Eileen (24 page)

“Be careful,” I told Rebecca. She rolled her eyes.

“Rita,” she said. “Don't be stupid.”

“Shoot me,” the woman cried. “I don't care anymore.” I could barely breathe under my wool scarf. I lowered it from my face and wiped my sweaty cheeks with the cuff of my coat.

“I know you,” said Mrs. Polk suddenly, dismayed. “You're the girl from Moorehead.”

Rebecca turned to me, shocked. “What are you doing, Eileen?” I fumbled to pull the scarf back up.

“She already knew my name,” I said in my defense. “Rebecca.”

What happened next is still unclear, but as far as I could tell, Rebecca took one hand off the gun to pull back the cuffs of her robe, and when she gripped the gun again, her hands shook, she fumbled and the gun fell and fired as it hit the floor. The blast stopped us all from breathing. I crouched down and froze. Rebecca hid her face in her hands and turned away from us. Mrs. Polk was silent, drew her fat legs up to her large chest, exposing her fleshy calves and knees. Outside the dog began to bark again. And then, the blast still echoing in my ears, we three looked at one another.

“Shit,” said Rebecca. She pointed at Mrs. Polk's right arm, a quickly spreading darkness seeping through her quilted housecoat.

“You shot me?” Mrs. Polk asked, her voice suddenly childlike with disbelief.

“Shit,” Rebecca said again.

Mrs. Polk started to scream again, struggling against her restraints. “I'm bleeding!” she cried. “Call a doctor!” She became hysterical, as anyone would.

“Hush,” said Rebecca, going to Mrs. Polk's side. “The neighbors will hear you. Don't make it any worse. Quit fussing,” she said, covering the woman's mouth with her hand. I had warned Rebecca about the gun. Mrs. Polk would be fine, I assured myself. A superficial flesh wound was all I thought she'd suffered. Her arm was wide and fatty. No great harm had occurred, I thought. But the woman could not be soothed. She panted like a crazed animal and shook her head violently against Rebecca's hold, trying to scream for help. I picked up the gun, and feeling the strange heat through the grip, I was struck with an idea.

You can think what you want, that I was vicious and conniving, that I was selfish, delusional, so twisted and paranoid that only death and destruction would satisfy me, make me happy. You can say I had a criminal mind, I was pleased only by the suffering of others, what have you. In a moment's time I figured out how to solve everyone's problems—mine, Rebecca's, Mrs. Polk's, my father's. I came up with a plan to take Mrs. Polk to my house, shoot her, wait until she died, leave the gun in my father's hands—he would be passed out drunk—then drive off into the sunrise. Yes, of course I wanted to run off, and all the more if Rebecca would come with me. And yes, I thought killing Mrs. Polk was the only way to save Rebecca and me from the consequences of Rebecca's scheme. If Mrs. Polk were dead, no
one would know that Rebecca and I had been involved, I figured. We'd be free.

But I was also thinking of my father. Nothing I could do would ever inspire him to dry out for good, get straight, be the father I wanted. He couldn't even see how sick he was. Only a massive shock would wake him up. If he believed he'd killed an innocent woman, that might be enough to shake him. Then he might see the light, accept the truth of his condition. He might have a change of heart. If they asked my father why he shot Mrs. Polk, maybe he'd mutter something about me and Lee, suggesting he thought that Lee was my boyfriend. The police would see he'd really lost his mind. They'd put him in prison maybe, but more likely they'd take him to a hospital, treat him well, nurse him back to health. I'd be long gone, of course, but at least he'd have the presence of mind to miss me, to regret what he'd put me through, to wish he could somehow make amends.

And as for me, I'd put off my escape from X-ville for long enough, my desire to leave always outweighed by my laziness and fear. If I killed Mrs. Polk, I'd be forced out of X-ville once and for all. I'd have to change my name. I'd have to completely disappear. Only fear of imprisonment, restitution, could propel me to leave. I could stay in X-ville and face hell, or I could disappear. I gave myself no choice. Shooting Mrs. Polk was the only option.

But how would we get Mrs. Polk to my house without her screaming the whole ride long? I wondered, turning the gun over in my hands. She bucked and stomped, wailing and gnashing her teeth as Rebecca shushed her and tried to stifle the screams by pressing her hands over the woman's mouth, but it
was like stopping a break in a dam—Mrs. Polk refused to quiet down. Her arm was bleeding, but not profusely. Rebecca looked at me in desperation.

“What do we do?”

I shuffled around in my purse for my mother's pills. “I have these,” I said, shaking the bottle. “They're for pain.”

“Tranquilizers?” Rebecca's face brightened. She grabbed them from my hand. “What else do you have in your purse, Eileen?” she asked. I didn't catch her sarcasm at first.

“Lipstick,” I answered.

I watched as Rebecca approached Mrs. Polk again, this time cautiously, coolly, as she would a frightened animal. The woman twisted her neck and bucked her head as Rebecca reached out to grab her face, one fist under her jaw, holding the pills in her other hand. She wrestled with the woman's head like a farmer with a cow, pinched her nose closed. Seeing her move like that made me wonder still, where had Rebecca come from? Perhaps she was a country girl, a farmer's daughter, a rancher. Truthfully, I cared less and less to make sense of her. I watched as Mrs. Polk clenched her jaw, held her breath, stared up fiercely into Rebecca's eyes. Finally her lips parted, and Rebecca opened her fist and took the pills in her other hand and worked them into Mrs. Polk's mouth. I was crouched down at a distance, observing them. I had a strangely comic impulse to pray or sing. I thought of the rites of passage I'd read about in
National Geographic,
bizarre ceremonies where people are bound and gagged, left in the desert, trapped in cages for days without food or water, administered hallucinogenic drugs so powerful
that they forget their childhoods, their names. They return to their villages entirely new people, imbued with the spirit of God, fearless of death, and respected by everyone. Perhaps this experience in the basement, I thought, was akin to that. After it was over I'd be living on a higher plane. No one could ever hurt me, I imagined. I'd be immune.

“You'll be sorry!” Mrs. Polk cried once the pills went down. “I know you now. I'll tell everyone what you've done.”

“Nobody will believe you,” said Rebecca, her tone not as assured or confident as it should have been.

“Like hell,” said Mrs. Polk, eyeing me. There was no great heartfelt surrender in the basement that night, just the three of us, our faces shiny with sweat or tears in the quaking light. Rebecca and I sat back and waited. The stain of blood on Mrs. Polk's arm seemed to stop spreading. Her breathing began to slow. “Get out, go away,” she whined. “Get the hell out of here.” Her voice dragged out like a slowing record bit by bit as the pills took effect. Once she was asleep, slumped against the wall, mouth leaking, tears drying into a crust around her eyes, Rebecca and I began to whisper. It took less than ten minutes, I'd say, to convince her that my plan was a good one. “My father's a drunk,” I said. “If he killed somebody, it'd be on the cops—they should have locked him up years ago. Maybe they'll find Mrs. Polk and sweep the whole thing under the rug. It doesn't matter. We'll be fine.” Rebecca's face had flattened and stiffened, her knuckles white as she clutched the dirty hem of her robe. “We'll have to hide out somewhere,” I added, trying to maintain my composure. “I was thinking New York City.”

“How do we get her to your father's house?” is all Rebecca asked me.

“We'll have to carry her out to the car.” It seemed easy.

“And you'll shoot her?”

“My father will,” I said. “But we'll pull the trigger.”

“We?” Rebecca's eyebrows lifted. She pushed her hair out of her face.

“I will,” I assented. It didn't seem so terrible. The woman had nothing to live for anyway. Either she could die quickly and painlessly or stay and rot in that awful house of hers, her dark past weighing on her day after day. “It won't hurt,” I said. “Look.” I kicked at the woman's fat feet. “She's out cold.”

After a few moments of biting her lip and wringing her hands, Rebecca agreed. Together we untied Mrs. Polk's hands and lifted her off the floor. Remarkable how much a human being can weigh, I remember thinking. I took her from under her shoulders and Rebecca held her feet, and we hoisted her bit by bit up the steps, me going backward and bearing most of the load. It took every reserve of energy I had, and by the time we'd reached the top of the stairs, my knees shook and my arms burned. “Let's take a break,” I said. But Rebecca insisted we move quickly.

“Let's get her out of here. Then you go on ahead to your father's house. Get him ready. I'll clean up here. We can't leave any evidence behind.” She grabbed Mrs. Polk's feet again. The weight of her body was like a tub of water. Her head fell back toward me, her mouth hung open. When I looked down into it, her teeth were brown, her gums nearly white. She was as good
as dead already, I thought. Rebecca stopped to cover her with her robe before we carried her out the front door. We moved carefully, but it was impossible not to bump her rear end on the frozen steps. A few times Rebecca slipped and let Mrs. Polk's legs hit the snow on the path to the sidewalk. It was slapstick, ridiculous, and I remember the jubilance rising from my chest into my throat. Once the woman was in the car, I paused to exhale, looked up at the sky, the stars spangled across the darkness like splattered paint. I thought I might burst into hysterical laughter under the quiet of that night, the beautiful stillness. I could feel the entire universe revolving around me in that moment. Rebecca looked tense. I shut the car door and put my death mask on then, tried to contain my excitement. I can't tell you what I was thinking. I'm not here to make excuses.

“I'll see you,” Rebecca said suddenly, turning to dash back into the house.

I called out after her. “I'll be waiting!” My voice bounded loud across the snow-filled yard. Rebecca turned and put a finger to her lips to hush me. “We can go anywhere we want,” I said, hushed. “Just the two of us. I have money. No one will ever find us.” I gave her my address. “A block from the elementary school. Can you find it?”

She just waved, hopped up the icy stairs, and closed the door behind her.

I
left X-ville without a single family photo, so all I have are my shifting memories to go on. I remember Dad as I left him—drawn and unconscious on the bed. Joanie I think of as a young girl, sensual and pretty and mindless. Mom, as I've told you, is harder to picture. I imagine just the frothiness of her graying hair as she lay dead in her bed, me curled up beside her, waiting to catch my breath before going out to tell my father, drunk for weeks already, that she was gone. “Are you sure?” is what he asked as I stood there in the stuffy, hot morning sunlight. I remember it—that image of loneliness, looking back at the half-open door to the room where my mother was no longer sleeping. The bathroom was where I went to cry. I remember my reflection vividly, eyes swollen and red in the mirror. I took off my clothes, still shaking, my arms ropy and useless as I held myself and sobbed in the shower. She died when I was just nineteen, thin as a rail by then, something my mother had praised me for.

I never liked looking at photos of myself. I'd been a pudgy child—that pale and homely girl in grade school who could not climb the rope or run as others did in P.E. Fat, loping thighs caused me to waddle in clothes my mother bought a size too tight in the hope that I would somehow change to fit them. And as I grew older, I remained short but whittled down to a small, birdlike stature. For a while I kept a little gut, doughy and oblong like a child's belly. By the time I left X-ville, though, I was a scarecrow, hardly an ounce of flesh to pinch, which was how I liked it. I knew that wasn't quite right, of course. I vowed to eat better, to dress better when I grew up. Be a real lady, I thought. I suppose I figured that once I left X-ville I would grow six inches, become shapely and beautiful. I thought of Rebecca, imagined her in a swimsuit, narrow hips and long, elegant thighs like models in the fashion magazines. A healthy glow. Maybe Rebecca could help me somehow, I wished, guide me, tell me where to go, how to dress, what to do, how to live. The picture of my future I'd had in mind before meeting Rebecca turned out to be somewhat accurate: I'd move into some ramshackle apartment, maybe a girls' boardinghouse where I'd be free to do such wonderful things as read newspapers, eat a spotted banana, go for a walk in the park, sit in a room like a normal person. But being with Rebecca could set me on a different path, I hoped. I wanted to do something great with my life. I wanted so badly to be someone important, to look down on the world from a skyscraper window and squash anyone who ever crossed me like a roach under my shoe.

Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don't apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I'm thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life. When I was twenty-four, the most I wanted was a cramped afternoon among strangers, or to dawdle down a sidewalk without my father waiting for me, to be safe someplace far away, to be home somewhere. As I've said, my disappearance was not the solution to all my problems, but it did allow me to start over. When I got to New York late on Christmas Day, I was sobered and hungry and my body was cramped and my face was swollen. I walked around Times Square all evening and went to a dirty movie because I was cold and too nervous to check into a hotel, worried that the police were after me. I was scared to speak to anyone, scared to breathe. That's where I met my first husband—in the back row of that movie theater. So you see, what came after this story ends was not a direct line to paradise, but I believe I got on the right road, with all the appropriate trips and kinks.

 • • • 

I
n the quiet darkness of that cold Christmas morning in X-ville, I parked the Dodge in my driveway, left Mrs. Polk slumped in the passenger seat, and barreled through the snow to the front of the house and went inside. I didn't think to
pack a suitcase, though I knew then these were my last moments in that house. My father awoke as I came down the attic steps stuffing the gun and my money, all the cash I had, into my purse. I never did empty my father's bank account, or cash my last paycheck. I wondered for a long time whether I'd stand to inherit the house after my father died, but after a decade or two, assuming he had passed away, I decided to forget about it. There was nothing in that house, no part of it that I wanted enough to go back to claim it. In any case, I am dead in X-ville, a ghost, a lost soul, a lost cause. When I found my father standing halfway up the stairs that morning, he was already drunk. He had a hat on and a coat wrapped around his shoulders over his usual robe and boxers. He looked as though he'd seen a ghost.

“Something's staking us out from behind the house,” he said. “I heard it breathing all night, dug inside the snow. A hoodlum it was not.” He shook his head. “Some kind of wild animal. A wolf, maybe.”

“Get into bed, Dad,” I told him. There was a bottle on the floor. I picked it up.

“Did you see it?” he asked, straining to lower himself down to sit at the top of the stairs, a decrepit king on his splintery throne. I sat down next to him, handed him the bottle, and turned to face him, watched him drink, his eyes milky, hands quaking.

“There are no wolves,” I told him, “only mice.”

It took him just a minute or two to suck all that gin down. I remember how he grew sleepy—the effect of the gin came over
him like a spirit entering his body—and like a child his head lolled, mouth frowned, eyelids fluttered like dying moths. I helped him up, gripping his arms at the elbows, and he fell onto me, neck clammy against my cheek. “Mice?” he mumbled. I led him into my mother's bedroom, laid him down, kissed his spotted, swollen hand.

“Good night, Dad,” is how I said good-bye, and I stood there and watched him fumble awkwardly with an empty bottle on the nightstand, squint at it, drop it on the dusty carpet, sigh, close his eyes, and drift off. I closed the door.

That was it. There was no grand finale. He was my father, and that is all he was to me. I could have sat and waited for hours for Rebecca to show up. But there was no point. I knew she was not coming. I knew she was long gone. In the end, she was a coward. Idealism without consequences is the pathetic dream of every spoiled brat, I suppose. Do I hold a grudge against her? I really don't. She was a strange woman, Rebecca was, and came into my life at an odd moment, just when I needed to run away from it the most. I could say more about her, but this is my story after all, not hers.

Before I left I used the bathroom, ran hot water over my frozen fingers. In the mirror I was a different girl. I can't explain the certitude I saw in my face. There was a whole new look in my eyes, my mouth. I said good-bye to the house from where I stood over the bathroom sink. I tell you I felt strangely calm. The weight of the gun, the money in my purse told me yes, it's time. Get out of here. I had my last moment with myself in that
place, in front of the mirror with my eyes shut. It hurt to leave. It was my home, after all, and it meant something to me, each of the rooms, each chair and shelf and lamp, the walls, the creaking floorboards, the worn banister. I'd cry my eyes out over it all in the weeks and months to come, but that day I just bid a solemn adieu. I really saw myself for the first time that night, a small creature in the throes of life, changing. I felt a great urge to look at photographs from my childhood, to kiss and caress the young faces in those snapshots. I kissed myself in the mirror—something I used to do as a child—and went down the stairs one final time. I would have liked to have gone out to the car and carried back all the shoes I could hold in my arms, drop them in the foyer, a parting gift to my dying father, hoping he'd storm X-ville like a tornado, create as much havoc as his weak heart would let him. But I didn't. I couldn't. I pictured him from earlier that morning as he trampled through the snow like a little boy toddling excitedly in his big coat, only gleeless and ragged, his eyes wide with panic instead of joy on our way to the liquor store. He'd lost his mind, and now his daughter.

I don't know where we went wrong in my family. We weren't terrible people, no worse than any of you. I suppose it's the luck of the draw, where we end up, what happens. I shut that front door forever. Then, as though God himself had willed it, as I turned to face the yard, one of those icicles cracked and struck me on the cheek, slicing like a thin blade from my eye to my jaw. It didn't hurt. It just stung a little. I felt the blood well up and
the cold creep into the wound like a ghost. Men would later say the scar gave me character. One said that the line drawn down my face was like an empty grave. Another called it the trail of tears. To me it is simply the mark of having been someone else once, that girl, Eileen—the one who got away.

That was a nice final ride through X-ville in the Dodge before the sun came up. All I had with me was the gun and the money in my purse and the map in my pocket. I had plotted my route from X-ville to Rutland over and over. There was no reason not to follow through with my plan, after all. I thought it would have been nice to have disappeared on New Year's Eve, lost in the bustle and revelry of out with the old, in with the new. But Christmas was just as easy a day to disappear into, as it turned out. In hindsight, the trains may not have been running at all that day. I'd never know, because I never made it to Rutland.

I sometimes like to imagine the conversation Rebecca would have had with my father if somehow he had stumbled down our cellar stairs and found her bound and frightened, as I'd found Mrs. Polk. Perhaps he'd simply untie her, ask if she had any booze, wander back up, dodging his ghosts. Or maybe he'd listen to her explain her story, her whole philosophy, then leave her to shiver and starve for a few days, or forever. Maybe he'd call the police, put the hounds out for me, his wounded daughter, using the convoluted scent of my sweat on my mother's soiled clothing to track me through the snow-covered hills. I've fantasized all kinds of scenarios. Nobody ever did come looking for me. Either that, or I hid well enough to never be found.
I told people to call me Lena. And I did change my last name when I got married that spring. That is one benefit of marriage. The woman becomes someone new.

Perhaps a week earlier I'd have pined for a normal Christmas, wishing I could knock on somebody's door, sit down at a lavish table—a turkey or ham or lamb, or roast duck being carved by a handsome and grinning old father. I may have pined for a loving mother in pearl earrings, a gentle granddad in a hand-knit sweater, a floppy-eared hound, a crackling fire. Perhaps if I'd never met Rebecca, I would have driven out of X-ville full of regrets. Maybe I would have sobbed at my failure to thrive, sworn to God I'd change, be a real lady, eat three square meals a day, sit still like a good girl, keep a diary, go to church, pray, wear clean clothes, have nice girlfriends, date boys, go steady, do laundry, and so on—anything if it meant I didn't have to forge my way alone, an orphan driving out into that cold Christmas morning.

But as it turned out, on my way out of X-ville I had no regrets, and I was not alone. Rita Polk sat limp beside me in the Dodge, almost reverent in her complete silence. Her hands—wide, blue with cold—fell onto the seat between us as I took a turn. I picked them up and placed them gently in her lap.

I drove slowly through the deserted streets, past the elementary school, X-ville High, town hall. I took a route past the police station, bid adieu to all that green copper, those large windows, the fluorescent lights and dirty linoleum floor inside. I drove down Main Street, gray and empty in the dim morning. Needles of yellow sunlight fell from the horizon through the low
buildings and illuminated the interior of the barber shop, the gold lettering on the bakery window, the crystalized slush in the gutter in front of the X-ville post office. The light teased and waned on my way out of town, as though it understood that I could not look at the place all at once, but only in glimpses, in details, and the wind howled and bit at my face and said for me to remember X-ville this way, swirling in the light and wind, just a place on Earth, a town like any other, walls and windows, nothing to be missed or loved or longed for. I tried the radio, tuned it past all the Christmas carols, then turned it off again.

I wish I could feel again the brief peace I found on that northbound highway. My mind was empty, eyes wide with wonder at the passing forests and snow-filled pastures. The sunlight blared through the trees, and at a particular swerve in the road, it blinded me. When I could see again, there was a deer standing a few yards ahead, blocking my way. I slowed, watching the animal frozen there, staring back at me head-on, as though I'd kept it waiting. I pulled over and rolled the car window back up.

Mrs. Polk was sound asleep when I left her in the car, still running by the side of the road. There was enough gas left in the tank for it to run for hours. I hope she opened her eyes to appreciate where I'd left her. If I'd had to die, that gorgeous stretch of white forest lit iridescent blue in the near dawn, still and cold, was as good a place as any. I said good-bye to the Dodge as I walked toward the deer, frozen still, breath steaming from its nostrils and hanging in the air between us like so many ghosts. I raised my hand as though to greet it. It just stood there, big
black eyes fixed on mine, startled but kind, face tinged with frost, antlers floating above its head like a crown. I remember that, how I crumbled before that animal, its body quaking and heavy and huge. Tears finally filled my eyes. I opened my mouth to speak to it, but it trotted off down the embankment and into the woods. That was it. I cried. I smeared my tears around to rub the blood off my face and kept walking, my footsteps crisp and certain in the frozen snow.

When I thumbed a ride a few miles up at a crossroads heading south, I told the driver that I'd had a fight with my mother. The man passed me his thermos full of whiskey. I gulped it down, and cried some more.