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“strange as she appears to be / oldest friend invisibly / she brushes my hair with a physical hand / lowers my body down to the land.”
-Adrianne Lenker, ‘my angel’
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
summer, 1995
One of Deanna’s favorite things to do is to peer outside the passenger side window and watch the continental United States peel away, minute by minute, mile by mile, while Led Zeppelin barrels through her eardrums. Because the Impala doesn’t have a working AC unit, she cranks the window down and allows the wind to whip her hair into a dirty-blonde riot. Normally she doesn’t wear her hair down, because it makes it hard for her to focus, to remain on guard, but when she’s in the car she doesn’t need to be. The car is protection enough, even without all of the sigils carved out beneath the passenger seat and the dashboard. Therefore, she allows her liberated hair to lash across her face, and makes no move to spit out the ragabond strands that have found their way into her mouth. She watches as Oklahoma bleeds into Arkansas. By now they’ve circled the entire Midwest at least three times over (deliberately avoiding Lawrence, Kansas, which her father still won’t touch with a 50-mile pole). His grip on the steering wheel is ironclad. He’s nursing a nasty gash on his shoulder from a scuffle with a werewolf, and they’ll need to get that checked out sometime soon. For now, he’s making do with some clumsy first-aid work from Deanna. Behind them, her brother silently flips through a book – Hatchet, she thinks it is – brow furrowed in utmost concentration.
For about half a minute the world is inexplicably and unutterably beautiful to her, in that it is a shard of opalite suspended in mid-air, the threadbare dreamcatcher dangling from the rearview mirror. Her eyelids droop and she finds herself perched upon the slanting borderline between consciousness and slumber, wading into the gray area where she can briefly forget why they’re all in the car in the first place. Perhaps they’re actually on a cross-country road trip for the summer. Perhaps her father has some camping gear stashed away in the trunk instead of shotguns and salt and silver bullets and holy water. Maybe tomorrow, her father will take her and Sammy to a marsh and they’ll go fishing. Maybe she’ll dip her feet in the water, watch the tadpoles circle her toes for hours and hours until her feet get all shrivelled up, like old-people skin, until Sammy calls her back inside the cabin for TV dinner and trash television. For about half a minute all of this is so real, so tangible, that she can hold it in her hands, feel its weight, reverently turn it over like a rare and precious jewel.
“Dee,” her father grumbles, and the jewel shatters. “Where are we now?”
She fumbles for the map, which has stuffed itself into the crevice between the seat and the door. “Um,” she says articulately, after peering at it for a few seconds. “We just crossed over into Arkansas, and we’re about… uh, 200-ish miles away from Eureka Springs?”
“That a question or a statement?”
“Statement, sir,” she replies, cringing. Old habits – both hers and her father’s – die hard. “We’re about 200 miles away from Eureka Springs.”
Her father grunts in response, signalling the end of their conversation, and she turns her head back to the green blur outside. Still Arkansas. It’ll be Arkansas for a long while, she thinks, especially considering the scope of the case ahead (Dad thinks that it’s got something to do with banshees; they’ve been popping out on the outskirts of several Arkansan towns). Behind her, Sammy perks up for the first time in hours.
“Dee,” he says, “close the window, it’s messing my pages up.”
She keeps her face turned outside. “I’m hot,” she groans into the wind, and is pleasantly rewarded with an extra gust that brushes, feathersoft, against her cheek.
“What?”
“I said I’m hot,” she repeats, summoning the energy to drag her head back in and look back at her little brother. “I’m hot and sweaty. So the window’s gonna stay open.”
“I can’t read my book,” he whines.
“Too bad.”
“It’s not all about you, Dee,” he retorts, and geez, isn’t that his favorite phrase lately? She wonders where he picked that up from.
“Yeah, well, I’m older, so it is actually all about me. Cry about it.” Not her best comeback, but whatever; she’s too hot to concoct witty comebacks to her 12 year old brother's complaining. She doesn’t need to look all the way back to know that Sam’s giving her his best level-10-bitch-glare, and finds that she doesn’t actually care all that much for her brother’s plight. Sue her. Suddenly she feels a smart of pain at the base of her scalp, yelping as Sam pulls at her hair.
“Ugh–hey!” she grits out as he tugs even more viciously. “Cut it out!”
“Close the window!”
“Sammy, you sonofa—”
“That’s enough,” John shouts, and both of them immediately pull back. “Dee, close the window.” Because her father’s word is commandment, and because she knows how to follow orders like a good little soldier, she does. Almost instantaneously the car is about twenty times stuffier and hotter, and she feels the heat gather surreptitiously at her neck, slyly pooling at her collarbones. Every breath she takes seems to increase the temperature of the car by at least half a degree, and her armpits chafe against her flannel and she’s dirty and she reeks and she’s sweaty and it’s all too much, so she unbuttons her flannel slips it off her shoulders, tucks it away next to the map. In her tank top the heat is much less oppressive, and she can finally allow herself to relax somewhat–
“The fuck are you doing?” Deanna abruptly turns towards her father, who’s wearing a downright venomous expression on his face. “Put your shirt back on. Now.”
“I didn’t–”
“Now.”
She sighs. “But I’m not–”
“Deanna, goddammit, can you listen to me for once in your life? Put your damn shirt on, you’re not a– a fucking streetwhore!”
Oh. She hates it when her dad does this. Suddenly a deadly silence settles into the car – not like the empty quiet that had been before, but something far, far more insidious. Wordlessly she picks her flannel up, unbuckles the seatbelt, slips it back over her shoulders. Suddenly she is the virgin Mary again, or maybe she’s really her mother Mary. Mary, forever twenty-nine and lovely and sweet and pure, forever suspended in time like an insect wrapped in spider silk; Mary, who stopped being a real person to Deanna when she was eight, because by then she’d completely forgotten the sound of her voice or the warmth of her hands or the quiet surety of her gaze; Mary, dead in a house fire, the reason why they orbit Kansas like a band of meteors. She’s really starting to despise the name.
She slumps down in her seat as Arkansas hurtles by, as Led Zeppelin blares into her ears, as the sun begins to cradle the horizon, as they are all purified underneath the wheat-gold light. She closes her eyes and internally meditates upon the path of a budding bead of sweat on her forehead, feels it trickle down her temple, down her cheek, drip down to her jawline. She begins the routine process of mentally rationalizing her father’s outbursts, reciting his mantra to her, everything she found about her in his journal – this is tough love, this is how I keep you safe, how I have always kept you safe, because the real monsters are men. A bared shoulder is enough to set them on you. You’re young, you’re beautiful, so beautiful. You look just like your mother, do you know that? The real monsters are men. They won’t stop for anything, you have to learn to fight them off, but sometimes you can’t. Sometimes they’re bigger than you, they’re meaner than I am. So don’t give them a reason to go after you. The real monsters are men. Wendigos’ll rip you apart, and spirits will scare the hell out of you, but that’s all they’ll ever do. But men can hurt you in ways you never even knew you could get hurt. All of the real monsters are men.
The real monsters are men – and yet. And yet, a traitorous little part of her rebukes her father, scorns him, curses him, tears him to pieces with its teeth. After that it tears her stupid flannel apart, too, and hurls the scraps of clothing out of the open window. Then it kisses her bare shoulders and sets her straight, delivers the wind to kiss her bruise-blossomed cheek. None of this happens, of course, but she allows her mind a second to mutiny all the same. To think that all she ever wanted was something cold, a little relief, a half-minute to cherish in her palms. Which was too much to ask for, really.
A small, hesitant tap on her shoulder. “What now,” she groans bleakly. Her eyes sting. She refuses to turn back, refuses to let Sammy see her face.
“You can open the window if you want,” her brother offers, voice small, and she is suddenly reminded of his impossible goodness. Sammy Winchester, the best of them all, holding out an olive branch like a lifeline. She still doesn’t turn back to face him, not yet, but she can picture it in her mind’s eye, his eyes big and pleading and puppy-dogged. And so, so sorry. He’s always been good at the kicked-puppy look, even at twelve; it’s gotten the two of them out of more trouble than she’d ever like to admit. Her brother offers her grace in the only way he can afford to with their father in the car and so she, in turn, reciprocates in the only way she knows how.
“Nah,” she drawls, stretching her arms far above her head. “I’m good. Keep reading your nerd books, dork.” For a second there’s silence from the backseat, and she’s afraid that he’s going to push her, but then she hears him ruffling through the pages, and she is grateful again. Sweat pools at her throat. Arkansas sings in the background.
—--
It’s well past 11 o’clock when they finally pull up to the motel, and Deanna yawns as she grabs her backpack and walkman, lumbers out of the passenger seat, and stretches the stiffness out of her legs. Sam’s still sleeping in the backseat, drool smeared all over his chin, and she desperately wishes that she still had her camera with her, just so she could take a picture of the moment and use it as blackmail material for the foreseeable future.
“Wake your brother up,” her father grumbles, voice rough with exhaustion. She nods, and opens his side of the door. Flicks him on the forehead.
“Wake up, bitch.”
“Owwww,” Sam groans. “Jerk.”
“Quit whining,” she snipes. “We’re here, get up.” When he groans, she tugs his arm as hard as she can, which gets her nowhere. Unstoppable force meets immovable object, yadda yadda yadda. Unfortunately for Deanna, her little brother isn’t, well, so little anymore; he hit his growth spurt right before he turned twelve, and went from a baby-faced cherub angel to a lanky almost-teenager with a mildly concerning BO situation virtually overnight. He’s gained weight, too, which is equally shocking considering the fact that, given their living situation, they’d never really had much to eat. He’s even got a couple inches on her now, which is as humiliating as it is disorienting, because when and how the fuck did that happen?
“Fine, fine, fine, I’ll get out,” he relents, clambering out of the passenger seat with his backpack and his copy of Hatchet (wouldja look at that, she was right after all). She watches as he rubs the sleep out of his eyes, which reminds her of when he was four and she was eight and they’d spend days and days alone together in motel rooms and whenever he’d get sleepy he’d start whining and stomping around the place before he’d tire himself out and yawn and rub his eyes the same way. She feels comforted by the fact that no matter how tall her moose of a brother grows, he’s still younger than her and, therefore, inferior to her in every way that matters.
“How’s the book?” she asks him, watches as he tucks it under his arm.
“It’s alright,” he says. “I like it.”
“You know, it’s really inaccurate.”
“You’ve read this book?” he asks her incredulously. “Wait, no, scratch that. You’re literate? You can read?”
She flicks him on the forehead again, and he yelps. “Big words for a guy who was drooling all over himself a few minutes ago. And yeah, I read the book in middle school.”
Sam lets out a laugh, rubbing his forehead as they walk up to the door of their home sweet motel room. “Didn’t know you had it in you.”
“Stuff it or I’ll flick you again,” she retorts. She watches her father unlock the door to the motel room and step inside, all but throwing his satchel onto the ground as he turns on the only light in the room. It flickers softly, its buzzing joining the litany of insects that chirrup away into the humid night.
Her dad turns towards them. “Dee – shower, then hit the hay. We’ve got a big day tomorrow; you and I need to be up early tomorrow morning to go check out the Freely house. Do you still have…”
“The stuff for the spell? Yep. I put them in your satchel.”
“Good. And the blood?”
She kneels down and shuffles around in her backpack for the two vials of her own blood. “Right here,” she announces, tapping the vials before putting them back.
“Perfect. We get up at five, we’re out of here by six. Sam, you know the drill–-”
“Salt the door and window, yeah, I know.” Deanna watches as her brother gets up with a somewhat exaggerated groan and sullenly reaches for the bags of rock salt they lug around everywhere. She’s not sure what his deal is, but he’s been cutting himself off from Dad every time he’s asked to do something hunting-related. He doesn’t even argue with him, though, just… sits by himself. Shuts down almost completely, gets lost in his own little world. His own private galaxy where he does nerdy shit, she supposes. Part of her understands it, her brother’s desire to get away from the life they lead even though it’s all the two of them have ever known. Or, well, it’s all Sam knows. Deanna still remembers the bits and scraps of life before the fire – the Christmas tree, the toy monkey she used to play with, the softness of her mother’s hair, the color of her nursery walls (pastel yellow) – and in some ways it’s what keeps her going. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps her going. Because once her dad finds out what killed Mom, once he kills it for himself, then the spell is broken, their kingdom is free. They can live their lives. Sam can go play soccer, go to college, find a girl and settle down; Dad can pick up an actual civilian job, and get drunk on weekends, and get fat, and she…
“Dee,” her dad calls out to her, and she snaps out of her train of thought.
“Yeah, dad?”
Her father, strangely enough, looks apprehensive. A little anxious, actually, now that she thinks about it. Deanna wonders if he’s going to go all soft and mushy on her. If he is, she might throw up. She can’t stand it when he yells at her, but she hates it even more when he tries to apologize. She suspects that, if she had been a boy, he wouldn’t have to do this. He could insult her and she would shrug it off and that would be that. As a matter of fact, she has shrugged it off; she doesn’t need to be reminded of all the crap her dad has to say about her. But John Winchester seems to regard his eldest daughter in two different ways – as a hunter, and as a girl. He’s been dressing her up in hunting clothes ever since she was five, flannels and jeans and boy clothes; in fact, there was a period of time in elementary school where her hair was cropped so short people thought she was a boy. He taught her to shoot a gun when she was seven years old. She’d killed at least twenty supernatural beings and exorcised two demons by the time she was fifteen. He’d never hesitated to give her the reins, watching from afar as she held her own against shit that would make any other teenager squeal.
And yet, he would occasionally remember that his daughter was, well, a girl, which was something he was far less equipped to deal with. There’s a reason why, when she got her period for the first time, she kept it a secret from him. Instead, she’d persuaded her English teacher – a kind, middle-aged mother of two whose name she can’t, for the life of her, remember – to lend her enough pads to last her a few months. It wasn’t until she bled through her pants during a hunt that he’d even realized, and for the next few months after that he treated her with kid gloves, wouldn’t let her do jack shit. And for the next few months she’d had to prove that no, being on her “monthlies” (he always seemed so loath to call it a period, for some reason) didn’t make her any less of a capable hunter.
And that was just the periods. Everything else – the acne, the mood swings, the cramps, the hormones (she’s a girl with eyes, sue her) – she’d managed on her own, licked her own wounds in whatever privacy she could afford. These were her problems to deal with, after all, and therefore not worth burdening her father or her brother with. So if Dad forgets to buy her pads, which is more often than not, she knows she can always make do with toilet paper. If he asks her if her monthlies are getting in the way, she’ll push herself twice as hard to prove herself to him. When he comprehends the attention she will inevitably receive from boys, from grown men with families who should know better, he will direct his calumny towards her and expect her to take it, and she will, she does, because Deanna is stronger than he’s ever given her credit for. And she tries so hard to make it easy for him, tries to make it so that he doesn’t have to deal with all of her feminine bullshit on top of his massive quest for revenge, but sometimes she ends up getting in the way. And then he gets mad. And then he gets sorry, which is worse, because she knows it’ll happen again.
“I’m sorry for what I said earlier,” he tells her, and she can tell that it pains him to say it. She can also tell that he has a lengthy homily planned out. She wonders, with some horror, if she spent the car ride planning out this grand speech to her, and decides that she doesn’t want to hear it.
She’s so, so tired of hearing it.
“Dad,” she says, cutting him off. “It’s okay. I get why you said it.” She watches as her father snaps his mouth shut, nods curtly. An unspoken agreement passes between them – I won’t mention it if you don’t. Fortunately for her, John Winchester hates confrontation and chick-flick moments almost as much as she does, which makes their lives a hell of a lot easier. As she turns to go get her clothes, though, she notices Sam staring at them, cradling the bag of salt in his arms. Strangely enough, he looks mad.
“What’s your problem?” she asks, and he scoffs.
“Nothing,” he mumbles. Face still twisted into a scowl, he shoves his hand into the bag of salt and scoops out a handful, scatters it over the threshold of the motel room. If she didn’t know any better, she’d swear that she heard him cursing underneath his breath – though what she doesn’t understand is why. She knows her brother has a bone to pick with Dad – has, historically, had a bone to pick with him ever since diapers – but he seems especially on edge today. Whatever. It’s not her problem to deal with; right now, there are far more pressing issues at hand, like taking a shower and catching up on her beauty rest.
The bathroom leaves a lot to be desired, she concludes, even for a dingy motel. The corners of the bathtub are coated with what appears to be mold or mildew, and the toilet seat is chipped and smells faintly of vomit. The overhead light is finicky, flickering on and off as she sets her clean clothes down and strips. Gingerly she tiptoes into the tub and turns the shower on. As expected, the water hits her back ice-cold, but eventually settles into a temperature she can only really describe as “just south of lukewarm.” The water pressure – if she could even call it that – is so low that she has to stand almost directly underneath the showerhead to allow the water to trickle down her naked back. Clinically she washes herself, makes sure to spend as little time as possible under the water. When she’s done she steps out, shivering slightly, dries herself with a ratty old towel that at some point must have been white but has now evolved into a muted brownish-grey color. She slips her pajamas on, takes her hair tie out. As she steps out of the bathroom and into the motel room, she catches her brother sleeping on one of the beds, snoring slightly, limbs askew. She’s never really noticed how freakishly long his legs are, but she does now – mostly because they’re taking up all of the space. Great. Groaning, she pushes his legs out of the way before wiggling under the covers. Her brother, the great oaf, hardly stirs.
“Night, dad,” she calls out as she turns off the desk lamp (the only light in the motel that seems to be working properly). Her father lets out a noise between a grumble and a groan which she assumes equates to good night, which is good enough for her. She doesn’t require soliloquy, or elaborate ruse; truthfully speaking, the last thing she wants is to make a poet out of either one of them. There are so many precious things that can afford to go unsaid.