“I loved you. Really. I still do.”
“Girl, you got no idea. You got no clue.” She wasn’t sure what she heard in his voice, but it sounded almost like loathing—the way he’d hissed at her the one time he spoke about never wanting to meet his father. “You’re lucky to have gotten as far the fuck away from me as possible. Everything I ever done, everything I ever touched. It’s just led to the next worst thing.”
He pulled at the purple nail, looking like it was held on only by the slime.
“ ’Bout to have a kid, you know. A son.”
She tensed at this, all her muscles twitching at once.
“Not sure how the hell I’m gonna do it. I get… headaches. Like so bad I can’t see or think. Tressel, back when he was recruiting for the Bucks, told me I was the hardest hitter he’d ever seen, and guess I’m paying for it now. I was a headhunter. I brought the violence. And I wouldn’t give it back for anything. It’s what I loved. But now every few months I’ll go through these times where I just feel like I’m losing my goddamn mind. Like my whole life’s been a bad dream.”
The road carried them on. Fifty-six slumped farther into his seat, his voice drifting.
“I did… bad things, I know. It ain’t like you know what you’re doing when you’re that age. You just do stuff. And no one’s ever told you what it means, so why do you care? You don’t. You just do it.”
His eyelids slipped closed, opened, fluttered, and his words turned to scrap and debris. He ended by muttering something about “All the blackmailers coming after me”—nothing but nonsense trailing to sleep. Then his eyes slipped closed and his chin slumped to his chest.
Tina let the tears come then. She rolled down her window so the sobs wouldn’t echo in the confines of the car.
At the edge of the city limits, there was a stretch of woods that ran all the way to the end of the county and a town called Morova (which itself was little more than a string of houses, a gas station, and a few churches). This was what Tina always thought of as Deep Ohio. These were the places where you got some hunters during the season, some kids playing war in the summer, and occasionally teenagers sneaking off to play with each other. But those cases were rare. Mostly it was the earthen depths of comingled tree species, a loamy scent, and floodplain grasses dotted with the inky purple of great blue lobelias. She remembered it because 56 had taken her here when the Brew was crowded. There was a turnoff for a dirt road about ten miles out on Stillwater. This road had a fence with a NO TRESPASSING sign fixed to the gate. Rather than a padlock, whoever owned the road simply left a metal spike in the latch to keep the gate closed. Fifty-six had shown her this. Tina left the car running, hopped out, and pulled the bolt. She noticed someone had spray-painted THE LORD LIVES over the sign.
He snored softly from the passenger seat, breath whispering in and out of his nostrils. Her fingers slipped beneath her shirt and found the scar on her stomach, palpated it the way she did when she felt like screaming. The ridge of flesh a reminder, a relic, of the prick that went too far.
Her senior year, she’d been in her room carving into her belly. Cutting into the fat forming the spare tire around her waist that never went away no matter how much she starved the creature. She was in her bed, under the covers with a flashlight, the way she liked to do it: holding the light with her left hand and cutting with her right. She’d made a pretty good gouge into this spot on her abdomen just above and to the left of her belly button. She hated looking at this flesh, this pudge. She hated the way it amassed around her torso. Hated the way she could pinch it. She began digging the blade of the box cutter deeper. The fat swallowed the steel. Then she felt a pop as it pierced the muscle beneath. The pain was unbelievable. She nearly cried out, hissing the sound into her hot bed tent. Clenching her jaw, she pushed in deeper. Then she began sawing. But the blade kept getting stuck and she had to start over. Blood bubbled up, flowing over her stomach and staining her hand. The pale yellow sheets caught the blood running down her torso. That stain grew and grew. She kept cutting. It seemed the more she cut, the more her ruined stomach looked irredeemable to her. The scar would be hideous, so why not keep going? Why not take out this entire part of herself? And anyway, she knew about pain. She knew about bleeding. She managed to cut half her stomach apart before the agony wailed and she along with it. Which brought her mother running. She woke up in the hospital.
They called it a suicide attempt even though that was not what had happened. She hadn’t been trying to kill herself. Nevertheless she stayed in the hospital for a week, and a woman came and talked to her for an hour every day.
This woman, Dr. Marsha, had an ugly bob of red hair, that kind of old-lady red that looks nearly purple. She had a withered face and wore bright red lipstick that sometimes got on her teeth. She sat by the hospital bed and badgered Tina about everything. Her mom, dad, school, boys. Once she hit on 56, she never let up, made Tina tell her everything. Every last detail.
Tina eventually asked, “This can’t get him in trouble, right?”
Dr. Marsha stared at her. She had this annoying habit of not answering questions. She’d sit and stare at you until you said something else.
“What I’m telling you can’t get him in trouble?” Tina repeated. She hadn’t told Dr. Marsha Five-Six’s real name, but it wouldn’t be difficult at all for her to figure out. The New Canaan hospital was the tallest building in the county but ultimately just as small a community as the rest of the town. She could probably ask any nurse with a kid in the high school who Tina Ross had dated her freshman and sophomore years.
“This won’t go beyond anyone but us,” Dr. Marsha said carefully. “But let me make something clear to you, Tina. And I’d like you to really listen to this, okay? You’re eighteen, you’re an adult, but hear what I’m saying.” She tented her fingers, flexed them against one another. “What you’re describing to me… This boy and his friends raped you. Even if you think some of the encounters were later consensual, what you’re telling me is that you were drugged and raped.”
How she hated this woman.
“You don’t know. This isn’t— It’s not the way you’re making it sound.”
“Tina. Honey. Listen to me. What happened to you—at least the way you’re telling me this happened—is not acceptable. In your heart you must know that.”
She’d nodded only because she had wanted Dr. Marsha to leave her alone. She promised she’d tell her parents, but she never did. After she went home, her mom reverted to the parent she’d been years earlier, doting, nervous, terrified of the fragility of the only child God had given her. Her dad wouldn’t let her drive anywhere alone and gave her rides where they both sat in silence. She saw Dr. Marsha twice more before they found out her dad’s insurance wouldn’t pay for the visits.
When she thought of God she thought of him not as the risen savior but as a man. In the guise of Santa, her parents had given her a picture book as a child, the story of Christ’s sacrifice. Beautiful illustrations of the garden of Gethsemane with violet and green vines twisting into a coal-black sky and tears of blood crawling down Jesus’s brow from where the thorns bit. The picture she studied the most, though, was of Jesus in the moment before the Crucifixion, after he’d laid down the cross and stood at the crest of Golgotha, Roman soldiers and a swimming blue sky at his back. The illustrator had rendered this moment with such care, but most surprising was the expression on the young man’s face. It wasn’t determination or anger or love or any of the other likely candidates she would expect from the immortal, stirring tale of his last long walk. It was fear. It was an unsettling realization when it dawned on her that the Son of God could feel fear. Could feel alone.