Bottomland

by Michelle Hoover

  Myrle gripped her hands. It happened once, if not today, so surely it wasn’t a lie. Preston liked to tell the story every chance he got. My sister had the best work in the house, the best this side of town, no matter how she whined. Girls could lose fingers too, I should have reminded Preston. And Myrle, she could lose plenty. The way a boy in the street stopped to lace her shoe. Men old as Ray, as Father even, turning to watch her. Always the same men, pretending to check their watches. I showed them what I thought with a thumb to my teeth.

  Myrle groaned and I rested my hand on hers. A good inch longer my fingers had been, but not now with my hands so curled and Myrle’s fat enough to make that ring on her finger squeeze.

  “I’ll send a letter for you anytime you want. Tomorrow even. That will give you something.”

  “They never write back.”

  “But they might.”

  “But they don’t.”

  She closed her eyes. I turned her hand over in mine, laying it palm to palm. Mrs. Keyes, Mrs. Keyes, she complained. From her, the name sounded like hissing. In the mornings, that look on her face. Sleep was all I wanted, a few slow hours. But I couldn’t stop thinking of letters. What she would have written. What I didn’t know about her if I couldn’t read what she sent. When finally her breathing went quiet, I stretched my arm to turn off the lamp, but with those fingers of mine, it took me three tries. Don’t go, that look of hers said. Don’t live. Not without me.

  IV

  At dinner the next night, Myrle wasn’t in her chair. The girls sat over their plates with fists tucked between their knees, and Dolores didn’t say a word. Across the table, Abigail stared at Myrle’s place as if she’d gotten it wrong. Just an empty yellow plate between a crooked set of silverware, the striped padding on the chair’s back pulling loose from its pins. The chair had nothing to say to us. Charlotte squeezed my knee, but I didn’t look. Why was it my fault, where my sister was? Sick, I thought, and upstairs in the sheets. The way she’d always been.

  Later in the front hall, Keyes stopped me. “Haven’t seen your sister, have you?” She stood by the door, peeking out. The noises of the city grew in that alley three times over and the cold leaked through every window. The house could never keep the city out. The hall was narrow, and Keyes stood thick with the smell of baby powder. Daughters by the dozen, she must have thought us, lined up room after room like a carton of eggs.

  “She must be upstairs,” I said.

  “When I knocked on your door, I didn’t hear a peep.” Keyes patted the pocket of her apron. She frowned and felt the pocket on the other side. Her hand swept over the table in the hall with its dish of lost things—barrettes, rubber bands, and pennies.

  That’s when I felt it, the itch in my chest. “What are you looking for?”

  “Nothing, nothing.” But it wasn’t nothing. Myrle had stolen the same before, right from Father’s ring. Keyes took hold of my chin between two knobby fingers, her eyes so gray I thought she could see right through me.

  “Up the stairs with you,” she said. “I’ll be locking the door in ten minutes. Your sister better be in by then, or she’ll have trouble. Can’t imagine such a girl on those steps. But then I can’t imagine any of you.”

  Upstairs, our bed was empty. I lay awake listening for the scrape of the door, the sound of my sister’s footsteps. Outside, the alley had gone quiet. March, when the city smelled of old snow and the October leaves had thawed and turned to mush. That mush stuck to our shoes. Hung in bits on our coattails. At home, they’d be clearing the barn. Oiling the tractor, the fields still frozen. Father would walk the place as if chasing something. It was Father a girl didn’t want to disappoint, though me, I always did. Myrle wasn’t in our bed, she wasn’t in our room. What would Father think?

  I put out the lamp and turned my face to my pillow. The pipes banged. Like someone knocking at us from under the floorboards, she’d said. It used to be Myrle and me. Like twins, but different. One light, one dark. One pretty, one not. One shy as a bird and the one who made sure that bird never got hurt.

  The doorknob rattled. In the dimness of the hall, Myrle stood in her coat, unwrapping her scarf.

  “Where were you?”

  She shuffled across the room and flipped off her boots. Under her coat, she wore one of my own dresses.

  “I went out,” she said.

  “Where?”

  She shrugged. “You go out.”

  “But you know where I am.”

  “Not always.” She dropped her sleeping gown over her head, tugging my dress off from underneath.

  “That’s not the same,” I said.

  She crawled across me and turned to the wall. “I’m tired. Mrs. Keyes will have me up early again.” I stared at her back, the curve of her hip. The sheet puckered when she breathed in. Quick to sleep like a cat, she was, and never a word more. She was here, but it wasn’t any better. In the dark, I imagined her walking the streets in her boots and coat. She must have walked to the quietest part of the city, where the shore hit the lake. I didn’t know what the lake looked like at night, if it looked like anything at all, or if it was only sound, a salty smell. It was something I’d never gotten used to, that fish stink. It clung to the vents of the buildings. To people’s skin. If Myrle was lucky, the moon would come out, a tail of white on the water that went for miles. I imagined my sister following it, the way I would if I ever got the chance. But for Myrle, getting to that moon was easy. All she had to do was step onto the lake and walk.

  The next week at the shop, I couldn’t think. My threads snapped, the pedal growled under my feet, and the needle caught my thumb. I wrapped it bleeding with a strip of cloth. Charlotte didn’t say a word unless it hinted at my sister’s name. At lunch, I took my break away from all the talk, but the bell came fast. I hated those needles and scraps, the dark in the daytime, and that dragon that burned at a touch. Myrle had been out every night, and still not a letter. If I had kept the first, I could open it like something new under our lamp and read it like she was still talking to me, which she wasn’t. I’d keep it under our mattress and listen to her voice in my sleep. I’m sorry, she’d say. I didn’t mean . . . I never wanted to leave like that.

  A cry from the corner. Charlotte shot out of her chair. “That’s Abigail.” The machines stopped and the lot of us went running after her, shoving to see. Abigail was on her feet, one hand out and the other clutching her face. She spun from one girl to the next. “Do you see it? Can you get it? Get it out!”

  A girl gasped. “It’s her eye.”

  Charlotte crouched in front of her, catching her arms. “Easy, Abigail. You just stay still.”

  “What’s this here?” called the foreman.

  Abigail’s hand was full and bloody now, her voice keening. Charlotte held her waist, calming her. From between Abigail’s fingers, something glinted hot and sharp.

  “Out of the way. Here, here.” Pushing Charlotte aside, the foreman caught Abigail under his arm and ran her from the room. Shut away in the elevator, the sound of Abigail’s cries fell floor by floor to the street.

  “What was that?”

  “A needle break,” Charlotte said. “Happens.” She grimaced. “I got one in my cheek once.”

  I backed away. The floor was stained with Abigail’s bleeding. This place, it cut every single thing. My sister and me, it cut all of us in half.

  “What’s wrong with Dolores?” another girl let out.

  Dolores sat at her machine. The chairs around her were empty, Abigail’s thrown to the floor, but Dolores gripped the seat of her chair like it might drop from under her.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” she whined. “Don’t you dare.”

  But already we could smell it. Her lap soaked and a puddle on the floor.

  “We’ll get you out of here,” Charlotte said.

  “But I can’t.”

  Cha
rlotte grabbed her coat and tied it around Dolores’ waist. We got her to her feet. The other girls watched in a line like sheep.

  “You girls best get to work by the time he’s back,” Charlotte snapped. She gave them a look, but I knew she didn’t care a dime about work, foreman or not. She wanted them to worry about anything but us.

  Outside it was already close to dark. We walked the mile or more to Mrs. Keyes, Dolores shivering. “What about Abby?”

  “Poor thing.” Charlotte bit her lip. “But I’ve seen worse. We’ve got to think she’ll be all right.”

  We turned into the alley just as Myrle rounded the corner. My sister ducked her face into her collar, her eyes on her feet. If she saw us, she pretended she didn’t.

  “Gotta go,” I said. Charlotte called after me, and Dolores, she was holding my arm. But it was Myrle, running off again to wherever she went. It was my only chance to find it.

  Across the river, around the Loop, to the money part of town that we never came near. I finally caught up with her. Myrle was standing in front a theater that read C-H-I-C-A-G-O, the words bright underneath:

  NORMA TALMADGE

  ON SCREEN

  THE SIGN ON THE DOOR

  When a woman at the entrance raised a fuss by handing her coat to the ticker taker, fur hat and all, Myrle was already in.

  “Hey!” the usher called when I tried it. “You got a ticket?”

  I reached into my pocket.

  “No ticket, no show,” he said.

  “But . . .”

  He shooed me off with his glove.

  “Fifty cents,” the man at the counter said.

  I reached into my pocket. Two quarters and a dime. All the extra I had for the month.

  “If you don’t got it . . .”

  “I got it.” I snatched the ticket out of his hand.

  Inside, the ceiling was high enough to hurt necks. Red carpet and gold, a light of a hundred diamonds overhead. I felt dark as dark with all the fancy people there, the women in dresses down to their heels. White-gloved ticket takers of all things. A flight of stairs that swept to the upper floors like a tongue. Myrle, she was nowhere. balcony, my ticket said.

  The lights flickered, the organ stamping. The place seemed to move underfoot, the balcony so high it felt like falling. I had to catch shoulders as I climbed the steps. When I found her, Myrle was sitting at the back in her coat, as high as she could get. That music, it was a reedy kind of roar. So full of light and air, I wondered how the place could hold so much at once. Myrle sat with her eyes closed as if that sound were just for her. And here it was, everything she’d been hiding in her head.

  “Esther.” Myrle leaned forward enough to nearly pitch herself out of her seat. She didn’t seem surprised I was there. “Do you see it?”

  “What?”

  “Just wait.”

  But all I could see on the screen was a woman locked in a room. She had skin whiter than cream, a mess of curls on her head. She sure looked a star. She was trying to pick a lock, and behind her a man lay on a bed as if sleeping, but he wasn’t. He had a gun in his hand, on his chest the bloom of something dark. On the other side of the door, the sign do not disturb.

  “The man was going to blackmail her,” Myrle whispered. “But her husband shot him trying to protect her. Then he locked the room and left. He didn’t know she was already hiding in there, a plan of her own.”

  The music was fast as running now, the sound jumping off the walls like bees. Norma was tearing at the door with all she had.

  “Does she get out?”

  “Sure. But not the way you think.” She closed her eyes. The light from the screen was bright as suns. Already Myrle seemed to have left me behind.

  “You don’t want to go home, do you?”

  “Home?”

  “The farm.”

  She gave a quick shake of her head.

  I reached for her hand. “What happened to your ring?”

  “It hurt.” Her fingers were puffy and fat. “Let’s go.” She took my arm and we scooted by people’s knees. I didn’t want to leave, not with the woman so close to breaking out of that room and my fifty cents, but Myrle was already down the stairs, her grip so tight I had to run to keep from falling. A mess of voices yelled at us from the seats. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, Myrle let go of my arm. She was out the doors, heading to the lobby. She didn’t look back. In a flash, she was on the far side of that ruby floor, going along like something was chasing her. But the only thing behind her was me.

  It took a few blocks to catch her. Myrle was breathing hard, walking in fits and starts. At the door of the boardinghouse, she pulled up short.

  “Esther,” she said, “don’t tell Mrs. Keyes.”

  “Tell her what?”

  “Anything.”

  When the door flew open, Keyes was in a fit. “Where have you two been?”

  Charlotte stood at her back. “Is she sick?”

  I didn’t say a word, but Myrle was still breathing like that, leaning against the frame. Mrs. Keyes drew her up the stairs. In our room, Keyes snapped the door shut and laid her on the bed. She opened Myrle’s coat, touched her forehead. She touched her stomach. Her hand jumped and she touched her stomach again.

  “What is it?” Charlotte asked.

  Keyes washed a hand over her cheeks. “Never thought a girl this old wouldn’t know her birds and bees.”

  “She’s pregnant?” Charlotte asked.

  I dropped into the chair.

  “You farm girls, you take the cake,” Keyes said. “Don’t your mothers teach you right?”

  Mother, she had never told us anything. And Nan, she’d told us even less. All we knew we knew from cows and pigs.

  But Charlotte, she didn’t seem surprised. “Aren’t you going to tell her?” she asked me.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Tell me what?” Keyes said.

  Myrle lay on her back, her face wet. Charlotte stared at me. Her or me, that stare said.

  “There was a boy back home,” I let out. “A neighbor.”

  “What boy?” Keyes asked.

  I shrugged. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  “But doesn’t he know?”

  “He forced her, that’s what he knows.”

  Myrle raised her head, as if telling was a choice. “He didn’t.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “He didn’t force me. He didn’t do anything.”

  “Are you forgetting how sick you were?”

  Myrle’s eyes went teary. “I don’t want to remember it like that.”

  “Hush now, the two of you.” Keyes blotted Myrle’s face with a handkerchief and blotted her own. “Forced or not, I can’t have a pregnant girl in this house.”

  “But she doesn’t have anywhere to go,” Charlotte said.

  “She has a family, doesn’t she?”

  “They don’t know,” I said.

  “But surely they would accept their own daughter.”

  “They won’t even write her back,” Charlotte said. “Tell her, Esther. All those letters she sent.”

  “Sure,” I said. “She wrote some letters.” All I could see was the tops of Father’s knees. If he thought stealing was enough for that, what would he think of the Elliot boy stealing this?

  “And you sent them for her.”

  “Sure I did.”

  Charlotte tilted her head. “Oh, my God.” Her eyes narrowed. I shoved my hands inside the folds of my skirt. “You didn’t, did you?” she said. “You never sent them. That’s why they didn’t write back.”

  “What’s it to you? It was no good their knowing we’re here. They’d make us come home. And Tom, he could do anything to her then.”

  The room went quiet, like the hush of those machines
at the end of a shift.

  Finally, Myrle spoke. “But Tom never did.”

  Charlotte huffed. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Stop it,” Keyes snapped. “I don’t care about letters. We can’t keep her here. There are rules. This isn’t a charity. It’s a decent house.”

  “Don’t you dare send her away,” Charlotte said.

  “And who will pay for her? If she can’t work. She hasn’t been much help lately as it is.”

  Myrle called out, and I jumped from my chair, but she turned away. When she called out again, she said Charlotte’s name.

  “There are places these days that’ll take a baby,” Keyes said. “No one has to know.”

  “No,” Myrle cried.

  Charlotte took Myrle’s hand. “Esther can pay,” Charlotte said, “and me.” She looked at me, then looked away. “I can pay.”

  I sat back. Esther and me, she’d said, but she didn’t mean it. Charlotte didn’t have sisters. But maybe now she had one. Maybe the kind who told her everything, the things my sister no longer told me. Charlotte and Keyes, they were watching me now as if expecting something.

  “I’ll help,” I said. “Of course.” Though I didn’t know how.

  But Myrle, she wasn’t thinking of me anymore. It was all Charlotte. That red hair and her eyes like lights. Could be Charlotte was the reason Myrle’s letters home didn’t matter anymore. As if I had been the one in the loft with the Elliot boy. As if I’d known it could turn to bad. But I didn’t. Still, I was the one who always got it wrong.

  Five cents for every dropped stitch, five for backtracking, five for folding the collar so they couldn’t iron it and sometimes even if they could. Five for needles and five if one broke because you weren’t watching (an eye if you were watching too hard). Five for listening to Charlotte, but today she was quiet. All week at the house she’d kept her door closed, Myrle locked behind it. She doesn’t want to see you, Charlotte had said. When I knocked, I could hear Myrle inside, padding about. One cent for being late, half a day for being late more than five minutes. Five if you had to get Mr. Preston to unlock the factory door, as I had every day since I lost my sister. Five more if Preston was in a mood. I hadn’t got many dimes the week before or the one before that. The coming week I might have to owe.