Family

by Micol Ostow

  i couldn’t. never.

  because the difference between sex with Henry and sex with uncle jack was that with Henry, i wanted it. with Henry, i could never, ever get enough.

  with Henry, i ignited like a supernova, lighting up the atmosphere. it would be eras, eons, endlessness before i broke the surface of the earth again.

  three days. in the van. with Henry. with consciousness. with swallows of smoke and hits from tabs. with flesh, fingertips, devouring mouths, drinking.

  it was infinity. it was always.

  “let me be your father.”

  “i don’t have a father. i never had a father.”

  and hadn’t wanted one. hadn’t seen the point of apron strings or family ties.

  there was only ever binding. there was only ever uncle jack. and the undertow.

  “that’s why.”

  “i don’t want…”

  i trailed off. it felt wrong, somehow, to disagree with Henry, to go against Him. but there were things i wanted from Him, things i wanted to do with Him, things that a girl shouldn’t do with her father.

  i knew that. even broken, even now, always, never, i knew that.

  “you do. and i can. i can be your family.”

  family. the word no longer crumbled like sandstone. now, instead, it swelled beneath me, carrying me forward. rushing me toward now.

  family.

  He rolled on top of me, and the heat came flooding back. the fever.

  “i can be everything.”

  after

  junior cuts the telephone wire, steady, sure-handed.

  leila clips the chains around the front gate, featherweight, aflight.

  shelly cackles, rubs at the greasepaint on her face. her eyes peer out at me, diamonds sunk deep within a pool of mud.

  i follow them down the winding drive, eyes lowered and trained on the ground in front of me.

  i listen for sounds.

  and then i hear them:

  gunshots.

  i try to stop listening. to shut out the sounds. to quiet the fever.

  but by now it is too late.

  blood

  leila may see through people, right to the core of their darkness. she was the one i watched out for, in the beginning. the one i always felt was watching me.

  but shelly?

  shelly has no mercy, no core at all. she is hollow. infinite.

  shelly is the one who has actually tasted blood.

  shelly is the one who craved it.

  the ranch

  it is like being in a movie.

  the ranch is a sprawling, run-down, chaotic cardboard cutout, a facsimile of what real life is like for real people.

  which suits me just fine. real life wasn’t exactly working out for me, if you’ll recall. real life never did me any favors.

  Henry found out about this place, the ranch, through a friend. He has lots of friends, which works out well for Him. for Him, and for us, i am learning.

  He tells me all about it, during our first three days in the van. i ask Henry about His family, His haven, and He explains about their homestead, the safe place where i’ll be—we’ll be—heading soon. the way Henry describes it, the ranch is love and openness and everyone caring. the ranch is family.

  my family.

  it used to be an actual film set, a wild, wild west backdrop. actors played dress-up here, make-believe—cowboys and indians and celluloid fantasy. there were shows you could watch on tv, in far-off houses where parents and children did such things as gather round nightly for wholesome entertainment. normal households, the types of households that none of us here at the ranch would know anything about.

  Henry has told me, of course, about my new family. our family. a network of sisters and brothers, each of them shattered in some unique way, each of them—of us—searching for wholeness. each of us a patch, knitting together, in the hopes of keeping ourselves warm.

  each of us unfurling, expectant. planting roots, transfixed, wet cement smoothed across the landscape of the ranch. setting. settling.

  these days, the ranch is an outline, a suggestion of its former wholeness. no one films here anymore. truth is stranger than fiction these days. nobody is interested in the wild, wild west, what with everything that’s going on today in the news.

  not these days.

  the new west has much more to offer people, in terms of fantasy.

  that’s where most of us girls on the ranch come from: the new west. or at least, that’s where we met Henry. we were easy enough for Him to find, spotlights radiating out from behind the blank curtains of our eyes.

  technically, i guess, we don’t really come from anywhere. not anymore.

  the west is a magnet, a beacon for broken people, and especially for us girls looking to escape from the infinite before.

  so.

  Henry collects us, His fantasies, and brings us back to the ranch.

  to be together.

  to be whole.

  to be family.

  arrival

  the man who owns the ranch, emmett—

  the friend of Henry’s friend’s friend, emmett—

  he, emmett, is very, very old.

  he is a wisp of smoke, a death rattle, a suggestion of before.

  i meet him on the day that i arrive.

  i am still stiff, blinking, sunlight-blind, fuzzy, fizzing, from three days in the van with Henry. my tongue is thick, my head buzzes with interference, white noise. wind tickles against the pliant insides of my thighs, the negative space where my jeans have been rubbed through. the places where i am exposed.

  i have surrendered my photos, my driver’s license, what little money i had.

  the money was uncle jack’s whiskey stash, and i’m not sorry to have taken it. even if it is no longer my own, mine alone, i am not sorry.

  everything belongs to everyone.

  he should be the sorry one, anyhow. uncle jack, i mean. though i’ve learned well enough that waiting for uncle jack to be sorry for anything is like waiting for the mother ship to land, waiting for the moon to careen into the craggy canyons of death valley.

  waiting for infinity.

  a girl, leila—one of my new sisters—takes it all from me: my bare, spare belongings, my everything, all that i surrender.

  she grins at me, shows her sharp, slick canines. her cheekbones are cut glass.

  my exposed places shudder and contract. Henry sees, palms the span of my head with His steady, sure hand, making my insides run like melted wax.

  He beckons someone else toward us, a bright-faced girl whose cheeks bloom red.

  he tells me her name: “shelly.”

  she swoons to hear Him call her out.

  swoons to watch His lips curl around the familiar breath sounds, the awareness of her being.

  Henry is the type that people swoon for.

  shelly is the type to swoon.

  “shelly,” Henry says. “shel.”

  she gnaws at her lower lip, thrusts her pale fingertips into the front pockets of her cutoff jeans. eyes me with bemused curiosity.

  if leila’s face is a lockbox, shelly’s is a blank journal, spine cracked, spread open on a worn tabletop. leila is a system of rapids; shelly is a life raft.

  i cannot drown again. will not.

  and shelly is a life raft.

  she giggles. “you’re new.”

  i pause, uncertain, and she reaches out. i want to start, to shrink, but before i can collapse in, i am enveloped. shelly embraces me. her hair brushes against my cheek; i smell honeysuckle. the skin on her arms is cool, like a mother’s against a fevered forehead.

  she pulls back, holds me at arm’s length. grins, giggles again.

  “we’re so glad you’re here,” she says, so calmly that there can be no room for doubt. glad spills out of her every pore, shines from the pupils of her sapphire eyes. her hand wraps around my forearm, squeezes and pulls me forward.

  “you’re going to love it.

  “yo
u’re going to love our family.”

  sisters

  shelly shows me around, introduces me to emmett.

  she looks like leila, except behind the eyes.

  i can see, as we walk the grounds, that all of us, the sisters, we all look somewhat alike. young, soft, clad in denim, cotton, leather sandals. fresh-faced.

  open.

  she’s kinder than leila, too. shelly is. she is warmth. she is chatter and fire and laughter. she bubbles over with the thrill of revealing her wonderland to a newfound sister.

  it has been eons since i’ve had a mother. ages since i knew a father.

  and i have never had a sister.

  before now.

  i think about mirror-mel, wonder what people see behind my eyes. wonder if i would even recognize what lies there, myself. wonder if any traces of my dark shadow-self remain.

  it strikes me: leila, shelly, and i:

  we are, now, a paper chain, conjoined tracings.

  infinite, ephemeral, inseparable.

  now.

  we are blood.

  we are family.

  fantasy

  emmett’s mostly blind, and can’t hear too well, either. shelly says he spends most of the day in a rocking chair, on the front porch of the building he uses as his home.

  he lives in a whorehouse that is not a whorehouse, above a saloon that is not a saloon.

  even robbed of sight and sound, emmett still shrouds himself in fantasy.

  of course, robbed of sight and sound, fantasy may be all that emmett has left.

  leila keeps him company, keeps him happy. Henry asked her to.

  people do what Henry asks them to.

  “Henry is jesus christ,” shelly says to me.

  we wind around the back of main street so that she can show me the storage silos, the barns where we will stay, the family. no movie sets for us. just love and space and everyone.

  Henry is jesus christ.

  shelly says this very matter-of-factly, as though she has just informed me that her favorite color is yellow, or that her birthday falls in august. that my eyes are dirtbrown. that emmett is blind, deaf, dying.

  Henry is jesus christ.

  she may be right.

  maybe.

  i smile, nod politely. shelly continues my tour of the ranch.

  we turn, head up to the corral by the creek, where the children are kept during the daytime.

  i wouldn’t have expected children. had i come to this place with any expectations, that is.

  “whose are they?” i ask.

  they climb, crawl, coo, winding their way through the arms of sisters. young, open girls, girls who look just like me. paper-doll girls with blank, peaceful expressions.

  conjoined, ephemeral. infinite.

  inseparable.

  i think: i would like to feel blank, to feel peaceful.

  i think: Henry can make me feel that way.

  i know: this is my now. and i am not sorry.

  shelly shrugs. “everyone’s. they’re everyone’s children. we raise them together.”

  everyone.

  i realize: we are all, here, sisters, mothers, daughters.

  all of us is everyone.

  now.

  yes.

  family.

  shelly explains that emmett lets us stay because he likes the company, likes to have pretty girls around cooking for him, even if he can’t quite make out their delicate features with his ruined eyes. likes to have young men—boys, really—tending to the maintenance, keeping the ranch from sinking further, sliding into total disrepair.

  keeping the death rattle at bay.

  we are here to sustain the fantasy. we are all here to sustain the fantasy.

  emmett’s.

  Henry’s.

  possibly, our own.

  real life wasn’t exactly working out for us. for any of us, i realize. real life never did any of us any favors.

  “and?” she adds, “i think he mainly likes leila.”

  that makes sense.

  i’m not sure how i feel about leila yet, myself. but still, it makes sense. leila is the opposite of death; she is a live wire, coiled, potent. maybe poisonous. how could emmett be immune?

  “it’s the perfect place for us, for our family,” she goes on.

  at first i think she means the ranch, the corral, the barn. i think she means how lucky it was that Henry came upon it, even though with Henry, of course, it’s never luck. it’s all His doing, it’s all His will, His way.

  then it dawns on me, like a cloud of realization. like one of Henry’s pills, like his cache of magic smoke, like a tab of enlightenment melting on my tongue:

  she means Henry. the half-life of Henry.

  His orbit is the perfect place for our shrieking, shrinking, fractured souls.

  she may not know she means it, but she does. i see it as sharply as emmett must see leila’s black-widow webbing.

  “lots of room here for anyone who wants to come and share in Henry’s love.”

  her eyes sparkle. she overflows with Henry’s love. she is bursting with it.

  and something else. something i can’t quite put my finger on.

  something i maybe don’t want to think about.

  shelly is my sister. and that is enough. for now.

  more than enough.

  for now.

  that is everything.

  “if we can keep it under control, fly under the radar? we could stay here forever.”

  the lilt to shelly’s voice tells me she would like this, that forever is what she yearns for.

  i have to wonder, even just for a moment, what sorts of things need to be kept under control.

  no matter; i am well versed in the fine art of flying under the radar.

  i should fit in well here, soaking in the syrup-strong glory of Henry’s love. in the orbit of His half-life.

  i could overflow here, burst. with love. and maybe something else.

  shelly is wrong, though. about Henry being jesus christ.

  i don’t tell her as much—those sparkling, forever-eyes worry me in some secret corner i choose to shy away from—but i’m sure of it in my soul. it’s an inescapable fact, like two plus two being four, or me having dirt-brown eyes, or uncle jack and his drinking:

  Henry can’t be jesus.

  jesus never did anything for me.

  i don’t believe in jesus christ.

  only in Henry.

  leila

  i only had twenty-one dollars on me when i arrived at the ranch, lucky jeans having finally given out, a thin layer of dust coating one of my two favorite tops, the straps of my sandals loosening from their scuffed foot beds.

  it was enough for leila.

  she smiled at me. it was a different smile than the one Henry had flashed when He came upon me at the park bench, like the messiah ready to show me to the gates of ever after.

  leila’s smile was closed and mysterious, like she’d read your diary or visited you in your dreams at night. like she knew your dirty secrets.

  like she knew how best to make you bleed.

  “i’ll need your wallet.” her lips parted. she wore her hair like mine, in a braid, but hers was tighter, her eyebrows creeping steadily toward her scalp.

  i blinked, disoriented from the three-day trip spent in Henry’s van. leila’s face was expressionless, save for the parted lips. at first i didn’t realize that this was how she smiled. how she said hello.

  how she asserted herself.

  “go easy on a new sister,” Henry said.

  even with His easy tone, it wasn’t a suggestion. with Henry, it was never a suggestion. never anything less than gospel.

  “i’ll need your wallet.” leila didn’t flinch. i guessed that she was my age, but older. somehow.

  there was a hidden language, a code shared between leila and Henry. i was jealous. i’d stumbled upon a lost world, an ancient language, and i’d misplaced my guidebook. their eyes were a sealed fort, unif
ied. i was weaponless, guileless. adrift as ever.

  i gave her my wallet.

  “i don’t have much cash,” i said, handing the lump of weather-beaten leather to her.

  she nodded, not looking at me, flipping the wallet open. she glanced at my ID: a driver’s license showing a snapshot of another girl, a mel from the before.

  “melinda jensen. seventeen years old.”

  i thought again:

  she, leila—

  she is my age. but older, somehow.

  i shrugged. “that’s me.” i peered at the picture upside down in her smooth, pale palm.

  even then, there had been cracks behind my eyes. a camera couldn’t hide those sorts of fissures, rivulets, fault lines. i could see them, now, from where i stood. Henry had seen them. leila could see them. they were permanent.

  leila slipped the license out of the wallet, quickly dropping it into a tin box with a lock on the front, like a tool kit, or a tackle box. the box was heavy, permanent; something solid, sturdy enough to house the ghost of my former self.

  something to capture and contain the hairline fractures of my past life. my half-life.

  she wasn’t finished. she continued to riffle through the wallet, examining the contents. her fingers paused, danced against a thick square. photo paper.

  like a magician coming to the end of a trick, she offered her palm to me again; from its center, half-life mel winked out, flanked by mother and uncle jack. the unholy trinity.

  “cute,” she said. she deftly deposited the picture in the lockbox, letting it float until it settled, covering my driver’s license.

  “i might have wanted that,” i said.

  leila didn’t seem to care what i might have ever wanted. she leveled me, eyes storm-gray. she snapped the box shut and jiggled its combination, sealing its contents. severing my ties. cutting me off from my former self.

  i didn’t want the picture. i didn’t need the license. wouldn’t need either, here at the ranch. not the money, either—Henry said that the family took care of each other. leila knew this, knew me, in an instant.