“Heyyy,” he says sloppily, “wait a minute. I know who you are. My friends told me there’s a new freaky Brayburn chick in town.”
So he does know who we are. Who I am.
Neve smirks.
“Brayburn lady coming for you.” He lolls about in an imitation of jumping rope. “Everyone knows who you are. Everyone says you and your friends are baaaaad.”
“Maybe you should pay attention to the rhyme and get as far away from me as you can,” I say, desperate for him to go before I can’t control myself anymore either.
“Nope,” he says, “I’m not scared of you.”
At that, Neve, who’s been sucking on one nail looking bored, rolls her eyes. “I’ve had enough of this. Mayhem, are you coming?”
“I…”
“I don’t know why people are scared of you,” he says, leaning in confidentially. “You seem like a really nice girl.”
“Oh man, that does it,” Neve says. “Nice?”
“Neve.” I try to keep my voice calm. “Let him go. We can take care of this another way.”
“What?” She grimaces. “Are you kidding me?”
“Neve, if you don’t let him go…” I take a deep breath. “I’m not going to be…”
“My best friend? My sister?” She pouts. “Really? No more reindeer games?”
“I was going to say I’m not going to be able to think about anything else or do anything else. I love you, remember? We’re family, remember? Come on, Neve. Come home.”
“Beat it,” the boy says. “She doesn’t care if you hang out with her or not.”
“Dude, shut up,” I say.
“No, you shut up,” Neve says, then turns back to me. “You know what? You don’t know anything. I’ve taken all the Brayburn ways and turned them into a system. So how about you and your whole family go fuck yourselves nice and hard?”
“Neve—”
In less than the blink of an eye, Neve hooks her arm around the boy’s neck and disappears down the beach. I search for them in the dark.
“Neve!” I theater-whisper. “Neve, please.”
But she’s gone.
And so is he.
THIRTY-FIVE
TUNNEL
I only stand there for a few seconds searching into the darkness before I remember I can find her even if she’s hiding. I try to think of her personality and who she is, and nothing happens. All around me people are dancing and picking each other up and chanting that the Sand Snatcher is dead and no one even knows the boy who was talking to Neve is gone because no one ever notices anything. I’m disturbed by the oblivion around me and disturbed by Neve’s new unbridled glimmer and—
It’s Neve’s words that come back to me and keep me standing in the sand instead of collapsing into it and through it. That I need to be as strong as I am and that I am not demure or weak. But I’m running out of time to stand here and think. It goes so fast once there’s someone in your grip; a matter of minutes at most. She dragged him away like a mountain lion with its prey.
The crowd around the fire begins to chant:
Brayburn lady coming for you
Brayburn lady coming for you
Delirious and frenzied, they hold hands and skip around the fire, and they don’t even see me. They don’t need to. I don’t even need to exist. I step out of the light and breathe and imagine. Neve holding my hand, stroking my shoulder, telling me the truth, being my friend. Neve, who is disturbed from the water and disturbed by life and who is angry and jealous and also needs someone to stand by her.
I have her.
She’s close but not too close, and she knows I’m coming but she doesn’t care. She wants me to see. In an instant I’m running toward her, zipping over the sand toward the boardwalk, the rides, the people screaming as they rise and fall, and then I stop.
All I see is darkness. If I didn’t know she was in there, I wouldn’t think there was anything at all. I’m in front of a tunnel that leads directly under the boardwalk next to the roller coaster. The tunnel is made of gray concrete and is big enough to stand in. There’s graffiti everywhere.
WARNING
KEEP OUT
Murder house
It’s like a clubhouse slapped together by twelve-year-olds. There’s so much noise coming from the rides and another bonfire party behind me that I can’t hear anything until I go in, ducking down and holding on to the sides. It’s smelly, like old seaweed and sweat, and a dripping noise comes from somewhere, invisible to me.
Beyond the concrete, the tunnel widens and the walls turn to dirt. Maybe this is the old system that runs under Santa Maria.
Then there’s a moan. A male voice.
I creep along the wall as quickly as I can, careful not to cast a shadow as a flickering light guides me to the sound. I expect to find Neve over the preppie boy and to step between them, but he is not what I find when I round the corner into the dirt room, or at least not just him.
Nine boys are lined up against the tunnel wall. Neve is moving over their bodies, one by one, straddling them, bringing her lips close to theirs, then releasing them. Each one moans, then sinks back in a daze.
The world loosens its grip on me as I try to understand what I’m seeing. And then I remember the boy from the Ferris wheel on the first day and how he loved when my lips came close to his. He said I could do it again.
Neve releases one boy and goes to the next. She breathes him in until his honeycombs are flat and there is only a thin layer of ice, then lets him go.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
Even from my vantage point it’s obvious they’re malnourished. They’re too thin, veins popped out, heads against dirt.
She doesn’t look like a bird anymore. She looks like a bug. A roach.
Neve lifts up, wipes at her mouth and then bends down again, cocking her head to the side.
“Come on, Mayhem,” she says. “Don’t you want to join me?”
I step out of the shadows.
“Doesn’t this solve your moral quandary? It’s symbiosis, my friend,” she says as a red-haired boy reaches for her.
“Please,” he says.
“Shhh,” she returns. Then to me, “It doesn’t hurt them, just makes them forget everything they’ve done. They like it, and for us it’s better than the water.” She puts her hand out to me. “We take care of each other, right? This is the wave of the future. Nobody dies and nobody has to remember if they don’t want to. Nobody disappears, either; they come and go.”
“Neve.” I squat down beside her. “Please come home with me. We will take care of you.” I look around. “Let these people go.”
She grins. “They can go anytime they want. They come to me. I have a waiting list, practically. Soon I’m going to need muscle at the door.” She claps her hands together. “Ooo, or maybe some kind of secret knock like at a speakeasy. Want to be my bouncer?”
I can’t even begin to think about how to deal with this.
“How are you any different than the Sand Snatcher, Neve?”
“I’m insulted.” Her face flattens. “I’ll tell you how I’m different. I don’t kill them, they come back of their own free will, and they’re begging me to give and take.” She stands. “That’s three ways. This keeps me from needing the water. I’m not going to go crazy and lose it like those other people the Brayburns wrote about. Anyway, it’s the perfect solution. Keeps potential problems out of the general population and could keep us from needing anything else. So stop trying to get me to go back to the farm. I’m not going back there. Elle will never listen to me about any of this, and it’s the only way shit isn’t going to go totally wrong for me. I’m trying to survive, just like everyone else. I have a right to do that, don’t I?” Her eyes plead for me to understand, and beyond that, to agree. “Stay with me, Mayhem.”
Right then, I want to. We could be powerful, independent, and I could shuck the feeling I have, like I’m carrying generations of tradition on my back. But then one of the boys
moans and when he turns his head his cheeks are covered in sores.
“I can’t.”
She waits, as though hoping I’ll change my mind, then flicks her hand dismissively. “Bye, then,” she says, dropping to her knees again, this time over a boy with black hair and cheeks pulled tight over his skull, like she’s sucked all the fat out of him. It takes me several seconds of waiting for reality to take a reasonable shape before I recognize Jake, the boy from the Ferris wheel. His head swivels on his neck as he smiles. “Thank you,” he says to Neve. “Thank you.”
THIRTY-SIX
ROXY BRAYBURN DAUGHTER OF STITCHER BRAYBURN
1974
The people come to us thinking they’re bees and we’re flowers, but they have it wrong because we’re jellyfish. We sting while they stare at our lights going, “Oh, pretty.”
Marcy and Boner are sick because they can’t handle being jellyfish, and Lucas doesn’t want to sting.
I always have. Never minded it a minute. Mama says it’s the Brayburn nature to be calm and certain, and to wait, but it hasn’t been that way for all of us. I was born on fire like my great-grandmother Julianna. Explain that.
Last night I woke up and Lucas was at the foot of the bed. He was babbling about how nothing can hurt him anymore.
He went outside and I had a lost feeling like he was going to leave me and he wouldn’t be coming back. The way he went seemed so permanent and decided. Before I heard him talking to Daddy outside, I glanced around the room at our things and the little life we’ve squeezed into this space, and I thought, Of course this can’t go on forever. It’s too perfect.
I tried to picture myself without Lucas and the simple idea had me doubled over so hard I swear to God it woke Mayhem up out of a peaceful sleep without me making a sound. I was only sitting on the bed, clutching at a pillow, tensing up my belly as though by doing so I could push away the thought that I am losing my husband.
Thank goodness Daddy was down there messing in the rosebushes like he does when he can’t sleep. I saw from the window, Lucas sinking to his knees with the car keys in hand, Daddy hugging him until he calmed down. I couldn’t hear what he said, but it was something about Brayburn women and how to live with them, I’m sure.
Mayhem caught sight of her dad and banged her little hands against the window. Lucas looked up and he had sadness all over him, bits of light that were jagged and stabbing at him, but he still smiled for Mayhem.
I’ve decided to leave Santa Maria for good. I’ve asked Mother before and she says we can’t, that we have to stay and do our jobs, but if we go, maybe the water will loosen its grip on Lucas. When I think of the greater world outside Santa Maria, it’s like there’s the ocean and the boardwalk and my friends and all the green and blue and yellow, and then everything else is one big desert, like in those movies where people get lost and end up crawling around on sand dunes.
I hope we don’t get lost.
THIRTY-SEVEN
MAYHEM BRAYBURN DAUGHTER OF ROXY BRAYBURN DRY
1987
I walk back to the house instead of running. I need everything to slow down and it’s whirring in a way I don’t like, an invisible machine picking up speed. So I take my time. I stop at a wall of honeysuckle on the way up, lean into it to remind myself that the earth is good and that life can be beautiful. I need that reminder or that discovery because things are getting harder to see. While I get high on honeysuckle smells, I catch sight of a family through windows like peeled-back eyelids. A woman with brown hair holds a baby, and another woman on the first floor works dough in the kitchen.
It must be nice just to live. As I am watching, the woman upstairs calls down, and the woman kneading the dough carefully places it into a bowl and covers it with a checkered towel she dampens in the sink. Briefly she stares ahead, and I think she has seen me skulking in her bushes, but she hasn’t. She’s looking at herself and there’s gray in her hair at her temples and I don’t have to ask for her secrets or see them to know she’s thinking about her life right then and she’s maybe wishing she could just live, too. And we meet in the middle between her window and my watching, and we linger there until she remembers herself and dashes away to where I can’t see her.
I had a dream of coming here and drifting through my days, of going to the beach and having friends and fawning over Rob Lowe, on my belly in a white nightgown with a blue face mask on and writing letters to River Phoenix at the address you can get from Tiger Beat magazine. We don’t shuck layers in life. We add onto them. And then we carry them.
Elle meets me in the driveway.
“Thank goodness you’re back,” she says. She has a look on her I’ve never seen before. It’s far past worry. She is terrified. “I was going to send Jason for you…” She clutches at her own hair as though trying to pull right answers out of her skull. “Think, think.”
“What is it?” I say, ready to run in, ready to pee my pants, too. Something must be wrong with Roxy.
A sickly glow emanates from the second-floor window as though the whole house is in ill health.
“Okay,” Elle says, sniffing herself straight. “Your mom needs you right now. She’s burning up. I should never have let her send you away tonight, because as soon as you left she started asking for you.” She opens the door to her old Mercedes, and calls into the house for Jason and Kidd. “I have a friend at the hospital, Joan, and I helped her with a … that doesn’t matter! She says she can give me something. Jason’s been trying to feed Roxy, but she actually threw broth at him, so…”
I can definitely picture that.
“I’m going to get some supplies,” Elle says. “Joan said to keep Roxy hydrated, and I’m going to get the stuff so she can be more comfortable. She’s going to be okay, but she took some sleeping pills, so can you just check on her?”
“Of course.” I have wasted a lot of days being mad at Roxy.
Jason and Kidd come outside, and Jason questions me silently and I give him the slightest shake of the head because Neve. He tightens his lips and they go into Elle’s car and they say something about how Kidd is hungry and they’re going to stop and Elle is really almost crying and then they’re gone and the driveway is silent except for the crickets and the crows.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” I ask them, and the crow with a little brown dot on his beak swoops down and lands on my shoulder. I just about get to the door before he hops off and back to the trees, but he has helped me just by being there anyway. I wish he could come into the house with me. He fits so well on my shoulder. But he seems to think his place is outside, right here.
I climb the stairs and there is no sound. This house always creaks and buzzes. Sometimes there’s Fleetwood Mac playing and sometimes it’s tribal flute music, and it always smells like flowers and incense, and there is always noise and stomping around upstairs. Even when there isn’t that, there is Millie meowing and the house itself, stretching and settling. And so this non-noise buries itself in my belly.
The house smells empty now except for a slight note of sickness, of bathroom visits and throw-up and cleaning up after both those things with bleach.
When I get into the room, Millie is on top of Elle’s bed next to Roxy, peering at her worriedly, paws tucked under her chin.
“Roxy, are you okay?”
Roxy doesn’t answer, but seeing Millie the way she is, I think she probably is okay, because I have a feeling Millie would not be sitting so calmly if something were seriously wrong.
“Good kitty.” I chuck her under the chin, and she makes a noise that is clearly asking me if Roxy’s okay. “She’ll be fine, Millie.”
“She’s magic,” Roxy slurs.
“Who, Mom?”
“Millie. She’s a magic cat. Just like the birds are. Look on the wall. My mother took that picture when she was little. Millie’s going to live forever,” she whispers. “The animals protect us.”
I smooth back her hair.
“Millie drank the water,” she croaks. �
�And we put it in the bird feeders. Shhhhh,” she says. “Don’t tell Grandma.”
She snores for a second. I slap lightly at her cheek. “Roxy?”
“I took some sleeping stuff,” Roxy says, voice thick.
“Elle said. How many?”
She puts up two fingers and her eyes flutter and she half-smiles. “Three,” she says. She’s messing with me.
“Are you sure? Only three?”
“Promise,” she says. “I’m not going to lose you now. Or me either. It just hurt too much.”
I flop onto the side of the bed. “Mama,” I say, “I’m really proud of you.”
Her breathing is uneven, and a tear slips quietly down her cheek. I get a washcloth and wet it down and then bring it back and pat her forehead and her neck with it. She is so hot.
“I know this is hard,” I say. “And I know why you did it. I know you had to. And I know you thought you were doing good leaving here when you did.”
“I’m sorry I brought you back,” she says. “Santa Maria is such a bitch.”
“No,” I say. “Don’t be sorry about that. Even with everything that’s happened I wouldn’t change any of it. I found … I found myself, or a piece of myself or something.” I search for words. “I found the truth of me.”
Roxy grabs my wrist with surprising strength that reminds me when she comes out of this, she’s going to be a whole different Roxy, one with sight and intuition and vision. She’s going to be a mother I’ve never seen before.
“Your dad,” she says, eyes still closed, “he wanted to be with me. There was this guy who was taking out hitchhikers, girls trying to get to San Francisco, and I took him out.” She laughs. “You’re a lover like your daddy, I bet. Not me.” She shakes her head against the pillow and peels her eyes open. Millie begins to purr. “He was for world peace and adventure and surfing. He wasn’t for murder. He wasn’t for even knowing people had thoughts like those, did things like that.”
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