Stacking in Rivertown (32 page)

She begins to talk like we should go to trial, saying that the chance of me walking is now in my favor. I balk. I worry. The dangers get me.

I’m certain that if I go to trial, I’ll lose. It’s been one thing after another, starting with Mandy’s appendicitis and ending with Miriam’s desertion.

At this point, there’s nothing else it could be. She’ll write, I keep thinking. She’ll call Josh. But she never does.

So I refuse to go to trial and order Cynthia to get me the best deal she can wrangle. “I spent ten years with Ben,” I say. “Prison is a walk in the park.”

She stares into my eyes, but I look away. I don’t tell her that I’m terrified, that the great Clarisse Broder, who jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge, is scared shitless to be walking around free with only a memory of Miriam in her head.

But I can’t stop myself from searching out news of Miriam. I watch while her CD goes up the charts and her sold-out concerts are given great reviews. As the weeks progress, she’s lauded, praised, and called a shoo-in for a Grammy.

The cliff I’m dropping off gets a lot more treacherous. I stop seeing visitors. I don’t read my mail. I have periods when I can’t move at all, even if I try. I somehow manage to keep this a secret.

Now I’m one of the ghosts flicking through, haunting the cells, where all my lovers lay, stacked, put away, like dolls flat on their backs, sleeping in Rivertown.

Beloved lover.

Then the final bargain comes through.

Cynthia arrives and they usher me into the lawyer room. “Manslaughter,” she says, not smiling. “Three years including time already served, possibility of parole as soon as fifteen months.”

“Yes,” I say.

Cynthia paces. “As your lawyer, it’s my responsibility to do my best for you. I think the bargain is decent, but my advice is to go to trial.”

I get my mouth open, but she interrupts, pounding the table.

“You can beat this thing, Becca. With Kat and Bates on your side, I can shred their case. Everybody wants you to go to trial, Becca. Burt, Josh, Greg. They’re upset that you’d accept this plea.”

I lie my head on the table.

“I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’m going to say it one time. Give evidence on Miriam. All you have to do is confirm she was up there that day. Then the police can force a fingerprint check.”

Cynthia stops in front of me, one hand leaning on the table. “Why keep up the charade, Becca? She hasn’t done a goddamn

thing for you.”

I raise my head, my eyes burning, feeling for the first time that if I had a gun in my hand right now, I’d pull the trigger. Cynthia takes a step away from me.

I lie my head back down.

“Okay,” she says. I hear her packing up her stuff. “I’ll come back tomorrow. But I’m sending the prison psychiatrist over to see you this afternoon.”

“The last thing I need is a fucking shrink,” I say.

“I don’t think you’re in any state to know what you need.”

I jerk my head up. “So who the fuck does? There isn’t anybody. Zilch. Zero. I’m sure the state would like to step in. That would be grand.”

“Stop it, Becca. Stop it right now.” She glares at me. “You’re impossible.” She picks up her briefcase and folds her raincoat over her arm. “I’m sending the psychiatrist today. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

That afternoon, they take me from my cell and drag me to see the shrink.

Just a nervous breakdown. Women have them all the time.

When Cynthia comes back the next day, we argue again. This time it’s me pounding the table. “Do I have to fucking spell it out for you? I don’t want to get out. I want to stay right here.”

Cynthia’s face goes blank. She stops her pacing and sits, staring at me for a long time.

“Okay,” she says at last. “We’ll take the plea.”

Before she leaves, she steps behind me and puts both of her hands on my shoulders. “Things will get better, Becca. You’ll see. You’ve got friends who care about you.”

I nod and put my head down. She leaves.

The bargain goes through. A week later, I stand before the judge. I’m charged. I plead guilty. I’m sentenced.

Three years. Fifteen months if I can keep my shit together. My thoughts now are fixed on Kat. In my mind, I tell her to hang on, that I’ll help her. Just fifteen months, I promise.

Three days later, Cynthia shows up. Her face is splotchy. She sits and searches me with her round, brown eyes.

“Becca, look at me.”

I allow my eyes to drift to hers. But in my head, I hear the willows beating the air. I smell the heat off the mudflats. At times, I can forget I’m in a cell and locked up. I have moments where Miriam disappears altogether.

“Becca. It’s about Kat. They were going to transfer her to New York tomorrow. She was facing nine counts of accomplice to murder.” She stops.

I look straight through her.

“She’s dead,” I say.

Cynthia looks away. “Hung herself off her bedframe.”

It’s strange how the river becomes so plain, like I’m standing in the grass again. The night presses close. The mists grow heavy. The frogs sing.

I remember that one year I heard Daddy saying something to Mama about how a sudden surge of the river had swept off a whole herd of cows, and that parts of them ended up in people’s houses along with the muck. Daddy laughed. That was my first inkling that our houses were a lot like Dumpsters.

But in this moment of Kat and the world of our secret suffering, I see how what I am is nothing more than a Dumpster, a receptacle for that which no one else finds valuable. I see how Kat is broken, like Violet, and perched upon garbage, her blanket drawn back. Strangers stare at her beautiful body. That body that I loved.

I don’t cry. I stand and walk away, turning at the door. Cynthia hasn’t moved. She’s staring down at her hands resting on the table.

“Claim her body for me. I’ll take care of her burial.”

Cynthia closes her eyes and nods.

I leave and lie on my cot, not making noise or bother. I think about the times when Kat and I used to act out
Romeo and Juliet
.

I will kiss thy lips,

Haply some poison yet doth hang on them,

To make me die with a restorative.

Thy lips are warm!

Kat would be lying still upon her mattress, having died of poison. I’d kneel beside, clutching the bread knife we used.

. . . then I’ll be brief. O happy dagger!

This is thy sheath.

I have no more room. My quotient of loss is filled too full. When weight has gathered beyond its limit, something must be removed.

But will the soul do? Is it lighter than a feather? Would I find the film and slip through easy?

The next day I wake, unable to remember some important things. When our cell door is unlocked, I sit on the edge of my bed, staring. The large black woman who was sleeping where Vin should have been is halfway out the door when she looks back.

“Come on, honey,” she says, taking me by the hand.

Things begin to blur out. The next thing I remember is that I’m sitting in front of the TV. I hear a voice that I remember. She’s a lovely woman. Oprah is smiling at her and acts like they’ve been chums for years. I keep staring at her face, trying out names, thinking that I know her.

Oprah lays her hand on this woman’s arm. She’s thin, thinner than she should be, I think I remember. And for a moment, I catch a slight tremble in her hand. She hides it beneath her leg.

“My guest today, as I’m sure everyone knows, is Miriam Dubois, whom all the experts say might walk out with an arm-load of Grammies tonight.”

Miriam. That was her name. I knew a Miriam once. I loved her. And now I feel her hand along my back. Her fingers run through my hair.

Oprah turns. “So let’s pick up where we left off before the break. I’m sure everyone wants to know the answer to this question.”

The young woman’s eyes sparkle with a thing that I think I misplaced somewhere. When she smiles, the corners of her eyes are so tender.

I want to touch just there, where the tenderness has come alive. And then perhaps to sit. Not near, but close enough to watch, to sense her presence in a room with me. I think I should die for that.

Oprah leans close, like girls telling secrets. “So tell me, Miriam, there were rumors months ago that you’d found someone special in your life. I’d love to be the first to know.”

Miriam laughs. My head tilts. I feel a thrill run through me.

“Come on, girlfriend. You can tell me.”

Miriam smiles. She shakes her head. “No.”

I’m so attentive now, all of me hanging on her words. And I catch in the camera close-up of her face, the gleam of those eyes. “No,” she says again. “There’s no one.”

I find that I’d leaned forward, and now I sit back as her words settle. Maybe they’re just sheets of paper, so thin you’d never know the weight of them. Weight is a tricky thing anyway.

No. There’s no one.

I can see why she’d say that. I understand. Yet I keep searching that face, those lips, looking for a slight sign. A giveaway. That she’s lying.

But she’s so smooth. Her delivery so sure and unbroken.

No. There’s no one.

I know that. I know how she’s right. There is no one. No one at all. There’s no one.

By nine, we’re locked in our cells. By nine thirty, my credit card-loving roommate is snoring up a storm.

I rise from my bed and take out a piece of stationery that Josh brought me. I think I remember, like some long-ago dream, that I wrote a note like this once before. Only it was different then. At that time, I was only pretending.

I write:

Lovely Miriam,

A Grammy would be nice for you.

Someone asked me today whether, just in case I died,there was anyone I’d like to name as my beneficiary. I had to think. Then I said, No. There’s no one.

I wish you the best.

Becca

I kneel and slip my knife from its hiding place. It’s so good to keep a weapon nearby. Just in case.

I lie on my bed and read my note again, then let it drop on my chest. The knife isn’t easy to work. In order to get to the arteries in my wrists, I have to do some hefty slashing.

And as I’m drifting, keeping my eyes fixed on the willow leaves trembling, I float with Vin and Mandy again, watching the banks ease by, hoping for a little rest.

The night Vin and me sat by watching our house go to ashes, he wrapped his arms around me. Neither of us ever cried.

I always wondered why we never even tried to get help. I think we’d already given up hope about something that should have been as natural as air.

So by the time I’d gotten to the real meat of my wrist and exposed a bit of bone, it wasn’t Miriam I was thinking of anymore. I found that in the center of my body, lying silent and red along my skeleton, I’d kept that last memory of Mama, fresh as the day she died, and promising her over and over, I will be true. I will be true. And beside her apparition and below, was that prevenient groan, whose nature can be known only by its shadow.

It is our lovers who cast us this shadow. How could we ever

turn away?

So it is Ben that I cling to now. Ben and his multiple wounds divine and bathed in radiance. I desire no other. Having seen the shadow plain, having guessed at its unseen nature, I shrink back, beaten down at last by that which I have carried secret and blind in my own broken body.

Rebirth

Stacking in Rivertown

I wake in a big room. It’s stuffy. I hear a TV.

I try to move but can only turn my head. One of the prison guards is talking to a man in a white coat. Now a nurse looks in my face, turns, and says something. The man in the white coat approaches and leans over, staring at me. Above my head is a bag of red fluid. I follow the red tube that comes out of it, seeing it go down into my hand. A wad of bandages circles my wrist.

The doctor and nurse disappear from view. I try to shift, but sense how I’m strapped in place. My head lolls to the side. I see beds lined up in a long row. The women in them are staring blank-eyed at the television that’s bolted up in the corner.

The nurse reappears and squirts water from a bottle into my mouth.

“That’s good,” she coos.

I hold it on my tongue.

Then I get a picture in my mind of Ben slumped on the ground with five holes in him. I see Kat, her neck stretched, her face bright red. Then something floats in.

No. There’s no one. Nobody. No.

I spit the water in the nurse’s face.

She doesn’t move. I can see she wants to slap me. But everyone in the room is silent, watching. She walks off, wiping her face.

I lie still. I don’t struggle. I’ve had a lot of training for this kind of thing. I can feel how they couldn’t strap my wrists. Too much damage. Instead, they have me bound mid-arm. I press my forearms back, slipping the straps toward my elbows. I reach wrist to wrist, working through the bandages and gouging the stitches out. I rip off the IV and blood feed.

So this is happiness, I think, feeling my body go light. And I find that I’m smiling. Funny how happiness isn’t all that hard when you know what you really want.

My blank-eyed neighbor screams. They come. I try to fight them. The blood makes my arms slippery. The doctor pulls the blanket and sheet off one side, yanks up my gown, and spears my thigh with a needle.

Now I’m floating again, seeing Ben. I want to tell him how much I love him and how everything that happened is forgotten now. It doesn’t matter anymore.

When I wake once more, my hands are enclosed in mitts and I have a tube taped in my mouth. I swing my head side to side to get it out. I try biting, but they have something rubber between my teeth. I scream and thrash. The doctor and nurse consult. I get another shot, but it doesn’t put me out, just keeps me groggy. The nurse comes in with Cynthia. Her eyes are red. She sits by the bed.

I look away.

“Becca,” she says. “Josh is a wreck. Burt broke down and cried in my office. You’ve got to stop this.”

Because of the stuff in my throat and mouth, I can’t explain to her about the little house I built. It’s made of white stone and sits on a rise above a river. In this house, the dead are stacked deep.

On the bottom is Mama, still fat and wedged into her slot. Then Mandy. Beloved friend.

Ben is stacked but still breathing. He’ll always sleep half-awake.

Then my lovers lie in slumber. Dear Violet, in a light sleep, tossing and turning. And Kat, my fairest love, trembling from her dreams. Above Kat is Miriam, murdered by her vicious lover as she slept.

In the top slot is the freshest body of all, laid out like a doll flat on her back. Across her stomach on the left side is the scar she mistook for an appendectomy. I smile, remembering her confusion. I find myself reluctant to leave her side because I miss her so deeply. She is the one I loved best.

Her skin is white now, bleached but pliable. Her lips I find to be soft as I touch mine to hers. They are dead, though. No mistaking that.

I glare at Cynthia. I throw my head side to side. She cries some. In time, she stands, squeezes my arm, and leaves.

The next few days are bleak. They drug me up, feeding me through the fucking tube. Eventually they wear me down. Eventually I begin to let them feed me. Ben’s basement again. I expect them to give me a new name and teach me to give pleasure to men.

But in my head I go for long dreams, floating down the river. Listening to the sound of wind and leaves.

They keep interrupting. The orderlies unstrap me for short periods while in the custody of some hefty guard watching me like I’m a criminal or something, like I’m a prostitute gone bad. I try one more time when I’m peeing by myself in the john. I wreck my wrists, opening the wounds that have just knit together. I can’t get in deep enough. And I wedge myself as tight as I can beside the toilet.

I think of the statue of the sad woman that Mandy and me adorned with a hat years ago. Her face was turned to the side. And she was turned at the waist also, as though having thought to move in that direction, but maybe had decided not. Perhaps she knew that no direction would satisfy, and that all her suffering had come to nothing.

I curve my arm around, rocking and drooling, clutching my legs up tight beneath. That’s when my guard opens the door and his face goes red like he’s angry, not sad at the sight of me in such a sorry condition.

The guard grabs me by my ankles and drags me out. We roll around on the floor in a red embrace until they hit me with another syringe.

And so I dream and drift once more to sleep. I walk to the edge of the river. I unbutton my dress and let it drop. When I step forward, the water is cool. I let the current take me.

On the far bank now, the shadows have lengthened. The night-jars have come out, swooping and diving, and the sun has bleached the cypress golden. Someone has propped me on a willow branch, swaying as the willow sways, and high in the upper limbs, the peewee calls,
pee-a-wee
.

“All right, Clarisse. Wake up.” A hand is gripping my chin, shaking my head. “You’ve got company.”

My eyes open a slit. The blood drip hangs above me again. The tube has returned to my mouth. I jerk my head out of the nurse’s hand. When she steps back, I see Cynthia.

A nurse walks by with a tray of food for the woman in the bed next to mine.

That’s when I notice him. He’s sitting quiet beside Cynthia. He’s wearing a Chicago Bulls cap and sunglasses that are familiar to me. Then I remember. That’s Becker’s hat. It’s Becker’s sunglasses.

The fucker. Nobody gave them to him. Tears are running out from beneath his sunglasses. I glare at him.

Cynthia leans forward, lying her hand on my leg. “Your brother’s here to see you, Becca. You remember Vin.”

I shake my head no. It’s a trick. Vin was bigger-boned. He had darker skin. And he’d be older now. Do they think I’m stupid?

Now the fake Vin stands and sits beside me on my bed. I turn my head away.

“Look at me, Becca.”

I know that voice. It’s not Vin.

“Becca.” He takes hold of my head and forces me to turn toward him, his hands trembling. He takes off his sunglasses, and I stare at him, remembering. It’s Violet. After all these years, she’s come to get me. I see that her neck isn’t separated from her head. Bates lied to me.

“I didn’t mean what I said in that interview. I’ve been sick to death with wanting you, to see you, to talk to you. I’ve been such a coward. I’m so ashamed. I made a terrible mistake.”

I stare at her, seeing how pale her skin, the dark lines beneath her eyes.

“Do you know me, Becca? Do you know who I am?”

I keep trying to remember, thinking about flames and how they shoot higher and higher as the two-room burns, how I worry for the willows that they’ll catch fire, and how Vin and me have to keep moving back because of the heat.

She starts crying and lies her forehead against mine, whispering. “Please stop hurting yourself.”

I sense her hands rubbing my head.

Now Violet sits back and turns to Cynthia. “Get the nurse.” She stares at me. “You’re going to eat now.”

When the nurse comes, Violet says, “Please take out the tube. She’ll let me feed her.”

“I’ll have to ask the doctor. He’s not here.”

“What have you got to lose?” Violet says, not mean but soft, like someone might be dying nearby.

The nurse leaves and I see her pick up a phone. Then she’s talking on it, gesturing.

Violet leans close to my ear, talking low. “I should never have listened to you that day. I’m such a stupid shit. Nothing could be worse than this.”

The nurse returns with a tray. She sets it down and leans forward, releasing the strap behind my head, peeling away the tape. As she separates my teeth, she steadily pulls the tube out. I start gagging.

Violet waits, then lies a bottle against my lips. “I want you to drink.”

I lie still, staring into her eyes, remembering pictures that someone showed me a long time ago of a woman in a Dumpster, another piece of trash thrown out. How did she awaken from her silent death? Did the Dumpster prove fertile for the quickening of limbs? I throw buttercups upon her gentle grave. And I lie her beneath the willows. I wet her eyes with the river.

Violet squirts liquid in my mouth. I hold it there, trying to remember how to swallow.

“You can do it.”

I choke on it, but get it down. A burn starts in my stomach.

“More,” she says.

I swallow another mouthful.

She hands Cynthia the bottle and takes a bowl and spoon. “You’re going to eat some soup.”

Cynthia props up my head with a pillow. Violet offers me a spoonful. I shake my head no.

“Just a little.”

We wait.

“Just a little,” she repeats.

I open my mouth and I swallow, following its course to the fire that is my stomach.

“Again.”

She keeps feeding me until I shake my head no.

“Okay. That’s good for starters. But now you have to do it on your own. I can’t come every time. You can do it for me. Remember that I want you to eat and to drink. And I want you to leave your wrists alone. Let them heal.”

Violet hands Cynthia the spoon and the bowl and holds my head in her hands again.

“They’re going to make me leave soon.”

I shake my head, but she holds me still.

“Shh, Becca. I’ll be back. But you have to eat and get better before I can come back.”

She leans forward, hesitating, then touches her lips to mine.

Her scent comes over me and she lies her forehead against my cheek, crying. Then she sits up. “Before I go, I want you to talk. I know that you can say my name.”

I stare, trying to memorize her again, because I sense I’ve forgotten something.

“Say Miriam, Becca.”

Vin sleeps by the river, but I’m awake. And the moon lights the mists silver. The live oak rustles, high on the rise and lit from behind.

“Miriam, Becca. Say it.”

The river of a sudden flows heavy, having broken loose from some northern freeze, carrying its Dumpsters full of bodies. And I hear my voice whispering, full of mud, full of wormtree.

“You say, ‘One clover. One bee. And revery, revery.’”

And now it’s like when you’re in the box and first you’re whispering. Not long after that, you’re screaming, but you don’t know why.

It’s the fire having leapt into the willows, spreading to the tupelos. The nurse and the doctor scurry like rats on a log. I see another needle. Cynthia gets between them and me, gesturing.

The ‘gators climb out of the river and drag me in.

Violet’s laid her body over me.

Kat loved for me to plait her braid. I’d lean her back in a chair, still naked from the play, still scared some, and always like she was, a little sad. Sigh no more, I’d say in her ear. I’d recite it for her as her hair fell free.

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

Men were deceivers ever;

One foot in sea, and one on shore,

To one thing constant never.

Then, sigh not so

But let them go,

And be you blithe and bonny,

Converting all your sounds of woe

Into Hey nonny, nonny.

And all the time I brushed her hair over my fingers. With each turn of the plait, I loved her more. With each wind about, I kissed her neck. She smelled of scented lotions and semen. Of roses and sweat.

Mama smelled of river-washed cotton. Her breath was heavy with milk, and her fingers were shaped like sausages, but smelled of rain.

So when it rains, I think of Mama. How she loved thunder and wind. We’d sit on the porch watching the storms come in. She’d take off her stretched-out shoes and her knee-highs, already fallen down to her ankles. We’d run out and get drenched. I’d stomp puddles. Vin would slide along the grass, buck naked, showing off his white ass.

Our bodies and minds are made from a thing so fresh, so fine. But we regress to that which wilts, folds down, and disappears.

So I live inside the river now. If you want to find me, you look for me here. Above me, I see cottonwoods atremble. I see trapjaws dropping off logs. I see the willows draped over.

How they sway. How they sway.

A guard comes and gets me from my cell, leading me to the visitor’s room.