“You understand that I have to do this,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s part of what I do. Transformations, remember. It’s difficult sometimes.”
She nodded.
She drew a lady on her left calf. Her golden hair flowed away from her as she lay on the bed of skin. Her eyes were open but Rose knew she was dead. Her open eyes had surprised Rose. She had died of an overdose of pills. Eaten one at a time.
“Why?” Rose asked as her mother swallowed a little white pill.
“Because I ache,” she said. “I’ve been stabbed in a million places.”
Had Bobbie played with her, too?
“I need you to stay,” Rose said. She started to cry. Where was her father? At work? The car was with him. Their closest neighbors, the Nelsons, were gone on vacation. She wasn’t sure she could reach anyone else. They lived too far from the city. Out in the country where nothing could hurt them. Her mother had ripped out the phone.
“Bobbie’s been playing with me,” Rose said. She was twelve, desperate. She’d tell her mother, get her to stay.
“What do you mean?” Her mother swallowed four pills this time.
“You know, putting his thing in me,” Rose said. Stop it, Mom. Stay with me.
“Tell your father,” she said. “He’ll protect you.”
That was it. That was all her mother had to say to her after all the agony she had been through.
“He promised me a pony,” she said.
“I’m so tired,” her mother said.
Rose ran downstairs and out the door. She ran into the dusty afternoon and through the woods toward the house Bobbie shared with his parents, farther and farther away from home. He worked in town at night. Maybe he’d be home now. She pounded and pounded on the door. After a while, she heard his voice from deep within the house. He came to the door, half-asleep.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“It’s Momma,” she said. “She’s taking too many sleeping pills. Please, you’ve got to do something.”
He opened the screen door and she came in. He went to the phone and called the police and an ambulance. She hated him, despised him, hated herself. But he was going to save her mother.
He took her hand and they went out to his car. He drove her back to her house and together they went upstairs. Her mother lay on the bed, her hair spread out around her, like a golden-haired Snow White waiting for her Prince Charming. Her eyes were open.
Bobbie started to cry. Rose went away. She wasn’t certain where she went. Her soul wandered for a time. She thought she had died when she was eight, but she had been wrong. Now she died. Pricked by her mother’s death.
She drew a garden on her other leg. Its weeds and thorns twisted around her calf and up her knee. A man stood among the weeds.
“He never let me near him after that,” Rose said.
“Who? Your father?” the tattooist asked.
“No,” Rose said. Tears stung her eyes. “Bobbie.”
She felt like she was going to throw up. “I hated him, but he was all there was. I guess. Momma had left me a long time before she died. And my dad was… my dad.”
The tattooist took the needle. Rose lay on her stomach and he drew on her back. Her butt became a tangle of dark briar that went up her back, no way to get through.
She remembered leaving her bedroom window open. The boys knew where to come in and they did, one at a time. She didn’t care who they were. She just opened her legs to them. She had to fill the emptiness somehow.
The briars pricked her skin; the tattooist drew drops of blood down her legs.
She touched the blood and remembered being seventeen. Her father was drunk. She had never seen him drunk before. But he was blind with grief. He wept and started calling her Joanie. Her mother’s name. She went into the bathroom and curled her hair up and behind her, dabbed her cheeks with powder, put her mother’s pearl necklace around her neck, slipped into her mother’s blue flowered dress, the one her mother had worn often, especially when she was in the garden, and then she went out to her father. In the darkness, she opened herself to him, not understanding, and he pushed into her, sobbing, until in the middle of it, hard inside her, he opened his eyes and screamed with the horror of it, knowing it was she; knowing it, he kept going. When he was finished, he curled up on the floor and asked how she could have done it.
“Does it hurt?” the tattooist asked.
“Yes.” Rose wiped her tears and sat up. “I want you to do my breasts.”
He drew flowers and restaurants and neon lights and cowboys. It hurt. He drew her trek across the country after her father told her to leave. She went to Bobbie’s house first. He had a wife and a child and he could not look at her. Rose turned away from the house and hoped he never touched his little girl the way he had touched her. She took a ride from a trucker. She let him have her at night, after they drove several hundred miles. She felt dry inside and he told her she wasn’t much fun. “I don’t want nobody don’t want me,” he said. He let her out in the darkness. The next one beat her up. The tattooist pricked the black and blue spots onto her skin. She hadn’t minded the beatings so much. She deserved it. Touching was meant to hurt. She ended up working in a restaurant in Tucson, fifteen hundred miles from home. For some reason, she told Bobbie where she was.
She looked down at her breasts and saw the envelope, saw the writing on the letter. The tattooist bit his lip as he pushed the needle into her.
“It’s for my own good,” she said.
“It’s for your death,” he said.
She nodded.
The letter told her her father was dead. A year to the day she had left. Lung cancer. She didn’t go back for the funeral. She stayed in Tucson. A cactus grew from her navel. An old Indian woman tried to heal her insides. But she couldn’t let the woman touch her. Couldn’t let anyone touch her.
When she turned nineteen, she went north. She found the tattooist and had him etch a rose into her body. It was her body now.
He painted the house around her side. It wrapped her. She had never gone back to the house. She had heard they sold it. Another family lived in it now. After she got the rose, she thought it would be better. It was supposed to be better. A reason to go on: because she had reclaimed her body. Instead, she stood in the motel room and wanted to die.
The tattooist moved away from her. He was crying.
“There are scabs all over your body,” he said.
She was naked except for the tattoos.
“Are you glad you remembered?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t go,” he said. “You’re very good. An artist. You could transform people.”
“I can’t even transform myself,” she said. She put on her clothes. Her entire body hurt.
“I could help you get started,” he said. She was quiet. “Stay until the scabs are gone, then.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll at least stay the night.”
He started to touch her arm, but he stopped. “I’m going to bed,” he said. He slowly walked up the steps to his loft.
Rose went to the office and sat on the couch. Her body was now covered with her memories. It ached with them. She took off her shirt; the throbbing lessened somewhat. She wanted to cry. The memories burned her skin. Hurt. Too much. She stood up and took off her pants. How could she live with it all? Stand it? She touched one of the faces on her body that was Bobbie. He peered at her from her right shoulder. She shook herself, like a dog shaking water from its fur, and the scabs fell away from her body, becoming flower petals, red, yellow, blue, floating slowly to rest on the carpet. Now she could clearly see all her memories. Her life was etched into her skin.
She went into the bathroom and stared at her body in the mirror. Her ruined body. Bobbie had ruined her. Killed her. Doomed her to sleep until she died. Her mother had ruined her. Her father had ruined her. She had only been a child. They had all taken pieces of her and had forgotten to give them back.