Rainey Royal

by Dylan Landis

  HER MOTHER SAID, LET me show you the backstitch, strongest one there is. It goes one stitch forward, half stitch back. Funny, huh? Live your life that well, baby, I’d say you’re doing great.

  THANK YOU FOR TRYING

  Two nights before they see the suicide girl high over the grand staircase at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rainey comes to Leah’s for dinner.

  Leah compulsively checks the fridge and straightens the rows of flan cups. She straightens the edges of her books. She straightens the plates on the table, perfects a space in the closet for Rainey’s coat, and drops into the love seat. Rainey is seventeen minutes late. Eighteen. Nineteen. And then she is there, prowling.

  “You still live like this?” Rainey says, surveying. “You still have no stuff?”

  “Like what?” Leah turns off the oven, where lasagna heats. She hates this oven. It’s harvest gold. Certain things are meant to be white, specifically these: sheets, appliances, moldings, towels, toilet paper, stationery, plates—though a gold rim is acceptable on the last two. This from her mother, the decorator.

  “I don’t know, coffee cups?” Rainey is snooping. “Bills? Catalogs? Ceramic poodles?” It’s almost charming, as if she urgently needs to know one riveting detail about Leah, and plans to shake it out of her white-box studio apartment. She grabs Leah’s sweater. “Magazines?” She shakes the sleeve, and it’s nice, this easy grabbing thing. Leah is suddenly grateful not to have stolen anything from Charles River Labs except a few Erlenmeyer flasks.

  “Magazines are in the bookshelves.” But Rainey would remember: her Scientific Americans are in chronological order.

  “I give up.” Rainey drops her purse on the love seat and walks to the bathroom. Leah listens to the sounds of Rainey’s absence. Flush. Running water. Pause for toweling. More silence. Lip gloss? The bathroom door opens.

  “Jesus, Levinson. You fold it? It’s dirty and you fold it?”

  “I like things neat,” says Leah. Is this affection? It feels like something she can bask in.

  “In the hamper?”

  Rainey eats two portions of lasagna and two of flan. “I was starving,” she says, finishing her flan, and Leah is pretty sure she means it.

  “Let’s make it a ritual,” she says. “Let’s go have steak next week. My treat.”

  Rainey wears less makeup than she did in school: a little sheen on her eyelids and lips. Vaseline, Leah remembers. A strand of Rainey’s hair is caught in the shine on one eyelid, and Leah longs to extract it.

  “No, only if I treat.” Rainey’s posture is perfect. It was that way in eighth grade. “Can Tina come?”

  Leah feels the whole operation sinking. “You can’t treat. You said you’re broke.” Unable to stand it any longer, she reaches across the table and lifts the strand of hair off Rainey’s face. It’s very long. It might be a yard long. She almost regrets having to release it.

  Rainey tosses her head like a horse dismissing a fly. She says, “I can manage. I’ve been managing.” She does not have a credit card. She still sells the occasional quilt. She does not have health insurance or an IRA. Leah learns these things because she asks. She asks because she feels compelled.

  “You know, I could loan you money,” says Leah. “Till you sell some work.”

  Rainey looks at her directly. “Stop trying to rescue me.”

  “I’m not.” Heat flows into Leah’s face. Rescuing Rainey is exactly what she wants to do. She thinks they are close enough that rescue is okay. Is she offering too much, or is her face naked?

  “Why don’t you commission a tapestry?” says Rainey. “That way I’d sell a piece of art, and you’d have something on the walls. It’s not normal not to have anything on your walls.”

  Leah begins to speak and stops. She doesn’t want to commission a piece of art. That would be even-steven, if she is going to be honest with herself. Also, she does not want anything on her walls.

  She thinks of her mother, the decorator, who used to sometimes grow thin as a bone. “I feel like a vessel of light,” her mother once said, back when she wasn’t eating. Leah wants that feeling right now, to be a vessel of light, to draw Rainey in like a moth.

  “I can’t afford it,” she says, “but you ought to give me some slides of your work. My mom might have a client who would order a quilt.”

  “Tapestry,” says Rainey. She pauses. “You really think?”

  THE NEXT MORNING THEY meet for breakfast at Eat Here Now, and Rainey is cheerful enough to let Leah pay. She hands Leah a little yellow cardboard box that says KODAK. “These are my only slides. You sure your mother will send them back?”

  “She’s my mother,” says Leah.

  The box opens like a little drawer. Leah pulls it out and holds the first slide up to the light. It shows a complicated—mosaic, to her mind, or something like a kaleidoscope interior. “That’s all photographs, letters, things like that,” says Rainey. “And silver thread. The woman who owned those things used to sing. She died last year. It’s a memory piece.”

  This sounds sacred to Leah. “I wish I could see it bigger.”

  Rainey bites her lip.

  “Don’t worry,” says Leah, “my mom has a slide projector,” because this sounds like a promising thing to say. She pulls out a second slide, a close-up of the first. Holding it up to the light, she makes out a watch face and a passport stamp. “These are exquisite,” she says, and she is just going for a third slide when Rainey touches her wrist.

  “They might get sticky,” Rainey says. “I brought tape for the box.”

  Obediently, Leah returns the slides to the little drawer and watches Rainey fastidiously tape both ends.

  “Even one commission, my God,” says Rainey. “She’ll really show them around?”

  “She said she would. She likes unusual things. She likes the touch of the artist’s hand.”

  “You could save my life,” says Rainey.

  After work Leah goes home and tucks the box of slides into a safe corner of her bookshelves.

  Leah has offered money. She’s offered meals. Now, just taking the slides in her hand, she feels like a rescuer.

  FIRST IMPRESSION LEAH GETS of the suicide girl is white shins and a pair of Candie’s platform sandals dangling over the limestone ledge, about twenty-five feet in the air above her.

  The second-story ledge encircles the grand staircase at the Metropolitan Museum, and the owner of the shins seems to float up there, suspended over the foot of the stairs. Petite and trembling, the suicide girl plants her hands at her sides as if she intends to propel herself down.

  It’s 6:00 P.M. A chamber orchestra plays to the lobby crowd, and Leah, on the ground floor beneath the ledge with Rainey and Tina, can’t stop staring. Around the girl, the gray fluted columns and balusters and the benchlike ledge she’s sitting on seem frigid as architecture carved from ice. She must be freezing, thinks Leah, who is bundled in a raccoon jacket, a cast-off from her mother. She grabs Rainey’s arm, ignoring Tina’s glance. Rainey gives her a sad little smile and lets Leah keep the arm. It feels good in Leah’s hand, resilient and lean.

  Rainey wanted to see the jewelry, and she’s brought Tina, who lives with her. They are twenty-five, and Leah is still nervous about Tina.

  Many people start talking at once. More hands fly to mouths. People stare up at the girl as if she were some bright bird flown in from the zoo.

  The girl looks over the people massing below her and on the second floor with a darting, startled gaze. To get to the high ledge, which rims three sides of the stairwell, she must have climbed over a granite railing upstairs; and because she has tucked herself in a corner against a massive pillar, the guards can’t sneak up from behind. It’s cold in October for her sandals, and her clothes are out of season, too; she wears a summery, finch-green dress.

  A guard upstairs begins admonishing the girl. More people drift to the base of the staircase to see. Don’t push, snaps Rainey. Her long hair flies with static electricity and seeks the coa
ts of people squeezing past. Tina stands to the side, letting the crowd part around her and looking up at the girl in green as if, Leah thinks, she were a puzzle Tina had to solve. Lilies opiate the air. Men and women in dark, gorgeous clothes spill toward the stairs from the lobby; the air is electrified in that area, and pulses of murmuring grow urgent. Leah, still gripping Rainey’s arm, glances at her; she guesses it’s not the pushing Rainey minds but the spectacle being made of the girl, who looks ready to cannonball from the second floor.

  Near Rainey and Leah, a woman with taut, shiny skin and eager eyes says to her companion, “What’s she going to do from up there? Break a fingernail?”

  Tina tips her head and says, “Is that your medical risk assessment?”

  The woman colors and looks away.

  You’ll love Tina, Rainey had said. She’s become this totally earnest person. Leah has a tiny seizure of jealousy over this, because sometimes she wants to bind Rainey to her the way Orthodox men bind phylacteries to their arms.

  Leah suspects that Tina, who is even lovelier than in high school, would have something to say about this binding business. Tina has changed. She is a fourth-year medical student. She is a tall, lean column of black with a slash of red lipstick. She looks serene in her beauty now. Her eyes have teaspoons of shadow beneath them. She’s almost Dr. Dial. Leah, who had fantasies of being Dr. Levinson, lives only a vaguely scientific life. She swabs the vaginas of sweet-tempered rats to see if, under a microscope, the cells look like cornflakes yet. If they do, that means the rats are in estrus and ready to mate. Leah makes nineteen thousand a year breeding laboratory rats and mice for Charles River in New Jersey.

  As the gathering at the foot of the grand staircase packs in and people from the lobby press to see what’s going on, the murmur ebbs, then rises. Guards gather in tight blue clusters and try to keep people back. An upstairs guard reaches toward the girl across the balusters. You have to get off there, Miss. Walk real careful. Take my hand. But the huge pillar stands between them, and the girl just stares at the floor below.

  In the lobby the chamber ensemble plays something sweet and fresh that makes Leah think of rainwater streaming between cobblestones.

  People have gathered up and down the stairs as if they were bleachers. “You can’t sit there,” another guard calls up to the girl, as if this were merely an infraction of the rules. Abruptly Tina shoulders her way toward him. He is young and, Leah is sure of it, shaking. She watches them confer. She peers over the heads of the people packed around her. Leah can see over most people in a crowd, even the women with Farrah Fawcett hair.

  She wonders if Rainey will want her arm back soon. Leah is going to need it, if the suicide girl falls. Also, she likes its proximity. A sudden memory hits her of Rainey, in eighth grade, kicking a dodgeball into her face, and Tina laughing, and she flushes with shame.

  “She must be crazy to want to die like this,” Leah whispers.

  “She doesn’t want to die,” says Rainey.

  “Honey,” Tina calls up, and her voice is a clear chime. The chatter quiets. “Sweetie. It’s never as bad as you think. What can I do? You want to tell me why you’re up there?”

  The girl smacks one foot hard against the wall, and her sandal sails off. It hits a man on the shoulder when it falls, and a flinch ripples through the crowd. “No.” She has a raspy, little-girl voice that should be selling Q-tips, Leah thinks. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Very gently, Rainey extracts her arm. Leah wonders if it was simply the arm’s time to be released, or if it was the sound of Tina’s voice.

  Several more guards appear at the foot of the stairs and begin gesturing for the crowd to move. Some people are almost directly beneath the girl, and the guards form a phalanx and usher them back toward the gift shop. Someone shouts, “Is there a doctor?” and from far back in the lobby someone else calls, “Cardiac surgeon, coming through.”

  “You don’t have to talk about it, sweetie.” Tina stands in her black turtleneck and jeans, looking and sounding to Leah exactly like what she is, a medical student who rotates through a slum gynecology clinic and has to gain the trust of teenage girls.

  “But I think you ought to know,” says Tina, “what will happen if you fall.”

  “DELL,” THE BOY SAYS, “I didn’t touch her. Please come down.”

  He’s up on the second floor, too, leaning into another pillar and gazing across the top of the staircase at Dell as if this were just one of her stunts. Everyone gets very quiet.

  The girl leans over as if the stairwell were a deep pool and she expects to roll forward off the ledge and splash. Which, thinks Leah, in a sense she might. She imagines, crazily, that the girl might spread her wings and take flight over the lobby, green belly flashing above the crowd. “You love her,” the girl says, and her voice echoes over the staircase.

  “I didn’t touch her,” the boy calls. Which is not the same, Leah thinks, as I don’t love her. “For Chrissake, Dell.”

  “What a prize,” says Rainey.

  “Get a ladder,” calls a guard, which is ridiculous; the girl is maybe twenty-five feet in the air.

  Tina cups her hands to her mouth and says loudly, “Honey?” and even the guards look at her. Even the boy looks at her, and Dell sits back up and looks at her. Tina lowers her hands and stands in the center of the floor at the bottom of the grand staircase. “If you fall, can I tell you? You won’t die, honey,” Tina says. “You’ll break a few ribs, maybe crack your skull. If you break the wrong vertebrae you could end up in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. But no way you’re gonna die.”

  “Oh my God,” Leah murmurs through her fingers, “she could fall on her face.”

  “I might die if I stand,” says the girl. She kicks off the other sandal, causing another mass flinch.

  Then she does stand, gingerly, bare toes curled around the edge of the granite.

  Two guards climb over the balusters from either side and move stealthily toward her, but she whirls to each side, causing everyone to gasp. “Don’t come any closer,” she says, and the guards hesitate.

  “Honey, come down the long way and talk about it,” says Tina. “No guy is worth this kind of damage.”

  The girl shakes her head.

  “She’s doing great,” Rainey says quietly to Leah, “but they don’t train them for this.”

  Dell shakes her head till her whole upper body begins to sway as she stands on the ledge.

  Leah hears the squall of sirens rise to a pitch outside, then cease. A man appears at Tina’s side. “I’m a cardiac surgeon,” he says. “Who needs me?” He looks around. Then he sees where everyone else is looking, looks back at Tina, and says nothing.

  “Dell!” says the boy, and stops. Don’t stop, thinks Leah.

  “That’s it?” says the girl. “Just Dell? That’s all you have to say?”

  From the second floor, silence. “Tell her you love her, asshole,” someone says loudly.

  Rainey whispers, “Someone needs to give that child a script.”

  Two policemen rush from the front door through a channel that opens in the crowd as the girl in the green dress either slips or loses her nerve for the dive and lets herself fall sideways, flailing, about six feet in front of where Tina stands. Leah hears her land both hard and soft, with a percussive thud.

  THAT NIGHT THEY SIT on the museum steps above Fifth Avenue. Rainey and Leah smoke. “I quit in anatomy,” says Tina, waving away Leah’s offer of a cigarette. “My cadaver’s lungs were the color of dog shit.”

  “Thank you for that detail,” says Rainey.

  “Just trying to save your life, Rain.” Lives, thinks Leah, turning her head to blow her smoke away from Tina. My life, too. “God, I wanted to save that girl,” says Tina.

  “You did save her,” says Rainey. “She didn’t dive.”

  “She’s got broken ribs, a broken ankle, and God knows what internal damage. I wanted to walk her out of there. Away from that pendejo.”
r />   Leah is afraid to break the moment by asking her exactly what it means. Rainey must know because she doesn’t ask.

  “She was begging him to come in the ambulance,” says Tina. “He didn’t want to go, can you imagine?” After a silence, she lowers her face into her hands and says, “I should have gone up on that ledge. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “If you’d walked up the stairs to the ledge,” says Rainey, “she’d have jumped sooner. You’re probably the reason she didn’t do a swan dive.”

  Tina nods into her hands and sniffs. Then she sits up. “The girls at the clinic, they all think their life revolves around some guy. You want to shake them. Just give me one who believes in her own self.”

  Rainey says, “You don’t believe your life revolves around some guy? Come on.”

  “You think I’m going thirty thousand bucks into debt so I can be some lovesick chick diving over a staircase?” says Tina. “I don’t have time for guys. I need sleep. I need six hours of sleep for once in my life.”

  “I have guys up to my ears,” says Rainey. “They don’t leave. Remember Jay, with the guitar? Remember the parrot guy? But no one my life should revolve around. Maybe Flynn.” She leans forward, chin on her elbows, and looks across Tina at Leah. “What about you, Lee-lee?”

  Teen, Rain, and Lee-lee. Leah is ecstatic. It’s the first real affection-thing she’s heard from Rainey in a while, and she wonders what would be the most casual way to step through this opening door. Certainly she has nothing to report about any guys.

  “My life revolves around rats.” She laughs. No one else does. “I mean—”

  “Wait, I almost forgot,” says Tina. Leah stops talking. Tina reaches into her bag and pulls out a white envelope. She hands the envelope to Rainey, who puts it in her own bag.

  Money, Leah thinks.

  And if that’s true, why is Tina allowed to help when she is not? Plus there’s something about how Tina does it that takes her breath away. No thanks are needed, and none given. It’s so effortless it’s almost reckless, like steering with no hands. It makes her jealous all over again.