We always went down there where the dead left us alone. The cemetery was close to both of our houses. We could hop on our bikes and each make it there in ten minutes, tops, and there was no one there to keep us from doing whatever we wanted. Beth only had to travel down a quiet country road for about a mile. From my house, I had to get on the highway, make it past the truck stop and all the semis coming in to weigh or refill or sleep, then take a jog down a hill onto the unmarked back road, past some woods and cornfields, and then, there it was, the old cemetery, which sprawled out from the gated drive, expanding all the way back to the field.
A wooden fence divided the oldest section of the cemetery from the newer burials, although the entire thing wasn’t used much at all anymore. It looked like a puzzle, the way it was divided up. In the old section, tombstones were dated all the way back to the early 1700s, with worn-out granite that looked exhausted from keeping up the memory. Most of the tombstones looked like they wanted to let everyone finally forget and move on. Rainworn, it was difficult to make out the names and the exact dates. You could intuit the information from what was left of the letters: an M, an R, maybe the hint of a Y was obviously Mary, and she died either in 1762 or 1785, or something close to that.
We preferred the cemetery to the park or the school sports grounds. There were no other kids at the cemetery to bug us. At the park, kids were always poking at me, trying to pick a fight with me, saying I was ugly and saying I looked like a dude, or chasing Beth around; the girls calling her a slut and boys trying to get her to kiss them, and we could never get anything fun done at the park. That’s why we ended up playing in the cemetery after school, which didn’t really help either of us where popularity was concerned. On top of everything else, we soon became known as the weird girls who hung out in the cemetery all the time.
Because of our weirdnesses compounded on top of weirdnesses, all we really had was each other, until she came into our lives. Then we had each other and we had her, but it felt like we had so much more than that.
I never knew a person could live like that; well, not really live, but survive like that. It made me feel like anything was possible. There’s something very particular about having a secret that big when you’re twelve years old. You get to live in two different worlds, and whatever is happening in the normal world can’t really touch you, because you have this other world you can go into, where everything is so much more amazing and unbelievable. It’s easy to keep worlds separate at that age, because you’re straddling childhood and adulthood. You’re already living on the edge of reality and fantasy, and just barely growing out of pretending all the time.
But this secret world wasn’t pretend; it was something else that, like a pretend world, would shatter as soon as it was integrated into normal life. At first, like a fantasy, it supplemented, but soon, because it was real, it supplanted our boring reality. The secret world became the most real, and the world we lived in every day with everyone else became something we had to get through to get back to her.
It was nearing the end of September. We’d been back in school long enough to have almost forgotten the freedom of summer. It must have been a weekend, because I was spending the night at Beth’s house, which meant we got to stay out till after dusk.
We went to the cemetery right after school. I put some music on my boom box. I liked to be retro, and listened to actual CDs of Godsmack, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Nine Inch Nails, and other good music that only happened in generations before me, and we played catch, and knocked a softball around with our bats, and had a picnic. We messed around all day. Then night fell, and we decided to play flashlight tag. This might not sound that entertaining with only two people, but in a cemetery at night, it was a lot of fun. Whoever was “it” would close her eyes for a count of twenty, and the other person would run and hide behind one of the many tombstones or trees in the sprawling graveyard. The one hiding would shriek ghostly noises, which, if done right, would echo and throw the seeker onto the wrong track. When Beth was tagged, she would jump out squealing, and hold her hands up like claws and rush at me. We liked to scare ourselves silly.
It was the second round of flashlight tag. We’d been screeching up a storm of fake horror since the sun set. Beth was “it.” I ran far away from her and crouched behind a headstone at the edge of the cemetery grounds near the field. It was very dark, save for the light of the moon, and a streetlamp a nearby farmer had mounted in his yard. The light shone through the wooded area that lined the south side of the cemetery, the blue light splitting through the leaves like spectral stars. Beth called out, “I’m coming for you,” her flashlight beam bouncing in the distance, pointing nowhere near where I was hiding. I kept silent, peeking over the top of a tombstone. Beth called out again, “I’m coming for you, creep!” I screeched. It echoed. She stopped and circled her light around the graveyard, and then, for some inexplicable reason, she started running in the opposite direction of where I was hiding. She ran away from me, shouting, “I see you! I see you!” I stood to get a better look, wondering how she could be so mistaken. She pointed her light in the very wrong direction in which she was also running, and, to my astonishment, it caught a figure of what seemed to be a person. This person halted momentarily, then quickly dashed through an open area, and hid behind a tree near the Thompson Mausoleum. “Hey, I got you. I tagged you. Come out! You’re it now,” Beth demanded. A chill shot through me. We weren’t alone.
I stood up, waving my arms frantically, “Beth! Beth, I’m over here,” I shouted from far behind her. Beth stopped, frozen in place, turned and shined her light on me, then she shined it back to where the figure she’d tagged was crouching behind a tree. Beth screamed, then took off in a dead run back to where I was standing.
“There’s someone else here! There’s someone else here, Gillian,” she panted when she got to me. I threw my arm around her shoulder, and pulled my flashlight out of my back pocket. We both pointed our lights toward where Beth had been standing. “Who’s there? We’ve got a gun,” I shouted, deepening my voice, trying to sound tough, and older. Beth raised her eyebrows at me.
“Why’d you say that?” she asked.
“I don’t want them to think they can fuck with us,” I told her.
“Maybe it was an animal,” she said, continuing to scan the cemetery with her flashlight. Right then, something moved near her beam. She caught it with her light and followed it. It was definitely a person, dashing toward the mausoleum, and then, miraculously, the person opened the mausoleum door and disappeared inside. We both turned our flashlights off and crouched down. “What do we do?” Beth whispered.
“I don’t know. Maybe we should just leave. ” I felt totally terrified.
“Do you think it’s alive?” she asked.
I turned to get a look at her. “What are you talking about? Of course they’re alive. They were running, weren’t they?”
“No.” She looked at me like I was stupid. “I mean, what if it’s, like, a ghost?”
“A ghost wouldn’t show up in the light, would it? I mean, wouldn’t a ghost, like, be transparent?” Sometimes Beth didn’t think things through.
She shook her head, pondering. “What if it’s a zombie?”
I looked around the cemetery for any signs of the dead beginning to dig their way up through the dirt to herald what I suddenly believed to be the inevitable zombie apocalypse that, somewhere deep inside, I always knew was coming. “If it is a zombie,” I said, “we have to stop it. It just takes one, and then they bite someone, then they bite someone else, and then it’s all over.”
“Right,” Beth nodded solemnly.
“We’ve got to kill it,” I said, feeling a childish bravery take over.
“How are we going to kill it? What are you talking about?” Beth balked. “We’re not big enough to kill anyone.”
“Sure we are. There are two of us, and we have bats.”
“But they’re all the way over there.” She pointed to where we’d left the bats, next to the boom box, just a few yards away from the mausoleum.
“Let’s go get them. Just stay close to me,” I instructed. “And remember, you have to hit zombies in the head. The only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its head, because the infection is in the brain.”
“How do you know that?” Beth asked.
“I read a lot,” I told her, and tugged at her sleeve to move. We made our way stealthily through the cemetery, crouching and scurrying, then stopping to hide behind a tombstone every few feet and peeking around to make sure that who or whatever it was who went in hadn’t come back out of the mausoleum, though it was hard to tell for sure in the dark. We finally made it to our bats. Beth told me to take the aluminum bat and that she would take the wooden one since I was stronger and it would do more damage. We argued over whether that was logical. Since she was weaker, I thought she should have the more durable bat, for added protection. But finally, she had it her way, like she always did when we argued.
I gripped my bat with two hands, and told her to keep her flashlight off and only to turn it on when I gave the word. I crept up to the mausoleum, taking one careful step after another, Beth right behind me. There were only three mausoleums in the whole cemetery. There weren’t many wealthy families in the town. It was a lot for most people just to afford a headstone. This one was the nicest and the largest mausoleum of the few of them. It was about the size of a small storage shed, made of gray stone, and adorned with two lion’s heads flanking the top of the doorway, ringed by chiseled flora.
When we got to the door, we could see very clearly that the lock had been broken. The chain hung loose off the metal handle, which I took hold of and, after taking a deep breath, pulled open. I jumped into the doorway, like I was in an action movie, my bat raised over my head, and shouted, “Now!” Beth turned on her flashlight and shined it past me into the small stone room.
“Ahhhhh!” I heard someone shriek. The light illuminated the inside of the mausoleum, and I saw her. She held her hands over her head and cowered down on the far wall. I swung my bat in front of myself twice, hollering, “Get back! Get back!” But she wasn’t moving, except to cover her head with her hands. “Get up! Get up and put your hands up!” I demanded. But she just continued to cover her head and assumed a fetal position on the floor against the wall.
“Who are you?” Beth shouted at her, her voice trembling with fear. I was shaking too, and didn’t know what to do. She seemed to be a skinny, very human woman. She was wearing hot pink cutoff shorts, and had dirty, stringy blond hair. That was all I could really tell, because of the way she was curled up. There were a couple of open scratches and some small sores on her legs and arms, and because of that, she did look like she might be a zombie, but the way she was cowering had me seriously questioning that possibility.
“Don’t hurt me. Please. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she moaned. “I didn’t do anything!”
“Get up!” I told her again. “Stand up so I can see you, and put your hands up, too.” I was proud of how authoritative I sounded.
“Okay, okay. Just don’t hurt me.” She uncurled herself and put her hands up, then clumsily came to a standing position. She didn’t look like the undead necessarily, but then, it wasn’t completely a sure thing, because she looked closer to dead than any living person I’d ever seen.
She was very thin, and her skin had a pale, grayish hue to it that did not allay my morbid fears. Her makeup was all smeared and fucked up. Her blue eyeshadow was smudged weirdly, and her bright red lipstick was smeared along her lips so that it jutted off to the side of her face. I couldn’t tell her age. She could have been thirty, forty, or fifty. I had no idea. She wore an old T-shirt with a silhouette of a bird on it that said “Birdie’s Gonna Fly,” and, like I said before, cutoff hot pink shorts and white sneakers. She squinted in the glare of Beth’s light, which was aimed directly at her face. “What do you want from me? Just take it. Take whatever you want,” she pleaded.
Beth and I looked to each other for an answer. We didn’t have any answer. Beth pointed her flashlight around the cold cement room. There was a stone bench attached to the wall that was covered in a collection of stained blankets and pillows. A large box sat across from the makeshift bed, obviously being used as a table. On top of it was a half-eaten Snickers bar, several candles, a mirror and razor, a glass pipe, a lighter, a pack of cigarettes, an open can of Mountain Dew, and some potato chips. On the floor was a tattered backpack, a pile of clothes, a box of incense, and a half-full bottle of vodka. The place looked like a weird nest. From above us, embedded in the wall, a stained-glass Virgin Mary looked down on us, and lining the wall were plaques with the names of the people whose bodies rested, I supposed, inside the walls of the mausoleum.
She bent forward, as the light was no longer in her eyes, and got a better look at us. “Hey, wait a minute. You’re just some kids.” She started to put her hands down.
“Watch it!” I shouted, raising my bat higher, trying to seem menacing. “Keep them up!” She put them back up, but seemed less intimidated.
“You little girls?” she asked. “Two little girlies?”
“Are you alive?” Beth asked, shining her flashlight back in the woman’s face.
“Am I alive? What the hell kinda question is that? Course I’m alive. Aw, did I scare y’all?”
“We ain’t scared,” I told her. “You’re the one that oughta be scared.”
“Okay, okay. Don’t whack me, honey. I ain’t done nothing to you. Here. I got something for you.” She slowly crouched down and reached toward her bag with one of her shaking, skinny hands. “Here, let’s be friends.” She squatted lower and fished around her backpack. “Here, I got a peace offering.” She reached into a pocket of the bag with one hand, keeping the other one in the air, and pulled out a Hershey’s bar. She held it up to us. “Here you go. You girlies want a candy bar?”
“No thank you,” Beth responded instinctually.
“Shh!” I snapped at her, giving her an exasperated look. That was no way to talk to a hostage.
“Sorry, gosh,” Beth muttered.
“Maybe I got something else you’d like.” Now both of her hands were down and she was just rummaging around her backpack. “Hey now. You’ll let a poor little lady have a cigarette, won’t you?” she asked, feigning being very pitiful, tilting her head up at me.
“I guess,” I said, feeling I was losing my grip on the situation.
She produced a lighter from the bag and stood, then slowly reached for the pack of cigarettes on the makeshift table. “Thanks, honey. That’s mighty kind of you.” She took out a cigarette and lit it. “Let’s get a little light on this subject. Whatdya say?” She proceeded to light the many candles on the “table,” then she sat on her “bed” and puffed her cigarette, regarding us with curiosity. Beth and I looked to each other in confusion. I slowly let the bat down, but kept it in my grip, resting it on my shoulder, just in case. Beth turned off her flashlight and rested her bat with its tip on the ground.
“Who are you?” I asked. “Are you living in here?”
“Who are you?” she retorted.
“I’m Beth. This is Gillian,” Beth told her politely. I rolled my eyes. What had gotten into her?
“I’m Tanya. Nice to meet you.” She held out her hand to shake and, to my horror, Beth shook it. Beth had the weirdest look on her face. She had kept letting a smile bloom, then trying to fix it back to a poker face, but it was obvious she was bursting with giddy excitement. “What are you two doing out here so late?” Tanya asked.
“This is where we hang out,” Beth said.
“What are you doing here, inside this . . . place?” I asked, my tone not at all friendly. It bothered me that Beth was acting so immediately taken by this strange woman.
She shrugged, took another drag of her cigarette, and ashed it on the floor. “Seems like as good a place as any,” she said. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m being rude. You want one?” She held the pack of cigarettes out to us.
“We are not old enough,” I told her insistently.
“Well, I’m not calling the police. Are you?” Tanya smiled up at Beth and winked. To my dismay, Beth giggled.
“Go ahead,” Tanya pressed. Beth laid her bat down, walked over to her and took a cigarette out of the pack.
“I’ll try it, Gillian. I always wanted to.” Beth was acting like this was some cool high school party we’d been privileged enough to gain access to. She sat down next to Tanya and put the cigarette in her mouth. Tanya lit it for her. She inhaled, suppressed a cough, and let it out as coolly as possible. “Mmm,” she said, holding herself like she was much older, her shoulders back, her legs crossed. “It tastes like peppermints.” She let the cigarette dangle from her fingers and looked around the tomb. “Cool setup you have here,” she told Tanya.
“Thanks.” Tanya looked me up and down. “Now, I woulda guessed that she was the do-goody,” she motioned to Beth, “and you was the bad influence. But I guess looks can be deceiving.” Beth laughed at that, too.
“She’s brave,” she told Tanya, “but she don’t like to get in trouble.”
“That right?” Tanya asked. “You sure do look like you’d be the one to instigate.”
I knew what she meant. I looked like a tomboy, and I dressed weird. I wore almost all black. I dressed like a cartoon character back then; basically the same outfit every day. I always wore a black baseball cap over my short black hair. Dad wouldn’t let me cut it as short as I wanted, so I had it cut in a bob, just above my chin. He let me dye it, though, and it was jet black, and so was my T-shirt, and so were my high-top sneakers, but my shorts were almost always blue jeans, and went no shorter than just above my knee. Beth, on the other hand, looked like a regular girl. She was blond and pretty, and wore whatever: jeans and cute shorts and blouses and girl’s T-shirts, and even dresses. She wore makeup when she could get away with it, and kept her hair neatly combed or in a cute little ponytail on top of her head. Of the two of us, she definitely looked like she would be the one less likely to get into trouble.
“Do you want to try it? It’s nice.” Beth held the cigarette up to me, a weirdly excited look in her eyes.
“Whatever,” I said, and took the cigarette nonchalantly. I sucked on it. It stung like hell. I sputtered and those two giggled at me. I handed it back to Beth, patting at my chest. “That’s horrible,” I coughed out. It made me immediately dizzy and nauseated. To this day I cannot stand the taste of menthols. I paced around the small cement enclosure. “Do you . . . live here?” I asked again.
Tanya sniffed hard and wiped her nose with her arm. “For now.” She looked up at me, and pinched up her face. “I’m not gonna lie. I’m in hiding. My husband,” she said, flicking her cigarette again, “he’s been beating me bad, and I gotta hide out from him right now. You understand?”
“Oh gosh,” Beth looked very sad and worried for her. “Beating you?”
“Yeah, he’s a jealous motherfucker.” She talked loud and fast when she talked about this. “He says, ‘Tanya, what you doin’ with those guys down at the bar?’ And I ain’t doin’ nothin’ with no one. Just go have a drink with my girlfriends. What can I do if other men talk to us? But he thinks I’m always getting with every guy in town. And when I come home, he knocks me around. I couldn’t take it no more. I took off. That’ll show him. I decided to hole up here for a while, till I can work out a plan.”
“Oh god. I’m so sorry.” Beth shook her head and took another drag of her own cigarette, but I think it was a fake drag. I don’t think she was inhaling anymore, because she wasn’t even coughing.
“Oh honey, it’s awful,” Tanya went on. “Last month, I told him I was pregnant with his baby. And the old fool didn’t believe it was his, so he . . .” She paused and looked at Beth for signs of emotion. Beth was listening, entranced, and apparently growing very concerned. “He done beat it outa me. Beat that unborn baby, dead, he sure did.” She was talking a mile a minute. “Beat the damned thing right outa me.” She made a punching motion toward her stomach and doubled over. “I lost that baby, and that’s when I took off. I need . . . I need help, girls.”
I stood over them, also stunned from her story, my mouth actually hanging open. “He killed your baby?” I whispered in astonishment.
“Jesus!” Beth let out. “Do you want us to call the police? Gillian!” Beth tugged on my shirt. “We can call the police for her.”
“No police!” Tanya hollered, loudly. We stared at her silently, startled by her response. She placed her hand on Beth’s shoulder. “You just can’t. Okay?”
“Why not?” Beth asked shyly. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”
“No. No. See . . .” She seemed to be searching for words. “The truth is, all the police, well . . . they’re his buddies. They’ll just believe his side, and they’ll tell him where I am. You can’t call the police. That ain’t what I need. I need to keep hiding. No one can know I’m here, you understand?” She was very intense about this point. We both nodded in agreement.
“Okay,” I agreed.
“It’s gotta be a secret. A lot of people know my boyfriend, and if anyone finds out—”
“I thought you said it was your husband,” I interrupted.
“What?” She shook her head. “Same difference. Oh god. This all gets me so upset and confused, talkin’ about this.” Beth patted Tanya on the back. Her cigarette was burned down. She followed Tanya’s lead and dropped it on the floor and stepped on it. “I need a drink.” Tanya said. She stood and picked up the vodka bottle, poured a bunch of it into the open can of Mountain Dew, then took a big swig. “Ahhh.” She smacked her lips, happily. “That’s better.” She held out the can of vodka Mountain Dew. “You want some?”
Beth and I looked at each other in shock. I felt terrified the way children do when they don’t know they’re terrified. Beth’s expression was stunned too, but excitement quickly began dancing in her eyes, and I could almost hear her thinking, Come on, Gillian. Do you want to do it? Let’s do it. Let’s drink that vodka Mountain Dew. Our parents had always told us never to take candy from strangers. They obviously had not thought about how much more enticing the offer of our first taste of cigarettes and liquor might be.
I shook my head. “I’m not old enough,” I told Tanya.
“Is that right?” Tanya said, taking another swig of her “cocktail.”
“It’s late,” I told Beth. “Your mom’s going to come looking for us if we don’t go back soon.”
“You two live nearby?” Tanya asked.
“Just down the road,” Beth told her. I elbowed her. I began to think maybe Beth’s parents had never told her anything about talking to strangers.
Tanya raised an eyebrow at that. “Oh yeah? Down this road?”
“Mmmm-hmmm,” Beth nodded.
“How’d you two like to make five dollars?”
“For what?” I asked.
Tanya came and sat down next to Beth. “I ain’t had hot food in days. I’m so hungry, girls. If you could find any way to bring me any kind of hot food later tonight, or even tomorrow, I’d pay you for it. Five dollars. Easy as pie.” She took out another cigarette and lit it. “If you come back later tonight, we could have ourselves a little party. Whatdya say? A secret slumber party, just us girls?”
I shook my head again. “I don’t know if we can do that.”
“But . . . maybe,” Beth said eagerly. “We could try, maybe, couldn’t we, Gillian?”
“It sure would mean the world to me. I’ve been out here all alone with no company, and all.”
I picked up Beth’s bat and grabbed her by the elbow. “Let’s go, before we get in trouble.”
“She’s right,” Tanya said. “Don’t want your parents coming out here looking for y’all.”
Beth stood and looked at Tanya intently. “We’ll help you,” she said. “I promise.” A sort of chill gripped me when she said that.
“You’re a real sweetheart,” Tanya told her.
I waved goodbye to Tanya. She waved back. We pushed open the mausoleum door and stepped out into the dark country night.
We packed our things into the basket on my bike and rode back to Beth’s house. She was so excited about our weird discovery, she was all hopped up on adrenaline and going a mile a minute. The whole way biking home, she kept hollering at me how amazing it all was. “Can you believe it?” She went on and on. “She lives in there. In the cemetery! She is so cool. This is so awesome. I mean, it’s awful what happened to her, but it’s kind of cool, right?”
I didn’t say much. I wasn’t sure whether it was very cool. I felt slightly scared of, and overwhelmingly sorry for, the woman. Beth asked me if we were going to sneak out and go back, but in a way that made it clear that she would be very disappointed if we didn’t. She’d also become fixated on the idea of trying liquor for the first time. Drinking liquor had never been suggested to us before. But now that it was a clear possibility, it seemed like it was all she’d ever really wanted to do. Through the entirety of our thus-far lifelong friendship, I somehow had no idea that Beth’s greatest ambition in life was simply to one day get drunk. Apparently the company and context mattered not. I didn’t dare stand in the way of this tween rite of passage.
It was horribly easy to sneak out of her parents’ house. They both worked six days a week in the car parts factory, and woke at five in the morning, even on Saturdays, which meant they went to bed at around ten. When we got back to Beth’s house, we put a frozen pizza in the oven and turned on the TV. An hour later, her parents told us good night and not to stay up too late. Beth packed up the food with all the care of a mother packing her child’s lunch for their first day of school. We took the pizza out of the oven and sliced it up. She wrapped it in tinfoil so that the slices would stay warm, reminding me that Tanya had specifically requested hot food. Then she heated a can of chicken noodle soup in the microwave and poured it into her mother’s thermos. I grabbed some chips and a couple of sodas. We didn’t even have to sneak out the window or anything. We went through the front door, and made it back to the cemetery just before eleven.
It was a strange thing to knock on a mausoleum door, and even more so to do it expecting an answer. Tanya opened the door and let us in. “I didn’t think you’uns would really come back,” she said excitedly.
“We brought you food, hot food, like you asked for,” Beth told her, proudly holding out the thermos. “We brought hot soup and pizza.”
“Oh my gosh, golly. Thank you so much,” Tanya said, waving her hand in the air. She was smoking a cigarette, again. She seemed to be a chain smoker, and the small room was thick with it. She propped the door open to let it air out, then went to her bag and got out five singles. “Here you go, girlies, just like I promised.” Beth started to decline the money, but I took the five dollars, telling her it was no problem. Tanya took the thermos, unscrewed the lid, and started drinking the soup, mmm’ing and aaahhh’ing, and she gulped half of it down. “Damn, that’s good!” she exclaimed, wiping her lips.
There’s something very satisfying about feeding a hungry person. After she had enough soup, she made a spot for us on her makeshift bed and piled some pillows on the floor where she sat at our feet. She asked if we wanted to listen to music, and turned on a small battery-powered radio. It just played the local country station, but it was fine. She asked for the pizza. Beth got out the aluminum-wrapped slices. We each took one. I opened two sodas for us. It was just like any other slumber party I’d ever been to, except it was being hosted by a homeless adult, and we were in a cemetery hiding in a candlelit one-room mausoleum. And also, the menthol smoke that hung in the air.
After Tanya took her third bite of pizza and thanked us for the tenth time, Beth began to get fidgety. I could tell she had her mind on one thing, and one thing only, but was too mannered to ask for it. Tanya, while eating the pizza, kept taking big gulps of what appeared to be a fresh Mountain Dew, which, I guessed from her demeanor, also contained a fair amount of vodka. Beth eyed it longingly. I took notice of the previously half-full bottle of vodka that sat by the box/table. It was now nearly empty. I felt both disappointment and relief at the thought that we were probably not going to be getting drunk for the first time that night. “Damn this pizza is good,” she went on, before taking another bite. “Dang. Pepperoni?”
“Yes. Pepperoni.”
“Dang.”
She finished her slice and asked for another. Beth gave her another. “I don’t usually eat,” she said, “but hot pizza sure is yummy. You start to miss hot food after a few days. That bastard got me out here with nothing real to eat, and all.”
I thought the statement “I don’t usually eat” was odd. Beth finally noticed the mostly empty bottle of vodka and I could see by the look on her face that her heart was completely sunk when she saw it. Without the vodka, I supposed, it wasn’t much of a party for her. We were just sitting in a mausoleum with a homeless woman, feeding her hot food, listening to her talk about her abusive husband, or boyfriend or whatever. Without the vodka, it was more like social work than a secret slumber party, really.
But then Tanya asked, “Hey, girlies, you want a little something extra in your sodas?”
Beth shrugged like she hadn’t thought of it. “Well, you don’t really have much left, do you?”
“What? Sure I do. Just get under the bed there you’re sitting on.” Beth’s eyes lit up. We both leaned over, looking under the stone bench she’d covered in blankets and called a bed, where she’d stashed another full bottle of vodka, as well as a nearly full bottle of whiskey. They were shiny and commanding.
We drank the vodka. It was clear and nearly tasteless, except for the burn that bad vodka has. It made the Mountain Dew sizzle like an electric jolt.
Thirty minutes later, Tanya was dancing. She was shimmying and twirling, and once, she leapt, like a strange, scrawny, drunk ballerina. Beth was laughing at her, and I felt brave and excited and confused. We were loud. We were screaming and howling. The walls were full of the dead and we were drunk children shrieking at them.
Tanya clapped her hands and tried to sing along with the music on the radio, “His shitty little soaped-up four-wheel drive . . . yow!” This suddenly caused her to lose her breath and begin a very serious coughing fit. When it was over, she sat down and gave us a cheers with her soda can. She told us she liked us. Beth said she felt dizzy and lay down, resting her head on my lap. I felt a little dizzy as well, and the vodka burned my throat and stomach every time I took a drink, but I liked that feeling.
Tanya said it was time to take her medicine. She picked something up off the table, then dug around in her bag and walked over to the window ledge. I wasn’t paying her much attention. I was twirling Beth’s hair and she was humming along to the song on the radio, holding her soda-can cocktail so it rested on her chest and she could lift her head and take a swig whenever she got the urge. I heard Tanya snorting loudly. Her back was turned to us. She was sniffing something and wiping her nose.
“What’s that?” Beth asked her.
“It’s my sinus medicine,” Tanya told her. She walked away from the window and sat back down near us. “What do you want to do now?” she asked excitedly.
“What else is there to do?” Beth asked, looking around the tiny room with its close, cold stone walls, the names of the dead etched into its smooth bricks.
“We could play games,” Tanya chirped.
“Like board games?” Beth asked, unimpressed.
“No, like drinking games,” Tanya came back.
“I don’t know what that means.” I shook my head. I was feeling a bit hazy. “Drinking games?”
“Yeah,” Tanya explained. “There’s one where you say something you’ve never done, and whoever has done it, they gotta take a drink. Then you know what they did, and you also get more drunk.”
“Oh, it sounds kinda like skeletons in the closet,” Beth said. “I love that game.”
“You have booze left?” Tanya asked.
Beth held up her can. “It’s half full.”
“That’s mostly soda, though. Here, I’ll give you some more.” Tanya leaned forward and poured a bunch of vodka in Beth’s can, then in mine. “Okay, now we can play. You start,” she pointed to me. “Just say something you’ve never done.”
“Ummm, okay.” I shrugged. “I’ve never cut class.” Beth and Tanya both took a drink.
“Bore-ring!” Beth sang, sitting up and adjusting herself on the “bed.” “I’ve got a good one.” She wiggled her eyebrows, and smirked evilly, but it was a strange, drunken smirk that seemed to be manifesting through a thick fog. “I’ve never . . .” she looked at both of us, drawing this statement out for dramatic effect, “had sex!?” she squealed, and covered her hand with her mouth, giggling.
Tanya took a big swig of her drink, meaning she’d had sex. Beth giggled harder. It was amazing. We’d never met an adult who didn’t treat us like little kids. They treated us that way, of course, because we were little kids. But with her, we’d found an alternate dimension where being an adult and being a kid didn’t mean what they were supposed to. She would tell us the truth. She was an adult and would tell us the truth about it, and we didn’t have to act a certain way or watch what we said around her, or pretend not to know things we already knew, or pretend not to be curious about things we were curious about. “Did it hurt the first time? How old were you?” Beth was obviously very curious. She looked at me and hiccuped. “Oh my god, did you ever poot it in yer mouth?” She was wavering where she sat and had drunk enough that she was beginning to slur her words. My head felt very heavy, but also, somehow, like it was floating.
“NO! NO! NO!” Tanya screamed, clapping her hands in the air. “That ain’t how you play. You get one turn! One turn.”
“I’m sorry,” Beth said, laying her head back against the wall and taking a deep breath.
“I’ll tell you, though. But don’t go outa turn again, okay?” Tanya was talking very fast and loud. “It hurts like hell. Yeah, girl! But it hurts even worse if it’s your first time and you’re not willing, so if that happens, just try and like it.” Beth scrunched up her forehead and blinked, looking confused. My mouth, once again, fell open as Tanya went on. “And they always, alllll waaays want you to put it in your mouth. Hell, sometimes you can make ’em pay to do that or in your butt, even. They’re crazy about it. Especially the truckers down there.” She motioned in a direction that I understood to mean the truck stop down the road, between the cemetery and my house. “I don’t know why they like it so much, but they do. Ha!” She let out a loud laugh and took a sip of her drink. “I worsh with Listerine after if I can, and,” she pointed at Beth, “don’t ever swallow that shit, no matter what they say.” We stared at her blankly in stunned silence. Beth blinked a few times, trying to take in all the new information she’d just received. “Hey, how old are you, anyway?” Tanya asked Beth.
“I’m . . . eleven,” Beth said meekly.
“I’m twelve,” I said, taking a very small sip of my drink. “She’ll be twelve too, next month. But I’ll be thirteen in four months. We’re in middle school. Sixth grade.” I didn’t know if this was important, but I worried that when Beth said “eleven” it had sounded too young, and we would get in trouble, somehow. Tanya, though, was unfazed.
“You look older than your age,” she told Beth. “You’re a pretty girl, so I’ll tell you something.” She paused to scratch a spot on her arm that looked as if it had been scratched many times before. “If a boy tells you size don’t matter, it means he’s got a little dinker. And it does matter.”
“What?!” Beth let out, spitting her drink out of her mouth and across the floor. She covered her mouth with her hands and snorted, then buried her head in my shoulder, having a laughing fit. Tanya started laughing too, in a loud, booming “Ha, ha, ha!” and slapped her thigh. I patted Beth’s head. Tears were running down her eyes from her laughter. It was a drunk, hysterical laughter that almost wouldn’t stop. Tanya got up and went to the window and took more of her sinus medicine. Beth finally sat upright, took some deep breaths, and calmed herself down. “My stomach hurts from laughing,” she told me, sighing exhaustedly. “Ohhhh wow.”
Tanya sat back down on the floor. “It’s my turn,” she hollered, then sniffed loudly and tilted her head back and sniffed again. “Hey,” she looked around, “where’s my drink?” She looked at Beth. “Did you take my drink?” she shouted in a sudden outburst. “You don’t gotta do that. I done give you your own. What the hell?” Beth meekly pointed to the small cement ledge below the stained-glass window where Tanya’s Mountain Dew can sat. “Awww, damn.” She stood and went back to the ledge to get her drink and immediately took a big gulp of it. “Oookay,” she said, calming down. “My turn. Hmmm.” She sucked on her bottom lip and looked from me to Beth, and back again. “I’ve never . . .” she eyed me weirdly and took a few steps toward us, “I’ve never . . . kissed a girl,” she leaned down for effect, “with tongue!” She shouted, and stared at me pointedly. I shrugged and shook my head, narrowing my eyes. I didn’t take a drink. Neither did Beth. But Tanya took a big drink of her “cocktail.”
“Wait,” I asked, “does that mean you have done it?”
“Hell yeah, honey,” she said, wiping her mouth with her arm.
“But aren’t you supposed to say things you haven’t done?” Beth asked.
“It don’t matter. You say whatever, and if you’re lying, you have to drink. That way you can drink even when it’s your turn,” Tanya explained.
“But we’ve all been drinking anyway. It’s just, when someone says something you’ve done, you also have to drink then, right?” I asked, incredulously.
“Who cares!” Tanya shouted and started laughing at me. “You are so uptight.”
“Yeah, Gillian, don’t be so uptight,” Beth said, shoving me, playfully. She took a swig of her drink. I was feeling very drunk already, and Beth was drinking even more than me.
“I’m not uptight,” I said, my expression sour. “I just want to know what the rules are.” I let out a frustrated sigh and took a big drink of my cocktail. They were getting on my nerves. I felt a strange, burning anger rise suddenly from my burning stomach.
Beth rested her head in her hands and mumbled, “Is the room spinning?” Then she did her best to sit upright and giggled at nothing.
“I thought for sure you’d take a drink on that one,” Tanya told me.
I didn’t like this statement. I furrowed my eyebrows in her direction. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, you know,” Tanya said. “You just look like you would’ve, that’s all.”
Beth laughed at that.
I shoved her lightly with my hand. “Shut up,” I told her.
“I’m sorry, Gillian,” Beth said, snorting and trying not to laugh. “I’m sorry.”
“You never even done it for practice?” Tanya asked, her eyes wide with excitement. She crossed over to us and sat back down. “I dare you’uns to.”
“Dare us to what?” I asked.
“Kiss!” Tanya shouted. “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” She clapped her hands in rhythm to the words.
“Kiss who?” I squealed.
“Each other.”
Beth looked at me, and laughed harder. She’d been on a drunk, long roller coaster of laughter for five straight minutes now. Sometimes it subsided, but was never fully gone, it was just a dip, where her laughter came to a brief rest, only to prepare for the next mounting crescendo of something that would push her over the edge, and she’d be sent rolling along the track of another outburst. She laughed and laughed and squealed, “Kiss me, Gillian!” and fell over.
“We’re not playing truth or dare,” I snapped at Tanya. “What the hell is wrong with you two?” This night foretold our drinking to come in years ahead. I was obviously an irritable, easily angered drunk, and Beth was the kind of drunk who might end up on a Girls Gone Wild video, constantly squealing and laughing at the absurd hilarity of, and game for, everything.
“Why not? Let’s play truth or dare!” Tanya boomed excitedly. She smacked her thigh. “Come on. I dare you to kiss her. With tongue.”
Beth lay on her side, giggling, “Kiss me, Gillian. Pucker up!” she said, pawing at the air. “Kissy kissy. Hahaha.” She was drunker than I was.
“Why do you get to go first?” I said to Tanya. “It would be our turn to say I never, so we should get the first dare.” I let out a long, annoyed, hissing sigh.
“Fine,” Tanya said. “Dare me. But if I do your dare, you got to do mine.”
Beth sat back up, unsteadily. “You’ll do a dare?” she asked, happily. She looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, oh I got one.” She held her finger in the air like a cartoon scholar who just had a bright idea, then brought the finger down and pointed it at Tanya. Her words came out in one childishly eager, drunken stream. “I dare you to take off your clothes, down to your underwear, and run all out to the road and . . .” she thought too hard, “spin around, and dance, naked, and then run back.”
“Can I keep my shoes on?” Tanya asked. Beth nodded yes, rubberly, and took another drink.
“You’re not going to do that,” I said.
“Hell yeah I am. We’re having a party,” Tanya retorted, standing and immediately removing her shirt. “But then, you gotta kiss her.” Beth nodded in agreement again, her head falling down slowly, then quickly snapping up, her eyelids heavy and lips pursed in what I think she thought was a smile, but what was beginning to look more like an imitation of a duck gone wrong.
Tanya wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts were small and her dark nipples were hard against the chill of early autumn. She struggled to get her tight shorts off over her tennis shoes, but soon enough she was standing before us in her baby blue cotton panties, waving her arms over her head, and enthusiastically hopping in place. “Let’s do it!” she shouted. Beth and I followed her out of the mausoleum. As soon as she’d made it outside, she took off in a strange, wobbling, yet vigorous run down the dark gravel drive, screaming “Yeeehaaaaw!” and “Yow!” as she went. When she hit the road, she ran out to the middle and, topless, in her underwear and tennis shoes, began doing an erratic Twist and Mashed Potato, shining, pale and white, visible by the light of the nearly full moon.
The dancing in the road took longer than I believe Beth had intended, and I very much hoped a car wouldn’t happen to pass as she was dancing her weird jig in the night, but finally, she deemed the deed done, and she ran back to us, stopping before us and panting, bent over with her hands on her knees like a woman who’d just finished a triathlon. “I did it,” she panted, and held her hand up for a high five. I high-fived her.
“You did it,” Beth squeaked happily, “you dud it.” She was holding onto my arm with her extremely inebriated head resting against my shoulder. “Dud it,” she squeaked again, leaning against me. “Dud ut, dud unt, dud dunt, did it, dunt dunt, dun dun.” It was the Pink Panther theme song she was singing. When she was done, she giggled meekly and rubbed her head against the arm of my jacket.
“Okay.” Tanya stood erect, amazingly unencumbered by being nearly naked in fifty degree weather. “You two’s turn. You gotta do your dare now.”
“We gotta do ur dare,” Beth slurred, smiling up at me from my side.
“Fine,” I said. I took her by the shoulders and turned her to face me.
“With tongue!” Tanya hollered.
She was watching us like we were the most intriguing film. Beth was having trouble standing on her own, still she persisted, smiling up at me with her heavy eyes and wobbling in place. “Kiss me, Gillian,” she said like it was a joke, and puckered her lips. I sighed heavily, and took her head in my hands. Neither of us had ever kissed anyone before, with tongue, boy or girl.
“Okay, I’m gonna do it,” I told her, and readied myself as if preparing for impact in a boxing match. I tilted my head and went in for the kiss. Beth opened and closed her mouth, making fake sexy moaning noises, but about two beats before our lips would have touched, she doubled over and hurled all over my shoes.
The vomiting was violent and went on for a while. When we thought it had stopped, it started again. I held her head as she vomited on the gravel road, then walked her over to the mausoleum, where she vomited again against the back wall. Tanya followed us around like a worried puppy, topless and yapping out advice. “Hold her head. She needs water. I don’t got no water. You need to get her home. Throw her in the shower. Hose her off.”
It took nearly an hour and a few failed attempts at keeping some Mountain Dew (sans vodka) down before Beth was in good enough shape to make the stumbling walk home, during which I half dragged, half carried her most of the way. Somehow, we made it. It was now well into the wee hours of the night. She hit her bed and went immediately to sleep. I woke her briefly to pour water down her throat and undressed her the best I could, then curled next to her, falling quickly into a heavy sleep myself.
Her parents never even suspected. The next day, in the late afternoon, we went back to the cemetery and collected the things we’d left: our bikes, my radio, and her mother’s mug. Tanya wasn’t there, but her things were still as they had been the night before. I rode back to my house in the mobile home lot where I lived with my father.
He was a kind, quiet man who worked at the rock quarry fulltime, and was doing his best to raise me alone, since my mother left us when I was seven. She’d always been a drunk, and when she lived with us, he did little more than cry and mumble, and they yelled at night. So when I came home from school one day and she was gone, it wasn’t the worst thing. I won’t say it wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t the worst thing. It was bad at first, not knowing where she was or if she was ever coming back, but eventually I got used to not caring, and by the time I was that age, I didn’t really think about it anymore.
Dad did his best. He didn’t always know quite what to say to me, but he was always good to me. When I came in that day, hungover at twelve years old in the late afternoon, he greeted me and motioned toward our dinner, which was laid out on the kitchen table. He had bought us Subway sandwiches and we ate them in the living room, watching the football game as we often did on Sunday nights, as if nothing extraordinary had happened. He had no idea. Of course, he had no reason to suspect anything was different. As far as he knew, I’d simply spent the night at my friend’s house and came home the next afternoon, as I had many times before. But somehow, I thought he would be able to see it on me, this change, whatever it was, brought on by the events of the previous night. It was so obvious to me, and it didn’t even register with him, I was ruined for the world. We both were, Beth and I, spoiled, in a weird way. Our safe, simple world where our basic needs were met would no longer be enough for us. We longed to taste the freedom of her lack.
It was hard for us to sleep that night. We lay awake in our separate beds, our minds racing with thoughts of her. In the space between waking and dreams, I saw her slinking in her baby blue panties and running shoes, topless up the night road, the stars guiding her on toward the truck stop where scurrilous men handed her bills to crawl up into their oily cabins and take them in her mouth. The smell of Listerine filled my nose and tickled the back of my tongue. We pondered what it was like to be her, free as her, and would she let us in again to that place where we could be free with her?
We went back as often as we could, which was quite often. After school and after our homework was complete, most days, we sat with her until sunset. She told us about things. She answered our child’s questions. She answered every question we asked and told us things we never would have thought to ask. She could talk for hours on end without tiring of the conversation. She could dance to country music on her old radio, and twirl for us, and gorge herself on candy, and comb her hair straight, and smoke infinite quantities of cigarettes. I took up smoking with her as a lark, and began turning pale from the horrible menthols. Beth didn’t smoke again, and didn’t drink with her, either. She was afraid of it after that night of violent vomiting, but I would help myself to a shot of whiskey here and there, which I sipped as we sat, enjoying the privacy of the mausoleum walls: insulated by the bodies of the rich dead.
Soon, we sat with her after school and after we’d only pretended to do our homework, and our grades began to fall, and I became paler, and neither of us took much interest in the school, or the playground antics of our peers, or the yammerings of our parents and teachers. We had more important things to think about. We ran errands for her. We made grocery lists and bought her close approximations of the food she’d asked for at the local supermarket: peanut butter and jelly, bread, Lunchables, and Go-Gurt pouches, cookies, and canned SpaghettiOs; nothing perishable, because she didn’t have a refrigerator. If not for us, she would have lived off of the chips and candy bars and liquor she purchased late at night at the truck stop. She paid us for our errands, three dollars here, five dollars even, sometimes, for a big haul. She seemed to have a nearly endless supply of small bills. I had a hunch I knew what most of the cash was from, but I didn’t ask. Although she was quick to divulge information about her personal life, and about the seedy goings-on of humankind, there were some things we did not ask, which I knew she would never be honest about.
It was in the paper for weeks. I noticed it one morning as I sat with my father, eating cereal, him drinking his coffee and reading the sports section, which is all he really ever read of the newspaper. The news part of the paper was lying on the table in front of me, and my eyes caught a headline: “Search Still in Progress for Woman Robber.” I read the story. A woman, wearing a ski mask, weighing approximately one hundred pounds, about five feet five inches tall, had robbed a gas station in a neighboring town. They weren’t sure if she’d even had a weapon. She’d held up the place with something that could have easily been anything, shoved into a paper bag and pointed at the cashier as if it was a gun. The cashier was a kid, a girl of only sixteen, so she gave the woman everything: all the money in the register as well as in the safe, which unfortunately had not been locked, so she got away with nearly two thousand dollars in small bills. We lived in a very rural area of neighboring small towns, and this sort of incident was quite uncommon. My father noticed what I was reading. “Goddamned meth heads are everywhere lately,” he grumbled, shaking his head and sipping his coffee.
There was a number to call if you had any information. Although I assumed the suspect was Tanya, I didn’t even think about calling the number. It would have been a betrayal. She was ours now, Beth’s and mine. She was like our pet. She was like a cat. We could leave her alone all day, sometimes even skipping days, and she would still be there, crooning and waiting to be fed and paid attention to.
We loved her. We loved her in different ways. For Beth, she was like a cool older sister, or older girlfriend. Beth felt excited and like she was doing something very taboo and very mature when she was with her. For me, it was a little different. I felt something that Beth also felt. On top of everything else, I needed to keep her well. I felt sorry for her, and I liked feeding her and caring for her. She was my friend, in a way, and I always felt like I was having an adventure when I was with her, but I also felt pity for her, hiding out alone there like she was. Nowhere to go, no one to see except the truckers and us.
Three weeks became a month and then, somehow, more than two months had passed, and winter was upon us. Tanya was becoming increasingly agitated during our visits. By the end of December, it would begin snowing, we all knew, and it wouldn’t let up until February. She didn’t have a plan. She never had. She mused about getting one of the truckers to let her hitch a ride with him out to California, or down to Florida. But there was something about the way she said this that let us all know these were only pipe dreams.
Beth snuck her blankets from her parents’ storage, and I bought her many sweatshirts and sweatpants from the dollar store with money she’d given me, which she wore in layers. She was paranoid that the FBI was after her. Sometimes it was the CIA and sometimes it was the NSA, though it was never the local police, which is what she should have probably actually been worried about. The reasons that the FBI, or CIA, or NSA might be after her were various and confusing, having to do with her husband, or boyfriend or brother, depending on which incarnation of the story she was telling that day, having deep government connections and trying to frame her, for what, it was unclear. She simply said, a wild look in her eyes, “I know that fucker’s tryin’ to frame me.” And after she took what she never wavered from referring to as her sinus medicine, she would lament the baby, which had either been beaten out of her, or which she’d been forced against her will to have aborted, or which she’d miscarried. I wasn’t sure what Beth believed, but I knew there was no husband or boyfriend, or brother, and there was no baby. There was just her shocked mind panicking like a tormented cat lurching at some constant apparition in the corners of her consciousness.
She was wide-eyed and more and more paranoid. Her past was a perpetually shifting narrative that, as she recalled its stories, sometimes seemed to surprise even her. She had no past, or she had many pasts. She had no foreseeable future. It was getting colder, and she had no plan. She was scratching at her own flesh till it scabbed and then scratching the scabs. She was trembling and chewing her lips. Sometimes, during the last two weeks, where she was chewing was bleeding, and one day one of her teeth fell out, and Beth cried, and I knew something had to change. There was blood coming from her gums where the blackened tooth had fallen out, and sinus medicine was crusted around her nose, and she just laughed and laughed, and laughed at the whole thing, and I knew something had to change.
It was a Thursday, dangerously encroaching upon a bad winter, and we were riding our bikes from school, an activity we would soon have to forsake, due to the oncoming snows. We’d start taking the bus again, and we would be fine. But what would she do? She didn’t have a plan, but luckily, I had one for her.
I told Beth I didn’t want to go to the cemetery right away. I wanted to take a different route, down Sycamore Street, where I knew of at least two empty houses that I thought could provide a good respite from the cold. We lived in a small town of just three thousand people, tucked into a valley on the western side of a small mountain. Nothing much happened. People didn’t move there. People either stayed, and stayed, or moved away, and the economy had been on a steady decline since I was small, so there was not a shortage of shabby, empty houses that had either been foreclosed on or altogether abandoned by owners who’d lost all hope of selling. The first house was in the middle of a residential block of town and quite exposed for our purposes, but we checked it out anyway. It was a small one-story thing, with a rotting porch, and many notices of condemnation stapled to the door and boarded-up windows. We crept in through the back door, and when we entered, it became obvious that we weren’t the only ones who’d broken in. Cigarette butts and empty beer cans littered the stained floor, and stupid graffiti covered the living room walls. It was cold inside, and we discovered that one of the bedroom ceilings was greatly compromised, crumbling in the corner, and rotten all the way through in one section, exposing the house to the elements.
We went down the road to the second place I had in mind, which was a larger two-story home that had been empty for a year, that rested on the edge of the residential street, tucked away inside a large, fenced-in yard surrounded by shrubbery, overgrown weeds, and trees, some of which were evergreens. This, I thought, would provide good cover, and if she draped the windows with blankets, would not draw much attention during the winter, even if she burned her candles at night. Beth and I dropped our bikes on the side of the road and crawled under the fence, pushing our way through the brambly weeds. It was more difficult to get inside this house as the doors had been boarded quite securely, but we were able to jimmy a basement window, and once we were inside, we saw that the house was in very good condition: dusty but sturdy, and not at all rotten. There was even a couch in the large living room, which, although it smelled of mold, would be usable. We were surprised to find that, although there was no electricity and the gas to the stove had been cut off, the water still worked. We could flush the toilet and run the sink. It didn’t get hot, but it was something. Beth was elated. “This’ll be like a mansion for her,” she beamed. We decided that we would convince her to move that night, after dark, but before it got too late. We went home, and I told my dad that I would be watching movies at Beth’s house until evening, and she told her parents that she would be with me, so that we could stay out past our regular curfew.
We met at the cemetery at six. We were disappointed to find Tanya wasn’t there. We spoke briefly about going to the truck stop to look for her, but somehow, that wasn’t an option. I think that would have been too real. Somehow, she would have seemed like a different person to us in a less private context. We waited around for a good hour. The mausoleum was cold, its stone walls exacerbating the chill, serving only to keep out the gusts of wind that came up intermittently as we waited. The sun was set, and we lit candles, noting that we could see our own breath rising and falling before us inside the mausoleum like a spectral warning of what would only be getting worse.
When Tanya finally arrived, she was drunker than usual, and the residue of her sinus medicine was crusted underneath her left nostril. “Heya, girlies,” she greeted us. “You’re out late. You bring me something? Here, look what I got.” She pulled two packets of Twinkies, some corn chips, a bag of Cheetos, a Pepsi, and a bottle of water out of her bag and laid them on the table. “You hungry? You have dinner?” She pulled a crumpled five, and three one-dollar bills out of her pocket and tucked them under a candle on the table. “I made some money today. It comes and it goes, though, don’t it? That was twenty big ones, and now look at it. Dang.” She’d told us she did “odd jobs” for the truckers, which Beth had presumed to mean helping them clean their trucks and pump gas, obviously not connecting the rantings of the first night of our meeting to actual, ongoing activities. At first, Tanya had been polite enough to answer Beth with, “Yeah, sure, that kinda stuff. I help ’em change the oil, give the hood a rub-down. Ha!” but she’d soon after that, during one of her sinus medicine binges, divulged and described in great detail exactly what the odd jobs looked like, and felt like, and smelled like, and how much she got paid for each type of odd job. Beth thought it was cool. I tried not to think about it too much.
She shook the Twinkie in my face. “You want some?”
I declined, but Beth opened the bag of Cheetos and ate a handful. I was anxious about getting things done, because we only had a few hours left before we had to be home.
“We found something for you,” I told her. “It’s a place you can live in the winter. It’s warm.”
“It’s a big house,” Beth said, chewing on the Cheetos. “You’ll love it.”
“What are you talkin’ about? What house?” Tanya asked, tearing open the bag of Twinkies and diving right in. “These are so good,” she said through the mouthful. “You know what I seen today? I seen this guy with a weird little dog with a bandanna tied around its neck that said ‘little bitch,’ and I said to him, ‘Now hey, do you know what the difference is between a bitch and a—’”
“You’ve got to start packing,” I interrupted her. “We can stay a little later tonight and help you move.” I took a blanket off her bed and began folding it. “I can ride you on my bike on the pegs. We’ll have to make a couple trips. We can put your stuff in our baskets.” I finished folding one blanket, set it down on the floor and went to folding the next. But as soon as I’d picked it up, Tanya snatched it out of my hands.
“What the hell are you doin’?” she snapped. “What you got in your head? Move where? What are you talking about?”
“The house we found you!” Beth said excitedly. “It’s so beautiful. And it’s totally empty.”
“Where’s it at? How you know no one ain’t coming back?”
“It’s abandoned,” I said. “It’s all boarded up, but we’ve got a way in.”
“Why would we go in?”
I rolled my eyes. “You can live there through the winter,” I said loudly, exasperated.
“Where’s this house at?” Tanya asked, seeming not at all pleased.
“It’s in town,” Beth said. “Just at the end of Sycamore, before Natural Bridge Road. It’s real private.” She tried, “It’s hidden so no one will know you’re in there.”
“Hunt-uh, Hunt-uh.” Tanya sat down on the bed and folded her arms across the blanket she held. She shook her head no several times. “I ain’t goin’ into town. They’ll find me there.”
“No one’s looking for you anymore,” I told her, deeply annoyed. “No one cares.” This pissed her off.
“Naw, naw, naw.” She shook her head no several more times. “I know better than that. They got radar satellites. They got infrared face recognition technology. Ain’t you read the news? Huh!?” she shouted. She’d been getting more irritable and raising her voice at us for no apparent reason over the last few weeks. It was like dealing with a small child.
“But we’ll go tonight. It’s dark,” I tried. “No one will see you.”
“Oh yeah? And then what?” she snapped back. “How am I gonna live in town? How will I get to the truck stop to make my money? How will you come and see me? People’ll see y’all going in and out. Then they’ll know.”
I hadn’t thought about all of this. She had some good points, but it didn’t matter. “It’s too cold to stay here,” I squealed. “There’s going to be a blizzard next week. You’ve got to go.”
“I don’t got to do nothing.” She tossed the blanket aside and stood, collecting her bag and taking it over to the ledge below the stained-glass Virgin Mary, where she proceeded to lay out her small mirror, onto which she dabbed her powder, which she snorted through a cut-up straw.
“We thought you’d be happy,” Beth said, worry and confusion apparent in her expression.
“I appreciate what you girls tryin’a do for me,” Tanya said, turning and sniffing, then taking her cigarettes out of her pocket and lighting one. She offered me one. I lit it and smoked it, cringing at the horrible menthol taste I never got used to. “But I ain’t goin’ into town tonight. No way. Maybe when it gets colder, if I have to. Or maybe, I’ll just hitch a ride with one of those old boys out to California. Go rest my head in San Francisco. Hang out with some hippies for a while.”
“You can’t stay here anymore,” I persisted. “I’m wearing a winter coat and it’s freezing in here.”
“It ain’t that bad,” Tanya argued. Beth came and sat down next to me dejectedly. I smoked my cigarette hard. I repeated that there was a blizzard coming soon. Beth seconded my concern. We went back and forth for a good twenty minutes, but finally we came to an agreement. We would move her on Sunday. For some reason, she thought, this would be a day when no one would be out and about to see us. I had a horrible feeling that come Sunday she would back down on her promise, but it was something, so I held onto the idea that on Sunday we’d move her, and everything would be all right, whatever all right looked like with her.
“So anyway,” Tanya told us, “I said to him, ‘What’s the difference between a bitch and a bulldog in heat?’ and he said, ‘What?’ And I said ‘tampons,’ you get it? And he looked like he was gonna turn red. And I said, ‘Don’t worry, hon, I don’t bite . . . much.’ And he laughed and laughed. They was always telling jokes like that when I was a little kid. When I was your age, there wasn’t no one watching us like they watch kids now. We could do whatever and didn’t have to worry about creeps like kids do now. I think it’s ’cause of the video games, you know? People growing up like that . . .”
Her stories trailed on into the evening. I took a shot of whiskey and watched the clock till it was time to head home. It didn’t feel the same that night as it had before. It felt like something we were quietly enduring or doing out of obligation and, somehow, on a, I suppose it would be, spiritual level, it made sense to me that the blizzard came early. Something had to change, had to move, had to freeze.
It was the very next day, a Friday, and just after lunch, we were alerted that school would be let out early. The storm was coming fast, more than three days before it was expected. I tried to sneak away when they let us out, but my dad was there waiting for me in the parking lot. The whole town was shutting down, preparing for the big blizzard. Factories were letting the workers out early, and the stores were closing. I asked my dad if I could bike home, but he was insistent, and tossed my bike in his truck bed, telling me we had to go get groceries before the store closed, because we might be snowed in for a couple of days. I saw Beth across the parking lot, getting into her mother’s car, her eyes met mine for a moment, and they were wide with worry. She shook her head no at me before her mom pulled away.
All the way to the grocery store, I begged to go to Beth’s house for the night. “You’re not going anywhere. You could be stuck there for days.” He was annoyed and emphatic. “Absolutely not.” He seldom put his foot down with me, but when he did, I knew it was no use arguing.
I called Beth as soon as I got home and she was inconsolable. She kept quietly weeping. I could almost see her wiping her tears away as she repeated, “What are we going to do, Gillian? We have to do something.”
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “She’ll be okay. She’s tough.” But something in me knew that probably wasn’t true. She was high and drunk and tweaked out most of the time, and the stone walls were more cold than she might even realize. Would she strip naked and run screaming through the onslaught? Would she drink herself into a warm slumber, her body insulated by a whiskey buzz inside a nest of blankets and confusion? I could hope. I could only hope.
The blizzard began just after eight. I watched the snow come down while my father sat on the couch, half watching television and half telling me about his day. I watched the snow come down, at first begging it to be light, then, as the wind began to pick up, I watched the blizzard like it was a murderer descending around us. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I wanted to tell my father, but I couldn’t. This existed far from him. This existed far outside of any world I could think of as real, with laws and reason. The wind was horribly loud, hissing like a cold kettle and etching frost on the windows. The snow was phantom white, its edges sometimes blue in the streetlights, falling in morbid sheets; like those laid across faces, covering blank eyes, or pulled down for shock.
After the first hour, sleet came with the snow and rattled against the roof, and the wind shook the house where I sat, warm and safe with my father and some fake reality show going on and on, and the temperature outside steadily dropping like a regrettable stone dropped down some dark, long-forgotten well, so deep you don’t hear it touch bottom and it makes you frightened of what it would be like if your own body was that stone, falling down that well of endless coldness, alone in the night.
The storm kept on through the night, and my dad told me to go to bed, but when he finally paid full attention to me, he could see that my face was pale and my eyes crazed with worry and I was trembling all over. He put his arm around me and told me not to be scared of the storm, and I finally burst out crying, and he held me, but I couldn’t stop. I was hiccuping and snorting like a baby, so he took me, for the first time since I was a baby, to bed with him, and fell asleep next to me in his work clothes, my head resting on his shoulder, while I looked out the window through tear-drenched eyes at the unrelenting night sky.
She was like our pet, and like with the pets of children, we couldn’t bear to look. We trudged through the several feet of snow, packed tight in the snowsuits our parents had dressed us in before they allowed us to brave the cold only two days after the blizzard had subsided enough that the roads were passable, and it was possible to drop me off at Beth’s house. We walked silently in our rubber snow boots up the road that led to the cemetery, then through the thick snow that covered the graveyard. The northmost side of the mausoleum had a snowdrift the wind had carved against it nearly five feet high. The door was cracked open, just a half inch, barely noticeable, but enough that I could tell the elements had gotten inside, and my breath also froze in the air. I placed my hand on the door and looked at my feet. I couldn’t bring myself to open it. “Tanya,” I said meekly. “Are you in there? Are you okay?” I closed my eyes and pressed my ear to the door’s small opening, waiting for an answer. There was none. “Tanya!” Beth cried louder. “It’s us! Hello! Hello!” Beth sounded like a sad little bird. I banged on the door with my gloved fist. It made a deep thudding sound against the door. Tears fell from Beth’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks. They were cold and she wiped them away. “Maybe she hitched a ride to California,” she said sadly. “Maybe she’s at the truck stop.”
I nodded yes. “She probably did. That’s what she said she was going to do.” We stared at the door. We didn’t dare open it. Finally, I pushed it all the way closed and took the heavy chain, which still hung open dangling from the latch, and strung it through the metal hook on the wall, then looped the chain in a knot. I tugged on the door. The chain held tight. “There,” I told Beth. “This way if she does come back, her place will be safe.”
Beth nodded. “That’s nice,” she said. “I hope she does. I’ll miss her.” More tears streamed down her pink cheeks and she wiped them away with her thick mittens. “California is really far away.” I nodded in agreement. It sure was.
We never went back to the cemetery. Of course, when we passed it on our bikes and in our parents’ cars, we couldn’t help but think of her, there in the mausoleum with her crumpled bills and endless cigarettes, our first taste of liquor and of freedom, real freedom we found there where we always used to go, back when the dead left us alone.