Mosquitoland (11 page)

For my thirteenth birthday, we chose
The Shining,
which messed me up for weeks. Afterward, Steve drove us home, and as I was now thirteen, I saw through the bullshit. Sexually speaking, Steve was dead to me.

As he made the turn onto my street, I geared myself up for a grounding. Sneaking out to a bad movie, having goofy fun with Henry, riding home with Steve, then getting caught—at the time, I wouldn't have admitted this, but the getting caught was just as much a part of my birthday tradition as anything else.

But on this night, the den lights were off. Climbing out of the Jetta, both Steve and Henry congratulated me on finally getting away with it. I nodded in a daze and walked inside.

The TV was on in the empty den, but muted.

No one was awake.

No one was mad.

No one cared.

My God, Iz . . . I hope you don't know what that feels like.

Signing off,

Mary Iris Malone,
Friend by Default

P.S.—I wish I hadn't written this down.

The Talismans of Disappointment

I WAKE UP
in cutoffs, mud caked to my face, and a roaring stomachache. The moan—which started in my toes, then wriggled its way through my veins and arteries, organs and muscles, all the way to my lungs—almost escapes. But the kinetic power of a moan is nothing compared to the willpower of a Mim.

It's the kind of middle-of-the-night you feel in your bones. I don't know what time it is, but my bones tell me it's somewhere between two and four a.m.

As I sit up, the journal topples off my chest. I stick it back in my bag, slip on my high-tops, and creep off toward the shit pit. (Congrats again, Universe. Yours is a suspiciously acute sense of humor.) Circling the dying embers of the campfire, I notice Caleb's empty bedding, but in the slipstream of such indigestion, it seems almost trivial. In fact, nothing means much of anything right now, other than the immediacy of my bellowing bowels and a permanent embargo on canned ham.

After the silencing of the bellows—well, things begin to mean things again. And Caleb's empty bedding is a definite something. Before I have a chance to guess what, I hear a noise just outside the clearing.

I freeze . . . quiet . . . listening.

At some point during my time in New Chicago, my ears acclimated to the echoing cacophony of birds chirping, leaves cracking, twigs snapping—the natural sounds of autumnal nature. I shut my good eye and sift through these noises like a forty-niner panning for gold.

Yes, there—right there—definite whispers.

I creep toward the edge of the clearing. Spidery trees and wispy branches, dead leaves crackling like old parchment, and a moonlight subdued—middle-of-the-night-forest is one creepy-ass place. I follow the soft speech toward an oak. At its base, a single shadow, tall and wiry, turned sideways, talking animatedly to someone just out of sight. I squat down on my hands and knees, sinking my knuckles into the soft dirt, willing the sound of my breath away. There are two distinct voices.

“. . . it, that's the plan. Get the whole stash, though. None of this half-ass horseshit.”

“What about the girl?” asks Caleb. After our little campfire story time, I'd recognize his voice anywhere.

“Sweetheart's a liability, ain't she?”

They're talking about me.

“She's kinda cute,” says Caleb. “Even with the mud.”

The moon is just bright enough to see Caleb's outline, but from this angle, I can't make out the second person.

“Keep your eyes on the prize, Caleb. That girl gets in our way, we'll just have to take care of her. You can do that, right?” A brief pause. This second voice has a strange guttural quality, as if the person is eating cake while talking.
“Caleb
?
”

“What?”

The second person makes a noise like he's spitting or something, then says, “If the girl gets in our way, I need to know you will take care of her.”

My heart is at an Olympic pace.

“Yes,” whispers Caleb. “I will.”

“Good. We're close now, you feel it?”

Holding my breath, I inch closer and picture what I must look like—lurking in the dark woods wearing these ridiculous cutoffs, my hair matted in clumps from the murky lake, and to top it off, my muddy war paint, acting as true camouflage.

“Yeah. Four hundred more should do the trick.”

“Well shit, the kid's gotta have that and then some stashed away. Now remember, last time we tried, he had the cash tucked down in the bottom of his sleeping bag. So we'll check there, plus the suitcase.”

I'm closing in now, circling around through leaves and brush. It's slow-going, but any faster, and I'd lose the stealth factor. I need the stealth factor. The stealth factor is crucial.

“You and I have had enough trouble out here to last two lifetimes, see. What we need is a fresh start. Beaches and girls and, who knows, might even get us a job in the movies. Shit, our story is prob'ly worth millions.”

“Prob'ly billions,” says Caleb.

“You're an idiot sometimes, you know that? Nothin's worth
billions
. Anyway, millions is plenty.”

Fingertips to forehead, I am caked in sweat. I crouch as low as possible, move quickly, quietly, efficiently, dart around the final tree, then duck and roll behind a prickly fern. I can already tell my stealthy instincts have not led me astray; I'm in prime vantage point, the perfect position to see who Caleb is talking to. Still holding my breath, I peer around the fern.

“I could be a writer,” he says. “I've always wanted to write.”

My skin crawls as Caleb contorts his face, answers himself.

“Yeah, we'll write it ourselves. More money that way.”

Now back to his original face and voice.

“Sure, more money. But it might open other doors, see. For other projects.”

I close my eyes, willing this to be a dream. In some miraculous sonic anomaly, I hear the voice of my father, miles and miles away, whispering in my ear:
Here we have a rare first-hand account of the Schneiderian First-Rank Symptoms of schizophrenia. Thought echo, voices heard arguing, voices heard commenting on one's actions, delusions of control, thought withdrawal, thought insertion, thought broadcasting, and delusional perception . . .
Suddenly, I'm in the living room back in Ashland, playing bank teller, doing the voices of both the teller and the customer.
“Something's wrong with her, Evie.”

Eyes still closed, I grip the fern for balance. It pierces my palm. A shriek pulls me from the memory.

“Who's there?”
says Caleb.

The shriek was my own.

Now it's Mom's turn to whisper in my ear . . .

Run, Mary.

Turning, I Goodwill myself through the woods, darting past trees, hurdling limbs and branches. I am Arrow Iris Malone, Olympic Record Holder in the Wooded Sprint, running straight and true, striking at the heart of my prey, the clearing. I burst through the line of trees, dive into my bedding, pull the blanket up to my chin, and close my eyes.

Caleb approaches, crashing his way through the woods, his lanky gait wrecking the pureness of the soundscape. And I am struck, now more than ever, at what an unnatural person he is. His footsteps crunch and crackle, closer, closer. He can't be more than a few feet away now. They stop, just by my head. Eyes closed, heart pounding, I am a statue.

Minutes pass.

He's standing there, I know it, waiting for me to make the first move.

Fake-sleeping in front of a psychopath in the middle of the woods is, believe it or not, harder than it sounds.

I pray that my right eye is actually closed, and will my breath to slow; my hand, which landed on my chest when I dove into bed, is rising and falling with each breath.

The external sounds of the forest dissipate.

The internal sounds of my body swell.

He's there.

I know it.

Don't move, Mary.

I used to lie in bed with my hand on my heart, just like I am now, and listen to my parents fight. That's when I discovered something: with extreme concentration, I could hear my own insides over the sound of Mom and Dad's yells. Blood coursing through veins, muscles stretching and creaking; sometimes, I could even hear my hair growing. It was bizarre, no doubt. But the worst, by far, was the amplification of my heartbeat. I would hear that sucker pounding and pounding, and consider all the things I hadn't done, and all the things I didn't even know about not doing, and all the heartbreaks I would never experience, the ones that led to love and everything else, and what if right there—what if right
here—
right now—I actually hear my heart stop beating?

beating . . .

beating . . .

beating . . .

Caleb hasn't budged. His uncomfortable nearness is palpable.

Each breath, in and out, rising, falling.

I think of those days long ago, lying in bed, terrified not of the yelling but of what the yelling meant. And here's what I learned: it's impossible to wonder
when
your heart will stop beating, without wondering if that time is now.

NO COFFEE
.

This is my first thought upon waking.

I am alive
.

A close second.

I rub the fall air from my eyes, willing my brain to get its wheels out of the mud.

“Mornin', honey.”

Across the campfire, Caleb sits in all his shadowy glory, a cigarette hanging from one side of his mouth, a spoon of ham from the other. He pulls a tin from the box and offers it to me. I vomit in my mouth, swallow, shake my head.

“More for me,” he mutters.

Shivering, I sit up and pull the blankets around my shoulders. I must have fallen asleep while I was pretending to be asleep. Pretty damn effective, I'd say.

“How'd you sleep?” The corners of Caleb's mouth curl into a faint smile.

“Like a log,” I lie. “You?”

“Same.”

I scan the clearing quickly, avoiding Caleb's shifty eyes. “Where's Walt?”

“Shit pit,” he mumbles, chews, puffs. I see him glance toward the tent, and wonder if he's already made a pass at Walt's money. I'm guessing not, or he wouldn't be here.

He's trying to figure out what to do with me.

I grab my backpack and rummage around for the makeup-remover pads, eager to be rid of last night's war paint. Mud or not, the pads should do the trick. Unfortunately, they're at the bottom of the bag, forcing me to acknowledge my many talismans of disappointment: one wooden box (wherefore art thou, Ahab?); one cell phone (thirty-nine missed calls); one bottle of Abilitol (if habit is king, I'm the joker); one terse letter (
Think of whats best for her. Please reconsider.
); and last, but certainly not least, one Hills Bros.
coffee can (behold! the Mistress of Burgling). A morning of harsh disappointments tends to slide down the gullet a little easier with some fresh java behind it. But as New Chicago seems to be heavy on the tainted meats and light on the gourmet beans, I'm forced to swallow my disappointments as they come.

I locate the makeup remover and begin wiping the caked mud off my face.

“You know. . . ” says Caleb. His cigarette is now a stump. Sucking down the last of its juices, he flicks it into the ashes of last night's campfire and looks up. His turned-off eyes stir a strange combination inside me, of both fight and flight. As if waiting for his sentence to finish itself, Caleb sits with his mouth open, the accusation there in spirit, but not word. Not yet. The thing is, it doesn't have to be spoken. I can feign ignorance till I'm blue in the face, but I was there. I know the deep end of his soul's pool. I know Caleb's dark secret: not
who
he is, but
what
. A shadow. A creepy-ass-
Gollum
-
Gollum
-schizo-effing shadow.

“Hey, hey, Mim!” Walt yells, bounding out of the woods, buttoning his pants. His face is still covered in dried mud. When he sees my clean face he stops. “Is the war over?”

Lord bless and keep the House of Walt for all of eternity!

“Sure is, Walt. Come here, let me clean you up.”

Caleb tosses his bedding into the tent, his accusations dangling on the tip of his tongue. “Well.” He yawns. “I'm gonna take a shit in the pit and a wash in the lake. Walt, I got something I wanna talk to you about when I get back.”

“Okay, Caleb.”

Then, looking at me, he winks. “You too, sweetie.” He retreats into the woods before I have a chance to give him my
eat shit
squint. (It's a dynamite squint, too, one I save for the purest of assholes.)

After cleaning Walt's face, I stick the pack of makeup remover back in my bag. My good eye lands on my bottle of Abilitol, and for a split second, I imagine the shape of a great grizzly charging me head-on. I see its sharp claws, its glassy eyes, its lolling tongue—I catch my breath and stuff the bottle down in the bag.

Fuck it
.
I can miss a day.

“Hey, Walt,” I say, a plan beginning to take shape. He's eating ham—like it's his first, last, and only—watching a bluebird tug a worm from the ground.

“Yo, Walt,” I whisper.

The bird seems desperate for its early, earthy breakfast. Walt is enthralled. “Hey, hey,” he says, still staring at the bird.

“You ever been to Cleveland?”

His head turns from the carnivorous bird to me. In my ear, I hear my mother again.
Have a vision, Mary, unclouded by fear.

I have limited experience, but I know this: moments of connection with another human being are patently rare. But rarer still are those who can recognize such a connection when they see one.

The camera zooms in on Walt's piercing eyes.

It cuts to a close-up of my own.

The connection is there, wriggling below the surface, just like that worm. And what's more, we both feel it.