Circling the Drain

No one knew in the beginning, not even us. It was only after the fields had been combed and the beds checked under and the basements cautiously explored. Only after pantries were rummaged, barns examined and garages turned upside down. After sheds were emptied and nooks and crannies pestered with light.

It was only after Mama sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee long grown cold and stared at nothing while her lips moved quietly to the Twenty-third Psalm over and over, and Daddy looked ten years older slumped into the parlor couch with a whiskey and three days of beard.

I sat in the corner where they'd told me to, knees to my chest, eyes squeezed shut, and stomach clenched like a fist. I sang to myself or traced patterns on the wall and tried to pull apart what happened.

It was only after they dragged Milo's Pond: thirty-five tired, solemn farmers slopping through, inch by careful inch, hoping to find something and hoping not to. It was only after they'd found nothing.

There was no postcard from a faraway place and no letter with photos of a baby or a husband or a new home. After another empty Christmas came and went with the air thick in our house, the tension like cheese you would have to lean into to slice. After my first kiss and my second, my first
day of high school and my last, my good grades and my not-so-good grades, only after it all went quietly by and I left them there, old now and broken in that house.

Years later, when I looked back and tried to understand, I replayed again and again the strange events of that day my older sister, Lucy, disappeared, and couldn't find a thread at all. I wondered at the way I'd figured things to be. I missed her as I had missed her every day since I turned around to empty air. Since I found the voice that answered my chatter came from no one, that my sister had left no footprints for the last hundred yards.

Spring rains threatened to flood some parts of town that year, and Hansen's field still hadn't dried out. I was a sleuth, tracking back to the final set of footprints in the middle of the field, where they stopped mid-stride then stood, feet together, and pressed down hard, it appeared, in the slightly muddy ground. Her prints were deep, like she'd pushed off. As though she had stopped short, spread her arms and pushed off into the air.

At first I thought I saw her straight above, arms extended, green calico dress fluttering against the breeze. She was as high as the clouds and I craned my neck to see her but then the sky was clear and empty and I wasn't sure I'd seen anything at all.
Lucy!
I screamed and spun around.
Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!
The field was a green sheet cake surrounded by a ring of tiny trees and I was its centerpiece, a ballerina, a hollow figurine.

I sat in the corner for three days. People came to the house and brought food. At night I skittered into the kitchen, ate until I was sleepy, then curled up in the corner with a blanket and a pillow from one of the parlor chairs. They spoke in whispers to Mama and Daddy. They refilled Daddy's whiskey glass and coaxed Mama to
eat something
now, Betty, girl they'll find her soon, they will
. Sometimes I got an absentminded pat on the head or a pinch on the cheek but mostly I was left alone. Mostly I was forgotten.

It was only after all the looking that they found the bones. Years later, under a hunter's cabin sixty miles away in Gleryton. Last spring yuppies wanted to bulldoze their new property, wanted to build a nicer place, and in the basement they found the bones of my sister, Lucy, arranged in a careful pattern on the floor. Matched the dental records. Matched the lovely crack in her right femur where she'd fallen, fragile, while ice-skating when she was ten and I was three, too small to skate, but standing on the side of the rink watching my beautiful sister twirl.

The summer Lucy disappeared I was nine and a half. Now I am thirty-three. I live in a house with a dog, a husband and rowdy seven-year-old twin boys. I can't let them out of my sight. I spy on them if I have to, but I like to be near them all the time. I tell myself: maybe I can do something if there is a second time around, maybe I'll be looking in the right direction.

So last April, though Mama was dead and Daddy was in and out of it, we buried Lucy. I was made of tears.
You were right
, I whispered to Daddy, whose confused blue eyes studied me.
She was taken from us
, I said close to his ear.
Someone took her, you were right
. But all I could think was: oh Lucy. Oh Lucy, why didn't you push harder on that ground? I would have helped, if you'd needed it. Why didn't you push yourself off into the blue sky and fly away like I'd always thought you had? And the only answer that slid back to me is this: perhaps I wasn't forgotten at all. Maybe my sister was snatched from Hansen's field as she intercepted. As she spread her arms to save me.

Trapped in the hotel room with a blizzard outside, she felt more stuck than she ever had before. They had set The Fire, smooth and speedy, as planned. Then they'd fled for their lives but the snow came—kept them slow, then stopped them altogether—and now here they were in this awful place, this decrepit hotel in the ghost of some downtown, waiting for the weather to stop, the plows to come.

She felt stuck in a way she wanted Gary to understand, but he wasn't listening to her at all. For whole moments she felt like air was swept out of the room, so that time ticked heavily but she couldn't fill her lungs. All that she could do was gulp and gasp: the heat of the small room overwhelming.

Gary lay on the bed in his jeans and undershirt reading a book he'd found in the bathroom. It was something about race cars or horses, engrossing enough that he ignored her completely and didn't seem to notice how the air disappeared or how solidly the heat pressed against them.

Outside the world was entirely white and brittle. Ice hung from the trees in strips and spears; the buildings she could see had icicled ledges and frosted glass. Even the 7-Eleven across the street, where they'd been buying food—chips, soda, canned pasta or pork and beans, candy, the occasional
bland, radiated sandwich—had a huge frosted window and blended into the big white world out there.

The little room was red and pink and dirty. The bed had a worn pinkish spread with cigarette burns and the carpet was faded red and gray—industrial, with large unidentifiable oval stains that darkened it in a few spots. There was a straight-backed wooden chair she kept sitting in and rising out of. It wasn't very comfortable but it was the only other place to sit besides the bed, which Gary now occupied, and the dresser, which was equally uncomfortable and held the TV. There was no bathroom in the room, that was down the long narrow dirty hallway and was shared with whoever else was on the floor. As yet, neither had seen the neighbors but evidence of their personal hygiene—or its absence—was all over the small bathroom, down to the hand-lettered sign that read
Do not flush in storm, toilet explodes water
to which someone had added
and crap!
in a questionable color of ink.

But here they were, regardless, trapped in this room. She walked from the window and the white world to the dresser where she leaned back and studied Gary, to the chair where she tried to curl up but could not, and then back to the window. Over and over again. Ever since The Fire it had not been all right, any of it—not the other fires, not The Fire itself, not even being with Gary, though she didn't know quite how to admit that to herself, except that afterwards she had begun to watch him differently than before, and wasn't sure she recognized what she saw.

Gary rolled over onto his back and turned another page. She kicked aside the magazines she'd already read and the newspapers with the strange stories about them—descriptions and suppositions and guesses about them. Well, mostly
about Gary. She pulled the drawing pad and crayons over to the corner and sank down on the dirty carpet with her back against the papered wall and began to draw the same things for the hundredth time: trees, the room, the 7-Eleven, Gary's truck, her house.

How to go on? How to move forward from this moment into the rest of her life knowing what she'd done? This was the chant in her head and then the air sucked out and sucked back in again. Over and over, The Fire and nowhere to go. Stuck.

Gary was fine. He smiled up on the bed, occasionally told stories, wanted to make love. He was, as always, unaffected. But she wasn't.

Baby
, he kept saying to her when she tried to pour all of it into words for him,
baby, we did what we needed to. She had it coming. Think of what she did to you, to us. We couldn't let her get away with that. We had to pay her back, baby. We had to
.

Only once, in the middle of the night, after making love to her (when she couldn't respond, just lay there, taking him but not present, floating somewhere else outside herself), only then had he seemed to notice and he'd said
Maybe I should've left you in the truck and done it myself
. And that really ripped her up, tore her inside because she saw he didn't understand why this was different, why
her
house and its contents were different. She saw then that he didn't understand that she was suffocating and he didn't understand that she was stuck. All he cared about was getting out when the snow eased up and making it to New York City to disappear for a long while until everything blew over. He didn't care about their little Virginia town and he didn't care about who was dead. He felt only an eye for an eye, and
the thrill, the continuing, perpetual thrill of the power of flames and that was it. She saw he felt this, he thought this, and all it did was take more air from the room.

The truth was, none of it had seemed real for a long time. Not since long before she met Gary and even that, fuzzy as it was now, even that didn't seem too real when she looked back. Just her and her mom silent and hating each other, but living one day to the next. Then, she had still gone to high school and even secretly liked it, books and classes. Before Gary.

Once Gary appeared everything else just melted away, as though it was made of clouds or had just been a strange dream. What remained was Gary and his friends, what remained was Gary's big black truck with the flames air-brushed in blue and violet along the length of it. What remained was the way he touched her and the way he moved and the power of his smile.

Hey
, Gary said.
What're you drawing?

Things
, she said.
Just whatever
.

He rose from the bed and came and crouched by her and she could smell the stink on him, four deep days of it though she'd stopped smelling her own a while ago.

I'll be right back
, he said. Which she knew meant he was headed down the hall to the bathroom. The door closed after him with a click.

This she didn't like. These minutes alone in the room she really didn't like because it was then that she saw the fire. Saw herself with the newspaper and gasoline, filling the basement with gasoline. Smelled the raw burn of fumes and knew that moment again, that moment with Gary's voice in her ear. Gary holding her to him and whispering what to do even though, really, he was in the truck waiting for her this time, instead of the other way around. And in
these minutes that he left her alone in the room, she felt the match zip, felt it fall from her hand, heard the fire taste the gas and fly up in sheets, and then she ran and ran and tripped and got up and ran some more until she was at the door of the truck, fumbling with the handle trying to open it, but it was locked. Gary wouldn't turn towards her, he just watched the house start to go, riveted, ignoring the hell out of her palms banging on the glass and her calling his name until finally, without looking, he reached over and pulled up on the lock and she clambered inside.

Without looking at her, without turning towards her, though she was shaking and shaking—how was it possible her body could move like this?—without so much as a glance towards her or a comforting motion, he said, through clenched teeth,
You don't call my name. When you burn you don't then go and yell my name in the street like a fucking idiot
.

And it was then, and quickly, that the full scope of what she'd just done occurred to her, and then she saw the face in the window, and Gary threw the truck in gear and pulled away.

 

Before that night, before The Fire, before she lit the match, following Gary's instructions, repeated and repeated to her
(No one will notice until you're done. No one will suspect you until after the fact and you just got to be gone by then and somewhere else, mentally and physically.)
Before that, she used to go on dates with him and he would do tricks for her: swallow his cigarette or once, at the state fair, light a pocket of gas he collected in his palm. He opened doors for her and held her elbow when they walked and even—that same time at the fair—punched a guy in the mouth for leering at her. She felt protected. No one she could recall
had ever taken such interest in her, had ever devoted so much energy to listening to her or providing for her.

But her mama hated Gary with an unparalleled fierceness. She'd never seen Mama quite so angry about anything else.
Now, I know you're not listening to me
, she'd start in,
but I'm telling you, he messes with your mind, girl. He has you acting like your common sense just disappeared! He's nothing, you hear me, nothing! A thug, and you're letting him pull you away from school! You better wake up to him and soon, the way he has you spelled. You better find yourself a way out, child
.

But she had no intention of walking away from the intensity of Gary. She had no intention of separating herself from all that power and it was only now, trapped in this blizzarded sweltering hotel outside of Richmond that she could see how much of herself she'd packaged up and given away. Could see that there were things gone forever.

Mama had been so angry, but she'd had no right to do what she'd done. Mama must've slipped her the pill in her dinner or soda, but how she knew about the baby to begin with was a mystery. Then those days of cramping and bleeding and vomiting. She hadn't been able to look Mama in the face, just lay there and cried and cried while Mama jabbered on about making mistakes and having to hold them the rest of your life. About when Mama was her age, about what it meant to have to give up everything for another person, and she knew then that Mama was talking about
her
. About the dreams she'd given up, the singing career that had never been, about Mama never being able to leave Three-Corners because of her no-count husband and…

None of it was new information, but its relevance, its connection was astonishing. Still, through the wall of nausea and cramps and blood had lingered a profound, impenetra
ble silence. Absolute stillness and quiet. A place where she had retreated and which kept the world and its buzz at a manageable distance.

They just meant to get the house. Gary said it was the only way he could pay Mama back for what she stole from him. Gary talked in low velvety tones and his words wrapped themselves around her like a warm plush blanket.

Only it was just supposed to be the house. Mama should've been at work. Mama should have been at Harlan, D.D.S., where she was the receptionist. Mama should have driven there around eight
A.M.
When they got to the house Gary even pointed out that Mama's car was gone: evidence of her whereabouts. He failed to mention until later moving the car himself, and he failed to mention tying Mama up. He failed to mention taping her mouth and propping her by a window so Mama could watch his face the whole time her daughter was in the basement pouring slippery gasoline and striking matches. It slipped his mind to mention these things he'd done until they were already running away and now here she was trapped in this awful room with him.

She'd dreamed sirens every night since they stopped.

 

Gary came back in the room, loose and lanky, his smile hard-to-read, his hair rumpled.

I want air
, she said.

Baby, give me a break
.

When are we going to go?

You leave it to me—

What if…

I said fucking leave it to me!

His features swung dark, anger stormed across his face. He glared at her.

All you do is wander around whimpering. You just leave it
to me. You got to leave things to me, baby, because you got nowhere to go, understand?

She began to cry and he went to her, a hand on either arm. He looked her in the eyes.
That's not quite what I meant, okay. I want you here, baby, you know that
.

She nodded, sniffled.

I'm going down
, he said. Which she knew meant: for food. Which she knew meant: for news. Which she knew meant: to see how long we have. And he rose, grabbing his sweater from the rug and his jacket from the bed. He walked out the door, locking it behind him even though she wasn't going anywhere.

She moved to the window, pressed her face to the glass and breathed fog onto it. She could see into the 7-Eleven just a little, just enough to see boxes of crackers and cookies and newspapers—at least that's what she imagined she saw, but it was hard to tell through the bright distortion of all that ice and of the snow that had begun to fall again, filling in the few footprints there were.

No plows had come through, though; like most southern towns there were probably only two plows in the whole county and the shabby downtown seemed unpopulated and under-traveled—certainly not deserving of any more attention than it was getting.

She could see hands, maybe a hip? She could see so much white upon white and she felt right then like snapping in two. Like everything in her was icicled also and might crack down the middle or shatter right there.

She thought: Everything I have is Gary and I don't want that.

She thought: What am I going to do?

She saw him cross from one side of the store to the other,
from junk food to magazines, the way his jeans fit, the glare of fluorescent light.

She thought: I have to get out of this room.

Suddenly, after four days of staying, this seemed like the only path to air, and what she needed, really needed, was air.

She grabbed her sweater and a coat. She unlocked the door and stumbled down the hall, tripping as though on new legs, pushing past the empty office and out into the blinding white street.

The air was so sharp it brought tears to her eyes. She doubled over, gulped at it, breathed deep and stayed like that for a minute: blinking and breathing in the silence of the deserted town. And then she began to walk, without thinking or planning or knowing where she was headed, she began to walk up the hill and away from the hotel, ice crunching beneath her feet. But each step was a struggle. The snow came up to her knees and she had to lift and step, lift and step, until finally she reached the top of a very steep hill and at its crest was a snowy stone bench. She brushed snow to the ground and sat there, sank there, really, drained from the short walk, breathing heavily, cold air sharp in her throat, ears numb, hands deep in her pockets.