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His hands slip on top of hers and between her fingers, and this is what dying feels like, she thinks. Will is on her and in and all around, encasing her, and it feels a little like her grave, but if he’s the dirt with which she’s to become one, she figures death won’t be so bad. Her daddy would be there.
A little while later they’re still wrapped up in each other, his head tucked into her neck and his torso half on hers, and Ethel’s never felt happier, not really. His breath is laboured as he speaks, puffing out against her throat like a kiss, but there’s an undeniable affection lacing through it—was it really all for her? It’s still musical, though, his words, his voice, him. “There’s no one else in the world but us.”
He’s cryptic like this, sometimes, and it’s moments like these when she really, truly understands him as a writer. Writers used to be abstract creatures to her, people made of words—now she traces each and every one of his between her lips; if he’s stored up of all those words, he could help her find a few for herself.
And he had, and she’d found a few for him, and them both, together. Nebraska, silence. Love, maybe. Home, definitely.
“There is no world; there’s only here, Nebraska,” she answers with words he’d given her, and he smiles against her skin, the lingering traces of sweat tickling them both.
\\
Ethel is stumbling up the staircase almost as soon as she’s through the front door, the rot seeping off the wood and into her skin.
There’s a belt in the rafters, she notices first. It looks haphazardly looped through, like whoever tried had realised the wood was too weak, too old, and the belt too lively, too new. It gives her the first bit of hope, even as she knows, has known since her screen door banged shut with finality behind her and her desperation.
Will knew their house inside and out, better than her. He wouldn’t have even entertained the idea. But she looks down and immediately back up again, eyes fixed on the belt hanging from the rotting wood and the noticeable lack of colour. It’s brown, or grey, and the wood creaks even now, but Willoughby Tucker’s blood is not pouring all over it and in that she finds solace.
It doesn’t last long, and she’s soon kneeling at his side, praying and crying. She hates his father all over again, finding his cool metal amidst the drowning.
\\
“You doin’ all right?” Mrs Tucker asks after a quiet greeting on the phone, and Ethel’s reply is not immediate, or monotone, as usual; there’s a picture lying on her bed just upstairs, of Will, her beautiful bloodstained blond—it’s all she can see now—and her. She remembers only vaguely when or how it was taken: a click of a digital camera and a sweet little square thrust into her hands a minute or so later.
She’d barely known Will then, but he’d been beside her and there’d been a camera in his hands and a click, and a Polaroid of evidence that she would lose her mind over all these years later, that rots her from the deepest inside. It saves her, too.
“Just fine, ma’am,” she breathes out, the tears still wet on her cheeks and the salt seasoning her words.
“That’s good, that’s good,” is the muttered reply, and then a distant yell to a young girl with Mrs Tucker’s clean blonde hair, not Will’s. After a few more exchanged pleasantries—How is your mother? Just fine. Are you keeping busy? Yes, trying to. Well, that’s good. That’s important.—the phone clicks goodbye for them both.
\\
She’s still his, up in that attic. Her blood is on, in, and all around Isaiah’s mouth, but it’s the same shade as Will’s. Even here, even when she isn’t in one piece—maybe hasn’t been since that afternoon in Nebraska—she’s his and he’s hers.
It’s poetic, she thinks with the clarity of death.
“I’m scared.”
“What of?”
“Lots of things. Death.”
“Well, just about everyone’s afraid of death.”
“Are you?”
“Nah. I’d die yours, at least.” They shared a small, gentle smile, their heads turned to the other atop that mattress like magnets. "Tell you what,” he'd shifted on the mattress, propping himself up with one bent arm and looking at her so deeply. “If you died right here, right now, you’d still be mine.”
This is death, after so many years wondering. The pain of it all, so excruciating as it runs through her body, the thrum steady in her thigh where his tongue ran over and through. His, his, his.
Isaiah's unfairly clean blond fills everything suddenly, untainted by their red—her life—and he's kissing her. She hasn't worn lipstick for a while, not even for those men in the flashing lights and dark rooms, but her lips drown in the colour. It trickles down her chin like she's hungry for it. It hurts even after it all.
Will had gotten it on his own lips once, on a nice, respectable Sunday when her mama was out of her moods enough to give her a piece of herself—just a smudge there at the corner she loved, trailing off onto his cheek. There was something so sweet about that then, something more precious than when he fell into her, something she clings to even now.
There are flies all around, buzzing, hovering. One seems to look at her, into her, reading it all in the sheen of her eyes and the empty slip of air between her lips, and it inches closer for every heartbeat she would have had.
Small, spindly legs rest on her thigh, sense-consuming and black on dirty, bare red. Eventually, the hurt will stop. Maybe it already has. Ethel sees nothing more than dirty, reddish blond, and a beautiful, pure white.