“You think I don’t know about your letters?” Teresa says. “I sent them.”
“Well, they worked,” Xavier says. “Here we are. So tell us what you want.”
Cornelia stutters down into her hands. “I have a life, you know. I can’t let anything ruin it. Please, Teresa. I’m prepared to write a sizable check, on behalf of all of us. We’ll be on our way and never bother you again. Unless what you need is a new place to stay. My husband Eric and I have a lovely guest house.” She blinks in alarm at her ill-conceived generosity. “Is that what you want? A home? I can give you a home.” The thought of what her homeowners’ association would make of Teresa and Tomas almost sends me into a fit of giggles.
Teresa extends her hand to her grown son. He stops spreading and lays the limp bread on her palm. She folds it in half. She brings it to her mouth. She takes a massive bite, and chews with her cheeks bulged out. The sight of it, the sound of it, makes me gag. I lift my eyes to the window. I try to remember what we want. Cornelia is right, isn’t she? We just want to be on our way.
“The thing of it is,” Teresa says, “the letters said all five of you. And I only count four.” She waggles her fingers toward Sekou, then purses her lips and makes her voice quiet, so as not to disturb his sleep. “Well, five. But not the right five.”
“Teresa—”
“When I brought Sarah up here, she was open. Damn it, I thought you guys would be open. I really don’t give a shit about Ben’s sob story. He should have come.”
“You kidnapped his mother,” Xavier says. “Maybe you should have thought that through before requiring his presence.”
“Kidnapped!” Teresa takes another bulging bite. “Ben has her locked in an old person jail. She’s not even old! We sprung her free.” Teresa beams up at her son. “My boy sprung her free.”
“Someone found her wandering out on Bushrow Road,” says Xavier.
“Isn’t that the fucking point of freedom? Getting to be free.”
Xavier shoots me a look. Maybe that seventh letter was right, after all. Maybe I can be the one to fix this.
“Ben isn’t coming,” I say. “We asked him to come and he won’t.”
“Well, then don’t ask him,” says Tomas.
He has balanced the paint stick atop the vat of peanut butter. The leftovers drip off the stick’s edges, onto the tabletop, and the instinct to clean it is so absorbing that it takes me a moment to see what his hand is holding instead of the stick. It’s Cornelia’s gasp that makes me look.
A gun is steady in his right hand.
Issy backs toward the door, her son behind her.
Xavier puts his hands up. “Put it down, Tomas.”
“Come back when it’s all five of you.”
Teresa raises her eyebrows as if to say, “What can you do?” Issy is gone by then, and we tumble behind her, away from them, eyes on Tomas, who stays in the dark room at his mother’s hand.
It’s when I step into the sun that you show yourself.
Well, it’s not you, exactly, but it’s a sign. There, on the ground, in the path leading from the Main Lodge to Xavier’s SUV, is the wing of a bird. More precisely, a wing ripped clean from the body of the bird it once belonged to, although the rest of the bird is gone—no blood, no guts, no flurry of feathers on the ground. Just a wing. It wasn’t there when we went inside. It’s not the sort of detail one misses.
Small, black, unfurled—the end of it tipped in gold.
You have returned to me, as I have returned to you. A simple truth, something that could only happen in the Unthinged World.
I know this even as Xavier and Issy and Sekou and Cornelia move me away from the gun, out across Home. Xavier has me by the wrist. I lean back as though I might still pluck up that strange and real sign from you, but Xavier’s hand tightens, and I scream at him to let me go, but then, we are all doing some version of screaming—Sekou, too, his sleep disturbed.
Before I know it, I’m being pushed into the SUV. If I could, I’d scramble out again, but Xavier slams the door shut and Issy wraps her arms around me while Sekou thrashes on her back. Xavier peels us out of there. “Mama, no,” Sekou says, “no, there’s pee-pee coming out!” The smell of toddler piss fills the car. Issy curses. Sekou wails. The gravel skates out under our tires. I realize I’m crying only when Issy reaches up to wipe the tears off my face.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, “I’m so sorry I made you come outside for this. Oh, you poor thing, oh, you poor baby.”
She has no idea it’s because I want to stay. She has no idea that I have to go back.
82
Marta drove me across the valley in her brown Rabbit, which smelled of turmeric. We shimmied into the gravel at the side of the road, parking below an incline that rose into a dense deciduous forest. We ate hard-boiled eggs and slices of honeydew in the front seat; the dry-roasted peanuts were for later. Then the sun rose. Then we climbed.
My legs were a good six inches longer than Marta’s and she was old enough to possess a black-and-white photograph of herself looking just like Shirley Temple, and yet I could barely keep up. Issy had told me that in the wintertime, Marta used a plastic sled, attached to a rope tied around her waist, to transport her groceries from the Rabbit parked on Bushrow Road, all the way to her cabin.
The day turned muggy. The mosquitos found us. One landed on her eyelid and she spoke to it: “Leave me be.” We were on a lightly trodden trail, still green. It wound around the side of the mountain, occasionally switching back the other direction. In this way, we climbed toward the clouds.
We came upon an unexpected break in the trees and hiked across a bald spot, a swath of stone underneath our feet. Marta gulped down her water. She kicked at the stone below us. “They call these the Ledges.” The valley below us was an array of green and blue. We were much higher than the ridge above Home.
“It’s pretty,” I said, before remembering how she’d frowned when Butterfly used that same word.
She zipped her water bottle back into her backpack. “I used to bring my children here.” She made her way diagonally away from me, up the mountain, as though this wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned she was a mother.
The Ledges was made of many ledges, large slabs of yellow stone sticking out of the mountain. We made our way up and over half a dozen of them, then climbed back into the woods toward an unseen, unspoken peak. My thighs burned but Marta stopped only when we reached the next rocky spread.
I dared to ask, “What do your kids do?”
We had a different view of the valley this time. We were pointing eastward, toward the distant Atlantic. The sun was in our eyes. I asked my question as Marta was mid-gulp. I asked in a grown-up way, about grown-up children, because it could be answered with “they’re lawyers” or “the older one lives in Boston” or “my son works in Singapore,” but I might also learn whether they had both died in a terrible hatchet accident.
She held out the bottle for me to finish. “Why don’t you tell me about your father first?”
My mouth was dry but I couldn’t bear to drink. “His name is William.” This was a funny thing to say, except that William was your name, too, and it was nice to hear you on the air.
Marta waved her hand. “I know. And I know he’s serving a life sentence for your brother’s murder. I want to hear the parts I don’t know.”
No one had said our story straight out like that that in a long time. When they had, the facts were only a chance to smuggle in meanness: by terrible boys at that school Jane got us into, or the ladies Mother had once called her friends. But instead Marta seemed to be saying, remember who you are.
I took a long swallow. The water slipped, warm, into my hidden insides. The sun was feverish on my eyelids, but I forced them open, staving off a sneeze. “Mother met Daddy at a dinner party. They served shrimp cocktail. She said she was allergic, but really she didn’t like shrimp.” Was that where to begin, now that I was beginning? “She was very beautiful. So
beautiful he couldn’t look away.” He had always said it like an accusation, but I tried to make it sound light.
“They fell in love, got married, had me. Mother’s family has a lot of…” What was the way to describe it? It wasn’t just money. It felt silly to try to explain in a place so abundant, where what we could eat or drink or grow was the only thing that mattered. It wasn’t just status, or a name that could get one reservations at the best restaurants, although Grandmother had that, too. I thought of Abraham standing in the morning light at the edge of the lake, and though it was absurd to imagine Grandmother wading in to stand beside him, they shared a quality I could only now put into words. “Power.”
Marta’s eyes flashed.
“Then Will was born. I think Mother thought that a baby would make things better, but … Daddy was already unhappy. He said Mother was a liar. He said the shrimp cocktail was all he’d ever needed to know about who she really was. They were always fighting by then. You have to understand, Mother could be wonderful, she would do my hair however I asked, and on our birthdays we got to have ice cream for breakfast.” I was talking of everyone in the past tense even though you were the only one who’d died. If I thought about Mother and Daddy out there, alive without me, I wouldn’t be able to say another word. “When she was happy, she was the best. I think that’s why he liked her. He thought she could make him happy, too. But that was the problem—no one can make another person happy.” There was so much more to tell, like how Mother smelled of orange blossoms, and how Daddy had a nice hum when he washed the dishes, but I felt exhausted. I held the empty water bottle out but Marta didn’t take it. She was looking down, over the valley, her eyes shaded with her small, wrinkled hand. We stood there a long time, until I lowered the water bottle myself.
Finally, she spoke. “Do you know the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus?”
“Yeah.”
“Start where the one-eyed shepherd returns to his cave from a day of tending his flock to discover Odysseus and his men drinking his milk.”
“I thought you wanted to know about Daddy.” I felt silly telling a story she already knew. But she just stood there. “Polyphemus … was angry to find Odysseus’s men in his cave. He pulled a boulder in front of the mouth of the cave so none of the sailors could escape, grabbed two of them, and popped them into his mouth.”
“Real monster stuff,” Marta said.
“Yeah, well, Polyphemus was a monster.”
Marta finally looked at me. “Then what happened?”
“Odysseus was angry, but he was a warrior; he knew better than to waste his energy on that,” I said. “And he was in a tricky spot. Only the cyclops was strong enough to move the boulder from the door of the cave, which meant Odysseus would have to outwit him.”
If Daddy got home before bedtime, he’d call me into your room at the top of the stairs. The street traffic rumbled below. The globe that lit up, from when he was a boy, would be turned on. You sucked on your middle fingers and he sat on the end of your bed, and the shadows of his hands cast on the wall while he showed us how Odysseus had sharpened a long stick with his knife, then put it into the fire to harden it into a brutal point. Mother came to stand in the doorway. He said that when Polyphemus returned from grazing his sheep, Odysseus apologized for having gotten off to such a rough start.
“Odysseus was skilled in the art of rhetoric,” I said, pleased with Daddy’s phrase tripping off my tongue. “He got the monster drunk and introduced himself as Nobody. That way, when Odysseus thrust the pointed stick into the jelly of his eye, and the monster screamed in pain, and his neighbors came to help him, Polyphemus would yell through the sealed door: ‘Nobody’s killing me!’ Of course the neighbors thought he meant nobody.”
“You like that part,” Marta said.
“I mean, that’s pretty clever, you have to admit. Anyway, the next morning, when Polyphemus took his sheep out to pasture, Odysseus and his men were finally able to sneak out. Polyphemus opened up the cave, but since he was blind, he ran his hands over the top of the sheep, to be sure none of the men were escaping. But Odysseus was one step ahead of him—he had his men cling to the bellies of the sheep, and they slipped out of the cave unnoticed. When they were finally back on board the ship, Odysseus called out his real name to Polyphemus, which was a big mistake. Polyphemus was Poseidon’s son, and you definitely don’t want to piss off the God of the Sea if you’re planning to sail home.”
“Well done,” Marta said. “Although you did leave out one detail, and in doing so, omitted what I believe to be the most important part of the story.” My heart sank. Of course she didn’t like the way I’d told it; no matter how many plants I knew, there was always one I didn’t. “When Odysseus and his men snuck out of the home of someone they’d robbed, tortured, and blinded, they stole his livelihood. They took his sheep with them, onto their ship.”
“So?”
“So does that sound like something the good guy does?”
“You’re saying Odysseus is the bad guy?”
“I’m saying it’s easy for a victor to call someone a monster.” Did she think I considered myself the victor in our family’s tale? I was trying to formulate my answer when she took a long inhalation, and let a great, deep breath out and said, “Saskia, I lost my children. They snuck out of the cave like Odysseus’s men.”
“Hidden under sheep?” I wanted to make her smile.
Marta lifted her head toward the rest of the mountaintop, still above us. She looked so sad. I breathed then. I breathed in and out. I looked over the sheer beauty of the valley. How far I’d come from that day with Mother weeping in the drive. Saying your name out loud, on a mountain I was climbing, surrounded by pearley everlasting, which is used as substitute for chewing gum, and tansy, which, when squeezed, is a suitable insect repellent. I didn’t know all the names that belonged to that place, not yet, but if I worked hard enough, someday I would know as much as anyone could about the Unthinged World.
Marta zipped up her backpack. “Stories belong to the victors. In the end, that’s what everyone’s fighting for—the chance to tell the story of what happened, no matter what actually did.”
83
Back at the ranch, Ben’s ranch, Cornelia prepares a sheet-pan dinner. My mind has stayed with that gold-tipped wing on the ground. The house sours with the others’ fear but I’m not afraid of our return.
“Shall I check the dough?” Cornelia calls.
“Leave it alone, I said.” Issy frowns at my grumpy tone. Cornelia’s wearing a “Kiss The Cook” apron, loading the dishwasher. She checks out the window for Ben’s van again. She’s mentioned that she’s roasting chicken and broccoli and chickpeas together on one pan about fifty times, as though we will find this revelation thrilling.
“You sure you’re okay?” Issy leans across the couch so that no one else hears.
“Really. I’m fine.” I do my best to keep my excitement hidden. To whoop with joy about that wing up on the land would be to lose her. Then Sekou makes the Playmobil ambulance guys scream. “Aaaaaahhhh,” they scream and scream.
“Stop that,” Issy says.
“Aaaaaahhhh.”
“Sekou…”
“It’s us,” I say, as the kid screams bloody murder.
She doesn’t get it.
“He’s doing us, leaving Home today.”
She plops down on the floor and tries to gather him into a hug but he scrambles out of her grasp. He plunges two figures into her hands. “Okay, Mama, you play that you’re asleep and you’re a big kid and I’ll be the mama and I’m going to scream!” He lets loose again. Issy looks like she might cry.
Xavier is upstairs on the phone with Billy. He’s been on the phone with Billy for hours. Sekou tires of his reenactment of the day’s trauma and finds a deck of cards and lines them up, one by one, across the floor.
“Want to play Spit?” I ask.
Issy frowns. “I can’t remember the rules.” Cornelia pours us wine. Xavier des
cends the stairs, eyes red. Ben does not come home.
It’s nearly dark when we sit down. There’s no sign of the dogs. Cornelia bows her head and clasps her hands. Her lips mouth a blessing and the rest of us exchange looks. When she lifts her head again, I force some flesh onto my tongue. Proper homage is paid to the dinner, oohs and aahs, it’s the best we’ve ever tasted.
Cornelia says, “I’ve decided to go back to Ohio.”
Xavier sets down his fork. The chicken scratches my throat.
Cornelia’s folds and unfolds her napkin. “That was … too much. Too much for me. I’m not built like the rest of you. The”—she chances a glance at Sekou—“the G-U-N. The whole … way they were. We went all the way up there and didn’t even get any answers. I’m not sure they have them. And Ben’s not going to change his mind.”
“But without you,” Xavier says, “we can’t go up there again, even if we do get Ben to change his mind. ‘All five of you. Or else.’”
Issy shuttles Sekou off her lap and onto the floor. Her hand brushes the top of his head. “Honestly, I’ve been thinking the same thing. I can’t take Sekou up there again, especially after the—the G-U-N. And it just … it brought up so much shit. To think Gabby thought it was okay to raise me there. God, and Tomas is so messed up.”
“My family needs me,” Cornelia says. “My girls, and Eric, they need—”
“We need you, Cornelia,” says Xavier.
Tears bead at the corners of her eyes. “It is a practice to be a mother. To make a home. My practice. It’s what keeps me sane.” She quivers as she says that word, and I understand that she is more like me than either of us care to admit; ever on the brink. “I’m not strong like the rest of you.”
“I’m not strong,” Xavier says, as though she’s accused him of something.
“Your family’s going through a crisis, and you’re able to make this a priority. As you should, Xavier; I’m not criticizing. I’m impressed by your ability to do what needs doing. But doesn’t some part of you want to go home to Billy? Don’t you all think we’ve done our best? We tried to convince Ben. We tried to convince Teresa and Tomas. We escaped when a deadly weapon was pulled on us. It’s time to call it a win. Or a defeat. I’m okay with defeat.”
Fierce Little Thing Page 17
