“There’s always that,” Vern said, nodding.
Their meetings after that first night at Ollie’s place tended to involve less talking, less social throat-clearing. They had an understanding.
Sometimes Ollie would say, “She only wants me for my body,” mock-mournfully, the back of her hand on her forehead. “You are insatiable, you know that? What is wrong with you?” Her tone would be teasing, but Vern’s face always hardened.
“I’m not insatiable,” Vern would say.
“Oh, but you are.”
Ollie would climb on top of her, pressing Vern’s back into the sofa. “Even now, you’re angry, but you want it, don’t you? Want me. It’s okay,” Ollie assured, sliding up Vern’s shirt. “I won’t stop.”
Vern didn’t know what she wanted. She was a girl made of aches and she flung her body at the world in the hopes that something, anything, might soothe the tendernesses.
This was only half metaphor. As Vern’s strength grew, so, too, did her discomfort. Frequent headaches. Nausea. Joints hurting. Limbs hurting. Everything hurting. Rarely did a moment pass unmarked by bodily grievance. A doubter and disbeliever, she knew these weren’t coincidence. Whatever had made her strong had also made her hurt. She sensed the hauntings, too, were connected. There was a foreign body inside, making her over, and it was no accident.
7
HOURS ACCUMULATED into days, into weeks, months, years, and Vern had nothing to show for it but tired joints and two wily almost-three-year-olds, who, as Vern’s mother had said of her, had more opinions than sense. Feral, always in woolens and furs because the elements bothered him so, had only just started to speak. She fixed his long, coiled hair into two French braids to keep it from obscuring his vision. He had eyes as shaky and wobbly as Vern’s, and a lazy eye, too. He was a watchful child, observant—less sure-footed than his sibling, perhaps, but no less adventurous.
Howling, especially, was bright as blazes. Talking to him was like talking to the taxman. He enunciated ever so clearly and spoke in the longest of sentences. He didn’t have the capacity to believe he was ever wrong.
It was a quaint picture, an image from a storybook. How idyllic. How lovely. Jars of bright purple preserves. Sacks of dried fruit hung from trees. Herbs hanging and drying from branches. Chubby babes padding along the soft earth. The smell of pine. The smell of dew.
Everything so pretty as that, Vern should’ve been happy, but most of the time she felt an all-consuming lust for the end of everything. Every day, wild rages rolled through her, a blaring horn. Only more pain settled her.
How could leaving have so much in common with staying? Cainland had been the source of Vern’s unhappiness, ergo, she ought be happy now.
When her babes slept, she’d go to the river and stick her head into the cold rushing stream, hold it there for minutes, hungry for air, just for that feeling of coming back up to the surface to breathe. She’d do it over and over, until her body was rags, dragging herself back to the shelter, collapsing into the deep sleep of the almost-dead.
Back at Cainland, she’d been able to drown properly. Not by herself, but with Reverend Sherman’s help. All she need do was get herself in enough trouble, then he’d hold her under the lake until she went still. Seconds later, he’d revive her with his lips to hers. It was a punishment for girls like Vern, the ones who could never get along. Washing away the past, the bad urges, the bad thoughts, the bad inclinations. Whenever she came to on the shore in Reverend Sherman’s arms, alive after all, it was hard not to see him as her savior, not to want to do everything to please him.
These were the Ascensions, the name Cainites gave to the redeeming drownings. Vern knew what Lucy meant now when she’d called her a masochist.
Drowning herself until she passed out wasn’t an option now. If she held herself under too long, she’d die for good, and there’d be no one to raise her babes. She calmed herself instead with these half drownings. When that didn’t work, she’d move on to burnings, holding her hand in the fire until it blistered.
It was always such a shame to awake again in the morn, all—and this was the strangest of it—recovered. Her hands would shine red and raw, bright with new skin, no sign of the burn but for flecks of what looked like moltings on the leaf mattress.
“Mam!” Howling gasped once, seeing her healed arm. A spider had bitten her the day before. There’d been a large, pus-filled rash where its fangs had sunk in. Vern slit the pustule open with her knife to drain the yellow and green muck out, Howling and Feral watching, curious, unafraid.