by T. Greenwood
Ma and Lily pulled into the driveway just after I’d gone to bed. I could hear the tires crushing gravel, the trailer carrying Lily’s stairs dragging wearily behind. It was too early to turn in, only eight o’clock, but I had hoped to be sleeping when they got home. I had hoped I wouldn’t have to see either of them until the next morning. But there was no way to feign sleep when Ma threw open the kitchen door. There was no way to keep my eyes pressed closed when she started screaming.
“Get your father on the phone now!” she said in the empty kitchen. Her voice had not been forgotten but had been missing for so long now it sounded like a phantom voice in the other room.
I lay on my back staring at the ceiling, knowing that as soon as I relented my whole world would be turned upside down again. I tugged at my nightgown, which had ridden up my legs. I’d used one of Ma’s rusty pink razors I found in a drawer and my legs were covered with little red itchy bumps.
“Indie!” she insisted, somehow knowing that I was lying awake in my bedroom just after twilight.
The trophy from the pool tournament was sitting on my bureau. I could make out its outline among the shadows of old perfume bottles, music boxes, and rolled-up socks. I’d left it there to put away later. I squeezed my eyes shut and listened as Benny’s heavy feet fell across the kitchen floor, as he leaned into Ma, whose arms remained heavy at her sides, as he started to whimper in the way that sounded like the train coming. I thought he was only crying because she wouldn’t hug him, but when the rumble of his sobs became the metal on metal sound of the tracks and the warning whistle of his cries became the scream of steam, I knew something much worse was happening in our kitchen.
As I ran down the hall, my legs brushed against the nylon of my nightgown, the damaged skin of my legs burning. I leaned down and pressed my cold palms against them to squash the fire. The only light on was the one over the stove; its fluorescent green glow made this an underwater scene, as if the linoleum were the floor of the ocean, and Benny, cowering in the corner by the refrigerator, was a creature instead of a boy. Ma stood by the kitchen table with her hands hiding her face. When she moved them away, there were dark, bloody hand prints on the pale green of her skin.
“What’s the matter, Ma?” I asked softly. Afraid.
She didn’t answer me, but picked up the phone and dialed the number for the bar. “Sheila, this is Judy Brown. I need to speak to my husband.”
I imagined Sheila in her halter top. I thought of the way she had stroked Daddy’s hair when he hurt his knee in the backyard dancing like John Travolta. I thought of the way her words tasted like stale peppermints. She would roll her eyes and hand Daddy the phone. She would maybe touch him by accident when he took the receiver from her.
In the deep-sea kitchen, Ma’s words swam softly. “Lily’s hemorrhaging. She was feeling sick yesterday during the awards ceremony, but she didn’t have a fever so I thought we could wait until we got home so she could see her regular doctor. But then she started bleeding just past Camp Verde.” Ma pressed her free hand onto the table and stared at the red mark it made. “I’ve got the rental car with the trailer. I need you to come get us.”
I saw Sheila go back behind the bar while Daddy curled the long cord into the kitchen. I smelled Rosey’s enchiladas and heard the basket of onion rings descending into the crackling fat. I felt Sheila’s sigh on Daddy’s neck.
Ma closed her eyes and raised her voice. “Your daughter is bleeding to death in the backseat of a car. If you don’t get here in five minutes she will die. Do you understand?”
Benny had sunk to the floor and was crawling toward the table. He looked like a man instead of a boy. He looked like a giant slithering across the sea floor. When he got to where Ma was standing, he bumped into her accidentally. His eyes rose up to meet hers, knowing probably that he’d made a terrible mistake trying to hide. Because no sooner did his soft eyes meet hers, trying to explain in a glance that he hadn’t meant to bump her, that he only needed to be safe, that she kicked. Like she was kicking a dog, and I covered my ears when she hung up the phone and started to yell at Benny.
Benny held one large hand to his side, wounded but not dead, and kept crawling through her liquid words toward the table. The cave under the sea. I thought for a moment of joining him. Of living inside that cave forever. But then her attention shifted to me, standing in the doorway with my hands over my ears and razor burn on my legs. She came at me as if she might be gentle, as if she might pull me into her arms and hold me there softly. That she might be sorry.
And she did. Inside my chest my heart bumped and thumped, awkward and scared. But her arms made a circle of softness around my bare shoulders. Benny was silent, hidden now and safe under the table and Ma was holding me. Tears grew hot and wet in the corners of my eyes. And she didn’t let go. This was the closest I had been to Ma in so long that I’d forgotten the way she smelled of lavender. I’d forgotten that her ribs made a cage around her heart. I’d forgotten that her hands were smaller than mine on my back. And in this lavender moment I could forgive her for kicking Benny. I could understand. The night at Rusty’s was still vivid in my mind. The metallic taste of hate in my mouth. But there was only tenderness here. Ma was holding on to me for dear life.
But when Daddy came into the kitchen, Ma let go.
“Where is she?” he said.
“I told you she’s in the car,” Ma said, turning to face him. All that softness turned to the hardness of bone and the sharpness of breath.
“Indie, stay here with your brother,” Daddy said.
I nodded and Ma followed Daddy out the door.
I left Benny under the table. I walked past him, pleading with me to stay, and into my room, where I picked up the trophy and stared at the brass plate with tiny screws holding it onto the marble base. I hadn’t even asked if Lily had won the Little Miss Desert Flower contest. I hadn’t asked because I already knew. I knew this like I knew when there was electricity in the air. I knew that if there were a banner and a crown and a trophy fifty times the size of mine that there would have been no blood. It was as simple as that. If Lily had won the contest, Ma wouldn’t have made this happen again.
The day before Thanksgiving, I got up to go to the café with Peter. I got up while he was in the bathroom, startled him when he came back into the dim light of our bedroom.
“Go back to bed.You don’t need to come with me today,” he said, running his long fingers through his hair.
“I want to,” I said, and went to the bureau for something to wear. The floor was cold underneath my feet. When I breathed, cold clouds escaped from my lips.
“Really, Indie. It’s okay,” he said, reaching for my hand.
I ignored him and pulled a pair of jeans out of the drawer.
“I said I want to.” My eyes were stinging.
“Okay,” he said, backing away from me, his hands raised defensively.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“That,” I said, imitating his gesture.
“Nothing. Sorry.”
I pulled the jeans on and turned away from him to pull my nightgown off. I was shivering, but I lingered like this, my naked back turned to him, for several moments before I slipped my favorite bra on and then a worn T-shirt over that. When I turned around again, he had already gone into the living room to rekindle the fire.
We rode silently through the woods to the Swan. The streets were empty. White Christmas lights in the trees were like fallen stars trapped in cold branches. It was beautiful. Strange. But today Peter didn’t linger inside the truck. He opened the door and slammed it shut again, walking briskly to the door, his keys ready in his hands as I followed quietly behind him.
He went straight to the kitchen, leaving me to navigate the dark stairs to the bakery alone. I flicked on the light, pulled an apron from the starched and newly laundered pack, looped it over my head, and pulled my hair away from my face with a rubber band. I found three buckets marked Wet in the re
frigerator (milk and sugar and eggs floating on top like miniature suns), and three marked Dry on the counter. I found a note written by Peter with instructions for triple berry, maple walnut, and chocolate cheesecake muffins. Anyone could do this job. This message could have been left for anyone.
I pulled three mixing bowls from the shelf and lined them up along the smooth wooden counter. I turned the oven to 325 degrees and blew flour off the radio. But when I turned the radio on, the knob came off in my hands. I tried several times to reattach it, but it no longer seemed to fit. Frustrated, I hurled the knob into the sink and it reverberated against the stainless steel sides.
I measured blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries into one bowl. Chocolate and sour cream, maple syrup and walnuts into the others. I dumped the Wet and Dry buckets’ contents into their respective bowls and stirred purposefully until my arm ached and the batters were smooth. I lined three tins with paper muffin cups, pretty, blue miniature accordions. The nonstick spray saturated them, beaded up on the exposed tin. The batter was thick, streaked with berries and chocolate and pure Vermont maple syrup.
Above me, I could hear Peter’s feet walking across the kitchen floor. I could hear the sink. The doorbells as Joe came in, his bicycle rolling across the floor and then out the back door to the alley where he would lock it to an old set of pipes.
After I put the muffins in the oven, I went to the office and turned on the lights, looked at Peter’s desk. I pulled open the drawers and stared at the carefully organized tray filled with tacks and erasers and rubber bands. The employee schedule hanging on the bulletin board was organized into shifts, names penciled perfectly into their time slots. Pencils sharpened like daggers, erasers free from ink or dirt, were lined up like soldiers on the lefthand side of the desk. A blotter without doodles. An empty wastebasket and a file cabinet without a single file out of place.
When I picked up the phone to call Lily, I also picked up a black magic marker. As the phone rang, midnight Phoenix time, I took the cap off and let the strong scent of poison, of toxins, linger under my nose. As Lily answered the phone, her voice frightened, I started to make black Xs all over Peter’s things. Instead of speaking, instead of demanding answers, instead of stopping her with my words, I marked the blotter, the employee schedule, the walls with black ink. I made Xs on the backs of my hands. I hung up the phone and made marks on the clean white apron, on my jeans, and on my T-shirt. I didn’t stop until the marker ran dry in my hands and my tears ran wet down my cheeks. Upstairs I could hear Peter dragging the Daily Special easel outside, and I stared at the mess I’d made and cried. It wasn’t until I smelled the muffins burning that I realized what I’d done.
Peter came down as I was pulling the blackened muffins from the oven. Smoke poured out of the door making us both cough.
“Let me get it, Indie. Please,” he said, and tossed the burning muffins into the sink.
I sat down on the floor next to the giant bread dough mixer, leaned my cheek against the cold metal base and closed my eyes.
Peter turned on the giant fan near the doorway and sat down next to me on the floor. He pulled me into him, fought me.
“What’s going on?”
I looked at his face, his eyes wide and filled with sorrow.
“Please help me,” he said.
I felt the cool metal against my skin, allowed my chest to rumble as it expelled the last few breaths of smokey air. “I’m like one of those cans you won’t buy at the grocery store,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
“One of those cans they always pile into a grocery cart and charge half price for. They’re the ones that someone dropped, the dented ones. Remember? Remember that time I put one in our cart? Tomatoes or something.You made me put it back. You said that a dented can is not just a dented can.You said that it makes the insides go bad. Remember?”
“No,” Peter said into my hair.
“It’s true, Peter. God, just give me that much.”
Here I am at nineteen. Swimming inside a borrowed sweater at six A.M. watching Peter coax the same swan from ice each morning for a week. The sweater was made on the wrong size needles by someone’s great-aunt. It is gray, thick with cables, and falls well below my hips. I have to roll the cuffs to keep my hands from disappearing in the long sleeves. Inside the borrowed sweater I imagine myself a swan trapped inside ice. I even feel my neck begin to arch in the same cold and precise way.
Finally, he asked if I would like to take a walk with him later in the day. If he might show me something he’d found. I remember nodding shyly; I had been quite content just to watch him chipping at ice with a chain saw. I imagine now we must have looked like any other pair of gangly teenagers scuffing our feet as we walked down the winding dirt road away from the Birches. In my memory of this day, a spectacular backdrop of paper castle and mountains jutting into the clear summer sky adds a strange effect to our silhouettes, but the truth is we could have been any other couple of kids on a hot summer afternoon. He had a way of walking a few steps ahead. I could see that he had to concentrate not to leave me behind. His legs were long and he knew where he was going. I didn’t know then that he was also counting his steps, like a metronome, keeping time. Didn’t understand yet that counting kept him safe.
The Birches charged employees a dollar an hour for bicycle rentals. The bikes were red and had one speed, more appropriate for beach boardwalks than for these mountain roads. But we made do and I followed behind Peter, my heart and legs pumping to keep up as we climbed hills and avoided the locals’ cars that sped along the dangerous asphalt curves. It took nearly an hour until we came to a bridge that overlooked what people here called a notch, what we might call a canyon out west. We left the bikes untethered and climbed over the guardrails, being careful not to tumble into the ravine below. Peter held out his hand to help me and I accepted. His backpack was bulging with something. I thought for a minute that he might have brought a picnic lunch for us, but when we got to the bottom where the stream was wider than it had appeared from the bridge, it was only a pair of binoculars and a blanket that he pulled from his pack.
The nest rested precariously in the higher limbs of an old maple near the water. It took me several attempts before I could even see it through the thick summer leaves.
“No,” he said, gesturing to the place I’d been looking. “There.”
Finally, I saw movement and held still until I could discern the heads of three infant robins, their heads peeking out over the top of the nest. They were small and nearly featherless. They craned their necks and opened their mouths, but no sounds came out.
“I found the mother’s body in the stream yesterday,” Peter said, sitting down on the blanket he had spread out on the grass.
I kept looking at the nest through the binoculars.
“I thought I’d try to get up there and bring them down. But the limbs are weak. They probably wouldn’t hold my weight.”
I stared through the binoculars at the limb jutting out over the cold water. I looked up at the tree and back at him. He was looking through the binoculars now, quiet. And I thought about saying, I’ll do it. Just help me up. But as I looked again at the fragile limb, I shivered inside that giant sweater.
Peter shrugged his shoulders and put the binoculars back into his pack. “It’s too dangerous.”
He didn’t mention the birds again. He still smiled each morning when I got my coffee and sat on the porch to watch him work. And sometimes in the late afternoons we would go swimming or ride a pair of rented bikes into town for pizza. We always bought the largest one and ate until our stomachs hurt and our fingers were greasy. He was careful not to touch me for too long, though, and I always blamed this on the birds. And so at night while my roommate snored softly in the bunk beneath me, I dreamed it over again. I felt the bark in my hands as I shimmied out on the limb. I dreamed my palms holding the prickly nest. I gave the three scrawny and featherless birds voices. The blue eggshells I offered him were th
e same color as my imagined sky.
By the end of July, I started to hate those birds. Each time he walked a few too many steps ahead of me or dismissed my offered hand, each time he said he’d rather stay in and read a book than drink beer on the employee beach with me at midnight, I resented their straining necks. I hated their mother for building her nest outside of my reach. Each time I waited for him to kiss me and instead he squeezed my shoulders and walked up the dimly lit wooden steps of the boys’ dorm, I was glad the birds had died.
I kept watching him carve the swans, though. No matter how hard I tried to stay in bed each morning, I couldn’t resist pulling on my jeans and wandering into the parking lot, where I always knew I could find him. And then, finally, one morning I decided to give up. The night before I had dream-tipped the birds’ nest over, spilling them like pebbles into the ravine below.
When the sun fell across my face I pulled the covers over my head and willed myself to stay inside.
I know now that I was responsible. That my simple willful absence must have been what upset him, what made his hands slip. I had inadvertently become a part of his intricate routine, and my absence that day distracted him. As he freed the swan from its cold prison, he might have been glancing toward my window. He might have lost his concentration when he turned his head to see if the sound behind him was me instead of a mosquito humming or just a strong late-summer breeze through the tops of the trees.
I remember only that the familiar buzz and hum of the chain saw had stopped. And the silence that followed was louder than Peter’s screams. Louder even than the sound of my heart and my feet pounding against the indoor-outdoor carpeting in the dormitory hallway as I ran to see what had happened.
The cuts were deep. The blade had slipped and traveled across the shin of his left leg and then sliced into the calf of his right. He had carved from his flesh a mangled sculpture of bone and muscle and blood.
