When We Were Animals(78)

At first I was numb, dizzy, and then my hand went up to the sudden searing pain on my cheek and came back covered in blood.

“Lumen,” Roy said. “I’m sorry. I—”

“Shut up,” I said. “Just be quiet for a minute.”

I looked at myself in a mirror hanging on his wall, and I was surprised. There was a girl, a long gash on the side of her face, bleeding fluently, something unfocused in her eyes. That was me.

“Goddamn it,” Roy was saying behind me, and when I turned I found he wasn’t speaking to me at all. He was pacing the floor, his fists pressed tight against his eyes. “Goddamn it,” he said again. “I don’t know how. I don’t know how.” He took one of his fists and rapped his knuckles hard against his skull. “She shouldn’t be here,” he said. “I hurt her. I broke her.”

And there was nothing pretty about it, nothing dramatic. This had nothing to do with the rituals of our little town, nothing to do with breaching or the cycles of the moon. This was something different, horrible in its plainness. His rage, my bloodied face, his fists, my shame. These were not the primal forces of the earth working through our polluted souls, not the bright clamor of youth in the stark urban fields of the modern age. It was just small and ugly and wrong.

The hospital was closer than my house, so I rode there, my bicycle serpentining across the road in my dizziness. I wasn’t sure if I would make it. By the time I got there, the front of my shirt was soaked and sticky with blood. I told them I fell. They treated me immediately, calling my father, giving me six stitches. A plastic surgeon was called in, since the wound was on my face. Everyone was very concerned.

The hospital was tidy and clean. It reminded me of civilized places. Places I didn’t belong. Places I was too ashamed to go back to.

*



After the stitches, I asked the nurse if I could use the bathroom. I felt funny, and in the bathroom I discovered blood on the insides of my thighs. At first I thought that maybe Roy had injured me—but then I realized what it was. I wasn’t amenorrheic anymore.

It hadn’t been a very long time since I had incanted magic words to romance my blood into flowing. But now it seemed like I had traveled a great distance from those fancies. I had grown accustomed to blood of all kinds. This was just a period.

*



I have a treasure. Do you want to know what it is? I could draw you a map to it. First you need to find the place where I live now, in a city in the northwestern quarter of our fair country. In the room where I sleep, there is a dark varnished maple dresser whose origins are unknown to me. On top of that dresser, you will find a jewelry box with many small drawers and hinged doors, like a magician’s cabinet. The very bottom drawer pulls out a long way, and you will need to pull it out almost completely in order to discover a packet of white tissue paper tied with a string. Undo the string, unfold the wrapping paper, and there you will find my treasure.

It’s a necklace, if you really want to know. It was given to me by my father. I don’t wear it anymore—because time has made it into a treasure, and you don’t dangle treasures from your neck. Not real ones.

It’s not the locket he gave me for Christmas. This he gave me that June, that same June that everything was happening. It was for me to wear at the prom. Ours was a small school, so everyone, even sophomores, went to the prom.

When he gave it to me, it was wrapped in the very same tissue and string (such consistencies are important)—except it was also in a gold foil box with a little bow on top. The box is lost now. You can’t save everything. You can’t save every little thing.

We were sitting at the kitchen table, and it was just before bedtime, so there were very few lights left on downstairs. We sat in a comfortable pool of kitchen light, surrounded by dark doorways, and we felt safe.

“I just thought you should have something nice,” he said. “For the dance.”

He was embarrassed, and he stirred more sugar into his mug of coffee for something to do with his hands.

I unwrapped it and held it up to admire it. It was a simple gold chain with a pendant in the shape of a dragonfly. Its wings had little bitty rubies in them, and the whole thing sparkled. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever been given.

“It’s perfect,” I said, because I wanted him to know he had done a good job of making me happy. He smiled and nodded and sipped his coffee, more pleased than he let on. That was our way, then. He and I, we were timid about the common practices of life now that I’d gotten older. But we helped each other along, and we stumbled through. We knew the quiet codes that stood in place of more overt, gangly expressions of love—and we got by all right.

I remember wondering for a few aching moments if maybe this had been a piece of my mother’s jewelry. I pictured her as a girl who would like dragonflies. A wisp of a creature with a name that pointed to darker things.

But then he rose from the table and rinsed his mug in the sink.

“I’m glad you like it,” he said. “Miss Simons—Margot—she, uh, she helped me pick it out. You might want to thank her, too.”

“Oh,” I said. I forced a smile, but he wasn’t looking at me anyway. “Yes. Yes, I will.”

He came up behind me, leaned down, and kissed me on the top of my head.

“Good night, Lumen,” he said. And then I heard the stairs creak with his footsteps as he went up to bed.