Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“You don’t have to walk me,” she says.

He drinks, exhales, holds the bottle over his heart.

“Everything all right at school?”

She purses an egg open, drops the contents into her mouth, pitches the shell into the bucket.

During study hall, in Mr. Krebs’s classroom, she touches the letters of her vocabulary words with a firing pin, turning the pin between thumb and forefinger. Behind her, Rilke is wearing her red London Fog coat, even though it’s too warm for it. Elise is ahead of her, leaning in to talk to Sadie, all blond hair and cherry lip gloss, all sly looks and embroidered jeans and matching tank tops, Elise’s red, Sadie’s blue, Elise saying, “She is such a bitch . I mean, for serious , such a be- yotch . And, like—if you needed reasons—(a) of all, her dad is a cop , and (b) of all, her name should be pronounced Rilk ey , and (c) of all, she, like—does her hair with, like— honey , and, like, jojoba oil . I can’t even—” Turtle waits to hear what Elise can’t even— but this is the end of the idea. Elise can’t even. Turtle feels lost. More than anything, lost, and uncaring, it’s like looking at a vocab sentence that doesn’t make sense: “Rilke does her hair with jojoba oil and Elise can’t even .” Turtle thinks, what is a jojoba? Some kind of whale? Elise is writing Rilke’s name on a note she’s composed, saying, “She stuffs them. You just know she stuffs them. Like, her mom bought her that push-up bra so that the boys would like her, because her mom doesn’t realize that no one likes her and that everybody can see how fake and ugly her fake, stuffed boobs are”—folding the note, creasing it with her thumb, applying her lipstick and kissing it, tauntingly, delightedly—“walking around everywhere with her stuffed bra stuck out in front of her like she’s a princess . But I’ve seen them. They’re nothing . They’re sad . They’re itty-bitty baby titties, shrunken and gross with black hairs all around the nipples.” Sadie is laughing helplessly behind her hands. “You just know she stays up at night crying because they’re so mean to her at school , and combing jojoba oil into her nipple hairs, probably, so they’ll be silky smooth for Anna to suck on.” Turtle has the Sig Sauer in the small of her back and she wears her flannel for this reason. The note is held out between two fingers like a cigarette and it goes hand over hand to the back of the class, where Rilke unfolds it and stoops over it and reads. She bends farther and farther forward and she makes no sound. She wears that coat, Turtle thinks, because she’s embarrassed.

That afternoon Turtle stands on the last step of the porch with the chamber of the shotgun open and smoking, cardboard placards pegged into place at intervals in the yard, each with their cluster of buckshot, Martin sitting in the Adirondack chair. Turtle says, “I’d like to go to the dance.”

Martin rubs his thumb along his jaw, still looking at her.

“I’d like to go dress shopping with you,” she says. She looks back at him, and she thinks, I hope you understand what you and I have together, the two of us here on this hill, and I hope that is enough for you, I hope it is enough for you, because it is everything to me.

He says nothing and she lays the gun on the balustrade and walks out to the yard. She collects the cardboard placards and carries them back to the porch. She leans over them and measures the spread with a tape measure, noting the round in a notebook, the spread, and the distance in five-yard increments. Martin watches her with a book open in his lap. When she has written the numbers down, she collects the notebook and the shotgun and goes inside and up to her room. She closes the door and leans against it. She takes out Jacob’s T-shirt and lays it over the floorboards. There is nothing, she thinks, except the thing itself. The shirt is stiffened in places with dry mud and it smells of leafy green thimbleberries and, too, it smells of Jacob, and she thinks, I am undivided in my intention and in my purpose, but she does not know half of what she does, or why she does it, and she does not know her own mind.

Turtle dreams of falling. Falling, and of the shotgun going off in her hands, and it is that feeling, that lurch, that shocks her awake, sitting upright in bed, silent, breathing hard, listening to a distant ringing, the sound of her auditory cells dying. The house smells of damp wood and eucalyptus. The sleeping bag is rucked and sweaty, black in places from grease. She waits, lowering herself slowly and silently back to the platform. He opens the door and she is careful not to move. The moonlight casts the window’s rectangle on the floor.

He moves to pick her up, his hands callused and dry, and she twists in his grip, making a small mewing sound, and he takes ahold of her and hauls her out of the sleeping bag, spilling her onto the floor, and there she lies. He does not say anything for a moment, does not touch her or reach out to her, but kneels beside her in the dark.

She can feel him overestimating and misinterpreting her resistance, in the way he has, reading too much, but she is mute for hateful and reckless reasons, thinking, let him read too much in it then, let him think it goes deeper than it does. She lies looking at how the floor goes on, moonlight cast from the window and faint firelight cast from the door. He rises and walks across the room and stands before the window, looking out at the dark hillside.

She does not herself know what is wrong with her, but she feels it, and she will not admit that she does not know where the feeling comes from, or if it is right, so she continues to lie mute and unmoving, holding on to a grievance she cannot articulate, cannot even hold in her mind. She wishes she could tell Anna that he didn’t make her this way. That he didn’t make her fearful, isolated, girl-hating.

“What is it?” he asks, turning around, going down on one knee, tucking her hair back behind her ear. “What is it?”

She grits her teeth.

“Come on,” he says, his voice dangerously impatient, and this hardens her resolve. “Talk to me,” he says, still kneeling. She lies unmoving. “Kibble,” he says, “don’t play this game with me.”

When she doesn’t respond, he gets up, walks over to her bed. Her guns on wall pegs. Her wool blankets neatly folded. The sleeping bag unzipped. He lifts the sleeping bag up, lifts each blanket, weighing them in his hands. He walks around the bed, sits down at its foot. He opens the steamer trunk. Turtle sits up in alarm. “Ahh,” he says, pursing his lips into a thin line. He leans over, stirs through the contents of the trunk, and then he lifts out the T-shirt. Holding it as if he doesn’t know what it is, he brings it to his face and smells it. Turtle watches him from her position on the floor. He rises and walks out the door, holding the shirt draped over one arm, and for a moment she does nothing. Then she vaults up and runs after him, shrieking, “No, Daddy, no!”

She follows him out into the muddy yard. The motion-activated lights switch on, showing the flooded wash of driveway and the blackness beyond, the mud squelching up between her toes and the grass icy on her feet. Her father walks to the fifty-gallon drums where they burn trash and he reaches beneath the flooded brim and draws out the fire poker, his arm sheathed in ashen water, and he holds the dripping poker at the full extension of his arm with the shirt tangled on the spur. He has a bottle of butane in the other hand and hoses the shirt up and down, saying nothing at all, and she runs to him and throws herself on him, battering his chest with her fists. He squares his feet and endures this while the T-shirt wicks up the butane. Then he tosses open the Zippo and touches the flame to the dirty white scrap. The shirt goes up with a gasp and Turtle stops and watches the cloth blacken and scraps of char rise up through the air around them, cupping small bright embers. They gyre briefly and then fall, littering the grass and the mud, winking out. The shirt has burned incompletely and he flicks it contemptuously off the spur and into the water. It sits for a moment on the surface, then sinks.