Shaking out the Dead

by K M Cholewa

“Is it why you hit the window?”

  Tatum and Geneva clustered tight around Rachael. Geneva raised Rachael’s chin so they could search for an answer in her eyes.

  Rachael could tell that they weren’t angry about the window. They didn’t want a good explanation for her behavior. They wanted her reason. They didn’t want to know why on earth anyone would put their hand through a window, but why would she.

  What could she tell them? That there was no floating in ancient seas? There were backs and fronts and forwards and backwards? That her aunt had missing pieces and the snow was messy and the girl in the mirror watched? The music still played in Geneva’s apartment, and it worked in Rachael, vibrating, dislodging the icebound. A wall she had built within herself thinned to a membrane, and something large passed through it. A deep swallow in reverse. Secrets, escaping.

  “I want to go home,” she said, and the tears flowed.

  

  “She wants to go home,” Tatum said to Paris in the hall between apartments.

  “Is that even a possibility?”

  “I don’t know. It seems like the kind of thing you shouldn’t have to ask for.” Tatum shook her head. “What did we do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” she kept her voice hushed, “we start making out and windows break and the past crawls out of the gutter.”

  Paris felt the fear washing over her. It was contagious.

  “I should get back in,” she said.

  Just then, the front door to the duplex opened, and a UPS man slid a box along the floor to Tatum’s door. She glanced over at the return address. Lee.

  “Speak of the devil,” she said. “I guess the birthday gift has arrived. You don’t think these are signs, do you?”

  “Only if they’re good ones,” Paris said.

  Tatum turned to go into Geneva’s.

  “Boy, I think we’d be hard pressed to read ’em as good.”

  Paris grabbed her arm.

  “Then we don’t need no stinkin’ signs.” He said it with a Mexican accent.

  He pulled her to him. He kissed her briefly, but deeply, a kiss meant to reinforce, to drive away past lies and past mistakes, and to protect them from omens.

  

  Paris walked home, head down into a strong midmorning wind. Above, cloud banks came together, traveling en masse, migrating southeast, eating the blue sky like locusts. Wind chimes rang like warnings, unwittingly attracting the attention of spirits. Paris crammed his hands into his pockets. His boots hit the pavement, one step after the other. A cat with a tattered ear peered out from behind a car tire. Its meow had a question mark as he passed by. The trees reached for the wind while Paris wrestled with his thoughts. Omens he could handle. Karma would handle him.

  Not twelve hours ago, Vincent sat at his counter, and Linda kneeled in his kitchen’s janitor’s closet. The Deluxe was closing. He told Tatum secrets but did not confess the truths he owed her. Vincent. The pictures. Paris worried that their kiss this morning could go the way of their kiss in the park. His steps sped up to keep pace with his anxiety, and he failed to greet the half-melted snowman with a magpie standing on its sunken, buttoned chest. His whole way home, he ignored the crushed cups. A lost mitten tried to flag him down, dirty, palm open to the sky.

  But he was blind to them.

  “Fucking Vincent.” He said it out loud. Vincent was going to call her. That’s what he had said. What did he want? Why was he here?

  Paris took the stairs down to his apartment. As he entered, he picked up the envelope on the floor he had stepped over earlier. He sat at his table and opened it at the side. The message was official, typed, and brief.

  He was being evicted.

  He placed the letter on the table. He sat elbows to knees, hands folded, head hung.

  Don’t take it personally. That’s karma’s message. It’s physics. Nothing more.

  He closed his eyes. He breathed deeply, seeking traces of Tatum’s scent, a scent you could chase but never quite catch, left behind on his clothing. He held her scar in his heart. His hands burned with envy. Vincent had never seen it. This, Paris somehow knew. The scar was the dividing line between the two of them, and Paris loved it for that fact. He conjured the image of Tatum’s torso, the asymmetry, and press of her ribs from beneath her skin. His eyes opened slowly and were drawn by the black gap beneath the closet door. Inside were his paints. His charcoals. His canvas.

  He felt a blaze in his chest. He didn’t move from his chair. The stillness around him shimmered, and he thought that, perhaps, want was merely hope, made to feel unworthy.

  25

  

  Tatum led Rachael back to their own apartment, blocking with her body the view of the UPS box in the hall. She decided to keep quiet that it was from Lee until she was certain there was a gift in there and that it wasn’t just a shipment of odds and ends that would make it look like he was clearing a space for a home gym.

  Inside, Rachael stood in the middle of the living room, looking lost.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Tatum said.

  Rachael blinked as though not registering the question.

  “Vincent?” she said.

  Tatum did not mean Vincent. She meant the scar, the missing breast.

  “Vincent came to see Geneva,” Tatum said. A fact she, herself, had registered.

  “He said he was going to call you.”

  Tatum was about to say, I don’t want him to call, but it caught on the inside of her lips. It was a new thought. A new idea. Was it true?

  She approached Rachael and sat down on the coffee table, the trunk, to be eye level with her.

  “You know,” Tatum said, “I do want him to call. But you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to tell him not to call again.”

  Tatum wasn’t sure what she said was true, but it felt good to say it.

  Rachael looked up at her. Her eyes were intelligent. She understood Tatum’s meaning. There’s power in rejecting the one who rejects you.

  “Rachael,” Tatum said, unsure of what she would say next. “I’m so sorry for everything that’s happened to you. I know you don’t want to be here. But you know, I’m happy you are. At first, I thought I could help you learn how to be sad and have it be okay. But I can’t now. Because now that you’re here, I don’t feel sad, myself, anymore.”

  Rachael looked at the ground.

  “It feels so good to have you in my life,” Tatum said, “that it makes me think I want Paris in my life more too.” Tatum swallowed. “Did you see Paris and me kissing each other?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “No,” she said but didn’t sound certain.

  “Should we talk about the scar?” Tatum said.

  Rachael said nothing.

  “Want to see it? It’s scarier, I think, if you see it and look away fast than it is if you look closely.”

  “Okay.”

  Tatum unbuttoned her shirt, keeping it closed. When it was undone, she looked Rachael solidly in the eye.

  “Ready?” she said.

  Rachael nodded.

  Tatum opened one side of her blouse and bra, revealing the gash. She looked down at it. She ran her finger along the tight seam.

  “Here’s where they sewed me back up after cutting away the bad stuff.” She avoided the word cancer. Too scary. Too never-over. “It doesn’t hurt at all. You can touch it if you want, but you don’t have to.”

  Rachael came forward. She reached up and touched the skin, puckered like pressed, old lady lips.

  “The scar is worse than it could’ve been, but I didn’t do all the stuff that would help it go away.”

  Rachael pulled her hand away but continued to look.

  “Why not?”

  “I think I wanted it. This may sound weird, but I think I like it, even though I know other
people might find it ugly.”

  Tatum thought enough was probably enough, and she rebuttoned her shirt.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  “So you’re better now?”

  “Gold, baby. Good as gold.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Rachael said.

  “Be nice to the windows.”

  Tatum followed Rachael as far as the kitchen. Rachael continued down the hall, and Tatum quickly slipped into the hall to retrieve the box. She brought it to the kitchen counter and pulled a knife from the block with an ear out for Rachael. She slit the tape down the center of the top of the package. Let there be a present, she thought, opening the flaps. From down the hall, she could hear the sound of Rachael peeing. She had left the bathroom door open, something she hadn’t done before. Tatum figured she didn’t want to be alone. She smiled, touched. Strange, the things that make you feel needed. She pushed aside a brown piece of packing paper to an expertly wrapped gift. Phew. She lifted it out and placed it on the counter. It was as appetizing as a cake. She reached into the box for the second item and pulled out a green, leather-bound book.

  It took a second for it to register. Tatum hadn’t seen it in years, a decade at least. The volume was thinner than she remembered. Somehow, she had exaggerated its size in her mind to match the distain in which she held it. The Book of Rachaels. She hated the thing. She didn’t know what it might mean to Rachael, or whether it would remind her of her mother, for better or for worse. Tatum tossed it onto the counter like it burned in her hands.

  “Ugh,” she hollered. “Goddamn it.”

  

  Rachael had flushed the toilet and now stood before the mirror. She pushed the bathroom door slightly more closed but not completely. She hiked up her T-shirt and looked at her own chest, flat like Tatum’s, but without the lightning strike on the right. She had been imagining a scar there, just as she might imagine a Halloween costume, when she heard her aunt holler. She pulled down her shirt and spun away from the mirror as though caught at something she shouldn’t be doing. She stood frozen in the bathroom, afraid.

  “I’m okay,” Tatum hollered down the hall. “Sorry. Uh, spider,” she said.

  Rachael crept into the kitchen.

  “It crawled out of the box. Spiders, ew,” Tatum said. “Hey, look what your dad sent.” She put a hand on top of the gift.

  Rachael moved toward it tentatively. She reached up and placed a hand on either side but then let her hands fall back to her sides.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  Rachael reached toward the counter again but this time toward the green book. She slid it to the edge and took it in both hands.

  “Oh, yeah,” Tatum said. “That came, too.”

  “I’m in this,” Rachael said.

  “Me, too.”

  Rachael’s head whipped around.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “’Fraid so.”

  “This is the book for the Rachaels.”

  Tatum took the book from her and flipped to the last filled page, only about a third of the way through. Rachael’s entry included just a few details of her birth. Her baby picture was tucked inside four plastic corners later to be supplemented by adult shots. Tatum flipped through the blank pages that followed, those reserved for the future Rachaels, and found what she was looking for. A loose baby picture. She flipped back to the entry before Rachael’s.

  “Rachael T. The T is for Tatum. That’s me.” She held the picture next to the name. “No one ever told you that?”

  Rachael took the book. She turned back a page or two looking at the entries. She stepped away from Tatum and turned her back to her.

  Then Rachael closed the book and slipped it back onto the counter. She touched the colored wrapping of her gift. She turned to face her aunt.

  “My middle name is Mallory,” she said.

  

  May

  26

  

  The weight of the sky grew. The sun climbed behind the gray wall of it. Midmorning, it spit out a rock. Then another, and another. The hail spilled onto the earth, rattling, pounding the sidewalk and nicking at the windows as it battered its way through the neighborhood. Paint jobs suffered flesh wounds. The tulips broke under heavy fire. From behind windows, nervous homeowners with bad roofs peeked. They crossed their fingers and exchanged hopeful looks. Maybe this would be it, the storm mighty enough to merit an insurance claim. With luck, there’d be money left over for lawn furniture.

  Paris and Tatum, Geneva, and Ron watched the sudden downpour from inside Geneva’s apartment. The hail bounced off the hood of Tatum’s car and off of Paris’s mattress, which was strapped to the roof of the car under a tarp. The winter had been mild; the spring, cold and erratic. A deep freeze had hit at the end of March. Flurries had emerged from sunlit April mists. And now, May first brought a hailstorm, straight from the apocalypse.

  Geneva played no music, but the hail made for a constant click, click, with the occasional burst that rattled like spilled marbles. Paris looked out the window from over Geneva’s shoulder. Tatum stood just to his side, slightly behind him. Tatum and Paris had slept together four times. Socially, they still behaved as friends. But anyone within twenty paces could feel the tug and pull between them. Paris’s joy was deep as he stood there. In that moment, four people silent in a room listening to a hailstorm seemed all he’d ever wanted.

  “I tasted hail, once,” Ron said, and three heads turned to him. “Bitter. Sooty.”

  It seemed the sign the sky had been waiting for. Magic words, stumbled upon, accidentally. The hail ceased. Just a few more nuggets fell, randomly, as they dislodged themselves from clouds.

  “I can see how ancient people would think a storm was an angry spirit passing through,” Tatum said.

  “Maybe not even angry,” Geneva said, “just mighty and reckless.”

  Twigs and leaves, casualties, littered the sidewalks. The four picked up where they had left off when the hail had chased them from their work. Geneva swept the rocks of ice from the walk while Paris and Ron negotiated the mattress off the roof of the car. Tatum pulled a box, the only box, of Paris’s clothing from the back seat. Rachael was in school today, but yesterday, she had helped with the moving of most of Paris’s things into the basement of the duplex. The diner hadn’t closed yet, but Paris had been evicted from his downtown apartment. He needed just a month or two to save up enough for a first and last months’ rent and damage deposit. So he moved out of one basement and into another. Both had daylight windows. But this one also had a space heater and upstairs privileges at Tatum’s.

  Paris and Ron maneuvered the mattress up the walk. Tatum held the front door. It had been her intention to help Paris carry it, but Ron had waved her off. He walked backward now, watching the ground over his shoulder. He shifted his way through the open door. Paris’s eyes met Tatum’s as he passed. Each smiled and looked away.

  But they hadn’t been falling effortlessly into love. In fact, Paris never fell at all. It was where he had started, and so he continued to float there while Tatum treaded love’s waters, struggling to keep her head above the surface, slapping and kicking with arms and legs.

  In Paris’s old apartment, after the first time they had sex, Paris had asked her, “Would you freak if I said I loved you?”

  Tatum dragged his thin sheet up over her head.

  “Would you believe it?” he asked.

  “La-la-la-la-la,” Tatum said, loudly.

  Paris tugged the sheet off her face.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  She rolled her head in his direction. “I believe you,” she said. “But I know the me you love may not be the me I am.” She sat up, pulling the sheet to her neck. “Someday, you might be disappointed that I’m not all you thought. You’ll be the one who was wrong, but I’ll be the one you’re disappointed with.”

  “That’s not tru
e,” Paris said. “I’ll always . . .”

  Tatum held up a hand to interrupt him.

  “Don’t ‘always’ or ‘never’ me, Paris,” she said. “People lie without meaning to. You don’t want it happening to you.”

  Then Tatum turned and placed her feet on the floor. She dressed, quietly. Paris pulled on his jeans but remained barefoot. He wondered for how long she would be gone.

  Over the next several days, Paris called her once per day. When her machine beeped, he would sit silent at the other end of the line, enough time for the heart to speak and no more. He would hang up as though parting company with her. He let go reluctantly.

  It took six days to receive her breathless call.

  “Paris? Can I . . . ” she said.

  “Come over.”

  It had been less awkward. More abandon. Afterward, Tatum lay on her stomach with her head on her forearm.

  “I’m a danger to myself and others,” she said.

  “Who isn’t?” Paris said, rolling over and kissing from the base of her spine to the base of her skull.

  When she left that time, he didn’t hear from her for four days. Paris imagined her sitting in her orange chair, one hand nervously toying with the nearby leaf of the ficus. She would chew on her bottom lip. Her mind would be up the road, calculating risks and outcomes. She would rise from her chair and watch the sun set, as she liked to do. It would feel to her like defeat when she showed up unannounced at his front door at the bottom of the concrete stairs. Paris led her in and took her to his mattress. He kissed her and then disappeared into the bathroom. He turned on the tub, washed his feet with cool water, and then returned to the bed, feet pink and clean.

  They made love. Quietly and slowly. Afterward, Paris hovered above her, leaning on his elbows. His hair hung forward.

  “I can’t help it,” he said. “I do love you.”

  Tatum squished her eyes closed then rolled out from under him and sat on the edge of the mattress. Paris picked up his glasses from the floor and sat up too.