WE DRIVE THROUGH Nevada. It takes a day to travel to a town so hot that corpses crawl up out of their graves because even the six feet of shade isn’t cool enough. We joke about eating cactus and rattlesnake, picking scales and spines out of our teeth with nails we’ve grown too long, although we secretly know we’re the kind who will settle for a ham sandwich. At least I would. We pass a smoke between us and talk intellectually about tumbleweed as if it were the one thing on this trip we’re meant to see. I roll down the window, lapping up the dry heat with my tongue. At a pay phone on the outskirts of Tonopah, I call Tim and tell him I’ll be gone for a while. I call my mother and tell her to go fuck herself.
Cassidy laughs and rattles dimes in her pocket. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”
I feel the elastic band on the underside of my shorts and say, “Yes, it does.” But as soon as it does, it doesn’t. I think about Kate, in parts, but not the whole of her. I see her eyes, sometimes blue, often gray, but I can’t make out the shape of her face or the body of a child leaning toward its mother, grasping for what’s warm and familiar. I can’t fit her in the frame, so as we drive I think about her hands, the smooth, webbed skin between her toes, the deep curve of her bottom lip. This part, the missing, doesn’t feel so good, but I don’t tell Cassidy this. Instead, I unfurl a map and tell her to head farther west. I want California.
“I’ve seen California,” she says, “You don’t want that.”
I’m coming back, Kate. You have to know that I’m trying to get better so they don’t take me away again. I’m trying to swallow all this sadness so they don’t suspect me again, but there’s so much of it. A woman is a dam, breaking. California is all for you, Kate.
In Tonopah, you can still get a hamburger for fifty-five cents, and for a dime you can play all the Perry Como songs your heart desires on the jukebox in the local luncheonette. One of two local radio stations plays gospel songs, although at midday everyone seems drunk on hooch passed around in old Coca Cola bottles.
“Fuck me,” Cassidy says. “We’re not in Kansas, Dorothy. We’re in 1950.”
“Good thing we’re white,” I say. “Good thing we blend in.”
For a moment, a blankness falls over Cassidy’s face, like a dark curtain that no one can see through. She’s a ghost town, an uninhabitable country. I’ve seen that look before. When I was seventeen, we were both at a sleepover at Kit Ryan’s house. I woke in the middle of the night and stole boxes of cookies and cake mix out of Kit Ryan’s kitchen. My home was one free of sweets, and I desperately wanted an Oreo cookie. Prone to night terrors, Cassidy rarely slept, and she found me with my bounty. Same blank stare like the one she’s giving me now when she called me the Nabisco thief. When Kit woke the next morning, she and her mother whispered in the kitchen, and all I could remember hearing is Kit, annoyed, saying we probably ate them all because who would just break into a house and steal all the biscuits? When I got home that night, I arranged all the loot in my closet and ate every last morsel. Every chip, every crumb.
In a small voice Cassidy says, “Good thing.”
At the front desk of the Motel Tonopah, a sign reads, Voted Worst Motel in the World. Annie, the proprietor, greets us in a sweeping floral muumuu and a bushel of red hair. Pointing to the sign, she says with pride, “You read right. This ain’t the Shangri La, ladies. We got none of that fancy-smelling bar soap and amenities. You get five channels on the television, and you’re lucky to even be getting a television on account of me experiencing some downsizing. You keep your rooms clean because I ain’t your damn maid or mother; I already got four rotten kids sucking on my teat. And I don’t want to find anything funny on those sheets, if you know what I mean. They get washed once a week, on laundry day, so consider today your lucky day.”
“You got a boy my age in that rotten bunch?” Cassidy asks.
Annie scowls. “That’ll be ten dollars a night, paid in advance.”
I wince from the heat, or perhaps it’s the lone fan blowing dirt in my face.
After Cassidy pays the bill, I say, “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
Cassidy rolls her eyes, “What do you want, Ellie? The Four Seasons and malts?”
“I didn’t realize clean sheets were a luxury.”
The room! The room is a comedy of errors, straight out of an Albee play, all theater of the absurd. On the television screen, a taped sign reads, Do Not Adjust Television Antennae. On the toilet seat, someone has scrawled, Flush after Every Other Elimination. Water Don’t Grow on Trees. Taped to the bathroom mirror, a sign reads, Do Not Use Towels or Wash Clothes to Clean Cars, Windshields, or Vaginas during the Time. Beneath the sign is a large arrow that points to a cardboard box on the floor filled with oily rags. Taped onto that box is another sign: Use Me.
“You think they got cameras in here?” I say.
“This is back-ass Nevada. They’ve probably got holes drilled in the walls. They’re probably watching us right now. They’ll use the good towels to clean up the evidence.”
“I’ve read about hotels like this.”
“I’ve lived in hotels like this,” Cassidy says, flushing the toilet twice and shoving one of the clean rags between her legs. When I gawk, Cassidy shrugs and says, “Evidence.”
The blood is a torrent, drowning everything in its wake. Through the red foam that sweeps across the hospital bed and spills over the tray tables, I see my husband collapse against a wall, and then a head. A swatch of pale blond hair and eyelids shuttered white. Then a fist burying itself in me as if it wanted to crawl back to where it had come from. Then come the gurgle and scream, and then Kate, white hair darkening in the sea, rolling deeper and deeper underwater.
Cassidy snaps her fingers in front of my face. “Earth to Ellie. Did I lose you to the little green men from up there?”
Be normal, I think. “More like the green shit growing on the walls.” Next to the black-and-white television set, mold spores spider up the wallpaper, and the corner of the room teems with miniature mushrooms. “Don’t take off your shoes,” I warn.
“I wonder if old Annie’s got a sign for that,” Cassidy laughs and sprawls out on the bed while I wonder whether Clorox could make this room habitable, bleach it to the bone. I want it to be winter. I want to feel what it’s like to drive through snow. But I remember the sun and the fact that my license was taken from me.
Cassidy says, “I thought we’d go out. Let’s get wrecked.”
“No cactus or rattlesnake? You’re not even in the least bit hungry? Because I’m starving.” I cover the lower half of my bed in Saran Wrap. I’m starting to see inkblots on the wallpaper. I blink them away. Focus on the task at hand.
“I’m working up to it. Once I get a little drink and boy in me, I’ll be ripping the heads off live snakes and picking needles out of my hair. That’s my kind of night. I hope you’re not wearing that shirt. No one will fuck you in that shirt.”
“I met my husband in this shirt.”
“My point,” Cassidy says. “Wait, is that plastic wrap? Are you wrapping your bed in plastic wrap?”
“There could be lice on this bed; I’m not taking any chances.”
“You think you’re taking this germaphobe thing a little far? Maybe I shouldn’t have broken you out of the loony bin,” Cassidy teases.
“That’s not funny,” I say. After a while, “I hate gross things.”
We move like fog in the night. The road ahead of us is dark and we make a game out of kicking beer cans and rifling through our empty cigarette packs. Tonopah is the sort of town where everyone draws their curtains to one side and gathers around a couch to watch the black-and-white television. Cassidy talks about group sex and cult blow jobs. There are no street signs.
“There’s a difference between wanting it and having it taken from you,” Cassidy says. “From being on top to waking up with a knee pressed on your back. When I came home, nobody even noticed I’d left. But they all talked about you. How your husband put you in the nuthouse.”
“He was right to do that,” I say.
“We’re not crazy is what I’m trying to tell you,” Cassidy says. She grabs my hand and squeezes it two times. “We’re not.”
I see a coral snake wrapped around Kate’s mouth. Her eyes are lidless, white, and wide. The snake hatches an egg in my daughter’s mouth and she chokes. “Of course not,” I say, knowing that the pills have made their exit and the shadows will become voices will become people will become shocks will become Kate. I will return.
“I’m not so sure,” I say.
Cassidy looks around and asks, “Where are we?”
“Back-ass Nevada.”
It’s ladies’ night at the Motel Tonopah, but men try to buy us drinks anyway. Everyone asks us where we’re from and Cassidy says, “Sun, moon, and stars, baby.” She drinks whiskey neat and licks her lips so much they get dry. Her hair is longer now; it covers the scars on the back of her neck. But every now and then I see her touch them, like habit, and I think about our day at the lake and all the hope.
A fat man named Fred sits next to me and he smells of raw onion and tobacco. I turn my back to him so he’s left talking to my hair. After a few moments he grunts, “Queer as fuck,” and moves down the bar. A woman walks in with a fox skin draped around her neck, and Fred pulls out a chair and buys her a drink. Boys play quarters on a table filled with chipped glasses. Fireflies dart in and out of the windows while two men haul out a broken jukebox to hock but no one pays them any mind, and the bartender drinks gin straight from the bottle. Somebody orders food but nobody eats it. A man yells, “I used to be in shipping. I used to move things.”
I remember the bleach, the sting of it. I remember brushing Kate’s hair out of her eyes. I remember the smallness of her hands. She’s so small; she won’t always be this small. One day she won’t be the thing that fills my hands. Her body will spill over.
Eyeing the jukebox men holding court across the room, Cassidy jumps out of her chair. She’s a woman who loves things in twos, who forever desires to be in French films she’s never seen and travel to places her parents abandoned her for. I want to shake her. I want to tell her that people always leave.
“Nothing deep,” Cassidy says, unbuttoning a button. Strands of her hair cling to her neck, all slicked with gloss and sweat. “What do you think of those guys? The ones with the box?”
“You’ve never had a more receptive audience.”
Cassidy comes closer, leans into me, and bites my cheek. “That day when I first met you at the carnival, I had you pegged; I had you made. You only have eyes for me.” She sticks out her tongue and I watch her run to the men.
Outside, thin snakes dangle from a tree like livewire. Stars paint the sky silver. The first month I couldn’t feel Kate, I only knew that cells were thick in the business of multiplication, and as a result a person would take shape. A person I wasn’t ready for, but it didn’t matter. Women are born to serve and breed, and when we fail at this, what else is there? What is it that we can do that men can’t? We bring their screaming mouths into this world only to be told by those mouths, now grown, that we’re lesser than. Only good for being on our knees, backs, and perched over stoves. We’re told, You’re smart for a woman, you’re mouthy for a woman, you’re brazen for a woman. They tell us we’re dangerous and emotional, prone to hysterics like landmines, and I wonder, if this is true, why aren’t they afraid?
Why was it that I was the only one afraid of this person occupying my body?
During the months that followed I prayed for a fall, a kick, or the will to plunge a hanger all the way in, but I was afraid that losing my daughter would hurt me in some unimaginable way, so I stayed home, locked in my room. Removed all the hangers from the closets. Took the cords out of the phones. Every night my husband would come home and return the hangers to the closets and plug the phones back into the walls. Every morning I’d wake to the same nightmare all over again. I prayed for amnesia.
Now, I close my eyes and feel the night, the stillness of it. A few blocks from the bar is a diner. I eat eggs off a white paper plate and leave a ten-dollar tip. When I leave, I see a man’s arms covered in scales. On the way back to the Motel Tonopah, I see snakes, so many of them, but I know it’s my head playing tricks and I crouch down on the curb of a street and make myself lose all the eggs. I press down on my stomach as if it’s a part of my body that doesn’t belong; I’d give anything for a pair of scissors or a steak knife. The eggs are still there and I need them gutted out. I require a scalpel and a knife; I need things to be removed. We all go a little mad sometimes. A couple passes and the woman says, “Look at that, will you? Woman can’t even hold her drink.”
Woman can’t hold anything, it seems. But I did hold Kate, until I couldn’t, and two years later my husband pried the bleach out of my hands. They didn’t understand how I needed to undo all of her history. Take back the years. I tried to kill my daughter; I tried to save my daughter. I don’t know what to think. For some reason I can’t get the smell of bleach out of my skin. Is this my haunting? Forever made to wear the perfume that imprisoned me, the smell I now associate with shocks? They tell you that you won’t feel a thing, only a jolt and the taste of metal in your mouth, like you’re sucking on coins, but they’re lying.
When I open my eyes I see Annie, proprietor of the Motel Tonopah, wearer of muumuus, and she says, “You ignored the signs.” She sits on the curb alongside me eating fried onions out of a paper bag.
“What?”
“The room,” she says. “I heard the flushing. It was like Niagara Falls in there.”
“That wasn’t me,” I say.
“I figured as much. Your friend’s got sass to her.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Where you from?”
“There are a lot of snakes in this town.” The eggs are still in me, multiplying.
“By the looks of it,” Annie says, raising her eyebrows, “your friend is about to get acquainted with two of them firsthand. They even got her pushing that old jukebox.” She points to Cassidy trailing the two men from the bar. From the sidewalk I can hear her grunting as she drags a dolly holding the jukebox along the concrete. The men pass a bottle between them, walking ahead, and I open my mouth, ready to shout Cassidy’s name, but I don’t. I watch my friend, who is a little drunk and a lot lost, getting her hands dirty.
“I’m from my father’s house, my husband’s house, and sometimes a hospital, which is to say I don’t really know where I’m from. It’s still Nevada but far from this town.” After a time I ask, “Why do you have all those signs in the rooms?”
Annie laughs. “It started as a joke in ’69, but now it’s something that passes the time. It seems to me that all we have is time—that’s the one thing that can’t be taken from us.”
“Speak for yourself. I lost nearly a year of my life in a hospital.”
“You sick or something?”
“Some might say so. But I don’t know. All I know is that there was a time when I had a lot of pain and I didn’t know where to put it. I was supposed to have a version of a life, and then I started seeing things that weren’t there but were there, and one day I stood over my daughter in a sink with a bottle of bleach and I don’t know, even now, even after all this time, how I got there. I don’t remember the bottle or putting her in the sink. It was as if I’d been sleeping and I woke up and there she was, cold and crying. There was a window of time when I thought I was happy . . .”
Annie’s eyes are red and wide. “Some women aren’t built for children.”
“What else is there? Should I take up dictation? Or should I be like Cass, feeding off the remains of her father’s money? There is no life that isn’t in service of a man. There is no time my grandfather or husband hasn’t accounted for. There is only what you can endure, what you can bear, and sometimes it feels good to lose time, to not be here for any of it.”
“One morning, years ago, my daughter packed a bag with her shirts and shorts and a few sandwiches and got as far as the highway. It was the cars that scared her—the fear that one would hit her—that drove her back. We didn’t even notice she’d been gone until she came back, face full of dust, and said she’d run away. She was five. You don’t see the boys running. It’s always the girls.” A kind of clarity registers on Annie’s face as if I am a puzzle she’s suddenly pieced together. It’s the opposite of Cassidy and her confusion, but it’s still exhausting. It occurs to me that I don’t know why I’m here, only that my head hurts. I should be home with my child. The pain colors everything white. I can make out the shape of things: trees, car parts on the sidewalk, and Annie—the lump of her, the mess of her hair. Why is she here? What is she telling me?
“I don’t understand.”
“Sounds like you’ve had a rough time. Like somebody took you by the hair and rubbed your face into the world until you got the taste and feel of how things are. Why else would you be out here, alone, puking your guts out onto the street, and not over there with your friend?”
“What are you doing here?” I ask. The words, as they leave me, are sharper than I intended.
Annie points to the house across the street and says, “I live over there. Twenty-seven years in that house with two dead husbands, a father seeing his life at the end of a dribble cup, and four kids who know this town is as good as it’ll ever get. All I’ve got left are boxes in the attic, a life spread out across pages of a photo album, and a rundown, shit-bag motel where I get to practice my sadness and watch it play out like an old movie. Maybe you need to ask yourself, What movie I got playing in my head?”
“But this is real.”
“No, it ain’t. Let me give you a piece of advice, speaking from personal experience. Don’t betray your kin. Now I’m not talking about your husband—fuck your husband because they all run around on you or lie about it. I’m talking about your kids. Don’t do wrong by them, because it has a way of coming back to you.”
I heave on the sidewalk.
Annie shakes her head and sighs, “Go on home, girl. It’s about time we all go on home.”
Back in the room, Cassidy’s alone and she slurs, “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Out,” I say. “With Annie.”
“Who’s Annie?”
I point to the television that’s airing nothing but snow and say, “Front desk lady.”
Cassidy sits up; hair clings to her face. “I’ll tell you how my night went. Two men and me load a jukebox onto a truck. We drive to another bar outside of town. One of them buys me a drink, and they keep buying drinks until I black out, and then I wake up here in this room. They carry me in. They wrap my stomach with your Saran Wrap and they fuck me until my smoke burns down to the filter. They put on their pants, one pisses in the toilet, and then they go back to where it is that they’ve come from. And I’ll tell you about tomorrow. I’ll wake up and vomit into the toilet he didn’t flush while you play the rebellious Stepford wife who tries to forget that she almost bleached her kid. One of us will have a breakdown and then we’ll go home. Want to place a bet on which one of us will crack first?”
“You don’t know me,” I say.
“That’s the rub, Ellie. I know your kind. I know you.”
The next morning, Cassidy vomits and we pack without speaking. I return the keys to the office while Cassidy packs the car. When I reach for her she says, “Don’t.”
Behind the desk is a man that’s not Annie, not even close. “Where’s Annie?”
“Room number,” he grunts, and I realize it’s fat Fred from the bar.
“Where’s Annie?”
“Annie’s dead. Shot up her four kids last night and then turned the gun on herself.”
“That’s impossible,” I say. My hands start shaking. “I saw her last night, in the street, in front of her house. I talked to her.”
“Then you might want to talk to the police, lady. Room number?”
“Wait. What are you even doing here?” I shout. Shhh, sweet Kate. This won’t hurt one bit.
Fred laughs. “What am I doing here? What am I doing here? Well, little lady, this is a bit awkward, you see, on account of Annie being my wife.”
“Your wife?”
“I think you better go now,” Fred says.
I stand in front of the car. Cassidy’s inside. The engine runs. She leans over to the passenger side and says, “Get in.”
“Annie’s dead.”
For a moment Cassidy’s quiet. Then she gives me the blank stare, again. “What did you do?”