Annabelle
“It’s perfect,” Sabrina says, holding up the note the Coyote pinned to the front door, a time and a place scrawled in blocky print. “I’ll meet him, like I always do. But then I’ll tell him he’s got to pay up.”
“It seems … weird,” you say. Sabrina had started leaving him voicemails from the payphone in front of the convenience store, cryptic and bitter. Your phone lines had been cut off, finally, after months of the phone company sending increasingly strident warnings. Envelopes marked URGENT in red ink.
“Stop worrying,” she says, putting her coat on, zipping it to her chin. She’s wearing the gold star charm after keeping it on her dresser all these weeks. You wonder what it means.
At the window you watch her pale hair recede into the dark. To your surprise, she turns once at the end of the driveway, gives you a smile and a wave, turns back again. Sets her shoulders and disappears from view.
Night falls, no Sabrina. You consider walking to the payphone, but who would you call? It wouldn’t help you find her, and you’d freeze. After a short thaw, winter came back, swift and hard and bitter.
You don’t know what to do with yourself. You pace the hallways, open the same cabinets over and over again, jump at every creak in the old house, thinking it’s her.
You lie down to sleep but can’t rest. You have no way of calling her. You have no one who can help. You think for a moment of calling the cops, but then you remember the Cranberry Festival, how the Coyote had stood in the circle of men with the police chief. His friends.
You try to calm yourself, tell yourself she will come back with a reason it took so long.
She’ll return and tell you a convoluted story about where she’d gone and what she had to do and why, her face flushed with victory.
She’ll show you her purse, a wallet fat with cash, and then the two of you will turn toward the future, toward the rest of your lives.
But that only works for so long. You check the clock every few minutes.
You search out some coins from between the couch cushions, resolve to walk to the payphone at the market.
You will call the police after all. You get as far as putting on your coat, but a moment later you are taking it off again.
What if she’s hurt and comes back while you are gone?
Every step you’d take down the road could be a step in the wrong direction.
You feel her close by, you know she wouldn’t leave you, not now, if she could help it.
In the end, you walk in circles in the yard calling her name.
Calling and calling and calling. Once, you think you hear her calling to you from far off, but realize it is only your own voice thrown back to you.
You don’t know whether it is the cold or the fear that makes you start to tremble, but you stay out until your teeth clack against one another, until your knees begin to falter and buckle underneath you like the untested legs of a fawn.
“Come back, help, help, help,” you plead, to the sky, the cold, indifferent stars, one last time. “Sabrina!” you shout, your heart pounding, your limbs weak. “Sabrina!”
Inside, you collapse against the door, exhausted and crazed with worry. You can’t get up and yet you feel a strange electricity running through you.
You have to make it nice for her, you decide. Then she will come. You have to keep moving, because when you are still you feel dread radiating from every nerve, every muscle and bone.
So you force yourself off the ground and put the kettle on for tea, though your hand shakes as you pull the cup and saucer from the cabinet.
You pour her a pitcher of milk and a bowl of cereal, clean a spoon to a high shine and lay it on a napkin.
Your eye lands on the fireplace and you think yes!
And haul chopped wood in from the side porch.
But, the wood is damp and old and the only lighter you can find takes try after try to spark, the wheel leaving a groove in your thumb from pressing so hard.
You’re on your third try with the fire when you feel a familiar pain low in your belly.
You straighten, wait a few minutes, feel it again.
Oh, you think. You’ve had it all wrong. It gets you giddy, those low cramps, the squeeze and release you know from your period.
You even laugh. Imagine, that you thought …
All this time … wait until you tell Sabrina.
You go to the bathroom, get a pad out, put it in your underwear in anticipation.
You leave the wrapper next to the sink, as though you forgot to toss it out, a thin slip of pink, so that Sabrina will see.
A little flag: All is well here. Your mind whirs.
You can go back to school. You can tell Miss Hamilton you were wrong.
You can still go away one day. You can still …
But then, a cramp like a vise around you. A pang that makes you bite your lip. This worries you, but you tell herself it is your body storing up months of its usual wash of blood. It is normal. It must be normal. To be expected. And Sabrina will be back soon.
Your brain is buzzing, with hope, with plans.
You ignore the dark fault line of worry running through you, ignore the fist opening and closing low in your pelvis.
You walk. Walk the upstairs hallway, grazing your fingers along the spindles that support the banister, rub dust from your fingerprints.
You go downstairs and walk from room to room, trying to keep up the story that everything is about to improve, while that same worry is caught in your mind like a burr. Sabrina should be back by now.
You pace and pace and pace until it is midnight and there is still no sign of your sister.
You lie down but can’t get comfortable, shove a pillow between your knees.
The ache is radiating across your lower back, through your hips, down the outsides of your thighs.
You reach a hand between your legs to check for the blood that is surely about to come, your period releasing you, but nothing, just a milky white film that you wipe away on your sheets.
Another hour passes and you can’t call the pain cramps anymore, the word doesn’t match. Cramp, an inconvenience. A charley horse you bite your lip through. Sabrina, you think, between the waves of pain. Sabrina, where are you? Sabrina, come.
You are the only one home but even so, when you scream, you scream into your pillow. Smother the sound.
You get up, straddle your desk chair, and when the next pain comes you hug your arms around the back, squeeze, squeeze harder, but it is not enough.
Not enough to bring you relief, to pull you up and out of the vise crushing you tighter, tighter, tighter still.
When the next pain comes you bite the top slat of the chair as hard as you can, a scream coming from the back of your throat, the taste of paint and resin and pine in your mouth.
Everything you are wearing is soaked through with sweat.
Your mother’s old nightgown is sticking to you and you hate the feeling of the fake lace at the neck.
You claw it away, claw and claw until it rips.
You are half girl, half animal. When you look out the window you see the woods, and you can’t articulate it, but it feels like a kind of answer to a question your body has been asking.
Sabrina is waiting for you out by the old factory.
Your old meeting place. Of course she is, of course.
Getting down the stairs feels impossible, but you must. Your survival depends on it. Just get to Sabrina and everything else will be fine.
You wait until the next pain comes and goes before you start down the stairs. You grip the banister like a person trying to stay steady on the deck of a ship in a storm.
The woods, the woods, the voice in your head says.
In your delirium you decide it is your mother’s voice.
It seems perfectly reasonable, in this moment when your body wants to destroy itself from the inside out, that your mother would counsel you.
That when you find yourself alone, with death crouched in the corners of the room, that your mother would return to you.
Sabrina will be there, waiting in the ruins of the old factory.
Her voice comes to you too. You must be confused, Annabelle. Did you forget I said to meet here?
As you cross the foyer there is a gush from between your legs.
You haven’t turned on the light but can feel it over your thighs.
For a moment you have the presence of mind to be mortified.
Have you peed yourself? But this liquid doesn’t have the sharp acrid tang of piss, Instead, the liquid smells slightly sweet.
You imagine an organ within you bursting, releasing its contents, something you need now just draining away.
You hobble down the hall. Another pain in the kitchen, and in its grip everything goes unfamiliar.
The copper pot that’s been on the stove your whole life, the crock full of wooden spoons, the old farm table that your grandfather built, all of it alien to you, threatening and strange in the darkness.
You stop, decide you need water, something to replace whatever is spilling from you, this liquid your body is wringing out.
You drink from the tap, huge gulps that dribble down your cheeks, splash across your chest. There’s a little moonlight coming in through the back window, putting a shine on the spigot.
It will have to be enough to guide you, there’s no time to find the flashlight.
The rush of cold air from the back door feels good against your fever-hot skin, but with the next pain the water you drank comes back up, mixed with a stream of bile. Your body is at fault. Nothing can touch you, enter you, without being tainted. You transform the normal into the wrong.
You stagger to the woods, the moon enough to catch the white sand of the walking path.
The pain has been seizing the muscles of your outer thighs so you feel as though you’ve run a tremendous distance, but you know you must push on.
You make it to the first line of trees when another pain takes you.
You bend, hug yourself, scream into the dark.
It takes you longer than ever before, longer than when you were a little girl making your way here the first time behind your mother.
Your mother talking easily as you walked.
You and Sabrina behind her with your fists stuffed with wildflowers and kindling, pine cones and stones rattling in your pockets.
Another belt of pain that drives any thought from your mind. You squat, bite down on a stick and it cracks between your teeth.
Clouds. There must be clouds because the moonlight is gone. You can’t make out the stones of the factory walls. You can’t see your feet or even your own hands held out in front of your face. The world has shrunk down so that it holds nothing but pain and darkness, pain and darkness.
You whimper, tears hot on your cheeks. Sabrina, please. PLEASE.
Something shrieks from the woods as pressure builds low in your guts, a feeling that, you think with indignity, is not unlike the urge to shit.
The sound is unlike any woods animal you know, not a fox, not an owl seizing its prey. It must be the devil taunting you, shrieking louder, longer. Please just make it stop, you think, please please please. Spare me.
You crouch low, the pressure now building to a fierce, fiery burn, and as you set your jaw you realize that all along the noise has been coming from within you, and you let out the loudest shriek yet, filling the woods with your furious, savage screams.