Laura van den Berg - Find Me

My body is leaden. I am sleeping more and dreaming less. I am unsure if this is progress. The waist of my jeans has started digging into my stomach, leaving behind a mark that looks like a second bellybutton.

We don’t speak. We don’t draw. We don’t play hide-and-go-seek or grand obituary, at least not aloud. I know we’re not supposed to use our own names for obituaries, but silently I do them for my eight-year-old self and my Stop & Shop self and the self that is still locked up in the Hospital. All the little selves I want to kill and bury deep.

In the middle of the night, I wake up alone. The room is dark. From the cold of the mattress, I know Marcus is gone. I push open the window and climb into the sill. I drink in the mineral smell of the night. The moon is a white sphere in the sky. I watch the light shift, the pattern of shadows on the ground. I think about how easy it would be for me and Marcus to slip out of this house and away.

Marcus steps into the backyard, carrying a burlap sack. His steps are long and slow. From the way he’s holding the sack in his arms, I know it’s not empty. He walks past the halo of trees and stops at the top of the slope.

The raccoon is dead. It suffocated under the floor or bashed itself in the head. It did not survive us. Marcus stops walking and I think he’s going to take out the dead raccoon and dig a grave or leave it for other animals to eat, let it return to the earth, but then he kneels and opens the sack and the raccoon leaps out, fully alive. In the moonlight, I can see the little black paws, the fluff of tail. The animal stands on its hind legs. Its head jerks left and then right. It opens and closes its mouth, tasting the air. It darts into the woods and is swallowed up by the night.

Marcus rolls up the burlap sack and slings it over his shoulder, but he doesn’t come inside right away. He stays there long after the raccoon is gone. At first, I think he’s just getting some fresh air or contemplating our current situation, how much longer we can stay in this house with Nelson and his experiments, with Darcie and her memories, or maybe even having a memory of his own, but then he kneels and starts pushing the dirt around with a stick and I know it’s something else. I almost call to him, but I can tell he’s really concentrating, that whatever he’s doing feels important. He is looking very hard at something in the ground.

* * *

When I lose sight of Marcus from the window, I start to worry about him disappearing again. I don’t get back into bed. I sit at the top of the stairs and wait for the door to open and close, for movement on the floorboards. At the foot of the stairs, he stops and watches me, his mask glinting. I see the burlap sack. I smell the dirt and sweat. I hear him breathing. He moves toward me one step at a time. On each new level he pauses and I think of my mother coming up from a dive, the interval stops. I stand and open my arms, and maybe it is because he did not disappear this time or maybe because he is taking so long to reach me or maybe it is all the remembering that makes a welling in my body, a pressure behind my eyes, that unmistakable feeling of being on the verge of tears that are going to come so full and so hot you think you are going to flood the house.

* * *

Nelson blames Darcie for releasing the raccoon. In the morning, we hear shouting from our bedroom and go downstairs, into the kitchen. Through the window we see that Nelson has Darcie cornered on the front porch. He is telling her that he is trying to do something meaningful and she agreed to help him but of course she can’t really understand what that means because she has never done anything meaningful in all her sorry life.

We watch from the kitchen window. The sink is filled with Mason jars. A line of red ants marches up a dirty wall. My scalp itches.

“You know this about yourself.” Nelson has her pressed against a railing, the wood dark and soft with rot. “You know this is true, now that you can remember.” Darcie is shaking her head and doing her hiccup-cry. Her back is bare.

We go outside, looking to break up the fight. We stand in front of the knobless front door, the neon yellow skull. When Nelson sees us he shrugs and takes a step back, casual, like this is all a misunderstanding. “Go away,” Darcie says, and at first I think she’s talking to Nelson, but then I realize she is looking at us.

We’re about to tell Nelson that Darcie is not responsible for the raccoon going free, that we are to blame, but then we notice a gray haze all around us, settling over the house and yard like a fog.

We walk into the yard. We see a wild bloom of orange.

The ground squishes under our feet. We follow a path of footsteps through the mud. New grass has started coming up along the edges of the lawn, a sparse green fringe. The buds on the tree branches are tight as fists. I smell chemicals. I smell death. A wind blows the heat toward us and I feel it on my stomach and on my face. Swirls of ember and ash. A charcoal taste in my mouth.

We stop in front of the burning thing. The feathers are gone, but I can still make out the metal frames on the ground. They are glowing with fire. They are melting into nothing. Darcie’s angel wings, alight on the front lawn.

That night we leave the Mansion under the cover of a moonless sky. I take only what I brought with me. I can’t be sure if the pages of the book are tainted with the trickiness of the Mansion, so I leave the sea behind. We stay away from the train tracks. We go out the back of the house, into the woods, down the slope. We follow the creek in the opposite direction, through a wet, brown valley. We stay close to the low rush of water.

There was a comfort to staying in the Mansion and watching the outside world recede, but after I started remembering, after Marcus showed me what he found in the woods, I thought of Ms. Neuman telling me I could be any kind of person I wanted and the thought of choosing wrong scared me more than being back out on the road.

In the woods, I am not as fast as I used to be. My breasts ache, push against the thin cotton of my bra. I feel the downward pull of gravity. I have become heavy and slow. I can no longer deny the signs, can no longer deny the newness in my body, which is swollen and tender with Louis’s child.

Eventually the woods fall away. Eventually we find Memphis. Another river, another bridge. A strip of neon signs for BLACK DIAMOND and KING’S PALACE CAFE and GUS’S FRIED CHICKEN. The lights sting my eyes. We see a man in a wheelchair. He is wearing a sweatshirt that says GOD BLESS AMERICA and spinning himself in circles. We see people wandering the streets, masked by night. They stand under the signs with lit cigarettes, the smoke rising and disappearing into the above.

We go into a Bojangles’ for water and toilets and in the bathroom I find a woman lying on her back under the sinks. Condensation is dripping from the pipes and hitting her in the face. A tiny syringe is sticking out of her arm. I stand over her. She is blinking very slowly and sliding her head back and forth across the linoleum. There’s wet toilet paper all over the floor. The tiles are a sick shade of green. I remember the RECOVERY POSITION sign, remember practicing the action with Marcus, and roll the woman onto her side. She is heavy and hard to move. Her skin feels like putty. I run out of the bathroom and tell the man behind the counter that he has a problem in there.

Back outside I take breaths so deep my lungs burn with oxygen.

We board a bus and don’t stop. There will be no more motel rooms, no more houses, no more detours. No more chances to become lost. This is our thinking now. At rest stops, I slip into bathrooms and vomit into toilets. I slosh water around in my mouth and wipe my face with wads of toilet paper and try to understand how my body is changing.