The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  As a result, after more than a few days in a row of similar sessions, while she sat huddled in her hoodie, lifeless on the futon, she’d also inhaled Meg’s visions for the future like secondhand smoke—Meg liked to talk when she was high—based on philosophical arguments around dancing the sacred body. Though she also confessed, just that afternoon, that once enough money was in savings, she planned to quit and go back to school full-time.

  “It’ll please my sister, if nothing else.”

  “But why keep going? You’re so much smarter than that.”

  Emily knew it was weird of her to say this, offensive even.

  Meg thought it over. “I think because I like the attention. Alex hates it. I’m pretty sure I embarrass her with the whole headdress thing.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  Alex had said so countless times.

  Meg continued, “She thinks I’ve squandered my potential. Well, she’s right. You realize she’s the reason I take those classes. Otherwise I’d have to put up with her bitching all the time.”

  Meg’s current schooling included two courses at a nearby community college, “Women Against Empire: Politics of Protest,” and “E-commerce, Me-Commerce: Today’s Business Tools.” The latter required a practical thesis, and she’d told Emily before, in vague terms, that she was on the verge of launching her own dance business online, of some fashion, what she called “Cam Girls 2.0.”

  Meg said, “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Of course.”

  “You know that scholarship Alex got to Reed? It doesn’t cover everything. Like, not at all. This is super on the DL, but I got a call from our parents. Kiki asked if I could kick in, for the college fund. Supposedly the art market’s tanking; they can’t sell a single thing. Seriously, you have to promise not to tell Alex.”

  Friday evening, at her own family’s house, Emily hears a squeal from outside. Father’s car speeds down the road. No more woodworking, he must’ve gotten a call from work. She lifts up the windowpane and lights a joint that Meg rolled for her. Existing simply in the moment, in the experience of witnessing her life become memory. Then she thinks about Nick. All she does is think about Nick. She jerks her head, rubs her arms. It’s insane to contemplate the accusations, but sometimes she indulges them. What if somehow they’re real? Why would he ever do something like that? If so, what part did she play? In this scenario, she can’t escape a logic that pulls her toward a culmination of thoughts, a storm cloud of thoughts, that doesn’t frighten so much as embolden her. That if Nick did do something wrong, it was for her. And so whatever he did, in a way she did it, too, with him. Criminals together.

  She sits down at her desk and prepares to write another letter.

  * * *

  The guard announces his mother’s arrival. His heart races. His whole body twitches. He can’t respond differently and it shames him.

  She sits down across from him. Long hair pulled back, black sweater, white jeans. Her long fingers in her lap hold what must be Emily’s latest letter. She says something but Nick doesn’t hear it, she barely exists, she’s a vehicle only.

  Then a loud voice intrudes, “Excuse me, Mrs. Toussaint?”

  The guard enters the room.

  “May I see what’s in your lap?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The envelope in your lap.”

  “What are you talking about?” Nick snaps.

  The door opens again. The sheriff enters. He says calmly, “Now let’s not have a fuss.”

  “What’s the problem?” his mom says. “I can bring my son a letter.”

  “Mrs. Toussaint, you are not allowed to pass any materials.”

  “That’s not true. I checked online before coming here.”

  “Ma’am, which one of us works here? Are we going to have a problem?”

  The guard reaches for the letter. At the same time the sheriff touches her shoulder. Both Toussaints lurch simultaneously, one away, one toward. The envelope falls. The guard goes for it, but Suzanne falls faster, grabs and grips it tightly, and stands up fast.

  But not before the sheriff briefly grabs her wrist.

  She spins, slaps him in the face. Even as he stares at her in surprise, gape-mouthed, he totters backward.

  The guard doesn’t know what to do, but his hand hovers over his gun.

  Nick watches it all unfold. He watches like he’s observed other things unfold, frozen, locked in place, about to piss himself. At the same time his mother stands her ground, gives him a look like, It’s okay. Then she assertively leaves the room, marches out through the open door, followed by the guard.

  “You thought I didn’t know about this?” the sheriff says to him quietly. “How stupid do you think I am?”

  * * *

  The next day the kitchen smells like fish because Meg cooked shrimp for dinner. The air is full of little flies.

  Emily undresses in the salty humidity, puts on sexy lingerie handpicked by her stylist, and waits for the camera to be prepared.

  That afternoon, Alex had finally found time to be a friend. Sort of. At first she’d asked how she was doing, how Nick was doing. But that only lasted five minutes before her own misery came pouring out behind her locked bedroom door, all liquid eyes, repressed sobs, pouting anguish during a lengthy monologue, then full-on fury about how Headdress was going to ruin Meg’s life and Alex’s life by proxy, assuming either of them would live to see Headdress’s new business venture go live.

  Alex and Meg had been bickering for days. Emily tried to stay out of it, she barely had enough energy for her own problems. Then much was revealed when Meg turned up at the Sisterhood with a carload of shopping. Boxes of drapes, two light stands, two hard drives, two pairs of blackout curtains. A new printer, a clothing stand on wheels, all sorts of other odd things, including lingerie and a bag full of sex toys.

  All of which, they learned, added up to Meg’s final project for her business class, Headdresslive.com, her new “platform,” to debut that night. It even had been advertised around town. The clubs where she danced allowed Meg to hang special banners she’d gotten printed, to announce the great unveiling of her brand.

  To Emily’s confusion, Alex explained in her bedroom that all the bullshit followed a recent trend where dancing girls became cam girls, became bodies streamed for tips in virtual currencies. A couple months earlier, Meg had read a magazine article that got her thinking, hence night class, hence Walmart, hence her big plan.

  However secretly intended, Emily thought of mentioning, to help with her sister’s college tuition in the fall, but she kept her lips sealed.

  Alex fell back on her bed and covered her eyes.

  “My sister is a prostitute.”

  “I don’t think it’s that bad.”

  “She graduated with high honors, did you know that? She just wanted to take a gap year. Now look at her.” Alex paused. A picture of the four of them, the Rosenthal sisters and their parents, was framed on her desk, taken when the girls were much younger. “Did you know Kiki went to Brown? Who later turns out to be the one who tells Meg, Meg told me this, that college is a waste for creative people like them. All of my mom’s friends these days are girls in their twenties. I’m not even exaggerating. She and my dad took in two of them to pay the rent. So she’s totally cool that her oldest daughter is a stripper. Unlike Fred, but he doesn’t even remember the world being otherwise.

  “Have I ever shown you Meg’s zine? I was so obsessed with it. It was about Meg’s social life during senior year, the year my parents left. There’s a lot of sex. I was allowed to do the stapling. It completely freaked out all the dummies. Look: each cover had this chick wearing a headdress. It’s from a drawing my mom made in college. That’s where the idiocy began. She was doing it anonymously, but by issue three kids had figured out it was Meg. Not that she cared. They were buying out the stock. I mean, the stories were pretty explicit. She wrote a sex advice column. She talked about who was hooking up with who, als
o anonymously. So it was like an X-rated crossword puzzle. You could buy it at the comics store. Then my dad read one. He’d been kept in the dark. Of course, Meg showed my mom the layout in advance. Kiki thought it was awesome. I think she still felt bad about moving to New York. But she hadn’t told my dad anything, even though Meg’s mailing her a copy of every issue. So Fred finds one. He explodes. He didn’t even call first, just drove all the way up from New York. Honestly I thought he was going to hit her. He’s really scary when he’s mad. Thinking we’re going all Miley on him. Normally he’s, like, this little ogre. If he gets a good review, he’s really funny, he just wants to horse around. But all of a sudden, Fred’s going to move back to Claymore, pull the plug, give up his art career to keep us from becoming sluts, his words. ‘Which is what appears to be happening.’ It was a whole weekend of that shit. As if he hadn’t been the one who wanted to leave! He’s so two-faced. So we voted. Three to one, just maintain. He was outnumbered. He was so pissed. My mom’s cowering the whole time in the kitchen. In the end he still pulled rank. Kiki had to tell Meg the zine was over. And the last thing he said that weekend? I totally remember this. It wasn’t like, ‘I love you,’ or, ‘You guys be good.’ He said, ‘If you’re going to be adults, you have to be responsible for your own decisions.’ As if we’d wanted to be our own parents in the first place.”

  Alex left for work a few minutes later, with several more follow-up questions beforehand about Nick and how he was doing, how she was holding up. But Emily could tell they weren’t real so much as necessary, for Alex to tell herself that she was acting the good friend.

  Emily watched her good friend drive away. Probably with a huge sigh of relief.

  From Meg, she’d learned that Alex had been spending a lot of nights with a kid named Jersey Mike, a senior, a total doofus, though hot. They’d met at a party. According to Meg, Jersey Mike was so-called because the hockey team was full of Mikes and he was really into sandwiches. Also into snowmobiles, and he fronted a rap band called the Potheads. “He’s like the sledneck version of Jay-Z,” Meg said.

  Though Emily could guess what was really going on. The new job. The boyfriend. Obviously her current situation was too much to handle, and Alex needed excuses to get away from her, the girl who’d literally moved into her life.

  And maybe Alex was subconsciously also preparing her for the fall, when she’d move to Oregon for college, and Emily would be forced to live without her best friend.

  So maybe she needed to be more responsible herself, she wondered, as she wandered around Alex’s bedroom. Take possession of her problems. Deal with them on her own. Maybe doing so was the least she owed her friend, her great friend, who’d given her so much. Before they parted. For twenty minutes Emily stewed on such thoughts, and watched a game show in the living room. Feeling Very Very frustrated, wracked with self-reproach and deep uncertainty. She still hadn’t told Alex what she’d told Nick that night, her secret. Maybe she never would. Look what telling Nick had done.

  Then Meg appeared and asked if Emily knew how to work a webcam.

  Around eight p.m., she monitored a chat room while Meg posed before the camera in her headdress and a blue silk nightgown, while they waited for onlookers to arrive, to pay Meg to perform whatever dances or sexual acts they wished to see.

  Emily felt queasy at first. Was she betraying Alex somehow? But the feeling receded while she watched Meg practice her routines, stare deeply into the camera’s eye.

  By eight thirty, nothing.

  By nine o’clock, a handful of visitors had come and gone, paying zip, arriving to type obscenities before Emily kicked them out of the chat room.

  At nine-thirty, Meg said flatly into the camera, “I can’t believe I spent four hundred dollars on this crap.”

  She got off the bed and changed into a sweatshirt. They split a can of bean dip on the couch, while Meg caught up on one of her shows. Then Meg threw a bag of frozen shrimp into the microwave. Soon the kitchen smelled like fish. The air was full of little flies.

  When Emily had her big idea.

  * * *

  Three hours later, in the dark, she drives back to her bedroom on the mountain and locks the door. She needs space and time to herself, away from Meg, away from Alex. Because look at this girl.

  The photographs burn in her hands. She doesn’t know this girl. What she’s doing, what she’s thinking. What does she mean by the poses she assumes? Is she thinking at all?

  They’d spent nearly thirty minutes on hair, the same on makeup. Even touched up a mole, Meg’s idea, that was an inch below her left breast. Afterward, they inspected the results on the laptop before sending a chosen few to the new printer.

  “You look so good,” Meg said.

  “I don’t,” she said. Feeling a smile creep through her lips, her prudish lips.

  “You do. Superhot. Trust me, if anyone should know. But what are you going to do with these?” Meg asked, referring to the tiny pile of photos.

  She hesitated an instant, then said, “I thought I’d give them to Nick.”

  “Holy crap, I love it. Was that the whole idea?” Meg laughed. “Jesus, you’re so his moll.” Then she’d laughed again, genuine and joyful, which boosted Emily’s confidence, when she really had no notion of what she’d done. Only that she’d felt wild when the idea struck, and that it felt good to follow the wild.

  Because in the absence of options she needed to create options.

  “Meg,” she’d called on her way out the door, “please don’t tell Alex.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just don’t. You promise?”

  “Whatever,” said Meg. Then her voice rebounded. “Honestly? I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  Back at home, the tone of her voice echoes in her head. She gets an envelope from her desk and tucks the photographs inside. She smiles. She feels untethered and free. She touches her chest under her shirt, the mole that Meg covered with foundation and concealer.

  Because what is not possible is not thinkable, and what is not thinkable is not doable, so she’s done nothing, nothing at all.

  But look at this girl.

  * * *

  The first fire in the valley began with a faro game in 1891. Faro was a popular game at the time, similar to poker. One afternoon each week, men from several branches of the Portis family, as well as other families working nearby, finished their work and plodded across the fields, over the stone walls they’d built themselves, to meet for a regular game. They were loggers and farmers, not fishermen. Fishermen they considered lowly. The land men prided themselves on being strong freethinkers and isolationists, for whom gathering to lay bets was not a vice but a chance to meet, relax, and share news, away from their wives and children.

  It was early December. The weather that night was bad, dumping snow, adding several inches to many that had fallen. By seven o’clock, Bronson Portis was drunk. Then again most of them were drunk. But Bronson was nervous, too loud. He dealt the cards sloppily. His face inscribed by years of routine inebriation. The nerves could be attributed to the fact that, for the first time in his life, he felt flush. He played hand after hand, mostly losing, and it did not seem to bother him. He’d come into a large inheritance the previous month when his father died and left all of the money and Portis land to him and his three younger brothers. They were rich.

  So it never would have occurred to him that his inheritance might vanish even faster than it appeared. That by night’s end he would lose it all to Peter Toussaint on a single rash hand, lose not only his own land but that of his brothers, their bequest, because the deeds were still in his name, the eldest son, after he’d dragged his feet for weeks about going into town to visit the lawyer.

  If he’d won the pot, Bronson would have taken an entire mountain from the Toussaints. But he lost.

  The next day, word spread quickly across the valley. For the Portis families, the world flipped upside down. Days and nights were reversed while wives raged, husbands
seethed, children grew sick from all the tension. Families paced on floorboards that soon would belong to people they barely knew. Snow fell on snow and became quickly ice when an unseasonable freeze held the mountains to extremely low temperatures. Among the Portis branches, no one knew when the Toussaints would claim their spoils, but it was certain that they would, fair was fair.

  Initially, the brothers avoided Bronson. They waited for him to lie down and give up the intake of breath. When that didn’t work, they took matters into their own hands. The night after Christmas, summoned by messenger, Bronson rode out on the public road under a half-full moon to the farm of Walter, his second-oldest brother. Starlight brightened the scattered clouds. They met in the barn, all men. Overbreathing like horses, the younger brothers and also four of their cousins who’d gathered to inform Bronson that he was banished henceforth from Claymore and was no longer their blood. If he appeared again in their presence, they’d shoot him dead.

  Bronson listened mutely and didn’t protest their sentence, to their surprise. The men waited for the guilty party to say something, anything. The air was cold and still. As for Bronson, he didn’t look at anyone. He simply turned to leave and sheepishly rode away, head bowed beneath the moon, as though in subservient acceptance of their order. But without apology or expressed regret, it seemed to the brothers that perhaps he was mocking their decision, through nonaction. He’d always been too proud, too fast to claim credit when responsibility ought to be shared. Now it was as though he’d shouldered their unhappy fate heroically, despite being its maker. As if the banishment was his own idea. They were outraged.

  Half an hour later, Bronson’s youngest brother, Taylor, the impulsive one, rode up and ripped his brother off his horse by the coat and beat him nearly dead on the road with a clinch cutter.

  What made matters worse, if that were possible, was that people knew that Bronson had kept some of his own land out of the pot. A parcel in Leduc of thirty acres belonged to the family of his wife, Elizabeth O’Brien. Bronson still had a place to live and farm, he and Elizabeth and their young son, Ernst, and would not become destitute.