Nobody’s Going to Save You

ONE

When I was very young I used to wander out to my father’s hunting shed and sit on a tall metal stool while he puttered. He’d built the shed as a place to hang his whitetails in the fall, but over the years it had morphed into a kind of retreat where he could listen to the Red Sox and drink his beers in peace. Ma never ventured out there, never showed any interest, but I spent hours shivering inside that drafty building, sanding blocks of wood and trying the sips of Budweiser he offered, which I swallowed down and pretended to like. Even before he strung himself up from the rafters like a deer carcass, the damp space felt haunted to me. Its bare lightbulbs cast strange shadows onto the tools and cords that cluttered the pegboard walls. And lining the rows of shelves like specimens in a museum were glass jars filled not, as I liked to pretend, with floating eyeballs or wrinkled gray fetuses, but with an archive of metal fasteners—wingnuts, lag bolts, washers, nails, screws, tiny bits of wire, anything he imagined might one day be of use. “Yankee ingenuity,” he said proudly whenever I lifted down a jar to inspect its contents. “Three quarters of what’s busted in this world could be fixed if people had just a little more patience.” Patience being something my father must have run short on, himself, in the end.

Sometimes I’d catch sight of my mother through the bank of grimy windows over the workbench—trailing a garden hose through the flowerbeds or standing cross-armed on the porch with a cocktail and a half-smoked Parliament, gazing off like she was expecting someone to come rushing up the wooded drive to the house. I asked Dad once what it was she was waiting for. He set down his beer can and came to stand beside me. We peered for a long time through the murky glass. “If I knew that, baby girl, I’d be a very happy man.”

On the morning of his funeral, I found my mother pulling old dishes from the kitchen cupboards, flinging them into a pile on the linoleum. She looked like a madwoman at a bonfire. On the counter stood a half-empty Bloody Mary, garnished with a stalk of translucent celery from the bunch Dad had bought the last time he’d made venison stew. What was it the school counselor had told me? Grief won’t look any one way.

“Ma,” I said. “What are you doing?” 

“All this stuff, Rosie! It’s too much! It’s weighing us down!”

Beneath the growing heap of dishes—the deep enamel pot we used to boil lobsters, the plastic colander I wore on my head when I was little—I saw a bunch of checked flannels and pit-stained undershirts. I dug around, discovered Dad’s spare leather boots, his coveralls embroidered with the shipyard’s logo, the forest-green hard hat sporting the union insignia and a unicorn sticker he’d let me paste on when I was little. He’d been dead for nine days. I plucked a blaze-orange hunting vest from the pile and zipped it to my chin. “It’s not weighing me down.”

Ma stopped rifling in the cupboards to look at me. She wasn’t yet forty but her hair had gone completely gray, which she liked to say was my fault. One of my earliest memories is of my mother telling me she’d never wanted kids, and even then, young as I was, I assured myself she didn’t mean that I specifically was unwanted. She pushed the hair out of her face and swirled the flaccid celery in her glass. 

“You don’t want that ugly thing,” she said. She reached for the cigarette balanced on the sink’s edge and started to nod slowly, pointing her cigarette at me. “No,” she said. “Actually, that’s good, actually. You should keep it. The two of you—” She trailed off and ashed into the drain.

Until my father died, the distance between my mother and me had always seemed fixed. Navigable. Suddenly that distance was expanding, rapidly and in all directions, the way my science teacher said the universe had been doing for billions of years. Was there some way to slow it down? Some way to retrieve all the far-flung, careening pieces and stuff them back into something singular and dense and whole? And was that really my job—keeping my mother close, making her love me? 

“The two of us what?” I said, shoving my fists into the vest’s deep pockets. “Why do you act like we were united against you?”

Ma laughed. Something jabbed my knuckle. From the pocket I pulled a lint-covered key, tied with a curl of red ribbon. My mind tore ahead of itself—conjuring a metal lockbox on one of the shed’s highest shelves, a handwritten note folded and stuffed inside. “What’s this?” I said. The note, I imagined, would explain everything—what had gone wrong, how we could fix it. I was fifteen but some childish part of me still believed we still might go back and make things right. 

Ma squinted at me over her drink like she was wracking her brain to recall something, then dropped her cigarette in the sink. “Who knows,” she said. With a grunt she climbed up on the counter and began to wrestle a set of nested Tupperwares from the cabinet over the fridge. There were five bowls, each a different color of the rainbow—red, orange, yellow, green, and blue—and their plastic coating was peeling off from too many turns in the microwave. She flung the stack toward the pile on the kitchen floor and the bowls came unnested mid-flight and went skittering across the linoleum. “Your father held on to everything except what actually mattered.”

I did not make it to the funeral. 

By which I mean that as soon as Ma stepped into the shower, I grabbed a cigarette from her purse and hurried down our front steps, past Dad’s hunting shed and his beloved ‘78 Nova, which was the color of rust and whose hood was strewn with red leaves from the sugar maple. Out on the highway, I caught a ride to my first keg party. The party was at the beach, very frigid and damp in December, and I got predictably drunk and predictably felt up by two varsity lacrosse players who were angling to play D-1 at Dartmouth. I downed another beer and told them my father hung himself. This shut them up and they got busy with my bra and jeans. First they had to unzip the orange vest. Behind a crude driftwood lean-to I lay on the half-frozen sand, listening to the distant bark of gulls and adolescent laughter and waves crashing on shore, sensing, but only barely, the crablike scuttle of hands across my body. I could not have cared less what happened to me, which was an empowering feeling. At some point I opened my eyes to see a girl with close-cropped hair and black combat boots bending over the boys who were bending over me. She yanked them back and called them assholes, shot out a boot and sent the driftwood flying. What the fuck, I said groggily, we’re fine, which the boys were saying, too. Shut up, she told me, pulling me to my feet and yanking my jeans back up over my ass. She hauled me across the beach to her car, a silver two-door parked at the far edge of the nearly empty lot. How strange, I thought as I slid into her passenger seat. How strange to be in this girl’s car. You’re a fucking idiot, she said. She lit one cigarette after another and flew over the winding roads. I leaned back and closed my eyes. How strange it all was. This girl and her rage. Those boys. My dead father and my unmoored mother. I closed my eyes and listened as the girl berated me, her voice so raspy and sure. How strange, I thought, how much she seems to care.

When I opened my eyes we were parked at the end of my driveway. I sat up fast. “What the fuck,” I said. My heart pounding like the surf in a storm.

“You gave me directions,” the girl said, tossing a paperback onto her dash. “Right before you said you wanted to kiss me.” She smiled and dug a pen from the console. “Don’t worry,” she smirked. “I didn’t let you.” She grabbed my hand and pushed up my sleeve. When she saw the bandage covering the stitches on my wrist, she stopped short and gave me a look.

“No,” I said quickly, shaking my head. “It’s not that.” I blinked as she scrawled a number and name onto my skin, just above the bandage. Jade Berlin. 

“Call me,” she said. 

I looked more closely at her. At the beach she’d had on some kind of bulky army jacket but now, in the heat of the idling car, she wore only a tattered black tee. A bright tattoo wound along the length of her right arm—jewel-colored grapes and berries, tumbling apples, a dimpled melon, a luscious dripping peach. Impulsively, I reached to touch it. “Did it hurt?” I asked, tracing a finger along a sinewy green vine. 

She studied me for a moment and smiled. “Everything hurts.”