Orpheus Girl

by Brynne Rebele-Henry

  When I get back, Grammy’s sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, something I’ve never seen her do. I didn’t even know she had cigarettes. She looks different, older. I can see all the wrinkles in her face but, more than that, how tired she looks. Like she’s ancient. It strikes me then that I’ve never known Grammy as anything other than an old woman with an absentee daughter, that we’ve never known each other as anything more than two people who were abandoned by the same person. Despite the fact that she raised me, to her I’m no more than the straight granddaughter she had to raise, and she’s always been my sad Grammy who’s had to work extra to support us both, who has permanent worry lines and who can never make it through a full movie without falling asleep even though she pretends she’s never really tired.

  I step into the kitchen, sit down next to her. “Grams?”

  She looks at me like she doesn’t even recognize me. “Sarah’s upstairs.”

  “We were just pretending.”

  “You’re both too old for that.”

  “But we weren’t doing anything, really.”

  She sighs.

  “Sarah just likes this boy, Bryce, you know,” I tell her. “Wanted to practice for him. I didn’t want her to. Thought it was a bad idea.”

  Grammy puts a hand on my shoulder. She doesn’t say anything, just keeps smoking. Then she nods at me. Her face has relaxed. I only realize the tension was there after it’s gone. I breathe a sigh of relief, like I escaped something terrible, though I don’t know what I have escaped exactly, or what she would have done had she really found out everything.

  I find Sarah sitting on my bed, her eyes red and sore-looking. She won’t look at me.

  When I spend the night at Sarah’s, her parents always make frozen dinners and then Sarah and I, until a couple of years ago, would take baths together, wash each other’s hair. Whenever I saw her like that, in the bath, I’d get a sharp feeling in my stomach, try to look away so I wouldn’t see her naked body. Sometimes I’d notice her watching me through her veil of hair, a blush slowly spreading down her face, though neither of us ever acknowledged it, so I could almost convince myself that I was only imagining it, that it didn’t mean anything.

  I didn’t know what it meant back then, that hot rush in my belly and lower, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to have it. Then, the year that we stopped taking baths together, I learned what that feeling in my stomach meant. I hooked up with a few girls in secret, didn’t tell her about it.

  One night in her bed, the first time I suggested we take separate baths, she put her hand in between my legs. She didn’t do anything, just rested it there. Then she took her hand away. We never talked about it, and she never did it again.

  Sarah, like me, is almost always alone. But unlike me, both her parents live together, and she has a brother, John. But she didn’t like them, didn’t like how her daddy was always preaching and making her wear dresses and go to church for every service. Sometimes she used to say she wished she had only a grandma like me, but I guess once she got to know me better and learned about the sadness of living almost alone, she changed her mind, because she doesn’t say that anymore.

  I’d often go to church with her and we’d whisper during service, giggling while the Sunday school kids shushed us. At school she was the bigger half of my only two friends. My other friend was Rosie, who, since she saw whatever happened that day, won’t speak to me and gets pink-faced whenever I try to talk to her. Sometimes when I see Sarah, I feel something like love twisting in my throat, but I always push it back down, try to swallow it. I never thought that she could love me, that any girl would. Whenever I thought about my future, it seemed like nothing more than an empty slate. The only certain thing I could ever think of for myself is the promise that one day I’ll be caught, that one day, just like all the other girls like me, I’ll disappear.

  Now, upstairs in my room, Sarah is twisting her coppery gold hair between two fingers, her face all crumpled up. It takes me a minute to realize she’s crying, that she’s shaking a little bit too, like the first time we kissed, only now her whole body is trembling.

  “Sarah?”

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “Okay.”

  She gets up and closes the door with a soft click, slides the lock, then comes back and sits next to me.

  “It wasn’t the first time I did that.”

  She’s crying harder, the mascara her mom makes her wear streaking down her cheeks, leaving black trails on her skin.

  “It wasn’t for me either.”

  The summer before, at Bible camp, a girl named Jean and I got locked in the crafts supply closet. In the two hours it had taken for a teacher to come find us, we’d explored each other’s mouths and I’d let her push up my shirt and run her hands over what were not quite breasts but weren’t nothing either. She stopped before the counselor found us. The counselor’s name was LeAnne, and she had six kids in the program and seemed perpetually dissatisfied with something. Thankfully she didn’t seem to notice that my shirt was half-off, just told us to get the dried corn skeins to the students for their crosses.

  Jean was like some kind of Artemis, a gay girl warrior. She was fifteen, and she lived on a farm-like commune with her four parents and drove a tractor around like it was a car. She had catlike cheekbones and a shaved head. She smoked a lot of weed and always smelled like some kind of strange smoke that left her voice scratchy. I don’t know why she was at church camp since her parents were real hippies, polyamorists. But I guess that, like me, she just needed something to do in our dried-up town, didn’t want to spend all her days smoking on her farm or helping her parents grow flowers and raise chickens.

  It’s a wonder our town didn’t revolt at her family’s presence, given that last year on prom night a girl got found with another girl, and she was sent away by her parents to a boarding school in California, never heard from again. I don’t know what happened to the other girl, nobody ever saw her after that night, when the principal opened the door and saw her with her arms around the other girl, her flame-red hair coming out of its braid. Her carnation corsage’s petals were probably crushed on the closet floor. The theme was Under the Sea and their satin mermaid-tail dresses were half-ripped, the strawberry scented body glitter they’d painted on their cheeks like scales were smeared into ugly pink streaks. I guess their disappearances show that being gay here is considered more offensive than any other sin, which is why I haven’t tried to tell anyone about myself. I already know what would happen, and I don’t want to disappear, too.

  Jean was homeschooled, so I never saw her again after summer ended. Once I thought I saw a girl who looked like her walking down to the river, but when I called Jean’s name, the girl didn’t turn. When I ran up to her, I saw that it wasn’t her at all. I think I thought that maybe I could love her, but I never got to find out. Maybe I just wanted to think about someone other than Sarah.

  The only time I went over to Jean’s house, she was stretched out on a hay bale in the barn like a panther, smoking. She offered me some of her joint. I managed to take two hits before I started coughing my lungs out. I’d never done anything like that before, but I thought I might as well, that it didn’t really matter anymore with everything else we were doing. Things got kind of hazy. Then we were kissing and hay was everywhere. Then she was on top of me, running her fingers up my thighs. But that was all we did because I started getting nervous and couldn’t stop coughing. I thought maybe someone was watching us and knew what we’d done and would tell everyone. I started crying and Jean obviously didn’t know what to do because she just sat there silently looking at her hands until I stopped.

  Afterward she tried to feed me some oatmeal bars that her mom had baked, but I started crying again because even though I never got to know her, I still missed my own mother. Eventually Jean just piled the hay around me like a blanket and ambled off to sm
oke another joint. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, it was dark and I still felt high. I got upset again and demanded that she take me the seven miles home in the dark. Jean sighed, then climbed into the John Deere tractor she used as a car and floored it.

  Jean got distracted and started driving in loops around the school parking lot until we realized we were driving in circles and not to my house. We parked the tractor down the road so Grammy wouldn’t see it.

  When I got home, I told Grammy that I had been at Sarah’s with Sarah and Jean and that we had been working on something for church camp but it was too late for Jean to drive back. Then I ran upstairs before she could smell the smoke on my clothes and in my hair or see my bloodshot eyes.

  I doused my shirt and Jean’s in the rose-scented Febreze that Grammy buys in bulk, sprayed the perfume Grammy had bought me for my fifteenth birthday into my hair. Jean fell asleep in my bed with her arm around my shoulders, but the next morning when I woke up, she was gone and that was the last time I ever saw her. I wanted to tell Sarah, but I never did. I was scared that if I told her what had previously been unspoken, then everything we’d quietly built together over the years would fall apart.

  When she’s done crying, Sarah laughs kind of sadly. “Are you”—here she gestures in the space between us—“you know, too?”

  I swallow. If I say it out loud, it will be the first time I’ve told anyone. With Jean I cried not because she knew, but because I didn’t have to tell her.

  “Yeah. I am.”

  She’s got a weird look on her face, the same way that I’ve seen different kinds of girls look at the leading man right after he pulls them out of burning buildings in the old black-and-white movies Grammy makes me watch with her on Friday nights, the same movies that Grammy never stays awake long enough to finish. Then she puts her arms around my shoulders and kisses me in a way I wasn’t expecting, and I kiss her back in a way I didn’t think I could. And this time, neither of us needs to say anything to pretend that this isn’t right. After, she falls asleep with her head on my chest and I hold her so tightly I can feel her heart beating against my rib cage.

  It’s almost midnight. I’ll be sixteen in three minutes. I hate my birthdays because even though I know it’s stupid, every birthday I think Mom is going to come back to see me, or at least call me. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t spend my birthdays with a sick and kind of excited feeling in my stomach. I always brush my hair out really good so that the curls lie flat. And every time the phone rings I jump, feel like I’m going to throw up, even though I know in my bones it’s not going to be her. And it never is. I don’t know how to miss someone I never knew, but I do. I like to think that one day I’ll go out to L.A. to find her. But I know she doesn’t want to be found.

  Sometimes I buy something stupid and pretend it’s from her. This year it’s either going to be a bottle of glittery daisy-yellow nail polish or a pack of Wrigley’s. Something else I do on all of my birthdays: I take out the shoebox where I keep the only things she left behind for me. There’s a half-empty perfume bottle with a crack in the side. Her hairbrush: a few strands of black hair mingle in with the blonde from the time she dyed her hair the wrong shade. There’s a photo of us on the day I was born, the only photo of us together that I’ve ever seen, the only thing I have that proves that Grammy and I didn’t dream her up. It’s held together by layers of scotch tape. I’m afraid that one day it will fall apart completely and I won’t be able to put it back together again. And then I won’t have anything else to remember her by.

  Twice every year (on my birthday and on Mom’s birthday), I uncork the bottle to smell the remnants of her old perfume, try to use that scent to deduce something about her, what she was like. In the box there are also two photos of Mom in high school, the only ones she didn’t take with her. In the pictures she’s sunny and blonde and smiling. She looks different from the other girls, though. Older. Like she knows things none of them do. Like she came from another time.

  She has sharp cheekbones and a high forehead with big, almost-blue eyes and a Byzantine nose, full lips that turn down at the corners, long straight blonde hair. I got everything but the hair. Mine’s wild and curly and the same black as the shale that washes up on the riverbank. In the pictures Mom doesn’t look happy. She looks like she could have been a different person, like she didn’t know what her life would become or that she’d get pregnant a few months after both pictures were taken. That she’d leave me. That in a few years she’d be a starlet with sad eyes playing a half-naked Aphrodite on TV. Last year I tried to find her. I knew it was stupid, but when I googled her I thought maybe I could find an address, a number I could call. But all I found were pictures of Mom smiling emptily and some gossip columns.

  The last thing of hers that I have is an old bracelet made out of dingy plastic pearls. Sometimes I slide it on my wrist, but it always leaves a green tinge on my arm. It’s my favorite thing of hers. I like to imagine where she got it. Sometimes I pretend that my father gave it to her, that maybe that’s why she left it behind: so I’d have something from him. But considering the things that Grammy’s said, I know that my father, like me, was probably someone she never stuck with long enough to know or keep.

  I hold each item carefully, like they’re relics from another world. Every time I look in the box, I find out something new about her, notice another almost-microscopic difference in her things. Once I noticed that a small yellow thread from something was wrapped around her hairbrush. Another time I found a small dried-up clover pressed beneath her cheerleading trophy. I couldn’t figure out what that meant, eventually decided that she’d probably put the trophy down in a field, that the flower stuck and she never noticed.

  I always wonder if Mom actually wanted to be a cheerleader, or if she just did it so that Grammy would look at her the way she looks at me when I put on the cheerleading uniform and awkwardly hold up my pom-poms, if Mom was ever really any of the things that Grammy likes to say she was, or if it was all just Grammy trying to change her into the girl she always wanted the both of us to be.

  Sarah stirs in her sleep, puts a hand on my chest. I can see her eyes flicker open, but then she squeezes them tight, pretends to still be sleeping. I pull her closer. She smells like the vanilla extract she dabs on her pulse points every morning. I don’t know why she does that instead of buying regular perfume, but she does, and somehow when the vanilla mixes with the scent of her skin, it becomes strange and exotic. Like a hothouse flower so rare no one except her has found it before.

  I fall asleep and dream about the wings bursting from my back again, the faces of the choir singers peering down at me. In the dream it’s like I’ve changed so much they can’t even recognize me, like I’ve morphed into something beyond remembering. I wake up gasping. Sometimes when I’m afraid of my future here, on nights like these when I try to sleep but only have nightmares, I think of Odysseus sailing uncharted seas, fighting to find his home again. I pretend I’m only sailing through Pieria, that I have another home to return to.

  When I wake up, Sarah is watching me with an odd look on her face, something between desire and sadness. Her cheek has a mark from where the button on my shirt was pressing into her face, and her lips are turned down with sleep. I sit up, push her off me as gently as I can.

  She laughs a little bit. “Hey stranger.”

  “Hey yourself.”

  She kisses me, and even though I was expecting it, the kiss still feels like some kind of revelation. We stay like this, her mouth on mine, my arms around her, until the sun rises and the light casts shadows like waves over our bodies.

  Downstairs Grammy has set the table with her favorite tablecloth (purple with crosses in the fabric) and put a vase filled with red roses in the center of it. She’s made her banana waffles, a semisecret recipe that takes a pound of sugar. She’s inordinately proud of these waffles and makes them on every holiday, minor or major. Grammy ey
es Sarah, like she knows something she doesn’t want to, but she doesn’t say anything.

  When Sarah’s parents ring the doorbell to take her home, she pulls me back upstairs, telling Grammy that she forgot to give me my birthday card.

  She gives me a short, fast kiss, like she’s trying to work something out on me with her mouth. I don’t mind. I try to wipe the just-kissed look off my face and walk her out the door. I watch the car disappear, until it’s nothing more than a blue speck on the horizon and the dust it kicked up has settled, leaving only the smell of exhaust and tire tracks in our dried-up dirt driveway.

  Grammy cooks for half the day, says we have a special guest, but she won’t tell me who. I’ve already guessed, though: Mr. Paul. Or my mom. But really, I know it’s just going to be Paul. I try to remind myself not to get my hopes up like I have every year since I can remember. I think Grammy’s going to start seeing Paul. He is the only widower in town. I heard at church that every Friday he goes into the woods and shoots birds. Nobody knows what he does with them once he kills them, just that he kills them. I think maybe he’s trying to feel in control of death, since his wife died in that car crash. I heard someone else say that he was in the crash too, that he escaped with only a few broken ribs and has blamed himself ever since.

  But that story could just be a small town rumor, which in Pieria is when a not very interesting or particularly true story about someone in the town gets turned into a myth of epic proportions, just because everyone knows each other and their cousins and their parents before them so well that they’d go crazy if they didn’t believe something strange and interesting was going down. Like the tale about the mayor’s wife being the secret daughter of James Joyce, first spread in the summer of 2004 and now accepted as a fact by everyone (except the wife). Or the story about my father being a criminal nicknamed Pollo, on the lam for robbing four banks in Austin, which has been going around for longer than I can remember. It’s unfair since I never met my father, don’t even know his name, and probably never will. Grammy thinks he’s one of the football players from Mom’s senior class.