When We Were Animals (27 page)

Sometimes death is a found mother.

And that’s how I found mine.

Then I ran.
The moon was not full, but it did not matter. Still outfitted in my papery pink party dress, I ran—I ran through town to the other side, against the headlights of the cars, into the woods, all the way to the quarry and the abandoned mine, where the wind played a shivery kind of music as it dove down into the deepest parts of the earth.

It was between moons—just before the June moon, the Lacuna—when I found my mother. I don’t mean her body, which was a thing of brittle ash—I mean her voice, which one day spoke back to me from the void where I had made my meager confessions.

I was sixteen years old, and there was something gone wrong with me. I was sixteen, and I hadn’t grown right, and all my friends were no longer my friends, and instead I had people I bit and who bit back. I had a beautiful, sad father and an angry drunken man who saw me as the reincarnation of a perverse angel. There was a pretty young woman with an affection for my father who picked out jewelry for me because my mother was a fantasy told to me in good-night stories. I was sixteen, and my name was light, and my body had been bloodied and torn and repaired. I did well in school. I drew maps. I wondered what my life would become—I tried to picture it. I was sixteen, and I was an animal. I was the wrong kind of animal. I didn’t believe as others believed. So there must have been some evil to it. The savagery of nature minus the nature is evil. I was sixteen years old, and I had grown proud of my evil. As though the earth itself had christened me Lumen, as though the heavens had given me their imprimatur. I would take it.

And that’s when I discovered my true mother.

The June moon
was called the Lacuna, which the dictionary told me meant “pause.” Maybe because it was the halfway point in the year, a moment when time itself held its breath, waited to exhale the remainder of its months. I don’t know—but it’s true that there was always a kind of holy stillness about that particular moon. It’s in that stillness that my mother went away many years before.

There was no light at all—no light anywhere. I ran my fingers along the walls of the caves I knew so well. My dress dragged along packed dirt. I smelled my way.

And maybe, after all, that was growing up—learning to navigate deeper territories, learning how to see in the dark. Or learning not to care that you couldn’t see in the dark.

But that seemed wrong, too. The adults around me, they weren’t less afraid—they were more. They were afraid of things they couldn’t articulate. They had lost the power to utter themselves, and so they cowered in sheetrock houses.

Mr. Hunter. He remade himself but could never make himself unbroken. I felt guilty. I had left him behind, there on his tinny height, no one to say goodbye to.

My father, I loved him. He was a sad man, too. But my whole life he had lied to me.

Still, I didn’t blame him. I would sing a song of him. I would write him into a poem. He deserved magic words to keep him safe. Miss Simons was no curse. She was not strong enough to be a curse. She was simply common. But my father and I, we were better. We cultivated ourselves on higher ground.

Maybe he had grown too afraid even to see that.

The adults, they lived in another country—a populace of scrawny fear, as far away as morning is from midnight.

I remember the
way your skin looked in the moonlight.

You.

Peter Meechum.

Blackhat Roy Ruggle.

Hondy Pilt.

Rose Lincoln.

Polly, pretty Polly.

I line you all up in my head, a beautiful processional, slow-motion and smiling. You are of my life.

When I point to you, stand up straight. Let me get a good look at you.

You were pale.

And you were dark.

Your ribs showed through your skin.

You were the one who always had leaves in your hair.

You wore your nakedness proudly—bathing in the moonlight as though your exposure were holy and dreadful.

You, on the other hand, always hid in bushes and behind trees. Was it shame or was it timidity?

You treated your skin before the moon came out. You were ridiculous, but you were lustrous.

You had freckled shoulders.

You had a birthmark on your right calf—I touched it once with my lips when you were sleeping.

I could draw maps of your skin—all of you. I have often, without your knowing it, traveled the topographies of your flesh.

You were brilliant in the moonlight, and I remember you all.

I went to
visit my mother. Hay for hair, paper for skin. And still just a girl. Of course a girl. It had never occurred to me—when she died she had been just a few years older than I was now. I had thought of my mother as many things: as a queen, as a bride, as a wild woman, as a prophet—but I had never thought of her as simply a girl, like me. In just a handful of years, I would be older than my own mother.

It hurt to think about that.

I could not see her in the dark, so I nestled myself against her. I spoke to her.

I said, “Hello. It’s me. It’s Lumen, your daughter.”

Her silence was profound, mocking.

I said, “Did you wear orchid gloves at your wedding? My dad says you did, but I don’t know.”

She was preserved in time. I rested my head against her shoulder. Her hay hair tickled my cheek. I smelled her gray skin, and it smelled of nothing at all. Her skin was dusty.

“Did you get lost?” I said. “I got lost, too.”

Sometimes when you
are looking for something, you find it.

You could call it magic.

If we name things, maybe they’ll never get away from us.

I slept, my
head in my mother’s lap. It might have been five minutes. It might have been an hour. When I woke, I thought it was late. I thought about my father and my promise to be home by midnight. But when I made my way out of the mine, I found Blackhat Roy near the mouth, waiting for me. He said nothing. He looked miserable—tortured. But this boy’s wretchedness felt far away from where I was.

“My mother’s dead,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “My father’s gone, too.”

“I forgot that.”

“I know.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“People saw you. Running.”

“You went to the dance?”

“No. I was looking for you.”

I turned and went to my secret place, my cistern. He followed me there, but I didn’t care. I had stopped hearing the world. In my head were confused, inarticulate voices. They babbled and boiled, and I drowned in them. My mother was a dead girl. There was darkness and dust and Blackhat Roy. You sometimes go wild, and you sometimes want that wildness shackled.

We faced each other, and the wind whistled up from the pit. While he looked, I undid my prom dress and let it fall to the ground. Then I took off my underwear. We’re all of us naked one way or the other.

My mother was calling my name from the deep wells of the earth, and I was rotted from the inside, and my mind was a gemstone mired in murk, and I would torture the impurities out. I would sweat them out, I would bleed them out, I would suffer them out, I would exhaust them out.

For there must be order. There must be balance. For every sin, a punishment. For every shameful act, a suffering. For every impure bite, a pure tooth knocked loose.

Otherwise, what was it all for?

The earth knew, whose days and nights were perfect tides of light.

The moon knew, whose pocky face had waxed and waned by untransgressible law for billions of years.

I knew, who was yet still a girl.

D
o you want to know who I am?

Do you want to know what I do?

I live next door to you with my husband and my child.

I have done such things as would shame the devil, yet I keep my front yard tidy, the trash bins lined up neatly on trash day.

I attend the meetings of the PTA. I offer to bake cookies.

At night, after everyone is asleep, I creep downstairs to the kitchen table and write down my memories. They are the stories I tell myself when I can’t sleep. Like fairy tales—or the mythos of a lost culture.

I was an excellent student.

I am an excellent member of the community. I never spit, and I always put my waste in the proper receptacles.

Do you know what else I do?

I sometimes walk out into the night. I walk down the middle of the deserted street. Our neighborhood is always silent at this hour—we comprise wholesome families. I feel the chill, as I did not as a girl. Maybe as you get older you grow into new kinds of dis-ease. Maybe death is the ultimate discomfort.

I walk to the park, which is deserted except for four teenagers who scurry away when they see me. The air they leave behind smells of marijuana. On the ground is an empty plastic bag and a box of matches with the name of a bar on it and an illustration of a woman sitting inside a massive martini glass.

The playground equipment is still and skeletal, unhinged as it is at this time of night from the fuss of child life, illuminated by what we used to call a Pheasant Moon.

I am alone. I am in love with my husband and my boy, but I am still alone.

Sometimes you want a hand over your mouth—you want to be hushed. Other times you just want to burn till there’s nothing left.

When Jack finally
comes, he does not speak for a while but instead just paces back and forth outside my cell. I watch him, feeling sorry that he has a wife whom he has to fetch from jail. He is a good man. All the other men in our neighborhood have wives who are properly aligned, who know how to stay indoors.

“You broke into that woman’s house,” he says finally, using his hands to show the concreteness of the facts. “You opened her kitchen window, and you climbed in her house when nobody was home. You did these things.”

These things and others he knows nothing of. My past is sometimes so noisy in my brain. I can only remain quiet.

“Ann,” he goes on. “Ann, Helena and I—we just work together. Sometimes I see her at school. Sometimes we talk. You know there’s nothing between us. You know I wouldn’t do that, don’t you?”

“I know.”

“Then why—”

He stops himself. You can see the restraint in his thin, sealed lips. He does not like to ask me why. He fears both the answer and the absence of an answer.

“They said…” he continues, almost pleading. “They said you took a jar of wheat germ.”

I smile a little to show him that everything will be all right—that things will always be all right—but he does not smile back.

“It seemed important,” I say.

Now he approaches my cage and puts his fingers on mine as they grip the bars. He looks at me as though he knows me and understands me and will be my ally forever.

“Ann,” he says, “you have to be better. You have to be.”

I would like to explain to him that there are worse horrors by far, that we will endure—but I don’t. Instead, I just say:

“I know.”

I stood before
Roy—a naked little offering that he did not accept.

He seemed ashamed to see my body. And when he looked at my face, all he saw was the line of stitches.

“I did that to you,” he said, swallowing hard.

Absently, I put my hand to the wound. When I brought it away, I noticed that my fingertips were coated with the peach-colored dust that Margot Simons had shown me how to use earlier.

Roy stepped away from me, as though I were difficult to be near. He moved to the other side of the pit and stood before it, gazing at me across that impossible depth. Then he looked down into it. I wondered what he saw there. Maybe he, too, had lost things to the earth. But I was unsettled by something in his eyes that was near to longing.

I was cold, and the gravelly ground bit into the soles of my feet.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“You know something?” he said without looking up. “I liked your room.”

“My room?”

“It was a nice room. I wonder if I would have been different if I grew up in a room like that.”

His voice was small and hollow. It echoed off the walls of the cistern.

“You grew up all right,” I said.

He made a sound that echoed against the walls of the cistern and seemed to come not from him but from the earth itself.

He toed some pebbles into the black pit, and they made no sound at all.

“At the beginning,” he said, “I wanted to break you. I really did. But I couldn’t. Then, later, I didn’t want to break you anymore. I wanted…the opposite. But something about me—my hands don’t work that way. And I broke you instead. It was an accident.”

“Roy,” I said. “Roy.”

“I hated you for such a long time,” he said, looking up at me. He rubbed a hand across his face, and his cheek smeared with ash. That’s when I noticed he was covered in it—ashy dust—as though whatever burned in him was smoldering out, leaving his skin desiccated. He smiled a smile that had no smile in it. “At least that I was good at. Hate’s simple. It makes sense. You know it, too.”

“Roy,” I said. “Don’t.”

He cried now, and his bare frame shivered with his tears.

“You read all those books,” he said, shaking his head. “All those fucking books.”

I wanted to tell him it meant nothing. I wanted to explain that it was all I knew how to do—that I read books instead of doing real things. I wanted to say to him that I was different now, that I had lost who I was and that I would never get that Lumen back again, that something had gone deranged inside me. I used to think that some people are born so good they are illiterate to the languages of desolation. But we all speak the same tongue.

I wanted to tell him these things, but my heart was going too fast. I was deafened by it, muted by it. I was peaceful in my brain, viewing myself as if from above, wondering at this little monkey of a creature who stood staring.

He gazed into the pit and then back at me, and there was an awful, imploring truth in his eyes.

“Lumen,” he said. “Lumen, I did something bad. Really bad. I went to your house tonight. No one was there. I tried to read the book you gave me. But I couldn’t. So I wanted to bring it back to you.”

He shook his head.

Something was fouled in him, and something was fouled in me, and I watched myself with him, and I could feel my own tears on my cheeks, because I knew what was coming, and I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t know how to stop things.

“Roy,” was all I could say. “Don’t. Please don’t.”

“Then help me, Lumen,” he said. “Help me.” And he put his arms out, palms up, for me to come to him.

It was a moment. I could have become one thing, but I became another. The creatures we truly are are exposed in tiny moments. This was one.

I could have saved him.

I did not save him.

“Help me,” he said again.

And I said, “I can’t.” I said, “I don’t know how.”

“Lumen,” he said.

I said, “Don’t be afraid.”

But he was. I could see that. He whimpered a little, his wild animal eyes gone all soft.

That’s when I turned my back on him. I turned and closed my eyes. I could not bear witness.

I heard a brief shuffle of dirt from beneath his feet. I breathed in the dusty air. I paid attention to my heart, the stubborn beating of my dreadful heart.

When I opened my eyes again and turned around, he’d fallen. Blackhat Roy Ruggle was gone.

I waited for
a while, and the earth was quite still. The only sound was my own breathing, and I listened to it. I persisted.

I didn’t know what else to do.

I put my prom dress back on, the rustle of the crinoline echoing gaudily in that grim sanctuary. I wiped my face with my gritty hands, and I made my way outside. Walking unhurriedly back through the woods, I was aware of all the voices of the crickets and the tree toads and the owls around me. The air was cold in my lungs, the stars reflected in the still water of the lake as I passed by. I was no part of the things I saw. I was just a traveler across these fields of night, and I was alone.

I smelled the smoke when I was still a great distance from the edge of the woods. What’s carried on the air can be carried a long way. I didn’t see it until I was almost home, that black plume that rose behind the trees, almost invisible except for the way it blocked out the stars and gave a halo to the gibbous moon. At the same time, I became aware of the flashing lights, blue, white, and red.

I must have looked like an apparition emerging from those trees, my prom dress torn and covered with burrs. But no one noticed. No one was paying any attention, because everyone was looking at the place where my house used to be—where now blackened timbers stood upright and smoked and crackled and released every now and then a dust of ash and ember.

I looked for my father, but I couldn’t see him among the neighbors who stood on the street in their nightclothes, shaking their heads and leaning together against tragedy.

When somebody finally saw me, I was seized by a team of uniformed men. Police confirmed that my name was Lumen Fowler, that Marcus Fowler was my father. They wanted to know where I had been.

“Where’s my dad?” I said.

They wanted to know if I knew who set the fire.

“Where’s my dad?” I said.

Then two paramedics led me to the back of an ambulance, where they put a blanket over my shoulders and performed tests on my pliant body. They told me to stay put there in the ambulance, but when they were gone I found myself wandering away among the vehicles and lights and moving figures. I was a meager ghost. No one saw me—I was nothing to see. I heard their voices. I heard everything. How the firemen had tried to stop him from going inside, how they had told him they’d cleared the house. But he had gone in anyway, saying he knew where I’d be hidden. The coal hole. Saying he was sure I was in there because I’d promised to be home by midnight. I’d promised.

I sat down on the ground, the crinoline bunched up underneath me, and I held out my hands to collect the ash that fell from the sky like flakes of snow.

Margot Simons found me. She tried to lift me, but my legs didn’t work right, so instead she sat down next to me on the road. Her face was streaky with soot and dried tears. She put her arms around me.

“It’ll be all right, Lumen,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ll take care of you,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

“Yes.”

“He loved you,” she said. “There was nothing else in the world for him but you.”

The ash collected on my palms. Miss Simons tightened her arms around me. She used one hand to brush away the ash that was collecting in my hair.

“You’re going to be okay,” she said.

I said, “Yes.”