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They drove all night to get to Arizona, somewhere in the northern part, Ellen can't remember the name of the place. Sleeping in the car still gets her head all messed up with the type of car sickness you can’t vomit away. Guess she has a lifetime to get used to it. Bill said hunters usually travel a lot.
Coming up a dirt road, Bill spots someone up ahead, smiles. As Ellen gets out of the car, her aches and pains falling off of her like the dust settling around them, she sees that it’s some blonde girl, hands in her back pockets, hips pushed out.
“My dad’s waiting inside.”
“Nice to see ya again, too, cranky pants.”
“I’ve been looking at pictures of dismembered people all day, Will. How would you feel?”
The girl beckons them along with a toss of her head. A lock of hair falls into her face. They follow her a ways away to a small house.
“Mary,” Bill whispers, “she’s Mary.”
After a while, when the fighting has lost all pretense of being subtle, Ellen has to excuse herself to the bathroom. She wants to smack Bill upside the head for staying out there. It’s none of their business.
The second she closes the door, it opens right back up again and Mary rushes into the tiny room.
“I know you’re just fleeing from the shouting,” she says, locking the door behind her.
“Gotta pee, too, though,” Ellen says, because this room is really too small for the two people in it, and with Mary in here, technically her and Mr Campbell could just continue the fight through the door, and Ellen would have to crawl out the window to escape it then.
Mary shrugs. “Be my guest.”
When Ellen doesn’t make a move toward the toilet, Mary nods toward the zipper of Ellen’s jeans, “Nothing I haven’t seen before,” and leans back against the door, pushing her hips out in that way she was doing when they met.
Usually, Ellen doesn’t fall for the triple dog dare kind of stuff; she’s got her head screwed on just fine, thank you very much, which has saved her ass plenty in the past. But Mary’s just standing there, looking. So Ellen pulls her pants down just enough, and does her business. Zips back up again and washes her hands.
“It’s hunting, you know.”
“What?”
“You love Will, right?”
“He’s my fiancé.”
“Well, give it a couple of months and you guys are gonna be fighting just like this if you keep hunting.”
“I’m not exactly a hunter yet.”
Mary’s quiet for a while, just looking, then she says, “Lucky you, Ellen.”
Bill and Mr and Mrs Campbell head off the next day. Even though they spent pretty much the entire evening the day before fighting (“I’m not going, dad, I won’t.” – “People are dying, Mary, and w-” – “I know! I’ve seen all of them. Dead.”) Mary hugs her father and kisses her mother’s cheek as they’re saying goodbye. Says, Be safe, when they say, See you in a month or two, sweetheart.
Bill kisses Ellen like he’s going off to war. In a way, she guesses he is. She repeats, Be safe, and he answers, See you in a month or two, honey.
It’s just the two of them in the house now.
During the first three days, Mary goes out by the dusty road and checks the mail box at least four times a day. It’s just bills in there. It’s on the tip of Ellen’s tongue to say, No news is good news, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that Mary won’t believe that, so she keeps it unsaid.
It kind of kills Ellen to admit this, but so far they mostly eat metallic-tasting, partially-liquid food from cans in silence. And Bill said hunting wasn’t like being in the Girl Scouts. Yeah right.
When she can’t take the silence or the way Mary’s taken to staring into her food anymore, she blurts out, “You liking the food?”
“I hope I choke on it,” Mary responds which is surprising enough to startle a laugh out of Ellen. So dramatic.
“Come on. It’s not so bad.”
“Easy for you to say. Once, we were on this hunt, some ticked off bear spirit killing people, and we were being chased through the forest and my dad sees this trap door in the ground. Lucky for us, it was a bomb shelter. We were trapped down there for more than a month. Ate nothing but canned stuff. Every time I eat this crap now it brings me right back to that hole in the ground.”
“How’d you get out?”
“Shot our way out.”
Honestly, Ellen had just been hoping for a little smalltalk to end the silence and bleed out some of the tension, but this is. Great, awesome. Sometimes Bill makes hunting sound like nothing but cars and libraries and sleazy motels but this-
“Don’t,” Mary interrupts, wiping the smile off Ellen’s face, “My mom almost died. Has this crazy scar down her back, it’s-“
“Sorry. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“That’s hunting.”
“Canned food and near-death experiences?”
“Pretty much.”
“And long car rides.”
“Yeah.”
That night, while Mary’s doing push-ups in the living room, Ellen distracts herself from that (so much grunting) by scavenging through the kitchen and finds a box of stale Cornflakes. They share them like popcorn, their fingers fumbling over each other, and Ellen thinks, It’s not so bad.
It’s like the ice has broken, now. The next day, Mary takes her out back, puts a gun in her hand, tells her to breathe in, aim, squeeze the trigger, breathe out. It’s a good afternoon of putting bullet holes through the cartoon rooster on the empty Cornflakes package.
Ellen’s cheeks are starting to hurt from smiling, and she isn’t sure if it’s just because she’s having a good time or if it’s because of the way Mary’s hands tickle over her to correct her stance, her grip, her ponytail.
“This is fun,” Ellen breathes out, just to say something.
“How is this fun? It’s a loud noise that could kill you.”
“Kills monsters, too. That’s why you took me out here, right? To show me the ropes. Can’t fool me, Campbell,” she teases, doesn’t mean anything serious by it, but it’s taken that way. Mary won’t meet her eyes. Ellen’s heart is beating hard enough for her to feel it in her thumbs, so she reaches out and lightly slaps Mary’s arm. Something, just say something.
“If you’re gonna hunt, you have to do it right. With aim like this, you won’t make it a month.” And Ellen wants it to sound like Mary's just bantering right back but it doesn’t. “It’s just-“ Mary pushes her jaw out, fists at her side, “Why on Earth would you choose this? Was normal life too boring for you? Did you just need a little more death in your life?”
Ellen doesn’t know what to say, can’t stop darting her eyes down Mary’s body, can’t stop seeking out the way it’s coiled and about to spring, and feels like she has to compensate for that somehow, so she says, “No one’s dead yet.”
Mary’s fists clench tighter, knuckles white, and it occurs to Ellen that she doesn’t know this girl. Doesn’t know half the things Mary could probably do with those pretty hands.
“You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
Mary turns on her heels to leave, but Ellen grabs for her, and before she knows what’s really going on, her lips are on Mary’s. Parting, opening. Wet.
“Oh.”
They stumble back to the house. Dust clouds swirl all around them. It gets in Ellen’s eyes, making her tear up, and Mary coughs right into Ellen’s mouth when she inhales it too deeply.
Ellen pushes Mary up against the bricks, puts her there like she means it, because she does. Presses her fingers inside Mary like she means that, too. She does. Then she finds out a new thing Mary can do with her hands.
Afterwards, they just stand there, leaning against the wall. Clothes still on, if a bit rumpled, a button popped here and there, hands sticky with each other, they look sideways at one another, smiling slow and stupid.
The sun glints brightly through Mary’s hair.
They left the guns back there, to bake in the yellow heat.
They’re lying in the scratchy grass on the side of the house that sees the most sun. Mary has bared her pale belly to bathe in it, and Ellen pretends to be blinded by the light reflected off of it. So Mary pushes her unto her back, presses Ellen into the rough terraine, straddles her hips like she expects to be bucked off. Of course, Ellen doesn’t, but she puts her hands all over that pale stomach, her thighs, her throat, and, once the shirts come off, her breasts. Dirty handprints on all that skin.
Later in the mirror, Ellen finds red spots on her back, like a thousand insect bites or measles. Some punishment born of dust and sun and girl sweat.
She spends the night topless in Mary’s bed. Wakes up with scratch marks and hickies in that same bright red.
One morning, the type of morning you wake up to real slow and easy, the sky grey and heavy outside, Ellen wakes up to Mary praying. She’s mumbling, eyes closed, torso folded in over her cupped hands like she’s holding something in them, and Ellen leans over and strokes her back till she finishes with a quiet, “Amen.”
“It’s never too late to get out. Have faith in that, Ellen. If you don’t, you’re gonna get yourself killed someday.”
They spend most of their mornings shooting cans from the fence outside, the afternoons cleaning the guns, the evenings reading, lying around, messing around.
They can’t wrestle anymore because Mary starts guffawing till she can’t breathe when Ellen starts using her teeth where she’s ticklish, and once Mary gets her clever, pretty hands into Ellen’s hair, she’s no good for anything anymore. Absolutely no good.
They eat canned food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and try to avoid the broken springs in the mattress and stay indoors when it rains and rush outside when the sun peaks out and Ellen tries desperately to feel like this is real life, like this isn’t a break from it.
“How long do hunts usually take?”
Mary looks at her, betrayed – don’t make me think about it – and Ellen tries to look sorry, even though she isn’t any good at that. “Depends. A poltergeist can be salted and burned in a night. A werewolf hunt usually takes at least a couple of lunar cycles. Sometimes you have to go to the hospital. That can add some weeks.”
“And a chupacabra hunt?” Ellen asks, mouth dry, throat dry.
Mary licks her lips, “A pack this size,” she says, “maybe two, three more weeks.”
Ellen leans over, hair falling out of place and in front of her eyes, and presses a kiss into the palm of Mary’s hand.
The trucks wake them up in the middle of the night.
Arm draping over her soft belly, lips brushing against the nape of her neck, hand ghosting over her hand.
It’s a dance and the music stops and the shoes aren’t big enough to protect when someone drifts off beat and starts stepping on toes.
“I guess they’re back.”
“Ellen, don’t think-”
“Mary!” someone screams from underneath them.
Mary jumps out of bed like the house just burst into flames, rushes for the door to the flight of stairs. Before Ellen follows her downstairs, though, she takes some seconds to go in the other bedroom and ruffle the covers, pull back the curtains, throw some stuff around like someone lived in here as well.
For the rest of the night, Ellen watches Mary’s hands covered in blood, stitching up her fiancé’s flesh.
Mary stays in touch. Adamantly so. She’s got no shame, that girl. Ellen can’t make herself step foot in a church anymore, and Mary’s writing love letters. (Maybe that last part is a bit of a stretch.)
Some of them just read something like, You have three weeks to let me know you’re alive! with two lines under the return adress. Figures she thinks she tricked Ellen into the life (saliva in the mouth when bells chime; soft fluttering heart when guns fire; false associations). Figures she feels guilty. Figures she’d probably feel worse if Ellen bit it.
Most of the letters are more like pages ripped out of a diary, though. Through them, Ellen learns that Mr Campbell is trying to convince Mrs Campbell that those weird casette players all the kids are walking around with these days can be fixed up to spot ghosts. Ellen has a good laugh about that one.
She learns that Mary is head-over-heels in love with some John guy, can’t get enough of him, never feels suffocated and sick at the sight of him, never pushes his arms away when he tries to wrap them around her as she’s wiping down the bar after last call.
She learns that something bad definitely happens in the fall of ’73 because after that, Mary seems to fear death like never before, starts speaking of guardian angels, can’t for the life of her stop talking about her damn boyfriend, and makes Ellen promise she’s done hunting, done for good.
She learns of a wedding with zero guests and a stack of donuts for a wedding cake and the prettiest wedding dress for seventy-five bucks you’ve ever seen and I’m sorry, but I knew you wouldn’t have forgiven me for inviting you.
She learns of Dean, and then Sam.
Not a single letter sees the inside of a trash can. Instead, Ellen keeps someone else’s life in her drawers, under her bed, behind the ID in her wallet. Wherever there's space to stash it.
In hindsight, Ellen would have done just about anything to have kept the whole thing teenage experimentation, a secret affair, just this thing that happened once in Arizona.
Mary was right. Ellen really hadn’t known what she was getting herself into.
Ellen finds out she’s pregnant the same week she finds out Mary is dead.
She thinks, if it’s a boy she’ll name him Mark, Marcus, something like that. If it’s a girl she’ll have to think of something else. Wouldn’t want to raise any suspicions; Bill might be in the dark about this but he’s not dumb. Besides, she’s built something here, on this backroad with this man, that she doesn’t want to see crumble. Wouldn’t want that.
When Jo comes screaming and gory into the world – this pretty blonde bundle of joy – Ellen thinks she understands in a way she didn’t before. Understands all that tension she used to try to kiss out of Mary.
Three years later, John Winchester walks into her bar. He orders a bottle of the cheapest like all the other poor saps that are either grieving or injured.
Now, she’s not the type of woman to stick her nose in things that don’t concern her, certainly not family matters, but she knows Mary had kids, John has kids. What kind of father sits in a bar downing 100 proof at one in the morning? In a hunter’s bar, no less. Not a good one that’s for sure. It’s not right. Mary wasn’t one to leave messes behind.
This is all on him, she supposes.
On her round collecting glasses and taking orders, she stops by his table.
“John Winchester, right?”
“Do I know you?”
“No, but I knew Mary Campbell.”
“Mary Winchester. My wife.”
“Right, sorry about that. Still can’t believe she took your name.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing a man like you can’t handle.”
He frowns, and she looks away. She puts all the used glasses down on the table, grabs John Winchester’s half-empty bottle, and pours some into one of them.
“To Mary.”
And eventually John raises his own glass and they toast to Mary, toss back whiskey like it’s water, like all the other poor saps, either bereft or bleeding.
When Bill is killed, she burns Mary's letters, too, the mountains upon mountains of pretty hand lettering, and scatters two sets of ashes.