Paullina Simons: Tully

It was a while before Tully took her hands away from her face. ‘Please be a friend to me, don’t do this in front of me, Shakie, okay? Otherwise I really won’t be able to be friends with you anymore. Okay?’

‘Okay, okay,’ Shakie said quickly, getting up and coming close to Tully. ‘Okay,’ she repeated, and went to hug Tully, who backed away.

It was dark but Tully wasn’t afraid. After Shakie left, Tully drove up to St Mark’s, parked the car, and walked around back. The gate screeched when she opened it, badly needing oiling. Making her way carefully through the backyard, Tully stopped near a wrought-iron chair, which had been brought out by Father Majette when he had found Tully lying on the ground. ‘God doesn’t distinguish between the dead and the living, my child,’ he had said. ‘He loves both equally. You’re still living, Natalie Anne. You wouldn’t want our Lord to mistake you for the dead, lying as you do among them.’

Only barely, thought Tully, moving the chair out of the way and lying down on the December Kansas ground. Only barely living , she thought, lying down in her coat and scarf and gloves next to a flat gravestone embedded in the earth. She ran her fingers carefully and gently over the cold stone.

One, two, three, four minutes of screaming. Raw, ugly, horrible screaming. Lynn Mandolini was shaking Jennifer, shaking Jennifer and screaming. Tully pressed her palms hard against her ears, wanting to break her eardrums, wanting just stop, stop.

She opened her eyes and saw Lynn pressing her lips to Jennifer’s face, pressing her mouth to Jennifer in an attempt to, Tully didn’t know what, but she shut her eyes quick, pressing the balls of her hands to her eyes to go blind to ward off Lynn Mandolini to stop to stop. But it was too late. The image of Lynn bending over and desperately pressing her lips to what was left of Jennifer burned like a big black tattoo into Tully’s head. Tully closed her eyes but continued to see a crazed mother bending over her only daughter.

Still on her knees, Tully moved towards the bathroom. ‘Mrs Mandolini, Mrs Mandolini,’ Tully whispered, her head bent. ‘It’s no use.’

But Lynn didn’t hear Tully, through her bloodcurdling screaming and whimpering, whimpering that made ants crawl on Tully’s skin.

‘Please, Mrs Mandolini,’ Tully repeated inaudibly, briefly looking into the bathroom.

There she is, lying in her mother’s arms. Lying in them. She lay in them when she was born and she is lying in them now. Well, it is only right that she should be lying in her mother’s arms, and not in mine.

Tully could not see Jennifer’s head, covered as it was by Lynn’s upper body, but she could see that Lynn’s face and hands, Jennifer’s white T-shirt, the floor, the shower curtain, the walls, the toilet all were dripping, saturated, soaking in what remained of Jennifer.

The doorbell rang; Tully went downstairs to answer it. She saw the policeman outside.

‘Is everything all right?’ he said, raising his cap. ‘A neighbor across the street – ’ he pointed to an elderly woman, standing still. ‘She seemed to think,’ he continued, ‘there was some trouble.’

‘There has been…some trouble,’ said Tully blankly, and then Lynn started to scream again. The policeman gently pushed Tully aside and ran up the stairs. Tully continued to stand near the open door. I could just go, go right now, just walk on out, right now, walk down the driveway, down the path, away from Sunset Court, away forever from Sunset Court.

‘Miss, miss.’ The police officer ran back down the stairs. He didn’t look the same anymore, thought Tully. ‘We need to call an ambulance,’ he said, and Tully noticed he was shivering. She noticed that she herself became calmer and calmer the more tumultuous the reaction around her got. The more she heard Lynn Mandolini’s screaming, the more something was swinging shut inside her. The more steady her hands became, the more regular her breath, the less she prayed, and the less she closed her eyes. And now the near-panic of this man for an ambulance made her almost , almost amused.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘it’s a little late.’

The ambulance came anyway, in about ten minutes. Two ambulances. And another police car. The lights, the blue and white colors, flashed so insistently, they nearly drowned out the image of Jennifer’s red blood. The sirens coming up the street nearly drowned out the sound of Lynn’s terrible screaming. After the paramedics rang the bell, they stood politely near the door, waiting for Tully to let them in, just like insurance salesmen or plumbers. ‘Have you thought about insurance?’ ‘We’ve come to replace your pipes.’

Swinging the door open, she pointed them upstairs, where the police officer was prying Lynn off Jennifer. Before he went up there for the second time, he went into the downstairs john and quietly threw up. Tully heard that sound. Compared to the screaming, it was an unchained melody to her. The paramedics had to give Lynn five hundred milligrams of Thorazine before they were able to detach her from Jennifer.

‘Miss, what’s your name, miss?’ said another policeman, touching Tully on the arm. She flinched from his touch.

‘Makker,’ she said, her mouth numb, like it was full of Novocain. Novocain that had been administered only after the dentist had drilled raw into her nerve endings.

‘Would you like something to calm yourself?’ the police officer inquired, and Tully looked down at her body, completely still, completely immobile.

‘If I was any calmer,’ she said, ‘I’d be in a coma. No, thank you.’ One of the paramedics grabbed her wrist and felt her head, uttering, ‘Shock. Needs to go to the hospital. Needs to be treated. Put her in with the mother.’

Tully snatched her wrist back from him. ‘I am fine,’ she said. ‘I’m just fine.’

‘Shock,’ the paramedic repeated in the same flat tone he might use for ‘Left. Right. One, two, three.’ ‘Needs to be treated.’

Tully did not move from the couch. She turned towards the stairs, and then quickly away, almost losing control of her bladder, seeing two men carrying down a covered stretcher.

Minutes passed. Sound waves stopped breaking through her barriers. The men moved and the blue lights twirled and whirled like party lights for a party girl, for a dancing girl. The crowd of people gathered outside for the party show. A whole crowd at noon. Have they nowhere else to be?

There was movement, and there was vision, but there was no sound, no sound at all. I wonder if he is right, Tully thought. I wonder if I am in shock. I wonder if this is what she felt like withdrawing from us all at the age of two and three, withdrawing because the sounds we made stopped making connections inside her head. I wonder if this is what she felt like when she was a little girl and was trying to shut out the whole world.

‘Miss Makker,’ she heard dimly. ‘Miss Makker. Could you tell us what happened? I know it’s hard for you, but you must try. Please, Miss Makker.’

I’m not her keeper, she wanted to say. I am not her keeper. I could not keep her. Could not.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Have you called Mr Mandolini?’

‘We need to. Miss Makker, were you here when it happened?’

Yeah, sure, she thought. Why, I helped her. Me and her mom, together. We helped her and then watched.

‘Was it, perhaps,’ the police officer was saying, ‘an accident? That’s what we’re trying to find out. What to put in the police report. Could it have been, perhaps, an accident?’

Tully slowly shook her head and stood up. She felt a light-headedness not unlike what she felt when she ‘healed’ herself She sat back down. Ah. That was better. Still, though, I’m breathing shallow. She touched her skin. It wascold and clammy. ‘Look, I am in shock, right? I cannot help you very well right now. But you know,’ she said, her voice catching a little, ‘she was a good Catholic girl. Perhaps if you say it was an accident, she’ll be able to be buried by the Church. You know how the Church doesn’t approve of those…unaccidents. So perhaps maybe you could just do that, what do you think?’