“I don’t know about want. But I have a plan.”
Her eyes stayed locked with Jess’s. In spite of their separate and shared griefs, their fury at each other, they were right in this moment, now. Like poker players, Sophie thought. Like conspirators, even lovers, almost. Enemies, maybe.
Like mother and daughter?
“A plan,” Jess said, sounding nothing like a mother. Not Sophie’s mother, anyway.
Sophie felt herself grin. Felt the nastiness in it. “You’re not going to like it.”
15
Long, long after he had come—with a shuddering violence Caribou had forgotten was possible—Aunt Sally went on rutting atop him. Caribou would never have dared complain, and didn’t really want to, anyway, though this hurt, now, twisting and bruising him in all kinds of places. Bracing his back against the floor of her tent, he kept the smile pinned to his face and his eyes open the way she always ordered him to. Fucking Aunt Sally had always been more like weathering a mountain storm than lovemaking, whatever that was. Certainly, he had never mistaken anything in what they did together for love. But there was awe in it, at least on his part, and wonder, too, of the most life-affirming, childlike sort, as he stared up into the majestic, unattainable slopes and couloirs of her, the glacial slides and gullies and terrifying drop-offs. Even writhing, Aunt Sally remained remote, alien. Caribou simply crimped his fingers into whatever handholds she’d decided to allow him today and clung.
When she was finally finished, having driven him, it seemed, halfway into the earth, she slid to the side but didn’t lie down. Like him, she was barely sweating despite the heavy summer evening. Soon, they would be shivering in their nakedness. They’d been shivering mid-act, Caribou realized, like icicles rubbing together, shooting off splinters of ice but no sparks or heat. Aunt Sally gazed down at him. Occasionally she did this, though rarely for so long or so intently. Sometimes, when she did, he almost felt as though he really was important to her: the moon in her vast night sky. Her only light. Of course, his was a borrowed light, a reflection, and so truly, even that came from her. She was his—the whole camp’s—black sun, a still-seething dead thing forever collapsing inward.
But she shed light, nevertheless.
They listened together to the cicadas and cranes sounding the dusk. The other monsters were already gone, Caribou having roused them and sent them scurrying, on Aunt Sally’s orders, into the surrounding towns for Party supplies: barbecue; booze; music; folding chairs; Bibles, because Mississippi guests, especially, felt reassured seeing a few of those strewn about; greasepaint; other, stranger items, unique to this particular event, that Caribou had never seen on an Aunt Sally Party list before.
He’d also given them her singular, explicit command: tonight, and tonight only, under no circumstances were any of the monsters to invite any guests. They were also not even to consider eating, not so much as a snack. Today was a day of fasting, apparently. The fasting before. Aunt Sally hadn’t bothered saying before what, and she hadn’t needed to. The monsters had erupted out of camp the second Caribou dismissed them, barking and eager as hunting hounds.
Also stupid as hunting hounds, and just as oblivious. Not that Aunt Sally had offered him the slightest clue as to what she was thinking or planning. He knew only that she was doing those things. Lying at her feet now, looking at her face, he felt another awful tremor rock him like an aftershock. Abruptly, her head was beside his, her magnificent mouth at his ear, and a brand-new, little-girl voice he had never heard from her before crawled up inside him.
“Excuse me, baby,” she said, mimicking his ringtone. Then she dropped into her own voice. “Sleep some, now. Do tell me what you dream.” And just like that, still shuddering, he slid out of consciousness.
When he awoke, he was alone in the tent. Patting around with his hands, he found his dress slacks, slid them on, donned his shirt and started to button it, and froze, experiencing a momentary explosion of panic. She’s gone, he thought. That was the plan. She’d finally vanished, left them to fend for themselves, and they would never see her more.
He would never see her more.
But even as he stumbled to his feet, pushing through the tent flaps and outside, Caribou spotted her silhouette. She was down the bank by the river, still and solid as the cypresses she stood among, a tree no kudzu vine would dare embrace. Unless she invited it to.
“Well?” she called without turning. Her voice, this time, was deep as owl-hoot, filling and rounding the air.
Caribou finished buttoning his shirt, tucked it in, straightened his hair, and assumed his proper posture: straight spine, bowed head. He approached carefully, with a respect born of fear so deep and old, it verged on love. It really did.
She wore a black sheath dress Caribou had no memory of having seen before. This often happened with Aunt Sally. She almost never left her tent, and yet, new clothes or accessories seemed to sprout on her whenever she required or—more rarely—wanted them. He stopped a foot or so behind her, far enough to her left so she could just glimpse him out of the corner of her eye. Always, even with him, Aunt Sally liked her monsters where she could see them.
“I dreamed,” he told her, after a silent while. When she didn’t stop him, he continued. “I think I dreamed … of logs.”
That earned him a snort, which smoothed into laughter. “Logs. Really?”
“Why is that funny?”
“I’m just always surprised when it works,” she said. “Policy.”
“You divined Policy. You brought it to us.”
“I made it up.” Aunt Sally stopped laughing, but slowly. She watched the river. Trees fanned around her like courtiers. It would not have surprised Caribou in the least to learn that she could command those, too, if she wanted, along with her monsters, maybe the owls and alligators. This was her Mississippi, after all. Her country. The one that had made her. The one she was making.
Just like any other good American, she’d told him once, when he’d made some similarly inane observation directly to her face. And then she’d laughed.
“What does it mean, then?” Caribou asked. “My dream. Dreams about logs.”
“I’d have to consult my book to be sure. But”—Aunt Sally turned, eyed him up and down—“I’m pretty sure the book says logs mean strangers at a party. “
“You’re joking.”
“Is that what I do? Is that what you think?”
Caribou knew better than to answer, or to back away. It took some effort, but he held his ground. “And my lucky numbers? Our lucky numbers, since it’s your party?”
“Four. I think. That I really will have to check.”
Four. Caribou let himself stare openly, for one moment, at Aunt Sally’s back. “That’s … there are only seven of us in camp right now, Aunt Sally. Can we afford … that just seems … wasteful?”
She said nothing, and she didn’t turn around. Caribou thought she might have been smiling, but he could only see her profile. As often as he had sometimes let himself imagine that he knew her, he did not know her. He never had.
Even so. Four guests, for seven monsters.
“Isn’t that a little dangerous? And decadent? And … unnecessary? Why risk so many?”
Perhaps Aunt Sally shrugged; perhaps that movement was just tree shadows stirring in what little wind there was. “I’m only telling you what Policy tells me, my young reindeer buck. I am merely the messenger.”
“But as you just said, ma’am.” He hadn’t expected to call her that, never did it on purpose. It happened when he was afraid. “You made Policy up.”
The sigh, this time, definitely came from her, and there was a note in it that caught Caribou completely off-guard: a Bessie Smith moan—of defiance? resignation?—and also a laugh, all at the same time. “Just because I made it up, doesn’t mean I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it?” Caribou snapped, knew he should shut up, but couldn’t. “Believe what? A dream of a cow means it’s your lucky day? A drea
m of your cousin, and you’re about to get sued? You do not believe that.”
Aunt Sally turned, and he rocked back, then curled his toes into the dirt and his hands against his sides and held tight. He wasn’t afraid. At least, not for the usual reasons. This time—for that single moment, only, the first in all the time he had known her—Aunt Sally herself had looked …
The thought was strange, so surprising that it almost wouldn’t come, took forever to come, was triggered by the droop of her mouth, the new shade of blankness in her eyes, like dulled curtains in a room that no dusting could ever clean.
For that one instant, Aunt Sally had looked like an old woman.
“Maybe I made Policy up,” she said. “Or maybe it came to me. Did you ever think of that?”
“Came to you? Like the Ten Commandments?”
To his amazement, Aunt Sally exploded into laughter. And that made her look like a little girl. She moved like one, too, positively skipping up the bank to his side to pat his cheek, kiss him on the mouth.
“Call it a vision, ’Bou. Or a belief. Or a story I made up. Either way, it’s something to live by, isn’t it? Maybe even something to live for. What more can any of us living things ask of the world we inhabit? It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever been given. Or given.”
“Not quite the greatest,” Caribou said, and for once, he knew that he had said exactly the right thing.
Aunt Sally grabbed his hand, held it tight, and beamed. It made him feel like her son—which he was, of course—and also her babysitter—which he also was. And her lover. Eventually, with a tug on her wrist, he brought her face around to his again; there it was in the moonlight, as dark as he knew his was white; the negation of him, and the thing that had made him.
“Four guests, Sally. Are you sure?”
“Are you saying that’s too many for poor Caribou to procure? Given all those systems and contacts you’ve spent all these years developing?”
He bristled, exactly the way he knew she wanted him to. But he didn’t smile; smiling would have ruined the moment, drained it of its intimacy, or whatever this was. “Of course it isn’t. It just seems…”
“That’s why I want only you bringing them, hon. Not the rabble. Only my dedicated, detail-oriented Caribou.”
“Okay,” he said. He let go of her hand, already running possibilities in his head. The truth was, he did have sources in mind, locations he had never actually used or planned to use, places he’d been saving, though he’d never quite imagined for what. He was already on his way back to the tent to consult his files and find his shoes when Aunt Sally stopped him.
“Oh, and ’Bou? Baby?”
He turned, and there was that new look again: Bessie-on-the-bottle, close to the end, except this Bessie was smiling about it. And it was the smile, even more than the dreaming look in her eyes, the tone in her voice—like a grandmother, now, a grandmother in an old folks’ home whose family no longer came—that alarmed Caribou most of all. Excited, and terrified him. Never, not once, ever, had he heard Aunt Sally sound small. Almost loving. And at the same time … hopeful?
Yes. That, most of all.
“’Bou? Hon. Make sure most of them are children.”
16
Before Rebecca even made it through the front door, Jess had transferred Eddie and his blanket and his squishy orange pretend-baseball and his pacifier to her arms and spun off again. “Where’ve you been, Bec?” She was already back in the kitchen, checking the temperature of a just-microwaved milk bottle against the skin of her arm, touching the tip of a wooden spoon to the pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove, dealing plates onto the counter, including one, as always, for Rebecca. There were no lights on, as usual; Jess seemed to prefer just the twilight slipping between the half-drawn curtains.
“Is Benny awake?” Rebecca asked, getting Eddie adjusted in her arms and smiling down at him. She gave him the little baseball. He jerked his arm and threw it on the floor and hiccupped, or maybe giggled. “Hello,” she said to him, this baby she barely knew, who had been crying for her.
“I’m pretty sure.” Jess passed Rebecca again, collecting her summer shawl and a grocery bag full of cleaning supplies off the leaning little coffee table and switching off the baseball game on the radio. Instantly, as though to fill the void, something upstairs rustled, settled. A whisper whipped past up there, like a gust from a fan, stirring the shadows on the blackened walls at the top of the stairs. “Make sure Benny takes his pain meds, okay?” Jess gestured toward the steps. “Actually takes them. Watch him do it.”
“He always says he doesn’t need them.”
“Yeah, well, I say he’s in pain.”
Jess had dropped her stuff by the door and returned to the kitchen once more to dump noodles in a colander. “Sauce isn’t quite done. Check it in a minute.” Then she was out of the kitchen, down the hall. Moments later, she returned to the nearly bare living room, her ankle-scraping skirt belling with the wind she made, expelling it, which made her look like a jellyfish, always tilted forward toward her next task with her head just slightly down, brown curls washed but flat against her ears and neck, her face never quite visible.
So like Amanda, Rebecca thought yet again. How could there be two of them in the same town? Tears spilled so fast onto Rebecca’s cheeks that for a second, she wasn’t even sure she’d cried them. She bit the sides of her tongue as her shoulders shook. Absently, she bounced Eddie in her arms. Eddie reached for her hair, tugging it like a bellpull to get her attention. And abruptly, still crying, Rebecca realized the difference between Jess and Amanda, or A-mad-da, as Jess called her—to her face, no less—whenever she felt Amanda needed the prick:
Jess wasn’t mad. Jess was broken.
She was also standing—had actually stopped moving, for a whole breath—right in front of Rebecca. “All right, what’s wrong?”
Here was another difference, Rebecca thought. Amanda would have noticed, sure, but she would never have asked. According to the Amanda mind-set, whatever was wrong was something to get over.
“I’ve had kind of a…” Rebecca started, wiping at her eyes with one hand, and realized with a start that Jess was looking right at her. She’d even let Rebecca see her whole face for a second: those high, hard cheekbones, devoid of makeup but still shiny, as though water poured constantly over them; those deep-set blue eyes, also shiny, also hard, like crystals.
Looking away, Jess snatched up her work bag, her grocery bag, her keys, touched Eddie’s forehead, and glanced over her shoulder, up the stairs toward the room she shared with Benny. As if in response, something up there sighed or sang. Jess ignored that and returned her gaze to Rebecca. “Well?”
Rebecca shook her head, lifted Eddie and kissed his forehead before settling him on her shoulder. “It’s been a really crazy twenty-four hours.”
“Not good enough,” Jess snapped.
“What?”
Nudging Rebecca aside with her hip, Jess started out the door, but she was still talking. Commanding, actually. “When I get back, you’re staying. So any other plans you’ve got, move ’em.”
“Um,” Rebecca said, bouncing Eddie in her arms. “Okay.” In truth, now that she thought about it, Jess was not like Amanda at all.
She was even sadder …
“Good girl. Tell Jumping Jack Flashypants he’s going to have to wait.”
“Oh. Hey, Jess, I meant to tell you about that, I didn’t ask Jack to ask you to—”
“That third spaghetti plate on the counter is for him. Tell him to eat something healthy, you can tell he eats too much crap just by looking at him. What?”
“Huh?”
“Stop staring. What are you thinking?” Abruptly—almost shyly—Jess smiled.
Just as quickly, she gulped the smile down. For a long moment, she stood frozen, her mouth a hard line, the tendons in her neck tight. Then she darted forward and kissed Rebecca on the cheek.
Before Rebecca could respond, Jess was down the steps, moving f
ast toward the sidewalk, still talking.
And also shuddering? Was she crying, now?
“Benny’s meds, Rebecca. Make him take them, okay?”
This time, the ceiling actually thumped, as though a whole family of squirrels had dropped out of the evergreen outside and through a hole in the rotting roof.
“You’re not hearing that?” Rebecca called.
“It’s Benny.”
“What, he’s dancing, now? On his half-healed broken ankles? Seriously, Jess, could we have this checked? Or get an exterminator? Eddie’s going to wind up picking up mouse-poop or…”
At the edge of the tiny yard, Jess turned. Apparently, she wasn’t crying, after all. Not with tears, anyway.
“We,” she said, softly.
Rebecca had no idea what to make of that. But she realized, in horror, that she’d done it again: hurt someone else she cared about, somehow.
“I mean, I could take care of it for you. Call somebody, or something. Will you let me call somebody?”
“Kiss your sweet, ridiculous guy for me,” said Jess. When Rebecca kissed Eddie, she added, “Oh, yeah, him, too.”
Which meant she’d meant Jack? Rebecca blushed.
“Take Eddie up to Benny when you bring Benny his dinner. They’re so good for each other.”
“Okay. Although Benny barely talks to me.” In Rebecca’s pocket, her phone buzzed. Jack, she thought. Or maybe Joel? Still bouncing Eddie, she fumbled for it.
“He’s had a really bad time, hon. And he’s in pain. Trust me. As for the rest … Rebecca, are you listening?”
That tone was unmistakable, was the Amanda-tone, and stopped Rebecca grappling with her phone. She looked at Jess, who nodded toward the house’s second story.
“As for the rest. You leave it be.” Then she was out the gate, down the block, heading straight across Campus Ave into the woods, along the lane toward Halfmoon House.
Maybe to clean up the mess Rebecca had left there?
Good Girls Page 15
