Marrow (36 page)

He gets home at six o’ clock. I hear him whistling as he walks through the door and drops his keys on the table. I know what he’ll do next; I smile when he opens the fridge and the bottle clanks. It’ll be a PBR for Leroy. Some things never change. I situate myself in the far corner, next to the window, and point my gun at the door. When he sees me standing in the shadows, Leroy Ashley drops his beer.

“Well, hello there,” I say.

The Pabst pools on the tile while Leroy stares at me.

“Oh come on,” I say. “You thought they’d keep my crazy ass locked up forever?” I toss him a pair of handcuffs. “To the bed,” I say. “And it would be my pleasure to blow a hole in that smug little mug of yours, so no tricky business.”

He lumbers forward. I watch him, my finger hooked around the trigger. I want him to do something stupid, just so I can shoot him. No. I can’t get emotional. An eye for an eye. I have to do this the just way.

“Anything you’d like to say?”

“I’ll fucking kill you, you cunt.”

I backhand him. “You’re all talk, you fuck. You should have done it when you had the chance.”

Oh my God,
he’s so angry. I sit on the edge of the bed closest to his head.

“Tell me something,” I say. “Were you born this way? If you had better parents, would you still be a rapist?”

He blinks at me and yanks on his handcuffs. I tap him on the forehead with my pistol.

“Stop. That.”

“Fuck you,” he says.

“Leroy.” I laugh. “I have blonde hair!” I pat my ponytail to make my point.

“I don’t think you would. Seriously, that’s the saddest part. If your mom hadn’t been a selfish cunt, you’d be a semi-normal person.”

“Don’t talk about my mother,” he roars. I’m happy; it’s the first time he hasn’t cussed at me.

“You think we’re different? You’re better than me? I see the sick in your eyes,” he says. “I’m going to kill you.”

“This was a good conversation,” I say, patting his head.

He’s hollering loud as he can, eyes burning with hate, when I inject him with a sedative. Right in the neck. He flinches and tries to bite me. I smack his cheek and tell him, “No.”

I wait in my corner while he falls asleep, humming the new Taylor Swift song that I heard on the ride over. When Leroy is asleep, I cut off his penis. I put it into the little pink cooler that I brought with me and cauterize his wound with a new pink Zippo I bought at the 7-11.

I pack ice around his member, and then I take his eyes. Super messy work. But I think it’s fair. Without eyes, he will no longer be able to see women or carry out a plan to hurt them. I take off his handcuffs before I leave and pat his belly. “Rot in hell, you sick fuck.”

I carry the cooler with me, on the Greyhound back to Miami. It sits in the cab of my rig until I throw it into the desert somewhere in New Mexico. I didn’t know I was going to allow him to live until he let me live; an eye for an eye. But he will not live the same life as he did before. Perhaps this one will be worse than death. Leroy Ashley has been brought to justice.

I WAS BORN SICK
. As was my mother, and her mother before her. It’s in our marrow. The eating house calls to me one day, and, just like that, I pack up my things and go back to the Bone. I don’t even have to think about it. It’s just time to face who I am. I paint it red, for all the blood I’ve shed. Then trim the windows in the purest white. I hire a man to lay new wood floors, and replace the cabinets and countertops in the kitchen. By spring of my first year back, the eating house has new smells, a new glow. There is even a shower in the bathroom where the old, chipped blue tub once sat. It has shiny glass doors and sprays water from two directions. It’s still the same, scary house, but I fixed it up to serve a new purpose. Dr. Elgin calls me once a week for the first year I’m back, but then I stop hearing from her. I think she knows I’m okay now. Mo knocks on my door almost every afternoon during the winter. We drink hot chocolate in front of the fireplace, and he tells me about the girls he likes at school. In summer, the most I see him is when I drive by a field and watch him passing a football back and forth with his buddies. He lifts a hand to wave at me and goes back to what he’s doing. He still hardly ever smiles, but I’ve come to like that about him. If I’m lucky, he stops by with a basket of blackberries that he’s thought to pick for me. I grin and bear those summers, because Mo always comes back to me in winter. My father comes to see me once, when he hears that I’ve moved back to the Bone. He’s old; his skin hangs from his bones like it’s melting away. I sit him at my new kitchen table—black, in honor of Leroy—and make him tea. He wants to tell me he’s sorry. I take his apology because I know he’s just a fucked up human like the rest of us. Before he leaves he tells me where he buried the tiny coffin I found that day in the oven. I’m glad. I want to take my sibling flowers. He tells me it wasn’t his baby, but I don’t believe him. He might have apologized, but he’s still a lying scumbag. He dies two months later. I won’t be taking him flowers, but I’m glad he made his peace.

Delaney passes one August; she simply falls into the grass while she’s gardening and takes her last breath under the sun. It’s Mother Mary who finds her. Mother Mary, who is ninety-seven years old, and will probably outlive us all. She says she knew to go to Delaney’s that day because the week before she predicted her death. When his mother passes, Judah moves out of his apartment and into her house. He tries to convince me to sell the eating house and move in with him, but I’ll never let the eating house go, or maybe it won’t let me go. It doesn’t matter anymore. So we take turns visiting each other’s spaces—a night here, a night there. He uses Delaney’s life insurance money to outfit the kitchen, lowering all of the countertops and buying custom made appliances. He leaves one counter high enough for me to stand and cut things when we cook together. The sentiment makes me cry. I never do buy a TV. Judah makes me watch his.

We are sitting side by side on the couch one evening, a bucket of popcorn between us, when he turns on the news and leaves to use the bathroom. The news makes me anxious; whenever Judah puts it on, I leave the room, but this time I turn up the volume and lean toward the picture of a man with extraordinarily kind mazarine eyes.

“A man is at large tonight in Washington,” the reporter says. I glance at the bathroom door, and scoot forward ‘til my rear is barely on the couch. “Cult leader Muslim Black escaped his Minnesota compound last week when police arrived to arrest him. He is said to have fled to Spokane, where police are searching for him now. During Black’s twelve-year reign as leader of the Paradise Gate Group, he reportedly raped and kept more than three dozen women prisoner…”

I hear the knob on the bathroom door rattle, and quickly change the channel. Judah smiles at me when he settles back down, and for a moment his face is enough to cleanse me of the sinister rage that I am feeling. All of his open beauty, his effortless love, the boldness with which he embraces his wheelchair. I smile, too, but for different reasons. Underneath my skin and underneath the sinewy tendons of muscle, my bones are rattling.

Rrrrrra ta ta ta

My marrow cries out, reminding me of who I am. I am Margo Moon. I am a murderess. I believe in poetic vengeance. Muslim Black is at large. It’s time, it’s time, it’s time … to hunt.

I ONCE SAW A YOUTUBE VIDEO
of a woman beating her baby. I was shocked by how calm she was. She wasn’t being forced; she wasn’t visibly angry or flustered. She sat with her back to the camera, punching, slapping and pinching—over and over while he screamed.

Why did I spend six minutes of my life watching as a child, who could not yet sit up by himself, was brutally beaten by his mother? Because he suffered, and I didn’t want to turn my face away from his suffering. Some might say that you don’t need to see it to know it exists. And while that is true, I felt that if he was hurting, the least I could do was hurt along with him. Somehow, by watching his pain, I was also acknowledging it. I have to tell you, the images of her hand coming down on his skin are ingrained in my memory, probably for as long as I live. He was too little to know that he was not supposed to be beaten. His mother’s harsh cruelty was his norm.

I will not forget him. I will not forget that people hurt each other, or that children suffer for the sins of their parents, and their parents before them. I will not forget that there are millions of people crying out for help at this very moment. It makes me feel hopeless … like I’m not enough.

To cope with this very aggressive reality, I started typing. Because if I could not take vengeance on behalf of that small child, I would have Margo do it for me. Margo and her poetic vengeance. I killed them all in this book: the rapists who took from my friends, the rotting sadists who hurt children, the takers of life, the killers of hope. I killed them and I enjoyed it. And while that makes me equally as corrupt—a murderess in my own right—we are what we think, after all.

I want to make it clear that I believe in justice both in this life and the next. I believe we ought fight for the hurting, open our eyes to suffering. Not just our own, but the suffering around us. Sometimes, by saving someone else, you save yourself a little as well. By loving someone else and expecting nothing in return, we learn to love ourselves and expect nothing in return. Perhaps it is the simple act of doing for others that makes us feel more valuable in our own skin.

I want to implore you not to hurt yourselves. Not to cut your skin, or swallow pills, or drink to drown pain. Not to hand yourselves over so easily to men for validation. Stop feeling useless and worthless. Stop drowning in regret. Stop listening to the persistent voice of your past failures. You were that child once, who Margo would have killed for. Fight for yourselves. You have a right to live, and to live well. You’ll inherit flaws; you’ll develop new ones. And that’s okay. Wear them, own them, use them to survive. Don’t kill others; don’t kill yourselves. Be bold about your right to be loved. And most importantly, don’t be ashamed of where you’ve come from, or the mistakes you’ve made. In blindness, love will exhume you.

Love,

Tarryn

EATING DISORDERS HELP LINE: 1-800-382-2832

CHILD HELP USA—CHILD ABUSE REPORTING: 1-800-4-A-CHILD

SUICIDE HELP LINE: 1-800-SUICIDE

RAINN—RAPE SUPPORT LINE: 1-800-656-HOPE

RUNAWAY HELP LINE: 1-800-621-4000

NATIONAL TEEN GAY & LESBIAN HOTLINE: 1-800-347-TEEN

I’LL START WITH THE PERSON I DEDICATED THE BOOK TO—MY MOM
. Who is nothing like Margo’s mother, I might add. I would have been a sociopath if Cynthia Fisher had not raised me. Thank you for teaching me kindness and what it means to love without the presence of self. If everyone had a mother like you, there would be less hurting in the world. My dad, who has very strange things in his marrow and passed them on to me.

My team of supporters—otherwise known as Tarryn’s Passionate Little Nutcases. Fierce and brave and frightening. I hope you’ve all seen the movie
300
because that’s what you remind me of. I wish I could thank you all individually and give you a hug. You girls truly brought me back to life.

Lori Sabin—my person. Simone Schneider, Tracy Finlay, Madison Green—people I love and wish I could see more. Nina Gomez and all of her alter egos. Some of my best times are spent with you. James Reynolds, for always encouraging, gifting, and giving that extra help when I need it. Rhonda Reynolds, for always being my mother.

Jenn Sterling, Rebecca Donovan, Tali Alexander, and Claire Contreras—Your encouragement and texts are always much appreciated. Alessandra Torre, for rescuing
Mud Vein
from
Marrow
! So grateful for that insight!

The bloggers who take the time to so eloquently review and support my books. Indie Solutions by Murphy Rae for the beautiful cover that encompasses everything
Marrow
is. Jovana Shirley at Unforeseen Editing—You always drop everything for me. Much appreciated.

Michelle Wang and Kolbee Rey—Thank you for sharing your stories with me. Human nature may have bullied your childhood, but you are tough and kind and full of light. I hope you never let other people’s mistakes dictate your worth. You are so loved.