Page 22

CHAPTER 21

August 21 st

8:52 PM

“G O HOME, BUTTERFLY. You’re not welcome here.”

“I want to see Grace.”

My father throws his empty beer bottle into the front yard. I can barely hear him over the television. Top of the order for the Rockies as we head to the eleventh inning … The light flickers through the sheer curtains. There are beers on the coffee table and a bag of Doritos on his recliner. “I said go home.”

“It’s an emergency.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“Grace!” I call into the house. “Grace!”

He shoves me back. I scrape my leg against the splintered wooden railing as I tumble down the steps, my full weight crashing against my hip as I hit the earth. My leg looks like it’s been fed through a shredder. Dried grass and dirt stick to the blood. The pain is enough to double me over, but I scramble to my feet anyway. He will always have the physical advantage, but I will always have more willpower.

“I saw the bruise you left on her.”

“You don’t know what you saw,” he says. “Get off my property. Get out of Annesville. Go home. You wore out your welcome ages ago. Next time I see you skulking around my house, I’ll shoot you like a dog. If I hear about you talking to Grace again, manipulating her with your bullshit, trying to turn her against me, I’ll shoot you both.”

“Not if I shoot you first.”

“Oh, butterfly. I’d like to see you try.”

Mitesh Jadhav answers the door with a shotgun. The skin on his neck reminds me of a shriveled fruit peel. A perfectly round scar the size of a nickel marks the spot where the bullet flared through him. He assesses my disheveled state and lowers the gun, but doesn’t put it away.

“Little late to be knocking on doors unannounced, Providence.” He is one of few people who can make my name sound pretty. His accent softens its syllables.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jadhav. It’s—” I gesture broadly at myself to acknowledge that I am aware how unhinged I look. My hair is matted from the rain, and my leg is still bleeding, and I am barefoot, and my feet are black from dirt. “It’s an emergency. I wanted to talk to Karishma.”

“About what?”

“Grace.”

He finally sets the shotgun down. “I don’t want my daughter dragged into any trouble.”

“I don’t either.”

Mitesh shakes his head and massages his bullet wound, as if to remind me the mere existence of my family means trouble. “You’ve been through a lot—you and Grace both—in the last few days, and I’m sorry for all of it, but I don’t want Karishma involved.”

“Mr. Jadhav, please. I’m trying to look out for Grace. I wanted to ask Karishma if she could keep an eye on her at school. She’s taken everything so hard, and I need to know someone is looking out for her.”

He sniffs out my lie immediately. “I’ll pass that along.”

“I’ll only take a minute.”

“Good night—and again, I’m sorry about your mother.”

I idle on the front porch after he shuts the door like an abandoned pet hoping their owner will have a change of heart, sure if I wait long enough and seem desperate enough he will relent, but my hope amounts to nothing. I get back in the car, turn on the engine, and scream until my throat is raw and my ears are ringing.

There’s only one place for me to go. Only one place I want to go. One person I want to be with. When she picks up my call, the crush of relief is so immense that it floods my eyes with tears.

My phone routes me south to Carey Gap, then east for a few miles along Route 20, the night black as pine tar and the highway apocalyptically desolate. I peel onto an unmarked dirt driveway. There is no name or address number posted on the mailbox, but there is a red-and-white sign warning me that trespassers will be shot and survivors will be shot again.

Towering hackberry trees line the driveway. My car trundles forward until the trees part to reveal a jute-colored Queen Anne house, three stories tall with a circular tower reaching up from the front corner of the house. The perimeter is awash in porch lights to atone for the darkness of the driveway.

My first thought: Clutter family. If someone fires a shotgun on the prairie and no one is around to hear it, did anyone fire a shotgun at all?

I bury the morbid image as soon as she steps onto the porch. I don’t want to entertain a universe in which Zoe could suffer such a fate. Even dressed for bed, she still takes my breath away. Dewy skin. Milkmaid braids. Pillowy lips, sticky with balm. She offers a one-armed hug before inviting me inside.

The interior exudes Victorian glamour with its botanical wallpaper, dark wood molding, and heavy velvet curtains—and while I find it charming, I also can’t dispel the feeling that I am appallingly out of place here, a pigeon among peacocks. Zoe escorts me into a parlor room with stained glass windows. A chandelier twinkles from the rosette sculpted into the ceiling. We sit on chaise lounges opposite each other, and as I settle into the cream-colored upholstery, I have the humbling thought that this piece of furniture probably costs more than my rent.

Zoe appraises my appearance thoughtfully, like an art collector who suspects a forgery, her mismatched eyes inscrutable until they reach the dried blood crusted on my calf. They pop open wide enough to fall out on stalks. “Sweet Christmas, Providence, let me get you a washcloth.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“Don’t be silly.”

Zoe disappears down the hallway, returning a minute later with a handful of damp rags and pouches of alcohol wipes. I reach for her supplies, but she shakes her head and sits on the hardwood floor. She wraps her hand in a rag and, slowly, gently, with the care my mother should have tended my wounds with, wipes away my bloodstains. The wound itself looks like something left behind from the jaws of a rabid animal, with half a dozen shallow, ragged cuts surrounding one that runs longer and deeper than the rest. The shallow ones must have been the splinters. The deep one, I can only assume, was from a nail. It missed my solar system tattoo by centimeters.

My dress is also ripped along the hem. Something else I’ve ruined for Sara.

She doesn’t warn me before the alcohol wipe. I inhale through my teeth and yank my leg away. “Jesus, Zoe!”

“It hurts less if you don’t know it’s coming.”

“Debatable.”

“Give me your leg again.”

I do. I curl my nails into the cushion when she reapplies the alcohol wipe. “Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?”

“I can put two and two together.”

“He wouldn’t let me see Grace.”

“Of course not,” she says. “How can he have iron-fisted control over her if he lets her have a relationship with someone who escaped that house?”

“I need to talk to her. I have this feeling—” I stop myself. It would unburden me to share my fear with someone else, but the stakes are too high. This is not Grace withholding details from the police. This is not a minor infraction or a well-meaning hiccup. This is catastrophic, and no one else can know, at least not until I’m sure.

“You have what feeling?”

“Nothing,” I tell her. “The usual horrible feelings I have when I think about my father.”

Zoe pastes bandage after bandage over my wounds, and when she’s done and she goes to the kitchen to wash her hands, only one thought pours through my head. Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me.

But she comes back. She reclines on her chaise lounge and drapes her porcelain legs over the top of the seat. Her lavender baby tee rides up above her ribs. The beauty mark beneath her breast winks at me, and she smiles coyly when she catches me admiring her. “What are you thinking about?” Zoe asks.

“My mother.”

“What about her?”

“How I’ll never speak to her again.”

“My parents aren’t dead, but they may as well be,” she says. “We haven’t spoken in thirteen years. They aren’t allowed to speak to me since I was disfellowshipped. Even if we were all in the same room, they’d act like I wasn’t there. Anyway, once I went to college, I used to spend every second hoping they’d call so I could hear their voices again, just be reminded we lived on the same planet, but they never did. I spent years waiting for the phone to ring, and then one night, I was getting in bed and I realized I didn’t think of the phone at all. All this to say: one day the wanting just goes away.”

I clutch a throw pillow to my chest, my fingers dancing along its intricate embroidery. I find a pattern that feels like the letter E , then L , then I , so on, so forth. Elissa. The wanting is all I have left of my mother. The void she left behind and everything I hoped would fix it. “You know she called me five times the day she died? I didn’t answer. It’d been so long, I didn’t even recognize her phone number.”

“Providence, you couldn’t have known any of this would happen.”

“Even if she had nothing to say to me, I would know nothing had changed between us. That would have been closure in itself. Now I have to wonder for the rest of my life if she had a change of heart.”

She knows better than to trot out a platitude about how my mother loved me or remind me of the unconditional love a mother has for her daughter. “What would you say to her?”

“I keep asking myself and coming up empty. Maybe it means there isn’t anything for me to say.”

“We always have one last thing to say.”

But I don’t think I do, and that’s because it doesn’t feel like she is really gone. My mother lives inside of me. She will forever be within me. There is no end to our story. She is my lungs and my beating heart. Without her, I cannot breathe. I cannot exist. There is no Providence without Elissa. She is Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, my beginning and my end.

Things I understand to be inevitable: taxes, heartbreak, the heat death of the universe. When Zoe invites me to her third-floor bedroom for a shower and a change of clothes, we begin to feel inevitable too. Something between us shifts, the way the air feels distended just before rain. You know what’s coming. All there is to do now is wait for the heavens to split apart.

The walls here are pine green and accented with ornamental moldings, the bed vast enough to drown in. Propped between pillows is the cherished stuffed puppy she’s had since she was a baby. He resembled a golden retriever once upon a time, but his yellow fur has turned gray, and the stitches of his smile have come loose. She relocates him to the wingback chair on the far side of the room, his arms and legs crossed demurely upon his throne.

She has matching pajama sets in every color of the rainbow. My hair is still wet from the shower as I hunt for anything that might fit me (I’ve always been noticeably thicker than Zoe). Meanwhile, she preens in her full-length mirror. Her hair, free from its braids, tumbles down her back in a glossy waterfall of blonde. I’m certain there are men who vote for her just because she’s beautiful and single. How tantalizing to think that you have a chance, however slim, to fuck your congresswoman.

Every time I glance at her, her eyes remain fixed on her own reflection, and the longer she withholds her attention, the more I need it, the more my need evolves into a real thing. It pulsates with memory, a heartbeat all its own.

I exhume a long-sleeved shirt from the bottom of the drawer. It squeezes me like a corset, tight enough to make my breasts ache, but at least it conceals my scars. She’s never seen those. The biting only started once we ended.

Zoe smiles meekly at me through the mirror. She asks me to watch TV with her for a little while. She doesn’t want to be alone yet.

We slink beneath silk sheets and rest our pretty heads on silk pillowcases. We find a rerun of Friends , the episode where Monica thinks Chandler is jacking off to sharks. With every burst of canned laughter, Zoe sidles closer. Skin meets skin, her forearm brushing mine, her thigh against my own. Girls are so soft. It’s the best thing about us.

When her lips find mine, I taste her heartbeat. She kisses me like I am water, like I am air, like I am breath. Like I am inevitable. My body fizzes with desire like a can of shaken cola.

It is an emotional bloodletting, a return to a place long forgotten in the fog of memory. The topography of our bodies has changed—mine most drastically, sculpted and sanded beyond recognition—but the choreography of our desire has not. Legs entwined, spiraling around each other like vines. Hands in hair. Mouths on necks. Do you still like this? Yes, yes, always yes, Zoe. Her breath, my breath, mingling hot and golden together, smoldering. When she peels my shirt off, my bite mark scars glow silver in the television light. She doesn’t ask.

Touches, featherlight. The curl of a finger, the flick of a tongue. Her body is delicate and birdlike, enchantingly different from my own. She wants me to tell her she’s a good girl, and I do. There you go. That’s it. She tastes like saltwater and pennies when she comes on my tongue. Contrary to all the poetry you’ve heard, women never taste like nectar or candy. I wouldn’t have them any other way.

She is on top of me with one finger inside me, then another, and her smile is incandescent. The face that launched a thousand ships. She tells me I’m beautiful when I finally come. It is a reward for both her patience and mine. She slips her fingers out of me and brings them, still glistening and slick, to my lips, and I take her fingers into my mouth and taste myself, and then I bite, just forcefully enough to make her gasp.

The ecstasy is agonizing. So is the comedown, quick yet deep like the slash of a pocketknife. Nostalgia is no match for reality.

Our heads return to their respective pillows, a valley of mattress now separating us. The heat between us cools to shy indifference. A different episode of Friends is on, one I don’t recall, and we feign interest in the plotline to avoid talking about what we’ve just done. I want to ask her if this means anything to her, but I don’t. I already know the answer.

In five years, Zoe will have a wedding band on her finger and a husband in her bed. He will be generically handsome, good at polite conversation but mediocre at oral sex. She will smile at him over a dinner spread of dishes that she cooked singlehandedly and tell herself this is good, this is right, and when she thinks back on this night, how pretty I looked beneath her, she will shudder and remind herself it was just a phase. I am merely a waypoint on a journey that will take her far away.

I lock the bathroom door behind me. The walls are thin enough that I can still hear the studio audience’s guffaws. I stare at my naked body in the mirror, every scar and tattoo coloring my skin, and wait for my eyes to fill with tears that never come. I imagine unzipping my ribcage and cupping my hands at my sternum, ready to catch the sadness when it pitches out of my chest, only to look down into my palms and find them traitorously empty. As if this encounter did not mean anything to me either.

Zoe is a waypoint for me too. Zoe is not my destination.

A younger version of myself stares back at me from within the mirror. Underneath the plastic surgery, the tattoos, and the bite mark scars, there is a teenaged girl with amber eyes and crooked teeth. She keeps her hair chopped to her shoulders so no one can yank it. Her nails are bloody from being gnawed to the quick. Greenish veins spread like cobwebs across the hollows of her eyes. Her smiles fall short of her eyes, and she fidgets with her clothing to make sure her bruises and scrapes remain covered at all times.

The girl in the mirror is me, but she is Grace too.

I know what I have to do.