Tuesday morning I sat at my desk trying out convenient emergencies that would allow me to take the afternoon off. I didn’t have children or pets that could suddenly need me at home. I hadn’t heard anything more from Vanessa Klaitner. I assumed she was lying when she said she wanted to help me.
“Blaine!” Garlic Breath hooted through our mutual cubicle wall. “Did you screw something up? ‘Cuz Letitia’s heading this way and she looks pissed.” I swiveled in my chair to see Garlic Breath’s bald spot disappear behind the wall and Letitia glaring at me.
A Venti Starbucks cup appeared about to crumple in her grip and shower me with black coffee. “HR called,” she barked. “They want you to go to some ridiculous stress management seminar this afternoon.”
I fought back a smile. “Oh, wow. I’ll have to spend the whole afternoon down in HR?”
Garlic Breath’s bald spot popped up over the cubicle wall again. I threw a pencil over my shoulder and he ducked back down.
“I’m watching you, Blaine,” Letitia spit. “You better not come in tomorrow looking like you’ve been partying all night.”
“Of course not, Letitia. I’ll be here at the usual time, ready to go,” I replied. “Well, better finish this analysis of how the upcoming elections in Bolivia might affect silver futures before I go.”
Letitia turned to Garlic Breath and snapped, “What are you looking at? Get back to work!” before slinking back to her office. Before leaving, I sent Vanessa Klaitner an email thanking her for fabricating the stress management seminar to correspond with my appointment.
Later that day, I followed Rosaria’s excellent directions to the Radiation-Oncology department for my simulation appointment. The prospect of being measured for radiation treatments made every muscle in my body twitch to run away. My voice sounded shrill in my head when I gave my name to the technician far down a dim hallway.
“Am I in the right place? I’m patient BL2911.”
The technician looked at the encounter form I handed her. “BL2911, huh? How about I call you Lara? Are you alone?” I nodded. She led me to a large room filled with machines that appeared to be the spawn of cameras mating with x-ray equipment.
“What are all the machines for?” I had read the extensive description of the radiation treatment process that Rosaria had given me, but the literature didn’t say there would be quite so much machinery involved. I envisioned something more along the lines of a firing squad.
“I’ll be using this equipment to take very accurate measurements of your body so we can focus the radiation only where it needs to go and nowhere else. A little later we’ll do your blocks, then we’ll make your cradle.”
“The blocks are the little shields?”
“Exactly.” Emma pulled a stool out from beneath the table and helped me. “Someone’s been doing her homework.”
I blushed at the compliment. “I’ll stay really still, I promise.” I lay back without being asked to and didn’t move as Emma put warm blankets over my chest and legs before sliding off my gown. I watched her in my peripheral vision as she pushed a series of buttons that brought the large machine hanging from the ceiling to life. It extended its mechanical arms, rotated, and hovered over me. My heart beat like a jackhammer in my ears. I tried to focus on the machine’s controls as thin beams of light danced across my naked pelvis. I could feel my brain slipping away from my body.
For the next forty-five minutes, I was only tangentially aware of Emma humming a dance tune as she made notations in my chart and occasionally tapped on my skin with something damp. When the machine stopped moving, Emma turned up the lights in the room. I craned my neck to see what she’d been doing. There were a few lines snaking across my belly and trickling down my upper thighs but most of the bright purple lines of Sharpie marker pointed toward a large circle just above my pubic bone. There was a target drawn on my womb.
“Now don’t try to wash these off. The radiation tech will need these to line you up in the machine. Eventually, we’ll replace some of them with tiny permanent tattoos.” Emma pulled the paper robe over the marks and helped me sit up. “Now then, why don’t you take a bathroom break while we set up for the next part?”
When I returned, the table was covered with a pillow-like mass filled with a foamy substance. After Emma helped me up on the membrane, the filling conformed to my thighs and lower back. Emma moved my body around the table like she was positioning a doll. She worked until the lines on my body lined up with the register marks on the table and the reference beams from the machine.
“Okay now, it’s very important that you not move at all while the chemicals react and the medium sets up. It may get quite warm. If you get uncomfortable just holler. I’ve got cool cloths that we can put on your head and shoulders.”
I’d had plenty of experience lying still and divorcing myself from what was happening to my body, but this was different. I couldn’t ignore that the table beneath me was getting hotter by the second.
Oh my God, my skin is burning off! This must be what Hell will be like. I lay perfectly still while I imagined the skin on my buttocks and inner thighs cracking and peeling off in sheets. I saw my muscles falling off the bones like a roasted chicken thigh and being consumed by fire. I struggled to get ahead of the images inside my head.
Suddenly, I was no longer in the simulation suite. I was running through a dense rainforest. Flames licked at my heels. I dove inside the center of a Strangling Fig and climbed on top of the rotting carcass of the tree the vines had choked to death. Scorched book pages and leaves the size of dinner plates floated down from the canopy high above my head. The trees around me were quickly engulfed in a roar of flames. A wave of acrid smoke washed across the forest floor. I couldn’t breathe or see my hands as I grabbed onto the closest vine and climbed up in search of fresh air. I needed to get out of the Strangling Fig before it caught fire. I spotted a giant bird’s nest in the next tree and crawled over the lip. Although the outside was woven from branches and vines, the inside was striated and wet. I slid down the steep sides and landed waist deep in a puddle of bloody goop. Floating in the center of the nest was a wicker bassinet. A baby, my mutant never-to-be-born baby, extended a tiny pus covered hand over the edge of the cradle and gurgled, “Are you alone?”
***
That night the nightmares turned in on themselves. Instead of fanciful beasts, Mama’s smoke-ravaged voice filled my head. I heard a beeping and Mama saying, “The mason jars. He don’t know you took the mason jars. It all burned… The cancer come. You’re all alone. It all burned. He don’t know.” My eyes snapped open. The room was pitch black, yet I could sense Mama tracking me like a shark smelling blood in the water.
I rolled off the futon and kicked at the sheets until my legs were free.
She knows about the cancer. She knows they’re going to burn me.
I sat up surprised to find my cell phone in my hand. Had I answered the phone in my sleep? The phone said I had one recent call. It had a 603 area code.
Did I dream about the mason jars?
Oh my god, they’ve found me. Or did Mama really call? Does she know about the mason jars?
A shelf of mason jars had been my ticket out of Hawthorne. Three weeks before graduation, I was in the hayloft working on my valedictorian speech when I saw the light come on in the room above my bedroom. The two rooms on the second floor of the addition hadn’t been used for at least twenty years, not since Dale’s mother died. An ice dam had damaged the roof during the blizzard of ‘78. Dale had never properly fixed it, so whenever there was a blowing storm, rain seeped between the siding and the walls. On the north wall, the faded plaid wallpaper was the only thing keeping the horsehair plaster attached to the rotten lathe. I had explored the two bedrooms not long after Mama and I moved to the farm but had not ventured up there since. The smell of mildew and grief were overpowering.
From my vantage point in the barn, I could see Dale waltzing a wardrobe away from the wall in the room that had once been a sewing room. His mother’s dress form still stood in the corner with the beginnings of a wool holiday dress pinned to it. Moths and mice had eaten holes in the red fabric until it hung like a tattered flag. I flicked off my lantern and ducked below the windowsill, hoping he didn’t see me watching him from across the yard. Dale took something out of the wardrobe, placed it on the floor, then pulled a wad of cash out of his jeans pocket. A greasy smile spread across his face as he thumbed through the bills in his hand. Then, he rolled them up, put them in a mason jar, and returned the wardrobe to its place against the wall.
I had wondered where Dale kept his money. I knew there was money. And, I knew Dale didn’t believe in banks or taxes. I had heard enough of his drunken rants about how the government was trying to bilk him out of all his money. He also bragged incessantly about how stupid the drunks down at the Rusty Nail were and how easy it was to trick them into ridiculous loan agreements. He stole from people. I didn’t think twice about stealing from him.
A week before graduation, I made my escape. Mama had gone to Portsmouth to buy a dress to wear to the ceremony, and Dale was on his annual “fishing trip” with Doc. At first when I pulled the heavy wardrobe away from the wall, I thought Dale had moved his money. The jars in front were filled with grape jelly and pickles. I pushed those out of the way and found row after row of jars filled with money. I’d hoped to get enough cash to get out of town and tide me over until I could start college. I found more than I needed. All told, I stole $52,782 of beer soaked, slightly moldy greenbacks. The police found Dale’s truck a few days later in a Wal-Mart parking lot near the Massachusetts border with the keys in the glove compartment.