Girl in Reverse (9781442497368)

by Stuber, Barbara

  I sink back into the bathroom, sit on the couch, my hands turned to ice. I haven’t talked to him since he brought my books over. I haven’t thanked him, so he definitely knows I am thankless and mannerless and just plain—less.

  Go do it right now.

  I walk out, sneak over, and stand in the shadow below a tapestry of Jesus carrying the Cross, titled The Way to Calvary. I peek around the corner, the perfect spot to watch Elliot, my quarry. He unloads his supplies onto the floor, assesses the lighting, and positions his easel by a twice-life-sized sculpture of two naked people sitting on a giant, scratchy-looking pig’s head. They embrace, inches away from a kiss.

  Elliot clips dark gray paper to his easel, opens his charcoal box, and stares forever at the lovers, who stare forever at each other. With his gaze fixed on the woman, he moves his charcoal stick through midair as if he’s touching her with it and begins to shadow the very spot where her breast brushes her boyfriend’s chest. My face burns. I look away, then look right back. Shadows and curves grow on Elliot’s paper.

  Sharp dashes of black.

  Highlights in white.

  Life drawing.

  The wheelchair woman and her daughter stop to watch. It’s fine to stare at bare body parts in here. You’re supposed to.

  Elliot squints, shades her jawline, bends to deepen the shadows of her armpit. He twists like the boyfriend, gripping the stone floor with his feet. His shoulders drop and rise. He smudges the contours of her cheek with the side of his thumb, closes one eye, adjusts his position, lost to the world. I lean against the wall thinking—here I am obsessing over an old stick of Chinese wood while Elliot James is twisting himself into love scenes.

  Without one bit of warning, he stretches and swivels around so fast he’s looking right at me. I jump, a termite caught in the light of day.

  Oh, God. Oh, God. I wave—hi.

  He nods.

  I walk to his easel. “Th—thanks for bringing my books over.”

  “Yeah.”

  Say something else! I sweep my hand. “I just came by to see the Pablo Picasso painting, you know, Girl before a Mirror.”

  “Fat chance. She lives in New York City in the Museum of Modern Art.”

  “Oh, well. Yes, uh . . . I mean, I like that poster in the art room. . . .” Excruciating pause. Colossal embarrassment.

  I walk around the sculpture trying to appear captivated by the artist’s signature, which is etched into the woman’s hip. The marble is milk-colored, silky, and glowing, as though it’s heated from inside. The title is: Atalanta and Meleager with the Calydonian Boar. The label explains that Atalanta is the woman, the huntress who has shot the boar. The upcoming kiss must be her reward.

  “They’re characters in a Greek myth,” Elliot says.

  I nod, like I already knew that.

  He shrugs. “I’m going to enter this in the Fine Arts Showcase at school.”

  Wow. That’s brave. “How do you want them to look?” I ask, instantly recognizing my second stupid, unanswerable remark. He wipes his hands on his pants and walks around the whiskery boar and its naked riders. He looks up and down their curving spines, around their pulsing necks. His gaze slides across their lips, over their navels, and down their legs. The man, Meleager, has a handful of Atalanta’s cascading marble hair. She grips his long curls, pulling him in. Their shadow on the gleaming stone floor is huge and beautiful—curving and complicated.

  Elliot stops, glances over at me, and points to his easel. “Do you want to know how I want them to look?” There’s a raise of his eyebrows and a slight smile. “Sweaty.”

  Unh!! I blink . . . blink, blink. Morse code for: Bring assistance. I am going to permanently die.

  Elliot goes back to work. It takes guts to expose your naked lovers to the students and faculty of Wilson High School, especially the rusted hearts of Miss Arth and Mr. Thorp.

  Other visitors watch Elliot draw. A tall, willowy girl, probably from the Art Institute, walks up. Her hair is in a messy blond ponytail. Her hands are covered with charcoal and she has a smudge on one gorgeous cheek. She wears a man’s shirt with a belt around it and boots. She looks at his drawing, then at him, and shakes her head. “Dammit, Elliot,” she says in a low, mocking voice, “how do you get your foreshortening so perfect?” She fake stamps her foot. “How?”

  Next to her, I feel like a human lump with a Chinese facial problem that no eraser or coating of charcoal smudges can resolve.

  Elliot does not introduce us. The blond girl leans down. Her golden hair falls over his shoulder. He describes how to foreshorten the lovers’ giant, dimpled knees so they appear to jut forward. She throws her arms up. “I know, I know . . . but still . . .” She blows him a kiss and walks toward her easel, exasperated—or pretending to be. Her blown kiss is cleverly mixed—part real, part kiss-off. But either way Elliot has got to feel kissed by that exotic, arty, curvy girl who would fit perfectly on any one of these pedestals.

  In a few minutes I stand on the museum steps staring across the Sculpture Park lawn. The shadows of the bare elms look so real, so black and stark that if they were tilted upright, they could be trees themselves. Only after I’ve walked past The Thinker do I remember that I came to see the Chinese antiques.

  Chapter 11

  “There’s more in that box,” Ralph remarks, chewing the side of his thumbnail Tuesday morning before school. Dad is warming up the car. Mother is on the phone in the living room. “Under the bottom.”

  I give Ralph a you are so full of it look.

  “Photographs are under the false bottom of the box,” he says flatly.

  “Of . . . ?”

  Ralph leans toward me and whispers fast, “Crime scenes and camels.”

  “Crime scenes?”

  Ralph grimaces, nods.

  “Whaddayamean?”

  “Body parts,” he says.

  Body parts. Body parts? “Dead-people body parts?”

  “They usually are.” Ralph raises his eyebrows. “Sorry, Lily.” He holds out his arm, chops his other hand across it above his wrist. “The arm is cut off here. There’s a handcuff and dead fingers hanging down. Another’s a face with a bullet hole in the forehead.”

  I picture the newsreels of Chinese torture camps in Korea, the bloody snow and wooden watchtowers. So Gone Mom was a spy, a pregnant spy—the perfect disguise.

  * * *

  After school I weave through cars parked in our driveway, dreading the next five minutes. It’s Mother’s bridge club day and our living room contains two foursomes of ladies, “Girdles,” as Ralph and I call them.

  Our front hall is smoky and smells of perfume. I hang up my coat and—ugh—run into Anita’s mother coming out of the half bath. She says she’s the dummy this round. I half expect her to act afraid of me, the way her daughter does, but she’s friendly, in a distant way.

  I fix a pleasant anticipatory expression on my face, unclench my fists, and follow her into the living room. Everyone looks up—blink, blink, smile. Most of them have kids at my school. Hello. Hello. Yes. Fine. Thank you. Good to see you, too. Thank you.

  Each lady has a little silver bowl of bridge-mix chocolates, an ashtray, and a tally. After the last hand they will switch from coffee to sherry.

  Someone asks me about Neil Bradford and his sister and how they are managing. “We can’t concentrate on our play today thinking about poor Tom,” my mother says. They shake their heads. The Red Horde has invaded our living room and sabotaged their bridge party.

  I describe the flag ceremony and our club projects to support the war effort. I do not add that, for me, school is a war zone. The Girdles nod at my mother in an approving way—Lily is a good girl, Vivian, such a brave thing to adopt her. And how beautifully you’ve raised her—such manners and poise.

  I start upstairs, then swivel and bump through the kitchen door, shoved by my phony, perfect-daughter self. I survey the mess. Washing dishes is a guilt fixer. It is also a detour from the secret stash of gory pictur
es burning a hole through the rafters. I stack everything in the dish rack. I put the leftover orange cake in tinfoil. I wipe the crumbs into the garbage, rinse and rerinse the dishrag, check my watch.

  I have the remainder of their card time plus the sherry-and-cigarette hour. Mother is preoccupied, Ralph and Dad both gone. Time to prowl the attic.

  I lock Ralph’s door, get his flashlight, and open the attic door. I clear the steps containing his Scout gear and climb toward the disgusting pigeon coop.

  There’s no floor—just raw boards on their edges running parallel, with gray insulation between. My eyes adjust. I see stepping-stones of scrap plywood straddling the boards. Two trails—one to the window and another to a tarp by the chimney stack. My heart races. How in the world did Ralph find my box?

  The single window is broken. The wind chimes rattle softly in the cold breeze. I bite my lip, stifle a sneeze, train the flashlight on the tarp, and crawl, propelled by raw nerves.

  I imagine my brand-new father straddling the rafters, hiding my box under the tarp, and declaring: Lillian Loo’s past is finished. Lillian Firestone’s future can begin.

  I sneak down the attic stairs and dart in the bathroom as the Girdles tromp upstairs to get their coats off my parents’ bed—Those were my worst cards, ever! I should have bid no trump. Ha-ha-ha. I must have that orange cake recipe. I lock the door, sit on the floor, and prepare to meet the dismembered body parts of my past.

  I spread a bath towel and lay everything out—door knocker with fangs, greenish jade piece, compass, wrist rest, incense box. I pry the bottom with a nail file and, sure enough, there’s a flat red package underneath. Ralph has left the twine in a knot that requires tweezers to undo. I arrange the pictures in a line facedown—the gory game of solitaire Gone Mom has dealt me.

  Each has the same Chinese word and the year 1934 written on the back.

  I hold my breath and flip the first picture over. It’s blurry, but I can see it’s a hand. A pale, drooping hand, chopped above the wrist, with long, stiff fingers and a handcuff exactly the way Ralph described. The index finger sticks up as if the person was pointing to his killer at the time of his death. The background is plain white.

  I sit back, shiver, and turn the next picture. It is a headless person’s bare back with a hole dug out between the shoulder blades. For a sickening moment I imagine it’s Tom Bradford with his arms hanging limply. There is something in the hole—bones or stringy guts or sticks. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. In the background is a fence with other body parts propped against it.

  The third is what look like two bloated, severed toes. I flick it away, my shoulders hunched to my ears, and swallow hard.

  One of the remaining pictures is going to be the head. I dread the head. I need Ralph for it. I gather everything back in the box, turn off the bathroom light, slip into my room, and hide it in the closet.

  * * *

  Later, after Dad is snoring, and Mother’s cold cream has gone to work for the night, I sneak into Ralph’s room, shake him. “Wake up!”

  He stirs, grabs for his flashlight. “Have you become nocturnal?”

  “Shh! Bring your magnifying glass.” I tug his pajama shirt. “Stalker feet. Please. In my room.”

  We sit together on the floor. Ralph rubs his eyes. He’s all pudgy and alive with bad breath and stinky feet. I tell him how I crawled through the attic. His eyes get wide. I can tell he’s impressed.

  “But I can’t look at the head by myself.” I put the unviewed photos facedown.

  “By the way, the word on the back of these is ‘Shanxi,’ ” Ralph says.

  “What? How do you know that? Did you show these to somebody? The Chows?”

  “No. I just copied down the word on a little piece of innocent paper and I showed it to them. I didn’t do anything bad. It’s okay. Really! Shanxi is a province in the north of China. That’s all.” He turns to the pictures. “Okay, you pick.”

  I turn one over. We lean down. It’s the head all right, gray and dusted with snow. The blank eyes are partly open. There’s a blurry bullet hole in the forehead.

  I drop the picture and start crying. “It’s Gone Mom. It has to be her.”

  Ralph shines his flashlight, positions his magnifier. After a long moment he taps my leg. “How could your first mother put a picture of herself in a box for you if she’s already dead?”

  I say nothing. I can’t talk above the clink and clatter of my heart.

  “And . . . this can’t be her unless she lived on after dying of a bullet wound that didn’t bleed and then somehow put her picture in your box and then traveled across the ocean and had you after she was already dead.”

  “You’re the one who said they were body parts.”

  “Right. But I didn’t say of what !”

  “You are not making sense,” I say.

  “No, you aren’t. Plus 1934 is before the Korean War.” Ralph scrutinizes the picture.

  I turn the other pictures over. One is a shaggy camel with saddlebags and reins hanging down. Another is a crowd of gypsies in a dusty pit. It’s impossible to distinguish their faces. “Why did she give me these? I mean it. Why?” Ralph squints into the magnifying glass. Says nothing. “Regular babies have albums with pictures of them inhaling birthday cake and standing all proud in their poopy diapers with popcorn stuck up their noses. But I’ve got pictures of dirt and camels and frozen hideousness. Not exactly cuddly and sentimental. No wonder they hid it from me. It’s sickening.”

  Ralph arranges the body parts one above the other—head, hollow back, hand, toes. “Maybe these make a Chinese totem pole.”

  I put my head down. Bewildered. “Is this some sick joke? A game?”

  Ralph says, “Well. Who can you ask? Who would know?”

  Chapter 12

  I wake up Wednesday with the Sisters of Mercy Children’s Home so real in my mind that I feel like I’ve slept there. The school nurse thinks I am staying home with cramps. Mother thinks I am at school, but actually I am about to do something impossible.

  I get off the bus, cross the street, and walk up the sidewalk to the front door. Rock salt crunches under my shoes. The yard is a mat of icy grass and oak twigs. The cement floor is swept, with a little bowl of kitty water not yet frozen by the door.

  I will ring the doorbell and count to ten. If no one answers, I will leave. I push the bell and count fast. Okay! But as I turn, the door opens. “Ha! Lillian! Oh my goodness.” She starts to reach out and then pulls back, her hand on her heart.

  Out of my mouth rattles, “Hello, Sister Evangeline.” We stand together a long moment, then she motions me inside.

  Votive candles still burn in the alcove by the visitor’s room—a smoky, welcoming spirit. There’s the big old desk with the gooseneck lamp we couldn’t touch. I look up the silent staircase to the landing, turn to her, and say, “I remember that the hem of your habit was always wet.”

  Evangeline looks amazed. “Yes, from the dew when we hung the wash.” I picture the backyard clotheslines, the corridors of waving sheets. “And from mopping the floors and watering our garden.”

  I study the row of coat hooks. Only two occupied. Sister and I lock eyes. Hers are greenish and tired looking. A wave of longing seems to move between us. “I’ve kept up with you, Lily. I know you have a brother and that you do well in school. I . . .” She stops. Maybe she can tell she’ll knock me flat with another word.

  “Yes . . . Ralph is m—my little brother.”

  She nods. A black kitten pads toward us, weaves around my ankles and the folds of Evangeline’s habit. “This is Joy. Black cats are better than white ones around nuns,” she says. “Her mother, Mystery, lived here when you did. Cats make good pets for a home where so many come and go. They don’t miss a thing and their purr is the perfect lullaby, at least for some.”

  I pick up Joy and scratch her ears and, of all the insane things, wonder if Mother will find cat hair on my coat and figure out where I’ve been. “Who live
s here now?” I ask.

  “Just Sister Immaculata and me and Joy.”

  Joy jumps out of my arms and curls up on the bottom stair. Sister Evangeline sits at the desk and I sit beside Joy. The entry hall fills with old sounds—clattering shoes, recited prayers, the dinnertime bell, laughter.

  “I remember Nancy the best,” I say. “She was an orphan too, a fifth grader. I was her ‘charge.’ ” I picture Nancy’s smiling mouth full of teeth too big for her face.

  “Yes, she took good care of you.”

  I glance into the visitors’ room, with the same doilies and dish of stale butterscotch candy.

  “Is your school out?” Evangeline asks.

  “No. I called in sick but . . .”

  Sister Evangeline’s eyebrows shoot up. “We nuns are familiar with managing secrets.”

  “I was wondering how long I lived here.”

  “About a year, Lily.”

  “Is that long for an orphan?”

  “No. Some children aren’t ever placed.” She looks off.

  I stare ahead and say the lines I have rehearsed. “I found a box of my belongings from my birth mother, Lien Loo, in the attic at home and I wondered if there might be anything else?”

  Sister Evangeline sniffs, blinks, reblinks, and stands up. She seems trapped by her wimple, unable to scratch her head or comb her fingers through her hair or even tug her collar. She folds her hands—grips them, actually. I remember her strong hands—the look of them, not the touch.

  “Or if there’s something I should know. The pictures in the box she left for me are awful. . . .” I cover my face. Tears slide between my fingers and onto my coat.

  I hear Sister Evangeline sigh, but she doesn’t say a word.

  “She was definitely Chinese, wasn’t she, my birth mother?” I say.

  “Yes, and a very determined young woman, as I recall.”

  “Sh—she wasn’t married, right?”

  “That is correct, Lillian.”

  “So she was alone when she brought me here?”

  Sister stands, leans on her fists on the desk. “Yes. And she was very much alone when she left.”