The Five Wounds Read online

  Lizette cups one of Angel’s breasts in her hand and squeezes, and Angel gasps at the pang. The pull against her nipple is stronger than Connor’s, a little painful, and not erotic. Lizette raises her head, releases the nipple with a little pop. “Yum,” she says, and licks her lips. She stands and pushes Angel onto the bed. All the while she holds Angel with those green eyes, and Angel is scooped out with desire. Then she leans in, and Angel raises her head to meet Lizette’s mouth with her own.

  AT HOME THAT NIGHT, Angel can’t eat the hamburger her grandmother places before her; she’s nauseated and light-headed, her limbs twitchy and unnatural. She thinks of her lips against Lizette’s, and her core sloshes.

  After Connor’s bath, Angel nuzzles him, breathing in his clean milky sweetness. He giggles at her hair and lips on his belly, his red mouth wet and delighted, the gurgle caught in his throat. She covers his head and hands and belly with kisses, both of them laughing. Then, all at once, Angel is troubled by the overlap between this intimacy and the other—the kissing, the nakedness—and she pulls away, bundles him swiftly into his red pajamas. He reaches for her face, but, seeing her expression, the smile fades. When she picks him up, she holds him face-out.

  She doesn’t think kissing him counts as child abuse. But, my god, to think that this afternoon, she did all that in front of him, which certainly does count as child abuse. Even if he was asleep, it will at the very least fuck him up severely.

  Her worries mutate and multiply: What if Lizette was trying to humiliate her? What if there was a camera, and this time there really are pictures of Angel, naked and compromised, spreading through the internet? Whole videos, even?

  By morning, Angel is rigid with tension and sleeplessness. As they mill around before Morning Check-In, Lizette flicks her upper arm. “Hey.” Before Angel can respond, Lizette has turned away and is saying something to Christy about a television show.

  Could Angel have imagined the events of yesterday? But she’s never been especially imaginative: how could she come up with something so outlandish? It seems impossible that she’s done the things she’s done with the girl at the desk ten feet away, because if they’ve done those things, how do they manage to be in the same room without setting upon each other?

  As Brianna makes announcements—a free résumé workshop at the public library, a used clothing and housewares fair at Sacred Heart of Jesus—a text beeps through on Angel’s phone. Angel’s heart lurches. She glances at Lizette, who slips her own phone into the purse at her feet.

  “Angel,” snaps Brianna. “Turn it off and put it away.”

  “Sorry, miss.” She reads it before zipping her phone into her backpack. Good 2cu xx.

  When she straightens, flushed, Brianna is watching her, stony-faced.

  Brianna lies on the brick floor, her head cushioned by the braided rug. Her phone, on speaker, rests on her stomach. It’s a Saturday night, and once again Brianna is home in her yoga pants. Later, she will watch several episodes of a BBC mystery about a serial killer in the Outer Hebrides, and she’ll fall asleep to the murmur of brogues sifting around her.

  She’s talking to Sierra in Portland, who is not in for the night, but, rather, getting ready to go out. “Oh, just drinks, then dinner with friends, and then we’ll stop by a burlesque show, and then probably a club after.” Sierra, it turns out, is sleeping with both a musician and their former human biology professor, who flies up regularly to see her. “I call them ‘the Body’ and ‘the Brain,’ ” Sierra says. “I can’t decide which I like more.”

  “If you can’t pick one, maybe you don’t actually like either.” Brianna hates her prissiness. But it doesn’t seem fair that Sierra bewitches men so casually.

  “Maybe. So tell me about the student’s dad? That still on?”

  Brianna affirms. “I don’t know, though. It’s fun when it happens, but after I’m like, what am I doing?” She wants to explain how attracted she is to him, how she imagines them together, actually together, sees herself as a young, cool stepmom to Angel, singing together in the kitchen as they make cookies. But she can’t tell Sierra this; the fact is that she’s ashamed of Amadeo, because he hasn’t been to college, doesn’t have a job, and that even as she’s imagining a future for them, she isn’t sure this is the future she wants, but she still wants him.

  Sierra is talking to someone else now, her voice muffled as though she’s tucked Brianna into her armpit. “Sorry,” she says, clear again. “I’m getting wine. Well, I mean, do you have better options?”

  Brianna should be offended, but Sierra isn’t wrong. She admits that, no, she doesn’t. “I spend all day around teenage girls.”

  “So, go with it. Have fun. It’s not like you’re going to marry him. In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with getting practice.”

  Practice. Last time, in bed, he stopped moving above her right in the middle of things. “Can I ask you something? Is it, like, normal, for a girl to say she regrets her baby?”

  Brianna had swiped her hair out of her face, pushed herself onto her elbow. “Angel said that? Is she depressed?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, troubled. “Is it bad?”

  Brianna had thrilled at his respect for her authority, his trust that she might be able to help them. “I mean, it’s definitely normal for her to have mixed feelings. She’s had to give up a lot. But, like, is she eating properly? Sleeping? I haven’t noticed any changes at school, but I will keep an eye out.”

  “Can we talk about this later?” he asked, and it was only then that the strangeness of pausing sex to talk about his daughter struck her.

  “Well, I’m at the bar,” Sierra says now. “Hey!”

  “Yeah?”

  “No, just saying hi to someone. I should go.”

  Instead of hanging up, Brianna watches her phone’s screen, listening to the joyful sounds of friends meeting up in a distant, exciting city, until the call cuts off. She drops her phone back onto her stomach and it slides onto the brick floor with a clatter. She gazes around the room again: her dimly glowing paper lantern; her wall of art museum postcards; her Klimt poster peeling up in the corner. All the sad artifacts of her careful, small life.

  Hi, she texts Amadeo. What are you up to?

  Each afternoon for the next two weeks, Angel and Lizette arrange study dates after Smart Starts! “Are we going to do our project after school?” Angel will say with studied nonchalance.

  Lizette shrugs. “Sure. My house or yours?”

  And Angel, as though actually considering bringing Lizette to her grandmother’s, where her dad sits in front of the internet all day, mulls it over. “Yours is closer.” Neither Lizette’s brother nor his girlfriend is ever around.

  Angel has already told her father she has to scale back on her work for Creative Windshield Solutions due to a school project, and he doesn’t object. Concern for her father flashes to the front of her mind, then dissolves.

  Oh, god, Angel thinks, in bed with Lizette. I am a lesbian, and the thought thrills and horrifies her. Lesbian. It is a truly gross word, an unwholesome fusion of lesion and alien. There are, of course, girls at her old school who make out with other girls at parties while guys whoop and holler and try to muscle in, and then there’s the small cadre of real lesbians, but they are the weird girls, the determinedly ugly ones with their sports bras and oversized Lobos shirts, baggy jeans and hideous glasses. They have Bieber haircuts or half-buzzed heads. They call themselves artists or are in bands, and they look down on anyone who wants to look like an actual girl. And now Angel is one of them.

  Carpet-muncher, lesbo, dyke.

  Before, when she considered what lesbians did to each other, it seemed pathetic and desperate. It would be wet and smelly and disgusting. But though she is doing what lesbians do, this doesn’t feel disgusting at all. Never did she feel this way with boys. Tenderness, yes. Pity. But not the rich swelling of affection, the unbearable musky love that wells in her. She likes the way they fit together, the safety
of it, their bodies neatly matched, the cool slide of skin on skin.

  After, Lizette pulls Angel to her, and this is Angel’s favorite part, her cheek against Lizette’s sweaty chest, their long hair tangled together on the pillow.

  Pale hatch marks mar the flesh on Lizette’s thighs and left arm, notches scored onto a prison wall. Some are newish, pink and tender; a couple still have a thread of raised scab. Angel counts them like beads on an abacus, each line a record of misery or rage or boredom or whatever it was that made Lizette do this. Angel wants to understand, but knows if she asked, Lizette’s wary face would snap shut for good.

  ON THE AFTERNOON BEFORE their presentation on Finland, they meet at Lizette’s to finish their poster and make egg butter.

  Lizette clears some dirty dishes and cereal boxes and strewn junk mail from the counter. While the babies play on a blanket on the kitchen floor, Angel sets to peeling the two dozen hard-boiled eggs. The eggs are hot, and Angel’s fingers burn as she picks the bits of shell off the slimy whites. The texture puts her in mind of the sheep’s eyeball they dissected in biology her first semester of high school.

  Lizette, who has refused to peel an egg (“They smell like donkey ass”), presses against her. “Come on.”

  “Stop it. Help me out.” Every time Angel is so grateful when Lizette wants her, so afraid that she won’t again.

  “You have to let them cool, anyways.” Lizette juts her chin at the bedroom. On the floor Mercedes gums an animal cracker, smears the soggy paste all over a pink bear. Beside her, Connor breathes through a snotty nose and pushes himself up on his forearms.

  “After we finish. After they fall asleep.”

  “Fine,” Lizette says with a dramatic sigh. “I’ll help crack.” Taking two eggs in each hand, she whacks them against the counter. The sulfuric funk rises around them.

  It’s a miracle that the person Angel loves like this should have ended up in her classroom at Smart Starts!, a miracle that she should be able to love like this at all. It’s so sudden and astonishing, unthinkable even a week ago. Such a strange progression of chance and error and damage led them to this place.

  The project is slow-going, because the shells stick and Angel has to stop to kiss Lizette and to hold Connor, who is under the weather.

  “I hope the whole class doesn’t catch his cold,” Angel says, wiping his nose. “I mean, I’ll wash my hands, but still.”

  “No way anyone’s going to eat this shit. Snot would improve it. Egg butter.”

  AFTER, ANGEL PUSHES her lips and nose into the cool curve of Lizette’s neck, but Lizette shrugs her off.

  “You’re squashing me.”

  “No way. I’m barely touching you.” Angel laughs, but not really, and rearranges herself to give Lizette more space. “Are you okay?”

  “Shut up.”

  Lizette’s mood is scaring her. She seems to have drifted very far away. It hurts to look at her this close, she’s so beautiful: the shape of her lips, the roundness of her cheeks and chin, the dense black lashes around her green eyes, even the two or three tiny pimples on her forehead.

  “Lizette?” With her fingers, Angel climbs Lizette’s scars like a ladder from forearm to inner elbow to bicep. There are two new marks, tender red gashes.

  Why? she wants to ask, but she can’t force the word out of her, not with Lizette so distant. What happened since yesterday? Is Angel to blame? She thinks of the blade drawing across skin, the stinging snag of it, and her eyes water. She wants to press that sadness out of Lizette, feel the barrier of skin melt away.

  In the crib the babies sprawl, limbs tangled. Connor’s damp curls adhere to his temples, Mercedes’s straight hair is a sweaty little pelt. Briefly Angel imagines a future for all of them, herself as the mother, Lizette as the tougher man-figure, all four of them in a pretty cottage somewhere green. Oregon, maybe. The babies would grow up together, and she sees them, brother and sister, hand in hand on the playground, looking out for one another. They would create a world without raping uncles or disappointing fathers, without the long parade of men mooching and drinking and yelling and sulking. It would be a safe world for those babies. Lizette would soften and heal, too, would come to love Angel. It might take time, but Angel doesn’t mind; Angel is young and can wait.

  The egg butter congeals in the refrigerator, the finished poster board waits by the door. After tomorrow, there will be no excuse for Angel to spend every afternoon with Lizette.

  “Hey, Lizette. Monday? After Smart Starts!? I thought maybe we could take the babies to the library. To story time.”

  Lizette opens her eyes, and Angel wills her to train them on her, but she stares at the ceiling. “You wanna hear some lady read kids’ books to you?”

  “I thought it’d be fun.”

  “Angel, they don’t even talk. They don’t care about no story time.”

  “Well.” Angel’s face heats. “What about dinner? You know, like a date.” She pictures them sharing a bowl of chips and salsa, maybe at Serafina’s. No one would know. They’d just be two girls out for a meal. They wouldn’t have to stick their tongues down each other’s throats. But they’d know, the two of them, and that prospect thrills her. “Lizette?”

  She strokes Lizette’s arm, feels the goose bumps rise under her fingertips. Her heart pounds as she waits for the answer. Lizette swats her away. “I’ve created a monster. I never should’ve let you eat me out.”

  Stung, Angel drops onto the pillow. Shame buzzes in her head; she feels swallowed by silence.

  Lizette kicks the covers off. “Ugh.” She gets up and scratches her scalp roughly with both hands, then steps heavily to her bureau. “This is so fucking boring.” She wrenches a drawer open and digs around. Angel watches her, cheek against her hand, her throat tight in a way that means tears will come if she isn’t careful. Lizette’s back is evenly pale. She doesn’t wear a swimming suit, Angel remembers, won’t go swimming at all. Lizette yanks clothing from the drawer, drops it on the ground, searching. It must mean something, right, that Lizette has permitted Angel to see her naked? But perhaps Lizette doesn’t even care enough about Angel to be self-conscious in front of her.

  “He better not’ve fucking stole it.” Lizette wrenches open another drawer. “I’ll fucking kill him.”

  Angel sits up in alarm—is she looking for heroin? A gun? Mercedes whimpers at her mother’s voice but doesn’t wake.

  “Oh, here it is.” Lizette brandishes a joint. “Want some?”

  Angel looks at the sleeping babies. “We’d have to do it away from them.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Angel wants to remind Lizette that she knows better, but doesn’t want to scare her away, not now that she’s acknowledging Angel again. “Still,” she says uneasily.

  “Fine. We’ll blow it out the window if you care. There isn’t even that much smoke.” She pushes open the window with such aggression Angel fears it might shatter.

  Lizette lights the joint and takes a deep drag. A thread of smoke rises, hangs in the air a moment before the draft blows it toward the center of the room. Angel thinks about her milk.

  “Ooh,” Lizette singsongs as Angel accepts the joint.

  She inhales, holding the smoke in, then splutters, spraying saliva.

  Lizette takes the joint back and laughs meanly. “I thought you were a bad girl.”

  “I’m not.” Angel squeezes her voice out beyond the deep unbearable tickle, coughs again. “I never said I was. Why are you being like this?” The more she talks, the angrier she gets. “Anyways, I used to smoke all the time, like last summer. Just because I’m not dying to brain-damage my kid doesn’t make me a goody-goody.”

  Angel stands and scoops her shirt and her underpants off the floor, untangles them with shaking hands. She can’t put them on fast enough, and her clumsiness angers her still more. Fuck Lizette.

  She leans over the crib, and the babies’ heads loom. She lifts Connor with extraordinary gentleness.

  “Don
’t leave,” says Lizette from the bed, resigned or contrite or maybe just tired. She’s on her side, head propped on a hand, stretched out like a pinup. “I’m sorry.”

  Angel doesn’t answer, but sits on the chair with its filthy blue upholstery, her back to Lizette. She closes her eyes and kisses Connor’s head, his sweat sticky against her lips. The world blurs around her. In her arms, Connor pulses, dissolves and re-forms, dissolves and re-forms.

  “Hey. Come here. Weed always makes me want to fuck.” Lizette pulls on her arm, dragging Angel to her feet and to the bed.

  “I need to put him down. Hang on.”

  But Lizette keeps pulling, her fingers in the waistband of Angel’s underpants, pushing them down roughly so they’re twisted around her thighs, and Angel has to wrench herself away. “Hang on,” she says.

  But after she’s put Connor in the crib and reluctantly joined Lizette in bed, Angel isn’t mad anymore. She lies back against the flat pillow, marveling at how quickly her anger fades, marveling that she can be at once bodiless and only body. Even Connor’s cries, when they start, don’t break her concentration.

  Angel and Lizette stand at the front of the room, their poster propped on the ledge of the whiteboard. They are last to present, after Russia, China, and Italy.

  “Go ahead, girls,” Brianna says, and Angel’s stomach flips like a chilled fish. Lizette has hardly spoken to her today, but now she turns and smiles warmly, as if there’s never been strangeness between them. Instead of her usual sweatshirt, Lizette has dressed up in a green satiny button-down. She tugs at the cuffs.

  “Finland is a country in Scandinavia,” Angel begins, and then the presentation spills from them in a steady, measured flow.