I’ve had disaster dreams for nine nights straight. Meteor crash. Tidal wave. Tornado. Campy dreams as well. New York eaten by army ants. Alien invaders. The atom bomb. Jail busts complete with nail files. And blizzard after blizzard after blizzard. I’m averaging three a night. Penance for surviving my handmade disasters.
It’s dusk. The very end of it anyway, leaving me with enough light to find the path into the campground.
The road into the campground isn’t impressive. It’s dug deep with family-motor-home grooves. Everything around me is flat with shadows. Far off I see the threatening tilt and dip I’d recognize from National Geographic. I was expecting surrealism, Salvador Dalí, or at least Georgia O’Keeffe. Instead, there is a trailer park. No snow. No trees. Only small patches of cedar chips where I can pitch my tent.
I’m tired, dream-anxious. I’ll set up camp, go to sleep. Dream dive. It’s been strange since I hurt Earl. The dreams are horrible. I wake up sobbing, heaving like I’m trying to cough up a hairball. I want to cough it up, dislodge Earl from my lungs so I can feel free. Instead, I wake up feeling lost, but I still want them, the dreams. I crave them.
The snow has stopped coming. It’s still thick on the ground up in the hills, but here, here it is just a dusting at its worst. The wind, however, is picking up speed, beating at my old-fashioned heavy green army tent. Threatening to pole snap. I should explore. Investigate what I came so far to find, but I’m tired.
The campground is surprisingly full and it takes me longer than I’d like to set up camp. The burns on my hands were largely second-degree but my palms are still wrapped in gauze and the pain is still there.
With a grimace, I push my last tent stake in and catch a curtain falling back into place at the RV closest. Someone watching me. It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to see. I ease carefully into the tent. My tent blocks the wind that’s pushing canvas in to touch my cheeks as I undress, arrange blankets. I curl into a fetal position. Pull up blanket layers. I try not to picture the Earl I left at the hospital. A small, all-alone boy in a too-big hospital room. His scarred face red against white sheets. His arms bandaged. Machines and tubes and pulleys meant to help him breathe and pee and hold still. They wouldn’t let me see him.
In the night, however, I’d find my way to his room. They put a cop outside it—outside mine too—but the guys who came on duty at midnight felt bad for us, and they’d let me shuffle in and sit with him, rest my bandaged hands on his chest and hope somewhere in his bruised-up brain he felt the weight of me.
I picture Earl now not as I saw him last but as I wish he was. No machines, no mask. Just Earl sleeping. His small body under blankets. His eyelids resting soft and grateful. Earl. I’m sorry. I shut my eyes. Wind ripples the tent canvas.
I’m moving up out of dark. Swimming for air in my fishbowl. Kids laughing. Something clanking. A water pump? Morning dishes. Didn’t sleep well. But no disasters. I open my eyes to stained canvas. There’s a lump under my back. The lump shivers under the hollow spaces between my body and dirt. It squirms when I shift, moves down past my tailbone.
I crawl outside in my T-shirt and underwear to loosen a tent stake and peer underneath. A lizard darts out to stand at my bare toes blinking rapidly, shyly aware of my height. He ducks his shiny black head toward ground so I won’t see so much of his half-circle smile, but the gleam of the red stripe down his back in the sunshine gives away his pride. He’s as big as my foot. When I bend down to stretch a finger along his slick-oil-surface skin, he darts under the RV parked next door. I hop up on the picnic table bench to clear his path. He gives me a hiss, a tongue-drag-tail hiss as he swishes in the dirt. It’s a soft hisssss, barely a threat. It starts the word going in my head again. “Hysterectomy.” I remember now, last night, alone and only half asleep in the tent with the wind pushing at me, I practiced saying it slow. Hyssssssterectomy. Slower so that the y changes into an i. Hissssssssssterectomy. I like the way it slides out from between my front teeth; it’s spit-slippery and sly. I drag it out at the end until it vibrates my lips. Hisssssssssssterectomeeee. It sounds like the balloon-size leak that brought all of the gushy clumps out of me in the first place. Bodily fluids all mixed up until they can’t even recognize their own potential. Hissssssssssssssterectomeeeeeeeeee. A word like that will upset my RV-owning neighbors.
It’s morning. From atop the picnic table, I can catch a look at the landscape that juts out in crevices and pillars like shadow puppets against the faint pink skyline. My skin has begun to itch again.
I can hardly wait to change into my jeans and boots and head into the Badlands. I’ll need to wear my sweater today. The wind whips up sand and cold and makes exposed skin pucker. Standing tall on the bench, my socks stuck to the wood by splinters and ancient-family-barbecue leftovers, I listen. The wind sounds different here. Different than it did in the hills. It’s full of voices carried in from the surrounding highways and towns.
The curtain on the RV to my right keeps opening and shutting. Someone’s peering at me. The same person from last night I’d guess. I can’t really blame them. I’m standing here half naked, tent stake in hand. My legs are obscene with bruises and scrapes and goose bumps. It’s impossible to shave around the traumas and so all the long black hairs stand out on end. I hop off the bench, bend down, and try to stick the stake back in the hole only the hole has already swallowed itself up. I stand up and push the heel of my foot against the stake until it slides a little farther in.
I duck into the tent to shake out my jeans. They’ve stiffened overnight. I check the pockets and give them one final shake to make sure there are no lizards living in the wrinkles. I bought a fisherman’s sweater in the town a half hour away from the park. The sweater was five dollars. There are coffee stains on the front. Some sloppy fisherman resting his cup on his gut or, more likely, a yuppie unable to drive and sip at the same time. In either case, the sweater’s warm and sloppy on my frame. With a white undershirt, it blocks the wind enough to make life outside comfortable. My hair is cleaner and softer than it has been in months, easy to braid. I’ve been in hotel rooms these last nights. I took hot shower after hot shower. Scrubbed my hair with flower-woman scents.
I lean out to get my boots. I left them outside to keep from dragging in quite so much sand.
I have very little food. Some bread, apples, a granola bar, and half a pack of Life Savers. I settle in at the picnic table, which is carved deep with hearts and arrows and curse words. I run my finger along Steve and Allison. I have a brief flash, the couple bent over, red pocketknife digging out a picnic-table memory. Such a silly thing. I’ll do the same later. Dig Earl and Emma into wood.
At night, I smell smoke, as if the diner and surrounding woods are still burning. When I’m sleeping, the Black Hills are not so far off and neither is the hospital that sits in their shadow with Earl in a bed, wrapped up tighter in his body than ever, the kind officer telling me that first long night: “The external burns are minor. It’s the smoke inhalation that they are worried about now. They don’t know when or if your daughter will wake up.”
“Son. He’s a boy.”
“Okay. Your son.”
And just like that he was my son. Mine. I felt a mix of joy and terror then that I couldn’t reconcile. I did not correct the officer. Instead, in the coming days, I got quieter. Listened. Watched. It wasn’t like my last hospital stay. They were kind, gentle. They all thought Earl was mine.
I finish tying up my boots and climb back into the tent one more time so that I can roll up the blankets and grab my leather jacket. I saw a phone at the entrance to the campground. I’ll call, tell my mother I’m alive. I’m strong. I have a handful of quarters, dimes, nickels, but mostly pennies that I transfer to another pocket. The rest I hold in my bandaged palm and count as I walk. Nearly four dollars. I could call collect but the idea of leaving that bill behind, that reminder seems wrong. It would also give her that extra moment in which to say no, to turn me away before she’s heard my voice.
The pay phone is carved up almost as badly as the picnic table. Michael loves Nadine. Jessica and Rachel were here. I pick up the receiver. It’s ice-cream sticky, good in case my palms start to sweat. I’ll still have some traction. I drop in change and listen to it clatter through, a nickel falls in the dust between my feet. There’s a pause before the phone begins to ring. The old pale blue rotary phone sitting on the end table in the living room, each ring rattling the metal handle on the drawer. My mother finishing up breakfast dishes. Shaking the soap off her hands, drying them as she walks to the phone. Flats squeaking on linoleum and then shuffling onto living room carpet. It rings four times, five.
“Hello.”
I can hear the distance between us static and pulsing. I don’t know what to say first. I should hang up before the phone line clicks dead. I press my finger deep into my other ear, but I can still hear the kids playing freeze tag behind me in the campground.
“It’s Emma. Are you there?” I press my finger deeper still until all I can hear is my blood pumping. The silence doesn’t become any clearer.
“Yes. I’m here.” Her voice is dotted with miles.
“I wanted to call.” I hold the receiver closer to my mouth. My chin presses to the black plastic; my bottom lip grooves into the tiny holes.
“Where are you?” She’s brittle and anger flimsy. I could scatter her with one slam of the phone. I hadn’t expected to have any power.
“Far away. And, well, things haven’t been so good for me.” I dig my thumbnail into the groove of Tess and Amelia Friends4Ever.
“Yeah, well, things have been hard for all of us.” She spits it out quick either because she hasn’t meant to say it just yet or because she’s anxious to point out my mistake. “I’m sorry, Emma. I didn’t mean that. Are you all right?”
There’s a faint noise, a click. I squeeze the receiver harder, press it against my ear.
“Are you there?”
“I’m here,” she says. I hear her suck air, hold it, and then continue.
“I’ve done a lot of things I can’t take back,” I say.
“Oh Emma. We all have.”
“I want to get healthy,” I blurt out.
“You mean you want the radiation?” I can tell she is trying hard not to sound excited. She doesn’t want to scare me away.
“I mean I want to stop using. Drugs. And people. I want to get the cancer out of my body. I want these burns to heal.”
“What burns?”
“Nothing. I mean it doesn’t matter. I just want to heal.”
“I want that for you too.”
“Mom,” I say testing out the word.
“Yes,” she says. The test a success. She accepts this word from me, likes it even. I can hear relief in her voice.
“I wanted it to be a baby,” I say suddenly. “I thought I could be a better parent than you and Daddy. Like I would know all the mistakes not to make. Now I’m glad it wasn’t real. I would have fucked it up. There is no way I could raise a child.”
“Emma,” she says as if my name is the only thing she is certain of.
“I’m too selfish.”
“Everyone is selfish at eighteen. You’re supposed to be selfish. I was selfish! I didn’t want a baby. I got pregnant and I knew I had to have you, but I’d hit my belly with my fist every morning.”
“Jesus. That’s a horrible thing to say.”
“Wait. Let me finish. Then, after you were born, I loved you so much that I knew what I felt for your father and what he felt for me had never been enough. Not really. Not for a lifetime. And I knew that my world could be bigger with you in it. All those little things I used to worry about became insignificant. There was just you and me. That’s what mattered.”
“I don’t know what all that means for me now.”
“Trying to save your father from himself almost killed me. Choosing to be your mom though … well, that saved me, Emma. You are my family. Always will be no matter what you do.” She pauses before asking, “Are you okay?”
“I am okay.”
“Are you safe?”
I think about that word “safe” for a while and all that a mother might mean by asking it and then answer: “I am safe, Mom. I’m okay.”
“I love you, Emma.”
She wants me to say it back, but I can’t so I say, “I’ll call you in a few days and…” The phone goes dead. Thank you for choosing us as your long-distance carrier. I keep the receiver pressed tight to my ear, dead dial tone cuts in. I grip it tightly until it begins to beep loud and harsh. I hang up with my free hand, hold it down but keep the phone to my ear for another minute.
I walk back to my tent, focus on the sifting of the sand away from my boots. I need to get inside the tent. Sit for a minute where no one can see me. “Family.” The word is thumping around in my belly, pushing against absent organs, begging to burst open my ugly scar. “Love.” That’s another good one I’ll never understand. The word begins and ends with a sound so soft, so gentle yet it congeals on my tongue. It doesn’t hiss or howl or swoosh. It only sits there, mouth rotting.
Nine days ago, I drove up to an emergency hospital entrance. Slammed brakes into a skid, dragged myself out, bleeding, aching, crying, shrapnel-pincushion Emma. I hobbled through sliding doors, latched on to a nurse, a doctor, some woman in mint-green scrubs. I told them Earl was still in the Jeep.
“There’s a fire in the hills. My little boy got hurt. I couldn’t get him out fast enough. Please, save him.” I was still really scared. Suddenly sure I could have done more for Earl if I’d only tried harder, tried sooner. I said, “He’s hurt bad. Please hurry,” and then I passed out. I crawl inside the dirty-green-dome tent, lie flat on my back, and cover my eyes with my hands, press my thumbs into eyelids. Behind them is a smiling Ray I don’t want to concentrate on, but I zoom in again, pull up his face. I can feel the rolls of the blanket under my butt, my jacket and shirt pulled up so that a strip of skin touches the wool itch. I should fix it, but I relax my arms instead, leave my palms over my eyes to keep in the dark. Ray’s face has changed to Earl’s. One soft cheek and one scarred cheek. I’m crying. I feel tears working through the grooves around my eyes before they slide down over the edge and pool in my ears, ocean-salt sounds.
My curled body aches hiccups. I breathe deep. I feel soggy and red. My eyes are burning. I’ll just rest, picture black. Just for a minute and then I’ll go exploring. I’ll wash my face at the pump and then I’ll go.
Earl. Burned-faced, angry Earl. He’s sitting at the corner of the tent, his hospital bed under him, hunched up, drawing on his dangerously pale outstretched leg. He’s holding a shiny silver pen, like a blade, that moves in tight, slow strokes. The pen must hurt him so I whisper, “I’m right here.” He looks at me and smiles, trying to make me smile. Eyes, violet, near purple. A fuzzy-peach velvet. I want to touch his pupils, the pits of his eyes. I reach out, inches from that purple-blue when I notice his scabs. They’re a deep ashy black, thick like charcoal and beginning to slide down his face. The scabs are pulling the wrinkled skin down, leaving behind a smooth, natural, fleshy pink. Like a fancy theater-house curtain falling down to the stage floor. Down from cheekbone to cheek until it all hangs soft off Earl’s jawline, dangerously loose. I turn my outstretched hand palm up to catch the moldable pink mass of ash and scar, but it changes again. Turns to liquid, a silver-gray mercury that drops onto my palm, a metallic puddle that slides even and wormlike over the wrinkles of my skin. Earl’s rising, getting up out of his hospital bed to leave the tent that’s grown to circus size. He stops when his head reaches the canvas top and looks at my liquid palm.
“I’ll be there soon,” I whisper to Earl, and the liquid begins to move, glide quicksilver to my wrist along the inside of my arm up the curve of my armpit, around and under my breasts, cold down my torso to my belly button where it pools thick, turning to a charcoal ash, warming me straight through.