn’t let go.
She said, “Yes.”
“This is your daughter?”
In a trance of comfort-giving, all she could give were short, economical responses.
Anything more would have been a waste of energy, a distraction. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling twenty after twenty out of his wallet and setting them on the bar, “for whatever…”
Her mother whispered, “Let’s go,” and urged Hope outside.
“I’m sorry.”
50 “No,” she said. “Don’t you be sorry.”
Behind them, the date called, “Goodnight,” and Hope’s mother turned briefly and said, “I know you understand.” He remained paralyzed, standing by the bar, getting smaller and smaller as they moved further and further away.
They walked over a footbridge that crossed the river and then all the way to the car. Her mother kept her close, pulled into her side, and set a rapid pace. They didn’t pay attention to a man pissing in a public fountain or to line cooks taking out the trash or to a cat poised over a freshly killed rat. They only looked forward. Everything else was in the periphery. It might as well have been a cardboard cutout of a small, southern city. It might as well have fallen over in the wind.
They got into the car and went to Walmart first, where they bought two new door locks for the house, considering that Hope’s house key had been one of the things she lost in her bag and Pierce knew where she lived, and then they went home. Hope just stood in the living room while her mom got a screwdriver and took out the old door locks and installed the new ones. She didn’t know her mother was handy but then again, she’d been doing all the little things around the house for many years. The locks didn’t make them any safer, not really, but it was a small practical thing that needed to be done.
Her mother said, “If he wants to get in, there’s nothing we can do to stop him. But we’ll do what we can and we won’t dwell on things that probably won’t even happen. We’ve got to keep our wits about us, sister golden hair.” She looked at Hope’s hair, saying, “I think the first thing we’ll do is wash it. Yes, in the bathroom sink.”
She wanted to see what it would look like clean, if somehow a good shampoo, conditioning, and combing would transform the rough chop into something decent. “Who
51 knows,” her mother said, rubbing her head with a towel, “maybe it will look edgy.” She was trying to appeal to Hope there, as if an edgy haircut was something she might actually like, but there was a solemn undercurrent that couldn’t be entirely hidden. They both knew it was there and didn’t even have to talk about it. Upon hearing what had happened, one of a stranger’s first thoughts would be “I’m just glad it wasn’t me,” whereas a mother’s desperate wish would be “I wish it had been me.”
Hope didn’t even get to look at herself in the mirror. Her mother wouldn’t let her look, saying, “It’s probably best if you don’t.” It was hard to tell what that meant exactly. Either the haircut truly was terrible and she was trying to prevent Hope from the shock of it, or it really wasn’t that bad but was just so different from what she was used to seeing and was terrible in its unfamiliarity.
Her mother said, “Don’t hate me for saying this.”
“Just say it.”
“I think we should buzz it.”
Hope closed her eyes.
“I know, I know.”
“How do you know?”
“I can imagine.”
“Why?”
“Because then it’ll all grow back evenly.” She picked at a longer piece of hair near the front of her head. “And you won’t have to deal with this mess. I just don’t know how it would look. I don’t know what we’d do with it.”
“Buzz it?”
52 “I think there’s clippers somewhere. I used to do it for your father.”
Her mother looked under the sink cabinet, went through a plastic bucket containing old, half-used, rusted toiletries, and found the old pair of clippers with the cord wrapped neatly around it. She found a ¼” blade and put it on the clippers.
Hope said, “You really think this is the best option?”
“I do.”
“You would do it?”
“It might sound crazy now, honey, but I think a clean slate would be worth it. I just don’t know if you want to wake up tomorrow and have to see this. It will be a long time before you can get some of your length back.”
“I thought my hair grew fast.”
“It does.”
“It won’t be long then.”
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t lie to yourself.”
Hope touched the soft, freshly washed hair. Being short, it felt silky like little-boy hair. It felt like it belonged to someone else. She never would have thought that losing her hair would seem like such a big deal. She was not vain. She didn’t even think herself pretty, even though, objectively, she was pretty. It was the rest of her, the worn shoes and the alien shirt, that might make someone look at Hope and not have the word “pretty” come to mind. She would rather have been that way than one of those girls who was called pretty, not because of her actual looks, but because of the other stuff, the hair and makeup and clothes.
53 Her mother already had the clippers out. The decision already seemed to have been made.
She said, “Okay,” and her mother didn’t even smile, didn’t give a little pep talk or a squeeze on the shoulder. She got to work. That was the only thing to do.
Hope felt the clippers go over her head, starting at her hairline and moving backward over the crown and down to her neck. She closed her eyes and breathed through her nose. When she was finished, her mother said, “I think he nicked your ear, that little asshole.”
Hope touched her ear and felt a crumb of blood with her fingers. She’d told her mother that it had been Pierce Mullins. She remembered meeting him that one time, briefly, and said,
“You never really know who a person is. You let a man in and he can leave you changed, while he slips away free.”
Her mother began to brush off her shoulders but Hope still felt the itchy little pieces of hair on her neck and some of it fell down her shirt and poked her back.
Her head felt cool and light. Exposed. There was nothing to flip over her shoulder, nothing to run her fingers through, nothing to blow in the wind. She said, “Should I look?” and her mother nodded. Her head was a good shape, at least. There were no odd bumps or moles. The blond buzz caught the light and shimmered like wheat. She ran a hand over the soft, foreign hair.
She said to herself, This is me, although it was hard to believe. Caught in her comb were long strands of hair. Just that morning, she’d had long hair.
“Is it bad?”
“It’s not bad at all.”
“It’s weird.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“When?”
54 “I don’t know,” she said, sweeping up the hair into a pile and putting it in the little trash can. “But I do know that a person can get used to anything.”
Her mother wrapped the cord around the clippers and put them away. She said, “I don’t know why I ever kept those. I guess it came in handy, didn’t it?”
“Lucky me.”
Hope sat on the toilet seat. She put her head in her hands and thought about something that made her face flush. The thought already made her sick with embarrassment. She said,
“Graduation.”
It was days away.
“We’re not going to think about that now.”
“I can’t.”
“Of course you can. You have to go. There’s no question about whether or not you’re going.”
“I’m a freak.”
“Stop.”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to lie to myself.”
“What?”
“I’m six-feet tall and bald.”
“You’re striking.”
“I’m a freak.”
“You’re unique.”
“A fucking freak.”
“You’re my child.”
55 “So?”
“You’re mine.”
“I’m embarrassing.”
“You’re not embarrassing.”
“Look at me.”
“I am.”
“I’m a super freak.”
“Honey,” she said, giving Hope this look that made it nearly impossible for her to maintain eye contact because it was so concentrated in its power, like holding a magnifying glass in the sun and watching it catch the sunlight and produce a beam that could scorch ants. Her mom said, “You get to choose what you see. You can see a freak if you want to, but that’s not being fair to yourself. That’s being lazy. That’s not seeing the big picture. It will be okay. You will be okay. The one good thing about life is that every experience is valuable. Even the bad things you can learn from, especially the bad things. Do you hear me?”
Her mom went to the doorway, paused, and said, “Let’s not turn this into a pity party. I don’t have the energy for it and I’m sure you don’t, either. We’re not going to worry about anything that we don’t have to worry about. Not right now. Not tonight.” She went into her bedroom, still talking, and Hope heard her mother take her earrings out and drop them into a little dish on her dresser. She heard the dresser drawers open and her mother changing out of her dress and into pajamas. Her voice traveled through open doors. She said, “We’re blessed with a thing called willpower, and while we’re still alive and kicking we sure as hell better use it.”
She appeared in the doorway again, wearing a matching set of white summer pajamas, a button-down shirt and a pair of drawstring shorts. It was something she’d purchased from a
56 clothing store at the beach years ago, from one of those little places in the Hammock Shops, where everything was connected by gravel paths and the air smelled of homemade fudge and the wind chimes talked to each other when the evening breeze came through.
Yawning, her mother said, “What we’re going to remember is that life goes on, and what you’re going to do now is walk on my back. It’s killing me from sitting on that barstool. This always happens if I don’t have something to lean on.”
Hope was tired, too, but she didn’t know if she’d be able to sleep that night. She didn’t have the energy to talk anymore. Sometimes, she wished she didn’t even have to try. Almost everything worth saying could be said with a look.
They went into the living room and Hope’s mother turned on the TV. She said,
“Background noise,” and then she moved the ottoman out of the way and lay on the floor. Her back gave her trouble, first because she was a tall woman and secondly because she’d spent so many years sitting behind a desk at work. Every day she sat in that chair, her spine slouched before a desk for eight-hour stretches, except for a couple of brief bathroom breaks and a lunch break, even though she had spent most of the lunch break sitting down, too. Hope had been warned that she would also experience extreme back pain one day. Not the typical ache that came with age, but the searing pain that comes with an extraordinary skeleton. During a routine physical, the pediatrician had made her bend over, touching her toes, so he could run a hand up her spine. He said that if her poor posture went uncorrected she would suffer unbearable back pain one day. When the doctor said that, about the pain, about growing older, she had the first sarcastic thought of her life. Unable to comprehend that she would one day be middle-aged and suffering like all the middle-aged and suffering people that populated her world, she thought,
Yeah, right.
57 Hope sat on the couch and took off her Chuck Taylors. She was about to take off her socks but her mom said, “I don’t want to smell those feet.”
Hope sighed.
“Go put on some clean socks. And take your shoes into your room, too. I don’t want to smell those puppies, either.”
Hope returned with a clean pair of socks and a shirt that didn’t smell like spit. Normally, she would have hated being ordered around like this, but on the night, she was glad to feel safe, not necessarily because of where she was, but because of who she was with. She put one foot on her mother’s back first, as if she were preparing to rise on a balance beam, and then brought up the other foot. She held out her arms, swaying slightly and adjusting her weight from one foot to the other. She felt beneath her feet the softness of fat around her mother’s muscles and bones.
She could decide what the most satisfying sound was, if it was a series of short, rapid pops or if it was the single, deep pop that came when she walked down near the lower back, the pop that made her mother groan with pain and relief.
Hope didn’t want to talk too much about her mother’s date, because there was so little vacant space in her mind to consider it, but she did have the flickering thought that the man had seemed, for once, decent. And he had dropped those twenties on the table like it was no big deal.
She said, vaguely, “What was he?”
“A dentist.”
“You got along?”
“He was fine.”
She’d probably said “fine” because she didn’t want Hope to feel bad for interrupting a good thing. Why else would she have been kissing him in public?
58 Hope said, “And the food?”
The Busy Pig was consistently ranked as having the best homemade head cheese in the
South, which was an impressive thing to the growing number of foodies. The most popular item on the menu was a charcuterie board but there were also a “Recession Special,” which was really deep-fried pig rectum with a sweet chili sauce.
Hope started to laugh before she even asked, “Did you eat pig butt?” She lost her balance and stepped on the floor, then toppled onto the couch.
She watched her mom struggle to get off the floor. She stood upright using the coffee table as support. She sat on the couch, too, breathing a little hard. She said, “I’m an old woman.”
They looked at the TV, which was turned to WYFF4, and Hope found herself rubbing her buzzed head without even realizing it. She felt the velvet against her hand and kept rubbing it, back and forth, back and forth, and watched the late-night replay of the evening news hour.
When Hope glanced over after only a few minutes, her mother’s eyes were shut.
Already, it was beginning to feel less like a bad thing that had actually happened and more like a story she would tell one day. It was that way with lots of things. She remembered being little and going to the beach with her parents in the summer. They’d played in the sand, swum, and gone for walks collecting seashells. They’d eaten crab legs from big buckets and
French fries with heavy Cajun seasoning. But when they had to pack the car and come home, that long four-hour drive back to the upstate, she remembered her mother saying, “I hate leaving so much, it’s almost not worth coming at all,” and her father nodding in agreement at the steering wheel. By the time they got home and did the laundry and slept in their regular beds for a few nights, the experience no longer seemed real. There was evidence of travel, like the plastic baggie of shells they kept in a kitchen drawer and the sand hidden in their flip-flops, that place
59 where thong met sole, and the suntans they could admire in the mirror when getting in or out of the shower, but even though they carried the memories and could see proof that those memories were real, there was always the question, Did it really happen? Before a moment fossilized into memory, it was an action or a taste or a feeling in the present, a thing experienced by the body and processed at lightning-speed by the brain. That was when something was really the most powerful, when it was so fresh and so new, that there was no question as to whether or not it was real.
60 CHAPTER 3 ALIEN, ABDUCTION
While all of the other girls in Hope’s graduating class rose in the blue-lit morning to fix their hair, Hope woke up late, washed her hair with a dime of shampoo, and dried it with the quick scrub of a towel.
She put on her graduation cap and gown, which had cost twenty-five dollars from
Jostens, the cheapest option available, no extra frills, no tassels, no bling, and stood in front of the mirror. She’d thought about sewing fake hair to her graduation cap, but realized that wouldn’t work because everybody was supposed to fling them in the air. And would she have needed a sewing machine? Or would the little sewing kit that her mother had bought from the
American Foundation for the Blind have worked? And where would she acquire loose, fake hair?
She had thought about wearing a regular wig, but even if she’d known where to find one, she didn’t have the money. The only option was to go, as her mother called it, “au naturale.” The prospect made Hope want to shrivel up, to be tiny instead of towering, but the graduation gown billowed around her, like a frock fitted for a hippo, and she seemed to fill the entire room. The black cap covered what little hair she did have. She dreaded what her classmates would say when they finally laid eyes on her.
She had skipped the last three half-days of school, explaining to her mother that the teachers wouldn’t care. Seniors only watched movies, signed yearbooks, and attended assemblies toward the end, anyway. Some of Hope’s friends had called the house to ask where she was, but she hadn’t answered. The prospect of telling the story, her story, was frightening. It meant that she had to admit weakness, or what she perceived as weakness, which was turning out to be a harder thing to deal with than she would have expected.
61 During those three days, Hope had gotten used to the new feeling of a buzzed head, but it wasn’t enough time to get used to seeing herself in a mirror. She saw the quiet line of her jaw, the full length of her neck. She was paler without the cover of hair. It was still a shock. To say it was all vanity would not only be false but also an oversimplification. Hope’s hair had been pretty, of course, but it was the physical representation of who she was, a thing that she could catch a glimpse of in a window and know it was herself there, reflected. It had been identifiable proof of her existence. An observer might have said that her hair had always looked the same, but Hope had been able to tell the slightest differences in it from day to day, as all women could of their own hair, the changes brought on by humidity or dryness, whether it be the frizz of a summer thunderstorm, the brittle limpness caused by a winter day, or the difference in her hair after going for a swim in a pool, lake, or ocean and then feeling it slowly air-dry. To all these many subtleties she had been carefully attune, but no longer. Buzzed hair did not misbehave.
On the way to the ceremony, Hope flipped down the passenger visor and unzipped her makeup bag. She and her mother were heading to nearby Furman University. The ceremony was taking place in Paladin Stadium because it could accommodate all three hundred and fifty students, along with their friends and family, and due to all the graduation traffic, the trip was taking longer than normal. That was a good thing because it gave Hope time to mentally prepare, but it was a bad thing because mental preparation wasn’t what she actually wanted. She wanted it to be over with. Apprehension began to rise as she picked through the bag, looking for lipstick.
As a child, she’d never been interested in gussying up, never snuck into her mother’s closet and tried on her dresses or heels, never drew all over her face with lipstick. It seemed like the tedious requirement of an adult, not something you would do for fun. She had, however,
62 seen a movie on TV once where young girls in nineteenth century England pinched their cheeks before a dance, so they would appear rosy before the available bachelors. That stuck with Hope.
She went around pinching her cheeks for weeks, learning for the first time that a small dose of pain, the quick squeeze of baby fat, produced a small dose of pleasure. She had even slipped her hand down the back of her pants once, thinking that if she liked pinching the cheeks on her face so much, she might like pinching her butt cheeks even more. She squeezed hard and then, realizing she couldn’t tell if they were pink or not, she dropped her pants and twisted around to look with the help of a small hand mirror, which was a nice touch because hand mirrors seemed so Victorian, but rather than turning rosy, there were white, bloodless splotches on each cheek.
She only felt embarrassed to have ever done it and prayed no one would find out. Over the years, there were long stretches of time when she didn’t think about it, but every now and then she would remember, like in the car, on graduation day, and the embarrassment would be made fresh all over again.
She fixed the smudged lipstick and returned the Kleenex, slamming the glove compartment shut a little too loudly for her mother’s liking.
She said, “Somebody’s in a bad mood.”
Somebody hated being referred to as somebody. Somebody had a name. Somebody wanted to put on her mascara in peace. Hope said, “I hate it when you say that.”
Her mother hissed.
Hope, finished with her face, flipped up the visor and dropped the makeup bag at her feet.
This drew her mother’s eyes away from the road and down to the floor, probably making sure that nothing spilled out of the bag and rolled under the seat, where it might melt and create a big
63 fat mess, but what she discovered down there was the unmistakable red of Chuck Taylors. “Are you wearing those damn shoes?” she said. “Seriously?”
“I don’t know what the big deal is.”
“Most people dress nice for the occasion.”
“So?”
“It’s an important day, probably more important for the parents than all of the kids, but you’re still supposed to look nice.”
Hope leaned as far away from her mother as she could get, against the door. Her cap, just a square of cardboard covered with cheap, black fabric, bent against the window. She muttered,
“What a joke,” but it was just loud enough for her mother to hear.
She gave Hope a long, hard, brown-eyed stare.
“We’re going to wreck.”
“We are not.”
“You weren’t looking.”
“When,” she said, “is your pouting going to end?”
“Let me check my calendar.”
“Don’t be a smart aleck.”
“I was just answering your question.”
“I know what you were doing.”
“What?”
“Testing me.” She had both hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock. That meant serious business. “I just don’t want you to let this define you. I’ve let things define me before that I regret. It’s no way to live.”
64 “I don’t feel like talking anymore.”
“Do you understand?”
“Alright.”
“I don’t want you to let this define you.”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
“Well, you’re not.”
“Is it all about what you want?”
“It’s my graduation.”
“Are you the center of the universe?”
“No.”
“Then quit acting like it.”
Hope was at full-boil. There was a little hole in the fabric of the roof, right above her head. She stuck her finger into the hole and tore it open. It was the perfect, little thing to piss her mother off. Every time she would see it from then on, she’d remember how it had happened and why it had happened. She’d see the rip in their relationship and she’d see the even greater rip in time. It would sing its song for years to come, until the car was one day crushed into a junkyard cube and the junkyard birds bathed in junkyard dust.
Her mom was angry enough that she kept rolling on her original tirade, not wanting to talk about the rip itself but using it as fuel. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “I can pass along some advice along to you that nobody ever passed on to me. My parents didn’t say a word to me about anything that really mattered. My father told me to change the oil in the car, and my mother taught me how to do hospital corners on beds, but that was about it. I loved them to death
65 and I miss them every single day, every single day when I wake up and when I go to bed, or if I hear the sound of ice shaken in a glass, or if I eat potato salad, or if I smell hairspray, but when they were alive, they were all caught up in their gin and tonics and Johnny Carson. I don’t blame them. They did the best they could, but there are a lot of things I wasn’t prepared for. I’ve got to do my duty, even if you don’t like it. You’ll remember all of this one day when I’m gone. You’ll wish that you’d listened to your mother and had been nice to her.”
Hope sat quietly the rest of the car ride, knowing it had ultimately been a game. She’d gotten ahead for ripping the cloth but that wasn’t enough to win. Her mother, in giving that speech, had shot from the three-point line and what followed after a period of drawn-out silence was a perfect, indelible swish.
They arrived at Furman. The irony of having the ceremony at the university did not strike
Hope, in her current state, as funny. A tiny fraction of the high school students would have been accepted, had they been foolish enough to apply in the first place, but even fewer would have been able to pay the formidable cost, which, once you included housing, tuition, and books, would have put you somewhere north of $50,000. It was a cruel joke to drop the senior class in such a place and say, “Congratulations!” It was cruel because the grounds were beautiful. With all of the graduation traffic, it had taken Hope and her mother thirty minutes to arrive, and in that thirty minutes the landscape had changed color. The highway shot through rolling green, woods and creeks on either side, and the only people riding bikes were people in racing jerseys, cleats, and little French caps. Their legs were shaved. Their veins rose hard. They reached, in their speed and in their grace, a light-headed nirvana. There was even a lake at the university with a
66 path for walking and cycling. On a clear day, the swans could have been mistaken for clouds mirrored on the water’s surface.
Students and their families scattered over the sprawling lawns and leaned against trees.
They hugged, kissed, and took photographs. It was a day so many of them had been waiting for and yet, inevitably, many of them would look back and wish it had never happened, because if it had never happened then they never would have had to grow up.
Hope rubbed her hand around the back of her neck, making sure she didn’t feel any pimples. On the inside, she was trying and failing to maintain calm. On the outside, hers was the face of a person roasting in a graduation gown. It was also the face of a person thoroughly displeased with her condition.
Her mother pulled out her ticket from her purse. She squinted at the small print and muttered to herself.
Each student had been allotted up to eight tickets but Hope had only asked for one. She’d originally invited her father and Maribel, but they couldn’t come because Maribel’s father was dying in a hospital in San Antonio. Her father said that he would fly Hope down soon, for a proper visit and some vacationing in the hill country, with the colors of rock, water, and sky, but they hadn’t made concrete plans. It didn’t matter, anyway. Hope didn’t know him well enough, not anymore, to have him around at a time like this. She would have been afraid that he wouldn’t understand, that he might have said, “Why did you let it happen?” or “Couldn’t you have called for help?” She didn’t want to risk it.
Hope’s mother turned in circles, looking at all the people. “I bet the ceremony is going to take forever,” she said, clearly trying not to be mad anymore, for the sake of the day, for the sake of the memory, maybe. “Should we go ahead and walk to the stadium?”
67 Hope didn’t say anything. She just walked away, leaving her mom behind, with a face like, Um, hello? In reality, she was probably thinking, How is it that one minute you are the light of my life and the next minute you are a raging bitch?
Hope decided to go ahead and find her place in line. Cole would be nearby, his last name being Roberts, and that’s who she really wanted to talk to. She needed to dig up more information about Pierce, because in the last three days she still hadn’t heard back from the police, and when she tried to search for the Momma's Boys on the internet, nothing had come up.
It must have been too new a development, still unadvertised to the general public. If there was anyone who might know something, it was Cole. She wanted to know who the Momma's Boys were, what had happened to Pierce, and why he had cut her hair. She wanted to make sense of the senseless, which meant that she was no different from every other human being wandering the earth slack-jawed.
She passed hundreds of people. No one paid attention to her, at first, although her black gown was an ever-shifting balloon around her. A group of guys from the wrestling team were the first to notice her. They had poor hearing from getting their heads slammed onto mats and wore pastel-colored bow ties around ham-hock necks. At first, they mistook Hope for a guy and said,
“That dude wearing lipstick?” and said, “Maybe it’s Maybelline, faggot!” She passed theater nerds who saw her baldness and began a game of listing off women with shaved heads in movies––Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta, Sigourney Weaver in Alien, and Demi Moore in
G.I. Jane. She passed the left-wing hippies who wondered if she was a Hare Krishna first and then a skinhead. “What color are her eyes?” they asked and before someone could get close enough to see that they were, in fact, a pale sea-green, Hope had swept past them like a storm cloud.
68 As she was about to head into Paladin Stadium, she saw the same group of black girls who’d called her an alien. She wanted to slide by, unseen, but their interest was in perpetual pique. Their braids, which had been carefully crissed and crossed at the crack of dawn, were like antennae picking up signals in the air.
“She doesn’t look too good.”
“Looks kind of like E.T. in the river.”
“Sick, yeah.”
They gathered around Hope and blocked her path.
All she managed to say was, “Let me through,” before they started talking over each other again.
“How’d it fall out?”
“All at once or a little bit?”
“On the pillow?”
“In the bath?”
“At night?”
“Is that why you weren’t in class?”
“Because you were dying?”
Over their heads, Hope saw Cole heading for his place in line. Hope licked the sweat from her upper lip. She said, “I have to go,” and tried to shoulder through the group.
Her mistake was in licking her lip.
“Shit.”
“She’s mad now.”
“Look at that tongue.”
69 “Flicking that tongue.”
“Don’t flick that tongue at me.”
“Alien tongue.”
By the time Hope arrived at the stadium, teachers were taking firm hold of students’ shoulders and guiding them, as if they were all braindead toddlers, and saying, “Remember what we practiced in rehearsal?” and “Watch your mouth” and “Do that poor girl a favor and quit grinding on her until after the ceremony is over.”
Hope saw Cole nearby, hollered his name, and tried to make her way to him. A music teacher named Mrs. Leadbelly blocked her path. Hope bounced off Leadbelly’s stomach, which protruded like a nine-month pregnancy, except it was relaxed like old drum head that needed tightening. A case of collapsed abdominal muscles gave Leadbelly, silver-haired and sixty- something, the baby bump but no “glow” to speak of.
She grabbed Hope by the arm and said, “I don’t know what happened to you, Robinson, but you better fall in line.”
Meanwhile, Cole made eye-contact with her, his eyebrows raised like, Jesus, what the hell happened to you?
Hope mouthed, We need to talk, but by then everybody was getting ready for the ceremony to start.
Leadbelly said, “It’s showtime, ‘09!”
Some kids mocked her by doing drum rolls on their stomachs.
What followed was the valedictorian’s speech, given by a small, quiet girl named Julia who looked like someone who’d enjoy making paper cranes out of old gum wrappers. Hope had
70 never even seen her before. The speech, which ended with the cringe-worthy sentiment “let’s move forward together,” was followed by a long period of standing, waiting, and listening to the principal croak names into the microphone, each name like a mud bubble bursting from his wide lips. Standing out in the sun, Hope felt herself turning into a puddle of soup. She imagined that, in a few hours’ time, her bones would be glistening in a pile. Sweat made its way down her lower back, right into the waistband of her already-damp underwear. Mentally, she began to free- dive further and further inside herself, not even thinking clearly, just sinking into the deep, hazy soup of her being, with no thoughts or images, her brain not even registering what the eyes saw anymore, just an expanse of gradient green, and the deeper she went, the darker the soup got, until she was floating in black, and when the principal finally called her name and it echoed across the stadium, she was brought back to the surface in a dizzying rush. She drew in air through her mouth. The entire ritual of receiving the diploma, shaking the hand, and taking the photo would probably take ten seconds, no time at all, but that ten seconds loomed in her mind.
As soon as she stepped onstage, hand already outstretched, the shouting began. People had cheered for everyone before her, even though it was discouraged for disrupting the ceremony. Hope didn’t hear her mother’s voice among the crowd, which was, when she looked at the masses of people spread before her, a smorgasbord of seersucker and polyester, nude- colored hose and cell-phone clips, sun hats blocking a view of the stage and paper programs used as fans. She didn’t see cameras flashing because the day was so bright, but she heard every photograph being taken and all of those clicks sounded like a swarm of locusts roaring up to devour her. The voices belonged to her peers.
“Faggot!”
“Nazi!”
71 “Alien!”
“Alien!”
“Nazi!”
“Fag!”
That this could be her life, her reality, seemed impossible. Were all of these people, whom she’d gone to school with for years, calling her these names? They’d been together during bad times, like when their fifth-grade teacher wheeled in a TV playing the news after the first plane hit the Twin Towers, and during good times, too, like when Barack Obama became president of the United States during their last year of high school. They’d seen the world change. The first “faggot” had come from a jock. She heard the aggression in the voice, like a beaver’s tail slapping water. Everyone else chimed in after that, not afraid to follow someone else’s lead, and the worst part was that it sounded like music, like the kind of music that you could do the Russian Cossack Dance to and everyone would shout, when the slew of slurs ended,
“Hey!” She was at the epicenter of their dance. There was no way out.
The principal leaned into the microphone, which rose and curled from the podium like a carnivorous flower. He said, “ENOUGH.”
She froze.
“Another word and security will escort you OUT.”
The principal stared at the crowd, not the least bit intimidated, not even in front of a thousand people, maybe more, and paused for a few painful seconds so his message could be absorbed. His eyes seemed to linger, waiting for weakness to emerge in the form of a quivering lip or a twitching eye, as if he could suss out the delinquency in a thousand people all at once and force them into repentance. “I do not tussle with sons of bitches,” he seemed to say. “I do not let
72 them in the sandbox with my good boys and girls. Do not shit in my sandbox or so help me God
I will shit on your permanent record.” A bubble of gas rose from his stomach. It groaned all the way up his abdomen, from throat to mouth, and blossomed into the microphone. His cheeks puffed––a burp. “Do you want to be good?” he seemed to ask. “Do you want to change? Do you want to be better?” The vulnerable said yes. Those were the soft ones. The hard ones didn’t flinch. The hard ones were young, cocksure. Their combs glistened in the sun, feathers fanned, steadfast.
The stand-off ended and the principal held out his hand. Hope lifted hers, shaking, withering, dying, and he took it swiftly. He handed her the diploma, turned to smile as their photograph was taken, and then leaned into her ear. She could smell the vaguely sweet stink of his swamp breath, that turning point a few hours after the teeth had been brushed and the tongue had been scrubbed, when the mouth began to revert back to its natural state. His eyes were frog eggs. The irises were dark, trembling specks of life. No arms, no legs, no tail. Only the essential heartbeat.
She stood there stupefied. He said, “Go,” and then she crossed the stage, went down the steps, and found her seat.
When the time came to move the tassel and toss the cap, everyone cheered, this being the pivotal moment that so many had dreamt of, but Hope didn’t bother. She looked up and saw caps in the air, rising and spinning, floating and falling, but couldn’t believe the way things were turning out. After graduation, so many of these people would disappear into whatever work they could scrape up, restocking shelves and answering phones and caring for lawns. They would die, move away, and retreat. They would drive drunk, fall asleep at the wheel, and swerve for deer.
73 Familiar voices would call some, blackness would envelop others. Some would stay. Others would move. But some things remained the same all over. There was lack and excess. There was beauty and remorse. Were there lives out there waiting to be adopted? Or was a life something you made? Who knew what to do with that lump of time that was a life, a life that could be shaped by its keeper’s hands but also by external forces known and unknown, sometimes turning into a form unrecognizable, like, Is this really mine? Look away for the briefest of moments and it changed in ways you never expected. So many of them, the young men and women, would retreat to their parents’ basements, watch TV on a Black Friday bargain, make Kraft macaroni & cheese, and fall in love with people and things that would never hurt them because they would never be able to touch them, hosts of cooking shows, young actors, display models on QVC, imagining what it would be like to touch the untouchable, convincing themselves it was better that way, shivering in fantasy. And what would become of Hope?
The girl beside her, another Robinson, unrelated, said, “Did they tell you how long you have to live?”
Hope didn’t bother answering. She only thought, I’m different than all the rest. I’m not going to end up like them. Little did she know that all of her peers, those jock-holes, those pimple-faced larvae, those belittling rooster whangs, believed the same thing about themselves.
After what they’d done to her, she couldn’t care less how they turned out.
As everyone drifted back toward their parents and into their cliques, Hope feared the opportunity to speak to Cole was slipping away and so she jumped over a row of seats like a caped gazelle, grabbed his arm, and squeezed. He was the only one that she needed.
She said, “Have you talked to Pierce?”
“Ow.”
74 “Do you know about the Momma's Boys?”
He was a heavy-set guy whose broad cheeks burned a constant red. Beneath that graduation gown, he was probably slick with sweat, a line of it marking the back of his pants like a vestigial tail. “What the fuck happened?” he said. “That was crazy. Them calling you names.
Shit, I’m going to have a bruise.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“You must have pissed them off.”
“Answer the question.”
“What?”
“Have you talked to him?”
“I ran into him once, maybe.”
“What’d he say?”
“My parents have these lunch reservations,” he said. “If you weren’t acting so weird, I’d tell you to come to my party tonight.”
She squeezed his arm tighter.
“Jesus.”
“What’d he say?”
“Gah,” he said. “Alright, alright. He said he had a bunch of new roommates, moved in with some guys, said they had some big plans or something, I don’t know. He seemed kind of weird, but I don’t know what’s been going on with him, so I can’t talk.”
“What plans?”
“He didn’t say.”
“You didn’t ask?”
75 “I don’t know.”
“Where do they live?”
“Man, I’m just doing my own thing and he’s doing his thing and you’re doing your thing, whatever that is. You’re coming at me like a crazy person.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“You sure look it.”
She leaned closer. In a quiet and controlled voice, she said, “He held a knife to my throat.
Do you think that’s a little weird, huh? Do you think that’d freak you out? Or was he just doing
‘his thing?’”
Cole held up his hands. He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’d have pissed your pants.”
“You don’t know me.”
“You’d have begged him to stop.”
“Me? I bet you begged.”
“I didn’t beg.”
“I bet you were pissing your pants.”
“I was scared, but I didn’t beg.”
“You’re a crazy bitch.”
“You’re just mad that I never talked to you.”
“What?”
“You’re mad that I talked to Pierce instead.”
“I got girls.”
“Really?”
76 “Yeah.”
“Real girls or just pictures of girls you pulled up on the internet?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you search for tall, blond girls.”
“Fuck you.”
“No,” Hope said, leaning in and preparing to say what she had never said to anyone before. “Fuck you.”
“You’re making all this shit up.”
She took off her graduation cap, ran a hand over her head, and said, “Does it look like
I’m making this up?” She wiped her hand, shining with sweat, down the front of his gown. She said, “There’s a lot you don’t know.”
“What the fuck happened to you?”
“If you were listening, you’d know.”
She’d felt herself gaining momentum and went along with it, seeing where it would take her, and for someone who wasn’t normally a big-talker, this was an outpouring she hadn’t expected. She stood her ground. She fought back. She didn’t roll over just because someone called her “crazy” or didn’t believe what she was saying. Inside, the venom was bubbling. A little of it had risen and she liked the way it burned her lips. She trained her eyes on Cole, that face like a beaming like a slow-roasted hog’s, and didn’t let up. The effects of her venom were beginning to appear. He was breaking down. He was losing his cool. She remembered the way he used to look at her, like she something he wanted to dip in honey mustard and eat. She must have been snarling. She felt like she was snarling. In her pupils was that startling, ethereal blackness that was only achieved by freediving into the soul’s rancid soup.
77 “Well, I don’t know where they live,” he said, looking at the ground. “I just remember
Pierce was on his way to the laser tag place. He said he went there to unwind. I was like,
‘Seriously, dude?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah.’”
“Unwind?”
“That’s what he said.”
“At Invasion?”
That was where her alien T-shirt had come from, the shirt she wore so often that on the day of her high school graduation, people were still calling her “alien.” It was the least offensive of everything she’d been called.
“Yeah,” he said, backing away. “That place.”
She let go of Cole, sensing that he’d shown all his cards, that there was nothing left to be gained. He glanced at his arm, but, because of the gown, the white handprint her tight grip had left wasn’t visible, nor the purple crescents where her nails had dug in, and he snorted back to his parents, wherever they were, those progenitors of idiocy with stomachs groaning for cold salad and celebratory ribeye.
At home, Officer Duncan’s business card was left in the front door. Hope went directly in the kitchen to drink milk from the jug, letting the card fall to the floor. She’d always used the glass before but somehow, on this day, she didn’t feel like the glass. She felt like the jug. She was thinking about how she’d only gotten a sliver of information, which was better than nothing, but still not as much as she’d hoped for. She wanted to understand what had happened to Pierce and why he’d attacked her, but wondered if all the answers people really wanted in life were
78 unattainable. You had to carry the weight of your collected questions and not let your knees buckle.
Hope’s mom paused in the doorway and looked at the ground. She didn’t say a word about drinking from the jug, even though it had never been allowed before. Earlier that morning, she’d put Hope’s graduation presents on the kitchen table. They had planned on opening them after the ceremony, but she didn’t say anything about that now. She just said, “Let’s have a quiet afternoon,” and retreated to her bedroom. It was like her body composition had changed, all of the water replaced with disappointment. Hope had no idea what her mother must have thought about the outburst during the ceremony, how such a barrage of insults could be rationalized by an innocent onlooker, but Hope was just glad they didn’t have to talk about it. There was only so much humiliation a person could take in one day.
On the table was a large package from Hope’s father. Without even thinking, she opened it with a butcher knife. The first thing she saw was a small drawstring bag with a tag on it reading “Jewelry by Maribel.” Inside was a sterling silver charm of a rattlesnake on a long silver chain. The snake had two stones for eyes. They appeared brown at first but when Hope put the charm in her hand and turned it around to look from different angles, there were rings of pearlescent orange, gold, and green that appeared to ripple. Hope flipped over the paper tag that was attached to the drawstring bag. It said the snake’s eyes were made of fire agate, a semi- precious stone found in the American Southwest and Mexico. It was known for its protective powers, ability to repel negative energies, and enhancement of sexual abilities. It made Hope sick. She didn’t want to be reminded of stupid Maribel and she didn’t want to believe that stones had magical powers. If she’d been wearing that snake around her neck in the alley, she wouldn’t have been protected. It wouldn’t have helped.
79 She couldn’t help but wonder if her father’s house was full of that bullshit. She wondered if he carried loose stones in his pocket or if Maribel made him wear one around his neck. She didn’t remember her father ever wearing jewelry, only a watch, and couldn’t imagine him giving into something like that. It had been nearly two years since they had last visited, though, and she figured that to assume he had not changed at all would be to assume she had not changed at all, which wasn’t true. The many facets of a person also rippled when looked at from different angles.
Taking up most of the box was an old quilt. It smelled like a wood stove when she pulled it out, that strong, oaky scent that became a flavor on the tongue. She looked at the pattern of stars stitched with blue cloth. It was old. It was thin. There were a number of burns on it, each one with a different story, from throughout the years. The earliest burns were from wandering embers. Later burns were from a little boy, Hope’s father, Lorne Robinson, having the brilliant idea of packing a pipe himself and lighting it up. Instead of sucking lightly on the pipe like his grandfather did, when the old man sat on the porch and made that delicious puffing sound, his scruffy, sunken cheeks expanding and collapsing, Lorne had blown into the pipe and watched the burning tobacco fly in bright red streaks, falling over the quilt like a meteor shower. He’d been beaten across the back of his legs with a switch for that one. Other burns were from the quilt being draped across a lap in winter and a dozing hand lowering a cigarette onto the quilt. It was a reminder that fire had the power to keep life going and snuff life out.
An accompanying note on wide-ruled paper read:
My Namesake,
80 You will not remember our meeting yesterday because you are not yet born. Your mother and father came up from Greenville because people like to look at old specimens such as myself and see how far they have come. I gave your mother tonic, sassafras, blueberry. It will make you strong.
I instruct this quilt be delivered to you upon the completion of your schooling though as you read this I am long departed. I take joy in my final days when I consider the future of my name and how you may better it. Do not let its appearance deceive you. Though threadbare and burned this quilt still gives warmth and comfort. Its work is not done. It is a good lesson.
Now I must close the windows.
Ina
Hope had never heard anything about her great-grandmother, dead now these eighteen years, leaving her any gifts. She’d barely heard anything about the woman at all. The next time she talked to her father, she would have to ask why he’d never told her about the quilt before. He must have carried the quilt around all of this time, keeping it in a box in his attack.
The remaining present was from her mother. Hope could tell it was a book. She tore the wrapping paper, praying it wasn’t what she thought it was, and saw the expected title––Oh, the
Places You’ll Go! It was the least original graduation gift a person could possibly pick out. A joke, a clichè. She couldn’t believe that was what her mother had decided to give her only child at her only high school graduation. If Hope had been clear-headed, she would have realized that the book was popular because it was appropriate and affordable. Her mother had already raised, fed, and clothed her. For all these years, she’d bought notebook and pencils for school. For math, that outrageously expensive graphing calculator from Texas Instruments. She had built a life for
81 the two of them and Hope knew this, but in a moment of material, human weakness, all of that wasn’t enough. She wanted a real present. It had nothing to do with love and everything to do with the immediate, if temporary, medicine of things.
She threw the book like a Frisbee against the wall, damaging the corner, and it fell to the floor. I’ve got to do something with myself, she thought, or I’m going to explode. She remembered how good it felt to run a few nights earlier, a way of releasing the pent-up energy that was otherwise enslaving her. She changed into a pair of shorts and her alien T-shirt. She swung into the kitchen and picked up the rattlesnake necklace, muttering, “Maribel my ass.” She placed it on her tongue and, in one hard gulp, swallowed. The pendant went first and the chain slithered second. Then she headed for the front door and mumbled, “I’m going out,” even though it wasn’t nearly loud enough for her mother to hear.
She ran through the neighborhood. Kids made slow circles on their bicycles. Ratty metallic ribbons streamed from handlebars that were sheathed in split, rotting rubber grips. She could feel the cold trail of metal and stone that the necklace left in her throat as it dropped into her stomach. The families of other graduates were getting out of cars, returning home for a special lunch, the opening of presents, a cake. Hope saw balloons tied around a mailbox. She punched one. From a porch, someone shouted, “Hey!” and she kept going. She ran until felt herself growing light-headed, which didn’t take long because she’d spent the entire morning sweating in that graduation gown and had only had a deep slug of milk when she got home. She kept running because she thought eventually the pain would turn to pleasure and she was waiting for the switch. It didn’t come. Instead, blackness overwhelmed her vision and she passed out on the sidewalk. She’d only run a couple of miles, two at most, and had almost made it back to her house when she fell.
82 She opened her eyes when the kids across the street, Ben and his little sister Easy Beth, took a half-empty water bottle from a neighbor’s recycling bin and poured the remains on her face. They were mouth-breathers. She smelled cold pepperoni on their breath.
Easy Beth held up two fingers in front of Hope’s face, as if that was a test she’d seen on
TV, and said, “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Two.”
She put her hand behind her back. “Now?”
“I can’t see them.”
Ben said, “Yeah, stupid.”
He crushed the water bottle in his hand and punted it like a football.
Hope sat cross-legged. Gnats crawled in the corners of her eyes and she wiped them away before they could drink the old, stale water that was now dribbling down her face. Ben and Easy
Beth looked at her, then each other. They both got on the ground and sat cross-legged, too. It had been a long time since they’d been together on the same level.
Ben said, “Your friends came.”
The squashed gnats were black dots on her fingertip. “The police?”
“Some other guys,” he said. “Your mom went with them. I guess they didn’t want to wait for you.”
Hope said, “Help me up,” and the kids sprung to their feet, each grabbing one of her hands, and pulled. Once upright, she towered above them and swayed, the edges of her vision going dark. The kids craned their necks, waiting to see if she’d pass out again. When she didn’t, they walked across the street together and Hope saw that the front door to the house was cracked open. She pushed the door, waited cautiously.
83 Easy Beth said, “They’re gone.”
Ben looked at the gifts and said, “Is it your birthday?”
Hope didn’t answer. She stood in the living room, with her hands shaking at her sides.
She did not hear the sounds of her mother’s television from the back bedroom. She did not hear the sifting of shoes from the closet, that great pile that she was always digging through or rearranging or cursing. She did not hear ice cubes tinkling from a glass of tea. In the air hung an absence so large Hope almost couldn’t breathe.
She looked at the high school portrait of her mother that hung on the wall. For a moment, sitting in front of the backdrop, with the hired photographer saying, “Tilt your head a little,” an eighteen-year-old Jean Robinson had probably considered shooting a bird for the photograph.
She had decided against it, though, maybe thinking about what her parents would say, those parents who got a little drunk and watched Johnny Carson and did impressions of him during commercial breaks, saying, “That’s some weird, wild stuff,” and tapping cigarette ash into crystal ashtrays, laughing at their own voices when they came out cracked or wheezy, and stabbing gherkins, their nightly treat, from the jar with a pickle fork, or maybe Jean had decided against flipping a bird because she realized that if she ever had children, they would look at the portrait of their mother and what would she want them to see? As the photographer said,
“Cheese,” she had decided to simply smile. And she decided to mean that smile. What the photograph revealed, once it was developed and printed and mailed out, was a young woman in the first prime of her life. In the photograph her mother wore a ringer T-shirt. Her hair was parted in the middle. Around her neck was a delicate gold chain with a three-leaf clover charm. The charm itself must have weighed barely anything, just a flake of gold. The second prime of her
84 life was when she was a new mother and she was in love with the world, truly, for the first time as a grown woman.
Hope looked at the high school portrait, which had yellowed over the years, and said,
“Where are you?”
85 CHAPTER 4 THE RAT POOP THEOREM
The initial wave of panic was for her mother’s safety. Then, as Hope picked up Officer
Duncan’s business card from the floor, the second wave hit. Would she even be able to call him?
They didn’t have a home telephone and Hope hadn’t gotten a replacement cell phone yet. She went into her mother’s bedroom and saw everything just as she had left it. The bed was made but the rumpled outline of her body was visible on top of the coverlet. There was a sunken place on the pillow where her head had been, that pillow she had mail-ordered because it was supposed to reduce neck pain. Above the bed was a watercolor painting of pansies, the little lion faces emerging in shades of pink and periwinkle. Hope had always thought the flowers looked happy but now those deep violet markings seemed to glare with malice. Everything was in its rightful place on top of the heavy oak dresser, including a porcelain dish of jewelry, a little TV, and a hairbrush. Her purse hung from the closet door knob. The only thing missing was Hope’s mother, Jean Robinson, not even a “thing” at all, but a human being of forty-nine years, standing
5’ 9” without shoes, 180 lbs., hair dyed a light shade of copper, upper arms beginning to puff, earlobes stretched from a lifetime of wearing heavy, sterling hoops.
Hope found her mother’s cellphone on the dresser and held it, momentarily, to her chest.
Thank you, she muttered. Thank you.
She called Officer Duncan and asked him to come over. He said, “We’re on our way,” and she said, “Hurry.”
In the living room, she looked to see if anything had been left behind. Specifically, a baby pacifier. She even got down on her knees, leaning over and putting her cheek on the floor, to see if one had rolled under the couch. She only found a foot-long dust bunny held together with filaments that would have glimmered if swept out into the light, her hair. There was no baby
86 pacifier but that didn’t stop her from knowing with absolute certainty that the Momma's Boys were responsible.
Ben was looking at her, but she hadn’t even noticed. He said, “Are you okay?” and she stood up, brushed off her knees, and said, “I’m not crazy.”
He said, “What?”
She’d forgotten that he was still in the house. He wore a pair of basketball shorts that hung past his knees and a T-shirt from his end-of-the-year field day. The shirt was covered in signatures from his classmates. They had written K.A.T.S., which stood for Kiss Ass This
Summer, and had drawn smiley faces.
She said, “You’ve got to go.”
“Our dad told us to stay out.”
“Too bad.”
“He says that when he says something, he really means it.”
Hope glanced at Ben’s knees. They were both skinned, probably because his team had lost tug-of-war. He was the kind of kid that held onto the rope until the very last second, never giving up, and had been pulled over the line, tripping and stumbling into mud that was mixed with knee-gouging rocks. She figured the only reason people liked tug-of-war was because you played it about five times in your entire life. The truth was that Hope, in the field days of her youth, had held on until the very last second, too.
She said, “Basketball, then.”
“The ball got wedged under the car.”
“Go get it.”
87 “First we tried with our hands, then I sat on the curb and used my feet.” As he talked, he looked through a stack of magazines on the coffee table. They came with discount codes and free shipping offers, begging for business. “Some people can’t even touch their toes but I can lean over and get my hands flat on the ground. I had to get new shoes last week because I outgrew the old ones. My mom says I’ve got flippers.”
“I’m not going to say it again.”
“You think you’re so old and serious, but you’re not. You’re just in high school. I’m going to be in high school before long.”
“I graduated.”
“Same difference.”
He found an advertisement for Chanel No. 5 and peeled back the flap containing a sample of the fragrance. He rubbed his wrist on the flap, then sniffed. He muttered, “Gross.”
“Where’d you learn that?”
He shrugged.
Hope lay on the couch, her body running the entire length of its three cushions. She thought, You don’t have a clue, Ben. Not a clue. My mother has a responsibility to me and I have a responsibility to her. The relationship has become reciprocal, but you probably don’t even know what that word means. It means that when I was a little kid hiding inside clothing racks at the department store, she had to find me. Now she’s gone and it’s my turn to find her. But this isn’t a department store, it’s an entire city and I don’t know what’s out there. I’ve never had any practice finding things. Up until now, everything has been given to me. By her. Because of her.
Hope knew that absolutely nothing could be done from home, not from her spot on the couch with the little smudges of brown on the cushion where her mother had dripped chocolate
88 ice cream and tried to wipe it off with a paper towel, only making the smudge even bigger. It was worse, Hope realized, to be the one waiting in the figurative dark. It was the position parents were in most often. They sat in shadow and waited for their kids to come home, wondering what chaos was unfolding just beyond their control, out in the remote, sketchy parking lots of the world, with the streetlamps casting nets of gold and the insects chirruping and the innocence of all good children shotgunned by bigger, badder forces. These images simmered in the imaginations of parents, the imagination being a machine that concocted the worst and the more well-oiled the machine, the more vivid the worst looked and smelled and felt. In the mind of a parent, the dark fell hard and fast.
In the dark, worry turned to fear, fear turned to frustration, frustration turned to anger.
That chain of emotions led mothers and fathers to snap when that front door creaked open late into the night, well past curfew, and say, “Do you have any idea what time it is?” when they really wanted to say, “I love you.” What they really wanted to do was hold their children fiercely and not let them go. When Hope had come home late after hanging out with Pierce, she’d crept quietly in the house and went to the bathroom first, to get herself cleaned up before bed. She peed and felt the pleasant soreness of first sex, then brushed her teeth and unrolled her tongue to scrub away the party taste. Her mother had knocked on the door, saying, “You’re home awfully late,” the concern in her voice leaning toward anger. Hope’s heart jumped then. She said, “Sorry, just brushing my teeth,” and then stood there, frozen, the toothbrush in her hand, a bead of water rolling down the handle, until she heard her mother walk away, back to bed. What she had really been saying was, “Are you safe when I’m not around?”
89 Now, Hope was the one sitting and waiting and wondering. She stared at the door, although she knew her mother wasn’t going to open it. She was somewhere on the other side, out in that great darkness.
Ben was giving the Chanel a second chance, tentatively smelling his wrist. “The basketball’s not really stuck under the car,” he said. “I’d just rather stay here.”
When Double-D arrived, Hope ushered the kids into the kitchen. She said, “Sit in here and read Dr. Seuss and shut up.” She thought about what a parent would say, then added, “Be good.”
Easy Beth said, “Are they coming for us?”
“What did I just say?”
“I don’t want to go to jail.”
Ben said, “You only shower once a week in the pen.”
She balled up her hands and brought them in front of her mouth, as if to hide from this newfound knowledge. “No baths?”
He shook his head. “No baths.”
Hope raised a finger to her lips, telling them to be quiet, and then met Double-D in the living room.
Duncan had a fleck of blood on his cheek and De La Rosa’s fingers were covered in powdered sugar. She was looking up at the ceiling fan, which happened to be turned off, and the edges of the blades were covered in black dust.
“Sorry,” Duncan said. He took one look at her new haircut, gave a fake smile, and looked away. “We’re coming from a call at the county speedway and Rosa had a funnel cake.”
90 Rosa sucked the powdered sugar from her thumb. Once clean, it was plump and brown, like a pacifier nipple. She looked at Hope, then looked back at the ceiling fan. She said, “You wouldn’t even need a step-ladder to clean up there."
Hope wanted to get right to the point. Every minute that went by her mother continued to be in the custody of a dangerous gang. They needed to move fast. Straightening up, she explained that while she’d been running earlier that afternoon her mother had been abducted by the Momma's Boys. She did not allow her voice to waver. She’d already been forced to stand in front of nearly a thousand people at her high school graduation earlier that day, which made it easier to stand her ground now. A mass of teenage peers was infinitely more intimidating than police officers, especially when the officers carried the faint smell of gasoline and carnival food.
She waited for someone to say, “Sounds like the Momma's Boys struck again,” because the connection was so obvious, at least to anybody with a half a brain, but there was only the sound of De La Rosa sucking her back teeth. She looked at the doorway, then windows, probably noting that there wasn’t any sign of forced entry. They wouldn’t have had to force themselves, though, just knock on the door and wait for her mother to open.
De La Rosa said, “Did they leave another present?”
Hope shook her head.
“They always do.”
“Maybe they ran out.”
“Think about it like this,” she said, fingers glistening with saliva. “If you’ve got a rat, you’re going to find rat poop. A rat doesn’t run out of poop. If you don’t find any poop, you’re probably just imagining the rat. You know what I mean?”
“It was them.”
91 De La Rosa tilted her head toward Duncan, a gesture that said, You take it from here, and then she began wandering around the house, looking under furniture, lifting up pillows, rifling through magazines.
Hope said, “I already looked,” and started to follow her.
Duncan held up his hands. “We understand your concern,” he said, “but the fact is most people aren’t actually missing. More often than not, it turns out they’ve just taken a trip or have temporarily relocated. In fact, if a person wants to disappear and move to an entirely different state, that’s perfectly legal. I’m not saying your mother did that, of course, but it does happen.
It’s probably nothing to worry about. She might have gone shopping. She might be at the movies. She might be out with friends. Maybe she told you that she had plans and you forgot, or maybe she decided to do something spur of the moment.”
Duncan glanced over his shoulder, looking for his partner, but she was out of eyesight.
He rubbed his lips together in concern. In a low voice, he said, “You’re probably still in shock from the other night. There’s no need to jump to conclusions here. I’m sure she’s fine.”
“She’s not like that.”
“Like what?”
“We don’t have money for stuff like that.”
“She might be getting some fresh air.”
“Fresh air?”
“Sure,” he said, adjusting his utility belt. “That’s a thing people do.”
De La Rosa drifted back into the living room. She said, “Let’s cut to the chase, Chickita.
Does your mama have a boyfriend?”
92 She reminded Hope of certain girls she’d grown up with, the kind of girls who thought they ruled the playground in elementary school because they weren’t afraid to use their sass to get what they wanted and make other kids feel bad. She was like the girls who got to the swing set first and wouldn’t give anyone else a turn, saying, “This is my kingdom.” Her small stature meant that if anybody ever stepped up to her, she could run to the teacher and pretend that she was being bullied. In fact, from a distance, De La Rosa could have been mistaken for a little girl who had started developing early. Her oiled hair was even braided into two pigtails, making her hat sit high on her head.
Hope said her mother was single.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Yes––she does have a boyfriend?”
“No––she doesn’t.”
“I thought you meant yes.”
“I meant no.”
“You said yes.”
“Now I don’t even remember what you asked.”
“Does she go out? On dates.”
“I’m telling you, she’s been kidnapped.”
De La Rosa raised her eyebrows, two arches drawn with a burgundy makeup pencil. “I’ll ask you again.” In a painfully slow and patronizing voice, she said, “Does she go on dates?”
Hope wished she hadn’t called Double-D. They didn’t believe her. They were trying to make her sound paranoid.
93 She said, “Sometimes,” although she didn’t want to admit it.
De La Rosa circled Hope, singing, “Mama’s got a case of Spring Fever.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Help us understand.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Hope said, wanting to break something, wanting to scream, wanting to become her own detective, “but you’re not listening. I’ve given you plenty of information and you’re not going after them. You’re just sitting here. These guys run around doing whatever they want and ruin people’s lives and there’s no consequence. Nobody stops them, nobody tells them it’s wrong. Instead of doing something about it, you’re standing here. I don’t know where my mom is. I don’t know what they’re doing to her. Whatever happens is my fault.”
De La Rosa said, “They’ve never abducted anyone before.”
“Maybe she’s the first.”
“You hearing this, D?”
“I’m telling you,” Hope said.
“I remember what it’s like to be your age.”
“She wouldn’t leave me.”
“A woman gets certain urges.” De La Rosa peeked into the kitchen and looked at the kids, that silent peanut gallery who’d traded Dr. Seuss for eavesdropping. “Sudden urges. One day, you’ll learn that a woman needs some time to herself. It’s hard taking care of everybody all the time. Sometimes you just want to get your nails down, sink into a hot tub, or get with a man.
You can’t judge a woman for what she wants. Nobody judges men.”
Hope could hear Easy Beth stage-whisper to Ben, “Is she a midget?”
94 De La Rosa stopped. She turned to them and, through the open doorway, said, “Who you calling a midget?”
They clammed up.
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “Skye De La Rosa is compact.”
Then she turned to Hope, saying, “There’s something funny going on here. This your brother and sister?”
“They live across the street. I told them to leave.”
“But they didn’t?”
“No.”
“Haven’t you two heard? Visitors are like fish. They stink.”
Easy Beth’s lower lip started to blubber.
Ben whispered, “Stop.”
Easy Beth, red-faced and herky-jerk, said, “You stop.”
De La Rosa went over to them and got down on her knees. It was a gesture meant to bring her eye-level with the kids, but she was so short that she ended up way below them and had to look up into their quivering, Hershey-brown eyes. “I got little babies myself. I got an older one like you, Victoria, and two little ones, Cesar and Pinto.”
“Really?”
“They’re my life.”
“I thought you were coming for me.”
“Why?”
Ben flicked one of her ears hard. It turned white and then flushed red. She started to cry and put her hands over her ears.
95 Duncan said, “Let’s take these kids home. We’ll be back for the cheek swab in a minute.”
He looked at Hope and said, “We still need that DNA sample.”
She thought, Fuck a cheek swab. Fuck the police. Fuck little kids. Fuck everybody who’s not us, and by “us,” she meant herself and her mom, but half of “us” was gone. All around the kitchen were little reminders––a half-eaten bar of dark chocolate that she might have finished before bed, a 500-hundred count bottle of women’s vitamins, a calendar on the fridge with her notes scribbled on important dates. On the square for that date, May 30, she had written “Hope
Graduates!” and drawn a picture of a star. Hope’s heart broke for that star, how it didn’t come close to representing the shitstorm of a day. She knew the police weren’t going to help. They didn’t even believe that her mother was abducted. They thought she needed air for Christ’s sake.
They thought she’d gone shopping. They thought she’d slipped away to a sleazy motel with a dirtbag who wanted to get his dick wet. No, they weren’t going to help her. That window had closed. In fact, it had never been open.
Hope went out onto the porch and watched them go, glad to have all of them out of her house. Duncan and De La Rosa led the kids across the street and up to their front door. The occasional lightning bug drifted through the gloaming.
Hope overheard De La Rosa asking if they knew what “fish” was in Spanish and Beth said, nearly whispering, “Pescado.”
“How’d you learn that?”
“Dora the Explorer.”
“Muy bien.”
Beth sighed a half-hearted “gracias.”
96 Hope saw through the bullshit. De La Rosa was trying to “relate.” She was trying to
“personalize” the policing experience. Who are you really protecting? she wondered. Who do you serve? Growing up, Hope had been taught to respect all authority and because she was white, she had always believed that the police were her friends and protectors. She’d never had a reason to believe any different. Even the police officer assigned to her high school was a friendly guy. In the mornings, Officer Brooks had stood in front of the school and waved to students getting dropped off. During lunch periods, he wandered the cafeteria and hung out with the
Army recruiters who were permanently positioned at their folding table against the far wall, and they took turns on the portable pull-up bar and drank Gatorade from the vending machines. He learned people’s names and busted up fights whenever they arose, even though he probably weighed 140 lbs. He’d even caught Hope staring at his gnarled ear once and said, without prompting, “One time my grandma was babysitting me when I was little and her dog Pixie almost chewed my ear off.” She’d asked, “What kind of dog?” and he said, “Yorkie-mix.”
People liked him for the transparency.
Hope had expected more from Duncan and De La Rosa. Granted, it was easier to direct her anger and disappointment at them because it meant she didn’t have to feel those things about herself, angry for ever getting involved with Pierce and disappointed in herself for not being someone else, someone better.
She watched as Duncan knocked on the door across the street and waited for someone to answer. No one opened the door, even though the dad’s car was in the driveway. He was home.
She wondered if he really was going to blow up when the kids appeared with two cops.
Duncan said, “Do your parents have a Hide-A-Key?”
Ben said, “It’s secret.”
97 “You can trust us.”
“They said not to tell.”
“It’s okay. We help people.”
He looked back at Hope, saying, “You didn’t help her,” and hearing that made Hope think that maybe he wasn’t totally oblivious.
“We’re going to.”
Ben lifted up a concrete statue of a little University of South Carolina gamecock that stood in the shrubs by the front steps. He picked up a key and carefully put the gamecock back in its depression in the mulch. He handed the key to Duncan, who disappeared into the dark house, probably looking for a light switch. Hope waited for the light to turn on and when it did, she saw into the living room through two illuminated windows. Their father was on the couch. She saw the orange of a prescription bottle balanced on his stomach, his stomach which did not rise or fall. It was De La Rosa who said, “In the name of the Father.”
As the officers checked for a pulse and radioed an ambulance, Ben appeared on the threshold of darkness and faced Hope. He was just a little boy in a doorway of light. He leapt down the steps and landed hard. He didn’t stumble, though, because his body was primed from
Field Day. Hope was already kneeling with her arms open when he jumped onto the porch. She held him and didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. I cannot believe, she thought, what this life has in store for us.
“I didn’t know,” he said into her shirt.
“I know.”
Easy Beth crossed the street next. Her mouth was open, although no sound came out. She hugged her brother’s back, clinging to him like a dirty-blond possum. He was the one she really
98 wanted. A lightning bug crawled on the collar of his T-shirt, the light pulsing from the tip of its body, intensifying and then dying. They were together like that for an immeasurable amount of time and she could feel the tiniest operations within them, the heart and the lungs and the blood, all gushing at the tiniest volume. Then, when he was ready, Ben pulled away and looked up at
Hope’s face. To open him up like a clock would surely reveal insides more intricate than she ever would have imagined.
His expression went from soft to hard. He said, “My mom?
“I bet she’s on her way right now.”
Ben took Easy Beth’s hand. He said, “Come on, Elizabeth,” and then went back across to the street, slowly. Her good, heartbroken brother dragged her along, like he probably would for the rest of his life.
When Hope closed the front door, she wasn’t saying that she didn’t care or that it didn’t make her sad to know that those children had lost a pillar in their lives. She was merely saying,
In the future, when I have the time, I will return to this moment, this feeling. But not now. Now,
I have my own trouble. And in her heart, she felt that Ben had given his blessing.
99 CHAPTER 5 STUNNED
The hot breath of spying neighbors fogged windows up and down the street. Most people remained distant, probably wanting to keep a barrier between themselves and the scene, as if trouble was a thing you could catch, but others, like the elderly Bacons, a retired middle-school principal and former Junior Miss South Carolina winner, sat in rocking chairs on their porch and shook their heads. They wore cardigans and crossed their arms tightly over their chests as if it were cold. It wasn’t. It was warm, the time of year when insects sang in the round and all the lawns flared green. The Bradford pears, past the point of stinking, were silent, respectful. Cheap graduation balloons bobbed like foil moons. The dark shapes of officers lingered in the yard across the street, while the EMS workers were inside the house, preparing to load up the body of a man Hope had been around, if only peripherally, most of her life. She remembered how on dark winter mornings he’d turned on his car twenty minutes before he had to leave. As it warmed up, fog drifted from the tailpipe and billowed around the car, which led her to believe it was
“shrouded in mystery,” a phrase she’d picked up from TV. That was when he still worked at the
Pepsi plant and had to leave early. Those were the winters before the downturn. It was spring now, but it still felt like all good things were rotting.
Hope took the car keys from her mother’s room and darted through the yard, mostly because she didn’t want to catch a glimpse of the grieving family and partly because she didn’t want to see Double-D and remind them that she still hadn’t given a DNA sample. She skidded over the grass and then unlocked the car. She felt, as she settled into the familiar, comfortable humidity, some closeness to her mother again. She inhaled the car’s stale air. It was impossible to tell if the smell of peppermint oil actually lingered or if her imagination had summoned it out of desperation, but it didn’t matter if it was real or not, because when she filled her lungs she was
100 reminded of how the entire back of the house smelled like that lotion when her mother had put it on each night, rubbing it over her arms and legs in circles, then interlacing her fingers to get out the little crescents that had gotten caught there, between the fingers, around the ring she wore.
That’s when she would call for Hope, so her mother could rub the excess lotion into her own pale hands.
The cameraman for the local news saw Hope and shouted, “Neighbor!”
The news had just started a segment that profiled people who had taken their lives as a result of being laid off. She wondered how they’d gotten there so quickly. A neighbor must have tipped them off.
The reporter jogged over to the car in heels and a Spandex skirt, saying, “Care to comment?” She knocked on the window, a sound that broke the hurting silence. She had cropped black hair and her long face was pressed up to the glass. “Were there warning signs?”
Hope hopped the curb and drove through the yard. The road was blocked with the police cruiser, an ambulance, and a news van. It was the easiest way out. The reporter jumped back and one of her heels must have sunk into the soft earth because when Hope glanced in the rearview mirror, just to make sure she hadn’t run over the woman, a precaution, she saw her stumble like a newborn foal, microphone pointed toward the sky as she tried not to fall.
Hope veered off the grass once she’d passed all the flashing lights and lurched back into the road, bumper scraping on the curb and shooting up a brief, tiny bouquet of sparks. The force of the car dropping back onto the road caused the stereo to turn on. In the CD player was
America’s The Complete Greatest Hits album. Track 1 began to play.
Hope sang along, mindlessly: “I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name. It was good to be out of the rain.”
101
She’d heard that Invasion had previously been a printing house for Christian handbooks, producing titles such as How to Hold Hands, The Heavenly Waltz, and Table Manners. This detail only mattered, particularly in middle school, because some boys bragged about going there and getting handjobs in the dark. Hope even remembered it being a popular destination for birthday parties for a while, but there came a time when everyone in her grade had outgrown it and decided the place wasn’t cool anymore. Then the recession hit in December of 2007. What was once a game for lower- and middle-class families became a luxury, but people with money weren’t flocking to play laser tag, so the whole business suffered. The warehouse was also a few blocks over from Main Street, which was the main artery where life still trickled, so Invasion didn’t receive much foot traffic. The area slipped into decay. Tarps flapped. Shopping cart wheels whined. Sticks chink-chink-chinked against chain-link fences. Banners from the “Bright
Future” campaign were zip-tied to the fences, frosted with pigeon shit. By the time Hope arrived on the evening of her high school graduation, the entire warehouse was aesthetically more akin to a Biker Bar than a family-friendly recreation hub. GOO GOO GA GA was freshly spray-painted on the right side of the warehouse. The blue surf-style letters rode a wave of milk. A skeleton balanced on a surfboard.
She parked in the side lot. In her mind, she was already inside gathering intel that would help her find her mother. If she knew where Pierce and his gang lived, she could find her. Hope was afraid of what they might have done to her, but deep down, she didn’t really think that they had any reason to inflict serious physical harm. The purpose, she imagined, was to hurt Hope, not anyone else. After all, Pierce had said that there were already too many dead and too many
102 dying, whatever that meant. She believed her mother must be alive at their lair, that rat’s nest in the Carolina dark, but also knew that just because you were alive didn’t mean you were safe.
Inside, the waiting area was empty of customers. Powder was shaken over a stain in the middle of the floor, the kind her elementary school teachers had used when kids threw up. It looked like a pile of sand flecked with blue crystals. The whole place weirdly smelled like maple syrup and when Hope saw the guy working behind the counter, with a name tag reading “Joel,” she expected him to be eating a stack of pancakes from a carry-out container. It wouldn’t have surprised her, considering his hair was pulled into a ponytail and his shoulders were hunched to hide a pair of breasts that were small and pointed like party hats, but he wasn’t eating pancakes and somehow that was the strangest thing of all.
He said, “A game is starting in approximately…” and paused to look at his chunky, waterproof watch, giving a little nod every time the second hand ticked forward. He made Hope wait until he could give a clean, even number, and finally said, “Five minutes.” He studied her face like he might study a recliner in a furniture store. “Would you refer to that as a hairstyle,” he asked, “or a haircut?”
His comment, which landed in the murk between innocent and insulting, took her off- guard. His own hair was fine and soft-looking, like a baby’s swirl of cotton-candy hair. The temples wisped. Hope had gone to school with a girl who’d had the same thing. She’d called them her “angel wings” and had been too proud about it. A boy cut them off and taped them to his own head, going around singing, “Fly like a bird, I’m gonna fly awa-a-ay,” and Hope realized she hadn’t thought about that in years and, hell, no wonder it had resurfaced. That was the first time she’d encountered a girl whose hair had been cut without consent.
She said, “I actually have a question for you.”
103 “Are you a former employee?” He blinked at her T-shirt and said, “I can do twenty percent off.”
“Have you seen Pierce Mullins lately? I heard he comes here.”
“You mean the master.”
“What?”
“He’s been at the top of the letter boards for quite a while now. That earns you the title of master, at least in my book.”
Joel nodded toward a television screen that was mounted on the wall, showing the rankings of players. She scanned the top ten for Pierce’s name but didn’t see it. Then she looked for his initials but couldn’t find them.
“He always uses the moniker ‘Ann.’ I don’t know why. It’s not my place to ask.”
“Ann” was in the number one spot.
“So, he comes a lot,” Hope said. “Pierce. Ann.”
“There are many methods of relaxation. It’s important to blow off steam before the pressure becomes too great. In fact, we are graced to have him in our presence at this very moment.”
“Pierce?”
“The one, the only.”
“Are you serious?”
“It’s only fitting the master be in his domain. We don’t get much business these days, as you can imagine, what with our government unleashed, that three-headed dog, but we’ve got a couple of groups in the briefing room tonight. It should be a good one. Those newbs don’t stand a chance, though. They don’t know what they’re in for.”
104 Hope was trying to keep her cool. She wondered if it was crazy to play offense like this, to pursue Pierce in his own territory. Of course it was. Her whole goal in coming to Invasion was to try and figure out where her mother was so that she could, ideally, go find her. But how could
Hope wrestle that information out of Pierce? She couldn’t just talk it out of him.
She pulled money out of her bra and said that she’d like to play. Before leaving the house, she’d reached into her mother’s top drawer, filled with twenty years’ worth of underwear in white, pink, and nude mounds, and taken a handful of the bills stashed in there. Her running shorts didn’t have pockets. The car keys were in there, too. The jagged edges dug into her flesh.
Joel took the money, saying, “Treasure from the trove.”
Behind him, a door was cracked a few inches. There was the usual office clutter, along with a jar of swirled peanut butter and grape jelly, top unscrewed, spoon sticking out, and half a loaf of white broad. There was also a box cutter.
While Joel rang her up, she said, “Do you mind if I pop in the office and see if my jacket’s in there? From when I worked here.”
He have a little bow and said, “My lady.”
Hope brushed by him, saying, “Thanks.” Her bra didn’t have much room left, so she rolled the box cutter into her shorts. Plus, she wanted easy access. She breezed back into the lobby, cool and light, saying, “I should’ve known. It must be long-gone.”
“You move at warp speed.”
The whole maneuver had probably taken less than ten seconds. That was too fast, she thought. I should have taken longer.
105 She sighed and said, “Oh, well.” She was trying to act and couldn’t tell if it was working.
Performing didn’t come naturally to her, not like this. She barely knew how to be anything other than herself.
“There never was a jacket.”
“There wasn’t?”
“It’s unlikely you were ever employed here in the first place. The hair, which I suspect is a cut, not a style, makes you look older than your actual age. I doubt you have ever been employed. I can’t imagine you clocking in.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I would venture to say that shirt was borrowed for the discount. It isn’t a crime. You don’t have to lie.”
“What was I doing then?”
“You were looking at the computer.”
“Why?”
“The video.”
He toed open the office door and Hope looked at the old desktop computer, which she hadn’t been paying attention to because all she had been thinking about was getting ahold of that box cutter. All along the top of the monitor were sticky notes covered in passwords, reminders.
A video was paused on the screen: double-penetration.
He said, “I can smell you.”
“Excuse me?”
For a moment, she wondered if he’d caught a whiff of the Chanel No. 5 that had rubbed off on her.
106 “Your honeypot.”
She opened her mouth, wanting to tell him to fuck off, but that would have been bad for her entire operation. She said, “I should go, the game’s starting,” and left before he could say anything else.
The Briefing Room was painted matte black. The assembly of players consisted of a group of middle-schoolers on a big group-date, the boys wearing madras shorts and polos with popped collars. The girls wore slim-fit polos, too, and matching sandals and headbands. There was also a group of young men who’d clearly come to play laser tag after a long day at office jobs, all of them wearing boat shoes, khakis, and sport shirts designed to wick away sweat.
Pierce was in the back row, with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes closed. If he really played a lot, he would have to sit through the briefing every time. Hope’s heart rate was already spiked and without giving herself any time to overthink the situation or second-guess herself, she sat beside him. The good thing about her encounter with Joel was that he had, if only momentarily, distracted Hope from the fact that she was about to come face-to-face with Pierce.
Not worrying about it for that brief amount of time allowed her to dive into the situation without as much fear. She was still scared, of course, but at least she sat beside him. She didn’t hide. She didn’t slink.
She was afraid of his lean yet powerful presence, but she didn’t feel endangered. There were other people around and he wouldn’t attack out in the open. It would be too big of a risk.
But, still. There, at his hip, was the knife.
The Game Master was getting ready to play an informational video for the group. Hope knew he was the Game Master because “Game Master” was written across the front of his
107 referee jersey. Each one of his dreads was the size of a Cheeto. He looked at Hope and said,
“You joining up?”
She nodded.
“Word,” he said. “We’re just getting started.” Then he planted his feet firmly on the floor and clapped his hands together. “Eyes on me, gang. That’s right. Up here. This is probably everybody who’s gonna come to the eight-thirty game tonight, so let’s go ahead and get this party started.”
While the Game Master spoke, Pierce looked over to see who had walked in at the last second. His eyes landed on Hope and dug in. She saw surprise in there, deep inside, but he was like a vicious cattle herder with his emotions, jolting them into submission with an electric rod.
The surprise was muted, wrangled. All of his color in his face was muted, too, so different from the way he had been. He turned away from her, facing the informational video that played from an old monitor at the front of the room. It opened with a montage of kids flooding into a laser tag arena, wearing colorful vests, and running through corridors while cradling toy guns. Then the video cut to the Commander in gold Aviators, saying, “If anyone talks during the video, the
Game Master will have to start it over. Roger that?”
Pierce looked straight ahead. He didn’t look to see if she had a weapon. He didn’t look at the doors to see if police were waiting to arrest him, either. His confidence was unnerving. He uncrossed his arms, rubbed his jaw lightly with the back of his hand, and she heard his knuckles brushing against the faint beard. “You thought you’d surprise me?” he said.
A bruise wrapped around his forearm, where someone must have grabbed him. The fingertips made darkest purple. She wondered if it had been her mother.
“Nothing surprises me anymore.”
108 Hope asked, “Where is she?” and adjusted the box cutter in her waistband, making sure it was still rolled securely. “I’m not fucking around.”
“You don’t have to get excited. She’s perfectly safe.”
“What have you done?”
“We need her.”
“For what?”
“To be,” he said, licking his lower lip, biding his time, “recognized.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Our mothers are dead,” he said. “We needed someone.”
She couldn’t tell what was worse, the things he actually said or the things he withheld from her. She had expected denial. This, whatever this was, was something different.
The video explained that when a player was shot, on either the phaser, the front of the vest, the two front shoulders, or the back of the vest, she was stunned. Being “stunned” in the game of laser tag meant you couldn’t shoot anymore, that you were frozen, but in life it meant sitting beside someone like Pierce, someone who had surprised you in the worst way possible, someone who had taken things that couldn’t be replaced, and then surprised you again, in a way that almost, just almost, made you feel bad for him. The feeling crept up the back of her neck and made all of the little hairs rise. His mother had died. That’s why he dropped out of school. Some things aligned then. She could have known this earlier if she’d reached out to him, but she didn’t, and for a moment she felt like maybe it was her fault. She caught herself. No, she thought. None of this is an excuse for what he’s done.
Hope said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
109 They had been whispering all along but she’d gotten so riled up by his answer that everyone heard her response, including the Game Master. His voice dripped with disappointment when he said, “You heard the video, gang. If somebody talks, it’s back to the beginning.” It was as if he thought every group of players would be able to obey orders but none of them ever made it through.
Everybody turned around and looked at Hope.
A middle-school boy said, “Boo.”
The girl beside him said, “Double-dog boo.”
Pierce blinked lizard-like.
The video started again.
Considering that Hope’s body was a chamber for her pounding heart, the drum beat filling her to the brim, it was hard to remain quiet. She managed to whisper, “Did you hurt her?”
“As we speak, she’s having hot dogs and canned corn. Soon she’ll be tucked into bed.”
“What?”
“Tucked, I said.”
“I’ll kill you.”
“I already killed you once,” he said, turning toward her. “At the party that night, when we were together. The little death.”
She was trembling, but not with pleasure.
He asked, “Do you know the French?”
“I’m not stupid.”
“I know. That’s why I liked you.”
110 She could pick out the qualities which had once struck her as attractive and now made her sick. His seriousness, that lean body slouched in a hard, plastic chair, and the faintest pulse of his heart beating beneath his ribs and making his dirty shirt twitch. His eyes had never seemed so dark before. Not black, but mean.
“Don’t tell me that,” she said.
“I thought you wanted the truth. What, now you want lies? I’ll admit, running into you the first time was a coincidence. It suited my needs. Afterward, I thought about your mom, how she leaned on the rail and pretended to be an old woman. She did a voice. There were impatiens in a hanging basket.”
“You met once.”
“That’s all it takes.”
She’d have to hunt him down during the game and use the element of surprise to get what she wanted. How all of this was going to happen, she wasn’t sure. She’d have to figure it out once the game began. This was the greatest problem, that she was making assumptions about how it would go down, when the truth was that you could never make assumptions about people who had nothing to lose.
The video ended and the Game Master herded them to the vesting room.
Red, blue, and green vests hung on hooks. Hope thought about pulling the box cutter out of her shorts and slitting his throat in front of everyone. It might feel good, at least momentarily, but it wouldn’t get her mother back. She followed him to the vests with red lights. He slid one on like it was a jacket, clipped the front, and then tightened the straps on either side. Then he picked out a vest for Hope, handing it to her. A near-gentlemanly gesture. She took it. She touched the
111 plastic phaser, which was attached to the vest by a rubber umbilical cord, and wished it was real.
She looked at Pierce and wondered if he was thinking the same thing.
The Game Master carried a plastic tray. He went to the group of officemates and delivered a memorized speech about players not being allowed to bring weapons into the arena.
“Weapons,” he said, “must be left in the tray and can be collected after the game. This included brass knuckles, butterfly knives, pocket knives, pepper spray, mace, matches, lighters, tasers, stun guns, throwing stars, nunchucks, and, of course, firearms.” All of them dropped in pocket knives. One of the middle-schoolers took a lighter out of his pocket and dropped it dramatically in the tray. The others looked on in awe. The kid then stuck his hand back into his cargo shorts and took out a single, bent cigarette. The Game Master said, “I don’t need that, but okay,” and then came over to Pierce and Hope, saying, “Y’all are at a serious disadvantage.”
She was afraid that he’d make her relinquish the box cutter. She could feel it pressed against her skin. The secret made her body stiffen, the fear of it being discovered.
“The numbers don’t concern me,” Pierce said, scanning the other players. “They’re zealots.”
Hope said, “And what are you?”
“What am I, Xavier?”
“A strategist.”
Hope said, “I thought you were going to say ‘asshole.’”
The Game Master gave her a funny smile, sensing something between them. “I hate to break this up, yo, but you’ve gotta put that blade in here.”
112 Hope was afraid that he was talking to her, but instead he held out the tray toward Pierce, who placed the sheathed knife in the tray. He didn’t seem concerned at all about giving it away, the very blade that had cut her hair.
The Game Master asked Hope, “Are you gonna talk during the whole game, too?”
“If I want to.”
“Daaang,” he said, head bobbing in respect and awe. Then he turned to Pierce and said,
“This your girl?”
Pierce didn’t say a word. He didn’t move.
The Game Master’s eyes widened and he said, “Okay, don’t go there, I get it,” and then his eyes landed on Hope chest. She looked down and saw the lump in her bra from the car keys.
She pulled them out and dropped them into the tray. “I guess you want these?” she said and he just shrugged, saying, “I thought it was some kind of third boob. I don’t know how y’all walk around with that….cargo.”
He walked away laughing, proud of his word choice. He set the tray by the door and put on his best WrestleMania voice: “Let’s get this party STARTED!”
Everybody cheered.
Hope had been biding her time and was sick of wading through all the bullshit. She put a hand on the plastic gun, which flashed red and was cold to touch. She leaned close to Pierce and said, as a final resort, “Just tell me where she is. You won’t get in trouble, I swear.”
“Trouble?”
“What were you going to do, anyway? Hold her hostage forever? Take away her life? She doesn’t belong to you. She’s not going to take care of you. She knows what you did to me.”
The Game Master said, “Is that all y’all got?”
113 The middle-schoolers leaned their heads back and howled like a pack of dogs.
Pierce said, “No deal.”
“You’re throwing your life away? Is that it? And you’re seeing who you can take down with you?”
A light above two double-doors flashed, casting the entire room in red. It was as if they were in the stomach of some great devil and were about to dive head-first into his bowels, to be pushed through his long and winding maze, but Hope wasn’t stupid. Being shat out wasn’t the same as being reborn. The Game Master pushed open the door into the arena, calling, “It’s go time!” Pierce was the first through, gone in an instant. The other were hot on his heels. They had thirty seconds to penetrate the arena and orient themselves before their phasers were activated.
The Game Master yelled, “No running,” but all of the middle-schoolers ran, anyway.
Hope was at the back of the pack. She entered the arena last, coming down a pitch-black tunnel that opened up into a destroyed Martian city, complete with sniper towers, bunkers, and bases. There were blockades and sandbags. There were giant plastic containers scattered throughout the arena with skulls and crossbones painted on them. Hope ran over to one and crouched behind it, engaging in stealth mode, not because she was interested in playing the game of laser tag but because she needed shadow, not light. Pierce could have been anywhere.
There was the distant chugging of an industrial fog machine and it was the artificial fog that smelled faintly of maple syrup. Over a sound system came distorted, intergalactic music with shimmering synth trails. The bass sounded like an asteroid being ground by mortar and pestle. She felt it in her feet and it was there, in her feet, that her own nervous tremor met the game’s tremor. It was a game for everyone else, at least.
114 An alarm sounded and Hope knew the game was live. Her phaser activated. She put a hand on the trigger and another hand on the heat sensor below the barrel of the phaser, which would allow her to shoot. It just happened naturally, out of instinct. She didn’t care about points, but in her mind the battle was real.
Only seconds after the alarm went off, she heard the pew! pew! of multiple shots fired.
She looked over the top of her barrel and saw two middle-schoolers pass through a beam of light.
Then they were gone, like fish disappearing in the shadows of an aquarium.
She heard, “Gotchya!” and felt the back panel of her vest vibrate.
The person that shot her was wearing a loud pair of tennis shoes that didn’t belong to
Pierce. She could hear the cry of rubber sole all around her, along with the fog-curdling screams of pre-teen girls:
“If somebody jumps out, I’m gonna pee my pants.”
“Oh my god, please don’t.”
“I had to change my underwear twice during Texas Chainsaw.”
Hope sought darkness. She moved to the edge of the arena and ran along the perimeter, where the lights couldn’t reach her. The syrup-smelling air tasted sweet on her tongue.
Ahead, she saw the faint glow of someone’s pack. She slowed down, creeping toward the figure. Closer, she saw the khakis, which appeared a dark shade of green.
Suddenly, he turned and saw Hope.
He said, “Shit!” and then shot her on the shoulder.
Her vest buzzed and flashed.
It was too bright.
115 She pushed past the guy, saying, “Move!” and heard him crash into the wall. Maybe she’d pushed too hard, but she didn’t stop to apologize. It was the sound of his plastic vest more than anything. She kept going until she found a ladder that rose to the second-level. The longer it took her to climb, the greater the chance of being spotted.
She went as quickly as possible, hand over hand, then ducked into the sniper tower.
Luckily, it was unoccupied. The dark chamber provided exactly what she needed, a vantage point. She thought she saw the red of Pierce’s vest at one point, glowing behind a pile of sandbags but she couldn’t be sure. She never saw the figure leave that position, so she just kept her eyes trained on that spot for so long that black got blacker and colors started to ripple and radiate. When Hope closed her eyes, she saw comet-tails streaking across her eyelids and felt, more and more, like she was in an alternate world.
Where was he?
She reached for the box cutter, rolled into the waistband of her shorts. It was gone. She ran her hands all the way around her waist, hoping to feel the shape of it, but it wasn’t there. She put her hand down her bra, fishing, but there were only crumpled dollar bills. There had been so many other distractions that she hadn’t heard it fall out.
A dark form walked down the catwalk, coming toward her, and she knew it was the
Game Master coming to eject her for pushing another player. That wuss, she thought. He probably claimed harassment. It would all be for nothing.
She’d have to go home and wait for days to pass so the police could see that her mom really had disappeared. A missing person report would be written up. It would sit on a desk, where coffee cups would leave stains like moon phases, and a while after that it would move into a file cabinet. A while after that it would be typed up for digital records and the original file
116 would be incinerated. It would fall through the cracks. It would disappear. Hope would have done whatever it took to save her mother but she’d jeopardized the mission. She was just a girl faking venom, a girl who hadn’t even bothered to toss her graduation cap. She covered her face, believing the Game Master was coming, and wanting to cover the shame swelling in her eyes and rolling down her face. She was so tired and hungry.
She wanted to take a shower, put on clean clothes, sleep in her own bed, and wake the next day to the sounds of her mother making breakfast in the kitchen, browning sausage and scraping it into the casserole dish along with canned mushrooms and cheese and eggs, all poured over a layer of croutons. She wanted to smell that special casserole her mother only made a few times a year, the recipe coming from an old cookbook with the cover torn off. She wanted to walk into the kitchen and see her mother at the table, in her bathrobe, reading glasses halfway down her nose. On the counter would be a little white timer that she glanced at periodically.
Hope wouldn’t even say anything, just sit down, and put her elbows on the table. There was something about that bathrobe that made her mother look old and sweet, that made Hope want to reach out and touch the sleeve.
The figure that came into the sniper tower wasn’t the Game Master. It was Pierce. He had taken off his vest and hidden it in some nook or cranny. He had the box cutter in his hand and the emerging blade had one job––to open the closed.
Hope saw him step out of the dark and into the red glow given off by her vest, illuminating his devil’s face, and she screamed. The scream travelled through the labyrinth of zealots and strategists, middle-schoolers and cubicle-workers, orphans and outliers. Pierce grabbed her face, squeezing so hard that her teeth dug into the insides of her cheeks.
117 She tried to gouge out his eyes but her thumbs couldn’t reach. She thought, Gun, and went for the phaser, if not to really shoot him then to crack him in the head. Pierce didn’t like that. He pushed her back into the wall. Dome rattling plywood, plywood rattling dome. He was kneeling before her now and his black jeans made a sound like sand when he twisted on the floor.
“Here’s the truth,” he said. “We told her it was fine living, that she was in a West End penthouse, but do you know what she did to me? She grabbed my arm and hissed at me, like an animal. I said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ and she said, ‘Speaking your language.’ Do you know what that did to me? You don’t know. A lot of people think it’s fashionable to hate their parents,” he said. It was the same thing he’d said before, when they’d been riding in his car.
“But they don’t know what grief is.”
His hand was squeezing her mouth. It felt like she was making an exaggerated fish face.
She tried to swallow and her tongue peaked out. The movement must have caught his attention because he pinched it quick, with the speed of a chameleon targeting a fly, and let his nails sink into the carpeted muscle. With a sudden flick of the box cutter, he forked the tip of her tongue.
Blood came down her throat and into her stomach. She snapped down, catching his fingers.
“I don’t want to see you again,” he said, wincing. “Ever.”
The wound pumped blood. Pretty soon his fingers were slick and he slipped them out of her bite. Right before he got free, there was a moment, brief but important, when her front teeth caught in the wrinkles of Pierce’s knuckles. She wished she could have held that position, but she couldn’t. Then he, too, slipped out of the sniper tower.
Hope slumped alone in the dark. She saw the image of a pink sunset washing over
Greenville’s West End, an area on the far edge of downtown, where her mother was apparently
118 being kept in a penthouse. He’d called it “home,” that was the word he’d used, home, but it wasn’t her home.
Home was on the ground, not in the sky.
It was as if the sunset was her consciousness slipping out of her body and dispersing into the sky, as if she was bleeding out across the land that had produced her and shaped her, as if, once the draining had been completed, she would be a pile of skin on the floor.
119 CHAPTER 6 DELIVERANCE À LA MODE
She considered staying put and letting herself bleed out. It wasn’t noble, but it was easy.
Then she remembered what her mother had said on the night of the mugging, after changing the house locks and giving her the haircut. She’d said, “We are blessed with a thing called willpower, and while we’re still alive and kicking we sure as hell better use it.” In the dark Hope might not have been able to see evidence that she was still alive and kicking, but her senses were engaged, for better or worse. All of her attention was concentrated on the screaming nerves in the tip, or tips, of her tongue. It hung out of her mouth like something heavy and foreign, as if a sea creature was crawling out of her body and had only managed to get one tentacle halfway out.
What else would her mother have said?
“If you’d try to stand up, you might surprise yourself.”
Hope got to her knees, then rose.
Okay, she said. I’m listening.
She reached the ladder that would lead her out of the sniper tower and back to the ground-floor. In order to grip the rungs, she wiped her hands dry on the front of her shirt. The fabric clung to her skin, the blood dripping warmly at first and then cooling and hardening. As soon as she began the slow descent, her vest began to vibrate. Players shot at her, blissfully unaware of what had just taken place, probably thinking her scream had belonged to a middle- schooler who’d been cornered by a wannabe boyfriend, maybe undoing his madras pants and hoping to get his baby fat stroked. They could shoot all they wanted, it didn’t matter. The vibrations were only a reminder that she could still feel.
120 The Game Master was sprawled beneath the EXIT sign. He covered a broken nose with one hand and, in the poor light, it looked like hot fudge was dripping from his nostrils. With the other hand, he held a cellphone to his ear.
“Just now,” he said. “That’s what I said.”
Hope knew what questions the 911 operator must have been asking.
“I thought me and him were friends.”
Then their eyes met. Based on his expression, she must have been a sight to behold. The whites of his eyes and his teeth glowed faintly purple.
He held the phone away from his ear, waiting for Hope to say something, but she was afraid to talk. She didn’t know if she could.
He brought the phone back to his ear again, slowly, and said, “He cut his girl, too.”
Hope went through the doors, leaving behind the game and all its Martian decay, and returned to Earth. As she headed for the bathroom, moving with the determination and suspicion of a creature that had gotten loose from its cage, blood bubbled in the footbed of her Chucks.
There was a wet spring in her step, a faint squishing. She pushed the swinging door to the bathroom and stepped inside. There were two stalls and smack in the middle of the floor was a drain. The drain made a little face that taunted her, wanting to slurp her up. She couldn’t help but feel, at least in the moment, that the drain was meant for her, like she was always meant to be turned inside-out and reduced to a dribble in that tiled, yellow shitbox with terrible, buzzing light and “The Second Cumming of Christ” written on the wall in smudged, red lipstick.
Hope stepped toward the sink and mirror, where she would have to face herself, but there was a part of her that was afraid to see whatever disfigurement awaited her, so she kept her eyes
121 on the sink a moment longer, building up the courage to look. The porcelain was cracked and orange stains streaked down the basin and circled the drain.
She wanted out of the vest. She wanted to breathe. She slid out of it carefully so as not to let anything touch her tongue, not a rogue strap, not a piece of Velcro. A storm brewed inside the organ. Thunder boomed and then tapered off. It went on like that, pulsing and then dying. The storm was concentrated at the very end, almost like it had been confined to the toe of a boot and it was angry to be trapped like that, growling.
Her mother would have said, “Honey, there’s no use in putting off the inevitable. You can’t avoid the truth that’s before you. You’ve got to face it. You’ve got to be strong. Remember who you are. You are mine.”
That voice like clean water.
Head lifted, Hope looked at herself in the mirror. Her gaze went past the off-white spots of soapy water that had dried on the mirror and locked onto the bright, protruding tongue. The cut was maybe half an inch long, although it had felt much worse, much deeper. She had assumed, at first, that it was going to be the death of her. She leaned in to get a better look and saw the red walls of exposed muscle. Somehow, the way it looked didn’t match with the way it felt. Her tongue, with all its taste buds covered in blood, had the texture of a strawberry.
She pulled paper towels out of the wall dispenser until there were none left. Granted, it didn’t take long. The bathroom was poorly stocked. Hope wiped her face first, wondering where she was beneath all that grime, trying to find herself again. The parts of her that weren’t blood- soaked appeared yellow in the bathroom light, a type of light that aged her ten years, made her look wasted. Cheeks, sunken. Lips, caked like two scabs. She watched herself in the mirror while
122 she worked and looked into her own eyes, strangely clear, as if she was waiting for them to tell her what she felt.
There was something terrible about looking at yourself like that, searching your own eyes to see what was there. When she’d briefly joined the photography club at high school a few years earlier, she’d borrowed her mother’s Minolta camera. It had been in a big cardboard box in the closet. There were some old rolls of undeveloped film and Hope had picked one at random and asked another club member to develop it, a guy who’d set up a darkroom in his basement. The only reason she put it in his hands was because he’d offered to do it for free, whereas a local pharmacy would have cost at least fifteen dollars and taken two weeks to send it away. She’d expected to discovered photos from her childhood that had fallen to the wayside, but when he brought her the contact sheet, he said, “This is intense. Who is it?” The truth was that roll contained photographs her mother had taken of herself in the bathroom mirror. In some, she was staring at herself head-on. In others, she was sitting on the side of the sink and turning to look at herself, sometimes showing both eyes and sometimes only one. No smile, just a resting expression. It was almost too much. Hope felt she’d seen a part of her mother that she shouldn’t have, a truth that should have been kept in the dark room of her own, private heart. In the
Invasion bathroom, Hope saw a similar look in her own eyes. It was as if women, when they were alone, looked at themselves in the mirror because it was a way of turning yourself into a witness of the loneliest moments in your life.
Hope’s own photography phase lasted only a few weeks. She had taken pictures of the neighbor’s clothesline, a cat taking a bath on the sidewalk, a letter that had fallen off the mail truck into the middle of the street. It didn’t last because she realized the pictures weren’t good and they didn’t matter. She couldn’t do it anymore.
123 Hope tore the paper towels into strips and wrapped them around her tongue. The work was made easier because her tongue was so long. It was the only time she had ever been thankful for having a long tongue. As she was wrapping, a middle-school girl walked into the bathroom.
Hope froze.
“It’s you,” she said. “I followed your trail. Everybody’s talking about what happened.”
Hope couldn’t say anything.
“Do you know that before he left, he took that entire tray of stuff people dumped out? All of those business guys were so mad about their pocket knives. They’re saying they’ll press charges. An ambulance is coming for the other guy. His nose is broken. Yours is worse, though.”
That meant Pierce had gotten the car keys. That’s probably what he wanted all along, to take her mother’s car. She imagined him squealing out of the parking lot and whipping into the night, raccoons rising from their tipped trash cans to see what all the noise was about, dogs groaning from their Igloos, owls turning their heads. She imagined him breathing deeply the smells that didn’t belong him, the smell of her mother that was there or not there, and his grief didn’t concern her at all, not then. She didn’t understand how grief took energy from some and gave energy to others. She didn’t understand how it made some sad and others angry. She just wanted him to take off. Scat! she’d yell into the sky as he left, heading toward the horizon. Scat, you piece of shit fucking goddamn prick orphan asshole son of a bitch!
If her mother had hissed at him, then maybe he would feel bad about what he’d done.
Maybe he wouldn’t be able to take the shame. After all, mothers were the people he actually respected and claimed to need. He wouldn’t feel shame for what he’d done to Hope, but maybe he’d feel something for her mother. Leaving might have been the best option for him, getting away from the place where his life had changed for the worse, where he was reminded of his loss
124 at every turn, but she knew he wouldn’t do it. He was stubborn. He relentless. Maybe he had been a good son, but that didn’t make him a good person.
The girl said, “I took a first aid course at school. You make more money babysitting with certifications.” She had also turned yellow beneath the fluorescent lighting. Her tiny, scavenging eyes glanced at Hope’s feet. She said, “You’re going to need to take all of this to the emergency department so they can see how much blood you’ve lost.”
Hope looked down. Around her feet were giant slugs of bloody paper.
The girl said that the ambulance was going to try to take her to the hospital, but she shouldn’t go with them because those trips could end up costing a lot of money. Her mom could take them. She was always looking for ways to help people. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“Hey, what’s your name?”
She didn’t have anything to write on. She wiped her finger on her shirt and wrote her name in blood on the mirror.
“Cool,” the girl said. “Let’s go.”
Hope gathered the paper towels in her arms, feeling light-headed as she bent over, and followed her into the lobby. The young businessmen in khakis were standing in a circle with crossed arms, mumbling about fathers and uncles and brothers-in-law who were lawyers. The other remaining middle-schoolers leaned against the wall, waiting for their parents to come pick them up. There was a boy with gelled hair holding another girl’s hand. His bangs were sculpted so they rose from his forehead like the nose of a skateboard. They had been the ones to boo
Hope. Upon seeing her, they fell silent and moved closer together. She could have said, “He’ll hurt you one day,” and she wouldn’t have been wrong.
125 EMS was also in the lobby with the Game Master, checking out his nose, and as soon as they saw Hope, one of the medics offered her a ride to the hospital. It wasn’t an offer so much as a warning to seek medical attention immediately. The girl said, “We have our own transportation, thank you,” and led Hope outside.
Hope glanced at the front desk, where Joel was stationed with hard nipples. He said,
“Ann does it again,” and she shot him a bloody bird, although he couldn’t see it for the surprisingly heavy mound of paper in her arms.
Ruth had just finished the seventh grade and hoped to become an OBGYN one day. She was slated to be Vice Principal of the student body next year but said it with enough feigned excitement that Hope could tell she really wanted to be President. Her mother, Linda, worked part-time as a caregiver. Hope learned all of this in the car as they drove to Greenville Memorial
Hospital.
She was in the backseat, sitting on a newspaper they’d spread out. Beside her was a trash bag full of stuffed animals. A blue elephant trunk poked out of the bag. Linda looked at Hope through the rearview mirror, saying, “Sorry about all them bags. I was gonna drop off old Mr.
Blue and his friends at the donation box earlier, but the day just got away from me. Looks like it got away from you, too.” She looked back at the road, face turning serious, eyebrows furrowing.
She looked a little bit like Lucille Ball might have looked if she hadn’t been a famous television star with a team of hair, clothes, and makeup people, if she’d just been a regular forty-year-old woman in South Carolina. “We’re gonna do right by you, hon,” Linda said, nodding to herself. “I promise.”
126 It was astonishing how quickly she had accepted Hope into her car, without even knowing the circumstances of what had led to her condition. Without being able to talk, she had been swept up by these strangers, taken into their care, and Hope wondered if it wasn’t a miracle that the exact thing she had needed had been provided. She couldn’t talk but it was as if her voice had been heard.
“It’s a good thing you ran into my Ruth,” Linda said, almost laughing. She must have been considering the same thing. “You can’t rely on many people to do right these days but Ruth is one you can vouch for.”
She reached across the seat and ran her hand down the back of Ruth’s head, smoothing her shoulder-length hair.
It was Saturday night round-up at the emergency department. Most of the seats were filled, not because everybody there needed medical attention but because each person who actually needed to be seen by a doctor had brought a posse. It was like graduation all over again, where you could bring up to eight guests. One old black man had a terrible cough and a bib had been draped around him to catch the silver phlegm that strung from his mouth. Hope guessed the people surrounding him were daughters, plus a son or son-in-law, and a grandchild wearing a winter hat in May. One of the daughters said, “He’s gonna die waiting in here,” and the other got in front of his face, saying, “You best not. Do you hear me? I said not today.” Then there was a guy who looked a little older than Hope with a thumb wrapped in a kitchen towel, sitting by a couple of buddies who were clearly drunk, and they were reenacting how he’d gotten hurt, by playing that game called Stump where you threw up a hammer, grabbed it mid-air, then brought
127 the hammer down and a pounded a nail into a stump. “Did you see it?” the guy with the hurt thumb said, head lolling. His buddy pulled out a cellphone and said, “Oh, everybody saw it.”
And then there was a woman in wheelchair sitting all by herself. She had just a little gray fuzz. On her chest, revealed by a loose pajama top, was a port.
Everybody watched Hope go up to the front desk. They didn’t even talk about her, just tracked her movements silently, like birds watching a girl pass with a French fry. Once she got up there, everybody snapped out of their stupor and resumed bitching about the wait-time. The nurse didn’t know what to do about all those paper towels at first, which had stuck together and hardened. She made Hope dump them in a clean trash bag, then gave her a clipboard. Name, contact info, past medical history, and allergies were pretty easy. The next part of the form gave
Hope pause. She was on her dad’s insurance but didn’t have the cards as proof. She left those spaces blank, not even thinking about the bill that would arrive in the mail one day. That was far off in her mind.
Because of all that bleeding, Hope was called back fast.
She ended up in a little area surrounded by a curtain. The doctor peeled the strips of paper towel from around her tongue with forceps. Through a gap in the curtain, she could see people staring at her, probably thinking, What in the hell happened? Was she in a gang fight? Did an animal attack her face? She must have started to slump forward because the doctor lightly touched her lower back, reminding her to keep upright and saying he didn’t want her to aspirate.
He examined her tongue, saying, “It looks pretty well bifurcated.” He pointed at her tongue, then followed the split with his finger. “The good news is we can take care of it here.”
She was glad to hear it. In her mind, she thought it would have been a bigger deal, like she’d have to be taken into the surgical theater.
128 He irrigated her mouth first and then she had to recline on a hard table. Her face was covered so the only thing peeking out was her tongue. She just lay there, looking up at the white sheet covering her eyes. She felt him pinch her tongue with gauze pads and pull it out. Her natural reaction was to pull the tongue back in, because she wanted to protect it and prevent any more pain, but the doctor warned, “You’re going to have to hold it out. Think you can do that?”
She nodded beneath the sheet.
“Good,” he said. “I can puncture and withdraw it with a large suture, but I’d like to avoid that if at all possible. This one of the more impressive tongues I’ve ever seen.”
Then came the lidocaine, without much notice. The needle sank in and she focused all of her energy on keeping the tongue extended, no matter how bad she wanted to escape the sharp pain. She felt air blowing on her tongue as the doctor instructed a nurse to keep it dry. A few minutes later she didn’t feel anything at all. There was only tugging and pulling as he stitched it up, saying that the sutures would dissolve in about a week. And then, just like that, he was finished.
For 2-3 days, she was supposed to be on a liquid diet and rinse her mouth after eating.
“The tongue heals fast,” he said. “You’ll be surprised at how good it looks in a few days. A clean line like this typically has a good cosmetic outcome.”
Her mouth was now home to a big, numb lump and what a relief it was.
“You know,” he said, taking off his gloves. “This line is unusually clean.”
He seemed to be implying, in a roundabout way, that this wasn’t the typical result of a seizure or car accident. That must have been his way of asking if there was something he needed to know about, if he should alert the police. What he didn’t know was that police were probably at Invasion at that very moment, talking with the Game Master and all those businessmen
129 wanting to press charges for having their precious pocket knives stolen. No, she didn’t want to be held up any longer. She just blinked at him.
“Well,” he said, after a pause had been allowed to develop, inflate, and then float away.
“Happy healing.”
On the way out, she passed patients glaring from hospital beds, leaning on crutches, and sucking on boxes of apples juice. They were doe-eyed from ventilators and wincing at internal pains. They watched her leave, probably jealous of the bounce in her step, and all she did was smile at them, or try to smile. She didn’t have much control over her mouth. She couldn’t really feel what was going on in there and wondered if she looked like Dopey walking around, drooling and relieved, but she didn’t care. She was going to be okay, she was leaving, and there were two allies waiting for her on the other side. Most importantly, she had an idea of her mother’s location. It was unbelievable how good she felt. It wasn’t necessarily that she’d been taken to a low point and had nowhere to go but up. Maybe that was part of it, but it didn’t seem quite right.
It was more like she’d been reminded of the goodness in the world and those good forces had sensed her need, sought her out, and given the gift of deliverance.
Linda had become friends with the wheelchair woman in the waiting room. As they all left, Linda lightly squeezed her hand and said, “You take care.”
The lady just pursed her lips, farted.
They stepped outside and paused by a trash can surrounded by a fairy ring of ground-out cigarette butts. Linda whispered, “She’s got two children if you can believe it, but where do you think they are? Not here. I asked if she went to church and she said she goes on the radio. That’s how she said it. I said, ‘Well, hon, that’s something.’” She took a deep breath and let her voice return to normal volume. “I’m talking about her,” she said, “but let’s look at you.”
130 They stood right outside the emergency department doors and admired Hope’s tongue, saying how much better it looked already, being sewn up and rinsed off.
Ruth said, “Can you feel the stitches?”
Hope shook her head. They were buried. She could almost hear the bugs trying to get inside, the faintest tapping of them on glass. It was warm outside but her skin was still cold from the air conditioning. Goosebumps spread across her arms, the tiny hairs rising as if to point to the sky, where only a handful of stars were visible. They probably weren’t all stars. One was probably a planet. Ruth held up her arm, too, showing off her own goosebumps.
Ruth said, “Hey, can we get ice cream before Hope goes home?”
“Do we really need that?”
“Just a treat.”
“Alright,” Linda said, as they all got into the car. “A drive-thru can’t hurt.”
Her eyes met Hope’s in the rearview mirror. She’d been through a lot and wouldn’t mind taking a moment to savor this newfound feeling of optimism. A brief moment, of course. A breather. Surely that was alright. She was afraid that the minute she got back on her mother’s trail something would happen and it would all go away.
“I can’t name it,” Linda said, with the blinker on, waiting for a break in the traffic to pull out of the hospital drive, “but I don’t feel right about leaving you just yet, either. Lord knows I’m tired, but something says stay a little longer.”
They went to McDonalds, ordered vanilla soft serve, and ate it in the parking lot. The car beside them was a beaten-up sedan with “Class of ‘09” written in paint pen on the back windshield. Hope turned around and looked at all the people inside the restaurant, homeless
131 people sipping cheap coffee, teenagers with the munchies, families eating late, and in a corner booth she saw three guys who had been on the football team and a girl who had been on homecoming court. Even if they’d looked outside at the same time and made eye contact, they wouldn’t have recognized Hope. That was for the best. They were all probably loading up on grease before heading to a graduation party, where somebody’s older brother would have bought the booze and girls were getting so drunk they’d have to make themselves puke halfway through the night just to keep raging. There was no part of Hope that wished she was going with them.
All of that felt so distant now. When she turned back around, the newspaper crinkled.
Her tongue hadn’t come back to life yet. The only way she could eat was by spooning a little ice cream further back on her tongue and then swallowing. She couldn’t taste it, but it was like her tongue recognized the flavor and sent sweet messages to her brain. It was dark in the car and she heard the sounds of everyone eating. Ruth had opted for a cone. She turned her head sideways and licked around and around, carousel-style.
She turned in the passenger seat, sitting on her knees, and faced Hope. She said,
“Everything turned out pretty good, huh?”
Linda said, “Good’s what we’re gonna call it?”
“What about not-bad?”
“Not-bad’s not bad,” she said, smiling. Then she turned her head a little, not so she was facing Hope, but so she could be heard better. “It didn’t seem right to ask before,” she said, “but now that you’re on the road to recovery and all, I wonder how this whole mess got to be. In the waiting room, Ruthie told me that a man hurt you and an employee there. She said he stole some things, too, before he fled.” When Hope didn’t say anything, Linda said, “Did you know this man?”
132 She turned to look at her now.
Hope nodded.
“He your friend?”
She shook her head.
“Boyfriend?”
She shook her head.
Linda dug a pen out of her purse and passed it to Hope, along with a clean napkin. She said, “I think you owe us a little more than that.”
She turned on the overhead light, which beamed bright into Hope’s eyes. She squinted and finally picked a word to write down. It wasn’t enough to be accurate, it also had to satisfy.
She picked “monster.”
“Why did he do these things?”
Hope wrote: He wanted to hurt me.
“Why would he be wanting to do that?”
She might have had a few different answers to that question, but she didn’t want to say.
She held the pen and didn’t move, hand hovering. Maybe they thought she was dumb. This interrogation format, sitting in the back of a car with child-proof locks and crappy light hurting her eyes, made her feel trapped. If they were so interested in helping people, then they shouldn’t expect anything in return, a reward in the form of explanation.
Linda said, “Maybe I’m sticking my big old nose where it doesn’t belong, but I only ask because my little girl went on her first group date tonight. I can’t help but worry about the people out there that’s not too nice, or the people that seem nice and then turn out the opposite. Maybe you know what I’m talking bout.”
133 Ruth pinched her eyes shut and opened her mouth, letting out a silent scream.
“It’s true,” Linda said. “I’m such a dinosaur, she had to explain it to me. These kids, you know, they’re so embarrassed to be alone with another person they go in groups.”
She was down at the cone now. As if it were marrow, she sucked out the last bit of ice cream from inside the cone.
Linda asked Ruth, “Did you talk to what’s his face?”
Ruth covered her eyes.
“You still like him?”
She huffed.
“Well, did you smooch? Come on, talk to me now.”
Ruth said, “I REALLY DON’T LIKE WHEN YOU PUT ME ON THE SPOT.”
“Now, don’t raise your voice just because I’m concerned,” Linda said, “or else this’ll be the last treat you ever get. It just makes me sick thinking of what happens to pretty little girls once they get grown-up. That’s the last time you’re going to that Explosion place.” Linda turned off the overhead light. Darkness fell in the car again and it was clear that she hadn’t been teasing.
Hope thought about reaching out to the bag of stuffed animals beside her and grabbing the elephant’s trunk, but she caught herself. It must have been a hard time, having to bag up her child’s toys and then picking her up from a group date. She probably didn’t want to drop off those toys. She probably wanted to drive around with them for a little while. It was a place
Hope’s mind had never wandered before and all she wanted was to be eating ice cream with her own mother.
Hope wrote on the clean, backside of the napkin and then handed it to Linda.
It said: I need to go home.
134 Linda sighed. “You’re probably dying to escape.”
Hope shook her head, trying to reassure that it wasn’t like that. She really did appreciate everything they had done for her but it was time for them to part ways.
“I get it, I get it.”
Ruth lowered her head a little, probably thinking the ice cream had been a bad idea. She said, “Where do you live?”
Hope lied: The West End.
And after Hope went into the bathroom, rinsed her mouth, and patted her lips dry, that is exactly where they took her. They passed the halfway finished baseball stadium, surrounded by a big chain link fence, and saw a crop of brand-new apartment buildings that contractors had abandoned due to the recession. Hope looked up at the top floors and wondered which one her mother was in. She thought she saw a light in one. She could have sworn. She tapped Linda on the shoulder, signaling her to stop.
Linda drummed the steering wheel. Before undoing the child locks, she said, “Real quick, there’s something I wanna say. I think different people have different gifts. I got mine, Ruth’s got hers. I can see them sometimes, hovering around people. I can’t put a name to your gift, it’s not clear, and maybe you don’t know what it is, either, but I can see it all around you. One day you’ll know and all the people around you will be better for it. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. It’s just like that line that came out after 911, you know. If you see something, you’re supposed to say something.”
Hope stared at her, overwhelmed by the sudden attention that had been paid to her spirit.
A small fire had been lit in her chest.
Linda undid the child locks and Hope got out of the car.
135 Ruth unrolled her window and Hope saw both of them leaning toward her, wanting to squeeze in last words, wanting to hold her there a little longer.
Linda said, “I just hope whoever did that to you gets what’s coming to him.”
“Yeah,” Ruth said. “An eye for an eye.”
136 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Perry W. Hungerford received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Montana in 2013, with a focus in forensics. She received her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Florida in 2018.
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