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Reading back in her diaries, Shauna wonders if she believes in that illusive ‘It’ that existed out in the wilderness. It, The Wilderness, Lottie, God, them. The writing frenzied, trailing off at the ends of sentences, picking back up days later with a different train of thought. Before it was such petty drama. Jeff and Jackie and Brown, the only place she could be honest with herself about how she felt about such things.
Her writing in the wild was different. The honesty was sharper. Before statements were connected to actions. Jackie pissed me off today, she gave me the silent treatment all day. Jeff refused to stop staring at me from across the lunch hall, I hate that it makes me feel so good. The wild gave her access to her emotions without the justification for them. I’m so angry was all she wrote once, the next sentence, seemingly days later, detailing how much meat they had left in the shed. She couldn’t remember specifically what she was angry about, when that was written. Perhaps that adds to her inability to reflect truly on her time there. Her own auto-biography has no time stamps.
Was there a God out there? Did it listen to them? They all believed there was, her own writing referring to an ‘it’ constantly. A better question might be, was it already out there? Did they invent him? Is a god any less real if it didn’t exist before you believed in it? Was it all just an excuse that they all made up, trying to justify how badly they wanted to hurt each other?
She wants us to, she had whispered over Jackie’s body. But who was She?
//
Taissa wants people to tell her things that she already thinks. Even before (Before before, not before with the trees and the snow and death death death) she had always been Right. Other people existed in two categories: people who agreed with her versus the people who did not. That had grated on Jackie, Shauna remembers. Jackie, lying on her back on her bed, legs hanging off of the edge as she complained about Taissa’s inability to compromise, how it made her life difficult as team captain. Shauna, silent, thinking that she actually admired that in Taissa. Jackie won’t like it, she had said, days, weeks, later. Taissa staring at her, a victorious glint in her eye. I won't tell Jackie, is what had really been said and Taissa had heard it.
Her and Shauna work like this: here is the worst thing about me, promise you won’t tell anyone? Ribcage open, rotting flesh exposed. They sit together, picking up each others organs, thumbs brushing over the sick and decay, promises quiet and hushed: I won’t, I won’t. The relief in telling someone something horrible about yourself. The careful look in their eyes, constantly regarding each other. I know you, Taissa always looks as if she is about to say. I know you do, Shauna doesn’t reply. Confirmation of something Taissa already knows.
Shauna and Taissa: the move from the crash site, the pregnancy, the wire, the wolves in the dark. Taissa’s chest shuddering beneath Shauna’s hands, rotten lungs shuddering, expand and let go. Shauna’s eyes watching the corners for wolves she knows aren’t there, watching anyway. In the morning, Taissa will turn over and know that Shauna watched the whole night. Another person who agrees, even if it is just with her fears. Taissa needed someone to think she was right even in the irrational, even just for that night in the dark. The next morning, she would be up with her sharp face, all vulnerability scrubbed clean. It’s different than it is with Jackie. It doesn’t feel like a secret, it feels like a promise. It doesn’t feel as if something is being taken away from her, rather that there is a shared space between Shauna and Taissa and the two of them regard each other constantly as they pile more and more shit between the two of them that they both carry together.
Shauna and Taissa: stumbling through the woods. Shauna, screaming in pain, choking on the snow and the wet of her tears falling back from her eyes, down her nose, into her throat. Taissa, gripping her shoulders, at times throwing her forward as they try to buffet the storm. There is a moment where Taissa’s grip loosens and Shauna is hit with the image of her alone in this storm, giving birth into the growing snow. The pain almost blinds her, her breath failing her, her cries silencing. Then, the grip reasserts itself and she goes back to pulling her along.
Shauna and Taissa: she knows Taissa would never leave her out there, pressing herself closer into Taissa’s side. Taissa pressing back. A promise asked and confirmed.
//
“I don’t wish I’d married Jackie,” Jeff tells her. And she does believe him. He believes himself.
The point isn’t that he would be better off with Jackie. Their life wouldn’t be better: their house better, their daughter less mean girl and more girl next door, book in hand instead of a phone.
Jeff imagines a life with Jackie as a life in which he would always have to be as good as everyone has made her be. She is picture perfect in death, scrubbed clean of flaws, smile fixed in place that blinds anyone that tries to look at it too closely. If they had married, Jeff would have known her the way that Shauna did. (Because wasn’t it marriage? Didn’t they swear to each other? Wasn’t it all possessive and where are you going without me wear this you lost your virginity and you’re my best friend until death do us part – and even then. Isn’t that how Shauna could pick apart her flesh from her bones - there has to be a sense of possession within that. I already owned this. I already had this.)
Instead, Jeff thinks he would have been stuck with the perfect woman that he could never amount to, an alternate version of himself, trapped in honey.
Marriage with Shauna is easier because it’s harder. It’s easier to imperfect, to have flaws and struggle, if you can look at your life and think: it was always going to be difficult. You can look at your life and think: no one else could make this work. She imagines herself with someone else, their face blank. Blank face, blank body, empty house. What would her dream man be? Dead, offered up on a plate for her?
It’s easier because it is more difficult: no one else could handle how she still sleeps as if there are ten more bodies in the room, no one else could handle his weird customer-service smile that he uses at dinner. They both would have divorced someone else by now. She can see it, some younger man who thought that she would have sex with him more, some bubbly woman who would realise that he never got over his high school sweetheart.
(“We’re still together. That’s got to count for something.” She counts their relationship in years that she thinks that Jackie would have stayed with him. 20 years, 30, 40. Does that make up for it? Did I make it right?)
Neither of them are Jackie and yet she sits in backseat between them. Look in the rearview, look at her bow. She’s still in her uniform. Turn too quickly and her and Jeff blur, where does one end and one begin?
She kisses Jeff that night, eyes drifting closed, warm mouth against his forehead. Let it be done to Jackie, she thinks. Let everything kind thing she tries to do for Jeff, be done to her. Let her forgive her, let him forgive her.
(Later that night she kisses Adam, pictures Jeff’s face when he finds out, perfectly matching Jackie’s final expression. There is an empty roaring chasm inside of her and she hurls Adam into it, hoping that will keep it filled, even if for a night.)
//
Shauna resents Natalie more than she knows that she should. She should be more understanding of Natalie, the only one who can’t put a face on everything that they did.
She, selfishly, cannot forgive Natalie for not giving in as soon as the rest of them. They worked in tandem: Natalie shot them, Shauna bled them. Shauna dug the knife in, felt the hot blood spill through her fingers, fascinated by the warmth coating her skin, bright and terrible. Years later, Shauna holding that gun pointed at a man’s face as he sweats. The exhilaration that pulsed through her, knowing that something lives or dies if she wanted it to. Her, her wants, her choice. Natalie must have felt the same in those woods.
Natalie standing, shocked, just as high but years more lucid than the rest of them as Shauna steps back from Travis, half sad that she didn’t get to feel that blood on her hands, half shamed by the look on Natalie’s face. (A secret part of her, angry, hungry, suffocated, wants to turn the knife on Natalie and Jackie, her fingers flexing for a moment before she smothers it and remembers her from Before all of this).
We work in tandem, she wants to say. There is nothing that I do that you haven’t done first and sharper. Here is Shauna, knife in hand, playing her part. There is Natalie, hands shaking, disrupting their orchestra.
And then later, all of them bowing to Natalie, reverent. Shauna does what she does best, she follows. Look, she bows her head to Natalie, eyes lowered. A symbol of subservience, note how it covers her vulnerable throat.
The symbolism of the entire thing is familiar even if the circumstances was different. They follow Natalie just as they followed Jackie. Tell each other something nice about each other, arrange yourselves in a circle, take a card from the deck, place your hands in the middle and do a chant before the game.
It’s choking, how so much of it can all be brought back to Jackie. Was Shauna the only one that noticed? Is it not that obvious to everyone else? Here is our new leader, didn’t we used to have another?
Here is Shauna, finally, finally, on a level playing field with someone. Shauna and Natalie, sharing a duty, equals. Here is everyone else, reminding her once again reminding her that she is the supporting act. What can she do but go along? It’s what she knows after all.
Some things cannot be moved past. At least that’s what Shauna tells herself, squinting at Natalie in the rearview mirror, drinking from the same bottle as her. Natalie offers it back to her and Shauna takes it. Natalie begins and Shauna finishes.
//
What do you say to the girl you turned into a God, standing before you now a woman? Remember when we were so small, remember when we raised you above everyone else? You were just as little as the rest of us, but you seemed so much larger, encompassing even when I could tell that you didn’t want to be.
There is always an apology on Shauna’s tongue that will never be spoken. There is simply too much to say. Sorry for hitting you (even though you let me). Sorry for constantly snapping at you (even though you were being weird and unfamiliar). There are too many justifications, too many allowances, instead it all sits between them. For every misstep, there is Lottie, guiding Shauna towards it. Holding her arm out, balancing her steady as she sinks into the mania, as easy as quicksand.
It can never be spoken. You never stopped it, Shauna really wants to say. They martyred you and you let them. You let me.
Shauna barely remembers attacking her, the whole thing a mass of red, her voice hoarse in her throat. There was only sensation: red, wet and that impact that rolled up her arms. All of it, so angry and terribly sad. There is only one part of it clear, the After, when Shauna had lolled her head towards Lottie, and felt a sharp flash of I killed her. It hadn’t been panic, it had been a guilty mix of shame and relief. Let her be dead, let me not have to see her again. Let her live, I can’t have this on my shoulders alone.
Such terrible selfishness. And there is Lottie, guiding her towards it, trying to be so helpful.
Perhaps that is why Shauna was one of the last to accept Lottie as some girl turned God. Everyone else seemed so quick to forget Lottie Before, witty and cheeky, a raised eyebrow in your direction whenever something was going on. Inside jokes were easy to make and then were made, often.
This hadn’t been Lottie, empty eyes, steady hands. How everyone clinged to her like this, while Shauna stifled beneath it. Lottie’s feverish murmurings weren’t holy, they were irritating. Why did no one else agree – not even Taissa? Familiar was not allowed in the wilderness, it took Shauna to crack until she learned.
(There they are, years later, finally grown into their skins even if the years slip away until that cabin is as close as it would take one of them to point it out. Constantly on their peripheral vision, waiting for one of them to acknowledge it before it consumed them once again.
We give it what it wants, Lottie says, eyes bottomless as they stare into Shauna. It was always violence with Lottie, always the crack of flesh, the bite of blood. She would only believe Shauna when she agrees to it. Hadn’t she been the first to tip them over that edge, hadn’t she been the first to take that first ever bite? Hadn’t she been the first one to swing and connect? Violence existed in their home, Shauna had let it in.
Let’s do it, Shauna says. Lottie's eyes steady on her’s. Of course she believes her. Who else would begin?)
//
It is a particularly sharp irony that she gives birth to Jackie. Pretty, vapid and sharp Callie. So similar that Shauna can feel her eye twitch when Callie regards her at the dining table.
She knows how to dig the knife in, just like Jackie. Knows Shauna the same way that Jackie did, just as shameful as it had been Before, worse now because she thought she could hide parts of herself better all those years later.
(She can never snap again. Even when Callie needles at her, eyes glinting as she awaits the reaction that she seems to crave. Every time Shauna goes to give it to her, she remembers Jackie’s face, her final words to her before she walked out and never came back in.
She’ll raise Jackie but she’ll be softer this time. Every time Callie leaves a room, she lets her eyes rest on her for a moment. Don’t let it be the last, she pleads, even as she feels the relief at the distance between them. Let her come back in, I’ll be kinder, I’ll be open.
She never is, but she’ll just ask for another chance the next day.)
Did I do good? Callie asks, looking ready to burst in anticipation for Shauna’s answer.
This is how she differs from Jackie. Jackie didn’t need her to affirm her, Jackie knew about herself far before Shauna learned it. Shauna is left unsure, as if Callie has binned the script they had been operating with.
Callie, pointing that gun at Lottie, having already pulled the trigger, refusing to be talked down by Shauna. The script has been tossed in the trash and Shauna feels hot, red panic in her throat. Lottie looks at Callie and there is no recognition. None of them see Jackie in her (maybe it was never there) and they have no reason to not lunge forward because that’s what they all did. Another part of her, ripped open for her daughter against her will. Look how bloodthirsty we all are, did I even hide it that well before?
She doesn’t remember her first baby, knows her second too much. Imagines some alternate reality in which she was allowed them both. Both of her children’s faces are blank masks, unavailable to her. The baby she had wanted when it was too late and the baby she got to keep and didn’t like. There’s that irony again. Perhaps one day she will tell Callie about her other baby, wonders what version of the story she will tell. He lived for a day, he died inside me, he only had one breath, I heard his crying for days after.
She dreams of the two of them, watching them play together in the living room. Callie, in sharp focus, and a stranger, bumping into her furniture as if he had figured out where everything was but Shauna had shifted it all a few inches to the left and left him disorientated.
Can a parent be so honest with their child? (Jackie’s face, Jackie’s face, Jackie’s face) Impossible.
//
“I liked the saints, they were all so tragic.” Is that why she let Jackie become an infected wound? Constantly picked at, thought over, every interaction pulled apart and analysed. Is this when she found out that I fucked Jeff? When did we go wrong, where we wrong the entire time? Playing MASH together, giggles mingled, skin flush against each other. When did I ruin you?
She tells Jackie this, lying in bed with her, Jeff working late again. Tells her that everyone builds her up, so does Shauna, but Shauna knew her, was the only one who did. Says it like an affirmation. Looks to Jackie, frozen in youth as she always will be. Waits for her to affirm what she said. Deny it, damn her. Anything.
Jackie says nothing, traces the fine wrinkles around Shauna’s eyes, fingertips light, gentle.
They fall asleep curled up together, foreheads pressed against each other and when she wakes up there is an indent on the bed next to her. She traces her fingertips over it. Light, gentle. And she gets up.