The Bitch Posse (37 page)

“Stephen is very lucky. His wife is diagnosed with cancer, breast cancer.”

Oh, my God.

“But she will get well. This cancer they can treat. What first seems unlucky is actually lucky. Mothers know these things.”

“What was your dream?” Stephen asks.

Amy tells them. They exchange a glance. “You pay attention to your dreams, Amy,” Shu-Qing says again.

“What, does it mean something?”

“You’re lucky you can remember your dreams. Stephen hardly ever remembers,” Shu-Qing says. As usual no one will answer her straight out.

“Amy? Amy Dionne?” And it’s him, him, he’s here, he’s here, maybe that’s what the dream was about, seeing Scotty.

“Amy, you have a visitor, and very
handsome,
” Shu-Qing emphasizes, and Stephen laughs.

When he walks around the curtain, Amy’s stunned. The Scotty in her memory has been breathed full of life, and he comes closer, hair dipping into his face, eyes full of concern, flowers, he brought her flowers, white roses. She never thought he’d bring her flowers again. Her eyes fill with tears.
Scotty
. . .

“Hi,” she whispers, emotion catching in her throat.
It’s over, it’s over, he’s just being nice, don’t let yourself care.

“Hi.” He sets down the roses, reaches out, shakes her hand. (Shakes her hand!) Then he sits in the chair opposite the bed. They stare at each other for a moment, uncertainty tripping between them like gnats. Stephen and Shu-Qing keep talking about Stephen’s wife, and their chatter fills the air. Funny a Chinese woman would name her son after a Catholic saint. But Amy’ll never go back to church, it’s all a lie.

Scotty and Amy keep staring at each other.

She finally thinks of something. “How was your flight?”

“Fine, good.” His fingers rub against one another in his lap, and he notices her empty pitcher. “Want some water?”

She forces a smile. Her face hurts so bad. “Thanks.”

He gets up and fills the pitcher from the tap in the bathroom.

When he comes back, they still keep staring. He points to her cross. “Where’d that come from?”

“Catey gave it to me before I left. I hardly remembered I was wearing it, then I crashed and I really shouldn’t have made it. I can’t take it off now.” So embarrassing, atheist Amy walks around with a cross for the rest of her life. But . . . it can’t be helped.

“That and your locket.”

She fingers it. “Yeah. Well, that’ll never come off.”

That’s as close as they’ve come since it happened to discussing Lucky, and she whispers, “God, Scotty, I don’t know what I was thinking. I can’t tell you how fast I was driving, and I’d had so much to drink. What the hell was I doing?”

And the answer falls into Amy’s mind, I
guess I was trying to kill myself.

The realization thuds her in the stomach.

She tries to make a joke. “Guess this is an enforced drying-out period,” she says and laughs, but Scotty doesn’t. He looks as if he wants to say something, but instead he pulls a couple of books from a paper bag.

They’re two Neruda paperbacks, his
Memoirs
and a book called
Passions and Impressions.
“I’ll read if you want.”

“That’d be nice.” She remembers what Rennie said.
Just tell him the truth.
“But first listen.”

“I’ve been listening,” he says, a little testily.

“That’s not what I mean. Come here.” She beckons him to the bed. “I need to tell you something about me. I’ve needed to tell you for a long time.”

Uncertainly, he approaches her and sits near her. Cupping her good hand as he bends close, she whispers to him the entire untold story. She’s told him bits and pieces before but certainly not what they ended up doing, and now she tells the whole long tale of the Porter Place and Rob Schafer and her two best friends in the world, and it takes an eternity to spill it all out (she includes everything—her emotions, her friends, the drugs, Rennie’s abortion, her parents, kissing Cherry, everything), and he keeps nodding, nodding, and at the end of it all he bends away and says, “Wow. I’m not sure I can deal with that.”

It’s so anticlimactic somehow, she’s pictured his look of shock and horror, names thrown at her.

“I guess,” he says, “in some way, I sensed it all along.”

“Does it change things?”

“Amy, there’s nothing left for it to change.”

And that realization, that it’s all gone away, leaves her numb.

“I have something to tell you too.” He recounts the details of his affair with Suzy Petersen, much more actually than Amy would have preferred to know, but like Scotty, it’s what she’s suspected for a long time. As he winds down the story, he just says, “I’m sorry,” and his eyes are wide and brown and soft.

But she can’t forgive that, fucking someone else, that’s just not fair, and when she was pregnant too, and she says, “I’m not sure I can deal with that either.” She doesn’t blame him for not forgiving her, she is, after all, an unconvicted criminal, and again they stare, the wall between them invisible but six feet wide. She wishes somehow she could break through all the shit, reach for him, kiss him, but that won’t happen again, maybe never, maybe not with anyone.

Take me back, Scotty. . . . Please take me back. . . .

Words fall into her head.
Be strong, Amy! He fed you shit, are you going to ask for seconds? Be strong! You don’t need him!

She knows who it is. Her very best friend in the whole wide world. Cherry Diana Winters.

Take me back, Bitch Posse. . . . Please take me back . . .

The same voice speaks in her head.
We never let you go, silly! You are the Über-Bitch-Goddess, now and forever!

And so she just looks at him instead of apologizing again like she was about to do.

She puts her good hand to her locket and her cross. She’s not sure she believes in God, hell, she’s been let down so many times. . . . But she wishes she could believe in something. Maybe she could believe, or just pretend to believe, in Luck, in things unfolding in a certain way for a reason.

And he stands up and returns to the chair and pulls the book onto his lap and asks again, “Want me to read?”

“Yes, read, please, Scotty. I’d like that.” Escape into words, dive into someone else’s emotions, that is about all she can deal with right now.

He opens
Passions and Impressions,
and Neruda’s words float around her softly: “
This woman fits in my hands. She is fair and blond, and I would carry her in my hands like a basket of magnolias. This woman fits in my eyes.
. . . ”

Oh, God, her heart’s breaking. Scotty feels it too, because he trails off, watching Amy’s face.

No. She won’t allow herself to be manipulated by words again, won’t let him try to rekindle the flame that’s long since burned away. “Read something else.”
You don’t need him. You don’t need anyone. You can stand on your own.

He doesn’t fight her and opens up the
Memoirs
instead. “
In these memoirs or recollections there are gaps here and there, and sometimes they are also forgetful, because life is like that
.”

Sounds a bit like Amy’s memories. She wishes she could remember every moment with her beautiful Bitch Posse girls, the girls who saved her so many times.

“
Intervals of dreaming help us to stand up under days of work. Many of the things I remember have blurred as I recalled them, they have crumbled to dust, like irreparably shattered glass.
. . . ”

What they did was wrong, worse than wrong. It was evil. But even the worst evil is forgivable.

Scotty can fight his own demons. That’s his business. She’ll take hers head-on, thank you very much.

“
Perhaps I didn’t just live in my self, perhaps I lived the lives of others.
. . . ”

The sentences fall into words and the words break into letters and the letters drop onto Amy and scatter and build up into a blanket that’s tucked over her shoulders by her two best friends on Earth.

“
From what I have left in writing on these pages there will always fall—
as in the autumn grove or during the harvesting of vineyards
—
yellow leaves on their way to death, and grapes that will find new life in the sacred wine
.”

And this moment is perfect, scripted, not anything like what she expected, not out of a fairy tale or a feel-good movie or a paperback novel, but all right. The only way, really, that this chapter of her life could have ended.

“
My life is a life put together from all those lives: the lives of the poet.
”

Scotty weaves the tale of Neruda’s childhood in a Chile that’s so far removed from this hospital, her life, their marriage. She smiles, just a little, and lets the words fall onto her, Scotty’s voice warm and red and true and all right. This isn’t love, not anymore, but it’s something kind and comforting, and she lets his words cover her until she’s asleep again. This time she dreams only of a warm summer night, a clear white moon, and silence.

May 1988
The Porter Place

As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I’m terrified. I can’t do this, I can’t, I can’t.

But for some reason he doesn’t sense my hesitation. As a matter of fact he looks like he’s scared shitless, and pleasure washes through me.
Yeah, I’ve got you now, shoe’s on the other foot now
. . . .

Still, I’m feeling kind of chickenshit; after all, I’ve never hurt anyone but myself before, and I wonder if this wasn’t a mistake.

Cherry reads my mind. “He’s not a someone, Rennie. Think of what he did to you.”

“I’m not—” Rob starts.

She goes on like she’s not listening. “What he did to Dawn. All his lies.”

“Leave Dawn out of this.”

“Shut up, Schafer.”

And that helps, the last name. Not Rob, not even Mr. Schafer our teacher. Schafer, I can deal with that.

I run my fingers through my hair. The chunky bits slide over my fingers like snakes, and words spill into my head, dripping from the pen of the greatest writer who ever lived:

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You bet we shall.

It also helps that Cherry slides the knife over his throat, breaking the skin, blood popping up like butterflies on either side of the cut. I don’t have to be the first one. He doesn’t scream but he squints, he’s shaking, it hurts, good, good! “If you’re lucky we might not kill you,” says Cherry. “If you’re lucky we might just give you a few scars of your own, instead. What do you think, Rennie? Should we let the little motherfucker have his little motherfucking stinking life?”

My cue. “
Fair is fold, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air
.” A puzzled look crosses his face, and I say, “Don’t act like you don’t know where that’s from, you asshole.” Can he really be so stupid?

“Up to you, Rennie,” says Amy. “Does he live or die?”

“He’s an asshole and pig and an animal . . . ” We’re playing Good Cop, Bad Cop, surely he knows this, but the important thing is I
hold his life in my hands.
“. . . but no one deserves to die.”

He’s glancing from me to Amy and back again, and the stark terror in his eyes sends a rush of power through me. “All right then,” says Cherry. She hands the knife to Amy, and the three of us just look at each other.

A swallow of hesitation trembles in my throat, and I whisper, “What’ll become of us? . . . ”

“The power is ours,” says Cherry loudly. “Fuck consequences.”

“Anyway,” says Amy. “Hang us, Schafer, you hang yourself.” She rips open his shirt from the front and slides the knife from his chest to his stomach, not too hard, but deep enough to leave a mark. She scrapes a channel through his skin, like the ones I’ve scraped on myself so many times, but this is so much more empowering. She draws it out and makes an angle, then returns to the starting point and smoothes it over as he moans until it’s a gorgeous letter D.

Then, she passes the knife to me.

The handle feels smooth against my fingers, an object, lifeless, the object. The object the object the object. One object meets another, that’s all this is. I carve out an A, digging deep, making channels, furrows, and blood bursts to the surface just like it does when I cut myself.

“That’s
my
A,” I say aloud. “I earned it.”

And he’s sobbing, words are falling from his mouth that aren’t even making any sense except it sounds like he’s begging for his life. I’m so happy, he sounds terrified, and I don’t even care that we’re hurting him. He’s hurt me so goddamn much, maybe other girls too, his wife for sure.

Cherry makes the W, working fast, slashing down and up and down and up and it’s very raw, her W, very sharp and edgy and dangerous, just like my very best friend in the world.

My head feels foggy, and I shake it to wake it up. Funny, I don’t feel evil at all. I feel righteous and justified and higher than I’ve ever been in my life. And Cherry passes me the knife. I get an extra turn because it’s me he fucked over, and very carefully and deliberately and slowly I make the N. I take my time and make it excruciating and horrible and never-ending, because that’s just how he did it to me.