Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“Why?”

“I think she’s kind of beautiful. Do you ever think so? That Virginia Woolf is kind of beautiful? And also kind of scary?”

“Hm,” Turtle says.

“Turtle?”

“Yes?”

“Do you know what I mean? That you wouldn’t need to kill her, not really?”

Turtle looks over at Cayenne. She says, “Yes, I can see that.”

“Would you have killed her like that? Just barehanded?”

“Yes,” Turtle says.

“Why haven’t you done it before?”

Turtle doesn’t say anything.

“Turtle?”

“Hmmm?”

“Turtle?”

“Yes.”

“Why haven’t you killed her before, if you would’ve? If it would be that easy. Why haven’t you just done it before?”

“I guess I never worried about her until she bothered you.”

“So you’d kill her for me?”

“Yes.”

“Turtle?” Cayenne says.

“Christ,” Turtle says. “What?”

“Nothing,” Cayenne says, embarrassed. She lowers herself down into the tub and out of view. Turtle finishes cleaning the gun and begins to reassemble it. The phone rings.

“Turtle,” Cayenne says gently, sitting up out of the tub.

The phone rings again.

“Go get that,” Cayenne says.

“Why?” Turtle says.

“Because,” Cayenne says, “I want to know who keeps calling.”

“It’s no one,” Turtle says.

“Turtle,” Cayenne says.

“What?”

“I know who it is.” She says it slyly, teasingly.

Out in the living room, the phone rings again.

“I think you should get it,” Cayenne says. “Since Martin got the new phone it rings all the time now.”

“He’s on a shopping spree,” Turtle says. “Table, chairs, new bed, new phone.”

The phone rings and rings.

“You threw the old phone away,” Cayenne says meaningfully.

Turtle sits, cleaning.

“Martin says it’s your secret lover .” Cayenne is very interested in Jacob. Turtle gets up and walks into the living room. Martin is at the counter with a beer, and he nods to the phone on the wall.

Turtle walks to the phone and picks it up off the cradle.

“Turtle?” Jacob’s voice is a clean, tightly fitted copper brush plunged through her throat and into her guts. She braces the heel of her hand against the wall.

“I can’t talk to you,” she says.

“Listen,” he says.

“You listen,” she says. Turtle cannot stop hating him and start needing him, not now, and she doesn’t know what that would mean for her, to need one more thing that she isn’t able to reach for, and she cannot bear to think of Jacob while she lies slicked with sweat and watches the shadows of alder leaves come in and out of focus against the drywall.

Jacob says, “Turtle, I—”

“No.”

“Turtle—”

“No.”

“I love you,” he says. “I don’t know what—”

Turtle hangs up. Martin touches the counter’s wood grain with a finger pad. Invested in him are all of the things she understands to be true and which she cannot look at him without seeing.

She walks back into the bathroom, where Cayenne is soaping up with Dr. Bronner’s. Turtle sits down at the edge of the tub. The room smells of peppermint. She looks at the mushrooms growing on the windowsill, and then she looks at Cayenne, really looking at her, and she finds herself loving the set of the girl’s shoulders, the ridge of her scapula moving beneath her reddish-brown skin, the hairless cups of her armpits as she raises her arms. Her finger is still covered in its splint and bandage, wrapped now in a plastic bag. Turtle thinks, I hope nothing ever happens to you. I hope you stay exactly this way, and thinking this, she sits there, regretting it all, thinking, Christ, that harm could ever come to a girl like this, and look at her. Just look at her.

Cayenne points to the mushrooms on the windowsill, and says, “What would it be like to be really small, Turtle? All those mushrooms would be just like trees, wouldn’t they?”

Turtle smiles and doesn’t know what to say, just shakes her head, and thinks better of it and says, “You’d live in fear of the black-tailed weasel.”

“That lives under the kitchen floor?”

“The same.”

At this, Cayenne nods very somberly—not having thought of the dangers, but accepting them now. Then she says, “I think we should name the weasel. It’s wrong that he doesn’t have a name.”

“What would you name him?”

“Dilbert,” Cayenne says.

“Dilbert?”

“Or else Rodrigo.”

The two girls sit in silence. Turtle picks up the gun and begins going over it with a rag.

“I don’t know what kind they are,” Turtle says.

“Oh,” Cayenne says.

She waits on Turtle’s every movement.

“Turtle,” she says.

“Gills,” Turtle says.

“Ah,” the girl says. “But I like ‘louvers’ better.”

“So do I,” Turtle says. “Isn’t that a museum, though? The Louver?”

“No,” Cayenne says.

“Oh,” Turtle says, “I thought it was. Some place.”

“Like where, Turtle?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where, Turtle?”

“San Francisco?”

“Do you think San Francisco is bigger than Wenatchee?” Cayenne asks.

“I don’t know,” Turtle says. “I’ve never been there.”

“To Wenatchee?” Cayenne says.

“To either.”

After dinner, she and Martin sit out on the porch and talk, Martin smoking a cigar, inspecting the ash for the cherry in the dark. Cayenne is inside, reading. The sun has set. He drinks, pitching the empty bottles sidehand out over the field. Turtle sits with the stock of the skeet gun balanced against her thigh and shoots each bottle at the apex of its flight. In the dark, the struck bottles seem to vanish, their glittering passage simply arrested.

“You ever hear of a bug that lays eggs in people?”

He takes his cigar from the arm of the chair, seems to settle into himself.

“Daddy?”

“Well, now,” he says. “I don’t know.”

“You never heard of that?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“What?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

Turtle is silent.

“Meth heads, kibble, hallucinate bugs under their skin. They pick wounds all over their arms, their thighs, in their cheeks. Sometimes they pick at their eyes. Is that what you mean?”

“Nothing else?”

He is silent.

“Could Cayenne have been on meth, do you think?”

“No, kibble. I don’t think so.”

He drinks from his bottle. Turtle breaks the shotgun over her arm, shucks away the hull casings. She chambers two bird-shot loads, locks the gun closed.

“Hell,” he says. “Maybe.”

Just inside of him are all the things she needs to know.

“If she wasn’t on the drug, if only someone that was on the drug told her that there were bugs under her skin, she wouldn’t believe that,” Turtle says. “If they went to the hospital and the doctors told her it wasn’t true. She’d know it was wrong. That whoever it was, they were wrong.”

Martin runs his thumb around the lip of the bottle.

“You’ve got it all figured out, kibble,” he says.

“I don’t,” she says.

He says, “Try this one.” He rises, wings the bottle out over the field like a discus thrower. Turtle shoots without rising, without shouldering the gun. The bottle arches away against the blue-black sky, and then it is simply gone.

He grins. Sits down grinning. “Uncanny,” he says.

“You haven’t written to the school district.”

“No.”

She hates to ask him.

“That’s the sort of thing you have to take care of, or somebody notices.”

He chews his lip.

It is possible that he has not filled out the paperwork because he does not believe they will go on like this much longer, or it is possible that he has not filled out the paperwork in the hope that someone will take her away. If he is being purposefully reckless, she needs to know.