Authors: Paula McLain
“Fuck,” growled Fawn. “Fuck and
double
fuck.”
In a Texaco bathroom, a dank and dim six-by-ten concrete box, Fawn pronounced me a “bloody fucking wreck.” There was no mirror, just a stainless-steel rectangle bolted to the wall over the sink, but I could see enough of myself in it to know Fawn was
right. I splashed water on my face and dusted my hands with powdered soap. There were no paper towels, so Fawn went into the stall for toilet paper, folded sheets that came out of a metal box and felt like wax paper. I cleaned myself up as much as I could, then went into the stall to pee, the urine hot and searing.
“I’m going to try and find us a ride,” Fawn said through the stall door. “See if you can stay here and not make things worse.”
I heard the door swing open and closed and then I was alone with the crosshatched stainless steel, the layers of graffiti. Without Fawn there to tell me to keep it together, I felt myself begin to dissolve. Had Donald raped me? Was it rape or had I wanted it to happen? I didn’t remember telling him no, but he hadn’t exactly asked me, had he?
Fawn came back in, swearing. “Where is everyone?” she said. “It’s like the whole fucking city’s asleep. We’re going to have to walk up to the freeway, I think, and see if we can hitch a ride from a trucker or something. I don’t know where that is, though. Let me go ask the guy inside the station for a map and then we’ll get going.”
“Wait. What about Claudia? Shouldn’t we go look for her?”
“She’s the one with the car, and do you see her looking for us? Fat chance. She’s halfway home by now, you can bet on it.”
I didn’t think that was true. Claudia wasn’t the type to just run off, only thinking of herself. And even if she were, how on earth would she have found her way back to her car alone? But thinking we had abandoned Claudia on top of everything else that had happened was too much to bear, so I made myself believe it was possible. I conjured a picture of Claudia on the highway home, drunk but purposeful. And when that picture was clear enough in mind, I said to Fawn, “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
We walked out of the bathroom and into the parking lot. A blinking neon sign under the larger
TEXACO
read
OPEN 24 HOURS
, and though there weren’t any cars anywhere, someone sat inside,
tending the place. I could just see the dark top of his head near the register.
“Let me handle this,” Fawn said. “I hate to say it, but you’re still looking a little spooky.”
I leaned against the cinder-block wall of the building and watched Fawn walk into the gas station like she was walking onto a set or a stage. She had her walk going and the hair. It was incredible, staggering even. I myself felt like the parking lot I waited in, like I was wearing exploded beer bottles and gum wrappers and wadded plastic bags, both outside and inside. And Fawn was flirting. It was unmistakable, the tilt of her head, the way her hair swung to one side like a pendulum, and then the laugh I watched through the window as if I were watching a bit of silent film.
I couldn’t stand it suddenly. Turning away, I noticed, for the first time, a darkened phone booth just down the street, past a ragged line of chain-link fencing. I could run to the phone before Fawn came out, but who would I call? I just wanted to be back at Raymond’s house in my cot that smelled like a rainy day. I wanted to be asleep with no memory whatsoever, the whole night behind me, manageable and benign and revised so that it couldn’t do me any more harm.
When Fawn finally came out, almost twenty minutes later, I was sitting on the sidewalk on a piece of newspaper I’d found, my legs straight out in front of me. “What are you doing on the ground?” Fawn asked.
“Waiting for
you
, of course.”
“Well you don’t have to wait much longer. I found us a ride. That guy inside, his name is Eddie. He gets off in like an hour and he’s going to drive us home.”
“We don’t even know him,” I said, “and he’s going to drive us all the way back to Moline?”
“I
know
him. I’ve just spent a half an hour talking to the guy.
And anyway, what does it matter? He’s going to give us a ride.”
“I called Raymond,” I said quietly. My eyes were locked on my knees, on the lacerations that were long and vertical, like bits of broken road.
“You did not. Not even you are that stupid.”
“I did. He’s on his way right now.”
Fawn’s hands were on her hips. Her voice pitched to a sneer when she said, “And what, pray tell, did you say?
Um, I’m high and banged all to shit in Chicago, can you come and get me?
”
“I just told him we were in trouble, that we needed him to come.”
“Correction,
you’re
in trouble. I’m out of here. I don’t need Raymond and I don’t need you. I told you, I’ve already got my ride home.”
“If you’re not here when he comes, what am I supposed to tell him? What’s he going to think?”
“What’s he going to
think
? You should listen to yourself sometime. It’s a riot.” She paced the patch of asphalt, her cork shoes neatly skirting dips and broken glass, the stumpy end of an abandoned cigar. “We are so busted and you don’t even know it. If you’d have let me take care of everything, like I told you to, we’d have been home before he even woke up. He’d never have known we were gone.” She stopped and looked down at me critically. “And just what were you planning to tell him about our adventure in Chicago?”
“I don’t know. The truth, I guess.”
Fawn made a disgusted snuffing sound. “Really? Well good luck with that. I wish you the best.” With that she went inside.
An hour later, Eddie’s shift replacement showed up, and Fawn and Eddie came out together. He was older than I might have guessed, maybe thirty, and he looked a little seedy, with long blond hair parted in the middle, a handlebar mustache trailing nearly to his chin. He had his arm thrown loosely over Fawn’s
shoulder as they walked to his car, a beat-up-looking Grand Torino. Fawn was smoking a cigarette, taking quick drags as she walked. Just once did she look over at me, expressionless, and then they were gone.
I don’t know how long I waited for Raymond in the parking lot, but as the minutes passed I grew more and more worried that I’d made a terrible mistake. He had sounded sleepy on the phone, and then angry and impatient with me, but finally concern had surfaced in his voice. When he asked me where he could find us, I had to get off and let the phone dangle as I ran up to the corner to get the names off of the street signs. I had let myself feel only relief then, knowing he was on his way, but now it occurred to me that I had no idea what I would say to Raymond when he arrived. Could I really tell him everything, about “borrowing” the car? About the drugs and the drinking? About Donald? And if I did tell, what then? He’d be livid, most certainly. I was busted, as Fawn so aptly put it, we both were, and grounding wasn’t going to be enough of a punishment for our considerable crimes. He would send Fawn away, back to Phoenix, and maybe send me away too. Could I really go back to Bakersfield? I couldn’t stand that. But how could I avoid it? I had to think of something, and fast; something I could tell Raymond that would make this night go away, disappear it altogether—the night, the drinks, the sick feeling in my stomach, my bleeding knees, Donald’s wet mouth and hands—everything waved away. Abracadabra.
Before long, I heard the rumble of a car pull into the station and looked up to see not Raymond but Eddie’s Grand Torino. He drew alongside one of the pumps, blocking my view, and idled there a few minutes. I couldn’t tell what was happening at all until I heard one of the doors swing open, slam shut. The car roared away and there stood Fawn on the island, leaning to rest a hand against one of the pumps so she could slide her shoes
back on. She looked disheveled, the ends of her hair tangled as if she’d spent the last half hour wrestling with Eddie in the front seat of his car, which she likely had. I knew I should be angry at Fawn for having left me there in the first place, but I wasn’t. I was happy and relieved to see Fawn’s face, disheveled or not.
“Well, aren’t you going to thank me already?” Fawn said when she was nearer. “I mean, I’m making a huge sacrifice for you.”
“Thank you.” I stood up and went to hug Fawn, but she flinched away. That’s when I saw the new, raw red marks on her arm, the small triangular tear along the left leg seam of her corduroy shorts. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“Nothing, I’m fine.” She shrugged me off and rifled through her purse for a comb. “We don’t have much time,” she said, drawing the comb resolutely through the worst of the snarls, “but I think I have a plan. What really happened to us tonight was that we were kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped? How? Why?”
“Why? Why is anyone kidnapped? We were just walking along the street—on our way home—and some guy picked us up, some freaky guy, and he drove us to Chicago where he was going to rape and murder us.”
“But we got away,” I added, getting into the story.
“Of course we got away. We ran away from him and that’s how you got your cuts and stuff, when you fell down. See, it’s foolproof. Am I a genius or what?”
Either she was a genius or she was insane. “He drove us a hundred and seventy-five miles, all the way to Chicago from Moline? How are we going to say he kept us in the car? I mean, wouldn’t we have tried to escape before?”
“He had a knife. He threatened to kill us if we moved so much as an inch.”
“But we ran away when he stopped the car?”
“Yep, that’s how brave we are.” Fawn tucked her comb away.
Her hair was perfect, gleaming. “Raymond’s going to eat this up with a spoon. Just stick to the story, okay? And cry if you can, that always helps.”
It was nearly dawn when Raymond arrived, and I didn’t have to make myself cry when I saw him; the tears came on their own, hard and fast. My voice was jagged and snotty when I recounted the story just as Fawn had laid it out. Then Fawn, her own tears flowing easy as water, told him what she remembered, adding details about the car—it was a Grand Torino—and the guy himself: he was white, between thirty and forty, and he was crazy. If we hadn’t gotten away, we’d be dead for sure.
And then something extraordinary happened. Raymond cried too. His face contorting, he pulled us both to him and held us in a vise grip that made me feel like I was suffocating, but I also didn’t want to move. This was the first time Raymond had really hugged me, I realized with a shock. He had rumpled my hair, patted me on the shoulder, fake-punched me on the arm—the kind of touching that passed between brothers, really. And lately, as he’d withdrawn more and more into his own routine, seeming to forget he even
had
two teenage girls living in his house, who were, like it or not, his responsibility, there hadn’t even been that level of familiarity. This hug, though, I could feel all the way down and through. It made me believe I was safe for the moment, and truly cared for.
“I’m going to kill him,” Raymond finally said when he was able to release us.
“You’ll never find him,” Fawn said. “I’m sure he’s long gone by now.”
“I’ll find him,” Raymond muttered to himself, and then he helped us into the truck, guiding me, then Fawn, gently by the elbow, as if we each were precious, fragile as glass.
I slept all the way home. When I woke up, Raymond was try
ing to lift me out of the car in a cradle hold, and rather than tell him I was fine to walk on my own, I sighed and closed my eyes and let myself be carried through the house and into our room. He laid me down gently on the bed and only then did I let myself open my eyes.
“Those cuts are pretty bad,” he said, his eyes moving over my knees and shins and up to my swollen jawline. “We’ll take you to the doctor later and have them look you over. Maybe you need stitches.”
“That’s a lot of trouble. I think I’m fine,” I said sleepily.
“You’re not fine. Something terrible has happened to you.”
With that, a wave of awareness flooded through me. Something terrible
had
happened to me, and the tears began to come afresh. Raymond held me as I sobbed, and when I quieted, he tucked me under the quilt and smoothed my hair and said, “Shhh. Don’t worry about anything, I’m going to make this right.”
When he left the room, Fawn turned to me from her own cot and whispered, “You’re a fucking natural. I had no idea.”
I ignored her, looking over Fawn’s head where morning light came through the blinds in glowing ribs. It was nearly nine a.m. Closing my eyes, the lenses of which felt scratched, serrated, I tried to sleep. But the same image kept spinning around to the front of my consciousness like a slot-machine lemon. A benign moment in the car, Donald’s hands pushing lower between my knees as we drove through quiet streets toward the lake. That’s when I should have pulled away and told him I wasn’t interested. But I had been interested then—in a dizzy, magic-carpet-ride way. Feeling the pressure of his hand graze my inner thighs, I wondered what it would be like to have Donald inside me. Was it my fault, then, what had happened? Could anyone tell me I was innocent, absolved? Say
Shhh
in a way that would truly make everything better right now?
“Are you asleep?” Fawn whispered. “Jamie?”
S
omeone likes you,” Leon whispered like a fourth-grader, snickering lightly. He and Raymond were up on the scaffolding, having a beer in the heat of the afternoon, while Katrina, the grown daughter of their landlady, Mrs. Unger, stood below them on the sunburned grass, gawking up. There was something not quite right about Katrina, though Raymond had a hard time putting his finger on it. Whenever he passed her in the hall, she stared openly at him, stood too close, let long pauses fall when he tried to engage her in the smallest pleasantries. She always looked as if she’d been sleeping in her clothes, her dress yawning open to reveal glimpses of her pale, plush underbelly. Her hair was flipped up on the ends and teased high, full of holes she hadn’t seen or looked for in a mirror.
“Hi Katrina,” Raymond called down to her now. She didn’t answer, just peered into his face with an attention that was so focused, so full-bore, he began to feel that she could see all of him, everything, right through to his skeleton. It was so unsettling that he picked up his brush and went back to work, even
though when Leon had arrived with the beer, he had pretty much decided to knock off for the afternoon.
Today, the priming finally complete, the house color was going up. Mrs. Unger had chosen a pale gray that looked lavender in some light, reminding Raymond of the pigeons on the wharves, the ones that preened like beauty queens though they ate anything—fish scales, popcorn, hardened buttons of saltwater taffy—though they walked around with their own shit on their claws.
“Well, if you’re going to be that way,” Leon said, watching Raymond moving the paintbrush across a line of bricks, “I guess I’ll take a nap.” With that, he climbed through the fitted-pipe railing of the scaffolding and into his and Raymond’s open kitchen window, heading into the cool dark of the apartment.
Raymond heard Katrina laugh when Leon wriggled through, but didn’t look down, and after a time she seemed to give up on him, wandering back into the building. Alone again, Raymond painted slowly, letting the mortar grooves lead the edge of his brush forward and back. Pigeon-colored paint flecked back, freckling his wrist and lower arm. After an hour had passed, he’d moved the scaffold but was still perched just under the windows of his own apartment. If he craned his neck slightly, he could see through the stacked rooms and into the living room, where Leon sat on the floor cross-legged, leaning back on his hands, chin tilted. Whoever he was smiling at full-wattage, Raymond couldn’t see. All he could make out from this vantage point was a woman’s foot rocking back and forth, toes pointed and tipped with pale polish. He wanted to think Leon had gone out instead of napping and asked a girlfriend up, but he knew it was Suzette. He knew it, and felt a sick internal thudding as Leon moved closer to the swaying foot, bending to kiss the instep, then ran the tip of his tongue into a groove between toes.
Without thinking of the consequences, how it would piss either or both of them off to look up and find him staring in
like a Peeping Tom, Raymond banged on the glass. Getting no response, he banged again louder, but the action only sped up. Now Leon stood up with his belt unclasped, his lower belly brown and flat, and Suzette followed him. Her hair was down and loose, her blouse trailed in one hand. She was braless and it was all Raymond could register for a moment—her white, white skin, the dip between her breasts—until he looked into her face. And there it was in blooming, too-close color, too close, like his own home movie: Suzette on the cliff’s edge. Her expression was radiant and purposeful—and what else?
Satisfied.
As if she knew she could have Leon if she wanted, or anyone else, anything else. The frailty and vulnerability Raymond knew better than his own interior had disappeared, leaving this fifty-foot woman—some impossible predator in a late-night movie about to devour the whole world. It was the strangest sensation for Raymond, seeing his sister in action. He knew, of course, or had guessed that this was how her life worked. That once she had something in her sights, she forgot everything else and reinvented herself on the spot. But ever since their adolescence, he’d been spared this close a view of the drama’s upswing, the scariness of her euphoria. Seeing it now made Raymond feel ill, because the only outcome was catastrophe. Leon, though Raymond loved him like a brother, was as bad a choice for Suzette as Benny. He’d only break her heart, and when he did, Raymond would have a front-row seat—like watching a car accident in slow motion with no distance from the wreckage.
As he stood there, leaning forward with such concentration that his forehead hit the window casing with a thunk, the couple began to move together, out of the living room and toward Leon’s bedroom down the hall, their hands all over each other.
“I see you,” someone called from below. Raymond jerked away from the window so fast he nearly fell, and the voice came again, louder, “I
see
you up there!” He peered over the edge of
the scaffolding and there was Katrina’s round face looking up through sycamore branches, her round eyes blinking slowly. “I’m supposed to come and get you.”
He nodded and waved to show her he’d heard, but as he began to lower the scaffold slowly, his grip on the rope system was shaky. Vertigo buzzed between his ears. What the hell was going on? Leon had sworn to him, given Raymond his word—and just days before. Was he lying then? Had the asshole already been sleeping with her?
When he reached the ground, Katrina was waiting. She had changed her clothes and now wore a pale blue shirtwaist and skirt. Her hair was combed. She wore lipstick. Standing entirely too close to him she said, “The gas man’s coming today. You need to open 1B for him, that’s what I’m supposed to tell you.”
“Sure.” He scratched his head and began to step out from under the ropes and pulleys. “I can do that.”
All the way across the lawn and through the front door Katrina shadowed him. He stood fitting his key into the lock of 1B, feeling the heat from her body, smelling the slightly pumpkin-y odor of her skin, her breath.
“I’ve always wanted to see in here,” she said. “Can you give me a tour?”
“It’s the same as your place,” he said distractedly. Part of him wanted to rush upstairs and confront Leon and Suzette. Part of him wanted to go out and get very, very drunk. None of him wanted to be where he was, talking to Katrina. “The units are exactly the same layout,” he said, pocketing his keys, trying to appear busy.
“But this one’s empty.” She arched her back, her plush belly pushing into the space between them. She clearly wanted him to lead her inside, to close the door. And then what? Was he supposed to kiss her, was that the daydream? Or make love to her
even? Her face was hopeful, and Raymond felt a rising disgust at this, the way she was like a door propped open.
“Well?” Katrina prompted, and he snapped back to himself. “I have to get back to work,” he said.
“Work? Yeah, I saw you
working
.” There was something in her tone that made Raymond think she knew something more, had seen him spying into his own apartment.
“Sorry,” he said, moving away.
“You’re not either,” she said to his back. “You’re not sorry.”
He turned fast on his heel and nearly ran into Suzette, who’d come noiselessly down the stairs.
“What do we have here?” she asked. She must have instantly taken in Katrina’s hungry plushness, Raymond’s discomfort. Nothing else would account for her tone, which was small and mean and loaded with insinuation.
Why was Suzette there anyway? Something had gone wrong with Leon, he knew, or else she’d still be upstairs with him—but Raymond hardly had the patience, at that moment, to pursue the matter. He was too angry to say anything but “Shut up, Suzy,” as he pushed past her and out the front door.
“What?” She followed him. “What the hell is your problem?” she yelled as he moved farther down the sidewalk. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
Everything in her words, her voice, told Raymond she thought she had really caught him at something he shouldn’t have been doing, and more than this, that she was getting pleasure from it—enjoying the fact that he could make mistakes too. And it was ludicrous, really. She was the one who’d been braless minutes before.
Raymond knew he should have kept walking, and let her say whatever the hell she wanted, to his back. But something small and mean in his own self surfaced. “My problem is you,” he
said, turning on her. “What are you doing anyway? You
stupid
girl. You think Leon’s going to be your boyfriend or something? That he’s going to save you? That he wants anything more from you than five minutes in bed?”
Suzette froze, her mouth falling open in shock and surprise, like a character in a cartoon. She was speechless.
He left her there. He left everything—his brushes drying stiff in the sun, the paint growing a skin in the open can, Katrina very likely complaining to her mother about him—and walked up the street. At the bodega he bought a six-pack of beer and drank them one after another on a bench in the park. Afterward, he lay down on the bench and closed his eyes. When he woke, the sun had dropped considerably and shifted behind the trees. He walked home wondering if he’d be able to look at either Leon or Suzette without wanting to punch them, and sincerely hoped they’d both be gone. But as he approached the building he saw they were outside, sitting together on the front steps.
Suzette stood up as he walked nearer, and reached out to latch onto his arm. “Don’t be mad at me, okay, Ray? Nothing happened.”
He shrugged off her hands and started to climb the steps to go inside.
“Ray?” Suzette said plaintively, as if to follow him. Then Leon spoke up.
“You’re being an asshole, you know that? Can’t you see you’re making your sister feel terrible?”
Raymond stopped at the door and turned around. “I’m not making her do anything. She’s a big girl, right?” His voice was thickly bitter.
“It’s not what you think, man. I’ve told her how it is with me. I’m not taking her for a ride. It’s fine, but you need to get cool about it.”
“That’s not going to happen.” Raymond pitched himself
down the stairs at Leon, but overshot it. He felt himself collapse onto the sidewalk, his tailbone colliding with a jarring thump. When Leon tried to give him a hand up, he stood and lunged simultaneously, grabbing Leon around the middle and taking him back down. Raymond was too drunk to land a punch, too close to Leon’s body to do more than push at his rib cage with soggy-feeling fists. It was a miserable semblance of a fight, and what’s more, Leon wouldn’t fight back. The whole time, Suzette stood to one side with her hand to her mouth. No one said anything, there were just the pathetic sounds of Raymond’s missed punches, and finally, weary of thrashing, Raymond scooted away from Leon and sat on the bottom step, looking off down the street at nothing.
“You all right, man?”
Raymond was silent.
“Anything I can do?”
“Stop screwing my sister?”
“I’m
not
screwing your sister. It didn’t get that far. Trust me.”
“Right,” Raymond said. Then he stood up, climbed the stairs, and entered his apartment. It was hushed and gray, cool. On the floor in the living room there was a full wineglass and an empty one, Suzette’s shucked sandals. Leon’s bedroom door was open, the sheets on his bed rumpled. Raymond sighed and went into his own room, locking the door behind him. He didn’t recognize anything. It was as if he had never lived there at all. There was a purple Indian print on the bed, plastic beads draped over the window, records scattered everywhere on the bare floor. Everything in the room smelled of Suzette’s shampoo and sandalwood incense. He lay down on the bed anyway, and pulled the coverlet over him. When he stretched out, he inadvertently kicked something to the floor. It was the expensive May Company dress rolled up in a little ball, discarded—just another skin thrown off.
Over the next few days, Raymond couldn’t bring himself to speak to either Leon or Suzette. He spent long hours out on the scaffolding, painting in a rhythm that almost soothed him. Almost. But then his arms would tire, even when he switched right to left and back again, his elbows flagging as the sun sank lower. The day was only so long, and he could accomplish only so much before he’d have to go inside and face Leon and Suzette.
It’s not as if Raymond thought he could ignore them forever, but he definitely needed a break, some time off from his thoughts, from the rut he’d dug himself into over the years. If only he could just float along for a while, not talk, not listen, not make the motions of repair. But they wouldn’t, either of them, let up on him.
Leon kept insisting the whole thing had been his mistake. “Things went pretty far with Suzette,” he admitted, “further than they should have. She came on to me, and I thought I had a handle on it, but then…Well, you know how things can happen. But I didn’t sleep with her, I swear it.”
“What, you want a medal or something?”
“No, man, just a little compassion is all,” he said, shaking his lion head.
As for Suzette, she apologized too—in her usual way, insinuating herself, making herself small enough to tuck into his pocket. And it was hard to ignore her; it was against all their rules. He loved Suzette. She’d been the focus of most of his whole life, but he was tired of being her savior, tired of their dance. Didn’t they know any other steps? Couldn’t they be another way with each other?
After a week of Raymond’s silent treatment, Leon came out to where Raymond was stirring paint. “You need a vacation,” he said.
“What do you mean? I work three, four hours a day.”
“Not from work, from this, your life. We’ll all go camping.”
“Camping? You, me, and Suzette? If I need a break from my life as you say, then I’d better go alone.”
“No, this is a great idea. Trust me.”
There was that word again,
trust.
Raymond wanted to trust Leon, he did. He wanted to believe Leon was telling the truth about putting the brakes on with Suzette, wanted to let the whole thing go. He was spending way too much time thinking about this, and couldn’t seem to stop. The more he stewed on the facts, the more Leon became every man who had ever wronged Suzette or ever would. She wasn’t going to change. She would always be two women, the one who swung herself fanatically off cliffs and the one who lay whimpering at the bottom, and although Raymond loved his sister fiercely, he wasn’t sure he liked or could spend another day with either of the selves she yo-yoed between.