Dead Girls and Other Stories

HOUSES

Homeless: this is the game. Eskimo and me in the backseat. Eskimo and me inside blankets, sheets. At a rest stop, we pocket gummy worms, Milky Ways. We shoot like comets down the aisles, then disappear fast as light. Outside, on a picnic table, our mother sits smoking. Outside, our mother says, Let’s go.

In the backseat, we pull blankets over our heads. Eskimo does the sign for house: hands flat like a roof, then walls. He likes to be inside. He likes to peer out. Every day, we build this house from scratch. I tell him, This is what it means to be homeless. You carry your house around inside you.

We’re not homeless, says Mom, overhearing. We’re between places. We’re in between.

We keep driving: Eskimo between silences, Mom between cigarettes. Me: a too-tall girl between seventh and eighth grade.

We get a hotel room with two beds, and I build Eskimo a house on the floor between them. Mom smokes outside, then crawls in beside us and we all lay there breathing at once.

When Mom was pregnant, she dreamt she was giving birth to an Eskimo baby, and that’s what Eskimo looked like when he came out: shock of black hair, squinty eyes. The watery thing that’s supposed to break unbroken and shining like snow.

Look, Laney, said Mom, placing him in my arms. Our Eskimo baby.

Eskimo squinted and kept squinting like he was always looking past. He got another name, but Eskimo was the one that stuck.

Things stick to Eskimo. Like the houses. Like the signing. The speech therapist who used to come said it would one day turn into talking. She said, Downs kids know the words before they can say them.

But Eskimo’s five now, and he still talks this way. In the back of the car, he does the sign for pray: two hands pressed together. He does it because it makes me laugh every time. I don’t know why. Or he points a stubby finger at my forehead, like E.T.

I’m Elliott, I tell him, and you’re E.T.

He signs back that he’s Elliott and I’m E.T.

I shake my head. I’ve never met anyone more like E.T. in my entire life, I say.

The hotel rooms get smaller, and then we sleep in the car, windows partway down. It’s summer. I point to stars and tell Eskimo how, far back and forever, people were drawing lines between them. How the right star could save you. How sailors used them to find the way home. Eskimo traces my hand with his finger. He does this sometimes.

On the highway, the wind blasts my hair. I think maybe we’ll speed all the way to the ocean. Signs tell us: Forty miles from the birthplace of Ronald Reagan. Thirty miles from GHOST TOWN IN THE SKY. JESUS WANTS YOU TO PRAY, PRAY, PRAY. And: ARE YOU ON THE ROAD TO SALVATION?

There it is, says Mom. That’s where we’re going.

Where?

Salvation.

But the next day we turn around. We’ve made our point, says Mom. We’ve gotten far enough to come back.

What about Salvation?

Laney, that was a joke.

I can feel Eskimo watching my face. He presses his palms together, and I try to smile. I hadn’t known this was what we were doing. I hadn’t known we were coming back.

Back home, I’d been dreaming the same dream: our house was burning, and I had to get Eskimo out. Back home, I made lists. Ways of being saved. At home, sometimes things were okay.

Billy starts crying the minute we pull up the driveway. He makes us all sit down in the living room, and Eskimo’s already crawling into his lap, signing Dad.

That will never happen again, Billy tells us, but most of all he looks at me. Never. Understand?

Okay, I say.

Ways of being saved:

By a fireman, from a burning house.

From terrorists, by presidential decree.

Stars, lifeboat at sea.

Eighth grade starts, and Salvation gets farther away. I try to explain it all to my best friend Maggie. How we took off in the middle of the night, how we slept in the car.

Like camping?

Sort of.

After school, we do our dance routine on Maggie’s white shag carpet. Hit Me Baby One More Time. We eat popcorn and watch Wrestlemania on her parents’ waterbed. Sometimes I think Maggie’s whole house is like one big waterbed, even the toilet seats plush and springy. The world could roll you around and around in this house, and nothing would ever happen to you.

On TV, the wrestlers keep trying to lay each other down in caskets. Maggie and her little brothers like Triple H, his muscles big and shiny as soup cans. I like the Undertaker, who looks ghostly and pale. Who looks like someone who’s lost his shine.

He wears eyeliner, says Maggie. And what kind of name is Undertaker, anyway?

Her brother chimes in: It’s cause he can raise people from the dead.

Maggie shrugs. It’s not like he’s Jesus or something, she says.

Maggie is saved, which means she gets to talk about Jesus like she knows him. Like him and her talk all the time. The closest I ever got was one day on the swing set in Maggie’s backyard. We were watching some carpenters up on the roof, and Maggie said: Jesus was a carpenter.

And right then, I swung my leg over the monkey bar and felt something between my legs—like sinking and rising all at once. It shuddered up through me, and for a second I understood.

Maggie’s mother calls from downstairs. Maggie and her brothers have to get ready to leave. They go to a kind of Sunday school even when it’s not Sunday.

We skid down the carpeted hall and into the kitchen, where Maggie’s mother eyes me. Do you need a ride, Lane? she asks. But really she means: Why is your mother always late?

No, I tell her. It’s okay. My mom will come.

So Maggie and her brothers shove into the minivan, and I’m left sitting on the porch. The house next door still has Halloween decorations up, cobwebs and a talking skull. When the cat walks by, the skull says, I want your soul.

I think again about the soft insides of Maggie’s house. I know the fake plant where they hide the key. I decide to go back in and sit one more time on the springy toilet, but I wind up lying on the waterbed instead.

From being buried alive, at the very last minute.

By the Undertaker.

By Jesus on the cross.

I reach down and try to get the shuddery feeling I got that day on the monkey bars: the sinking that’s also like rising. I think of Jesus reaching inside me and grasping my squirming red heart in his hand. It slips between his fingers with a little punctured Oh. Then it’s the Undertaker pressing me down inside a casket: darkness and the taste of dirt.

When I look up, I see Maggie’s father standing in the doorway.

How it is at night: like storm clouds, like natural disasters with names going down the alphabet. Catastrophic and then over and never again.

Sometimes Eskimo and me climb out onto the roof. Eskimo points to stars and I name them. I say: That one’s the sign we saw, Ghost Town in the Sky. Over there is the birthplace of Ronald Reagan. I keep going. In the quiet, you can hear things. Knuckles, bones. Pucker sound the body makes when punched. You can hear it rising, up and up above the rooftops.

Sometimes it gets so dark, I have to touch my skin to see if I’m real. I grasp at my wrist. Kneecap, collarbone. A me-shaped connect-the-dots. Eskimo traces my hand with his finger, like he’s writing me into the dark. I point at our neighbor’s satellite dish and tell Eskimo how it’s bouncing our signals into outer space, a sign or a flare.

In the mornings, we put on a whistling show of everything’s fine, just fine. I look over at Eskimo, who flaps a sock in front of his face. Who occupies time in the full and uncut way I used to.

But lately it’s like the storm has gotten inside me. Quiet makes my brain addled and jumpy. Bats and lightning lurch around inside my chest.

At night, after Eskimo’s asleep in his plastic car bed, something pushes me out the door and I wander around the streets in the dark. In the dark, you’re nowhere, you’re always in between. I walk all the way to the edge of town just to feel something.

Later I sneak back in and find Eskimo sitting at the top of the stairs. I tuck him back into his car bed, but in the morning, when I wake up, he’s a small round ball curled against my spine.

Last year, in seventh grade, there was Mr. Harman, the man who was going to save me. Every day in Science, I’d picture it: how I’d show up one night on his doorstep, him opening the door, and how I wouldn’t even have to say anything. How he’d see it all on my face like a bruise. Jesus, kid, he’d say.

But then he got fired for IM chats he had with an eighth-grade girl and it was like being doubly betrayed.

Now it’s eighth grade: no Mr. Harman, no Maggie. She’s not allowed to speak to me—not since her father caught me in the waterbed. Sinful, he said. I walk past our old table in the cafeteria just in case, but she doesn’t look up. For a second, the other girls turn: ponytails smooth and shining, faces blank as daylight. I keep walking till I get to the very farthest table.

A girl named Melyssa with a Y touches her spiky necklace and says aren’t I that girl Maggie’s friend?

I look back at Maggie across the cafeteria. No, I say.

This one time, says Melyssa with a Y, I said God damnit in the hall and she was like, Damnit is not the Lord’s last name.

Oh, I say. Weird.

Melyssa with a Y says she likes my jacket, which is Billy’s old one from the Army. I found it in a box in the basement, and when he saw me wearing it, he said, Huh, look at that. He said better me wearing it than him.

Melyssa with a Y tells me to come with her to the gas station after school. That’s where I meet him. That’s where I meet Connor.

Connor’s from our town, he says, but I’ve never seen him before. More than that, though, he doesn’t seem like he’s from anywhere. Like he just slipped through some rip in the universe. He’s tall with green cauldron eyes, and when he leans in toward me behind the gas station, somehow I know it’s him: the one who’ll save me.

Mom and Billy hate him right away. He’s seventeen, they say. He has a record, they say.

Connor stirs up something inside them. Billy slams the phone down when he calls. For two weeks straight, Mom barely drinks. She stays up late, guards the front door.

I know what you’re doing, she says when I get too near.

But I can always outlast her because suddenly I don’t need to sleep. All the time, I seem to be hovering someplace just off the ground.

Eskimo looks at me and won’t stop looking. Like suddenly I’m the alien getting called off to space.

One night, I sneak Connor into my bed. He’s been outside, in the trees. He smells like cigarettes and rain. He has a pale moon face that pulls. A face you can never quite see.

He says he failed his probation. He says, Let’s run away.

Where? I say.

Anywhere.

The next night, I touch every object in my room, trying to find one important enough to bring. I look at my shelf lined with little objects: rocks and trinkets and souvenirs. They must have been collected by some other girl, someone I used to be. I shove the shoebox with all my CDs under Eskimo’s car bed.

We’ll keep going, I think. We’ll keep going till we hit the ocean. We’ll never once look back.

But instead we stop at an old house, windows punched in like black eyes. Inside, people scrawled on mattresses. Phone numbers sprawled on walls. No, I think. Other way around. Sprawl, scrawl, I say to myself as we climb up the stairs.

The attic is garbage and debris piled up to my knees. A stained and dirty mattress floating above. It looks like a raft drifting out to sea. For a second, I look out, dizzy, from the top of the stairs and think: the ocean. All this time I’ve been going toward it.

Connor sells some pills he stole. Bills change hands. Other things. Cigarette ash makes a ring around the mattress. On the ceiling, more phone numbers, none of them mine. (What if I forget my own phone number?) On the ceiling, one lone playing card. A jack of spades. I try to picture the person who must’ve pasted it there.

For a while, I want to leave and then I don’t anymore. Time turns to water—nights, days—and I wonder if I could leave, if I’m even an I anymore. I’m in the walls like a smell. When police cars show up, people run. But gravity’s gotten huge and strange and I think I could never leave this place even if I wanted to.

I’ll hide here, I tell Connor. I’ll hide in the walls.

Connor looks away, and I know then that he’s gotten tired of me. He says they have police dogs. He says he could go to jail. Do I want that?

No.

He goes outside and I think maybe he’s turning himself in, but instead he brings two policemen up to find me.

That true what he told us? they ask, and for a second I’m surprised they can see me—that I’m real and visible. You can’t go home?

I nod.

The policemen look at each other and sigh. All right, they say in tired voices. Let’s go.

Outside, I see I’ve missed it: the first snow. Night air cuts into me, smooth and clean. The street glows bright as bone. Then I’m in the back of a police car watching lights go red, blue, red on the snow.

Can he come? I ask about Connor. But the policemen don’t talk to me. I wonder if I get a phone call.

At the police station, they leave me in a room full of filing cabinets and bright lights. I wonder how the world can go from dark to lights just like that.

A long while passes, and I wonder if the policemen forgot about me. There’s a phone just sitting on a desk, and I don’t know what else to do, so I call Maggie, who has her own phone line.