Notes on an Execution(20)

What was going through your head? You genuinely don’t have an answer. You would explain it, if you could. Have you ever hurt so badly, you wish you could ask. Have you ever hurt so badly you lose every last trace of yourself?

*

The first Girl was a stranger.

At seventeen years old, you lived alone. You were the only child in your last foster home, a small house near Plattsburgh owned by a woman in her seventies. After your high school graduation, she set you up in a trailer near the edge of the woods, fifty dollars a month. You had a summer job at the Dairy Queen down the highway and a car you’d bought with a wad of crumpled cash. Suddenly, you were emancipated. The solitude was a shock to the system. A dunk of frigid water.

Seventeen, and the world had new edges. The corners were cruel, too sharp, and you spent hours on the musty couch in that trailer, digging around in the stew of yourself. It was strange to be in school, where girls laughed and shrieked, where boys embarrassed one another and showed off their bigness. But it was even stranger to be alone in the heat. After hours of contemplation, when the screaming pressed, violent, nearly deafening, you swore you could see your mother’s figure out the window, standing at the edge of the forest. She always vanished as soon as she’d arrived.

It happened in the middle of June. You had been chasing your coworker at the Dairy Queen all summer, a high school dropout with streaky dyed hair that flaked dandruff down her shoulders. You’d complimented her. You’d teased her like you’d seen the boys from school do. She had finally come back to your trailer, lay down on the couch, and unclasped her bra. It snuck up on you as you were quivering at the hilt: the screaming. The baby’s endless wailing, so distracting you could hardly see. Your penis drooped. The frustration only made it worse—and before your coworker left, she laughed. The sound, like a hideous track layered over the baby’s shrieking. You sat with the lights on until morning, the echo of your own agony ringing awful in your ears.

At work the next day, she wouldn’t even look at you. By the time you closed up, took the trash out to the dumpsters, and locked the Dairy Queen, you were bent entirely into yourself. The highway pulsed all the way home—you maneuvered your clattering VW Bug carelessly, swerving over the yellow lines, the wind whipping a beat into your ear, that screaming endless, unbearable.

She materialized in the headlights.

In the moonlight, that first Girl was just a shadow at the end of a long driveway. A ripple of hair. The Girl squinted in the bright of your headlights—her face was perfectly animal, vulnerable and confused.

You braked. You opened the door. You stepped onto the gravel.

*

Now, time melts. You hear the scrawl of the officer’s pen as he fills out the Watch Log. The thunk of his footsteps, lumbering uselessly away. You sink into the muck, the wild, furious dark, the cell widening and tightening until you are not a person, only a little ball. You press your forehead to the concrete, pleading with the baby. Please, stop crying.

If Jenny were here, she would know to gather your limbs. She would swaddle you tight, whisper consolations—It will pass, Jenny would hum, her skin like ripened fruit. It always does.

Jenny comes when you are weakest. When you most want to forget.

Her hair fanned out on the faded pillowcase.

Her footprints after a shower, dripping wet across the bathroom floor.





Hazel





1990



Hazel’s first memory of herself was also a memory of her sister.

It was the sort of memory that lingered and haunted, lurking in the very marrow of her bones. It arrived when Hazel’s pulse raced—every time she stepped onstage or drove too fast down the highway, she was transported. In the memory, Hazel was just a pumping mass of tissue, blurry and floating. Around her, a darkness that beat like a drum.

There was evidence of this time, in the ultrasound her mother kept balanced on the nightstand. Within the silver frame, Hazel and her sister were two little specks of molecule, growing together in this dark and primitive space. Her mother loved that photo, because you could see it even then, before either of them had ears or toenails. Two tiny webbed hands reaching out to each other, like deep-sea creatures in silent conversation.

In every important second of Hazel’s life, she could hear the phantom sound of her sister’s heartbeat layered over her own, as if they were still suspended together in the womb. It was a familiar syncopation. The most comforting thump. And no matter how far apart they were, how different or distant, Hazel’s hand would lift, always, to meet Jenny’s.

*

The morning Jenny came home from college, Hazel sat in the shower, letting the water beat scalding lashes onto the curve of her back. The seat her parents had installed in the corner of the tub was slippery beneath her bare thighs, and Hazel soaped her knee carefully, running the sponge over scar tissue. The place where the doctors had stitched up her skin was still a furious, blistering red—she could see the exact spot where her own ligament had been reconstructed, replaced with that of a stranger who had died right before surgery. Often, when Hazel looked at her knee, she thought of that nameless person, now just ash or bone.

She shampooed quickly, then turned off the water, listening as her hair dripped onto the shower floor. Downstairs, Hazel’s parents were frantic—her mother was banging idly around the kitchen, fussing with the marinade for the Christmas brisket. Her father’s shovel scraped against the driveway as he cleared the snow for Jenny’s car. They’d been in a blustery panic for days; her mother had wrapped the gifts weeks ago, and they’d been waiting stale beneath the tree ever since, dust gathering on glossy paper. Hazel’s father worked from home, and her mother had transformed his office into a guest room for the occasion, returning from the department store one frigid afternoon, arms filled with curtains, sheets, a generic framed photograph of a beach at sunset. The frenzy, when she realized she’d forgotten the pillowcases at the checkout counter. I don’t think he’ll care if you use the old ones, Hazel had said, from her perpetual spot on the sunken couch.