When We Were Animals(75)

So I wrote her a note of apology, which went like this:

Dear Rose,

I’m sorry for hitting you with the baseball bat and breaking your arm.

I remember when you were called Rosebush, and I thought I would like to have a name as pretty as a flower instead of something so scientific and technical as Lumen. I thought you were lucky. My whole life, really, I thought you were lucky. It seemed like you could touch things and make them your way.

Is that true? Can you touch things and make them your way? It wouldn’t surprise me. Do you know the story of King Midas? If you don’t, I’ll tell it to you sometime.

Somewhere while we were growing up, things got strange. I stopped being able to recognize things for what they were, because the closer I looked the more things changed into something else. Do you ever feel this way, or is it just me?

I remember in the third grade you could draw perfect pictures of fashion-plate girls in all kinds of different outfits, and they all looked beautiful, like runway models. I was jealous, because the only thing I could draw were maps, and they weren’t pretty at all—just practical and informational.

Also, I miss my mother, even though I never knew her. I wonder what kind of girl I would have been if she had been here. Maybe the kind of girl who wouldn’t have ever broken your arm. Maybe the kind of girl who would have been your best friend and brought you flowers and cupcakes when some other girl took to fury and broke your arm with a baseball bat. I could picture that. I can picture lots of things.

So I’m very sorry. Sorry for this and for so much else, stuff that doesn’t even have to do with you. There aren’t enough sorries in the world for how I am.

Yours truly,

Lumen



I enclosed the letter in a white envelope and put a red tulip sticker, which was the closest sticker I had to a rose, over the back flap.

I wondered if during the next full moon there would be some retaliation for my assault on Rose. But as it turned out, Rose’s body had finished its breaching. When June’s full moon came, she was not among those who ran. All of a sudden, she had grown up.

I wondered, in my most dreamy states, if I had had something to do with her being weaned from the breach. Had I clobbered her into adulthood? The body had its own magic after all.

The other thing I wondered was this: Would I ever grow up like Rose and like Polly and like all the others before me? Or, having never been a real breacher, would I never fully graduate from breaching?

There were so many beautiful, dark, and lonely ways in the sunken corridors of adolescence—how did everyone else manage to make it through without a map? Were they not tempted, as I was, to linger?

*



Having disclosed myself to Rose Lincoln, I found there were things I wanted to say to Blackhat Roy as well. I had spent too much of my life reacting to people. Now I might be the one other people reacted to. I was ready to be someone who did things.

I rode my bicycle to his home—a place everybody knew about but where nobody went. It was an old house on a dirt road down near the bottling plant. I stood for a long time outside, holding onto the handlebars of my bike, just looking at the place. There was a wraparound porch on the house, but it was filled with rusted sewing machines, stacks of sun-bleached magazines tied together with string, old fishing rods leaning in a huddle against the house, a plastic kiddie car collecting dead leaves, rainwater, and mosquitoes in its seat, chipped wooden frames with no pictures in them, planters spilling over with withered creepers. There was a wooden swing suspended from the porch roof, but seated on it was a stuffed and mounted black boar, its fur coated with dust, its tusks yellowed with age.

I couldn’t stop looking into the glass eyes of that snarling boar, even when the screen door slammed open and Roy appeared in the doorway.

“The f*ck are you doing here?” he said.

I looked at him, but I found I could say nothing. It was a good question. What was I doing there?

“This is my goddamn home,” he said.

Again I said nothing. I gripped the handlebars tighter and gazed at him, at this place. I could not muster a response.

Then his demeanor seemed to relent a little. His body shifted sideways.

“Well,” he said in a lower voice, “come on if you’re coming.”

So I let my bike drop to the ground and followed him inside.

The interior of the house was like the porch—the same disarray of aged artifacts—but what was most remarkable was Roy’s comfort with it all, the way he moved through it with a strange kind of ease, as though he were on intimate terms with all the lonely jetsam of the world. He performed a kind of ballet through crusted plates of old food and teetering pyramids of empty beer cans. Where I twitched and fumbled, he shifted. Saying nothing, he led me back to his bedroom, where, pushed up awkwardly against one wall, was a simple iron-frame bed, the mattress, without sheets, skewed a little off the box spring. There was an unzippered plaid sleeping bag bunched up like a quilt on top of it.

On the wall was a framed photograph, crooked, of a man. I wondered who the man was, if it was Roy’s father, but when I reached out to straighten it, Roy growled, “Stop. Don’t touch anything. You shouldn’t’ve come here.”

I turned to him, reminded of my purpose.

“I brought you something,” I said. I dug into my bag and pulled out the book. It was The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I held it out to him.