Castles (12 page)

"I have."

"You can't go through life worrying about him, Maggie." Steve picked something out of his teeth and smiled. "Why don't you move in with me?"

I laughed. "That's funny, Steve. I'm sure Mama would be happy about it."

"We could have sex all night, every night."

I looked up at Steve. A buried memory crept up and flashed in front of me like a beacon leading me to shore. Steve was strapped to the table with duct tape, and I leaned over him with pliers. I saw the fear in his eyes and watched his forked tongue slide back and forth in his mouth. The wind had given me the answer long ago, but I didn't know what to make of it until now.

I smiled as I thought of Steve's bloody tongue rubbing across my naked stomach. I took a step forward and leaned in to kiss him. If this was the way it was supposed to be, I had to lure the man into a sense of calm. I wasn't ready to cut him, but I could certainly get him ready.

I kissed Steve across the cheeks and bit softly on his earlobe. "Why don't we do that now?" I whispered. "Take me someplace I can feel you."

I closed my eyes and heard Grandma in the soft breeze that blew around us. "
Build it slow, Maggie. Build it slow.
"

I did just a Grandma said, but if I was confused at first about my feelings for Steve, things certainly weren't clearer after I slept with him a few times. I enjoyed it too much, but in the back of my mind—and often while in the throes of passion—I would imagine cutting into his belly and letting the insides spill out around me. It aroused me more, and in those moments of conflicting thoughts, I usually came.

I'd often lie next to him in his bed after we were done and run my fingers across his chest or stomach, pushing here and there to see just where to cut. At the same time, I felt satisfied and more complete than I was before. Steve was there for me, when so often no one else was. He smiled at me, laughed with me, and listened when I felt like talking about Mama or Mr. Pulman.

When he talked, though, I watched his tongue slither back and forth. Grandma was right: it was split down the middle and often whipped me with anger a minute before lavishing praise in my direction. I could feel that vengeful ember grow, and it was the tongue I wanted to feel against me the most, sometimes attached to his body, sometimes in the palm of my hand.

Steve made it easy to hate, too.

I probably deserved it each time Steve assaulted me with words or his fist, but I know what Grandma would say: "
You don't deserve anything from a man, and they deserve nothing from you.
" His tendency for violence became more pronounced the more we slept together. He would rage if I denied him, if Mama kept me in the house, or if I was on my period. It was cyclical, but I could appease him easily enough by spreading my legs at every opportunity.

He was, in a word, pliable.

As I said before, Mr. Pulman had a tendency to look away when I talked to him. In fact, the only person he ever looked directly at was Mama. It was disconcerting, to say the least, and I often wanted to ask him what his problem was. However, Mama's wrath was something I was keen to avoid, especially since I was now the third wheel and a stranger in my own house.

I stepped out of my room several months after Mr. Pulman moved in and looked at both of them on the couch. While Mr. Pulman stared at something on the floor, Mama had a look about her that said she wanted to talk. It was a look I'd seen many times before, and I was to listen. I wondered for a moment if she knew something about Steve and me, but I had gone to lengths to make sure that was one secret I was going to keep. It was my mess, not hers, and I was going to clean it up.

"What?"

"We're getting married, Maggie." Mama sat on the edge of the couch and looked at me through her drunken eyes. I never once saw a smile creep across her face like you might expect. "Billy proposed last night."

I stood silent for a moment and tried to digest this bit of news. How could this be? I wondered if Mama wasn't so blinded by her misguided direction of late, or if she saw the world though hazy eyes after the mess with Alfie. She certainly wouldn't get married to a man that couldn't look her own daughter in the face, would she?

Rather than say a word otherwise, I turned back to my room and shut the door. I heard them whisper in the living room followed by footsteps—one set out the front door and the other towards me.

Mama opened my bedroom door and stood with her arms crossed, her expression one of exasperation more than anger. I sat on my bed with my knees pulled to my chest, back against the wall, much like all those times I cowered from her when I was five or six. Grandma wasn't going to save me, though. I had to stand for myself.

"You don't like him, do you?" Mama asked.

"No. He worries me."

"Why?"

"He won't look at me, Mama." I looked at her as she uncrossed her arms, sat down on the other side of my bed and stared at the floor.

"He's not like Alfie, you know."

I didn't want to believe her. All men had forked tongues. Why couldn't she see this? "Grandma wouldn't like him."

She looked up at me. For a second, I thought I saw a glint of anger, caught in the tears that welled up on the edge of her eyelids. "She's dead, Maggie."

"She would have cleaned up your mess."

That glint of anger was much more pronounced and crept across her face like a caustic acid, turning her lips down and narrowing her eyes. "Sometimes messes aren't what they seem until you open your eyes. I need a man, Maggie. I'm tired of living my life wondering who will turn on me at any moment. You don't understand that, but I wish you'd crawl out of your teenage skin and grow up for a minute."

"What about Alfie? You thought the same way about him."

"Don't talk to me about Alfie. It was rebellion. That's it. This isn't the same thing."

I sat silent, watching her expressions change. I realized then she was aware of her messes, but didn't know how to clean them up. Grandma must have protected her all those years, and when Mama finally stood on her own, she failed miserably and let Alfie into our lives. Without thought, she banished him instead of taking care of the problem. It was something she tried to sweep under the carpet and ignore. Some messes, however, aren't meant to be ignored. They eventually resurface, often worse than they were in the first place. Mama knew that.

As thoughts of Alfie roamed through my head, they collided with thoughts of Michael. Who cleaned up my mess? I never thought of it like that before, but I was pregnant with his child and he had turned his back to me. Someone else must have put him in the Bus, but all I could think of for the past few years was the image of the eels taking him apart. I wasn't capable of standing on my own at the time. Did Mama help?

I couldn't say. "He worries me, Mama," I finally whispered.

She stood up, and I felt something that made me want to pressure her more. There was concern, not only for her, but maybe for me as well. She didn't have to look in my eyes for me to see it. I knew she worried as much as I did.

She sighed and looked down at the Barbie nightlight I still had plugged into my wall. "We're going to be all right, Maggie. I promise."

I wished I could believe her. I wished she could believe herself.

She left my room at that moment and walked out the front door. I didn't know where she went, but I assumed it was to follow Mr. Pulman and let him know that I was okay with her decision. I wasn't, but I couldn't argue.

I crawled under my covers and closed my eyes. I had lost too much since Grandma left: my virginity and Michael, Dusty, Justin and now Mama. She was all I had left, and she couldn't see past her own desires to understand the mess she was leaving for God to clean up. Storms were coming, and they would be larger than any that came before.

As for Steve, he would have to wait.

Grandma was at the wedding. Maybe she would tell me what to do as I sat in a chair in the corner of the Justice of the Peace's office and watched Mama drive a wedge between us for good. Mr. Pulman couldn't keep his eyes on the judge. He darted back and forth from Mama to the desk to the bookshelf and finally the floor.

In a chair next to me, Grandma sat silent. I knew Mama couldn't see her, but I often wondered if she could sense her presence. There are threads that bind families regardless of how much hate exists, and they are as present in death as they are in life. Grandma had so often left her castle in the sky to tell me something or offer guidance in my darkest hours. Could she have done the same for Mama?

I looked at Grandma as a tear rolled down her face. I knew it wasn't a tear of joy, but a realization that all of her teachings had fallen on deaf ears. She finally turned to me and whispered. "
She knows how to clean up a mess as good as you, Maggie. You have to remind her, though. Remind her of what it's like inside the wind. Take her outside and let her listen to what it has to say.
"

I smiled and didn't say a word. I would do just that. I would take Mama outside and remind her of everything girls need to do to build their castles in the sky. I would teach her one more time.

Mr. Pulman hit Mama across the face after their first month of marriage. By the second month, there was a permanent bruise across her left cheek. A few weeks later, she was sprawled across the kitchen floor, her face bloodied and one eye closed. I watched her body convulse as she drew her knees to her chest. I sat on the couch, afraid to move, to say a word, to breathe out. I wanted to, though. I wanted to smash the bottle of beer that sat precariously on the edge of the coffee table and find the largest shard capable of splitting Mr. Pulman's stomach wide open. Maybe if Mama were bathed in
his
blood instead of her own, she would finally see what Grandma and I knew all along: Mr. Pulman was a bad man.

"Get up, you bitch!" Mr. Pulman stood over Mama, panting like a dog in the heat of the day. His nostrils flared in time to the opening and closing of his fists. "Don't you
ever
talk back to me."

He stepped over Mama's body—dragging a boot across her face—and grabbed a beer from the fridge. With a quick flick of the wrist, he popped the cap off and took a long drink. Halfway through the bottle, he stopped and looked at me.

It was the first time we made eye contact.

"What?" He slowly brought the bottle down. His eyes never left me. "You want something?"

I shook my head and tried to look away. His gaze held me as it burned through my soul.

"You and your mother can clean up this mess. She wants to spend a little time with you? Fine." He lifted the bottle then dropped it on the floor. Beer spilled across the tile, gravitating toward Mama's bloodied face. "Have fun."

Mr. Pulman tore his eyes from me and headed for the door. With one hand on the doorknob and the other on the screen door, he stopped and took a deep breath. "You tell anyone, and you're next."

I waited until I heard his footsteps on the gravel before getting up to tend to Mama.

The latest argument had started somewhere between dinner and the first six-pack of beer. I wasn't a part of the initial conversation, but my position on the couch while watching television brought me inside the fray without my consent. If I had left the room at any one of the many awkward moments where my name was cast about like a butterfly in a tornado, the outcome might have been a little less violent. I often found myself wondering if my dislike of Mr. Pulman was the primary spark that lit his anger. I didn't know him very well despite the time he'd been in the house. I'm sure my feelings were like static in the air around them—a pesky nuisance.

I found a washcloth on the counter and rinsed it in the sink. Mama's body quivered and her chest stuttered with every breath as she tried to hold back tears. Her right eye was swollen shut, and I could see a deep gash across her cheek. For every abusive scar we kept inside, there were some that couldn't be hidden. Mama would wear her scar until the last brick of her castle was laid out.

"Mama?" My thoughts raced, but I found my words to be tentative at best. "Are you okay?"

Mama looked up at me with her one good eye as I held the washcloth against her cheek. She didn't say a word; her expression was enough.

"Do you want me to get help?" It was a silly question. Did she want me to tell everyone and let out her deepest mistake? Did she want me paint a scarlet letter "I" across her chest for the world to see what an idiot she'd been? I didn't need to see her shake her head quickly back and forth to know the answer to my question.

"I'll get you a Band-Aid."

I turned to the sink to wring out the washcloth. Blood dripped freely onto the steel, mixing with drops of water before flowing down the drain. For a moment, my thoughts drifted from Mama to my dream about Steve. Would the blood pool so rapidly in his mouth that I wouldn't have time to watch it mix with his own saliva? Despite the moment—or perhaps because of it—I found myself itching to try.

I wanted to do the same thing to Mr. Pulman, and I had a feeling deep inside that Mama would have approved. It was her mess, however, and if there's one thing she hated most about Grandma, I believe it was the way Mama's messes were always cleaned up without question. If she was ever to stand on her own, she would have to deal with Mr. Pulman herself.

Mama hadn't moved much by the time I returned with a sterile cloth and some medical tape. The beer spilled earlier had reached the other side of her head, mixing with her hair and some of the blood. She flinched as I wiped the fresh blood away one more time and applied a bit of pressure to her cheek.

"We need a storm, Mama." I didn't want to be direct, but I knew the seed had to be planted, to germinate inside of her if it wasn't already. Maybe there was hope in the desert of her soul—hope that might bloom if properly nourished. "We need to clean some things up."

Mama raised herself up on her knees and lifted her head toward me. Her hair, mottled with blood and beer, hung around her good eye, leaving the bloodied one to gaze inside me. Was she looking for strength? Or something else entirely?