Melanie Thon - First, Body - Stories

In the end, he defeated himself. All those scars left spaces empty. She forgot why she’d gone to the woods and who she wanted to find there. She loved only her nurse, and almost forgot my father, and almost forgot my brother and me.

I caught the pretty boy smoothing her sheet. Thin as an angel, this Rafael, so graceful he seemed to be dancing. He held her wrist to feel the pulse. He checked her IV. He said, What a beautiful way to eat .

He loved her too. How can anyone explain? He wasn’t afraid of burned thighs or skin peeling. He touched her feathery hair, sparse and fine as wet down on one of the unborn chicks my brother kept in jars of formaldehyde the year he was fourteen. Specimens, he called them, his eighth-grade science project. Every two days he cracked another egg to examine the fetus. I hated myself, remembering this, seeing my own mother curl up like one of these. But there they were, those jars of yellow fluid, those creatures floating.

I stroked her arm to make her wake.

What do you want now ? she said.

To say goodnight .

Not goodbye ?

Not yet .

It’s not up to you , she said. She was seventy-seven years old, seventy-three pounds the last time anyone checked.

What did I want?

I wanted her big again. Tall as my father. Wide in the hips.

Think of me as a child. Once, when I was sick, my mother sat three days beside me, afraid to sleep because I might stop breathing. Sometimes when I woke I smelled deerskin and tobacco, felt my father’s cool hand on my forehead.

I have this proof they loved me.

What went wrong?

I turned fifteen. Jack Fetters said, Someday, Marie . Jack Fetters whispered, We’re not so different as you think .

He was a guard at the state penitentiary. He said, Man goes crazy watching other men all day . His wife, Edie, had some terrible disease with a jungle name. Made her arms and legs puff up huge, three times their normal size. Jack Fetters said, Sometimes the body is a cage . They had a little girl just five, another seventeen, four boys in the middle. The one I knew had found his profession already: Nate Fetters was a sixteen-year-old car thief.

I thought, sooner or later his own daddy and a pack of dogs will chase him up a tree. Would Jack Fetters haul his son back to town, or would he chain the animals and let the thief escape?

A trap, either way.

I liked that boy, Nate Fetters. But he never noticed me. It was the father who touched my neck under my hair. It was the father I slapped away. The father who kept finding me. After school, at the edge of town, throwing rocks down the ravine. The patient father. Someday, Marie .

Was he handsome?

How can I explain?

He was the wolfman in a dream, a shape-shifter, caught halfway between what he was and what he was going to be. Even before I unbuttoned his shirt, I imagined silvery fur along his spine. Before I pulled his pants to his ankles, I saw his skinny wolf legs. I knew he’d grunt and moan on top of me. Bite too hard. Come too quickly.

This part I didn’t see: a car pulled off the road, a back seat — my father with a flashlight, breaking glass above me. I never guessed my own belly would swell up huge like Edie’s legs.

Wayne sat on the window ledge. Our mother’s room. Another day.

She’s worse , he said.

At last, I thought, it’s ending.

But he didn’t mean this.

He said, She promised that little fairy her damn TV .

I knew Wayne. He wanted the color television. He figured he’d earned it, living with Mother. Thirteen years. I’ve done my time . That’s what he’d say.

Her eyelids fluttered. She was asking God, What did I do to deserve children like these ?

Listen, I felt sorry for my brother. He was soon to be an orphan. Just like me.

Once we hid in the ravine, that dangerous place, forbidden, where fugitives dug caves, where terrified girls changed themselves to pine trees. We buried ourselves under dirt and damp leaves. We couldn’t speak or see. We couldn’t be seen. God only glanced our way. If he saw the pile of leaves, he thought it was his wind rustling. He turned his gaze. He let us do it. He let us slip our little hands under each other’s clothes. Warm hands. So small! Child hands. So much the same. God didn’t thunder in our ears. God didn’t hurl his lightning.

But later he must have guessed. He came as brittle light between black branches. He was each one blaming the other. He showed himself as blindness, the path through trees suddenly overgrown with thorns and briars. He came as fear. He turned to root and stone to trip us.

The man on my mother’s window ledge had split knuckles, a stubbled beard, bloated face. He said, It’s late. I work tonight . He said, Call me if there’s any change .

First love gone to this. If I said, Remember ? Wayne would say I’d had a dream. He’d say I was a scrawny brat. He’d say the closest thing he ever gave me to a kiss was a rope burn around my wrist.

This is how God gets revenge: he leaves one to remember and one to forget.

The boy I loved had been struck dead.

At twenty, Wayne said, This whole town is a penitentiary . He meant to climb the wall and leap. No barbed wire. No snags. He moved up and down the coast, Anchorage to Los Angeles. He wrote once a year. Every time he was just about to make some real money. But after our father died, Wayne came home to Mother, safe, took a job with Esther McQuade at the 4-Doors Bar on Main Street. It’s a good business , he said. Everybody has to drink .

Six months later, he married Esther’s pregnant daughter. Some kind of trade. He said, I know this first one’s not gonna look much like me . Now he was Esther’s partner instead of her employee.

But he was still jealous, thought I must be smart and lucky. Because I went to college, two years. Because I got as far as Missoula and stayed. Eighty miles. I wanted to tell him, No matter where I go, I’m just the same .

Did he blame himself for Mother’s last accident?

I never asked. I knew what he’d say. Just because she lives in my house doesn’t mean I trot to the bathroom with her .

She spent two days in bed before she told him. A tub of scalding water, thighs and buttocks burning. She was ashamed. I just sat down , she said. I wasn’t thinking .

By the time she showed him, the skin was raw, the wounds infected. She couldn’t ride a single mile. The doctor who came to the house gave her morphine. He said, How did you stand it ?

And she said, I forgot my body .

This doctor was a boy, blinking behind thick glasses. He couldn’t grasp her meaning. Mother said, Go ask your father. Maybe he can tell you .

The doctor shook his head. No way to help her here in Deer Lodge. He said, We’ll have to fly you to Missoula .

Yes , she said, I’d like that . She meant the ride, the helicopter.

Now this, three weeks of antibiotics and painkillers pumped into veins that kept collapsing. She had a doctor for each part of her: one for skin and one for brain, one to save her from pneumonia. But all of them together couldn’t heal her whole body. The neurologist rubbed his clean hands as if they hurt him. He stood near the window — gray light, white jacket, all I remember. He tried to explain it. Common with stroke victims, immune system impaired, the body can’t fight infection . He said, It’s one thing after another, like stomping out brush fires .

We were alone at last. I smoothed her hair. She curled into herself, tiny bird of a woman, still shrinking, becoming my child, my unborn mother. I leaned close to whisper. It’s me , I said, Marie, your daughter .