I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl by Kelle Groom Read Free Book Online Page B

in meetings who killed another person while in a blackout, who woke up in jail. But I thought those things only happened to other people. When I saw that man, who got out of prison after many years, he was so kind. Always willing to help other alcoholics. At first I didn’t know his story, just thought he was one of the successful people who knew how to do the steps. Sometimes I thought he looked down on me for my failure to stay sober. I didn’t understand that he could see me because we were the same. When someone would mention the promises—“we are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness”—I could feel a road ahead open up. I believed it was true, but thought that was just for other people too.
    I need to get out of this house. I’m in shock, but some part of me is in charge. First, I need clothes. The turquoise shirt with black polka dots is torn up one side, but they never bothered to take it off. No skirt. I put my legs into a pair of Levi’s belonging to one of the men. Pull them up. Too big. The man wakes up, complains.
    They let me dress. They drive me to my car, but my keys are gone, my purse. Alone, walking, I sing a song from long ago inmy head. Gone with my purse is my wallet with the photo of my son, photo of myself as child. I’d kept them side by side—the same face nineteen years apart, mine black-and-white, his in color. My grandmother gave me the photos after he died.
    After an hour of walking in the morning heat, the pastel Sunday people speeding by, I pass the train car restaurant where I no longer work. I’d dressed like a dancer there, all the hostesses, cocktail waitresses in black leotards, silky black skirts, slippers. My body like a black lake. A painter once said the body is most beautiful at the joints: the shoulders, neck, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles—and the back and breasts. Where we’re glued together.
    Highway grit’s inside my sandals. The only person I know in this town is Danny, the father of my child. The sun scratching my eyes makes me want to close them. Mascara smeared down my face in old tears. I want to lie down on the roadside. My skin is pinpricked, stuck. It aches in large, flat areas—my thighs and stomach thud. My back. Inside something taut’s abraded, cut like a plum. I haven’t been to his house in three years. Not since the early months of my pregnancy when we’d briefly reunited after he’d called. Said he loved me and wanted his parents to adopt my baby. But after three days, I broke it off again—I wasn’t in love; I didn’t want to be in his grip. I’d started to think that maybe I could keep my baby, raise him myself.
    Danny’s house is past the train restaurant, on the opposite side of the highway. I’m still not positive I’ve got the right street, until I see his face at the bedroom window, long hair flat from his pillow, eyes sleepy, watching me walking on his wet grass, as if he’s been waiting all this time, expecting me.
    Waiting, as though he’s got the heightened senses of a cat, even though his brother told me he’d tried to kill himself with Old Grand-Dad and phenobarbital after I broke off the engagement,after I refused to have an abortion, and later refused to give his parents the baby, after I told him it wasn’t his child, after I’d tried to run him down in the train restaurant parking lot when he barred my way, pregnant. He’d grabbed my wrist and turned it, like a mean game to see how much I could take, the twisting like a rug burn. I hadn’t known what I would do with a baby inside, running to my car. He stood in front of the hood, and I gunned it, imagined him bouncing off. The British architect I’d been dating pulled him out of the way.
    This is his parents’ house. They are somewhere in these rooms. I met him when I was eighteen. He picked fights. When I first saw him, he was leaning against the wall at the ABC bar, face bloody and swollen. Told me he’d eaten a coral snake, the most deadly,