Goodbye, Sweet Girl Read online

  My mother called Danny’s aunt, who sent his brother, Wade, over to get him. Wade was big, with stringy red hair, lots of freckles, and strong arms, and he scared me. His dog, Mimi, followed him everywhere, like a little white mop dragging around his feet. Mimi made Wade seem less scary, because he loved her so much.

  ON THAT SNOW day, I put on my powder-blue snowsuit and begged my mother to let me go sledding. She said yes, but to come home by lunch. Outside, the air was so cold that the inside of my nose cracked and tickled. Glen was still sleeping. He could sleep all day.

  I grabbed my sled from the garage and dragged it around to the front of the house. The snow looked so flat and soft and white, I couldn’t resist. I stretched out my arms and looked up at the clear blue sky, palms facing upward, then let myself fall back, slowly at first, then faster. The sky stretched out endlessly above me, the world spinning. When I landed, the snow was hard. It was too cold and had crystallized into frozen shards of glass. Still, I thrust my arms and legs back and forth, dragging out an angel in the ice.

  I wanted to be an angel, but I didn’t think I was holy. In Sunday school, I had learned about possession. Possession happened when you didn’t fill your body with the Holy Spirit. There was a scripture that read, “When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out.”

  My body wasn’t a safe house. I had awful thoughts all the time. I was jealous of my brother, and I knew jealousy was a sin. Sometimes, I wished that I had been given up for adoption by accident, and that my original family was frantically looking for me. When they found me, they would be so grateful and full of love that I would be the most special person in the world, and they would never know about my meanness and lies—how I screamed at my mom or blamed things on my brother. I knew it was a sin not to honor my mother and father, and that was what I thought was my worst sin.

  At night, I worried that I had left a door open for the devil in my body. Before I fell asleep, I prayed for God to protect me, from the ghosts, from my nightmares, from possession. When I woke up with that familiar heaviness on my chest, I prayed again: God, protect me. Make it go away.

  Yes, I was no angel. When I looked into the cold sky, I only saw one thin cloud stretching across it in lines. That cloud wasn’t fluffy enough to be heaven, I thought. God would fall through a cloud like that.

  A shadow appeared in my vision. It was Danny. He held out his hand and helped me up, but when I reached down for my sled, he started kicking my angel viciously with his sneakers until my angel was a mess of streaky footprints.

  “Hey!” I yelled, ready to push him over into the snow, but I stopped when I saw his tear-streaked face.

  “You’ve got to help,” he said, gulping in air. “I let Mimi out, and she didn’t come back. Now Wade’s really mad at me. I looked everywhere, but I can’t find her, and Wade says he’s going to kick my ass. You’ve got to help me find her.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking up and wiping my arm across my nose, which was starting to run. “I was going sledding.”

  His eyes welled up with tears again.

  “Well . . . okay,” I said.

  I brushed the snow off my legs. Danny was hopping back and forth from one foot to the other, so I started walking.

  Danny pulled on me, and we hurried down the road. “Let’s check my dad’s house,” he said. “Maybe Mimi went there.”

  Danny and I reached his dad’s yard and picked our way through the snowy knapweed. At the door, I hesitated as Danny turned the knob. I had never seen a dying man before.

  Danny opened the door, and light spilled from the outside into a dusty living room.

  “You have to be quiet in here,” he said. We stepped inside. The floors were linoleum, even in the living room, and there was a green vinyl couch, but no other furniture besides that. There were no curtains on the windows, but the room was still dark because the windows were dirty. From down the hallway came a deep, alien sound—a mechanical breathing that pulsed in and out—and Danny crept toward the sound. I followed him with my breath held, and he pushed open a door.

  Inside the room, there was a chair that looked like a barber’s chair, and Danny’s dad was lying flat in it, while a plastic bubble-like shape floated near his head. The bubble was hooked to a machine that was making the breathing sound, and the bubble pulsed in time with the machine. The plastic expanded and rippled as though it would break, then contracted back into itself with a sucking sound.

  Danny’s dad was facing the window, but he couldn’t see us. We inched closer, and I let my breath out in one big whoosh. He was smoking a cigarette, but through a tracheotomy. At the sound of my breathing, he looked over and took the cigarette out of his neck. He ignored me and pressed his finger to the hole. His voice sounded as though he had been sucking the helium out of a balloon. “What are you doing here?” he asked Danny.

  “Mimi ran away, and we can’t find her. I thought she might be here,” Danny said. He was hopping from toe to toe like he had to go to the bathroom. I stepped back and pretended that I was invisible.

  Danny’s dad didn’t look mad, but he looked tired. “She’s not here,” he said. “I haven’t seen her. Isn’t she with Wade at your aunt’s?”

  Danny looked down at his feet, ashamed. “I let her out,” he said, “and I forgot to let her back in. Wade’s checking the woods for her.”

  His dad’s face got even paler then, and he quickly put his finger back in his neck. “You know how much Wade loves that dog,” he said.

  Danny’s face went white, then pink, then white again. He shuffled his feet and took his arms out of his pockets, then put them back in quickly, rustling the nylon on his thin coat. He looked at his dad.

  His dad turned his face away. “Just go home and help your aunt with Grandpa,” he said. “Wade can find Mimi.”

  “Okay,” Danny said, then turned to leave. He didn’t hug his dad or say, “I love you.” I knew Danny didn’t see his dad much, and soon afterward, he died.

  In the spring, my father found Mimi. She had frozen in the snow in a field just behind our house, and remained buried there until the snow thawed out. My father scooped up her little white body and carried her inside. When Wade arrived, my father placed Mimi in his arms like a baby. Wade didn’t look so tough anymore.

  Danny was standing behind him, crying. He was still the boy with the knife, but he was also the boy who was suffering, and I felt a softening toward him. I wanted to take away his anger, and his grief, and replace it all with love. I wanted to give him the hugs he had never been given. I wanted to be like my parents, who only saw his innocence. Maybe, most of all, I wanted him to forgive me because I couldn’t save him.

  ON THE NIGHT I met Caleb, I was twenty-six—no longer a girl—but I still carried the memory of Danny in my bones. The feeling of shame from when he exposed himself to me, the terror of knowing that he had come so close to me with that blade. And still, I wanted to forget his violence and love him through my fear. I wanted my compassion to be enough to spare him any more pain. I was a woman full of wants who wanted to love someone in a way that would heal us both.

  THAT NIGHT, I sat in a booth by myself at the Neurolux in Boise, where I was attending college. I was sinking into sparkling red plastic that was easy to get lost in. My friend Kelly M. was dancing with a man. A flashing neon crown blinked above the stage behind them, the yellow glow of the lights hazy in the smoke. The darkness, the sweaty bodies, the slick plastic under my thighs; I wanted something to happen.

  I stared greedily at the man. He wasn’t handsome, but there was something about him. In a baseball cap and flannel shirt, he was different from the other men in this hipster bar. He looked more like the men from my hometown, men who could fell trees and chop cords of firewood, leaving thick layers of sawdust in the air and the sweet smell of fresh timber.

  Kelly M. sidled up to him, swaying her hips. She h
ad always been more confident than me. She reached out her hands and placed her fingers in his belt loops. Then, with a flourish, she pulled down his pants and danced off. Unruffled, he continued dancing alone in his boxer shorts, pants bunched up around his ankles.

  I laughed, and Kelly M. danced over and slid into the booth next to me. “Who is that?” I asked.

  “That’s Caleb,” she said. “You would love him. He’s a fiction writer who lives in the woods in a little cabin he built by himself. He’s exactly your type.”

  She waved Caleb over and introduced him to me.

  We stayed until the bar closed, and then he walked me to my apartment. I invited him inside. On my couch, I sat close to him. He took off his hat. Only twenty-four, and he was already bald. He shyly ran his hand over his smooth scalp, visibly embarrassed. I reached over and glided my hand gently over his head, then smiled at him to show him that I didn’t care. He leaned over and kissed me quickly, as though I would change my mind.

  I didn’t change my mind.

  LATER, WHEN CALEB and I slept in his cabin in Idaho City, a former gold-rush town outside Boise, we could only spoon. His bed was on a wooden pallet just above the wood stove, but the heat radiating off the stove made our bodies too hot to touch. We only ever wanted to be touching, so we slept on the couch instead. He smoothed my thick hair down before laying his cheek against my head. He wrapped his arms around my shoulders. I had never slept so soundly.

  “You fit me perfectly,” he said. “It’s like your body was made for mine.”

  We had only been dating for two months, and our relationship was still uncertain. Caleb would disappear for days at a time without contacting me. I knew that he didn’t have phone service at his cabin, but I also knew that he drove into Boise three days a week for his MFA classes at the university. When he was in Boise, I could see his truck parked on the street, always under the same tree, but I didn’t tell him that I knew he was in town. I didn’t want to appear too eager.

  Sometimes he would call me late at night after he’d been out drinking with his friends. He would want me to join him, or to come over to my apartment. Sometimes I would join him. Sometimes I would let him come over. Sometimes I would let the phone ring.

  But when we were together, he was so sweet. He held me tight. He opened the car door for me. He called me honey. His West Virginia drawl made him seem gentlemanly. When his mother called while we were together, he always told her that he loved her before ending the call. This was so unlike my family. Love was something we kept compressed deep inside. Now I wanted to let Caleb into that darkness inside me.

  IN HIS COZY cabin, I lay on the couch, covered in a blanket. Icicles, almost fluorescent in the moonlight, hung outside the window. Caleb played his guitar and sang “Pale Blue Eyes” by the Velvet Underground to me. My eyes were pale blue, and so were his. My eyes drifted shut, and I floated into that blue warmth. I was still not a good sleeper, still suffered from the night terrors of my childhood, often woke haunted by ghosts, real or imagined, hovering on the edge of my wakefulness, but in Caleb’s cabin I slept soundly.

  Later that night I woke to pee, but Caleb didn’t have indoor plumbing, so I moved his arm from my shoulders, slipped on my boots, and let myself outside. I didn’t feel like walking up the hill to the outhouse, so I squatted in the snow. The moon turned the snow into glitter around me while my gentle lover slumbered inside. Euphoria cracked in my chest. Such warmth. I raised my face to that moon and closed my eyes. Even then, the blue moonlight filtered through my eyelids.

  This is a moment I will never allow myself to forget, I thought. When things get dark, I will always come back to this. I will return to this light.

  I went back inside the cabin and curled my body up in the space that Caleb’s body had left for mine. I don’t know what I dreamed about. Not Danny. Not my parents. Not sadness. Maybe not anything.

  2

  Queen of Swords

  SHORTLY BEFORE I met Caleb, I had my tarot cards read by a beautiful brunette named Shannon. Shannon also did Reiki massage, and when I was twenty-five and trying to heal from a painful breakup, she had given me one. By then I had stopped believing in the God of my childhood, but I still searched for answers outside myself. In many ways I was a skeptic, but Reiki and tarot appealed to that little girl inside me who still believed in God, ghosts, angels, and the devil.

  During the massage, Shannon held her hands above my stomach, and her fingers quivered. She put me through a visualization exercise and told me to picture myself in a tower, to think of everything that caused me pain. She told me to visualize those painful memories as rocks, and to throw the rocks out of the tower, where they would land on the ground, be absorbed by the dirt, and bloom into flowers. In my imagination, I threw many rocks. There was much pain, but also many flowers.

  She instructed me to visualize turning around and looking at the center of the tower, where a little girl sat. She said, “That little girl is you as a child. Go to her. Hug her. Treat that child version of yourself with the kindness that you would have for any child. Hug her like a loving mother would hug her and picture the walls of the tower collapsing.”

  It seemed to work. As I visualized hugging my child self, I thought of my mother. My shoulders shook with pain. My mother was an orphan: her father dead when she was seven, her mother dead when my mom was eleven. There was a part of her that she kept off-limits to me. It was as if the child of an orphan was an orphan.

  A YEAR AFTER my Reiki massage, Shannon read my tarot cards. I was still single at that time, but had been with a series of lovers who didn’t work out. Shannon and I sat cross-legged on the carpet of my apartment while she spread her cards into a map of my past, present, and future. It felt as if each time I drew a card for myself, the card was the Queen of Swords.

  The Queen of Swords reaches out for someone, but holds a sword in front of her. Is it for protection or is it a weapon? Her face is repentant. Sorrowful.

  Shannon instructed me to be careful. “Every person you sleep with,” she warned, “will leave an imprint on you, a little piece of their soul. You don’t want to take on a black soul. You don’t want that darkness in yourself.”

  She told me to envision cords tying me to the people who had hurt me and then cut the cords. She instructed me to act this out physically. I made my fingers in the shape of a pair of scissors. Then snip. It was that easy.

  That night, in bed, I started cutting the cords, my fingers working furiously, but the hurtful lovers sprang up too fast.

  THERE WAS THE wolf biologist, a graduate student with whitish blond hair and a Scandinavian last name. His house was warm, the wood stove always burning during the cold Idaho winter. He had a soft beard that he would nuzzle into my neck, grrring, making me ticklish and giggly. I thought I could have loved him, but he had another girlfriend—the one who really mattered—in Moscow, Idaho.

  There was Greg, the sociologist, who was the first man to tell me he loved me. When I told him about a man who had held me down when I was nineteen, Greg asked me if I wanted to use nipple clamps or other S&M devices. He assumed I wanted to be hurt again. As if being hurt was the thing I loved.

  There was the fourth-grade teacher who liked to smoke pot before having sex. We spent entire afternoons in bed listening to Prince and touching each other. That relationship dissolved organically. It was only about sex, and I wanted more, but not with him.

  There was the fish biologist, the only man I had dated who had consistent employment, a government job even, and he treated me kindly. At night I curved to his outline, wearing his stability like a blanket.

  The security he offered me burrowed into my heart—crystallizing into love, or at least something like it. We had so little in common, but I would have spent my life with him. I wouldn’t have been happy, but I would have been safe.

  When he left, I bowed my head into my lap, curling into myself, digging my nails into my arms. Not good enough, the voice in my head said. I was never good e
nough.

  Snip, snip, snip. There were too many cords for me to sever. I was so tired. I couldn’t keep up with them; I fell asleep tangled in cords.

  WHEN MY TAROT reading was over, Shannon put me through another visualization. She instructed me to think of the four elements—earth, fire, air, and water—and identify which element the men I had loved had in common. I closed my eyes, but all I could see was the ice of the rushing Salmon River in winter. I was the water trapped under the floes.

  When I met Caleb, there was no ice in the way he held me, in the way he nuzzled his head into my hair. He was only warmth.

  I had sex with Caleb too soon. I didn’t know how to say no, and truthfully, I wanted to be with him, but still I lived with so much shame.

  I remember being thirteen, riding in the back seat on the way to Wednesday-night Advent services at church. It was the middle of a cold winter, the night sky already black in late afternoon. Our headlights carved hollow tunnels through the drifting snow. Salt-N-Pepa sang on the radio about sex. About talking about sex. I bopped along in the back seat while my mom talked to my dad about work, but when I started to sing along, she swiveled around to look at me.

  Her eyes glowed in the dark car. “This song is terrible,” she said. “Just terrible. I can’t believe it’s on the radio.”

  I protested. “They are just saying we should talk about sex—even the bad things. They’re not saying we should have it.”