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Cicadas are crying and moonlight falls in blurry columns across the bedsheets. Mary is tucked under Sadie’s arm, breathing along with the breeze. Tonight is hot and restless. They cannot sleep.
"Do you ever think about getting out?"
Getting out of what, she wants to ask. But she has a feeling it is a question for quiet reflection. Sadie does not want to quietly reflect, not tonight, but Mary likes these types of questions. Something about the unknowable men she’s known, and that just for once Mary wants to know somebody — wants to know Sadie. So she contemplates.
Getting out implies she is stuck in. She knows she is stuck in, but she does not want to always be aware of that. Her own mind is a prison, because no matter where she goes she is still submerged in the mist of memory and flanked on all sides by spirits. The only getting out for her will be paid in blood. So she doesn’t think of getting out, not really. She can’t, can she? And even if she could, would she? As Arthur once said, she is more ghost than woman: she is made of the past, stitched together by memory and surviving only on echoes of past feeling. Without that she is a corpse.
"Yes," she says despite, or maybe because. And it is true that, yes, maybe she does think of getting out. It is only late at night when her mind is too slow and tired to fight against her (to know what is good for her) that she allows herself to think about getting out.
It goes like this: she lives in a homestead somewhere that she does not yet know, and she wakes up in the morning next to Mary who is wearing something warm and comfortable, and they make love before sunrise and finally she sets out for her bounty (because although some may say she was not born into violence but that it grew into her, she knows it is in her bones, the itch to make something bleed). She has never known Jake, never known Arthur, never known a love and a loss quite so catastrophic. All she knows is Mary and their home and sometimes violence. And it doesn’t help her sleep, but it does warm her chest.
Mary whispers it, like a confession. Like it is something scary and illicit to want to be okay. “So do I.”