These Dry Bones

The distant rumble of thunder followed Tess as she made her way into the house, laundry basket balanced against one hip. She paid no attention to it; there had been thunder in the distance every afternoon for nearly three months, and still, there was no rain. Heat thunder, her grandmother had called it, claiming it was common during the Dust Bowl. The intermittent rumblings brought no sign of relief from a nearly year-long drought and a summer of relentless, triple-digit heat. Looking at the brown grass, dead tree leaves, and withered backyard gardens, she couldn’t imagine the Dust Bowl looking much different.

She stepped into the dim light of the kitchen, letting the screen door bang against its frame behind her. The air conditioner had given up the ghost back in June, when the heat had just begun to add its weight to the accelerating drought. There was no money for repairs, let alone to replace it. Instead, she kept the lights off, windows and doors standing wide, night and day, hoping to tease any slight breeze into the stifling rooms, where fans did little but push hot air around.

Setting the laundry basket down on the kitchen table, she took an ice tray out of the freezer, dropped six precious cubes into a bowl of water, dipped a dish towel into it, then draped the towel across her neck, relishing the rivulets of ice water that ran down her collarbone and soaked into her t-shirt. She wiped her face with one end of the towel and pushed damp stray hairs back against her head, considering. There was the laundry, fresh from the line and already wilted by the heat, to put away. Breakfast dishes filled the sink, silent and reproachful; her grandmother’s warnings about unwashed dishes drawing bugs playing, unheeded, in the back of her mind.

An overflowing trash can sat next to the sink. She usually burned the trash, but the county had been in a burn ban for two months. Once a week or so, she’d load the trash into the bed of her truck and drive it to the dumpster outside the high school cafeteria. It wasn’t strictly legal, but she knew the school board members, had gone to school for 12 years with most of them, in fact. Nothing was ever said about her trash sitting in their dumpster, out of place among the wrappers and empty, institution-sized cans of vegetables.

Across the kitchen was the door to her bedroom, dark and inviting. She thought of laying down in bed, surrendering to sleep while the fans paddled the air around the quiet room. She’d been doing that a lot lately, though — too much, really — and the resulting sodden, three hour naps always ended with her sitting in the living room, wide awake, until 3 or 4 in the morning. No nap today, she decided, turning deliberately away from the bedroom door to face the kitchen table and the unfolded laundry sitting on it. The white edge of an envelope peeked out from under the edge of the laundry basket.

The letter. That’s what she was trying not to think about. The letter. She nudged the laundry out of way until she could just make out her own name, written in her mother’s spindly handwriting, on the front. Abruptly, she put the laundry basket on the floor and picked the letter up, holding it gingerly by the sides, as if it were a small, vicious animal that might bite without warning. “Four years of silence,” she thought. “Four years without so much as a Christmas card, and now….this.” She wondered briefly if something had happened to a family member — an illness or an injury — and dismissed the idea out of hand. Her mother wouldn’t write about that; she’d take pleasure in not letting Tess know. She couldn’t think of any reason her mom would send a letter, certainly not to apologize or offer a truce or to reopen the lines of communication that Tess had shut down four years earlier. “I bet she’s thought of something scathing, something particularly ugly to say, and she’s thinking of how much it’ll hurt me to read it. Or she’s dying — hopefully of something slow and painful — and she wants to make amends.” Neither seemed any more likely than the other; neither helped her decide what to do with the letter in her hands. She put it back onto the table and sat down.

She sees his hands, strong, with long fingers and neatly-manicured nails, resting high on her leg. She sees her child’s body wiggle, unsure, uncomfortable with the touch, still innocent and trusting. 9-year-old Tess calls herself silly — her mother’s favorite taunt, silly — of course she’s being silly, he’s Daddy….and she stays still, saying nothing. The word in her throat — STOP — makes a perfect roadblock to catch all the words and cries and screams that will try, in the next six years, to crawl up her throat and out into existence, where they will make this thing, this shameful, unspoken thing, real.

She’d last seen her mom on Christmas Eve four years earlier. Ever since her dad died, Tess had gone to her mom’s house early on that day to help her set up for the annual family Christmas Party that night. The routine was that Tess washed dishes and swept floors while her mom dusted and, well, complained: about the weather, about the work of hosting this party that she nevertheless insisted happen each year, about Tess’s brothers and their wives and all the myriad reasons she had to be, and to stay, miserable. After three or four drinks, she would shift to talking about her own childhood: a doormat for a mother, a father who was “a real SOB if ever there was one,” the pressure to find a husband — and a good one — quickly, to get married as as soon as possible after high school graduation. Tess had often thought that her dad was not so much Mr. Right as he was Mr. Right-Now; less “love of my life” and more “any port in a storm,” but of course, she could never say that. She simply cleaned and arranged and provided the occasional “mmm, hmmm” to her mom’s constant litany of all the ways life had Done Her Wrong.

It is the summer of her eleventh year, and suddenly, she is her father’s singular interest. He wants her to bring him cold beers from the fridge, to sit next to him on the sofa, to wear her hair up, her shirts open three buttons down from her throat. “You’re so pretty,” he tells her again and again, smiling at her in a way that makes her think of the Big Bad Wolf grinning at Little Red Riding Hood from beneath her grandmother’s bonnet. She smiles back at him even though the hairs on the back of her neck stand up and her hands want to tug at her shirt, to pull it down over her stomach and her girlish hips. He tells her endlessly how grown-up she is, and she wants to believe him, but inside she is an incoherent heap of conflicting emotions: the happiness at having his attention tempered with the feeling of impending danger. It leaves a tight, unrelenting pain in her stomach, and she often feels not flattered by his gaze but frightened and held prisoner by it. Her throat aches from the effort of holding back this fear; an ache that will become constant, will follow her into adulthood, and will come to be her default, as normal to her as breathing: never object, never talk back.

That Christmas Eve was different than the others, though, for one simple reason: months earlier, Tess had started seeing a therapist. She’d talked to her doctor about feeling irritable, depressed. Her doctor had made a referral, and Tess had made an initial appointment, citing stress as the reason for the visit. She’d almost canceled at the last minute; In the end, it was her conditioning to be compliant, to be the Good Girl, that kept her from backing out.

The therapist was a nice lady, a bit older than Tess’s mom, with a kind, open face, an apparently endless supply of cardigans, and glasses held around her neck on a chain. For the first four visits, they talked about almost nothing. Tess mentioned her insomnia and stress headaches; the therapist taught her a handful of meditation and deep-breathing exercises. But the feeling of expectation — the weight of things that needed to be said — grew with each appointment, until one day she found herself unable to bear it any longer. She came to her appointment that day, exhausted from a sleepless night, and with no preamble whatsoever, simply blurted out, “My father raped me when when I was a child.”

The words hung in the air for an endless moment, waiting, waiting…..and before the therapist could react to them, before Tess herself could somehow snatch them back out of existence, she had dropped onto the couch and burst into tears.

She sees her pre-teen bedroom — blue shag rug, floral drapes that match the bedspread, pink Barbie Dreamhouse in the corner — and the door opening slowly, an inch at a time, in the gray hour before dawn. Sees 12 year old Tess pretend to be asleep, pretend to stay asleep, as he slides under the covers next to her, her eyes squinted, her face tensed with the effort of pretending she is not here, she is not here, SHE IS NOT HERE…….until he finishes, and disappears into the hallway bathroom, leaving her door open a few inches, like a victory lap that no one can see but her.

She cried for the entire 45-minute appointment that day, and left feeling hollow; empty but somehow hopeful. Her pain was real, it had been acknowledged by another person. Perhaps it would be possible to heal. God knows her life made no sense at the time: she was alone, twice-divorced and childless. She worked in her town’s small library five days a week but that was all. She had no hobbies, no interests, no real friends. She worked and she sat in the living room of her small, neat home, reading romance novels and doing her best to not think. Perhaps, she thought, it was possible to have more in her life than just this. And perhaps therapy was the way to find out.

She is fourteen. The early-morning visits continue; she feels weightless, dried out, like the skin of a rabbit she’d seen in a gun shop once, all flattened skin and hair that bore almost no resemblance to an actual animal. She wonders if she were still enough for long enough, if she’d dry out like that rabbit, until whatever it is in her that drives her father to such behavior dried up or disappeared. She wonders if it is possible for a person to become dry enough to blow away in the wind.

Tess kept going to therapy, and she kept talking, often through ugly tears. For months the tears overwhelmed her, falling like the proverbial Flood and erasing every other aspect of her life. They could be triggered by anything, or nothing: driving home from work, thinking only of what to make for her solitary dinner, and suddenly sobbing at a red light, struggling to breathe, to see the road in front of her. She felt like an open wound, something red and swollen and unhealed. She wondered if she would ever really heal, if it was even possible. But through it all, she kept showing up at her therapist’s office each week.

She remembers how heavy his body was: heavy and demanding and somehow carnivorous. How she didn’t feel like his Special Girl anymore, but like his prey, his dinner, his bottomless supply of nourishment. How he made it seem he would starve without her sacrifice. She remembers how heavy the shame was, like a thick woolen blanket draped over the heat of July, holding her motionless, unable to breathe. She remembers him saying “If you tell, no one will believe you,” remembers seeing her mother’s face in her mind’s eye, knowing that he is right. She remembers thinking of all the ways out, only to realize that there is really only one way out, and she is too scared to take it.

That Christmas Eve — the last time she would speak to her mother, though she didn’t know it at the time — she had struggled to listen to her mother’s stories. They were always the same: her mother was Perpetual Victim. No one’s story ever compared; no one else’s pain could be recognized. Her father had been right, she thought. She could tell her story here and now, and it would never register. It would never be heard. She looked at her mother and made a sudden, stark realization.

She believes it happened, she thought to herself, she just doesn’t believe it hurt me.

And that was it. She had begged off of the party, claiming migraine, and had simply never gone back. She considered blocking her mom’s number, then realized it wouldn’t matter. Her mom was a one-way train whose tracks ran in only one direction. She stayed in therapy, she grieved the loss of her family, and slowly, slowly, she healed. The part of her that needed a mother dried up like a summer garden in the middle of a drought, slowly going dormant except for an occasional twinge at Christmas and on her birthday. Until today. Until that damn letter arrived.

More heat thunder, a bit closer this time, shook her out of her reverie. Read it, she thought to herself, Don’t read it. Yes or no? The lady or the tiger? Which Is it going to be? And will anything really change, no matter which one I pick? Will anything ever really change?

Moved by a sudden impulse, Tess grabbed the letter and headed back through the kitchen to the back door, stopping only to grab a box of matches. The county was in a burn ban from the drought; technically, they weren’t supposed to burn anything……

A beat-up grill stood next to the small patio, balanced uneasily on crumbling red bricks, dust-covered and unused. She opened it and unceremoniously dropped the letter, still unopened, inside. She lit a match. A breath of wind, unexpectedly cool, blew it out. She lit another, watching closely as it sputtered, then caught. She held it over the letter, hesitating for only a moment, then touched the flame to its edge. It blazed immediately, and she watched it burn to ash. There was no way back. Nothing her mother could say or write would change a relationship written in stone. Better no hope than false hope; these dry bones would only hold so much weight before they splintered.

Thunder cracked again, nearly overhead. The breeze became a wild gust that scattered dry leaves from the edges of the patio, carrying with it the scent of rain and damp earth. A storm was finally coming, and she had never felt so in need of its cleansing power. She closed the grill and turned to go inside. The wind gusted again, hard and insistent. Taking a deep breath, she tilted her head to the sky and closed her eyes as the torrent of rain finally began to fall.