We are Wormwood (5 page)

“There it is,” Momma said. “My Lily’s devil smile.”

I wanted to ask if she knew Charlie’s parents were
behavioral scientists - and by the way, can you tell that we kissed in your car
and the smoke smell will never come off the leather seats?
 
And have you seen Pluto lately?

I lolled my head back, curled my toes. Pluto jumped up onto
my lap. Momma saw her wormwood eyes, the blood on her snout, and stroked her
black fur.

“Someone’s looking out for you,” she said.

I imagined the demon, luring the cats of the neighborhood
into the woods, one by one. It was she who tore their eyes out and asked, “Do
you know a girl named Lily?” until she met the one who mewed a soft, “Yes.”
My black Pluto.

At night Charlie chased the demon through the streets as she
taunted him with his teddy bear, laughing, always a step ahead. She lured him
onto my lawn and ran circles around him in the grass, the teddy bear held over
her head. Charlie ran after her with the soles of his bare feet blackened from
walking across burning coals until his legs gave out. He collapsed in the grass
outside, panting up froth, clutching at the sky. He cried for Little B. Always
Little B.

I threw off my blankets and ran toward the door to go save
him, but the demon slammed her hands against my window. The force reverberated
through my house. I fell backwards into bed, clutching at the sheets.

She pressed her mouth against the window. She wore the
funereal veil, and bit down on the top of the teddy bear’s head.

I dreamt, sometimes, that she opened the latch and came into
my room, pale skin wrecking the light, wormwood about to collapse. But instead
of screaming, I opened my arms to welcome her into my bed. And instead of
destroying me with fang teeth, she curled up against me, shivering, trying to
warm herself underneath the sheets.

Pluto jumped into my arms. The window rattled and I held
tight to her. Charlie continued to foam and writhe in the grass, but I couldn’t
hear him over the hiss in my ears.
A swelling noise, louder
than the blood in my throat, louder and louder.

She whispered. Let me in, baby girl. Let me

In.

CHARLIE
PROGRESSED FROM
walking across hot coals to self-flagellation. While
muttering incantations, he beat himself with a cat-o-nine-tails crafted in shop
class of bits of leather and shards of glass. The kids at school called him
“suicide boy” while giving him wristbands to hide his cuts. To Charlie, they
were mute, because his brain was frying from sleep without rest. The teachers
referred him to a counselor; he fell asleep on the counselor’s desk when asked
if he had a “safe home environment.” Her recommendation to the teachers was to
move him to a desk in the back and let him sleep. Hidden in the back row, he
scratched at his wrists with a broken piece of glass. As his appetite waned, he
lay in my lap, underneath the bleachers, whispering of mythology.

“After Persephone ate the pomegranate, she could never go
home again,” Charlie said. “Well, except to visit her mother.”

“Why would she want to do that?” I asked, only
half-listening.

Thinking: I want to build a time machine. I want to climb
inside and go back before they set your teddy bear on fire. I’ll bring it to
you unsinged so you can sleep again.

“The god Zeus was in love with a beautiful woman, named
Leda, so he turned into a swan and raped her.”

He pressed his chin into my knee and coughed. I kept
expecting him to choke out glass. It was only spring, but we were already well
on our way to becoming insane that year. I still hoarded matchsticks and
firecrackers. Charlie kept hitting himself in an attempt to transcend the pain.
Phaedra started tending to carnivorous plants.
As for Momma?
Well, she was the same as she’d always been. The last time I’d seen her, she
told me held a sword underneath her tongue. When The Nightcatcher came around
again all she’d have to do was open her mouth and cut off The Nightcatcher’s
head. With it, she’d grow a tree, and from that tree, feed the entire world.
Nobody would ever go hungry again.

“Once, a god of poison came out of the hush place, and
poisoned an entire town,” Charlie said.

“That isn’t in your mythology books,” I whispered.

He coughed again. There it was, a chunk of glass from his
cat-o-nine tails, spit and saliva in my palm.

Phaedra told me to leave him.
That I was
addicted to the pain that broken people caused.
She said all
fourteen-year-olds were, but I don’t think she paid much attention. She
smuggled Venus flytraps in her backpack and whispered Bukowski poetry to them.
She whispered to me with her nose in the mouth of Venus’ prickly hairs.

“And besides,” she said, “
he
kills
cats.”

“No he doesn’t,” I said.

She didn’t hear me as she started a whispering frenzy under
her breath again, rubbing the Venus’s hairs with the tip of her finger:

she
got up and lit a cigarette, she
was trembling all

over
. She paced up and down, wild
and crazy. She had

a
small body. Her arms were thin,
very thin and when

she
screamed and started beating me
I held her

wrists
and then I got it through
the eyes: hatred,

centuries
deep and true. I was
wrong and graceless and

sick
. All the things I had learned
had been wasted.

there
was no creature living as
foul as I

and
all my poems were

false
.(1)

(1) “I’m in Love” by Charles Bukowski

Summer came and school let out. Charlie took me to the river
outside of town. His scars flushed red in the heat. His thin cotton t-shirt and
swim shorts couldn’t hide the whip burns and scars webbing his skin.

We stood on the bridge and looked down into the water. Even
in summer’s sunshine, the water below lay dark and churning.

“I used to come here alone,” he said. “I held my hands over
the water until I didn’t know where I began and the water ended.”

When I stared down at the murk, I knew Charlie didn’t take
me here to swim. I crossed my arms over my chest and felt my Momma’s two sizes
too big bikini underneath my clothes.

“I used to think it didn’t have a bottom,” he said, and then
nodded off in the middle of the sentence, his head dipping against his chin.

Nobody would think of swimming in that murky blackness.
Nobody except someone who’d been there before.

Sleep deprivation could cause dizziness, hallucinations,
aching, paranoia, stunted growth, self-flagellation with a cat-o-nine tails,
and sleep chasing a demon across your girlfriend’s yard. Maybe it could cause
you to kiss her by the side of the river, like you’ll never kiss her again,
pushing grit and sand into her mouth with your tongue. Maybe you’d stand up,
knees shaking, point to the highest tree and say, “Think I can jump from all
the way up there?”

I watched Charlie climb the tree above the river until it
arched like an arthritic spine, until he couldn’t climb any higher without
breaking branches. I should have told him to stop, but I guess I wanted to know
if he’d actually do it.
If he’d really jump.

I sat down on the edge of the bridge where the concrete
scraped against the bottom of my legs.

“Think I can touch the bottom?” he asked.

He could’ve been a pale animal snarled in the branches.
Maybe another year of sleepwalking and he’d forget human speech and speak only
in hisses. He grasped a thick branch in one hand and leaned out over the water.

He held his hand out, light swelling between his fingers.

She snuck up behind me and whispered in my ear.

“Ke-ke-ke-ke-ke.”

“Charlie!” I called out.

He jumped from the tree. For a moment he seemed to hang
suspended in midair. He outstretched his hands like wings and his fingers
scraped the underside of the sun. His wounds were no longer wounds, but sparks
of light, gold and glittering. The light suffused him in magic that replaced
his pale, flabby skin and insomniac eyes with a heavenly glow, a falling star,
chariot fire, a single shining image of a god before he plunged downwards.

He disappeared into the turbid water.

I rushed to the edge of the bridge, calling his name though
I knew he couldn’t hear me.

Though I knew he wouldn’t resurface.

He wanted to jump. He’d wanted to jump since his parents set
fire to Little B, long before he made his first cat-o-nine tails or took his
first walk across burning coals. Every moment led up to this; his moment to
wear the sun like a crown.

I couldn’t feel my fingers, my throat. My head throbbed. I
opened my mouth but I couldn’t breathe.

The demon behind me held the folds of her white dress out
like wings. She tossed her head back, thick black hair,
her
mouth open in a rictus.

“Ke-ke-ke-ke.”

I stood before her, vulnerable and shivering.

“You can still jump in and save him,” she said.

But I saw the dark waters below.
Heavy, so
heavy, the thick blackness enough to crush me.
The river whispered,
“Hush, hush, suffocating is so easy.” I held my hand over the water. I couldn’t
tell where my hand ended and the river began.

The demon lifted up the bottom of her dress, her pale thighs
so white I thought her bones must be on the outside. She revealed her jutting
hips, her small black panties,
her
skinny, scratched
ribcage.

She discarded her dress on the bridge and jumped into the
river.

Sometimes I imagine the two of them, Charlie and the demon,
sinking downward through miles and miles of water. His hair in her hands like a
leash, his head between her palms, his scars kissed by
blind
fish
.

They never found his body.

AT
SCHOOL THE BOYS
called me black widow and baby killer. Terrance Fleur said
I pushed Charlie into the river because there was no loyalty among weirdoes. He
knew I kept a stash of matches in my coat pocket; I lit them and threw them at
the teacher’s back when I got bored. According to Terrance, with his buckteeth
and dirty, ginger-colored face, this meant I was capable of anything.

Some nameless jock pushed me against the lockers and lifted
up my skirt. He asked me with his fat, bruised mouth dripping tobacco spit, my
hair pulled taut, if I liked to fuck corpses.

“Do you want to find out?” I asked, my voice soft, cheek
against the cool metal lockers.

He let me go, but that didn’t keep him from tongue-lashing
me in the hallways, leaning over to whisper,
“Suck my dick?”
in math class.

My English professor made me stay late after class. I
assumed to lecture me about not reading the Great Gatsby, or to send me to the
principal because I’d burned a hole through his favorite leather jacket.
Instead, he suggested counseling.

“I’m over it,” I said.

“We’re not talking about Charlie.”

“Then what are we talking about?”

“I’m talking about you.”

“I try to avoid that.”

“Exactly what I’m talking about. This kind of unacceptable
behavior,” he said, “your antisocial tendencies.”

If only I had a goddamn cigarette. I’d blow smoke into his
mouth until his lungs burst.

“I don’t want you coming back to class until your behavior
improves.”

His face was like a horse’s face, lean and panicked, with
eyes too big for his head. I took a step towards him. He reached for the phone
on his desk, ready to call for help. A teacher like him never had an adolescent
daughter.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

I blew him a kiss and left.

I knew that, instead of helping me, he wanted to bind me in
chains, take me to the bridge of the river, and command the river to give
Charlie back and take me in his place.

Charlie’s parents didn’t invite me to the funeral.
Behavioral scientists, so inconsiderate.
The morning of his
funeral service, I sat on the church steps in a velvet-black dress stolen from
my mother. In my arms I held a bouquet of tiny blue flowers I picked in the
woods for Charlie.

I leaned my head against the thick church walls and listened
to the preacher speak. I couldn’t make out any his words behind the door, but
they were probably something like:

“She could have saved him, but she didn’t. She’ll burn in
hell for this. There’s no special place for daughters of schizophrenics, God
didn’t account for that one. But don’t you worry, my little lambs, we can throw
her in with the fornicators.”

The organ music started to play and the pallbearers, holding
an empty casket, dragged themselves out of the double doors of the church. The
rest of the mourners followed behind, including Charlie’s frazzle-haired
parents who pretended not to see me. Charlie’s six-year-old cousin picked up a
rock and threw it at me. It narrowly missed my head.

“Go away!” he said, and threw another rock.

It struck me in the stomach. I dropped the flowers and ran.

I searched for her in the woods. Around me insects buzzed
and fireflies lit up in the damp gray morning. I tore my hands trying to climb
into the skins of trees. I expected to find her in the hollow of a trunk, like
an unborn fetus. Or hiding with a child that resembled me, while crystallized
bugs squirmed in her lap.

“Where are you?” I called out.

I beat my fists against the trees. I sat down in the dirt in
Momma’s good velvet, tore at the grass, and tore at my skin. The trees were
unimpressed and too old to shudder at my tantrum. The noise of the woods noise
continued, clicking and clacking.