Precious And Fragile Things

“I am not my mother.” She muttered this, each word tasting sour. She didn’t believe herself.

Her ablutions were brief but effective. Staring at the clothes in the bags, Gilly felt herself wanting to slip into disconnectedness again. It was tempting to let the blankness take over. She forced it away.

She changed her panties but kept her bra on. Apparently he hadn’t thought to buy her one. She put her own jeans back on, her own shirt. She didn’t want to wear the clothes he’d bought her. She wanted her own things, even if the hems of her jeans were stiff with dirt and her shirt smelled faintly of the juice she hadn’t realized was spilled on it. She folded the rest of the clothes and shoved them back in the bags.

Gilly combed her hair and tied it back with the ponytail holder from her jeans pocket. It was Arwen’s. Her fingers trembled as she twisted the elastic into her hair. They’d stopped by the time she finished using the sparkly toothbrush.

Todd had put more wood in the stove, and now the room was almost stifling. He sat on the couch, staring at nothing. Smoking, tapping the ashes into an old coffee can set on the table in front of him.

“Feel better?” he asked without looking at her.

“No.”

Todd sighed. “I’m not an asshole, Gilly. Or a psycho. Really.”

She didn’t say anything.

He looked at her, anger smoldering in his dark eyes. The sight made her step back toward the insignificant safety of the bathroom. Todd got up from the couch and made as though to step toward her.

“You afraid of me?”

She shook her head, not quite able to voice the lie. She was suddenly terrified. In her hands the plastic crinkled and shifted, and she clutched the bags in front of her like a shield.

“Shit,” Todd said. “This is all a bunch of shit.”

Then he stormed to the front door and out, slamming it behind him. A few minutes later she heard the truck’s engine roar into life. Gilly dropped the bags and ran to the window, but he’d already pulled away.

5

Gilly had always prided herself on keeping cool in an emergency, but now she flew to the door, flung it open, ran out onto the freezing front porch. The truck had disappeared. She ran after it anyway.

She couldn’t even hear it by the time she crossed the snowy yard and reached the gravel that began the rutted road. Rocks dug into her sock-clad feet and she hopped, slapping at her arms to warm herself in her long-sleeved but thin shirt. She ventured a few steps down the road, which grew immediately shadowed by the trees.

A layer of snow, perhaps two inches deep, interspersed with rocks and ice, blanketed the ground. It hadn’t been a good winter for snow. Bitter-cold temperatures had abounded since late October, and one large storm had closed schools across the state, but that was all. None of it had melted, and piles of it were still all over the place, but no more had fallen. Gilly looked at the moody gray sky, clouds obscuring the sun. This spot was up high. Close to the sky. The wind pushed at the trees and lifted the tips of her hair. Was she going to run?

She looked again down empty road and knew she wasn’t. Not like this, anyway. Not unprepared. Sparkly tights would not protect her feet. He hadn’t bothered to tie her up when he left, but he hadn’t needed to.

“Moss,” she muttered aloud, turning back toward the cabin. “Something about moss.”

Growing on a side of a tree. Something about finding and following a stream. She knew snippets of information about how to find her way out of the woods, but nothing useful.

The smartest thing to do would be to steal the truck and drive away, something she’d have to do when he got back. With that in mind, Gilly headed back into the cabin. She closed the door behind her and looked down at her muddy socks. She stripped them off and dug around in the plastic bags until she found another pair. They had kittens on them. Sparkly, glittery kittens.

Socks in hand, Gilly sank onto the floor and cradled her face in her hands. She didn’t cry. Her feet and hands were cold, and she shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself. The floor was filthy, but she couldn’t seem to care. How had she ended up here, in this place?

Quiet. Everything was quiet around her. Her knees ached, her thighs cramped, and a chill stole over her in the overheated room. Still, Gilly didn’t move. She had nowhere to be, nothing to do, nobody tugging on her for attention. She was still. She was silent.

She sat that way for a long time.

Without a watch or a clock, Gilly had no way of knowing how long Todd had been gone. At last she could no longer stand even the luxury of idleness. She had to do something.

With nothing to keep them occupied, her hands opened and shut like hysterical puppets. Gilly paced the room, step by step, measuring her prison with her footsteps. There had to be a way, some way to take advantage of his absence. In the end, she could think of nothing, could make no decision.

She understood without hesitation she was breaking down, that she’d broken down the moment at the gas station when she’d stayed in the truck instead of escaping. Her split from reality was shameful but not surprising; that she’d wondered for years if she would one day step off the deep end did not, now, make her feel better about having taken the dive.

She was too strong for this, damn it. Had always forced herself to be too strong. No fashionable Zoloft or Prozac for her, no trips to the therapist to work out her “issues,” nothing but sheer determination had kept her functioning. And yet now…now all she could think about was her mother.

Gilly had grown accustomed to hearing her mother’s voice. Dispensing advice. Scolding. She knew it was really her own inner voice. She hadn’t realized until a day ago that she’d used it out loud, too.

She thought of her mom now, not hearing her voice but remembering it, instead.

“We’re normal,” her mother says. “You think we’re not, but we are. Other families are just like this, Gillian. Whether you believe it or not.”

Gilly doesn’t believe it. By now she’s spent too much time at Danica’s house. She understands that most other people’s mothers don’t spend days without showering or brushing their teeth, without getting out of their nightgowns. Most mothers are able to get up off the floors of their bedrooms. They don’t cry softly, moaning, over and over and over again while rocking. Most people’s mothers wear bracelets on their wrists, not scars.

A cliché has prompted her mother to say it. Spilled milk, a puddle of it on the table and the floor. Gilly knocked it over with her elbow and would’ve cleaned it up before her mom even noticed, but it’s one of the days Marlena has made it out of the dim sanctuary of her bedroom. She weeps over the spill, gnashing her teeth and pulling at her hair as she gets on hands and knees to mop up the spill with the hem of her skirt.

“This is normal, Gillian,” her mother mutters over and over. “You think this isn’t, you think we aren’t. But we are!”

Gilly had stood watching as blank faced as she felt now.

This is different. You’re not her. This isn’t like that.

But it was worse, wasn’t it? What Gilly had allowed to happen, no, what she’d chosen to do was worse than anything her mother had ever done. Because Gilly couldn’t blame any of this on being crazy. She’d worked too hard against insanity.

A plastic bag tangled in her ankles as she paced, and Gilly paused to kick it away. She looked at all the things he’d bought her and kicked those, too. Scattering the brightly colored turtlenecks made her feel better for a moment, gave her some power.

She gathered up the clothes and stuffed them back in the bags. Gilly looped the handles over her arms and took all the stuff upstairs. She was moving on autopilot, but having something to do made her feel calmer. Allowed her to think.

She pulled open the top drawer on the dresser and prepared to put away the clothes. Inside she found a sheaf of photographs, some in frames but most loose. She picked up the top one.

A dark-haired boy stared out at her. He stood beside a tall, bearded man wearing a blaze-orange vest and holding a gun. The boy was not smiling. Gilly traced the line of his face with one finger. It was Todd.

He was in other photos, too, in some as young as perhaps eight and others as old as sixteen. It was the younger faces that grabbed her attention. Something about him as a boy seemed so familiar to her, but she couldn’t quite figure out why.

Gilly put the pictures away and used the other drawers to store the things Todd had bought for her. In the chest at the foot of the bed she found sheets, blankets, pillowcases. These were cleaner than those on the bed and fragrant with the biting scent of cedar. She stripped the bed and made it up again. Smoothing the sheets and plumping the pillows gave her hands something to do while her mind worked, but when the task was over her mind was as blank as it had been before.

In the kitchen, she opened cupboards and saw the supplies he’d bought in the hours she’d been asleep. Beneath the sink she found bottles and cartons of soap, sponges, bleach. They weren’t new, but they’d work. She rolled up her sleeves and bent to the task.

The day passed that way, and Gilly lost herself in the work. At home, Gilly was lucky if she got to fold a basket of laundry before being pulled away to take care of some other chore. Floors went unmopped for weeks, toilets went unscrubbed, furniture went undusted. Gilly hated never finishing anything. She’d learned to live with it, but she hated it. She felt she could never sit, never rest, never take some time for herself. Not until she was done, and she was never done. Later in her life, with spotless floors and unrumpled bedspreads, she might look back to this time with wistful nostalgia. But she doubted it. She hated never finishing anything.

Most of her girlfriends complained about it incessantly, but Gilly liked cleaning. Not just the end results, but the effort. Making order out of chaos. For her, it was much the same feeling she’d heard long-distance runners or other athletes describe. When she was cleaning, really working hard, Gilly could put herself into “the zone.”

Everything else faded away, leaving behind only the scent of bleach and lemon cleanser, the ache of muscles worked hard and a blank, serene mind. It wasn’t a state she often reached. Always, there were too many distractions, too many interruptions. Too many demands on her time.

Now, today, the dirty cabin and time reeled out in front of her without an end to either of them. By concentrating on one small part at a time, the task didn’t seem so daunting. Todd had cleaned the fridge before loading it with groceries, but the rest of the kitchen was a disaster. Gilly started with the counters, then the cupboard fronts, the stove. She cleaned the scarred table of as much grime as she could. She discovered the pantry, as fully stocked as the fridge and cupboards, and through it the door to the backyard. She scrubbed the floor on hands and knees and dumped buckets of black water off the back porch, forming a dirty puddle that quickly froze.

Early-falling dark and the grumbling of her stomach forced her to stop. Gilly surveyed her efforts. The kitchen would never be fresh and new, but it was now, at least, clean. Her back ached and her fingers cramped, stiff and blistered from the scrub brush, but satisfaction filled her. She’d accomplished something, even if it was irrelevant and useless to her situation.