Everything looks familiar and nothing looks familiar. My heart continues to thump and I stumble forward, trip over roots, and reach out to catch myself on tree trunks that rub at my already raw palm. I need to slow down and think. The snow is falling again and starting to stick.
I stop on flat ground. I bend at my knees and hang my head low.
Breathe, Emma. I’m light-headed. Hyperventilating. In. Out. In. Out. It’s not so fucking bad, Emma.
It starts to come back. Some breath. Some sense. Earl’s mother’s body is down there. She’s been dead awhile. Earl told me as much in his own way. At least George didn’t eat her or feed her to the crows or whatever. This is better, right? She’s just dead. Not chopped up. Not digested. Dead and underground where a good body should be. I stand up straight, press my back to a tall pine. I’m steadier, but I’m shivering. I can’t stop shaking and even trying to stop seems to make it worse. George killed her and he’ll kill you next, a little voice in my head is whispering. He shoved her down those stairs and shut the door. Maybe she wasn’t even dead when he shut the doors. Maybe it took days. Maybe Earl could have saved her and he didn’t.
“Shut up,” I say to myself aloud. “The world is full of fucked-up shit. I just need to get to the end of it.”
I shut my eyes and picture the Badlands the way Ray and I always did. Red and craggy. Stretching out before us. Our toes on the edge of a dusty cliff. Our arms out at our sides. Ready to fly.
I open my eyes slowly to the wintry world right here. All around me things are beginning to change. The pines are preparing to carry more weight, puffing up their needles and shaking off their branches. Snow blankets the cold skin of the boulders that dot the landscape. A flake catches on my eyelashes, accidental, and another on my tongue, purposeful. They melt a cold softness. I blink to keep the flakes off of my eyeballs. They land burning kisses on my cheeks, my forehead, and my throat. The flakes gain an icy weight, turn into pebbles that push down to meet ground.
I’m in a fairy tale: The Big-Breasted, Blood-Encrusted Princess.
“Once upon a time there was a dark-haired girl who liked to eat snow and run away from dead bodies,” I say to no one.
Think, Emma.
Which direction is the diner? I walked uphill with Earl so I simply need to head down, but down no longer looks like one simple direction. Snow swirls through the gaps in the trees and a multitude of foggy white paths appear. Were there always so many ways to twist through these trees? Adrenaline takes ahold of the back of my neck and burns through the muscles in my shoulders. It doesn’t matter. I will find the diner and the parking lot when the land levels out. I tell myself this is true. I can’t have gone that far off the trail Earl led me up. I move, picking up my thick feet as quickly as I can. The snow is falling fast and the terrain is unrecognizable. It’s disorienting, like I’ve been spinning myself dizzy, and yet every individual flake and tree and root remains in focus. All I can see is white, and the shaking is taking hold of my hands and teeth. My shoulder hits a tree trunk, stopping me in my tracks, and my feet slide ahead of me. My ass hits the ground. The wind is whipping at me and urging me to stop. It lashes around trees with that evil hint of a train whistle.
The temperature is dropping. I peer past tree trunks to see something almost as tall as the trees, minus the bark.
Where is George? Has he gone inside to sit out the storm or is he close by, following me?
An old stone chimney juts up singularly phallic. The stones are snug, piled strong, and they lead down gracefully to an old foundation that’s laid out like a game of hopscotch. I could toss and skip single footed from room to room on a better, brighter day. I kneel down, creaky kneed, to touch the skeleton of the house.
There is a chance that real families exist. One might have lived inside these walls. Newborn babies and second-floor nursery moments. Hot meals around a table. A group of people who choose each other over and over again.
I remember how angry my mom was with me after she married Frank and I wouldn’t speak to him. Literally did not utter a word to him for nearly a year. She couldn’t understand why I wasn’t grateful. She was right to be mad. I know that now and I knew it then. She was handing me something that maybe wasn’t perfect, maybe wasn’t what I’d asked for, but it was a fresh start. Trying it out would not have done harm.
“Damn it, Emma. I know you miss your father, but he’s gone. And honestly, he wasn’t that great a dad when he was alive,” she said. She shushed me when I began to protest and continued. “I don’t know what you’ve made him into in your head, but he was always drinking. Never really present. He loved you. Please know that, but I loved you too. Still do.”
She was right about some of what she said. I didn’t want a new dad. Frank was boring. He watched football and went to the gym and aspired to nothing more than the purchase of a new camcorder. He bought us a house that looked like every other house. And, somehow worst of all, he loved my mom too much. More than she loved him. I could see that she was stuffing it all down to make a good choice. The right choice. So much so that she failed to notice how I was already like my father, sneaking into the kitchen to drink the last of whatever was in their glasses. I did it to impress Ray at first, but kept doing it because it felt warm and fuzzy, because it blurred the world around me into something less dangerous.
A branch snaps in the woods. The sound is sharp but the fall of it heavy, muffled by the wind and the snow already thick enough to make the ground a cushion. The falling snow is thick now too. I can see no farther than my own outstretched hands.
“Who’s there?” I ask.
My mind is going to make something up. Pull the Sasquatch out of the shadows if given a chance so I look at the foundation again. There’s nothing human left here. This house should never have been. The hills ate it up as fast as they could and what about the family? Settlers, surely, who never belonged here.
Our plan, Ray’s and mine once we found out about Pea Baby, was “never settle.” We were going to keep moving. To give what we could, but never claim. “This country does not belong to us,” Ray would say and I’d agree, nod my head yes, but knowing that everywhere I went, everywhere I looked, I was always looking for a home. As I found out about Pea Baby or thought I did anyway, I became one of those people Ray hated, who simply wanted a front porch and a rocking chair and someone to love them and only them. I became my mom. Pathetic.
“Earl!” I yell into the snow. “Where are you?”
I hug my jacket tighter. It isn’t warm enough. The sweat I worked up in my panic is cooling, and I’m shaking more than ever. The snow pelts down, little white pills that melt before I can swallow them. George is out there somewhere. Free to find me. Free to find Earl.
“Earl!” The wind takes the name and bashes it into nearby pines.
I’ll walk back, away from the ghost-root house, and I’ll find the diner. I shield my eyes with my hand from the snow that’s clinking against my forehead and cheeks. The sky is up there somewhere, tightened and swollen. Angry as fuck.
“Earl!” I shout. My hands are cupped around my mouth to amplify.
The dead-winter woods do nothing to answer me. I’ve lost feeling in my fingers and toes. The world is changing too fast, flipbook animation style all around me. My fairy tale is shifting: Once upon a time there was a princess who slept neck-deep in a snowstorm.
When I was Earl’s age, I took in a stray cat. Fur matted and tangled. Someone had cut off all of his whiskers, leaving him to weave and bob unsure of his limitations and boundaries. I found him at the Dairy Queen and named him Avalanche. One night, I sneaked into the laundry room to dig mint-chocolate-chip ice cream out of the freezer. The next morning, no Avalanche. No purr for breakfast. No fuzzy hug. Later, I went in search of a Popsicle and found him. Peaceful, snowball curled in our freezer. I reached into cold air, fingers brushing frozen dinners and ice bags. Dead. A perfect little sculpture. He must have gone in to lick old ice cream off the side of the carton and I locked him in. My mom helped me bury him the next day. A shallow grave in the backyard that my father never noticed.
I didn’t know I could set to sweating in the middle of a snowstorm, but here I am, sweating and shaking. Hypothermia or withdrawal. The only thing to do is keep walking, move my heavy feet, one, then the other. Avalanche looked so calm. So ignorant of death. My eyes keep tearing up and freezing to my lashes. I stumble forward. Trees.
My body melts first, a big gooey Emma pile falling forward through snow only because the wind is on my back. Knees hit ground, head slides forward and hits metal. Even numb fingers can tell that by some miracle I’ve found the diner. A mew escapes my throat as I hoist myself up.
The air inside is warm, and my throat burns as I take my first deep breath. I stamp my boots to the floor and lightning shoots up through my knees and into my thighs. I move into the kitchen and try to light the stove but my hands are shaking. I smell gas. I try to light one match. Another. Finally, one catches and the stove puffs bright. I sink to the floor. The shaking is spreading from my hands to my arms, to my knees, even into my neck.
I let go, lie down. My clothes snow-melting to soak into the pores of my skin. I’ll rest. Calm, done. The tiredness sweeps over me. Through me. The black feels so good, like velvet. I dream of Ray. His warm body is covering mine.
“I love you, Emma My Emma. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
“Why didn’t we stick together?” I ask. “I should have come with you.”
He is running his fingers through my hair. A habit of his. He will braid it next, turn the long dark strands into puzzles and mazes. It puts me to sleep every time, this braiding game.
“It just didn’t work. That’s all, Emma.”
“I can’t remember what was supposed to happen.”
“You can.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You wanted to prove to me it was a baby.”
A last-minute drug-induced revelation. My body and brain numbed by all we’d ingested. The sick, simple thought—a small incision to the belly, an opening up of the uterus. If I were to cut myself open and cup Ray’s hands around the little bundle inside of me, it would swim to life.
“That’s crazy,” I say to Ray.
“You wanted to live. I wanted to die. It doesn’t have to make more sense than that.”
And then a different voice, “Shhhh.”
Ray fades.
Through the darkness, I hear a series of caws and then a rattling that makes me think of a snake’s long shimmer of a body, but the soft feathers that brush my skin tell me it is a crow. One of Earl’s crows, I think. Talons rest on my skin, sharp needles connected by leathery toes.
“Emma,” the crow says. “Emma.” A bark of a name and the smooth sides of its beak brush my cheeks as if to soothe.
A wave of air that smells like cedar sweeps over me and then the crow is pulling at my limbs, taking off my wet jacket, my shoes. For a moment in my fog, I know Ray has returned just as much as I know that I am the kitten. And that’s how I’d rewrite it, if I could do such a thing. I’d go back and Ray would find me in the freezer. He’d pull me out and hold me in his cupped palms, and even as I think this, I know I am confused. My mind is not right. That was before Ray. When Daddy was still alive and sleeping on the couch. In the morning, I’d change the sheets and flip the cushions so Mommy wouldn’t know he’d pissed himself again.
“Daddy,” I say. “Wake up.” He sleeps on his side with his back to the room. His rib cage lifting toward the ceiling. His snores make him sound like he is drowning.
I shove him hard with both hands.
“Get up,” I say.
“Shhhh,” he says. “I have to get you warm.” This is not what Daddy would say, but he’s saying it as he wakes from sleep, turning toward me on the couch with his sloppy morning drool face, only his bottom half isn’t turning. His torso twists separate from his pelvis, the skin stretching like Silly Putty and then the blood, oozing out of his middle.
“I’ll fix it, Daddy. Just get up. I’ll fix it.”
“Shhhh,” he says again but his face doesn’t move. It’s not him. I see that now. It’s someone else. My father died before my ninth birthday.
“There is a body in the cellar,” I say, and I see Earl’s mother again. Leaning there. Her swollen skin shifts, plumping up. Her long hair turning silky. She smiles. Soft. Stands. Moves to the chair across the cellar and takes a seat. Rests her arms on her knees and leans in toward me. I fall back, rag doll on the floor. I become the body.
“I’m not good for other people,” I say, but she only smiles at me with more kindness.
It comes in waves. Rolls of sick, and I retch until my body can’t and then I vomit nothing. Air and regret and the memory of past consumption. I don’t think it will ever stop, but then it does.
Then the world is warm and dark and soft and quiet and I go.
Darkness is replaced by a raw tenderness that prevents me from moving. My eyes are open. My joints ache, my toes burn a steady throb.
This could be dead, I think, but I move slowly, letting each appendage bend and stretch before sitting up. I’m covered in blankets I don’t recognize. I’m lying next to the open oven and the kitchen is wonderfully warm. I wiggle my toes. I can feel all of them. My boots are off. My socks too. Dazed, I reach out of the blankets to touch my face and then I peek under the blankets. I’m naked except for my sports bra and underwear, and I see now that my clothes are draped over the counters. Spread out to dry. There is sick in my hair, and the smell makes me feel sick again but my stomach has nothing left to give. I wrap my hair into a tight bun at the back of my head and hold it still with an elastic.
Next to me is a lump of a little body. Hair sticking up wild from the top of the blankets. The familiar silver butterfly mask crookedly covering but not centered. It’s Earl. And I realize a few things at once. First, this is my chance to see Earl’s real face. Second, Earl has the body of a little girl. I think of George. I don’t have a son.
I wrap a loose blanket around my shoulders. I lean in and try to move the mask, but Earl snorts and swats at me before rolling over on her back, the mask moving to cover more face than before. I reach for the blankets and lift them slowly, peer under. A pale body, naked except for panties. A soft waist giving in to a too-thin rib cage.
I drop the blankets back down.
I feel a sharp sadness in my chest. Was he, I mean she, so scared of me that being a boy seemed safer? Of course, it is always safer to be a boy. Everyone knows that. Fucking men always waiting to take something that isn’t theirs, to reach up into your insides and tear you up.
I tiptoe around the small diner kitchen. I need time to gather my thoughts. Figure out what to do. I push open the door and step into the seating area, which is much cooler than the kitchen.
Outside the windows, the world is settling. The early morning sky is clear and bright. The snow has stopped falling. It lies thick and untouched. I hear a throat-clearing growl and a bear walks out of the trees and onto the parking lot. A big, lumbering, belly-sloppy bear sidles up to Veronica, pushing at her gently with his nose. She rocks under his weight and snow falls off her roof onto the bear’s back. He shakes it off, annoyed. The snowfall has taken him by surprise as well. October, even late October, must be early for this kind of weather. He thought he had a little time before he had to hibernate. He’s huge, fattened up for the winter but not yet asleep. He’s crossing the snow-covered parking lot alone and leaving pothole-size footsteps behind. It’s the largest animal I’ve ever seen. He stops and looks through the diner window to consider me the same way I am considering him. His big brown eyes are on mine. We watch each other for a moment before he moves on.
Back in the kitchen, I stand over the kid.
Our parents sent Ray on Outward Bound the year after they got married. He’d been acting out. Sneaking out of the house, cutting himself. While I managed to keep my drinking secret, Ray was not so skilled. At the wedding, my soon-to-be stepfather pulled me aside and asked me to watch out for him. He made me Ray’s babysitter.
“He needs your sense of balance, Emma,” his father said. “Stay close to him.” Easy enough, I was already in love with Ray. Our stupid parents were so worried that they let us fall asleep, curled together in his hot room watching B movies until we slept. They saw nothing sexual between us. No warning signs at all, and perhaps they were right. Ray loved me, but not in the way I wanted him to.
My Ray was gone for three months on Outward Bound. He didn’t want to go. He hated them for making him. I wrote him notes every night. Observations from the day that I would have shared with him had he been there alongside of me:
Slept through breakfast lunch and dinner. Thinking of a pizza snack. Wishing for a monkey butler.
In July, when the corn is knee high, let’s fold in half and disappear.
Mrs. Hurie stopped wearing bras. Her boobs hang like pendulums when she gardens. I dare you to look away.
I had nowhere to send them, but I piled them up on loose scraps of paper and tucked them into his pillowcase.
In the end, he portaged through Minnesota in February and came back with a host of gruesome stories and a renewed love for bathroom humor and a best friend named Charlie, who I resented. Ray looked good when he came back. He’d put on weight. His cuts had healed. He loved to tell me how brave he’d been.
They jumped into icy waters on purpose so that someone else could drag them out and save them from freezing to death. You get the victim and yourself undressed, then wrap up next to them.
Earl did the same thing for me. Kept me safe. A wave of feeling passes through me right then. Protectiveness? Love? The kind of too-late feelings I should have had for Ray at the end.
My jeans are stiff, potato-bag harsh against my bruised legs. My socks are still wet, but I haven’t been this well cared for since I was very little and I hadn’t yet taught my mom to be afraid to love me.
Earl’s clothes are in a pile on the floor. A big wet heap that hasn’t been sorted out. I pull it apart and lay it out in the same careful way my clothes were laid out for me. I kneel down next to her. The butterfly mask has slipped almost entirely off, and I put my hand between Earl’s shoulder blades.
“Hey, Earl,” I say. “Can you wake up?”
And just like that she shoots up, blankets and mask falling away so that she can back up against the wall. Both hands to her face to cover what I briefly see are the scars she promised me.
“Whoa, I’m not going to hurt you.”
I loved Ray’s scars—my love never distinguished between the accidental and the self-inflicted. I wanted to trace them, mark them. They were a way of claiming ownership over him, and because of me, he kept making them. Cut here and here and here. I would trace them when they were still bloody. Lie lazily next to him in our spot by the river and count the marks where he’d opened himself up. Ask for one more.
I want to tell Earl that I know she is a girl and that being a girl is okay. That being a girl is great, even if that’s a lie.
She’s just a little kid. A body that needs a bath. Small hands. Tiny feet. She has the fat belly of a little kid not grown to her full height and yet her body is already changing, subtly shifting. I got my period when I was nine. A terrifying surprise to me and a devastation to my mom.
“Oh, Emma,” my mom said when she caught me pulling the stained sheets out of the dryer. I’d panicked and tried to clean them as I would have for my father’s accidents, forgetting to throw in my own pajama pants. Blood and urine leave different histories.
Earl has a birthmark on her chest that looks like the state of Ohio. And then I do what I know I shouldn’t and I lie. “It’s okay. I’ve already seen your scar.”
The kid doesn’t say anything and continues to secure the mask either out of habit or because I’m a liar.
“You’re a girl,” I say gently.
“Am not.”
“I see you. You’re a girl and that’s okay. I’m a girl too. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I’m not a girl.” I hear the anger. It’s an old rage. Something said before. Shouted. Whimpered. “I’m a boy, just got the wrong parts.”
“Okay, Earl, what do you mean ‘wrong parts’?” I ask.
“I don’t have a penis. I have a gina.” He whispers the word “gina” as if it is our secret code phrase. “My mama said God got mixed up and switched my parts with some other kid.”
“So, some girl is wearing your penis around?” I ask.
Earl laughs in spite of himself. “I think it’s just stuck up in, you know, there. It’ll come out when it’s ready.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works, and what’s wrong with being a girl?” I ask.
“Nothing’s wrong with it. I’m just not!” He’s had this conversation a hundred times before and he starts to get dressed.
“Fine. You’re a boy.”
“You believe me?”
“Makes no difference to me what you are. I’m used to you being a boy. It’s old news.”
He smiles. Grateful. My chest expands with warmth.
“Did you move him?”
“Move who?” I know exactly whom he means.
“George.”
“No.”
He looks surprised, and I think his surprise is like my own—he isn’t accustomed to people being honest—but then he says, “He’ll come for us.”
I think of the empty lawn chair.
“He’s dead now, I’m sure of it.” The snow falls steadily. The temperature is too low for someone outside to survive the night.
“Was he dead when you left him?” Earl asks.
“No,” I admit. “But he was dying and I tied him to the chair and he was just lying there on the ground.”
“Lying there?”
“Yes, Jesus. He fell over in the chair. He woke up, so I tied him to the chair and then he vomited and fell over. He passed out.”
Earl stares at me for a while.
“What were you doing that whole time?”
The cellar. Body brown. Skull bones visible through skin. Like a sheet of tissue paper wrapped around a birthday present.
“You saw her,” he says.
“I was with your dying father. That’s plenty.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Earl,” I say, and reach out to grab his arm. It is a touch meant to reassure him, to hold him still so I can talk some sense into him, but he swipes at my hand and breaks free without even giving me a minute of contact. This is the same kid who let me wrap around him last night? “I’m not going to hurt you.”
He says nothing.
“You don’t know him. He makes me dress up like a girl. He calls me Earlene,” Earl says, and then takes off his butterfly mask, and I see what else George is capable of. A face thick with scars but also fresh spots. Little red scabs over cigarette burns. A split lip.
“George did this?” I ask. “Because you are a boy?”
“I’m what he’s got left. He doesn’t like that.”
Rage grows in me, a welcome déjà vu of a tamped-down feeling. Warm and thick and burning at the edges. I let George go, and now he’s free to find Earl again.
“It’s not so bad,” Earl says, and the rage loses its heat, goes rigid with its sudden cooling.
I stare at his eyes now, and in that look from Earl to Emma and Emma to Earl, I feel it. The fear. George is coming; he is here in these hills.
“He didn’t always want me dead. We moved here so we could start again. He said this would fix everything. Mama said he wouldn’t hurt us anymore if he was happy.”
“But he did hurt you. He does. He killed your mother, didn’t he.”
Earl flinches a little but recovers quickly. “We moved, but he was never happy. This place wasn’t what he said it would be. Maybe if it had been more like what he’d planned he would have gotten better instead of worse.”
“A place doesn’t just turn you, Earl.”
“I don’t think he meant to kill her. He just wanted to make her stop crying. He said it was all he could ever hear out here, her hollering and weeping, so he held on to her neck too long. I couldn’t stop him. I should have stopped him. I tried. This place made him sick. He says we’re running out of money.”
“Earl,” I say, his name coming out of me with such sorrow that saying anything else seems arbitrary. But then I think again and add, “Why do you want to stay here in this sad place?”
“What do you mean?” he asks. “You think it’s gonna make me sick too? Make me kill someone?” His eyes are wide with fear of the possibility.
“Haven’t you already killed someone? Or tried anyway?” I ask. “George. You’ve tried to kill your father,” I say when I see he isn’t getting it. How has this not occurred to him before.
“George doesn’t count,” he says, but I can tell he is unsure. He isn’t sure what he’s capable of. I know that feeling. I’ve worried my whole life that I’m crazy.
“My mama’s here and it isn’t bad for me like it is for him. It makes me feel strong like I can make my own world, like I won’t ever have to fit into anyone else’s again.”
“My father taught me that no one is evil by accident. You have to invite it in. Don’t invite it, Earl. Leave here with me.”
I reach across the distance again for Earl’s small hand and he lets me take it. I lean down and keep my eyes locked on to his pupils.
“We have to hurry, Earl. We have to run.”