Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“That’s not good enough.” He gestures again to Martin’s truck. “I mean—are you really planning on going to Idaho? Are you really transferring there? Is your dad moving you out there? Or did your dad just transfer you there, hoping that the paperwork would get lost and no one would notice? Because that’s just not gonna fly. And you know why it’s not gonna fly? Because there are people who give a fuck, Turtle.”

“Jacob, I told you. There are things I need to take care of here.”

“I mean, what’s the plan?”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“Come on,” Jacob says. “This is stupid. I mean, just get in the truck with me and come get registered. Because we both know you’re not leaving Mendocino.”

“Jacob, you need to go.”

“No.”

“Jacob,” she says. “Listen to me.”

“No, Turtle. This is simple! I mean—this is stupid! Let’s go and—”

“You spoiled fuck,” she says. She grabs his shirt and jerks him toward her. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but it’s not simple. It’s not at all simple, and you better fucking leave . Are you listening? I don’t want you pretending you know anything about it when you know nothing . I don’t want you telling me what to do. Now get the fuck off my property.” She shoves him back against the truck and says, “Go back to your pathetic, bloodless little life. I’ll be here living mine. And don’t you ever tell me what to do, not like that, not ever again.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, I’m leaving. But if you think I’m never coming back—”

She spits into the gravel between them. He slowly gets into the truck and starts the engine, watching her through the windshield. He turns the truck around and roars away down the drive. She stands for a moment longer. You just keep giving things up. You just keep giving them up like that. What you want, she thinks, is to have no choices. But, she thinks, he’s right. He’s right about you, which is why you can never see him again. He is right about Martin, and if you could ask him about Cayenne he would know what to do. Hell, she thinks. Right? You think he is right? He doesn’t know anything about it. I’m all Martin has, and I can’t leave him alone with that. I can’t. She thinks, when your daddy sees clearly, then he wants everything for you, and when he doesn’t, when he can’t see that you are your own person, then he wants to bring you down with him. How could Jacob know anything about that, how could Jacob be right about Martin? Martin has more hurt in him, and more courage in him, than Jacob could ever understand. They look at you, and they see what you need to do. Go, he’d say. Run. But they don’t see it from where you stand. They don’t see who you’d be leaving behind and what all of that meant to you. They can’t. They only see it their way. And Jacob is only right in that he would say what anyone else would say, as if it weren’t complicated, but he doesn’t get it. Profoundly doesn’t fucking get it, will never get it, and that world, Turtle thinks, has not done so well by you that you owe it anything. Just because everybody believes something, just because everybody but you believes it, that doesn’t make you wrong.

Inside, Martin is crouching awkwardly over Cayenne’s splayed hand and stitching the wound closed. “Christ,” he says. “Was that your little boyfriend? I’d relish the chance to meet him, you know.” Cayenne is leaning back against the wall, her mouth stuffed full of her shirt, her face clenched. One eye opens, rolls, and fastens on Turtle, the skin around the eye crumpled in pain.

“Shut up,” she says. “I know you’ve met him.” She watches his face harden, thinking, if you ever hurt him, I will open you like a fucking fish and pull out your entrails in fucking handfuls and I will fucking leave you that way. Martin is dragging the needle through the bloody, puckering edge of the wound.

Turtle lies in a cold bath and looks up at the boards of the ceiling. It has been a week since the amputation. School has started without her. She puts her hands on the bathtub’s sides and raises herself up, walks to the sink and kneels there, going through the things beneath the sink until she comes back with a disposable razor. Her legs are near hairless but she runs the razor up her shin, and then stops and looks at the blade, and she thinks, what are you doing, Turtle, what are you doing, and then she goes to the sink and picks up Martin’s shaving cream and dispenses it into her hand and stands there, dripping water, lathering her pubic hair and then gently parting it from her skin. When she is done, she walks to the toilet and sits down and throws the razor on the floor and puts her head in her hands.

She comes out of the bath into the kitchen. Martin has torn open the wall and exposed old newspaper insulation, blackened wiring. He is sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket, tearing out the boards along the floor with a cat’s paw, smoking a cigar. Long ropes of rat-eaten wiring lie on the floor with an ohmmeter. A pair of kitchen tongs leans up against his bucket. The back door is propped open with a Skilsaw. Turtle, in 501s and a T-shirt, stands toweling her hair. In the living room, Cayenne has the belt sander turned faceup and is sharpening sticks on it for some purpose all her own. She works with one hand, holding the other, wounded hand close to herself. She seems utterly absorbed. What the hell she’s doing, Turtle doesn’t know.

“Oh, kibble,” Martin says, “I’m going to be having the guys over for a game of poker. I think it’s better if they don’t hang out with Cayenne. I think you should take Grandpa’s truck, go into town, show her around Mendocino for a couple of hours. Come back around eleven, when the guys are gone.”

“She hates me,” Turtle says.

“She doesn’t hate you,” Martin says. Picking up the kitchen tongs, he reaches into the wall and draws out a dead rat and wings it out the open door into the gulch.

“She hates me, and she’s right to hate me.”

“She’ll come around.”

Turtle looks at Cayenne, who cannot hear them over the sander. The girl should be wearing earplugs. More boards have been torn out in the living room. They are stacked on the floor near Cayenne with the heaps of hacked-out newspaper insulation blackened and charred from the short. Martin has been furniture shopping. A new bed in the bedroom, and a new table in the living room, covered now in spools of wire and beer bottles and cigars and old plates. There is a stack of bills and the letter from the district. Martin has not bothered to answer it. Turtle is sure that someone will follow up on her absence from school. Martin has done nothing. He does not seem to care. She looks back at him. She hates him with such intensity it is hard to look at him. He is bent forward into the wall, wrenching the wiring up from where it is tacked to the studs.

Turtle spends the day shooting skeet on the porch. In the evening, she walks up through the orchard with Grandpa’s keys, the Remington 870, and a jump starter. She comes to where the ashen remains of the trailer are succumbing to the raspberry brambles. She unlocks the truck and sits on the old vinyl bench seat, looking at the burned black trailer through the cracked windshield. In the drink holder there is a Big Gulp cup full of sunflower seeds, and in the other a bottle of Tabasco. She is overcome for a moment, thinking of Grandpa, of the cribbage games, of how he used to put Tabasco on his pizza. She wraps and rewraps her hands on the steering wheel, tries the ignition. The engine turns over and over without starting, and then it catches, and she throws the truck into reverse, turns around in the grassy field, and drives back to the house, not looking back, touching her jaw with two fingers as if it were sore. She knows how to drive, but she has never driven without Martin there in the cab with her, and she just eases along. She parks Grandpa’s truck beside Daddy’s and, leaving it running, goes into the unlit house. Cayenne is reading in front of the fire. She stirs the girl with her foot. “Come on,” she says.