Girl in Pieces

On discharge day, Charlie's¹ mother Misty¹¹ meets her in the hospital lobby: gray jacket, gray sneakers, hair still a fiery red. She does not smile. Outside on the sidewalk, she stops abruptly and presses an envelope into Charlie's¹ hand.

Inside are a Greyhound bus ticket to Tucson, Arizona, her birth certificate, and the $933 she and Ellis² had saved together. Mikey³ and his mother have arranged everything. Her mother¹¹ tells her that living together would never work, nor would a halfway house. Then, unexpectedly, she wraps Charlie¹ in a fierce hug and whispers that it is breaking her heart.

She walks away. Vinnie¹⁴ finds Charlie¹ standing paralyzed on the corner and drives her to the bus station, pressing cash into her hand, telling her to sit in the front of the bus, take no drinks from strangers, and never come back. The bus ride takes almost two days through six states.

Charlie¹ arrives in Tucson's muggy night and finds Mikey's³ purple guest house behind a yard of silver bird sculptures. Within days, she has broken a glass bottle and restocked her tender kit with fresh shards, just in case. She gets a dishwashing job at True Grit, a grungy coffeehouse on Fourth Avenue, and rents a decrepit room from an old man named Leonard.

At True Grit, she meets Riley West,⁴ the cook: twenty-seven years old, former frontman of a semi-famous band called Long Home, now an alcoholic who sneaks beers from the fridge and vomits into the trash bin between orders.

He flirts with her, calls her Strange Girl, and notices her scars. When she is hungry, he slips her bags of food. He lives in a robin's-egg-blue bungalow crammed with books and a backyard recording studio he built with the last of his music money. His sister Julie⁹ owns the coffeehouse and protects him endlessly.

Riley⁴ pushes Charlie¹ to stop hiding her arms. He rolls up her sleeves in the dish station, traces her scars, and tells her to own her travels and buy short-sleeved shirts. She does. They become lovers after he shows up drunk at her room one night.

She starts staying at his bungalow, waking him for work, cleaning his vomit. Then he asks her to go on a run for him, pressing money into her palm and giving her an address. At a house with a black door, a man on a couch and a woman named Wendy with red-and-yellow hair sell her drugs.

She pockets the bag and delivers it to Riley,⁴ who disappears into the bathroom and emerges alert and grinning. He calls her a real good girl. The runs become routine. Charlie¹ tells herself this is what love looks like: being needed, being useful, even when the task makes her stomach turn.

Mikey³ returns to Tucson. Charlie¹ has been breathing in his scent from his pillow for weeks, hoping his rescue of her means something more. They scavenge furniture together, eat burgers, and she pushes up her sleeves to show him the full damage. He cries. She makes her move: a kiss in her dark room.

For one second, he kisses back. Then he pushes her away and wipes his mouth because she tastes like the beer she drank earlier at a party, breaking her sobriety rules. He tells her he cannot do that, he has a girlfriend named Bunny.

Weeks later, while Mikey³ is on tour with the band he manages, he marries Bunny in Seattle. Charlie¹ sees the photos on Facebook at work and gets physically sick. She spends days in Riley's⁴ bed, feverish and weeping. Riley⁴ heats bowls of broth and changes the cool cloth on her forehead, but asks no questions about what she has lost.

Charlie's¹ drawings of her neighbors (Hector, Manny, Karen, Leonard) are accepted for a group show curated by Tony Padilla,¹⁶ an established artist and friend of Ariel.¹² She spends mornings at the gallery, learning the language of the art world: actualized identity, constructed identity, core fragmentation.

A thin, angry artist named Holly calls Charlie's¹ scars revolutionary and offers to make her a reading list. Charlie¹ looks at her arms and does not see revolution; she sees sad and pain. At the opening, Ariel¹² appears. Charlie¹ confesses she stole a glittery skull cross from Ariel's¹² house months ago.

Ariel¹² says she already knew, already understood. She tells Charlie¹ she lost her son Alexander to an overdose, and she knows what it is to be empty but full with hell. Charlie's¹ drawings get a positive review for their curiously sympathetic eye and classical quirk. She has been seen, but she is still falling.

Blue,⁶ recently discharged from Creeley, arrives in Tucson carrying ten black-and-white composition books tied with a red ribbon. They are from Louisa,⁷ who wants Charlie¹ to have her life story. Then Blue⁶ drops the news: Louisa⁷ set herself on fire. She is gone.

Blue,⁶ devastated, relapses almost immediately, scoring meth and smoking it at Riley's⁴ house. Charlie¹ finds her there, pupils blown wide, drool on her chin, surrounded by Riley's⁴ album sleeves. The grief compounds: Ellis,² who bled too much. Louisa,⁷ who burned.

Charlie¹ cannot outrun the accumulating evidence that girls like her do not survive. She carries Louisa's composition books everywhere but cannot bring herself to open them yet. Riley,⁴ meanwhile, has stopped preparing for the benefit concert. His guitar stays in its case, his lyric notebook shoved under the couch.

After Blue⁶ tells her about Louisa,⁷ Charlie¹ runs to Riley's⁴ house seeking comfort. She finds him in the kitchen, pressed against Wendy, his drug dealer, their bodies tangled on the counter. Wendy smirks at Charlie¹ and tells her to go back to her blades and butts. Riley⁴ turns, his face a stranger's mask of fury.

He shoves Charlie¹ hard into the wall, shattering a framed album cover behind her, screaming at her to get out, that there is nothing here, that she should go back to where she came from. Charlie¹ flees into Tucson's All Souls Day parade, the Día de los Muertos procession, surrounded by skull-faced revelers and paper-mâché skeletons.

She dissociates, sees Ellis² dancing, hears her father's voice, watches Louisa⁷ in flames. She returns to her apartment to find it trashed: her tender kit stomped and emptied, her sketchbook shredded, Wendy's graffiti on the wall. Charlie¹ drinks whiskey and grinds her feet into broken glass.

Charlie's¹ neighbors find her bleeding. Linus⁸ and her brother Tanner,¹⁵ an EMT student, bandage her feet and drive her out of Tucson. They take her to Santa Fe, to the home of their grandfather Felix,¹⁰ an elderly painter with a rambling adobe house and a barnlike studio filled with canvases, brushes, and decades of creative detritus.

Felix¹⁰ gives Charlie¹ a small room and a studio space. He tells her to do nothing for a while, that sometimes not working is work. When she is ready, she begins reading Louisa's composition books. The first page of the first book reads: A girl's life is the worst life in the world.

A girl's life is: you are born, you bleed, you burn. Charlie¹ starts drawing a graphic novel about her own life, using herself as the subject. She draws a girl whose clothes fall away panel by panel, revealing more and more scars as the story arcs toward the present.

Charlie¹ returns to Tucson a different person, wearing skirts and short sleeves bought at a Santa Fe thrift store. She finds Blue⁶ has transformed their apartment: the linoleum ripped up and replaced with rose-painted fir, new shelves installed, a map-of-the-world shower curtain, and a patient project underway to tape together the shredded photographs of Ellis² from Wendy's rampage.

Blue⁶ tells Charlie¹ she is done with drugs and drinking, that she wants to be real friends who help each other survive. They start attending meetings together in a church basement.

Charlie¹ goes to Julie⁹ and confesses she helped Riley⁴ buy drugs. Julie⁹ does not fire her. Instead, Charlie¹ and Linus⁸ propose a plan to save True Grit: discounted day-old pastries from a panadería, a healthier lunch menu, new paint on the walls. Julie⁹ agrees. The coffeehouse begins to recover.

At the Luis Alvarez benefit concert at Hotel Congress, packed with Tucson's music community, Mikey³ approaches Charlie.¹ He is no longer wearing dreadlocks; his hair is short and golden. A plain gold wedding band glints on his finger. He presses a folded piece of paper into her hand. He tells her he saw Ellis² during a tour stop in Sandpoint, Idaho.

She is in a care facility called Amethyst House. She is not totally gone. When Mikey³ said Charlie's¹ name, Ellis's² whole face lit up. Later, Riley⁴ takes the stage, sober, clean-shaven, an alcohol monitor blinking on his ankle. He sings a slow ballad he wrote for Charlie,¹ an apology about the night he found her tender kit and the fight that followed.

After the set, he finds her backstage, presses a note into her hand, and returns to the stage to play a rollicking country cover of the song from Grease. The note reads: I do remember, and I did. I do. Take care of yourself. He signs his real name: Irwin David Baxter.⁴

Felix Arneson¹⁰ offers Charlie¹ a job as his assistant: room, board, a small salary, and her own studio in the high desert of Santa Fe. She will fly to New York first to meet him at his hotel, see museums, then fly back with him because he is afraid to fly alone.

Charlie¹ has never been on an airplane. On the flight, a friendly girl named Shelley notices Charlie's¹ scars and holds her hand, telling her to breathe through the terror of takeoff, that the hardest part is getting there. Charlie¹ clutches two pieces of paper: Riley's⁴ note and Ellis's² address in Idaho.

She composes a letter in her head, beginning with the words she has been unable to speak for so long: Dear Ellis,² I have something really fucking angelic to tell you. She does not have a tender kit anymore. She is walking into life unprepared for the first time in years.