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.