MEN PREFERRED ME blond, rich, and on the verge of expiration. I was someone before my hair caught on fire: a woman with a pedigree who glamorously slummed it, the owner of black diamond earrings and forever-bruised knees. A daughter whose heart once broke in four places when my mother called me an expensive parking lot, trash taken out on Wednesdays. Even after that strange woman with the butter breath and wild eyes tied my ankles so tight the slightest movement made my skin scrape and burn, even after the flames singed my hair charcoal—even then, I never considered an apology, a final cinematic plea for forgiveness.
I wasn’t the woman who barged into that house and rearranged the furniture. The house was run-down and flashing No Vacancy long before I pulled up in the driveway and made my demands.
When that woman yanked the sock out of my mouth and said, “Tell me why you did it,” I coughed through tears, “I . . .” Mind changed, sock shoved all the way in, lights out, door locked, and the woman soft-knuckling the window, waving her goodbyes.
Somehow I managed to escape before any real damage was done.
I wasn’t always this way. I wasn’t always the lightbulb hanging over a man’s bed.
WE COULD START the story with me, Gillian. That’s one way to go about it. The story of the home-wrecking whore who got her hair caught on fire and managed to survive. Managed to shake free from the ropes and jump out of a window. Do you know what it’s like to feel your skin burn like paper, to see glass cling to your body? I heard the sirens and smelled the smoke, but you should know that my story begins and ends with my brother, Jonah.
Jonah’s not a man, not yet. In the literal sense of the word, of course, of course, with his license to buy booze he’ll never drink and rent cars he’ll never drive because he walks. But to me he’s a thirty-five-year-old boy with uneven arms from a car accident we don’t talk about. Holes in his arms that are slowly closing up, needle marks everyone wishes they could drywall. Points of entry, Jonah once called them.
In his sleep he talks about a girl called Lucia. In his sleep he’s always talking about girls.
WHEN JONAH WAS eleven he told me that he drew circles around his body with chalk, marker, whatever he could get his hands on, and he’d ask me why people traced outlines around dead bodies. “That’s a myth,” I said. “Chalk upsets the integrity of the scene. Cops take pictures.”
One night after our father came home drunk, Jonah snuck into our parents’ bedroom, and, with string, made an outline of our father’s body. He took all the paring knives out of the kitchen drawer and arranged them around the body, the blades pointing toward his sleeping father. Mother smiled, smoothed his hair in all the right places, and said, “Look at you, saving me.”
“Take pictures,” I said. Sometimes I wrote stories about small children murdering their parents. Sometimes I read these stories to Jonah out loud. But they were just stories—words stranded on a page.
Back then, Mother held Jonah longer than she should. She was always grasping at things, and he seemed to be the one constant, the one thing that would allow for her fierce attachment. Theirs was a love that made him grow and forced her to retreat. When he wandered off, which he was prone to do, she would trail behind, tidying up. When he caught a bird by the legs and squeezed it, hard, Mother begged him to let it go. There was tetanus, rabies, and multisyllabic illnesses to consider, treat, and manage. “Sixteen shots to the stomach,” she said. “Needles as long as your arm,” she said. But he didn’t acquiesce, rather he stared at her with eyes that were a chilling blue, and said, “Do you think it can feel me?” The bird thrashed and Jonah’s arms were clawed but still he held on. Mother later told me she was awestruck, admired Jonah (so fearless!), but I never understood it—how Mother didn’t shake the crazy out of Jonah and lock him in his room. But that was our mother: always wanting to be the thing she created, never what she was.
After a few moments, Jonah let the bird go. Said, “I’m bored with this. Do we need to go to the hospital now? Should we go in the car? But wait, you can’t drive.”
When I was sixteen and back from a short stint at a boarding school out east, Jonah said, “You’re adopted.” Over the past year I had whittled down to bone and was horrified by the prospect of this smooth, buttery cake adding a layer over my slight frame. Was it possible to gain weight by proximity, by standing next to the thing one was desperate to avoid? I felt old. But I was small, like sonnets, and I believed this to be a good thing. Woman as integer. The kitchen was quiet save for Jonah’s steady breathing. Our father was on a plane to who knows where, coming from who knows what, and Mother was in the bedroom, buying skirts from catalogs.
“It’s not my fault you’re a loser,” I said.
“Try putting something in your mouth, give it a new sensation. I’m talking about things that are edible, although that’s debatable.” Jonah reached for a muffin, a blueberry one, which was cruel and calculating because blueberry muffins were my absolute and unequivocal downfall, the one thing that could bring this elimination game down, tip the scales as it were, and he knew this. Look at that fucker tearing into the muffin like some barn animal. It wasn’t even a muffin-top tease—it was a full-on assault, down to the burned ends and crumbs on his plate! As he reached for another muffin I realized I hated him. This was more than the normal sort of hate that transpires between siblings who, say, dodge one another between classes and deny each other’s existence in the confines of fluorescent hallways and cafeterias. Rather, this was a body gone numb, a loathing that rises up your throat, the kind that makes you feral, where I could imagine stabbing my brother with a fork because he devoured what I desired. Look at his mouth, all gruesome and covered in crumbs!
“At least Mom didn’t catch me getting off. Oh wait, that was you,” I said, sipping hot water.
“She probably liked it. Probably the most skin she’s seen in months. Now I get why Dad put the clamp on porn. Looking through people’s windows and barging into their rooms is far more interesting. You get the unscripted version of things.”
“You’re totally sick.”
“I’m not sick and stop saying totally.”
Upstairs a door creaked. Mother shouted: “What’s with all the yelling?”
“You’re adopted. We picked you from among the children in an orphanage in the Dakotas. You know they had children in cages back then? You were filthy and ate your hair but we took pity on you, loved you anyway. Or that’s what Mom told me. No one told you until now because we didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but someone has to put an end to it. Someone needs to wipe the tears. Come on, make with it, Gillian. Show me sad.”
“Shut up. Shut your mouth.” He’d been on this kick for weeks, talking about bloodlines and lineage, and Mother had said, Well of course you’re not adopted. Who would tell you such a story? Behind me Jonah stood with his finger over his lips. I knew how far he could go, which secrets to reveal and which to keep, so I shook my head and had said, Never mind, never more. Jonah had a way of crawling under your skin and settling there. Altering the way you felt things.
“You’re not our kind,” Jonah whispered to me while he thought I slept. “But maybe that’s a good thing.”
A decade later I reminded him about the argument, to which he replied, “Of course you’re our kind. What does that even mean, our kind ? Who else’s would you be?”
“WERE YOUR KNEES always like that? Bruised?” Jonah says, leaning into me in a way that feels like an intrusion. It’s a month after the hotel room incident and I cut my hair short to hide the fact that parts were burned. What right did he have to my knees? Jonah continues, “It’s a good thing that Ellie’s dead. It’s good. She’s gone one-way while we’re still scrambling for our round-trip tickets.”
“What are you talking about, Jonah?”
“I think you mean who. By the way, what happened to your hair?”
“My hair is none of your business. Tell me you’re not skipping pills. Didn’t the doctor tell you about the pills? How you needed to keep taking them?”
“Why would I take pills that stop me from seeing things as they really are?”
“Tell me about your life, about the friends you’re making,” I say, desperate to change the subject.
“Friends? I never figured you one for banalities. Should we make small talk then? Talk about the weather, the book I just read, or the five-year-old girl that was fucked in India and forced to marry her rapist? No, I thought we’d talk about you. About the friend you’ve made.”
The way Jonah says friend.
And then: “About the car he drives, that house he lives in with that dead wife and the daughter in the window. Never thought you’d be a woman who goes in for stucco. I used to like to watch her sometimes—the daughter, not the wife. Although I suppose I could go visit her if I knew where she was buried. Mainly, I wonder how the story about my sister, and the man who sleeps on top of her sheets instead of between them, will play out.”
“She wasn’t buried, she was burned,” I say. “Quit playing Nancy Drew. It doesn’t suit you. Remember, you live in New York.”
“You brought me back, dear sister, remember? They say after your body is cremated, they grind the remains of you. Imagine a body in a blender,” Jonah says. “But I’ll tell you about Lionel. He’s smart. He’s been teaching me about evil. How to find it, carve it out, and make the necessary calibrations and corrections.” Jonah talks in a way that’s foreign, in a voice that doesn’t belong to my brother. Or possibly this was him all along.
“Jonah, you’re scaring me.”
“Have you met her?” Jonah says. He’s lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.
“Met who?”
“Kate. She’s a piece of work, that one. Sometimes I follow her to the ravine just to see her stare at the rocks.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the sad girl who still watches you sleep. By the way, why haven’t you gone to the police? Press charges.”
“I want to be a person who turns over leaves.”
“News flash: leaves look the same on both sides.”
Jonah’s room is blue. He needs it that way, clean. Jonah rents a building under construction, a building still being renovated, and his room was once a laboratory where doctors in the business of elimination would perform procedures on rich pregnant women. Floor painted black, walls the color of certain skies—he needs space to move because he’s become dormant, like barnacles affixed to the undersides of large ships and fat whales. He’s become attached to pain, so much so that Lionel has to put the shake in him, has to shove him in front of the mirror so Jonah can see the barnacles. They cover his face. There’s no way to get clean. “They know their own kind,” Lionel says, handing him a knife. “Get to scraping,” Lionel urges. “There’s no way of getting clean otherwise.” His words are a blinding sunrise Jonah doesn’t want to see, a note held for too long (needle lifted, placed back on the record, again, again) to a point where the music becomes unbearable. Jonah’s face hurts, feels smothered, this is why he needs the blue. The river will loosen the grip and cool him down.
“Through me you go into a city of weeping; through me you go into eternal pain; through me you go among the lost people,” says Lionel, whispering in Jonah’s ear like resuscitation.
“I don’t need your CPR,” Jonah says. “And I don’t need you to clean up my mess. I need my sister back.”
“You keep holding on to that,” Lionel laughs.
A head lifts, a word holds and plays out the scene, looks for places to hide but there are none. And the cold, “No.” The word is a note folded into itself, a wave carrying his voice out into the ocean, and he finds himself grabbing for a mouthful of air, wants to shut Lionel the fuck up (“Dude, can you just quit the shit?”), but there’s no quitting of the shit. There is only Lionel, whose voice, with the passage of each day, only seems to get louder.
Behind him, Lionel breathes down his neck and whispers, “We need to talk about your sister. We need to talk about what should be done with her.”
“What should be done with her?” Jonah says.
“I think you know.”
WHEN JONAH WAS twelve, he was tall, angular, but soft, the sort of boy who didn’t shoot guns like the rest of them. He kept close to our mother, hid behind the folds of her dresses, and our father hated him for it. Hated that his son was allowed access to his wife’s heart, permitted to touch the skin underneath her clothes. Once Jonah was in the picture, Mother swatted our father away.
When our father arrived home from a village that cartographers failed to diagram, raw from a deal that fell through—a botched investment that would require us to move to a garden apartment, hock all the finery, and use the old dishes with the flowers rubbed off—he was drunk on gin and sore beneath his clothes from a disagreement regarding the failed deal. Later, Mother affixed ice packs to blankets to wrap around his thighs and shins, which had swollen and bruised black. Later, they packed the whole of our lives into boxes they stole from the supermarket. Later, Mother shrilled at her husband, “You are lesser than.” Mother’s fury gave her the kind of temporary apoplexy that prevented her from completing sentences, but her fragments and half thoughts were just as ruinous.
But in his room at that particular moment were just Jonah, age twelve, and our father’s anger.
I also remember blood, my own, how it soaked through my pants and stained the sheets. I spent two days each month in the bathroom, and on that Saturday I heard our father stomp up the stairs and reprimand Jonah for something that we won’t remember.
A scuffle, chairs knocked over, and a succession of screams. Father bolted, fled into the street. I found Jonah on the floor, one blue eye bleeding. I pried open his fist to find a pair of tweezers, wet with blood. Smiling he said, “I tried to be good, but being good does you no good so what else is there?”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I didn’t like how he kicked open my door like that. I didn’t like his tone. So I taught him manners. It’s sad when you have to teach adults things they should already know.”
We ran to the car. How hard could it be to drive, I thought. Shove the key into the ignition, hit the gas pedal, and steer the wheel. I was fifteen, swerving a car down the street.
The road shows us how close to the edge we are.
Jonah stared out the car window, seeing through it, beyond it, to the houses down the drive. “You know what I did, but we can pretend if that’s how you want to play it.”
“Jonah, what did you do?”
“I don’t like mittens, or people who wear them. That poor thumb is left to fend for itself, while all the other fingers point and laugh.”
“Tell me what you did with the tweezers.”
“You saw. Lionel cut things,” Jonah said. “He told me to sleep. Told me he was going to play doctor and Dad’s role was the victim. So I went to sleep. Where are we going?”
“We’re running away.”
“You’re driving. I’m sitting. No one’s running.”
“We can’t talk about Lionel. You know the rules.”
“Yes, sir,” Jonah said. “Let’s play a game.”
“What kind of game?”
“To play it, we’ll need the tree.”
His hand jerked the wheel. My foot pumped the gas instead of the brake. The smell of steel and smoke perfumed. Glass raked through our hair. His collarbone shattered. My knees were scraped and battered.
At the hospital, Mother hissed at me, “What were you thinking? What did you do?”
“I’m bleeding,” I said.
“You’re good for nothing,” she said, but she was already gone, scurrying away with her little address book to the pay phone.
“Don’t listen to her,” my father said. “Your mother’s trying to calm down after the thought of losing you kids.”
“How? By acting like an asshole?”
Father walked like a man past his prime, already put out to pasture; a man who knew that his wife changed the sheets on their bed before he pulled into the driveway because he couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping on something used. Once I overheard him say to Mother, “Keep it clean and quiet.” To which she responded, “What kind of woman do you take me for? I’ve been clean; it’s been quiet.”
All those years, Mother gave him the gift of clean sheets.
Even in the waiting room, with its air conditioning and too-bright lights, they could feel the heat. The hot wind came down from the desert, determined to scorch the earth clean. Twenty days a year they suffered the kind of heat that made sane men wild, rabid, prone to killing garden snakes and black rabbits with machetes. The kind of heat that made women push their husbands out of moving cars while their newborns were strapped in the back seat. Teenagers jumped off the tallest buildings they could find, but only ended up cracking ribs and breaking a few bones. The streets stunk of carrion, cigarette smoke, and bad luck.
Mother stood against a pay phone, loading it up with change, punching the keys, and wailing into the receiver at whoever was on the other side. When I approached her, placed a nervous hand on her shoulder, she whirled around and hissed, “You just couldn’t keep it together, could you? Always have to be the star of your own show.”
My lip trembled. I fought back tears. And then I saw my father watching us. Pity washed across his face and I momentarily hated him for the luxury of being loved more than me. “It must hurt to have another man in your house. Fucking Mom. On your bed,” I said. Men in our town were buying up real estate in Mother’s heart and only two could fit—the man on current rotation in her bed and Jonah, asleep by her knee. The rest were the remains: renters who dared to shove their way in if there was a vacancy. I was fifteen and I knew this. Our father was thirty-eight and still thinking he had a claim by way of a marriage certificate, but that wasn’t a deed and no one told him the rules of the game or how it was played. He withdrew, maybe realizing the graft of love he tried to stick wouldn’t take. He was molting, and the one person he loved didn’t care.
“Why would you do that? What have I ever done to hurt you?” he said.
Jonah shook his head. “You got it all wrong. It was Lionel.”