Authors: Shannon Kirk
“Lola, my phone, where’s my phone?” I said, sitting up straighter and closing my eyes as I talked. The blood racing to my skull throbbed loudly, demanding I stop talking.
“Lola, my phone, my phone, get my phone.”
Through my squinting eyes, I saw her crawl across the lot,
her hands pressed firmly in the loose gravel of the top layer of tar. She entered again the clunking and smashed car, the doors still ajar from her extractions. I thought she might back out on all fours with my phone antenna in her teeth, like a hunting dog retrieving a dead duck.
Images of others vaguely came to appear in my periphery. Knocking began within the car, which forced me to inspect it more closely. Flames flattened out, escaping the steaming hood, the engine aflame. Urgent, orange flames spread and contracted, spread and contracted, blazing fingers desperately searching to touch skin and scar. A trail of gas snaked beneath the trunk, creeping closer to my foot.
“Lola, get out of the car, now! Fire!”
I don’t think she heard me, because I don’t think I was really yelling. I felt trapped in one of those dreams, trying to scream my lungs out, but unable to muster even a gurgle.
I tried again.
“Lola! Fire.” I scrambled to wobbling legs, and just as I did, she backed out, standing tall, threw the phone in my face, and burst in the direction of the chief and the deputy who remained unconscious and too close to the engine.
I allowed the phone to plummet to the ground and likewise wobbled toward the chief and deputy. Taking my share of the work, I pulled the deputy opposite the direction Lola pulled the chief, just far enough and fast enough to miss the flaming paint that began to rain down upon the scene as the car burst up and out.
Once settled, I reclined to the ground and watched the inferno in a mesmerized hypnosis. The fire raged madly, seemingly furious upon being set free, as if it had been bottled for centuries under the hood of Sammy’s Volvo.
And I am always this way with a fire, remembering the time my father set our barn ablaze when I was five. On the day of the barn fire, just one week into owning the chickens and with my mother and baby brother shopping, my father asked
me to run inside and fetch us both a cold Pepsi. However fast I was, however long it took me to scramble my five-year-old feet inside, fling open the refrigerator, fist the two bottles, and run back on out to find my father, well, that was how long it took for the dead grass my dad had raked up for a bonfire to catch a gust of Great Lakes wind and stick within the crevices of the dried barn boards. There I stood, useless, clenching Pepsis, as though I were choking two geese. A wall of wicked fire, running upwards from ground to sky, no sideways flames, no doubt of direction, flames streaming up and up and pushing me, plastered back to the house.
“Get inside,” my father must have screamed, his arms gesturing wildly. “Get inside,” he must have repeated loudly, but all I heard was the roaring hiss of the red-orange flames, which insisted I do nothing but stare. Many years later in middle Indiana, doing the same as I watched, unblinking, the Volvo burn, a shadow formed overhead. One of the women with a shopping cart who we’d passed only moments before attempted to umbrella me from the irregular drops of rain.
“You hurt? You hear me?” She mouthed. I couldn’t hear her words.
“My phone,” I said to her, pointing to where I’d dropped it, ten feet away.
“The who?”
“My phone. My phone. Please, there, my phone.”
The woman, about mid-fifties, with a dirty blond matted perm, housecoat, and road-stained slippers, shuffled to where I pointed, bent like an elderly grandma, and shuffled back, handing me my phone with her mouth in slackjaw.
Shouting from the strip mall began—but only as a collective mass of moving sound, which I tuned out either because my eardrums had burst or because I needed to focus on the one call I had to make. Lola sat gasping for breath with the chief’s wrist in her hands, counting his pulse by keeping time on her Sanyo watch. By the look of her enlarged nostrils
and squished nose, I could tell she was concerned with the silence between his heartbeats.
I’m pretty sure my judgment was clouded when I made the call. I’m pretty sure I deliberately broke all sorts of department codes. But in that moment, I felt I had no choice.
“Boyd,” I said when he answered. “I’m going to need your help after all.”
And I know it seems useless
,
I know how it always turns out
Georgia, since everything’s possible
We will still go, go
–“Go” by The Innocence Mission
Dorothy, this vision I hold of her, like an old precious Polaroid in my purse, the photo changed only by the warping of color over time, but still and forever the same in terms of heart-caving nostalgia. Dorothy, sweetly sleeping, courtesy shock, courtesy sickness, her blond curls rising and falling with every inhale, every exhale. I wanted to keep my own breath in time with hers so that I might be a sleeping beauty just like her. To have someone stand watch over me, protect me from wolves, from dragons—yet, only lovely Dorothy, my new friend, my only friend, the closest one to my desire to mother a child, only she was worthy of such administrations. Only Dorothy deserved pause before the storm. I, I was a mere weapon.
How was she able to sleep? I understand, I truly understand. In the moment I gave her my hand on her pillow, she likely allowed herself to succumb to whatever battle of insomnia and fever she’d been beating back. I was to save her. She handed me her fate.
And I had work to do. And though I’d turned Love on for Dorothy, no other switch was on. Not even one for annoyance.
I had abandoned all hope on cops showing up, so I put the possibility of them showing up, out of my mind.
Hole-in-his-Face-Brad-y-Poo’s moaning began to carry outside, moving in the direction of my wing and the kitchen and his dead, burnt brother. I figured he would not be long in returning. And I guessed he’d likely recover from his brother’s corpse some tool or apparatus or artifact of demented sentiment, whatever, and then he’d reenter the kitchen. There, he’d soon figure I had used the phone, seeing as I left the envelope with the address under the dangling cord. With hand heel to forehead like a dunce saying “duh,” he’d finally realize I’d called the cops. I wasn’t going to underestimate the smarter of the dumb twins. Sleeping Dorothy and I had all of four minutes to escape and get to the van.
I collected and stashed Asset #40—Dorothy’s knitting needles—in my back holster, while kicking Dorothy to wake up. I removed Asset #41, the bobby pin in her hair, and slid to the locked door. Only two months prior, I had maneuvered a mini-needle through Jackson Brown’s shaved skin to finely stitch her paw, which she’d slashed on a jagged roof edge while chasing a cooing dove. So since I was really a surgeon inside, picking the country lock on Dorothy’s cell door was as easy as popping a canister of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls with the flat end of a fork. Pop.
With the door open, waking Dorothy became a liability and a duty. I slid back to her bed and as soon as I arrived, I bent to her lifting head. Cupping a hand, the one with the blood from my eye, I held firm to her dry, cracked lips, staring into her now startled eyes.
“Dorothy, keep your mouth shut. And I mean shut tight if you want to live. Follow me, now. Get up, now.”
I didn’t let go because I wasn’t sure she understood.
“Do you understand me? If you make one noise, we’re toast. You have to shut up and follow me. Understand?” My holster banged into my up-bent shoulder, rattling the knitting needles, bedpost arrows, and keys inside.
Dorothy nodded her head to indicate she understood.
Slowly I released hold on her mouth; she wiped my blood from her lips.
Are we blood sisters now? Is this what it means to have a best friend?
Stop
.
Stop these ridiculous thoughts. Get to the van
.
Honestly, you’d think I’d kidnapped the girl. I had to push her from behind, prodding with my index and middle fingers on her spine as though a gun. Her one skinny leg and her one swelled leg wobbled from fatigue and emotional retching, and she continually turned to face me with a puppy-dog, quizzical gaze. “Turn and walk. Be quiet,” I kept saying.
Step by step we crossed the threshold. She seemed so hesitant to take the flight down, checking me constantly with an expression of “You sure? You sure?” I pushed harder with my finger gun. Her back felt knobby and knotted, not fleshy as it should have been in her late state.
Given the wetness outside, the stairwell’s thick air of must and dank hit our noses in a swift uppercut, so much heavier than in times of sunlight. Like a smelling salt, the mold must have slapped Dorothy to a sharper alertness, for she jumped and froze. I pushed again.
I wasn’t mad at Dorothy. I had scant emotion. I just needed her to focus and quicken her feeble pace. Dorothy herself was most definitely not an asset. But she was my instant friend and now my ward, and we’d formed an unspoken bond no one else could ever really understand, even myself. So although I growled directives at her, I did take two pauses to pat her back to say, “Come on now, be strong. You can do this,” which is what Mother said to my father on the day he had to throw the first shovel of dirt on Aunt Lindy’s grave.
We were about midway down the stairs, close to the top of the last flight. I fisted Dorothy’s greasy hair to halt her descent and hold her still. Fearing his return, I strained to hear any shuffle along
the tar and gravel outside. Dorothy’s shallow breathing filled the stairwell with a rumbling static, like an old lady with pneumonia, that crickety wheeze of breath encumbered by phlegm. With her wrist in my hand, her heartbeat tapped too quick; with my bloody palm to her forehead, her temperature nearly burned me. Again she locked eyes with me, and in this second moment of tightening our bond, without her saying the words, I answered, “I know.”
By my estimation, we had about a minute and a half to reach the bottom floor, exit the building, cross the small parking lot, and enter the forest path before Brad emerged from my wing. I had visualized the outside world and the path back to the van since the first day in this hellhole, even though I had been blindfolded and bagged when I’d arrived. I counted the steps, recorded the give of the ground, touched the air for climate, and had replayed those details into a visual memory of terrain, topography, and temperature. In my mind, I’d made the trek from van to building and building to van a hundred thousand times. And you know what? Apart from the building being a white building—a former boarding school—instead of a white farmhouse, I was dead-on exact on every detail. Goes to show what your senses and your memory, your prior learnings and your confidence, will give you if you’re able to strip out the nonproductive distractions of fear and anticipation. Listen. Smell. Taste. See. Live. Evaluate. In real time.
Most people perceive only 1 percent of the colors in the vast spectrum of hues. The rare humans who visualize more than 1 percent report either a disappointment with everyone else’s dull perception of life or claim to have visited Heaven in their dreams. They have a type of super-sense, these lucky souls.
A recent article in
Scientific American
reminded me of the super-sense I experienced during my time in the Appletree prison. Summarizing research published in the
Journal of Neuroscience
on the cross-modal neuroplasticity of the deaf and blind, the article proclaimed, “This research…is a reminder that our brains have some hidden superpowers.” If you’re not aware
of cross-modal neuroplasticity, basically it is the ability of the brain to reorganize itself in the areas where a person may be sense-deprived. For example, how “deaf individuals perceive sensory stimuli, making them susceptible to a perceptual illusion that hearing people do not experience.” I really liked the introductory paragraph of the actual Journal article, which stated rather succinctly, I thought: “Experience shapes brain development throughout life, but neuroplasticity is variable from one brain system to another.”
So I, a deaf person, a blind person, a person deprived of varying senses, one who with practice, built models of reality, a separate dimension of senses that overlaid with the world in a very true way. Perhaps emotions are merely another set of senses, and the absence of them makes for precision hearing, touching, smelling, seeing, imagining.
Perhaps.
Who knows.
Detecting no scrubble of his footfall, we scrambled to the bottom of the stairs and shuffled our way outside. Looking left, looking right, I found no sign of Brad, so I pushed Dorothy diagonally across the tarred area to the opening of the path to the van. Our bodies were practically merged we were so close. We cut a shadow of two mountains stuck together with those bellies, which I studied with awe when we reached the mouth of the trail.
Are we one girl? The same girl? Are we all the same at sixteen? So ready for life, and yet so young. I have to save us both. Us four
.
I leaned from behind to speak in Dorothy’s ear as I collected the keys from my holster. The heat emanating from her body made me think she might combust; my face grew flushed. I hadn’t noticed the sprinkles of rain until they cooled me of her warmth.
“Dorothy, walk straight ahead exactly one minute. Running would be faster if you can. Trust me, I know it’s scary in there, and it will be dark, but it opens onto a large field with cows and a big willow tree. Under the tree is a van. We’ll take the van. I’ve got the key. Let’s go.”
Dorothy nodded her head in a slow, nauseated way, and took one step into the forest. I followed, glued to her body. Our steps were in synch and so close together, as though we walked with tied legs, the sound of the door shutting behind us was slightly muffled by the thud of our double-footfall.
“Oh, hell no! You girls stop now!” Brad’s voice was a high pitch of crazed depravity.