Blue Field(23)

Past the maples and oak, giant gladioli grew in stiff waves that rendered visible the heady wind. The clouds were bolting and she knelt in the fluxing light. Though the scissors were dull, green liquor soon stained her hands. Dummy. She’d f*cked and re-f*cked her husband as if sewing a needle through fabric, concealing her doubts—about him, herself, diving, Jane diving, what they were all doing, what were they doing?—like excess fabric, pleats in a skirt. Idiot. She worked her borrowed scissors until she had her bunch—red and coral and white with stamens brushed with saffron and a few buds that hadn’t opened yet. The sky had slowly turned a bruised blue and burnished gold and she seethed at the radiance, as unreachable as Jane. Marilyn would violate her now if she could—prise her best friend open so she could question her, pound the sense back into her, the Jane bunkered tight now as an oyster, lips cyanotic as a winter violet, an aragonite luster at the corner of a closed eye, a single tear like a milky sac.

Her own eyes stung. The air felt grimy, particulate with twittering bats, like a time-travelling echolocation of Jane’s scoffing laughter and riot-act readings when Marilyn needed them post-parents’ deaths. And those teenhood dare-scares—requiring Marilyn to scream strings of suck-mes at some gangly dude ambling past their table in the high-school cafeteria one lunch period. Jane jeering and throwing her own head back mouth agape, gasp-laughing—only to stop laughing and lean forward clutching Marilyn’s arm. Dead serious? Jane had said. That as far as you can go?

Streaks of furious sorrow splayed inside Marilyn now like forked lightning. She dropped the flowers. They lay on the ground like fuses of colour. She wanted to grind and ignite them somehow with her heel. But the sky crushed against her and she crouched once more and snatched up the stalks. She imagined their withering trajectory even as she dandled them.





23


Home. She hit the remote in two places at once and the gate swung, the garage door revved. She nosed the car in and parked and turned the engine off. The door slung down behind her and she rested in the plush quiet—and again woke, this time feeling misshapen, stiff. A struggle to warp from the car and flatten past her husband’s storage containers and gas bottles, to open and close the townhouse’s inner door. The alarm system chimed and she disarmed it then tapped on the lights and unlatched the shuttered closet containing the mechanicals and engaged the AC. For a second, the irregular patterns on the hallway’s slate floor eddied then stilled. Then she slogged past her office and climbed the tower-steep stairs. Dazzle of clean counters. Double oven perfect for multi-course feast-making though she and Rand mostly used it for fancy frozens. She dislodged a glass from a cabinet and stocked it with ice. The ice sizzled and popped and she held the tumbler to her sore forehead then exhumed her handset from her bag. Exhaustion grew in her like weeds and she felt winched open, exposed, a rustling inside her like scurrying rats. What to say! She tried to recall when she’d last spoken with Jane’s dad but failed. Marilyn set her device on the counter and swizzled the ice with her finger then ran it along her gums until she felt them shrink. She felt like something chalked on a sidewalk, all outline. Once more her ears rang. Call. Call. The fridge’s motor sounded like a zipper opening and closing at high speed.

Coward. In the darkened bedroom she dropped fully clothed onto the bed. She panted into dreaming then choked on and off into consciousness. A car parked on the street outside. Jane-y, Marilyn heard. She heard, Mare-i-lyn—in Mrs. Allen’s soprano some distance from the root cellar where the girls once shushed each other among sacks of potatoes and onions. Medallions of spider webs swagged the low ceiling—it took buckets of bravery to get here but now the girls were outside plucking poisonous berries from the Allens’ hedge. Fake slurping and belching, the girls slipped into the shade of the lion-maned elm. Girls! Come out, come out, wherever you are. Mrs. Allen’s voice grew louder, closer. The girls thrilled at hiding in plain sight.

You’re going to catch it, Jane suddenly crowed, pointing at some spatter on Marilyn’s sneaks.

Dripping red.

She gasped. Her pulse staggered and leapt. In her hypnagogic toppling, wind stropped her ears and she toppled off a cliff.

You awake? Rand said. Mare?

High above, the ceiling was a floating socket. On the edge of the bed sat her husband, furred with wriggling dark curlicues. He smelled sour, sharp like scallions. Don’t shut me out, he said. Please.

She coiled upright. In the corners of the room tessellations appeared—crowns of antlers, dark nests with their shadow treasures, all that once flocked to her deep in the freezing back chambers of flooded mines and far inside caves and wrecks, narcosis’ brood. With each the dire need to check her gages every minute to remind herself where and who she was, recall how she’d return in one piece. A miracle, it seemed to her now, that each time she’d made it back.

He thumped the wall over the headboard with his fist. Talk to me. You think it’s my fault? That I put a gun to her?

No, she said.

He stretched onto the mattress and she felt his corrugated breaths. Do you wish it had been me? he said.

Her stomach rumbled, or his did. How unfair their bodies with their idiot needs. How their bodies went and went. If he was guilty, she thought, so was she. She snapped on her bedside light. He flung an arm over his eyes.

Do you wish it had been me? she said.

Marilyn, he said after a silence. We’re all we have.