“What color ribbon?” Claude asks, flashing his eyes.
“Blue.” Mindy clears her mouth with her tongue and blinks from Claude’s face to the sky in her windows. She gasps—bisecting the view from the middle window on the long wall to the left of her bed is a thinly branched tree.
“There’s a tree!” she exclaims, shrugging herself up on her elbows, turning back and forth from the tree to Claude. Her flesh goosebumps—her underarm and thigh tingle under their growths.
“That’s Migo’s tree. I planted it last night. It’s a Mexican Sycamore.”
“Migo’s?” Mindy’s excitement contracts into a knot deep in her chest. It’s been days since she’s seen the dog. “Where’s Migo?” she whispers.
“Migo’s dead,” Claude says. Does his gaze slip from her eyes to her crest? “He didn’t wake up the other morning. I mixed his ashes in with the roots when I planted the tree last night.” An arched eyebrow: “You had feelings for him?”
Mindy sinks back into her pillow and stares at the tree—its trunk and branches remind her of a fish skeleton hanging from the lip of a trashcan. She remembers the feel of Migo’s mottled coat under her hand, his weight against her side. Claude had said Migo was “beautiful.”
“I got used to him,” Mindy murmurs. “He was familiar.”
A groove between Claude’s eyes deepens. “He was a killer. Did you know that? Before I took him in, my house was full of life. I had a parrot and a cat. And another dog—an old husky. The parrot talked. ‘Buenos noces,’ he could say, and ‘hermosa luna’: ‘good-night,’ and ‘beautiful moon.’ One day Migo brought me the parrot’s body—he jumped on the couch next to me with it in his jaws as if he was carrying a rolled newspaper—and dropped it on my lap. The perch was too high for him to reach. I don’t know how he lured Rodrigo down. The cat, which I admit I never liked much, I found murdered in the yard. And Migo tortured my old friend the husky for months, biting him on his back and belly and ears when I wasn’t around. I’d find Mukluk bleeding. I tried to separate them, but the husky whined to be with his tormenter—Mukluk understood that murdering was part of Migo’s nature, part of his perfect breeding, and he longed for the company, even if it was killing him. Eventually, his big heart burst. So, for a long time— until you came—it was just Migo and me.”
Mindy shivers and pulls her sheet up to her neck. She runs a palm over her bare scalp, finds her crest, and pets it. Claude nods toward the window with the tree, the creases on his face lengthening with his smile.
“Keep your eyes on those leaves,” he says. “See if they don’t grow bloody teeth.”
VI
For the first time since she gave birth, Mindy dreams: She is behind the wheel of Doc Mo’s SUV—she’s moved from the passenger seat after forcing him out of the vehicle. She winces against a blistering sun at the fat doctor, who lumbers past cacti, stones, and tumbleweeds toward a parched gully. Look for the wounded animal I saw, she’s insisted. It’s your job to take care of the injured. Her swollen belly presses against the wheel—driving will be difficult, but the border isn’t far. The baby inside her kicks through her flesh, sounding the horn, and the doctor looks back over his shoulder. He can’t see the pistol—it feels like a toy in Mindy’s palm. Further— she waves with her free hand—the animal I saw was limping further away. Do your duty. She’s never shot at anything but a target. Should she aim at his head or his body? Mindy’s dream-perspective shifts: now she sees herself from outside the SUV—is that really her in the curly black wig and yellow raincoat? And that belly! It seems so long ago. The doctor turns his back to her and throws back his shoulders—a puny act of defiance—or maybe resignation. Mindy watches herself calculate—is she sure she won’t need him? The phone on the passenger seat buzzes like a snake’s rattle, and she’s looking at a close up of the gun’s muzzle. She feels her finger jerk the trigger—and a silent explosion engulfs her in black.
Mindy’s eyes spring open. She’s safe in her room. It’s morning. Migo’s tree, its branches now thick with leaves, blots out most of the ashy sky in the middle window. Lately, Claude has been replacing the prints on her walls while she sleeps instead of when she showers, and she glances about for any changes. She half-expects to see a Yoshitoshi print he described the previous afternoon, though he’d told her its lack of color would make it unprofitable to reproduce:
“In the print the ghost of a maid rises from the well she’s haunting. She committed suicide because she broke a dish, part of an extremely valuable table setting. The ghost counts to nine, over and over again.”
“She killed herself because of a broken dish?”
“Why not? It was her duty to maintain a complete set. But people needed the well she haunted. How do you think her ghost was exorcised?”
Mindy had tried to picture the obsessively counting ghost, but instead saw her mother—emerging from a fog, waving the pink Lady Schick razor she’d used to shave Mindy clean. “Oh,” Mindy sobbed. Claude’s head had snapped up from his work, and she found herself staring at him.
“‘A broken dish,’” she repeated. “Oh—your hand—”
“Ah—” And Claude had lowered his gaze—he’d sliced open his index finger. Blood ran along it and dripped onto his woodblock. He’d grinned wryly before wrapping his finger in a white handkerchief—a red stain bloomed. He’d gathered his things—awkwardly, because of his wound—and left without a word.
VII
Mindy’s dream and the memory of Claude’s blood spreading on the handkerchief have left her restless. Now he’s late with her breakfast. Should she take her shower before eating? She reaches for her crest. It’s festooned with blue ribbons that dangle past her shoulders. Each shower soaks the ribbons, which stiffen after drying and rustle like wind-blown branches when Mindy tosses her long crest-hair. She looks at Migo’s tree, as she does a hundred times a day, and remembers the feel of the dog’s body against hers. She shakes her head a second time, glimpsing fluttering bits of blue. Claude had brought her the roll of blue ribbon, but not the shears with mirroring blades she’d hoped for—he’d sliced the ribbon into pieces himself with one of his knives. As Mindy cranes her neck, enjoying the weight of her hair, she discovers two new prints, side by side over her headboard. Hung while she dreamed. Turning, she looks up at them from her knees.
The first print depicts a nobleman squatting on a mat. In a nearby dish of water he sees the reflection of a female demon about to attack him from behind, and his hand tightens around the hilt of his sword. Mindy sucks in a breath—the puddles on the floor of her shower—had she ever tried to see herself in them? She hops off her bed, sheds her robe, and hurries to her bathroom. But when she steps into the shower and turns the faucets, nothing happens. She twists until her palms hurt, but no water. She tries the sink—again, nothing. And the toilet, which might, if she’d ever thought of looking, have provided the most reflective surface of all, is dry. Mindy licks her lips. Her mouth and tongue are pasty. Where is Claude? Disappointed, thirsty, and hungry, she returns to her bed. Glancing once again at the “demon in the water dish,” she heaves a sigh, slumps onto her side, and frowns up at the second print. Its central figure is a lovely young woman.
This woman contemplates a broken wooden bucket lying at her feet. Like many of the prints on Mindy’s walls, this one features a Japanese inscription. Examining the calligraphy, Mindy feels her lips move, as if she’s uttering a prayer, and a translation emerges: “The bottom of the bucket has fallen out—the moon has no home in the water.” But I don’t understand Japanese, she thinks, bewildered. What can this mean? And she hears herself whisper an answer: “No reflections.”
Mindy’s face drops onto her pillow. Lying on her stomach, she scratches the itchy patch on her thigh, then picks at the hair under her arm and sniffs her fingers. She worries that her crest is really nothing more than a lop-sided Mohawk. Its dry ribbons irritate her neck. She imagines q
uenching her thirst from the nobleman’s water-dish, in spite of the demon in it.
VIII
She waits. Darkness comes, then light, then darkness again. Maybe it’s the same day with rare dark clouds, maybe many days pass. When it’s light, the leaves on Migo’s tree glisten, sharp and dangerous. From her bed she calls, or thinks she might call, Claude, but she doesn’t hear her voice or feel it in her throat. “I’m hungry—” she whimpers with closed eyes, as if she’s a baby. It’s hard to fill her lungs. When she lifts her lids the pictures on the walls spin around her like a color wheel. The wheel slows and stops. Directly across from her, right where it’s always been, is the print of Daruma, the founder of Zen Buddhism. Daruma sits in his red robe, his legs folded under him. It took Daruma nine years of meditation to reach enlightenment, Claude has told her. So much time that he lost the use of his legs. But you can buy little round figures of him. ‘Dharma dolls,’ they’re called. You can get them anywhere, even in the shops that sell my prints. The little red dolls are self-righting—tip one over, it pops back up. They symbolize optimism.
Mindy tries to hold the image of the meditating holy man. Red spheres swirl like tiny planets around her head—no, not planets—dharma dolls. Mindy hugs herself and draws her knees to her breasts, curling around an emptiness that’s the size and shape of one of those dolls.
An acrid odor burns her sinuses. Is that her? Her eyes would tear if they weren’t so dry. No water to drink or wash with or see herself in. She reaches for her crest, her arm as weightless as papier-mâché. The ribbons, stuck in clumps of waxy hair, crumble at her touch. Has Claude been allowing her ugliness to ferment? She thought he was protecting and nurturing her, but maybe he’s been trying to protect the rest of the world. From her. Had he been saving the world from Migo, too? At the expense of his other pets?
Mindy pictures Doc Mo collapsing in the arroyo, feels the volume of the gunshot that started her labor. How long would it have taken the doctor’s fat body to decompose in the desert heat? Bacteria first, insects next, crawling inside his clothes, then winged and four-footed carrion eaters—like the Mad Hatter’s tea party, Mindy imagines. But now she sees herself perched on the dinner table, and the guests surrounding her are the legendary figures of Claude’s Yoshitoshi prints—warriors and poets, buddhas and courtesans, demons and ghosts. Circling the table is the mad young woman from a print Mindy had forgotten—the woman wanders the streets at midnight, her letter to a dead lover unspooling all the way to a silver moon.
Who would be looking for Mindy? Authorities couldn’t be bothered—the parents of the baby she failed to steal are twenty-five thousand dollars better off. Her Mexican associates have surely found another willing thief. Would she recognize the child she bore? He’s no kin to her, though her blood fed him. She winces at meditating Dharma. How long until her legs become useless? She lifts herself to her hands and knees in the center of her mattress. Her robe hangs open, and her breasts dangle like forgotten fruit, the tattooed drops of milk crawling like ants from her nipple. The strip of stucco between her headboard and the prints is daubed with red—Claude’s blood? She looks at the doorway he left through, and it seems as impenetrable as the prints covering her walls.
IX
The doorway—Mindy’s hand a lily on its dark frame. The wall outside it is close enough to touch. She feels the weight of the stone tiles under her feet. She closes her eyes and tries to remember the exhilaration of her rush to freedom after giving birth—too numb for pain, the blinding sun thrown at her from the metal and glass of a thousand cars, the baby she’d hoped to barter left behind.
To her left—the hallway ends abruptly. To the right—she blinks, startled: on an easel stands a print, more colorful than any in her room—yellow, green, blue, red, purple, orange—a print like this would have required a dozen woodblocks. She leans on the doorframe, one foot hovering over the threshold. The print is less than ten feet away, its colors swirl, and Mindy understands—it isn’t a print at all, it’s a mirror. The mirror is angled so it reflects not her, but something incredibly beautiful—a garden?—at the end of a connecting corridor. A few paces, and she’ll see herself, then run to paradise. But she hesitates—at the base of the easel there’s a little red globe—a dharma doll. Stuck in its head like a pick in a ‘fro is a gleaming blade. An invitation to shave? Mindy grabs her crest, and ribbon-dust falls into her eyes. There’s a mark on the dharma doll’s belly.
“X,” Mindy reads. X, like the eyes of the dead in comic strips? Not a Japanese character, but still a message. Her heart hammers harder and faster until the beats don’t separate. She sees Claude, the blood leaking from his hand like a silk rose from a magician’s sleeve, his last question left hanging . . . about the ghost of the maid who broke the dish and endlessly counted to nine. How was she exorcised?
Mindy comprehends: “Not X,” she cries. “Ten!” And as she hears her own voice, like ripping paper, the colors in the mirror whirl into a blinding, saturating brilliance that fills her core. Her limbs dissolve, and she is absorbed by her completion.
Annabelle’s Children
From up here on the ceiling, I see three scalps beneath me. Their owners are having a meeting. The fluorescent lights illuminate one head that’s shaved and gleaming with an indentation in the center that looks like a sunken grave, one with a hairline receding to dark curls, and a third with a comb-over that fails to cover skin the color and texture of butterscotch pudding. This head and the head with curls belong to men I knew
when I was alive.
I’ve been dead for days and days, and this is the first time I’ve recognized anyone, so I don’t know if my presence in this room is by coincidence or design. “Dead” for me has been a completely passive experience. Every morning I wake up attached to something that’s living—something different each day, no repeats, at least not so far. Yesterday I was with a goldendoodle, the day before a Starbucks barista. Today, it’s this spider on the ceiling. I’ve got no will of my own, no physical essence. Where my host goes, I go. And though I share my partner’s space, I’m neither seen nor felt. So far I’ve had no appetites at all. I recognize emotions, but I don’t seem to feel them. I have extraordinary patience—have you ever spent a day connected to a clam?
This morning the men down at the conference table are talking about me and the eggs harvested from my ovaries before I lost my battle with acute myelogenous leukemia. Carl, the one with the curls, was to have been my husband. The comb-over guy is P.P. Frederico, the filmmaker who gave me my big break after my last stint in rehab, years before my death. The shaved scalp belongs to a stranger. The three are discussing an idea for a reality TV show—Annabelle’s Children, one of them called it.
“You say you’ve got full legal rights to Annabelle’s eggs?” shaved head asks.
Carl clears his throat. “Zygotes,” he says, “not eggs. Annabelle and I were told that fertilized eggs would survive the freezing better. I supplied the sperm. The zygotes are legally mine.”
Carl’s right. My eggs were harvested because aggressive chemotherapy and radiation were going to sterilize me. His sperm fertilized the salvaged eggs in vitro, and the zygotes were frozen so we could have our own biological children when I recovered. Which I didn’t.
Light reflects off the stranger’s polished head. He must be a network executive. His fingers drum the table. “I don’t know. Isn’t the point of this show that each couple—each husband of the couple—will fertilize one of Annabelle’s eggs himself? The way I understood it is you have the competitive stuff first—the sports and the trivia contests and whatever—singing, if you want—with the usual up-close-and-personals, followed by the audience vote. Then the winning dads fertilize the eggs, which get implanted in their wives.”
“We plan at least one show on the science of it all,” P.P. says. “Doctors, test tubes, petri dishes. Footage of sperm penetrating eggs. We stagger the implantations so we
get about eight weeks’ worth of births at the end of the season. Twelve couples is the target.”
“Hunh,” the network guy grunts. “But Annabelle is the attraction. People want to be connected to her! No offense, but what’s the appeal of kids that are half Carl’s?”
“Didn’t you read the market research we sent?” P.P. asks. “Focus groups couldn’t differentiate between “egg” and “zygote.” We just de-emphasize Carl. We lose him in the scientific mumbo-jumbo, as far as the TV audience is concerned. For potential competitor-parents—ninety-five percent of those questioned deemed the father’s biological involvement ‘unimportant.’ This is about Annabelle and nothing else, Larry.”
“If we include episodes on the impact of environment on child development, it’ll be better scientifically if all the kids had the same biological mother and father,” Carl offers quietly.
Women of Consequence Page 19
