NO ME WITHOUT YOU Thesis Submitted to the College of Arts

Home , A New Morning, Divine Hammer, Growing on Me, Needed Me, Shit on You, Silent All These Years

NO ME WITHOUT YOU

Thesis

Submitted to

The College of Arts and Sciences of the

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

The Degree of

Master of Arts in English

Sandra E. Riley, M.Ed

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

Dayton, Ohio

August 2017

NO ME WITHOUT YOU

Name: Riley, Sandra Elizabeth

APPROVED BY:

______PJ Carlisle, Ph.D Advisor, H.W. Martin Post Doc Fellow

______Andrew Slade, Ph.D Department Chair, Reader #1

______Bryan Bardine, Ph.D Associate Professor of English, Reader #2

ABSTRACT

NO ME WITHOUT YOU

Name: Riley, Sandra Elizabeth University of Dayton

Advisor: Dr. PJ Carlisle

This novel is an exploration of the narrator‟s grief as she undertakes a quest to understand the reasons for her sister‟s suicide. Through this grieving process, the heroine must confront old family traumas and negotiate ways of coping with these ugly truths. It is a novel about family secrets, trauma, addiction, mental illness, and ultimately, resilience.

iii

Dedicated to JLH

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my earliest reader at the University of Dayton—Dr. Meredith

Doench, whose encouragement compelled me to keep writing, despite early frustrations in the drafting process. Thank you to Professor Al Carrillo—our initial conversations gave me the courage to keep writing, and convinced me that

I did in fact have the makings of a novel. Thank you to Dr. Andy Slade, who has been gracious and accommodating throughout my journey to the MA, and to Dr.

PJ Carlisle, who not only agreed to be my thesis advisor her last semester at UD, but gave me the direction and input I needed while understanding my vision for

No Me Without You. Finally, thank you to Dr. Bryan Bardine, for being a considerate reader and compassionate teacher.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………………………………iii

DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………………………..iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………………………….v

CHAPTER I: DON‟T FEAR THE REAPER………………………………………………………1

CHAPTER II: THERE WAS NOTHING MORE TO DREAD……………………………25

CHAPTER III: SILENT ALL THESE YEARS………………………………………………...42

CHAPTER IV: A BOX FULL OF DARKNESS………………………………………………..56

CHAPTER V: YOU RATHER PUT ME TO SLEEP THAN SIT BY MY SIDE……..74

CHAPTER VI: I‟M JUST LOOKING FOR ONE DIVINE HAMMER………………..91

CHAPTER VII: A PANDORA‟S BOX FULL OF DARKNESS………………………….114

CHAPTER VIII: NAG CHAMPA TIME MACHINE……………………………………….131

CHAPTER IX: I‟VE GOT DREAMS TO REMEMBER……………………………………134

CHAPTER X: BEREFT OF A JOYLESS BASTARD……………………………………….141

CHAPTER XI: RED FOX IN STAR CAVE……………………………………………………160

CHAPTER XII: TRAVEL DOWN THE ROAD AND BACK AGAIN…………………171

CHAPTER XIII: HER FACE WAS ALL I COULD SEE, AN OLD ANTHEM ON A NEW MORNING ...... ………………..187

CHAPTER XIV: THE ART OF LOSING ISN‟T HARD TO MASTER……………….212 vi

CHAPTER I

DON‟T FEAR THE REAPER

The riotous reek of flowers competed with my mother‟s White Diamonds and the faintest hint of cigarettes. Nobody listened to the “in lieu of flowers” request in the obituary, my mother took a bath in her perfume to disguise her failure to shower, and Garrison forgot to dry clean his suit, last worn to his sister‟s wedding, where he smoked cigarettes all night into the morning. When I think of my sister‟s funeral, this is the strongest memory—the aura of my mother‟s perfume, the heady flowers, and the slightest whiff of cigarettes haunting the stiff gray fabric of my boyfriend‟s lapels.

I sat between Garrison and my mother, listening to the minister drivel on about suffering, heaven, and God‟s plan. I clenched my thighs together to keep my legs from touching my mother and put all my weight against Garrison. I measured my breaths into long steady intervals, willful in preventing my body from quivering. This minister, he presumed we all believed in God. I clenched my jaw and let my molars pinch in the wet walls of my cheeks to keep from screaming or howling or wailing. I knew that if I lessened the grip of my resolve I would startle everyone with the desperation of my grief. I wanted to extract

1 myself from the horror of listening to this man of the cloth who didn‟t know my sister from Adam but had the audacity to speak about her soul with such familiarity it was disturbing—

I was waiting for him to say that “everything happens for a reason,” but I suppose “God‟s plan” was bad enough. Garrison had his hand on my knee. My mother‟s body shook with her sobs. I wanted to smack her, to slap off Garrison‟s hand, to run out of the oversized creepy Victorian funeral home, and gulp in the cold January air. The air was too heavy with the sickly sweet flowers, overwrought perfume, and cigarette smoke. I swallowed back the rise of salty bile threatening to erupt, likely all over Garrison‟s suit and my mother‟s gray sateen dress. I should have stepped out during the rites, excused myself to the bathroom, to the coat room, hell, even to the upstairs office marked with Private on the door. I would have been forgiven for fleeing—after all, I was grieving, a woman who‟d lost her sister to suicide.

Instead, I was polite. I mouthed the words to “Amazing Grace” and “How

Great Thou Art” while my mother‟s vibrato warbled a little too loud over the chorus of attendants. Afterward, I stood next to the urn on the pillar holding my sister‟s remains--Jenna, embodied in ashes. I wished my parents would have kept her body long enough for an open casket funeral. I needed to see her body, her hands neatly folded on her abdomen, wearing more makeup than she ever did alive, for some sort of closure I guess, but my parents decided it was better to burn her remains and hold a memorial with that ugly ass green urn staring everybody in the face.

They must have thrived on failing to meet the most common of expectations—decorum, decency, the milk of human kindness. You know, giving their long-suffering eldest child a proper fucking burial and funeral. Instead, some half-hearted memorial. An obituary full of lies. My sister‟s body ash instead of embalmed flesh and bone and fair hair the color of wheat that would have just kept growing and growing in her casket, a river of hair, her grass green dress I would have buried her in, if it were all up to me. Sure the planet was running out of room for such silly human trappings—dead bodies tucked into dirt, but it would have been nice, you know, to come visit. To stretch out on top of my sister on a nice spring day and look at the clouds like you see in the movies and talk to her. To know sure, she‟s dead, but she‟s still here somehow. But no. The memorial, Jenna in a vase.

Yes, I stood next to the pillar holding my sister in that ugly pea green speckled vase, between my parents, my father stoic, my mother red-faced and ugly crying, her greasy badly dyed hair sticking in clumps to her freckled forehead. I shook hands with people I didn‟t give a shit about—old neighbors, coworkers of my Dad‟s, cousins and uncles I hadn‟t seen in years. “It‟s such a shame,” “So sorry for your loss,” “She was so young and talented.” After the glum greetings and accepting of condolences, I was sandwiched between Garrison and my mother listening to the drivel from the minister that was supposed to make me feel better, then I had to sit through a so-called reception watching people shovel food in their mouths and drink pop from little paper Dixie cups while they muttered small talk about their home repair projects and the trip to Florida they intended to make, it‟s always Florida for some reason.

And to think, they had postponed the service until I could arrive. It meant something to my mom and dad to have me here—so I could say goodbye to my sister in such a way it‟s palatable for the relatives who would talk about my no show or tardiness, so my parents could half-grin in the bizarre pictures my mother insisted on taking. As though Jenna‟s funeral was the perfect time for an updated family picture. They waited so everyone could dispense all these macabre pleasantries until I could be present so they checked the box of appearing to be the grieving parents with their grieving daughter in tow, and all I wanted to do was run.

There was a collage of pictures of my sister on a bulletin board, pixelated digital images where her fair hair looked brash and her skin had an eerie glow.

“Jenna was so pretty. I‟m so very sorry for your loss, Maddie.”

Everyone was so sorry.

But not nearly as sorry as I was that she did it this time, she finally quit talking shit and committed suicide. Jenna was dead. She finally did it this time, she followed Delaney into the dark woods and she won‟t be back.

----

After five suicide attempts since our brother‟s death I should have felt relief. I had sat across from my sister in crowded inpatient psychiatric wards during visiting hours, her wrists bandaged, while she cheerfully talked about painting again and the new Strokes record and how she wanted to learn to knit.

Jenna‟s eyeliner unsmudged, her bitten nails softened by pink polish, her hair straightened and smooth. 27 stitches in her wrists. Vertical lines, because she meant it.

I should have been glad Jenna was dead. She‟d been miserable for years. I should have felt relief that her suffering had found reprieve. I‟d never have to see her in the loony bin again, maniacally sucking on the e-cigarettes they give to patients, Jenna making small talk about how they keep shoving food at her and encouraging naps, how even the nurses on the ward have acknowledged their struggles with depression. “It‟s good to know I‟m not the only crazy one,” my sister said, with a laugh that sounded a little desperate.

“Of course you‟re not alone, Jenna. We‟re all crazy. Some of us are better at hiding it, is all,” I had said, patting her hand in a “there, there” gesture that probably irritated her, coming from me. Because I had never been as effusive as she was, emoting all the time, befriending anyone she met, immersed as she was in art and music and all matters of feeling, my sister had the very mistaken impression that I did not feel anything at all. Jenna acted unfazed every time I came to see her in the hospital after every suicide attempt, even leaving a vacation in Iceland once to rush to her, and for what? To face a stone cold bitch with snake eyes and snake hair, a Gorgon in waking life, my sister.

I had just touched down in Keflavik and turned on my phone to find a single text message from my Dad: Jenna is in the hospital again. She slit her wrists and barricaded herself in her apartment. The fire department had to knock down her door. That was it. Nothing about his level of concern. His level of concern seemed oddly placed on her front door, not my sister‟s mental health. I walked off the plane and went right to the airline and shelled out another two grand to get back home, foregoing my plans to see the whales and the Northern

Lights, never mind that I picked up a job catering weddings on the weekends in

5 addition to my trusty job spent copywriting in a cubicle five days a week to be able to afford the airfare and excursions and lodging and food.

I had planned that trip for three years before I was finally able to execute it, and I spent nearly all my remaining money on booking the emergency flight back home. What I saw of Iceland was the terminal where I waited five hours to board my flight to Toronto that would then connect me home. I slept some on the way to Toronto, but mostly spent my time looking out at the black sky and swallowing back my panic as best as I could with Ginger Ale. I touched down, waited another three hours to board my plane home, and finally landed. Six flights in roughly two days.

I hardly remember any of those airports, or the people I saw—I remember the hum of the engines, the stainless steel doors of the airport bathrooms, the sound of the wheels of the suitcase I dragged behind me, the faint heartburn from drinking so much black coffee on an empty stomach. I was thinking of my sister all the while, filled with a heavy dread that sounded like thundering cellos echoing in my head, flinching at the thought of it—Jenna taking a razor blade to her veins and cutting so deep she‟d die.

I wondered where she did it, and about the blood, and how the brown carpet of her apartment must have masked the stains. I wondered if she was fucked up at the time, what drugs she was on, if she was thinking of our brother, if she was listening to music at the time. I wondered what the paramedics thought, and the fire department, when they finally gained access to her apartment to find Jenna likely unconscious and bleeding profoundly. I wondered

6 if she thought of me at all, and if she cared that she‟d be leaving me entirely alone.

I took a cab to the hospital from the airport. I had hardly slept hardly at all in two days, or taken a shower, or even brushed my teeth. All I could think of was my sister. And when she saw me, all Jenna said was: “You look like shit. You should have stayed in Iceland.” I excused myself and sobbed in the bathroom for a while until I was dry heaving. And then I put on some lipstick and pulled my hair into a ponytail and went back to see my sister, sitting in a robe with her bandaged wrists at a table alone, flipping through the pages of People magazine as though she really gave a shit about the royal wedding.

I pushed my fear and grief and tears far back down my throat until I had heartburn. I told Jenna I saw the Frida biopic with Hayek finally, and that when she got out we should go get pedicures. I would pay. “That sounds nice, Maddie,” she offered, never looking back up from her magazine.

---

I was the one given the task of cleaning out her place. As usual, our, I should have said my, since I was the only one left—parents couldn‟t be bothered.

Their house was just too far away, they said. Utter bullshit. They lived but three hours away, in the same state. When my brother Delaney, their son, overdosed on top of the clock tower where his band practiced, my parents never scheduled a memorial. They left his remains at the funeral home for months. Jenna and I had to drive up to Cleveland to collect his remains.

My mother and father were so unaffected by anything, even the loss of their children. It was a wonder they even worked up enough gumption to have

7 sex and make children at all. And then to have two creative, sensitive, addiction- prone and mentally ill children—my brother and sister—and to be remarkably non-reactive to it all, to see their lives as messes they can‟t be inconvenienced to clean up—well. Good thing they knew they could always count on me to keep my shit together. I remained shocked that they even had a memorial for my sister at all, given their epic failure to do anything at all to preserve Delaney‟s memory.

Little did they know I learned long ago there is only so much space for tornadoes of emoting, for longing made palpable, for demons given free reign.

Jenna and Delaney paraded their misery around, then stayed fucked up to not feel the hot shame of being a human being. Nope, I swallowed down my shame with prescription drugs meant to sedate and polish my tattered edges.

I took a deep breath.

Everything she left was mine.

The house smelled like ashy Nag Champa and—gross—cat urine and dirty litter box. Which reminded me…there was Frankie at my feet now, purring like a freight train, aggressively rubbing up against my shins. She was getting her white fur all over my brown cords.

And there, on the windowsill, was Bean, creepy somehow, the black cat in the window with his green eyes. My skin covered in goosebumps and I buried my hands in the pockets of my peacoat.

For a second I thought the stupid cat was my sister‟s ghost in animal form.

Grief makes you lose your mind.

I scanned her small apartment and felt a rush of panic, anxiety lapped at my heart. My Virgo nature craved order, simplicity and tidiness. Jenna the

Cancer-Leo cusp was all turbulent emotion. Oscillating as she did from the shallow end of underwhelming joy to the deep end of sorrow, her messy tabletops and unwashed dishes and pile of shoes by the front door pissed me off.

A note on the coffee table written to herself—Take your meds. Go for a run. Stop smoking. Live. You failed there, Jenna.

She pissed me off and haunted me and then I had the distinct pleasure of cleaning out the home she made, filled as it was with her self-care notes to self and the deep kitchen drawer meant for pots and pans filled instead with prescription bottles for antidepressants and antianxiety and anticonvulsants and antipsychotics. A collage of Frida Kahlo prints on the living room wall, the same deep sad brown eyes under the caterpillar unibrow staring back at me, the cats staring too, the ruins of my dead sister‟s life.

Chaos.

Her house was a mess and I was the one left to pick it up.

I thought I felt something hot and rising in my stomach. What is commonly called rage, I suppose, but I did the sensible thing and took two

Xanax. Now was not the time for coming unglued. If I weren‟t here, sizing up the task of cleaning out her apartment, my parents would have just let the landlord clean out the place and donate, or worse still, trash all of my sister‟s earthly belongings. “I‟ll take care of it Dad,” I told him, and that was that.

When we were kids, I would follow around my big sister, putting our

Barbies neatly back in the rooms of their Dream House. I‟d put the Play Doh she left out back in its yellow plastic container. I‟d put the crayons back in the box and the books back on the shelf and I‟d hang up her coat she just threw any place.

I took off my coat and put it gently on the back of a chair in her eat-in kitchen. What I needed to do was make a list.

And look—there‟s a steno pad on her kitchen table. It was a list:

--Diet Coke --Cat litter --Yogurt --Lipsmackers

A haphazard grocery list? And the acrid smell of Frankie and Bean‟s combined contributions to the litterbox wouldn‟t be so easily gotten rid of.

The lines on the page were swimming in my vision. I was crying, of course

I was crying again, my 31 year old sister still wore Lipsmackers, the flavored chap-stick I outgrew in high school.

My neat little list idea was venturing into dangerous territory. I turned the page, putting Jenna‟s list out of sight, the whirls of her florid handwriting gone.

My list, my list. The list I needed to find structure and order. There was the page. And look, a harmless pen. My list:

 Clean out litterbox  Find a place to put all the creepy Frida Kahlo prints and Jenna‟s vagina flower paintings  Go through jewelry/clothes. Donate to Goodwill the remainders.  Go through books/movies/music  Sell all furniture on Craigslist. Except the vanity. Keep the vanity.  Find a home for Frances and Bean  Clean out Jenna‟s apartment  Call her landlord  Stop crying  Stop being pathetic  Hold yourself together  Clean up Jenna‟s mess

I went back to my list and scratched out “Clean up Jenna‟s mess.” It seemed mean-spirited now that she was dead.

Dead. The word hit me in the chest like a crushing wave and made my hands cold and my teeth hurt.

Jenna was dead and I made a list.

Frankie was sitting on the table, her pink nose sniffing the paper. And Jenna‟s creepy green-eyed ghost of a black cat blinked at me from the window. I felt haunted in my dead sister‟s apartment. Surely it was irrational to be terrified and on the verge of a panic attack. Oh wait, this was a panic attack. I should have known from the sickening crush of weight on my chest.

I had to get out of there, away from the piles of paper and the haphazard pile of shoes and the forlorn cats.

I grabbed my coat. I ripped out my list from the notepad. The tattered edges irked me, but I could smooth the edge of the paper later when I was not standing in my dead sister‟s house losing my mind.

Somehow the air was gone from the house and my heart sounded like gunshots ricocheting in my ears and like that I was out the door and down the steps and to my car and oh yes, there were my Xanax. I took two.

----

“Maddie, I just can‟t bear the thought of entering her cramped filthy apartment,” my mother said, her sigh so melodramatic and forlorn I rolled my eyes.

Of course we would have to have been in the same room for that to happen.

She was in Cleveland, Village of the Damned, as Jenna called it. I never asked my mother to help me clean out her place. I told my father I would handle it. And now my mother wanted me to console her and smooth her rough edges and assure her it would be just fine if she avoided the task of cleaning out her dead daughter‟s apartment.

“I know, mom. You and dad just worry about arranging her memorial service, okay?” I pulled the sheets over my boobs and nestled in further to

Garrison‟s arm. My mother puttered on and on about calling all our relatives and getting the house ready for everyone and how she‟s going to make her Velveeta

Mexican dip and pigs-in-a-blanket.

As if I gave a damn about the nasty food she was making for our white trash relatives, most of whom hadn‟t seen Jenna in years.

“Madison, I hope you know I could not get through all of this without you.

Your father and I were finally putting Delaney behind us…” her voice trailed off.

She sighed. I swallowed down my fury.

My mother had just admitted that she and my father had put my brother behind them, as though their own son were a bad memory best forgotten.

“Anyway, I am too sick right now to come down there and I know Jenna‟s cats would trigger my asthma. Your father is trying to hold on to his vacation hours so he can make his fishing trip. It‟s just a really bad time for us to come down there and deal with her mess…”

Her voice trailed off again. My mother was waiting for me to soothe her guilt and accept her excuses. She was always so sick, sick my entire life, but never hospitalized, never diagnosed with anything but asthma. Her “sickness” was

12 illustrated in days spent without bathing, wearing the same red chenille bathrobe, threadbare at the elbows and stained with grease and coffee, shuffling from her bedroom to the kitchen to the bathroom without a word to anyone. If you tried to speak to her you were admonished with a scowl and a variant of: “If you need anything, ask your father. I‟m sick.”

“Well, you and dad won‟t have to worry about Jenna‟s „mess.‟ I have to get going mom. I‟ll see you tomorrow morning.” I tossed my phone on the nightstand and looked over to Garrison, his eyes closed. He was faking sleep to avoid conversation, I knew it, because he snored so loud when he was truly asleep it was like the sound of cutting down trees.

I turned on my side and reached down between his legs. He was still hard.

He sighed, his eyelids fluttering open, blue irises focused with total clarity.

“Are you sure you‟re in the mood with everything going on?”

His voice was haggard, probably because I was still stroking his cock.

“Just fuck me, Garrison. I need to know I‟m still alive.”

He had me pinned down with legs apart in an instant and I came and came.

----

The obituary printed in the paper said Jenna died from cardiac arrest spawned by an acute asthma attack. To send money in lieu of flowers to a charity of one‟s choice, and the memorial service would be held in Cleveland, of course.

It did not mention the cornucopia of drugs in her system, or call a spade a spade—she died from a self-induced drug overdose.

When the paramedics arrived they found her unconscious, behind her front door surrounded by 11 of her rescue inhalers. She called the ambulance herself. They took her to the hospital and did chest compressions for an hour.

She arrived dead on the scene and they resuscitated my sister into the artificial life form of a dead body kept alive by machines.

I watched her body convulse uncontrollably while she danced with death, after they took Jenna off the drips. I stood next to my fat mother in her fucking

Christmas turtleneck with her horrible dye job and sobbed like a slob.

Of course my father wasn‟t there. He sat in the lobby, using the ready excuse of being present should any family arrive, nevermind that his oldest child was actively dying.

No brain activity. It would be hours, they had said. Hours before she expired.

Expired. Jenna expired January 11th. Really though, I could have told you that expiration can be traced back to almost five years before she finally gave in to her greatest addiction—dying.

Jenna expired the day our baby brother locked himself in the clock tower alone with a bottle of Jack and a handful of pills. When he died Jenna‟s picture was still in his hand.

Delaney‟s obituary said he too died of cardiac arrest, although his was a bit more honest with its inclusion of “accidental drug overdose.”

But it was no accident. My youngest sibling, my brother Delaney Hunt, committed suicide on February 13th. My oldest sibling, Jenna Hunt, committed suicide January 11th, although it took her two days to die.

They were both dead as doornails and I was all that was left. It was fitting somehow. I was never a part of their world. I didn‟t speak their language. I never knew what they stayed up late into the night whispering about or what they did in the basement after school every day when we were kids.

I wasn‟t in their orbit. Jenna and Delaney constellated and left me in the black. And now they were both gone from me forever.

All three of us were born of the same two parents, so why did my own sister and brother treat me like an outsider? A changeling?

“Sad little Maddie,” Jenna said. “My sad little Maddie without a home.”

There was a picture of the three of us. We were sitting on the porch swing of the house we all grew up in, Delaney sat between Jenna and me, his arms enveloping us both. He was grinning, of course, and his wild curly hair grazed his shoulders. Jenna at one end, in her plaid pants and platforms, forearms resting on her knees. And me at the other end of the swing, hair shorter than my brother‟s. I was seventeen, Jenna nineteen, Delaney almost sixteen.

How was I the only one left?

The three of us together like towheaded carbon copies, we looked happy.

We were sitting on the swing on the porch of the house where we spent our entire childhoods. Delaney would sit on that swing and play his guitar. Jenna would sit on the porch next to him under the big window and paint her toenails. I would often sit apart from them, on the stoop, with my book spread out on my lap.

When I looked at this picture of the three of us together on that porch I could

15 even hear the wind chime, the boughs of the pine in the side yard brushing against the house, the slap of the swing on the porch rail.

It was my home but I was always a guest in it somehow, never at ease.

Jenna and Delaney were my siblings but I was always a stranger among them.

Maybe Jenna was right—I was poor Maddie without a home.

----

My sister hated her body. She hated her face. Jenna would spend hours picking at her skin in the mirror, furrowing her brow at the sight of her reflection.

She was always on a diet and she bit her nails down to nubs.

I could never understand her lack of confidence, or her warped view of herself. Jenna was tall, well-proportioned, green-eyed and pretty. Before she found crystal meth her teeth were white and even. She had thick fair hair and a regal jawline.

Jenna was fucking beautiful. Nearly perfect. She never knew it.

The irony of her autopsy wasn‟t lost on me. My mother thought I was morbid for requesting a copy to be Fed-Exed to my house, but she failed to understand my need to catalog every detail.

Except for the lethal mix of drugs in her system—heroin, crystal meth, and drugs I couldn‟t even pronounce—Jenna was perfect. Her body and all of its organs were sound, her weight in perfect range.

She never knew how perfect she was, her body‟s symmetry and its good working order.

I couldn‟t stop thinking that, reading the four pages over and over.

Your body was fine, Jenna. It was your mind that caused all the trouble.

----

Garrison‟s morning wood poked into my back. I was the little spoon, on my side, hip aching from sleeping in the same position all night. As I came into my body I willed my eyes to open.

The blazing light escaped from a slight opening in the blackout curtains. It made my heart jolt and gallop in my chest.

Please tell me I didn’t sleep in the day of my sister’s memorial service.

Please tell me I didn’t sleep in the morning of my sister’s memorial service.

Please tell me—

The alarm‟s green numbers read 7:45.

I slept in the morning of my sister‟s memorial service.

A memorial service that began at 10:30 in our hometown three hours away.

My heart had slowed to a dull thud and the lull in my oncoming panic let the splitting headache cutting my head in half reveal itself.

I sat up and puked immediately all over my feet.

“Maddie? Babe, are you okay?” Garrison asked, tugging on my ponytail.

I couldn‟t answer because I couldn‟t breathe.

I heard Garrison fumble out of bed, the floorboards creaking as he half-ran around our sleigh bed to reach my side. Before I could warn him about the puke his bare foot found it. “What the…ew, Mad. That‟s nasty,” said Garrison, stepping back.

He turned around and opened the curtains to let in the day. The sky was a searing blue, the sun a white glare.

“We slept through Jenna‟s memorial,” I spat out, miserable.

Garrison put his hands on his hips and squinted his eyes to read the alarm.

Without his glasses, he was as blind as a bat.

“It‟s 7:45. The service is at 10:30 in Cleveland. We aren‟t going to make it.

God I feel rotten.”

“Clearly.” Garrison grabbed a towel out of the laundry basket and sopped up the splatter. “Well, get your rotten ass in the shower and I‟ll start the coffee and call your mom and tell her we‟re going to be late.”

“Call my dad. My mom is going to go ballistic, she has to give the picture of a perfect family to her relatives, even if I‟m her only kid left.”

I made my way to the bathroom on unsteady feet. My mouth still watered with the metallic taste of impending puke.

I only had two glasses of wine. I wondered if I was coming down with some stomach bug.

I washed quickly and pulled my hair back up into a bun. I pulled a gray turtleneck sweater over my head and smoothed my hair. I wore my pinstripe pants and added some mascara to my lashes and lipstain to my mouth so I didn‟t look dead.

It was eight o‟clock.

I sat on the toilet and put lotion on my feet while Garrison showered. He was talking up a storm but I didn‟t hear a thing. “Your dad said they‟re postponing the memorial service until noon.”

I was sure my mother was wringing her hands, worried what everyone was thinking, and Jenna‟s friends were irritated there wasn‟t a bar open, and my Dad was taciturn and irritated with my uncustomary tardiness, but more than anything I was relieved. Relieved I could be there to honor my sister‟s memory.

Relieved I didn‟t live with my father anymore, forced to witness his silent rage made audible by slammed doors and broken glass.

Relieved I wouldn‟t miss my own sister‟s memorial service. Although I doubt Jenna gave a fig.

After all, she was dead.

The nausea lingered so I sucked on Starlite mints and made Garrison let me drive up to Cleveland. The drive up 71 was silent.

That‟s one thing I loved about my man. He could always gauge when I wasn‟t in the mood to talk. As I drove he kept his hand on my thigh and it helped anchor me into my own body.

----

It occurred to me that my sister‟s memorial was postponed on account of my sleeping in, but I couldn‟t bring myself to get out of the car when we got to the church. Garrison was saying something but all I heard was my pulse pounding furiously in my ears.

Dread and rage were at war in me. Jenna was dead, her apartment was mine to excavate and evacuate, but I had to first endure this memorial service.

Endure my parents, when mostly I wanted to avoid them entirely. I wanted to barricade myself in the car the way Jenna barricaded herself in her apartment, lock all the doors and instead of slit my wrists then cry for help, I could just avoid

19 seeing my mom and my dad who wanted me there to help grant the allusion of normalcy.

We were a normal family, see? My dad and mom needed me there to show everyone—here is our daughter, still alive and breathing, isn‟t she a success? Not addicted to drugs or contemplating suicide or in the throes of a nihilistic crisis.

Here is our daughter with her good looking and hard-working long-time boyfriend and sure we hope they get engaged and married and make us grandparents one day, we at least have this one person who came out okay, who we raised and now at least we have her to pin our hopes on, now that the other two have passed on to be with the Lord we don‟t really believe in but must pretend to revere for the sake of appearances, nobody needs to know we say we pray when really we mean we don‟t believe in anything, not even our children and what they could have been.

I was prepared though. I took a Xanax. Garrison sighed. Opened the car door. Walked around and opened mine with obvious exasperation, but the hand he offered to help me out of the car, the hand he placed on the small of my back, was gentle.

The nausea was back but it must have been my nerves.

The service at the Lutheran church was to appease our relatives, who clucked their tongues and whispered about the failure of my parents to publicly grieve for my brother after his willful overdose. And Jenna‟s friends, of course.

The few she managed to keep.

God knew, if there was a God, that Jenna would have given two shits about a church service.

The only thing my sister believed in was Delaney, and after he died she filled the void of belief with any escape valve she could find.

I looked over at Garrison and I started to cry.

----

“It was a fine service,” said my father, cutting himself a piece of pecan pie.

“Yes, I just wish you would have said something, Maddie. You have a way with words,” said my mother, giving me a huge piece of the pie I had just said I didn‟t want. I hate it when she says that—„a way with words‟—she just means I‟m literate and make a living writing about products I would never use myself.

I took the pie though, and even grinned a little at her. I was trying to be decent. My mother might be incapable of acknowledging the obvious—her daughter followed her son in suicide and all of this was too gruesome to even articulate—but she was putting on a brave face in her dress, hosting relatives, accepting condolences...

“Irene, let her alone. She‟s not feeling well. Can‟t you tell? Her face is damn near as gray as that sweater she‟s got on.” My father sounded gruffer than he should have.

I said nothing and smiled at my mother.

Saying nothing with a smile had been my M.O. for years, and Jenna hated me for it.

The pie was gelatinous and too sweet on my tongue. The pecans scraped the roof of my mouth. I swallowed two bites before darting off the couch and pushing past Garrison to the bathroom.

My sickness granted me and Garrison a get out of jail free card. Instead of being roped into spending the night and sneaking to share a bed with my 6‟4 boyfriend on a pullout couch, we drove back down 71. Garrison drove, and I sat in the passenger seat holding a little gold urn containing my sister‟s remains—the remains of the remains my parents buried. Why they incinerated her body to go on to bury her ashes in the ground anyhow was beyond me, but I had learned to stop trying to rationalize my parents‟ eccentricities.

“Would it be sacrilege to put Jenna in a cup holder?” I was laughing as I asked, while furious about the inane prospect.

Garrison caught the edge in my voice and looked over at me, his blue eyes soft.

I reached around to the backseat and placed her remains in one of the cup holders there so I didn‟t have to look at it.

“How are you feeling, Mad?”

“Better now that we‟ve left that house.” My parents‟ house was a mausoleum of our childhood. Nothing had changed.

Nothing.

The same plastic covers, yellowed now with age, covered the pink floral couches. American Gothic still hung in the hallway next to all of our senior pictures—Jenna with long stick-straight platinum hair. Me in my riot grrrl phase with half my head shaved and my butterfly tattoo still fresh and purple, peaking out of my v-neck. Delaney with his guitar, his hair a soft mass of curls.

All of our bedrooms were still the same because we weren‟t allowed to take anything but clothes and books when we each moved out.

“I can‟t get over your mom never allowing us to sleep in your old room,”

Garrison said, pulling out a Camel from his pack stowed in a pocket of the car door. “You‟re 30 years old, Madison. Your parents…”

I slipped my sunglasses on my face, reclined the seat, and put my feet up on the dash. Garrison was still talking but I stopped listening. The simple answer was—we‟re not married.

To Irene and Ron, it was that simple. I had told Garrison this before. It didn‟t matter now, though. We left them behind in their mausoleum to the ideal family they thought they created, alone in their advanced middle age, two out of three children gone now, and me hours away and not going back anytime soon.

If ever, if I could help it.

I only endured them as long as I did because I wanted to be there to support Jenna as we faced them together. I never had to sit on the plastic covers on the ugly floral furniture my mother wanted to preserve, I never had to sit at the kitchen table and wonder why they kept up the hideous border of apple wallpaper again, or walk past my bedroom that still seemed shrouded in all the anxiety I carried as a teenager, afraid I would never leave that house, afraid I would be smashed under glass like a lab specimen, preserved forever as their daughter and nothing more, an extension of them both, the misplaced recipient of all their vague expectations I would never come close to meeting because the parameters kept changing.

Garrison lit his cigarette. I fiddled with a knob on the radio until a classic rock station came in—Blue Oyster Cult‟s “Don‟t Fear the Reaper.”

The irony wasn‟t lost on me.

I was not afraid of the Reaper, some vague figure likely in black, holding a scythe, perhaps beckoning me to a waiting cliff with a skeletal finger.

More frightening was to go on living, knowing the still fresh grief for my brother would just be amplified now with Jenna gone from me forever.

A fraction of Jenna in a cup holder, Garrison‟s cigarette, the wind coming in through the crack on the driver‟s side window. With every mile marker we passed I felt the dread lift.

There was nothing more to dread.

CHAPTER II

THERE WAS NOTHING MORE TO DREAD

There was nothing more to dread. My sister succeeded in her years-long quest to kill herself. I did not have to ever answer again the call that came from a number I did not recognize but felt compelled to pick up just the same, given the odd hour of 10:52 on a Sunday night—

“May I speak with Madison Hunt?” The clipped voice of the woman on the other end said.

“This is she.”

“Good evening Madison. This is Nancy calling from the Ohio State

University Medical Center.”

Nancy waited for me to respond.

“Good evening Nancy.” The sinister weight of dread in my throat belied my congenial tone. For a second, I wondered why a hospital would be calling me, but my own doubts were quickly silenced by sick recognition. Why indeed would a hospital be calling me? Why indeed. Jenna.

“Your sister had you listed as an emergency contact in her record.”

I noticed Nancy‟s use of the past tense. I waited. Garrison was asleep beside me. I had a paperback copy of Sue Grafton‟s V is for Vengeance still open on my lap. The room seemed darker despite the steady glow of my bedside lamp.

I waited. I rested my neck on the headboard.

Nancy sighed. “Miss Hunt, I regret to inform you that Jenna is intubated in the ICU. The situation is very serious. We are on the 11th floor.”

I tossed aside my book, brought my feet to the floor, and sat there on the edge of the side of the bed, the magenta paisley pattern of my pajama pants out of focus in my line of sight. I was staring at my thighs.

“I‟m on my way.”

I had to shake Garrison vigorously to pull him out of his sleep.

“What is it Mad?” he rubbed his eyes and yawned.

“I need you to drive me to the hospital. Jenna is in the ICU.”

----

There was nothing more to dread.

But of course there was. I had to clean out her apartment. I had to dive into the wreck of it, the remains of Jenna‟s life. The cats, the paintings, the orange plastic prescription bottles, the tangled strands of necklaces on doorknobs, the closets stuffed full of clothes and coats and our great grandmother‟s linen. The half-dead plants and the mountain of overdue notices.

All of it awaited me.

Garrison and I got home and the metallic taste of nausea lingered in my mouth.

I looked over at him and took off my seat belt.

The hard look on his face told me I‟d done it again.

I‟d tuned him out entirely while wide awake. Over an hour together, winding down 71, our faces less than two feet away from each other, and I could not recall a single word he‟d said, or if he had said anything at all.

I reached over and touched his face, the fine stubble like sand under my fingers. His earnest, freckled face. “Baby, I‟m sorry.”

“I hate it when you do that to me. It‟s like you get caught in your head and

I just cease to fuckin exist Madison!” More of a whisper but an ejaculation nevertheless. The garage light fell across his face. The car smelled warm and stale.

I leaned forward and rested my forehead against his. I felt his body recoil as if he wanted to hit me. He opened his mouth instead, and flooded my nostrils with the smell of his cigarette and coffee breath when he sighed.

“I‟m sorry. I‟m sorry.” But I was not. In fact, I wanted to offer him a piece of gum because his breath wasn‟t doing much for my nausea, and the last thing I wanted was to comfort my boyfriend because the poor little baby was ignored on the drive home from my dead sister‟s memorial.

“Maddie, it‟s like you weren‟t even there.” His voice was tight and resigned, as though he did not have the patience for my inattentive company.

It‟s because I wasn‟t.

----

I felt like puking my guts out. I felt like a drunk on a boat. I felt like an elephant had been sitting on my chest all night.

The salty watering taste in my mouth begged me to retch but it was not even six AM yet and my stomach was empty. Not a single drop of spirits had slipped between my lips but my darkened bedroom was tilted on its axis and spinning. The elephant on my chest, well that was easy to diagnose—my old friend anxiety with a twist of panic for good measure.

I could have taken a pill or two to tranquilize the elephant, but the stomach upset must have been the flu making its presence known in my body.

I was taking advantage of my bereavement, and off work until the following Monday. It was Wednesday, which left me five days to clean out Jenna‟s place, get my shit together, and kill the stomach bug nestled in my intestines.

Monday morning I could return to the contained world of my cubicle, where I spent eight even hours a day, five days a week, writing copy for a bath products company.

Yes, I had five days free of thinking of synonyms for clean.

The bed was empty, except for my body, made more diminutive in size without Garrison to moor it. Garrison, who was already out the door by five in the morning, well on his way in his truck to spend 12 hours of his day mapping out power lines.

The house was mine.

Both ours, and Jenna‟s.

But the thought of Jenna‟s apartment gave me the creeps. Creeps creeps, as in my body would involuntarily shiver at the mere thought of crossing the threshold of her front door.

In fact, I would have stayed in my bed and watched HGTV all day, put off cleaning out Jenna‟s place, and numbed myself with a double dose of Xanax if it weren‟t for those cats.

They needed fed. They needed a fresh litter box.

And now, they needed a home.

I kicked back the warm down comforter and the naked air was freezing on my legs. I needed to get up. To shower. To brush my teeth. To eat something. To be a decent human being.

But being a decent human being was more difficult than it sounds.

My elephant was still on my chest. My thoughts were a semi spiraling down a mountain road---

The weight of Jenna’s life is on my chest and I have to head out in the freezing morning air to her ghost ship of an apartment when I can’t even breathe let alone get out of bed and dress myself and make my uncertain way through the labyrinth of my grief I have to go today all my dead sister’s shit awaits the litterbox the insane amount of art on the walls the clothes she had air drying in the bathroom on neat white plastic hangers all those nebulous black cardigans and the thick-yarned sweaters the t-shirts too piles of medication she didn’t touch rotting bananas in a bowl ashtrays overflowing with cigarettes but you have to go Maddie you said you would you have to go get up get up get up

I rolled out of bed and made my way to the bathroom in our quiet house.

It was time.

----

The first thing to be done, after plopping down the heavy bucket of litter, was to open every single window in Jenna‟s apartment. The place reeked of putrid cat and stale air. Never mind that it was below four degrees outside, and I was shivering so hard my teeth and ribs ached.

It took an entire trash bag to completely clean out the litterbox. The dust from the litter made me sneeze and filled my mouth with a soapy taste.

Frankie and Bean purred wildly at my ankles. I filled their bowl to overflowing and refreshed the arid water dish.

I lit a stick of Nag Champa and placed it in the dragon incense holder that sat on the coffee table. It was once Delaney‟s.

I looked up from the smoking wood dragon and I saw my brother, leaning against the doorframe of Jenna‟s open front door, his pale hair in soft frizzy curls grazing his collarbone, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, a smirk on his face.

“Little Maddie,” he said. I saw the mist of his breath, I heard the condescension.

His skin was impossibly pale and his eyes were clear and too bright.

I looked at the dragon in its halo of sweet smoke. When I looked back to the door, Delaney was gone.

I closed the door and locked it. I looked down at the dull dark carpet.

I had to get myself together. Hallucinations of my dead brother while alone in my dead sister‟s apartment?

I walked the short distance to the bathroom, where I saw Jenna sitting on the edge of the bathtub, her pale face and green eyes, the black sweaters left to dry on white plastic hangers she‟d pushed aside on the shower curtain rod.

“Took you long enough to get here,” she said, her voice hard.

I sighed. I opened the medicine cabinet. Ah ha. Abilify. Antipsychotic med meant to quell hallucinations and mania. I took two.

I learned all about prescription drugs writing copy for brochures two years ago. I took the job specifically to learn more about the meds Jenna should have been taking.

I looked back to the bathtub, to the black sweaters dangling from the shower curtain rod on their white hangers. Jenna was gone. The sweaters swayed on their hangers as though a breeze had passed through the room.

I cleaned out the litterbox and fed the cats. I can come back tomorrow, I thought to myself.

I was scared, and could not reason with the terror blooming in my chest. I closed all the windows and locked them and grabbed my coat and locked the door behind me.

I would have to come back the next day.

My sister and my brother were dead.

Delaney was dead. Jenna was dead.

There was nothing more to dread.

----

The fridge was a disgusting vomit inducer. It was easy to see why—the power was out for days. Jenna had failed to pay her electric bill for three months according to the past due notice on the kitchen table. The smell of soured milk and cheap Indian food fused together made me gag and dry heave and half cry. It was freezing, but I left the window open.

Frankie and Bean spooned together across the woven rug under the kitchen sink. Those stupid cats should have been on Jenna‟s bed, in her room, tucked away from the cold. Instead, they were with me. I didn‟t even like cats, but

Frankie and Bean were growing on me.

This time, my brother wasn‟t mocking me from the doorframe, and my sister wasn‟t like a pale ash blonde Wednesday Adams sitting among her somber black sweaters.

I saw no dead people, but Jesus Christ that refrigerator was disgusting, and I had been consistently nauseated for four days straight. I still had so much work to do, and even though Jenna lived in a small one bedroom apartment, my sister packed every square inch of the place with stuff.

She used to joke that she‟d end up on Hoarders: “One day Maddie you‟ll have to make an intervention. It‟s all mom and dad‟s fault. They never let us keep anything as kids, remember?”

I did remember. Our house was sterile, devoid of knickknacks and keepsakes, pictures of us as kids minimized to a single 8 by 10 on the wall replaced annually until our senior picture. One family portrait drilled into the brick above the empty mantle over the hallow fireplace. Nothing but lamps on the end tables. Our bedrooms were inspected by our father every Saturday morning— our only furniture beds, bedside tables, a dresser, one four-tiered bookshelf, and a desk. One lamp on the bedside table, which held an alarm clock. Only one book was permitted on the table at a time.

Beds were made daily. It was easier for my father to maintain this austere aesthetic when we were past the age of toys. When we had toys, we were banished

32 to the basement, which still had the old cedar chest we used for a toy box in the nook under the basement stairs, and Delaney‟s train set and cars. We were not permitted to have puzzles or craft sets because of the potential for clutter.

Reading was encouraged because it was quiet and “sharpened our minds.”

Anything that did not pass our father‟s inspections resulted in a whipping, pants down if it was a „repeated pattern of behavior.‟ I found comfort in order and minimalism, and maintained my dad‟s aesthetic. I took pride in passing his weekly inspection. I avoided the whippings. Jenna did not. She got one every

Saturday.

Jenna naturally rebelled, stuffing her closet and drawers to the max with sketches. She kept her drawings in a roll under her bed, and her bigger paintings in the art room at school, but she hoarded clothes, CD‟s, and books. Everything threatened to spill out of the confines of the receptacles in her room. She failed inspection every week. I wondered if she did so on purpose, leaving a mountain of books on her bedside, her comforter askew, drawers of her dresser half open.

“This does not pass inspection. You know my expectations Jenna, and your willful disregard of them is unacceptable. Close the door.” There would be the sound of his belt unbuckling, my sister‟s whelps.

I would go to Delaney‟s room and help him to pass inspection by smoothing over his comforter and putting his Batman action figure in my pocket.

By the time he was twelve he had it down—bed made, everything tucked away.

Like me he preferred to avoid a beating.

Our mother never made an appearance during inspection. On Saturdays, she stayed in bed until at least noon.

Our dad was a Vietnam vet. He served but two years in the army, yet he never eased out of his need for order. Sloppiness in his house was not acceptable under any circumstances, and he was not about to let his children disrupt the order of his universe. Our mom was “sick” and spent most of her days in her bedroom, unable to keep her job as a librarian by the time we were teenagers because of her constant missed days of work. She came out of her room to cook meals and pack our lunches. Her vacant eyes were immune to our pleas for leniency from inspections.

Jenna retaliated against our Spartan upbringing by covering nearly every inch of wall with art, filling every tabletop with pretty little plates and boxes and little glass figurines of woodland animals, and comforting herself with clutter in the home she made for herself in adulthood.

Now it was my task to compile her clutter and tuck it all away.

Why did I agree to do this? What the hell was I thinking, taking on all of this alone? Garrison working, my mother “sick,” and my father avoidant. I all too quickly let my parents off the hook for cleaning up the mess they made.

I stepped outside Jenna‟s second floor apartment and rested my forearms on the rickety wood of the railing and looked down at the parking lot at my sister‟s rusted red Ford Fiesta with its dented bumper and half peeled off Sonic

Youth bumper sticker. Her car was something else I needed to rehome.

I needed to call in for reinforcement.

Erica arrived within ten minutes, bustling in with Starbucks and a huge roll of trash bags.

“Girl, what took you so long to call me? I been worried about you,” she said, and put everything on Jenna‟s kitchen table. Erica pulled me into a too-tight hug, still in her Starbucks uniform. Her dreadlocks smelled like coffee beans.

“I thought I could get through it on my own, but all I‟ve managed to do is clean out the litterbox, feed the cats, and scrub out the fridge.” I picked up the bag of rotten food off the floor and walked to the front door, throwing it outside on the landing, grateful the bag held the toxic stuff and didn‟t bust open to contaminate everything.

“A true Virgo. Let me guess, you were going to scrub the tub and toilet next?” Her voice was too loud, but I called her to cheer me up and get this shit done. Erica had enough energy to power her own army.

“Actually, that is exactly what I was going to do.” I could think clearly when things were clean.

Erica untucked her button down shirt and rolled up the sleeves to her elbows. She handed me my cup of chai and stood next to me at the kitchen sink.

“How are you doing?” She pushed her small square glasses up the bridge of her nose, looked me in the eye, scanned the kitchen‟s parameter.

I followed her gaze and saw what she did—black cabinets covered in postcards, the 40 of Budweiser on the stove repurposed as a vase holding dried baby‟s breath, the Tree of Life tapestry Jenna used for a curtain—all the ways my sister tried to infuse beauty into her house.

I took a long sip of my chai, now lukewarm in the cup. “I‟m off work until

Monday. I have until next weekend to clean out the place.”

“Uh huh. You didn‟t answer my question. How are you doin?”

I couldn‟t look my oldest friend in the face. “I think I am coming down with a stomach bug. I haven‟t been feeling well. And cleaning out Jenna‟s apartment is…” I took another sip of chai. “Overwhelming. I don‟t even know where to begin or what to do with all this stuff. Everything needs cleaned—“

“Madison, forget the cleaning. Focus. Do you want any of Jen‟s furniture?”

Erica grabbed my elbow hard, her naturally long nails like a bird‟s talons gripping the branch of my bone. She let go of me, powerwalked into Jenna‟s bedroom, came out a few seconds later and surveyed the living room, her hands tucked in the back pockets of her khakis.

I looked at the card table covered with a sixties floral bedspread my sister used for a kitchen table and the pair of rusted folding chairs. In the living room, our grandma‟s old coffee table, a twin bed my sister used for a couch, an old tube

TV and record player sitting atop a wicker trunk. My sister had no real furniture.

Her bed was a mattress on the floor. None of the castaway furniture was worth salvaging, except for maybe her vanity.

Erica was right. I had to get rid of the furniture. None of it Garrison would welcome into our house filled with antiques and Amish woods. “No, none of it would meet Garrison‟s approval, and we don‟t really need anything. Do you want any of it?”

“Hell no! We can put the coffee table and bed up for sale on Craigslist. I‟ll make a post right now.” And just like that, Erica was in a flurry, snapping pictures with her phone. I sipped my Chai and leaned back against the sink.

“So let me guess. Your folks have left you with the task of cleanin out everything, right?”

“You nailed it. My dad is trying to hold on to his vacation time for a fishing trip this spring and doesn‟t want to clean up Jenna‟s “mess” as he called it. My mom claims to be too sick, but as far as I‟m concerned, she can go fuck herself.”

“Did I just hear you say your own mother can go fuck herself?” Erica looked me dead in the eye over the silver wire rims of her glasses and grabbed my forearm.

“Yes, yes you did.”

She tilted her head back and laughed, her mouth open wide enough to see the silver of her fillings. “That‟s my girl.” Erica‟s smile slipped away. She dug her nails in her scalp and scratched her head, then smoothed down the nest of her dreads into a messy bun at the crown of her head. “What were they gonna do with

Jenna‟s place and all her things if you weren‟t here?

“Probably have Jenna‟s landlord clean out the apartment. I know he would probably trash everything, and that just seemed wrong, so I said I‟d take care of it.” I was surprised to find tears forming in my eyes.

Erica clucked her tongue and shook her head. “For shame! Your family is somethin else.”

I didn‟t know what to say to that.

Erica‟s phone chirped and she swiped the screen to check her messages.

“And what do you know. Some guy named Pedro says he will take both for $50.”

Pedro did indeed take the bed, and the coffee table for $50. He also took the TV, the mattress on Jenna‟s floor, and the card table and pair of folding chairs for another $25.

Within two hours, all that was left was Jenna‟s “stuff.” And her vanity.

I was sitting on the floor of Jenna‟s bedroom. Erica was digging through my sister‟s long closet, stuffed to the brim with clothes. For such a shitty apartment, she certainly was granted generous closet space.

There were three piles of clothes—one Erica wanted, one for Goodwill, and one for me. My pile was significantly smaller than the other two. Erica was in her element. Like Jenna, she had had many sartorial phases, and her style echoed that of someone with multiple personality disorder—grunge plaid, goth black, chintzy hippie, no-nonsense button downs and khaki.

All I wanted were her oversized Big Lebowski wool sweaters.

Erica was still talking. I was half listening, half chewing on my cuticles.

Frankie and Bean were spooning on my sweaters.

“Are you sure you don‟t mind me taking your sister‟s clothes?”

“Erica, you‟ve only asked me that sixty times. No! Take all that you want!

Garrison would kill me if I took up any more of our tiny closet space anyway.”

And it was true. He would have. Our Victorian had laughable closets. “You‟re helping me so much. Please, take it.”

“All right Mad. I say, let‟s finish the clothes tonight and get out of here. It‟s five o‟clock and I am ready to throw down on some Mexican.”

It was already five? I noticed then how the light was fading outside, how

Jenna‟s apartment was growing darker. Garrison would be home before me. I reached into the kangaroo pocket of my hoodie and shot him a text—At Jenna’s apartment. Erica is helping me clean out her clothes. Leaving soon. Want some food? We’re getting Mexican.

It took him two seconds to reply—Steak burrito. No beans this time. Had he been staring at his phone? I had been a shitty girlfriend lately, there was no denying that. Uninterested in sex, hardly speaking to him, not cooking. I had sat a lot on the couch and watched a lot of HGTV while Garrison was an island in the spare bedroom, reading Popular Mechanics. I hadn‟t done the dishes or our laundry, or even thought to ask him how his day was.

But surely I got a pass since my sister killed herself six days ago?

I took a trash bag from the roll on the floor and packed up the clothes I was keeping. Less than half a bag.

Erica said, “I don‟t know why you waited so long to call me! I told you to call me to help as soon as you told me! I have known you too long and know your people. I knew your parents would pull this shit on you after the way they handled Delaney‟s body.” She tied an olive green pashmina scarf around her neck, freshly gleaned from Jenna.

I stopped stuffing the clothes in the trash bags and looked up at my oldest friend. We met twelve years ago waitressing at the same 24 hour breakfast place on High Street that had since been converted to a hair salon. We spent hours after close sipping coffee and flirting with the Cuban line cooks, wrapping silverware in napkins and wiping down tables, recounting our misadventures from the night, fighting over the jukebox. Erica always wanted to play James

Brown and Michael Jackson, and I always wanted Pat Benatar and Janis Joplin.

Erica was the kind of person who sticks.

And she was the only person I could call to help me do this.

Erica must have misread the expression on my face because her face fell and she hugged me tight and said she was sorry.

“For what?” I pulled out of her embrace even though it was the most comforting thing I had felt in days.

“For what I just said about your parents and Delaney. I know they‟re your family and I don‟t mean to be disrespectful,” Erica said, her enunciation of disrespectful like caramel stuck to her teeth.

“Given that my mother and father left my brother‟s remains at a funeral home for six months after he died when they were less than ten miles from their house, you‟re just telling the truth. It took a drive up 71 with you beside me and

Jenna drunk off her ass and high on Oxy in the backseat for us to recover

Delaney. And now my sister finally succumbs to her never-ending death wish and

I‟m the one left to clean out her shit and find homes for her cats. You are helping me so much. Fuck my parents. And fuck Jenna too!” I was holding the trash bags of clothes and nearly tripped over the mountain of shoes piled against the wall as

I walked to the front door. Erica‟s face was blank.

I threw down the bags of clothes on the floor by the front door. I wanted to throw them over the balcony to the parking lot below. The urge to smash something was strong. I shoved my hands into the pocket of my hoodie and turned around, and there sat Jenna under the window in the small living room by her sickly yucca tree, her cats nestled in her lap. I looked away and squared my shoulders, and walked straight back to Jenna‟s bedroom, where I found Erica looking out the window.

“Maddie?” She didn‟t turn from the window. In the fading light of the evening her mass of dreads made an imposing shadow on the wall.

“Yeah?” I kept my hands in my pocket.

“Why does Jenna have Delaney‟s ashes on a shelf above her bed?” Erica knew what the little gold vase was on the small slab of a shelf, of course she did, because she came with us to get our brother from the funeral home that day.

Her use of present tense gave me the chills considering how I had just seen my sister, my dead sister, sitting with her cats on the floor and looking at me with steady eyes, green and unwavering, much like the cats‟. I didn‟t turn around, but I swore I could feel Jenna, standing behind me, leaning into the doorframe. I looked out the window at the barren sycamore tree against the gray sky. “Because she‟s always wanted to keep Delaney close.”

Erica turned away from the window and said: “I‟ll come back over tomorrow and help you finish up the rest. I don‟t want you back in this apartment alone, Mad. The vibe is trippin‟ me out.”

I knew exactly what she meant. The vibe was off indeed.

CHAPTER III

SILENT ALL THESE YEARS

We went to Sarasota for a family vacation. Our mother wanted to take the state routes through the panhandle instead of staying on the artery of 75. We took the Suburban. I stayed in the middle row seat, Delaney and Jenna took the back. I wanted to read to lessen the weight of the hours spent in the car on leather seats that burned the skin of my thighs. Our dad commanded the stereo—a biography of Ulysses S. Grant on tape. Our mom kept the passenger seat reclined and slept.

Delaney and Jenna worked on a collaborative comic book about a family of roaches living in an apocalyptic world. I listened to Alanis Morissette‟s Jagged

Little Pill on my Discman seven times on the drive down.

Our parents bickered about when and where to stop, what to eat, and what hotel we would stay in for the week when we finally arrived. Our dad was disgusted with our mom‟s “complete lack of fiscal responsibility” for choosing to reserve two suites at the hotel in downtown Sarasota on the coast that included breakfast, a pool, and access to the beach.

“Irene you could have chosen something much more affordable. I am the only one contributing financially to our household.”

“You told me to book rooms Don. I booked rooms. If you were so worried about money, why didn‟t you do it yourself? I can‟t do anything right.” Our mom was working her way up to the tears of the self-sacrificing martyr she imagined herself to be.

Stony silence and a tightened jaw from my dad.

“I don‟t understand why you can‟t appreciate anything I do. I try so hard to make you happy Don. I‟m not perfect!”

“The rooms are fine Irene. Never mind.” They‟d go back to silence in the front.

It was a miserable drive down through the backwoods of Florida. The green water was oppressive. The heat made our hair frizz. Billboards shot out of the canopy of trees to proclaim that Hell Was Real.

I expected the air to snap.

Jenna kept her knees in my back to keep me in my place. Delaney called me sissy and told me to stop being a moody dork. Our dad had yet to walk the twelve steps and took a swig every now and again from the bottle of Wild Turkey he kept under the false bottom of the center console. Our mom filed her nails down with an emery board and nagged Delaney to keep up with his Ritalin, nagged Jenna to keep her hair out of her face, and nagged me to stop playing with my food and actually eat it.

The arrival in Sarasota wasn‟t much better. We stayed in the hotel our mother chose. Our father was hesitant to take us anywhere on account of the cost—“You have a pool, the ocean behind it, and a hot breakfast buffet every day.

You kids better fill up because I am not paying for lunch.” He was drinking the nips from the mini fridge.

I was only fourteen at the time but I knew those little bottles cost more than just money.

Our mother sat on the beach and covered her body in baby oil and ate

Publix dried apricots. I sat with her while Jenna and Delaney walked along the shore. It was the year of the Red Tide and there were corpses of blowfish everywhere. Delaney picked up one and chased Jenna with it. I could hear their laughter over the waves.

“Do you think dad will come down to the beach?” I asked my mother. I was burying my shins in the damp sand. I was enthralled with the low tide—the unrelenting ocean decided to back off for a while. If I ignored the dead fish and strands of seaweed like shedded witch hair, I felt all right. I was soaking up having my mother alone.

“He is at the lounge having a few cocktails, but he should be joining us soon.” I couldn‟t read her eyes behind her sunglasses, but the way she hissed cocktails through pinched cheeks and pursed lips told me he would not be joining us at all.

After three days stationed at the hotel, cabin fever was making us kids crazed. The private beach grew tiresome after us kids ended up with blistering sunburns. We were three pale haired and green eyed boiled lobsters. The hotel pool was too small and too over chlorinated and too full of old people doing laps, whiny hyperactive kids in floaties, and drunk couples making out.

Jenna and I were in one queen bed, Delaney in the other. We were watching The Shining, made all the more terrifying because we were staying in a hotel. Our hotel was not situated in the mountains, but like the Overlook it shared the same long corridors of doors. Our father, like Jack Nicholson, was a failed writer turned English teacher with a fondness for liquor. I wondered if

Jenna and Delaney were making the same parallels in their heads as I was.

Kubrick‟s soundtrack was an invitation to a panic attack.

Jenna was picking at her toes while I braided her hair. Delaney was impersonating Jack Nicholson, but he was simply too adorable with his red red face and sun white hair to be convincing when he bellowed “Here‟s Johnny!” shortly after Jack Nicholson had axed his way through the door.

I finished Jenna‟s fishtail. Shelley Duvall was screaming. I wanted to watch something else because the movie was scaring me, but I kept my mouth shut about it and looked at the “Things to Do” laminated brochure I found in the nightstand with the Gideon Bible. That‟s when I saw the Ringling Brothers Circus

Museum and the Ca d‟Zan.

“You guys, I found a place for us to go that isn‟t lame.” Delaney and Jenna didn‟t hear me, they were enthralled with the film. The wave of blood was gushing out of the elevator.

I had suggested the botanical gardens earlier, but Jenna scowled and

Delaney said: “You‟re a weirdo Maddie. Who cares about flowers?”

Well, I did. I loved flowers.

I read about John Ringling‟s former empire in the brochure—the art museum, the circus museum, and his mansion the Ca‟ D‟Zan, which had fallen

45 into disrepair but “was still worth a glance.” I made up my mind. We were going to go. I would ask my mom how to bring up the idea to our dad when we met for

“family dinner” in our parents‟ suite.

“Family dinner” consisted of dinner on TV trays and the CBS Evening

News, with maybe an hour of strained togetherness watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. Delaney would try to make me and Jenna laugh by mocking our parents or making goofy faces. Jenna would make fun of the contestants and their attire. She was really good at figuring out Wheel of Fortune puzzles. Our dad, if in a good mood, would play Wheel of Fortune along with Jenna. Our mom was a whiz at Jeopardy.

Our family dinners on vacation were a lot like our family dinners at home, except we had no dishes to do there, so there was more down time. The down time caused my stomach to kink up in knots of anxiety. Anything could happen during the down time—my dad‟s mood might sour between rounds. My mom might decide to provoke a fight. Jenna might decide to provoke my dad. Delaney might have an ADHD-induced meltdown and throw something. I was always surfing the waves of their moods and hoping to find somewhere solid to stand.

“I think we should go somewhere tomorrow since we leave for home in two days.”

Nobody looked at me.

My dad tightened his jaw and then released it. Tightened, released, tightened. My mom looked up for a second from her Word Search pad. Delaney‟s mouth fell open, then he remembered himself and closed it. Jenna elbowed me hard.

“What do you sug-chest?” My father‟s face was flushed and he reeked of beer. He had picked up a case to “cut back.” The empties were crushed and held in a dirty linen bag provided by the hotel.

“There is a circus museum, an art museum, and an old mansion we should go see. You can see all three for the same price and there is even a coupon in the brochure for half off.” I had the brochure folded in the pocket of my shorts. I dug it out, smoothed over the creases, and handed it to my father.

I sat back down on the floor with Jenna and Delaney and left my dad on the couch with my mom. It was the right time to ask—after a dinner of fried chicken from a bucket, after Wheel of Fortune and Double Jeopardy. Jenna and

Delaney were giving their rapt attention to a denture glue commercial. My mom went back to her Word Search. I kept my gaze on the blue stiff carpet. There was a pattern of gray diamonds if you looked close enough. From far away the carpet just looked blue.

My dad opened another can of Milwaukee‟s Best. I heard the crumpling of shiny paper, then felt something hit my head. I looked at the floor next to me. It was the brochure. I wanted to cry but knew better.

“That‟s what I think about a pansy ass circus museum.”

I counted my breaths. Jenna let her leg touch mine. Delaney was rocking back and forth.

“Irene your retard son is having a fit again. Get these ungrateful fuckers out of here and suck my cock.” I looked at my father and the look of fury and disgust on my face must have given me away even if I remained silent because he

47 slammed down his beer on the end table and slapped me right across the mouth with the back of his hand.

I stood up so fast I saw my father flinch. My mother put down her Word

Search and gasped. She sat there, useless and ugly with fat thighs in white shorts.

My mouth was filling with blood.

“Don‟t you look at me like that you little bitch! Get the fuck out! OUT!” He sent his saliva flying with that final OUT. I felt its impact on my too-hot and still cherry tomato red arm. I was not about to give that son of a bitch the satisfaction of seeing me cry. I darted to my left for the door and went across the hall to the suite I shared with Delaney and Jenna and locked myself in our shared bathroom where I spit out the blood pooling in my mouth and thought about killing myself.

I knew that was stupid though. It was stupid to kill myself when I only had four years left with the drunk joyless motherfucker I called “Dad.”

When I came out of the bathroom showered and calm, I found Jenna shushing Delaney, sitting next to his rocking body on the bed by the window. She was holding both of his hands tight. If she let go he would start hitting himself.

I said nothing. I waited for Jenna to blame me for Delaney‟s „fit‟ but she didn‟t. I should have let our mom ask for us, or waited until morning.

I got into the empty bed and turned on an Adam Sandler movie on the TV.

I fell asleep with it on. Jenna stayed with Delaney all night.

When I woke up the next morning the two of them were curled together,

Jenna the big spoon, her arm holding down both of Delaney‟s across his chest.

My swollen lip was stuck to the bottom row of my teeth. The tv was still on, but

Adam Sandler had departed and some really excited guy was telling the world about the power of a stain remover.

I left Delaney and Jenna to sleep and went to the pool. I squatted down in a corner of the shallow end and read all the signs that warned against swimming alone. I half expected someone stern to appear and tell me I needed a chaperone but nobody ever came.

----

“Let‟s go to this museum you asked about yesterday. You father is still asleep and won‟t be joining us. He does not feel well.” My mother took a bite of her cinnamon raisin bagel. I said nothing, I ate nothing. Delaney inhaled his waffle. Jenna drank black coffee and ate nothing but bacon.

“Meet me in the parking lot in ten minutes,” our mom said in a pinched rushed way, and left the three of us sitting at the table in the lobby.

We went to the dilapidated mansion instead of the circus and art museums. There was a problem with the air conditioning, so we missed seeing the canon and the tent poles of the Big Top, the Rubens paintings and the sculptures of men with tiny penises. Only the first floor was available for viewing, the grand marble staircase was roped off. There was a leaky roof rotting the place bit by bit. The marble terrace was crumbling. The floor-to-ceiling windows were curtained from the outside in vines of a plant I could not recognize.

“This place is crawling with ghosts. And it smells like old people,” Delaney said in a too-loud whisper that echoed.

“What an imagination you have!” our mom said, messying Delaney‟s hair.

“Let‟s have a picnic. There is a restaurant here by those big trees outside.”

We ate our panini sandwiches under the shade of a banyan tree. Its trunk reminded me of the illustrations of bone marrow in my Human Biology textbook, all stringy and dense. The canopy blotted out the sun.

“It‟s like we‟re in Narnia,” Delaney said.

“This is better than the hotel,” Jenna offered.

“This was a good idea, Maddie,” my mom said, patting me on the shoulder.

I flinched at her touch and she pretended not to notice.

----

I was standing on the balcony of the second floor of the Ca’ D’Zan, looking down at the black and white marble tile of the interior court. The skylights let in big squares of sunlight, but the lower level remained shrouded in shadow. The wallpaper was peeling, the marble of the balcony railing felt soft. It was crumbling in my hands. I saw Jenna sitting on a red couch below alone and in that instant of recognition her eyes snapped up and found me standing above.

She brought both of her hands to her neck and choked herself to gagging. Her eyes became amber snake eyes. Dead eyes.

I opened my eyes and felt transported back to the now and out of the crumbling mansion of my memory where Jenna had taunted me about her death, even in a dream. Garrison was asleep, his long body an invitation to climb.

I did.

I headed back to Jenna‟s, and left Garrison‟s still warm from sex body in our bed at 7:30 in the morning on a Saturday. I stopped at Goodwill on the way,

50 and left trash bags of my sister‟s clothes outside the double doors marked

“Donations.”

I wanted it over.

I let myself in. The sun was bright and warmer than you‟d expect in

January. Frankie and Bean greeted me at the door in a chorus of purrs. I scanned the kitchen and living room—what was left: cabinets full of mismatched dishes, the fridge covered in ironic magnets, all the damn art on the walls, half-dead houseplants, records and CD‟s.

I was going to do this alone, but I forgot boxes. I shot Erica a text—Can you bring boxes? Need some dishes? It was 8:02, and she was undoubtedly awake, work or not.

I made the short walk to her bedroom. More art. The vanity covered in perfume bottles and makeup with drawers full of who knows what. The hall closet with its ragtag towels and threadbare sheets. And oh. The bathroom. The murder of crows hanging from plastic white hangers on the shower curtain rod.

My phone vibrated in my coat pocket. I sat on the toilet seat and looked— there was Erica. And she was awake—Gotta swing by work. Already have them reserving boxes. Be there in an hour.

And she would be.

I reached down and petted Frankie. She was making a figure eight around my ankles over and over. Even without boxes, I knew I could find something productive to do while I waited for Erica to come, something more productive than sitting on the toilet petting a cat.

I stepped into Jenna‟s bedroom and hung my coat over the door. I scrolled through the limited music on my phone and decided upon moody Tori Amos.

Perfect for the occasion. “Crucify” began, louder than it should have been, probably because the tiny apartment was quiet and waiting. I put my phone on the windowsill, pulling down the purple elephant mandala tapestry Jenna had tacked over the window, letting the sunlight flood in.

The plastic drawers Jenna used for a dresser sat empty in the closet. They would be perfect for all the crap sitting on the vanity.

I pulled a drawer off its track and took it over to the vanity, the perfume bottles and jewelry box went right in. Makeup and hair brushes got chucked.

There. Easy peasy.

Tucked in the mirror was a picture. Jenna sitting on Delaney‟s lap, her arm around his neck. They were both laughing in the glow of a bonfire, their eyes heavily-lidded.

I took this picture. Delaney‟s 22nd birthday. He would kill himself just nine months later. There was my brother and sister, laughing and fucked up on

God knows what. Jenna looked at this picture every day she sat before her mirror and put on her makeup. Each time she sat before this mirror and tweezed her eyebrows until they were barely there, each time she got high and picked at her face until she bled, Jenna saw Delaney.

She saw him looking back at her every time she saw herself.

It’s been HERE—silent all these years—

Tori crooned on because she was so damn pleased to hear her own damn voice and she was a mermaid—

The sky is falling

And my chest was like a vise, tightening and tightening right up to my throat.

“The vibe,” as Erica had put it the day before, was off.

I was afraid to look down into the mirror to see my face, so I didn‟t. I was still holding this picture, why was I still holding this picture?

I threw it down on the floor, and when I stood up I came eye to eye with

Delaney‟s remains in a tiny gold urn.

I needed to find a home for those too. I could put him next to Jenna, who was sitting on a shelf behind a row of all my “M” books—Morrison, mostly, right behind The Bluest Eye and Sula, as a matter of fact, because I couldn‟t stand looking at it, at her, in a what do you know, identical gold urn—

Hold on to nothing

As fast as you can

Tori crooned on in “Pretty Good Year.” This year was a month in and so far, well. Hardly good.

I walked over and pulled off another drawer from the track of Jenna‟s makeshift dresser. Four drawers were left in her vanity. Now that the top was clear and I could see nothing but watermarks and dust overlaying the maple wood, I was free to put a plastic drawer on top. The initial impulse to dump all the contents of her vanity drawers into the plastic one was surpassed when I recognized that I would just have to deal with it later. Later, when I was struggling enough as it was to find a place for all of this stuff in my neat little world of labels and alphabetization and minimal clutter.

Top three drawers were easy—right into the trash. Packs of Marlboro

Lights (empty now). Prescription bottles, lighters, a one hitter, Lipsmackers, old receipts, condoms. Nothing I needed, nothing of worth, nothing at all.

Bottom drawer. This one was deeper, and heavy. Her journals. The top one was leather, the rest were composition books. I should have known to look for them, she had been keeping a journal all of our lives. All of her juvenile chronicles were probably still in her old bedroom at our parents‟ house in Cleveland.

At the bottom of the drawer were old concert tickets, tucked inside a document protector. The Pixies. Elliott Smith. The Beastie Boys. PJ Harvey. And in they went with the journals.

I stacked the plastic drawers on top of each other and marched outside without my coat right to my car. They fit neatly on the front bucket seat of my

Subaru.

Back inside I went, and Frankie and Bean greeted me. What the hell was I going to do with those cats? Tori was warbling from Jenna‟s bedroom, “Pretty

Good Year” was still pounding on.

Jenna‟s room stood empty, with the exception of the vanity that I was not so sure I wanted, now that I saw it in the light. The vanity was water stained and sadly tired somehow. Fuck it, to the curb it went. It was lighter than I expected it to be. I left it on the snow by the half-buried fire hydrant.

My phone was ringing when I walked back into Jenna‟s apartment. It was my mom. I clicked Ignore and browsed through my music. Creedance Clearwater

Revival was less haunting than Tori Amos, I decided. It took the length of “Hey

Tonight” to remove the art on the walls of my sister‟s old bedroom. I took the last

54 stack of postcards of Dali and Picasso paintings and left them in the pile in the living room.

And there was the shelf with Delaney‟s ashes above what used to be my sister‟s bed. A portion of what used to be his body remained in Jenna‟s bedroom.

The tangible evidence of Jenna‟s fixation with our brother was morbid and lewd to me, and I couldn‟t find a logical explanation for it—only that seeing Delaney‟s urn there gave me the creeps.

And it pissed me off. Fuck Jenna for killing herself and fuck Delaney for killing himself and fuck them both for being so wrapped up in their own suffering they couldn‟t see anything or anyone but each other in that hurricane.

I picked up the urn. Five years he had been gone. For Jenna, he was always here.

It was senseless, their deaths. I threw the urn against the wall and poof—

Delaney‟s remains were all over the carpet. A dent was left on the wall where I threw the urn. Some of him dusted my boots, gray specks on the wet from the snow brown suede.

Delaney was there with Jenna. Silent all these years.

CHAPTER IV

A BOX FULL OF DARKNESS

There used to be a Scientology church on the corner of First and Park in

Victorian Village. It was right across the street from the giant anonymous apartment building where so many of my friends had lived over the years—their apartments were disparate entities and I could see, whenever I visited there, that you could live in that apartment building for years and remain unseen.

The Scientology church was not called “a church,” when it was in possession of the Christian Scientist congregation, which must not have been all that formidable given the size of the narrow parking lot. It was called something else, something about the Christ Scientist, and its pillars and utilitarian glass double doors made it resemble a bank more than the place of worship it was.

If Scientologists even worship, that is.

The Scientology church across from the brick monolith of the apartment building had a sidewalk flanked by tall evergreens that resembled shrubs more than trees. I came to know it well, the pillars and the pathway, one night/morning at 3 am long after last call and a trip to White Castle for cheese sticks and sliders to absorb all the alcohol. Jenna and I were sitting on the steps

56 of the brick faceless building, having just safely walked Erica back home to her apartment.

Jenna was smoking a cigarette in a black tank top, the lacy strap of her black bra too loose and sliding off her shoulder. She had on two thick black leather cuffs. While the cuffs added to the grunge chic aesthetic she had mastered, their true purpose was to conceal the scars on her wrists. The newest scars.

“I don‟t know why I like that building, but I do. I‟ve never seen anyone in it and the parking lot is always empty, but there is always a light on that I find comforting. I come and sit here a lot, usually after work, or early in the morning like this, after the bars have closed.” Jenna worked second shift and nights as an

ER receptionist at the hospital just a few blocks from where we were.

I looked at the building and felt like I was living in The Secret Garden,

Jenna showing me her special place where she found a kind of sanctuary that I could not understand. I was still drunk. To me, the “Christ Scientist” etched into the building‟s façade coupled with the trees/shrubs had a labyrinth quality that made me feel lost.

I was drowning, sitting there on the stoop with my sister. We weren‟t fighting, we were sitting together in that purgatory of night creeping toward morning after spending all night drinking margaritas punctuated with shots of tequila. Salt poured on the space between thumb and forefinger, the burn down the tunnel of throat, a lime to suck afterward. I wanted to grab a hold of Jenna by the shoulders and keep her this way, close to kind, all mean-spirited snark and jagged sarcasm softened by liquor.

I was scared to lose her. I didn‟t say that though. Instead: “You‟re a weirdo.”

“You‟re a brat,” she said, and punched me in the arm.

We walked back to Jenna‟s apartment. I sat in the dark of her bedroom while she finished her last cigarette of the night, my feet up on the wall, my head at her feet, the two of us on her bed on the floor.

“Maddie, why don‟t you ever talk about Delaney?”

It had been three years since he had overdosed on purpose.

“Because he‟s gone and I can‟t bring him back and I‟m still angry with him for killing himself.”

“Not everyone can shut off their feelings like you.”

“Yeah well. You asked. I answered.”

“I miss my baby brother. I can‟t wait to die to see him again.”

“Don‟t say that you can‟t wait to die Jenna.”

“Why? It‟s my life. I can end it when I want.”

I sat up and sat on my hands that formed into fists of their own accord.

“You‟re right. You can end it when you want, and there is nothing I can do to stop you. I‟m really tired Jenna and I am too drunk to go home so please just shut up and let me sleep.” I laid down next to her and covered my face with a pillow. I knew I said the wrong thing but there was no going back.

She always did that. Shoved me so far away I always said the wrong thing and couldn‟t get back to her, shoved well past the buoy, swallowed in the undertow.

----

Work was like Zen therapy. My neat contained world in my cubicle offered unimaginable relief from the grief I carried for Jenna, silent now, after all these years.

If at first you don‟t succeed at killing yourself—try and try again. Jenna finally did.

At work, I did not think about Jenna. I checked my emails. Diligently attended meetings with my laptop, a pen behind my ear, and a composition book in the event technology failed.

Our firm would be getting a new contract. Soon I would need synonyms for sexy instead of clean—instead of copy for a soap company, I‟d be writing copy for a lingerie company‟s notorious catalogues. Their bras I would never dream of wearing, because I could not accept having my breasts spilling out of cups of such pathetic support it was laughable. And their underwear, if you could even call it that, was all cheap tawdry strings and bows. The word panties made me cringe, so my work would be cut out for me.

Not quite exquisite French lingerie, but my boss expected me to write with such enthusiasm I could convince women (and the men who hoped to rip them off to engage in sweaty guttural sex no doubt) that these underthings promised ecstasy.

But first, I had three more weeks of writing about soap. Quick-foaming hand soap. Antibacterial hand soap. Body wash. Artisanal bar soap. Shower gel.

Bubble bath.

So much soap, but never enough to keep me clean. Ever since I finished cleaning out Jenna‟s apartment, I could not stop washing my hands. I would put on hand cream only to wash my hands again because my skin felt contaminated.

At work, I only washed my hands during bathroom breaks, before and after lunch, and for every trip to the gurgling water cooler. My hands were peeling and red. They looked like I had burned them.

After washing, I would then slip into the neat world of my cubicle—a clutterless desk except for my composition book, desktop, phone, and pen. Two pictures were on my corkboard next to a list of departments and their extensions.

One was me and Garrison, at a Dave Matthews show ten years ago, faces and hair wet from the rain, I was smiling so big because his hand was on my ass and we were drunk and young and in love.

The other was the willow tree by the lake in Michigan where we spent a week every summer growing up. I took it the last year we went, its enormous wizened trunk and drapey green limbs by the blue water, the sky devoid of clouds and a blue so deep you could drown in it.

I had kissed Jenna‟s friend the night before under that tree, our mouths hot and soft and tasting of the root beer floats we had just eaten after a dinner of fish my father and Delaney caught that morning. Under that willow, roots hard under our bottoms, the lake lapped at our shins.

Summer. Her name was Summer. She was Jenna‟s best friend in high school. And since Jenna and Summer had just graduated, my parents brought

Summer along with us that summer. She teased me relentlessly, and had, before

60 the trip, taken to snapping my bra—hard—and tugging, just as hard, on my ponytail.

“Why don‟t you eat something string bean? I could snap you in two.” And she could have. She played lacrosse and her shoulders were like a rower‟s, her solid thighs imposing.

Jenna had snuck away to fuck the married man two cabins down, Summer had said, when she found me alone under the tree. I was so startled I didn‟t speak. She sat next to me, so close our bare thighs touched.

“I don‟t know what she sees in that guy. He has a gut and thinning hair,” said Summer, shaking her head. “Since she told your mom and dad the two of us were taking a walk, I had to leave the cabin.”

I wondered why she was confiding in me about this. I was not a part of the

Summer and Jenna alliance.

I thought of my sister and her way of letting men have her body, men who didn‟t give a shit about her, men she didn‟t give a shit about. I wanted to say something about it, but it, whatever it was that made Jenna Jenna, was unspeakable, even to Summer, who knew my sister best. Summer‟s skin hot on mine, the crickets‟ chorus of vespers, something like dread thrumming in my veins when I thought of Jenna—

I stopped thinking of Jenna, I stopped thinking of anything. Summer had slipped her fingers under the hem of my shorts, deftly making her way to the clit I had just discovered weeks before masturbating in the tub, and when I groaned she brought her mouth to mine and kissed me while her fingers crashed in and out of me until I came.

Then the familiar—a hard tug on my ponytail and a growl in my face—“Tell anyone and I‟ll rip out all the hair on your pretty little head.” She stood up, wiping her wet hand on the ass of her shorts, and marched back to the cabin.

We went home the next morning. Summer sat behind me, in the back row of seats in the Suburban, her knees boring into my back, her banter with Jenna as acerbic as ever while my mom droned on and on about where she wanted to stop and eat for lunch and picked fights with my dad, who, while sober for a year at that point, remained a joyless dry drunk. I could feel Summer‟s dark brown eyes burning holes in the back of my skull while Delaney snored softly on my shoulder.

Summer took off for Penn State a few weeks later.

Summer? Why had I just remembered my sole reason for taking that picture of that willow tree minutes before we left the lake was to remember what had happened the night before, Summer‟s mouth and hands and my own smell so strong I felt overwhelmed by what my sixteen year old body could do?

I used that picture as a bookmark for years. When I put it right next to the screen of my computer monitor, I figured the serene tree, the water, and the spray of wildflowers lining the path to the dock would offer some tranquility when my eyes began to burn and my vision to swarm after staring at the blinking cursor of a computer monitor for too long.

I had been in the mists of my memory for so long, sitting in a fugue at my desk, that the screensaver had kicked in—nature shots on a reel, a raindrop dripping from a leaf, a forest of trees at twilight, some exotic orange flower that

62 looked like a bug. I tapped the space bar and my desktop swam into view, clicked refresh on my work emails. 13 unread messages.

I looked at the time in the bottom right corner of my computer monitor. So much for sending out drafts to my boss before leaving. I clicked on the red X and put my computer to sleep.

I freed the picture of the willow from the clear pushpin, slipped it between the pages of my composition book, and grabbed my coat off the hook.

I was so preoccupied with the task of gathering my things, buttoning my coat and wrapping a scarf around my neck, shoving my composition book into my bag, and marching out of work that I forgot to wash my hands before leaving the building.

----

I had cleaned the entire house, fed myself a dinner of chicken salad with crackers and grapes, fed Frankie and Bean, taken a shower and watched two episodes of NCIS and Garrison still wasn‟t home. Four hours late so far, and he hadn‟t even called.

I hadn‟t reached out either in his absence. Not even a text.

More troubling than his silence was my complete indifference. I should have cared that my boyfriend was out late, and while I did wonder, and remained in a state of expectation for his arrival home, I had to admit I enjoyed having the house to myself. I didn‟t have to worry about making his dinner or asking about his day.

Bean and Frankie were spooning on the rug under the coffee table. I was trimming my cuticles. I decided to keep Jenna‟s cats. I had called Cat Welfare and

63 they were full, and the shelter made it clear both cats would be euthanized, and only after I paid a surrender fee. As if the cats were mine to surrender in the first place. Garrison had made it clear he did not approve, nor did he have the slightest hint of sympathy for the plight of Frankie and Bean.

I didn‟t even like cats, but nobody I knew could take them and leaving them to die at the shelter seemed cruel. The damn things reminded me of my sister. Like me, they were unsure what to do without Jenna to fret over.

I stretched out on the couch. Frankie stretched out on my chest and nuzzled her wet nose into the crook of my neck. Bean took the space between my knees.

We must have fallen asleep, because I woke to Garrison standing over me, tugging on my hand. A laugh track echoed from the TV, a Friends rerun. The cable box read 2:07. I let Garrison pull me up from the couch. Frankie and Bean were nowhere to be seen. I clicked off the TV, and dropped the remote harder than I meant to on the table.

Garrison flinched at the sound. He had taken off his Carhartt coat and left it on the dining room table, his work boots were covered in snow and in the middle of the floor, dripping onto the hardwood. He loomed seven inches over me at 6‟3 in his safety yellow hoodie.

He reeked of cigarettes and sour beer. “Come to bed Mad,” said Garrison, offering no explanation for coming home nearly eight hours late, stumbling over the boots he left in the middle of the floor on the way to the stair, pulling me behind him like a tugboat.

I was too tired to argue with him, to demand explanation, to even ask where he had been. I followed him up the steps to our room, and fell into bed and listened to the water run in the bathroom. I was curled up and nearly asleep when

Garrison wrapped his arm around me to grab my breast. His callused fingers freed my nipple from my camisole. I rolled over on my back. He moved his mouth to my nipples, his warm mouth on my cold skin.

His close-cut fade was too short for me to bury my hands in, but I held his head while he sucked on my nipples. I raised up my hips to greet the hard on bulging from his boxer briefs.

He raised his mouth up to my neck and bit it, hard. It hurt. That bite was going to leave a mark.

I worked his cock through the hole in his briefs and stroked it, his precum sticky on my palm. He shoved my underwear to the side, pinned my wrists down and slid into me. He was so hard and I was so tight it hurt, but I liked it just the same, and didn‟t even mind his beer breath barely disguised by mouthwash panting in my face.

Garrison seemed angry. He was digging his nails into my wrists (likely to leave bruises on the pale thin skin covering them). He pulled his cock out almost entirely, only to slam it deep into me, so hard I could feel him hit my cervix. His hipbones pierced my thighs.

It had been too long. We had barely touched each other in weeks.

He was about to come, I could feel him trembling. I was groaning deep in my throat and spread my legs wider still. I whimpered an “I love you,” but it was

65 too hard to say anything more, I was breathless and he was relentless, fucking me like he hated me, hard and without tenderness.

He moved his hands from my wrists and pulled out, taking one hand to his cock and one to my throat. He was squeezing my throat, I could hear gargling sounds as I tried to breathe, tears were rolling down my face, and then he sprayed his cum all over my stomach and my breasts and the bed.

He rolled off me with a grunt.

Garrison had never choked me before.

I snuck a glance at him. His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. I had his cum all over me and I was freezing without the covers and felt disgusting, sprayed, as I was, with his sperm.

“Garrison?”

He said nothing, rolled over on his side, and pulled the down comforter up over his naked body.

I stayed there on the bed freezing and mortified without the covers until he started snoring. It felt like hours and it could have been for all I knew. Then I rolled out of bed to wash him off me.

Garrison left wordlessly for work the next morning, punctual as ever despite a late night and an early morning.

He also left a spray of little moon bruises on both wrists, a dark purple hickey in the center of my neck the size of a plum, and hickeys on both nipples.

My labia were so tender they hurt.

I showered and combed my hair. It hung in wet waves tickling my shoulder blades. I looked long in the bathroom mirror at my naked and bruised

66 body. He had never been that rough with me before. Nibbles on the neck, holding me down, sure, but never bruises like that.

I was nauseated again that morning. God knows how long I had walked around feeling seasick without ever leaving land.

Then the familiar vise of panic.

My period was late.

----

During my lunch hour, I called to make an appointment. It would seem I was likely seven weeks pregnant, according to the friendly nurse on the line. I would go in the following week for my first appointment.

On my way to work, I had picked up a pregnancy test, a 2-liter of ginger ale, and a box of saltines. I locked myself in the bathroom and peed on a stick.

Two pink lines appeared, almost simultaneously.

I hurled up bile, since nothing was in my stomach. Washed my face and hands with too-hot water. Made sure the knot of my scarf still covered my hickey.

Then I sat in my cubicle and pounded out pieces that had been due the day before, and got a leg up on the upcoming tide of deadlines. I sipped my ginger ale.

I nibbled on my saltines.

Now that the call to my doctor‟s office was done, I lined up the contents of my lunchbox: Ritz crackers, string cheese, green grapes, baby carrots—on my desk in a line. Nothing looked good, but I hadn‟t eaten anything but saltines and my jittery hands and splitting headache (never mind my both queasy and growling stomach) demanded that I ate something.

I shot a text off to Erica—can we hang soon?

And a text to Garrison, after much deliberation. I didn‟t want him to find me cloying or a nag, or worse still, needy, but I had to know—Will you be home at your usual time tonight? I took his punctuality for granted, but after the night before I could not be so sure anymore.

I pulled out the Mary Oliver collection of poems I had been reading, and settled in to her tranquil grief:

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

Jenna‟s box full of darkness had been anything but a gift. I finished my lunch. Erica texted back—We’re long overdue.

No word from Garrison by the time my lunch hour was over. This delay caused no immediate alarm. After all, he spent his days climbing up poles to monitor power lines and make repairs. Sometimes he had to drive to cities hours away.

My work was easy and gratifying and orderly that afternoon. I absorbed myself in it and did not think about anything else. Still no reply came from

Garrison.

I had filled out my request for leave for my doctor‟s appointment the following week and I was gathering my things to go when my phone finally chirped. It was Garrison—Don’t know, have to stop in Cardington. There’s a power outage from all the snow out here. Don’t wait up.

No I love you. Or Sorry, but I will probably be late. Not even a banal How has your day been? Never mind an explanation for coming home wasted at two

AM and having sex with me so rough I had the marks to prove it.

Garrison and me, we had never been the kinky kind. We met at a shitty frat party in Athens. I was a freshman at Ohio University, majoring in English at the time. Garrison‟s buddy from high school was a “brother” of the house,

Garrison was a student at Hocking College, majoring in Construction

Management.

I was there for the free shitty beer with my dorm roommate. Drinking underage, you couldn‟t be too picky. Audrey had dumped me in the kitchen to head upstairs for likely carnal purposes with a boy, another “brother” of the house, who had invited her to the party. Despite the promise she had made at my urging to not abandon me in a house full of roofie-giving frat boys as we walked uptown from our dorm, she did just that.

I was leaning against the kitchen sink sipping rancid Nattie Light, wondering what to do with my hands, when tall, lanky Garrison ambled over in his Timberland boots and red thermal shirt. “You look just as bored as I am,” he said, leaning back against the sink, standing close enough our hips and arms touched. Well, his hips were more in line with my ribcage—

I noticed he was drinking a bottle of water. “Are you a Delta Zeta Whatever they are?” I guzzled my Nattie Light for courage and nearly choked.

“No. My buddy Chris is. He‟s that guy in the Browns jersey holding up the legs of the girl doing that kegstand.”

I followed with my gaze politely even though I didn‟t care about his buddy

Chris and cared even less about the girl doing the kegstand.

“How old are you?”

“18.” I answered before realizing that I should have lied about my age. I had just turned eighteen two weeks ago, but I didn‟t say that.

“Awww! You‟re a baby! You shouldn‟t be drinking underage.” He touched his mouth and I wondered why.

Later, he told me he was 24. We sat on the steps of the huge side porch while the party carried on. He‟d served a tour in Dubya‟s Iraq war, and went back to school, relieved he was “still right in the head” and “had all his body parts.”

The army spared him combat, his gift for wires and machinery kept him busy.

And alive.

He walked me back to my dorm after getting my number. We had an old- fashioned courtship, dinners in restaurants with fabric tablecloths, trips to the movies, walks in the park. He always paid for dinner, held the door, brought me flowers just because. All the things the magazines say are a recipe for the perfect mate. We held off on sex for two years. Garrison wanted to keep me “innocent.”

Little did Garrison know about how I achieved my first orgasm at the hands of Summer Evans, or that my senior year of high school I spent nearly every lunch in the dugout mastering blow jobs with my long-haired skater boyfriend Cory, who I had full-blown sex with every chance I got the summer before I left for college and Cory drove to California.

The sex Garrison and I had had for the past ten years had been efficient, vanilla, and steady. Missionary mostly, and cuddling, oral only if one of us was

70 feeling particularly generous. We had talked about getting married off and on.

Both of us were children of parents in long-suffering and miserable marriages, something neither of us wanted to recreate. We had talked about maybe having kids, but we were both afraid that as two damaged people we‟d just recreate the damage done to us.

What had happened the night before was not normal. Garrison was never a neck biter or nipple sucker. He was never home late and he rarely drank to excess—the son of drunks, he was always vigilant about remaining temperate.

Garrison was always even-keel and that is what I had always loved about him, what I needed from him.

I had not been entirely present in the weeks since Jenna died. Could that have been it? Was he resentful of my distance? He knew how Jenna was, my infinite sadness from losing my sister again and again. Garrison had always been steady and calming, quelling my anxiety and never wavering in being reliable and forthright—the kind of man who‟d squeeze my hand and remind me to breathe, the kind of man who‟d say: “Tell me what I can do to make it better, Maddie,” the kind of man who fixed what needed fixing and said very little but did what needed done.

He had never touched me without tenderness.

He had never given me a box full of darkness.

----

Jenna hated Garrison from the beginning: “He‟s not smart enough for you.

And the buzz cut does him no favors,” was her initial judgment, whispered to me at the kitchen counter while we were loading our plates with turkey and mashed

71 potatoes. I rolled my eyes at my sister and ignored her. I had taken him home for

Thanksgiving the year we met. My dad was impressed with his put-together demeanor and his military service. Delaney was enthused to have someone to play video games with, and my mother was pleased I had found “someone special.”

But Jenna, Jenna never warmed to Garrison. It was his fault I went into technical writing and didn‟t become a poet. It was his fault I never wanted to go to shows with her, never mind that I was more of a homebody and had no desire to go to punk shows. It was his fault I was a “stuck up bitch.” Garrison tolerated

Jenna when he had to—at Thanksgiving and Christmas or the occasional milestone. He never came along when I went anywhere with my sister, he let us be.

I wondered what Jenna would say if she were alive to know I was pregnant, that I would be having Garrison‟s baby. It seemed unlikely that she would say congratulations or fret over me, and more likely that she would raise an eyebrow, light a cigarette, and ask me if I was sure that it was what I really wanted.

I was pregnant when I saw my sister nearly dead in the ICU, kept alive by machines. I was pregnant with Garrison‟s baby the night he drove me to the hospital, the night I made a long elevator ride to the ICU and saw Jenna shrouded in a bed in stiff bleached linen, her chest rising and falling with breath provided by an intubator, the plastic on her nose like a ridiculous elephant trunk.

I was pregnant while I held my sister‟s hand and her body convulsed after they took her off the machines.

I was pregnant when I watched my sister die. I held a light in my gut in a box full of darkness.

CHAPTER V

YOU RATHER PUT ME TO SLEEP THAN SIT BY MY SIDE

“You should care more that our baby brother needs some help and not be judging him for this!” Jenna‟s face was crumpled into a splotchy red tornado of rage.

I stepped back from her kinetic body. She was coiled to strike. I shook my head and ran my tongue over my teeth before speaking. I bit my lower lip to buy some more time. And then I looked her in the face and said: “It‟s not for you to judge how much I care about Delaney. I am just stating the obvious that moving in with you Jenna is probably not in his best interest if he is trying to beat heroin.”

We were standing outside in the driveway of our parents‟ house beside the pine tree in the side yard. It was summer. I had just driven up to Cleveland with my sister from Columbus. Her car was on the fritz again. We took mine. Delaney was twenty and still living with our parents. Jenna and I were united in thinking that Delaney needed to leave our childhood home, but not where and with whom he should live.

Our brother could not live on his own. Delaney could not keep a job. He could not remember to feed himself. He was not compliant with medication to manage his ADHD and newly-diagnosed Bipolar, and nearly overdosed on heroin the week before. They released him because he claimed he was at a party and didn‟t mean to snort heroin—he said he thought it was cocaine. As though cocaine was excusable for snorting.

“You are such a bitch! Where should he go then? Do you really think

Garrison is going to let him live with you two in your new house?”

She had a point there. Garrison would not. He had even said before I left to get Jenna—“Madison, I love you but I cannot support your addict brother and you are not responsible for his well-being. He is an adult now.”

Our mom had called me first to tell me about Delaney‟s “close call” as she put it. “You can handle these things much better than your sister, you know how upset she gets about things. I really think you and Jenna should come up here and see your brother. It would put him in better spirits. Your dad is very angry right now, but he will come around.”

“He‟s always angry about something, mom.” It was true. He was. We did all we could as kids to avert being the recipient of our father‟s rage. He was angry when he drank. He was angry when he stopped drinking. He was angry we never cleaned the house to his specifications. He was angry Delaney was “touched” and angry Jenna had “no self-control” and he was angry I was “living in sin” even though he was not faintly religious.

My mom sighed emphatically. “You have to understand your father‟s position. When you have kids you want them to be independent…” her voice

75 trailed off. She sighed again. She was trying to convince me my father had a right to be angry. “Delaney will not accept responsibility for his actions. We can‟t take care of him forever you know!”

I did know, and I knew the best thing for Delaney would be to get away from the misery of living with our parents. I knew though that Jenna was hardly a model of sobriety, and had just spent two weeks in inpatient psychiatric care only two weeks before Delaney landed in the ER. Our parents didn‟t know Jenna checked herself in of her own accord because she heard voices telling her to buy a gun and shoot herself. I did though because she called and asked me to bring her the new OPI nail polish in a high gloss black shade, and a pack of Juicy Fruit to the hospital.

When I went to see her, she painted my nails and hers and said she had just read Vanna White‟s autobiography.

“Vanna White? Really? What‟s her talent? Prancing in heels and touching letters? I remember when she had to turn them.”

“No really! She‟s actually inspiring! And she crochets!”

This made me giggle. Vanna White crocheted.

“So you‟re probably wondering why I‟m here.”

“I think I have some idea.” I didn‟t want to hear the gruesome details. I didn‟t want to be a part of her game—she would tell me the truth about exactly how she wanted to hurt herself and wait for me flinch.

“I had been hearing voices for days telling me to go buy a gun and shoot myself. One is a man who whispers and the other is a woman who yells. Wanting

76 to die and thinking about how is nothing new, but the voices freaked me out

Mad.”

“That is understandable. I‟m just glad you got the help you needed to take care of yourself.”

It was chilling to see how Jenna and Delaney both spiraled down at the same time, their high tides in sync. Jenna heard voices telling her to shoot herself and a week or so later Delaney was in the ER for “accidentally” snorting too much heroin.

I had no idea what to do or say to any of them. I just felt sorry and rotten and helpless. I wasn‟t a shrink or social worker but I knew that my sister could not take care of my brother the way she wanted to because her own suffering bled through everything. I knew I couldn‟t take care of Delaney because having him in my house would just keep fresh old pain while destroying my relationship with

Garrison in the process. I knew Delaney couldn‟t stay with our parents any longer either.

“Delaney is moving in with me. End of story. We are taking him to my house tonight, Maddie.” Jenna had made up her mind. It was not up for discussion.

I pushed it anyway. “Then what Jenna? How will you take care of him and get him clean when you can‟t even take care of yourself?”

It was a valid question but I was getting no closer to Jenna, only further away. I started biting my cuticles. Jenna was pacing, her flip flops slapping her heels. “You know why Delaney is the way he is. You know why I am the way I am.

Our parents did this to us. You‟re just like our mom and dad…” her voice had that manic edge. I wondered what drugs she was on.

“I am not like our mom and dad! You are such a hateful bitch! You and

Delaney are two sick puppies. Maybe you deserve each other.” I watched Jenna‟s face break. That hurt her. Good. I was not about to let her compare me to our asshole drunk dad and enabling depressive mother. I was not in denial about the miserable state of affairs. I did not ignore the manifestation of mental illness or rugsweep drug addiction. I had a prescribed dose of Xanax for my anxiety and a physician I saw on a regular basis to manage my symptoms. I knew better than to try and self-medicate like my brother and sister.

Jenna and Delaney were sick puppies. I knew Delaney living with Jenna would send them both into a vortex of old pain. The blind leading the blind into the dark woods.

“I‟m going to go tell mom we‟re taking Delaney home with us. You should go help Delaney pack up his things.”

“I don‟t need you to tell me what to do Maddie!” She was crying. Good.

I walked inside the house. Our father was sitting at the kitchen table grading a stack of essays, his glasses slung low on his nose. He worked as an adjunct at the community college during summers. I noticed his hair was thinning to such a degree he had a pink bald spot.

“We‟re going to take Delaney home with us.”

My mother stepped out of the kitchen and wiped her hands on her apron.

She was baking a carrot cake even though we all told her we weren‟t hungry. She

78 had gained more weight since I saw her last and her red hair had gray roots at least an inch thick. “What do you think Ron?”

My father looked up from the paper he was grading. He looked at me when he answered my mother: “I think that he better get out of this house before I throw him out.” His blue eyes were yellowed and bloodshot.

“Oh Ron.” My mother shook her head. My father went back to grading. I stepped backward from the kitchen table.

They were useless and full of shit.

Delaney had to get out of there. He had to get away from our dad who had stopped beating him years ago but found new ways to humiliate him by calling him a retard or highlighting his latest failings whenever he brought a girl home.

Our brother had to get away from our mother who fawned and enabled and infantilized, who washed his clothes and folded them and put them away, who reminded him to brush his teeth and floss.

“Well I am going to go wait in the car. Jenna is going to help Delaney gather his things. See ya.”

“We love you Maddie!” I looked back and nodded at my mom. She always did that—spoke for my father, who most often said nothing.

“You two are my heroes!” Delaney said from my backseat. I looked at him through my rearview. He was wearing reflective aviators and I could see my eyes reflected back in the lenses of his glasses in the mirror. My mascara was smudged.

“You mean I‟m your hero. You would still be with mom and dad if you weren‟t coming to live with me,” said Jenna from the passenger seat. She had

79 kicked off her flip flops and put her feet on my dash, the red polish peeling on her toenails.

“Yeah well your hoopdie would have never made it up 71 without Maddie sis.”

Jenna sighed. Lit a cigarette even though she knew I hated it when she smoked in my car.

“I‟m going to take a nap. Don‟t fight.” Delaney said, and stretched across the backseat and rested his head on the back of my headrest.

We didn‟t fight because we didn‟t speak. Delaney slept. Jenna smoked six cigarettes. I counted the butts she let fly through the crack in the window, watched the sparks hit the tar in my passenger rearview. I put on a Breeders CD because we both liked the band and we even sang “Divine Hammer” together:

I'm just looking for a faith Waiting to be followed It disappears this near You're the rod I'm water I'm just looking for one divine hammer loud enough to wake Delaney but he was snowed and numb under the heroin avalanche. His hair tickled the back of my neck through the hole in the headrest.

I drove them to Jenna‟s apartment, the end unit of a brick row house, and helped Jenna unload my trunk full of Delaney‟s stuff—his guitar, a suitcase, a backpack, his pair of black Chucks that had seen better days—and put them on her porch. Jenna sat on her stoop and lit a cigarette. I woke up Delaney and told him he was home.

He gave me a bear hug. “Don‟t worry about us Maddie. We‟ll be just fine.”

I nodded at Jenna, she lifted her chin in response. Delaney sat next to her on the stoop and rested his elbows on his knees.

I wished we were a family who said “I love you” but we weren‟t.

----

Jenna and Delaney lived together a little over a year in her row house. He couldn‟t keep a job and Jenna could barely pay her rent. Jenna would call and list the latest offenses of our little brother—“Delly is such a mess Maddie! He eats all my food and brings home loser girls he picks up from god knows where and he quit his job at the record store because he said he needed time to make his own music instead of selling CD‟s and vinyl for shitty bands…”

It was always like that, Jenna breathless by the end of her litany, the frustration and fear in her voice all too palpable for me. “Jenna, you have to let

Delaney be an adult. And that means accepting consequences for his decisions.

You can‟t afford to take care of him, and I‟m not just talking about money.”

“I don‟t know why I told you anything at all. You are so judgmental!”

“I‟m just trying to help you find solutions because it sounds like Delaney living with you is not working out. You can‟t take care of him forever Jenna.”

“Someone has to!”

“He‟s not a baby. You need to tell him to move out.”

“And go where? Back to Cleveland?”

“Well maybe it would be motivating to live with our parents again.” I didn‟t believe that, but I hoped that it would be a kick in the ass Delaney needed to grow up—get a job, get an apartment, get some motivation to do something besides get high and play his guitar.

“I cannot believe you! Do you really think Delaney deserves to be treated like shit all the time by our dad and talked down to all the time by our mom?”

“I don‟t want Delaney to be treated like shit Jenna. But he‟s too comfortable living with you. You baby him.”

“Forget I said anything at all, Maddie. Just forget it.” And then she‟d just hang up on me, no “goodbye” or “I have to go” or even a polite change of subject.

It took Jenna coming home from work one October morning to find

Delaney strung out on her couch with a needle still in his arm for her to finally kick him out.

“You‟re right. As usual. Can you come pick up Delaney and take him to mom and dad‟s? I already called mom and she said dad was fishing this weekend so it would be a good time for Del to come back home. I have to work third shift tonight at the hospital and I worked last night.”

“Jenna, breathe. Have you been to bed yet?” She had called me at 2:30 in the afternoon, meaning she had gotten home from work at eight in the morning and should have been sleeping.

“No. Delaney is outside on the porch grinding his teeth and smoking all my cigarettes.”

“Do you think I should take him to a hospital?”

“No, they‟d just put him in rehab and make it worse.”

“Maybe that‟s what he needs.” Why was rehab such a dirty word?

“Please Maddie, just come get him and take him to our mom. I feel so sick and I can‟t sleep. He is so mad at me right now!”

“Take a hot shower and go to bed Jenna. I‟ll take care of it. You don‟t need to come home from work and see our brother out of his mind on drugs.”

I left work early and drove to Jenna‟s. Delaney was sitting on her porch, grinding his teeth, smoking a cigarette. Just as Jenna said he was. He had on a pair of dirty gray corduroy pants and a white Bob Marley tee shirt with several days of stains on it, his hair a knotted nimbus. His eyes were hidden behind his aviators. I saw myself in the lenses, my own eyes hidden behind a pair of tortoise wayfarers.

“Hey Delaney. I‟m going to take you home.” I stopped on the bottom stoop. I wasn‟t sure how to approach him.

“Yeah Jenna has had enough of my shit I guess.” He sounded like he was speaking in slow mo.

I folded my arms across my chest. “Delaney do you want to get help?” I already knew the answer but asked anyhow.

He dropped his still-lit cigarette and left it burning on the cement of the porch.

“You are helping me now sis. Let‟s go before Jenna comes out here and starts screaming at me again.” Delaney‟s voice quivered as though he were cold.

“What about your stuff?” He had nothing with him, he wasn‟t even wearing shoes.

“Jenna can sell whatever she can. I even left her with some of the good stuff.” He smiled, his teeth yellow and his gums too red.

The “good stuff” meant drugs. Meant Jenna was on them too. Delaney just gutted me and was too fucked up to realize it.

He gave me a box full of darkness, a whole body ache.

----

Delaney went into the dark woods during a quiet snowfall in early

February. He went to the place he rehearsed with his mediocre metal band—a loft space in an old brick building with a busted clock tower that always read 7:11-- took a handful of pills and swallowed them down with Jack Daniels. He was three months shy of his 23rd birthday.

One of his bandmates whose name I can‟t remember, or maybe I don‟t want to, said he found him with Jenna‟s picture in his hand. Delaney wrote the lyrics of Katatonia‟s “Sweet Nurse” on the wall in permanent marker. That‟s how he was found—drowned under the wave of a self-inflicted overdose, Jenna in his hand, lyrics on the wall for a swan song, Jenna his sweet nurse, Delaney slipped away when he couldn‟t keep her.

----

I last saw my sister in a brown tiled room, her bed raised to half-sitting, her body shrouded in white bleached Economy linen, dead on arrival but resuscitated, alive only for the intrusion of the plastic tube taped to her face that filled her lungs with air.

It would be best to remove Jenna from all life-sustaining measures, the doctor said. “There is no brain activity.”

My parents had arrived to the hospital by then. My mother was wearing a

Christmas-themed turtleneck, a print of little reindeers. My father was red-faced and tight-lipped and asked no questions. “You stay with Jenna. I will call the family.”

„The family.‟ He meant his brother and sister, our mother‟s sister. Both sets of grandparents were dead by then. That‟s what I was thinking—I was tallying up the dead, the blackened limbs of my family tree. I wondered why „the family‟ mattered so much to my father then—when his wife and daughter were standing right in front of him. He made the decision to keep Jenna on life support so all of our relatives could “say goodbye.”

They wanted to say goodbye to a husk.

I said goodbye one more time to her earthly body before it was burned.

She was off the drips and convulsing, her body ricocheting from one gigantic hiccup over and over. I stood at her bedside a minute, maybe two, and then I slipped out of the ICU and ran down the 11 flights of stairs to the first level and waited until I got outside to the courtyard by the sleeping fountain to cry in the cold.

I sat on the side of the fountain on top of the snow and called Garrison to come get me. I kept calling until he picked up, making it all the way to his voicemail five times before he answered.

“Madison where are you? Nobody saw you leave.” He was still upstairs in the waiting room with my cousins and aunt and dad.

“Outside. Take me home. I can‟t go back upstairs.” I started sobbing then, there in the snow.

“I‟m coming.”

Garrison drove us back home and we sat in the car in the garage while I sobbed into his neck and knew my sister was slipping away from me forever.

----

When I drove home from work the day I took a pregnancy test and discovered I was pregnant and had been pregnant when I saw my sister die I drove with the window down despite the snow. It was February. A week after the anniversary of Delaney‟s death, nearly three weeks since Jenna died, I was driving home from work in the snow very much alive and pregnant.

It was all too ridiculous to comprehend. The snowy pure air made the constant nausea simmer down to something bearable. Garrison had said to not wait up for him, but Erica had promised to come over for dinner.

Nobody knew about the baby blooming in my uterus but me.

----

“You‟re keeping these cats huh?” Erica said as Frankie, more sociable than the elusive Bean, jumped on her lap as soon as she sat down on the couch. Bean kept watch from his perch on the mantle over the fireplace.

“For now. Cat Welfare has no room and the humane society said I can pay a surrender fee and they‟ll put both of them down because they‟re at capacity for cats right now. I don‟t have it in me to pay someone to kill my sister‟s cats, you know?” Frankie‟s black fur melded with Erica‟s black jeans.

Erica nodded, gave Frankie a good scratch under the chin, then gently put her down on the floor. Frankie joined Bean on the opposite end of the mantle,

Jenna‟s cats bookends.

“So how are you doing?” said Erica, falling back against my couch, kicking her feet in mismatched socks up on the coffee table. One sock was brown argyle, the other navy and white stripes. Her dreads were tucked under a slouchy olive cap.

“Let me get food ordered before I get into it. Pizza or Chinese?” I had both numbers already saved in my contacts.

“Chinese.”

I called for delivery from Eat Rice, made a pot of jasmine tea for us, and clicked on HGTV. We watched a couple with nine kids look for a place big enough to house their brood in Italy, the two of us wondering how the woman stayed so thin after housing so many children in her uterus.

“I‟m surprised her uterus didn‟t prolapse after all them kids!” Erica cackled and slapped the brown throw pillow that sat between us on the couch.

I turned my body toward her. I had to tell her. “Erica—“

Erica stopped laughing and looked at me over her glasses, her brown eyes so dark the pupils were almost indistinguishable from the irises.

The doorbell rang. “That‟s our food.” I didn‟t bother getting plates. Erica ate her chicken fried rice with chopsticks, I slurped all the broth from my wonton soup from the plastic bowl, leaving a pile of dumpling corpses speckled with chive confetti at the bottom and sat it on the coffee table.

The couple with nine kids finally decided on the budget-friendly place in town despite the hill.

“I haven‟t been feeling well for the past several weeks. I thought I was coming down with something. I‟ve been nauseated for weeks, Erica.”

Erica didn‟t look at me. She sat her chicken fried rice down on the table and picked up her tea cup. She took a sip, scratched her head, picked up her food again.

“I realized my period was late and picked up a pregnancy test on my way to work today.”

“And?”

“I‟m pregnant.” I drew my knees up under my chin. Another show was on, a show dedicated to transforming dingy rooms into designer dreams.

“Does Garrison know?” Erica picked up the remote and clicked off the tv.

I shook my head. “I just found out this morning at work.”

Erica put her food down on the table next to my brothless bowl of wonton, took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Well girl I am here to support whatever decision you make, you know that. Can I be real with you though?”

“Please be real.” I half-laughed. She was always real. When Erica asked if she could be real she meant she was about to say what she had to say whether or not I liked it or not and she was going to ask questions she expected me to answer. I shoved up the sleeves of my sweater to my elbows, let my legs be free of my chin and lean easy against the arm of the couch.

Erica squeezed my arm, the cool metal of her rings on the underside.

“Were you trying to get pregnant?”

“Hell no!” I brought my feet to the floor.

“Do you want to have this baby?” The timbre of her voice softened and fell a few decibels. Erica was loud and throaty-voiced but that question sounded like it came from a different voiced person. She pulled off her hat and let the cords of her hair free, put her glasses back on.

“I don‟t know. But I made an appointment with my doctor. I‟m only seven weeks.”

“When are you going to tell Garrison?”

“Tonight when he gets home.” If he got home.

“What happened to your birth control girl? I know we‟re grown ass women who know how this stuff works.” She made a clucking sound and went back to her chicken fried rice after adding a packet of soy sauce to it.

I took up my teacup and laughed, really laughed. The „grown ass women who know how this stuff works‟ bit did me in. “Good question. Can‟t wait to ask my doctor!”

“Seriously though.”

“I‟ve taken my pill every single morning after I brush my teeth as I have for years. I don‟t fuckin know!” I swallowed down the last of my tea. I needed to make more, but something easier on my belly, like chamomile or lavender.

Erica gave me a look of vague disbelief.

“I haven‟t been on antibiotics, I‟ve not skipped a pill, I don‟t know how I am but I am.” Pregnant.

“So what you gonna do?”

“Tell Garrison when he gets home and go from there. We‟ve talked about kids and maybe having them but it was not something we planned.” I didn‟t have it in me to tell Erica I was afraid to tell him. I didn‟t have it in me to tell her he came home late and drunk and fucked me without love and like I was nobody. I didn‟t have it in me to tell her I can‟t have an abortion because it feels like a careless waste of life after my sister just killed herself.

“Fair enough,” Erica said, then turned the TV back on to interior design transformations. A widowed woman needed a new bedroom after caring for her

89 dying husband in the old one. The designer was going for “comforting” colors and fabric, as though you could fluff death right out of the pillows, quiet grief with recessed lighting, and provide solace in pale blue paint.

CHAPTER VI

I‟M JUST LOOKING FOR ONE DIVINE HAMMER

Garrison texted at 8:30, just minutes after Erica had left: Boss is putting me up in a Holiday Inn in Marion. The good news is after I finish up the job I’m off for three days. I should be home by the time you get off work tomorrow.

Love you Mad.

I wanted a call but didn‟t want to ask him to make one or do it myself. His boss had never put him up in a hotel before without advance notice. But I was tired, my body was so tired, and I just wanted to sleep.

Ditto I told him through text after tucking in, leaving my phone beside me in bed, the weight of the small phone too much to move.

It’s twilight. Low on the horizon, a hot pink sliver of sunset casts a long shimmer across the surface of the lake. Where is my sister? I am trying to find her. I scan the cluster of cabins beyond the edge of my peripheral vision, past the giant oak with the tire swing, down the gentle slope to the shore, a dirt path lined with black eyed susans and orange coneflowers and chicory, there is the willow waiting by the water and under the arc of limbs is a woman. Jenna? No. Her hair is dark, she turns to face me, hearing the slap-slap-slap of my flip flops in the wet grass. Summer, it’s Summer. “Madison,” she says, but I walk past her to the dock, where I see Jenna, sitting with her feet in the water. Jenna stands up and turns to face me and I notice her wrists they’re bleeding blood is all over the weathered wood her wrists are raining blood and her hair is impossibly long well past her waist the wind picks up the sliver of sun is gone

“Jenna what have you done” I whisper willing my feet forward to face my waiting sister her green green eyes incandescent like a cat’s I try to grab her arms but her limbs are too slippery from the blood “Wanna see” she smiles then her teeth black and rotten turns her back to me and dives into the water “Madison! Don’t go in after her!” Summer’s voice, closer now, hoarse from screaming she’s running toward me barefoot I dive into the water after my sister the water is cold dark deep and impossibly clear and then I see tendrils of white hair swimming into view Jenna it’s Jenna my sister— you’re the rod I’m water I’m just looking for one divine hammer

“Jenna.” My voice was hoarse from a throat thick with sleep, my eyes were shut, I was flat on my back in what felt like my bed. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere in the house.

“Open your eyes.”

My sister‟s voice jolted me up and out of half-sleep. Jenna was sitting cross legged at the foot of my bed, biting her nails like she always did. “You‟re forgetting something,” she said.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

“The basement. Look in the basement.”

The alarm was beeping. I sat up spooked. I was just awake, was I not?

Sitting up in bed, Jenna was there at the foot of my bed, telling me I was forgetting something in the basement, she was biting her nails and wearing a black sweater with little pearl buttons lining the vee, her hair fell free down her back.

Jenna sitting at the foot of my bed would have been probable if she weren‟t dead.

I swore I was awake, but as my eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness and a warm sleep slowly faded from my body I came to see that I had been still asleep, waking up from a dream in a dream. It was trippy gruesome shit, a strange way to begin the day.

I was forgetting something in the basement. The basement was where I put all of her things I didn‟t know what to do with—Jenna‟s paintings, Frida

Kahlo prints with threads along the wood frame of the stretched canvas, a box of glass woodland animals, a tangle of necklaces in a jewelry box, a stack of CD‟s and records, her journals. I didn‟t forget. I just didn‟t know what to do with it.

When I came home from work, Garrison‟s truck was parked in the driveway, a sight that made my heart drop into my stomach. I let myself in the unlocked door and heard Johnny Cash in the kitchen and the sound of dishes clamoring in the sink. I slipped out of my boots and coat and scarf and made my way back to the kitchen. I walked up behind Garrison standing at the sink, his hands in the water, and buried my face in between his shoulder blades, my arms around his muscular chest. “You‟re home.”

He dropped the saucepan he was scrubbing, dried his hands on a towel, and turned to face me. It was like he had aged ten years in two days, his eyes were in a nest of lines. He took he callused hands and brought them to my face, rubbing his thumb across the still-fading hickey on my neck. “I‟m so sorry about the other night. I went with Tim to the bar after work. His wife left and took their

93 kids and won‟t tell him where they are. He was a mess. My phone died so I didn‟t call. I was wasted and stupid and drove home. When I saw you sleeping on the couch I was so relieved and when I came to bed I needed to have you.” Then he kissed me, hard.

I stepped back. I was about to tear into him for mauling me like I was nothing more than a cum dumpster, that we have been together too long for him to start pulling shit like this on me now. “Garrison—“

“Shhh.” He put his hand over my mouth. “Shhh. Not now. I need to make this up to you.” He kissed me again, unbuttoning his flannel shirt I wore to work, slipping it off my shoulders, letting it fall to the floor. He yanked down my leggings and tugged my underwear to my knees, grabbed my hips and made light work of lifting my body to the counter. Garrison kneeled down, his hands were at my hips, nails digging into my skin, and buried his face between my legs like a starving dog.

He was relentless, his tongue lapping at my slit, his teeth grazing my labia, and finally making their way to my clit, nibbling ferociously until I was trembling, ass damp from my own wetness. And he wouldn‟t stop, my hips were bucking forward, my head against the cabinet, my hands gripped the counter‟s edge. I was trying to swim up out of the delirium of my orgasm when I came again, a gush this time.

He wiped his face on my inner thighs and stood. He looked at me nakedly and would not move away from where I sat perched on the counter in my bra, panting like a dog. Garrison stepped forward into the space between my legs and pulled me in tight, my face smashed against his neck, his adam‟s apple just under

94 my mouth. He groaned in my ear and pressed himself against me but he had the dignity to keep his dick in his pants and he held me, his heart galloping like mine.

Johnny and June were singing “Jackson”--

When I breeze into that city People gonna stoop and bow All them women gonna make me Teach 'em what they don't know how

I mean if he was going to go this far he might as well finish the job so I told him so by scooting my hips forward and wrapping my legs around him but he would have none of it. “No. I made you dinner. Manicotti. It‟s getting cold on the table.” Garrison lifted me down off the counter, his big hands gripping my ribs like a sandwich. He leaned down and yanked up my pants for me, handed me the red flannel from the floor, pulled me like a tugboat to the dinner table.

Frankie and Bean were bookends in the bay window by the table with a jungle of houseplants between them. I sat across from Garrison, the rectangle of a table between us, a deep bowl heavy with manicotti heavy with ricotta in front of each of us. “I can‟t eat that much you know,” I said.

“You could try.” Garrison took a long sip from his wineglass. He could have smashed that glass single-handedly if he really wanted.

I tried to eat but he was heavy-handed with the garlic and the smell was giving me a headache. We talked about our jobs, complaining about our impossible bosses and impending deadlines and insane coworkers. I told him I would stop writing copy about soap soon and turn my talents to describing lingerie and underwear. I did not tell him I was pregnant. He told me he wanted to start his own business as an independent contractor. He did not tell me

95 anything about his staying overnight for work the night before in Marion. I didn‟t touch my wine and he didn‟t say anything about it, just took over my glass after he polished off his.

“I‟ll clean up. Find us a movie.”

I did—Bruce Willis in the Fifth Element. Garrison stretched out on the wraparound couch, putting his head in my lap. He fell asleep within minutes. I watched the movie in its entirety, commercials and all, Bruce first saving the divine being with orange hair, then she saves him and all of humanity, the weight of Garrison‟s head on my thighs. When the credits rolled, I nudged him awake.

He left a quarter-sized spot of drool on my leg, and he was still asleep pretty much as he made his way up the stairs to our bedroom, only awake enough to transfer his sleeping body to another place. While I brushed my teeth and flossed I thought I have to tell him about the baby, but by the time I finished flossing my teeth and rinsing my mouth I made up my mind to wait.

It wasn‟t a baby. An embryo. Not even a fetus. Maybe I wasn‟t even pregnant, maybe my chemically-induced period just failed to come this month. A buildup of synthetic hormones in my system delaying the blood and mimicking pregnancy, giving me all the symptoms. I would wait until I went to the doctor, until I was sure.

Garrison slept, his arm already stretched out to my side of the bed, waiting for me to be the little spoon.

----

A week later I was sure.

I was pregnant. I had empirical evidence—a urine test that said yes, blood tests that would later say yes, and an ultrasound that confirmed the presence of a baby growing in my uterus.

My physician said in a smushed way: “We are going to do an ultrasound today to confirm this pregnancy because when taken correctly oral contraceptives have an almost nonexistent fail rate.” Despite my assurances to Dr. Lee about taking my birth control every single morning after brushing my teeth, she tucked a strand of errant hair behind her ear and said: “Ultrasound then. Two doors down.”

Two doors down I stripped off my pants and underwear and in bustled Dr.

Lee, snapping on gloves and telling me to scoot my „bottom‟ to the edge of the table. She put my feet in the stirrups gentler than her bristling and efficient manner called for, but was all business when she shoved a plastic glove covered wand up my vagina. Dr. Lee made clucking sounds while hitting buttons on her keyboard with her free hand, the other probing for signs of life.

“Well Madison,” her enunciation making the D in my name silent, “would you like to see your baby?”

She turned the screen to show me. My “baby” looked like a kidney bean with a round little head. I saw the sesame seed that must have been his heart blinking like a cursor on a blank computer screen. I said nothing.

It was too enormous to understand.

“Would you like to hear the heartbeat?”

I nodded in agreement and then the whole cold little room filled with the urgent drumming sound, so fast I couldn‟t keep up with the counts.

“You‟re about 8 weeks along now. Due September 24th.”

“But my birth control—“

Dr. Lee was busy printing images from the ultrasound. She handed me one that said HI MOM! and took my hand, helping me to sit upright.

I eased my feet out of the stirrups and leveled with Dr. Lee—“I don‟t understand how this happened. I am religious about taking my birth control.” I was looking down at the fuzzy ultrasound, still incredulous and numb.

Dr. Lee was squirting foamy hand sanitizer into her small palms. “Well these things do happen. Oral contraceptives have a 9% failure rate. Perhaps you missed a day or took the dose at a later time than usual. You are very much pregnant.”

What a funny way to word it, „very much pregnant,‟ and the „these things do happen‟ stuck in my craw. This thing happened to me.

She put her hands in the pockets of her cardigan. I noticed the tasteful pearls in her neat little ears. “Do you have any questions?”

I had a thousand questions. How was I pregnant, how was I the nine percent, how would I tell Garrison? How could I ready myself for a seismic shift set to arrive in seven months? Would I even allow it to happen? I had options but the only one that seemed like a sound whole decision was to let it come to be, to let the life in me be.

I sighed. Dr. Lee waited. “Yes—can I keep taking my anxiety medicine?”

While I didn‟t take it every day, just knowing I had Xanax at the ready should I be seized with fear or panic kept me calm—even when I wasn‟t calm, I had the power to make myself be with the help of a pill.

Dr. Lee furrowed her brow. This was a question she should have expected since she‟s been my doctor for nearly a decade. “I think there is greater risk to you and your baby if you remain untreated for your anxiety disorder.” She reached in her pocket and scribbled something on a pad and handed me the slip. “Instead of taking medicine when anxiety strikes, take a pill every day. This is the lowest dose available. I want you back in three weeks. You will have closer monitoring through ultrasounds to make sure the baby is developing properly, but it should be fine.”

It would be fine, it would.

----

It wasn‟t.

Even the easy intimacy of nearly twelve years with someone can dissolve because of a cluster of cells multiplying by the day.

“I really don‟t want to have kids. If you do, you should leave me now,”

Garrison had said when I hit around 25 and my college friends started having babies.

“I don‟t want kids. I‟m not leaving you.”

We had talked about kids again off and on, always when a couple we knew were venturing into the adventure of parenthood, and we would look at each other with relief that it wasn‟t us giving up our ability to sleep in on the weekend or spontaneously hop a plane to Cozumel or Jamaica or Grand Cayman when the

Ohio winter dragged into April. There was something deliciously selfish about deliberately remaining child free that I cherished in our relationship.

Besides, the two of us—both children of alcoholics—made up our minds to not have kids and do to our kids what was done to us.

I dreaded telling him, but there was no more waiting now that I had been to the doctor and had the proof of life held in a grainy ultrasound image.

The night I screwed my courage to the sticking place I left Garrison downstairs on the Xbox. I didn‟t know I would tell him the same day the pregnancy was confirmed by Dr. Lee, but I did. I made the trip up the creaky hardwood steps accompanied by Frankie and Bean. I brushed my teeth and settled in under our flannel sheets with Sue Grafton‟s T is for Trespass.

I was on page 80 by the time I heard Garrison coming up. I made a tiny dog ear to mark my place, placed my book on my bedside table, and clicked off the lamp. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. I listened to the quickfire way he brushed his teeth, the smooth sound of his bare feet shuffling on the hardwood floors. He settled in beside me and pulled my body against his.

I waited for him to start snoring, audible proof he was asleep. I needed to hear him sleep before I could fall asleep myself. He didn‟t start snoring though.

“I‟m pregnant.”

“What?”

I cleared my throat and made a concerted effort to raise my voice an octave. “My birth control failed. You know I take it every morning. I‟m pregnant.”

I had even kept taking my pill after a positive pregnancy test until I had confirmation from my doctor.

“How long have you known?”

“A week. I had an ultrasound today. I heard the heartbeat.”

100

Garrison says nothing for what feels like a long time. It was a long time—I watched six, seven, eight, twelve minutes pass on the alarm clock.

“I don‟t know what to say,” said Garrison, his throat sounded full of grit.

The twelve minute lapse in response made that evident. I buried my face in the cave of his armpit. “Do you want to have this baby with me and be a Dad?”

His deodorant was struggling to keep his more sharp sweat at bay. It wasn‟t an unpleasant smell, his body.

“I don‟t know Madison. I don‟t know.” He was talking into my hair. His breath was hot on my scalp.

We stayed in silence a while longer, his arm for a pillow, his mouth in my hair. I heard the house settle around us, the snow falling on the tin roof of the porch, Garrison‟s heart.

He freed his arm from under me, kicked off the down comforter, and got out of bed. “I‟m going to go sleep on the couch,” Garrison said. I watched his back retreat in the dark, heard him gallop down the stairs.

It would be fine, Dr. Lee said.

It wasn‟t.

----

I woke up to the sound of the shower. I was not going to let Garrison off easy for leaving me to sleep alone all night after I told him about the baby.

I did my business on the toilet, and then sat in my underwear with the lid down until Garrison finished his shower.

101

He pulled the world map shower curtain back and blindly reached for his towel. He dried his face and opened his eyes, flinched like he had been hit. “You scared me.”

“How‟d you sleep?” I asked.

“Terribly.”

I watched Garrison dry himself in his efficient quick way, the sight of his naked body stirring up reservoirs of want I ignored. “Poor baby.”

He wrapped his towel around his hips and stepped out of the shower, his feet leaving wet imprints on the rug. I tucked my knees under my chin to avoid being stepped on.

Garrison said nothing, stepped forward to the sink, and wiped the steam from the mirror with his bare hand. I hated it when he did that, inevitably it left streaks. He looked at himself in the mirror, running a hand over his stubble, and decided it was not worth the effort to shave.

It was Saturday, after all.

“Garrison…”

He said nothing. I brought my feet to the gray rug on the floor still damp in the spots where Garrison stood. I looked at my dry cracked hands on my pale thighs. I needed to stop washing my hands so much. My veins were blue and thick just under the skin. I glanced down at my bare toenails. Anywhere but his face. The bathroom was full of steam and the man smell of his soap.

He opened the medicine cabinet, put on deodorant.

“Are you going to talk to me?”

“About what.” He didn‟t even bother to lilt his voice to indicate a question.

102

This stonewalling bullshit was too much.

“About what I told you last night.”

“Oh that.” He closed the medicine cabinet, squirted some toothpaste on his toothbrush, and vigorously began the task of scrubbing away his morning breath.

I waited, running my tongue over my own unbrushed teeth, a layer of sleep plaque like sweaters on my teeth.

Garrison rinsed out his mouth. Ran his fingers through his short strawberry hair. He hung his towel on the rack next to the door. This made me proud—he usually just left his towel hanging on the doorknob where it never dried properly, it just hung there to collect mildew.

He turned his body toward me, his naked body in full view, the length and breadth of it overwhelming in our too-small bathroom. He clenched and unclenched his jaw.

I kept my eyes on his even though his face was like stone and I wanted to look away.

And so, evidently, was his penis, rising first to half mast, then fully raised, his head stopping somewhere just above his belly button. He stepped forward.

Even with my face turned up, his erection was all I could see in focus. I was trapped on the toilet between the sink and the shower and my only way out was forward, where he stood, blocking my exit with his body.

“Sure, we can talk. After you suck my cock.” He sounded condescending and placating and it pissed me off.

103

I jerked my head back to find his face. “No. Not until you talk to me.” I intended to sound commanding and no-nonsense, but I was disgusted to hear the sob in my voice.

Garrison‟s face did not break. He locked his jaw tight and raised his hand from his side. I flinched in expectation of being hit and watched his face break into something like tenderness, but he was not feeling tender enough because he took that hand and grabbed my hair, using his hair-free hand to guide his cock into my mouth. he was choking me with it and gripping my hair so tight it felt like he was pulling it out and up from the roots like carrots from the ground I was sobbing and gurgling snot all over him forced to swallow my own snot because he was relentless bringing my head down and back over and over with a fist full of my hair he took his other hand and tugged my camisole down so hard I heard the lace strap rip took hold of my breast and squeezed it like a lemon and he was so quiet so eerily quiet except for his breath coming out of his nostrils like a steam engine his lips in a long flat line I had my palms tucked under my thighs I closed my eyes and squeezed my lids shut tight until I saw a gray tornado I would have to settle in for the ride until he came

“Open your eyes Madison.”

I was counting the number of times I felt the tip of his cock ram the back of my throat. I was up to 33, 34, 35. Why wasn‟t he coming?

“Open your eyes Madison.”

40, 41, 42.

“Open your fucking eyes!” Garrison yanked my head off his body.

104

I was coughing and gagging and crying. I felt myself float up and out of my body. I opened my eyes.

“Good. Now keep them open and finish.”

I hated him. I hated him then. This was not the man I had loved for twelve years. This is the drunk bastard who bit me all over just a week ago in the middle of the night.

I kept my eyes open. His fist had released some of my hair but with the way he was fucking my mouth I knew I would be walking around with a throat so sore it would feel like tonsillitis by the time he was through.

I couldn‟t count with my eyes open. He was biting his lower lip now, he was getting close, putting some of the weight of his legs on me, slowing down his thrusts.

I was bracing myself for a spray of his sickening sweet and sour sperm. I had already swallowed enough of my own snot to feel queasy and his cum would not help calm the storm in my stomach.

He squeezed his eyes shut and started panting, freeing his lips from the long frown. Closer, with both his hands gripping my shoulders. I felt his whole body tighten and then he let out a gut-deep groan. I felt a surge of something like love seeing him so bare, giving himself over to pleasure.

“Yes, swallow it Madison. You swallow it,” he said through gritted teeth, then he collapsed on my chest, his sharp knees puncturing my belly and landing on my thighs, smashing my palms to the toilet seat, his hands in my hair again, filling my mouth with his want. He rose, unsteady, put one hand on the sink and one hand on my shoulder for balance.

105

It gave me some satisfaction to see him trembling, face flushed and beaded with sweat. I freed my hands from the prison of my thighs and wiped the tears from my face. I unrolled some toilet paper, folded it into a neat square and blew my nose. I felt like I had swallowed a gallon of raw eggs. I pulled my torn camisole over my breasts, but the straps were ripped and it was useless. I smoothed over my hair, horrified to see that Garrison did rip up some of my hair from the roots. A small handful in fact. I rolled up the hair and put it in the trash.

I looked up at Garrison, who had been standing there all the while, witness to my futile attempts to tidy myself up into something neat and controlled and containable, his hands on his hips, his cock still at half-mast, his blue eyes and freckled flushed face. He looked like a man cornered but he was the one cornering me.

I covered my face with my hands and cried.

I heard his bones crack as he fell to the floor, his knees between my feet on the rug, his hands on my thighs. “Please don‟t cry. Come on Madison.”

Garrison brought his hands up from their grip on my thighs to form a tighter grip on my elbows. He was trying to free my hands from my face. I fought hard to preserve some scrap of self-possession despite my tears but he was a lot stronger than I was. “Please. Just let me be.”

“No.” He held both wrists, his thumbs cut off circulation to my hands and my fingers were going numb. “I need you to listen to me. I do not want to have this child. I do not want to be a father.”

“Let me go Garrison.” He let my wrists free but stayed kneeled between my legs on the floor.

106

“You know how I feel about having kids. We have talked about this a hundred times.”

“I know. I wasn‟t trying to get pregnant.”

“So get an abortion. I‟ll go with you.” He said it so blandly, as though we were going together to pick up dry cleaning.

I put my hands back under my thighs again. “I don‟t want to have an abortion Garrison. I was pregnant when I saw Jenna dying.”

The crease between his eyebrows sharpened. “What does Jenna dying have to do with an abortion?”

“I can‟t throw this baby away. My sister just killed herself and threw her life away. I am not going to do the same thing! I can‟t just kill it, there‟s a heartbeat and everything!” I was surprised by my own resolve.

“Well you‟re on your own, Maddie.” Garrison stood up and stomped out of the bathroom.

I followed him into our bedroom and sat on the still unmade bed. “What do you mean? Are you saying you‟re breaking up with me because I‟m keeping this baby?”

Garrison pulled on a pair of boxer briefs. They were new, a shade of cranberry, a deviation from his uniform of gray boxers. “I‟m not breaking up with you because you are keeping this baby. I‟m breaking up with you because I have wanted to for a long time.”

The elephant of panic was on my chest. I pulled a pillow into my lap and held it against me. “What are you saying?” I knew, of course, because he was speaking English, but my brain refused to register the words.

107

Garrison pulled on a gray undershirt, walked to our closet and took out a pair of jeans. He sighed. Sat down on the bed, put one leg in, then the other. He stood up and buttoned his jeans, then sat back down. “I was going to break up with you but then Jenna killed herself and I wanted to wait until you were over it.”

As if I would ever be over my sister killing herself. “That was very thoughtful of you. It‟s been two weeks Garrison. I‟m not over it. I‟ll never be over it.”

He turned to face me. I sat up against the headboard holding a pillow to my chest for a life raft while he stayed at the foot of the bed, sitting barefoot and cross-legged, his legs yards of dark denim. Garrison sighed, folded his arms across his chest. “I love you but you are not easy to love. I‟m not just in a relationship with you. I‟m in a relationship with your anxiety and your panic and your need to control every goddamn thing.”

“I—“

He cut me off—“No. You‟re always telling me I need to talk to you, but as soon as I do you jump in to correct my view of things, to tell me how I‟m wrong and you‟re right.”

I opened my mouth to speak but he cut me off again.

“No. Just shut the fuck up and listen to me. You got crazy after your brother offed himself and you‟re not the girl I met. You weren‟t scared of anything, you didn‟t need the house to be fuckin perfect and when we had sex you were into it, you didn‟t lay there like a cold dead fish. You looked at me like I was somebody and didn‟t make me feel stupid but you don‟t do that anymore. Now

108 you‟re just…” he looked at the window, the view of the backyard blocked by the wood wide slat blinds. He looked at the hardwood floor, at his big hands, now resting on his knees.

“I‟m just what?” I held the pillow tighter but it was a feather down pillow, one of Garrison‟s, it hardly served as the raft I needed.

Garrison unfolded his legs and swung them over the edge of the bed and stood. He started pacing, walking the narrow rectangle from the footboard to the door and back. “You‟re just exhausting! I am fucking tired of walking on eggshells because you‟ll have a panic attack if I hang my towel on the doorknob or leave my boots by the door or not rinse my dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.

God fuckin forbid I try to have sex with you without showering first! You have no idea how aggravating you are because you‟re fucking crazy!”

Of course. I was the aggravating crazy hysterical woman. This motherfucker didn‟t know crazy! I threw aside his stupid itchy pillow and scooted my body to the edge of the mattress, folded my hands together to squash the instinct to form fists instead.

“Sometimes I look at you in your pressed clothes and straightened hair, your spotless car and plain white underwear, and I want to slap the shit out of you.”

“You want to slap me because I take care of myself? That makes perfect sense.” I didn‟t look at him. If I looked at him I would have lost the sarcastic cold edge I was maintaining.

“Just shut up and listen to me! I‟m not done. I am a grown ass man

Madison and you treat me like a kid you have to clean up after and keep in line!”

109

Garrison stopped pacing, folded his arms across his chest, leaned against the wall in the space between the door and the closet, and looked at me.

I stood up and walked to my dresser, turned my back to him to pull off the torn camisole and day-old underwear and I put on a bra and a pair of—yes—white underwear. I slammed my underwear drawer shut. Jerked open my tee shirt drawer, pulled out the first one I saw, which just happened to be a Poison tour shirt from 1989, a thrift store score which I yanked over my head, then smoothed down my hair. I opened my pajama drawer and sifted through to find the holey gray sweats on the bottom. I pulled them up my legs and over my hips and they settled onto my body like an old friend. Garrison was talking but I was so engrossed with the task of getting dressed that I didn‟t hear him. I opened my sock drawer and chose the black wool ones that stretch out around my ankles but keep my toes warm. I walked back to the bed and sat down.

“Did you hear a word of what I just said?”

I put on my socks. “No. You were saying something about how I treat you like a child.” Dressed now, I looked at him. Pulled up a foot and placed it against the length of my thigh.

Garrison‟s face screwed into a red fury that scared me a little but I was too busy playing it cool. “I don‟t know how the hell you can just tune me out like that!

Fucking listen to me!” His long legs carried him across the room in three paces and he was in my face, pointing his finger in my face, closing all the space between our bodies. He was acting like my father. I was waiting for a slap across the face or a side punch to the head or a hair yank but I willed myself to not

110 flinch. “I just said I have been sleeping with someone else for the past two years and you were so far off in la-la land that you didn‟t hear me!”

“What did you just say?”

“I have been sleeping with someone else. For two years.” Garrison stepped back. Let the words he just said settle in, twisted the knife in my chest and stepped back to watch me die.

There was no knife of course but it felt like it. I brought my arms to my stomach and held them tight against my navel, willing my guts to stay in.

“I don‟t know what you expect Madison. You tell me how to spend my own money and you won‟t even come for me anymore and then you just lay there like it‟s torture to have sex with me. I have needs—“

“Don‟t tell me about your needs! Who the fuck do you think you are?” I stood up. My voice was louder than I intended it to be. “Is that where you were the other night? With her? How do you even have the time?”

“My schedule is a lot more open than you know but you stopped asking how my day was when your sister started trying to kill herself every fucking month.”

“You leave my fucking sister out of this! You are disgusting! You‟re a fucking disgusting bastard!” I felt contaminated. I felt my skin burn. He had been sleeping with someone else for two years while he still slept beside me and had sex with me and kissed me with the filthy mouth he kissed her with—I wanted to rip the sheets from our bed and set the mattress on fire. I wanted to shower and slough off all my skin in the hottest water possible.

111

I walked to my dresser. Gripped the edge of it with an unsteady hand. My body was shaking. I needed my medication.

Garrison was quiet. He pulled a hoodie off the hook on the wall in the closet and put it on, placed his hands in the kangaroo pocket.

We looked at each other. I was not crying but I was biting my cheeks inside my mouth so hard blood was pooling in my molars.

“I will give you some money for the abortion. I am going to get out of here until tomorrow night and give you some time to yourself. You need to move out.

Take the time you need to find a place. I‟m going to stay with Rachel.”

“I need to move out? I have been paying half the mortgage here for six years!”

“It‟s my house Madison. My name is on the mortgage.”

“Rachel. Is that her name?”

“Yes.”

“You mean to tell me that after twelve years together, you are kicking me out pregnant with your baby and you‟ve been cheating on me for two years?”

“If that‟s the way you want to put it, then fine.”

I picked up the heart-shaped votive holder on my dresser with my left hand and transferred it over to my right. If that is how I wanted to put it. And then I hurled it at Garrison‟s crotch.

It hit the target, ricocheted off his bare foot, fell to the floor. The glass held.

“You crazy bitch!” Garrison‟s voice was shrill. He was crying, holding the dick he couldn‟t keep in his pants, doubled over.

112

Maybe I was a crazy bitch, because seeing him hurt calmed me. I picked up the heart off the floor and put it back on my dresser. There was a dent now in the floor where it fell. “You go to Rachel. I bet she‟ll make you feel all better. I‟m going to take a bath.”

I didn‟t need a divine hammer.

I left him crying, holding himself, and I slipped into the bath and fell asleep.

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CHAPTER VII

A PANDORA‟S BOX FULL OF DARKNESS

The water in the tub was still lukewarm when I woke up, so I hadn‟t been asleep long, but long enough to get a crick in my neck and for my skin to wither. I pulled the stopper out with my toes and listened to the drain slurp down the water. I brushed my teeth and combed the tangles out of my hair and put my clothes back on. By the time I was through I felt halfway decent. Better, even.

But feeling halfway decent didn‟t last long. After I fed Frankie and Bean and refilled their water, after I fed myself some yogurt and blueberries and refilled my water bottle, I saw Garrison‟s old hockey bag stuffed full by the front door. I looked out the living room window and saw him shoveling the driveway.

He had even brushed the snow off my car, a thoughtful gesture that made me feel lousy.

I had hoped he would be gone by the time I came downstairs. I didn‟t want to face the humiliation of seeing his face again. I leaned down by the front door and unzipped his hockey bag. It was big enough to carry a child in it, and

Garrison had it packed full of clothes—there was his underwear rolled into sausages, his socks, an ocean of gray crew neck tee shirts he wore under

114 everything. I heard him kicking snow off his boots on the stairs of the porch and zipped the bag up just in time.

Garrison opened the front door and nearly hit me in the face with it. “Hey, sorry I didn‟t know you were at the door.” His nose and cheeks were red from the cold, he was sniffling.

“Sorry I thought you were gone already.” I stepped back from him and his hockey bag, put my hands in the pockets of my sweats. One pocket had a hole in it, I stretched it wider with my index and middle fingers, grazed the skin of my thigh with my nails.

“I‟m going to get out of here. Let me know if you need some money. I‟ll call you in a few days,” Garrison said. The strap of his hockey bag dug into his down coat.

I lifted my chin in response and closed the door behind him. The house was cavernous and too quiet without Garrison in it. I rested my forehead against the refinished wood of the door. The door was restored from an 1845 farm house.

I remembered helping Garrison hold it in place while he screwed in the hinges.

I refused to come unhinged over a door, over an empty house, over his leaving. I had thirty grand in savings—I was saving for a wedding and a honeymoon but my would-be groom failed to propose. I had money and gainful employment and health insurance and I was thirty years old. While I never planned to be a mother, least of all a single one, I would be a mother just the same. If Jenna hadn‟t killed herself, I likely would have made an appointment and terminated the pregnancy. I volunteered for NARAL Pro Choice America in college and donated money with every tax return to Planned Parenthood. But

115 knowing I had a tiny speck of light growing in me when I saw my sister succumb to darkness was enough of a reason to keep this baby.

This little baby, ransacking my body and upending my life. Garrison didn‟t want to be a father, and that was fine. There are worse things that could happen to a kid than not having a father. I had one and would have been better off without. “I am going to be a mom,” I said aloud to myself in the too-empty house.

“Just don‟t fuck it up,” Jenna said.

I let the restored farmhouse door hold all my body weight, the added-on deadbolt dug into my spine. I didn‟t mind the slight pain. After all, when you hear the voice of your dead sister you want the added reassurance that you are in fact awake and not asleep—

There stood my sister at the top of the stairs, dressed in black like Johnny

Cash—black sweater, black jeans, black Doc Martens, her ashy blonde hair in a tight knot at the top of her head.

“You‟re dead,” I said.

“Way to state the obvious sis!”

“You‟re not real.” I shook my head. She wasn‟t real.

“Even if you‟ve made me up, here I am. You need to get out of this house before you lose your mind and burn it down. I always thought he was an asshole anyway.”

It was true, Jenna even called him Asshole. “I know. I‟m not the crazy one.”

Jenna laughed at that. “Right! You just take your little pill and wash and wash and wash your hands and count your steps. Totally sane.”

116

“Well I‟m not the one who killed myself.” I looked down at my feet.

“No, but you‟re talking to someone who isn‟t there.”

I looked at the top of the steps. Jenna was gone.

----

Erica‟s house was situated on the edge of a nearly abandoned city park— the baseball diamond had no bases, the hockey rink had a boarded-up scoreboard, the basketball court had patches to cover graffiti you could still read through the paint. There was a big swing set with only two working swings, monkey bars, a zip line without a ladder to access it, a twisty slide that always had a pool of muddy water at the bottom in the spring. In winter, the park was even more desolate. Days would pass without a single foot imprint in the snow.

My attic room in Erica‟s house had a window at the far end snug between the eaves with a view of the park. I stuck my bed right in front of it. My new bed, a four poster Queen, barely fit in the space between the slopes of the ceiling. I was guilty of propping my feet up on the headboard and staring out the window at the park below, watching the sun rise and set behind the basketball hoops.

It wasn‟t permanent, but I loved my attic room. It felt like coming home, more than the house I lived in with Garrison, more than my parents‟ house that never felt like mine, even after spending seventeen years of my life there. Erica was going to make the finished attic a Pilates and Yoga studio, but she decided I should have it—“You‟ll need some privacy and more room for you and the baby,” so the attic room that ran the entire length of her Craftsman was mine. While it lacked a real closet, the walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night was a quest, and I still hit my head on the ceiling if I got up too fast, I loved it.

117

The day Garrison said he wanted me gone, I called Erica. Of course I called

Erica. Who else was there to call? Going to Cleveland to my parents was out of the question. I had a job where I had to be Monday morning, a new contract that required me to write copy for a lingerie company. Going to my parents would have caused more stress than anything—my mother would have tried to stuff me to the gills with Crisco-laden baked goods, only to return to her bedroom to sleep all day. My father would have been stiff-lipped and taciturn, offering only: “I never liked him anyway. He should have asked for your hand in marriage instead of stringing you along for years.” Telling my parents I was pregnant with the baby

Garrison didn‟t want would have brought on hysterical tears from my mother and a disappointed sigh from my father. I was not ready to tell them anything—that

Garrison and I were over, that I was having a baby, that I was going to keep that baby far from them.

If Jenna had been alive, I would have gone to her apartment. She wouldn‟t have been much help, but she was my sister and I loved her and we would have watched The Bodyguard or Mystic Pizza and eaten chocolate until we were sick from the sweetness, then ordered a pizza for good measure. “He was an asshole anyway, you‟ll be better off without him,” my sister would have said.

All I had was Erica when shit got real. So I called, and she said: “Well pack a bag and come on over, I‟m making steak fajitas and guacamole for dinner.”

Dinner turned into an overnight, then another overnight, then Erica looking at me over her glasses over her cup of tea to say—“Why don‟t you move in here? You know I have the room. And with you and Jeremiah both paying me rent, my mortgage is a lot smaller.”

118

“I can afford my own place Erica. And what about Frankie and Bean?”

“This ain‟t about money! And I‟ll put up with those evil twin black cats.

You‟re havin a baby! You shouldn‟t be alone right now Mad. You need somebody to be happy for you and it‟s gonna be me. Babies are blessings! Remember the blessing and forget your heartbreak. It will be good to have you around and you can help shrink my house payment.”

It was just like her to offer help and make it sound like I was helping her by taking her help. And so I moved in with Erica and her boyfriend Jeremiah. I left everything but my clothes and books and Jenna‟s stuff I held on to, leaving behind furniture that was mine—the dining room table and chairs, bookshelves, my antique dresser, a leather chair and ottoman in the living room—and decided

I would just buy new what I needed for living. And that turned out to be a new bed, a new dresser, a new desk, a new crib in cherry wood to match my bed that was still in the box.

The attic had a little half door tucked in a corner of the knee wall. Behind the little door was a small cubby for storage, where I shoved leftover boxes of

Jenna‟s things. Behind the creepy little door with its glass doorknob, I also put her urn and Delaney‟s mostly empty one. Even after I threw his ashes at Jenna‟s bedroom wall after her suicide, Delaney‟s urn still held some of his ashes. I needed to find a better place for their ashes than tucked into a forgotten nook in

Erica‟s attic, but it worked at the time. I didn‟t want to stare at the remains of

Jenna and Delaney every single day, it was better to tuck them away.

There was something ridiculous about it, about finding a suitable place to place your dead brother and dead sister‟s urns, but there was also something

119 ridiculous about losing both your brother and your sister to suicide. There was something ridiculous about parents who would leave their son‟s remains at a funeral home for months after his death, something ridiculous about parents who would refuse to acknowledge that death as a suicide, something ridiculous about parents who would fail to even schedule a funeral or memorial service for their son. Equally ridiculous was a sister who kept the remains of her dead brother above her bed for half a decade, who said she couldn‟t wait to die to be with him.

But I was learning to accept it. My life was ridiculous.

----

“I already have my hands full as it is. Wait til I take Jeremiah home. You think my mama is gonna like her daughter bringing home a white boy?”

I was sitting at Erica‟s kitchen table, eating from a huge plate of red beans, plantains, and rice. My appetite was in full bloom once the never-ending nausea subsided, and I was lucky to be living with Erica who could throw down in the kitchen.

I had just asked if she was going to tell her mom that Jeremiah moved in, but she laughed me off, and it was understandable—her mother Jacinta lived and breathed Detroit. She was a Black Panther. When Erica brought me home with her one weekend, she told her mom: “Don‟t worry mama, Madison‟s got soul and

I‟m not her only black friend.”

At the time, it was true. And I guess I still had soul, but when Tasha moved to New York, Erica became my only black friend. And really, she was my only friend, I had let my friendships fall away and didn‟t seek anyone else out. I had

Garrison, I had Jenna, I had Erica.

120

Erica was all I had after everything.

I looked over at Jeremiah, who was in the process of making one of his shakes, measuring out the whey protein with a scoop. He was a personal trainer, always drinking and eating weird shit for what he called “optimum performance”—steamed fish, asparagus, cottage cheese, plain oatmeal, egg whites. And shakes. Lots and lots of protein shakes.

Erica met Jeremiah at the gym. The winter she turned thirty, she decided it was her year to get „ripped‟ and pretty Jeremiah, all blue-eyed and smooth muscle, won her over. Erica gave up on getting ripped but Jeremiah remained.

I thought of Erica‟s mom‟s house, full of portraits of Malcolm X and

Angela Davis, tribal art and African masks, Jacinta‟s usual attire of dashikis and elaborate head wraps.

Yeah, a white boyfriend would be a tough sell.

----

Jeremiah and Erica left for Detroit to see Jacinta, and I had the house to myself, with Frankie and Bean for company. It was early March, and Ohio was still holding on to winter—the snow had melted away, but the cold stayed, the sky without sun, like Chernobyl after the reactor exploded, billows of gray clouds. It had been three weeks since I moved out and I felt fine, except at night, when the hunger for Garrison‟s body seeped into my body. I grieved for him like he was dead. I was lulled, like many in a long term relationship, into believing that we would be together until we were old.

Garrison called, emailed, texted. He called my work extension even, but I silenced the ringer. At first, he was cloying and concerned—Haven’t heard from

121 you. Hope you’re settled in somewhere. Have you found a place? How are you feeling? Then he grew a little resentful—You could at least have the decency to let me know you’re okay, and let me know what you’ve decided. When I stayed silent he let the bastard out—You’re a manipulative cunt.

Although I wondered how ignoring him completely was manipulative.

What did he expect? That I‟d be checking in? Sending him updates? Right, when he kicked me out of the home we made, admitted to having a side piece, and made it abundantly clear he had no desire to be a father and encouraged me to have an abortion. Did he expect me to beg him to come back? It seemed like I was not behaving in a way he expected or doing what he wanted me to do, but I didn‟t care what Garrison wanted anymore. He didn‟t want me, he didn‟t want our baby—and that was all I needed to know to firmly make up my mind to leave him be.

Garrison even had his mother call me, but I sent her straight to voicemail.

The message she left was slurred and sloppy because of course she was drunk—

“Madishun, I heard you‟re havin my grandbaby. I know my idiot of a son said he wanted nothing to do with it but I hope you‟ll let me help, I just want to help how

I can.” Thanks but no thanks, Sherry was an alcoholic in end stage liver failure and a chain smoker who lived three hours away.

My mom had been calling me weekly since Jenna died, but I let her go straight to voicemail too. She‟d leave rambling messages about which cousin was having a baby, who was getting a divorce, which distant uncle had his gallbladder removed, my father was drinking again but she hoped he would go back to AA.

She was still sick and so tired, she wondered if she had fibromyalgia or

122 rheumatoid arthritis. I ignored her calls but sent her an email every week just to keep the nagging at bay—I told her work was keeping me busy, that I hope she was holding on, to give my regards to my dad. I did not tell her Garrison and I were over, where I was living, or about the baby in my uterus set to arrive in six months.

I never felt the pressure to be a good daughter the way Jenna did. Since I was “normal”—no drug addictions, no inpatient psychiatric stays, possessed an ability to hold a job and pay my own bills so I never had to beg my dad for money—I was mostly left alone. I got a card in the mail for my birthday each year with a check for $25, I came home for Christmas. I sent cards on their birthdays.

That was that and I was fine with it. I assuaged my guilt by maintaining minimal contact and I avoided my mother‟s nagging intrusions and my father‟s judgment.

For the most part, I was left alone.

That changed when Jenna died. I heard more from my mother than I ever had in my life. I guessed I would have to tell her about the baby, about Garrison and I being over, about the move. But I just didn‟t want to. I hoped she and my father would just slip out of my life and let me be.

----

It was Saturday night. Erica and Jeremiah wouldn‟t be home until Monday night. I had spent my first night alone reading Agatha Christie‟s Murder on the

Orient Express in my attic room in the too-large house in my new bed with

Frankie and Bean. I slept in until 11:30 the next morning because growing that baby was exhausting. I went from wanting to puke all the time to wanting to sleep all the time. I ate semisweet chocolate chips from the bag and a clementine for

123 breakfast & lunch, watched three episodes of House Hunters International, and then scrubbed the grout of the subway tile in the bathroom to keep my hands busy and clear my head.

Cleaning for me was meditation. I scrubbed all the baseboards and swept the hardwood stairs that led to my room. I changed my sheets and washed the walls, swept the floor and mopped it too. I decided to hang all of Jenna‟s Frida

Kahlo prints on the wall above the banister leading up the stairs to my room— that way I wouldn‟t have to face Frida Kahlo‟s sad brown eyes following me around my room.

I had six of them—Frida in a suit with shorn hair. Frida with butterflies in her hair, a black cat on one shoulder and a monkey on the other. Frida with flowers in her hair and a slit throat wearing a hand for an earring. Frida in the woods with antlers in her hair and a deer body, arrows dripping blood in her furry pelt. Frida with a red ribbon wound through her hair and around her neck, a monkey on her shoulder. Frida with her hair tucked in an elaborate veil with

Diego‟s face superimposed on her forehead. Frida was equally beautiful in all of them but her face haunted me, her eyes too alive. All the Fridas belonged there on the stair where I would forget they were there.

After hanging all the Fridas I had but one thing to do—to sift through, once and for all, all of Jenna‟s ephemera behind the little glass-knobbed door in the corner of my attic room. Out came the gold urns—Jenna and Delaney. I likened their remains to salt and pepper shakers. I put them both in the window behind my headboard so Frankie and Bean couldn‟t knock them over. I pulled out the coffee filter box in the front. Inside there were no coffee filters, instead there were

124 little square match boxes from Tom‟s, the bar right around the corner from

Jenna‟s old apartment. An amethyst ring, a moonstone ring, a tangle of necklaces. I kept the rings, slipped the amethyst on my left middle finger, the moonstone on my right thumb, and tossed the necklaces. Concert ticket stubs.

Cool as they were, what did I need them for? In the trash they went. A jewelry box. When I opened it I found a bent spoon and syringe. This too I put in the trash.

I wondered why I didn‟t go through this stuff earlier. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Now that the grief had cooled I had no impulse to save everything—like the oil pastels and charcoal and colored pencils. I needed none of it, I was no artist. In the trash it all went. I kept the sketchbook though, it was kind of cool—a detailed rendering of a pack of Camel Lights, a pine tree, a sketch of a faceless man. I put the sketchpad on a shelf in the built-ins and checked my chirping phone. Texts from Garrison. You have mail here. How are you doing?

My mom told me she tried to call you. Where are you living?

Toss the mail in the trash, I can pay my bills online. I sent back. I could.

Anything he had wasn‟t worth the trip to his house to get it.

Where are you living?

In German Village with Erica and Jeremiah. He would find out eventually.

When are you due?

I didn’t know you cared. September. I sat on my bed for a minute, holding my phone in my hand. I was waiting for a response but it never came. My phone said it was 11:33, my alarm read 11:35. It was getting late, and I was suddenly

125 starving and exhausted, but then I noticed the little door in the knee wall was still open. I should have at least finished the job of cleaning it out. I looked inside the little doorway and saw Frankie and Bean curled together in the far corner, nestled around an old Budweiser beer box. To reach the box I had to crawl partially inside the cubby on my knees.

Frankie gave me a pissed off hiss. Bean batted at my nose with a paw but kept his claws retracted. I was disturbing their hiding spot, what nerve! Jenna‟s cats were teaching me about their regal ways. I dragged out the box, sat on the floor with my back against the bedframe, and lifted the flaps. The box felt like

Jenna. It smelled like old cigarettes and incense on the inside. And inside—a stack of journals.

I know my myths. Pandora had a box like this. Her curiosity destroyed her.

----

Loneliness was a wiener dog nipping at my ankles in Erica‟s house.

Jeremiah lived there too, and so did I, but to me it was just Erica‟s house—she owned the place, after all. She could have kicked us both out at any time and gone on about her life, four levels of house for a castle of her own.

Erica‟s house or not, it was my castle while she and Jeremiah were in

Detroit. It was Sunday, early afternoon. I had to work the next day and had the house to myself until Monday night. Well, I had the cats too, so maybe the house wasn‟t mine alone. I had Frankie and Bean staring me in the eye, giving me sass, padding after me from room to room as though I were their charge. I watched a marathon of Law & Order SVU from 7am until 2:00 when I just couldn‟t take watching another episode about victims of sexual trauma and called my mom.

126

I had been putting it off for too long. 5 weeks to be exact, since I made the final call to my mom to say Jenna‟s keys to her apartment were turned over to the landlord and the place was cleaned out. She and dad could expect a tax write off for donating Jenna‟s junker car to Goodwill as the executors of Jenna‟s estate.

Estate, as though Jenna owned a mansion and boat and fleet of luxury vehicles.

“Well hello daughter! I haven‟t heard your voice in ages!” my mom said, enthusiastic into the phone.

“Hey mom. How are you and dad?”

“Well your dad is tinkering in the garage with his trains. He‟s been spending a lot of time there since we lost your sister. He has a whole city in there

Madison! You will have to see it, it‟s really something. The train even sounds real and the track is just darling!”

So my father was spending his time in the garage hunched over a train set, drunk without or without Wild Turkey, existing in a solitary pretend world. How darling indeed. I sighed into my elbow instead of my phone to be polite and then

I asked how she was doing.

“Well I have been helping your Aunt Connie with a quilt she‟s making for your Uncle Sam. He‟s been moved to hospice now. I‟ve been trying out some of

Vanna White‟s crochet patterns too. Who knew she turned letters and crocheted?

Neat huh?”

“Vanna White? She doesn‟t even turn the letters anymore mom. She touches them.”

“Well she has great patterns and she is good at what she does.”

127

“It takes a lot of talent to touch a screen and prance around in heels in an evening gown night after night, you‟re right mom. I didn‟t know she could crochet. This changes my entire opinion about Vanna White!”

“Not just anyone could do her job. I‟m working on an afghan of hers right now.”

“That‟s great. What colors.” Since my mom couldn‟t read sarcasm I figured

I would play along. Be polite. Show interest.

“A really pretty light purple and dark green. The purple isn‟t really lavender, but it‟s lighter than normal purple. And the dark green is like a hunter green but not as dark.”

Why couldn‟t she just say „purple and green‟ and leave it at that?

“But enough about me honey. I‟m old and boring. I‟m a little worried about your dad. He‟s off the wagon again.”

Off the wagon. Off or on the wagon, he was still an asshole. “I‟m sorry to hear that mom.”

“Organizing your sister‟s finances was not easy. It really put a lot of stress on your dad. The bank has been hounding your dad for payment on Jenna‟s loans since he cosigned for them.”

“She didn‟t have federal loans?”

“No, she used the bank, I don‟t know all the details, you know they confuse me. I let your dad handle the money, and he has been getting calls at all hours on the house phone. They‟re telling him he is responsible for over $23,000! That is a lot of money Madison.”

128

“I‟m sure dad will work out something. Try not to worry about it too much mom. Hey, I was thinking of coming up for a visit, would you and dad like that?”

I didn‟t want to hear about how stressed my father was over Jenna‟s death or his stupid trains. I didn‟t want to hear about her afghan‟s color scheme. I just wanted her to shut up and shut up fast so I could hang up the phone.

“A visit! Wait until I tell your dad! I bet he would like that. Well next weekend we are going to Wheeling, how about the weekend after that?”

“All right. I‟ll email you at the end of next week and we‟ll figure out a plan.

I need to get going mom.” And then I hung up because I didn‟t want to exchange I love yous when they signified nothing. I had new text messages from Garrison:

Let me know if you need any money. I might need his money someday, but I didn‟t need it right then. What a nice guy.

You should know, Rachel is moving in here next month. I didn‟t know what to say to that so I let it fester in me instead. I wondered what she looked like and where they met and how. I didn‟t have it in me to ask though, I just imagined

Rachel as a brunette for some reason, with layered hair and brown eyes, a true girl-next-door type who wore velour tracksuits for loungewear and had acrylic nails. I hoped she was fat with crooked teeth and a whiny voice.

----

Jenna‟s amethyst and moonstone rings were a sort of grounding in the void created by her absence. She was gone but her rings were on my fingers and it was comforting to have something tangible that was hers near me if she‟d never be again. I still missed the shit out of her and there was no sugarcoating it. I still wished I would have had the courage to kick her ass and shake her out of it but

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Jenna was just gone and what else could I do but wear her rings and keep a stiff upper lip and stop wondering why she had to squash out her life without a fight.

I researched theories about suicide. Mental illness or personality disorders. Depression so deep hope is gone and loneliness prevails. Trauma.

Eating disorders. Side effects from prescription drugs. Shitty relationships, unemployment, financial ruin. Stress. Psychosis. Terminal illness. Genetics.

Existential crisis. Abuse. Addiction. PTSD, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, borderline, OCD. A broken heart, a cry for help.

I had Pandora‟s box of darkness up two flights of stairs from my island on the couch with the cats in front of the TV but I sat paralyzed and incapable of walking up all those steps to that creepy little door in the attic to pull out the box of Jenna‟s journals, my sister‟s voice on the page louder than anything she ever said aloud alive.

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CHAPTER VIII

NAG CHAMPA TIME MACHINE

I sat down on my bed with the box. Frankie and Bean jumped up on the bed to inspect the box, brushing their whiskers against the edges, sniffing it like dogs with their little pink noses. Incense and cigarettes wafted up from the cardboard. Everything smelled intensely when I was pregnant and the smell of the box and the composition books inside teleported me back to Jenna‟s apartment by their scent alone.

I dreaded reading them. I kept putting it off, but my sister had been dead for over a month and it was time to look my own terror in the eye and punch it in the face. It was time to walk the wire, the gangplank, the high dive. Screw my courage to the sticking place and all that.

I loved Jenna but I couldn‟t swallow her suffering. It was too close to mine.

But I started to read them anyway—

Jenna’s Journals, Act 1

Something in me is irreparably flawed, fundamentally fucked up

You wrote, while you shackled yourself to Jude, patron saint of impossible causes, he your nebulous junkie lover. An intoxicating sad song was your love, full of stars and longing that like so many things scraped you hollower still. Chasing him into the darkness, a darkness so intoxicating you didn‟t even need a

131 sad song because all the agony of your shame was gone once Jude pleaded mercy to silence your rage and taught you how to find that plump blueberry of a vein in the nook of your elbow. Jude knew you, his impossible sad song, would always be the source of his longing. He dragged you down to the darkness and showed you how he made light, broken and sad as it was, hoping you‟d stay cradled there in the nook of his elbow, a love junkie forever. But he didn‟t know you like I know you, a scraped out hollow dark night, a sad nebulous song.

I don’t know how you can feel nothing and feel like you’re flying at the same time, but that’s how it is

You must‟ve known there‟d be no going back again once you stuck the needle in. You set your mind to nothing o‟clock, machinations of your misery striking thirteen. Delaney was just like you, filling the void of his waking life with seductive numb nothingness. IS it any wonder to discover you held each other fast in the darkness, held on to nothing as fast as you could? My sister, impossible sad song love junkie, you sad sick thing, taking our brother as your lover. Impossible. You must‟ve known there‟d be no going back again once you stuck the needle in, because feeling so good I didn’t care was something I need, you said.

I stopped reading because Jenna‟s handwriting was a blur to my horrified eyes. I wasn‟t reading Flowers in the Attic I was reading my sister‟s journal and my stupid heart was slamming in and out of my chest and the room was spinning and the quiet was too loud, Jenna‟s voice was too loud, how could I have not known how could I have not seen? Jenna and Delaney were closer than I knew and closer than I could ever believe and how could I have not known what they were to each other, how blind and deaf and dumb was I, what could I have done even if I‟d known?

I couldn‟t keep reading that shit. It was two AM and I had to work in the morning anyway. I kicked the box off the bed and threw the journal under my bed, and I was so tired from growing a baby my body shut my brain down and I

132 slept with the lights on with Frankie curled around my head and Bean curled around my feet, cat parentheses.

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CHAPTER IX

I‟VE GOT DREAMS TO REMEMBER

I sit cross legged under the stairs in the basement, the only place we are allowed to play. The basement floor isn’t poured cement anymore it’s wood, with wide gaps between the planks and through the planks I can see an orange glow, like a porch light on a dark night. I open up our toy box and instead of matchbox cars and Cabbage Patch dolls there’s Jenna’s journals, composition books, but they’re covered in sticky blood and the pages are blank so I shove them down the gaps in the floor and see them burn below and at the bottom of the toy box is a key, heavy and ornate in my hand and I get it and then the basement starts to flood and I run up the stairs and each stair falls away into the rising water I’m standing in my parents’ kitchen and my mother is shoving cake in her mouth, chocolate icing all over her face and my father is pouring whiskey into a glass and he doesn’t stop, even when the amber liquid pools on the counter, and Jenna is slitting her wrists with a steak knife from the knife block and Delaney is sitting alone at the kitchen table slack-jawed with a bottle of whiskey in his hand and the water is covering my feet and the kitchen floor now so I run out the back door and I run out into the backyard and I run down the street holding the key and I come to the tall shrubs that line the path to the Scientology church only there is no church there is nothing but the tall shrubs all around me, a maze of conifer and I run and run and someone is chasing me and I stop when I see a door in the wall of shrubs and I have the key but the thing chasing me is breathing right over my shoulder and I turn to see my father and I punch him in the face

On a lower dose of Xanax I remembered all my dreams, dreams made even more vivid thanks in part to the flood of hormones surfing through my bloodstream to grow the baby swimming in me. I woke up without the alarm again. It was

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Monday, 5:23. Frankie and Bean were at the foot of the bed together, their eyes glowed back at me in the dark, a pair of sentinels.

The house would cease to be mine and theirs alone, Erica and Jeremiah would be coming home. I missed my friend, the hours alone were heavy.

“Get outta bed and eat something sis. You aren‟t just keeping yourself alive anymore,” Delaney said, sitting on my floor by the little door where I kept the remnants of his and Jenna‟s ashes.

I rubbed my eyes and looked back at the knee wall and he wasn‟t there anymore. I clicked on my lamp and saw Jenna‟s journals in a heap on the floor. I kicked them under the bed as I made my way downstairs to ready myself to join the land of the living and get on with the business of the day.

I knew how to shove away what I can‟t bear to see.

----

It was storming outside, the thunder rumbled low in my chest. I‟d take rain over snow any day. I was standing at the stove stirring parmesan cheese and heavy cream and butter in a saucepan for alfredo sauce, listening to the Very Best of Otis Redding on Erica‟s banged-up boom box. The CD skipped every now and again, not enough to interrupt the song, just to prolong a refrain or bridge a count or two too long—

I've got dreams, dreams to reme-em-ber Listen to me (I've got dreams) rough dreaaaaams (dreams to remember)

Jeremiah and Erica come in from the rain, their shoes slopping on the tile floor of the entryway.

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“You didn‟t have to drive like a bat out of hell down 75 just because you‟re mad and feel like you have something to prove,” said Jeremiah.

I turned down Otis a little to eavesdrop.

“Why don‟t you kiss my black ass right at Broad and High Jeremiah!” slam went the door. Slam went bags on the floor by the door.

I put the saucepan on the backburner to let it thicken and stepped out into the living room. “Hi! How was your trip? Did Jacinta eat you alive Jeremiah?”

“Whose side are you on?” asked Erica, throwing her purse on the couch.

She gave me a look like I had betrayed her.

“We had a very nice time. Jacinta is a lady. I wish I could say the same for her daughter.” Jeremiah gave Erica a long glare and stomped up the stairs.

“Is everything all right?” The codependent in me wanted to smooth out the bumps.

Erica sighed and took off her glasses, using the hem of her red tee shirt to wipe away the rain from the lenses. “Jeremiah is just PMSing, really. He hates it when I drive and I had to fuck with him a little.”

“You would. Did everything go well?” I walked back into the kitchen to stir the fettucine. It was nearly done.

“Sure it did. A little too well. Jeremiah was flirting with my mother and she ate it right up! They even went to the gym so he could take her through a workout.” Erica opened the fridge and took out a can of La Croix.

“He wasn‟t really flirting with your mom was he? You don‟t mean that.”

“I do, Madison. I do. I offered to leave Jeremiah there so he could carry on with my mama and he got so pissed he called me a crazy bitch!”

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“You don‟t really believe…”

“Oh my god! Not you too!”

“I‟m just saying, do you hear yourself? He loves you. Of course he wants to make a good impression on your mom, who is kind of scary until you get to know her, and you know it‟s true!” I took a fork and extracted a noodle from the rolling salty water. The pasta was done.

Erica moved away from the sink so I could dump the pot into the waiting colander. She looked around the kitchen and the adjoining breakfast nook into living room. “Did you clean?”

“Yep. And dinner is about done if you‟re hungry.”

“Yeah I‟m hungry. We drove straight through. I‟d invite Jeremiah, but I know he‟s lookin out for his girlish figure—“ said Erica, intentionally loud.

“What about my girlish figure?” said Jeremiah, stepping into the kitchen. I had to grant that he was a good looking man—tall but not too tall, dark hair kept longish but not too long, blue eyed and muscular, an American boy, a teenage girl‟s wet dream. He was pretty, and you‟d peg him as stupid until you took the time to know him.

Erica looked up at him with a studied look of vexation. But really, she was over the moon for the man and it was kind of special to see.

“Erica says you don‟t want any alfredo—“ I pulled down three bowls from the cupboard.

“You make me up a plate Maddie. I‟m starving. Erica can speak for herself.”

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“Are the two of you going to bicker all night? Should I go hole myself up in my room? You sound like old people married too long.” I handed Jeremiah his bowl of pasta swimming in sauce.

I felt the tension melt between them as we ate dinner. By the time the table was cleared, Erica was back to calling him „honey‟ and they were snuggled up on the couch watching some cooking competition on TV, Jeremiah was twisting

Erica‟s dreadlocks for her, Erica had her head on his chest.

I left them there, comforted just knowing they were home to help me fill the too-quiet house, and stole away to my attic room. I put on Neil Young‟s

Harvest Moon record and sat down on the floor by my bed. I had to unbutton my work khakis because they were cutting into my belly. I wasn‟t pregnant enough to need maternity clothes, but my boobs were falling out of my bras and my pants all fit like I had just eaten Thanksgiving dinner. I let my back rest against the bedframe, let Frankie lick my hair like a weirdo from her perch on the bed, let

Bean curl up in my lap to purr. They were both black but Bean had a white speck on his nose, his one mark of distinction from his sister.

Jenna‟s handwriting caught my eye. The journal I kicked off my bed last night was there, peaking out under the bedskirt Erica laughed at me for buying—

“You‟re an old lady at heart Madison, nobody buys a bedskirt!”

Did I have the balls to read the damn thing?

Yes.

Jenna’s Journals, Act 2

I’m one fucked up bitch but even I know you shouldn’t fuck your brother

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You said, but it didn‟t stop you from sticking the needle in again, a glorious sigh, looking in the peephole of your door to find his cold clear blue eyes and cold- bitten face. Delaney came and you let him in like you always did, kicking off his steel-toed boots and letting snow melt into the dusky carpet of your apartment. He pushed you and you let him, he taunted you and you let him. “Nobody knows, Jenna Lou, just us,” he said, but now I know and I can‟t understand. It does not compute. Like a woman standing beside the pile of rubble after a tornado has torn her house asunder, I survey the damage, dumbstruck.

Jenna said, “I don‟t have to be the fucked up girl anymore.” But she was the fucked up girl. The fucked up woman. She mastered the art of getting fucked up.

It was all fucked.

Jenna was fucked up but not a liar.

I started dry heaving and sobbing and the cats mewed concern and flopped their bodies down and pawed at my shins.

I waited to feel nothing, to slip out of the moment and count the planks of the floor or the freckles on my forearm, to go somewhere else still sitting in the same place. But all I could see was the wave of blood pouring out of the elevator at the Overlook Hotel, my sister with black teeth and snake eyes, my brother standing in incense smoke in the open doorway calling me sad little Maddie without a home.

I read in my own sister‟s handwriting all her phantom secrets and it hollowed out something in me I can‟t describe, there‟s just a canyon where I stood on the ledge wondering how there could be a hole that big inside of me but there was.

I had finished reading one, the composition book wasn‟t even half full.

There were three more left and I wondered if I had it in me to walk into the

139 woods after her into that starless night, to stare down into the infinite well of her sadness, to let it be goodbye, to meet all her demons alone on a dark and stormy night with her grieving green-eyed black cats keeping watch over me in my attic room.

Something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I wasn‟t sure if there was a heaven to direct it, but it was storming outside my bedroom window. I opened it and gulped in the electric air and let the rain anoint my new bed and I got a grip because I wasn‟t about to come undone knowing now the gravity of what Jenna and Delaney were to each other: two colliding and colluding black holes.

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CHAPTER X

BEREFT OF A JOYLESS BASTARD

I was grieving for Garrison like he was dead. I had lived with Erica for two months and still felt blindsided that he didn‟t want me anymore. I woke up at least twice a week expecting to find his long body beside me, reaching out into the emptiness in that half-sleep, saddened every time like it was still new and fresh.

My belly hung over my underwear, skin tight and hot. I‟d be having a baby at summer‟s end. A baby he didn‟t want but I did, a calm and steady certainty that my life would be changed forever, I would be changed forever, and I wasn‟t afraid to go it alone.

I still missed the son of a bitch though. I missed going to the grocery store and bickering over what salad dressing to get. I missed cleaning the house with him on Sunday mornings listening to Car Talk on the radio. I missed stealing glances at his face when he‟d look down at his plate while eating, his Irish skin that burned more than browned, his blue blue eyes behind glasses, his chipped front tooth. While it was true that most days Garrison was a joyless bastard, he was my joyless bastard and I was used to him.

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Then I‟d remember that he had been sleeping with someone else right under my nose for two years, that he said “I don‟t want to have this baby,” that he kicked me out of a house where we had made a life. A house where he still lived and made a home with the whore he left me for. I wasn‟t even sure if Rachel was a whore but I felt self-satisfied referring to her as one. Rachel could fret over

Garrison now, she could worry about his quiet rage, she could make his coffee and fold his underwear.

Spring had just found its rhythm. Erica‟s magnolia tree in the front yard was on the verge of blooming and the tulips by the mailbox were proud and bright. The abandoned park behind the house was all green and overgrown, errant saplings from the maple tree erupted around the play structure. I kept waiting for kids to come but they never did. I was settled in to my attic room, had bought a rocking chair from the flea market and a copy of Goodnight Moon. I knew the baby would be coming soon.

Work was work. I was still writing copy about underwear and skanky lingerie, but my boss wanted me to take over an account for a mechanical engineering firm despite my impending maternity leave—“You have the brain for this contract, and you can work from home after the baby comes.” I did what I was told like I always did and put thirty percent of my salary in savings each paycheck and wondered how I would tell Erica I planned to buy a condo after the baby was born.

Erica seemed to think I would just stay on forever and raise the baby and she would be Auntie Erica and we would live happily ever after. While I loved my friend she was the worst housekeeper, her domestic bliss with Jeremiah was hard

142 to swallow every single day, and I felt like I was putting her out. Even though she made it a point to tell me it was my home too and I was family, I was her family, I didn‟t need to look for somewhere to go because everything I could need was right there under her roof, I felt ready to start thinking about having a place of my own to raise my baby, a place where Erica couldn‟t leave her sneakers in the middle of the floor, clog the bathroom drain with her wild hair, or put glasses on the wood coffee table without a coaster. It wasn‟t even my coffee table but I cringed every time she left a new watermark.

But I stayed on in my room in the attic and settled in for staying through the spring and summer and fall and likely the winter. I would find a place next spring for me and the baby and Frankie and Bean, a place where nobody could tell me to leave.

----

“It seems you will have a daughter,” Dr. Lee said. Already it was over, she was wiping off the blue goop on my belly with a paper towel, she helped me sit upright and then fiddled with the ultrasound machine and a strand of images spit out the side. I could feel the baby—her—swimming around in my uterus, the flutter of her little body inside of mine. I was 20 weeks along, halfway through. It was May.

I‟d be driving up to Cleveland to tell my parents about the baby that weekend. I held the images from Dr. Lee on my lap and gulped them in. A side profile with a nose that already looked like mine, a little fist, a pair of feet. A little girl growing, half Garrison and half me.

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I thanked Dr. Lee. Put my pants on. Walked out into the beautiful day and to the coffee shop next door and paid too much for a cup of chai. I left my car in the parking lot, pulled my hair up into a bun to let the sun warm the back of my neck, and I drifted down the sidewalk and turned the corner into the residential neighborhood not far from the house where I once lived with Garrison. There was a park not far from Dr. Lee‟s office in the strip mall. I walked there, my work flats were cutting into my heels, but I didn‟t care, it felt wonderful to walk under old trees, to move my body.

I sat on a bench under a cherry blossom tree. I took the lid off my chai and sat it on the bench next to me. I kicked off my shoes and when I went to sip my tea I found a little pink flower floating on the top. I left it there to drown and wilt in the tea, I drank it all down and swallowed the flower too. This used to be the park where I‟d coax Garrison into coming with me for walks. He‟d tell me we weren‟t old people and it was stupid but he would come anyway, we would walk the perimeter of the park and sit on this bench usually, my hand on his knee and his hand in my hair and I never would have guessed I‟d be sitting there pregnant with a baby he didn‟t want, apart from him.

The house where I lived with him was just a few streets over, but my heart knew better then to go back. Coming to the park was all the nostalgia I could handle. I walked back to my car holding my flats and I didn‟t even notice the flowers or the trees or the hundred year old houses, all I could see was a sidewalk riddled with cracks.

The art of losing isn‟t hard to master.

----

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“I taught myself how to knit!” I told my mom. She and my dad had just met me at Bubba‟s-Q. I had already been seated at a table when they got there. I was careful to turn my body sideways when I hugged them in case they noticed my belly before I was ready to tell them. I hid the slope of it in a dress that skimmed over my body. Fleetwood Mac‟s “Dreams” came from the speakers in the ceiling, Stevie Knicks out of place in a busy barbeque restaurant on a

Saturday afternoon,

thunder only happens when it’s raining

I drank down a big gulp of my lemon water and the ice hit my teeth.

“I have been trying to craft with you for years,” my mother said, adjusting her body into the chair to the left of me at the square table. She was wearing a blue and white seersucker button down shirt with matching capri pants, plucked straight from the Blair catalog. She tried, she really tried. I had to give her that.

She had her hair tucked back behind her ears, gray roots less than a half inch long, dyed an auburn shade that looked professionally done for once. Usually her hair had a swampy green tint, the result of trying to make her gray hair red by directly applying dye straight from a box.

My father took the seat across from my mother to the right of me. He was wearing a red Indians tee shirt. He scrutinized the menu and mumbled about how he couldn‟t see the damn thing anyway because he forgot his readers and asked the server “What do you recommend?”

The server recommended the brisket and corn bread. My father ordered a half slab, macaroni and cheese, and green beans. My mom ordered the brisket, macaroni and cheese and greens. I ordered a double order of macaroni and

145 cheese. My mother then prattled on about craft stores with the best sales and yarn brands. I drank my lemon water while my dad scowled at all the people buzzing around us.

It didn‟t take long for me to be anxious and disgusted with their dysfunction. Neither mentioned my sister, dead all of four months. My mother added four packets of sugar to her iced tea, my father grumbled about how the last thing she needed was more sugar and he was a grown ass man who wanted a gooddamn drink and he would have one when he pleased.

“You‟ve been sober now two weeks Ron. You should call your sponsor.” My mother took a sip of her tea, leaving blush lipstick on the straw.

“”When you stop eating like a pig and are smaller than a house, we‟ll talk about my drinking,” he said, glancing back to the bar every few seconds.

“So how is retirement dad?” I was desperate for a change of subject, for a halt in their bickering.

My father tossed down his napkin with a tight half-laugh. “At this rate, I‟ll never retire. You mother can‟t stop ordering from catalogues and spending my money. I‟m still adjuncting at Cuyahoga Community College.”

“How are your students?” I took a sip of my lemon water. Thanked our server when she brought our food. Listened to my dad tell me about the single mom welfare queens who were going to fail out eventually anyway when they had to take math classes or the hard sciences, who were wasting government funds for tuition and living off their student loans when they couldn‟t write “a goddamn paragraph to save their lives.” I shook a little more pepper than I meant to on my mountain of macaroni.

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My father buttered his cornbread and ate it before he touched anything else on his plate. The server came by and refilled my water from a clear plastic jug that sweated icy droplets on my arm as she poured. I watched my lemon sink to the bottom of the glass. My mother took tiny bites of her macaroni and didn‟t touch her meat. She ate all her greens though. Apparently being likened to the size of a house killed her appetite.

The baby fluttered in me and I touched her back right through my dress.

My mother saw me touch my stomach and her mouth dropped open. When my father slipped away to use the bathroom she took a big bite of her macaroni, put down her spoon, and asked with a mouth half full of food: “You‟re pregnant, aren‟t you?”

She said it in the same tone she used when I was a teenager, when she confronted me about eating like a bird. She said it in the same tone she used when she lectured me about nobody wanting the cow when you give the milk away for free when I moved in with Garrison, intending to live with him without so much as a marriage proposal. She said it in the same tone she used when she wanted to hurl a question at me like a slap across the face meant to stun me motionless.

“Yes.” The server came by and cleared away my father‟s plate. I took another long drink of my lemon water.

My mother‟s eyebrows, too thin from years of overplucking, shot up while her mouth hung down. I could see my father walking back from the bathroom, adjusting his belt buckle below his natural waist. My mother didn‟t see him yet,

147 she faced me instead of the restaurant, her body tilted toward me like we were conspirators. She shoveled in a spoonful of macaroni.

My father sat down. Signaled the server over. Ordered a bottle of

Budweiser. My mother wiped her mouth daintily with her napkin, smoothed it back over her lap.

“I‟ll let you tell your father.”

“Tell me what?” The server brought over the bottle of beer and sat it down on the table atop a bar napkin.

“I‟m pregnant.” I flinched when I said it, I don‟t know why, but something about the way I failed to breathe as soon as my mother said “I‟ll let you tell your father” made me wait for a fist that never came. I was a grown up now. He couldn‟t hit me anymore, my mother couldn‟t set me up like a trap for him to snap into.

My father gulped twice and half the bottle of beer was gone. Just like that.

“Are you and Garrison going to marry?” my mother asked.

I put down my fork, pushed away my plate, smoothed my dress over the slope of my belly. “No.”

“Well I think it would be best for the child if you did—“

I cut her off, found my voice. I‟d be damned if she was going to lecture me about what would be best for my child. “No it would not. Garrison left me. We are not going to be together. I am raising my daughter on my own.”

“You‟re having a little girl!” my mother choked it out, like a little girl was a prize. I regretted saying it, letting her know the sex of a baby I wanted to keep far from her arms.

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And then I wondered why I was spending my Saturday afternoon with people I didn‟t want my unborn daughter around, my natural born parents notwithstanding. The sight of my father‟s bulbous red nose and yellowed eyes, the sight of my mother‟s smug face—just made me wonder, who the hell did they think they were?

My father crossed his arms across his chest. “What do you mean he left you? Does he know about his child?”

His child. I wasn‟t about to take the time to explain to my parents that it was our child, a child he didn‟t want, a child I wanted more than I wanted to belong to Garrison, that capsized the boat and set me free, that brought the truth from Garrison‟s lips after years of lies—

They were talking to me like I was a child. “Yes. Look, I don‟t want to get into it with either of you. I am having a baby that I want. The right thing to say is congratulations.”

My mother looked like I had slapped her. My father looked like a tea kettle ready to spew, his face flushed red, his lips puckered.

“Well, when are you due?” my mother said.

“September.”

“So you‟re already five months along?”

I nodded. The server came over, asked if we wanted dessert. My mother asked to see the menu. My father ordered another beer. I asked the server for a cup of ice and she brought it back and took my father‟s empty away.

“Well why don‟t you come back home and live with us? I can help you take care of the baby.” My mother ordered a piece of cherry pie. A la mode.

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“I‟m very happy with where I live right now.” I chewed on some ice.

“Well you should be with your family! Don‟t you agree, Ron?”

He did the gulp twice and swallow half the beer thing again. He wasn‟t going to stop until he‟d had at least five beers. I decided I‟d better not stay and see the wreckage.

“Look, I am gainfully employed, I have health insurance, I have a place to live. I even have money saved. I will be fine, and so will my daughter. I‟m going to get going because I have an over two hour drive back home.” I pushed back my chair. Stood up. Pulled my purse off the back of the chair, slung it over my shoulder and held on to the strap. “Thanks for lunch.”

My father was staring at me with something ugly like disgust. My mother looked frantic but I didn‟t let her break me, I turned and walked out of the restaurant, didn‟t falter when she called my name once, twice, a third time with rage.

But I wasn‟t ready to go home. There was something about being back in

Cleveland, the same stretched out sideways silhouette of downtown, streets I knew better than the back of my hand. So I drove to Barnes and Noble and bought an iced chai at the Starbucks counter and I made my way over to the health and wellness section to find pregnancy books that would calm instead of scare the shit out of me. There I found Summer‟s mom Suzanne eyeing a book on herbal remedies for menopause.

I pretended I didn‟t recognize her, overcome with a wave of shyness that felt a little like choking. I forgot all about the pregnancy books and went to hide in Poetry, where I landed on W and picked up a book of James Wright poems and

150 started reading “a Blessing,” where I became absorbed in the poem and forgot about the place where I was, or the chai I left sitting on the shelf while I stood and read about the eyes of ponies darkening with kindness and felt like breaking into blossom when I heard

“Madison, is that you?” and looked to my left and saw Suzanne, her peppered bob and sleek gray yoga wear coupled with a pair of silver Birkenstock sandals that hugged her big toes. She was holding a little hardback edition of the

Four Agreements, wearing a pair of red readers at the tip of her nose. She looked like a softer version of Summer, with softened brown eyes and sunspots, grays weaving with her dark brown hair.

I smiled at her even though I wanted to dive back into the poems and forget Cleveland Ohio and Jenna and Delaney and my parents and Garrison and

Summer. I wanted to not think about Summer, and the strange sadness and longing that ate at me when I looked at her mom standing right in front of me, and then thought about how long it had been since I last saw her, saw Summer.

“It is.” I left my thumb in place in my Selected Poems of James Wright and looked at the watercolor trees on the cover. And then I looked at Suzanne.

Suzanne took off her readers, put them back in a snakeskin case, slipped the case into her sensible over the shoulder knit bag the color of champagne.

“Maddie, I‟m so sorry about Jenna.” She was touching my forearm, it was an entreaty and consolation all at once.

The shock of hearing my sister‟s name in the open air when my own parents wouldn‟t even say it left me a little gutted. I remembered my chai and took a sip. It was almost cold and tasted like pepper. I turned my body so she

151 wouldn‟t see me sideways and ask a thousand questions about the baby. “It‟s okay.” I mean it wasn‟t okay Jenna killed herself but what else was there to say?

“How is Summer?”

Suzanne‟s face was a flurry of emotion I couldn‟t quite read. She said: “She just came back home after her second tour in Iraq, and before Iraq was

Afghanistan. I thought she would be safe in the navy as a nurse, but that was before I realized the navy provides medics for the marines…” Her voice trailed off and she looked over my shoulder toward the exit—her eyes searching for something not even there. Suzanne had the look of someone suppressing a torrent of words. I waited. She sighed, composed her face into a polite tight- lipped smile, and said: “Well she‟s back home now, recovering from an injury, and the hope is that she‟ll be able to find a nursing job in Columbus, actually. I know she would love to see you. I‟m having some family over this Monday for

Memorial Day, if you don‟t have plans with your folks you can come by if you‟ll be home.”

“Thank you. I‟ll remember that. My home is in Columbus though.” I was

30 years old, why did the city I grew up in have to be home, even if I hadn‟t lived there in over ten years? What injury did Summer have? I was trying to think of a polite way to ask.

“Oh I knew that! But if you‟re back in Cleveland, feel free. I know Summer would love to see you again, she was disappointed she heard about Jenna after it was too late to pay her respects, but she was in the hospital at the time recovering after…” Suzanne got that faraway look in her eyes but stopped, gave me her tight

152 polite smile, and said “Stop by if you can. It would mean a lot.” She gave me

Summer‟s cell phone number, waited on me to program it into my phone.

I wanted to ask what happened to Summer, I wanted to ask how she was, I wanted to know how she was injured, I wanted to know why she was in the hospital at the time Jenna killed herself. But I didn‟t know how to ask any of those things, so I just nodded, and Suzanne said goodbye and went toward the register and I turned back to James Wright.

Except I couldn‟t see the words on the page and I felt like I needed to sit down, so I took the chair in the corner in the poetry section, and I thought about

Summer and I thought about Jenna and I thought about “home” and where that might be for me. I put James Wright back and took my cold leftover Chai and I drove back down to the place I called home now—my attic room in Erica‟s old house by the derelict park. I went up to my bed when I got home to find nobody waiting for me but Frankie and Bean, twin green eyes in the window seat.

I turned on my side and I closed my eyes and as I swam toward sleep I thought of Summer and the lake and being fingered sitting on the roots of a willow tree by the lake her brown brown eyes and root beer sweet mouth on mine and the compact ferocity of her beauty—

----

I woke up to four missed calls from my parents‟ home phone, missing my sister. I could count on Jenna to validate all my vague rage about our parents, and after meeting my mom and dad for lunch yesterday my brain was still looping back to it, to my father drinking beer like the apocalypse was dawning and my mother setting traps for me to fall directly into my father‟s rage.

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I missed my sister like you miss leaves on the trees in late January, her bitten down nails and black leather cuffs on her wrists at all times to cover her scars, her throaty voice and bitter laugh. I wanted to call Jenna so bad because there was nobody else who‟d know the scraped out feeling I couldn‟t smooth out and fill up.

I was hungry but smart enough to keep a sleeve of Ritz crackers by my bedside lamp, so I ate half a sleeve and gave Frankie a good scratch along her scruff and let Sunday wash all over me. I didn‟t have anywhere else to be so I stayed right there in bed until my full bladder sent me scurrying downstairs.

----

“When I was pregnant with Jeremiah I just knew I was going to have a hard birth. Woman‟s intuition, never doubt it! I ended up in labor with him for

38 hours! I got an episiotomy and had stitches from the front all the way up to my butt crack!” Jeremiah‟s mother cackled, and slapped her thigh, finding merriment in describing the warfare of childbirth. I had enough of hearing the gruesome details.

I squirted out some spicy brown mustard on my brat and said I was trying not to think about birth yet and made an excuse about needing to use the bathroom to leave the picnic table under the sycamore trees. I walked back to the solitude of my tent. I came along as a third wheel to Jeremiah‟s mom‟s land by the river with Erica and Jeremiah because I didn‟t want to spend another day in my attic room, haunted by my sister and feeling sorry for myself. I thought the fresh air would do me some good.

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I sat down on my air mattress in my tent. It felt like a barely inflated pool float under my butt. I zipped the flap shut and took out my phone and scrolled through my contacts. Jenna was still programmed in there. I didn‟t have it in me to delete her (now nonworking) number. I scrolled down to S and stopped on

Summer Evans.

I heard the slap of someone‟s flip flops as they walked past my tent and the unceasing river, the obnoxious birds in the canopy of trees overhead. I looked at my phone for a long time. And then I called Summer.

She answered on the second ring, her voice an octave or two lower than I remembered. “Maddie Hunt. I‟ll be damned. My mother has been harassing me to call you since she saw you yesterday. How are you?”

“Fine, I‟m fine. I should be asking you that question. Your mom said you were injured, what...”

Summer cut me off—“I‟m sorry about Jenna, Maddie. Your sister meant a lot to me. I didn‟t know about what happened until I got back home, and by then it had been three weeks since—“

This time I cut her off: “Since she had killed herself?”

I heard her take a long breath in, then Summer said: “Yeah, since she killed herself. I was afraid that was the case. I‟m still sorry about Jenna,

Madison.”

Madison. She never called me Madison when we were kids. It was always

Maddie, said with all the intonation of calling a dog or chastising a child, never my full name. “Well I appreciate that. I was just calling to see about this family cookout your mom invited me to—“

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“Oh she did, did she? Well. It‟s just my family in my mom‟s backyard drinking beer and grilling out. My cousins are coming down from Michigan. You can come if you want, but aren‟t you in Columbus?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought so. Well if you‟re sure the drive isn‟t too much for you, be here tomorrow at one. Oh and so you don‟t freak out when you see me, be prepared— half my arm was blown off in Afghanistan. There‟s nothing from my left elbow down.”

“I thought you were in Iraq. Your mom said you were in Iraq.”

“My mom never really knew exactly where I was. I went where I needed to be. I was driving a bunch of supplies with my arm out the window, and yeah.

Roadside bomb. So I‟m missing half my arm and I have some scars. I look like a fucking mutant from my neck down.”

“I‟m sorry that happened to you.” I laid back on the air mattress. I kicked off my sandals. I waited for her to talk again. She sounded practically breezy describing the blast that blew off her arm.

Summer didn‟t say anything in response.

“Well just so you don‟t freak out, I‟m five months pregnant.”

“Congratulations! Is it that guy‟s you‟ve been seeing forever? The super tall dude who‟s kind of an antisocial asshole? Jenna always said he was an antisocial asshole whenever she talked about him.”

I laughed. “Yeah, Jenna and Garrison never really got along.”

“Garrison? Like Harrison with a G?”

“Yeah. Garrison. It‟s a funny story, but we aren‟t together anymore.”

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“Oh, so you‟re with someone else now and having a baby?”

The conversation was beginning to deflate me. I sighed. And then I told her the truth—“No. I‟m with nobody and I‟m having a baby. A daughter, actually.

A baby girl I don‟t have a name for yet, due in September.”

“You‟re with nobody?” Her voice cracked. She sounded incredulous.

“I‟m with nobody. Garrison didn‟t want the baby. And he‟d been cheating on me for two years anyway with some skank from his work. So I moved out. I wasn‟t trying to have a baby, it was one of those freak birth control failures, and after Jenna I couldn‟t have an abortion. I just couldn‟t do it.”

“Fuck Maddie, here I am feeling sorry for myself and you‟re pregnant and alone after just losing your sister—“

“Don‟t feel sorry for me Summer. If you‟re going to pity me maybe I should just stay down here and let you be.” I was wondering if calling Summer Evans was a mistake. I was ready to delete her newly added number and forget ever running into her mother at all, forget the impulse to reconnect with her after so many years. I was getting good at cutting ties and forgetting.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

“I don‟t feel sorry for you. I‟m sorry. There is a difference.” I could hear her lighting a cigarette.

“Smoking is awful for you. You really should quit.”

“Yeah, well—“ I heard her let out a long exhale, take a long drag, then exhale again. “Listen. It‟d be real nice to see you Madison. I hope you come up tomorrow. You‟re still an uptight pain in the ass, but I would still love to see you.

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It‟s been a long time, I think the last time I saw you you were seventeen, the summer before I left for college, right?”

“Yeah.” I was seventeen, we were in Michigan, it was August. Delaney kept getting nosebleeds. My father stayed on the lake on his brother‟s boat and came back each night that week with a new layer of sunburn on his face and a cooler full of walleye. My mother slept until at least noon every day. Jenna and Summer spent all their time ignoring me, so I‟d play Scrabble and Uno with Delaney until he got bored and pulled out his Gameboy and I read my book. I got out once with

Jenna and Summer on the canoe--

“Yeah. Remember when you capsized the canoe?” Summer laughed. Took a long drag on her cigarette. Let out an exhale.

“I didn‟t capsize the canoe. I was sitting in the middle between you and

Jenna, remember? Jenna was steering.”

“Oh yeah! Weren‟t you two fighting about something?”

“Yeah. I told her she was fat, after she told me I was flat chested and ugly.”

“You two were so mean to each other.”

“No Summer. Jenna was mean to me. And I fought back.”

“Yeah, but you were mean too Maddie.”

I was mean, but in the way sisters are mean to each other, poking as they do at old wounds. The words froze halfway up my throat so I said nothing. And then I said—“Hey, it‟s good to talk to you. I‟m going to get off here though. Text me your address and I‟ll try to get up there tomorrow.”

“All right. Maddie, tell me you‟re coming up tomorrow.”

“I‟m coming up tomorrow.”

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“Good. 1pm.”

“1pm. Look Summer, I better get off here.”

“Yeah you already said that. Fine. Bye,” and her end went dead.

I laid on my side and counted the baby‟s kicks and listened to the river rushing past my tent.

Maybe I would drive up to see Summer.

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CHAPTER XI

RED FOX IN STAR CAVE

I was glad I stayed, even if camping nearly six months pregnant isn‟t at the top of the list of things I‟d recommend to anyone. Sleeping on an air mattress on uneven cold ground that deflated in the middle of the night led to a bone-deep body ache the next morning. Yet something about waking up to the sound of a river brought a still sense of peace that I hadn‟t felt in a long time.

Jeremiah and Erica‟s tent was quiet, so I stretched out my crimped-up body and walked for a while down the long winding gravel driveway. I walked a little over a mile, until the gravel drive gave way to a paved road. I turned back and walked along the same path I came, noticing all the things I had missed—the collapsed remains of a barn next to an eerily intact silo, purple and white wildflowers, the sycamore trees spiraling up to the sky the closer I got to the water.

I walked to the shore and walked right into the water, Chacos on my feet and all. I stood in the cold green water and held my new black and white polka dot maternity dress up to keep it dry. I stood there a long time, taking long deep breaths to keep calm. I looked to my right and saw a red fox taking a drink from the green river all but twenty feet away from me. His red eyes met mine, and we

160 regarded one another. I nodded at him, as though he could lift his chin in a gesture of return. He took another sip of water, his eyes never leaving mine. And then he ran up the shore and into the trees, leaving me standing in the river, dumbstruck with wonder.

----

Summer‟s mom still lived in a quaint neighborhood full of mid-century bungalows and split levels, cul-de-sacs with street names like Star Cave Court, and old maple trees that sent scores of seed propellers into the wind at season‟s end. Old people powerwalked and families with strollers and dogs in tow populated the sidewalks. People waved when you walked or drove past, making eye contact all the while, but never once saying hello.

It always felt like stepping onto the real life set of the Wonder Years. I parked my car and walked in the shade to Suzanne‟s, wondering why the hell I decided to drive from Yellow Springs to Chagrin Falls five months pregnant and alone, but of course I knew the irrefutable truth was I wanted to see Summer and know if she was broken by everything she‟d seen.

The Summer Evans I knew was a clenched jaw Athena, her dark deep eyes like caves of wonder, quiet and bossy, honest and mean. At the time I didn‟t know what I expected to find but I rang the doorbell twice and waited for the rest of my life to meet me.

Nobody answered despite a driveway with four parked cars. I thought about leaving, my anxiety a flash in the pan, but hunger and exhaustion won out and I followed the smell of grilled meat to the side yard. I let myself in and walked past the lilac bushes. Bruce Spingsteen‟s “Born to Run” was on the radio

161 and I could hear ice rumbling around in the cooler, a pop top open, a small chorus of voices. I stood in the haze of the heady lilac bushes for a minute until I found enough courage to choke back my shyness and greeted the nameless faces in the backyard.

I didn‟t know anyone I saw, but they all looked vaguely familiar. There was a trio of dark haired college age boys playing cornhole and a shrunken old lady with set white hair wearing an orange dress sitting on the deck under a rainbow sun umbrella at the black patio table. Summer‟s grandma. And with her sat a couple in their fifties wearing replica navy tee shirts with American flags on them, their hair all salt and pepper.

Just when I was about to face the hell of awkward introductions, Suzanne stepped out of sliding glass door holding a turkey platter plate full of raw meat.

“Madison! So glad you came!” she said.

I smiled at her and walked up the steps to the deck. Suzanne gave the plate of meat to one half of the salt and pepper American flag couple, who lifted the lid and put some more burgers on a grill already loaded with skewers and brats.

“Thanks for inviting me.” I handed Suzanne the $4.99 store bought daisies

I brought and she gave me a spontaneous hug that made me uncomfortable even though I knew she was just being kind.

I always froze in the face of someone‟s spontaneous overflow of emotions.

“Don‟t be silly,” she said, holding the daisies in the crook of her arm.

Suzanne introduced me to the American flag salt and pepper shakers—her brother and sister-in-law. The dark haired cornhole trio were their sons.

162

Summer‟s aunt and uncle and cousins. “Come on in with me, I need to get the potato salad ready.”

I followed Suzanne into the kitchen, watched her pull out a vase from under the sink and fill it with water, asked if there was anything I could do.

“Oh no, honey. You just relax. You‟re a guest here. Summer went with her aunt to pick up some beer and chips. They should be back soon. Have you been to your parents today? Are they excited to be grandparents?”

I don‟t know why I was surprised she knew I was pregnant, I had just told

Summer I was the day before, but I was still taken aback by it. “No, I was camping in Yellow Springs yesterday and just drove up today. I‟m not very close to my parents anyway.”

“Well, I‟m happy you‟re here for Memorial Day with us! Here. Take this bowl of fruit salad, will you? And go sit outside with my mom out of the sun and kick th/ose feet up.”

I did what I was told and sat under the umbrella, sipping on a can of Sprite and listening to Summer‟s grandma tell me about Bingo night.

And then Summer stood at the threshold of the sliding glass doors and the deck, holding a case of Sam Adams in her good hand, her eyes hidden by

Wayfarers, hair back in a tight military regulation bun. Summer wore a navy and white striped boatneck shirt and a pair of jean shorts that stopped mid-thigh and brown Chucks. She had a tattoo of a compass rose on the middle of one thigh and an owl in grayscale on the other. I tried not to stare at the stump of her left arm where her forearm and hand once were but I did.

“Maddie. I see you made it.”

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“I did. Hey Summer.” I stood up, smoothed my dress down over my hips, walked over to her. I‟m not short but she sailed over my head.

Summer sat the Sam Adams down on top of the cooler, and then she hugged me tight against her body, her hipbones jutting into my belly, her breasts nearly in my face. She smelled like cedar, spearmint, and cigarettes. I pulled back and she touched my belly. “You look like you have a little beer belly.”

“Thanks.” I stepped back from her. Wondered what to do with my hands.

Wished my dress had pockets so I could hide them. I wanted to take off her sunglasses and look her in the eye. I wanted to let her hair loose and ask her where she‟d been the past 13 years.

“I‟m sure my mom introduced everyone?”

I nodded.

“Well then. Make yourself at home.”

I did. I was sitting with one of the cornhole cousins, who was actually my age, sold insurance, and had just gotten a German Shepherd puppy. He said he was going to train it to be a service dog for Summer—“Just don‟t tell her. You know what a hard ass she is.” He told me his name but I had forgotten it.

Summer plopped down next to me at the picnic table in the yard under the birch tree. She popped open a can of Coke and said “Tony, remember Jenna?”

“Of course.”

“This is her baby sister Maddie,” she said, and took a bite of her burger.

I looked at her good arm to my left and saw the scars spiraling down her forearm, purple and red, her remaining hand mottled with burn scars. I touched her wrist just to learn the texture of her skin.

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“You gonna let me eat or are you planning to hold a cripple prisoner all day? I only have one hand now Maddie.”

Tony laughed. Mumbled something about wanting another beer, and left us alone at the table.

I was too embarrassed to say anything so I chased around an errant grape from my fruit salad. Summer ate her burger. “I‟m sorry,” I said.

“Let me rub your belly for good luck and we‟ll call it even. I think I horrify people now, so I admire your bravery in touching me.” Half of Summer‟s face was hidden behind sunglasses too big for her face.

I looked at her stump, the seared purple line where the rest of her limb had been, the burn scars. “Do you still hurt?” I touched her stump, just to know what it felt like, and she let me.

“Not in the way you think.” Summer angled her body toward mine. And then she brought her good hand to my belly and her stump too.

“If you wait long enough she‟ll kick you.” As if on cue, she did.

“Are you ready to be a mama? Do you have a name yet?”

“No. But I‟m sure I‟ll figure it out.”

“Yeah you will. Would you be having this baby if Jenna hadn‟t killed herself?”

I looked at my reflection in her sunglasses, my mouth a tight line. “What makes you ask me a question like that?”

Summer pulled back into herself. Wiped her mouth. Then she said, “I just asked because you aren‟t even with that guy anymore and you‟re alone. Your parents have always sucked and you know it. Hardly seems like an ideal time to

165 bring a baby into the world.” She crushed her now empty can with her good hand, stood up, muttered something about needing a beer and a cigarette.

While her refusal to soften the truth stung, I wondered how she could have found the trail to my logic for continuing with the pregnancy when, except for that afternoon and a phone call the day before, we hadn‟t spoken in over ten years. Was I that easy to read, to understand? Or was Summer capable of more empathy than I knew?

I sat there stewing about it and wondered if I should say my goodbyes and go back home. I watched Summer smoke a cigarette in the side yard by the lilac bushes with one of her cousins, her face in profile, the same stupid sunglasses on her face. I made up my mind to go and was about to maneuver my belly out from under the picnic table when Summer came back and sat down next to me. She took off her sunglasses and looked me in the face.

“I‟m sorry I said it that way. I‟m sorry you lost Jenna. I just know where you come from, and how hard it has to be.” Summer‟s deep brown eyes swallowed me whole.

“I‟ll be fine. You‟re the one who lost half your arm.” Summer flinched when I said it and then I was the one apologizing: “I‟m sorry. I didn‟t mean...”

“Yes you did and it‟s okay. But I‟m going to live, even with half an arm. I can get a prosthetic, Maddie. I can cover burn scars. But you can‟t get your sister back. So if it makes you feel better to feel sorry for me instead of being reminded of your grief, then so be it.”

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“Summer, I didn‟t drive all the way up here just to argue with you.” I turned sideways on the bench, freed one leg, and then the other from the picnic table.

Summer grabbed my hand. “Stay, Maddie. Tell me what happened to

Jenna.”

“She overdosed accidentally on purpose. Left no note this time. But I found a stack of her journals—“

Summer clenched her jaw. “Have you read them? Do they bring you any peace?”

“Hardly.” I sighed. Looked away. Wondered how to say it, and then I just did—“My sister was really sick Summer.”

“I know she gave up after Delaney died. And she had her demons—“

I looked at Summer, and I felt like throwing up. “My brother was her demon.”

“What do you mean?”

I leaned forward toward Summer, who was tracing the condensation on her can of Sam Adams. “My sister was really fucked up, Summer.”

“Aren‟t we all?” She laughed but there was no joy in it.

“Not like this.”

Summer looked at me, her nebulous brown eyes bearing into mine, fine lines like fault lines across the thin freckled skin of her cheek bones. She said,

“I‟ve known Jenna for a long time. I know how dark she could get. Your sister was my best friend when we were kids. But it got to where I couldn‟t watch her continue to self-destruct over and over again.” Summer looked down at her

167 upturned palm resting on her thigh, moved her hand to clasp the opposite elbow.

If she had both arms in their entirety, they would have been folded across her ribs. She met my gaze again: “I can only imagine how hard it is to be left with nothing but the journals she used to write out her misery.”

“I had no idea she was so messed up. I knew she was an addict and sad, but I never knew how bad it was.”

Summer turned her body toward mine until our knees were touching. “So why are you putting yourself through the hell of reading them? She‟s gone,

Maddie. Nothing will change that. I know you want to know why, but sometimes you gotta accept it is what it is.”

“Because I had to know. I started reading them, and I can‟t stop now. I haven‟t been able to look at them in weeks since I read—“ I stopped myself from saying it.

“But you can stop now. Burn the journals. Let her memory rest. Jenna would have been humiliated if she knew you were going to be the one reading them, Maddie. She always told me you were more like the oldest than she was.”

I laughed at that. “I already know too much.”

“I‟m sorry, Maddie,” her voice was more like a cry than spoken word. “I know she had some deep secrets she kept hidden. Even from me.”

I looked around at the cookout, Summer‟s relatives dotted across the lawn, her cousins back to playing cornhole, her mom sitting with her grandma under the rainbow patio umbrella. Enough of a breeze had built, allowing for a steady long song from the wood wind chimes hanging from a low branch of the birch

168 tree. “Yeah well, I grew up in the same house and still didn‟t know what was going on between my own brother and sister.”

“Listen Maddie. Stop reading her journals. You‟ll never find any peace from it. It‟s not going to bring Jenna back from the dead.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” she asked, her face leaning toward mine, close enough to kiss.

I nodded. The sun was beginning its descent. I wanted to get home to my bed, and I knew it was far away. “I better get going Summer. I‟ve got a long drive back home.” I stood up, so did Summer, who pulled me into a hard hug.

“Hey, I‟m glad you came up. I have wanted to see your face for a long time,” she said, the haunt of a smile on her lips.

I didn‟t know what to say to that, so I nodded and said nothing at all.

----

When I got back to my attic room I had my mind made up. I was going to sit down to read the rest of my sister‟s journals and so I did. The second journal was a green composition book, its pages stained with coffee, all the pages filled with my sister‟s lilting script—

Jenna’s Journals, Act 3

Our father, the drunk tornado. Our mother, the creaking house wheezing in the wind. You and Delaney, tucked in the dark basement together to wait out the storm. I was the weathervane spinning madly in the wind of everyone‟s moods.

I could smell trouble but I did what I did best---duck and cover. You set dad going like a fat gold watch, you soothed Delaney during his storms, you hurled resentment at our mother. I saw you coming, said nothing, hid my face in a book. I saw our father cross the threshold, heard your bedroom door shut and lock, and knew you were in for it. That is when I found Delaney and kept him distracted from causing a scene. You know me. The peacekeeper. Our mother did nothing, what she does best.

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I thought it was just beatings. Sometimes, I even thought you deserved them. But you didn‟t deserve what you got--pants pulled down, face smashed into a pillow, raped again and again by our father. You never told me what happened to you, you left it there for me to find, your journals a trapdoor.

That‟s all she wrote. Here‟s where her story ends. The art of losing isn‟t hard to master. Most people die without a record of their pain, but Jenna left hers behind for me to find, all the horrifying filth of my father and the sad madness of my brother and my sister‟s dizzying spiral into death.

My sister tried and tried again to die and now I knew why.

I felt the long drop down my throat and to my heart and down my spine and to my feet and the world.

I could feel the truth settling in to my bones. My body was shutting down for sleep. My freight train of thoughts came to a halt. A heavy sleep without fear.

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CHAPTER XII

TRAVEL DOWN THE ROAD AND BACK AGAIN

There’s a thunderstorm and I’m back in Garrison’s house, the high ceilinged rooms and stained glass windows in the living room and stairwell, the hardwood floors he was always so particular about. A hundred and twelve year old house with its original floors and heavy oak doors and nooks and crannies and I was back in it walking up the stairs and when I got upstairs I saw a light on in the bathroom, a sliver of yellow light seeping out of the closed door and I opened the door and saw Jenna sitting fully clothed in the bathtub, slicing her wrists open with a razor, and when she saw me she pulled her shirtsleeves down, tucked her hair behind her ears and said hello and I asked why she was slitting her wrists when she was already dead

I needed to sleep and sleep I did. It was 10:45 in the morning and the smell of rain filled my attic room, the thunderstorm outside coming in. I closed the window and used the hem of the tank top I slept in to dry the old wood of the windowsill. I was ferociously hungry and thirsty and my bladder was about to burst.

The body wants what it wants.

Erica was home, twisting the new growth of her hair so they‟d stay in locs, watching Golden Girls reruns on TV. I settled down on the couch next to her and resisted the urge to put my head on her shoulder—Erica‟s easy like that.

“Did you take today off?”

“Well yeah. I called off.”

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“Well I‟m off today so we can hang. It‟s been a minute. You hungry?”

“I could eat," I told her as she got up to head into the kitchen, and made myself comfortable on the sunken-in orange corduroy couch with the aid of several throw pillows. Dorothy was giving Stan a piece of her mind on the TV.

Frankie had made the trek down two flights of stairs to the living room with me and was purring contentedly on the arm of the couch next to me while I could hear Erica banging pans around and slamming the fridge shut, the whirr of the coffee grinder. Another episode of the Golden Girls started, the plane across the skyline, and thank you for being a friend. The house was filling up with the smell of bacon and coffee and the psychological terror of the night before spent with

Jenna‟s suffering and spilled blood on lined pages had faded to the recesses of my mind.

Erica brought in a plate for me—bacon, toast, and two eggs overeasy—and a tall glass of orange juice. I thanked her and began munching on a piece of crispy bacon that tasted like heaven. I looked Erica in the eye and her face fell. She was wearing her glasses and had pulled her mane of dreadlocks up into a nest.

“You been crying. What is the matter sis?”

“I didn‟t sleep well.” I kept eating my bacon. Erica went back in the kitchen.

She returned a few minutes later with a plate of her own. I had already killed my breakfast by then and was giving Frankie a good scratch under his chin.

Sophia was clutching her basket purse and begging Dorothy not to put her in

Shady Pines on TV. Erica ate her breakfast and let me be, took my dirty dishes into the kitchen and came back with a cup of coffee for me. I still could not part

172 with my morning mug of coffee, even though all the books and the internet said to limit caffeine.

Erica shut off the TV and turned to face me on the couch. “So,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee.

I sighed. I knew what she was doing. Erica lets nothing go—she knew I had been crying, and now she was making it her mission to discover why. “Yes?” I faked a smile.

“Why do you look like somebody just broke your heart? You been cryin all night long Madison, your eyes are puffy and your little pale nose is red and your whole vibe is a sad black cloud.”

“I stayed up and read my sister‟s journals. All of them.”

Erica didn‟t say anything, but didn‟t break her long steady gaze.

“My sister—“ I started, then stopped. I could hear the clock on the dining room wall ticking, the sound of something hitting the floor in a leap—likely Bean, on his way downstairs. “I read a lot of troubling things. I knew Jenna was unstable and self-destructive and a junkie and kept getting into horrible relationships but I had no idea how fucked up my sister truly was, or why. I thought she was just a bipolar drug addict who never got over our brother‟s suicide. I wasn‟t prepared for—“ I stopped speaking because my eyes were filling up and I was not about to give them free reign. I wasn‟t prepared for that degree of darkness. I could feel my chest tightening up and my heart galloping in my chest and I was trying to find a steady calm place within myself so I could go on.

Erica put her hand on my knee. I took several long deep breaths until I felt the tightness in my chest ease. And then I told my friend the truth about my

173 sister, about my father, about Jenna and Delaney. Bean sauntered into the living room like it was his and flung himself dramatically down on the rug under my feet. Erica‟s mouth was a stunned o and she just kept saying “wow,” and “oh no,” and muttering apologies like she was the one who had done me wrong.

And then Erica shook her head no in a resolute way and she stood up and started pacing back and forth in front of the defunct fireplace and I felt my hands and feet get cold and the sea level of Erica‟s rage rising while I felt less and less.

Erica stopped pacing and put her hands in her hair and said: “You have to be done with your parents now Maddie. You can‟t go back to those people ever again. You and that baby girl need to stay far away from that mess.”

“I feel like I need to at least confront my father about this.”

“No. You stay away from that sick motherfucker.”

“I need to know if it‟s true. I need to see his face when I ask him about it.

No matter what he says I‟ll know the truth.”

Erica shook her head no. Started pacing again. Stopped pacing to say “You done already know the truth.”

“I don‟t want to talk about my dad anymore, ok? I need a break from thinking about it.” I stood up and rubbed my lower back and smoothed down the tank top over my belly. I pulled my hair out of the tight bun it was in and I looked at Erica and knew the fury I felt had nothing to do with her at all and that I had better just get away and go wash my hands or clean the bathroom, or go back to bed because I didn‟t want to think or speak or feel about it.

“I got you.”

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“I know. Thank you for breakfast. I‟m going to go lay down. But oh yeah,

Erica?”

“Yeah?”

“Garrison was cheating on me with my sister. The first time they slept together I was cooking and helping my mom clean the kitchen on Christmas day!

They slept together on Christmas day! In my parents‟ house!”

“What?!” Erica bellowed. She couldn‟t believe what she was hearing but knew it was the truth.

“Yeah.”

“So let me get this straight: you‟ll believe Jenna slept with Garrison but not that your dad raped her?”

“Please don‟t say that.” I gave in and cried.

“I‟m not tryin to hurt you Maddie but I want you to hear me. You stay away from that man. Don‟t even call him your dad.”

“I do not want to talk about this anymore. I told you to let me be. Right now is not the time for this conversation.” I felt cold and stepped back from Erica and turned to walk back up to my room.

“I am here if you need me.”

“Thank you for breakfast,” I told her, without tears.

And then I walked up the two staircases to my room and went back into my room under the eaves and got into bed and picked up Tana French‟s The

Likeness and let my mind inhabit somewhere else for a while. I tried to sleep but hunger was dawning and the body wants what it wants so I came out of my attic lair and went back downstairs to the kitchen and ate crackers and cheese for

175 lunch washed down with flat Sprite straight from a 2 liter and sat outside on the back porch where I found Erica sitting on the stoop and painting her toenails lavender.

“You still mad?” she asked, turning her foot to get the sickle pinky toenail, more nail polish on her skin than the nail.

“No. I hear you. I‟m just hormonal and can‟t handle your way of telling it like it is all the time.” I sat down beside her and let my belly rest on the tops of my thighs, brought my hands to my knees. I said, “Erica, paint my nails,” and she did, a pale purple that looked better against her brown skin than the pale freckled skin of my hands, but I needed my friend and didn‟t know how to tell her and the casual tenderness of having someone paint your fingernails did the trick and put me at ease and eased the tension between us, at least for a time.

----

I should learn to leave well enough alone but I kept chewing it over and over in my mind, and by the time I ate my ham and swiss on wheat sandwich and polished off my bag of baby carrots I knew I was going to call Garrison. Then I mulled it over some more and opted for texts instead. I had a meeting in twenty minutes, after all. I was putting in eleven to twelve hour days whenever I could to ingratiate myself to my boss so when I took three months off work when I had the baby, or when I dipped out for two hours at a time to make it to OB appointments, he‟d still write a positive yearly review when the time came.

I have to ask you something.

Two minutes later: Ask away.

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I wondered how best to frame the question. I held my phone in my hands and looked at it, struck dumb.

Garrison beat me to the punch—Is everything okay? Do you need money?

No I don’t need your money. I’m fine.

You wanted to ask me something

Yes. Why did you cheat on me with my own sister? I thought you hated her.

A second later, and he was calling me, but I hit ignore to send him straight to voicemail. I went to the meeting and heard about the new line of lemon- scented antibacterial hand soap that would make its way to the shelves in the next few months. And then I went back to my desk and read my work email. By the time I finished that I was brave enough to look at my phone, where I found seven unread messages from Garrison—

How did you find out?

Who told you that?

Your sister threw herself at me. You know she was crazy!

Look, I’m sorry.

What difference does it make anyway?

I’m done sending these messages. Pick up the phone and call me. We need to talk.

I can give you money if you need it but I still don’t want to be a father.

I deleted them all.

When I got a certified letter from Garrison three weeks later, I wasn‟t surprised to read his intent to waive his parental rights.

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But I was gutted by it just the same.

----

It was summer. I was seven months pregnant, 31 weeks. I kept my hair in a bun and bought a little fan to keep on my desk at work. I bought a replica for my nightstand to keep me cool at night. I was knitting capes and bonnets for the baby with patterns I found in catalogues I borrowed from the library with the softest yarns I could find. She was coming, and she still didn‟t have a name.

I thought I liked the sound of River for a name but thought it best to just wait for her to come so I could see her face. She might not be a River at all. I was going to be a mother, I was going to start a family, I was going it alone. There was nobody left on my family tree to root me, and Garrison didn‟t want me or the baby we made. The more I discovered about the man I had loved for 12 years, the more I wondered if it was love at all, how could I love someone I didn‟t know at all?

My mom kept calling and leaving teary voicemails. How could I do this to her and my dad, I was all they had, I was having their grandchild, didn‟t I want their love? Was there anything I needed, anything she could do, anything she did to make me abandon her?

Finally, I called home one Saturday afternoon. I was startled to hear my father‟s voice on the other end—

“Madison! Well how have you been daughter?”

“Fine. Mom has been calling me a lot so I was just calling to see how she‟s...”

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He cut me off: “Oh, so I‟m chopped liver? I haven‟t heard from you in two months!”

“Sorry, look I just called to talk to mom, so—“

“She‟s at the grocery store. I‟ll have to take a message for you.”

He was sober. Dry drunk. “I just called to say hi, you know how worked up she gets with worry. I‟m fine. How are you doing?”

“You always have had a good head on your shoulders. You get it from me.”

I was disgusted to hear him compare me to himself and find a likeness. I opted to say nothing at all.

“I‟ve been outside putting down slug repellant all morning. The nasty bastards are destroying my plants. I‟m not teaching at all this summer and I‟ve been sober since, well, since that day we met you for lunch.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“Listen, while I have you on the phone—“ I had to ask. I had to know. I had been thinking about it for weeks, ever since I read Jenna‟s journals, and even though I had but a few sentences of evidence and more unanswered questions than answers, a gnawing seed of cold fear and disgust was growing in me and I had to know. My father barely touched me as a child. He was the kind of dad who gave me a pat on the head when I flipped over the handlebars of my bike and required stitches in my chin. The kind of dad who never hugged you but taught you how to change a flat tire and file your taxes on paper.

“Yes?”

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“When I cleaned out Jenna‟s apartment I found her journals, and I recently read through them.”

He sighed. “You know your sister was very disturbed.”

“I know she had her struggles. I wanted to ask you about something I read.”

“Well come on out with it, I‟ve got to get this grass cut.”

“Well it was about you, dad.”

“What on earth could it be? That I was a drunk asshole and she hated me?”

“No, Jenna wrote about how you raped her for years.” I was sitting up on my bed, leaning back against the headboard, picking at my toes. I think I stopped breathing.

He took a sharp breath in. Then he said: “Madison, you lived in the same house. Do you remember me ever doing that to your sister?”

“Well no, but—“

“But what? Did I ever rape you?” He screamed it into the phone and I held my head away from the phone to give my ear a reprieve.

“No. You didn‟t even hug me. But this isn‟t about me. It‟s about Jenna.”

“Did you ever see or hear me touch your sister?”

“Well no, but—“

“Exactly! No!”

“You did go in her room and beat her with the door locked though. I remember that.”

“Your sister needed beat!”

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“Listen, I missed a lot as a kid. I lived in my own world. Jenna always pushed me away. I learned it was better to just isolate myself.”

“So are you accusing me then?”

“I‟m not accusing you of anything. I‟m just asking.”

“You know your sister was disturbed. She was confused.”

Disturbed? Maybe. But confused? Hardly. Jenna bluntly called it like she saw it. “So you‟re saying what she wrote isn‟t true. That you didn‟t rape your own daughter.” I felt heat rising up from my chest and the salty brine of impending puke in the back of my throat. This conversation was getting me nowhere.

“I‟m very disappointed in you, Madison. First you reject your own mother, and then you call me to make such accusations—“

“I just asked a question dad. A question you still haven‟t answered. Did you ever touch Jenna or not?”

“Here is all the answer you need—don‟t you ever call me, or show up at this house. As far as I am concerned, all my children are dead.”

And then he hung up, and I walked calmly down to the second floor and threw up until nothing was left in me. When I was finished, I washed my face and brushed my teeth and put on a dress and I went outside and sat on the porch with my laptop and started researching the impact of incest.

Nothing made me feel more in control than knowledge.

I read about sibling incest, which can come about as a means of comforting one‟s self against the trauma of parent-child incest. I read about incest as an overarching topic, I read about the long term effects, to include:

-a tendency to form abusive relationships and end up revictimized

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-self-harming, a need to spill one‟s blood

-addictions and substance abuse

-psychiatric problems—to include depression and dissociative experiences

The oldest child, typically a daughter, is most likely to be a victim of incest.

Families where incest occurs often fail to be physically affectionate, or demonstrative of love, and appear to outsiders as “normal”—parents are in a long-term relationship and are financially sound.

It sounded like us. We lived in the suburbs and went to good schools. Our parents had been married for over three decades. A house. Yard. Garage. Three kids, husband, wife. A former librarian and a teacher. Normal boxes checked.

But we weren‟t normal. I didn‟t know about this sinkhole, but I knew as a kid that my parents weren‟t normal. Our mom stopped hugging me, Jenna, and

Delaney when we were in preschool. Our father never hugged us. Love, if you can call it that, was demonstrated with the meeting of basic needs, trips to Michigan, new school clothes. My father was a drunk bastard and my mother was his codependent long-suffering martyr wife.

When I think about it, Jenna had every mark of an incest victim.

How did I escape unscathed? Why could I not see it then, what good was it knowing the depths of the horror when Jenna was dead? Delaney was dead.

My parents were dead to me and I knew it for certain.

I sat on the porch a long time. And then I went to the backyard and got on my knees and started pulling weeds out of the raised bed I had Jeremiah help me build at the start of the summer. The tomatoes and peppers were coming along nicely, but the basil had blight. I couldn‟t see the progress of the carrots or

182 potatoes in the dark damp soil, but I trusted that they were growing as they should. I was pulling out crabgrass with my bare hands when I heard Erica open the back door.

“Hey! Come inside and eat somethin! And call this Summer girl back, she‟s called twice since you‟ve been out there digging in the dirt.”

I looked over my shoulder at Erica, still in her running clothes. She was working out with Jeremiah again. I brought myself to standing slowly, willing feeling into my numb legs. I did need to eat. And maybe I needed to call Summer.

So I ate two bowls of beans and rice washed down with a glass of orange juice. All I wanted was orange juice, pregnancy made the longing for citrus acute.

Erica was pleased to see me eat—“Your bony ass needs seconds! Feed that baby!”

I was feeding the baby. She was the only reason why I ate at all. I wasn‟t anorexic, but I had lost most of my appetite since I finished reading Jenna‟s journals. My daily anxiety med kept my terror at bay but I‟d kept the lump in my throat, that lump that feels like I couldn‟t swallow.

I helped Erica do the dishes, then picked up my phone off the counter and noted the missed calls from Summer. I walked back outside and sank down into the broken-down wicker chair on the porch and called her back.

“I was wondering if you were ignoring me,” said Summer, answering halfway through the first ring, no time wasted on idle pleasantries, just her scratchy alto diving right in.

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“I was out in the backyard weeding my raised bed and just had dinner with

Erica. I left my phone on the counter.” I sounded defensive. I needed to lighten up.

“Yeah yeah. Just giving you shit. I was calling to let you know I got a job at the VA in Columbus. I‟m moving down your way next weekend, I found a cute one bedroom in Victorian Village. We should get some dinner.”

“Congratulations on the job! Are you excited to be working again?”

“Of course I am. I need to get out from under my mom, who drives me fucking crazy. I‟m 32 years old. Too old to live at home. It‟s only a desk job though. I‟ll man the phones and talk to vets about their healthy problems and try to route them to the right services. Given that I don‟t have a prosthetic yet and my

PTSD, my doc won‟t clear me for clinical work yet. I feel like I‟ve been benched.”

Summer laughed, but there was no joy in it.

“Well, is it a desk job for nurses?”

“Yeah.”

“All right then. Pay decent? Good benefits?” I was trying to cheer her up.

“I‟d make more in a hospital, but yeah.”

“Summer, I write copy for lingerie and bath products in a cubicle all day.

I‟m not writing the great American novel or saving any lives, but it pays the bills.”

I heard the click of her lighter, a sharp inhale. I asked—“You can go back to a floor nursing eventually, right?”

“If I get my demons in check.”

“Demons? Would you care to elaborate?”

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“I‟ll show you mine if you show me yours.” She cackled, and it was genuine laughter.

“I‟m going to take a rain check on that.” I had had enough of demons that day.

“Figured you would. Well, I‟ll call you when I get down there.”

“You better! I think you‟ll like it here.”

“I hope. Bye Mad.”

“Bye.” I hung up my phone and went back upstairs and filled the tub with warm water and a handful of Epsom salts scented with eucalyptus. I let my body settle in to the warmth. The baby kept kicking my ribs, rolling around inside me like a barrel. I closed my eyes. Weeding the garden wore me out. I was getting slower and slower as I settled into my third trimester of pregnancy.

I had fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes my neck had a crick in it and the water was cooler than lukewarm but not cold. I sat up and a wave of water sloshed out of the claw footed tub and onto the bathroom floor. I looked up from the floor and saw Jenna sitting on the toilet seat, biting her nails.

“I thought you‟d never wake up,” she said.

I looked at her sitting there, her very presence so tangible my logical mind didn‟t even question it. “Jenna.”

“Madison.” She stopped biting her nails. Her hair was down, well past her shoulders, longer than the bob-length she had at the time of her death. She was wearing a Black Flag tee shirt.

We looked at each other.

“It‟s true you know. What you read about dad.”

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“I figured.” I pulled the plug on the drain and the water began to recede.

“Jenna?” She said nothing in return. Just kept looking at me. “Why not me? Why didn‟t I know anything? Why didn‟t he try to touch me?”

Jenna leaned forward, brought her forearms to rest on her thighs.

“Because I had to protect you. I told him I would tell everyone if he ever touched you.”

“Did mom know? Did Delaney?”

“No.”

I looked down at my fingers, pale and waterlogged. I looked back up and saw Jenna was gone.

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CHAPTER XIII

HER FACE WAS ALL I COULD SEE, AN OLD ANTHEM ON A NEW MORNING

“I told you to stop reading them,” said Summer, shoving a triangle of pita loaded with tzatziki into her mouth. She took a swig of wine, and left no trace of her plum lips on the glass.

“That‟s easy for you to say, but if Jenna were your sister, wouldn‟t you want to know the truth? I didn‟t have the kind of relationship you did with her, I didn‟t see all the things she kept hidden the way you did.” She must have been wearing lip stain, there was no way lipstick could stay put like that.

“I know it‟s easy for me to tell you not to read her journals, but if I were you I would have done the same thing.”

I dipped into the tzatziki with a carrot. The garlic was strong enough to make my eyes water. Summer looked away from me, her gaze falling somewhere to the left behind me. She faced the restaurant. Her face was all I could see. She had chopped off her hair since I saw her last—a short bob. I would never say it aloud, but she looked just like her mom Suzanne.

Summer‟s eyes were on me again, intense enough to make me flinch. She was a Scorpio, after all—one to look you over, tease out your weakness, strip you

187 naked then tell it to you straight when you had nowhere left to hide. “I knew

Jenna very well. Maybe you were hoping you‟d find something different than you did.”

Tears sprang to my eyes and I hated her for it. “Did you know our father raped her for eight years or that she and Delaney were sickly in love with each other? How about her addictions to crack and heroin and junkie abusive losers?

Oh, and she fucked Garrison too. More than once.”

Summer‟s face didn‟t lose that cynical shadow, her eyes hard, jaw clenched, just a glimpse of teeth visible through her lips. She said nothing. I felt my hands shaking in my lap. I couldn‟t breathe. The room was too hot and spinning.

“Maddie. Breathe.” She brought her hand to my face.

I looked at her and she took her hand back. I‟d rather she had kept it there.

I took a sip of water and a long breath in.

Our dinner had started out pleasant enough, we ordered food and Summer told me about her move and when she would be starting her new job. I told her about my pregnancy, and then I brought up finishing the reading Jenna‟s journals, when she replied like she had been there done that, and I was a fool for entertaining my curiosity.

“You told me about Garrison already. I already knew about your brother, and I had my suspicions about your dad,” she said, her voice low deep and even.

“But how? How did you know about Delaney? And my Dad?” I had raised my voice an octave without meaning to.

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“I always knew Jenna loved your brother, and when Delaney died I watched her will to live shrivel up and die. Jenna keeping Delaney‟s ashes above her bed always creeped me out. As for your dad—“ she stopped. The waiter had arrived with our dinner. After she asked for a refill on her wine, Summer said—

“Jenna told me once to never be alone with your dad, and to tell her if he ever tried anything. My mom has a perv uncle she warned me about as a kid so I knew what Jenna was talking about.”

I picked up my fork and put it down as though I had something to say but there was nothing I could do to shake the feeling of having a hole in my windpipe.

I pushed the chair back from the table and told Summer I was going to the bathroom to buy me some time to get it together and when I got there I hyperventilated until I puked up the pita bread I had been nervously eating waiting for our food. I rinsed my face in cold water and walked back to the table, where I discovered my plate of lamb and lemon dill potatoes had been boxed up to go.

“I‟m taking you back to my house. We‟ll eat dinner there,” Summer said.

She stood up to leave. The matter was settled, as far as she was concerned.

I took the to go bag and we walked the block back to her apartment, past the old Victorians and to Summer‟s house, once a grand Victorian, now a house segmented into three separate apartments. She lived on the top floor, and I was completely charmed by the place—its leaded windows, crown molding, old radiators, the claw foot tub in the bathroom. I asked where she kept the plates and she showed me, then went outside on the fire escape to smoke a cigarette while I set the table. Summer‟s kitchen table was an old 50‟s red formica table

189 with a boomerang print. It looked like a transplant from a diner and took up half the floor space of her eat-in kitchen.

“I guess I just don‟t understand how I could have lived in that house for years without knowing my own sister!” I said to Summer, unable to eat my dinner because I was still stewing over it all.

“Your sister didn‟t want you to know. Jenna wanted to protect you from it.

It‟s as simple as that. You have to let it go Maddie. She‟s gone. Eat your dinner.

Feed that baby. Didn‟t you say your doctor is frustrated you haven‟t gained enough weight?”

It was true, Dr. Lee was frustrated I had gained all of eight pounds at seven months pregnant. “She always needs something to stress me out about. The baby is fine.”

“Of course she is, but what about you? Quit talking about this heavy shit and eat your dinner. Talking about it doesn‟t change anything.”

I took a bite of my potatoes. They were getting cold. Summer was right. I was stuck on a loop in my head, a rollercoaster of grief and anger and disbelief. I needed to eat, so I did.

“Cut up this lamb for me, will you?” Summer asked, and I did. I started thinking about how exhausting and overwhelming everyday tasks had to be for her now, how of course she cut off her long hair now that she had to take care of it by herself every day.

Summer was scowling at me. She slammed down her wineglass on the table and left a slosh of burgundy liquid. “Don‟t you feel sorry for me,” she snarled.

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“I don‟t. I was just thinking your hair looks nice.”

Her face softened and Summer ran her hand through the strands, an endearing nervous gesture. “Thank you,” Summer said, eyes on her plate full of lamb and rice.

“Summer?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think it‟s the truth?”

She knew I meant Jenna, the recognition in her eyes needed no preface.

“Your sister wasn‟t a liar Maddie.”

“Yeah. I guess I just needed to hear someone else say it. I tried to ask my dad about it when I called my parents the other day and he exploded on me and refused to talk about it and said as far as he was concerned all three of his kids were dead.”

“He‟s a son of a bitch and you don‟t need that shit in your life.”

“That‟s what Erica said.”

“Yeah, believe her.”

“I do.” We ate in silence for a while. I cleared our plates when we were finished, walked to Summer‟s shelf of records, put on Neil Young‟s Harvest

Moon. “I never get tired of his voice,” I said, and closed the lid to the turntable.

“I‟m going to step outside and pollute my lungs. Get comfortable,” said

Summer, letting herself out the door to the fire escape.

I pulled my hair off my neck into a bun and stretched out on her couch, looking through one of her old nursing school textbooks on maternal and fetal medicine.

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When Summer came back inside she peered down to see what I was looking at—an in-depth diagram of the placenta and umbilical cord. “Doing your research I see.”

I closed the book and left it in my lap. Summer sat beside me and slipped out of her gray cardigan, down to a yellow high-necked tank top that camouflaged her burn scars. I could see the angry branding of her scars enveloping her truncated arm.

“Maddie?”

I kept looking at the heavy textbook on my lap. “Yeah?”

“I‟m sorry Garrison is a shit. I‟m sorry about your family. I‟m sorry you‟re having this baby all alone.”

“Don‟t you feel sorry for me Summer.” I looked up into her face, but her gaze fell on the Neko Case tour poster framed on the wall behind a stout bookshelf.

Her brown eyes swam back to mine, framed as they were by a web of fine lines. She was too young for such deep crow‟s feet—Summer had seen too much. I waited for her to say something, but she didn‟t. The a/c unit in the window hummed on in its watery way.

Finally Summer rested her arm—the one missing a forearm and hand—on the top of the slope of my belly and left it there. She was rewarded with a good swift kick that made her laugh.

I laid my head on her shoulder and breathed in the faint undertones of sandalwood in her perfume and the sweet burnt smell of cigarettes. I let my knees

192 lean comfortably into hers, and when Summer‟s nursing textbook fell to the floor,

I left it where it was.

“What will you name her?”

“I don‟t know.”

“You still have time.”

I let my eyes close and brought my head down from the bony confines of her shoulder to the softness of her chest, where I fell asleep.

When I woke back up, I had no idea how long I had been asleep. I opened my eyes and took stock without moving. The lamp was still on, and the darkness outside the window revealed nothing because it was dark when we walked home from the restaurant. My head was still on Summer‟s evenly-rising chest. I counted her respirations for I don‟t know how long, but it felt nice to just be held, her arm around my shoulder, my hands palms up in my lap, nothing to hide.

I lifted my head off the softness of her chest and saw the quarter-sized spot of drool I left behind. Then I looked at Summer‟s face and she was still awake.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Twenty minutes at the most,” said Summer, nonplussed.

“I should probably go home.”

“Probably.” Summer‟s face was hard to read. She folded her arms across her chest.

“Would it be weird if I stayed?”

“It‟s weird you had to ask me that.”

“Well?” My voice had gone hoarse. I hated it when I couldn‟t read someone, because I liked to know how I should conduct myself. I pulled my hair

193 out of its tight bun and freed my feet from the sandals I was wearing. I had made up my mind. “I‟m staying.”

“There‟s extra toothbrushes in the linen closet, bottom shelf in the basket.

I like to buy in bulk,” Summer said, calling after me.

She did indeed like to buy in bulk—the package held ten toothbrushes, and only one was missing. I brushed my teeth and washed my face with lavender soap with sprigs of rosemary in it. I came back to the living room, where I found

Summer in a pair of boxers and a Flaming Lips tee shirt.

“You‟re sleeping in my bed. I‟m not going to let a pregnant lady take the couch.”

I went to her room while she went about the business of brushing her teeth. Her bed was a study in white on white—white sheets, a white comforter, white throw pillows. A framed print of one of Picasso‟s nudes hung above her bed—a side profile, the meaty thighs of the subject only slightly distorted, a hint of his future forays into experimentation in expression. Summer had a naked lady hanging above her bed.

I chose the side of the bed without a nightstand, figuring it was the side that stayed empty, my body happily enveloped in down, the a/c unit in the window made the room feel like the inside of a walk-in cooler. I was half asleep by the time Summer came to bed, my eyes were at half-mast.

She turned off the lamp, settled in beside me. “Sometimes I scream in my sleep. Don‟t worry about it.”

I remember nodding before giving in to sleep—

----

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Summer didn‟t scream though. I made my pregnancy-induced trips to the bathroom several times throughout the night but she slept all the while, her body stiff and silent.

When I woke up at six AM starving, I slipped out of bed after smoothing the covers over her shoulders. She was still out, and I thought about just leaving her to sleep and sneaking out in the burgeoning dawn, but she deserved better.

I was starving but her fridge was nearly empty. I walked to the donut shop and got half a dozen with two coffees. When I got back, I could hear the shower running. I thumbed through Summer‟s records and put on the Cars, sat down on her couch and kicked my feet up on the old trunk she used for a coffee table. I polished off two long johns and let a belch rip loose. My appetite was out of control.

“Very ladylike Madison,” said Summer, running her fingers through her still wet hair.

“I picked up some donuts from that place around the corner if you‟re hungry. I woke up starving.”

“I thought you slipped out on me.” She took up one of the coffees and sat next to me on the couch. “I‟m not one for food in the morning. Just the usual whore‟s breakfast of coffee and cigarettes.” She laughed, a raspy bark.

I looked at her, resplendent in the sunlight streaming in from the window, her lips the color of her flushed cheeks, the sun reflected in her eyes. And then I took her face in my hands and I kissed her without thinking about it, her mouth hot and wet and tasting of coffee, the warmth swirling up in me, making me dizzy.

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Summer pulled away, her breath coming out in pants, and she brought her hand to her mouth as if she were astonished. “Why did you do that?” She was still trying to regain a steady breath, her eyes held a hurricane.

“Because I wanted to.”

“You don‟t know what you want Maddie.”

“Don‟t you tell me what I want Summer. I wanted to kiss you and so I did.

Don‟t be an asshole.”

“You should go, Madison.” She was looking at her feet on the floor.

I stood up and slipped my feet into my sandals, slipped my bag over my shoulder, and slipped right out the door and down the steps and to the street. I drove home listening to a Smashing Pumpkins CD I had since high school, “1979” an old anthem on a new morning.

----

“You‟re almost eight months pregnant Maddie. It‟s time you start getting essentials. Jeremiah and I have decided we are buying a stroller and a car seat.”

“Oh, you‟ve decided, huh?” I found this amusing, because Erica was the one who had decided for Jeremiah. I did need a car seat and a stroller. I wasn‟t going to argue with my friend about it either because I knew better—once Erica made up her mind, there was nothing to be said.

Erica swiveled around from her spot at the stove and glared at me over her glasses. “You need to get ready for this baby.”

“I made a blanket. And I already bought a crib. You know that. Calm down.

I still have time.”

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“Yeah but that crib is still in the box and you‟re going to need a lot more than that. After I finish cooking lunch we are going to the store. Oh and one of my cousins had a little girl and she has a bunch of clothes for you.”

“That is sweet of her.” I was genuinely touched by the gesture, and Erica‟s generosity of spirit. Sometimes it seemed she was the only person I had in the world to lean on, and maybe it‟s because she was. “I‟ll go to the store with you.

You‟re right, I do need those things. But it makes me uncomfortable to have you taking care of those things for me when I can buy them myself.”

Erica spun around from the cutting board, where she was slicing tomatoes for BLT‟s. “I‟ve known you too long to be pissed you don‟t know how to let someone help you out. I know you can buy them yourself. But I want to do it because you are my sister and that baby already means the world to me.” And then she turned around again, and went back to slicing the heirloom tomato from the garden, stepped over to the stove to flip the bacon over in the cast iron skillet.

I just sighed, because sometimes her love was exhausting and there was nothing to be said. I sat down at the table and left Erica to cook and picked up my cell phone. No new messages. No new voicemails. No missed calls. I was thinking of Summer, who said: “You should go now Madison,” and how I did, I just went without a word. She had called once without leaving a message since then, a week ago, but I didn‟t have it in me to sit with my heart in my throat listening to the phone ring. The more I thought about it, the more stupid I felt.

I was pregnant and fresh out of courage and self-worth. And then the strangest thing—she called, just when I was thinking of her. I stepped outside to

197 the back porch and answered, looking at the always-empty park just beyond the end of Erica‟s backyard. “Hello,” I said, and waited.

“Maddie.”

“Yeah?” My voice cracked. I didn‟t know how to talk to boys when I was a teenager. When I met Garrison in college, he was six years older and very much direct, persistent, and devoted to making me his girlfriend—so I didn‟t have to worry about how to talk to him. And so it went with Summer—I didn‟t know how to talk to her, I couldn‟t label the feeling hearing her voice on the other end imbibed in my body.

“It‟s Summer.”

“I know. I have caller ID.”

“Right. Cell phones. Hey, would you want to hang out tonight?”

“Sure,” my voice a high pinched sound.

“Ok. Why don‟t I come see your place?”

“Sure. But it‟s not really mine. It‟s Erica‟s. I‟m just staying here.”

“Right. Well, Erica‟s place then, where you are staying.”

“I think that could work. Want to come over for dinner?”

“I—I think that sounds nice.”

“Good. 6:30.” And then I hung up, and came inside, and must have been grinning like an idiot because Erica sat our plates on the table and asked what I was so happy about.

“Oh it‟s nothing, just an old friend called. I invited her over for dinner tonight, do you mind?”

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“You know I love feeding people. An old friend huh?”

“Yeah. Summer. I think I‟ve talked about her before—she was Jenna‟s best friend when they were in high school. I met up with her Memorial Day weekend at a cookout. She just moved down here.”

“Well I hope she likes fajitas, because it‟s what I‟m makin. Hurry up and eat. We need to get to the store.”

I didn‟t need an invitation to eat. I went right to it.

----

She came early.

I was still in the shower when she arrived, and by the time I scrubbed my body and covered my tight belly with cocoa butter and put on my trusty black and white polka dot dress and combed my hair and walked downstairs, she had apparently been there for quite some time, because she was out on the back porch with Jeremiah, her back to me, a beer in one hand, comfortable as she could be.

“Your girl showed up while you were in the shower,” said Erica, mixing guacamole in a wood bowl. She had on a yellow tank top without a bra and had her dreadlocks piled high on top of her head.

“Sorry. I needed that shower though.” It was August and stepping outside was akin to walking into a sauna, and my trip with Erica that afternoon to Babies

R Us and the putting together of the crib left me worse for the wear.

“No worries. But she did show up early.”

“I‟ll get out there,” I said, and opened the back door, then stepped out onto the porch with Jeremiah and Summer. The heat was oppressive. Jeremiah was sitting at the table on the porch, drinking a Corona with lime. Saturday was his

199 cheat day—the rest of the time he was loyal to his “nutrition plan.” Summer stood up from her chair and turned to face me, set her beer down on the table.

Jeremiah excused himself—“I‟ll go see what I can do to help with dinner,” and slipped back inside, leaving me alone on the porch with Summer.

“You came early.”

“It‟s a fault of mine, I‟m afraid.”

“There are worse things,” I said, and looked at her standing there resplendent in a grass green tee shirt dress with a prosthetic limb.

“You like my new Terminator hand?” she said, and flexed her bicep, making a fist with her addendum of a hand.

It was all cool metal and black. “If Joan Jett had a prosthetic she would totally have one just like that.”

“I forgot how funny you are,” said Summer.

We both just stood there. I pulled out a chair and sat down. It was only after I had settled into the folding lawn chair that she pulled out a chair opposite mine and sat down. She wore reflective Aviators.

My hair was still wet from the shower but my neck was wet with sweat so I pulled my hair to the top of my head into a lazy bun and brought my hands to rest on the top of my belly. “How‟s work?”

“Boring but steady. I think I‟ll start looking for positions at inpatient psych hospitals soon.”

I looked at her. She wanted to work with mentally ill people all the time. It made me think.

“Your tits are huge,” she said.

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“I know. I‟m glad you noticed. They come with this huge belly.”

Erica pulled open the sliding glass door and stuck her head outside to say we should come in to eat dinner.

So we did. I wanted to stare at Summer and watch the way she ate out of a morbid fascination, but Erica was too busy asking her a thousand questions about where she went to college and what she did for a living and her astrological sign and who her first concert was and what I was like as a kid that Summer barely ate at all. Then Summer started asking Jeremiah for fitness advice and my heartburn kicked in and I felt humongous and invisible at the same time which seemed impossible to feel at once, but I did.

Erica cleared the plates away and Jeremiah offered to help do the dishes. I looked at Summer and she looked back. “Want to see my room?” I felt like a teenager, asking it.

“Sure. Let me get another beer.” She came out of the kitchen holding one and I took her up to my attic room. Summer stopped and looked at all the Frida prints in the stairwell, pausing at each. “Jenna‟s, right?”

“Yeah.

She stopped and looked at my room, at the crib and the rocking chair, my bed by the window, the park visible beyond the backyard through my window.

“It‟s like your own apartment up here.”

“Yeah, it works for now.” I sat down on the edge of my bed and Summer sat next to me. It didn‟t take long for Frankie to make herself at home in

Summer‟s lap. Bean curled himself around my lower back and pawed at my sides.

“These cats have always creeped me out. Who gets two black cats?”

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“Jenna.”

“I know. They‟ve got to be at least ten now, right?”

“They‟re actually twelve. I was never a cat person but I couldn‟t just let them get gassed.”

“Yeah. So,” she said, and looked at me down the side of her nose.

“So. Why did you kick me out like that?”

Summer glared at me. “Oh come off it.” She swallowed once, twice, three times, either spit or air, not the beer she brought upstairs and had barely touched. “You threw me for a loop. I‟m sorry for telling you to go but you can‟t go around doing that to people.”

“What is „that‟ exactly, Summer?” I crossed my arms and let them rest on the shelf of my pregnant belly.

“You can‟t kiss me like that when you don‟t mean it.” She swallowed again and a vein popped out in her forehead, a fault line.

“I meant it.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No Maddie. You‟re confused, and pregnant, and grieving. I can‟t be what you need.”

“My only confusion stems for your insistence on knowing how I feel or what I need.” I stood up and started pacing around my room.

“I‟m a fucking mess. When someone tells you the truth about them, believe them. Believe me. The past five years I‟ve seen enough severed limbs, brain injuries, and death to last a lifetime. I wake up screaming in my sleep. I get the

202 shakes. I‟ve considered killing myself nearly twice a week and that‟s while taking a mood stabilizer and enough antidepressants to tranquilize a horse.” She took a drink of beer.

“Summer Evans you‟re 32 years old. What the hell are you going to do?

Shrivel up and settle down to die? I‟m paralyzed by anxiety and panic attacks. I count the number of times I chew. I wash my hands raw. I have hallucinations of my dead sister. I‟m taking an anxiety med that could give my baby birth defects because I‟m too fucked up to function without it. Nobody is normal. Nobody comes out unscathed. I‟m sorry but I just don‟t buy that you‟re subhuman.”

Summer pushed Frankie off her lap and stood up, walked around the side of the bed and looked out the window. “You were a lot easier to boss around when we were kids,” she said, and looked at me so nakedly I felt my bravery fade. “Have you ever been with a woman?”

“Yes. You.”

“That doesn‟t count, we were kids, just messing around.”

“Oh, so that‟s all.”

Summer sat down on my bed. “No, I mean a relationship. Have you ever been in a relationship with a woman?”

“No, except for my high school boyfriend there was only Garrison. For almost twelve years.”

“Uh huh, and Garrison, whose child you‟re carrying...”

I walked over to her and put my hands on my hips. “A child he does not want.”

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“Even still, he is the father of your child. How do you think he would feel about you dating a woman?”

“Garrison doesn‟t get to feel anything about what I do. I am not his property.”

Summer laughed. “No, but how would he feel if he discovered you‟re dating a crippled dyke?”

“You aren‟t crippled. I don‟t care what he thinks. He already has another woman in his house sharing his bed. He cheated on me with her for the past two years.”

“Sit down, will you?” she said, patting the bed next to her. I did. “All right.

I‟ll drop Garrison, but have you thought about the ramifications of being with a woman? Getting death stares for holding hands in public? Dropping your straight privilege? Am I really the person you want for a partner? Do you want to raise your daughter with me?”

I wanted to touch her but I was afraid. “I know who you are Summer. I didn‟t say we should live together. I just think it would be nice to spend more time with you.”

Summer raised her eyebrows and bit her lip. “Oh, you just want to hang out, huh? No problem. We‟re hanging out right now!” She was flippant. I had said the wrong thing.

“Well yeah. I‟d definitely kiss you again, unless you think I‟m too fat—“

“You‟re pregnant. Don‟t be an idiot.”

“Is that a problem?”

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“No. But if you think we can just „hang out‟ you‟re naïve. Especially since you‟re pregnant. You might find I am the Gorgon you refuse to believe I am.”

“I know you‟re a real bitch when you think you know what‟s best. I‟m not afraid of you Summer.” I sounded like a petulant brat. I brought my sweaty hands to my knees. She was right. We couldn‟t just hang out. There was nothing casual about it.

“You‟re not afraid of me, huh?” Summer leaned in and put her face in mine, her voice all low thunder.

I kept my hands on my knees. I kept my gaze steady, even if looking her in the eye was sending my heart into somersaults, the flecks of orange in her amber eyes, the iris enveloped by a green ring. I was trying my deep breathing but my chest was rising and falling without restraint.

Summer brought her palm to my face, her thumb slid down my jaw, her hand came to rest on my neck. And then she kissed me with unapologetic want and I groaned and she just kissed me harder.

----

Her body had changed, and not just the missing limb—burn scars were painted in a heavy brush across her chest and all around her arms. Tattoos I didn‟t even know she had—an intricate labyrinth at the small of her back, the dragon-tailed M glyph for Scorpio on her hip. The softness in her frame was eroded, the angles of her body were sharp, her thighs and biceps hard muscle, her breasts still voluptuous but hard too, like she bore armor under her skin. There was no give in Summer Evans.

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I laid on my side because it was the only comfortable position I knew at eight months pregnant and looked at her, naked, her Terminator prosthetic on the floor with her dress, her hair in tufts around her face, her face all lax, eyes hooded with heavy lids. She rested her hand on the slope of my belly.

I could look at her all day I thought, and fell asleep.

----

“So, tell me about your „friend‟ who stayed last night, and joined us at the breakfast table wearing one of your dresses,” Erica said, leaning against the doorframe of my bedroom. She actually used air quotes to emphasize “friend.”

I looked up from Ina May Gaskin’s Guide to Childbirth and shrugged.

“I‟ve known her a long time Erica. She was Jenna‟s best friend growing up.”

Erica waved a hand in dismissal, tossed her free dreadlocks over her shoulder. “I already knew all that. Tell me about that dazed blissful look on both of y‟alls faces. Why she stayed last night when she only drank two beers. Why you walked her out to her car when she left.”

“I was just being polite.”

Erica pursed her lips, gave me a scowl. She wasn‟t buying it.

“We‟re just reconnecting. She‟s been through a lot. So have I. And all right,

I might like her a little.”

“A little?”

“Just a little.”

Erica threw her head back and laughed so big I could see the silver of her fillings. “I just want you to be happy, Mad. I mean it. I hope she will make you happy.”

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“I do too.”

----

I was sitting in my natural childbirth class with Summer, who offered to be my support and birth partner. Given that I had spent the night with her at least twice a week for the past month, enough to warrant keeping a toothbrush at her house, it seemed fitting. Summer said we could skip the U-Haul on the second date since I was pregnant and all. She had to explain the reference to me— lesbians move so quickly into commitment that they move in together after the second date. “You really are a baby dyke, aren‟t you,” she had said, laughing.

I didn‟t even know what I was. If being open to loving Summer Evans meant I was a lesbian, I guess I was a lesbian. I didn‟t much care. All I knew was I wanted to be with her, all the time, and if she wasn‟t with me, I wondered how she was.

I sat between her legs on the floor, my forearms resting on her knees. Our instructor was encouraging us to think of contractions as surges, and urged our birth partners to supply firm counterpressure to our lower back. We had started the session watching women in Russia give birth in the Dead Sea, letting their babies swim up into their waiting arms. We heard the midwife discuss the importance of oiling the perineum and stretching it in preparation for labor.

Summer whispered that she would stretch my perineum all right, and said

“Thank god this is the last one. This lady is a nuts.” I tried not to laugh and practiced huffing through my pretend “surges.” It was all too much. I knew that my daughter would be coming any time, that I was only two weeks away from my due date. Her birth was inevitable, and I needed to be ready.

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Our instructor urged us to turn and face our partner, to look them in the eye and say “I trust you completely, I trust my body, I trust us.”

I turned around to face Summer, her lips in a contained smirk, her eyes were alight with muted laughter. “I trust you completely.” Her smirk faded. “I trust my body.” She brought her hand to my belly. “I trust us.”

And then Summer kissed me hard on the mouth, in a room full of men with their pregnant partners, and if anyone stared I was none the wiser, caught too deeply in a heady tenderness I forgot where we were.

----

Summer was screaming in her sleep. It was a frightening cry of desperation. Her body, half-clothed in underwear and a cami, thrashed against the sheets. I rose up from my side slowly, quietly, trying not to startle her further.

I clicked on the lamp. Summer was still thrashing and groaning. Her eyes were frantic behind fluttering eyelids. She gripped the mattress with her good hand and kept her jaw locked tight, the sickening sound of teeth on teeth grinding.

My daughter was kicking madly in my belly, as though she too was distressed. Night terrors. “Sometimes I scream in my sleep. Don‟t worry about it,” she had said, the first night I stayed.

There was a bottle of lithium next to the alarm clock she was supposed to take nightly. I wonder if she forgot. I sat there, my heart seized with anxiety— should I have tried to wake her? Would she snap at me if I did?

Her eyes opened and she sat up stiff.

“Summer, baby are you all right?”

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No response. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, stood up stiffly, looked out the window under the shade. She checked the lock, ensured the a/c unit was secure, walked out of the bedroom. I followed her.

Summer walked into the kitchen. I heard her lock the window. She walked to the door, looked through the peephole, checked the deadbolt, secured the chain. I hurried back to bed and she walked in stiff-limbed, eyes glossy, pupils dilated, sweat beads on her forehead. She looked right through me, a sleepwalker zombie soldier. She got back into bed, her body stiff and straight, and closed her eyes. I waited to hear the rhythmic breaths, waited to see the steady rise and fall of her chest, waited to witness Summer succumb to sleep.

She did. I noticed my heart had stopped pounding, I remembered to breathe. I shut off the light, inched my body closer to Summer‟s body. The burden of my belly kept me from resting too close. I put my forehead against her head, my hand on her chest, and I slept, finally.

When I came to the next morning, Tina Turner was wailing about river deep and mountain high from the kitchen radio. Something was sizzling in a pan.

Bacon. I laid there for a while because her bed was comfortable and knowing she was near was enough for me. And then she brought me breakfast—a plate piled high with toast with marmalade, still hot bacon, and gigantic strawberries.

Summer kissed my forehead and waited until I was sitting up to pass me my plate. She went into the kitchen again and came back with a glass of water in an old mason jar. “How‟d you sleep?” She asked.

“Just fine. You know, except for the 42 trips to the bathroom. And you had a nightmare, I think, and did a bit of sleepwalking.”

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“Sorry about that. I didn‟t keep you awake, did I?”

“Not for long.”

“Good.” She sat down on the bed next to me and took up her cup of coffee.

“Summer, what do you dream about that makes you scream like that?”

“I told you I have PTSD, didn‟t I?” Her voice was hard. She was wearing a pair of leggings and a NAVY tee shirt, she had wily strands of gray curls along her hairline, clear in the morning light.

I knew I was running on ice so I gave a nod instead of daring to speak.

“There you go.” Summer stood up from the bed, knocking me down with the palm of her eye. She felt far away, illogical as it was when I saw her standing right there.

I know I was supposed to infer something from „there you go,‟ but I was pregnant and started crying. Summer stood like a pillar and opened her mouth as though she had something to say but she said nothing. I stood up and reached out for her and she let me. “What happened to you,” I said.

“I was held down and choked while my commanding officer raped me.”

Her body was motionless in my arms. The baby was a buoy between us.

When she said it, I saw it happen to her in the camera of my mind. I was afraid to look at her so I held her tighter still and spoke into her chest since she was a head taller than me—“I‟m sorry that happened to you.” I stopped crying because she needed me to be stronger so I grew stronger still while Summer remained motionless and the sound of her heart raging in my ear said what she did not.

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When the waves of Summer‟s tears came I held her tight, her hipbones jabbing me in the belly, jabbing River, who gave a kick that made Summer stop crying, look down at my full moon of a belly, and giggle. Being human was hard but there‟s unexpected joy in it too. Maybe that‟s hope.

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CHAPTER XIV

THE ART OF LOSING ISN‟T HARD TO MASTER

I thought of you one by one and tried to hold your faces in my eyes

Tried to say something to each of you of what it is without you

[Philip Levine]

The art of losing isn‟t hard to master.

Jenna said to Delaney, after his death, “There is no me without you.” Now there was neither of them, and my parents dead as far as I was concerned. Jenna was right. Jenna was right when she said “Poor sad little Maddie without a home.” I had no home but the one I made for me and River now.

There are places in people where nobody needs to go, corners of their soul where no light can reach. Jenna‟s journals gave me the keys to a condemned house, and I, a fool in my grief, looking for a reason for her death, slipped in the back door for the truth. Except I wasn‟t ready for it, hadn‟t steeled myself enough for it, couldn‟t imagine the hideous suffocating darkness inside my sister‟s heart.

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Jenna came unraveled when Delaney ended his life. She saw no reason to go on, there was no sunset beautiful enough to convince her to say without him there to share it. My sister was broken before Delaney made his departure, a departure he thought was inevitable.

My mother, lost in denial, Delaney, seething in rage, my father drunk and mean, Jenna lost in the undertow, and me—disassociated and in my head, nose in a book. Our family was rotten, it can‟t be denied, but how did I come out of it still intact?

A reliance on meds to manage my anxiety, sure. A failed long term relationship and a burgeoning one in my third trimester of pregnancy indicating a certain degree of damage, sure, but I never wanted to sit the ejector seat of my own life. That has to count for something. I could spend years of my life in therapy talking about it, but nothing had broken me yet, even knowing the truth about my own family, and I knew nobody would ever be able to tell me why. Not everything happens for a reason.

Except River. She happened for a reason. And Summer.

----

And now River was coming. As soon as I felt the waves of cramps coming and going I knew it was time. I paced around my attic room and sat on the edge of the bed to bear down through contractions. I waited until the waves came ten minutes apart. I tried to lay down and rest to see if they would slow down, knowing that I was 41 weeks and four days pregnant and she was due some time ago.

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I picked up my phone off my nightstand and called Summer, who didn‟t answer. It was 11:45 at night and I had intended to go in to work one more time and tie up some loose ends before I started my maternity leave in the morning, but those ends ended up untied because River was coming. I sent a text to

Summer—It‟s time. I‟m going to have Erica take me to the hospital.

I went down the stairs as fast as I could before a contraction came, past the hall of Fridas and down to the second story. Erica‟s bedroom was at the end of the hallway and I just had to make it there to wake her up then down the stairs and to the car to the hospital. I read all the books. I knew labor for first time moms could last a long time, or even stall. I didn‟t want to be at the hospital past my due date with a stalled labor.

But labor wasn‟t stalled. I could feel the calm before I was hit with another wave of pain when I got to Erica‟s bedroom door. I gripped the wood trim and beared down through the contraction, got my breath. I didn‟t want to wake her up and have labor stop.

I pushed the cracked bedroom door open and whispered that it was time.

Erica kept sleeping, her head on Jeremiah‟s chest, their bodies bathed in the hall light in the dark of their room. Jeremiah opened his eyes.

“Can one of you drive me to the hospital? I‟m in labor.”

Jeremiah shook Erica awake with an urgency that was almost comical—

“Baby wake up! Maddie needs a ride to the hospital, it‟s time.”

Erica jolted upright, swung her legs over the bed, wide awake in seconds.

She fumbled for her glasses on the nightstand. “How far apart are your contractions?”

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“They‟re close.” I felt another one beginning to rumble, low in my belly.

“About five minutes. I can‟t keep track anymore.”

“Shit! Has your water broken?” Erica pulled a hoodie hanging from one of the posts of her four poster bed, put it on over her grandma nightgown, left the scarf on her head in place.

“No. Can you take me to the hospital? My bag is already by the door.” My phone buzzed in my palm. Summer—I‟m on my way right now.

“Let‟s go now! You can‟t drive yourself!”

We went. I had to sit on the floor of the passenger side, gripping the seat through each contraction. By the time we pulled up to the kerb in her old Elantra my contractions were on top of each other.

Summer‟s face swam into view. She helped me out of the car, hoisted my bag over her shoulder. A nurse met us in front of the hospital with a wheelchair,

Summer had already called L&D. I couldn‟t answer the questions the nurse was asking because all I could concentrate on was the incredible pressure tearing my hips apart and Summer‟s cold fingers pushing back the wisps of hair sticking to my sweaty forehead. “Breathe Maddie breathe.”

I breathed and breathed and breathed. Pushed and pushed and pushed.

The nurse told me to stop pushing but I couldn‟t.

My crotch was on fire. That must be it. She‟s crowning.

The nurse wheeled me to delivery, telling me over and over to stop pushing.

Summer said “I don‟t think it‟s voluntary at this point.” I was squeezing the bones of her hand.

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They got me out of the chair and put my feet in stirrups. Summer was telling them, there were at least a half dozen people in the room, that she was my partner, while someone complained about there being no time for an IV and to get me on the monitor.

Summer‟s face. Calm. Eyes steady on mine. She was saying something I couldn‟t hear. I couldn‟t hear anything. Just my own heart.

A man in scrubs appeared. Touched my knee with a cold hand. “You can let go,” he said.

So I did, I let her go, out she came, red and purple and screaming, they put her on my chest.

Summer was crying. I held the wrinkled miracle against my chest. She smelled like rust and her gurgly screams faded to lip smacking. She was hungry.

Less than a minute old on the outside and she was ready to survive, to sate her hunger, to seek warmth.

----

River slept on my chest. Like her uncle Delaney, she was born with red hair.

Of course I didn‟t remember when Delaney was born, only the memory of a picture, buried somewhere in my mom and dad‟s basement—I sat next to

Jenna, who held a newborn Delaney, our identical shade of white blonde hair in stark contrast to Delaney‟s searing red. Jenna looked down into his wrinkly face, transfixed. I met the eye of the person taking the picture, my lips in a tight line.

One of these things is not like the others.

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A baby is hardly a harbinger of sleep. River nursed, then expected to sleep on my chest until she deigned to dine again. I had given up trying to swaddle her or plug her restless mouth with a pacifier. I just let her sleep there, in the hollow between my ribs. I counted her breaths. I counted mine.

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