Precious

by Sandra Novack

  “Just one look,” she told Ginny. “Just one, Ginny, and no more.”

  The man approached. The bird man. A faint dizziness came over her—something chemical, perhaps, clinging to his scrubs, something like bleach burning her nostrils. She refused to look away, for Ginny, for the woman who, after all, was her friend. “We’re ready,” she said, helping Ginny forward.

  Though she should have felt little shock at how horrific life could be, though it seemed her past might have prepared her for this, it did nothing to alleviate the shock, the quiet terror that filled her when the man folded back the sheet and life was reduced, in measure, by smaller scales: not an adult but a child there, the frail bones and thin arms, the unshaped, bloated body, the tilt of the head and soft line of the jaw, the marks by her neck, thumbprints that had turned black. The thin ribs, the small pucker of breasts not yet formed. The table swallowed the child on all sides. There were bruises on her body that even death didn’t hide, and a snaking wound that peeked out from the lip of the folded sheet that covered the body. The man with the skullcap kept the girl’s right arm covered, but Natalia could still see the jagged, torn flesh. No blood, not now. Even the girl’s face alarmed Natalia. She might have expected the last pain of death, the twisted expression she’d seen before, how the dead’s last moments trailed them into eternity, to the next life, to whatever was around the corner between here and there. But what she found was worse, ironic—a face that despite the ravaged body and bruises seemed only at peace, as if she’d simply shut her eyes and slept. That was a look that filled Natalia with a quiet terror. That was a look that would follow her into her dreams that night.

  “Don’t remember this,” Natalia said. “Remember her the way she was.”

  She took in air. She held Ginny tighter, felt Ginny’s entire body go limp again. She stiffened her hold. She waited.

  “No, no, no, no,” Ginny said. A whisper.

  “Something,” the man with the skullcap said, “got ahold of her arm. We think maybe an animal.”

  A wolf, Natalia thought. The child was devoured by a wolf.

  “That’s not Vicki,” Ginny said, shaking her head. Her eyes had gone blank. Her voice was hard like a pebble. She stepped back. She shook her head again. Natalia let her go. “That’s not Vicki,” she said again. “That’s somebody else’s baby. That’s somebody else’s girl.”

  Both Natalia and Milly took Ginny home. They stopped first at Ginny’s house and collected items from her bedroom: clothing and a toothbrush, a hairbrush, a few nightgowns, some creams and floss, shorts and shirts, underwear.

  “Do you need anything?” Natalia asked Milly as they parted ways on the street.

  “It wasn’t my little girl,” Ginny said, looking up.

  “We’ll take care of her,” Milly said. “She can stay with us as long as she needs.” To Natalia’s surprise, the old woman reached for her, too, and hugged her suddenly.

  The air felt good, the motion. She focused on her feet, on the sound of her soles as they hit the pavement. Everything around her was sharp, the sky not black but a deep velvety blue, the stars jeweled in the night. The streetlights hummed, teemed with small bugs. A breeze. A house light at Mrs. Stone’s was on. The Schultzes’ schnauzer was out in the yard. Natalia passed and it sent up a bark.

  The drink. The lights. She was tired. She could have slept for a long time, hours, decades, millennia, but she couldn’t stand the thought of closing her eyes and slipping into another world that might, if her dreams turned against her, be even worse than the day, made more horrific in the aftermath and amplified to cataclysmic proportions.

  In the kitchen she cuts vegetables for soup, as her own mother did when she heard about the invasion. She cuts an onion, realizing how profoundly absurd rituals are, incantations to keep away sorrow, those small things we do to cushion ourselves from blows, to hope against no hope. The world could be torn to pieces, bombs could fall and cities could fall, and they often did. People could die. Children could die, too. There could be rubble left, dogs barking. It all happened. All of it.

  She finishes her drink.

  Sometime later, moments, minutes, hours, Natalia hears the kitchen door slam, then the rush of feet, the sobbing screams, the curses from Eva first, and then from Frank, everything garbled and fragmented. Natalia gets up from the couch and rushes into the hallway in time to have Eva push past her, her hand held up to her face, and there, in her nostril, crusted blood, a shine on the cheek, a net of red-black lines spidering across her flesh. “I told you,” Eva is saying, her voice breathless and straining, “if you ever touched me again. If you ever.” Frank is behind her, the force of his energy tangible, fisted, balled. How everything turns in him, how an unmitigated hatred fills him, momentarily, one that will change, over the following hours, to regret—immense regret. But now the line of his jaw clenches. The air around him burns with electricity.

  “Everything that comes out of your mouth is a fucking lie,” he yells.

  Jarred by the broken silence, Natalia rushes instinctively after Eva, but Frank grabs her. The table in the hallway wobbles under her weight. Eva maneuvers away from both of them. There is noise—so much noise—Frank’s screams, Natalia’s questions, and the slam of Eva’s bedroom door, the elevated pitch of “What did you do?” And there is Frank screaming about what Sissy told him, a truth she should never have spoken. And all this is heard through open windows, from the lit house on the street. In the confusion, Sissy is left to herself. She crawls under the kitchen table, feeling bits of dirt and sand against her palms as she does. She draws her legs up and waits.

  The story goes like this.

  The story goes like this …

  “What happened?” Natalia is yelling. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t know,” Frank yells. “What was I supposed to do?”

  If the world were Sissy’s, and if Sissy were wondrous and death a thing that hardly existed, she might be able to save Eva. She might run after her, screaming, I’m coming for you! I’m coming for you, Eva! If the world were magical, she would send her apologies over the distance; they would rain down over Eva like hundreds and hundreds of flowers falling suddenly from the sky; they would soothe her, mend everything. But the world, finally, is not hers to bend or re-create. The world is something else entirely. She crouches down more. A drop of blood on the floor—she wipes it with her finger, makes a circle. She closes her eyes and disappears.

  It is sometimes impossible to measure the time, to order things and place them in the past and leave them there for good, as one might turn one’s back to a fire and walk away. At some point, after the door to her parents’ bedroom closes, after the voices recede into a thin wash of agitated whispers, Sissy crawls out from under the table and tentatively tiptoes past her parents’ bedroom door, each step laid softly, a ghost. Cautiously through the hallway, up the stairs. Her parents finally as unknowable as the day itself. A dead friend, a bloodied sister, how everything in a moment conflates, and how her thoughts settle finally on Eva. Upstairs she knocks on Eva’s door, a bumpity-bump-bump rhythm. Then, when it seems the door will never open, she hears a click. Eva’s phone lies on the bed. Sissy stands dumbly as Eva flits frantically around her room, gathering clothes without any thought: only one pair of underwear, one pair of jeans, five different T-shirts, two skirts. She stuffs them into an army bag.

  Sissy moves to the edge of her bed, her fingers touching the cotton cover. The blood in Eva’s nose is caked now. Black streaks of mascara snake down her cheeks. Sissy bites her nail, making it bleed, too. She bites the inside of her cheek, to do the same.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You know, Sissy.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  Eva pulls rings from her jewelry box and slides them onto her fingers, one by one, until there is a succession of silver.

  “Are you coming back?”

  “I don’t know,” Eva says, crying now. She gath
ers more clothing. She opens her closet and pulls out a few more skirts, stripping them from hangers. She leaves her books on her dresser.

  “Can I come?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Sissy leans against the bed, uses it for support.

  For the first time since Sissy has entered, Eva stops what she’s doing. She stands at a distance, across from Sissy, and makes an indecipherable face, not knowing what else to say. Finally, she tells her, “I’d take you if I could, but they’d just get you. They’d probably accuse me of kidnapping you or something. They’d probably call the cops. They’d do that if I took the car. They’d sure as hell do that if I took you.” Her voice trails off. Sissy shifts uncomfortably, leaning on her left side, trying to consider this. She smooths the bedspread, the roses that look like cuts.

  “You can have my lip gloss,” Eva says, tossing it to her.

  Sissy looks at the orange tube lying in her open palm. She doesn’t remember even catching it. “Thanks,” she says, studying it, waiting.

  “You can have whatever else you want, too.” Eva gathers a few more items: a nightgown, a halter top, a pair of sneakers. Outside, somewhere in front of the house, a car horn sounds once—shrill.

  “Don’t go,” Sissy says. “Stay.”

  “Not here,” she says. “But I’ll see you around, you know?”

  If running away were a game, Sissy thinks. It is over—the fighting, the racket—though it still clings to her, still feels raw. And Eva is packing the last of her items. And Eva is saying goodbye. In this moment Sissy cannot think to reach for her sister. In this moment she can barely speak.

  Eva stares at her, blinks hard. “How much do you love me?” she asks.

  Sissy says nothing. She shakes her head, dumbly, and with that, Eva mumbles something else—a piece of advice, perhaps. Sissy barely registers it. Then Eva goes, sprinting down the steps two, three at a time.

  Sissy can hear the thudding of footsteps, the rush of motion. The front door opens and closes—a squeak, a bang—before she can say anything else at all. Then there are more footsteps, Natalia, alerted to the front door, hurrying out from her bedroom to see what’s wrong, then calling out into the night, “Come back.” Sissy freezes at the top of the steps, listening. She scrambles down the steps and hears a screech outside. Natalia grabs her by the shoulder. “Sissy,” she says. “Stay here.”

  Sissy breaks from her mother’s grasp and runs down the steps, down the sidewalk to the narrow street outside her house. She smells rubber; the tire tracks snake down the macadam. The night is newly settled and quiet, the air still. A few lights go on, here and there, along the street. A front door opens; a neighbor steps outside. Above her stars sprinkle the sky. She looks both ways, down Ellis Avenue, past the sympathetic trees and parked cars lining the road. She stares out into everything and sees nothing.

  Time passed and settled into place.

  There were always those occasions when Sissy, thirty-two, made the trip back again through seemingly relentless hours and hazy miles, sometimes with her husband and her daughter if schedules permitted; and sometimes, like now and for shorter weekend visits, alone. The train station was filled with people, and over the haze of static and the noise of the bustling crowd walking by, suitcases rolling unevenly, Sissy took a seat and waited for the voice to cut through the loudspeaker and announce the departure of the express from D.C. to Philadelphia. From there she would disembark and catch the bus to her parents’ house, to those same streets and places she remembered from childhood, places where the memory of Eva always lingered. To her side, a board clicked out arrivals and departures with persistent regularity. In front of her a line of people inched slowly forward to the ticket counter. And above her the vaulted ceiling depicted a painting of a locomotive, steam billowing against the calm sky, a conductor dressed in navy waving people into cars, a smile etched on his face.

  There were always times to leave things behind, always times to return again, changed, tempered by the consciousness of memory.

  Outside the station, a December rain fell, forceful and even. Sissy called her husband to let him know that even with the slick roads and bad weather, the train was scheduled to leave on time, and her baggage was checked and ready. Her eight-year-old daughter, Margaret, got on the phone, her voice still milky with sleep, and stayed on just long enough to tell Sissy goodbye and come back soon and be safe and bring her back a gift, please. She heard her husband issue a comment about breakfast and then there was a shuffling sound, a small muffle, and his voice on the other end of the line again. “I could still come,” he said, his voice a whisper. “I could get Margaret ready—”

  “Don’t be silly,” Sissy said. “It’s only three days, and you’ve got work tomorrow. In and out; I’ll be home before you miss me.”

  They spoke for another few minutes, about preparations and arrangements for the weekend: Sissy and her mother and the planned excursion downtown to hunt for slipcovers; her father’s offer to drive them all out to the country. Sissy didn’t mention the anticipation she held on these occasions when she came home, the secret wishes she still, after so many years, held inside her, nor did she discuss the dread that sometimes crept in and clouded her love. She hardly ever spoke about Eva, though she thought of her—and in that way held her close—most days.

  That night, after Eva ran away and Frank’s anger receded like a storm wave, it was Natalia who spent days and days calling around the neighborhood to those friends of Eva’s that she knew, finally exhausting her mental list to acquaintances and relative strangers. And it was Frank who drove around town for hours, searching for Greg’s car at the school and parks and at his home. The boy’s parents refused to give Frank any answers as to where Eva went, but finally, after a week of Frank’s showing up and asking, Greg’s mother acquiesced and gave Frank a slip of paper with an address in New Jersey, a friend of their family. Of course he went. Of course he looked for Eva. When Frank arrived at the small apartment, no one answered the door, though inside a curtain moved. Once, when he lingered too long on the front steps, knocking incessantly, practically pleading, the police showed up and asked him to leave. There was a knowledge that gradually seeded itself, that those who do not wish to be found never are, that Eva stubbornly adamantly, refused to come home and eventually left the apartment in New Jersey altogether, her emancipation finalized on her eighteenth birthday, just three weeks after that night. Eventually, when Natalia herself drove out to the apartment—convinced that if not Frank then she could bring Eva home—she secured only an address in California and was told Eva had bought a bus ticket there, though no one could tell Natalia why.

  Both Natalia and Frank waited, hoping that Eva would call. They suffered through scandalous rumors and correctly leveled accusations, though no one ever really thought Eva would stay away forever. No one believed that. Eventually, they all thought, the girl was bound to need something—money, a loan, a favor, advice—but the phone never rang once, and Natalia’s letters trickled back one by one, unopened, refused, and then finally, after another year, it was no longer a valid address. And that was it. It sometimes seemed to Sissy and perhaps to Natalia and Frank and maybe even to Eva herself, that there should have been more—more antagonisms, more debate, more filling in of questions that persisted across the long years. But there was, in place of all this, silence that blanketed the past and the Kisches’ history, covering it like a dense snow. Through all the years, Frank never, ever, spoke of Eva, so final was his remorse. Unlike Natalia, he never would say he’d tried his best, though he never again raised a hand to anyone in the family, and he barely, as Sissy grew, even so much as dared an embrace. In time his resolve weakened with his body, everything seeming to drain from his flesh—all life, all vigor. Often, when he and Natalia watched television, there might be an alert that appeared, flashing across the screen—a child suddenly gone missing—and Frank would stop doing whatever he was doing and grow contemplative, and Natalia would get up sudden
ly and put on a pot of coffee and no words would pass between them.

  Time had done nothing to alleviate Natalia’s wounds. Her face took on a complex network of lines; the skin at her neck drew itself forward, rope after rope appearing. As Sissy grew, as her body shot up and outward and her face filled in, Natalia told fewer and fewer stories about Gypsies and distant lands and moths that fluttered about, escaping over the wires. Eventually, the stories ceased altogether and were forgotten; indeed in Natalia, all history became lost. Still, sometimes, years later, questions about that summer—about so many things—consumed Sissy. She would remember Eva’s accusation leveled at their mother— Aren’t you going to do anything?—and then her final pronouncement to Sissy before she left her bedroom, one forgotten and later remembered, a warning that Sissy should watch her back. If anyone lays a hand on you, Eva said, you get the hell out.

  “A story,” an adult Sissy would say, tentatively, to Natalia when they spoke on the phone. “Tell me more about Eva. Tell me more about my sister.”

  “What stories?” Natalia would ask. “I’m all out of stories. I cried all my tears,” Natalia said, “when you weren’t watching. Not even God sees everything.”

  Inevitably, Natalia would change the subject, or the conversation would end abruptly, and it was as if Natalia were closing a book, their collective history pressed like a flower between the pages. Sissy couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t more they could have done; she couldn’t help but think that in a small way, with Eva gone, something between Natalia and Frank was finally resolved—an order in the house restored—despite the hole at the center of everything that Eva could rightly claim as hers. How they all circled around that space, each of them carefully maneuvering it, in their own ways; how they danced around the space in conversations; how they sometimes pretended it wasn’t there, turning their backs on it instead.