Miss Catherine found me sitting underneath the crepe myrtle in her lawn with my head in my hands.
“What have they done to you?” she asked, her voice gentle.
She tugged on my hand.
“No, If I let go I will fall apart,” I said.
“Oh darling,” she said, “no you won’t.”
I lowered my hands, and there was Miss Catherine leaning over me, her body slimmed and roped in, skin bound so tight that I thought I could see her lungs and heart swimming underneath. As always, she wore her thick black sunglasses.
“Let me see your face,” she said.
I choked and glanced up. It was almost summer and the gardens of the ladies turned a rich green, flowers trembling and singed at the edges, the water in bird baths and garden hoses spitting hiss-fire. Yet when I looked down I was still a late autumn with my grasslimbs twisted into brown shades, the hard seed of my mouth crushing my tongue. My flowers would never bloom into spring. They would remain the same as always, red-wired and orange blooded.
“What’s all over your lap?” she asked.
I looked down and saw glass sprayed all across my legs. When I looked back up Miss Catherine smiled. She knew. I clutched at my dress, my unwinding throat. She knew. She could see what the other ladies could not, past my illusion of pretty thing skin and bright eyes. She knew what I was. She knew, and there were no numbers to save me.
She plucked a dandelion from my eye and blew the wisps away.
That night I dreamed that a black horse came to visit me while I slept and he reached his neck through the open window. He nuzzled my cheek and I awoke and took his soft head between my hands. Then he opened his mouth and inside his mouth I saw stars and stars and dark horse-headed nebulae and black matter and swirling galaxies of light.
I awoke to find my husband asleep, his hands knotted above his head.
That’s when I went out into the backyard and found the children locked in Miss Catherine’s chicken coop, little ghosts with barbed wire scars. I pressed my hands up against the fence and stared through the thin slats at those children, and tried to remember the last time I’d seen children out in the street playing, the last time I’d seen a child duck behind a corner at the end of a hallway or peek out from underneath lace dining room curtains.
Maybe this was normal.
I did not remember the time when I lived on an Adirondack mountainside, when I was a wild and lush growing thing. My husband said that it was normal. Nobody remembers the place from where they were born. But sometimes I thought if I closed my eyes I could remember a place where the stars were not the pale, ceramic plate designs they were in suburbia, but were alive and dripping down my chin. I remembered sunlight that pushed its way through my skin and refracted hot and glittering on the other side.
I remembered the first time I told my husband “I don’t belong here.” That was the morning after I found the little ghosts in Miss Catherine’s garden. And I remembered how he laughed when I said it, and I smiled, this thin smile that I wanted to believe in, because with the first “I don’t belong here,” you can almost forget, you can almost tell yourself it’s another one of your little lies.
My husband ate his breakfast, oatmeal pancakes and orange juice, while I sat beside him at the table with the sunlight curling and uncurling the flowers in my back. In that moment I’d never realized how small the room was, how cold the bare linoleum floor, how the walls closed in on me as if trying to choke me.
He kissed me once more and ran off to work, leaving me alone with the shuddering walls. I went into the bedroom and pulled open his closet. I pulled out one of his flannel shirts, the red one, and pressed it to my nose. Breathed in. I slipped the shirt on. I always wore his shirts when he left for work. The ritual protected me, or so I thought. I buttoned up each of the seven buttons and then ran my fingers over each one, counting underneath my breath, as I watched my reflection in the mirror.
Only when I looked at his shirt swallowing me did I’d realize the numbers were gone, I hadn’t been counting since I’d dropped Claudine’s glass cake stand. Ever since then the walls started to collapse, the colors of the floors and walls bled into one another, skin and plaster started to converge and soon would be unrecognizable from one another. Everything had gotten out of order, and there would be no going back.
I went outside to escape from the oppressing walls of the house and saw a black car with heavy tinted windows outside of Miss Catherine’s house. My legs started to uncurl, and when I took a step I wobbled and nearly fell. I sat down on the side of the curb hugging my husband’s shirt to my waist, trying to relearn how to breathe. In. Out.
A man in a gray suit stepped out of the car. I shrunk and hugged my husband’s shirt closer. In. Out. It seemed wherever the man stepped he deflected the light. His gray suit opened its mouth and swallowed it up. He wore the same sunglasses as Miss Catherine. When he glanced at me I felt as if he was going to swallow me too, and I reached up to touch my throat. If I didn’t I knew it would fall away.
He smiled at me and went inside Miss Catherine’s house.
The next night the children were gone.
“There was a man visiting Miss Catherine today,” I told my husband the next morning.
“Are you okay?” he asked, picking the bugs out of my hair, “you look sick.”
“Why would a man be visiting Miss Catherine?”
“Have you been sleeping?” he asked.
He held a shiny beetle in the palm of one hand. It shimmered green, opened its wings, and flew away.
“No,” I said, “no.”
He touched my cheek,
“You should get some rest,” he said, and the words stuck in my mouth. They thrashed and thrummed. They squirmed, six-legged and glimmering. I couldn’t speak them, I didn’t dare.
I do not belong here.
But it didn’t matter whether I spoke them or not, they put pressure on my tongue all the same.
Miss Catherine found me in my backyard, staring at the empty chicken coop through the thin slats of the fence.
“Looking for something, darling?” she asked me. She spoke like I always thought a mother would, like warm milk, soft and gliding over the surface. Yet when I looked down she had the body of a predator, rapacious and thin.
“You would think me terribly silly,” I said.
“I doubt that. What’s on your mind?”
I pressed my hands against the wooden fence, and said nothing.
“Little Owl,” she whispered, and she touched my black hair as it blew through the fence. She braided it through her fingers.
“I thought there were children in your chicken coop,” I said, “but now they’re gone.”
I thought she would laugh at me. I thought that her smile would turn into a pincer and she’d take off her glasses and eat me alive.
Instead she released my hair and said, “they had somewhere else they needed to be.”
“That man took them, didn’t he? He took them somewhere.”
“I know it’s hard, darling. I know you’re having a difficult time. Sometimes you get to thinking there’s no escape.”
“Where was he taking those children?”
“Why don’t you go take a trip to the countryside? The flowers should still be in bloom. We’ve been having such good weather lately.”
“God damn it,” I said, and choked, “god damn it, why does everyone talk to me like I don’t even exist?”
I started to cry. The drops ran down my chin and fell on the back of my hands. My tears were tea-stained, the color of plant food.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said, “I don’t belong here.”
“Darling, please,” Miss Catherine said, “Do you think any of us belong here?”
I said nothing.
“I used to live in the countryside and thought the silence would kill me, so I moved to the city and thought the smoke would kill me. Now I’m here and I already want to move back to the country.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Little Owl,” Miss Catherine said, her voice soft, “even as a flower you wouldn’t be happy.”
I wondered sometimes if Miss Catherine was telling the truth, if her and Claudine and all the other ladies looked around their kitchens or living rooms and thought, “I do not belong here.” If they unraveled themselves on the floor because they felt out of place, ready to spill out of their containers. If they stopped eating because they mistook the orange juice for cyanide, or stopped getting dressed because when they looked in the mirror they’d grown wings and their sweaters didn’t fit anymore. If they counted one two three four because all of a sudden the kitchen sink was a steel death trap and the husband’s shadow had become a bear chasing her through a forest of couches and tea treys and it was too much it was all too much five six seven eight.
It was night when I took my husband’s car keys and snuck down into the garage. He’d taught me how to drive once, several summers ago, when everything was new and magic still glittered on my flowers, when I was not a dull colored antebellum thing losing my head. I’d been terrified of the steel box of a car and the sick lurch of the road, so I hadn’t driven since then. I kept slamming on the brakes because I thought if I didn’t the road would stop suddenly and we’d both plummet down into a chasm.
Strange how that no longer seemed to matter.
I opened the garage door and backed the car out of the driveway.
I left that suburban neighborhood and I drove away from the lights and away from the taupe houses, down a winding path where the darkness rose up snarling and wild. I drove onto interstate 61 because 61 seemed like a calm number, a good number. God, I’d never seen so much space before, the way that interstate sprawled out before me so that even the sky seemed gutted and small in comparison.
Several times I tried to go back. There were certain images I’d always held onto, my husband’s face, the warm way that light spread across the bed, the plaid button down, to keep my feet on the ground. To make me stay. But underneath the hot pressure of the wheels these images disintegrated.
I rolled down the window and the wind whipped through my chest, my hair.
I did not know the way to the Adirondacks. In the summer heat and the night I did not see flowers growing along the side of the road, only the grass bubbling and burnt. Still I thought, I would follow the numbers, the endless stream of signs emblazoned with 61, and I knew that I’d eventually find the side of the mountain where I once grew wild and I’d find the two witch men who made me. I imagined them now, sitting heavy in a stone hut filled with smoke. I’d find them and tell them to undo me. Take me apart.
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