Work Text:
Allie cuts her hair in Santa Clarita.
She does it at her sister’s urging. Even days from the ashes and miles from the San Fernando Valley, Jill’s eyes never lose that hunted look that says she’s waiting for someone to recognize Gilchrist’s girls and drag them back to Glendale. Allie privately thinks that the ghost of their father is one of their last concerns, but there’s little she’ll deny her sister.
They’re on the side of the road, crouched over and half-hidden by the cracked carcass of an SUV. Allie meets her own wild eyes in the back fender, caked with grime and rust.
Jill takes watch, but even with the sharpness of her face and the mean twist of her lips, she’s not much of a threat when Allie has their only knife. It was their father’s, stolen from beneath his pillowcase, the one they soaked in acrid whiskey and held to a rusty lighter.
The thought of nicking herself is enough to steady Allie’s shaking hands. She cuts close to the scalp, imagines shaving it all off like one of those monks who think swearing off all your earthly possessions makes you a better person. All Allie has is a knife, the clothes on her back, and a sister. Does that make her holy?
Clump by clump, it comes off, her knife sawing off the golden strands like a scythe through wheat. She holds a shorn fistful to the wind and lets it go, watches it scatter, freer than she’s ever been.
Her hair is just another thing that was never hers. It belonged to the men who paid to grab and pull it. It belonged to her mother, the memory of whom could make her father pause and stare before shaking his head and muttering under his sour breath. It belonged to the little fingers that reached up, up, up, before they were batted away.
She’s got half of her head chopped away when Jill shakes her shoulder with her prey animal eyes and says, “We need to go.”
Allie eyes her reflection, her uneven cut like those rockstars in old, peeling magazines.
“Okay,” she says.
-
They don’t talk about the baby.
That’s the first of the unsaid rules Allie and Jill develop for their time on the road.
They were halfway to Bakersfield the first time Jill tried. She barely got through the first word before she was cut off by a noise, guttural and animal-like. It was only Jill’s wide-eyed, open-mouthed gaze that made Allie realize the noise was her, ripped straight from her chest without her permission, as everything always is. Her sister never brought it up again.
There’s a pragmatic reason for it. Out on their own, there’s no reason to dwell on the past, not when their future is so uncertain. If you don’t get moving, you get dead. And Allie has given up way too much to do anything but survive.
They don’t talk about the baby, but Jill will talk about just anything else. She prattles on about things she remembers from before. About stories from their mother, from the nicer johns, from that radio some of the other working girls smuggled into the basement of the old library. About the passing rock formations, the shape of the clouds, and the constellations that form hunters, animals, ancient heroes.
Jill scampers along and fills the silence with stories, and Allie utilizes her whole five-feet-and-some-change of height to look scary and mean. She knows how to do it, how to mold her face to read danger, like a viper. Just like she knows how to look pretty and soft for the men, like she knows how to look demure for That Bastard, like she knows how to look strong for her sister. Masks upon masks upon masks.
She never got the shape of her mother-mask.
It’s late-August now, and the sky has shifted enough that the constellations Jill finds are different than the ones they’d seen at the beginning of their journey.
Perseus, her sister says, tracing her finger along an astral line. Banished with his mother for being prophesied to kill his grandfather.
Squinting at the distant blots of light, Allie scoffs. To be so lucky.
They’ve been deep into farm country for days, walking through crumbling houses and brown fields. Even the weeds are dying here. Everything’s so dry, Allie feels just about ready to blow to dust herself.
It’s Jill who spots the house—barely a house, barely a shack—halfway up a road off the main highway.
They settle down and make camp. Jill takes first watch, metal blade winking in the loose moonlight.
Allie rolls over and she doesn’t talk, but she dreams.
It’s the same thing every night. She wishes she had Jill’s nightmares instead.
In her dreams, he is so warm in her arms. Warm like living. Warm like burning. Tiny, too. Tiny like gone-too-soon.
There’s this secret she’s been keeping. About the baby. This wretched, shameful little secret that’s between just her and Jill. Allie’s glad she doesn’t believe in God anymore. One less witness to things she’d like to keep buried.
The secret is this: before he was born, before she ever saw those eyes open, or those hands reach out, or thought of naming him anything but the end of my miserable life, she’d hated the kid.
Allie hopes he didn’t know. That he didn’t sense it in how she never spoke softly to him in the night or rubbed her swollen stomach for anything but her own relief.
It’s not fair. She’d felt like a child herself, living in her father’s house, under watch of her big sister. A child having a child.
Jill fears their dad, but when Allie looks into the blade of their knife, it is her mother who she never wants to be. Their mother who left and Allie wonders if she could ever be that cruel. If, despite her best efforts, she is her mother’s daughter.
Then her son is born, and Allie is cleaved from the inside out.
Her baby, given his name because Allie doesn’t believe in God, but Jill always loved a good creation myth.
There is a hole in her when she holds him for the first time and she can’t tell if it’s shaped like love or hate or worry because he’s so, so small and so, so fragile, and no one will protect him. No one could protect her.
That first night, she stays up. Rocking him in her arms, soothing him when he startles, begging him to be quiet because no one can afford this kind of patience. Still, he cries. She watches the door, even knowing there’s nothing she could do if her father burst in with his anger and his fists. Still, she holds her baby.
Her baby, who Allie hates because she wants to protect him, hates because she cannot protect him, hates because she isn’t sure she can love him.
It isn’t until her hands are warm, wet red and the hole in her chest is definitively grief-shaped that she gets her answer.
The only difference between love and grief is timing, and Allie is always too late.
Jill makes the plans. Because Jill is the eldest daughter. By a handful of months nobody cares for anymore, but she is the eldest. Jill is the eldest daughter. She is the one who buries the bodies.
Jill takes first watch while Allie slips away to have the same wish.
In her dreams, the baby is always warm.
In her dreams, he is always silent.
And if she wakes to the taste of smoke on her tongue, that’s just typical.
(It isn't until there's kind, dark hands pulling her out that she realizes this is real.)