What were you thinking? the detective asked, after. You were so exhausted, you could feel the tears streaming down your cheeks, some delayed physiological reaction.
I’m curious, Ansel. You were young then, only seventeen. What was going through your head when you killed those Girls?
You wanted to tell her it wasn’t like that. Not a thought process, or a thing that curved in any traceable way. You wanted to tell her about the screaming, your urgent need for quiet. You felt like your child self, standing helpless, trying to confess: Sometimes I do things I can’t explain. The need was piercing, persistent. It didn’t really matter that the act was wrong—this seemed like the most trivial and irrelevant detail.
Why those three Girls, that summer? the detective asked. Why did you stop, until Houston?
*
You crawl to the cold breakfast tray in the corner of your cell and pull the fork from beneath a pile of ant-swarmed eggs. You crush it beneath your shoe, gather the tines in your palm, examining for the sharpest one. When you press the plastic into the soft of your wrist, it does not break the skin and it does not stop the flood of memory.
What was going through your head? You genuinely don’t have an answer. You would explain it, if you could. Have you ever hurt so badly, you wish you could ask. Have you ever hurt so badly you lose every last trace of yourself?
*
The first Girl was a stranger.
At seventeen years old, you lived alone. You were the only child in your last foster home, a small house near Plattsburgh owned by a woman in her seventies. After your high school graduation, she set you up in a trailer near the edge of the woods, fifty dollars a month. You had a summer job at the Dairy Queen down the highway and a car you’d bought with a wad of crumpled cash. Suddenly, you were emancipated. The solitude was a shock to the system. A dunk of frigid water.
Seventeen, and the world had new edges. The corners were cruel, too sharp, and you spent hours on the musty couch in that trailer, digging around in the stew of yourself. It was strange to be in school, where girls laughed and shrieked, where boys embarrassed one another and showed off their bigness. But it was even stranger to be alone in the heat. After hours of contemplation, when the screaming pressed, violent, nearly deafening, you swore you could see your mother’s figure out the window, standing at the edge of the forest. She always vanished as soon as she’d arrived.
It happened in the middle of June. You had been chasing your coworker at the Dairy Queen all summer, a high school dropout with streaky dyed hair that flaked dandruff down her shoulders. You’d complimented her. You’d teased her like you’d seen the boys from school do. She had finally come back to your trailer, lay down on the couch, and unclasped her bra. It snuck up on you as you were quivering at the hilt: the screaming. The baby’s endless wailing, so distracting you could hardly see. Your penis drooped. The frustration only made it worse—and before your coworker left, she laughed. The sound, like a hideous track layered over the baby’s shrieking. You sat with the lights on until morning, the echo of your own agony ringing awful in your ears.
At work the next day, she wouldn’t even look at you. By the time you closed up, took the trash out to the dumpsters, and locked the Dairy Queen, you were bent entirely into yourself. The highway pulsed all the way home—you maneuvered your clattering VW Bug carelessly, swerving over the yellow lines, the wind whipping a beat into your ear, that screaming endless, unbearable.
She materialized in the headlights.
In the moonlight, that first Girl was just a shadow at the end of a long driveway. A ripple of hair. The Girl squinted in the bright of your headlights—her face was perfectly animal, vulnerable and confused.
You braked. You opened the door. You stepped onto the gravel.
*
Now, time melts. You hear the scrawl of the officer’s pen as he fills out the Watch Log. The thunk of his footsteps, lumbering uselessly away. You sink into the muck, the wild, furious dark, the cell widening and tightening until you are not a person, only a little ball. You press your forehead to the concrete, pleading with the baby. Please, stop crying.
If Jenny were here, she would know to gather your limbs. She would swaddle you tight, whisper consolations—It will pass, Jenny would hum, her skin like ripened fruit. It always does.
Jenny comes when you are weakest. When you most want to forget.
Her hair fanned out on the faded pillowcase.
Her footprints after a shower, dripping wet across the bathroom floor.
Hazel
1990
Hazel’s first memory of herself was also a memory of her sister.