WHEN I WAS small I wanted a pony but never got one. Instead, my mother purchased a horse head attached to a long stick and told me to ride: “Wild animals you can’t control, but this toy, this, you can hold in your hands. You can make it go anywhere you want it to. Do you hear me, Gillian?”
“I see,” I’d said.
A teacher once told me that my handwriting was almost confident.
I’ve kept that pony for over twenty-five years. Hid it in my dorm-room closet behind a stack of empty shoeboxes. There are stores that sell designer shoeboxes to give the suggestion of a kind of life. Now the pony is under my bed. A lover once found it while he was tying a shoe. “Whatever gets you off,” he said. I mean, this was a man who once confided to me that he made love to an inflatable doll on three separate occasions. Sober. We fucked for a year.
I’ve never been good at letting things go.
When I moved to California, I had problems with the water. I started to miss hurricanes; I cried out for storms. I only watched television shows that promised hard rain. I fell asleep to videos of hail and wondered why all the famous storms are named after women. An air robbed of moisture does things to you. A constellation of red, blistery bumps covered my chest, arms, and back. The insides of my mouth tasted of rusted pipes. I brushed my teeth with tap water and my lover laughed and said, “You’re just moving the metal around, baby.”
My brother Jonah laughs. He lives in New York but he comes here often. “You’re worried about water when you live in a place where the ground sometimes rearranges itself?”
“Don’t you find it strange that everyone talks about the water?” Even the act of drinking water requires a plan, a filtration system.
“There are worse things.”
After six months my skin returned to its normal state.
“In New York you can drink water right out of the faucet,” Jonah says.
“I like it here,” I say. “Everything, including your freedom, requires a plan.”
WE MAKE LOVE, quietly, while his wife lies unconscious in the next room. The meds have seized her, and she drifts in between life and a darkness that resembles death. Some days she’s lucid; others, like this one, she keeps calling me Kate. Keeps telling me to leave. Let me sleep. Go away, I never loved you. I did this. I did this to you. It’s my fault. I hate you. I know what you do while I sleep. I maybe loved you once.
I shake my head. Poor woman. You don’t know me. You don’t know about the horse head I’ve hidden under your bed.
While James is fucking me, I hum a lullaby my mother once sang to me when I was a child. “Mommy’s home,” I say. My fingers spider down his back—real slow like, so he can feel it. He puts his hand over my mouth. I’m loud. I bite him. Wild animals you can’t control.
“You’re not making this easy.”
“Your dying wife is in the other room. You made this what it is. Suddenly you’re too cheap to afford a hotel room?”
“It’s not like you have a home we can go to,” James snaps.
After, I pull on a T-shirt that reads, “Future Corpse.”
“I’m worried about you,” he says. “You look like you never sleep. When do you sleep? You’re out all night for days at a time, and during the day . . .”
“Since when are you concerned about my health? I’m fine, just fine. You need to be focusing on your wife and your daughter. How is your daughter? The one who bakes the cakes—what’s her name again?”
“I’m too tired to play this game. Why are you doing this to her?”
“The cancer patient in the other room? I don’t know her any more than you do, James. But hey, if you want me to go back to playing Kate, the dutiful daughter, I can do that. That’s a game I can play. I know how much you miss her.”
Whatever gets you off.
I get up and walk across the room and out the door in nothing but my T-shirt. I bring his wife a glass of water because that’s what I assume a good daughter does—brings a dying woman something to drink. I fill the glass directly from the tap because why bother? It’s not as if she’s straight enough to notice a little fluoride. If I were her I’d drink the whole glass because when you’re about to die why not live dangerously?
I go into his stepdaughter’s room. Sometimes I like being in here when she’s not. The sadness is palpable; I feel like I’m not alone, like she’s here with me. There’s not much here in terms of decoration: a blue curtain, a fringe rug, and stacks of books written by dead men. I flip through photo albums and I notice there are no pictures of her from when she was a baby. It was as if all the years before ten ceased to exist, as if she just appeared in California, aged ten, wearing a twinset.
On the windowsill leans a frame: it’s a photo of Kate and Ellie when they were younger. A mother and daughter at the beach, but Kate is out of focus—it was as if the photographer wanted to blur her out of the frame. I remove the photo from the frame and, on the back, written in small script, a name: Tim. Underneath: Remember him. I curl the photograph in my hand.
James is dressed and in the kitchen. A man on the television warns of a tsunami, aftershocks from an earthquake in Chile. Afterward, a woman recounts a study that reveals that within the next thirty years an earthquake will swallow us whole. I laugh because we’ve heard this before. Brush fires in the canyons, the blustery Santa Anas blowing hot from the desert, and tectonic plates rearranging themselves like some sort of jigsaw puzzle—the story of our impending catastrophic ruin is common. When I press the photo into James’s hand, he looks at it as if it’s far more terrifying than the images projected onto a television screen.
“I’ll play Kate. I’ll play nice, if that’s what you want me to do.”
“Why are you doing this? You’re acting like a child again. You’re not fifteen and this is not that house.”
Massaging the inside of his leg I say, “Kate, Gillian, who do you want? Who do you want me to be?”
Another time: I tell James I watched The Shining when I was five. He rents us a room on the far part of town and we feast on raw fish while a madman wields an axe. On the news we learn that the inhabitants of a small California town have vanished. Reporters scour the remains. Bowls filled with soggy, half-eaten cereal. Televisions tuned to soap operas, game shows, and the local news. Cigarettes burned down to the filter. It was as if five hundred people woke one morning, started their day and then . . . disappeared. There are forensic experts, state troopers, and investigators on the scene—all dressed up in astonishment. Everyone is mystified. Evangelists dial in to local radio shows and talk about the rapture, that this is the first step of our punishment for not being what He had intended. This disappearance was phase one of The Plan.
“Of course Jesus has a project manager,” I say. I smoke a cigarette with the eerie feeling of being watched. I once drove through a town near the Sierras where everything remained in a state of arrested decay. Soup tins lined supermarket shelves, bullet holes sprayed Shell signs, and abandoned tractors and pickups were strewn across wheat fields. Structures were maintained, but only enough so they remained standing. I remember that town was the last place I could hear the sound of my own breath. I took a man then, and the only things we had in common were our inability to love and our proficiency at fucking. We wondered aloud, how does one attach oneself to someone else? We’d lived our childhoods as if we were phantom limbs crying out for the familial love we were deprived of. When you’re in the desert, you’re thankful for even a thimble of water—so this sex, these two bodies forming a temporary attachment, was our thimble.
“Pets, people—all gone. Even the plants, all signs of life, vanished. Where did they all go?” James says, massaging his forehead with his fingertips. He seems to be in pain. We sit in silence for several minutes. I continue to eat the fish. My mother hated fish, couldn’t stand the taste of it.
“I wonder if I can go to where they went,” says James.
Did Kate appear the way this town disappeared?
“I feel like we’re being watched,” I say. I pace the room and look out the windows. I open and close the door. There is a piece of paper on the floor. In bold, slanting script the note reads: This has been your warning.
“WHAT DID YOU do today?” Jonah said.
My brother hated small talk. Exchanges involving weather reports sent him into a blind rage. Celebrity gossip made him lethal. Jonah preferred to start in the middle of things. On a checkout line, he’d once threatened a cashier by saying, If you ask how I am today, I will end you. When he told me the story, I asked him why he went to Costco; I didn’t figure him for being into multiples. Subtraction was his game. He said he needed duct tape. Lots of it. No one thought to ask a man why he needed twenty rolls of tape. Perhaps people assumed that he had much to fix.
“The same thing I did yesterday. Maybe more of it?” I was watching a comedy show without laughing.
“Sixty percent chance of thundersnow tomorrow. Winds are coming in from the north. Buffalo is already covered in eight feet of powder.”
“You called me with a weather report? Are you dying or is someone dead?”
“What’s the forecast? Be descriptive. Spare nothing.”
“It’s seventy-five and sunny. It’s always seventy-five and sunny.”
“And the barometric pressure? The humidity? I need you to talk to me about pressure.” Jonah was in a panic. He spoke like a skipping record.
“Jonah, are you taking your pills?”
“I think I might love someone.”
“Far worse than I imagined.”
“This is serious business. I love Lucia and I think she’s going to leave me.”
“So how’s she different than the rest?” My eyelashes hurt. I was jealous in a way that was less about sex and more about possession. Jonah belonged to me. Jonah was my property. I thought about an interview with Ted Bundy I once saw: The ultimate possession was, in fact, the taking of the life. And then . . . the physical possession of the remains.
“She’s worse off than both of us and trying to climb out of it. Why does she get a free pass?”
“You want me on a plane? I can be there in the morning.”
Jonah sighed. “I want you to listen to weather reports.”
“THERE ARE NO pictures of her before she was ten,” I say. I hold Kate’s photo album in my hands.
“You know why.”
“I wasn’t asking a question.”
“I spoke with Jonah yesterday.”
“Why the fuck would you speak to my brother? How did you get his number? What could you possibly have to say?”
“I called him because it’s starting again. I called him because I’m worried about you and he’s the only one who’s able to get through to you.”
In a voice I don’t recognize I say, “You’ll be sorry you did that.”
WHEN THE WIFE dies, I remove the pony from under my bed and wrap it neatly in two white trash bags before I return it to my closet. I weep because I accidentally purchased scented bags, the kind that remove stubborn odors. Everything that has come before has been removed. The past twenty-five years—gone. When no one can see, I clench the stick between my legs and run. My legs chafe and burn. The horse’s hair matted with tears.
A few days later I enter the house when no one’s home. I am a hurricane. Kate’s room is tidy, neat, and I take all the clothes out of her drawers and throw them on the floor. I spit on them. I remove dresses—why is everything blue?—from the racks and rub them all over my body, even the dirty parts. I walk into the kitchen and make a sandwich and get crumbs all over the carpet because why not? I pull socks over my hands and play pretend like my brother and I used to do when we were small, before my mother called me trash taken out on Wednesdays, when we all knew it was collected on Fridays. I was what you left to rot.
I have the picture of Kate and Ellie in my hand. At least you had a mother.
“SOMETIMES YOU GO too far,” Jonah says. We are in the same place, seventy-five and sunny.