Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

While Anna smokes, the boy pretends to fall down dead in a puddle. Anna doesn’t seem to notice. She continues to smoke as another woman comes out of her room to scold him. “It was his stepfather, right?” Mary asks Lindy because Lindy knows everything about everyone.

“No,” Lindy says, correcting her severely. “Anna was married to one man her entire life, since she was seventeen.” Lindy still respects the sanctity of marriage.

Jonathan wasn’t my first. I met him in my thirties, when I thought I finally knew what I wanted, when I thought I could offer the most. I was raised to believe that life adds up to something, that one experience meaningfully leads to another and eventually, someday, an epiphany. The irony is that on our first date, we talked about taking a trip to the desert together. We talked about camping out under the stars with coyotes howling in the safe distance, giant Gila monsters asleep on rocks cooled by the night. There was no question but that we were meant for each other, so to talk about taking a trip on our first date seemed natural. Remembering that feeling alarms me above and beyond everything else — that I felt so sure and so right when I was so utterly wrong.

That first night, I invited Jonathan in. While I put water on to boil for tea, he made me laugh by reciting rules for desert living he had learned on an Outward Bound trip. “Always inform someone of the planned destination, route, and expected time of return.” He spoke in a deep, put-on macho voice. “Be sure the vehicle is in good condition and equipped with a sound battery, good hoses, spare tire and fan belts, necessary tools.” “Talk like yourself,” I said, laughing. “Be Jonathan again and let’s have some tea.” But he didn’t stop. “If the vehicle breaks down, signal trouble by raising the hood, tying a cloth on the antenna.” I patted the space on the sofa next to me for him to join me. He leaned over to kiss me. “Breathe through your nose,” he whispered, still speaking in that other voice, “don’t talk, or lick salt if water is scarce.” I shivered with the best kind of pleasure — excitement laced with fear. When I woke up in the morning he was leaning on one elbow watching me. “You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, speaking in his normal, Jonathan voice. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Mary swings her legs, puts her feet on the floor, and starts on her fingernails with the knife. Still on her knees, Lindy sips from the flask she keeps in the inside pocket of her denim jacket, then squeezes toothpaste onto her tongue in case a counselor happens to walk in. She busies herself fitting the top pole of the tree into the bottom pole, then wraps the filler branches like long green pipe cleaners around the sparse areas of the plastic trunk. We’ve spent many nights like this, the three of us intent on something useless, waiting for a counselor to tell us to go to bed while other residents try to sleep. We strain not to listen beyond the rattle and hum of the swamp coolers.

I pick up the phone and dial the number to the airport. Lindy smiles at me — she knows about my phone calls.

Apparently it’s been a long day for the man who answers the phone because he just says “What?” Still, the sound of his voice coming in over the line from the real world into the shelter lounge gives me a charge. Like the thrill I got — before Jonathan’s on-the-half-hour phone calls; before he started checking the mileage on the car on the days he left it at home and walked to work and then stopped leaving the car at home altogether; before I started sleeping in my clothes because a nightgown somehow meant I’d been waiting for someone else; before Jonathan became so afraid each time I left the room that he’d flip chairs jumping out of them to follow me; before the beginning when those flipping chairs were the fast, loud proof of his love; before I’d ever met Jonathan, when I would go out to the airport though I wasn’t flying anywhere. I watched the planes boldly defy gravity. From a bench, I studied people gliding on the moving sidewalks on their way somewhere, moving easily between one world and another.

The man’s voice on the phone — coming from out there where he checks luggage or tears tickets to faraway destinations — makes my features sharper. I can feel the way my nose sits on my face and the hairs on my cheek brush against each other. I can hear my life happening, the scrape of Mary’s knife and the clinking of glass Christmas balls in Lindy’s hand. The table under my hand is just that, solid wood, nothing to interpret. The man hangs up. There is no bridging the gap between out there and our unlisted number, our P.O. box address.

Lindy saves the homemade decorations for last, putting them to the side in a pile. She holds a Christmas ball up to the tree, deciding how to arrange them. She hangs another ball on a plastic branch, then pulls herself up from her knees and stands back to take a look. It is only at times like this, when she brushes her hair back from her face, that the yellowing bruise on her forehead is apparent. She walked into a wall trying to get out of her house quickly, before her husband came home from the police station. Once, she bent over in the kitchen to retrieve a dropped napkin and I saw the beginning of the zipperlike knife scars on her back from nights she didn’t make it out in time. When I squinted my eyes, the scars looked like a ritual scarification, deliberate patterns meant to be deciphered. I touched her back without thinking, and she whipped around. “No,” she said through her teeth. “I’m so sorry,” I said, my eyes welling with tears for the first time since I’d arrived, afraid I’d lose my only friend.

She didn’t talk to me again until the next morning. I asked her if I could tell her a story, and I told her about a day when my parents were still alive, when I was a child with my hand deep in the fur of our dog’s coat, sitting on a dock as my parents prepared a boat. My parents laughed at my mother’s soaked tennis shoes, at the ridiculousness of her stepping in the water accidentally, at the joyful ridiculousness of life in general. I buried my fingers in the dog’s fur, smelled the sea air, and looked out at the ocean, endless like my life before me. “That’s not a story,” she said, but she wasn’t judging me, just stating a fact.

I’ve seen my own bruise chart. It’s blank — a line drawn through the front and then the back of an outline of a naked woman — except for an arrow pointing to the outline woman’s wrists. “Self-inflicted” is written in parentheses. The woman’s face is an empty circle without features. The slash marks on my wrist were a tentative rehearsal with a razor pressed into my flesh not hard enough to kill.

The night Jonathan discovered them, he was handsome and staid as a washed-up movie star. It was a month before I left, and I found comfort in the fact that someone this cruel could love me. His pupils pulsed larger and smaller until I felt hypnotized. He held my wrists, and for a moment it felt like a question. “This is no ordinary sorrow,” I answered. His washed-up movie star looks encouraged the actress in me. He fingered the drawer of our bedside table that contained the gun bought for our protection. He was always stilling me with the possibilities, with my own wildest imaginings.

A Christmas bulb hanging from the end of one of the green plastic branches falls suddenly and shatters on the part of the lounge floor that the rug doesn’t quite reach. Lindy pulls her pants up again and kneels to gather the shards of green glass. “I’m destined to spend my life on my knees,” she says to no one in particular.

Mary admires the nails on her finished hand, and I dial my old number with the phone on the hook. Neither of us notices Lindy until she is standing in front of us. She holds her hand out like a child offering something she does not want anymore. A long sliver of green glass juts from the side of her wrist.