***
No. This can’t be happening, she thought to herself.
It was just around ten o’clock in the morning when she returned to the house, carrying the reusable bags from the organic market into the sunlit kitchen. She had seen his silver car parked in the driveway, intrigued that he was home so soon on a workday. Her heart picked up at the prospect of seeing him; he had been away for a few nights at a gig and had just returned yesterday evening, long after she had gone to sleep. But he left her a note on her pillow, and when she awoke that morning she sensed that he had been there, watching her in the night as he sometimes did, her heart jumping at the thrill of it.
Missed you, baby, the note said. Will be back tonight. Can’t wait to see you.
Now, as she turned up the back steps to the kitchen door, she heard soft murmurings behind it. She put the bags down, quietly, her heart swiftly sinking into the old, familiar dread that she knew all too well. She opened to door, guarding against its wooden creek, and found him. The other woman was seated on the granite countertop. Their clothes were strung over the floor. Her legs were wrapped around his naked frame-This is the first time I’ve seen him naked, she couldn’t help thinking to herself- and she was rocking lazily against and away from him; her head thrown back, mouth open. His back was to her, to Tabitha. His hands were clenched around the woman’s buttocks. He brought them up into claws and dragged them over the woman’s back.
Be prepared for the hurt, if it comes…Chessa had said. Nothing could have prepared Tabitha for the devastation of this moment. This was reality spit venomously in her face. She felt the light go out inside of her, and the resounding coldness of dark cover all.
“So you couldn’t wait to see me, huh?” she asked, standing in the open door.
The girl startled and pushed away from him. She was young, beautiful, sober. He turned and stood, looking at her. Unashamed, defiant; his face betraying nothing and seemingly expressed nothing.
“Hey baby,” he said. “Sorry. Didn’t expect you back so soon.”
“Bullshit,” she said, feeling six months of hurt overtake her like a sudden fever. Feeling that blackness.
“Oh gosh,” the girl muttered, over and over under her breath, and Tabitha turned in morbid curiosity at this naked girl who would say “gosh” instead of “god”.
Has he handpicked this one, or what? she thought. Was all of this simply meant for me?
“I think I should go,” the girl said, glancing from him to Tabitha and back to him.
“Yeah, go on and get outta here. But hey,” he said, grabbing the girl by the hand and kissing it, a gesture more obscene to Tabs than the heavy musk that hung in the air or his uncovered sex exposed before her eyes, “I’ll keep in touch.”
The girl smiled, quickly dropping it as her eyes met with Tabitha’s and scurrying out of the kitchen, her clothes balled in front of her.
Now they were alone. He made no attempt to gather his clothes but stood, leaning cavalier against the counter. Tabs could not bring herself to move out of the frame of the door.
“So…what? You couldn’t make it to the bedroom this time?” she asked, her bravado already threatening to break against the flames that tugged at her stomach and, to her consternation, licked at her thighs.
“I told you I thought you’d be out longer,” he said, his voice low.
She stood for a moment, hating the tears that threatened to break the doors of their cage, clawing to be unleashed.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“What I do,” he answered. “Why, you gotta problem with it?”
“I gotta problem with you acting like a cold-hearted bastard,” she replied, her voice breaking.
“Well, I guess you’d know all about the cold part, wouldn’t you sweets?”
He smirked, and there was a mocking in his voice that
shredded her insides with metal claws.
“I’ll tell you what I fucking know,” she said, slamming the door with a ferocity that made him jump, the vulgar word that she had always refused to utter slicing through her mouth foreign and powerful, warming that cold, empty place.
“I know that you could give a shit about that girl,” she continued. “I know that you’re in here because you knew I’d find you. I know I’ve spent the past six months of my life pretending that it didn’t make me sick every time you’d come in here parading your whores around.”
“You want to know why I’m ‘cold’?” she yelled, slamming her keys onto the countertop, feeling the vindication overflowing in her more joyous than any drug. She eyed his body and cocked her head. “It’s because I don’t trust where that’s been, you fucking man-whore.”
He stared at her, stunned. His hands were balled into fists at his side.
“Well, at least now you’re being honest,” he said, moving towards her with a predator’s gait. But she wouldn’t give; she held her ground.
“You think I don’t see beneath that mask of fucking piety,” he said, taking her by the arms. “You think I don’t know what you are.”
“You know what I am,” she said quietly, unable to release herself from his grip, her belly brushing up against him.
“And you knew what I was from the beginning,” he said, his voice rising. “What more do you want from me, huh? I’m the best to you that I know how.”
“Liar,” she yelled back. “You call this your best?”
“No, this is called waking you up,” he shouted, pushing her away. “I’m tired of doing this dance with you, Tabs. I mean, I bring you here, I let you live in my house for six fuckin’ months, and I never let any other chick in here before, you get that?”
He opened his arms wide, gesturing to the blank space around him.
“Anything, all this shit is yours. I gave you all of it. I said, ‘this is your home now’. And I’ve never told anyone, ever, the things I’ve confided to you. You know that. You think that doesn’t mean somethin’?”
He moved back up against her, pinning her between the edge of the counter and him.
“But I’m sick of all your hypocritical shit,” he said.
Tabitha’s nose pinched sharply, and she tried to turn away from him.
“You smell like her,” she said, not attempting to mask her disgust.
“No, you listen to me,” he said, pinning her chin between his fingers and forcing her face to meet his. “This game that you’re playin’ with me. It stops.”
“That I’m playing?”
“Yes, dammit. And we’re endin’ it now. One way or the other it stops. You either accept me or you don’t. You’re either with me or you’re not. Half-ass doesn’t cut it anymore.”
“You’re damn right, it doesn’t,” she said, pushing him a step back.
“And what does that mean, coming from you, huh?”
“It means I’m not the one who’s holding back,” she said.
“Bullshit, you’re not! Whatt’a you call the fuckin’ hell you put me through the other night, huh? And all the nights before that?”
“I call it self-preservation, that’s what. I call it what I’ve always called it. I told you I wouldn’t until I was sure…”
“Until you were sure of what?!”
“Until I was sure it was enough,” she screamed, no longer able to hold back. “Until you’re ready to make me enough for you. Ah, God…” she cried. She stumbled back and brushed tears away with her fist, angry at her helplessness against them.
“Don’t you get it?” she cried. “You bastard, don’t you get it? Don’t you get that I would give you all myself? That I would do anything, let you do anything you wanted with me? Do you even begin to realize how I…I ache for you like a fucking addict. That it’s like death every time you fucking touch me, because all I can think about is how I’ll fucking lose my mind from wanting you?”
She was in his face now; the only thing separating his bare skin from hers was the flimsy, summer dress she wore.
“Don’t you know that the only thing that’s stopped me is my pride? I’m worth more than this, damn it,” she cried. “And I’m not fucking sharing someone who’s been in my body, in the deepest places of me; someone I love as terribly as I love you. I shouldn’t fucking have to!”
Tabs banged her head against the edge of the wall and sobbed, and it was only the truth that stopped him from going to her.
“And the thought that once you had all that there was to take of me, you’d toss me away? You’d throw me away like all of your other garbage…”
“How could you think I’d do that,” he said, softening.
“It’s what you do,” she said, her words cutting the air like a bullet.
He sighed. Turned away, raking his hand through his hair. She felt deliriously empowered with the recklessness of her speech. She was as naked as him now, nothing left to hide.
“Tabs,” he said, his back to her. “I don’t know if I can change.”
“I know I can’t,” she replied.
“So where does that leave us?”
She paused, the gravity of his confession hitting her like a stone.
“It leaves us where we’ve been. Stuck in this mess where we keep hurting each other.”
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” he said, knowing it was a lie.
She smiled in a way that scared him.
“Maybe I’ll sleep with James,” she said.
“What?”
“Maybe then it’ll feel even between us.”
“You wanna fuck James, you go right the fuck ahead,” he yelled.
“I don’t want to fuck anyone but you, you moron!” She pushed against his chest with both hands. “But why the hell shouldn’t I?” She felt the rage rise in both of them. It felt out of control. It felt like madness coming on fast. “What’s it to you?”
He didn’t answer. His breath puffed out in hot blasts.
“What do you care if I wrap my legs around him,” she continued, taunting him in a whispered breath. “What do you care if he touches me, screams my name, makes me wet?”
If she were mine, James had said to him.
“Shut up!”
He pushed her away with an intensity that he did not fully mean. The suddenness of it shocked her and she lost her footing, falling back over the bar, smacking her head against the granite countertop and pulling a cluster of cooking bottles down over her. The bottles shattered around her, one making a clean cut over her left eye.
“Oh, shit,” he muttered, shocked, unable to move to help her but held in place, captivated by the horror of what he’d done.
“Tabs, I…”
She floundered for a moment like a broken doll, then burst from the floor with an animal’s senseless rage. Blood coursed down her brow. The top half of a broken bottle was in her hands. She brought it down. It broke against his arm, thrown up to shield his face, sending shards of pain up his side. She screamed nonsensically in his face as she did it, not human sounds; pure, unadulterated hurt. Then, like a shadow passed over, he looked up and she was gone. The door swung silently in the light summer air. He heard a bird chirping busily a nearby tree branch, searching out its love, and the distant echo of a motor speeding down the lane and out of sight.
-Requiem for the Fallen-
The translucent shimmer of sunlight could not block out the icy winds of the northwest. They meandered in torrents through the suffocated tangle of forest growth. Tabitha pulled her sweater closer, wrapping her wrists in its ephemeral warmth, watching her breath crystallize like the essence of ghosts, and ascend to greet the mist that enveloped the tops of the trees in a mystical canopy; her mouth on its mouth. Her boots scuffed against the log steps that trailed down this side of the mountain, overgrown with clover and fern. Here, everything and nothing was silent. The forest exclaimed with the caws of roving crows and brown hawk, and the shuffles of the squirrel and the chipmunk traversing the wooden highway. A far off cry and the smell of horses warned of the hidden enemies nature makes, and there were some places she would not wander, among the mossy dens and deep ravines, under the fallen trees and turgid undergrowth.
Life was everywhere in its most elemental melody; but the most blessed and necessary silence lie in her being its only human inhabitant. Here she could almost touch God; His absence the most deafening and empty of places. Where was that void in her heart where He once lay? Had it hardened and mended over its tangled and disenchanted ruin of flesh? Was God as lost to her as she now felt to… him?
She would sit in this spot at dawn, as the morning’s early light transgressed into this sanctuary of forgotten paradise, reaching for that forgotten someone who had been lost, who had driven her arms and thighs and heart into bleak oblivion, falling into madness, drunk with her own destruction, deviant in its sophisticated lie, soft as doves wings in its beckoning, who had spoken to her as softly as a child and had filled her mouth with blood that said “live this lie with me-fall back and let it crush your lungs. I am your beastangel of pulse and hunger and I devour you.” Now she searched inside the fragile shell of what remains, as reticent and still as the fragile dawn in its breathy drapery, seeking to unlock the course trappings that have closed her up in this silent fail-safe; wondering if she will ever recapture the source that moves us to speak and laugh and touch and commune with others, the living world, without devolving into the blank existence of a hollowed soul.
Amelia approached her from the wooden steps. Her galoshes squeaked against their spotted crevices, and the hem of her patchwork shirt gathered a curved, wetted stain of the dew. Tabitha turned to her and offered a small waive of her hand.
“Thought I would find you here,” Amelia said in her small, even voice.
Tabitha turned to the light. Amelia reached down and touched her face with a mother’s gentle, yet commanding grace. Tabitha’s left cheek bore a violet blush. Her eye was a web of red and blue, frightening in its beauty and the violence that it implied.
“This is healing nicely,” Amelia said. “Matthias is feverish this morning. He’s asking for your stories. Would you come to him?”
“Of course,” Tabitha replied, rising to her feet and brushing the moist dust and branch from her pants.
They stepped cautiously down the forest’s side and made their way across the two miles of meandering trailway into the grassy glen that housed several rustic cabins, their pine shingles blackened and green with moss and age. Smoke poured from half a dozen homemade chimneys, and through the black-paned windows shown the dim promise of lamplight into darkened rooms, not yet greeted by the day. Tabitha and Amelia stepped through the side entrance of the one with a turquoise painted door- a subtle illumination in an otherwise natural habitat- and were greeted by Sephora and Jeb, and their little Matthias lying on his cotton cot. He wore Captain America pajamas that had been faded with age, his thumb snuggled tightly in his mouth. His cheeks were bright red with heat, and beads of sweat gathered on his small forehead. Tied to his feet with white rags were onion slices, and the smell of eucalyptus filled the air from the poultice applied to his chest and neck. Tabitha eased herself onto the edge of his bed, brushing a stray tangle of hair from his head.
“Hey, Buddy,” she whispered.
“Hi Tabby.”
“What’s this I hear from Miss Amelia, hmm? Don’t you feel good?”
“Mmm-Mmm,” he replied, shaking his head.
“What can I do to make you feel better?”
“Want to hear a story,” he said, replacing his thumb in his mouth.
“A Story?” she asked, with mocked inquiry.
“Mmm-Hmm.”
“Well, I suppose we can arrange that,” she said, smiling. Matthias was the only one who could cajole a genuine smile from her. His innocent and childlike ferocity of affection resurrected some small fragment of her heart, and she was grateful to produce some measure of happiness in another. She reached for the weathered copy of Grimm’s fairy tales that she had purchased i
n the secondhand bookstore in town (how strange, she had thought, to have no children’s books here) and opened to Hansel and Gretel, one of her favorites.
“This is one you haven’t heard before. It’s about a little boy who lived with his sister in a magical forest, and who had to be very, very brave.”
Matthias settled in, his eyes glazed over happily with the hypnotic pull of the storyteller’s words. Jeb and Sephora leaned into each other, his arm over her shoulder and her head resting on his chest, their faces a mixture of exhaustion and worry and love. Amelia placed a hand on Tabitha’s shoulder as she quietly made her way out. As Tabitha’s mouth opened the portal to Hansel and Gretel’s harrowing escape from the witch’s gingerbread house, the tirades of riddling trickster Rumpelstihlskin in his caddy shack, and the heroics of the huntsman who filled a wolf’s belly full of rocks, the redness began to recede from Matthias’ cheeks, and the glassiness of his eyes seemed to dissipate. His eyes grew heavy and his chubby fist fell with a gentle thump as sleep overtook him. His arm was slung carelessly over his teddy bear, the tips of his fingers grasping the hem of Tabitha’s sweater. Sephora placed the underside of her hand over his forehead, exhaling relief at the coolness of his skin.
“Shhew,” she breathed out, “his fever’s broken. Tabitha, thank you. He is so comforted by you. We all are.”
She embraced Tabitha, a little awkwardly, as Tabitha still shrank back instinctually from human contact. She forced herself to place her arms around Sephora in a light, yet sincere, embrace. Jeb offered her his handshake. She accepted it, not without difficulty; being touched by any man was a crushing trigger of panic and anguish. However, being in a place like this where physical contact was as much a part of everyday life as breathing- where neighbors greeted each other in generous embraces, women kissed women’s cheeks and men clapped each other on the back- left her no choice but to re-assimilate.
“Thank you both for letting me help. I’m happy for anything I can do to repay everyone’s generosity. Reading to Matty is a pleasure; it’s as much for me as it is for him. I’m grateful for his friendship.”
“He’s quite smitten with you. You may be the great love of his four year-old life,” Jeb said, laughing.
Tabitha laughed too. “Well, we’ll make it through a few more stories and then he’ll have plenty of fairy tale princesses to dream about.”
Tabitha made as if to go.
“Oh, will you stay for breakfast now?” Sephora asked. “You must be hungry since we kept you from breakfast with the others.”
“Thanks, I’m fine, really. I have to go get the morning’s chores done,” Tabitha said.
“Oh, let me help you with yours. You shouldn’t have all those to do after we’ve kept you here for so long.”
“It’s no trouble, honestly,” Tabitha replied. “And don’t give my coming this morning another thought. I’m just happy that his fever is broken.”
She gave Sephora’s hand an affectionate squeeze, waved goodbye to Jeb and emerged into the crisp morning air that opened her lungs and quieted the anxious flutter that skirted around her insides. As much as she cherished Matty, and appreciated the good company of Jeb and Sephora, an hour and a half’s time with anyone forced the beginnings of an intimacy that she still could not maintain with others.
The heat of the day would be approaching in a few swift hours. Tabitha gathered her baskets and headed towards the long garden that bordered the flanks of the glen. Its posts and mesh-wire barrels spiraled the air like a fair munchkin city. She stepped with care across the rows, positioning herself amongst the pea plants, feeling for full pods and plucking them into her baskets. In two hours time, she had filled three baskets. She drew them back to the small cabin she called her own, which sat at the outermost edge of the forest, stopping every few minutes to catch herself and reposition her hands under the pressing weight of the metal handles.
She edged the door open with her foot, the early day’s light falling in yellow slices through the plain kitchen. She poured the peas into the tub-sink, and filled her buckets with soapy water. Pulling the door behind her, she walked to the dining hall, where Amelia and some of the other women were already busy at work preparing the midday meal. Tabitha slid her buckets into an errant corner of the room and began washing the large, communal tables. The suds rolled onto the floor carelessly; they would be smoothed over with large, crudely fashioned mops, and would gleam in the light when the community gathered together again. Tabitha felt a sense of misplaced timelessness as she observed, outside of herself, her hands performing these antiquated tasks. She seemed to be transported into a realm where life as it had been no longer existed, but had been swept away in this paradox of culture and social habit that mimicked a long-forgotten ancestry, predating electricity and mass continuity (and the sound of electric guitars, of drumbeats as thick as molasses). She shook her head to disengage the imagery of thought into safe, disposable fragments, clearing the slate blank once again, as she poured out the sooty grey water onto the stone steps, brushed the moisture from her forehead, and retreated back to her cabin.
Seth, who had moved here with his two mistresses-Corinne and Krista- stood undressing in the latrine area before one the communal, manual showers. His flamboyance sparked no flame in her; she gazed upon his lithe, boyish frame with the casual disregard of a dog taking a piss. It was almost comical to her- the sensual ambiance, the wanton disregard he wanted so desperately to assume. How could he create something he did not know how to define? His women were beautiful though, full and lush and sensual like earthen goddesses, but modest enough to keep covered out of doors. They, like Tabitha, chose to bathe indoors, in the claw-footed tubs that were provided to every cabin. Tabitha would go now, and fill hers with cool water from the well, and sink into it with a good book, removing the sticky film which overtook her skin after the morning’s long work. She preferred her bath first thing, but found that walks up the mountain with damp skin and moist hair was deathly, and was now accustomed to her pre-lunch soak, much like Seth, she supposed, who was finished with his lovemaking and in need of one around the same time.
She bolted the door of her small cottage, an unaccustomed habit but one the others understood, given the circumstances. She stripped off the sweater, trousers, and camisole that she had thrown on with absentmindedness. She stopped as she was pulling the camisole’s light protection over her head and saw herself in the oval mirror, which stood and swiveled on its old fashioned podium. She saw the small rivet of cuts that scattered her arm and shoulders, her upper back. There was a small bump just beneath her elbow where a shard of glass had worked its way too far under her skin. It would be some time before it would begin to surface, poking through the pink membrane of her flesh.
It had been the heavy ceramic bowls, and the iron skillet that had fallen behind the bottles of liquor that littered the bar, pulled down by the bar cloth she had grabbed, unthinking, an instantaneous reaction to break her fall, and she had fallen on the broken glass and had been pushed down into it and had it broken over her as the whole contents of the kitchen bar had fallen on her, heavy as a verdict. She reached up and touched her face, hesitant, remembering the sharp hardness of the corner of the bar and her eye reverberating against it, momentarily overcoming her with pain, raw and pure.
She turned away from her image, easing into the coolness of the water mingled with the light breeze of the open window high above her in the corner of the room, openable only with a large, hooked pole which leaned against the wall, and tried not hear his voice in the outer recesses of her memory, echoing like the remnants of a half-forgotten nightmare…Tabs! No! Tabs! Baby, I’m sorry! Tabs! She smelled the dust in the air and the fumes of exhaust as the car tore down the private roadway. She tasted the salt tears and the blood that had dripped into her mouth, metallic and too real. And she saw a blurry figure stumbling behind, stumbling after, and she heard his voice, and she heard his voice…
Tabitha gasped for breath as
her head surfaced out of the tub. Her arms clutched its ceramic frame and she breathed heavily in and out of her mouth. Sometimes, she didn’t even realize when she had gone under. It was so easy just to fall back and let the water recede over her until the kaleidoscope of pictures and sound muffled and blurred under the blue winter of emptiness. She would not cry now. When she had first arrived here, over two weeks ago, she found her mourning place at the crest of the mountain top, and poured out what must have sounded like the death song of a wounded animal, feeling the reaper take them slow. She cried until the very essence of herself was purged, stifled only by her scabbed hands held to her mouth; she cried her very soul out of existence. Now there was only a blessed void where her sorrow should be, a hollowness that was consistently numb, unfestered even by these remembrances that hinted at some past life she had lived some million births and deaths before. But it was the hollowness of a carved-out ache, an untended infection that had decimated itself in a cancerous hunger.
She was about to reach for her robe when she heard the faint rattle of her front door. The lock was an old-fashioned hatch situated above the doorknob, and required a large, iron key to unfasten it. It reminded her of her grandmother’s farmhouse in the mountains of Pennsylvania, a myriad of unopenable doors harboring quiet, brooding secrets. That switch, switch sound was enough to send ice water up the base of Tabitha’s spine. She was suspended between throwing on her robe or remaining crouched beneath the calm stillness of the bathwater. She saw the door jarring in her mind’s eye, the stillness of the cottage closing in on her with suffocating force, the horror of what she might face. She brought her broken fingernails to her lips- still mangled from the shards of glass that the backstreet doctor had pulled from beneath her nails- closed her eyes, and waited…waited…
Amelia’s voice was a distant and muffled plea-“Tabitha? Are you there?” Tabitha let out a long breath, and climbed from the tub. She fastened her robe about her as she padded across the wooden floors to the kitchen door. Amelia stood there, concerned.
“I’m sorry. Did I take you from your bath?”
“It’s okay,” Tabitha replied, “I just wasn’t sure who it was at the door.”
Amelia nodded. “Do you think he would know to look for you here?”
“This is the last place he would look for me.”
“But you’re still afraid.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Not in the way you think,” Tabitha said, feeling that past self fade into focus from its shadowy recesses, rattling at the bars of its cage. It could stir and howl and beat against the outposts; she would not patronize it.
“He wouldn’t hurt me. What you see here,” she said, touching her face gently,” well, I guess I haven’t explained it very well to anyone.”
“You don’t owe anyone an explanation,” Amelia said, placing her hand on Tabitha’s shoulder.
“It really was an accident. It isn’t the reason I left. It’s just the abstract of an internal something; much more complicated.”
“I’m probably not the best person to offer you a consolatory ear,” Amelia said. “I’ve had so many dysfunctional relationships. Out there, it’s hard to trust the love you feel for anyone. Everything is so artificial. I don’t know why I ever expected love to be any different.”
“It’s what we allow it to be,” Tabitha said, scraping a nail across her finger.
Amelia smiled, pouring herself a cup of water from the pitcher on the table.
“It is, isn’t it? Listen, the reason I stopped in is because Janson is here. He’d like to meet you, speak with you for a moment. Don’t worry,” she said, seeing the panic rise on Tabitha’s face, “he’s simply curious. We rarely allow visitors-it’s more of his affirming our judgment.”
“But will he send me away?”
“I see no conceivable reason why he would,” Amelia said, rinsing her cup and placing it into the drain board. “He’ll meet you in the circle.”
Amelia let herself out of the door. Tabitha re-secured the lock and took a long breath. From her closet, she chose a simple, black tunic and adorned herself with only the amber pendant which had belonged to her aunt and which she refused to part with. She pulled on her black, leather boots and fastened the door behind her. On her way out, she noticed the pea pods lying in the kitchen sink. Their hard skins shown like pebbles in the midday sun. She wished nothing more than to sit in the blissful quiet of the coming hours, working her hands unconsciously through the sinewy green shells and listening to the cicadas’ and bullfrogs’ thwarting songs near the lake outside her window.
She passed behind the cabins and cottages and common rooms into a small clearing which had been outlined in smooth, round stones from the mountainside. In the center were several alter-shaped formations. Janson had seated himself on the centermost one, motioning with an elegant extension of his hand for Tabitha to take another close by. She sat cautiously, summoning all of her mustered fortitude to meet this man’s gaze, a man utterly foreign to her but to whom she had once felt such animosity towards; now she looked on him with humility, as she was in his debt.
He was much older than she, beautiful, with long, thick silver hair and deep blue eyes, like hers. His face had the gaunt bone structure of a German, harsh and masculine, and the punctuation of his gaze on her flesh was like the lash of a whip. Tabitha thought about the secret thrill that the other women here felt at the terror of him; she understood now why that would be a good thing. In another life, she thought, she might have made a man like this her teacher. But no, the only place she would have ever been vulnerable to him was in her bed, and this one was more interested in playing head games. He wants to be worshipped for his mind; how like a woman, she thought. They sat motionless for a few moments, taking each other in.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, surprising her with the informality of his introduction.
“Fine. Better, thank you,” she replied.
He shook his head firmly, as if agreeing.
“Amelia tells me that you have assimilated well, and I gather that with the workload that you’ve assumed and your graciousness to the others in the community-Jeb and Sephora, especially- you’ve made quite a favorable impression on our little community.”
“It was the least I could do to repay everyone’s kindness. I know that my being here is breaking the rules; but I needed so much to come here.”
“How did you know about this place?” he asked.
This was the one question she hoped he wouldn’t ask, not knowing the implications her answer would have. There was no credible explanation that he would buy, other than the truth.
“My brother is a member here.”
“Your brother?” he asked, surprise quite evident in his voice.
“Yes.”
“His name?”
“His name was Bobby.”
“Paul is your brother?”
“Yes. He doesn’t know I’m here; I haven’t seen or heard from him and I haven’t asked…”
“He’s in seclusion right now, on our other campus,” Janson answered, his tone evening out. “Did you share this with the others when you arrived?”
“Yes. I thought that, if they knew who I was, they would be less afraid to let me stay for a while. If they know Bobby like I do, they’d know that I might as well convince the moon not to rise as to talk Bobby into anything. And, knowing his history, they’d know that I would never speak to my family about his life here. Although, I didn’t really expect that he would acknowledge me, even if he did see me.”
“What I’m trying to say,” she continued, “is that I’m truly grateful for the sanctuary that your community has provided me, and that I hope you will not feel threatened by my presence here.”
“My dear, there is nothing here that we fear exposure of. We live honest, if unconventional, lives, well within the realms of all legality, disregarding social norms of course,” he said, as Seth ran past in a nearby field, still naked and cha
sing Krista, who was barely clothed herself and laughing breathlessly. He tackled her to the ground and then swooped her up, rustling her into their cabin. Corrine, sitting on an old rocker on their front porch, shook her head and went on with her knitting. There was a time when Tabitha would have turned away, flushed and nonplussed. Now she looked on calm, unaffected, ordinary; nothing touched her now.
“Amelia has filled me in on the highlights of your recent experiences,” he continued. “Do you fear that this man will find you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Tabitha felt no instinctual trust for the man seated before her. But she could understand, maybe for the first time, while gazing into his unjudgemental eyes, how her brother could have attached himself to Janson. His face was worn with years of accumulated wisdom, the kind that only comes from living. It reminded her of Chessa, a brief and meaningful friend. She felt her guard falter ever so slightly, and drew her walls gently down.
“There was a bond between us. It was deep-rooted; at least, in me it was. But it wasn’t rational on either of our parts. We were fundamental opposites; we were pitted against each other from the start. Spiritually, we were light and darkness, and neither of us would budge from the path we had chosen. But, there was a likeness between us, which was also on a spiritual level, like, two sides of the same coin, or two directions on the same path. And despite the idiocy of it all, we fit together seamlessly.”
Tabitha stopped. She had laid out the rationalizations so often in her mind. Explaining them to another person was like throwing them into the air and wondering if they would materialize differently once they fell to the ground again.
“Go on,” Janson said.
“It was naïve of me to ever have expected a different ending.”
“Was this done in anger?” he asked, gesturing to her face and the cut lines along her arm.
“It was an accident. He pushed me away and I lost my footing. I said things that I knew would make him furious.”
She paused for breath that was stifled in her chest. Her heart hurt.
“ What scares me is,” she said, her voice beginning to break as she remembered the look in his eyes as she ran her hands over herself, crazed, speaking blasphemies in his ears, carving out his soul, “I think I was glad that he had done it. It was my out. I knew the minute that I hit the floor, that it was my out. And I was ready. I told someone once that the heart gives up when there’s nothing left to hope for, when it hurts too much to be with a person than without them. I didn’t know, until I was holding broken glass in my hands, until I swung it down over him, how ready I was; I’d been gone for a long time.”
They were both silent for a while.
“We cannot choose the souls that we are bound to,” Janson said. “Sometimes the pull towards someone goes so deep, it’s utterly insuperable. Wasn’t it Bronte who said, ’Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same’?”
He smiled to himself. His reference surprised Tabitha; she had always loved that book, it was one of her favorites. No one, she thought, had ever understood the nature of love like Bronte, how love went beyond flutters in the heart, pining and yearning, or even beyond hatred and loathing. Love runs blood deep; permanent, inescapable.
“Never rebuke yourself for trusting in the connection,” Janson said. “Our souls are a slave to our will; they are a slave to the disease. We cannot control what our soul’s mates will do with, or to, themselves. Love is corruptible. It does not mean that you were not meant to be tied to this person; it means that they have altered their soul’s course.”
Janson’s words were a balm of relief poured out on her head. Her voice shivered when she replied, “Yes, but that is why I’m afraid to see him again.”
Janson waited, studying her face.
“I felt as though I was losing myself-I was getting lost in him. I felt like I had never wanted or needed someone so desperately. The power he had to hurt me was so… I felt my resolve breaking. I felt myself becoming someone I didn’t recognize anymore, and worse, I felt myself becoming desensitized to- what were to me- intolerable things, things I would never have suffered for anyone else…”
She thought back to the first time she had accidentally walked past his room and seen a strung-out groupie cuffed to his bed. All their pained cries filling the night, bumping up against her dreams, begging him to hurt them more, giving him what she wouldn’t; complete surrender. The endless sketchbooks filled with his fantasies that she made herself read, especially when she needed a good reality check, exposed the things he secretly, secretly wanted to do to her, to any woman, that both thrilled and sickened her, but that she could never understand. Compartmentalized into a soulless, exaggerated, hollow fuck-shell, absent of any cognizant thought or affection other than mindless, violent, animal copulation. Only animals lacked the brain sickness, the frenzied madness that made human beings create nightmares out of ecstasy. She had wanted his violence mixed with tenderness. She wanted him to crave her, the way that they all craved him, like a fix, like air. She had wanted to find the place that touched him, to crawl inside it and leave her mark, making her his home.
“ I looked upon all the garbage so vaguely with him…and now I realize I don’t know who I am anymore,” she confessed, tears falling down her face, turning her cornea a deeper shade of violet. “I have to find some part of myself that exists wholly on its own, without him. I can’t do that if I’m faced with him again.”
She sighed, burying her head in her hands.
“I just want to forget.”
“If only we could forsake what we had been before, hmm?” Janson patted her shoulder, stood up. “You are welcome to stay, for as long as you like. I don’t feel it’s necessary to speak with you about the expectations of residency here, or of respecting our practices; I think the others are more than pleased and comfortable with you.”
“Thank you.”
“Would you like me to tell Paul that you’re here? He may want to see you.”
“I’d rather you didn’t. It was Paul’s decision when he severed ties, and, I’d rather he not know if he didn’t have to.”
“Ah, I see,” he replied. “And your parents, will they be concerned with your whereabouts?”
“My parents are on the other side of the world. They’re missionaries and, last I heard, they were somewhere in New Guinea; I doubt they even have access to a post office, let alone a telephone. Bobby and I lived with our Aunt and, she passed away a few years ago, not long after Bobby left. I was sixteen.”
Janson paused, gazing out over the drowsy haze of the afternoon, the moths, the foxgloves and harebells pitted against the lush underbelly of the forest. The community had gathered for their meal, and there was a busy and cheerful chatter emanating from the dinner hall.
“I am sorry that you were left alone,” he said.
Tabitha didn’t reply. It was a small, but meaningful thing.
“I promise I’ll only stay until I’m ready to face it all again,” she said, gesturing to the outside world with a sweep of her hand, gazing on the vast landscape of her life as a foreign, terrible country.
“You will stay as long as you like,” he replied.
“Perhaps,” he said, placing a hand on her thigh, “you will consider joining us. There are many ways to heal.”
His hand slid upward only slightly, and his fingers pressed into the fabric of her flesh. Tabitha fought the revulsion that swiftly blackened her image of this person she had so readily confided in. But she could feel it, turning her legs to stone. A breeze blew over them, carrying with it the charred breath of smoke and hickory. He gave her leg the gentlest squeeze before releasing her.
“Thank you for meeting with me today,” he said.
“It was nice to meet you,” was all she could bring herself to reply before disengaging from the rock and returning, slowly, to her cottage.
Once she had safely latched the door and pushed one of the kitche
n chairs under the latch, she refilled the tub and immersed herself, scouring her skin with the gritty underside of a loofa, disregarding the tenderness of her mending cuts and the scald of the water that she had gotten too hot. Every touch of a stranger felt like a violation, every sensual glance a trespass. Finally, after scrubbing vigorously, she stopped and breathed as she slid her arms out the water to rest them on her head.
Am I ruined? she thought.
Would she spend the rest of her life resisting every futile glance, every puck shot at intimacy? Would she sit behind darkened windows, gazing out onto the moor, lost in the fantasy of the feel of the rocks beneath her skin in a grey rain, the sun entranced behind the clouds as thick as wool and the trees a damp canopy overshadowing soft, warm hands moving over her, and dying alone because she had once grazed the membrane of something unattainable but real, so that any who dared to come after would only ring with the brass shrill of mockery for what they could never be?
As she sat shelling her peas in the rocking chair, listening to the afternoon buzz of hummingbirds and honey bees and the shuttering of the hard-packed greens falling from their pods, plink, plink, plink, plink, she thought about the feeling of greyhound bus seats, how taking a bus lacks the glamour and prestige of the train car, shutting oneself behind ornate glass doors and staring out at vast plains of trees and mountainside. You could be in any time, at any place. Bus rides were different. Their suspension threw you from side to side, and the drivers manipulate its boxy frame through jammed city streets with the disdainful finesse of garbage collectors rumbling their treasures together through the compactor…