Blue Field(27)

Rise up my love. My fair one. Come away.

It was glorious, this moment. Her brain nearly shrieked with it. She felt wonderful, astonished, at once repellent and ascendant. Jane was dead. Dead! If still believing in Jane wasn’t faith, what was?

In a corner of the church basement someone’s blazered sleeve caught her saucer, and tea washed over the lip of the cup. She tracked her husband as he conversed by the coat rack with fellow condolencers. She shrank further into her corner. Then came Amy.

Forgive me, she blared, expression contorted.

Please, Marilyn said, startled. There’s no need.

Amy’s legs nearly straddled Marilyn’s. There is, Amy said.

A whiff like insecticide—Marilyn’s own alcohol-mint breath on the rebound? Forgive me? Marilyn said.

Amy’s face grew heavy, relaxed into sadness. She reached out and touched one of Marilyn’s curls. Stay in touch, Amy said. Don’t be a stranger. Like she was.

Ass-f*cking hypocrites.

Vintage teenage Jane. On her hands and knees on the neighbour’s patio, upchucking while Marilyn braced her from behind. They’d been babysitting and, having delivered their charges to bed, had quickly bellied up to a line of Jell-O shooters on the kitchen counter.

Your family advocates anal sex?

Outside on the grass Jane had lurched to her feet. Precisely, she said. Through the back door if you have to, but remain a blessed virgin until your Mr. Prince shows.

Fearing the snitch-neighbours, Marilyn and Jane hadn’t exactly hollered to f*ck Mr. Prince, f*ck him up good. But drunk as could be they’d laughed so hard in each other’s arms that they’d eaten each other’s hair. Summer gnats hovered over them like tiny souls.

In her living room she cracked a fresh bottle and poured another sloppy one.

Jane had never actually said, Your mom is crazy mean and your dad flirts with me too much. Marilyn had never actually said, Your parents don’t care how smart you are, they think good grades make you stand out too much, make you pray less, might scare off the Great Charming One.

She slammed her drink. Rise the f*ck up. She felt terrible, ugly. Blaming the Allens. Blaming her own parents. Rand. Might as well lock herself in a box. Sloshed, she tucked her legs under her on the couch. Good times. Middle of a weekday, Rand at work while she fell behind on her own projects. Outside the living-room window her street commenced its goosestep through the mad season of mid-September, a cold-hot march before the leaves on the trees detonated with final colour, sacrificing themselves to the ground. She examined her drained glass. Salut stranger. Arise too Marmalade and Panda, Jane’s family cats batting a crippled mouse between them on the kitchen linoleum. The old neighbourhood creek swollen with snow-melt—back in the years when winter meant heaps of snow. Arise even the two young women parting on a busy sidewalk on a watery, windy day in spring. Call me you bitch. Marilyn would take even that back in a second. Even the one whole summer when she and Jane were nine and spirited a rusty trowel from Mr. Allen’s rickety toolshed to cut small disks of grass from the Allens’ backyard and bury treasures beneath the lilac bushes—a gnawed-on ballpoint pen found by the side of the road, scraps of paper with single words written on them, Hi! Ribbet! then carefully folded over, an inexpensive earring pilfered at scorching risk from Amy’s dollar-store jewelry box. Marilyn and Jane carefully concealed their handiwork, resetting the browned parcel of sod so it reknit into the woof and warp of magic-carpet rides over a vast cave of wonders they whispered about on frequent sleepovers.

Marilyn set her tumbler on the coffee table and stood and hitched her pants. Rise up now. Please. Come the f*ck away.

Fuck. She toddled down the stairs. Past her neglected office to the front door she went. She put her ear to it. Footsteps clipped along the sidewalk beyond the wrought-iron gate. Surely no one she knew. Or wanted to know. No one searching for her lost in her ridiculous tower of a townhouse. No Jane to the rescue—all this time Marilyn hadn’t realized how much Jane needed saving, needed Marilyn’s help. Jane, Jane, Marilyn thought anyway. She peered through the peephole but it was like looking through a fun-house distortion—zippy cars in candy colours and tidy shrubs and pert birds dispersing for somewhere better. Who knew where? Who cared. It made no sense to think but she thought if she could sleep some more it might help. Apparently she’d forgotten how. Or she needed more something-anything but she’d forgotten what. Something before her very eyes she couldn’t yet see.

She lay on the bed. Drifting. The sky waxed to a blue-black filling her window. Way out and beyond, stars coursed the night’s channels like an overlay of light and motion both there and not, laws inscrutable, anarchic. She recalled a time when she lay on her stomach in the submerged mouth of a river cave with some heavy current of crystalline water blowing past. She’d pulled some major deco, so a very nice narcosis was blowing her brain. Zoning, she gazed at the gravelly bottom. Suddenly, two pebbles detached themselves from the beige surround and looked at her. The freshwater flounder was slightly smaller than her bare hand. She reached out and tapped near it. The little fish lifted. Anything could happen. She tapped some more in a semi-circle around her and fish after fish rose like tiny perfect puffs of smoke. See you. You too.





      Part Four





28


Twenty-three hours in the truck hauling the trailer south down the continent. They took turns piloting through flotillas of space-station-sized rigs to the tune of all-night-radio crazies, caught pee breaks at service centres the size of towns.