Between Heaven and Here

by Susan Straight

  Every time, her mother said, Ganlargent, mo so fast it was like one word. Four words—make some money, me.

  She whispered to Marie-Claire, “Man better smile tou soule li.”

  Only for you.

  Enrique and Gustave showed up in 1949. They’d been in Sarrat as children. Gustave smiled and nodded sometimes. But when he came in after working the canefields, Enrique kept his eyes guarded, his head slanted to the left while he studied everyone in the front room buying plates of chicken and rice and greens.

  She was sixteen. He was over thirty. But after a month, when he came into the yard, he took off his hat in a motion, ducked his head toward her, and smiled so slowly it seemed five minutes before she saw his white white teeth.

  Now he came out of his daughter’s room with the smell of perfume on his arms, about to go hunt someone.

  NO ONE EVER slept in her daughter’s daybed now. The chair was still at Fantine’s desk, where she had written her first stories. When Marie-Claire moved the chair to sit beside Glorette, two magazines fell off. Vogue. The woman’s lips glossy as candied apple. A story about Italy. Pictures of narrow stone streets, and hams. Fantine was in Zurich right now, tasting someone else’s food, listening to what they said.

  And I have to wash Glorette feet. All them miles, up and down the alley. See the same faces some night, see some stranger. Must be the stranger kill her.

  She took off the high-heeled sandals. The ankles like clay. She tied up the jaw again, and put the baggies of rice back on the eyes. Then Clarette burst through the front door and Marie-Claire heard her say, “Rey Jr. still sick?”

  She saw the light in Fantine’s room, just off the kitchen, and came inside. Her uniform was black, her boots like military.

  “Oh, hell, no. No. No.”

  “I’m sorry, bebe.”

  “Sorry?” Clarette twirled and put her hands to her temples. “No. I am not this person. I am not these people.”

  “She your people.”

  “I am not the people who get high all night and die and then my kids have to see a dead body. I am not the one who touches a dead body and then the cops find out and I lose my job. No. Oh, hell no. I am not doing this.”

  “Hush and them kids don’t see nothin. Hush! She sleep in here. You pick up them kids one by one and take em Felonise house. You call Cerise and tell her and her maman come home. And then you help me right here.”

  “Cause you know Cerise ain’t gon do it.”

  “Oui. I know. And baby—” Because Clarette was more like her own daughter now, since Clarette’s mother had died when she was only fourteen, and she had never known her father, and her brother was gone, too—“I wish I didn’t have to ask you. I wish Lafayette could carry em. And you sleep. But he gotta build the coffin.”

  “Oh, my God,” Clarette said, putting her palms to her temples again, so her elbows looked like wings. “You can’t just bury someone out here.”

  Marie-Claire saw the whole place then, in her head, as if she were in the police helicopter that circled like a hornet over the riverbed, looking at homeless camps. The orange groves laid out in rows where she and these girls had moved up and down in straight lines, picking Valencias, all these years. Enrique’s barn, and the eight tiny white houses on the narrow street, and her own larger house right here on the rise, surrounded by bougainvillea. He had bought it with more than money. He’d killed Atwater, slowly, and then buried him somewhere out there.

  Clarette said, “I can’t believe—”

  Marie Claire waited. Can’t believe she’s dead, can’t believe Enrique expected them to bury here here, can’t believe—

  Then Clarette came closer. “How does she still look beautiful?” she whispered. “All these years and her hair like that.” The long black hair cascaded through the wrought-iron curlicues on the daybed. Take two to do the hair, Marie-Claire thought. But I can do her nails.

  “So damn illegal,” Clarette whispered. “I’ll lose my job if the cops come. Damn! I just finished a ten-hour shift!”

  “What you think I done? I got up at six and made breakfast for Enrique and Gustave and your husband.”

  “Like I’m happy he’s staying out here in the barn!”

  Reynaldo had left Clarette two years ago. “I ain’t happy, me. But here he was in my kitchen at seven. And then I cleaned this house and washed all the sheets, and you brought me them kids at four. Rey-Rey done throw up twice cause he ate too many Otter Pops. The box got fifty and whole thing gone.”

  “How you let—”

  “How I let? You think I can keep a eye on all four of em and it was 109 outside? I try keep everything in the yard alive.”

  “I’m just so damn tired!”

  “I been tired longer than you been alive. You don’t want do this, go home. But you gotta take them kids with you.” Marie-Claire stood up and went to Fantine’s closet so she wouldn’t scream at her daughter-in-law. Not a closet. This had been a breakfast nook, not a bedroom. And the armoire filled with clothes Fantine would never look at again, and things she’d left after college.

  The dress Fantine had worn to high school graduation. Glorette was still exactly the same size as seventeen. But she’d had Victor the week of graduation. Marie-Claire took out the dress—silky and slippery. What they called the fabric—Qiana?

  Clarette twirled twice more and then went toward the door.

  “Don’t tell Felonise why. Tell her I don’t feel good.” Clarette closed the door behind her.

  Marie-Claire heard her going down the hallway, heard the murmuring, and she heard the heavy footsteps of Clarette carrying the first one.

  WHEN SHE CAME back, she said, “Oh, my God.”

  Marie-Claire had taken off the clothes and put them in a white plastic trash bag with red ties. Glorette’s breasts were dappled with scars. Tiny white chrysanthemums. Eight. Someone had burned her with cigarettes. Marie-Claire put the white sheet over her chest.

  Clarette said hoarsely, “What you want me to do first?”

  “Help me with the diapers.”

  She remembered vague things about what her aunt had done. There was still more waste in the body. Her aunt had used rags, but there were also four diapers left in the cupboard, from when Teeter was potty-training. They were large, but not large enough. Marie-Claire opened them up and overlapped three. She cut the fourth into pads.

  “Push down on her stomach.” Not much more pee came out. Not like when you had a baby and they had to push out all the afterbirth and blood poured from you like you’d grown a river inside and not a baby. When she had Lafayette she was eighteen and her mother was back in Louisiana. Two white nurses at the hospital pushed down so hard on her belly she screamed they were killing her, and one said, “Don’t be ignorant.”

  Clarette seemed stunned. Her braids held back by an elastic, but one came out and brushed against Glorette’s shoulder. The bead at the end knocking the bone. She jumped and Marie-Claire said, “Just sit down here. On this chair.”

  Marie-Claire dumped the diapers into the trash bag. She filled a basin with vinegar and water, and washed out Glorette’s privates. She covered the body with the sheet. She threw the wet paper towels in the bag, too. Not like rags, where you had to wash them, burn them, or bury them—back in the old days. Now she said, “Don’t move. Sit right there. She don’t be lonely.”

  At the trashcans behind the house, she dropped the lid quietly. Nightbirds were singing in the eucalyptus windbreak. One mockingbird in the sycamore at the edge of the yard.

  Beto had come one night when the mockingbirds were fighting in the trees, singing longer and longer songs, keeping her awake. He was the Indian man who’d worked here for years before Enrique came to this place after the war. They’d always spent hours in the barn, where Beto sharpened knives and tools in the winter. But that night, he was drunk, and Enrique was gone somewhere with Gustave. Beto said, “How you know he won’t get tired of you next? Just find a way to get rid of you. Bury you out there s
omewhere. On his land.”

  “Why you say that to me?”

  “Cause he got this land the wrong way. He knew that white man wouldn’t sell it to him. So he killed him.”

  “Maybe they have a fight.” She remembered Beto sitting in the kitchen holding a cup of coffee, having drunk whiskey with Enrique and Gustave all night.

  “A fight that lasted ten days? He took ten days to die. I was there.”

  “So you help.”

  Beto shrugged. He had a long braid down his back and a feathery little moustache over his lip. Two hairs at the end touching the corner of his mouth. He said, “I didn’t know what your husband was doing at first. But he’s stone cold. You thought about that? You’re still young. And beautiful.”

  “And I got a baby in the back. Two years old.”

  Beto said, “Listen.” And they heard the nightbirds through the window screen in the kitchen. “You never thought about Atwater used to sleep in this house? And where he’s layin now?”

  “Ain’t my business.”

  Beto said, “Spirits everybody’s business. My old man’s buried over there in Agua Dulce somewhere. I still see him walkin the river at night.”

  “I sit in here at night,” Marie-Claire told him, and took away the coffee cup. “And you can sit down in the barn.”

  “I ain’t comin back,” Beto said. “I just wanted to see you again.” He stood up. “You sure you ain’t part Indian? That hair? Those eyes?”

  “I’m whole married. You seen me. Now you go.”

  THE HOUSE WAS silent. Like never. Felonise or someone in the kitchen, children sleeping in the bedrooms, Enrique snoring softly like a rattle had lodged in his throat.

  “You got nail polish?” she said to Clarette, who sat staring out the bedroom window.

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.” Marie-Claire bent to Fantine’s small desk. In the drawer she found polish remover, the pink liquid sharper than the vinegar smell. When Enrique came back with the dry ice and the boys were done with the coffin, she would behead all the roses and put the petals around the body, even between the legs when no one saw.

  Clarette dug in her purse and came up with a bottle. Pink as pale and shiny as the inside of a shell. “You know who picked this?” she whispered. “Rey Jr. He said it was the prettiest color he’d ever seen. We were at Target. And Teeter punched him and said that was sissy.”

  She stood while Marie-Claire sat in the chair and began taking off the thick red polish, dirty and chipped. The fingers harder now, the wrist tiny but resisting. The skin like a terrible dough spread over the bones.

  All that blood pooling inside. Marie-Claire said, “Rey Jr., he ate too many them red Otter Pops. And I had to sit next to him for a while, make sure he ain’t throw up again. He ain’t want me to go. We was right here, cause the porch was so hot and them other kids was in the groves.”

  Clarette said, “Greedy.”

  “He start talkin about blood.”

  “What? What did he see?”

  “Non. When you a child, you look around you. Not inside yet. You see a flower, and you don’t know.”

  “Know what?” Clarette looked out the window at the sunflowers with their heads hanging.

  Marie-Claire said, “Them white flower. Jimsonweed. Rey Jr. said somebody tell him that hell’s bells, and you can die if you touch it. I tell him you have to make a drink from it to die, and he say how do I know? Indian man tell me, when I first get here.”

  Beto said Enrique had boiled the jimsonweed and added the liquid to Atwater’s whiskey. He’d killed rabbits and roasted them on spits made of green oleander branches, so the poison entered the flesh.

  So she could have this house. So they would be safe. The painting on the wall right here, sent by Fantine from Paris, of a blackbird on a snowy fence in France. The coffee beans from Belize that Marie-Claire had never opened—the package was too beautiful.

  She said to Clarette, “You don’t remember, but you always want sugarcane. Back when Gustave grow cane in his yard, and you greedy. Suck on that cane until you have a white beard down your face. You bout five. And then Glorette and Fantine go work the sugarcane in Louisiana one time, help Enrique when somebody die, and you get so mad. Your mama won’t let you go. She say you never go to Louisiana. Never.”

  “He got her. That old man.”

  “He got her and Claudine and Zizi. Broke her wrist when he throw her down. You remember when I knock Fantine down the porch?”

  Her eyes stung from the polish remover. Her own flat hand clapping across Fantine’s face so hard her only daughter fell against the steps. Fantine had talked the others into walking downtown to a rich white girl’s pool party, and the father had touched Glorette on the shoulder, looked at her hard. Glorette told them. And when Marie-Claire told her the story of Mr. McQuine, Fantine had laughed impatiently. As if that could never happen here. As if she never needed to be afraid.

  Downtown, where the older houses were, Cerise and Clarette lived a few streets apart. Cerise’s house with shingles painted light blue, and a wrought-iron arch over the sidewalk with jasmine vine. Clarette’s house with stucco painted yellow, and red geraniums Marie-Claire had started for her in coffee cans.

  Every room in the house full except this one. So quiet when she was sitting beside Michel, back then. Auntie Viola’s house two doors down the quarter from her mother’s. Plate dinners until midnight, when her mother finally locked the door. People in the front room, in the kitchen, and her trying to sleep in the middle room. “Hush—Marie-Claire dor-me.” But she couldn’t. And now the children here, and the men in the kitchen. Reynaldo fighting with Clarette about money, coming back here to live in the empty stone house deep in the grove. Clarette saying she couldn’t believe Marie-Claire let him eat here, making it easy for him.

  “Go check on the coffin,” she said to Clarette now. “See Lafayette get that wood. I be okay here.”

  Clarette went out the front door. And Marie-Claire knew she turned her head toward her sleeping children at the little house where Felonise was sitting on her own couch, making sure they had no bad dreams or woke up wanting their mothers, dying to come over here and see what was going on.

  Rey Jr. crying after he threw up, saying, “I hate when it comes out my nose!” Saying, “It looks like blood comin out my stomach!” Saying, “How come when we eat steak the blood is gray? If we cooked our blood would it turn black?”

  And her saying, “That what color you get when you cut your arm, oui? Get black if you healthy.”

  She took the old polish from the last, smallest fingernail. Glorette sitting on this daybed when she was ten. Saying, “This my favorite place to take a nap. In the whole world. You wake up at my house, you see the wall. You wake up here, you see the flowers right by your face. Or the moon. Remember you let me sleep until dark once? The moon came up all perfect right there.” She’d touched the window glass.

  The fingers hard now. The nails would keep growing? Marie-Claire shook the polish. Need to do that hair. But I don’t want touch it yet.

  She studied the pale pink. And Glorette’s eyelids, shadowy and purple. I have to do makeup, too.

  “So you don’t be lonely,” Marie-Claire said quietly. “I sat in my mama’s house look at a magazine, and I wanted nail polish so bad. They ain’t had it at the corner store. Just food and cigarettes and beer. She taken me to Baton Rouge once and I got red nail polish. Red as blood. I paint my nails and then Mr. McQuine get Mary. They put us in the truck. I was sixteen. We come here, and then Enrique show up two years later.”

  She opened the bottle. The smell so strong.

  “I paint my nails every Saturday, after we got married, and then I had to pick oranges, and wash them diaper, and kill them chicken. But I paint em anyway. We went to the five-and-dime on Palm. Why not nickel-and-dime? All you girls got candy. I got a new color once a month. They had names on the back. Fantine used to tell me. Candy Apple. Apricot Dream. I wonder who name all the
m color.”

  Atwater must have slept in the bedroom she shared with Enrique. He had to be buried somewhere by the river.

  All those Saturdays, her boys in the other bedroom playing the radio. Marvin Gaye. Girl you give me good feelin—sugar—something like sanctified.

  She pulled Glorette’s hand to her, that motion she wished all her life she could do for Fantine, and dropped the first tiny pearl of pink on a fingernail.

  POINCIANA

  “WHY YOU WASTE your money here?” she asked Sisia. The smell of the chemicals at the nail salon went through Glorette’s eyes and into her brain. Passed right through the tears and the eyeball. Through the iris, she thought.

  “Not a waste,” Lynn Win said, moving around Sisia’s hand like a hummingbird checking flowers. Like the hummingbird that came to the hibiscus in front of The Lamplighter Motel. Mrs. Tajinder Patel’s hibiscus. “Only to you,” Lynn Win said.

  “Please.” Glorette walked into the doorway to breathe and looked at the cars roaming past the strip mall. Every strip mall in Rio Seco, in California, in the world, probably, was like this. Nail salon, video store, doughnut shop, liquor, and Launderland and taqueria. All the smells hovering in their own doorways, like the owners did in the early morning and late at night, waiting.

  Like she and Sisia hovered. Sundown first, Launderland in winter when it was cold in the alley, taqueria when the cops cruised by. All the standing and waiting between jobs. They were just jobs. Like clean the counter at the taqueria. Take out the trash. Uncrate the liquor. Wash the sheets. All up and down the street. Lean against the chainlink fence, against the bus stop but you couldn’t sit on the bench, shove your shoulder into the cinderblock wall outside Launderland and even sleep for a minute, if the fog settled in like a quilt, like the opposite of an electric blanket, and cooled off the night.

  Not now. Hot as hell til past midnight.

  The nail polish vapors stung her eyes. Why you couldn’t get high off these fumes? So convenient. 7-Eleven was a convenience store. Easy. She could sit here and close her eyes and Lynn Win would paint her like a statue and the vapors would rise up into her mouth and nose and make the inside of her forehead turn to snow. She would pay Lynn Win. Instead of paying for the rock to turn into fumes.