Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

Turtle walks with Wallace out to his VW Bug. Wallace, Turtle knows, has a philosophy degree from some college up north, she doesn’t know much about it, but she knows that he’s different from the others, a decade younger, closer to Jacob in his worldview than to Martin. Wallace opens the car door, and stands just inside of it. Turtle says, “Wallace, I don’t think Cayenne is here of her own consent. I think she shouldn’t be here. I don’t think it’s safe for her here.”

Wallace gives a startled laugh. He says, “You think she’s been kidnapped?” He laughs again. “Julia! Listen. If she was kidnapped, wouldn’t she be like, ‘Help me! Help me!’? I mean— come on . The girl is obviously okay.” He squints at her, then he looks toward where Martin is laughing, helping Jim into his truck, banging the roof of the cab joyously, saying, “Bitches! Am I right? You never fucking know!”

Turtle leans in to him. She says, “You can tell someone, can’t you?”

Wallace says, “Oh come on, Julia. It’s really none of my business. He’s probably just taking care of her because her parents are drug addicts or some shit like that. He’s a good guy. He got a little unhinged in there, sure, but he’s all right. Besides, sweetheart, it’s none of my business, is it? And who would I tell? Child Protective Services? Come on. She’s better off here. I know Martin. He’s an odd guy, but he’d never hurt someone. You came up good, didn’t you? A forceful young woman, you’ve become.”

“Tell someone, tell the cops, I don’t care, anyone,” Turtle says.

Wallace laughs, putting his hands up. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, right!”

“Please.”

“Right. Call the police! And then I’d answer the door in the middle of the night and he’d be there with an M16, right?” Wallace laughs again, at the idea of it. Turtle is staring. He will not believe it, she thinks. He will not. He does not want to believe it. “And maybe a bottle of Jim Beam? No,” he says, still chuckling, “No, Julia. No one’s a prisoner .”

He pulls his car door closed, looks at her through the window, and Turtle puts her palm against it. She wants to scream at him. She wants to yell. She stands in the high grass while Wallace pulls away, throws the VW Bug into drive, and goes down the road.

Turtle walks back into the house and goes up to her room. There, she stands in front of the window, the moonlight slanting in around her, and she turns the pink box over in her hands. It reads, FIRST RESPONSE PREGNANCY: Only test that tells you 6 DAYS before your missed period. She turns her back to the window, sits on the ledge, chewing her lip. She thinks, can Grandpa have known, and can he have let it slip him by, and how could a man I loved do that? She thinks, no, Turtle, you’re thinking about this all wrong. If he ever overlooked something, it’s because he knew your daddy loved the ever-living shit out of you, that whatever harm he might ever have done to you, it was a drop in the ocean of his love. Grandpa knew that, so stop thinking to yourself about him, because it means nothing, and what he decided to do at the end, that wasn’t something he’d been putting off, that was something he should never have done, not earlier and not then.

She listens until Martin comes back into the house. She hears him talk with Cayenne. Their voices murmur and rise. Then he goes into his room and he paces. Turtle listens for Cayenne, but the girl lies in front of the fireplace, reading her book, making no noise at all. Turtle opens the box and dispenses the three small, pink plastic packages into her hand. She rolls them forward and back. She thinks, it’s not possible. It is not possible that it could happen to me. Turtle could tear the walls down. She is choked, throttled, replete with rage. She thinks, it cannot be.

She hears Martin’s bedroom door open. She hears him come down the hallway. She hears his footsteps on the stairs. Fucking bastard, she thinks. We can’t keep doing this. This is too fucking dangerous. This is an entirely different game now. He stands outside the door. She depresses the release, draws the Sig Sauer half out of the holster. He opens the door, stands in the doorway. She is still. She feels fixed in place. The world rotates around her. She is looking at his boots. Tremors chase themselves up her thighs. She has her right hand on the Sig in the small of her back, tightening on the polymer grip.

He comes into the room. He raises her chin up with his knuckle and she puts her arms around him and breathes in his scent, wool and cigarettes and gun grease. The Sig Sauer is still in her hand. He carries her back to his room, and she feels for him a terrible neediness. He is so massive that to be in his arms is skin-crawlingly good, like returning home, like going back to being a child. Martin cradles her in one arm to work the cut-glass knob with the other and kicks open the door and carries her into the bedroom with his clothes strewn on the floor and a new bed with new sheets and a new bedside table. The shadows of the alder leaves and the alder catkins play across the wounds on the walls where she prized out the screws and pulled down his bookshelves. There is still the old familiar gap between the drywall and the floor, and this dark line bounds the room, an unbridgeable gap where the two meet, a gap opening into the dark of the foundation that breathes up its cold mineral and female scent, and Turtle can imagine the great beams of the foundation resting right on the sandstone and the dirt beneath the house, beneath the floorboards, the dark places sashed with spiderwebs. He walks her to the bed and he throws her into the air and she hangs suspended in the room’s silver light and dappled shadows, and then she drops onto the bed, into the feather duvet, the knotted sheets with his tobacco-scented sweat, lying there where she has been thrown as if she cannot move, as if she is a puppet and not a girl, her head cocked up and her eyes open and looking at that drywall, Martin dragging off her pants and throwing them aside, and then lifting away her panties and discarding these, too, the leaves coming in and out of focus on the wall. She wants in some way to quench her loneliness. She wants to lie here and be wrung clean of all personhood. He kneels down between her thighs and she puts one hand in his hair and cries aloud with grief and with self-hatred and with some suspended and awful pleasure. When it is done she lies in the tangled sheets unwinded and unmoved while Martin sits at the bed’s edge, propping himself up on a knee, gasping, sobbing almost—all she needs to do is wait silently with the fan of her ribs opening and closing, laboring until everything that she held sacred about him will be gone, and then, she doesn’t know what. They wait in the darkness in the long moments after what they have done, and it is different than it was before and Turtle will not speak and will not move. It feels as if she can hold still, can relax all vestiges of herself from her limbs. She will not spend long nights in contact with her own mind, she will not have to rise from this bed or admit how she came into it, she can do nothing and be nothing and there will be no pain. She can feel it, though, everywhere in the room, climbing up the walls, in the shadows of the sheets, breathing from the dark gap between the floorboards and the drywall, a brooding pain that gathers and accretes and waits for her, the pain of being herself, each moment long and particular and awful.

“Goddamn,” he says from the edge of the bed. She does not look at him. “Goddamn. Your fucking guts, kibble.” Turtle says nothing. “Into that gutsack full of hate, into slick wet filth, and again into hatred and into filth and into nothing.”

“Shut up,” Turtle says.