“No,” Helen said, sighing. “It’s just those boys.”
Those boys: Gus Dyer and his quiet tagalong Johnny Clare. They always came around on sale days and never bought anything, just picked up things with their sticky hands and stared at Rachel, especially Gus, who was clearly smitten by her. He stammered and blushed as if Rachel could see him. It was—almost—adorable. Helen tried to keep Rachel behind her when they came by, but today she was too late. They were there before she had a chance to protect her.
“Hey,” Gus said. He was chewing on something—a twig. It made his lips green. Little bits of bark were in his teeth. Helen wished Rachel could see this. “Hey, Rachel. Hey, Helen.”
Neither of the girls said anything. Rachel had been instructed in how to be with boys. She had been told how they were.
“Can we help you?” Helen said.
“No,” Gus said. Johnny Clare just shook his head.
“Y’all can scoot then,” Helen said.
“We’re not hurting anything.” Gus had never been scared of Helen, for some reason. It might have been because he wasn’t smart enough to be. “Do you mind if I speak to Rachel?”
Helen laughed. “She has nothing to say to you.”
“That’s right, Gus Dyer,” Rachel said, but without much conviction. “I have nothing to say to you.” She was smiling. Helen realized she was actually trying to flirt with him.
“See?” Helen said. “Get on out of here.”
Gus didn’t move. He looked back at his friend Johnny Clare. Johnny didn’t say anything, either. Everyone was quiet until Gus spoke. “Well,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to say to Rachel. We’re going. My folks and me. Leaving Roam.”
Rachel actually gasped. “No,” she said.
“What do you care?” Helen knocked against her sister’s shoulder with her own.
Rachel appeared to gather herself. “I don’t,” she said. “It’s just . . . you can’t give up on Roam. Our great-grandfather founded this town.”
Gus nodded. “I know,” he said. “But we’re not giving up. There’s just not much left to hold on to.”
Suddenly Johnny spoke up. “Gus and I are about the only boys still here,” he said.
“Men,” Gus said, correcting him. “We’re men.”
A black dog wandered in the yard behind them, stopping to look at the gathering as if it might be something the dog wanted to be a part of. Then it disappeared behind the Treadways’ house.
“Anything else?” Helen asked. “You’re scaring away our customers.”
Gus looked behind him, to his left and his right. No one was there.
“Just one more thing,” Gus said. “Rachel.”
Rachel. She’d never heard her name spoken like that before. Helen wasn’t sure she had heard anyone say her name like that, either.
“Yes?” Rachel said.
“We,” Gus started, then rethought it. “Johnny and me and a couple of others—not just us—Laura Anne’s going to be there, too. But we’re going down by the bridge and just, you know, have a farewell party. Say good-bye with smiles on our faces instead of frowns.”
“The bridge?” Rachel said. “What bridge?”
Helen would have liked to kill Gus Dyer now.
“The old bridge down by the ravine,” he said.
“That bridge is gone,” Helen said. “Long gone.”
“It’s old,” Gus said. “And I wouldn’t trust it. But—”
“There’s a bridge?” Rachel asked again.
“There’s no bridge,” Helen said.
Gus and Johnny looked at each other, and then at Rachel, and then at Helen. There was a story in Helen’s eyes, and somehow they could read it. It wasn’t a short story, either; it was a long one, and it was all about Helen and Rachel and who they were to each other, and even about the things Helen had told her. It couldn’t have been clearer if it had been written in a book.
“There’s no bridge,” Rachel said.
Gus and John kept looking at Helen, and Helen kept looking at them. “Okay,” Gus said. “Jeez. There’s no bridge. Can you come anyway?”
“Can Helen come, too?”
So much happened in the world beyond what Rachel knew. That Gus and Helen were having their own silent conversation at the same time Rachel and Gus were talking to each other was nothing she could have even imagined. That people were able to speak with their eyes—of this, too, she had no idea. But she would learn.
“I don’t think it’s that kind of party,” Helen said. “Is it, Gus?”
“No,” Gus said, defeated. “It’s not.” Gus took one last long look at the most beautiful girl he would ever see in his life. “Bye, Rachel.”
“Bye, Gus. And bye, Johnny Clare.”
So the boys left. Helen watched them walk away while Rachel appeared to be putting some of the table’s trinkets in a kind of order. Even Helen could feel how sad her sister was, though, sad in a way Rachel could never express, sad for missing out on something she had never, and would never, know. When the boys turned the corner Helen looked at the house standing there—empty now for a week—and saw Tammy Chan looking at her through the living room window. Tammy died ten years ago, in the flood. Helen remembered how her body had been found at the top of a pine tree, but she didn’t look that worse for wear now. Tammy Chan smiled, and lifted a hand to wave, and Helen almost did, too—force of habit. She stopped herself, because it didn’t feel right to be waving at a ghost, even if one waved at you first. Distracted, then, she didn’t hear the click-click of a real person approaching. Dorothy Samuels. Rachel liked Mrs. Samuels. It hadn’t been easy for Helen, keeping the two of them apart, but, for the most part, she had.
“Girls,” said Mrs. Samuels. “Good morning.”
“Morning,” Helen said. She watched as Dorothy glanced at her and then quickly to Rachel, where she let her gaze linger. She can’t even look at me, Helen thought.
“Good morning, Mrs. Samuels,” Rachel said. “How are you today?”
Mrs. Samuels had been a good friend of their mother’s. She was close to fifty years old, the age their mother would have been. Mrs. Samuels did things like put a kettle on the stove to boil water for her coffee each morning, and work in her garden, and make pies for charity auctions and the like (back when they had charity auctions in Roam), while her husband carved walking sticks from tree branches. It seemed so strange to Helen that they were still able to do all this while her own parents had melted away into the soil.
“I’m very well, thank you, Rachel,” she said. “Older than I’ve been.” She held out her hand and Rachel took it in both of hers, and Rachel ran her fingers across them as though she were reading the topography of a map. Rachel sighed, her face tilting toward her sister. Mrs. Samuels was nice.
“What can we do for you, Mrs. Samuels?” Helen said. “We have a number of new items today.”
“So I see.” Mrs. Samuels’s voice was tinged with sadness and—Helen heard it—the sharp edge of disapproval. “So I see.”
She let her eyes wander across the card table—past the deck of cards, the set of three blue pens from different stays at the Concorde Hotel, the chipped, stained coffee mug—until they stopped on something, transfixed.
“Your mother’s brooch.”
“Yes,” Helen said.
Now Mrs. Samuels was able to look at Helen, and Helen back at her, each woman filling her own space in the world and each of them unwilling, or unable, to move from it. At moments like this you could see Rachel suspecting something but unsure enough even to say what it was she thought.
“Helen?” Rachel said. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing, Rachel.” Helen was still looking at Mrs. Samuels. “Mrs. Samuels is interested in Mother’s brooch.”
“May I see it?” Mrs. Samuels asked.
Rachel’s hands, eager to be a part of whatever was going on, clumsily moved among all the objects until she came to it. She clasped it in both hands, to make sure, and then
held it out for Mrs. Samuels to take.
“Thank you, Rachel,” she said.
She took it, looked at it: it was a beautiful Chinese flower. Or at least it had the feeling of something foreign, of something faraway, of something magical. The way the jewels and stones glowed, even in darkness. Someone said they were just garnets and orange jasper—but there was definitely something about them. Rachel swore the flower had an aroma. To her it smelled like a camellia.
“It’s beautiful,” Rachel said, “isn’t it?”
“It is,” Mrs. Samuels said.
“You must have seen her wear it many times.”
“More than that,” Dorothy said. “I gave it to her.”
“Oh.”
Dorothy looked at Helen. “Your sister knew that, I’m sure,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
Slowly, Helen nodded. “I think I did know that.”
Dorothy held the brooch with both of her hands, just as Rachel had. “How much?”
Rachel was flustered. “We couldn’t sell it,” she said. “Not to you, Mrs. Samuels. Just take it. Please.”
“Don’t be silly,” Dorothy said. “I insist. How much for this lovely brooch? Helen?”
Again their eyes locked in wordless battle. “Five dollars,” Helen said.
“That’s much less than it cost me, even all those years ago. Are you sure?”
“Fine. Ten.”
“Helen,” Rachel said.
“Ten it is,” Dorothy said, opening the tarnished golden clasp of her small black purse and gingerly removing a weathered bill. Helen quickly snatched it from her and dropped it into the cigar box.
Dorothy held the brooch for only a moment more. Then she said, “Here you are, Rachel. A little present.”
She crossed to the other side of the card table and carefully pinned the brooch on Rachel’s dress. Then she hugged her. “It looks beautiful. You look like a queen.”
“Like a queen? Really?” Rachel said, unable to stop herself.
Dorothy was crying now, softly. “Remember her,” she said. “Remember your mother. If she were here she would tell you to stay hopeful. Things could change: they always do.” And she squeezed Rachel’s shoulder before she turned and walked away.
“Hopeful for what?” Helen called after her. “Hopeful for what?”
But Mrs. Samuels was already gone around the corner.
Rachel and Helen stood there, both of them appearing to look at Mrs. Samuels as she left them, but neither seeing her. Helen’s eyes were clouded, too.
“That was nice,” Rachel said, fingering the brooch on her chest.
“Yes,” Helen said, as she felt her strength returning. “Now we have money for the cake.”
There were other customers that day, but only a few, and none of them spent any of their precious money. When Rachel said she smelled rain—she was good at that—they packed everything up and covered their things with a tarp and almost made it home before the first drops started falling. It was a warm rain, the kind you could steep a tea bag in. So although they were just a few feet away from the awning that would bring shelter, they stopped and let the rain fall all over them. The girls, would you just look at the girls. It’s what you would say had you seen them, standing in the warm summer shower.
They both closed their eyes and raised their heads toward the heavens. Rachel’s hand reached out, her fingers gently waving like the fronds of a sea flower, until they found Helen’s wrist. Then she clasped their wet hands together.
“What they said about leaving,” Rachel said then. “The boys.”
“Idiots,” Helen said. “What makes them think anywhere else is going to be better than Roam?”
“It just made me think,” Rachel said. “Maybe we should go, too.”
“Really?” Helen said. “And do what, where?”
Rachel had no answer for that, of course. “Or maybe—maybe I should leave. Just me. I’m a grown woman now.”
“Really?” Helen laughed. “A grown woman? A grown woman can take care of herself, Rachel. I don’t see you doing that anytime soon. Or ever.”
“Because you never let me try.”
Helen bit her bottom lip to keep from screaming and let go of her sister’s hand. “Go ahead,” she said. “Try. See how far it gets you. You couldn’t find your shoes without me! Actually, Rachel, sometimes I feel more like your servant than your sister. ‘Get this, get that. Clean this up.’ It’s never ending. Literally.”
“I don’t want to be a burden to you,” Rachel said. “I want to show you—”
“I think it’s too late for that, Rachel. It’s a lifetime too late for that. Have you ever considered what I’ve given up for you? I could have gone anywhere, done anything. But then Mother and Father died, and I had to babysit my little sister instead.”
“I’m sorry,” Rachel said. She was crying now, though she couldn’t tell the tears from the rain. “I’m so sorry. But is it too late? Mrs. Samuels just said—”
Helen looked at her sister. Her dress was translucent against her body. Not too long ago little blind girls were put away with other little blind girls in an asylum, because no one even wanted to know such people existed, blind people with their twisted faces and bad posture and eerie stares. Could have happened to Rachel, too, after their parents died. No one would have blamed Helen had she done that. But she didn’t, and now it was too late. Over the years it had happened: now Helen needed Rachel more than Rachel needed her.
“Don’t leave me,” Helen said. And then, almost too softly to hear, “Please.”
“Never,” Rachel said, but with less conviction than Helen would have liked. “Where would I even go?”
The rain came down harder. Against the metal porch covering it sounded like thunder.
“Never,” Helen said. And she took her sister by the shoulders and shook her, pressing her lips to Rachel’s ear. “Never! Never! Never!” she said.
And Rachel, through tears, said, “Let go of me, Helen. Please.”
But Helen wouldn’t let go, and they stood like that until the rain stopped and some of the wet dripped out of their clothes. Then they set the cart on the porch and walked into the house Elijah McCallister had built, so many years ago, and tried to pretend that nothing had changed, when everything had.
ROAM:
A SHORT HISTORY,
PART III
Silk made Elijah a very rich man, and as rich men have always done, he built a house far too big for a man to live in. It was elegant, magnificent, absurd. It would have been absurd anywhere, but in Roam, an invented place in the middle of nowhere, it was gloriously, mythically, absurd. In addition to being huge—you had to look at it twice just to see it once—it was also recklessly beautiful, the largely uninhabitable manifestation of the mind of a madman lucky enough to find a thing through which he could channel his ambition. In his dreams his house swallowed everything and everybody; America lived inside of it instead of the other way around. The imported Chinese kept coming, half of them working in the silk factory and the stores and clearing the land to build a bigger factory and more stores; the other half working on his house, building wing after wing after wing, soon to no purpose at all but his own deranged desire to hear the incessant sounds of progress hammering in his ears. Elijah liked to be able to see new rooms, new porches, new staircases; it wasn’t necessary that they lead somewhere.
At least there was a town in which the house could exist. For quite some time Main Street was the only street, and only was called Main Street after there was a second street, and then a third. It was laid out much like any other town—thoughtlessly, and in haste. Here is where the rich people lived, and here the workers. This is where the white people shopped, and here was the special store for the Chinese, which had everything they could ever want, as long as they didn’t want that much. There was a barn and a bar and a general store. There was a place to eat. One young man opened a haberdashery, and that was welcomed by men and women alike. People lived and died
. They loved and laughed and cried. It was the same here as it was anywhere else in the world; people were no more or less sad, no more or less happy, no more or less anything. Roam was new, but at the same time it wasn’t anything new at all. The only difference was, it was Elijah’s. He made the laws and invented the money. His house was like a second town—even he never saw it all—and rumor had it that within its labyrinthine bowels he sired many families with the most excellent of the Chinese women and had children—one of them a son, to keep his blood and name alive—who never saw one another, though sometimes separated only by a wall and a door. They say he had more children than a dozen men, and though he never married a single one of their Chinese mothers, he professed an abiding fondness for each—and in fact treated them all with the gentleness one usually reserved for stray dogs and babies not your own. Outside of his own home he forbade the comingling of white men and yellow woman; he called their offspring combos and created a slum just for them. He created everything, the worst of it and the best of it as well, and for a little while—a week, perhaps, give or take a day—Elijah was content.
Ming Kai was not.
All these years, as Ming Kai had watched Roam grow from a patch of mulberry trees into a real town, he was kept separate from its success. Even though it would never have existed without him, he was of value only for as long as Elijah wanted to know his secret. Once Elijah knew the secret of making silk, Ming Kai became just another person in Roam, another person to perform a small part in the drama of Elijah McCallister’s life.
But not entirely. When Elijah needed to talk to someone, it was always Ming Kai he sought out. When the pressures of running the town became overwhelming—and they did, occasionally, though Elijah would have no one else in the world know it—he turned to Ming Kai. They would talk from night into the morning about the bears, about the combos, about the past. Ming Kai mostly listened; he could go for some hours without saying a word. Still, in the morning Elijah would clap him on the back and say Thank you, my friend. You have been a great help. And to Elijah he did feel like a friend—his only friend.
It had been years since they talked like this. Now Ming Kai felt like just another man; no one knew who he was, what he’d done in his time. After giving up his life to come here, this was too much to bear.
The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel Page 6
