I knew a girl, once. A girl, I say, but that does not express what she really was – angel-child, devil-
dreamer, woman-maiden, an innocent fucked and toughened by life. Hesper Melancon. A name like a secret,
the evening star leading me astray. There were days when I didn't think she was real, when I didn't
think she could possibly exist in the same sphere as the rest of us, when I thought maybe I so much
needed her that I created her, built her out of broken violin strings and Spanish moss and the bits of
tobacco that gathered in the bottoms of my pockets.
Are you real? That was the first thing she ever said to me. It was one of those hot desert days where
your tongue rasps the roof of your mouth, sandpaper on wood, and every breath is like cactus needles in
your lungs; I snuck into the backyard of a house up for sale. The owners didn't drain their pool before
they moved out, so I scaled the fence, stripped down to my underwear, and dove in, reveling in the way
the cool aquamarine smoothed over me and licked off the heat. I lost myself in the water and my own
thoughts, and I didn't notice her sitting at the pool's edge, drowsily scoping me, until I paddled over
to the side to grab the mango juice I brought with me, and there she was, drinking right out of my juice
bottle.
-Are you real? she asked.
I was about to ask her the same thing, this stranger who knocked the wind right out of me. Even sitting
down, I could tell she was nearly six feet tall, and resplendent curves and taut muscles and tawny flesh
took up all that height. She had this ridiculous hairdo, shorn close to the scalp on one side and chin-
length on the other, brown-black highlighted with streaks of cactus-flower red and platinum blonde. She
wore all black, black pants and black t-shirt, black boots draped with rows of silver chains, and you'd
think on such a hot day she'd have fried in that outfit, but she didn't even appear to be sweating. And
her eyes – white-blue, but they didn't give the impression of ice. They were more like the hottest part
of a flame. She asked if I was real and what could I say? I was flabbergasted enough that I forgot to
be embarrassed about a stranger seeing me in my skivvies, and I said: C'mon in. She jumped in with her
clothes on, boots and all.
We became lovers before we even left that backyard, before we exchanged names. At sunset, it finally
cooled enough to get out of the pool; we lay on the sun-warmed clay and turned each other inside out.
She was rough when she bit at my tits until the blood rose to the surface and left scarlet speckles,
rough when she plundered me with her eager hand, but when my hand was inside her she trembled and
whimpered like a kitten. She followed me like a kitten, too; she followed me to my trailer home and
stayed, and she had such a presence that after a week or two, I felt she'd always been there, as though
she lived there first and I encroached on her territory. She had that way about her, making any space
she inhabited seem like her birthright.
I soon discovered she was totally shit-nuts. I suppose I should have guessed that from the beginning,
from the way she jumped into the water with all her clothes on, and how she didn't hesitate to put her
hand between the legs of a girl she'd only just met, and how she followed me home; but I was so smitten
and so drunk on the Arizona heat that I acted pretty nuts myself – I invited her into the pool, I put my
hand between her legs without hesitation, and I certainly didn't stop her from following me home. She
was crazy, she was magic, and I wanted to learn everything about her, decipher her code, puzzle the
pieces together, solve the mystery of her. Later on, when our affair curdled like milk left out of the
fridge too long, she spat an accusation at me:
-Eulalie, you treat me like I'm some newly discovered species that you need to dissect and study. I'm
tired of it. I'm a fucking human, okay? Not a goddamn curio.
There was truth in that, sure, but my study of her wasn't meant to belittle. I only wanted to understand
her; she left me wonderstruck, she was so unlike anyone else.
She may have thought I treated her like a rare moth in my collection, but I never could pin her down, as
soon as I thought I had her figured out she did something unexpected and I had to start over from square
one. That's one of the reasons I stayed in love with her so long, and am in love with her, still. As
soon as the mystery's gone and you've got someone pegged, it's time to move on, but I never pinned her
down, never figured her out. Here I am now, trying to diagram our relationship, trying to sketch a
portrait of my star light, star bright, first star I see at night, my trailer bride, my fire spirit.
Even that description is wrong – my fire spirit – because it implies ownership, implies that she belonged
to me, and Jesus, I may as well be saying the wind belonged to me. Girls like her, you can hold them,
but good luck holding on to them.
The first thing I never knew about her was why she came to the desert. She never knew why I was there,
either. It didn't need to be mentioned. Most people go to the desert cos they've got nowhere else to
go, they ran out of luck someplace else, they lost all their money at the horse races, their wife left
them for her dentist, they tried to fight God and God won. . .and they go to the desert because that arid
plain can burn your conscience clean, you can forget your past under that vast and uncaring sky. I ran
there from Nashville, after a nasty breakup with a greasy pompadour musician boy. We lived together for
two years and things were never what you'd call idyllic, but I gave it a shot, and one night he came home
all stinking of white lightning and shouting at me about this lovesong I wrote, which wasn't about him,
it was about a girl. He called me a fucking dyke and then he picked up a chair and hurled it at the wall
and it splintered apart, and he looked ready to throw a punch at me and I just said: Leave your keys here
and get the hell out. I owned most of the stuff in the place, and the lease was under my name, and I
told him I'd drop his clothes and his bass guitar at his mom's house. He staggered away from my life and
I sat on the floor and cried, and I thought he might be right, maybe I was a fucking dyke, and then I
started laughing, a loud howling laugh. I'm surprised the neighbors didn't call the police. A couple
days later, I realized I couldn't be in that place anymore, I'd lived there too long and needed to start
again with a clean slate; I chose Arizona because that's the page my United States atlas fell open to,
and it appealed to me, I thought of cowgirls in skintight jeans and sun-bleached cattle bones, I thought
of rocks and dirt and red skies and all that empty space. I sold most of my shit and bought a trailer
home, hitched it to my pick-up truck and drove west, and when I got there I made some money by playing my
fiddle in cowboy bars, but mostly I sat outside my trailer and got dust in my hair, drank a lot of gin
and watched the tumbleweeds blow by. But this story isn't about me, or about crappy ex-boyfriends. It's
about Hesper.
She told me of her childhood and her family one morning-evening – we usually woke up around four p.m.,
that July in Arizona. My trailer held heat like an oven and I only had a tiny window air-conditioner at
one end, so it was too hot to move around during the hours when the sun was highest in the sky. On this
particular day, a week or so before her thirtieth birthday, we woke up and lolled in bed for a while, it
was still too hot to move, but we fucked, anyway, like coyotes during mating season. We scrabbled and
bit on my rickety, too-small bed, and then I stood up, naked and smelling of salt and Hesper's
unmistakable bayou smell – I'm not kidding, she smelled like the bayou; not in a bad way, she just had
this faint but ever-present musk of moss and water and oily, fertile mud – and I poured us two glasses of
sweet tea. I curled up next to her and we sipped at our tea, and I said: Hesper, can I ask about your
tattoos?
-Which ones, Lalie?
She had several tattoos, but the ones that piqued my curiosity were on her upper arms. Her left bicep
displayed a lurid Mardi Gras mask, a purple-blue voodoo bird creature, and underneath it a banner bearing
the phrase laissez les bons temps roulez; her right arm bore an extremely graphic depiction of Christ on
the cross, so detailed you could almost feel the nails driven through his palms, the thorns piercing his
holy flesh, his final moments of writhing agony. The ones on your arms.
-My dad was from New Orleans and my mom is Pentecostal.
I gave her a look like you can't weasel your way out of this, missy, and she sighed languidly and began
to talk.
Hesper Melancon was born in Twombly, Louisiana, in August 1975, to Jean-Pierre Melancon and Ruthie
Melancon (nee Quarles). Twombly was hardly more than a dot of dry land in the middle of the bayou; it
wasn't on any maps, and the people who lived there joked that unless you'd been there before, you'd never
be able to find it. Jean-Pierre and Ruthie were such an odd combination that Hesper was mixed-up from
the beginning, couldn't help it, not with all those ancestral ghosts singing and moaning in her blood.
Jean-Pierre Melancon was Haitian-Acadian, the youngest of twelve children in a rowdy Catholic family.
Catholic, yes, but there were whispers that a couple of the great-great-aunts still practiced Voodoo,
secretly, with well-hidden stashes of black cat bones and gator feet. Jean-Pierre was a smart boy, and a
charming one, albeit a bit of a troublemaker, and also very handsome: tall, with a thick wave of black
hair and smooth, glistening ginger skin. He could have had his pick of many different girls, and he
disappointed his family when he chose Ruthie Quarles – they hoped he'd marry someone rich, but she came
from poor mountain folk, and on top of that, she wasn't even Catholic. Still, they doted on Jean-Pierre,
him being the baby and all, and if he was happy, they were happy. Ruthie Quarles was a slight, red-
haired and freckled girl, three years Jean-Pierre's junior. She grew up the middle child of five in a
Pentecostal family from the Appalachian area of Kentucky; they were Scotch-Irish (and a little bit of
Cherokee, somewhere way back, but they never really talked about that), settled there for the mining and
stayed for the moonshine. Ruthie wanted more from life than that, and she put herself through college.
After graduation, she decided she needed to see even more of the world, so she ran off to the wilds of
New Orleans, and that's where she met Jean-Pierre Melancon. He seduced her quickly and easily. Ruthie's
family didn't come to the wedding; they were quite distraught by her choice to marry a Catholic, and a
colored one at that. A large part of their attraction to one another probably stemmed from their
striking dissimilarities; things from outside your normal realm of experience have a way of being
frighteningly enticing. So they got married despite their families' trepidations, and Ruthie got
pregnant almost immediately.
The newlyweds lived in a cozy little apartment in the French Quarter, right in the midst of all the
bustle of the city. But when Ruthie told Jean-Pierre of her pregnancy, he said: Ruthie, my love, this
apartment is too small to live in with a child, and too dangerous, think of all the scum out on the
streets. They moved out of the city, out to Twombly, to live in a house Jean-Pierre's great-uncle
François Melancon left to him. The eventual problems all sprouted from this move, but they tried to
raise their child properly; how many mistakes have been made in the name of children? Jean-Pierre needed
the dirty, disgusting, pretty city, needed the brass bands and the concertina players, the smell of
spices and fresh beignets every morning. It was his home. And Ruthie, well, she came to New Orleans to
get away from the country life, and now here they were out in the middle of a swamp with nothing around
for miles and miles. Hesper was born in that damp house, that house that was constantly twilit inside
from the canopy of vines and Spanish moss. The bayou chorus – mosquito buzz, frog chirrup, gator moan –
was her lullaby. Jean-Pierre and Ruthie made a go of it for a couple years, and then they both fell into
addictive patterns; Jean-Pierre drank heavily, Ruthie prayed constantly. Hesper claims she remembers
those days, even though she was only a small tot. She heard them shriek at each other, and she compared
their sounds to the bayou sounds, her father the alligator tenor, her mother the alto frog. Jean-Pierre
got sloppy-drunk and tried to kiss Ruthie, tried to get her to make love to him, but she refused his
advances, and he didn't understand, she'd been so lustful when they lived in N'awlins. And he yelled
things at her in Creole which Hesper couldn't understand, only knew they were awful, awful words by the
way he said them, and by the way her mother's prayers got even stronger after he said them. Ruthie
locked herself in the bathroom and Jean-Pierre started crying, choking thick sobs, and he took his little
girl on his knee and bounced her slowly, out on the front porch staring out at the dark water, while he
sang sad old Haitian slave songs or sad old French love songs.
-There are only two things about my father I remember clearly. The sound of his voice singing those
songs, and the smell of his étoufee simmering in the kitchen.
When Hesper was three, Jean-Pierre couldn't take it anymore, and he split, took off who-knows-where.
Rotten Papists, Ruthie shouted, when she read the note saying he'd left, Mama was right to warn me away
from him, and I didn't listen. Ruthie and Hesper went back to Kentucky with its mine-stripped mountains
and blue grass, to live with the Quarles family. Now, the Quarles' were Pentecostal, but most of them
were more into giving lip service to their religion than actually practicing it. However, Grandma
Esther, she was very serious about it. She prayed five times a day, at least, and she went to a branch
of the church where the parishioners handled snakes and spoke in tongues and didn't allow any sort of
activity that felt remotely like fun. She convinced Ruthie that religion was just the thing she and
Hesper needed to wipe the stench of sin, left by that Godless Papist, off of them. Ruthie and Esther
immersed Hesper in the life of the church, and from the age of four on, Hesper handled poisonous snakes.
They crawled all over her, slid their smooth serpent skin along her neck and arms and shoulders, and the
other churchgoers believed that because of their faith in the Lord, Hesper would be safe from the biting
fangs. That appalled me – who lets a four year old play with venomous snakes? And I thought my
childhood was crazy, traveling around with my Pop while he played his guitar. . .I didn't express my
shock, because I so very much wanted her to keep talking. Hesper also spoke in tongues; she didn't do it
on purpose, she was no fake, it just happened – she fell down on her knees and frothed at the mouth,
thrashed around on the floor and spouted streams of words that were not hers, which she did not
understand. The congregation fawned over her, saying what a lucky girl, to be affected so early by the
spirit of God, but Hesper wasn't sure how lucky it was.
-Everyone thought I was so close to Jesus, then, but when I recall those moments, she paused to take a
sip of her sweet tea, I don't recall feeling blessed or full of light. I was terrified, felt like I was
being possessed by something overwhelming and evil.
Right around this same time, little Hesper began to have violent nightmares about being burnt at the
stake as a witch, nightmares from which she woke up yowling and feverish; she said she could feel every
moment in exquisite detail, she could feel the flames licking at her toes, crawling up her arms, eating
her alive. She continued to have these nightmares all her life, though they grew more infrequent as she
got older. She still had them when we were together; on several nights I woke to her screaming at the
top of her lungs, kicking at me or the blankets or the wall, I had to shake her awake and her skin would
be so hot to the touch that it nearly burnt me.
Hesper turned fifteen, and knew she had to leave that environment. The last straw came when she bought
some make-up one day, just a lipstick and eyeliner, and when Ruthie saw it on her, she said: I won't have
any daughter of mine looking like a whore, walking around all painted up like a new saloon. The very
next day, Hesper stuck out her thumb and headed south, toward Louisiana and the home of her father's side
of the family.
-Catholicism does have its issues, I admit, but Catholics are a thousand times more fun and full of life
than Pentecostals.
In New Orleans, Hesper found her family, her gran-mére, some of her aunts and uncles, none of whom she'd
ever met, and they welcomed her with open arms. Oh, I tried to tell your Papa to apologize to your Mama
and go back to you, his wife and child, but non, he was so stubborn, said Hesper's gran-mére, and now. .
. Hesper was told that her father had continued to drink, started gambling and hanging around with a bad
crowd, spent his life at the House of the Rising Sun, so to speak, and died of liver failure a few years
before she arrived, in debt and alone. Her father's death upset her, but she'd never really known him,
and she was just so glad to have part of her family, who accepted her, who accepted the world in all its
messy glory, who loved food and dance and music. She spent a few years in New Orleans, in that time got
her GED and made money running errands around town on a bicycle, darting between cars and tourists in the
French Quarter, sitting on curbs and playing guitar sometimes, sometimes waking up in slimy gutters or
moldering cemeteries after blurred nights of boozing. And then, she said, it was time for her to leave
again, to see more of the world. She saved up some money and bought a motorcycle, hopped on it to see
the country, the whole North American continent really, forays into Canada and Mexico, with her guitar
strapped on her back and her boots dusty from the road.
-I've noticed, that even these days, people are suspicious of a woman traveling alone. Men can travel
wherever they like, but being a woman, there will always be people who look at you like you're abnormal,
who hide behind their questioning eyes the assumption that you're on the run from the law, or from your
husband, that maybe you're a hooker or a thief.
Hesper being Hesper, the general public's caginess and fear only pushed her further, pushed her into
flirting with true outlaw status.
-I stole most of what I needed. Once, in a tiny town in southern Iowa, right near the Missouri border, I
robbed a bank.
It seems unlikely that she could have done that and gotten away with it, but if anyone could do it, she
would be the one. Rebel child. Her stories ended there, that day, and I did not press her to continue.
The more I tried to get her to talk, the more silent she became; I already knew this about her. She only
talked of her life on her terms, and then only in fragments, her life was a rushing river inside her and
she was the dam that held it back, she only let small spurts out every once in a while, as though if she
let out too much at a time the dam would break and the river become unstoppable, a violent watery
darkness flooding and drowning everything else.
The next time she chose to tell me any stories was October, a cool autumn dusk in the desert. We sat
outside the trailer, I played fiddle softly, the straining gently creeping, quiet, so quiet I heard the
scorpions scuttling in the shadows, and the kangaroo mice grew curious and came to hop around my feet.
The near-full moon started to rise, came up all smoldering red like an ember, and I played "Bad Moon
Rising," Hesper sang along in a reedy whisper – Hope you have got your things together, hope you are
quite prepared to die. When the song ended we sat in the desert of silence, opened cans of beer and
sucked at them, and with no warning Hesper jumped up and went inside, came back out holding a book the
size and shape of a photo album. When she followed me home, she had nothing but the clothes on her back
and those cowpunk boots, and one day I came home from work and she had a large suitcase and her guitar
and her motorcycle. I never knew where she'd been keeping them up to that point, or where she stayed
before she exploded into my life, and I never dared ask. That night, she sat down next to me and opened
the book. It was a scrapbook of sorts, every few pages emblazoned at the top with the name of a place,
and dates.
-The times I spent in those places.
Some of the dates spanned years, some only a week or so. After the place name and the dates, the pages
dedicated to that particular location held things like bits of maps, dried flowers yellowing to dust, the
occasional blurred photograph, and strange cryptic notes, names and words that meant nothing to me. She
flipped through the pages one by one, stopped sometimes to tell me a story, about a job she had fishing
off the coast of Florida, or the crone she met in Mexico, who with papery hands laid atop Hesper's, told
her the oldest kind of secrets. She reached a page that said Wisconsin, and it contained only a small
fibrous piece of a map, which showed blue trails of rivers, and black dots denoting towns with names like
Greenbush, Glenbeulah, Dundee, and New Fane.
What did you do in Wisconsin?
-I hunted werewolves.
And that's all she said on that topic. She flipped through page after page – Saskatchewan, San
Francisco, Natchez, Newark – the final page with anything on it read Chapel Hill, November 18, 2001 to
and no closing date. There was nothing else on the page, and all the pages after that were blank, all of
2002 and 2003 completely missing from the chronicle. She shut the book and pulled from her beer
nonchalantly, but I saw her hands shaking, I saw a tear try to squeeze itself from her whitefire eyes,
she blinked it away, set down her beer can and wandered out aways into the thick night. I heard her
mumble:
-Oh, Tommy. I'm so sorry.
Many months passed before I found out who Tommy was, but from the way she said that name, weighted down
by the heaviness of grief, I knew immediately there had been some great loss involved.
For all her tomboy swagger, Hesper was more of a woman than I could ever hope to be. She was the full
glorious cipher of ancient womanhood, her body was Biblical, those hips held the power of Delilah,
Bathsheba, Jezebel, Eve, and a thousand other temptresses. When I made love to her I made love to the
concept of Woman. Compared to her, I was almost boyish. I had long hair, I wore dresses, and I wasn't
unattractive or even boyish, really, but – Hesper was so much woman, and she made me seem plain, pale
quiet slip of a thing I am. Her woman-ness made her uncomfortable, she tried to cover up her curves with
baggy clothes, tried to mask her saltmarsh smell with whiskey and motor oil, tried to shove away any
sense of fragility with a sneer on her lips and a strut in her step. I always wondered what made her so
uneasy with her beauty, wondered if it was something in her childhood, maybe her religious background, or
if some horror occurred in her young adult years. There is so much I never knew about her.
Her voice, too, was all woman. It was deep, raspy from inhaling smoke and diesel, but still feminine; it
drew all the pain from the pit of her, dredged up a secret well of womanly sorrow every time she sang.
My voice was octaves higher, but I sounded like a little girl; when we sang together, the fullness of her
voice made my own sound thin as a threadbare elbow on an old coat.
Music was a big part of our relationship. She played the guitar, I played the violin. I didn't think
much of my voice, but Hesper said she loved to hear me sing, said it calmed her. On nights when she was
too demon-haunted to sleep, she paced the floors and I played and sang for her – sometimes my own songs,
sometimes sad reeling renditions of her favorites, songs by rock icons ("Child Of The Moon" by the
Rolling Stones and "Vagabond Ways" by Marianne Faithfull were two of her frequent requests), or very old
folk songs like "Goodnight Irene." I played shows sometimes, in Phoenix and Austin, and later, after we
moved back east, all up and down the coast and in the Deep South; I garnered a half-living from my
music. Hesper was a far more talented songwriter than I, she wrote the kind of songs that can crack a
body in half, and I prodded her to play out, but she rarely did. She claimed the world wasn't ready for
her. I convinced her to play once, got her a gig at a small, trendy bar in New York City, and I learned
that maybe she was right about the world not being ready – the audience sat in a disturbed hush, not
knowing what to make of her apocalyptic visions or her sexy violent verses, not able to comprehend her
particular brand of madness.
We stayed in the desert until April, and then it was time to move. We couldn't face another stifling
summer, and anyway, Hesper couldn't stay in one place too long, she said it made her itchy. I'm more of
a settling-down type, I like to see new things, but I also like to have roots. But I moved with Hesper,
she was the evening star shimmering in the sky of my world, urging me on, up, away. We balanced each
other out, I eased her flame to a steadier blaze, and she kept me from being contented to the point of
stagnancy. The first place we went after leaving Arizona was purely on her whim.
-There's this place, Lalie, up in the mountains in western Pennsylvania. I passed by it once, and I've
always thought it'd be great to live there. Can we, please?
I found it impossible to say no to her, and that spring we parked my trailer on the banks of Fortune
Teller Creek. We camped there while the river unfroze and the wood anemone flowered, we made love on
moist earth as the last snows melted in trickles from mountain crags, on cold wood nights I cooked soup
on a camp stove and we warmed ourselves with whiskey-infused mugs of tea. We stayed there while the
black tupelo blossomed, but didn't wait to see it bear fruit. As lovely as Fortune Teller Creek was, the
solitude put a strain on us; we'd already had too much of it in the desert. So we sold my trailer and
moved to Philadelphia. We talked about New York City, but couldn't afford it, and Philadelphia was close
enough to it that we could go up often without having to pay the high cost of living there. We moved
into a big tumbledown house in West Philly, with a few acquaintances of mine. Hesper and I shared a
room; the other three rooms were inhabited by an opium-smoking industrial sculpture maker, a poi-spinning
dreadlocked girl who never wore shoes, and a punk rocker by the name of Scumbag, who didn't say much to
us but always brought different girls (and the occasional boy) back to his room. Hesper got a job as a
bike messenger, I played my music in cramped rooms above used bookstores and Ethiopian restaurants, and
tended bar on the side. Every other weekend or so, we went to New York. If I had a gig, we took my
truck, but usually we just rode the Chinatown bus and spent our days wandering around, or went on dates
to Coney Island, and at night we crashed on folks' couches.
Everything was really perfect for a while. We had friends, we had enough money, and our house was always
well stocked with food from community gardens or grocery store dumpsters. Flowering vines grew over the
porch railings, we adopted a tiger-striped stray cat that Hesper named Keef; Hesper stopped having her
nightmares, and we fell asleep to the rumble of trains gently rocking the foundation of our house.
We lived in Philadelphia for slightly over a year, and then Hesper got itchy again. This time, we went
south. We both missed it – she, of course, missed Louisiana, and I missed Tennessee, which is where I
spent a good portion of my life. Neither one of us had the desire to move back to our childhood states,
but being closer to them sounded good, so we chose Georgia. We got an apartment in a country suburb of
Atlanta, and it was perfect there, too, at first. On soaking languid summer days, we sat out on the tiny
balcony, sipped mint juleps and fanned ourselves, pretended we were southern belles, cracked each other
up by saying things like: I do declare! and Oh, Lawdy, you give me the vapors! I wrote a song about
Hesper during those early months in Georgia, not the first or last song I wrote about her, but my
favorite – a song about loving a woman whose heart is as warm and wild as the sweet, dirty South.
On humid nights, I rode on the back of her bike with my arms tight around her, we drove out on middle-of-
nowhere class D highways, sent up clouds of dust that stuck to our damp skin.
Then the brakes failed, and we went rolling downhill, too fast to stop, too fast to jump off. I wish I
could pinpoint the exact moment things went wrong, wish I could say: If only I hadn't done this, Hesper
would still sleep next to me, I would still smooth her hair back from her sweaty forehead after
nightmares. I've analyzed all the facts and I still don't know – don't know why she was ever with me, or
why she left. It ended inevitably, I think. I tried too hard to hold on to her, and she needed to go
seek out new faces, needed someone who could match her ardent soul, someone who could fan the flames
instead of act as a wet blanket. Someone who could allow her to self-destruct.
It didn't all happen at once, the downhill slide and calamitous crash. It happened in increments, little
thorny things that added up to the both of us being poked raw. Everything upset her. She called me
clingy.
-Get some of your own friends!
When I did, she said I was ignoring her, said she thought I was screwing around on her. I told her that,
even if I wanted to screw around, I wouldn't have the time or energy – she drained me completely. In
late fall, I went to visit my Pop. I hadn't seen him in years, and I figured it would be good to get
away from our angry words for a while, figured that when I got back, things would have cooled off and
we'd have passionate make-up sex and I'd cry and apologize and it would all be better. I spent three
weeks in Tennessee, and when I returned to Georgia, I found out what Hesper kept busy with while I was
away. Cocaine. She didn't see anything wrong with it, she told me openly; she actually tried to get me
to start. I tried it once, a desperate plea, a powdery prayer – God grant me an addiction, if it means
Hesper will stay. She laid a thick white line on her bronze thigh and I inhaled. My veins tingled and
my pupils blossomed, suddenly the world was so sharp, I felt for a moment like I understood what Hesper
felt like all the time, taking in everything all at once, burning for the world. My pelvis throbbed with
desire and I jumped on top of Hesper and devoured her, tasted every pore and follicle of her, I thrust
all my fingers into her and then my whole fist, thrummed her until she bellowed, again and again, and we
both saw purple. But after that, Hesper passed out, and I hated what the coke did to me. I roamed the
apartment, exhausted and restless, my heart palpitated and my skin didn't fit right. I never touched the
stuff again after that night, and Hesper took my lack of interest in the drug for disapproval of her
habit, but disapproval isn't the right word for what I felt while watching her in those days. It was
more like terror. She was already so volatile, so fever-bright, and the coke made her tick even faster;
her temperature ran so high that I begged her to see a doctor, I feared she might literally consume
herself in flames, spontaneously combust. I never asked her to stop, knowing it would be only an
exercise in futility, but she wished I wanted to be part of her newest hobby, and she spent more and more
time away from the apartment, with so-called friends who applauded her dangerous predilections, who
cheered to watch her burn.
Her nightmares got worse, too. She had her witch hunt memories at least once a week, and she had other
torments of her past near every night. She flailed away from me when I attempted to comfort her. She
screamed the names of family and friends long gone, Ruthie, Jean-Pierre, but the name I heard most
frequently was Tommy. We had an argument one night, I don't remember now what started it – isn't that
always how those things go? – and I, normally so quiet in those matters, I, the girl who lets others win
just to avoid excess conflict, I was on my eighth beer, surly, and I said: Who the fuck is Tommy? I keep
hearing you say his name. Are you still in love with him?
-Tommy was my son. The one time I slept with a man, I got pregnant. I decided to have the baby; only,
there was something wrong with him. He was born too soon, and his lungs weren't fully developed. They
tried everything, but he died at six months, and he'd spent most of those months in an incubator. My son
spent most of his short life in a little fucking plastic cage, and it was my fucking fault, punishment
for a life of smoking, drinking, and never caring about anything. I finally cared about something, and
it was taken from me. So, you happy now? Is that what you wanted to know? Tommy isn't an ex-lover.
He's my dead son.
-Baby, it wasn't your fault, I. . .
-You know what? You can't fix me, no matter how many it wasn't your fault-s you spew at me. I will
always be this way. I'm thirty-two years old, and if I haven't changed yet, I'm not bound to do it
anytime soon. But sometimes I think you revel in my craziness, Eulalie, the way you dig so hard to find
out the details of my tragic past. You treat me like I'm some newly discovered species that you need to
dissect and study. I'm tired of it. I'm a fucking human, okay? Not a goddamn curio.
She stormed from the building and did not come home for two days. She came back and the house filled
with tense quiet. She had nothing to say to me, she'd said too much already, and she was simply done
talking. I took up sleeping on the couch and I kept my mouth shut, too. Christmas came and went with no
gifts exchanging hands, and New Year's Eve was like a funeral – as the clock clicked over to the next
year, we sat at the kitchen table, drank our drinks silently, didn't clink glasses, didn't kiss at
midnight. Two days later, I got back from work and she was gone. For a few days, I thought maybe she'd
come back; she'd left half her stuff, including her motorcycle. I couldn't imagine her going away for
good without that bike, but my heart held knowledge my brain didn't want to face, yet, and my brain
synced up when I found, among the pile of stuff she orphaned in our bedroom closet, a receipt for a bus
ticket to Los Angeles.
A year has passed since I lost the girl I never really had, since my devil-dreamer left me for the City
of Angels. My evening star now glimmers on someone else's horizon, and I'm still here trying to map her
progress across the heavens. I've written albums of sad sad songs, pages of prose with vague plots and
no closure. The only thing I wish, star light, star bright, is that I'm mentioned somewhere in the
scrapbook of her life, on a page or two of map pieces, torn out and glued together so it looks like
Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia are all one state, adorned with cryptic notes that read trailer,
Fortune Teller Creek, Eulalie, and love.