Bailey Cunningham is a MacDowell Fellow and past Millay Arts writer-in-residence. Her fiction appears in places such as The Rumpus, Crazyhorse, and Contrary Magazine. You can find her at baileyrosecunningham.com.
I’d never been to a place like this. Molared between a cell phone store and a paper lantern shop was the lingerie boutique with the girls in the black uniforms who all looked a bit like my daughter, in different ways. The same age. Pretty like her. I stood in the mall’s hallway, a throat of white tiles, and waited. I could see the employees watching me from the other side of the glass, as still as the breasty headless mannequins that centerpieced their displays.
They didn’t want me in there. I didn’t look quite right. I hadn’t yet shrugged off the something-terrible-has-happened face, which I carried with me everywhere and which made it hard to look directly into mirrors. Little corners hid in my features, sharp bits around my eyes that glinted like warnings telling people to get away. I had learned grief was not as contagious as it seemed, but this was not something other people believed.
I watched a blonde ponytail run the cash register for a twenty-something-year-old with a waist like the handle of a hammer. The employee wrapped a scrap of black lace in pink tissue paper, then slid the paper into a little pink bag that the twenty-something-year-old spun around her wrist as she walked out. She was humming a song to herself, which I realized was the same song playing loudly in the shop. Her timing was off, echoing rather than harmonizing. I thought of canyons.
“Hello, I’m Ruby. Can I help you?”
I had stepped towards the entrance, alerting an employee to my status as a potential customer. She hadn’t seen my face yet, not well, so I turned myself to her and showed her. She paused for a moment, her lips parting in the politest version of “Oh no, not this sad excuse for a person” I had seen yet. Her lips closed and thinned into a smile. “How can I help you today?” she asked.
She looked less like my daughter than the other employees, but still similar the way all young girls look similar. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She was wearing a black apron. Her skin was flat as highways leveled out from years of semi-truck weight, her makeup impeccable, eyes bright and corner-less.
“I don’t really know,” I said. She beckoned me forward. I stepped out of the mall and into the boutique’s shiny biosphere. The air was colder and smelled strongly of perfume. The synthy pop music was louder, the lights dimmer.
“Have you shopped with us before?” she asked.
“No. Well, my daughter did. I used to give her money to shop here.”
“Perfect! We have a large selection right now. Our mid-winter sale just ended, so new product is just pouring in.”
I glanced around. The other employees and shoppers were turned away from us, their eyes cast down.
“Listen, I don’t really know where to start.”
The girl nodded. She walked over to a display full of rouge-colored bras and bustiers. “Try this,” she said, holding up a dark velvet bodysuit with lace panels down the stomach. “It will work, trust me.” I took it in my hands. It was lighter than I expected, soft. It was nothing like the cotton sets I bought in half-dozen packs at the drugstore. I turned it over and saw three snaps at the crotch. I could feel my cheeks turn red.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not for me.” I flipped the fabric around and ran my fingers down the panels thin as surgical blades. I could feel my own heat fill the pits of the lace, the sweat of my fingers turning the intricate netting black. “Is it a popular one?” I asked.
“Very. She’s a rollover from last season. All the girls have her.”
I pictured every woman I had ever met wandering the earth with it/her hidden under their clothes, rounding unround breasts, gliding between ass cheeks, forming map lines in skin. I pictured my seventeen-year-old daughter, a vague girlbody, a placeholder, tightening the straps to fit her chest. “Maybe I’ll give it a try,” I said.
Ruby helped me pay at the register and handed over my own little pink bag.
“We hope to see you again soon,” she said.
. . .
That night, I sat on my bed drinking a bottle of red wine. I liked the feel of wine more than the taste, the way I wanted to check the mirror for holes in my tongue after every sip. Blue patches of nighttime sky pressed into the quilt, turning fabric into continents I avoided touching. I stared down a stack of library books my therapist had recommended to me. My therapist liked to say, “The only way out is through,” which is another way of saying, “You need to feel like shit for a while longer.”
My daughter is not stupid, but my daughter sometimes thought it was fun to hitchhike with friends along a quiet exit tucked inside a chamber of trees. It was called the Lincoln/Deadwood Exit. Artists lived out there from a disbanded colony, and the artists liked to tell stories about the woods from the warmth of their pickup cabs. One day it was lonely witches transforming backpackers into birds with tweets like lullabies for newborns. Another day it was cabins with doorways lined in teeth that swallowed curious trespassers whole. Melissa treasured these stories, rationing them out like gifts over late evening dinners.
“They see shadows moving out there, Mom.”
“Wow.”
“And there are trees with creepy roots that look like fingers. Sometimes they find things in the roots. Like jewelry and pet collars.”
I thought she believed hearing interesting things would make her an interesting woman. Of course I warned her about the dangers of talking to strangers and accepting rides from strangers and being a young girl in rural America. I reminded her that the dark secluded woods were scary for valid reasons, but she wasn’t a worrier like me.
“I don’t want to be afraid all the time,” she told me when I tried to put my foot down. “I don’t want to live like that.”
“But you’re seventeen. You have to live like that.”
She shook her head. I didn’t know how to parent a nearly-adult teenager, how to tell her no. I tried sending her news articles about missing hitchhikers, about girls who didn’t come home. She told me she knew these stories already.
I was relieved when she found a boyfriend. She started taking him with her, walking the two miles to the exit together, turning up thumbs like lit candles. But the boyfriend didn’t go with her the last time. On a cold Friday afternoon two months ago. She was bored and he was busy, and so she went alone. She stood on the Lincoln/Deadwood Exit, and then something happened, and then most of her was gone, except a little bit of blood they found on a tree trunk at the height her head stood above the ground.
Odd things disappear in the woods. This was a story she once told me between bites of meatloaf. It had been a school night. She had geometry homework waiting for her upstairs. This meant she was downstairs, putting it off, talking to me. She told me little pockets of absence float about the trees, pulling in anything near that houses a heartbeat.
The artists wouldn’t open their doors to me. I pictured them burying her piece by piece in the black dirt of the deepest parts of the woods, but then the police found a four-second home security recording of my daughter two states away, running through the night, ghostly, wild, scared, and beautiful. That was three weeks ago. My daughter was alive three weeks ago.
I ignored the therapy books and instead picked up the bodysuit I’d purchased earlier. It looked black in the light, elegant and dangerous. For a different kind of woman who did the kinds of things I didn’t do, but sometimes thought about doing. The kind of woman my daughter might have been when I wasn’t around.
I laid down on the bed and pulled my legs through the holes, wriggling it up over my ass, my stomach, pulling the straps on over my shoulders. It was exhausting, and afterwards, I felt like an unspooled metal coil lying flat beneath a hand. I looked down, which was a mistake. My stomach bulged between the lace panels; my breasts, too small to fill the cups, slumped in little invisible pools. I released the crotch snaps and pulled the thing over my head. The phone was ringing. The phone was always ringing with calls from reporters wanting to interview the grieving mother, calls I ignored, calls I blocked. I didn’t unplug it because my personal investigator had my number and I didn’t want him to think I had given up. I put the phone in the bathroom with the fan going and the sink running, and in the morning the receiver was slick with moisture and pink mold was budding between the dial buttons.
. . .
“I don’t want this anymore,” I said, placing the bodysuit on the counter of the lingerie shop. It was a different girl helping me today. Her nails were long and pointed and red like little beetles.
“Did you try it on?” she said, not looking at me.
“Yes.”
“Did you wear underwear under it? For returns you’re supposed to wear underwear under the panties part to be hygienic.”
“I’m supposed to wear underwear under the underwear?”
“Under the panties part.”
I told her I didn’t know what that meant. I went to go, I didn’t care about my money. The air was too sickly sweet here, like being stuck in a rotting rose garden in August. A man wearing a large coat passed by me. He was staring at a flock of preteens giggling at a tray of thongs. They were wearing soccer uniforms and cleats that sounded like pebbles falling against the checkered linoleum. One of the girls leaned back, cupping a v-string to her chest, and the man stepped forward, and I stepped forward, too.
“Molly, time to go. Mom’s waiting.” The man beckoned to his daughter, the little redhead with the v-string. I watched her roll her eyes, a near-perfect replica of my own daughter’s perpetual annoyances, and felt my whole body explode.
“Hi, again.” The salesgirl from yesterday, Ruby, appeared to my right. I pulled my gaze from the man’s daughter. “The bodysuit didn’t work out?”
“Um, yeah. Too much for me.”
“I don’t know about that.” Ruby looked me up and down. Her hair was loose today, and curled. She had on eyeliner that made her look older than she was, but her eyes were still cornerless, still soft.
“You said your daughter shops here?”
“She used to.”
“I see. What sorts of things did she like to buy?”
I told her I didn’t know, which was the truth. What kind of mother made it her business knowing the sexy things her daughter wore? I paid for them, but I never wanted to know Melissa’s desires, if she preferred pushups to see-through bralettes, if she tucked crotchless panties in her dresser between stacks of practical briefs. I didn’t want to think of her boyfriend in bed with her, running his hands along satin bands stretched over the palest parts of her. I didn’t want to think of him now, grieved and horny, fantasizing my daughter alive and well beneath him.
“I hate to see you leave empty-handed. Why don’t you take a look at our newest piece? It’s inspired by bondage. So delicate, but exudes an air of confidence.” Ruby pointed to a mannequin draped in a black leather corset made of intricate triangles and silver studs. A thick collar stretched tightly across the mannequin’s neck.
“Thanks,” I said finally, “but you seem to be a terrible judge of what I need.”
“Oh I don’t think so. This one’s for you. You’ve got a glint of naughtiness about you. It’s okay, many of us do.”
She handed me one of the leather atrocities. I took it in my fist, let it hang to the floor like something dead.
. . .
Outside the mall bathrooms in a corridor of yolk-colored light, I inspected the missing persons notice board. The board was made of paper faces. Eyes with souls lost to low-quality printers watched me lean against the bench, my fingers weaving structure into the complicated bindings of the leather I held in my lap. I felt quiet, my mind empty and swollen. I tried to count the days I had been living alone, the number of hours I spent weekly not talking to others. I counted the paper faces, the ones who looked under eighteen, the ones who had been posted for more than two weeks. I didn’t let them put Melissa up there. When there was time to make missing person posters, too much time had passed, and I wanted to pretend that statistics were still on my side. My investigator told me I should take up hiking, that hikers were always the heroes. He believed in intuition. He told me to keep my eyes open, to listen hard, because sometimes you could hear your loved one calling to you—that is, if she hasn’t given up. I didn’t know what to say when he asked me if my daughter was the kind to easily give up. So instead I told him how her favorite color was when the sky turned lilac in the evenings, and that she loved peppermint milkshakes on Friday nights, and that she pronounced kumquat like “kum-coo-ate” no matter how many times I corrected her.
“What is that?” he asked. “A car?”
“No. Well, it’s a fruit. Like an orange, sort of.”
“Was that what she was eating when she disappeared?” My investigator only thought in terms of cases, which meant he crammed entire people into their single worst moments on earth. This made him good at his job. This often made it feel like we were searching for two different daughters.
I didn’t tell him that once I found a vibrator under Melissa’s bed shaped like a tube of lipstick. Another time, furry handcuffs. Once her boyfriend stayed over very late and I heard the house bend and warp with the gravity of teenage sex. I found photos on her phone of her wearing a navy bustier, a hungry look in her eyes that turned my stomach sour. After she was gone, I searched her dresser for the bustier. It had disappeared along with her, but there were other things she left behind, things that reminded me my daughter was a woman who wanted, a woman who seized pleasure like it was the throat of something she wanted to eat for dinner.
I didn’t think my investigator would understand what Melissa always knew—that a woman taking pleasure in sex is not the same as a woman taking pleasure in her own destruction. It all might have looked the same to him. He might have decided finding Melissa wasn’t worth his time.
I went into the women’s bathroom and got naked in a stall, hanging my clothes on a skinny hook as I pulled the leather corset over my nipples, my waist. The many ties caged me into a surprising shape, both narrow and curved. I stepped out into the empty bathroom lobby and admired myself in the mirror. A fish came to mind. All sleek and shiny and contained within stiff vertebrae. My breasts were two taut lemons. My waist a garden hose. Pubic hair flared out from my underwear like sprigs of herbs, and before I could stop myself, I thought, thank god it can be shaved. I avoided looking at my face, at my eyes with the sharp bits which would glint in the fluorescent light and ruin everything. Instead, I went back into the stall. I kept the corset on, let it be a second skin beneath my sweater and my jeans. I felt the paper eyes on my back as I walked down the corridor, felt my heart attempt to surface from my body toxic with shame. I could sense it wiggling past my breastplate, but the corset held it down, drowning it back into place.
. . .
Even when I made my daughter, I did not want. I thought wanting was for men and boys. I didn’t seek it out, and that isn’t to say I didn’t choose it, because I did, often. But I did not long for it. I liked the warmth the way I liked three cups of coffee spread out over cold Sunday mornings. I liked the need of someone else pressing into my skin, leaving behind signatures only I could see. I kept my body under sheets and when it was over, I ran to the shower because sex made my skin feel the way it did after gardening. Greasy and teeming with living things.
They found a girl prostitute in Minnesota. Her body was a ledge on which to send all mothers diving off. “So many bites,” my investigator told me. He wanted me to know it wasn’t Melissa, he knew how I watched the news, it wasn’t Melissa.
The next day I went to the eye doctor. I made a same-day appointment, arrived early. The waiting room was empty and when I asked the receptionist how long it would be, she handed me a form to fill out instead.
“What brings you here today?” she asked.
“It feels like there’s something sharp stuck in them.” I pointed to my eyes. “In the corners. I’m probably imagining it.”
“Have you walked into any glass windows recently?”
I shook my head.
“Any car accidents?”
“No.”
“If it’s an eyelid issue, you might need dermatology. That’s down the road.” She was squinting at me. “You look fine to me.”
“I do?”
“Well, maybe not fine.” She squinted at me again. She grabbed a tiny plastic bottle from beneath her desk and handed it to me. “If the sensation continues, you can try eyedrops.”
“I don’t think I can live like this for very much longer.”
“The eyedrops should help.”
I wanted to argue, but I didn’t have the energy because the corset was tight and forcing my breath into cramped partitions. I skipped seeing the doctor, pocketed a brochure, and read it on the train back home. “Sight is our most valuable asset. Practice good eye health so that you can live life to the fullest.”
. . .
The corset was beginning to smell. A musty yeasty smell that I both craved and found disgusting. I’d been wearing it for a week now, too afraid to take it off. I was starting to worry what would happen when I had nothing holding me together. The smell coming from the leather reminded me of a base my mother would use to make soup. Or a butcher shop on Wednesdays when the meat is fresh and bright with blood. It kept me up at night, turning the air into worlds I could not reach. I missed my daughter. I missed my daughter and it was killing me, or destroying me, or just making me very, very, incredibly small.
In the lot of the mall a buzzing noise crowded my ears. I watched the white lines of my parking spot quiver and disappear. I was falling, waking, crawling, rising. My mashed lungs were making me faint in microbursts. I woke in front of the notice board. More paper eyes, more girls who looked like Melissa telling me not to come back. I wasn’t worth the trouble, I couldn’t understand. I woke in front of the lingerie shop and Ruby was gesturing to me, mouthing the words “Come inside.” I was inside, and I felt warm and wet, and I was panting, though my heart was still as cold butter, and I could hear Melissa telling me stories about the woods, about the people trapped within them, the ones who wanted control, and who wanted to be controlled, and the ones who weren’t interested in either, but still, wanted, wanted, wanted. I wished Melissa had been stolen by enchanted trees. I wished a witch had charmed her into birdsong. Not this, not girls covered in bites, not—
Ruby handed me fistfuls of delicates. I held them in my arms like a baby, letting them turn heavy with their numbers, heavy with their promises: bras and bralettes and panties and thongs and bodysuits and corsets and bodices and bustiers and garters and slips and teddies and thigh-highs and babydolls and stockings and g-strings and v-strings and bandeaus and waist-cinchers and suspender belts and chemises. I woke and I was alone. I woke and I wanted to go back to sleep. I woke and she was still gone and no one could tell me why, and I was so frightened, like a child in a dark room, like my daughter sprinting down an empty street, like a new home and the doors are locked with keys no one gave me, and something is scratching up the walls. There are so many ways to be alive, Melissa said, Mom, there are other ways to live.
