Blackout. Her whole self converged into one shattering wound. The shriek came then, a mewling cry. Johnny was covered in gore up to his elbows, and Lavender watched as he picked up the gardening shears he’d sterilized with alcohol, then used them to cut the umbilical cord. Seconds later, Lavender was holding it. Her child. Slick with afterbirth, foamy around the head, the baby was a tangle of furious limbs. In the lantern’s glow, his eyes were nearly black. He did not look like a baby, Lavender thought. Little purple alien.
Johnny slumped beside her in the hay, panting.
“Look,” he rasped. “Look at what we made, my girl.”
The feeling hit Lavender just in time: a love so consuming, it felt more like panic. The sensation was followed immediately by a nauseous, tidal guilt. Because Lavender knew, from the second she saw the baby, that she did not want this kind of love. It was too much. Too hungry. But it had been growing inside her all these months, and now it had fingers, toes. It was gulping oxygen.
Johnny wiped the baby down with a towel and positioned him firmly against Lavender’s nipple. As she peered down at the scrunched and flaking bundle, Lavender was thankful for the dark of the barn, the sweaty damp of her face—Johnny hated when she cried. Lavender placed a palm on the ball of the baby’s head, those initial traitorous thoughts already laced with regret. She drowned the feeling with assurances, murmured against the baby’s slippery skin. I will love you like the ocean loves the sand.
They named the baby Ansel, after Johnny’s grandfather.
*
Here were the things Johnny had promised:
Quiet. Open skies. A whole house at their disposal, a garden of Lavender’s own. No school, no disappointed teachers. No rules at all. A life where no one was ever watching—they were alone in the farmhouse, completely alone, the nearest neighbor ten miles away. Sometimes, when Johnny went out hunting, Lavender stood on the back deck and screamed as loudly as she could, screamed until her voice went hoarse, to see if someone would come running. No one ever did.
Just a year earlier, Lavender had been a normal sixteen. It was 1972, and she’d spent her days sleeping through math class then history class then English class, cackling with her friend Julie as they smoked pilfered cigarettes by the gym door. She met Johnny Packer at the tavern, when they snuck in one Friday. He was older, handsome. Like a young John Wayne, Julie had giggled, the first time Johnny showed up after school in his pickup truck. Lavender loved Johnny’s scraggly hair, his rotation of flannel shirts, his heavy work boots. Johnny’s hands were always filthy from the farm, but Lavender loved how he smelled. Like grease and sunshine.
The last time Lavender saw her mother, she’d been slumped at the folding card table, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. Her mother had attempted a housewife’s beehive—it was flat, lopsided, like a drooping balloon.
You go right ahead, Lavender’s mother had said. Drop out of school, move to that ratty farm.
A sick, satisfied smile.
Just you wait, honey. Men are wolves, and some wolves are patient.
Lavender had swiped her mother’s antique locket from the dresser on her way out. The locket was a circle of rusty metal with an empty nameplate inside. It had adorned the center of her mother’s broken jewelry box for as long as she could remember—the only proof that Lavender’s mother was capable of treasuring something.
It was true that living on the farm had not been quite what Lavender had imagined. She’d moved in six months after meeting Johnny; before that, Johnny had lived alone with his grandfather. Johnny’s mother had passed away and his father had left, and he never spoke of either of them. Old Ansel had been a war veteran with a grizzled voice who made Johnny perform chores for every meal as a child. Old Ansel coughed, and he coughed, until he died, a few weeks after Lavender arrived. They buried him in the yard beneath the spruce; Lavender didn’t like to walk over the spot, still humped with dirt. She’d learned to milk the goat, to wring the chickens’ necks before she plucked and disemboweled them. She tended to the garden, which was ten times the size of the small patch she’d kept behind her mother’s trailer—it was always threatening to outgrow her. She had given up regular showers, too difficult with the outdoor spigot, and her hair had become permanently tangled.
Johnny did the hunting. He purified their water. Fixed up the house. Some nights, he’d call Lavender in from a long day in the yard—she would find him standing by the door with his pants unzipped, engorged and waiting with a sneer on his face. Those nights, he threw her against the wall. With her cheek slammed hard on the splintering oak, Johnny’s hunger growling into her neck, she would revel in the essence of it. His thrusting need. Those calloused hands, exalting her. My girl, my girl. Lavender did not know if she thrilled with Johnny’s hardness or the fact that she could gentle it.