There has to be something wrong with us,
to do what we did.
-In Cold Blood
What he told me wasn’t a lie. I sat with my back to the fire, turning over his words like stones in my hands, trying to make sense of the little things that change us forever. It was sweetness, and kindness, and a little bit of cruelty too; it was the sound of a backdoor closing and a window being shuttered to the light, the slow abandoning of who I was before. But he didn’t tell me what I truly needed to hear. He didn’t tell me how the people we used to be came back to us.
He was the catch in your chest, the darkening of your eyes - though I only know this, now, because I knew you. He was the hurtling of a freight train in the dark he was a storm on the flatlands he was blood on the fire. At the end, he was the only one I couldn’t forgive.
“They say you shouldn’t regret anything,” he tried. “They say you should regret the things you didn’t do rather than the ones you did.” But whoever said that had never made my mistakes.
When you understand anything you begin to forgive it, or so they say, and his words were gentle and he tried to teach me kindness, I know, yet all I learned was spite. I didn’t understand it - didn’t understand him - didn’t understand why everyone I met and everything I saw and everywhere I went just led back to you. If he was the breathlessness of the storm you were its eye. In the pale night he drew a pattern in the earth, traced the outline of a bird that was blown away just as effortlessly as everything else, and the only reason I didn’t love him, I see now, was because you did.
He told me I was a storyteller, better than some and more honest than most, that I could build a life out of the things I put on the page. I only knew he meant it because he never lied. I was quiet back then, with blood on my hands and more in my mouth, teeth devilishly white and cruel as sin. They never suspect a soft-spoken girl. When I confessed my crimes in full he told me I was mistaken - as if I was not familiar with myself. As if he knew me better than I did. The light from the fire made him look flushed gold, and he was nervous, shoulders rounded as if he’d abandoned a heavy weight. I couldn’t stand to look at him anymore.
“You need to let go of this,” he counseled me. “You need to go home.”
But home - wherever that was - had already become unmoored in my memory.
I was shy and quiet then, and people mistake that for innocence in the same way that they mistake youth for purity. The thing that he liked about me, he said, was that I always had the right words to say. I was nineteen, him a decade older, polite and reserved and weighed down with a compassion that I could not understand. He never so much as came close to me, never eyed me with the mix of fascination and shame that men so often did. His eyes were fawn-dark, sweet as an animal’s, reflective as a mirror - when I looked into them, I saw the gleam of the moon thrown back. We burned entire nights away on that empty land, dipping our heads against the wind, each of us running from something whose name we couldn’t speak.
He didn’t believe that I’d killed you, and I didn’t believe that he’d traveled to the bluffs, alone but for the mare he rode, hushed by the snowfall and wintry air. I didn’t believe he’d murdered them, and the irony - how we always thought the best of one another - reeks of a sly humor now.
White men do not often hang, and white women almost never. Still we fled. There was a viciousness to my crime and to his that would not be forgiven. All that empty earth, all those pine-furred forests - to me it tasted like freedom. You never love a thing so much as when it could be taken away. Every step I took, every car we stole, every motel room we abandoned felt immeasurable. His mother had warned me with plaintive words - “He acts so sweet, God, he’ll make you feel so sorry for him,” - but I was too swayed by his kindnesses to listen. How he watched through the windows while I slept, how he treated me like the sister he never had.
It all came down on the US 14 somewhere outside of Yellowstone. We’d been drinking bottom shelf whiskey - “Old man’s drink,” he always said - and calling up memories of the places we’d once belonged. When we flagged down the car, the man recognized me on sight: the shorn black hair and the starved lines of my cheekbones. I wondered if he’d seen me on television or in the newspaper or in a sheriff’s office somewhere out to nowhere - but none of it mattered. All I could think of was those three graves, and you somewhere buried unmarked and forgotten.
TBC.