The Body Farm, page 9
They cross into Utah without fanfare. As the miles pass, the peaks shrink back into foothills. Carl drives between arches and towers of stone. The last of the sunlight drains from the air, and stars appear, more stars than he has ever seen. There is no light pollution here. So few people live in Utah. Carl is elated by the wealth of constellations, the splash of the Milky Way across the great bowl of the sky.
A rustle from the back seat. Eden yawns, then groans. “Shit, my mouth hurts,” he says.
“No swearing.”
“Really?”
“Well, only do it when we’re alone.”
There is no moon tonight. The car’s headlights, sweeping across shrubbery and stone, might be the last lights in the whole world.
“Dad?” Eden says.
“Uh-huh.”
A small silence. Carl wishes he could see his son’s face in the rearview mirror, but Eden is still lying down, and anyway the interior of the car is black as pitch.
“Is Mom going to prison?” Eden asks.
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that too. She might. But she’s white and middle-aged and fairly well-off, so I don’t know what’ll happen.” He pauses, then asks, “Do you want her to go to prison?”
“I don’t ever want to see her again.”
“That’s fair.”
“I don’t give a shit what happens to her. She can die for all I care.”
Carl knows this isn’t true, but he only says, “How’s the dizziness?”
“Better.”
For a moment there is only the thrum of the engine and the murmur of wheels on pavement. Then Eden says in a tone of wonder, “Look at the stars.”
○
It’s after midnight when Carl parks in the garage beneath his building. He’ll return the rental car on his way to the tournament later. In the elevator, Eden slumps against the wall. His mouth is no longer bleeding, but the scab is fresh and painful-looking once more. Carl leads the way down the hall to his apartment. He hurries to hide his one-hitter and stash while Eden is in the bathroom. Then he wipes the kitchen counter down with a sponge and frowns into the fridge, empty except for condiments and moldering takeout boxes.
Eden enters the room with a strange look on his face. Carl can’t quite interpret it.
“Straight to bed with you, young man,” he says. “Your room is pretty much the way you left it. Might be a little dusty. I’ll vacuum in the morning.”
Eden sits at the kitchen table. “Actually, can we do something first?”
“Sure, I guess.”
He looks at his lap. “I asked Mom. She said no.”
“Well, your mom is a jerk. Fuck her.” The words are in the open air before Carl has the presence of mind to stop himself. Normally he would never say such a thing.
“Fuck her,” Eden echoes fiercely.
“What do you want to do?”
He cuts his son’s hair right at the table. Eden holds a shaving mirror to watch as Carl lifts each lock, grown to an impressive length over months and years, and snips it away. Red-brown coils fall to the floor like autumn leaves. Eden’s face is aglow with happiness, unmistakable even beneath his mask of wounds.
Nothing around Carl seems entirely real. Too much has happened in the past couple of days. He feels caught between waking and dreaming, unsure which state he currently inhabits, but he keeps cutting. Soon Eden sports a mop top of uneven tufts. He tips his face this way and that, investigating his own reflection with his mouth open.
“Ready?” Carl asks, reaching for his beard trimmer.
“Born ready.”
The oddest things whirl through Carl’s head as he shears his son like a sheep, leaving only a quarter inch of ruddy fur. Murder, June said, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. What is the inverse of death? What is the opposite of grief? Carl’s heartache has burned away like morning mist beneath the rising sun. Nape to crown, he works the trimmer with a confident hand. There is no stranger here, no changeling, only Eden, always Eden, his own same Eden. A concentrated version, stripped of superficialities, distilled to pure essence. More Eden than ever before. His lip has begun to bleed again from too much smiling.
Carl finishes the buzz cut with a flourish, meeting his son’s eyes in the hand mirror. Eden’s jaw seems more pronounced without the frame of his curly mane. His long-lobed ears are visible now. Has he always had those sharp cheekbones? He looks so much like Carl at fourteen that Carl finds himself groping for the back of the chair to keep his balance.
Silence falls. Eden pushes back his chair and rises to his feet. He wears that same new expression, which Carl can now identify as relief. Eden spins in the glow of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling fan, and Carl finds himself laughing, and maybe crying too, for the first time since getting his son’s midnight call.
Across, beyond, through—that was the first definition for trans, but there were others beneath it. The second was a state change, as in liquid to solid, or, Carl thinks now, a literal change of states, New York to Nevada. The final definition was on or to the other side of, as in a transcontinental road trip or, perhaps, the process of healing from a wound. One day Eden will emerge on the other side of this suffering recovered and renewed. That’s the hope, anyway.
Carl was not present when Eden was born, and he has missed any number of moments along the way, but he is here, now, for what may prove to be the most crucial milestone of them all. Eden strikes a proud pose. Carl wipes his eyes with the heel of his palm. Through chance and calamity and wild good fortune, he will bear witness to whatever this transition is: experimentation or affirmation, rebirth or revelation, homecoming or becoming. He will see who this miraculous child turns out to be.
The First Rule of Natalie
My sister was found as a newborn at the edge of the ocean, washed up on the beach by the tide. She lay on her back with her sea-colored eyes open. She did not cry as the waves surged around her, carrying her little body farther up the sand with each foamy swell. Strands of seaweed coiled around her plump belly. In lieu of a parent’s finger, she clutched a shell in her fist—a coiled mollusk spiral, thumb-sized and tapered, as brown as flesh, plucked from the bottom of the ocean.
My parents insisted that Natalie was not found that way at all. They said she’d been born in a hospital, just as I was. My sister was two years older, so I had not been there and could not be certain, but I did not believe them.
○
I first formed my hypothesis at the age of eight. We lived in Annapolis then, my father, mother, Natalie, and me. Our house was squat but cozy, and I could see Chesapeake Bay from my bedroom window. Mama and Papa were both psychiatrists, and the similarities did not end there: they were both slight of frame with limp mouse-brown hair, they both wore glasses, and they both routinely left half-empty coffee cups and half-finished books all around the house. When presented with new information, they both responded identically: a pause, a head tilt, and then: “Interesting.” They were so alike I sometimes forgot they weren’t related by blood.
I was a carbon copy and a combination. Like Mama, I’d developed astigmatism in kindergarten. Like Papa, I was allergic to dogs. Like both of them, I had dark eyes and freckles on every square inch of skin.
And then there was Natalie. At ten years old, she towered over me, nearly our father’s height already. Her shoulders were broad, her hair as straight and blond as straw. A prominent brow. Webbed hands and feet. In family photographs, she looked like a gangly stork accidentally hatched in the nest of stubby sandpipers.
I always knew Natalie was not like other children. She did not speak. She had no language at all, in fact, neither active nor passive. She did not even know her own name. She spent her days in the playroom, drawing, working with modeling clay, or adhering stickers to her face. She wore diapers to sleep. Though she knew how to use the toilet, she refused to get out of bed to do so.
Natalie was prone to rages, and we never knew what might set them off. A car horn. A stomachache. Nothing at all. Mama had a scar above her left eye from the time my sister hurled a mug across the kitchen. Papa needed stitches when Natalie slammed a door on his hand. I bore so many scratches up and down my arms—always in the process of scabbing and healing—that the kids at school assumed I had cats.
No pets. They would not have been safe with Natalie.
My sister functioned best with a strict routine, which Papa, Mama, and I knew by heart. Always the same breakfast: plain oatmeal and a cup of orange juice. Morning in the playroom with her art supplies. Lunch of peanut butter and jelly and applesauce. Afternoon in the backyard in good weather, or a Disney movie in the living room if it was raining or cold. Dinner of chicken fingers and broccoli. Bedtime at seven on the dot, her star nightlight projecting a whirling galaxy on the ceiling and New Age music playing on a loop.
Baths were a hassle. That was my first clue. Natalie had a thing about water; she did not even like the sound of the kitchen faucet running and would press her palms over her ears. My parents had taught her to tolerate being wiped down by a damp washcloth every evening, but Sunday was bath day, a weekly trauma. Mama always sent me to my room, but the screams and splashing carried down the hall. Whatever happened in the bathroom often resulted in injuries—black eye, fat lip.
Once Natalie came crashing into my room on Sunday night, naked and dripping, with suds in her hair. She appeared to have fled in the middle of things, evading the final rinse and the towel. I looked up from my book as she climbed into bed beside me and squirmed under my blanket, soaking the mattress. Her pupils were pinpoints. She rocked back and forth, making the humming monotone that served as her distress call.
Mama poked her head into the room, her hair disheveled. When she saw that I was not in danger, she left again, her back bowed.
Natalie shivered and snuggled close to borrow my warmth. I was used to her nakedness; she often decided that clothes were a nuisance and would strip without embarrassment wherever she was, even in the backyard in clear view of the neighbors’ houses.
I wondered why she was so afraid of the water. I wondered why God had gifted her webbed fingers if she was never going to swim.
“Natalie,” I said, and she darted her blue eyes at me, then away. Words were not words to her—they were music, a sequence of notes without meaning. She communicated best through touch, though you had to let her initiate. If you patted her shoulder or stroked her hair when she wasn’t ready, she often bit.
She continued to rock gently against the mattress. The steady, repetitive movement reminded me of the buffeting of waves in deep water. After I’d spent a long day swimming in Chesapeake Bay, I would feel a phantom echo of the surf’s constant motion for hours afterward. Natalie hummed, and this, too, reminded me of the sea: a muffled monotone, the way human voices sounded underwater.
She reached for my hand and laced her fingers through mine. I felt the webs between her fingers stretch against my knuckles, and that’s when I got my idea.
○
At school, I researched mermaids. The library was the best part of the pricey private academy my parents had chosen for me. Heavy mahogany bookshelves stood interspersed with stained-glass windows. The light was diffuse and marbled. A reverent hush filled the air, broken only by the scratch of students taking notes.
I hefted a stack of books into the seclusion of a carrel. Turning the pages, I read that nearly every culture had developed legends about mermaids. Some people saw them as good omens or benevolent spirits, while others believed they were dangerous. In China there were stories of mermaids who wept pearls instead of tears. In Zimbabwe they were called njuzu and got blamed for foul weather. The Greeks pictured them as malicious sirens, luring sailors to their deaths for sport.
Scientists theorized that manatees were the root of the myth of the mermaid, though the photos on the glossy pages—lumbering gray beasts with whiskers—looked nothing like women to me. But then, I was not a sailor who had been at sea for forty days on a ship crewed entirely by men.
According to the books, mermaids never appeared in human form. They always had long fish tails, sometimes gills. The only story I could find of a complete transformation was The Little Mermaid, a horrifying cautionary tale in which a mermaid traded her voice and tail for human legs and feet that felt with every step as though she were walking on broken glass.
None of this sounded like Natalie. Discouraged, I put the books back on the shelf and went to lunch.
I had known most of my classmates since kindergarten. The school was a small, intimate affair. Patsy, Ellie, Aliyah, and I always sat together, proud third graders, no longer relegated to the little-kid area of the lunchroom with its rainbow chairs and constant supervision.
My friends often had playdates at one another’s houses after school. I was sometimes invited but rarely accepted, since it would have meant leaving my parents with Natalie for an extra few hours without the relief of my presence, rendering them irritable and spent. Besides, I could never reciprocate by asking Patsy, Ellie, or Aliyah over in return. No one but my parents and me ever crossed the threshold of our house; we did not know how Natalie would react.
I did not particularly mind this. I found my school friends nice but overwhelming. They laughed so easily, so loudly. Their movements were unguarded and uncontrolled; Natalie would have smacked me if I ever gestured as freely as Patsy did. Aliyah and Ellie were criers, bursting into sobs while describing a sibling who would not share or a parent who had punished them by taking away their video games. I often failed to react to the crowning climax of this kind of sob story, expecting there had to be more to come. Such minor things—big sisters who hoarded cookies, little brothers who wore diapers and stank—did not merit tears.
I was the quiet one. There was no point in talking about my home life. My friends would not have known what to do with stories about Natalie rocking and humming for hours on end or gouging her fingernails through the flesh of my forearms because I dared to leave the room before she was ready to be parted from me.
○
Every Sunday morning, my mother and I walked the two and a half blocks down the hill to the beach. It was our special time together. There was never enough to go around in our house—Natalie was a whirlpool that sucked up all the light and energy and love. But for two hours on Sunday morning, Mama belonged only to me.
It was March, too cold to swim. The summer tourists, thankfully, were not yet present. Mama and I took our shoes off and strolled side by side on the chilly sand, not saying much. I picked up sea glass and showed it to her. The beach was bordered at both ends by a pile of stones, each rock bigger than I was. Sometimes seals gathered there, sunning themselves.
“Do you believe in mermaids?” I asked my mother. The wind was icy, whipping my hair against my face and buffing Mama’s cheeks rosy.
She considered my question. “As symbols of men’s idealization of the feminine, yes. Mermaids might also represent a fear of women.”
“Okay.”
“I suppose they could be seen as emblems of female empowerment. It depends on which myth you’re thinking of.”
I nodded, feigning comprehension. My parents did not childproof their conversation for me, which gratified me even when I struggled to understand. They treated me as though I, too, were a trained psychiatrist.
And then my mother grinned. “I always liked selkies better, though,” she said. “They make a much more interesting story.”
“Selkies?” I did not know the word.
“I’ll tell you on the walk home,” Mama said. “Your father has been on Natalie duty for almost three hours. I’m betting he’s at the end of his rope.”
○
That night I lay awake, blazing with new ideas. My sister was a selkie. I’d come close with my hypothesis—I had just chosen the wrong mythical creature.
Mama’s people were Irish, and in her childhood she’d been told about selkies by her grandfather, who died before I was born. Selkies were chimerical beings, part human, part seal, morphing their biology when they crossed from water to land. In the ocean, they swam and frolicked with other pinnipeds. On the shore, they shed their pelts, peeling off the heavy fur and tucking it somewhere safe, out of sight. They looked like people then, moving through the human world unnoticed.
Selkies were neither one thing nor another, living a halfway existence, always yearning for their other state of being. You could befriend them in their human shape, even love them, but you could not keep them. One day the call of the sea would overpower them, and they would return to the beach where they first had come ashore, find their hidden sealskin, change their form, and swim away.
Mama had never seen a selkie herself, but she told me that her grandfather had. It was a brief encounter, a distant glimpse along the Irish coast. My great-grandfather was a young boy, watching from a cliff top as a woman picked her way over the rocky shoreline far below him. He saw her stoop and gather something up off the ground—he couldn’t tell what it was. A moment later, a seal lolloped over the stones and dove jubilantly into the waves.
○
On a sunny afternoon, my sister and I sat at the playroom table, drawing together. The first rule of Natalie was that she could never be alone. In part this was her own choice—she became distressed without one of us in sight—but it was also a matter of safety. What if she marked up the walls with her crayons? What if she figured out how to open the window and climbed out?
So I was on Natalie duty while Mama saw clients and Papa prepared dinner. My parents shared an office on the east side of the house and took turns meeting their patients there. I’d visited their workspace only a few times—plush leather chairs, a spidery fern, ochre light, soundproofing, and a white noise machine for good measure. The room had its own entrance where clients could ring a private doorbell and go in and out unseen by Natalie and me.
I was teaching myself to draw seals out of a book. The tricky part was the snout—I kept giving them dog faces. Natalie drew spirals, her favorite shape, swiveling her whole torso with each rotation of the crayon. The walls of the playroom were papered with her artwork. Mama and Papa wanted her to feel that her efforts were as valued as mine—my A-plus essays on the fridge, my chess trophies on the mantel—though I knew Natalie did not care. Drawing was an experiential need for her, and as soon as she finished each page we might as well have lit it on fire.
