“Why couldn’t you cut it?” he asked and to his shame, his voice broke. He didn’t fully understand this loop, the way the sister said they had been here before, but that threads had been spliced, tied.
He didn’t expect her touch to be warm and gentle and familiar. There was relief in her touch, the setting down of a load he didn’t know he carried. His shoulders straightened, even if his hold on her did not ease.
Her hand on him tightened, slid from his cheek to his neck, where fingers kneaded him as though he were dough. Jackson’s eyes slid shut and a sound he did not recognize came from him, a low moan not pain, nor pleasure. It only was. He pulled himself back into his human body, so he might not feel the touch so keenly, but it didn’t help.
“Because I couldn’t bear it,” she said. Her voice sounded like a bird call, a sapsucker’s tap or a blue jay’s demand, he didn’t know. Then her hand did come away. “Some day I will.”
In the motion, he smelled oranges. This scent clung to her, despite the death in the room, the body just steps away.
Some day she would bear it? Some day she would cut it? Jackson wanted to ask, but it was all he could do to open his eyes. Mae’s whip slithered from his neck and he stepped away from both of them. Mae and the other drew together, then Mae stepped to the edge of the room, bringing a sheet of canvas over the dead body. They worked to wrap the body, plainly having done such work together before.
“Do you have a name?”
The woman’s mouth twitched. “You may call me Beth,” she said, and effortlessly rolled the body into the canvas. Blood stained the concrete floor, but she pressed her hands into it and drew it into herself.
Jackson half expected the body to vanish, for its ghost to bleed down from the ceiling, but neither of these things happened. Except for the show, the room held its silence for a long while as Beth and Mae worked to clean the mess they had made.
“You … So you …” Jackson tried to fit it together and couldn’t.
Mae, who hadn’t said a word since he had come down here, stared at him. She didn’t look angry, but neither was she calm. Something roiled under the surface of her. “Every life has its proper length,” she finally said. “There are proper ways to do things. For us, this is one.”
Jackson shook his head. “No.” He paced around them and while it was plain the blood was vanishing into Beth’s hands, he chose to ignore it. “That’s all this is, just another show, to pretty up what you did to that poor … person.” It was an inadequate word, because the bird hadn’t been costume, had been actual body. So were the others like they were, with multiple forms they could take and leave?
Mae tilted her head and an eyebrow inched up, as if she were waiting for more incredulity. Jackson decided to give her some.
“Probably just someone who overstepped their bounds, the way your brothers did in Chinatown,” he said. He began to pace a slow figure eight pattern on the floor before them. “Everyone’s got rules need respecting, and they weren’t respected here. Little crowgirl didn’t understand what she … he … did, or didn’t care, the nuance to the situation likely didn’t bother you any, girl who climbs up a fire escape to watch me in my room … she doesn’t need particulars, does she?”
If Jackson hadn’t been looking at Mae, he would have missed the slight flick of her wrist. She and Beth moved in tandem, toward him as fast as wind. Beth’s hand was fisted in his gut before he could protest, and a tangle of threads came around his wrists. Jackson screamed, but her knife flashed in her other hand, and she drew it down.
The world vanished.
Jackson, having been raised in the Catholic walls of the foundling hospital, expected a flood of white light. A chorus of angels with harps. Perhaps his mother and father would be there. They would inch forward and bend to their knees, seeking his forgiveness, which he would give without question, because this would be heaven, all would be repaired, perfect, without flaw. They would never know another pain. He looked, but there was only blackness.
And then, there was Mae and Beth and the tangled threads of his life. He tried to reach for them, but lacked hands or tentacles or anything that might touch anything. He tried to move, but he had no body to move.
“Everyone,” Mae said, “has rules that must be respected. Didn’t you just say that?”
He tried to meet her eyes, but either she didn’t have any or he didn’t have any, because he couldn’t see her; there was only the slightest impression of her, the almost-garden scent of soap. Leaves and herbs and everything green. Beth was close, the smell of oranges not having evaporated.
“That includes us.”
Mae moved as a whisper of breath on wind, even though there was no wind. He looked again for a source of light, for heavenly or divine intervention, but there was nothing. Nothing. He had difficulty understanding this. The sisters had told him and so too the fathers, so why was there nothing?
“Are you so certain you’re dead?”
The essence of Mae’s hand slid into Jackson’s threads. It was base, the feeling shooting through him as her hand stroked up their length. She drew them out, untangling them with a hand that wasn’t a hand, until the threads lay in perfect accord across the back of her palm. Beth came closer, blade resting in her hand.
“You aren’t yet,” Beth said, but she drew her blade across the threads and Jackson made a strangled noise as they came apart, as bits of thread frayed into the darkness.
“D-don’t …” Forcing the word out was like trying to breathe underwater. Jackson thrashed, but as more threads parted under her knife, a low whimper poured out of him, liquid and foul, and he hated himself. “I don’t understand.” These words came with more ease. “Don’t send me away.”
Beth’s knife slid away and her fingers worked now, unhurried and true. She bound one thread back together and fused the ends of two others into one whole. Jackson didn’t understand as he watched; he trembled in his own confusion.
“She won’t send you away,” came Mae’s voice. “She doesn’t make that choice.”
Mae was the one, he knew, but there was something else in her voice, something —
Mae’s face swam out of the dark then, a pale crescent, gibbous moon, waxing, waning, beautiful and distant, spilling light onto a million cities. He saw them all in this light and saw himself too, himself with Mae and Beth never far, but where had the sister gone? There was a hollow space where she should rest, a space Jackson didn’t want to explain, though part of him surely already knew.
“It’s like St. Nicholas,” he whispered. “You cannot be this — you cannot visit and claim every person as they die … How many people die every day? You cannot possibly … You cannot —”
The blade emerged again from Beth’s hand and the laugh that broke from him was ragged. If such things were possible, all things were possible and he was a fool for not understanding that.
It’s only the understage, he told himself. They turned out the lights. We are there, and there is a dead body, a dead body only costumed because those can’t possibly be real broken wings, and that body cannot have been disemboweled by the very hand that now holds … That now holds …
Here, the idea broke, because Beth’s hand had been inside him. She held some part of him even now, her fingers cool and sure as if she were peeling the oranges she smelled of. He hated the idea that something larger than himself might be moving him around on the game board that was the world. Impossible. He had never balked at the idea of a heaven, but the idea of an all-powerful god —
“There is no one god,” Mae whispered, “but only many, where —”
“I am not your plaything,” Jackson whispered back, his voice trailing off in a hiss as the air in the room grew heavier. He felt like there was a hot stone on his chest. Her hand? His own atop it.
Something within him gave way. He allowed himself to be aware of this: the way his hand rested on hers, the way their fingers twined together, like threads themselves. He had no memory of touchin
g her, of her not moving away, but there their hands rested. He allowed himself to relax, to understand what these hands meant. She held his threads, told Beth when to cut, but his hand rested upon hers.
When he lifted his hand, her own came away. The bite of Beth’s knife eased and what had flowed out of him was once again swallowed and hidden. He understood the power in his own hand, and it made him quake with laughter. He did not feel like a fifteen-year-old boy. He was a man trapped within a body; he was a monster. He understood the monster in the depths of Macquarie’s was nothing compared to him, understood even fates might be bent to one’s own needs. Was it love that stayed Mae’s hand and made her bend her own sister’s in return?
As Mae’s face moved from full moon into eclipse, he could not say. He could not crawl inside her mind and know its every curve. Could not fathom what made her or them act as they did. Sister Jerome Grace said he had to come here, and now that he was here? Did he have to stay? Or had he already been made into what needed making?
I made you what you are …
The sister claimed such but here, Jackson refused that idea. She had not — he already was before her fingers set upon his threads. He had come from another place, had not been forged as humans were. He was something else, as were they.
The pressure of the air became too much. Jackson forced himself into motion, throwing hands and legs outward. He turned to move toward the door he knew was there — although it wasn’t there, not until Mae’s hand withdrew, not until Beth also curled away. The dark place they had inhabited vanished, the understage coming back to the fore, with its curled ropes, trap doors, and dead bod —
It was gone, the body and the bloodied mattress. Swallowed by that dark place or something else, he didn’t know. He knew only the doors and their touch under his palms as he pushed them open. There were doors backstage, doors performers would open to catch a breath of air, to have a seat and smoke a cigarette. He flung these wide and stepped out into the world, a world that did not (could not) understand what he was.
He ran until his body refused to go farther, until his legs were weak and shaking from effort and his breath came in sharp, hollow puffs. Jackson fell to the alley street and heaved until he was empty, and then heaved a little more.
It didn’t ease what was inside, the truth of him, the thing that needed expulsion. From some distant place, he heard laughter. Male and female and then gone. And he ached for that — to be normal in the night if it would have him.
§
Jackson didn’t want to talk to anyone. Neither did he want to go into Kotler’s Bakery the following day with Foster because he thought of the way Mae liked palmiers, and he couldn’t not buy a handful of them himself if he went inside. Couldn’t not imagine the way the flaky pasty would break apart in her mouth.
When Foster closed the door behind them, he was reminded of Mae closing the doors to the understage, and how her hand curled around his arm the way Foster’s did now. Foster pulled him toward the gleaming bakery case, while Mae pulled him toward the slaughtered body.
Kotler’s was busy, a variety of people filling the warm bread-scented space. Even so, the four clerks knew who Foster was and were coming to know Jackson. There was no wait for them. While Foster acquired bread, Jackson studied the pastries in the cases. The glass reflected his own image, the one place he looked like a normal boy — brown houndstooth coat with a crimson scarf the sister had given him. Christmas soon and he wondered if she would like a box of pastries for the holiday, though not the palmiers. Those were Mae’s.
He bought five of them, the clerk wrapping them in brown paper before tying them with the standard blue Kotler ribbon. He paid, even though the young clerk shook her head, murmuring that their protection of this place was enough. The paper crinkled under his fingers and Jackson supposed Mae was not supposed to come here at all if this place was protected by Cressida.
This thought didn’t trouble him as much as he suspected it should. He untied the ribbon and stuffed it into his pocket, unfolding the clever paper pouch as he and Foster stepped into the sun. The day was as bright as the understage, everything thrown into sharp angles with heavy shadows. The palmiers were filled with raspberry jam, and while sweet it carried a tart edge Jackson enjoyed. He glanced back, to the bakery clerk.
“Something wrong with the sweets?”
Jackson shook off Foster’s question, looking beyond his own reflection to the girl behind the counter. She was pretty, in a perfectly normal way. She took pride in her work, carefully folding each packet for each customer. The way she looped the blue ribbons into bows was precise without being fussy; her hands simply knew the work.
He reached for the door, going back inside.
“What are —”
Foster’s words were lost as the door swung shut. He made his way back to the counter, wanting to wait in the line like a normal person, but when the blonde clerk caught sight of him, fear widened her eyes. She looked from his face, to the packet of palmiers he held, and then back to his face. Jackson licked the crumbs from his lips and she took a step back, abandoning the customers before her. She vanished into the back room.
The other clerks stared at him.
He didn’t bother to explain himself. He rounded the counter and followed the blonde clerk. None of the remaining clerks thought it out of the ordinary; they didn’t follow, only turned back to the customers. Jackson found himself in the kitchen, a space that pressed hot damp fingers against his cheeks. A variety of faces looked up at him from their work: Chinese, European, but the clerk was not among them.
“Where did she go?”
He asked the question of a flour-covered woman beside a long counter. She had been kneading dough, but stopped to stare at him. Jackson wondered if she didn’t speak English, but she nodded her head toward the back of the kitchen, and he found the clerk hiding behind the tallest oven, heat pouring over her.
Sweat beaded on her forehead and she pressed herself closer to the wall at his approach. Her eyes, blue like the napkins at Cressida’s dinners, never left him. She held up one hand and it shook so badly he thought it might fall off. Where had the calm girl from the counter gone? She who could tie bows without so much as a waver?
“I’m sorry,” she said and her voice was thick with an accent Jackson didn’t know. She angled her shaking hand toward the packet of palmiers. “If you … If t-they’re not to your standard …” Her fingers plucked at the brown wrapping paper, but Jackson didn’t give up the pastries.
He wondered how she had been treated in the past to fear his simple return to the bakery. How had Cressida and her men kept this place in line? The clerks probably knew Mae, the family she belonged to, and what Cressida would say should she be found to be patronizing this place. These thoughts rained down on Jackson as the clerk tried again to take his bag.
“They’re not …” Jackson’s voice stuck in his throat and he took an abrupt step backwards so he wouldn’t crowd her. He glanced at the others in the kitchen and saw they were all working, as though a young girl wasn’t cowering in a corner.
“The palmiers are fine,” he told her, hoping to ease her panic. “What did they …” He couldn’t ask that, wouldn’t make her tell. “Whatever they did, I’m not going to. Just …” It sounded awkward now, as the words rushed out of him. “Wondered if you might want to go do something sometime.” He wouldn’t take her to Macquarie’s; he didn’t think she would set foot in the place.
She stared at him, the hum and rattle of the kitchen rising up around them. As if to prove the palmiers were fine, he thumbed a complete pastry into his mouth, chewing while she thought about it. Her mouth twitched; surely he looked a fool with the pastry wedged in his mouth. It was almost normal, something a regular boy would do. Making a fool of himself in front of a girl.
When she nodded, he was more than a little surprised, but a spike of relief went through him. “Well, good then,” he said and took another step back. She smoothed a hand over her face
to erase the sweat. “I’ll come by tonight.”
She nodded again and Jackson realized only when he reached the street he didn’t know her name. He glanced through the window again, but she hadn’t emerged from the kitchen. Foster’s hand claimed his arm — that scene under the stage rolled against him, beautiful Mae and that broken body and the way the Beth’s knife had severed the threads. Jackson pulled out of Foster’s grip.
“That isn’t who I am,” he whispered, and didn’t answer Foster’s puzzled look.
§
Her name was Gussie.
It was a perfectly awful name, she said, having belonged more properly to her uncle August who died the day she was born, bless his soul. It was the shock of her being a girl, everyone said with a laugh, but she couldn’t help but wonder. Her family owned the bakery, she said as they walked along the docks. She didn’t get to the water very often; her world was one of small warm spaces filled with yeast and flour and sugar. Her hands reflected this, creases yet embedded with flour though she had washed and changed into a fresh dress. There was a similar smudge of flour along her collar, but Jackson didn’t point it out. Didn’t even lean over and brush it away. He wanted to be tempted; he wasn’t.
She was perfectly lovely in every way, from the fall of golden hair down her back to the bakery ribbon tying it back. Well-spoken when she realized he didn’t mean to complain about the pastries even now, she accepted the sack of hot fried fish and squid he offered up. Jackson took his own sack from the vendor and they ate as they walked and talked.
Was this how normal people did it? He looked over the bay waters, the boats in their places, and wondered how many people came here just to watch the fishermen. It was quiet, the catch of the day already hauled in, taken away. It wasn’t much of a place for a date, if this could be called that; it reeked of fish and salt, and the docks were slippery underfoot.
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