INTENSITY

She had hidden some of the worst details of her past even from Laura Templeton, her only good friend. Often, on the brink of a revelation to Laura, she would pull back from disclosure and speak not about the events that she had endured and not about the people who had tormented her but about places—Key West, Mendocino County, New Orleans, San Francisco, Wyoming—where she had lived. She was lyrical when the subject was the natural beauty of mountains, plains, bayous, or low moonlit breakers rolling in from the Gulf of Mexico, but she could feel anger tightening her face and shame coloring it when she told the harder truths about the friends of Anne who had populated her childhood.

Now her throat was tight. She was curiously aware of the weight of her heart, like a stone in her chest, heavy with the past.

Sick with shame and anger, she nevertheless sensed that she must finish telling Ariel what had happened during that Florida night of unextinguished candles. Revelation might be a door out of darkness.

“Oh, God, how I hated him, the greasy bastard, stinking of beer and sweat, crashing around my room, drunk and screaming, going to cut me up for bait, Anne laughing out in the living room and then at the doorway, that drunken laugh of hers, hooting and shrill, thinking he was so funny, Jesus, and all the time it was my birthday, my special day, my birthday.” Tears might have come now if she had not spent a lifetime learning to repress them. “And the palmetto all over me, frantic, scurrying, up my back and into my hair…”

In the sticky, suffocating Key West heat, thunder had rattled in the window and sung in the bedsprings, and cold blue reflections of lightning had fluttered like a dream fire across the painted wood floor. Chyna almost screamed when the tropical cockroach, as big as her little-girl hand, burrowed through her long hair, but fear of Woltz kept her silent. She endured, as well, when the beetle scuttled out of her hair, across her shoulder, down her slender arm, to the floor, hoping that it would flee into the room, not daring to fling it away for fear that any movement she made would be heard by Woltz in spite of the thunder, in spite of his shouted threats and curses, even over her mother’s laughter. But the palmetto scurried along her side to one of her bare feet and began to explore that end of her again, foot and ankle, calf and thigh. Then it crawled under one leg of her shorts, into the cleft of her butt, antennae quivering. She had lain in a paralysis of terror, wanting only for the torment to end, for lightning to strike her, for God to take her away to somewhere better than this hateful world.

Laughing, her mother had entered the room: “Jimmy, you nut, she’s not here. She’s gone outside, along the beach somewhere, like always.” And Woltz said, “Well, if she comes back, I’m going to cut her up for chum, I swear I am.” Then he laughed and said, “Man, did you see her eyes? Christ! She was scared shitless.” “Yeah,” Anne said, “she’s a gutless little wuss. She’ll be hiding out there for hours. I don’t know when the hell she’ll ever grow up.” Woltz said, “Sure doesn’t take after her mother. You were born grown up, weren’t you, baby? ” “Listen, asshole,” Anne said, “you pull any crap like that with me, I’m sure not going to run like she did. I’ll kick your balls so hard you’ll have to change your name to Nancy.” Woltz roared with laughter, and from under the bed Chyna saw her mother’s bare feet approach Woltzs feet, and then her mother was giggling.

Fat and obscene and agitated, the palmetto had crawled out from under the waistband of Chyna’s shorts and into the small of her back, moving toward her neck, and she had been unable to bear the thought of it in her hair again. Regardless of the consequence, she reached back as the beetle crossed her tube top, and seized it. The thing twitched, squirmed in her hand, but she tightened her fist.