COMPASS PROSE
A Project
Presented to the faculty of the Department of English
California State University, Sacramento
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
English
(Creative Writing)
by
Jennifer R. Wiltz
SPRING
2012
© 2012
Jennifer R. Wiltz
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii
COMPASS PROSE
A Project
by
Jennifer R. Wiltz
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Douglas Rice
__________________________________, Second Reader
Joshua McKinney
____________________________
Date
iii
Student: Jennifer R. Wiltz
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format
manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for
the project.
__________________________, Graduate Coordinator
David Toise
Department of English
iv
___________________
Date
Abstract
of
COMPASS PROSE
by
Jennifer R. Wiltz
The stories in this collection reflect a collective sense of unease, both with place
and with self. In every case, the character is searching for a center, for something that
will hold true—for a compass that will always point to the truth. The question characters
and readers must grapple with is whether such a compass exists in the first place. While
some narrative traditions have used alternate storytelling techniques to express a similar
sense of unease or dislocation (metafiction or postmodern fiction, as primary examples), I
present each of these stories in a very traditional framework. Narrative design, in other
words, offers no way out. The language in which I present these stories is meant to
convey the shadows that linger behind our words—one is able to see the shadow, but
never to grasp it. The shadows, in turn, represent the vaguest glimmer of things we know
to be true but struggle to accept.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Douglas Rice
_______________________
Date
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Chapter
1. THE LODGER.................................................................................................................... 1
2. SPLINTERS...................................................................................................................... 18
3. THE PROPER PLACEMENT OF CANNONS ............................................................... 39
4. FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON ........................................................................... 65
vi
1
The Lodger
Edwin spotted them the moment he stepped off the train. There were hundreds of
them, planted in the lake like garden stakes: pink marshmallows striped with carmine,
their long necks curved like question marks. He wondered what sort of evolutionary
quandary had been solved by their design. To him, a creature that posed an eternal query
was more of a problem than a solution.
The lake and its adjoining train station were fifteen miles from the lodge—he
remembered as much from his uncle’s phone call. “Splendid view,” Lionel had said.
“Alkaline lake, you know, breeds algae like mad. That’s why the birds love it. Tell
Emily we’ll drive in for a closer look. Women adore flamingoes.”
Edwin looked away from the lake. The valley’s hills were partially obscured by
the bloated paunch of a thick grey cloud. He picked up his valise and stepped into the
station house. He had not brought a slicker.
Inside, a clean-shaven African in a khaki uniform stepped forward to greet him.
The man’s shirt bore a patch embroidered with his name and the name of his employer,
Ashby House. “Mr. Edwin?” he asked.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Lionel sent me. I will drive you to the lodge.” The African smiled and
reached for his valise. Edwin stiffened. Jon and Dottie had warned him about African
larceny, present on a level no Englishman could combat without constant vigilance.
Trains were robbed, travelers abducted, embassies bombed, and tourists bilked at every
2
opportunity. You’ll never make it out alive, Jon added, unless you keep your money in a
zipper pouch beneath your shirt. Five people, he’d said, must know your whereabouts at
all times.
Emily was no longer one of those people.
Edwin bent his head at the thought. The African interpreted his gesture as a goahead signal and transferred the valise into his grip without touching Edwin’s fingers.
“My name is Lembile,” he said.
With an eye toward his valise, he returned the African’s smile. “I’m Edwin.
Edwin Ashby.”
*
The road, he realized, deserved no such appellation. It was less a surface for
travel and more a washboard for the gods, ridged with crevices that would have gotten a
deity’s trousers clean but could not get human beings from place to place without
compressing an inch from the spine. He eyed a woman walking beside the road with a
basket on her head. If Jon and Dottie were right, the Land Rover would break down and
she would be transporting axles or shocks in her basket, conveniently available for twenty
thousand Kenya shillings each.
He wanted to ask how long the fifteen-mile journey would take, but making
himself heard over the vehicle noise required more lung power than he possessed. He
knew there was a family estate somewhere in the middle of the country, now a lodge and
restaurant dependent on affluent tourists. His uncle had succeeded to the running of the
lodge upon his grandfather’s death. Until Emily sent out their announcements, he had
3
never seriously considered seeing any of it in person. What has it got to do with me? he
asked. It’s a part of your family, she replied. Aren’t you the least bit curious?
His answer had not pleased her.
It pleased him even less to be here without her. He did not want to be here at all.
He found the buildings shabby, the roads abysmal, the food anemic, the people difficult
to understand, and the policemen with machine guns unsettling. But it was what she
would have wanted. He suspected his lack of enthusiasm for his heritage had led to
Emily’s lack of enthusiasm for their marriage. So he had come, alone, with one
shamefully small valise and no slicker.
A few miles from the station, Lembile slowed the vehicle and turned off the road.
He piloted the Rover through knee-high scrub and a stand of trees with thorns that
scraped the windows as they passed. When they cleared the trees, Edwin saw a
semicircular gathering of tin shanties, some no more than bits of corrugated metal nailed
together and roofed with tree branches or cardboard. One of the shanties had a walk-up
counter with four people gathered beside it. A plastic sign advertising Pepsi leaned
against the wall, still attached to a splintered wooden pole that had, at one point, been
rooted in the ground.
The people beside the Pepsi shack, three men and one old woman, were short and
dark and rectangular in shape. The woman wore a yellow sack dress and a red scarf
around her head. The men wore long shorts and ribbed cotton tanks with sagging
armholes. Two of the men had strapped sections of bald tires to their feet in place of
4
sandals. Edwin felt their gaze and swallowed thickly; they looked at him as if he were
made of something they could eat. “What is this place?” he asked.
“I will only be a moment,” Lembile said. He put the Rover in park and slipped
out of the vehicle. Edwin felt the rear door lift, then Lembile reappeared with an armful
of small bundles, each wrapped in brown paper. He deposited them onto the counter of
the Pepsi shack.
The old woman looked over her shoulder at Edwin and refused to touch the
offerings. Lembile placed one of the bundles in her arms and pointed at one of the tin
parallelograms, a lopsided affair with two children squatting beside it. The old woman
jabbed Lembile in the shoulder with her finger, but Lembile stopped the assault with an
embrace. He clasped her to his chest, pressed a kiss to her forehead, and whispered into
her ear.
His words calmed her. She shuffled away toward the bare-chested children.
Lembile watched her go, then resumed his seat in the Rover. He slid the key into
the ignition but did not turn it. A moment passed before he spoke. “They are my
family,” he said.
“It’s generous of you to provide for them.”
Lembile turned his head, an unwelcome emotion pleating his brow and locking
his buttermilk teeth behind a closed-lipped grimace. He is upset, Edwin thought. It hurts
his pride to have an outsider see how poor his family is. “They must be proud of you,”
Edwin said.
“Must they?”
5
“You’re setting a fine example.”
Lembile blinked and turned the key in the ignition. A dog ambled by, unafraid of
the Rover’s growling engine. Edwin could see ribs through its shrunken brown skin.
The dog looked sideways at him, eyeing him the same way the villagers had. He felt as if
the dog and the woman wanted him to apologize for having eaten breakfast that day.
Edwin shivered. My God, he thought. What a horrible place.
*
The lodge sat low at the base of the hills. Built of rock and timber, it was three
stories high with a wraparound porch, gazebo, and sculpted terrace. Directional signposts
pointed visitors toward a gift shop, lobby, dining room, and guest rooms. Edwin got out
of the Rover and turned to look back at the lake, but he saw nothing. The lodge did not
have the proper elevation for a view.
Lionel Ashby clapped him on the shoulder as soon as he was within reach. His
uncle’s great brown mane had bleached with age, but the Ashby eyes, watery and blue,
looked back at him with warmth. “Hello, my boy! Did you see the flamingoes?
Magnificent creatures, aren’t they?”
Edwin tried to smile. Emily had always used words like “magnificent” or
“brilliant.” She liked everyday events to have a larger significance, and he had indulged
her fanciful interpretations. He wanted her to feel significant. He wanted her to feel as if
she mattered in the world, if only because she mattered in his. But now she was gone,
and with her went any desire to aggrandize the brutishness of life. “Indeed,” he said.
6
Lionel waved to a porter, who stepped outside and picked up Edwin’s valise. The
porter, identified by embroidery as “Amsalu,” had the same unlined skin and earnest
expression as Lembile. “Take this to the honeymoon suite,” Lionel said. “Unpack it,
please, and don’t forget the turndown.”
“Yes, sir.” Amsalu nodded and whisked the valise away.
“You must forgive me for that,” Lionel said, holding the lobby door open.
Edwin stretched his lips in a closed-mouth smile. “One room is as good as the
next. They’ve all got baths, haven’t they?”
“I would have loved to show the both of you around. The black rhino just had a
calf.”
Edwin realized he had no idea what a baby rhinoceros would look like. He
wondered why he, on his own, was not to be privy to the sight.
“Do you know,” Lionel continued, “that you can tell the difference between a
black rhinoceros and a white rhinoceros by their calves? Black infants trot behind the
mother, while the whites run ahead, almost as if she were pushing them forward. It’s the
oddest thing. I can’t explain it. Can you?”
Edwin thought it was ridiculous to be asked, considering he’d never even seen a
rhinoceros. “No,” he said. “I can’t.”
On each side of the reception desk, a conical pink topiary rose waist high. They
looked like artificial Christmas trees made especially for a little girl. His uncle pointed at
them and smiled. “Flamingo feathers,” he said. “I pay the villagers’ children to collect
7
them. They make jewelry out of them, too. Twist the feather stems together, roll them
with tape, and glue on a backing. Tourists love it.”
Edwin thought of the bare-chested children of Lembile’s village. The dullness of
their eyes and skin did not prefigure the swiftness or dexterity needed to turn his uncle’s
pittance into a profitable rate per hour. They do not eat, he thought. How can they work?
He wanted to ask his uncle about it, to find out if he, too, had seen the hellish village in
which they lived. But then an image surfaced in his head—Lembile’s face, lambent with
a shame that shone through the most opaque skin on earth.
He could find no way to speak of it.
His uncle ignored the silence. “How was the train ride? Not too inconvenient, I
hope?”
The village drifted beneath his consciousness, into the quicksand that held the
things capable of swallowing him. “The train?” he said. “It was late.”
“I don’t know why they bother with schedules. Or watches, for that matter. They
don’t work here.”
“How do you do it?”
Lionel’s eyes drifted toward the window. “It’s been two years, you know, since
we sold the plane.”
“Perhaps you could buy it back.”
His uncle blinked, then turned his head and smiled. “I prefer solid ground. The
lumps and bumps of it, you know. Did you manage to see anything on the way up?”
Edwin shrugged.
8
“You ought to have stopped in Naivasha. They have hippos.”
“You don’t have those here?”
“Birds and baboons, my boy. Just birds and baboons.” He let his palm fall
against the desk. “Are you hungry? It’s a little early, but I can have Alice start the
dinner service. Plenty of time for a good long chat. Shall I call for a whiskey and soda?”
“I’d like to settle in a bit first. Would you mind if I had supper alone?”
Lionel pressed his lips together. “She really hit you hard with this, didn’t she?”
Without waiting for an answer, he pointed to an adjacent doorway labeled Dining Room.
“Alice will make you anything you want. We’ve only three other guests, so you won’t be
disturbed.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a large brass key. “You’re
in one of the cottages, the farthest from the lodge. If you’d like an escort, just ring for
Amsalu. Breakfast service begins at six tomorrow morning. We’ll talk then.”
A large pink hand clapped him on the shoulder. He felt the heat from his uncle’s
palm soak into his skin. Lionel vanished around the corner, where Edwin heard him give
orders to the cook. When he looked down at his shoulder, he saw a rectangle of moisture
had darkened the olive green cotton to a drab gray.
He made his way into the dining room, where dozens of white-shrouded tables sat
with empty glasses and a full assortment of silver. The eastern wall was almost entirely
glassed in, offering a view of the plain and its wildlife. He could not imagine the room
being full.
He sat at the table nearest the kitchen so the cook would not be forced to traverse
the entire hall to bring him a bowl of soup. Another porter passed by and he wished his
9
uncle had not told Amsalu to unpack his bag. He did not want the man to find the
jewelry box tucked inside his left loafer. They would all know he had arrived alone. At
the moment, Edwin didn’t know which was worse—the porter stealing the diamond, or
the porter knowing Edwin brought the diamond instead of the person meant to wear it.
But then there was no reason for the porter to take the diamond at all when there were
shillings to be had, tucked between his rolled-up socks.
He placed a hand over his chest, feeling the outline of his nylon money pouch.
Deemed an “essential” by Jon and Dottie, it contained two zippered compartments, one
for cash and one for his passport. He had transferred money to the valise only because
the pouch bulged beneath his shirt and he did not like the way the zipper teeth snagged in
his chest hair as he moved. He tugged at the pouch’s neck strap and tried to imagine why
people went out of their way to see a hippopotamus.
When a round African woman came to ask him what he wanted, he ordered a
bowl of pea soup and a glass of sherry. She brought him a dinner roll and butter. A short
while later, she ferried out a tureen full of steaming liquid. He stirred it with the serving
spoon and noticed there was no ham hock. “That will be all,”’ he said. “Thank you.”
He took two sips of the sherry and poured the rest into the soup to disguise the
fact that it had been burned.
*
The honeymoon suite was not a suite at all, but a single room designed to offer
two people an absolute minimum of privacy. The shower and toilet sat in an alcove
protected only by a swinging wooden door. The windows had no glass, only plantation
10
shutters through which anyone could peer or listen. An enormous bed occupied the far
wall.
The green duvet had been turned down and fresh towels placed on the wicker
chest at the foot of the bed. Edwin slipped out of his jacket and flung it over the back of
a cane chair. He thought about scavenging for his toothbrush, but decided against using
any of the water piped into the suite. He removed his shoes, squared them beneath the
bed, and crawled beneath the duvet without undressing. From beneath the cold sheets, he
reached out to turn off the bedside lamp.
There were noises outside he could not identify. Insects, he supposed, rubbing
limbs or wings together in a frenzied mating call. In the distance, animals with throaty
voices hooted in regular intervals—primitive Morse Code for nocturnal hunters.
Edwin turned on his side, resisting the urge to sandwich his head beneath the
pillows. Why, he wondered, had his ancestors chosen this place to stake their claim?
Even if they had come in good faith, why had they not returned once they realized what it
was like? He could not imagine what held them here, other than a perverse determination
to brook no failure. He knew little about his family tree other than what his father had
told him. The Ashbys were descended from the Nevilles or Percys or some such family,
ruined in the support of a king who lost a war. Once, his father had taken him to see a
battlefield in Hampstead. Edwin had seen no point in watching an empty field and had
gone to wait for his father in the car. His father had joined him not five minutes later.
“Onward and upward,” his father had said.
11
The thatch above his head crackled. Something perched on his roof issued a
complaint at being denied entry, a high-pitched shriek punctuated with a glottal stop at
regular intervals. He shifted onto his other side, turning his back to the door of the
cottage.
He wondered why Lembile did not just give his family the money he’d saved
instead of using it to purchase food from the lodge. Could he not buy medicine, seeds,
goats, or chickens that might do them more good than an armful of sub-par viands?
Surely that was all his uncle would willingly part with. As a child, he remembered
Lionel’s Christmas visits to London, marked by gifts like lodge stationery or pens
imprinted with the Ashby House logo. Each year, when Lionel’s cab honked from the
curb, he’d gone up to his bedroom window to smile and wave as his uncle stepped inside
the cab. He waved with one hand, and with the other, tossed the pens and stationery into
the rubbish bin.
He had never told Emily any of this.
*
When he woke, he rubbed his eyes. He saw his own jacket tossed over a chair
back and a familiar valise perched on a cane rack. For a whisper of time, the difference
between sleeping and waking, he did not know where he was. Then, as his synapses
began to fire, he remembered.
Africa, he thought. Flamingoes. My jacket is wrinkled.
He stood up, fully clothed still, and padded to the shower alcove. He pushed the
swinging door open and saw a spider the size of a saucer crawling up the far wall. He
12
stepped backward. The creature’s hirsute abdomen pulsed visibly. He let go of the door
and reached for his jacket.
When he reached the dining room, his uncle was already there. Lionel sat alone
with a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of tea, the Daily Nation open in front of him. “Hello,
my boy,” his uncle said. “Did you rest well?”
“You’ll need to send someone to my room.”
“What’s wrong?”
“The shower isn’t operable in its present condition.”
“We’ll fix it.”
“I’m not sure you can.”
“You can fix anything as long as you keep at it.”
“Some things are beyond our fixing. They are beyond anyone’s fixing.”
Lionel folded his newspaper. “I told you I was sorry for not switching your
room.”
“I know.”
“They’re all the same, you know. No real difference but the name.”
“That’s not true.” He thought of the way the bed faced the door in the so-called
honeymoon suite. “You know it isn’t.”
“You haven’t ordered your breakfast yet. What would you like?”
“Please ask the porter to move my things to a different room.”
“Because of the shower? Lembile will have it fixed by noon.”
13
The name forced upon him a remembrance of the stricken village and the hungry
old woman. A hot coal settled in his stomach. When he looked at his uncle’s oatmeal, he
tasted its ash in his mouth.
“I will fix it, Edwin,” Lionel said softly. “I can fix it.”
He looked at his uncle, wild white hair in a tufted halo around his head. Lionel’s
skin had reddened over the years, chapped and weathered and lined in a way his own
father’s wasn’t. The two men hardly looked like brothers, one tall and blustery, one slim
and blue-veined. He thought of the flamingoes and the evolutionary quandary they
presented. If a creature’s appearance was the direct result of an environmental need, did
that mean his uncle had proven hardier than his father? That he had been tested more
severely and still survived? He looked at his uncle as if for the first time.
“All right,” he said.
Lionel clapped his hands. “Splendid! Now, please, tell me what can I order you
for breakfast. I have the oatmeal because it’s safe—Alice can’t burn it.”
“You choose,” Edwin said. “I don’t know what I want.”
“Let me go find Alice. I’ll only be a moment.” His uncle pushed back his chair
and hurried toward the kitchen. He burst through the swinging doors at the back of the
dining room. “Alice! Alice, where are you?”
The cook answered in a singsong native accent. “I am here, Mr. Ashby, sir.
What can I get for you?”
“Will you bring out a tray with beans, toast, and strong coffee? As strong as you
can make it, Alice. We’ve got a young man on the mend out here.”
14
Edwin’s stomach turned over at the thought. He looked down at his uncle’s halfeaten bowl of oatmeal. Something was not right, something inside him.
“Mr. Ashby,” the cook said, voice rising on the final syllable as if it were a
question. In a quieter tone, she asked him where the previous evening’s delivery had
been placed.
“In the cooler,” Lionel answered, “where it always is.”
“It is not there, Mr. Ashby.”
“I’m sure you’re not looking closely, Alice. Come here. We’ll look together.”
Edwin could not see into the kitchen from his vantage point. His stomach made
noise and he pressed a hand to it. His fingers brushed against the money pouch beneath
his shirt; he had slept in it without realizing it.
He pulled the pouch from beneath his shirt. It bulged with folded Kenya shillings,
exchanged hastily at the airport. He realized he did not know how many shillings made
up one pound sterling, nor how much of his cash he’d transferred to the valise.
“Did you look over here?” Lionel asked. “Under the rack of lamb?”
“Yes, sir.” Alice paused. “There was to be fresh beef,” she said. “For tonight’s
Wellington.”
“I can read the menu, Alice. What have you done with the meat?”
Edwin wondered how much the beef had cost. Was it flown in from Nairobi, or
driven in from a local butcher? Would it arrive packed in ice, like an organ waiting to be
transplanted?
“I have not touched it, sir.”
15
“If that were true, it would be sitting right here. Kilos of fresh meat, Alice! Do
you realize what that costs?”
“I did not touch it, Mr. Ashby, I swear. It is missing.”
“This is the third time this month! I know the delivery arrived—I signed for it
myself. What have you done with it?”
“I do nothing, Mr. Ashby! I cook for you, like you ask me to.”
“The sous-chef has only been here two weeks. Neither the waitstaff nor the
porters are out back when the deliveries arrive. Alice, you know you are doing wrong,
don’t you?”
“I would not steal from you, Mr. Ashby. I would never do it!”
His uncle threw something heavy to the floor—a pot or saucepan. “I can’t have
it, Alice! I run a business, not a charity! Isn’t it enough that I feed you while you are
here? What more must I do for you in order for you not to steal from me?”
The woman named Alice began to sob. “I do not steal, Mr. Ashby. I swear to
you.”
“Get your things,” Lionel said softly. “I will not see you here again.”
Alice’s sobs became wails. Edwin suddenly felt short of breath, too, as if her
gasps had removed all oxygen from the air. He felt his lungs begin to burn.
The beef would not arrive in ice.
It would arrive wrapped in brown paper.
When he remembered his words to Lembile in the Land Rover, he felt his face
begin to burn, too. He had been wrong. Wrong about everything.
16
His legs twitched and he wanted to run. He wanted to get up and go to his room
and pretend never to have heard this conversation. What could he possibly do—sacrifice
Lembile to save Alice? The landscape of his choice opened up before him like a
minefield. Every place he stepped would be the wrong one.
This whole barbarous country, he thought. It is one enormous minefield.
He tried to picture a rhinoceros. What had his uncle said about them? The white
rhinoceros babies trotted ahead of their mothers. If that were true, the calf would be the
first one to step on a mine. It would be blown up before it’s mother’s eyes. Or what
about the other species? The black rhinoceros mother, she would be blown up for
marching ahead. One rhinoceros would lose its child, the other its mother. Two species,
neither whole. How did anything survive here?
A moment later, Lionel emerged from the kitchen with an embarrassed smile. He
pushed his white mane back from his forehead. “I’m sorry you had to hear that, but
that’s an African for you—cooking with one hand, stealing with the other.”
They are hungry, Edwin wanted to say.
“No matter,” Lionel continued. “I’ll call up Lembile for reinforcements. I won’t
have my favorite nephew go without. I’ll fix us some tea while Lembile heats up your
beans and toast.” Then his uncle narrowed his eyes. “Good God! What is your money
bag doing outside of your shirt? Put it away before someone robs you blind.”
Edwin looked down at the cheap nylon pouch. He thought of the tin shanties and
the tire shoes and the hungry dog. He did not know why evolution had carried some men
out of Africa and not others. He did not know why Lembile should be saved and not
17
Alice. He did not know why anyone would choose to remain in a place where not
everyone could be saved.
“Edwin, did you hear me?”
He looked at his uncle, at the cornflower-blue Ashby eyes. They were rheumy,
permanently traced with red. His father’s eyes were clear.
Adaptation was meant to solve problems, but what happened when there was no
solution? What happened when even the creator could not provide an answer? A private
plane solved nothing. A nylon pouch solved nothing. All they did was remind you of the
problem every time you moved.
“I heard you,” Edwin said.
He looked out the dining room’s enormous picture window. A glimmer of light
swam on the horizon. It was too close to be the lake.
18
Splinters
Beth watched her sister pull one white tennis shoe out from under the purple
comforter. Natalie turned the shoe over to inspect the sole, tracing every line of the
sunburst-imprinted rubber with the tip of her index finger. “Jesus, Nat, don’t do that,”
she said. “You don’t know what you stepped in.”
Natalie held her palm over the sole. Ink stains bloomed on the backs of her hands
like purple winter pansies. The ends of her nails, split and bitten, shone indigo.
“Where’s the pen?” Beth asked.
“I can’t wear this. Louis XIV would shit twice and die if he knew we were all
stepping on his personal emblem.”
Beth sighed. Natalie had worn the shoe yesterday and the day before and the day
before. “Just put it on. We’re already late.”
“He’ll be pissed. I warned you.”
Beth reached for her sister’s hair. She ran her fingertips through Natalie’s
lumbar-length strands, trying to separate them as best she could. Some days she found
candle wax or ramen noodles or pieces of chewed paper stuck to them. The doctors had
likened avolition to caring for an aging parent. Beth did not agree. Aging parents were
weak, infirm, shaking with the weight of decades. Natalie was not. She was strong. The
thing inside her knew that, of course. “I wish you’d let me cut this,” she said.
Natalie closed her eyes. “If I did, you wouldn’t do this anymore.”
19
“I already told you we’re late.” She gathered Natalie’s hair into a ponytail,
twisted the tail into a bun, and looked around for something to use as a hair stick.
“Chopsticks?”
Natalie reached toward the nightstand. She grabbed a thin piece of plastic, long
and octahedral, and handed it up to Beth. One end was smooth, the other jagged.
Beth took it from her and held the jagged end in front of her eyes. “What is this?”
The jagged end had peaks and valleys, deep enough and sharp enough to wound. “What
the hell is this?” It had been there, all this time, within reach at any moment of the dark
night, when the cold or the wings or the pain became too much. “Answer me, Nat.”
“It was that guy across the street again.”
“He gave this to you?”
Natalie shook her head. Beth’s hand traveled with the movement to hold her
sister’s hair in place. “He was looking in here again. I tried to close the blinds.”
“Close them or destroy them?”
“They wouldn’t fold straight.”
“They’re cheap blinds.”
“I got mad.”
“We talked about this.”
“I don’t like him.”
“You don’t know him.”
“He looked like Ramses.”
“No one knows what Ramses looked like.”
20
“I do,” Natalie said softly.
Beth’s fingertips curled inward, pressing on Natalie’s skull. I know you’re in
there, she thought. And I know you hate me, but please, don’t take it out on her again.
“Put on your shoes,” she said, covering the jagged end of the broken rod with her thumb
and slipping it into her sister’s hair to hold the coil in place. “I need to pick up my son.”
*
Seth always waited for her in the same place, on the corner of the block in front of
the bus loading zone. Middle school was a dangerous place for a boy to be picked up by
his mother, but Seth’s father, her ex, was so popular that the other kids overlooked Seth’s
social liabilities. They wanted to make friends with him in the hopes of being invited to
the set, of finding out what it was really like to be on a TV show. One time, she’d heard
him tell another kid on the phone that Jack was moving to England, that he’d gotten a
role on some East Neighbor Wessex Come Hither Abbey show. She’d bitten her lip until
it was Joseph Stalin red to keep from offering a better lie.
A year ago, in the hospital, he’d been the one sitting there when Natalie woke up.
By the time she came back from the vending machine, he was bawling in Nat’s bandaged
arms. Her sister whispered something in his ear that made him cry harder. When she
thought of what it might have been, she shut it away in the dark place beneath her heart
that held all the screams she had never let loose.
That night at St. Luke’s was a bucket of the blackest pitch, dumped upside down
to tar her whole life. She could not get free of it, no matter how she fought. It only
stiffened with time, turning her limbs into petrified branches. She waved them and
21
swayed them but never caught hold of her son or her sister. All she could do was keep
them entangled beside her until she found a way to dissolve the tar. Once she dissolved
the tar, she would figure out how to heal the scars. Seth’s were in his heart, and she saw
them every time she looked at her son. Natalie’s were on her arms, and she saw them
every moment she lived and breathed, beneath the skin of her eyelids while she slept.
“Do you see him?” she asked, pulling up to the curb and pressing the brake to the
floor. Natalie pointed out her son’s thin figure before she herself had time to spot him.
She looked at Natalie’s left hand, clenched around the seat frame until her knuckles
bleached. “Nat,” she said softly. “You all right?”
“I’m fine,” her sister said. “It’s fine.”
Beth’s hand hovered over the “unlock” button. “Are you sure?”
“Like Napoleon.”
“Napoleon at Marengo or Napoleon at Waterloo?”
“He had Waterloo in the bag, Beth. You know that.”
Seth knocked on the window of the back passenger seat. “Shit,” Beth said. She
counted to three and then tapped the button that would let her son into the car. All she
could do was hope to get back home before anything happened. Her hands gripped the
steering wheel, thumbs resting on small rectangular buttons printed with pluses and
minuses. She did not know what they could possibly add or subtract.
A black messenger bag flew across her peripheral vision. Seth slid into the car
and inhaled deeply. “Out of breath from that long walk?” she said.
Her son grinned back at her in the rearview mirror. “New car smell.”
22
Beth saw Natalie’s fingers twitch. Not now, she begged. Not until we’re home.
Natalie whirled in her seat. “Mendicant,” she said.
“Oh, come on!” Seth cried. “I just got in the friggin’ car.”
“You didn’t study for your vocabulary test. Belial said so.”
Beth tightened her grip on the steering wheel and looked into the rearview mirror.
It had been easy to explain Belial to Seth as a child. Children will believe anything when
the books they read contain witches, goblins, superheroes, and monsters. Angels weren’t
so different—they flew like witches and granted wishes like genies.
Before Belial, Nat had recited Spenser from memory while making spaghetti from
Play-Doh. At the grocery store, she recited a running tally of the car’s total, plus tax,
with each new item deposited inside it. She had a pet spider, Medusa, and liked to wear a
white Strawberry Shortcake pinafore with bright red knee socks. One day, she went to
school complaining of a headache. Sometime before recess, she collapsed at the
chalkboard of her fourth-grade classroom. They had all been called to the hospital, where
two days later, she woke up and said an angel had taken up residence in her head. It
crouched in the viscous space between her brain and her skull, and his wings stung her
every time he moved, she said. His name was Belial. She asked the doctors to show her
the X-ray so she could see what he looked like.
It was all downhill from there.
The doctors’ first request was for Natalie to be institutionalized. Their mother
hesitated. Having a schizophrenic child was embarrassing, but having an
23
institutionalized child whose absence from family photos would have to be explained was
even more embarrassing. Their mother ordered the doctors to fix it. They did.
From the age of nine until fourteen, Natalie did not know what day it was, what
year it was, or how to leave the house. Their mother filled every prescription the doctors
would give her, Thorazine and Haldol and Clozaril, mixed in the food processor with
yogurt or strawberry ice cream. When their parents swerved to avoid a bicyclist on the
road, Beth became her legal guardian. Even now, the doctors made sure never to touch
her hands, as if her sister’s condition might be something both genetic and
communicable. Not one of them could explain why Natalie chose an angel as her
hallucination of preference. Not one of them could give her a good reason why any of it
happened at all—except to tell her that a very selfish little girl had probably woken up
one day and decided to steal the spotlight from her normal, well-adjusted parents and
sibling.
Fuckwits, she thought. They don’t see it.
In the rearview mirror, she saw Seth fold his lips, pressing them inward until it
looked like he didn’t have any. It was what he did when he was thinking. Beth exhaled.
Thinking is good. She put the car back in gear and advanced to a stop sign at the end of
the block.
“If you studied,” Natalie said, “you know what it means.”
“It means beggar,” Seth said. “Tell Belial to suck it.”
“You first.”
“Does he know anything about chemistry?”
24
“No.”
“Can you ask him?”
“He says he doesn’t know. But he wants you to cut your hair.”
Seth brushed his shaggy bob out of his eyes. “I need help.” He reached into his
bag and pulled out a piece of paper, handing it to Natalie.
Beth snapped her blinker on. “What is that? Is that detention? What’d you do?”
“I didn’t do anything, Mom. Jesus, just read the assignment.”
“I can’t. I’m driving.” She waved an old woman in a Crown Vic through the
four-way stop. When the old woman had turned, her red leather pump punished the
accelerator, doubling the speed limit for a school zone. It was wrong and she knew it,
but she wanted something to roar, even if it couldn’t be her. If she accomplished that,
and only that, she could survive. If she survived, Nat survived.
Natalie smoothed the crumpled paper on her leg. “Create a two- to five-minute
presentation on the assigned topic listed below. Define the term, then explain how it is
used in a chemistry lab. Seth’s term is ‘limiting reagent.’”
“Jesus,” Beth said. “We should sue for cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Not helping, Mom.”
She ran a yellow light, the only stoplight between school and home. “Why are
you even doing chemistry? I thought they didn’t torture you with that stuff until high
school.” She turned sharply onto her block, whacking the steering wheel to the end of
its turning radius.
“Chill out, Mom. You’ll strain the power steering. It’s bad for the motor.”
25
“How do you know about that?”
“I read the owner’s manual.”
“Does it tell you what all these plus and minus buttons are for?”
“Mom, you can figure it out. You have a PhD.”
“I teach history, for Christ’s sake.”
“I don’t teach anything,” Natalie said.
Yes, you do, Beth thought. She flipped her visor down and pushed the button for
the garage door opener. Roo, the Viszla, barked and started turning in circles.
Seth picked his bag up off the floor. “So neither of you geniuses know what a
limiting reagent is?”
Beth stopped. All she remembered from chemistry class was that Pb stood for
lead and electrons hung out in something called a valence, which made sense if you
thought about it like a window treatment. “We’ll figure it out,” she said, hoisting her
shoulder bag and unlocking the door that led from the garage to the kitchen. “We always
do.”
*
Natalie watched her sister prop up a cookbook and open it to a peanut butter
cookie recipe. Beth dug out a mixing bowl, measuring cups, measuring spoons, peanut
butter, eggs, sugar, baking soda, unsalted butter, salt, and baking powder. Natalie did not
understand why the recipe called for “unsalted butter” and “salt,” but the lesson was
about limiting reagents, not ill-informed cookbook writers, so she kept her mouth shut.
26
Beth brushed her blonde bangs away from her eyes. “Okay,” she said, handing
Seth a wooden spoon. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make two
batches of cookie dough. Double all the measurements in the recipe, and do the
calculations out loud so I can hear them. Let me know when you run into trouble.”
Seth obeyed, reciting the fraction multipliers as he dipped the measuring cups into
the canisters and scraped them against the rims, just as Beth had taught him.
Belial, she thought, are you sure you don’t know about limiting reagents?
The angel shifted his weight. The feathered tips of his wings pricked her brain,
creating a halo of burning light. You didn’t have to do that, she thought. You could have
just said you didn’t know. She blinked so Beth wouldn’t notice that her eyes had filled
with tears.
In three minutes, Seth managed to get the mixing bowl full of ingredients. He
looked up at Beth. “That’s it—that’s the last ingredient.”
Beth stared at the bowl. “That’s not possible. How’d you do that?”
“You watched me the whole time.”
Beth groaned. “We must have fucked up the fractions.”
“Mom,” Seth said. “Swearing.”
“It doesn’t count if you’re swearing at fractions. Or Republicans.”
“Is there a lesson here?”
“Don’t vote Republican. People will swear at you.”
“Thanks, Mom. Thanks a lot.” Seth thrust the wooden spoon into the dough as if
he were St. George and the peanut butter had scales.
27
Beth dropped her elbows onto the kitchen island and plopped her face in her
hands. “I’m sorry, kiddo. What can I say? God invented calculators and chemists so
real people wouldn’t have to deal with this shit.”
“I thought you knew stuff,” Seth said.
Natalie stood up straight. “Don’t say that to her.”
Belial raised his head.
“It’s okay, Nat,” Beth said.
“It’s not.” For you, either, she said to Belial. She looked at her sister and saw the
faint v of lines pressing outward from the corner of Beth’s eyes. She knew that at night,
Beth wore a strange green mask and dabbed something on those lines out of an
eyedropper. You don’t have to do that, she’d told her sister. Yes, I do, Beth always
answered. “Here,” she said. “Give me the bowl.”
Seth pushed it toward her. She pulled the wooden spoon out of the hardening
mass of dough. Excalibur, she thought. She put it in her mouth and scraped the excess
dough off with her teeth.
Beth groaned. “Nat, don’t. There’s raw egg in that.”
She swirled the dough around her mouth, feeling the rocky granules of sugar
scrape across her tongue. If the sky swallowed the earth, she thought, this is what
Stonehenge would feel like. Soft with moss, hard with age, sweet with memory.
It wasn’t an observatory, Belial said. Or a temple.
“I don’t care,” she said.
“Nat?”
28
“Nothing, Beth.” An image of Arthur surfaced in her brain. Belial had told her
he existed, that he was a British chieftain who had no round table or caparisoned horse or
even a kingdom to call his own. He had a pagan red-headed wife, a very large war horse,
and two Irish wolfhounds. But he defended Badon Pass against an entire Saxon army
with a handful of men and two dogs who believed in him. He created momentum where
none had been before.
Belial flicked her with a wing. That’s physics, little one, not chemistry.
She grimaced. I thought you didn’t know anything about this stuff.
I didn’t create the world, he answered. I just live here.
Natalie stuck the wooden spoon back into the bowl. “Asshole,” she said.
She reached for Seth’s textbook and flipped to the glossary. It defined a limiting
reagent as the ingredient in a chemical reaction that is completely used up before all
others, thus determining when the reaction stopped.
Natalie looked at Beth and thought about what had happened to put those lines at
the side of her eyes. They had never spoken about that night at St. Luke’s. She had
never told her sister why it happened. Beth thought it had been all Belial’s fault, pulling
strings like a puppeteer. She was wrong. Natalie scratched her arm through the sleeve of
her sweater. The cable knit was too thick for her to feel the cocaine-thin lines that traced
the length of her ulna. “I understand now,” she said.
“I’m glad one of us does,” Beth answered.
“Can someone explain all this to me?” Seth asked.
29
Natalie pointed at Beth, standing against the refrigerator with her arms crossed
and four finger-streaks of flour swiped across her forehead. “Beth fucked up the
fractions because she sucks at math. Then she got mad because she sucks at being
patient, too. But she still cares enough to help you find the answer.”
Seth shrugged. “So?”
“So math skills are her limiting reagent. They’re what ran out first. And then her
patience. But not love.” Natalie paused. “Never love.”
Color bloomed in Seth’s cheeks. “Jesus, Mom, how come you didn’t just say
that?”
She saw Beth swallow heavily. “I didn’t know it, kid.”
That was beautiful, Belial said. Maybe someday you can explain the rest of it to
her
Natalie clamped down on her lip. For the second time that day, it began to bleed.
“Can we have dinner now?” Seth asked.
“Yeah,” Beth said softly. “We can have dinner now.”
*
Beth watched Natalie pick up the knife. Wedge-shaped and sharp enough to cut a
transmission, it was more than what her sister needed to slice carrots and tomatoes for a
dinner salad. The smallest one, the peeling knife, was still in the dishwasher. Removing
it and hand-washing it would have made things worse.
Natalie pushed up her sleeves, held the enormous blade in front of her mouth, and
blew on it, deeply, from her throat. She watched the fog created by her breath clear away
30
and then nodded. Beth wondered what in God’s name she found in the fog. “Are you
okay?” she asked, eviscerating a hunk of iceberg lettuce with her hands.
“Why?”
Beth forced her eyes to remain on the lettuce and not on the lines tracing Natalie’s
ulnas. “No reason.” Her sister put a carrot under the blade, toward the handle end where
the blade was sharpest. She pushed the carrot forward as she raised and lowered the
knife. The blade made a clapping sound as it struck the cutting board, a guillotine blade
that fell hard on the platform after slicing through a round, orange neck. “Slow it down,
Robespierre,” she said.
“‘Terror is only justice.’ Prompt, severe, and inflexible.’”
“You have the entire Robespierre canon to work with, and that’s the quote you
choose?”
“I like it.”
“Liking it is one thing. Just don’t believe it.”
“Maybe he’s right.” Natalie paused, eyes drifting to cabinet level. The knife
quivered in her hand.
“Nat, come on.” She stepped in behind her sister and reached for the knife.
“Knuckles in, knife down.”
Natalie’s grip remained slack. “Maybe fear is really retribution. We just don’t
remember what for.”
“It’s not,” Beth said, slipping the knife out of Natalie’s hands and placing it on the
far counter. She reached for a kitchen towel to wipe her hands and camouflage the way
31
they shook. “I’ve given birth without drugs. I know what fear is. It’s stupidity, not
retribution.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“You can’t take this guy seriously. His middle name is Marie.”
“Fight fair. Every French guy’s middle name is Marie.”
“He thought he was a god. He drank the Kool-Aid before they knew it was KoolAid.”
“The Egyptians believed their pharaoh was a god. All anointed kings are
supposed to be representations of God. What about pantheists? God is a worm, God is a
squirrel, God is the green green grass that goats eat and then shit out on a hillside.”
“Do you really believe God is just a steaming pile of shit on a hill?”
Natalie extended her arms. “Stranger things have happened.”
“Don’t do that, Nat.” She clenched the kitchen towel between her shaking hands.
She still couldn’t look at Natalie’s foot-long scars. A full year later and the mere sight of
them brought cosmic guilt rushing up her esophagus in the form of bile, coffee, birth
control pills, and whatever else she’d eaten that day. “And don’t change the subject. No
one called that shit ‘the Reign of Justice.’ Robespierre was crazy and that’s all there was
to it. He fucked up his own suicide, for Christ’s sake.”
“So did I,” Natalie said softly.
“Don’t talk about it.” Beth crossed the kitchen and moved the knife into the sink.
“Don’t you ever talk about it.”
Natalie sucked in her breath and closed her eyes.
32
“What is it?”
“It’s Belial,” Natalie said. “He wants us to talk about it.”
*
Dinner tasted like ash in her mouth. Belial needled her as she set the table, as she
ate, as she helped Beth clear away the dinner dishes. She doesn’t know, he taunted. She
doesn’t know, she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know. He tapped her with a wing every time
she managed to clear her thoughts and all she could do was wrap one hand around the
base of her chair, invisible beneath the tablecloth, and squeeze. Seth chattered about a
new album he’d downloaded, Beth teased him about his hair, and she tried not to reach
for any of the dishes scattered around the table. If she did, Beth would see the soaked
armpits of her sweater and know something was wrong.
She doesn’t know, Belial said.
I don’t want her to, she thought. I want her to be free. I want her to be happy.
After dinner, Seth went to his room to work on his chemistry presentation. She
lied and told Beth she was tired, that she wanted to take a nap. Beth touched her forehead
once, just once, and let her retreat into the guest bedroom without further comment. She
lay down on the comforter and wrapped it around her like a womb.
She doesn’t know, Belial said. She still thinks I’m the problem.
You are the problem, Natalie snapped. Without you, we’d all be fine.
Would you?
Natalie flung the comforter over her eyes.
33
I asked you a question. Belial flicked a wing over her occipital lobe. The room
went dark for a moment and her nerve endings sizzled with pain.
“Yes!” she cried. “Without you, we would all be happy.”
You’re lying. To me and to her.
Fuck you, she said. “I can’t tell her.”
Beth refused to understand that she was her own person, deep down inside,
beneath the hair and scalp and Belial’s wings hinged over the slimy pink folds of her
brain. Those things were only the surface. The core of her, the synapses and nerves and
impulses that flashed between them, came from a place that Belial couldn’t touch. He
tried, but he couldn’t. This is what Beth could not, did not want to, believe.
When she had taken the knife into her hand that night, she began as if she were
holding a violin bow, perpendicular to her wrist. It was Belial who had told her she was
doing it wrong. If you actually want it to work, little one, you have to do it the other way
around. But she was the one who had turned the knife around.
She squeezed her eyes until she saw only purple stars blistering over her eyelids.
An hour passed while she floated in the cosmos of her veins.
When she let go of her eyelids, she felt stronger. Belial’s wings were folded
tightly, into their least harmful position. He had chosen to retreat.
She sat up slowly, making sure it wasn’t a trick. When her feet touched Beth’s
carpet, she felt calm and whole. She smoothed the comforter where she had wrinkled it
and moved toward the door.
34
In the hallway, she heard the sound of the TV. Beth was watching the news.
Then she heard something else—her sister’s voice. Apparently, Beth was talking to the
news. Natalie hung back in the hallway and smiled. That was Beth. She thought she
could change anything. All she had to do was fight hard enough, want it badly enough,
and the opposition would crumble before her superior force of will. Beth believed the
world was a logical, orderly place that would respond to the laws of physics, charm, or
bribes, in that order. Most of the time, she was right.
She leaned her head against the wall and listened to the news anchor and to Beth.
The anchor began reciting the day’s top stories and Beth interjected swear words at
appropriate junctures. Just the sound of her sister’s voice soothed her. Indignation in
Beth was as comforting as coddling from an elderly grandmother. But by the time the
anchor got to flooding in the Midwest, she heard something else. A rustle on the leather
sofa. Beth sniffed twice and then blew her nose.
No, Natalie thought.
The anchor moved on to a story about a blocked initiative to raise taxes on the
wealthiest two percent of Americans. He said something about Republicans and
campaign contributions and Wall Street and record profits. “Oh, you have to be fucking
kidding me,” Beth said.
The anchor said something about investment bankers and bonuses and $5,000-aplate dinners and blocking a consumer protection bureau appointment. When the anchor
used the word “watchdog,” Roo barked. Before the program went to commercial,
something clanged into the sliding glass door. Beth had thrown the remote.
35
Natalie pushed her palm against the wall. Don’t, she begged. Please, don’t.
“Fuck the fucking fuckers,” Beth said to the TV in a soggy voice. “Fuck their
kids. Fuck their dogs. Fuck their cats. Fuck their cars. Fuck their drivers. Fuck their
expense accounts. Fuck their catered lunches. Fuck the fucking income tax I pay to
support their fucking bitch-ass housewives. Fuck those whores and their collagen and
their spray tans. Real Housewife this, you fucking assholes. I have alimony to pay, you
lazy-ass motherfuckers. I have a kid who’ll need college tuition and a dog with hip
dysplasia and a schizophrenic sister and I have to pay health insurance for all of them.
And you need more money from me because you refuse to raise taxes on those rich
motherfuckers who have all the money in the world anyway? Well, fuck you, Senate
Republicans, and fuck you, Brian Williams, for being the bearer of bad news. Fuck you,
Mom and Dad, for leaving me alone. Fuck you, doctors, for erasing five years of my
sister’s life. Fuck you, God, for getting us all in this mess. Fuck you, world. Fuck
everything that can’t find a way to keep us together.”
Natalie touched her cheeks. They were full of hot, fearful blood. Beth’s anger
felt like a snapped bone inside her own body, something that caused her marrow to leak
away and poison her veins. How long had Beth hidden all this? How could it happen in
the first place, when Natalie worked so hard to absorb all the evil in the world? The
angel and his wings and their jellyfish stings, they were all for a purpose. If she didn’t
have that, what was left? “Beth, I’m sorry,” she whispered.
As soon as she spoke, she heard Beth shift on the couch. “Nat?” she sniffed. “Is
that you?” Beth hurried around the corner and reached out for her. Her sister’s warm
36
hands slipped over her shoulders and pressed them gently. They felt like the sky and the
stars and Natalie wanted them to melt over her.
“Beth, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
Beth summoned a smile, the one she used for her ex-husband and the university
chancellor. “Don’t worry about that. I’m just blowing off steam.”
“I don’t want you to say that to me any more.”
Beth’s grip on her shoulders tightened. “Did Belial say something to you?”
Why does she always blame me? Belial asked.
Because it’s always you, she answered. You, or the one you represent.
In St. Luke’s, that first horrible night, she had woken up to find Seth sobbing at
her side. He was telling her things that his dad had said on the phone to him, about not
wanting him to come visit and asking why he had to send money for braces when Beth
was on a full professor’s salary. Then Beth came back into the room holding a paper cup
of coffee and for a shivering sliver of time, before Beth realized she was awake, she’d
seen what her sister looked like when she was alone, in her mind and in her heart. It was
a gray place, thin and scraped dry of hope. Natalie whispered to Seth that she would hold
strong against Belial and all the rest of the evil in the world, and never let anything hurt
them again. All of the bad things, in Seth’s voice and Beth’s face, had happened while
she was asleep.
“Beth, I’ve been asleep,” she whispered. “And I didn’t even know it.”
“It’s okay,” Beth said, smoothing her hair back from her face. “You need the
rest.”
37
“No.” The tears were rising now, faster than she could tamp them down. “Why
am I like this, Beth?”
Two crystalline steaks darted through her sister’s powdered eyeliner. “Jesus, Nat,
don’t you know?” Beth touched her cheek and Natalie leaned into it, drawn to the hum
and pulse of her sister’s blood, her blood, their blood. “They choose us. The best of us.”
“Who, Beth?”
“The angels.”
Beneath her sweater, the scars began to itch, pulled like tectonic plates by the
dryness of her skin. It was the demons and the darkness that lived beneath them. They
wanted out. “I was supposed to keep everything bad inside, so it could never touch you.”
“That isn’t true,” Beth said.
“It has to be,” she said. “Because otherwise we’d be the same. We have the same
blood.”
“But they didn’t pick me,” she said. “They picked you.”
Natalie bent her head. In Beth’s world, there was nothing but the three of them,
she and Seth and Beth, a triangular frame that supported the weight of the universe. But
in her world, the frame became disjointed, pressed outward with the force of an angel’s
wings. They pushed the fixed angles of Beth’s familial triangle into a rhombus or
parallelogram. “They shouldn’t have done that.”
“Nat, I don’t want you to go somewhere I can’t come with you.”
“I tried to,” she said. “I just want you to know.” She looked down at the ghosted
line of her sister’s scalp, edges blurred by teased shafts of hair and individual follicles
38
sprouting hair two shades darker than the tips. It was the only place on her sister’s body
where one could see where she was put together, that she wasn’t a smooth-cheeked
mannequin with gym-tight abs and collagen-plumped lips. “I did it for you,” she said.
Belial’s lips curled into a smile.
*
Beth heard her sister’s heart beating beneath the skin and the scars. She turned
her head so that her ear was directly above Natalie’s chest. Remember this, she told
herself. Remember what it sounds like. Someday, she knew, this thing inside Natalie
would burst into light and carry her away with it. The doctors still begged her to release
Natalie to them, to let them shine lights in her face and experiment with four-syllable
drugs until one of them made her say, Belial who? She couldn’t do it. The doctors’
knives were smaller and sharper, but they were knives nonetheless. They wanted to cut
her and Natalie apart, to sever the Gordian knot of their DNA.
Under her ear, Natalie’s heart changed rhythm, stutter-stepping like an unprepared
hurdler. There were scars there, too. There were splinters of that knife, of that night, in
both of them still. Beth thought of the church down the street, at the end of the block.
Above the door there hung a big round stained-glass window. She could not bring herself
to enter it. It was no coincidence that the pieces of the stained glass were all splintershaped.
39
The Proper Placement of Cannons
The porter at the foot of the gangplank reminded them to keep their passports on
them at all times. They would not, he said, be able to re-board the ship without them.
Lisa patted the strap of the straw tote lashed over her forearm. Tucked deep within its
zipper pocket was her passport, hidden behind a large red canvas wallet. She was
disappointed that no one had stamped it yet. This was Nassau, which was clearly outside
the boundaries of the United States. Apparently she had gravely misunderstood the rules
of international sovereignty.
She stepped down the sparkly gangplank, striped with a grippy traction tape that
enabled even handicapped passengers to hobble down to shore. “Excuse me,” she said to
the porter. “I have a question.”
“Oh, come on,” Carrie said. “You heard the man. We only have until three
o’clock.”
“But I want—”
“The drivers are waiting, you guys.” Jane, Lisa’s roommate, pointed at the fleet
of blue minivans arranged in a half-circle thirty feet from the foot of the gangplank.
Dark-skinned men wearing shorts and sandals leaned against them, holding clipboards
and pens. She hoisted a purse strap over her shoulder. “I’m going down.”
Lisa tried to smile. “Never mind,” she told the porter.
Carrie hurried to catch up with Jane, who had already grabbed a clipboard and
checked their names off the master list of shore tour participants provided by the cruise
ship. Jane stepped into one of the minivans, folding her long legs into acute angles as she
40
bumped down the bench seat to the far window. She clutched her canvas tote to her
chest. Carrie scrambled up beside her, wheat-blonde hair trailing over the seat back. In
three days, Carrie had tanned the color of cinnamon. She’d worn a different bathing suit
each day, resulting in an unruly collection of white stripes bisecting her shoulders in
geometric patterns. “You look like a Spirograph,” Jane said.
Lisa took the last seat in the row beside Carrie. A middle-aged woman clambered
into the front passenger seat. She wore a straw hat, Bermuda shorts, and a t-shirt printed
with the name of the cruise line. Three boys climbed onto the rear bench seat. Lisa
listened as they talked about the games in the ship’s onboard arcade. “Lego Star Wars
III?” one boy said. “That’s for pussies. I wish they had Call of Duty: Black Ops.”
Their driver was the last to enter the vehicle. He slipped his clipboard between
the seat and the center console, then turned to greet them. Lisa glanced at his nametag, a
plastic rectangle that told them his name was Eddie. “Welcome to the Bahamas,” he said,
voice lilting like iambic pentameter. “I will be your driver today. I will take you to three
of Nassau’s most popular attractions: the Queen’s Staircase, the Nassau market, and Fort
Charlotte. As we drive, I will point out to you interesting landmarks and tell you a little
about our historic city.”
The three boys in the back of the van compared cheat codes for Grand Theft Auto
IV. “I have one for never-ending body armor,” a boy said.
“That’s nothing,” another answered. “I found one to make the hookers suck your
dick. You don’t even have to pay for it.”
41
“Okay,” Eddie said. “Let’s get going.” He slipped a key in the ignition and a
warning beep sounded three times. Eddie ignored it.
“Are there seatbelts?” Jane asked, looking down at her lap.
“Don’t worry,” Eddie said. “You do not have to wear them.”
“Isn’t it the law?”
“Yes, but no one obeys it.”
Carrie frowned. “What’s the speed limit here?”
“You will be quite safe,” Eddie said. “Our accident rate is very low.” He put the
minivan in gear and backed away from the other transport vehicles.
Lisa fought the urge to put on the seatbelt. She glanced around the van to see if
anyone else reached for their belts. No one did. She imagined the minivan barreling
around a corner, tilting onto two wheels, and sliding on its side into the water or
smashing into a cement retaining wall. The image was ridiculous, she had to admit.
Women visiting the Caribbean did not die in minivans—they died when criminals lured
them away from their family or friends.
She watched out the window as they pulled away. To her left, the water was flat
and pale. Behind a canal, an enormous orange building with towers and skyways rose
from the sands. To her right, she saw a collection of low-slung tin-roofed buildings and
streets bordered by more sand and weeds. “Notice as we are driving,” Eddie said, “that
many of the buildings here in Nassau are different colors. We color-code our buildings
so everyone knows where to find what they need. For example, the police stations are all
green and the government buildings are all pink.”
42
“I wish they did that at home,” Jane said.
“If they did,” Carrie said, “they’d just pick ugly colors.”
Eddie turned away from the main street and wound through a collection of homes
that backed up to the sea. Most of the buildings had rust stains dripping from window
frames or ceiling vents. The fences were all chain-link. Lisa saw no dogs or children
playing in the small front yards. “What day is it?” she asked.
“It’s Thursday,” Jane answered. “You’re not thinking about work, are you?”
“I wasn’t until you mentioned it.” Lisa’s boss, Charity, was only a year older than
she was. She worked from home and flooded Lisa with instant messages and daily phone
calls, asking for help writing metrics, rubrics, scoring sheets, job descriptions,
evaluations, and other bureaucratic paperwork requested of her by the management team.
It was always an emergency. The documents always needed to be produced by the end of
the day. It was not supposed to be Lisa’s job to write them.
Lisa answered Charity’s calls on the first ring, every time. Charity was never
ready. She had to swallow the gulp of energy drink in her mouth, cough, light a cigarette,
inhale, shout to someone else in the room, or pick up the phone receiver she’d already
dropped. The first words out of her mouth were some form of, “I’m sorry, I’m just
having a really rough day.” Cats were sick, boyfriends or girlfriends said hurtful things,
parents were ill or hospitalized, bowels were irritable, pregnancy was possible, cysts must
be removed, landlords refused to fix things, cars refused to run properly, driver’s licenses
did not renew themselves, mail refused to arrive at its destination on time, banks refused
to help her reverse fraudulent charges, Georgian credit card thieves refused to stop using
43
her accounts, her computer’s wireless card refused to hold a signal. For Charity,
explanations were equivalent to erasures. She washed her shortcomings away in a wave
of words and didn’t understand that more effort could possibly be required of her to make
the situation right. Lisa knew that the easiest thing to do would be to answer the phone
on the third ring, but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. It would have been a surrender. The
excuses would end one day—they had to. The world was round and everything doubled
back on itself eventually.
A thin, nervous feeling tickled the bottom of her stomach. Lisa looked out the
window. The van had turned off the main drag, onto a road without a stripe painted
down the middle. “And over here,” Eddie said, pointing to their left, “you will see our
most famous landmark. It is a flight of stairs carved into the rock, built by slaves in the
late 18th century.”
“What’s it called?” asked the woman in the front seat.
“The Queen’s Staircase.”
“Why is it called that?”
“The Bahamas are part of the British Commonwealth. Many landmarks and
buildings here are named after kings and queens.”
“But it’s not named after a queen,” the woman said.
Eddie pulled the minivan into a small parking lot at the foot of the staircase. “It is
named for the queen,” he said, turning off the engine. “You will have thirty minutes to
climb the staircase.” He cocked his wrist. “It is 11:30 a.m. Please be back in the van by
noon, and we will continue on to the Nassau market.”
44
Everyone in the van turned and looked at Lisa, who was seated nearest the handle
for the van’s sliding side door. She grasped the handle with both hands, turned it
clockwise, and pulled as hard as she could.
The boys in the back seat hustled out eagerly. “This van stinks,” one boy said.
“Yeah, someone totally ripped one.”
“Old lady in front,” the third boy said.
Lisa slid out next, one hand on her tiered skirt to keep it from flying up in the
breeze. Soft and warm, the air felt like a hairdryer aimed at her legs. She closed her eyes
and breathed deeply, wishing she could identify the faint floral scent in the air. “What is
that?” she asked.
“Palms and ferns,” Carrie said. “They don’t smell.”
Back home, Carrie hosted a public access gardening show. She told people how
to keep aphids off roses and use coffee grounds as compost. It did not mean she knew
the blooming patterns of plants native to the Bahamas. To Carrie, though, it was all the
same. She identified pine trees by species from the window of a speeding car, advised
strangers in the grocery store how to grow their own basil, and did it all without seeming
to understand that universal knowledge on the subject of plants was not possible based on
a two-year community college stint. “Well, something does,” Lisa said.
“It’s probably someone’s perfume.”
It isn’t perfume, Lisa thought.
Above them, the Queen’s Staircase rose a hundred feet, a long series of gray steps
cut into the native limestone. Palm trees and dense green foliage bordered the path to the
45
stairs. On the right, an enormous rise of uncut stone formed a sidewall. Visitors had
carved things into the rock and its pockets of moss. “It’s beautiful,” Jane said.
“It’s sad,” Lisa replied. “The graffiti, I mean.”
“Let’s go,” Carrie said. “We can race to the top.”
“Wait, I want to get a picture first.” Lisa lifted her arm and rummaged through
her straw bag. Her fingers splayed over the rolled beach towel, sunscreen bottle, spare
flip flops, and small toiletry case she always carried with her. The red plastic camera
eluded her grasp. She squatted on the ground and began removing items one at a time
until she found the camera tucked into a fold of the beach towel.
She turned it on and waited for its electric whine. A red LED light on the front
would glow when it was ready for use. She put the camera on her thigh and cupped her
hands around it to get a good look at the light. Because the camera’s shell was red
plastic, it was difficult to tell when the LED light was actually lit and when it was simply
reflecting the color of the shell. “Okay,” she said. “It’s ready.”
She stood up and aimed the camera at the staircase. The middle-aged woman
from the van’s front seat was on the fourth step. Lisa moved the camera viewfinder up
past the woman’s head. The top of the staircase was cut off, now, too. Shit, she thought.
Not only would she not have a stamped passport, but now every time she looked at the
staircase in her photo album, she’d see the obtuse woman in a Carnival cruise line t-shirt.
She snapped the picture without focusing or framing and shoved the camera back in her
bag.
46
Jane’s long legs carried her up the stairs faster than the others. She slid past the
older woman easily, turning her matchstick frame sideways. The older woman held her
right hand out, palm flat, against the sidewall. “I should have done this when I was
younger,” she panted.
“Why didn’t you?” Carrie asked, stepping around her on the left.
“You know. Husband, kids, a house to run.”
“Mistake number one,” Carrie said. Lisa smiled. Both Carrie and her mother had
signed up for eHarmony together. One month later, her mother had a new steady
boyfriend and Carrie had three bald men emailing her, asking her why their tomatoes had
worms.
Twenty steps up, Lisa felt her thighs begin to burn. The carved stone steps were
higher than a modern stair; pressing herself up each one was beginning to take a toll.
Jane, unfazed, made her way to the top. Carrie followed, huffing loudly, her blonde
ponytail swinging like a metronome.
When she reached the top, Lisa fought the urge to bend at the waist and rest her
forearms on her thighs. She held her arms akimbo to try and dry the sweat that had
gathered beneath her bra. Everything she had brought on the cruise was machinewashable, but she had counted on re-wearing an item or two during the six days. Her
flounced cotton skirt would be fine, but the crocheted tank was too tight-fitting to survive
the day intact.
“About time, slowpokes,” Jane teased.
“How the hell did you do that?” Carrie asked. “I’m dying here.”
47
Lisa pressed a hand to her bra, hoping it would absorb the tickling bead of sweat
dripping down her left breast. “Are you guys sweating?”
“No,” Jane said. “You’re just out of shape.”
Lisa glared at her. Jane co-opted the the TV for hours most nights to play a
dancing video game, stomping on a mat with colored panels that matched up with arrows
provided onscreen. When she was on her period, she sat in Lisa’s coral-colored recliner
and played the game with the hand controller instead of the dance mat. Lisa had bought
the TV with her first paycheck from her first job. She had bought the stereo with her
college graduation money.
She turned her back to Jane to avoid saying something rude about mat-stomping
video game prowess not equating to physical fitness. Shading her eyes with her hand,
she looked out at the hard-earned view. Between the staircase and the sea, the tops of
green jungle trees leafed out like a tarantula’s legs. There was something predatory in the
angle of their slant. The nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach only worsened as she
stared at them. They were watching, waiting to swallow her up.
Lisa closed her eyes. It was another ridiculous thought, like the minivan crashing.
Maybe, she thought, she had eaten something bad for breakfast. Maybe someday she
would have to ask Jane to use headphones.
On their left, the staircase became a narrow walkway upon which a few locals sat
and waited for breathless tourists. Carrie walked over to an old woman seated on what
looked like a bongo drum. A stack of palm fronds lay waist-high beside her; as they
watched, she picked up individual fronds and wove them into a wide-brimmed hat with a
48
short cone top. A small cardboard sign lay propped against the bongo. Hats $5, Bag
$10.
Carrie reached into her cross-body bag and pulled out a bill. “Here,” she said,
handing the woman $10. “I like that hat. Keep the change.” The old woman smiled and
gave her the hat. “How about you guys? Don’t you want anything?”
Lisa resettled her bag on her shoulder. Their all-inclusive cruise had turned out to
be all-inclusive of everything the ship didn’t charge extra for, like shore tours or drinks
from the bar or tips for every waiter, butler, and porter who inquired twelve times daily
after her well-being and personal needs. Still, she always tried to buy something small
for her mother and sister wherever she went. She stepped closer to the woman. “What
do the bags look like?”
The woman pointed at two that lay on the ground. They were the shape of a
saddlebag with a long shoulder strap. She had decorated them with palm fronds dyed
bright colors, twisting them into little buds that looked like flowers. One bag had blue
buds, the other orange. “I put your name,” the woman said.
“What?”
“Your name,” the woman said. She pointed at a blank space above the colored
buds.
“It’s for my sister,” Lisa said.
“She blue or orange?”
49
Lisa did not answer, still not sure she wanted to buy the bag at all. If she said no,
the old woman would probably be disappointed. But what would her sister do with a
palm frond saddlebag? “I don’t know,” she said.
“What her name?” the woman asked. Suddenly there was an orange-dyed palm
frond in her hand.
“Sara,” Lisa said softly.
“S-a-r-a-h?”
“S-a-r-a. No ‘h’.”
The woman grunted. “Pretty. Shorter.” Then her fingers whooshed over the
bag’s surface, threading the frond into four block letters. The ‘s’ and the ‘r’ slowed her
down a little. The ‘a’ took only four stitches. When she had finished, she held the bag
out with a bright smile. Her teeth were whiter than Lisa’s, even after the do-it-yourself
bleaching strips. “For Sara,” she said.
Lisa reached into her bag for the red canvas wallet. She zipped it open and drew
out a ten-dollar bill. “Thank you,” she said. “My sister will love it.” The bag would go
in the back of her sister’s closet, behind a bathrobe or an old prom dress. She felt her
cheeks turn red as she handed the woman the money.
The old woman nodded and picked up another handful of fronds, weaving a hat
for another tourist on another cruise ship. “We better get back,” Jane said, glancing at
her watch.
“Don’t you want to get something?” Carrie asked.
“Let’s just go back.”
50
“Are you sure?”
“I just want to go back.”
On the way down, they passed the middle-aged front-seat passenger, finally
making her way to the top of the staircase. The armpits of her t-shirt were several shades
darker than the rest of it. “You should buy a hat,” Carrie said, hopping by.
The older woman put a hand to her head. “But I have a hat.”
“Time to go,” Carrie called. “Eddie’s waiting.”
At the minivan, the three boys saw them coming. One boy pointed at Carrie and
laughed. “Dude, she went to Chevy’s. It’s her birthday or something.”
Carrie adjusted her palm fronds. “This hat is awesome. You guys don’t know
anything.”
“It makes you look Mexican.”
“That’s a sombrero.”
“Same shit.”
“You see?” Jane rolled her eyes. “This is why I don’t want to have kids.”
Lisa felt the nervous tickle in her stomach again.
At just past the quarter-century mark, Jane had never been on a date. Twice a
year, she took off her glasses, put on some lipstick, and wore a pair of heels and a skirt.
If anyone tried to talk to her, she looked at the ground and muttered and fled, then went
right back to complaining about never being noticed. It hadn’t been so bad in college.
None of their friends had had a boyfriend or known what to do to get one. But the rest of
51
them learned. Jane didn’t. She declared herself content to wait for God to bring her the
perfect man so she wouldn’t have to “settle” like the rest of them.
Lisa thought of the boys—and then the men—she’d brought home to their
apartment. She’d cried bitterly over two of them, met most of their mothers, and only
regretted her involvement with one of them. She still had the heart-shaped rock the
geologist had given her, tucked in a corner of her nightstand drawer. The first time she’d
ever gone to a spa was when she went to Squaw Valley with the database administrator.
He refused to lace up a pair of skates, but happily watched her wobble her way around
the rink. They were good men, all of them, even after they faded from her life.
Jane hid in her room every time one of them had come over. On Sunday
mornings, Lisa had hustled them out the door to a diner for post-coital pancakes to avoid
an awkward breakfast run-in with Jane. If the boy came back afterward, to gather up a
forgotten jacket or borrow a CD, Jane would be sitting in the living room in a thin, faded
sleepshirt, eating peaches out of a can. Sometimes she held the PlayStation controller,
others she watched the same Jude Law movie she’d seen eighteen times before. If it
appeared the boy might stay for a cup of coffee, she turned off the TV and went back
upstairs. She was never dressed in her Sunday best. Jane had been to church twice in as
many years, both times when she stayed at her parents’ for the weekend.
People lie, Lisa thought, all the time, and nothing ever happens to them. A drop
of sweat trickled down her left breast. It felt like a spider crawling over her skin.
“I couldn’t deal with a kid that turned out like them,” Jane said.
“If the kids are raised right,” Lisa said, “they won’t be evil.”
52
“Not with my luck.”
“It has nothing to do with luck.”
“Then what is it?”
Lisa looked at Jane’s tanktop. It was close-fitting, of pale pink spandex. She
wore no bra. The fabric was not thick enough to conceal the shadow of two dark, flat
nipples. “It’s a choice.”
Jane didn’t answer. She turned her back on Lisa and got into the minivan. Carrie
hopped up beside her, palm-frond hat in hand. Lisa sat on the end of the bench seat, far
enough from Carrie so that her skirt didn’t touch Carrie’s leg. When Eddie turned on the
minivan’s air conditioning, goosebumps broke out on arms and legs.
Their next stop was the Nassau straw market, a collection of vendors who came
from all over the city and neighboring islands to sell their wares. “The market has almost
been destroyed twice,” Eddie said. “Once by fire and once by Hurricane Irene. The
vendors just keep coming back.”
Carrie snorted. “You mean the tourists keep coming back.”
“You will have forty-five minutes to shop, and then we will continue to Fort
Charlotte. Although it is called the straw market, you can also buy clothing, handcrafts,
collectibles, spices, and jewelry.”
“How about dolls?” asked the woman in the front seat. “Do they sell dolls, too?”
“Yes, you can find hand-made dolls in the market.” Eddie tilted the rearview
mirror. Lisa saw his eyes look to the boys in the back. “They also sell candy, fruit, and
machetes.”
53
Lisa heard one boy gasp. “Open the door, lady,” he said.
“Hold your horses.” She set down her two bags and shifted position on the seat.
When she reached for the silver door handle, she caught a whiff of her own sweat—pine
in a land of palm. She gritted her teeth and jerked the door open. The boys tumbled out,
their pocket chains clanging against the sliding door’s grate.
“Remember,” Eddie said. “The vendors expect you to bargain with them. It is a
tradition. You might insult them if you pay the first price they give you.”
Lisa grimaced. She hated the barter system, or any type of negotiations that led to
haggling. The price tag, she thought, was invented for a reason.
“Let’s go,” Carrie said. “I want to find something that goes with my hat.” Lisa
and Jane followed her up to the market, a big paved lot with rows and rows of vendors.
“This looks like a tent city. Like we’re in 2009 or something.”
“That’s depressing,” Jane said.
“Look over here.” Carrie wandered off into a large tent filled with wire shelves.
On the shelves were mirrors, wallets, jars, and small figurines. “Look at this guy.” She
picked up a plaster monkey holding a bunch of tiny plaster bananas. “He’s pretty cute,
right?”
“I like this,” Jane said, reaching for a mirror painted with red and blue swirls on
the back. Lisa noticed she did not look at the glass, but only at the back.
“You should buy it,” Carrie said.
Jane set it back down. “I can’t afford it.”
“How do you know? You haven’t even asked how much it costs.”
54
“When you’re as broke as I am, it doesn’t matter how much it costs.”
“You’re on a cruise, Jane. You have money. Ask the man how much it costs.”
“No,” Jane said.
“Are you afraid to barter?”
“No.”
“Then what? What’s another five or ten bucks going to hurt?”
“I just don’t want it.”
“It’s part of the experience.”
“A part that costs money.”
Lisa turned away. “I’ll be in the next stall,” she said. Jane had spent $70 on a
pair of Nine West heels at Macy’s last week and at least half that on video games at
Game Stop the day before.
“I’ll do it for you,” Carrie said. “Give me the mirror.”
“No,” Jane said. “Just leave it.”
Lisa left the stall. It was more than her friends and the sweat and the money that
was bothering her. Something was wrong. Something more than sweat was leaching out
of her. The things she tolerated at home were not tolerable here. She looked out over the
water and scanned the horizon for clouds. A storm, she thought. I want to see a storm.
But she saw only sky, the same vague hue as the water.
She looked at the trays spread out before her, heaped with piles of daffodilcolored saffron and long brown vanilla beans. She was supposed to imagine cooking
something exotic and impressing her guests by using saffron from the Bahamas instead of
55
out of a McCormick bottle. The only thing she knew that required saffron was paella.
She only knew what paella was because of the chefs on Food Network. I don’t even like
to cook, she thought.
She wandered back to the stall with her friends and the monkey and the mirror.
“If you didn’t want to spend any money, why’d you come on a cruise?” Carrie
asked. “This whole trip was your idea.”
Jane stood in a corner of the stall, shoulders straight and tense, arms pressed to
her sides. “My parents go on a lot of cruises. It sounded fun.”
“I’m having fun. I don’t know why you’re not.”
“I am,” Jane said.
“Then act like it.” Carrie spotted Lisa. “You’re having fun, right?”
Lisa looked at the two of them. Carrie stood with arms akimbo, leaning forward
toward Jane. Backed into a corner, Jane crossed her legs at the ankles and clutched at her
tote bag. “I don’t know,” she said.
Then she turned and walked back to the minivan.
Eddie stood beside it, a piece of yellow fruit in his left hand and a small peeling
knife in his right. He raised the fruit in greeting when she walked up to him. “You do
not wish to buy anything? There is much to explore here.”
“I bought my sister a bag at our last stop. I don’t want anything for myself.”
“Where are your friends?”
“Haggling.” She leaned against the van. “Do they really sell machetes here?”
“Yes.”
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“There’s no way the cruise ship will allow them onboard.”
Eddie smiled, revealing teeth the color of an elephant’s tusks.
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“In Gambier.”
“Where is that?”
“The other side of the island.”
“What’s it like?”
“I know one man whose house caught fire. He got out and went back in for his
poodle. He did not survive.” Eddie held out a piece of fruit to her and she shook her
head. “I know another man who divorced his wife right before she got a big promotion at
work. After the divorce, she used the money to buy a big house. If it were me, I would
have made up with her.”
“Do you have a wife?”
He sliced another piece of fruit, stopping the blade before it hit his thumb. “No.”
She wondered if he were telling the truth. “Why did you tell those boys they
could buy machetes?”
“It made them happy.”
“They’ll be angry as soon as the porter takes the machetes away from them.”
Eddie shrugged.
“You don’t care?” she asked.
“You don’t want any starfruit?” Eddie held out a piece of yellow fruit flesh,
perched on top of the knife blade.
57
“No,” she said, and went to sit inside the van. It was hot and smelled of feet and
rubber. She slid all the way to the end of the bench, to the window, and waited for the
others to return.
The three boys came back carrying one burlap sack each. The middle-aged
woman came back with three small parcels, one wrapped in banana leaves and tied with
twine. Despite her hat, the tip of her nose was pinker than the rest of her face. Carrie and
Jane were last to arrive. Carrie held two plastic bags and Jane held one.
“Man, you should have seen it,” Carrie said, climbing up onto the bench seat and
slamming the door shut behind her. “I was going back and forth with this guy, asking for
more stuff, and then asking for gift wrap, and then asking for a free keychain. It’s a
shell.” She fished in her plastic bag and pulled out a miniature conch shell, pierced at the
top with a silver jump ring. “Check it out! Totally free. I’m going to give it to my
grandma.”
Lisa looked down at the straw bag she’d bought her sister. “What’s your grandma
going to do with a conch shell keychain?”
“It’s cute,” Carrie said. “Don’t be such a bitch about everything.”
“Sure,” Lisa said. “I’ll do that, just for you.”
“What’s your problem?”
I don’t know, she wanted to say.
“Girl fight,” said one of the boys in the back.
Eddie spun around in the driver’s seat. “Do we have a problem here?”
“I don’t,” Carrie answered.
58
It’s a lie, Lisa thought. Don’t believe her.
“Well, then,” Eddie said. “Our last stop of the afternoon will be Fort Charlotte.”
He glanced at the woman beside him. “Named for Queen Charlotte, the wife of George
III. Built by the British in 1789, the fort has never been occupied for battle. As we pull
up, you’ll see the ramparts and drawbridge. There is also a moat that is now empty. You
will have one hour to tour the inside of the fort, and then I will drive you back to the port
where your ship is docked.”
“Is there a guided tour?” the woman in the front seat asked.
“No,” Eddie answered. “But there is a free brochure at the information desk that
points out the fort’s most interesting features, such as the cannon deck and the prison.”
“You like prison,” one of the boys said to another. “Especially the showers.”
“Shut up, douche-nozzle.”
Jane rolled her eyes.
The minivan inched toward a green hill, upon which sat a prehistoric-looking
collection of gray stone draped in peeling white paint. The fort was low, square, and
sloped inward; it looked more like a Civil War ironclad than a landward battle station.
Eddie pulled the van into a parking lot and turned off the ignition. “Don’t forget,” he
said. “One hour.”
One of the boys kicked the back of the bench seat. “Open the door, already.”
Carrie reached for the silver handle and slid the door open. “I hope you melt in
the sunlight.”
“Whatever, Twilight. Just let us the fuck out of the van.”
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“You see?” Jane said. “I am never having kids.”
Carrie scooted out of the van, followed by Jane. Lisa glanced over shoulder at the
boys in the back before following. They looked like boys anywhere—thin, pale, long
hair swooped over their foreheads, black t-shirts, black jeans, chains dangling from belt
loops to pockets. They aren’t evil or unmanageable, she thought. Not the way Jane
thinks they are. They’ve just been lied to by their parents. The same way Jane lies to
herself.
“Wait,” Lisa said, barricading the open van door with her arm. She looked into
the eyes of the boy nearest the door. “She doesn’t mean it. I want you to know that.” If
she could make him understand that the thing Jane said had nothing to do with him, she
would have done something. Fixed something. “It’s important that you know that.”
“Are you gonna move or what?” the boy said. He pushed her arm away and
brushed past her, followed by his two friends. They slid out the door in a tumble of long
limbs, loose pants, and sloppy chains. She heard them laughing as they walked away.
“Crazy bitch thinks she’s Dr. Phil,” one of them said.
Lisa slid out of the van, limbs heavy with sweat and fatigue.
“Jesus, Lisa, what did you say that for?” Carrie asked.
“Because it’s true.” Lisa looked at Jane. “And we need to say things that are the
truth.”
“Let’s just walk, okay?”
Walking is lying, she wanted to say. Sometimes even breathing is lying. She
glanced at Eddie, who seemed to be listening with interest. Staying close to him felt like
60
a lie, too. If they spoke in his presence, those words wouldn’t be the truth. His body
would displace the air around them, make it take different shapes and patterns in their
mouths. It would make them say things they didn’t mean. She wondered which was
worse—never speaking, or speaking and saying the wrong things. I don’t know, she
thought. I don’t know anything anymore.
“Okay,” she said. “We can walk.”
Lisa fell into step with Carrie and Jane and followed the three boys up the path
from the parking lot to the fortress. Carrie kicked a pebble out of her path, and the pebble
bounced in front of Lisa. Lisa kicked it forward on her next step. She and Carrie kicked
it back and forth for three more steps before a sideways kick on Lisa’s part caused the
pebble to drift into Jane’s path. Jane stopped.
“What’s wrong?” Carrie asked.
Jane breaths were shallow and loud. She turned to Lisa. “Why do you sleep with
anyone who pays attention to you?”
Lisa felt her stomach clench around the words. It was trying to digest them, break
them down into their components and search out the nutrients—or the poison—inside.
This, then, was the shell of the truth. The meat of it was still hidden.
Her back was to the sun. It dried the sweat between her shoulder blades. For a
moment, she thought of sunscreen and cancer and the lacy black melanomas the women’s
magazines showed in photographs. She hated those pictures. They frightened her, made
her think that beneath her skin, strange black mold peppered her bones. But we need the
sun, she thought. Why does it turn us black from the inside out, changing us from who
61
we were into something else, a mutated strain of DNA that isn’t what we were born with?
Can one live longer without sun-triggered vitamins than one can with its cancerous
aftereffects?
Yes, she decided. You can.
She looked up at Jane. “Why are you afraid to?”
Her friend crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t need to sleep with a man to
get his attention. I don’t think you do, either.”
“I don’t sleep with them to get their attention. I sleep with them because I’m in
love with them.”
“Then maybe you don’t know what love is.”
“That’s why I’m looking for it,” Lisa said softly. “Jane, you have to look for it.”
“Guys,” Carrie said. “What’s going on here?” She took off her palm frond hat
and stepped between Lisa and Jane. “We’re supposed to be on vacation.”
“We are,” Lisa said.
“I want to go back,” Jane said. “Let’s just go back.”
“But we came all this way.”
Carrie looked down to the parking lot. “We can’t sit in the van for the next hour.”
“Yes, we can,” Jane said. “It’s not that long.”
“I’m going to see the fort,” Lisa said.
“I want to see it, too,” Carrie said softly.
“Then let’s go,” Lisa said. “Let her stay here if she’s too scared.”
Jane’s lower lip quivered. “I’m not scared,” she said. “That’s not it.”
62
“Then what is it?”
Her roommate peeled off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She did not speak.
Lisa watched the girl’s shoulders shake with held-in sobs. She thought about all
the lies Jane’s parents must have told her to make her so afraid. Her own parents had
done the same—you can be anything you want when you grow up, everyone falls in love
and gets married, don’t worry, your time will come. She did not hate her parents or
Jane’s for telling those lies. She hated Jane for believing them.
“I’m going up there,” she said.
Jane’s muffled voice floated out from under her hands. “You always cared more
about your boyfriends than your friends.”
No, Lisa thought. I care about me. Why don’t you care about you? She looked
at Carrie. The other girl’s arms were already circling Jane and patting her hair where it
fell down her back. “Are you coming?” she asked.
“In a minute,” Carrie said. “You go ahead.”
She knew Carrie was lying, too. She would accept Jane’s version of events and
the two would lock their shields together, like Roman legionnaires, against her. It was the
way women operated. It was one more lie they told.
Lisa turned away from both of them. She followed the paved walking path that
encircled the fort. It crested a small rise and then dropped down onto the other side of the
hill and forked. The segment on her left continued around the other side of the fort. The
segment on her right led toward the outer wall of the fort.
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“Pardon me,” a voice behind her said. Lisa turned to see two men wearing thin tshirts and long brown shorts. One had a round afro, the other had spiked dreadlocks.
The man with an afro had a gold front tooth. “Are you looking for a tour?” he said, in a
voice accented like Eddie’s.
“Our driver said there is no tour.”
“There is no official tour,” the man with dreadlocks said. “Our national park
system cannot afford a full-time guide, but my friend and I operate our own tour. We can
show you the inside of the fortress.”
“What’s inside the fortress?”
The man with the afro and gold tooth smiled. “We know all parts of the fortress.
If you want to see the cannons, we take you to the cannons. If you want to see the
dungeons, we take you to the dungeons. If you want to see the pirate wreck, we take you
down to the shore. Would you like to see the shipwreck?”
“No,” she said. She thought of Eddie and the way he had tricked the boys into
buying machetes they would never be allowed to keep. He had done it so easily, without
caring, without thinking. “What do you want from me?” she asked.
“To take you on a tour,” the man with the dreadlocks said.
For the first time, she realized she was alone, in a strange country, with two
strange men. Carrie and Jane were on the other side of the hill. She was invisible to
them. Was this what had happened to other girls who never returned to their cruise ship
berths? Had they, too, been punished for disagreeing with their roommates? White
smiles and golden hair one minute, bones beneath barnacled rocks the next.
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Her purse strap hung loosely over her shoulder. If she told them to go away, that
she had no money, she would be lying. If she told them she wanted to go with them, she
would be lying. Lying was what had caused all the trouble in the first place. Lying was
what made her feel like she had to run away from home, from work, from Charity. “I’m
not looking for a tour,” she said.
“But you are walking to the fort, you are on your way,” the man with dreadlocks
said. “We can show you everything, things you would not see alone.”
The man with the afro backed up another step and glanced over his shoulder. He
looked behind the fortress’s outer wall, into a curve bathed in shadow.
Lisa shivered. She looked to her left, to the fortress. At the top of the outer wall,
the noses of several cannons protruded through rectangular notches cut in the thick stone.
They aimed seaward and landward, ready for an attack from any latitude. The salt air had
rusted them and turned them the color of dried blood. They were immovable.
When Jane walked in heels, she scuffed them along the sidewalk like they were
slippers, as if she didn’t trust them to stay on her feet if she picked them up. She looked
at her feet all day long, waiting for a heel to break or become stuck in a sidewalk crack.
She shred the soles to ribbons. The shoes ended up in the garbage every time.
“Come with us,” the man with the dreadlocks said. “Your tour begins.”
Lisa shook her head.
“You don’t want to see the cannons?”
“No,” she said. “They’re pointing in the wrong direction.”
65
Finger Pointing at the Moon
Ain’t nothing I can do to change your mind. I know that now and it don’t matter.
Don’t nothing matter but the way George Edd’s dogs moved when they saw him coming
out from the house. They smiled and folded themselves in half and spun in a circle.
Kidney-beaning, he called it. A normal dog would pant and slobber and kiss you with a
sandpaper tongue. But boxers ain’t like that. They make themselves smaller, pressing
their heads to their hindquarters, and turn in a circle so you can’t grab hold of them. This
means they love you. Maybe if you can remember that, what I done won’t seem so bad.
*
My mama’s name is Gene. My daddy’s name was Gene. One is named after a
glamorous movie star. The other was just named, period. Names meant more to mama,
for obvious reasons, and she took great care when picking ours out. The first boy was
called Jonas, after her daddy. She called the second Waylon and the third Willie. I was
called Loretta, pronounced low-retta. The school nurse was the only one to say my name
without making it sound like something caught in a drain.
Because I was the girl, I didn’t have to work in the yard or go hunting. What I did
have to do was cook, clean, sew, mend, dust, iron, polish, scrape, and scrub. I learned to
tell everyone’s clothes apart by the way they were ruined. Waylon liked to fish, so his
clothes always had dried mud in the pockets from the worms he put there. One time, I
found an actual worm, crushed and forgotten, its casing shredded and its greasy pink
insides loose like silly string. I left it in, washed and ironed like the piece of ribbon the
pastor uses for a bookmark in his Bible.
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Daddy’s clothes were full of splinters and shavings that landed in his cuffs and
pockets. He worked in the casket factory, carving cedar wood for the fancy coffins with
cherubs and spindles and leaves on them. There were small bloodstains on his pants from
when he cut himself and didn’t notice. Sometimes I found change in his pockets, which I
kept. Other times I found lipsticks and I kept those, too.
My two oldest brothers, Jonas and Waylon, went to work at the casket factory to
help take care of us after Daddy died. The casket factory didn’t need two workers, but
they took Waylon on anyway because Daddy’s death had been an accident and the casket
makers felt bad about it. Jonas had to give up his job with George Edd Hart at the dog
farm. Waylon had just finished school, so he didn’t have anything to give up. Willie and
I were still in school. Our job was learning who Boo Radley was, or Mama probably
would have tried to get us on at the casket factory, too.
The problem was Jonas didn’t want to quit the dog farm. George Edd Hart raised
boxers, real pretty ones that made your heart sashay in your chest. They were wild and
happy and Jonas said they made him feel wild and happy, too. George Edd had forty
dogs on the farm, but he was already on Medicare. He needed Jonas to help with giving
the puppies their shots, feeding them, cleaning out the dog pens, and making sure the
locks on the pens were sturdy.
On his last day of work, Jonas brought me with him. I’d volunteered to help
George Edd after school and on weekends and I needed to know where I could find the
rakes and hoses and things. It was a Saturday in September, hot like the oven someone
might use to cook something as big as a desert. The dogs didn’t like it when it was that
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hot. They stayed in their shade houses and drank lots of water. We didn’t have that
option, so Jonas sweated through his shirt and I piled my hair under a ball cap to keep it
off the back of my neck.
“See here, Loretta,” Jonas said. “This part’s important.” He stopped in front of
the chain-link cage George Edd kept the eight-week-olds in. Six butterscotch puppies
tumbled over each other to bark and claw at the fence wall nearest us. One of them
climbed over the top of his brothers and sisters, using them as stepping stones to get
closer to Jonas. My brother knelt down and slipped his finger through the chain-link.
The puppy nibbled on it. “Don’t fall in love,” Jonas said. “They’re cute little bastards,
but they don’t belong to you.”
I watched the sunlight fall on Jonas’s back. It made the center of his blue button
shirt look faded, like his spine had seen more wear than the rest of him. “I ain’t in love
with nothin’,” I said.
Jonas rattled the door of the cage. “Make sure they’re locked up tight so they
can’t get out, you hear? George Edd takes $200 on deposit, and if one of the pups got out
and disappeared, he’d have to give it back.” He looked down at the ground and tapped
his boot against a rock protruding through the dirt. “George Edd needs every penny,
Loretta.”
“I know. I’ll make sure.”
“If you don’t hear a click, this cage ain’t locked. If it ain’t locked, them dogs can
get out and George Edd will be real shook up by it.” He slipped a key out of his pocket
and undid the lock on the puppies’ cage. “Now you try.”
68
“I know how to close a lock, Jo.”
“Not this one,” he said. “It sticks. It’s rusted on the inside, maybe. Put out your
hand.” He pulled the lock out of the latch and reached for my hand. I unfolded it for
him, revealing a palm scored red with four half-moon dents. Instead of giving me the
lock, he held my palm up and inspected it. “What you been doing to your hand,
Loretta?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Those are just marks from my fingernails.”
“What you been clenching your fist for? You gonna fight somebody?”
“I ain’t never fought. I just scrubbed the floor.”
“Since when does scrubbing the floor mean hurting yourself?”
I looked up at him and wondered what to say. It wasn’t my job to make him
smarter. He lived in that house same as I did. He had to know what happened in it, even
when he wasn’t there. But if I kept quiet, the subject would drop and he’d slap that lock
against my palm and it would sit between us, a hunk of scored silver metal meant to keep
things out. “Mama made me do it.”
Jonas wore a hat, always. His eyes were hazy blue, like liquid fabric softener, and
he said the sun hurt them. He adjusted his hat right then, as if some speck of sunshine
had found its way through the felt. “Made you do what?”
“Use a toothbrush.”
“On your mouth?”
“Who ever heard of puncturing their own hand by brushing their teeth? God
damn, Jonas, you’re dumb as dirt, you know that?”
69
Jonas grinned. “You got one hell of a mouth on you, Lo. What’d you do, grab
that toothbrush and scrub so hard you tore your own skin?”
“I pretended it was a microphone and the floor was my voice.”
“Lo, I don’t even know what that means.”
I thought about telling him to try, but that was one thing you couldn’t ever ask
Jonas to do harder. Jo smiled when he was scared. Just a little and just at the corners. It
was his way of saying, “My try is bigger than my scared.” I ain’t never seen anyone
whose try was bigger than Jo’s.
He put the lock back on the puppy cage and sank to his knees, his back against the
chain-link. The puppies swarmed him, trying to lock their claws in his shirt and crawl up
his back. He ignored them, shifting his hat again and looking up at me out of the corners
of his eyes. “I don’t want to leave this, Lo.”
“Why not? You like hosing dog shit all day?”
“Once I go inside that factory, I’m Daddy. I ain’t coming out my own person no
more.”
“Ain’t true,” I said. “I would know.”
“How?”
“I would feel different. On the inside. I’ve felt you for fourteen years. Even
when Daddy was alive, I never felt nothing of him. You ain’t him, Jo.”
“I guess if you believe it, that’s enough. Ain’t no one smarter than you.”
“You don’t have to worry about the dogs. I’ll take good care of them.”
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“I know you will,” he said, reaching out for me. I gave him my hand and he
pulled me down next to him. The puppies started scratching my back, too, with them
damn sharp little claws. I knelt beside him, his pant leg touching mine.
“You still gonna live at home?” I asked.
“That what you been afraid of?”
“Maybe.”
“I can’t leave you, Lo. You know that.” He tilted my chin up so we looked each
other in the eye. I swallowed the air like it was meringue. There was something in his
eyes, something that knew but didn’t want to talk. “Nothing’s going to change,” he said.
“I’ll be gone a few more hours, that’s all.”
“I got three and a half more years of school.”
“Don’t matter how many years.”
“There are four of us, Jo, plus Mama. Ain’t all of us staying in that house
forever.”
“Not your job to worry about that, Lo.”
One of the puppies bit me. “Ow,” I said, turning to poke its pink nose. “You’re
coon bait, you hear?” Then I got up. “You gonna let those dogs walk all over you?”
“Been doing it all my life. No reason to stop now.”
“There’s always a reason, Jo.”
His eyes followed the drops of sweat gathered along the rim of my earlobe that
dove onto my shoulders. “For you, then,” he said.
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I remember the way his lips curled when he said those words. They rolled
outward, like he was going to smoke a cigar, and then pulled back, and then rolled again.
There were things in his head that he never said, never let people know he thought. But I
knew, because even though I didn’t work at the casket factory, I had a job in this family,
too, and it was knowing what no one else wanted known.
Daddy could have stopped himself from dying. Mama loved him even when she
filled his side of the bed with thumbtacks to keep him away. Jonas watched me when I
bent over to pull laundry from the dryer. He watched me when I pulled a tray of biscuits
from the oven, when I stood on tiptoe to reach the plastic pitcher on the top shelf, when I
bit the eraser off my pencil because I couldn’t think of the right word to describe the way
Estella behaved to Pip.
When he watched me, I felt it in some original place in my bones that formed
before Mama even knew I was going to be a person. A place before blood. A place
underneath bone. A place that came first.
*
It wasn’t a thing that ever started, the way you can start to like fried okra after
you have it from Sue’s counter at the gas station instead of frozen from Kroger. It was
something always there, like the sky or the ocean. Maybe those things weren’t there
once, but it was so far before any human ever dreamed up what it might have been like
without them that it makes it pointless to speculate. You are born with your fingers and
your toes and your eyes. You don’t imagine them into being. That’s how it was with me
and Jo. Might as well have had no lungs as not loved Jo.
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At school, I thought about him instead of geometry or biology. It was stupid to
try and prove how many degrees are in a circle when books exist to tell us the answer,
and since there wasn’t an ocean within five hundred miles of us, thinking about sharks
and plankton seemed like wondering how many diamonds I could fit around my neck. So
I thought about what a piece of mail might look like with both our names on it and how
there were lots of things in life that were meant to be shared, like milkshakes and rib
platters.
I never thought about things the other girls did under the bleachers or in the
backseats of cars. I didn’t want it. Letting a boy who couldn’t spell my name put his
hands on what that name signified was like giving my Mama Seagram’s instead of the
bottle with the black and white label. They didn’t deserve it, and it wasn’t like they
would know the difference anyway.
One time, I thought about Jonas putting his hands on me and I shivered cold, not
hot. The man in my thought who did those things wasn’t Jo, not the real Jo. Other girls
at school talked about getting their boyfriends to buy them things by letting the boys stick
parts of themselves inside them. But I’d had Jo inside me since the day I was born. And
he didn’t need to waste money on flowers or a necklace. It wouldn’t make me happier or
prettier, so might as well keep it and spend it on Mama’s gin, since her passing out was
the only thing that made it safe for me to hold Jo’s hand under the kitchen table.
*
Willie finished school the year after Jonas started at the coffin factory. Even
before Mama asked him to, Jonas said he’d find out if there might be room for Willie at
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the factory, too. There weren’t any other places to work in town but Linus Olsen’s gas
station or Sue Lee’s other gas station. Willie didn’t like Sue Lee because her little sister
turned him down for the Sadie Hawkins dance. Willie didn’t like Linus Olsen because
Linus had a Mexican mechanic in his shop and he let the Mexican play music that
sounded like a car crash, all sharp and bright and loud. That left Willie plumb out of
luck.
“Better be room down there,” Mama said, cigarette tweezed between her fingers.
“They killed your father. Least they could do is pay me six dollars an hour for his son’s
labor. Keep me in the manner to which I’ve become accustomed.”
“There’ll be room,” Willie said. “If they don’t want any trouble, there’ll be
room.”
Mama ashed on my math homework.
“When’s dinner, Lo?” Willie said. “I’m hungry.”
“Baby girl? Your brother is hungry.”
Willie was the only one of us that looked like Mama’s side of the family, all
stocky and yellow-haired and blue-eyed. The rest of us were dark and lean, like Daddy
had been. If I tried to save the best part of dinner for Jo, she always caught me and made
me give it to Willie instead.
“In a minute, Mama.” I stirred the groundnut stew. The peanut butter hadn’t
thinned out enough yet, so I poured some water into the pan and whisked it into the stew.
It bubbled red like Georgia dirt. “We’re waiting for Jonas, remember?”
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“Jonas can heat it up again when he gets home,” Waylon said, coming in the
screen door from the backyard. Waylon worked the night shift and Jonas worked the day
shift so one of them was always home to keep an eye on things. He shrugged off his
fishing vest and hung it on the peg by the screen door. “I got to be at work in half an
hour.”
I turned down the heat on the stove. “Jonas will eat it hot, like the rest of us. If
you don’t like it, you can go to work hungry.”
Waylon glared at me. “I don’t see what’s so sweet about you being sixteen. You
bitch about damn near everything now.”
“You think I ain’t got nothing to bitch about, Way? Why don’t you go to school
and have teachers tell you shit you knew since you were ten? Do you know what we did
in Home Ec today?”
“What, baby?” Mama said, holding her glass up to the light to see how much gin
was left.
“We made biscuits.” I opened the refrigerator and reached for the tonic water,
then poured two fingers into Mama’s glass. “More gin, Mama.”
“Thank you, baby.”
“Biscuits sounds easy to me,” Willie said. “What the hell’s your problem?”
“The teacher said not to let there be any specks of butter or shortening in the
dough.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Waylon said.
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“Well, it ain’t. Stamp out all the butter and shortening and just see if you can
swallow them biscuits without a glass of milk. When I told her that, she sent me to the
office.”
“What do you care?” Willie asked. “Not like you don’t already know how to
make biscuits.”
I looked down at the stove, at the rusted metal coils of the burners and the
blackened drip pans and chipped yellow paint along the edges. “There’s a right way to
do things and a wrong way to do things. I ain’t about the wrong way.”
“That’s news to me.” Willie grinned and leaned back in his chair, pushing the
front two legs off the ground.
“You got actual words trapped in that big mouth of yours, Willie, or just hot air?”
His smile was gritty like tobacco. “Maybe both, Lo. I wanna hear you tell us all
them right things you do in this house, ‘specially the ones you do with Jo.”
I threw down the wooden spoon, splattering the wall with sauce.
“Willie,” Waylon said. “It ain’t the time.”
“Sure it is, ‘cause she ain’t gonna let no one eat until Jo gets back.”
I faced him square, with both hands on my hips. I could hear the stew bubbling
behind me but I didn’t turn around.
“I got a question for you, Loretta,” he said. “Do you two think we’re stupid?
You think I don’t see him lean against your door at night, pressing himself into it like it
was you?”
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“William!” Mama slammed her glass onto the table so hard the liquid flew out the
far side of the rim. It splashed onto the plastic tablecloth and beaded into crystalline
lakes. “Oh,” she moaned, sweeping her fingers through the liquid and placing them in
her mouth.
No one said anything except the stew.
While it was quiet, Jonas’s truck pulled up and parked. We heard his boots slap
the paved walkway that led to the front door. We heard him clap his feet against the
stoop to get rid of the coffin dust before coming inside. We heard his every moment like
the earth was tearing apart, forming a canyon beneath our feet, separating us from each
other like the ends of a five-pointed star.
Jo came around the corner into the kitchen and wiped his brow with his forearm.
He looked first to me, like he always did, and for the first time ever, I wished he hadn’t.
Now it was something Willie and Waylon and Mama would notice, and it wouldn’t
belong to us anymore. “Smells good, Lo.”
Willie put all four chair legs on the floor. “Did you get me a job?”
“No,” Jonas said. He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest.
“They said two men by the name of Middlebrooks are enough. I’ll figure something
out.”
“No need to figure,” Waylon said. He pulled his work shirt off the peg and
slipped it on over his t-shirt. “Loretta can quit George Edd. Give Willie the job.”
“No,” Jonas said.
“Come on,” Willie groaned. “It’s just a bunch of damn dogs. Ain’t no girl’s job.”
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I thought of the puppies and their soft noses and skulls that were still flattening
out. “I love them,” I said. “That is a girl’s job.”
Jonas nodded. “Loretta stays with George Edd.”
Waylon snapped his shirt shut. “Jo, you don’t know what you’re doing. Either
Willie works for George Edd or he works for a man who’d hire a Mexican before he’d
hire a Middlebrooks.”
“I said Loretta stays. I’ll figure something else for Willie.”
Willie grumbled. “This ain’t right, Jonas. Something has to give. You think you
special enough to find something that don’t exist in this town?”
Jonas looked at me. “Yes,” he said.
Mama belched while holding her glass and spilled tonic water down her blouse.
*
That summer, Jonas arranged with Sue Lee for Willie to make deliveries of gas
and groceries. I was grateful to George Edd for letting me stay on so I didn’t have to be
in the house all day with Mama. Between May and August, I grew two inches, which
made it easier to reach over some of the dog pens and unlatch them from the inside. The
dogs learned who I was by the way I smelled. Sometimes I brought bits of bacon for
them from home, tucked into my pockets. George Edd showed me how to give the dogs
who played too hard a cortisone shot, easing muscles that were too sore from running.
One day when I finished all my chores, I let myself in the puppy pen. There was
a litter of seven, all older than eight weeks and all ready to be picked up by the people
who bought them. The first to leave, a flashy fawn girl with a whipped cream splotch on
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her forehead, was supposed to be picked up that weekend. “Two more days,” I said to
her. “You get a brand new family in two days.”
The pup sneezed and began chewing on my shoelace.
I sank down against the chain-link and let them crawl all over me. Tiny tongues
and teeth tasted my jeans and the skin on my arms. Their claws hurt like the dickens
when they went straight through my t-shirt and nicked my belly button or my breasts. I
took turns picking them up and holding them, so they’d be used it when they got to their
new homes.
I sat with them for I don’t know how long, waiting for Jonas to come and pick me
up. When I heard his boots pounding the dirt, I picked up the puppy that was howling the
loudest and held him up to my face.
“Loretta,” he said. “You ready to go home?”
I stared into the puppy’s eyes. He didn’t know anything about the world beyond
this cage, beyond his brother and sisters. His world was small and as long as George Edd
and I were there, nothing could intrude on it. “What if I said no?”
“Hard to walk away from the little ones, isn’t it?”
“Hard? Shit, Jo, it’s impossible. Look at this face.” I turned the puppy dangling
in my hands so Jo could see it better. “You think Mama would let me have one?”
The smile fell away from Jo’s face. “Don’t do it, Lo. Don’t bring anything into
that house. She’ll kill it, you know that.”
“You really think she would?”
“She’ll vacuum it up or think it’s a rat and hit it with a frying pan.”
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“Don’t seem right,” I said. “The whole world sees one thing and she sees
another.”
“She don’t see with her eyes. She sees with her glass.”
“It ain’t ever going to stop, is it?”
“Loretta, come on out of there. I want to talk to you.”
I held the puppy to my face and breathed into its fur. It smelled like cotton balls
and straw. I never wanted to let it go. I kissed it on the neck and it kicked its legs real
hard, trying to get me to let it go. “Ungrateful bastard,” I said, putting him back on the
ground.
I got up and let myself out of the puppy pen. As soon as I tugged the lock to test
that it was clicked shut, Jonas reached for my hand. “Let’s go say hi to Ali,” he said.
Our clasped hands swung back and forth as he led me toward the back of the
farm, where the biggest dog George Edd had ever bred lived in an old wooden house. A
hundred and fifteen pounds, Ali had muscles thicker than my whole body. He moved
real slow, even when you held out a piece of bacon for him. He knew he was the biggest
and he didn’t have to hurry for nobody.
Jonas rattled the chain-link fence around Ali’s wooden house. “Come on out,
boy. You remember me, don’t you?”
Ali rumbled in his throat. He scraped himself to his feet and lumbered out to the
fence to take the treat in Jo’s hand. “I missed you, boy.” Jonas’s fingers, rough and red
from assembling coffins, disappeared in the big dog’s neck scruff. He didn’t look at me
when he said what he said next. “I been missing you, too, Lo.”
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“I’m where I always am.”
“But I’m not. I’m at the factory longer hours than I ever was here.”
“I still feed you every night, don’t I? You still watch me do my homework after
dinner.”
“Of course. I just feel like something’s gonna change.”
“It won’t. Sue won’t even put in the gas pumps that take credit cards.”
“I mean with us.” He gave Ali one last pat. Then he brought his arm back over
the fence and grasped both my hands. I felt the blood pumping underneath his skin, I
know I did. I looked up at him and saw the same pulse beating at his forehead.
“Jo, where’s your hat?”
Jonas’s forehead wrinkled and his face looked like clouds about to rain. “Loretta,
I don’t know what to do.”
“About what?”
“I hardly see you some nights, and that don’t explain the way I been feeling.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
He put all his weight on one leg and looked off into the distance. He squinted like
he was looking for a mile marker sign and then shook his head. “I ain’t never felt you so
strong as when you’re a ghost to me.”
Then he started talking faster, the way he did when he when he didn’t know if he
was right or wrong. Like he thought more words meant more sense. “I know we’re in
this because we ain’t got no choice. But if we’re in it, shouldn’t we be loving the real
thing instead of a ghost?”
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“You gotta work ‘cause Mama can’t and I gotta be in school ‘cause the law says
it. Either we’re ghosts some of the time or we’re nothing.” I broke out of his grasp and
kicked a rock. Without his hands holding mine, I felt the way Mama did without a glass
of gin. I tried to keep my voice from acting like hers and shaking when it didn’t get what
it wanted. “Is that what you want?”
Jonas growled and turned his back to me. “God, I need you, Lo. Without you, all
the other things in the world get inside me and I don’t want them there.”
I thought of Estella and Pip, and Mama and Daddy. They were cruel to the ones
they loved. Seeing how much the other person hurt was the only way they knew how
much their love mattered. But I had no desire to be cruel to Jonas. He had to be a whole
person without me.
Jonas turned around and reached for my hands. He began rubbing my knuckles,
dipping his fingers in and out of the webbing between them. The bottom of my stomach
tingled and I felt parts of me go warm and wet. Jo’s face looked the way my body felt.
We were hoarse all over. “What do you want, Jo? Just tell me what you want.”
“I want it to be real. Any other way’s like a finger pointing at the moon.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A finger pointing at the moon ain’t the moon, Lo. It can’t be.”
He let go of my hands and grasped my face instead, rubbing his thumbs along my
cheekbones like he was painting me with his fingers. He began to breathe with his mouth
open, the way some of the kids at school did when they were sick. “Loretta,” he
whispered.
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Jo’s voice scratched like a record that had been kicked across the floor. He pulled
me against his chest, scissoring his biceps across my back. Then he bent his lips to mine
and kissed me.
*
I picked up the sausage from the pan with tongs, leaving the drippings behind.
Then I reached into the flour canister and flung some into the pan, stirring with a whisk to
make sure the drippings absorbed the flour.
Mama shuffled into the kitchen in a blue bathrobe, her face stiff and dry like a
stale marshmallow. “I’m hungry, baby,” she growled.
“Gravy’ll be ready in ten minutes, Mama.”
Her raccoon eyes watched me as I reached for a juice glass and got her some
water out of the tap. She sat down in a kitchen chair, took one sip, and shook her flat,
frosted curls. “I’ve lost my taste for it.”
“For what?”
“Anything but gin.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, Mama.”
“Oh, I think you would, baby girl.” Mama’s voice was smooth, like the one silk
dress in the back of her closet.
I stopped stirring when I realized why her voice was so smooth. I bent my head
and closed my eyes. “You want to do this right now, Mama? Ten minutes before
breakfast?”
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She reached for the plastic-coated box of Marlboros sitting on the table. I heard
the lid rustle open, followed by the snap and whoosh of the lighter. “Tell me, Loretta,”
she said, words squished and lips locked around a cigarette. “Why don’t you go out
Friday nights like the rest of the girls?”
“There ain’t nothing I’m interested in out there, with them.”
“You know lying to your mama’s a sin, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Then again, maybe you don’t have the first idea what that word is. Turn around
and look at me, baby girl.”
I did what she asked. Mama exhaled in my direction. For a moment, the smoke
floated in the air between us and Mama looked softer and younger. When it cleared, I
saw the real her with hard lines around her lips, all from smoking and none from smiling.
“I know what it means, Mama. It means hurting someone and we ain’t doing that.”
“Is that so?” She got up from the table and opened the refrigerator. Her look
bounced from shelf to shelf like a pinball.
I pulled the plastic gin bottle from the cupboard and held it next to me. “It ain’t in
there. And we ain’t hurting no one.”
Mama swung her hand toward the bottle the way some people swung bats at balls.
“I thought that at first, baby girl. But I was wrong.” She unscrewed the lid and took a
drink. When she looked at me again, it was like looking down a double-barreled
shotgun—two empty holes whose only job was to kill you. “You think it don’t hurt your
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other brothers to see it?” she said. “You think it don’t make them wonder, how come not
me?” She waved the hand with the cigarette in front of my face. “You make them feel
like dirt every day of their lives, more’n any man who might spit on their boots and again
in their faces. I can’t watch it no more, Loretta.”
“If they feel low, it ain’t got nothing to do with me.”
“I should have stopped you, Lo.”
“Can’t,” I said, turning back to the stove and lowering the heat.
Mama came up behind me and leaned against me, her cheek on my shoulder
blade. “Oh, I know it feels good, baby. We women, we ache on the inside and
sometimes a man is the only thing that can make it go away.”
“Ain’t about that, Mama.”
“You and Jo are part of the same two people, me and your daddy. No surprise in
you loving each other, seeing where you came from. But it has to stop.”
Somewhere in the back of the house, a door slammed. I thought about who would
come in the kitchen first. It wouldn’t be Jo. It wouldn’t be anyone who could help me. I
gripped the whisk in my hand and wished it were something sharp. “It ain’t something I
can stop,” I said. “We didn’t choose what blood got put in us or where we got born. It
would have happened if Jo was halfway across the world from me. He would have found
me.”
Mama pushed herself off me and took another swallow of gin. “Either you put a
stop to it, baby girl, or I will.”
“I don’t believe you.”
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“Then let me tell you what will happen, Lo. One day, Willie will see you two
going into the same room at night or hear Jo pressing you up against the bathroom door.
And he’ll pick up that shotgun and shoot Jo dead, or shoot himself.”
I kept stirring, blending the flour and the drippings and the milk. “He wouldn’t
do that.”
“He would if his Mama told him to.”
I spun as fast as I could and ripped the bottle out of her hand. “Don’t no one need
a mother like you! Don’t no one need a wife like you, either. I bet Daddy asked the folks
at the coffin factory to just put him in one so he didn’t have to come home to you!”
It took her smile a minute to catch up with her face and fade away. “It’s always
been you, Loretta, that’s smarter than all them put together.”
I knew what she meant. The bottle shook in my hand. Everything I’d ever seen
in the future began to fall away, like a mudslide carrying half a hill down with it.
“You’re asking me to do something nature ain’t meant for me to do.”
“Jo loves you, but he ain’t made up of nothing but try. If you let him, he’ll try us
all into the ground.” She took one more drag then ground the cigarette into the kitchen
counter. “Ain’t no sense in waiting, Lo. You make your choice while I go put on my
face.”
*
When Willie and Waylon came into the kitchen, I stood at the stove, stirring the
gravy. They turned their chairs backwards and sat with their chests facing the chair back.
Mama came next, wearing makeup and a fresh bathrobe. Jo came last. I could feel him
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wanting to move toward me, to grab my hand and stir the gravy as if he were teaching me
how to make it. He would stir and I would stir and our hips would create an echo
together.
I turned away from him, as if I needed something from the refrigerator. Moving
that way hurt so bad it almost broke my spine.
“I’m hungry, Lo,” Willie said. “Hurry it up.”
I’d already put the biscuits in a basket on the table. The frying pan handle was
too hot to touch, so I wrapped it in a potholder before carrying it to the table. Then I
went back to the cupboard to pull out plates, and reached into the drawer next to the sink
for silverware.
I could feel Mama watching me, as if she had that shotgun trained on me the
whole time. I put the first plate down in front of her. Then I leaned over Willie to set
down his plate. My hand shook and he grabbed my wrist. “What you shaking for,
Loretta? You cold?”
“No,” I said. “Let go.”
I bent over Waylon to put his plate down next. Waylon smelled like soap. He
was the only one who bothered to take a shower before coming to the breakfast table.
Sometimes he brought fish back from the lake, all cleaned and gutted. He never made
extra work for me. He had never done anything wrong. He wasn’t Jo, and that was his
only failing for me.
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Then there was only Jo’s plate left and I couldn’t face it. Mama meant what she
said. Even though I’d been careful to keep the lipsticks I found in Daddy’s pockets, she
still somehow knew. I never found the same color or brand of lipstick twice.
I stood up straight and looked out the window over the sink. Every day of my life
stretched in front of me like the interstate, split and splattered with dead things. Only
difference was what the dead things looked like. I knew what dead people looked like
‘cause I saw Daddy in his coffin. But I didn’t know what the things inside us looked like
when they died. Did they wither and change color, too? If love was the thing that died,
how would anyone ever know?
“He has to know,” I said.
Mama smiled. “What you mumbling, baby girl?”
I remembered what Jo told me at George Edd’s place, about the ghosting. Mama
didn’t know about that. She didn’t know how it felt to carry someone else inside you all
the time. She thought being close was about touching and kissing. She didn’t know that
sometimes the blood and the bones of it didn’t matter at all. If Mama wanted me to kill
something in my head to keep the bodies round the table alive, I couldn’t do it. But I
could pretend. I could pretend so good that no one would know what I had done.
My arms had clasped Jo’s plate to my chest. I lowered it and looked at the back
of his head. There was a sharp line across his neck where the barber used a razor to make
his hair hem up nice and even. All other mornings, I stood behind him and he leaned his
head back into me and that line brushed against my breast. He turned his head from side
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to side, rubbing against my nipple until it hardened. It wouldn’t ever happen again and I
wanted to cry.
“What are you doing back there, Lo?” he asked. “Ain’t I got a plate coming,
too?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You daydreaming about something?”
“George Edd’s dogs,” I answered, hanging back so he couldn’t brush against me.
“The way they say things.”
I bent to the left and deposited his plate. I bent to the right and deposited his
silverware. Then I spun in a circle and walked over to refrigerator to fetch the orange
juice.