“Ash was the one driving,” I say. “He kept driving even though I told him to stop.”
That’s what they do. They keep going when you tell them to stop.
I can tell Raine wants to believe me. She knows exactly what I’m talking about.
“I knew he was cheating on me,” she says. “But he went there to see you? Why him? Don’t you have enough?”
“Me? Oh, no. You have the wrong girl. That was Tami.”
TamiandAsh. AshandTami.
“Don’t you know that if you shoot me, they win?” I say. Again and again and again, they win. “Don’t you know you’ll just be another fucked person in prison?”
Don’t you know it’s the women who always pay? The sick women. The poor women. The dark women. The women, scorned. The women, forgotten. The women, beaten and used.
But look at us now. We are the ones who can make or break a life. We are the ones who start and end everything.
Maybe Raine drops the gun on purpose. Maybe it is a choice. Or maybe she just gets tired and her body makes the decision for her. Either way, the gun lands in the water with a splash and joins my phone at the bottom of the pool.
“Sit with me,” I say. What else is there to do?
So Raine sits. We stare into the water. Who knows what will happen to us now.
“I thought the pills were supposed to make it stop hurting,” she says.
“No pill can do that,” I say.
I take her hand. We lean into each other. We hold each other up, just a little. Sometimes that’s all we can do.
Maybe we are just dust and specks floating in space. But no matter how infinite and vast it is out here, somehow we find each other. Gravity pulls us in. We crash into each other, over and over and over again, we connect and fuse and change matter, we touch and make explosions. We touch and it changes everything.
We dissolve and we come back together, re-formed into something new. Something better.
“I don’t understand,” Raine says. “The pills. Something is wrong with the pills.”
But they only affect shame. Not loss, not grief, not this.
Sometimes we need to dissolve. Sometimes we need to go back to fragments, to dust and specks. Sometimes that’s what it takes to build a new path.
Tami and Ash in their private first-class cabin, clear sky ahead. They think they can coast. They think they can trust their path forward will be easy because it has always been easy.
But paths intersect with other paths. New paths are born where we’ve dissolved and collected and built something new.
“He was mine and they took him,” Raine says.
“Yes,” I say.
“They’re not going to get away with this,” Raine says.
“No,” I say.
And then her hand becomes a vise, and mine breaks inside its grip, all the bones of my fingers crushed into fragments, needle-sharp, tearing from the inside.
Sometimes new stars smash into old stars. Sometimes whole galaxies collide. Sometimes everything changes and it lights up the universe.
And I tell her, “Keep squeezing. Squeeze as hard as you can.”
38
It’s possible to build a whole life out of other people’s stories. You can fill in the details with imagination and hope. You can make a new childhood to replace the one you lost.
I wake up to the smell of smoke. It is night again, and I am in the forest, naked, covered with dirt. My skin inhales it through the cuts all over my body. I am absorbing the earth. I am putting down roots.
Something is different this time.
I can’t stay here. I am not wild, not made for the forest. It is time to go home.
The forest whispers its gossip. I don’t care what it says about me. I don’t care what anyone thinks. I have built a life on caring too much. That life is over. That life has burned away.
The trees grow impatient. They grab and scratch and pull at my hair. I run, but they trip me with their roots. My knees scrape and burn, soil pushing grit into my blood. I break out of the forest into the clearing, and I brace myself for what I know I’m going to see: my favorite rock, my climbing tree, but nothing else. Where Daddy’s garden should be is only a bent, rusted fence protecting a plot of overgrown, dry weeds. I call out to my fathers even though I know no one’s here. All I hear is the trees mocking me. A feral cat steps out of the shadows. I say “Gotami!” but it just hisses and runs away.
And there, in the place where I painted a memory of my home, is an old abandoned church at the end of a gravel road in the middle of the forest, years’ worth of ivy creeping between the crumbling stones. The windows are long gone. There is no tasteful Episcopal stained glass left. Everything of value was stripped long ago.
The heavy wooden door is rotting off its hinges. I step into a dusty, cobwebbed cavern barely lit by pale moonlight streaking through the glassless windows. Overturned pews, an old wasps’ nest hanging in a corner of the ceiling, decaying floorboards sprouting ferns, the tendrils of ivy reaching up the walls like bad veins.
I follow the smoke down the hill. I tell the trees I will join them soon. The blood on my feet will nourish the soil, I will drop my roots and fuse with theirs, and I will learn their secret language.
I know the deer trails. I know my way around the crowds and the cameras and police lights. I know my way around in the dark.
The house is on fire and so is the world, and no one’s trying to put it out.
I rise with the smoke. I climb up the stairs to our bedroom. I find our packed suitcase at the foot of the bed with nowhere to go. I look in our purse. I find a whole bottle full of glittering, golden pills. What did these thousands of dollars’ worth of Freedom buy us?
Our phone is on the nightstand. I pick it up and dial Lily’s number, but no one answers. What time is it in Taiwan? What time is it here? I look at the phone as I throw it on the bed and the name Dr. Lily Chen shows on the screen.
Everything is pain. My lungs are full of knives. My skin is so hot.
I set the fire. It was time to burn this prison down.
Are we free yet?
There is our mother, fortified by gin, standing close to the most handsome police officer. We must be on fire, because everyone starts screaming when they see us come out of the burning house. Flames must be shooting out of our eyes. Our skin must be melting off. We are only a charred skeleton moving across this scorched piece of earth.
This is my origin story. This is my creation myth. This is me being born from the ashes of everything I destroyed. The police are yelling, but I can’t hear them. The sound of the fire is too loud in my ears. I can see them draw their guns. I can see the way they look at me, like I am dangerous.