In This Light (6 page)

Careful, baby.

I’ve got your life now—your little girl smiling in my hand, dressed in her white fairy costume, waving her sparkling fairy wand; I hold your sad wife in her striped bathing suit. If I could feel, her chubby knees would break my heart. I’ve got you in my pocket—your driver’s license, my proof. I’m in your pants. I belt them tight. I keep your coins in my boots for good luck. I wear your hat, earflaps down. I bought a silver knife with your forty-three dollars. I carved your name in a cross on my thigh.

Yesterday I found a dump of jack-o’-lanterns in the ditch, the smashed faces of all the men I used to know. They grinned to show me the stones in their broken mouths. They’ve taken themselves apart. I’m looking for their unstuffed clothes, hoping they didn’t empty their pockets before their skulls flamed out.

It’s dark. Clare pulls me toward the gully. She wants me to run down between the black trees and twisting vines. She wants me to feel my way—she wants me to crawl.

Morning again, I saw a deer, only the head and legs, bits of hide, a smear of blood, five crows taking flight, wings hissing as they rose. Someone’s accident butchered here, the stunned meat taken home. Before you fell asleep, I said,
Anyone can kill.

She’s in your sights. Nobody understands your fear, how you feel my hands even now, reaching for your wrists, slipping under your clothes. So many ways to do it, brutal or graceful, silent as the blood in my sister’s veins or full of shattered light and sound. Kick to the shoulder, blast of the gun—she staggers, wounded, not killed all at once. There’s snow on the ground, gold leaves going brown. There’s light in the last trembling leaves, but the sun is gone. You follow her trail, dark puddles spreading in snow, black into white, her blood.

You remember a farmer straddling his own sheep.
Will it be like this?
The knife, one slit, precise.
Pain is just a feeling like any other feeling.
She never struggled. He reached inside, grabbed something, squeezed hard.
I can’t tell you what it was.

She won’t drop in time, won’t give up. When you put your hands in front of you, you almost feel her there: hair, flesh, breath, blood. She wants only what you want: to survive one minute more.

What would you do if you found her now, if her ragged breathing stopped? Too far to drag her back to the truck; you’d have to open her in the sudden dark, pull her steaming entrails into the snow.

I wait for the next ride. Clare wants me to follow in her tracks, to find her before she falls, to touch her, to wash her blood clean in this snow, to put it back in her veins, to make her whole.

You walk in a circle. You wonder if you’re lost. The doe’s following you now, but at a distance. She’s trying to forgive you. If she could speak, she might tell you the way home. She might say,
You can climb inside me, wear my body like a coat.

You can’t explain this to anyone.
Never, no.
You need me. I’m the only one alive who knows your fear, who understands how dangerous we are to each other in these woods, on this road.

II.  XMAS, JAMAICA PLAIN

I’m your worst fear.

But not the worst thing that can happen.

I lived in your house half the night, I’m the broken window in your little boy’s bedroom. I’m the flooded tiles in the bathroom where the water flowed and flowed.

I’m the tattoo in the hollow of Emile’s pelvis, five butterflies spreading blue wings to rise out of his scar.

I’m dark hands slipping through all your pale woman underthings; dirty fingers fondling a strand of pearls, your throat, a white bird carved of stone. I’m the body you feel wearing your fox coat.

Clare said,
Take the jewelry; it’s yours.

My heart’s in my hands: what I touch, I love; what I love, I own.

Snow that night and nobody seemed surprised, so I figured it must be winter. Later I remembered it was Christmas, or it had been, the day before. I was with Emile, who wanted to be Emilia. We’d started downtown, Boston. Now it was Jamaica Plain, three miles south.
Home for the holidays
, Emile said, some private joke. He’d been working the block around the Greyhound station all night, wearing nothing but a white scarf and black turtleneck, tight jeans.
Man wants to see before he buys
, Emile said. He meant the ones in long cars, cruising, looking for fragile boys with female faces.

Emile was sixteen, he thought.

Getting old.

He’d made sixty-four dollars, three tricks with cash, plus some pills—a bonus for good work, blues and greens, he didn’t know what. Nobody’d offered to take him home, which is all he wanted: a warm bed, some sleep, eggs in the morning, the smell of butter, hunks of bread torn off the loaf.

Crashing, both of us, ragged from days of speed and crack, no substitute for the smooth high of pure cocaine but all we could afford. Now, enough cash between us at last. I had another twenty-five from the man who said he was in the circus once, who called himself the Jungle Creep—on top of me he made that sound. Before he unlocked the door, he said,
Are you a real girl?
I looked at his plates—New Jersey; that’s why he didn’t know the lines, didn’t know that the boys as girls stay away from the Zone unless they want their faces crushed. He wanted me to prove it first. Some bad luck once, I guess. I said,
It’s fucking freezing. I’m real. Open the frigging door or go.

Now it was too late to score, too cold, nobody on the street but Emile and me, the wind, so we walked, we kept walking. I had a green parka, somebody else’s wallet in the pocket—I couldn’t remember who or where, the coat stolen weeks ago and still mine, a miracle out here. We shared, trading it off. I loved Emile. I mean, it hurt my skin to see his cold.

Emile had a plan. It had to be Jamaica Plain,
home—
enough hands as dark as mine, enough faces as brown as Emile’s—not like Brookline, where we’d have to turn ourselves inside out. Jamaica Plain, where there were pretty painted houses next to shacks, where the sound of bursting glass wouldn’t be that loud.

Listen, we needed to sleep, to eat, that’s all. So thirsty even my veins felt dry, flattened out. Hungry somewhere in my head, but my stomach shrunken to a knot so small I thought it might be gone. I remembered the man, maybe last week, before the snow, leaning against the statue of starved horses, twisted metal at the edge of the Common. He had a knife, long enough for gutting fish. Dressed in camouflage but not hiding. He stared at his thumb, licked it clean, and cut deep to watch the bright blood bubble out. He stuck it in his mouth to drink, hungry, and I swore I’d never get that low. But nights later I dreamed him beside me. Raw and dizzy, I woke, offering my whole hand, begging him to cut it off.

We walked around your block three times. We were patient now. Numb. No car up your drive and your porch light blazing, left to burn all night, we thought. Your house glowed, yellow even in the dark, paint so shiny it looked wet, and Emile said he lived somewhere like this once, when he was still a boy all the time, hair cropped short, before lipstick and mascara, when his cheeks weren’t blushed, before his mother caught him and his father locked him out.

In this house Emile found your red dress, your slippery stockings. He was happy, I swear.

So why did he end up on the floor?

I’m not going to tell you; I don’t know.

First, the rock wrapped in Emile’s scarf, glass splintering in the cold, and we climbed into the safe body of your house. Later we saw this was a child’s room, your only one. We found the tiny cowboy boots in the closet, black like Emile’s but small, so small. I tried the little bed. It was soft enough but too short. In every room your blue-eyed boy floated on the wall. Emile wanted to take him down. Emile said,
He scares me.
Emile said your little boy’s too pretty, his blond curls too long. Emile said,
Some night the wrong person’s going to take him home.

Emile’s not saying anything now, but if you touched his mouth you’d know. Like a blind person reading lips, you’d feel everything he needed to tell.

We stood in the cold light of the open refrigerator, drinking milk from the carton, eating pecan pie with our hands, squirting whipped cream into our mouths. You don’t know how it hurt us to eat this way, our shriveled stomachs stretching; you don’t know why we couldn’t stop. We took the praline ice cream to your bed, one of those tiny containers, sweet and sickening, bits of candy frozen hard. We fell asleep and it melted, so we drank it, thick, with your brandy, watching bodies writhe on the TV, no sound: flames and ambulances all night; children leaping; a girl in mud under a car, eight men lifting; a skier crashing into a wall—we never knew who was saved and who was not. Talking heads spat the news again and again. There was no reason to listen—tomorrow exactly the same things would happen, and still everyone would forget.

There were other houses after yours, places I went alone, but there were none before and none like this. When I want to feel love I remember the dark thrill of it, the bright sound of glass, the sudden size and weight of my own heart in my own chest, how I knew it now, how it was real to me in my body, separate from lungs and liver and ribs, how it made the color of my blood surge against the backs of my eyes, how nothing mattered anymore because I believed in this, my own heart, its will to live.

No lights, no alarm. We waited outside. Fifteen seconds. Years collapsed. We were scared of you, who you might be inside, terrified lady with a gun, some fool with bad aim and dumb luck. The boost to the window, Emile lifting me, then I was there, in you, I swear, the smell that particular, that strong, almost a taste in your boy’s room, his sweet milky breath under my tongue. Heat left low, but to us warm as a body, humid, hot.

My skin’s cracked now, hands that cold, but I think of them plunged deep in your drawer, down in all your soft underbelly underclothes, slipping through all your jumbled silky womanthings.

I pulled them out and out.

I’m your worst fear. I touched everything in your house: all the presents just unwrapped—cashmere sweater, rocking horse, velvet pouch. I lay on your bed, smoking cigarettes, wrapped in your fur coat. How many foxes? I tried to count.

But it was Emile who wore the red dress, who left it crumpled on the floor.

Thin as he is, he couldn’t zip the back—he’s a boy, after all—he has those shoulders, those soon-to-be-a-man bones. He swore trying to squash his boy feet into the matching heels; then he sobbed. I had to tell him he had lovely feet, and he did, elegant, long—those golden toes. I found him a pair of stockings, one size fits all.

I wore your husband’s pinstriped jacket. I pretended all the gifts were mine to offer. I pulled the pearls from their violet pouch.

We danced.

We slid across the polished wooden floor of your living room, spun in the white lights of the twinkling tree. And again, I tell you, I swear I felt the exact size and shape of things inside me, heart and kidney, my sweet left lung. All the angels hanging from the branches opened their glass mouths, stunned.

He was more woman than you, his thick hair wound tight and pinned.
Watch this
, he said.
Chignon.

I’m not lying. He transformed himself in front of your mirror, gold eyeshadow, faint blush. He was beautiful. He could have fooled anyone. Your husband would have paid a hundred dollars to feel Emile’s mouth kiss all the places you won’t touch.

Later the red dress lay like a wet rag on the floor. Later the stockings snagged, the strand of pearls snapped and the beads rolled. Later Emile was all boy, naked on the bathroom floor.

I’m the one who got away, the one you don’t know; I’m the long hairs you find under your pillow, nested in your drain, tangled in your brush. You think I might come back. You dream me dark always. I could be any dirty girl on the street, or the one on the bus, black lips, just-shaved head. You see her through mud-spattered glass, quick, blurred. You want me dead—it’s come to this—killed, but not by your clean hands. You pray for accidents instead, me high and spacy, stepping off the curb, a car that comes too fast. You dream some twisted night road and me walking, some poor drunk weaving his way home. He won’t even know what he’s struck. In the morning he’ll touch the headlight I smashed, the fender I splattered, dirt or blood. In the light he’ll see my body rising, half remembered, snow that whirls to a shape then blows apart. Only you will know for sure, the morning news, another unidentified girl dead, hit and run, her killer never found.

I wonder if you’ll rest then, or if every sound will be glass, every pair of hands mine, reaching for your sleeping son.

How can I explain?

We didn’t come for him.

I’m your worst fear. Slivers of window embedded in carpet. Sharp and invisible. You can follow my muddy footprints through your house, but if you follow them backward they always lead here: to this room, to his bed.

If you could see my hands, not the ones you imagine but my real hands, they’d be reaching for Emile’s body. If you looked at Emile’s feet, if you touched them, you could feel us dancing.

This is all I want.

After we danced, we lay so close on your bed I dreamed we were twins, joined forever this way, two arms, three legs, two heads.

But I woke in my body alone.

Outside, snow fell like pieces of broken light.

I already knew what had happened. But I didn’t want to know.

I heard him in the bathroom.

I mean, I heard the water flow and flow.

I told myself he was washing you away, your perfume, your lavender oil scent. Becoming himself. Tomorrow we’d go.

I tried to watch the TV, the silent man in front of the map, the endless night news. But there it was, my heart again, throbbing in my fingertips.

I couldn’t stand it—the snow outside; the sound of water; your little boy’s head propped on the dresser, drifting on the wall; the man in the corner of the room, trapped in the flickering box: his silent mouth wouldn’t stop.

I pounded on the bathroom door. I said,
Goddamn it, Emile, you’re clean enough.
I said I had a bad feeling about this place. I said I felt you coming home.