From the kitchen comes such laughter, such a roaring gluttonous wet laugh. Smaller ones join. They are lite and airy, and before long someone else is trying to talk over the laughter, trying to lay a dim, ordinary story over it.
The girl, probably no more than fifteen, is on the couch looking out a bay window in the living room. Vehicles are in the driveway and along the road, pickups and smaller cars. Now and again a vehicle leaves and another comes and out of it an aunt or uncle or cousin emerges, in some cases all three. In the house they come, letting themselves in for the kitchen, walking into an uproar of greetings and embraces and saying happy birthday to someone, and somewhere in there are the girl’s mother and stepfather and older brother.
The girl remains in the living room, listening, apart from them.
The TV isn’t on.
She’s in this room alone.
In class the girl pretends to study while the others are nose-down and the room is silent. Her eyes are sunken and red. She takes many looks out the window, never too much time between each. During kickball in PE, the class is out behind the school on the practice field, and she’s in the outfield with her hands wound in her shirt, not paying attention to the pitch or the kicker or where the ball is going.
She’s watching the road that runs out front the school, and then she’s watching the parking lot and the big empty space alongside the school, where wind is dragging in from the fields a dirt and corn smell.
After school, her friend Laura comes over and in the girl’s room they study, a continuance of many study sessions to, as the school said, catch the girl up to speed.
From the time she was out, such a long time.
They finish working.
Laura says her mom was talking and saying sometimes she’ll be in traffic thinking about you, saying how she’ll be looking at the flow of cars on the road and, even though there’s traffic lights and only three signal options, you can’t predict traffic jams. Laura says her mom thinks what happened to you is, kinda, like that, how she’ll be thinking about you and what happened and think how can you predict a thing like that?
The girl is sitting on the bed and has paused collecting her textbooks.
She says nothing.
“My mom thinks you hearing that might help.”
The girl finishes collecting books.
Laura says, sometime later, “Does it?”
It’s halfway through dinner when the girl starts shaking and her breathing reaches and quickens, and she takes hold the table and remains fixed in her seat, and, no doubt, images arise in her mind which her mother and stepfather and older brother, who watch from their plates with horrid helplessness, cannot access or fathom.
The girl pauses her meal to allow this wave passage.
Her mother asks are you okay, sweetie?
The girl is looking across the kitchen to the window over the sink, where the sun is dying. She’s watching them from memory in her head, the horrors, the kitchen is the white screen on which they play.
Her mother says tell us what you’re feeling, sweetie.
Her husband gives a look, and she says what, I’m going to ask, Ted, I can’t sit here and watch her go through this day in and out and not ask! She says sweetie, what are you feeling, I wish you would talk to me, I wish you could tell me!
That doesn’t help her, the stepfather says.
Sweetie, her mother says, sweetie, please tell me, please let it out.
Mom, the brother says. Mom!
Jesus Christ, Barb, look what you’re doing, the stepfather says.
The girl’s mother says across the table, please, don’t keep it in your head, please, let it out.
The stepfather stands from his plate and says that doesn’t help talking to her like that, they said stop saying stuff like that to her, and out the room he goes.
The brother takes his dinner to his room and leaves his mother crying into her elbows where she sits.
Between classes the girl locks other girls out the restroom. She urinates alone. Against the door there are knocks and girls saying who locked the door, go get a teacher, it’s locked. Keys unlock the door a moment later and there’s a teacher coming in saying to the girl, hon, you can’t keep locking the door, you can’t lock folks out the restroom. It’s a kind voice, it says, hon, did you hear me?
Can’t keep doing that, it says.
It looks like rain when the girl walks home from school. Clouds are bloated and heavy and dark. The route she takes is fifteen minutes longer than necessary, it leads her around the park and the town pool, then cuts between the grocer and the bank, clear and free from Fairway Street, where she will not go, not even in rain.
She walks without headphones.
She listens intently to cars and other walkers, in front and behind, and general ambient sounds, listening for any out of place.
Or too close.
Before bed, the girl’s mother pokes in the bedroom. Behind her the hall is black and crude and moving. She says goodnight, hon, but hovers.
There’s a baseball bat within reach of the girl’s bed, where she’s studying.
A wood-stained Louisville Slugger.
The girl says night.
Her mother still hovers.
She says, gramma’s stroke, remember that came outta nowhere? She says to the girl remember how we’d go over and see gramma and she’d be spry and lively and, remember, how she was eating so well and walking around the pond afternoons, walking and keeping active? Her mother lingers. She continues, she says remember gramma’s vitality, remember how she was so strong and smiling, your gramma? And then that stroke, just, and how the family was so surprised, it was so unexpected, and how can you prepare for something like that? She says, hon, how can you? Sometimes things happen, sweetie, she says, things random and bad.
From the dark the stepfather calls, Barb, what are you doing?
Does it help to hear that, the mother says? She says does it help to hear random things happen, and no one thinks you should have been prepared for something like that, for that awfulness, she says, no one expected you to be ready for something like that, my love.
The stepfather’s voice raises volume. Barb, it says, Barb?
The mother is still hovering in the door, on the edge of dark.
She says, does it help?
Her brother is eating breakfast and watching TV, the small box one on the kitchen counter, it’s a news segment and when the girl comes in he covers the TV screen and says they’re doing a thing, want me to turn it off? A reporter is talking behind him. The girl listens for a moment then says you don’t have to.
The brother says we can turn it.
But he doesn’t.
He resumes breakfast, a big bowl of cereal.
The girl doesn’t make food or sit, or get juice or say a word. She watches, from where she stands rigid, the reporter broadcasting in front of the house on Fairway Street and asking viewers to recall, for a moment, the horrors which took place there.
On screen the man’s photo is given.
The girl then sits, looking at the bald face that she will sometimes see in nightmares, or throughout her day, the wrinkled and jagged face with black eyes and a smile like a primeval shark, the grin of some older, deeper wickedness. But, too, the plainness of that horrid face. Photos of the girls join his, all five in a row, school photos where the girls are without arrogance and brave and, one can reasonably assume, deeply loved by many, and the reporter gives their names to viewers, asking for thoughts and prayers for the families still recovering. Each photo, the bald man’s too, is given a birth and death date. Birth dates vary, death dates do not. Death dates are the same for all. While the reporter is talking all photos are taken and the girl’s own photo is then raised, all to itself, all alone, for viewers to see. It is last year’s yearbook photo. She’s wearing glasses in it and smiling in a way which is no longer possible.
Her photo is given a birth date, no death date.
The girl stands and turns it off.
Her friend Laura is waiting at her locker after last period.
She says come with me.
A heavy door, three down from the cafeteria, is open.
Laura leads the girl here.
Inside is the school’s art studio and a group of students who do not board buses or sidewalks bound for home when the school day is done, but instead collect here, among finished and unfinished artworks tacked up and around for all to see and the lovely round art teacher offering warm greetings, and it is in the rear of this group of after school students of many shapes and shades that Laura brings her.
She says here are others who don’t speak their pain, they create with it.
She says you should be here.
The girl says nothing, looking over clay statues and paintings and prints and photographs and sketches in many varieties of skill and brightness and warmth and color, beautiful and arresting.
The girl finds a student staring at her from the front row, a tall girl with large brown curls and cheeks like skipping stones.
Laura says, again, you should be here.
Out the room the girl goes, without a word.
A neighbor is outside when the girl is home. He’s in work clothes, what he wears when he’s working the ambulance at the hospital up the highway, past the fairgrounds.
The neighbor is collecting a cooler and thermos from his car.
He straightens at the sight of her, he doesn’t say hello. Above, the sky is wide and creeping in with rolling clouds.
Up the drive the girl comes.
Across the fence, from one driveway to another, the girl says she has a question.
He says sure.
She says, after quite a long moment of silence, has he seen a dead person?
He says he saw once a family van collided with a semi, and later that week a toddler drowned in a pool.
There’s people walking by on the sidewalk with a dog, a little thing, and the people are chatting and laughing and otherwise indifferent to the sharpness of the world at large.
When the people are a good distance up the street, the neighbor says he sees tragedies everyday which arrive without warning, and that it would do a person no good to linger on such thoughts.
She considers this. Then heads inside.
A group assignment is given second period.
The girl has to present with three funny-looking students on an assigned topic.
The group scoots and huddles around the girl.
She listens while they discuss and write on their topic, brainstorming different ways they could illustrate for the classroom the benefits of fear as a survival mechanism, how fearing the right things, more than any other skill or tool or medicine, enables our continued existence.
They say to the girl what’s the matter, what are you crying for, huh? They say why you holding on the desk and breathing like that, all tight and tense like that, huh, they’re just talking fear, they’re just talking the assignment, fear and survival.
They ask the girl what part she wants to present.
The girl skips school the next day, and the day after.
She skips the next week, too.
One afternoon the stepfather is waiting in the living room when the girl comes in, he’s come from work early, he says, and he’s rubbing his hands together, perhaps uneasy. The school called him, he says. They didn’t call your mother, he says.
The girl doesn’t come in further as he talks, she stays in the hall.
He stands and circles the couch and rubs his hands and says he needs help, okay, he says to the girl in the hall he needs her to meet him halfway, okay, that all the time in the bedroom and all the quiet at the dinner table and all the withdrawing from school, life, all of that, he says, he gets all of that, and he gets not talking about it. He tells her, from where he’s stopped behind the couch, who would want to talk about all that, all that happened in that house, and he’s shaking his head and saying not him, he wouldn’t, he understands.
He would keep it all in, too, he says.
But, he says, if you do that then you’re stuck, and your life is stuck and your mind is stuck and your stuck saying the same things and thinking the same things and doing the same routine things, over and over, and all you have then is what happened in that house, he says, all you have is what that man did to your friends, what he tried to do to you. That night is all you will have and you are all that night will have, and the two of you will be stuck.
He’d grown quite heated as he spoke, and he’d moved about the living room so now he stands in front of the TV, and his cheeks are warm.
He says do you want that?
Do you want to be stuck like that?
The next day, the girl doesn’t skip classes but sits through them and keeps herself from rising and walking out the building, though there are many temptations to do just that. At the end of the day, she finds the heavy door, three down from the cafeteria, open and receiving students.
It receives her.
More students enter and settle around the girl, where she’s seated and retreated inward, and the art teacher welcomes new and returning faces. Walking back and forth in front the class, she says so often, so so often, words can’t capture our experiences. She asks the class if they know what she means. None present answer, but she receives unflinching attention and silence. She says how can we communicate pain and hopelessness and despair, and how can we communicate shame and loneliness when words fail to articulate, when words simply don’t have the meaning we need to express, and then what, she says, and then what do we do with those words? We give them to someone else, and, I’m serious, then what? Where is the meaning in that, she says, where is the meaning after we’ve packed all that ugliness and trauma and beauty into a word and after we’ve given those words to someone, and we watch them try to unpack the word, watch them try to pull out the same meaning we packed in, but it never unpacks the same, does it, she says. It doesn’t unpack the way we put it in that word.
Here, she says, in this art room, we transform what we have inside ourselves into meaning and beauty and reclamation, and here we find, through creation, empowerment, we find, through our hands and eyes we can trust again, and walking along the class now she says here we release feelings and here, she says in finality, we heal.
The girl notices the same tall curly-haired girl, near the front row, is, again, staring back at her.
The girl shifts in her seat, removing an uninterrupted view of herself.
The art teacher then invites new faces to participate and use this time and any paints and canvases or any other supplies available in the room and untangle yourself and give voice to silence.
Class breaks apart to various corners and working areas and some students deliberate and pull materials for new projects and some continue work on projects in progress. The tall girl mixes paint before a canvas holding violent colors.
Still in her seat, the girl is unsure where or how she fits in this class dynamic.
The girl is in the garage, where she’s cleared some room and set up one of her brother’s old easels and a canvas and some paints from the school art room.
Light from the kitchen lays across the backyard and looks in the garage, now and again her mother’s head is peering out and talking to someone the girl cannot see.
The girl looks intently into empty white canvas. She’s mixed some bright paints which she has nearby and which never move any further than where they rest.
There is friction in beginning.
She cannot commit paint onto the emptiness.
It whispers in her ear cruel blessings of doubt, blessings of sloth, whispering discomfort and retreat.
It follows into her dreams.
The white, blankness.
The following day the girl finds a corner in the art room, away from others. She is sitting on a stool and is arrested, once more, by the same looming and white empty canvas propped and waiting for her to bleed her nightmares.
Around the room, students create without worry for mistakes and appear fearless in their processes, taking risks with color and form.
The girl is unable.
Frustration wiggles in, and tears form.
A hand then rests on her shoulder.
The tall girl with curly brown hair is at her side, looking into the white, the empty.
She says may I?
She lifts the girl’s paintbrush and runs it through paint and closes the girl’s hand around the brush.
She says to, please, trust, it will not lead you astray, you need only surrender.
The girl relents and allows the tall girl to guide brush to canvas where she releases the girl’s hand and then gives space, a few steps back, for creation to begin, for the girl to folly and persevere.
A moment, then the girl begins with one brush stroke, then another.
Before it is time to go, her canvas has collected paint and form and depth, and many students have gathered round to see and encourage and compliment.
On the walk from school, the girl has the canvas tucked underarm. Her eyes wander and her thoughts are, for the moment, less aware, less suspicious.
Overcast lies shattered overhead, cracked like glass. Blue and sun peek in.
A dark car rolls up the street. Black exhaust follows like a tired dog. A taillight is out and it’s missing two hubcaps and, too, rust has eaten much of its belly and left deep bite marks.
It rolls by again, later, when the girl is closer to home.
The girl sees the driver twisted and watching her.
Windows obscure the driver’s details but for the shadow of the head and a wild mane of hair.
Rubbery paint smells hang in the garage. The girl mixes and tests colors and tilts her head this way and that, wondering at the canvas which holds dark shades and deep reds and somber hues, wondering at how her inner compass has shown her to such a surreal and disturbing perspective, and then in the painting she recognizes a saddened face, and there are more, five she counts, bleeding in the dark background.
But there is one more, a bald face with black eyes.
And a smile.
She had come to paint all these.
In her head she relives that night on Fairway Street.
She weeps, but she grants these memories uninterrupted passage, and her weeping rises and falls many times over as she paints.
She comes in from the garage for the night.
Her eyes are swollen and red but her figure is loose, it is not wound and tight.
She drifts into her room. Memories’ passage has left her beaten and tired.
But unbroken.
No one is home that morning, when the phone rings.
Just the girl.
She says hello?
There’s no one on the other end.
It rings again before lunch and then after dinner, then the next morning and throughout the days that follow, with never a voice to greet.
Only quiet.
Only the other end listening to the girl say hello, who’s there?
One evening, the girl is in the art room and has begun work on a second painting. This one is severe and sharp, and is uncomfortable to look at. The students have gone and the teacher has locked up her desk and said don’t stay too late, okay, and then has, herself, gone, and it is only the girl and the tall, curly-haired girl, cleaning up their paints and brushes.
Only this goes later than the girl would have liked, and dusk is peeking in the windows.
The girl washes her hands and can’t help stare at the tall girl’s painting in the corner, in that cream dusk. On the canvas is painted a bedroom closet with a light on and there’s a man standing just in the closet, an odd shape of a man with a hand waving hello from inside. The man is a shadow but for the hand, it’s given flesh by the tall girl’s paint, a hand with gnarled and greedy fingers.
The tall girl catches her staring.
She says the problem is everyone’s carrying around something.
She says that’s the fucking problem.
Noises wake the girl from hard sleep. Moonlight drips across the floor and bed like milk. Her eyes are open and considering the black corners of her bedroom.
Downstairs the floor groans.
The girl rises and listens further from her door.
Someone is walking in the house.
But not with purpose.
With exploration, perhaps?
Slowly the girl comes out her room, listening, and her hands find in the dark the landing. It peers over the black and still living room.
Then it becomes apparent.
Someone is looking up at the girl.
The dark removes all but their shape.
Mom, the girl says.
Mom, she says again.
A voice climbs up the landing, out the darkness.
It says go back to bed, sweetie, mother says. The girl lingers. The shape below is a disturbing black cut-out, an oil-spill with the architecture of a person.
The girl does as she’s told.
Under the sheets, the girl listens to the walking downstairs, that gradual and aimless walking and groaning of wood.
The tall girl walks the girl home after school and after working on their paintings together. The sun is drooping but still the day is warm and, now and again, a soft wind passes and brings with it the sounds of other, busier streets.
The girl leads the tall girl away from Fairway Street.
That way is longer, the tall girl says.
I can’t go that way today, the girl says and onward she goes.
The tall girl follows and says, when can you go that way? She catches up and stands in the girl’s way forward and says, when can you walk that way? I want to know, she says.
Not long after, the tall girl is leading her up Fairway Street. Birds do not sing here and cars do not pass here, and the street holds an awful and quiet stillness.
At the end is the home.
Tall trees keep the home in shadow, even in broad and full day.
Police tape remains, but is tattered and dances on the occasional breeze.
They stand on the sidewalk.
The windows are dark and cracked and ingrained with layers of thick, coarse dust, and the shutters lean and hang and the siding is smeared with mud and mold and is warped. It is starved of moisture along its face and bloated on its side, and the whole of the house appears shriveled and dead.
The girl remembers sleeping in this house, her friend’s house, that night, and her friends asleep on the floor and on the bed, and she remembers the man, the bald man with black diamond eyes, coming in and standing outside the room, and she remembers then the screaming and the man chasing them through the house and leaving her friends’ bodies in rooms.
She reaches for the tall girl’s hand.
It’s okay, the tall girl says.
It’s okay.
Deputies are going this way and that when the girl is sitting in the Sheriff’s station waiting area the following afternoon.
A woman in a ball cap and sneakers and a tshirt with a bald eagle on the front and a flag on the back is crying into her hands one row of chairs over. Her weeping is soft and rattled.
A deputy comes for the girl and shows her to the Sheriff’s office.
He’s an older, heftier gentleman, the Sheriff, in jeans and work boots. He’s at his desk when the girl is delivered.
He smiles faintly when she sits.
He says she’s been in his thoughts now and again.
He says he was wondering when she’d stop in.
The girl doesn’t offer much, not a smile.
The Sheriff’s breathing is labored and he’s sweating and red-faced just sitting.
The girl uses several moments to build toward her question.
When she’s able she says does tragedy strike at random?
The question sits with the Sheriff a long moment.
He says when that man, and he gives the bald man’s name, walked in that house that night he’d been watching your friend get on and off the bus and following her to that house on Fairway each and every day. He says that bald man, and gives the man’s name once more, left behind plans and abduction notes his mother found, and there were stories, too, stories he’d written and fantasies for what he’d do to your friend, these were patterns, connections. He says that man shaved his head bald to avoid leaving hair evidence, and he entered the house that night and that night specifically because he thought he’d get in and out undetected. That night, he says, was selected and planned for some time. When you step back and look at a night like that, he says, you see all these events, all these little moments, like they’re on a string, one to another, and you can follow the strings and see the horrible shapes they make.
He says if anything’s true, there ain’t one thing without something come before it, leading up to it.
Little events, she says. Little moments.
It leaves her as a question.
The Sheriff says, so little you wouldn’t notice.
The girl is unsure how to sit with this information.
For a moment she is restless in her chair.
That man, he says folding his hands over his swollen chest, didn’t count on two things that night. He says, you and those other girls sleeping over, and you grabbing his gun and ending the whole thing before it got worse.
He says, after a time, just because you can’t see the strings, don’t make a night like that night random, hon.
What more there is to say, neither quite know.
Quiet comes between them.
The girl is in the art room before school. Overhead lights are off and she is among the works of students, surrounding herself with their beauty and brightness, their whimsy, their kindness and generosity, the love and thoughtfulness and joy which feed them.
Little events.
Her own paintings harbor sorrow, like black clouds, like stains on this room, they are starved of loveliness and bloated with violence and despair.
The girl removes her paintings and gathers them to toss out.
On the lights go.
The tall girl is in the doorway.
She says please don’t do that.
The girl does not heed, but continues on her way.
She says, again, please.
She shares with the girl a story of violation and anguish, a story that spans many nights over many years, a layered story that stretches so deep, so far inside light cannot reach, but the tall girl does not weep as she explains what has been committed against her over and again.
She says to the girl, please do not toss those.
The girl lowers her paintings.
There’s a policewoman waiting outside the house when the girl is home from school. Her parents are yet at work, her brother is down at the quarry.
The policewoman’s uniform is wrinkled and keeps deep fold lines, the blue is a strange blue. The blue of her shirt doesn’t match the blue of her pants, and she’s white-haired and very old for an officer. She makes great effort to appear younger, her over-produced makeup, the odd way she is standing, as if forcing herself to stand in this odd manner, this upright way, is not natural to her.
A grin comes to her old face.
She says might she ask some questions.
Neither move from where they stand.
Inside, the policewoman says.
After a moment of consideration, they remain where they stand on the porch.
The policewoman opens a memo pad.
She says she apologizes, there was a reshuffle at the station. Some reports and statements have been misplaced. These questions, she says, are simply for refiling purposes, okay?
She says, did he say anything? That night? She gives the bald man’s name.
Did he?
No answer is given.
The older police woman says, did he before you shot through his head? Did he say anything then? Last words? A message for family? His mother?
Still, no answer is given.
Did he beg you not to?
Did he cry?
Did he?
The girl gives silence and nothing else.
Families are invited one Friday evening for a viewing of the students’ works. The art room has become, for this evening, an intricate web of colored paintings and sketches and clay, emotions and experiences interconnected. The girl and the tall girl stand before their art and discuss with viewers and student parents what they are to find in the subjects. The girl presents three paintings. In one, the bald man’s face is painted over red, and his eyes are shut.
More than questions, the girl’s works are given stares and looks which are off-putting. Many skip her paintings all together.
But not the girl’s family.
They do not pass for other, brighter paintings.
They stand and see her work and they engage.
They offer comments of pride and comfort.
After, there is juice and snacks, in the hall outside the art room, and the girl is surrounded by her family.
For once, she wishes not to retreat.
But to stay.
Surrounded.
Crying is heard, deeply wounded weeping.
An older, white-haired woman, someone says, is standing at the girl’s paintings with her face in her hands, shuddering.
The next afternoon, the girl does not avoid Fairway Street walking home from school. She braves the sidewalk and gives the house at street’s end a moment’s curiosity one might give any home which is not theirs.
A rusted black car missing hubcaps pulls along the girl.
The older woman exits.
She’s in the same uniform, the strange mismatched blue and heavy makeup.
She comes round the beaten car, smiling into the warm afternoon. Her eyes are red, her eye makeup corrected, or reapplied.
She says could you come down to the station, please? A few more questions.
She says nights like that night, they feel like a conclusion, don’t they? She says, they feel like an end to a trail, somehow, don’t they? But they keep going, she says, everything keeps linking together, connecting people who don’t know each other, but who share in tragedy.
The girl isn’t looking at the woman, she’s looking at the car.
They’re out of squad cars today, the older woman says.
All of ‘em are on the road, she says.
She has one hand in her pocket, holding something the girl can’t see.
I’ll have you home in an hour, she says, would that be all right?
Several days later, when the girl never came home and was reported missing by her stepfather, a call authorities note as particularly guttural and horrific, eyewitnesses report seeing a girl with a matching description on Fairway enter a black sedan with an older woman and the two drove away, toward if you were heading out of town, into wide open country.
Not toward the Sheriff’s station.
Another string.
From that night.
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Thank you for sharing, because it doesn't matter where it didn't fit you still gave it life. God, that shook me to the core, I didn't know where it was going (which I think is brilliant) and the fragmented way you wrote worked exactly with expressing the shock and sudden feelings. Great work.