Castles (8 page)

I leaned against the side of the maintenance shed and cried. I wrapped myself with my arms, oblivious to the cold outside but quite aware of the cold within me. I wanted to die, to crawl into the grave I'd already dug and disappear forever.

I looked out at the desert beyond the fence. I couldn't see the Bus, but I knew it was there. I'd been inside enough times to be able to walk the mile or so in the darkness and find shelter. Maybe Mama needed time to accept what had happened. Maybe if she got herself drunk enough she would pass out on the couch and forget I said anything at all.

I crawled through the fence and headed toward the Bus, crying. Inside of me, I knew there was a life—a tiny version of myself created no more than three weeks ago. In a fit of passion and a sudden urge to grow up, I'd made a mess of everything. I didn't know what I was going to do to make things better, but as I walked around cactus and sage bushes, I could hear Grandma's voice offer her advice.

"God is always aware of what people do, what they leave behind for others to step on. Storms are His way of making sure the messes don't hurt anyone else."

I stopped and looked up. If storms were God's way of making sure messes don't hurt anyone else, where were the clouds now? Were they building in the distance, waiting for the right moment? I couldn't see that far, but the season was ripe for it.

I shuddered at the thought of the dust eels inside the wind and wiped the tears from my face. I didn't need that right now.

When I finally reached the Bus, I'd stopped crying.

It wasn't long before I fell asleep in the passenger seat.

I dreamed of the carousel of singing men that night. I hadn't dreamed of them since I was ten, and I'm sure I tried to push those memories back. Like most memories, they had found a crack in the weather-stripping and seeped out of that closet where I thought I kept everything safe.

I found myself outside the Bus, leaning against the front bumper, naked and cold. The men circled the Bus, looking at me and smiling. There were faces I thought I recognized, but most were foreign to me. The one that looked so familiar the first few times I dreamed of the carousel when I was nine, stood apart from the others.

Michael held his hand. I felt my nakedness then more than ever.

Michael let go of the other man's hand and stepped forward. He wore pajamas I'd seen more than once, pajamas I'd removed from his body more than once. He slipped though the other men and stood in front of me, his hands opening and closing much the way they did the first time we made love. Was he nervous about something?

I'm never sure of what dreams are supposed to tell us. They come at the worst of times, more likely than not the result of our subconscious mind attempting to resolve the events of the day. At other times, though, they reach into our past and pull out bits and pieces of memory, mix them together with sour milk and acrid fluid, then pour it out like a soothsayer might pour out tea from a cup. What we are left with is a message to read in the rotten chunks of our lives.

I looked up at Michael and watched his mouth move. He spoke words in a language I thought I understood, but nothing seemed to make sense. He was animated, his arms moving in response to whatever he said, his expression one of fear and condemnation. I wrapped my arms around my naked self and pushed my back against the Bus, afraid of what he was going to do.

The Bus shook and I woke up to screams from the back. I remember vividly looking out at the dust blowing by the windshield and
knowing
—without any doubt—what made the noise behind me. I was afraid to look, to confirm my belief in something I'd only recently come to accept.

I turned slowly. The screams mixed together with sounds of sucking and biting and chewing, at the same time in unison and apart. My heart beat rapidly, my breath ragged.

The dust outside created a veil over the Bus. So little light penetrated the windows and those that were broken only invited the dust inside. I choked and covered my face as the Bus rocked in the ensuing chaos outside. Despite the dim light, however, I could see them: thousands of eels swarmed over something on the middle of the floor. The eels writhed together, and their long tails whipped back and forth, as they bit into whatever it was they ate. And ate they did, ripping off bits of . . . of . . .

It wasn't there before I fell asleep; I'd checked once for sanity's sake. The back of the Bus was free of any body, animal or otherwise. Had someone come inside while I was passed out in the front seat? Did the storm leave a meal for the creatures?

I reached for the door handle and stopped. There is a need for us to gaze on death so that we may, in retrospect, feel better about our own mortality. Even if that death is as gruesome as what plays on the television set or is dramatized in the movies, it's the message it imparts we must understand.

I needed to see that death for myself.

I turned back. Some of the eels moved around a piece of flesh. I could see the dark blood, hear the sucking,
smell
sulfur within the dust. There, attached to the mouth of one of the eels, was the fabric of Michael's pajamas.

I screamed and sat petrified at the sight. One of the eels slipped off the body and floated in the air in front of me. It looked at me with translucent teeth spotted with blood. It's empty sockets bore into me.

"
I told you to cut out his tongue, Maggie.
" Grandma's voice, sharp and clear, punctured the howl of the wind. "
You let God clean up the mess.
"

I pushed on the door and fell out of the Bus. Grains of sand filled my mouth as I righted myself and stood up. I had to get out of there.

I ran, but I'm not sure if I ever looked back.

The dust storm passed, and I stood outside the fence to the trailer park. Mama didn't want me back in the house, and I refused to return to the Bus for shelter. I knew once the wind died down, the dust eels would go away. Still, I wasn't ready to face Michael's body, ripped apart by something I didn't understand.

Was this what happened to the body we found in the Bus years ago? Did the wind come and clean up the mess?

If that was the case, whose body was it?

The night sky was streaked with clouds left over from the thunderstorms, and stars poked through. Grandma told me once that stars were holes in the black blanket of sin that covered the world. The light we see is what comes from Heaven, reminding us of our destination. I often wondered if my castle in the sky was bathed in that same light—a shelter from the storms bathed in eternal sunshine.

I put my hand on my stomach, so very aware of the life growing inside me. What was I going to do? I honestly thought Mama would be with me, help me through this time in my life. While I stood at the fence and looked over at the darkened trailer, I still had hope that she wouldn't leave me alone. I was her child, after all.

"You should have let me teach you." The voice behind me was gruff, raspy and very slurred. I turned slowly from the trailer park.

Alfie stood silhouetted against the night sky. He took a drink from a bottle inside a brown paper bag then threw it into the desert. "Had to do it on your own."

I held my breath and silently prayed he would go away. There was no escape save the desert beyond. If I tried to hop over the fence, I would never make it. If I screamed, no one was going to hear me. If I ran, he would catch me.

Alfie took a step toward me and unbuckled his belt. I knew that look in his eye; I'd seen it so many times before. He was too drunk to understand what he was doing but not drunk enough to lose consciousness. It was a dangerous time, one that often led to beatings Mama had to suffer at Alfie's hand. It was also tainted with the sick look I remembered so vividly from the living room the last time I saw him take his belt off.

"Mama ain't coming home to save you this time, Maggie." He took another step toward me and unbuttoned his pants. "Why don't you just give in and have some fun?"

I looked to my left and ran. If I followed the fence far enough, I would find the road and safety. If only I hadn't believed my only shelter was in the Bus, I wouldn't have been in that situation.

Alfie quickly caught up to me and grabbed my arm. I felt pain shoot through me as he pushed his fingers between my muscles and yanked me to the ground. I brushed against a barrel cactus and cut my face.

I screamed, not so much at the situation but at the pain exploding from my cheeks. I knew the people in the nearby trailers heard me, and if I thought they would have lifted a finger to help me, I would have screamed again. Alfie, however, knew better. He punched me in my face, against the cuts, and pushed my head into the hard dirt.

He was on top of me by then. It hadn't taken long: three seconds, maybe four. My attempted escape, his lightning reflexes despite being drunk, the permanent marring on my face that I still wear to this day—all of it ran together right then, and only through reflection could I ever sort out the events.

I've had a lot of time to think about that moment, and wonder if there was anything I could have done to prevent it.

There are brushes with death we all have, and they come at us without warning. There is the accident at an intersection when you have the right of way. There is the misstep at the top of the stairs, avoiding the fall by reacting quickly. There are faces in the crowd who would do you harm in a second, regardless of whether or not you know them. There is, on top of that, rape.

We have to deal with these brushes any way we can. We sometimes hide them from others, wearing our shame but never explaining the change that's come over us. We sometimes wish them away, or deny they ever happened. We sometimes accept our fate, learn our lesson, move on with life.

As I cried that night, feeling the weight of Alfie over me as he thrust inside, I knew this was a brush with death I could never hide. There is a reason for everything that happens, and even if something is tragic, painful or full of rage, it is part of a larger whole.

I looked up through my tears at the blurry stars above. Heaven's light shone on me, and even though I knew life was never going to be the same, it wasn't over. My castle in the sky waited for me, and I was going to make it larger than anyone could have imagined. I wanted to hear Grandma's voice again, to know everything was all right. It didn't even matter at that point if the voice was disembodied; it would have been my most solemn comfort.

Instead of Grandma, I was left with Alfie's last words as he stood up and buttoned his pants. "That's what good girls like you get," he said. He put his foot on my stomach and pushed as hard as he could. "You can clean up your own mess, now."

Alfie left me that night sobbing on the desert floor. I curled into myself with my knees to my chest and pants around my ankles.

I started to bleed.

I didn't tell anyone what I saw in the Bus. I couldn't, however, hide what happened later. I finally pulled myself together, climbed over the fence and sat on the rocking chair by the front door, life pouring from me as I cried. Mama would
have
to come out in the morning, and then she would know.

I spent the next week in the hospital, probed and prodded, questioned and accused, harassed and humiliated. A police officer—who I think took a fancy to Mama—repeatedly asked about Michael. It was almost surreal the way the world looked to me, then: white, sterile, dashes of color thrown in like spilled paint. Nothing made sense at all.

I don't think about my time in the hospital very much. I remember most of it, and what parts are missing—time that slipped through cracks to dissolve into nothing—I attribute to the pain I felt. I didn't want to live, at least not the way I'd been living for so long.

On one of the occasions when Mama came to visit without accompanying someone in khaki or white, she sat down on the chair next to the bed and cried. I remember feeling the same as I did when I was six, watching a tear fall from her eyes when Grandma berated her for not caring about the cut on my foot. I didn't say anything to her at first, not because I was mad, but because I wanted her to cry.

When she finally spoke, she struggled to get her words out. "I'm sorry," she said. It was enough for her to say just that. She whispered something I didn't catch and stood up. With a kiss, she left and I was alone with a memory that I keep clear today. I stared at the door as she walked away, wondering if I'd see her again. I know now that she had finally fallen to the pressure of motherhood. It only took her twelve years to do it.

I returned home, afraid. I stood at the screen door for a while that first night and looked over the fence into the distance. I couldn't see the Bus in the dark, but I knew it was there, marking death like a gravestone. It hit me then that Michael's final resting place would forever be stuck in my memory, whether I liked it or not. I would always have that reminder of the night two lives were taken, and God wasn't there to clean up the mess.

It wasn't until years later that I realized God wasn't supposed to clean up the mess. I was.

The first night after I returned from the hospital, I didn't fall asleep until well after midnight. I stared at the ceiling and tried to coax reason from insanity. I'm sure Mama knew I was awake, but she probably wanted me to have time to sort through my emotions. I thought I had enough time in the recovery room.

The pattern in the ceiling blended together, and I found myself connecting the random splotches until I'd painted a scene of death, with Alfie caught in the middle. If I looked hard enough, I could see the dust eels eating his body, chewing on his flesh as he screamed. It wasn't long before the patterns started to swirl in unnatural ways, writhing around in the ceiling.

I froze. It wasn't anything in the scene I'd painted myself that frightened me—I couldn't
move
. My body tingled, like I'd stepped out of a freezer and into the bright sun, my flesh on fire. I tried to lift my head, wiggle my fingers, move my legs; nothing worked. I couldn't even blink.