Rainey Royal

by Dylan Landis

  “No,” says Laurette. “We cannot. How is your mother?”

  Rainey is suddenly aware of the air in her sinuses. She wonders if her face looks stuck. She has no idea how her mother is. Linda Royal lives on an ashram in Boulder, or maybe it is some kind of cult. Rainey is twenty-two, and for nine years the ashram has been Linda’s family.

  “She’s great,” she says. “We still talk twice a week. Listen.” She slips into her best little-girl voice and tucks her head into her shoulder. “I have to ask you about her, but I can’t do it in the lobby.”

  “Try,” says Laurette in an encouraging way. “I can’t have guests.”

  “Why? Why can’t you?”

  Laurette laughs. “Oh, Niece.”

  Rainey feels herself deflected in that same way as when her father calls her Daughter. “I don’t get it. Why must we always meet at Tom’s?”

  “Because it’s right on the corner. And my place is a mess.”

  You’re an artist, Rainey wants to say, you’re allowed to live in a mess. And it is true that Laurette is a painter, though she talks about it like a past life, and Rainey has never seen her work.

  In high school, in the third-floor girls’ room, Rainey made Mary Gage eat half a cigarette. She made Anita Levy cut off her own braid, and she made Leah stick her tongue out for a square of paper that Leah believed was acid. The important things were out of her control, but sometimes she could make people do stuff by using a voice that sounded like melting sugar, and she summons now her best bullying voice for Laurette.

  “Well, guess what.” She walks to the stairs and puts a foot on the second step, so that her leg is between Laurette’s knees. She looks down at her aunt and smiles. “You’re having company now. I don’t care if it’s a mess.”

  To her surprise, Laurette meets her gaze without blinking. After a moment Laurette pulls herself up by the banister and stands, so that Rainey has to look up at her. “Don’t you dare try to intimidate me,” says Laurette.

  Behind Rainey, a door clicks open and squeals. Laurette looks toward the sound.

  “Shit.” She lunges up the stairs two at a time.

  Rainey, following her, glances back. In the lobby a man with a wide broom stands in an apartment doorway. “You talk to her,” he calls. “She hasn’t brought a damn thing to the basement yet.”

  She turns and runs after her aunt, hears the thunk, thunk, thunk of deadbolts turning and corners Laurette at a third-floor apartment door. The door swings open and thuds on some obstruction. Laurette squeezes quickly into a long hall with ornate crown moldings. She blocks the doorway and peers at Rainey.

  “That was the super,” she whispers. “Now go.”

  Impossible. Traces of her mother must lie in this place. Rainey jams her foot between the casement and the door. She watches Laurette tip her head toward the stairs, listening. “He could come up,” says Rainey casually. “You might need me.”

  Laurette looks down at Rainey’s sneaker. “All right, all right,” she hisses. “Get in.”

  Inside, as Laurette leans past her to lock the deadbolts, Rainey examines with a thrill what blocked the door. Along the length of the hallway is a fortress wall of stacked magazines, newspapers, and cardboard boxes, two piles deep and high as her waist. It allows only a narrow trail for walking.

  “Don’t look,” says Laurette. “It’s terrible. I don’t want anybody looking.”

  Two gray cats patrol the top of the magazine wall. Rainey strokes one as she follows her aunt. She smells mildewed paper. She brushes against newspaper edges that look like shredded lace and imagines the air filled with infinitesimal paper particles, yellowed and flammable. If she lit a cigarette, the place might ignite. Halfway down they pass the kitchen, where the refrigerator is consumed almost to the freezer by shopping bags and leaning, unframed canvases.

  She’s the artist in the family, Linda used to say, as if there were room for only one. But Linda could copy a dress in a magazine, just by eye.

  “My coffeemaker’s broken,” says Laurette, her voice catching.

  It isn’t broken, it’s buried, thinks Rainey. A pigeon flutters past the kitchen window, which overlooks an air shaft. Rainey, trapped by trash, feels herself grounded, caged.

  Laurette hugs herself as she walks. “We’ll talk in the living room. Then I’ll take you to lunch.”

  Rainey remembers that voice, her mother’s voice, singing her to sleep. “That’s cool,” she says.

  The living room is packed with layers of detritus almost to her thigh, like the strata of unearthed civilizations. Trailing from the mouths of shopping bags and strewn on boxes are objects so varied they make Rainey feel faint: sweaters, books, an antler, a guitar with no strings, two wooden-backed oval hairbrushes, a red ring box. A marble mantel juts up above it all. Set nearby are two shapely pink armchairs and a sofa in yellow damask. The trail ends at a closed door that must lead to the bedroom.

  “Move the magazines,” says Laurette. She follows a trail to one chair, and gestures to the other.

  Rainey’s movements feel heavy, as if her legs must pull through river sludge. She wants to race down to the street and breathe. She relocates a stack of slick, heavy National Geographics from the seat cushion; they leave an oblong depression, where she sits. Sunlight, struggling through dirty windows, raises a nap of dust on the cardboard boxes.

  I have every right to be here, she thinks. Old photos, paper dolls, report cards, anything Laurette may have salvaged from their girlhoods—such things would, in all fairness, be Rainey’s, right? She imagines cutting these things up to make the largest and most beautiful paper tapestry of her life. She would call it, simply, Linda.

  It would never be for sale.

  Laurette leans toward Rainey. “I’m in a legal battle,” she says. “It takes all my attention. You can’t stay long.”

  It’s true, Rainey can’t stay all day. She’s meeting Tina and Eric, and Tina is cooking. She’s kept Señora Colón’s apartment, but Rainey’s moving her into the townhouse, rent-free: ally, sister, friend. Leah is busy tonight, or maybe not; Tina agitates her. Rainey plans to ask Eric for a sparrow at the top of her right breast. She is not sure Eric will agree to a sparrow, though. She is not sure Tina will agree to a breast. She is sure her father finds Eric ludicrous: “Tattoo artist? Is that a little inflated, babe?”

  Yet Rainey likes sitting in the home of an actual aunt—a woman who once shared a bedroom with her mother. She likes being near these quirky objects—a beaded sweater, a blue vase shaped like a hand—that her mother may have touched. She might keep visiting Laurette just to sit in her pink chair like a niece and sip coffee from the excavated coffeemaker, and they will sift through ring boxes and old letters like a family.

  “They want to evict me,” says Laurette, patting a sprawling pile of mail in the shape of a coffee table. “They’re bloodsuckers. I’m no fire hazard. I don’t even cook. I’m rent controlled—they want the apartment.”

  Rainey looks over the kindling that is Laurette’s living room. “Can they do it?”

  “Landlord’s coming in a week to see if I got rid of my things. I’d like to see him throw out his things.”

  “I hear you,” says Rainey automatically. She will do nothing but agree with her aunt.

  “No, you don’t.” Laurette’s eyes are rimmed with pink. Maybe it’s the dust, Rainey thinks; her own eyes are beginning to itch. “I have every issue of Andy Warhol’s Interview ever printed. I have Art in America going back to 1948, when my son was born. I have a painting in one of those magazines. I need to find it.”

  “You still paint?” It seems impossible: no space. On the walls are portraits of a boy and a young man done in pear-colored light. “That’s Francis, right?” She remembers a young cousin who came over on long-ago holidays, who built houses out of chairs and sheets.

  “I painted when I had a larger apartment. When I had a husband who brought his friends home for drinks, and a little boy who didn’t think I was crazy.
” Laurette’s eyes glitter. “Don’t look, okay? Ask me about Linda. Then we’ll go to Tom’s. I don’t go anywhere but Tom’s. I’ll buy you a tuna-fish sandwich.”

  “Or a grilled cheese.”

  “No,” says Laurette.

  Rainey nods. She will eat what Laurette tells her to eat.

  “That ring,” says Laurette, leaning forward to study Rainey’s hand. “That was our mother’s.”

  Rainey gets prickles on her arms. Is there going to be a fight about the ring? “Linda gave it to me,” she says, and closes her other hand over the diamond bedded in rubies. I can’t take worldly goods where I’m going, Linda Royal had said, and it had sounded then like her mother was going to die. Rainey’s seen her mother twice in a decade. What is there to say about a ring, anyway?

  “I wanted that ring,” says Laurette. “But I got the silver,” and Rainey thinks: Must find silver.

  “Laurette,” she says, “We had a flood. I lost everything of Linda’s. Everything I’d saved. I thought you could give me something that belonged to her. Maybe some photos, too.”

  Laurette tilts her head and eyes Rainey warily as a crow. “You want some of my things?”

  “Not yours.” Rainey looks around the jumble of cartons and bags and says carefully, “Just a few of Linda’s things. If you have them.”

  “You didn’t come to talk,” says Laurette. “You’re one of the Dumpster people. You want to paw through everything and throw stuff out. You know what’s in these boxes? The cross my mother wore. Birth certificates. Old photographs. Letters. The silver. My mother’s wedding china. I’m not opening one box, I’m not giving things away, and nothing goes in the trash.”

  At the thought of finding pieces of Linda in Laurette’s junk, Rainey feels socked into her chair. Her left leg is wedged against a shopping bag that bulges with cooking pots and naked dolls. She wonders if Eric will have to rest his hand on her breast while he works.

  “I think you should go.”

  “Listen,” says Rainey. “I am not one of the Dumpster people. I am—I am a genius. I have a thought. We go through the cartons and save whatever’s valuable. Then we store that someplace else. So if you get evicted, you’ll always have it.”

  Laurette’s eyes widen. Then she shakes her head. “I’m fighting this,” she says. “Nothing leaves.”

  “They send a sheriff,” says Rainey, though she is not sure sheriffs exist in New York City. “It’s really bad. They carry your stuff down to the sidewalk.” Laurette releases the chair and grips her head. “They drop it at the curb,” says Rainey. “You can’t guard everything. People pick it up and walk away with it.”

  “This is untenable,” says Laurette.

  “Then the garbage trucks come,” says Rainey, thinking, And I ought to know. She listens without mercy to Laurette’s jagged breaths. Her own secret stash had been neat, organized, hidden. Things Left Behind by Linda Royal.

  “If you don’t go through the boxes,” says Rainey, drumming on one with her fingertips, “those trucks could be carting away the wedding china.”

  Laurette makes a sudden noise that is part grinding and part shriek. Rainey waits her out. Finally Laurette says, “I’ve got no place to store anything.”

  “You do,” says Rainey. “Our townhouse basement.” Either the water will dry up, she thinks, or she’ll take her Lindathings and that will be the end of it, whichever comes first.

  “I don’t like it,” says Laurette.

  “Yes, you do.” Rainey combs her fingers through her own long hair as if she were younger, innocent, no possible harm to anyone. “You come over and check on your stuff. Make sure it’s safe. And it will be. Safe.”

  Laurette bites her lip ferociously. “Oh, God,” she says. “Oh, God.” Her shoulders shake. She propels herself out of the pink chair and paces the narrow aisle. “Why?” she says. “Why would you help me?”

  Rainey gathers herself for this moment. She sits up straight and gazes at Laurette. She tries to make her pupils dilate. “I haven’t seen Linda in years,” she says, bringing her voice down to a stage whisper and thinking, Trust me. “You’re the closest thing I have to a mother.”

  Laurette nods as if she expected this. “Francis never visits,” she says. “He calls every Sunday. He loves me, but visiting gives him a panic attack.” She puts her hand over her breast as if her heart might leap out. Francis is an architect in Berkeley now, and Rainey imagines him in a white apartment with white furniture and nothing on the tabletops. I am your only niece, Rainey wants to tell Laurette.

  Laurette seems to be thinking something over. “Swear to me,” she says finally, “as if you were my daughter, that you won’t take a thing or throw anything out.”

  Outside the window, a pigeon takes off from the concrete sill, and a cat lets loose a hunting cry.

  Rainey raises her right hand. “As if I were your daughter,” she says.

  HER MOTHER SAID, FROM mother to daughter. Taking the ring off her own finger and working it onto Rainey’s, tightly, so that Rainey had thought, Now we will always be connected.

  Her mother said, Don’t ever let your father get his hands on this. It’s worth a lot.

  Her mother said, I’m sure they have a telephone there. She picked her cigarette up off the edge of Rainey’s nightstand, inhaled.

  Her mother said, Don’t let men push you around, baby, not with that body.

  Out in the hall her mother said, Howard, I could have stayed. All you had to do was stop smiling at me from the goddamn doorway like I was too stupid to stop packing.

  BY FOUR O’CLOCK, RAINEY is late for Tina’s and Laurette is on a mission. She wants to store most of what’s in her boxes in the townhouse basement. “I’m talking about a tiny room,” Rainey says. “Ten boxes and some paintings. Not the maps, Laurette. Not the perfume bottles.”

  Her father is going to kill her. Bringing home more junk. Laurette opens one carton after another; they disgorge towels and bead necklaces, hotel stationery and old packages of gauze. Rainey’s job is to pack it all up again, tuck the flaps in. Laurette can’t think this stuff is going to be saved. Rainey’s throat hurts from the dusty, papery air, and her head hurts from yearning. She wants to stumble upon copper-plated baby shoes; she wants to unearth a tendril of snipped-off hair.

  From a box of tightly packed manila folders, Laurette pulls a black-and-white photo, a shiny eight-by-ten with one broken-off corner, and studies it long enough that Rainey looks up.

  It’s a picture of the sisters. The girls stand with dripping cones at the beach; they are perhaps nine or ten. Linda beams at the camera, but Laurette looks anxiously to her left as if a stranger were near.

  “My mother.” Rainey holds one side of the photo and runs a finger over Linda’s windblown hair. “You found my mother.”

  Laurette tugs at the photo. Rainey hangs on. “Tell me more about her,” she says.

  “We never got along.” Laurette stands with her hand out, waiting. “Linda was prettier. She was always laughing, even when nothing was funny. I would be off somewhere drawing. She got all the boys. There really isn’t much to say.”

  Rainey nods. It sounds like her mother as an adult, too. “She never painted?”

  “Just sewed.” Laurette reaches for the photograph, which Rainey holds out of reach. “She made her own prom dress.” Laurette hesitates, and in the sentence she doesn’t speak Rainey hears, I didn’t go to the prom.

  “She taught me,” says Rainey. “I can sew on the bias.” She smiles at her aunt. “I got the art from you, I guess.” The photo is as much a part of her as fingernails and bone. “I can keep this, can’t I, Aunt Laurette?”

  “Keep it?” Laurette plucks the picture from Rainey’s hand and holds it at arm’s length. “Is that why we’re opening boxes? So you can take my things?”

  “No.” Rainey feels the fine print of her face being read.

  “You were going to take things from the boxes when you stored them.”

  Rainey sha
kes her head. But how could she not take things from the boxes? She feels mute, her throat coated in dust.

  “I always knew there’d be a thief. I just didn’t think it would be my sister’s child. Practically a daughter,” says Laurette. “Get out.”

  Instead, Rainey comes closer. She touches Laurette’s face. Laurette takes a sharp breath, as if she might slap Rainey. And Rainey is gloriously prepared to receive it. She deserves it. But Laurette does not slap. Her eyes fill, and she says, “Go.”

  Rainey stifles a tiny laugh in her nose. Of course Laurette won’t give her the photo. Rainey picks up the carton that holds the files, the one that yielded the picture.

  “Put that box down,” says Laurette in Rainey’s mother’s voice.

  “I’m digging you out, Laurette. You and the cats.”

  Laurette plunges both hands deep in her crinkly hair. “I don’t trust you,” she says. “You have to leave.”

  “But I’m like a daughter, remember?” She holds the carton out to Laurette. “Keep looking,” she says. “You know there’s more.”

  Laurette holds herself stiffly. Rainey sets the box on the floor at her feet. “I’m not afraid of you,” says Laurette.

  “Look inside,” says Rainey. “You’re going to see things you haven’t seen in years.”

  Slowly, still rigid, Laurette gazes down at the box. She stoops and walks her fingers across the tops of the files, extracts, this time, a handwritten letter. “Howard won’t like it,” she singsongs. “This storage business.”

  Rainey looks at the tender curve of Laurette’s back. She reaches down and gets into a gentle tugging battle over the letter. “Howard told me to come here. He said you would have what I need,” she says. “He wants me to be happy.”

  She puts a tentative hand between the wings of Laurette’s shoulder blades. She imagines her aunt’s heart beating fast as a bird’s in the cage of her ribs.

  “That’s it,” she says, holding the letter and photograph to her chest as Laurette dips into another file. “You can’t throw out a daughter. You know that, right? No one can throw out a daughter.”