Marrow (22 page)

I imagine my mother’s ghost walking into the kitchen, standing over my shoulder, trying to push my back into my seat.
Stay in the Bone, stay in the Bone, stay in the Bone.

I feel like my lungs are constricting, like everyone who has ever lived in this house is ganging up on me, filling me with their fear. I walk backward to the front door, looking accusingly at the air around me. My hand reaches behind me for the doorknob. I can feel its grooves, its rust, its connection to the house. I try to turn it, but it jams, moving neither left nor right. I yank at it. The ghosts are moving in. If they reach me, they won’t let me leave. I am crying without tears, but then I hear my name on Judah’s voice. The knob is unstuck; I fling it open and stumble out into the night air. Judah is at the bottom of the three steps, calling my name. I run down to him and find myself kneeling at his chair, crying into his lap. He touches my head, warm hands and compassion, which only makes me cry harder.

“What is it, blondie? People are going to think you’re giving me a blow job.” He makes no move to disturb me. I feel his fingers massaging my neck and scalp as he lets me cry. My hurt is compounded. I’m unsure from which direction to approach it. It feels like everyone is leaving me, like everyone always has, and yet I’m not sure I care. But, I do care, because I’m crying, and it hurts. I don’t blame them, that’s the difference. I’ve grown to expect it.

“I’ll come back for you, Margo. I promise.”

I shake my head. No, he won’t, but that’s okay too. This is our goodbye.

“Judah,” I say, pulling my head back to look at him. “I’m only nineteen years old.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I kind of already know that.”

“I’ve only really known you for a few months.”

“If you want to think of it that way…”

I stare at him. The way he’s looking at me is causing me shame. But I’ll say it. I’ll say it all, despite the wrongness of my feelings.

“What are you saying?” he asks.

“That I love you. That I love you deeply. I’m in love with you.”

The smile falls from his face. For a moment, he’s exposed. Horrified. I pull back, but his hands are on my arms, holding me prisoner in his lap.

“Let me go,” I say.

He does. I step back, out of his reach.

“Don’t come back here. No matter what happens. Promise me.”

“Margo…?”

“Just promise me.”

“Why? Why would you make me promise that?”

“Because,” I say. “If you come back, I’ll come back.”

He stares at me for a long time.

“I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I’m sorry for all of this.”

I’m backing up again. It feels ironic, familiar. Back into the eating house I go, the word goodbye eating the flesh of my lips. Wanting to be said, wanting to never be said.
Get it over with,
I tell myself.

“Goodbye, Judah.” My voice is clear and strong.

“I can’t say it, Margo.”

“Don’t,” I tell him. “Just remember one thing. You left me.”

And then I’m back in the house, and I’ve closed the door on Judah, and on the small chance I thought I had at love. And what an idiot I was to think I had that chance.

“It’s just us now,” I say to the eating house. “You can have me.”

A REPORTER IS SPEAKING
about a baby koala born at the zoo near Seattle. I focus my whole attention on that story—the birth of a koala on the day Judah leaves the Bone. It’s only after he leaves that I look out the window at the empty street, but all I can think about is the koala. I want to see it. I want to go to the zoo, just like Judah promised me we would. As I leave the room and walk up the stairs, the news story switches to the murder of Lyndee Anthony. The clear voice of the reporter travels with me for a while, and then my thoughts drown it out. “Police are still searching for—”

When you start life, you have high hopes. Even if you’re born in the Bone, with a mother who wears a red, silk robe all day long, and sells her body to men for a nice crisp hundred dollar bill. You believe in the unbelievable. You see fairies in your empty pantry where the cans are supposed to be, and the rats that scramble across your bedroom floor are messengers from the gods, or your own personal spirit animal. And, if you’re really creative, you romanticize the rags you’re wearing. You’re Cinderella, you’re Snow White, you’re…

You’re a dead girl walking. But, for a time, you’re blind to it, and that’s a good thing. And then it’s taken—slowly … slowly … slowly. The loss of innocence is the most severe of growing pains. One day you believe you’re Cinderella, and the next all your imaginary glimmer falls away, and you see yourself as just another poor fuck, sentenced to live out your days in the Bone. Your innocence leaves so violently. It hurts to understand that no one is going to rescue you. No one can give you freedom. No one can give you justice, or vengeance, or happiness, or anything. Anything. If you’re willing, and if you’re brave, you take it. I have to get out of here.

The day after Judah leaves, I take six thousand dollars of my mother’s money, and I buy a car from an ad I find in the paper. It’s the first time I’ve ever bought a paper, and it takes me ten minutes to find the section where used cars are sold. An impulse buy, but I trust it because it’s what I need right now. It’s an open top Jeep, black and older than I am, but in pretty good shape. The owner is Mr. Fimmes, a rickety old vet with arthritis and a set of dentures that he pops in and out of place with his tongue. The Jeep belonged to his son before he died in an accident climbing Rainier. He’s not the sentimental type, he tells me. He kept it around because his wife wouldn’t let him sell it.

“She died of cancer six months ago, so I figured now’s the time…”

I tell him I’m sorry for his loss as I poke around in the glove box. I find a moldy box of cigars and a pocketknife that looks expensive. I pull out the knife and offer it to him. “You might want to keep this.” He shakes his head. “Told you. Not the sentimental type.”

“Oh,” I say lamely, thinking of all the boxes of my mother’s things in the attic. Would I be able to give those away as easily?

“I hardly drove it, and it’s in pretty good shape.” He pops his dentures in place to tell me this, then pops them back out again. It’s tough looking and impractical since it rains so goddamn much. But I don’t mind the feel of rain on my face, and it’s better than buying a beat-up, gang-banger car from Alfie’s Car Lot. Everyone knows Alfie deals everything Mo does not. The lot is just a side business. Cars traded for drugs, cars bought to hide cash. Those cars have bad juju. I hand Mr. Fimmes the cash and drive away. I go slowly, my foot hovering nervously over the brake. I watch old Mr. Fimmes in the rearview mirror, thinking at any moment he’s going to figure out I can’t drive and call the whole thing off. I’ve only driven once before, when Sandy let me drive her car around the Rag’s parking lot after hours. I’d been good at it then, but there had been no other cars around. So this is it. I’m teaching myself. I take the back streets, slamming the brakes too hard at the stop signs, and almost knocking over someone’s mailbox when I make a turn.

I’ll be the only person on Wessex Street, besides Mo, who owns a car. This makes me a target. Judah was suspicious of me, so why wouldn’t these strangers be? Either way, I don’t want anyone to know I have it. Sandy says I can leave in in her garage for a few days. I drop it off at her house and catch the bus home. It feels good. I bought a car. I’m a total grownup.

I rent the eating house to Sandy, who finally left Luis and is seeing a new guy she met in the vitamin aisle at Wal-Mart. He’s nice enough; I met them at a bar once, but soon after arriving, I felt like the awkward third wheel and said I had to go.

I go to the library and print off a lease agreement I find online. Four hundred dollars a month, and she is responsible for the utilities. She says she is going to get a roommate and charge them six hundred dollars a month to live with her. I don’t care. I tell her so. This response seems to illicit excitement from her, and she rushes off to put an ad on Craigslist. I don’t know who Craig is, but as I toss my things into garbage bags, I pray he doesn’t send a psychopath to live in my mother’s house. Then I remember that I’m much worse than a psychopath, and that shuts up my mental fretting.

I get a driver’s license, and then I open a bank account, depositing most of my mother’s money and a stack of my paychecks. I keep five thousand dollars in a rolled up sock in my purse. On an almost sunny day in late August, when the wild blackberries hang heavy and ripe on their branches, I climb into my Jeep and leave the Bone behind forever.

HOW DO YOU JUST LEAVE
the place you’ve always lived and not know where you’re going? HOW DO YOU JUST LEAVE THE PLACE YOU’VE ALWAYS LIVED AND NOT KNOW WHERE YOU’RE GOING?!

I jerk my steering wheel to the right and cross two lanes of traffic, cutting off a Subaru and a semi before the Jeep groans to a stop on the shoulder of the highway. I flick on the Jeep’s emergency lights and hop out. This is crazy. What am I doing? The gravel crunches beneath my shoes as I race to the opposite side of the car and lean against the passenger side door, bending at the waist. I just need to … breathe … without … anyone … seeing me. I try to look calm, even as my heart rages. I am nothing. I have no one. The world is big, and this is all I’ve ever known. I cover my eyes with my hands and feel fear crushing what courage I worked so hard to cultivate over the last few weeks. I’m following signs to a city I’ve never even visited. I have no idea where I’m going to sleep tonight. God, I’m stupid. Following a pipe dream that Judah laid the foundation to. Before he left me.

What makes me think I can live this fray?

And then there is a voice that comes from deep inside me; it is what I imagine the eating house sounds like: rumbly and old.
“You’ve killed people. What makes you think you can’t?”

I say it out loud, with car engines roaring behind me, and suddenly I’m sober. Sober as the night I smashed Vola Fields’s head on the side of her dresser for beating her baby. Sober like the day I used Gassy the gas can to douse Lyndee Anthony in two dollars worth of premium before I tossed a match her way.

Of course I can do this. I’m deranged. I am capable of murder. I’m like my grandmother who pushed my mother’s head under the murky bathwater and tried to drown her. Surely, somewhere inside of me dwells the ability to survive in a city larger than the Bone. I survived aloneness, I fed myself, I clothed myself, I graduated high school, I read books to make myself smarter. I’ll do it all again, because that’s what I do.
Right?
Right.

I am almost put back together when a highway patrol car pulls up behind the Jeep.
Fuck.
Running my hands through my hair, my mind immediately goes to the contents of my car. Is there anything in here that can get me in trouble? I think of the knife set that I took from the kitchen when I was packing up, and the pink Zippo that I never gave back to Judah. No. I can’t get in trouble for having those. But Nevaeh’s bear sits on the passenger seat. The bear from the picture that was on every news station in America. The bear I took from Lyndee Anthony’s book bag before I burned it along with her.

I straighten my spine.

“Hello,” I say. I notice that his hand rests lightly on the hilt of his gun as he walks over. Something they teach them to do in the police academy?
Just so you know, I have a gun! Hey there, I can blow your head off!

“
Ma’am,” he says. “Are you having car trouble?”

“It’s overheating,” I say quickly. He bends down to peer into the Jeep, even though the removable top is off. “Are you headed somewhere?”

“I’m moving,” I say flatly. “To Seattle.” I eye Bambi. Why didn’t I stuff it into one of the trash bags?

He eyes the bags stuffed into my trunk in a hurry, then opens the driver’s side door.

“Seattle,” he says. “Big ambitions. See your license and registration,” he says. I fumble in my wallet, then the glove box, and hand them over. I study him as he looks them over, carrying them back to his cruiser to run my plates. I consider putting the bear away, but if he’s already seen it, it will look suspicious.