Marrow Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Tarryn Fisher

  All rights reserved.

  Visit my website at www.tarrynfisher.com

  Cover Designer: Indie Solutions by Murphy Rae, www.murphyrae.net

  Editor: Madison Seidler, www.madisonseidler.com

  Interior Designer: Jovana Shirley, Unforeseen Editing, www.unforeseenediting.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For my mother, who keeps me from harm.

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  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments and Shit

  THE PEARL STARTS ITS LIFE AS A SPLINTER—something unwanted like a piece of shell or shard of dirt that accidentally lodges itself in an oyster's body. To ease the splinter, the oyster takes defensive action, secreting a smooth, hard, lucid substance around the irritant to protect itself. That substance is called "nacre.” So long as the splinter remains within its body, the oyster will continue to coat it in nacre, layer upon beautiful layer. I always thought it was remarkable that the oyster coats its enemy not only in something beautiful, but a part of itself. And while diamonds are embraced with warm excitement, regarded to be of highest, deepest value, the pearl is somewhat overlooked. Its humble beginnings are that of a parasite, growing in something that is alive, draining its host of beauty. It’s clever—the plight of the splinter. A sort of rags to riches story.

  THERE IS A HOUSE IN THE BONE, with a broken window. A sheet of newspaper covers the hole, secured around the edges with thick pieces of duct tape. The siding on the house sags like old flesh, holding up a roof that looks as if it’s bearing the world’s burdens.

  I live in this house with my mother. Under the rain, under the oppression, in the room with the broken window. I call it the eating house. Because, if you let it, this house will devour you, like it did my mother. Like it tries to devour me.

  “Margo, bring me the washcloth.”

  My name followed by a command.

  I do. You can barely call it a washcloth. It’s just an old rag, smoothed over by too many uses and discolored by the dirty things it has scrubbed. She takes it from my hand without looking at me. Her fingers are elegant, nails painted black and chipped along the edges. She moves the washcloth between her legs and cleans herself roughly. I flinch and look away, offering her minuscule privacy. That’s all the privacy you get in this house—the aversion of eyes. There are always people—men mostly—lurking around the doors and hallways. They leer, and, if you give them the chance, they reach for you. If you give them the chance. I don’t.

  My mother steps out of the bath and takes the towel from my hand. The house smells like mold and rot, but for an hour after she takes a bath, it smells of her bath salts.

  “Margo, hand me my robe.”

  My name followed by a command.

  She hates taking baths alone. She told me her mother tried to drown her in the bathtub when she was a child. It still scares her. Sometimes, at night, I hear her whimpering in her sleep, No mama, no. I didn’t know her mother. After the drowning incident, my mother was put into foster care. A nightmare, she calls it. By the time she’d matriculated from the system, my grandmother had died of a massive heart attack and left her only daughter the house—the eating house.

  She looks at herself in the mirror as I unfold her robe—a red thing, filmy to the touch. It is my job to launder it twice a week. I do so with care, as it is her most prized possession. My mother is beautiful in the same way that a storm is beautiful. She is wild and destructive, and in the middle of her fury you feel her God given right to destroy. We both admire her reflection for a few more minutes as she runs the pads of her fingers over her face, checking for flaws. This is her mid-afternoon ritual before things get going. She takes out the little tubs of creams that I bring her from the pharmacy, and lines them along the chipped sink. One at a time, she dabs them around her eyes and mouth.

  “Margo,” she says. I wait for the command, breath bated. This time she is looking at my reflection, slightly behind hers. “You’re not a pretty girl. You could at least lose the weight. What you don’t have in the face, you can have in the body.”

  So I can sell it like you do?

  “I’ll try, Mama.”

  Submission. That’s my job.

  “Margo, you can go now,” she says. “Stay in your room.”

  My name followed by a double command. What a special treat!

  I walk backwards out of the bathroom. It’s what I’ve learned to do to avoid being struck in the head with something. My mother is dangerous when she doesn’t take her pills. And you never know when she’s off. Sometimes I sneak in her room to count them, so I know how many safe days I have left.

  “Margo,” she calls when I am almost to my door.

  “Yes, Mama?” I say. My voice is almost a whisper.

  “You can skip dinner tonight.”

  She offers it like it’s something good, but what she’s really saying is, “I won’t be allowing you to eat tonight.”

  That’s all right. I have my own stash, and there’s nothing in the cupboards anyway.

  I go to my room, and she locks the door behind me, pocketing the key. The lock on my door is the only working lock in the house, besides the one on the front door. My mother had it installed a few years ago. I though it was to keep me safe, until I figured out that my mother was stashing her money under a loose floorboard in my room. Her money is all there under my feet. She doesn’t spend it on clothes, or cars, or food. She hoards it. I skim money off the top to buy food. She probably knows, since I’m still alive and also fat.

  I sit on my floor and slide a box out from under my bed. I choose wisely in case she’s listening at the door: a banana and two slices of bread. No noise, no crunching, no wrappers. The banana is black and sticky, and the bread is stale, but it still tastes good. I pull off pieces of the bread and squash it between my fingers before putting it in my mouth. I like to pretend I’m taking Holy Communion. My friend, Destiny, took her first communion. She said the priest put a flat piece of bread on your tongue, and while it was sitting on your tongue it turned into the body of the Lord Jesus. You had to wait for the Lord Jesus’s body to melt before you swallowed it, because you couldn’t very well bite the Lord Jesus’s body, and then you had to drink his blood. I don’t know anything about the Lord Jesus or why you have to eat his body or drink his blood to be Cathol
ic, but I’d rather pretend to eat God’s body than stale, old bread.

  When I’m done with my dinner I can hear muffled thuds and the floorboards groaning under the weight of feet. Whose feet? The tall man? The man with the gray, curly chest hair? Or perhaps it’s the man who coughs so hard he makes my mother’s bed rattle.

  “The croup,” I say to my limp banana skin. I read about the croup in one of my books. A library book I keep checking out because I don’t want to give it back. I slide it out from my school bag as I eat a Honey Bun, and look at the pictures while licking the sticky off my fingers. When I hear Mama’s headboard creaking against the wall I eat another. I’m going to be fat for as long as I live in the eating house. For as long as the house eats me.

  I DON’T KNOW WHERE THE MEN COME FROM. How they know to drive to 49 Wessex Street and park their cars in the shadow of the eating house. I don’t know how they know to walk the three cracked steps to the front door and stand under the bulb that never stops flickering. Or how they know to take the rusted brass knob in their hands and let themselves in. They were, perhaps, men who my mother knew in her former life. The life in which she wore pleated skirts and pantyhose, and caught the bus to work every day.

  She briefly went to church in those days, lifting her hands during the music like she was catching God’s blessings in her palms and letting them swim there. Smiling teary-eyed when the pastor told the congregation that God would not forsake us in our darkest hour. And when our darkest hour came, and she lost her job, I’d come home from school to find her speaking in tongues at the kitchen sink, buried to her elbows in soapy water, her eyes shut tight during her onslaught of prayer. When she’d seen me standing in the kitchen doorway, my book bag slung over my shoulder, she’d smiled through her tears and beckoned me toward her. “We are under a spiritual attack,” she’d said, grasping my hands. “We need to pray against Satan and his demons.”

  I’d latch on to her cold hands, squeezing my eyes shut like the quality of my prayer depended on how tightly I closed them, and prayed with her, our voices filling the eating house in a cacophony of urgent appeal. My voice had been aimless, blasting up, up, upward without any belief to keep it there. I preferred Destiny’s muted Catholicism where they ate body parts like decent, faith-driven zombies to this loud, demanding behavior my mother had adopted. God, give me! Give me! I’m your child and thus you must give me!

  She doesn’t believe in God anymore; she left him somewhere between losing her job and the first man she invited into her bed. I always thought her faith was flimsy—like paper—useful until you get it wet. I’ve heard her talking about religion with one of the men who comes—the one who laughs so boisterously my mother, who hates loud noises, is constantly shushing him. “If there is a God,” she’d said, “then I believe he’s more insulted by religion than he is by atheism.”

  I do not believe in God either; I never have, not even when I’d squeezed my eyes shut and prayed with her in the kitchen, the soap from her hands running down my elbows. My mother doesn’t know that we share this similarity. She would know if she asked, but she never does. I believe in loneliness so deep and profound it has a physical presence. I believe in choices—hard ones that people in charge seldom seem to get right. I believe that everyone needs something: a woman’s touch, companionship, money, forgiveness. And to acquire those things a person will accumulate as much sin as they need to. I often look at my classmates and wonder what it is they’ll grow up to want, and what they’ll give up to have it

  The men come two a night. It’s all a perfectly planned dance with never a moment of overlap. I don’t know if they know about each other, or if they believe themselves to be my mother’s only companion. She meets them at the door, her voice lilting and friendly, her red silk robe rippling around her like blood water. It is a fake her, not the blank-faced woman who stares for hours at the scratched, wooden floorboards, tilting bottles of pills down her throat. She asks how they are, then leads them up the stairs. They speak to her with familiarity, old friends, who call her Wendy and laugh at the things she says. I match their cars with their voices: the cornflower blue Volvo with a dent in the front bumper, a yellow Corvette with the disco ball hanging from the mirror, and the most frequent visitor, an old Mustang—not a beat up clunker either, but the restored kind, with bright, cherry red paint and custom plates that read LWMN. I never see his face—the Mustang guy, he’s always looking at the ground. Once I caught a glimpse of the back of his head as he was leaving my mother’s bedroom. He was bald, shoulders broad and curving forward. He left cigar smoke and the smell of cedar wood lingering in the hallways. On one occasion he left his watch behind on my mother’s dresser. A heavy thing with the symbol of a crown behind the glass face. I snuck into her room to look at it when she was asleep. Wondering how someone could stand to have something so heavy hanging from their wrist. Like a ball and chain. Where did I hear that? Must have been at Destiny’s house. The next night, when I went to look for the watch, it was gone.

  I tell Destiny.

  “The Mustang man probably came to get it while you was at school,” she tells me. “You know what that was right?” She has her hand on her hip, and her head is tilted to the side while she wears her signature you-don’t-know-shit face.

  When I don’t answer her she continues.

  “It was a Ro-lex,” she says. “Probably real. My uncle wears a fake one. You could have stolen that and pawned it for a bike or something. People will pay at least a hundred dollars for sumpin’ like that.”

  “I don’t want a bike,” I say. What I want is my mother.

  Destiny rolls her eyes, and then her hips as she turns away and walks to her dresser.

  “I have to go,” I say, standing up. I feel anxious … devious for telling Destiny about the man and the watch.

  “I thought we was gonna watch a movie.”

  I sit back down. I can never say no to a movie. And there is always popcorn at her house. Her mother buys the value pack because she knows we like it. Destiny tells me that the popcorn in the movie theater tastes a million times better than the stuff she makes in her microwave. “And your fingers get all greasy from the butter…” she says.

  There isn’t a movie theater in the Bone. You have to catch the bus two towns over. Destiny’s dad takes her and her brothers all the time. I don’t even have a TV at the eating house, so watching movies while sitting on Destiny’s red-and-white striped couch is enough for me. We start to watch Pretty Woman, but halfway through I tell Destiny I have a stomachache. Julia Roberts’s character is too much like my mom—the toothy smile, the vulnerability.

  I walk home in the rain, wishing I’d taken some popcorn. By the time I reach my front door, my white T-shirt is soaked through. I pull it over my head as soon as I get inside, failing to notice the car in the driveway. I walk toward the kitchen and stop short. A man is standing on the stairs looking at me. I gasp. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I clutch the shirt to my chest, but it’s twisted, and I can’t straighten it out to cover myself. I hear my mother’s voice.

  “Robert…?” she says. I catch a glimpse of her red robe as I run for the kitchen. I find the laundry basket that I keep next to the washer and grab a clean shirt. As I’m struggling to get it over my head, she walks in.

  “What the hell were you thinking?”

  This is more than she’s said to me in six months.

  “I-I didn’t see the car. I was wet…” I dip my head and swallow my shame.

  “You embarrassed me,” she says between her teeth. “Walking through my house showing yourself like that.” She speaks of my body like it’s a thing of disgust. Something to be hidden and never shown.

  I say nothing. My chest heaves. I hate myself. She swoops out as quickly as she swooped in—in a flurry of red silk and condemnation. I can smell her vanilla perfume as I begin to cry.

  I want her back. I want to know what changed her so that I have somewhere to lay my blame. If there was a cause, I could stop blaming
myself. I trace my memories, over and over, searching for the root—the moment, or month, or day she vanished.

  From my mattress, I stare at the ceiling. Deep brown watermarks stain what was once cream paint. In those marks, I study our years in the eating house. The gradual recession of happiness. Your life can be nicked away so slowly that you don’t even notice it.

  Her laughter went first, then her smiles, which were so deep they showed more gum than tooth. The last thing to go was her eyes—her brilliantly expressive eyes. They stopped looking and gazed right through. They stared at walls, and cabinets, and floors. They stared at everything except me. In the early days I’d tried everything to get her to look at me: drop a bowl of cereal and milk on the floor, right in front of her so that her toes were flecked with milk, or scribble all over my arms and legs with marker until I was as deeply blue as a Smurf. With grim determination, I lied to her face, broke her trinkets, swore loudly, and sang songs she hated at the top of my lungs. Hateful attempts met with milky-eyed ambivalence. She’s slowly dying, and I’m not sure she knows it.

  FOLD YOUR HANDS IN YOUR LAP. Smile. Don’t smile. Don’t look anyone in the eye. Pretend you don’t care. Study your shoes. Don’t smile … don’t ever smile. God.

  I am fidgety and awkward. I never know what to do and when to do it. A boy smiled at me once; he was cute. He’d already passed by the time I smiled back. Too little too late. I couldn’t make my face move in time. School is a reprieve from home; home is a reprieve from school. I don’t belong anywhere, so I travel from place to place hoping no one notices me—but if they do, I hope they won’t be overly cruel. I think about the past. Days long gone.

  Everything different, everything so strangely the same. People become different, I realize. It’s the landscape that never changes: the highway signs marred with graffiti, the pink and orange blended sunsets that kiss the top of the evergreens, even the line of cars waiting to turn into the Wal-Mart parking lot. That’s what jars me the most: same sky, same Bone, same house, different mother.