In This Light (16 page)

Dora tells Lewis none of this. She wants to be her body only, her body in the car, in the rain, out here on the black road. But her body is a map. Her body is a history. His fingers find every scar and bruise.
What happened here, and here?
He doesn’t ask, but where he touches she remembers. She cries, and he holds her. He expects no explanation. He isn’t scared of sorrow. It doesn’t surprise him. When he’s calmed her, he touches her again.

She imagines her grandfather upstairs in the house far from this road. He’s rolled his chair close to the window. He’s trying to see through the rain, trying to remember his right shoulder, how the raised rifle kicked as he fired. He’s trying to count the ducks falling from the sky, but there are too many, they always come too fast, and then he sees, he understands this one thing: it’s only the rain.

She imagines Lewis’s grandmother—one stump, one wooden leg; Lewis is touching her legs—and she sees her own future, her body coming apart, how she’ll lose it piece by piece. She doesn’t know how he does this to her, why he won’t stop. They make love so many times, so long, her fingers and feet and lips go numb.

They will be caught. It’s necessary. They know this as they know each other: without words. They are waiting in their silence to see how it will happen.

The gold impala, empty.

A dirt road.

Tonight they saw the pretty little horses, the setting sun.

Four ponies, lean and glowing in gold light. One deep ginger with hair like velvet. One the bleached white of bone. Two bays nuzzling. They heard the hum of insect wings, saw the ginger pony brace his legs to piss hard.

Later they stood on a bridge, watching gulls swoop high, then dive toward water, saw them vanish at the surface as if a blue hole opened between air and river.

Tonight when they lay down in the woods where palm and pine grow together, they touched each other’s bones: hips, cheeks, spine. Tonight, for the first time, they closed their eyes and almost slept, the man enfolding the child, one bird fallen—her body the white belly, his the dark wings—and it is in this way they wake to the sound of glass shattering on the road.

It’s only boys, three of them, nine or ten years old.

They beat the car with sticks and rocks. Lewis knows that if he closes his eyes the bare-chested boys with sticks will become men with guns. He lies naked, watching children destroy the car. His hand clamps Dora’s mouth, and she wonders, Does he think I’m fool enough to yell? it’s not that simple, his fear. What he wants is for the body beneath his body to be gone. But her body insists. Still as it is, it is too many sharp bones. It will not soften, will not be hidden, will not sink into this ground. The boys jab their little knives into tires; the air escaping hisses off the road. His body hot on top of hers has a smell of something smoldering, about to burn, and then the match is struck, the first one, and the vinyl seats are split open with the sharp knives and the stuffing spills out—the first match is thrown and the second match is struck and the smell in the night is melting plastic. Together, two boys stand on the hood to drop a rock onto the windshield, and the glass is a shattered web caved in that does not break apart. Black smoke billows from open doors. The man in the woods has pressed the air from the girl’s lungs, and the boys, who are thrilled with their miraculous destruction, are mounting their bikes and pedaling home.

He is off her and she gulps air. He hates the boys, their bare white skin, their whoops and their strange silence in the end, but they’re gone, so it’s only the girl beside him now, silent but for her gasping, and he hates that sound, and he hates her bright reflecting skin—he can’t see his own hand at the end of his own arm.

He wants her dressed, and she knows; she’s quick. He wants to leave her or be able to love her despite everything. But he can’t escape the smell of fear, strong as piss, rising from his skin. He can’t escape the rage, a shaking too deep to stop, blood quivering in the veins. He wants to weep, thinking of his mother in the morning, walking to this girl’s house.

There’s nothing to do but let the car burn. The sky’s gone green with clouds. If the storm comes soon enough, if the rain’s hard, these flames might flicker out.

They walk together partway and then alone. They do not touch or speak. They do not look over their shoulders. They do not look up and hope.

When he disappears, he disappears completely, moving across the field, silent and invisible as the black canal. She thinks he is gone forever. She leaves no door unlocked. But that night he comes again.

He’s green sky and wind. He swirls up from the south.

He’s the wind uprooting palms, pavement that seems to melt and flow, the drone of pumps. He’s three stones hitting the glass of her window, sharper than rain. He’s all sound.

She’s afraid of him but more afraid for him, his new recklessness, and what would happen if her mother woke and made one call? What would anyone see here but a dark-skinned man at a white girl’s door? So she’s opening the window, letting the rain pour in—she’s speaking his name into the wind and he hears her—she’s moving down the stairs to open the door so carefully locked.

He’s inside, he’s there, filling the doorway, dripping, dark, his clothes drenched, his skin wet, his hair full of rain. Water flows from him, puddles on the floor; muddy rivulets stream across the tile, and Dora thinks of Estrelle on her hands and knees tomorrow, Estrelle not asking, not her business what the white people do in their own house, just her business to make it right when they stop.

She’s wearing a long T-shirt, her underpants. Nothing else. She’s cold. But it’s not cold. Her shaking is a spasm now, in her chest and knees. She leans against the door so she won’t fall. She says,
Why are you here?
He moves close and she smells his breath and body, the burn of adrenaline, the acid rising in his throat. He grabs her wrist, pulls up his wet shirt to press her palm to his stomach.
Can you feel it?
he says. He means the quivering, the blood jumping under the skin—he believes she’ll know. But she doesn’t know.

He says,
I have to lie down.

She thinks he wants to hurt her still. His body’s hard against her—belly, hip, hand—hard. His fingers twist her hair and pull. She remembers the weight of him in the woods. He squeezes her bare arm, says again,
I have to lie down.
He says,
I want this to stop.

He’s following her up the stairs. He’s leaving his muddy tracks through her house but he doesn’t care—it’s the last time, he’s not coming back. So what if the doors are chained and bolted after this, what if there are big-headed dogs in the yard after this, what if the girl is slapped and questioned till she spits out a lie or the ridiculous, unbelievable truth, what does he care?

In the blue room, on the blue bed, he strokes her body through the shirt; he strokes her bare thighs. She wants him to hate her. She wants him to do this and be gone— she wants to lie on the bed alone while the wind tears the palms out of the ground, while the rain blown sideways batters the house—she wants nothing left of him but the damp place where he lay in his wet clothes. She wants him not to kiss, not to touch her face, not to put his fingers in her mouth; she wants him not naked, only unzipped— quick, hard—she wants to hate him and be hurt and be done. She wants him not to speak ever again. She wants not to feel the short blades, not to hear the hiss of air, not to smell the vinyl melting on his skin.

But he is naked. He’s pulled the T-shirt over her head. He’s pulled the panties down to her ankles. She’s small in this room, in this bed, a child in this house, herself and not herself—she’s letting him touch her, everywhere—he’s inside her, everywhere, and it’s wrong, she knows, to want him and be this scared. She thinks of the grandfather down the hall, wide-eyed and helpless in his bed. She imagines he knows everything and wants to come but can’t come. She imagines him weeping, longing to put his big hands on the smooth gun. And the man in this bed is kissing her eyelids. His long fingers are in her mouth. She’s terrified, and he knows and he holds her head in both hands and he moves so slowly, and his lips are almost touching hers when he whispers,
Baby, no
, and she sees she’s herself again, not blurred with the boys on the road; she’s his lover, and that’s what breaks her and breaks him, because they see the muddy tracks through this house, because they can follow those footsteps back along a muddy road to a place where a gold car exploded hours ago and is burning still—it’s a fire the rain can’t put out.

He wants to go. He’s pulling on his wet clothes. She knows how it ends here. He won’t risk this again, for her. The boys in their bright skin will dance around this bed forever. The gold flames will rise forever from the road.

He’s his own footprints wiped from the stairs. He’s the rose-splattered bedspread washed and dried. He’s the faint outline only she can find.

But it’s not over.

It’s just begun.

Hard as he tries to go, there’s no way out of her. Not long now till she’ll know. First the swelling. Then the sickness and no blood.
Actions have consequences.
Your grandfather can’t say it now, but it doesn’t matter: you know who can’t help you, who can’t be called. And the consequence of no action is to understand what you’ll do alone.

It’s easy to steal what you need. You don’t ask yourself what’s right. You think of boys with sticks and Max in jail, how dangerous you are, rocks thrown at your window, a wet man who flows through you: first rain, then fire. You imagine your life forever in this house.

There’s cash in Lily’s purse, wads of it, uncounted—for Estrelle and the gardener, for any shy boy who might bring wine to the back door. You know how much to take each week for four weeks. You know how soon and where to go. Seven miles. It’s not that far. You ride your bike. You don’t think what you’ll do after.
After
is another country, a place you can’t know.

The woman at the desk counts your money, says,
Age?
, squints when you say
Eighteen
but writes it down. She says,
How will you get home?
And Dora says her boyfriend will come; he’s got a car and all she has to do is call, and the woman Dora won’t remember says,
That’s fine, but we can’t let you go till somebody comes
, and Dora nods, of course, somebody will come.

There’s the finger to be pricked and one drop of blood. There’s a movie and a clever girl who shows you the pink model of your uterus, who explains what she calls
the procedure.
There’s the yellow pill to calm you and seven colored birds hanging from the ceiling, twisting on their strings over the table. There’s the clever girl in green scrubs now, offering two fingers for you to grip. She says,
You can’t hurt me.
And the doctor comes in his white mask. He’s a face you won’t know and don’t want to know, and he says,
You’re a little one;
he’s already between your legs, so you’re not sure what he means, but you can squeeze too hard, and the girl says,
Let go.
The sound is water in a vacuum. The paper birds spin. The curved blade is quick, and the doctor says,
That’s all.

In a room with tiny windows too high there are eleven beds; you are number eight. You eat cookies, drink juice—obedient Dora, you hold out your arm, let one more woman in green take the pressure of your blood, ninety over sixty, a lie, what could they know about your blood? A third woman tells you to rest now, just for an hour, don’t move—here’s a pad, your underwear, call me if there’s too much blood.

How much is too much?

How many times do the little boys jab their knives into soft tires?

How many matches make a car explode? She’s too weak to do what she needs to do. She drifts and wakes. A woman’s whispering,
We’ve got a bleeder.
Dora hopes it’s not her. She feels the stabbing from inside, the doctor again, the bright boys. It could be her. She checks her underwear, sees the black clots, the thin red streaks—not too much—there’s so much more blood in a body than this—and the woman who is the bleeder is screaming now, feeling the blood beneath her, slippery, the blood, and the three women in green hold her down.

Dora sees and takes her one chance, gathers her clothes in a ball, slips from the bed and out the door.

In the bathroom she wads the paper gown in the trash with the soaked pad. She stuffs paper towels in her underpants. She doesn’t look. What good would it do to know? Her shoes are in the other room where the woman has stopped wailing.

The window here is wide enough, and Dora Stone is gone.

I see her on the road, riding. I know it’s true but still don’t quite believe she’s doing this. She’s dizzy. She can’t sit down. The air rises in waves off the pavement. It’s not the heat but the light she can’t bear. She weaves and cars honk, but nobody stops and the sound of horns is a distant sound to her, a sound from her life, before. She can’t see anything except her own hands on the bike, gleaming metal, and the road moving under her. She means to go home, but it’s too far, and she goes to the field instead, lies in the refrigerator instead, and this is where the things she can’t remember begin:

    the boy on the bike

    the mother on the porch

    the dogs in the dark

    their smell, her smell

    and then the men

    the needle, the mask, the scissors gliding along

       her skin.

This is where you wake in a white room. This is where the mother, your mother, opens her eyes at exactly the same moment you open yours.

You do not think of God or mercy. You think of water, cows and trailers swirling across flooded lawns; you think of wind, the furious swaying heads of palms in the moments before they fall; you think of your grandfather’s cities, the ones he built and can’t remember now, the cities where streets flow with mud and hail, rivers of forgetfulness, and the roofless identical houses split open, walls and rafters splinter on the ground; you think of boats, their crammed cargo, arms and legs dangling over rails, torsos twisting, all those dark bodies straining toward this shore.