She Lies Twisted (5 page)

“
Tate,” Prissy called out as I began to walk away. I paused but didn't turn back. “Have a good life.” And then I heard footsteps and the sound of a screen door slamming shut and I knew another chapter of my life was closing along with it. Tears threatened again and I dashed them away with my elbow. I didn't need this. Crying again wouldn't help Boyd's spirit. But honoring his memory would. Now all I had to do was steal a car and drive a hundred miles without a license.

Perfect.

Grandma Willa left her keys in a frosted glass bowl by the front door. It had been shattered a million times and glued back together because if she walked by and it wasn't there, she had a fit. I got the attachment to the bowl, it was the last gift my mother had given my grandma before she got sick but why she had to keep it on one of those stupid decorative tables by the front door was beyond me. It was just asking to be broken. I fished the keys from the bowl and flipped through them until I found the one to the Cadillac. It was a 1998 Seville but since my grandmother never drove it anywhere, it was still in pretty good shape. Boyd and I had borrowed it once or twice but he'd preferred his old black truck that was such a jumble of car parts that the guy who built it, Boyd's cousin Mac, had no idea what it had started out as. I smiled at the memory as I unlocked the door and then frowned.

There would be no more riding in Boyd's truck with the busted up speakers, no more trips to the ocean, no more homemade chili with corn chips. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

“
My life is nothing,” I said to myself as I climbed into the front seat of the car. “It's nothing and I am fucking nobody.” More tears spilled as I buckled Boyd's ashes into the front seat next to a blue-green vase I'd stolen from the living room. It still had the dusty remains of a hundred year old silk flowers in it. I snatched them out roughly and threw them into the grass beside the car before peeling out of the driveway with no seat belt and the door partially hanging open. It took me fifteen minutes to notice. I smiled at Boyd's box with my cheeks still wet. “Thanks for keeping the pigs off me.” He didn't respond. I pretended he did though, pretended I heard him laugh like a biker in bar. And then I imagined a conversation where he chastised me for using slang I didn't really understand and I berated him for wearing socks with holes.

“
I miss you Boyd,” I said. “And I always will.”

I hate long drives. Always have. Boyd had usually been behind the wheel because, with the exception of the time he taught me how, I hated driving. I'd have rather been in the passenger seat reading a magazine or painting my nails lime green or tearing through a novel I'd read a hundred times. Boyd never cared. He let me be me and he liked me that way. Nobody else had liked me since my family had died. Nobody but Boyd.

“
I hate you,” I spat at him as I parked the car in the empty lot and eyed the gray sea. Then I felt guilty and apologized. I unbuckled Boyd and the vase and carried them to the edge where the grass stopped and the sky began. I paused a moment and tried to think about what I should say, if anything. I'd never been particularly religious and wasn't about to start now. Some people felt tragedy drew them closer to God or the Goddess or the Holy Spirit or whatever. It just drove me away, made me angry, made me doubt even more. No holy whatever that was worth worshipping would do what had been done to me.

I knelt down in the grass and peeled the tape off of the box. Inside was a plastic bag filled with ashes. I pulled the bag out by its knotted top and stared at it. Last week, it had been Boyd. Today, it was dirt. I grimaced.

“
I'm really gonna miss you,” I said as I untied the plastic and attempted to pour Boyd's ashes into the vase. The top was so narrow that I ended up with as much on my hands and the grass as there was inside. I started to cry again. I tried not to but there was really nobody to be strong for. It was just me and the screech of the ocean against the rocks. I shook off the ashes from my sweater, scooped as much as I could from the ground, and brushed my hands against the side of the glass. It would have to do. It wasn't perfect but it was all I had in me.

I crushed the cardboard box and folded up the plastic bag before putting them back in the car and then approached the metal railing with the vase clutched between my hands. I stepped over the danger sign that warned tourists away from the edge until I was standing as close as I could to the sea.

“
Boyd,” I choked out and then paused. “Johnathan David Boyd.”
Yes, that was better. That felt right.
“I, Tatum Ruby O'Neil, promise to miss you everyday for the rest of my life.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “And I'll love you until the day I die.”

As I released the vase into the air, as it became silhouetted against the darkening sky, I thought I felt a pressure at my back, like a warning, a familiar hand guiding me away from the edge. But when I snapped my eyes open, the sensation and the vase were gone and the cliff was crumbling beneath my feet.

I was falling.

She lies twist'd, twist'd, twist'd,

On the edge of gray cliffs mist'd.

Bruised and broken, bloodied red,

Temper'd by demons, souls of the dead.

Her eyes and lips have gone to seed,

Her twist'd body no longer breathes.

Wrong'd and ruin'd, broken down,

Our twist'd gatekeep, we have found.

When you pass out and come to, there's this feeling of loss. Like time has passed you by and you've somehow been cheated out of a part of your life. When I found my sister, Jessica, dead, I passed out and when I woke up, her body was gone. The blood was gone. She was gone. There was this piece missing from my mental jigsaw puzzle. A family portrait with a missing head. When I woke up on the beach that day, it was nothing like that. It wasn't like I had missed a part of my life. It was as if it had never been.

I sat up, salty and wet, coated in a fine layer of sand and pebbles and bits of dried kelp and tried to remember how I had gotten there.
The ashes, the cliff, falling like Alice down the rabbit hole.
I rubbed my temples in tight circles. Blood, blood, blood. Every significant moment in my life was covered in it, drenched, soaked,
consumed
by it. The sea still held its quiet menace, the air still hung in gray sheets, but something was different and it wasn't the scenery.

“
What is wrong with me?”

As soon as the words left my throat, I could feel it. There was something different in my voice, my words, the way my tongue crept across my lips. I brushed my hands down the front of my sweatshirt. A huge gash sliced across the gray fabric from hip to shoulder. I dug my fingers into the rend and peeled it away from my skin. My nails met rough lines but no pain. I lifted the hem and examined my belly. Dark X's crisscrossed my pale skin in a diagonal line from the bottom of my ribcage to the top of my belly button.

Stitches.

“
What the-” I picked at the black thread with one of my fingernails. It was stiff and rigid but not painful and underneath it, there was only a white scar and no wound. “How long have I been here?” The wind snatched my words in cold hands and whipped them away from me. Had I been lying here for hours? Days?
Weeks?
“Impossible.” I dropped my sweater over the bizarre medical experiment my midsection had become and pushed myself to my feet. Gaping wounds didn't just disappear. Maybe I was dreaming? But no...I shook my head and reached a hand up to my hair. Dreams didn't hurt this much. I felt around my scalp for injuries and came across another coarse line of stitches.

“
This is fucked,” I whispered to myself, feeling the first surges of panic. I tried to retrace my steps but could only remember the cliff crumbling then...nothing. I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my fists against my shuttered lids. I knelt down in the sand and let the cacophony of crashing waves and howling wind wash over me.
Pain, heat, a face with dark eyes and a sad smile, rocks, my hair brushing across my cheeks as I...
I rose from my crouch and whirled to face the staircase of cliffs behind me. One after another they stepped down from the grassy coast and dipped into the water until the smallest of the five outcroppings was mostly submerged by white foam.