First, Body

by Melanie Rae Thon

  I wanted to hold out the phone, let my mother hear what I heard. I wanted to say, Find me if you can.

  It’s me, Nadine, I said.

  I heard the match scrape, the hiss of flame burning air. I heard my mother suck in her breath.

  Your daughter, I almost said.

  Where are you?

  I thought she was afraid I might be down the road, already on my way, needing money, her soft bed. I saw her there on the edge of the bunk, yellow spread wrapped around her shoulders, cigarette dangling from her lips. I saw the faded outlines of spilled coffee, dark stains on pale cloth, my mother’s jittery hand.

  Not that close, I said.

  Muffled words. I thought she said, I’m glad. The Haitian man kept jumping, dreadlocks twisting, pants flapping — those legs, no flesh, another scarecrow man. Dollar bills fluttered in his guitar case, wings in wind. Un coeur d’oiseaux brisés, he said, and I almost knew what he meant. A crowd had gathered to listen, two dozen, maybe more, all those people between us, but he was watching me; I was watching him.

  I’m glad you called, my mother said again.

  And I swear, I knew then.

  Je ne pleure pas, the Haitian man said.

  For a moment both his feet were off the ground at once. For a moment his mouth stayed open, stunned. He was a dark angel hanging in blue air. I saw his heart break against his ribs. For a moment there were no cars and no breath.

  Then every sound that ever was rushed in. Horns blaring, exploding glass; ice cracking on the river; On the ground, motherfucker — all this again.

  I said, Clare’s dead.

  Tell me where you are, Nadine.

  Fuck you, Clare said.

  The Haitian man fell to earth. I heard the bones of his legs snap. He wouldn’t look at me now. He was bent over his case, stuffing bills in his pockets.

  The voice came over the phone, the one that says you have thirty seconds left. I said, I’m out of quarters. I said, Maybe I’ll call you back.

  That night I found a lover.

  I mean, I found a man who didn’t pay, who let me sleep in his car instead. He told me his name and I forget. Fat man with a snake coiled in the hair of his chest. I kept thinking, All this flesh. When he was in me, I thought I could be him.

  Clare said, I tried to come home once, but the birds had eaten all the crumbs. There was no path.

  The next night, another lover, another man with gifts. Two vials of crack we smoked, then heroin to cut the high. Got to chase the dragon, he said. No needles. Clean white smack so pure we only had to breathe it in. Safe this way, he said. He held a wet cloth, told me, Lean back, made me snort the water too, got to get the last bit. When he moved on top of me, I didn’t have a body: I was all head.

  Then it was day and I was drifting, knowing that by dark I’d have to look again.

  Emile appeared on Newbury Street, shop window, second floor: he was a beautiful mannequin in a red dress.

  Listen, you think it’s easy the way we live? Clare told me this: I never had a day off. I had to keep walking. I could never stay in bed.

  So she was glad when they put her in a cell, glad to give them all she had: clothes, cash, fingerprints. She said, I knew enough not to drink the water, but nobody told me not to breathe the air.

  No lover that night. I found a cardboard box instead. Cold before dawn, and I thought, Just one corner, just the edge. When the flames burst, I meant to smother them. I felt Earl, his cool metal grasp. Get out, he said. Ashes floated in the frozen air, the box gone that fast. Clare said, Look at me: this is what they did. Later my singed hair broke off in my hands.

  In the morning, I called Adele again. Tell me, I said.

  I thought she might know exactly where and when. I thought there might be a room, a white sheet, a bed, a place I could enter and leave, the before and after of my sister’s death.

  But there were only approximate details, a jail, stones, barbed wire somewhere.

  No body. She meant she never saw Clare dead.

  Clare said she tried to get home in time, but the witch caught her and put her in the candy house instead.

  Busted. Prostitution and possession.

  Let me answer the charges.

  This is Clare’s story.

  Let me tell you what my sister owned.

  In her pocket, one vial of crack, almost gone. In her veins, strangers’ blood. She possessed ninety-six pounds. I want to be exact. The ninety-six pounds included the weight of skin, coat, bowels, lungs; the weight of dirt under her nails; the weight of semen, three men last night and five the night before.

  The ninety-six pounds included the vial, a rabbit’s foot rubbed so often it was nearly hairless, worn to bone.

  Around her wrist she wore her own hair, what was left of it, what she’d saved and braided, a bracelet now. In her left ear, one gold hoop and one rhinestone stud, and they didn’t weigh much but were included in the ninety-six pounds.

  She possessed the virus.

  But did not think of it as hers alone.

  She passed it on and on.

  Stripped and showered, she possessed ninety-one pounds, her body only, which brings me to the second charge.

  Listen, I heard of a man who gave a kidney to his brother. They hadn’t spoken for eleven years. A perfect match in spite of this. All that blood flowed between them, but the brother died, still ranting, still full of piss and spit.

  Don’t talk to me about mercy.

  The one who lived, the one left unforgiven, the one carved nearly in half, believed in justice of another kind: If we possess our bodies only, we must offer up this gift.

  You can talk forever about risk.

  New York City, Clare. Holding pen. They crammed her in a room, two hundred bodies close, no windows here. They told her to stand and stand, no ventilation, only a fan beating the poison air. And this is where she came to possess the mutant germ, the final gift. It required no consensual act, no exchange of blood or semen, no mother’s milk, no generous brother willing to open his flesh.

  Listen, who’s coughing there?

  All you have to do is breathe it in.

  It loved her, this germ. It loved her lungs, first and best, the damp dark, the soft spaces there. But in the end, it wanted all of her and had no fear.

  December still, Clare eight months dead. Adele knew only half of this.

  You can always come home, she said.

  I went looking for my lover, the fat one with the car, anybody with a snake on his chest.

  I found three men in the Zone, all with cash — no snakes and none that fat. Tomorrow I’d look again. I wanted one with white skin and black hair, a belly where my bones could sink so I wouldn’t feel so thin. I wanted the snake in my hands, the snake around my neck; I wanted his unbelievable weight to keep me pinned.

  Ten days in a cell, Clare released. Two hundred and fifty-three hours without a fix — she thought she might go straight, but it didn’t happen like that.

  She found a friend instead. You’re sad, baby, he said. She dropped her pants. Not for sex, not with him, only to find a vein not scarred too hard. When your blood blooms in the syringe, you know you’ve hit.

  Listen, nobody asks to be like this.

  If the dope’s too pure, you’re dead.

  This is Clare’s story. This is her voice speaking through me. This is my body. This is how we stay alive out here.

  Listen. It’s hope that kills you in the end.

  On Brattle Street I saw this: tall man with thick legs, tiny child clutching his pants. Too beautiful, I thought, blue veins, fragile skull, her pulse flickering at the temple where I could touch it if I dared. The man needed a quarter for the meter. He asked me for change, held out three dimes. A good trade, I said. He stepped back toward the car, left the girl between us. I crouched to be her size, spoke soft words, nonsense, and she stared. When I moved, she moved with me. The man wasn’t watching. I wanted to shout to him, Hold on to this hand. I wanted to tell him, There’s a
boneyard in the woods, a hunter’s pile of refuse, jaw of a beaver, vertebrae of a deer. I wanted to tell him how easily we disappear.

  That night I found Emile sleeping in a doorway. Shrunken little man with a white beard. No blanket, no coat. He opened one eye. Cover me, he said.

  I held out my hands, empty palms, to show him all I had.

  With your body, he said.

  He held up his own hands, fingerless. I froze once, he said.

  In the tunnel I found the Haitian man. Every time a train came, people tossed coins in his case and left him there. Still he sang, for me alone, left his ragged words flapping in my ribs.

  Listen, the lungs float in water.

  Listen, the lungs crackle in your hands.

  Out of the body, the lungs simply collapse.

  For my people, he said.

  His skin was darker than mine, dark as my father’s perhaps. His clothes grew bigger every day: he was singing himself sick. By February he’d be gone. By February I’d add the Haitian manchild to my list of the disappeared.

  But that night I threw coins to him.

  That night I believed in the miracles of wine and bread, how what we eat becomes our flesh.

  It was almost Christmas. I put quarters in the phone to hear the words. Come home if you want, Adele said.

  Clare made me remember the inside of the trailer. She made me count the beds. Close the curtains — it’s a box, she said.

  Clare made me see Adele at the table, the morning she told me she was going to marry Mick. It’s my last chance, my mother said. I wanted the plates to fly out of the cupboard. I wanted to shatter every glass.

  I smoked a cigarette instead.

  I was thirteen.

  It was ten A.M.

  I drank a beer.

  I felt sorry for Adele, I swear. She was thirty-four, an old woman with red hair. She said, Look at me, and I did, at her too-pale freckled skin going slack.

  I thought, How many men can pass through one woman? I thought, How many children can one woman have? I tried to count: Clare’s father and Clare, my father and me, two men between, two children never born whose tiny fingers still dug somewhere. She didn’t need to make the words, I feel them; didn’t need to touch her body, here. I knew everything. It was her hand reaching for the cigarettes. It was the way she had to keep striking the match to get it lit. It was the color of her nails — pink, chipped.

  If she’d been anyone but my mother I would have forgiven her for what she said.

  I can’t do it again. She meant she had another one on the way. She meant she couldn’t make it end. So Mick was coming here, to live, bringing his already ten-year-old son, child of his dead first wife; the boy needed a mother, God knows, and I saw exactly how it would be with all of them, Mick and the boy and the baby — I could hear the wailing already, the unborn child weeping through my mother’s flesh.

  Clare made me remember all this. Clare made me hang up before my mother said the words come home again.

  Storm that night, snow blown to two-foot drifts; rain froze them hard. Forever, Clare said.

  She didn’t know which needle, didn’t know whose blood made her like this. She didn’t know whose dangerous breath blew through her in the end. She told me she had a dream. We were alone in the trailer. Our little hands cast shadows on the wall: rabbit, bird, devil’s head. She said, Someone’s hand passed over my lungs like that.

  I wanted to go home. I didn’t care what she said. I saw the trailer in the distance, the colored lights blinking on and off, the miles of snow between me and them. I saw the shape of my mother move beyond curtain and glass.

  It’s too late to knock, Clare said.

  She made me remember our first theft, Adele’s car, all the windows down, made me see her at fifteen, myself at ten. We weren’t running away: we were feeling the wind. We drove north, out of the dusty August day into the surprising twilight. I remember the blue of that sky, dark and brilliant, dense, like liquid, cool on our skin. And then ahead of us, glowing in a field, we saw a carnival tent, lit from inside.

  Freaks, we thought, and we wanted to see, imagined we’d find the midget sisters, thirty-three inches high; the two-headed pig; the three-hundred-pound calf.

  We wanted to see Don Juan the Dwarf, that silk robe, that black mustache. We wanted to buy his kisses for dimes. We wanted him to touch our faces with his stubby hands.

  We wanted the tattooed woman to open her shirt. Pink-eyed albino lady. We wanted her to show us the birds of paradise on her old white chest.

  We wanted to go into the final room, the draped booth at the far corner of the tent, we wanted to pay our extra dollar to see the babies in their jars: the one with half a brain and the twins joined hip to chest. We wanted to see our own faces reflected in that glass, to know our own bodies, revealed like this.

  We wanted freaks, the strange thrill of them.

  But this is what we found instead: ordinary cripples, a man in a violet robe promising Jesus would heal them.

  We found children in wheelchairs. We saw their trembling limbs.

  We saw a bald girl in a yellow dress.

  We saw two boys with withered bodies and huge heads.

  We saw all the mothers on their knees. We thought their cries would lift this tent.

  Busted driving home. Adele knew who had the car but turned us in. That’s why I left, Clare said.

  I’m waiting for you on the road.

  You could be anyone: a woman with a blond child, or the man in the blue truck come back. You could be the one who wants me dead. We meet at last.

  I’m not trying to go home. I’m heading north instead.

  Clare’s tired. Clare’s not talking now. If you’re dangerous, I don’t think she’ll tell me.

  I see swirling snow, pink light between bare trees, your car in the distance, moving fast. I speak out loud to hear myself. Clare’s gone, I say. But when you spot me, when you swerve and stop, she surprises me. She says, Go, little sister, get in.

  She whispers, Yes, this is the one.

  I don’t know what she means.

  If you ask me where I want to go, I’ll tell you this: Take me out of the snow. Take me to a tent in a field. Make it summer. Make the sky too blue. Make the wind blow. Let me stand here with all the crippled children. Give me twisted bones and metal braces. Give me crutches so I can walk. Let my mother fall down weeping, begging the man in violet robes to make me whole.

  THE SNOW THIEF

  MY FATHER FLED without waking. Snow fell. The ghost of an elk drifted between trees. Mother called that November morning. Gone, she said, as if he might be missing. He was sixty-nine, still quick and wiry, a tow-truck driver who cruised county roads rescuing women like me.

  A single vessel ruptures; blood billows in the brain. That fast. Impossible to believe. Eleven years since he’d caught me with his friend Jack Fetters in the back seat. No one could blame his bursting artery on me. No one except my father himself. He filled my one-room flat on Water Street. I smelled smoke in damp wool, saw the shadow of his hand pass close to my face.

  Simply dead. How could this be? He’d wounded the elk at dawn, tracked it for miles down the ravine. Near dark, the bull became an owl and flew away.

  Lungs freeze. Hearts fail. It’s easy. I know it happens everywhere, hundreds of times a day, to daughters much younger than I was then. Still, each one leaves a mystery.

  As my father slipped into bed that night, he said, My shoulder hurts. Could you rub me?

  And Mother whispered, I’m too sleepy.

  It drove her mad. Over and over she said the same thing: I was going to rub his shoulder in the morning.

  I thought we’d lose her. She kept asking, How could I sleep with your father dead beside me? I remember how suddenly she shrank, how nothing she ate stayed with her. My brother wanted to put her away. A home, Wayne said, for her own safety.

  One night we found all her windows open, the back door flapping. We caught her three miles up the highwa
y. She stood in the middle of the road, as if she’d felt us coming and had paused to wait. Our headlights blasted through worn cloth, revealed small drooping breasts and tense legs, bare feet too cold to bleed. She wore only her tattered nightgown. No underpants beneath it. Nothing.

  She wouldn’t ride in the truck. I gave her my coat and boots. I wore Wayne’s. He had to drive in stocking feet. Mother and I walked together, silent the whole way. I held her arm to keep her steady. But this is the truth: she was the one to steady me. It made sense, this cold — a kind of prayer, this ceaseless walking.

  When we got home, she let me wash her feet. I told her she was lucky, no frostbite, and she said, Lucky?

  Then she slept, fifty-six hours straight.

  The doctor said, She needs this. She’s healing.

  I washed her whole body. She hadn’t bathed for twelve days. My mother, that smell! Air too thick to breathe, tight as skin around me.

  She woke wanting sausages and steak. Eggs fried in bacon grease. A can of hash with corned beef. She ate like this for days and days, stayed skinny all the same. It’s your father, she said. He’s hungry.

  He took her piece by piece. For thirteen years my mother stumbled in tracks she couldn’t see. Every year another stroke left another tiny hole in her brain. I thought of it this way, saw our father standing at the edge of the pines, his gun raised. He was firing at Mother; but it was dusk, and since he was dead, his aim was unsteady. Each time he hit, she staggered toward him. He was a proud man, even now. It was his way of calling.

  In the end, he defeated himself. All those scars left spaces empty. She forgot why she’d gone to the woods and who she wanted to find there. She loved only her nurse, and almost forgot my father, and almost forgot my brother and me.

  I caught the pretty boy smoothing her sheet. Thin as an angel, this Rafael, so graceful he seemed to be dancing. He held her wrist to feel the pulse. He checked her IV. He said, What a beautiful way to eat.

  He loved her too. How can anyone explain? He wasn’t afraid of burned thighs or skin peeling. He touched her feathery hair, sparse and fine as wet down on one of the unborn chicks my brother kept in jars of formaldehyde the year he was fourteen. Specimens, he called them, his eighth-grade science project. Every two days he cracked another egg to examine the fetus. I hated myself, remembering this, seeing my own mother curl up like one of these. But there they were, those jars of yellow fluid, those creatures floating.