Where No Gods Came

by Sheila O'Connor

  Back at our house, I curl into a ball on my bedroom floor, bunch my father's jacket into a pillow for my head. The walls are bare except for the gray stains where the pictures used to hang. I try to float away on the waves, let them rock me into dreams, but I can't sleep. I know my father is sitting on the front steps smoking; through the open window, I can hear him sigh. He's waiting to talk to me, to settle this uneasy silence we've lived in since my birthday.

  “Come on out,” he says, when he discovers me standing at the screen door. “You're getting too old to sleep in a T-shirt. Get a nightgown in Minneapolis with some of the money.”

  “Where's your good friend Wiley?”

  “Oh, he's out enjoying civilization for the last time. This isn't his fault, Faina. If you're looking to blame someone, blame me.”

  “I do.”

  “What about a truce for our last night? This isn't the way you want to leave.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “God, you're a stubborn kid.” He yanks me down onto his lap, like he used to do when I was little, wraps me up in the warm circle of his arms. I give in, settle against his body, my back resting on his fat stomach.

  “Don't forget about that book I gave you. I was hoping you'd write down your days for me.”

  I touch my chest. The key to the diary is hidden there, close to my heart, hanging from a purple ribbon under my shirt. “Maybe. Would you do the same for me?”

  “Me?” he laughs. “Jesus, Faina, I can hardly sign a check. You're the one with all the brains.”

  “I don't want to go,” I remind him, though I know nothing I say now will change his mind.

  Ahead of us there is only the endless flat land of ocean and dark sky leading to nothing. After San Diego, where is the world?

  “Is Minneapolis near the ocean?” I ask.

  He laughs again. “That goes to show you don't know everything.”

  “You'll be on the ocean, won't you?”

  “Constantly.”

  When I see him in my mind, I will picture him straight ahead of me, out our old front door, another mysterious ship in the distance.

  “It'll go fast. You'll see.” He presses his cheek against my head; I lean my weight into the nest of his body. Away from him, from here, will I disappear? After San Diego, where is the world?

  Lenore - A Smart Girl

  The night Bobby sent Faina back to me, I stood at the window, watching her little cricket body climb out of the yellow cab, wondering how I'd let him talk me into this reunion. Cash, company, light housekeeping. Temporary. Until he was back on his feet.

  When I heard the thump-thump up the stairway I steadied myself with one last swallow. My heart pulsed in my throat, my hands shook. I strangled my ratty bathrobe close around my neck, shivered while sweat rivered down between my breasts. We should have done this earlier, when I was still ravishing. The beautiful mother. The mother she never knew.

  Through the peephole I scrutinized her, a scrawny stray no taller than my chest. A runt, the waste of a litter. And the indisputable truth: She was without question Bobby's daughter. It had given me such a great laugh through the years to wonder. But there was Bobby, in those dark eyes wild with challenge, the same half-smile sneer, stringy black hair. Clothes he must have bought her. A potato-sack dress, old canvas tennis shoes, drab from washing.

  When I opened the door to peek past the chain, the driver held out his hand for the twenty. “Sorry I can't stay.” Then he snatched the money, left with my change.

  “How was your trip?” I asked, sliding off the chain for her arrival.

  “All right,” she said flatly, but I could see the storm in her black eyes.

  “You can keep your things in Cammy's room,” I told her. “It's this way.” I teetered down the hallway, my heart twisted into a tight knot. Behind me, I could hear the constant swish of her duffel bag being lugged along the carpet. “If you're starving, nose around the kitchen. There's not much in the way of food but you're welcome to it. This is it.” I opened the door to Cammy's room. “You can settle in in the morning.”

  “But where's Cammy? Will she be home soon?” Her voice broke like a snapped twig.

  “Cammy? That's another story.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spied the slight quiver of her chin. She clutched the cloth handle of that enormous bag as if she planned to escape on a moment's notice. Like Cammy.

  “I don't know what you expected,” I said. “But this is it.”

  “I didn't expect anything,” she said, staring down at her shoes.

  “Well,” I laughed. “It's a smart girl who learns that lesson early.”

  Faina - Minneapolis

  During the first few days, I pass the hours sitting on the floor, my back against the apartment door, my closed eyes pressed into my knees. This isn't my mother, I tell myself. I'm not really here. I just want to be ready, my suitcase next to me, so I can walk out the door when my dad comes to take me back home.

  “Don't open that door,” she warns me. “This is the city. We need to stay inside.”

  I write in my diary, everything I've seen so far. The outside of this battered brick building, Lenore's apartment over a bakery and a plumbing store, the filthy marble staircase, halls with peeling sea-green paint, black iron bars over the windows. A woman in a nightgown who won't get out of bed.

  When the delivery boys come from Dakota Liquors or Kenny's Grocery, I'm ordered to keep the chain on the door, slip the check through the crack. “Don't talk to anybody.”

  While she sleeps, I snoop through Cammy's things. I'm living in her room, in the middle of her mysterious life. Worn moccasins. Velvet paisley fringe pillows tossed on her bed. A brass incense holder full of half-burnt matches and ash. Her macrame purse littered with lipstick, a lighter, loose tobacco, scraps of paper. In the afternoons, I close Cammy's door, turn on her fold-down stereo, and listen to her collection of record albums. Abbey Road. Carly Simon. Woodstock. I lie on her twin bed and page through her Jefferson yearbook. No signatures. But she's there, in the ninth-grade class, smiling in the same square photograph my dad kept in his sock drawer. Cammy. Wavy blonde hair, big round eyes, perfect teeth. Not my father. Not Lenore. Not me.

  “I think you'll find I like my privacy,” Lenore says when I ask about Cammy.

  I work on the mystery my own way, piece together the clues Cammy left behind. I study the scribbles in her civics book, The Needle and the Damage Done, song lyrics copied in smudged pencil. I read through a box of old cards and letters. Love notes from boys with different names. Mark. Spider. Flash. Shane. In the back of her closet, I hunt through cardboard boxes of clothes, scuffed shoes, hot rollers, a plastic bag of make-up. I want to know my sister.

  “WHERE IS SHE?” I write to my dad, on blue tissue stationery marked airmail. “I can't believe you did this to ME!” I lick the seal, slip it between Cammy's mattress and box spring. As soon as he sends his address, I'll mail them all. The whole horrible story.

  The night we break our days of silence, my name comes to me in a dream. “Faina,” a low moan. “Faina, help me.”

  My first thought is: It's Cammy. She's alive. She's finally home. But then I open my eyes to the shadowy world of Cammy's bedroom, and see Lenore, framed by the yellow square of street light, doubled over in the doorway.

  “I'm sick,” she whispers. “Help me.”

  I sit up in bed, pull the sheet close to my chin. The air is heavy with this clinging Minnesota heat, sticky, not a hint of breeze through the open window. “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  “No, no. I don't have that kind of money.”

  I close my eyes tight and will her to disappear. When I open them again, I will be in my own bed in San Diego.

  “I need something. Quick.” She collapses to her knees, covers her mouth with both hands.

  I grab the wastebasket and shove it in her direction, careful not to touch her. Curling into the corner of Cammy's bed, I press my palms against my ears to keep fro
m hearing her cough and gag.

  “I'm dying,” she says, slumping face down onto the carpet. Blue legs, her nightgown twisted around her hips, the ragged edges of old underwear.

  “Lenore, I've got to call somebody.” I press a wadded ball of sheet over my nose to block the stench of vomit. “Please, tell me.”

  “It's okay,” she mumbles into the carpet. “Don't call anybody. Promise me. It's just the flu.”

  Then she is completely still, except for short quick gasps, almost like hiccups. For a long time, I sit with the sheet over my nose, chewing on the damp edge, listening to the car doors slam outside my window and the last-call customers laugh outside Rusty's Tavern. If she dies, what happens to me? Where will I go? Who will take care of me?

  Finally I swallow hard, pinch my nose, walk over and nudge her shoulder. She is lying in a pool of foamy vomit. I roll her body away from the slime that clings to her cheek. I lift her moist wrist to check for a pulse, the way we did in gym class after jumping jacks, but it's hidden somewhere under her sharp bones and besides I don't know what the count should be.

  “Lenore.” When I jerk her, her arm wiggles like Jell-O. I don't want to be alone with a dead body. “Lenore,” I shout into her ear, “can you hear me?”

  “Go away,” she moans, rolling back toward the vomit.

  “You can't stay here. Let me help you back to bed.”

  “I can't,” she sobs. Her body shudders under my hands.

  “I'll help you.” I don't know how I'll do it, but I can't leave her here, asleep in her own sickness. “Come on.” I wrap my arms around her waist and tug hard. Through the flimsy nightgown, I can feel the rattle of her frightening rib cage. “Lenore, please.” She hunches up on her hands and knees; her weak arms wobble under the weight. “You can do it,” I say.

  The two of us begin to inch our way down the hall, Lenore crawling, me budging her forward with my hands on her hips. “We're almost there. You'll feel better in your own bed.” When we get to her room, my stomach swirls from the smell of vomit and stale smoke. Snapping on her light, I discover another puddle next to her bed.

  “Be careful,” I whisper, sidestepping her past the mess.

  Once I've settled her in bed, I turn the fan so the air blows directly over her clammy body. “Do you want anything?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “The light. It's killing my eyes.”

  In the kitchen, I dump a bottle of Pine-Sol into a plastic bowl. I have to get rid of the smell or I'll never be able to sleep. I tie a dishrag around my nose. When I bend down to scrub the carpet, I hold my breath. The Pine-Sol fumes burn my eyes, but I don't cry. I don't cry because, like my dad always said, I'm a tough kid who can survive anything.

  “Maybe you should see a doctor,” I tell her the next morning, as I change the sheets on her bed.

  “I've been down that road already, and look where it got me. No, it was just a little bug. But I'm still going to go easy on the vodka.”

  After that we never return to that night. Instead we start on simple conversations: TV shows, my grades at school, books I like to read. To pass the slow days, I make myself useful. Dust the claw feet of the sofa, her vanity table, polish the mirrored tray that displays her bottles of perfume. I vacuum the lavender carpet in the living room, run a dry cheesecloth over the crystal prism lamps on each side of her bed.

  I do my work between visits to her room, where we practice being friendly. Mornings, I bring her coffee and dry toast, sit on the edge of her bed and compete against game-show contestants on television. “Good girl,” she says, slapping my knee and smiling when I answer a question correctly. “I'll tell you what, little lady; you get your brains from me. When I was your age I spent the summer trying to read the whole set of Encyclopedia Britannicas. Papa Roy bought them for me for my twelfth birthday. I had this dream to do research in my spare time. Crazy. But when I went back to school in September, the teacher was tired of me raising my hand. One day after school, my mother called me into the dining room, where she was polishing the silver tea set Papa Roy had given her. I remember she kept working the rag in these angry circles. ‘Lenore,’ she said. ‘It isn't attractive to flaunt your gifts. Mrs. Pierre sent a note that says you're monopolizing the classroom. Let someone else have a chance. You're not as bright as you think.’ Not as bright as I think. Can you believe that's what she said to me? But I showed them all. Class valedictorian of West High School at sixteen.”

  I try to listen past her, to hear the contestants make their best guess. Often, she begins a long sentence which seems to wander away from both of us, and her words are filled with a rage I have never known.

  For lunch we share a plate of saltines, sometimes splitting a can of chicken-noodle soup. She sips the broth out of the bowl, while I scoop away at the big mound of noodles. I arrange the crackers on a china platter trimmed with pink and gold roses; hers are spread with butter and raspberry jam. “Sometimes I just need the extra sugar,” she says, nibbling the corners daintily.

  Afterward, I help her with her daily “hygiene.” I backcomb her hair, ratting it close to her scalp the way she taught me. I try to keep my eyes off her dark roots, the white flecks of skin flaking off the ashen scalp. But at night, when I close my eyes, that image always comes back to me. “A beautician you'll never be,” she says daily, studying her reflection in the magnified mirror. “One thing that's hard to lose is true beauty.” She runs a cotton ball coated with Pond's cold cream over her eyes, wipes away old mascara in a glob of white grease. Then she begins again, with a heavy coat of fleshy powder caking her nose, a dash of lipstick over each cheek. Still, her yellowed skin shows through—the color of her nicotine-stained teeth. “You're not too young to put a little something on that face of yours. Your skin is so dark, you could use a good base.”

  When she's finished rubbing Cammy's CoverGirl into my skin, I stare into the mirror, my pores magnified into deep pits, the stubbly hair of my eyebrows dense and thick like whiskers. I return to the milky white spot of my right eye, the secret blindness I believe is coming. I trace my tongue along my jagged front teeth.

  “You'll be pretty someday,” she says to me. “But I'd try to stay out of the sun.”

  Minneapolis. Now I'm allowed out of the apartment on short errands. I pick up groceries, buy marmalade twists at the bakery downstairs. “Don't talk to anybody,” she warns me, each time before I leave. “Don't answer questions. And don't tell the other tenants you live here.”

  Outside, on the sidewalk, I let the summer sun bake into my skin. If the bench at the bus stop is empty, I sit for a few minutes and soak in this strange city. The steady storm of traffic. The smell of stale beer from Rusty's Tavern mixed with hot blacktop. Delivery trucks pulling up in the alley. The Paradise Club, the neon palm tree dull in the daylight. Bread trucks unloading at Kenny's. The gutter a collection of candy wrappers and cigarette butts. At the end of the block, a grim black hearse in front of Mead's Mortuary and the roar of engines from the Auto Trade lot.

  Thursdays, the bookmobile arrives at Dakota Park. Inside the narrow trailer, it's sweltering and silent and dusty. I take my usual place in front of Mythology. Last year at Ocean View, I won a blue ribbon for my project on Icarus: I wish I could show Lenore the story I wrote, my drawings of his beautiful bird wings. The bookmobile's mythology section is small: religion, fairy tales and gods all mixed together. Today, I choose Greek Goddesses because I like the story of Persephone, the way her mother nearly died without her.

  When I'm finished, I take out the list Lenore wrote for me this morning. “I used to love a good story,” she told me, folding the paper and passing it to me. “Since you're going to the bookmobile, why not choose a book you can read to me on these long afternoons? Or at night, when there's nothing worth watching.”

  “I'm looking for Little Women,” I tell the librarian.

  “It should be right there in fiction under A. For Alcott. I'm sure we have a copy. It's not read much anymore.”

 
The book is old, with gray pages and a drab brown cover. Four girls in full dresses pose around a piano. I can tell it's going to be boring.

  “That's an excellent choice,” the librarian says. “One of my favorites. And it's good to see a girl your age still interested in the classics.”

  “My mother and I are reading the classics this summer,” I tell her.

  “How wonderful. Your mother must be a remarkable woman.”

  “Yes,” I say, setting my two books on the counter. “She is.”

  I've slipped it past her before, but today she studies Cammy's library card, her eyebrows pinched together suddenly, her mouth in a frown. “You're not Camille McCoy.”

  “No,” I say.

  “I can tell from the birth date. You couldn't be sixteen.”

  “It's my sister's. She said I could use it.”

  “Of course,” she says, sliding it back toward me. “But our policy is that patrons check out books in their own name.”

  “I don't have a card.”

  “Well, let's fix that today.”

  She lifts a white form out of a metal file box. “It'll just take a minute. Name?”

  “Faina McCoy.”

  I remember Lenore's warning not to talk to anybody. Not to answer anyone's questions. I know if she finds out about the card, she won't let me come back to the bookmobile.

  “That's unusual. Is it F-A-I-N-A?”

  “Yes,” I say, amazed she can spell it.

  “Date of birth?”

  “Could I just use Cammy's card today? I'm in a hurry.”

  “It will just take a minute. Besides, I can't let you use your sister's card.”

  “June 17, 1961.”

  “Address?”

  I have to think for a minute, to picture from memory the black numbers over the door. “2126 Dakota.”

  “Are you new here?”

  “Not really.”

  “I thought I noticed a little accent.”

  I chew my lip. I've said too much already.