Jubilee

by Jennifer Givhan

  Some say he was honoring the girl’s spirit, at first. It had begun as tribute, an altar, before taking the bizarre twist and veering into horror.

  Joshua had tried not to picture Jubilee among those terrifying, hanging dolls.

  Not to picture Bianca as the caretaker of such a place.

  A decade ago, the article had said, the island’s keeper, the doll fanatic, had been found drowned on the same shore where he’d supposedly found the little girl when the curse began.

  Bianca had called in sick to her writing-center gig, she’d said, because they had a rough night, Jubilee and her, they hadn’t slept well. He’d offered not to come over as planned, to let her get some rest, but she’d insisted he come anyway.

  Matty answered the door with the half-smirking, half-exasperated expression that Joshua had come to believe was the only mask he wore, his costume of protective-but-good-natured-nevertheless brother. He held a Dark Horse Comics mug and wore cutoff shorts, a short-sleeved button down, and sandals.

  “Hey, it’s Beast,” Matty said, his tone friendly. Joshua smiled, appreciating this gesture of familiarity, nicknaming him, recognizing that he was becoming a staple in their lives, like they relied on him, like he and Matty now shared a common purpose: watching over Bianca.

  Joshua nodded back. “How’s it going?” He stepped inside the redbrick house, taking in the electric energy he felt radiating from Bianca’s space down the hallway, the manic pixie vibe she often exuded that left him high and craving more.

  “It’s been a night, I’ll tell you what.”

  “She okay?”

  Matty chuckled slightly, took a sip of his coffee, shook his head. Never let slip his good-natured-brother mask. “Nothing more than usual.”

  Joshua didn’t let himself wonder why none of this scared him. Why he was so eager to wrap himself in the tangled limbs and breast and belly of a woman whose island caretaker stood here in the hallway, passing the torch to him: shift change, changing of the guards.

  He stopped at the little table outside her door, on which perched a fishbowl and a five-dollar goldfish. “He’s mine,” she’d declared. “I call him Blue. How blue it’d be, swimming back into oblivion.”

  “Where’s that from?”

  “It’s a piece of a poem I’ve had swimming in my head. It has something to do with Eve’s children rescued from the waters of Lethe . . . I haven’t worked it all out yet, haven’t committed it to paper.”

  He shivered, recalling her words and their ominous echo of the island of dolls. He hadn’t stumbled across that part of his research yet, when she’d quoted her poem, so he’d just told her a lame story of how, before Jayden, when he’d lived in the dorms his freshman year, he’d heard that it was possible to swallow a live goldfish in one piece then regurgitate it still alive. So on a bet, he tried it. The fish came back out, tail flapping. But a few minutes later, it’d died. “I felt bad,” he told her, “but I won the bet. He came out alive, even if only for a little while.”

  She’d answered that he was horrible for killing it, then admitted a part of her wanted him to try it again, to test if it was still true. Or if a fish could ever beat the odds. Undrown.

  Now, he wondered if he could have used her poem as a segue into the island of dolls. Gauge her reaction. With her knowledge of Mexican history and haunted things, maybe she already knew of it.

  He knocked on her bedroom door, expecting her to mumble “Come in” from her bed, and he stiffened at the hope of climbing in beside her, breathing in her vanilla-and-orange-peel scent, pressing his face into the crook of her neck, her dark hair streaming around them both, pulling her soft belly and the cup of her hips against him. They hadn’t slept together yet, not officially. Honestly? He was probably less ready for all that than she was, even with her baggage, and that was saying something. But damn, it felt good to lie beside her.

  She didn’t answer.

  He knocked louder.

  Still nothing.

  He looked back down the hall toward Matty’s alcove but Matty had already put his earphones back on and was clacking away at his keyboard.

  Josh turned back toward Bee’s door, listening for her, but heard nothing.

  Should he text her first, before barging in? Had they been together long enough that he had a right to open the door? It felt like an invasion of privacy.

  He put his hand on the knob and flicked, slightly, to check if it was locked. When it gave, he turned it completely, his pulse quickening, and opened the door, calling. “Bee? You here?”

  The half-light through her purple curtains cast an ethereal flush across the many faces of Frida hung across her walls, alongside the other Mexican surrealist painters she loved, all women of course. Reprints she’d found cheap on the border where she’d grown up, she’d told him, striated color across cheap cardboard but still beautiful mirrors of the original works. A thin figure with a magical contraption feeding stardust and dark matter to a caged crescent moon with a long, thin spoon through the bars. A blue ghost-shelled woman peering into a small, wooden box from a shelf and seeing inside her own blue, flickering face.

  Stuff like that.

  He glanced around the dim room.

  Bianca wasn’t in bed like he’d expected but hunched on the floor beside Jubilee’s bassinet, her back toward him. Was she sleeping? Crying?

  He couldn’t help for a moment seeing her as the drowned island woman of the dolls.

  Maldito. Cursed.

  Then he saw she was moving, scribbling. He inched closer, afraid to disturb her.

  He watched her writing the way he and Jayden had watched archaeologists at the natural history museum through the glass with their headlamps and paintbrushes, dusting the bones so lightly. She was filling the journal he’d given her at the beach.

  If she noticed him, she gave no sign. She only perched on her knees, hunched forward, journal on the floor, pen to the page, filling line after line. She could have been praying at an altar.

  Jubilee lay in her bassinet, a baby blanket tucked to her chin, her hazel eyes closed. Like the Reborns he’d seen online, Jubilee looked so lifelike, she could have been sleeping. It was as if her eyelids would flutter and her little mouth would make sucking motions in her sleep. Even the veins bluish beneath her infant-thin skin appeared in the detailing of her face and neck, the dimpled infant rolls at her knees and thighs, the wrinkles in her tiny feet and hands. Every time Joshua looked at Jubilee in her crib, he felt the urge to press his hand against her torso to check for breathing. They stayed in that strange tableau a few moments, Joshua standing silent, watching, trying to understand what he was seeing.

  Bianca must have known he’d come in, for a minute later she stretched her arm toward him, gesturing for him to join her on the floor.

  “Hey,” he whispered, kneeling beside her. “What are we doing?”

  “Writing,” she said, and kept scrawling. He watched the loops and curves of her handwriting, observing the ragged edges of line ends emerging in patterns as she wrote. She didn’t stop where the journal’s page prescribed but where she decided.

  “A poem?” he asked.

  A few moments of silence. He thought she hadn’t heard him.

  Then she answered. “A letter.”

  A few weeks later, Joshua was alone with Jubilee. Bianca had gone into the next room to talk to Matty, she’d said, and left Joshua in her bedroom. He stood above the bassinet, watching for the telltale rise and sink of her chest the way he’d spent the first few nights with Jayden after Olivia had left him without a single instruction and he had no idea what he was doing, but he knew breathing was important. Joshua stroked her hair with his fingertips. Today she wore a yellow onesie, baby ducks stitched across the chest, fuzzy bloomers, yellow socks. All premie clothes. He’d gone with Bianca to Target a couple of times for baby essentials, premie diapers, premie onesies
. She’d bought an actual baby bottle, stopped using that plastic doll one he’d seen at the beach. They’d said nothing about it, but he guessed she’d thrown it away.

  He still hadn’t asked Bianca straight out, Why the doll? Couldn’t work up the nerve. Didn’t want to risk upsetting the island. Every once in a while she would say strangely poetic things, and he kept mental notes. She’d say things like she was “sewing her life together from corpse-like memories and joy so unexpected it deserved every chance at breath it got, every side stitch, every gluttonous inhalation.” He’d hold her and tell her how beautiful her poetry was. How he was glad to be a part of the joy.

  He stared at Jubilee, her eyes closed. He tried talking to her in the voice he’d used when Jayden was an infant but he couldn’t manage it and soon found himself confiding in her as if she were some kind of hoodoo doll instead, a juju baby that could absorb his fear and confusion, releasing him. “Hey, Jubilee. What’s she recovering from, little girl? You know, don’t you? I think you know.”

  He hadn’t meant to, but he picked her up. Her body was heavier than he’d expected. He placed her head against his shoulder and swayed back and forth, patting her and whispering, “Shhh . . . shhh . . .” the way Bianca had. It felt like an experiment. Only, it also felt real. He made another mental note: she smelled like Bianca and baby powder.

  “I’m gonna stick around, you watch. She’s going to be okay. I know she’s going to be okay.” He rocked and patted. A warning flickered. You’re losing it. She’s sucking you into her world. He squelched it down, kept holding Bianca’s baby.

  Bianca returned to the bedroom, saying she needed to change Jubilee. Joshua watched. Beside the bassinet was a dresser with a terrycloth changing pad. From a wicker basket next to the pad, Bianca pulled out a tiny diaper, wipes, and powder. She changed Jubilee, pulling off first the bloomers, then removing the diaper and throwing it in the wastebasket. Of course Jubilee had no genitalia, but Bianca wiped her as if she did. While she worked, she cooed and sang. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.”

  Joshua was becoming part of the study. He stepped into the painting. He was all in. He quieted the voice nagging at him since he’d met her, since he’d rowed up to her island, since she’d lured him to the shore and he’d stepped onto the beach, willingly, and he joined in her song, throwing his whole self into whatever strange game they were playing.

  “Hide it under a bushel? No! I’m gonna let it shine.”

  She smiled over at him each time he sang “No!” with such emphasis they were both laughing through the words.

  When she finished, she held Jubilee close and sat on the bed. From the nightstand, she lifted Jubilee’s bottle and fed her. Joshua was so high on endorphins from all the laughing it almost seemed natural. Almost.

  “Hey, can I ask you something?” Joshua asked. He pulled out his therapist’s mental notepad of questions. He’d dole them out one at a time, gauge her responses, change tactics accordingly.

  Her face still glowed, ruddy from laughing, but her smile faded slightly. “What’s up?”

  “When I first met Matty, he seemed upset when I mentioned Jayden.” He cleared his throat. “And you say he adores us, but every time I bring Jayden over, Matty seems, I don’t know . . . sullen or frustrated. Do kids just bother him?”

  She set Jubilee back in the bassinet, walked over to the window where the purple curtains draped open; he followed her gaze past the stucco wall to an avocado tree in the neighbor’s backyard. She wrapped her arms around her chest.

  He was tempted to fill in the silence with an apology. He often felt like he was walking on eggshells around her, but he had to admit that was part of her allure. Her current always buzzing, and he could never tell when she’d spark. She’d stormed out of the office that first day after Matty got all weird about Joshua and Bee both having “kids.” And each week since then, she’d crackle a little more. Like he was getting through to her. Like he was helping her uncover whatever was burning her up inside. Like they were making progress. Part of him felt like a little boy, hiding under the bed whenever the social worker would come, every time Bianca got angry. But the stronger part, the older part, felt like the social worker coaxing her out from under the bed. He sat on her office chair and leaned back, his hands locked behind his head, as if letting her know he would wait for her reply.

  She turned toward him, her expression guarded. Sad. She took a deep breath. “When I was with Gabe, he got another girl pregnant. Katrina. I was in high school still, he’d gone off to college. He was supposed to wait for me. A year. I’d follow him then, we agreed. But he couldn’t wait, I guess. We’d been together since I was fourteen, he was a year older. He didn’t love her. He said it was a mistake. I tried staying with him. But it was hard, seeing her in the passenger seat of his truck. I’d be walking home from school my senior year, walking alone past the carnicería and donut shop and laundromat toward my house—just a block away from his—and they’d pass by. On their way back from her doctor’s appointments. He’d call me to apologize. Tell me the baby was making her really sick. She had that pregnancy sickness that makes you throw up nonstop. He was really good to her. I got it all twisted in my mind for a while, believing it meant he’d be really good to me too. When I got pregnant.” She looked away from Joshua, toward the floor, her cheeks flushed bright red, her neck rashed with embarrassment or shame, Joshua couldn’t tell which, but he sensed her discomfort. He probably should’ve been confused (why would she have still wanted a baby with him?) but Joshua knew firsthand from falling for Bee the heart knows no reason.

  “It’s all right, Bee. I know you had a life before me. I’m not upset. You can keep going.”

  “My mom found out about it, small town, rumors. She said I couldn’t go to prom with him; he had responsibilities to someone else now, and I screamed I’d never forgive her. Matty came down to the Valley and told me I had to break up with Gabe. That coming between them, keeping a father from his child, was wrong. I wasn’t. I didn’t mean to. Matty said he’d never forgiven our father for not being his real father. It wasn’t Dad’s fault that Matty’s father abandoned him and my mother. But Matty made me feel small and stupid. He called me pathetic. Called Gabe a consolation prize, a white elephant gift. I shouldn’t want him anyway, but what I was doing, he said, was degrading myself by playing the other woman and standing in the way of a family . . .” She was crying. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with her wrists, wiped those on her shirt. “I gave up my UCLA scholarship and went to Holy Cross University instead. Their choir came to the Valley and something in their song sounded like redemption. I wanted God’s forgiveness, maybe. Or Matty’s. I broke up with Gabe and left early, right after graduation, spent the summer at my Tía Lydia’s in San Clemente. Matty had given me the Destiny’s Child album Survivor because, he said, I was. Katrina had the baby, and I thought I’d get over Gabe. But when our dad died, I got back with Gabe. Matty found out and said he wouldn’t speak to me as long as I was seeing that lowlife, he called him. And he stayed good to his word. He didn’t speak to me the whole time I was living down there. He iced me out completely until I moved back into his house.”

  Joshua stood up and moved to hug her, but she bristled. “I’m glad you told me,” he said. “I hadn’t realized Matty was so stubborn.”

  Bianca chuckled mirthlessly. “Oh, he’s stubborn all right. Downright pigheaded. Thinks he’s always right. Always knows what’s best.”

  Joshua murmured understanding. “Older sibling syndrome. My sister has it too.” He kissed the top of Bianca’s head, and he felt her relax in his arms.

  She looked up, her grimace given way to softness. “I’m lucky to know you, Joshua Walker,” she said, and pressed her body to his, her breasts against his chest, her thighs between his legs. She traced her lips against his neck, kissing upward toward his mouth. “Lucky,” she whispered again, her breath warm and tingling
in his ear.

  “I’m the lucky one, Bee,” he said, his voice husky. He wanted her. He wanted her so badly he forgot he was supposed to be studying her. He kissed her until he forgot he’d been troubled at all.

  Seven

  Bloody Mary

  Before Jubilee

  She was fifteen again; she was always fifteen. She wasn’t supposed to take a bath for several days after the D&C, but she didn’t care. She needed the water. She filled the tub lukewarm and clear—no suds, for those stung—and dipped herself gingerly past the water’s edge, then deeper. When she submerged completely, she allowed the water to rinse the words again and again over her. Dilation and curettage. She imagined a cactus flower opening wide, and bleeding. She opened her eyes. Whatever gift she had given, she prayed Mother Mary would return to her tenfold. When the time came. She would birth a nation. She would birth the stars. She would birth a newness that would emerge on the other side of the water.

  She held her curettage flowers, red swirling in the lukewarm tub.

  Petals in her palms—& floating away.

  That was then.