by Lauren Groff
The man came back. Instead of standing, he sank down opposite to where she was, and she felt a sharp and sudden pain on her throat. But then the pain translated to cold, and she knew that he was holding out a glass bottle to her, and she took it in her hand. On her cheek, then, there was another feel, a slick plastic, and the man said, Biscoitos, and she took the package of cookies in her other hand and ate one to be polite. Obrigado, she whispered, but he said nothing back.
The drink was beer. She clung to the heft of the bottle in her hand. Though he far outpowered her, he had at least given her a weapon. She drank sparingly to make the weight of the bottle last. Across the dark gulf of the aisle, his gulps were thick and loud, and he must have brought more beer for himself because every so often she heard a clink of an empty bottle on the concrete floor and a hiss of a new beer being opened and the chime of the cap falling to the floor. The storm roared outside steadily, and her feet on the floor began to be tickled, then lapped, by water. The storm was coming in.
* * *
—
Worse than being in the storm was not knowing what the storm was doing. The evidence of it was everywhere: in the cold water up to her rear on her little shelf, in the blast of wind, the rattle of the building, and the sounds of distant crashes, boats, most probably, smashing into the shore. She wondered about fires blazing through the rickety old structures of this part of town, and what would be left in the morning. If she survived this night, this hulk of a man across from her in the darkness, she could close her eyes on the taxi ride to the airport, she could get on a plane, she could soar over the wreckage until the plane landed, her mother in a wheelchair beaming at her from the bottom of the escalator in baggage claim. It would not be her mess to clean up. She was a visitor only; she could be absolved. But this was cold comfort, barely any at all. The end of the storm was unreal, and she was beyond tired. The hours of waiting in the dark here, the years of waiting in the darkness at home, were too much; they overcame her in waves of exhaustion. There was no telling how fast the water would rise. It didn’t matter: the man was already here. And Helena waited for his sudden lunge, his powerful body that her own thin one couldn’t resist for long.
There was a pop outside, and the man’s bulk came closer, and he said something gruff, and she cringed, but he didn’t touch her.
* * *
—
She was lulled by the darkness, the man’s immobility save for his drinking. It must be morning by now, at least. Her fear had dulled, and her thoughts were thick with sleep. She rested her head against the towels in their packages and shifted so the cramp in her rear was soothed, and shut her eyes, as if she could make the dark any darker and push the storm and the man farther from her.
The shopkeeper stood three times, there was the kiss of the refrigerator three times, he sloshed back and groaned to the floor opposite her three times. The third time, she was nearly asleep when he leaned over and put his hand on her ankle. He had been holding a beer, and his skin on hers was shockingly cold.
She had feared this for so long, it seemed, that when it was here, it was almost a relief. She felt her anger blaze alive, and she jerked her leg away, but his hand found her ankle again and clamped down to the point of pain, then beyond. She gave an involuntary cry, and he laughed, as if to say that wasn’t even close to the limit of his strength, and she bit her lip until it bled, and he loosened his hand again.
She thought of her mother, at home in Miami, where there was only dry sun outside, the crucifix in the shadows above the bed; she thought of the small tin orixá, the goddess of the sea, calm above the register in the dark. She found herself praying, not knowing if she was praying to her mother or to either of the gods, or a mixture of all three, but in truth it didn’t matter to whom the words were addressed because the act without direction was all she could do.
* * *
—
The shopkeeper removed his hand only to fetch more beer or food from the shelves. He crunched and breathed heavily and smacked his lips, and she remembered how he had tongued the gap between his teeth that day he gazed up at her on her balcony, how pink and pulsing and obscene it was. When he returned, he put his hand on her leg again, each time higher on her calf. The gate rattled with less desperation now; the wind appeared to have died down a little. When he reached her knee, he felt the raw wet mouth of the wound there, and despite herself, she pulled in a hissing breath, and this shook something from him.
He ran his finger over the edges of the wound. Every once in a while, the finger would dart forward and touch inside the cut, and she would gasp, and he would laugh. He began to talk. He was beyond drunk, this was clear, and his tongue was thick and his words were strange, and she was sure she would never have understood his Portuguese even if she spoke the language.
She felt sick with anticipated pain. She clutched herself, waiting, and found her brain transliterating surreally, the long strands of language broken into short strands, swept into a semblance of rhythm. She took comfort in the images that rose in the darkness before her. Bull’s blood zucchini flowerstar, she imagined he said. Cinema collation of strange mad zebras.
She listened. His words thickened. His hand fell back away from her knee, down her calf. Outside, she heard the wind through leaves—there were still trees, then, and the trees still had leaves—and the occasional plink of rain against metal. It could be the eye of the storm, she told herself; and if it was, she would have to bear the intensification of wind again, this man’s heavy presence, and she knew what would happen if she had to wait with him once more through the terrible roar outside. She would not be able to be still enough for him to forget her. But at last, the shopkeeper fell silent and a whistling started up in his nose and she understood that he was asleep.
* * *
—
In tiny increments, she extracted her body from under his hand. She stood from the puddle on the concrete where she was sitting and moved, stiff and cold, toward where she remembered the door to be. She had to put down the beer bottle that she had clutched all night to move a shelf out of the way and lift the lock. In a burst of strength, she ripped the gate up and away from the ground.
The day dazzled with sun. Steam rose from the street, a clean sheet of liquid light covering the cobblestones, a wet skin glittering on the buildings. Gold drops fell from the treelimbs, and a cool gentle wind swept the hair from her face. Her leg was caked with blood, the wound livid, her body racked in the joints. She didn’t care.
Behind her, the shopkeeper shifted to his feet, bottles ringing on the wet floor as he struggled. She turned, ready to shout, but he was gazing beyond her into the outside. The reflection from the street pushed into the dark of the store, made his round and greasy face shine with moving sunlight. He held on to the shelf before him, and she saw his fear, different and subtler than hers, rise from him and move deeper into the shadows of the room. The shopkeeper tilted his head and closed his eyes, and soon he said, Campainhas, and this was a thing she understood, because she also heard the churchbells ringing into the morning. She said, Yes. He looked at her as if surprised to find her there; he had forgotten her; she was merely the postscript to his tempestuous night. She was a mere visitor. She was nothing. Helena reached over to the tin orixá above the cash register and found it to be sharper and lighter than she had imagined it, a thought turned to matter, an idea that fit in the palm of her hand.
* * *
—
For a long while, she stood in the doorway, listening to the bells, happy for them; but they went on and on, and she began to listen for them to stop. Each peal, she was sure, would be the last. The bright sound would dissolve back into the sea-touched wind, and the ordinary noises of Salvador would rise to take the bells’ place, the calling voices, a scooter, a dog barking, a drum; and Helena would be freed to move forward, outward, up. But each note disintegrated and was followed by another and then another, and she felt stuck wher
e she stood, a wild feeling rising in her. Her body grew unbearably tense; her heart began to beat so fast it felt as if it were winged.
And then she saw, plain as the street before her, her mother in her bedroom at home, pale among her pillows. Helena could not tell if she was alive or dead. She was so peaceful, so very still. The Miami sun fingered the edges of the blinds. The birds filled the loquat tree just outside the window, the tree her mother had planted herself before Helena was born, the fruit already rotten, the birds already drunk on the fruit, wildly singing.
Helena’s hands flew out to stop the vision, and the nail of her index finger began to throb where she had hit the wooden doorway at her side. The wet street was again spread before her, the air still full of horrid bells. She sent one last rattled look inside the store and found the shopkeeper kneeling amongst his ruin. He held a can washed free of its label, a roll of undamaged toilet tissue in pink paper. His face was strange, as if it had collapsed into itself. He was making a low whistling sound through the gap in his teeth.
She took a step toward him without thinking, then stopped. She hated herself for her first impulse, to comfort. The caretaker of others wasn’t who she wanted to be—it was not her natural role—but it somehow had become who she was.
She watched herself as if from above as she moved back into the store, picking over the rubble. The shopkeeper stood as she neared. He smelled of wet denim and sweated-out alcohol and sour private skin. Up close, he looked at her face briefly, with a doggish expression, something both hungry and ashamed. Maybe he had a family, a wife who had worried when he hadn’t returned in the night. Certainly, he, too, was the child of a mother who was either very old or dead.
He looked up at her, then he closed his eyes, as if she, this morning, was too much for him.
She reached out to touch him, but in the end, she couldn’t. She took a step back and picked things up off the ground. A pen. A dustpan. A bath toy. She piled the items gently in his arms. And when he didn’t move, she stooped to collect more: pens, cookies, a hand of bananas. One perfect orange, its pores even and clean.
FLOWER HUNTERS
It is Halloween; she’d almost forgotten.
At the corner, a man is putting sand and tea-light candles into white paper bags.
He will return later with a lighter, filling the dark neighborhood with a glowing grid for the trick-or-treaters.
She wonders if this is wise, whether it is not, in fact, incredibly dangerous to put flames near so many small uncoordinated people with polyester hems.
All day today and yesterday she has been reading the early naturalist William Bartram, who traveled through Florida in 1774; because of him, she forgot Halloween.
She’s most definitely in love with that dead Quaker.
This is not to say that she is no longer in love with her husband; she is, but after sixteen years together, perhaps they have blurred at the edges of each other’s vision.
She says to her dog, who is beside her at the window watching the candle man, One day you’ll wake up and realize your favorite person has turned into a person-shaped cloud.
The dog ignores her, because the dog is wise.
In any event, her husband will inevitably win, since Bartram takes the form of dead trees and dreams, and her husband takes the form of warm pragmatic flesh.
She picks up her cell—she wants to tell her best friend, Meg, about her sudden overwhelming love for the ghost of a Quaker naturalist—but then she remembers that Meg doesn’t want to be her best friend anymore.
A week ago, Meg said very gently, I’m sorry, I just need to take a break.
Outside, in Florida, there’s still the hot yellow wool of daylight.
In the kitchen, her sons are eating their dinner of bean tacos glumly.
They had wanted to be ninjas, but she had to concoct something quickly, and now their costumes are hanging up in the laundry room.
Earlier, she put her own long-sleeved white button-down backward on the younger boy, crossed the arms around and tied them in the back, added a contractor’s mask she’d slitted and colored with a silver Sharpie, and because he was armless, she pinned a candy bucket to the waist.
Cannibal Lecture, he is calling himself, a little too on the nose.
For the older boy, she cut eyeholes in a white sheet for an old-style ghost, though it rankled, a white boy in a white sheet, Florida still the Deep South; she hopes that the effect is mitigated by the rosebuds along the hems.
She also forgot the kindergarten’s Spooky Breakfast this morning; she’d failed to bring the boo-berry muffins, and her smaller son had sat in his regular clothes in his tiny red chair, looking hopefully at the door as mothers and fathers in their masks and wigs who kept not being her poured in.
She wasn’t even thinking of him at that hour; she was thinking of William Bartram.
Her husband comes in from work, sees the costumes, raises an eyebrow, remains merciful.
The boys brighten as if on a dimmer switch, her husband turns on “Thriller” to get in the mood, and she watches them bop around, a twist in the heart.
It’s not yet dusk, but the shadows have stretched.
Her husband puts on an old green Mohawk wig, the boys shimmy their costumes on again, and the three of them head out.
* * *
—
She is alone in the house with the dog and William Bartram and the bags of wan lollipops that were all that remained on the drugstore’s shelves.
It’s necessary to hand out candy; her first year in the house, she righteously gave out toothbrushes, and it wasn’t an accident that a heavy oak branch smashed her window that night.
She can almost see three blocks away into the kitchen of Meg’s house, where beautiful handmade costumes are being put on.
Meg loves this shit.
A week ago, when Meg broke up with her, they were eating ginger scones that Meg had made from scratch, and the bite in her mouth went so dry that she couldn’t swallow for a long, long time.
She just nodded as Meg spoke kindly and firmly, and she felt each rip as her heart was torn into smaller and smaller pieces in Meg’s capable hands.
Meg has enormous gray eyes and strong hips and shoulders, and hair like a glass of dark honey with sunshine in it.
Meg is the best person she knows, far better than herself or her husband, maybe even better than William Bartram.
Meg is the medical director of the abortion clinic in town, and all day she has to hold her patients’ stories and their bodies, as well as the tragic lack of imagination from the chanting protesters on the sidewalk.
It would be too much for anyone, but it is not too much for Meg.
On the mantel in Meg’s house, there are pictures of Meg with her children as babies, secured on her back, all three peering at the camera like koalas.
She, too, has often felt the urge to ride nestled cozily on Meg’s back.
She would feel safe there, her cheek against her strongest friend.
But for the past week she has respected Meg’s wish to take a break, and so she has not called Meg or stopped by her house for coffee or sent her children down the street to play with Meg’s children until someone runs home screaming with a bruise or low blood sugar.
What is it about me that people need breaks from? she asks the dog, who looks as though she wants to say something but, out of innate gentleness, refrains.
A generous kind of dog, the labradoodle.
Well, William Bartram won’t need a break from her.
The dead need nothing from us; the living take and take.
She brings William Bartram in his book costume out to the front porch, where it is cooler, and fetches the candy in a bowl and the dog and the wineglass so big it can hold a full bottle of ten-dollar Shiraz.
She settles herself under the bat lights she plugged in bec
ause she forgot to make jack-o’-lanterns and watches real bats swinging between the rooftops.
William Bartram seduced her with his drawings of horny turtles and dog-faced alligators, with his flights of ecstatic gratitude that lifted him toward God.
A week ago, after the ginger scones and suffocating with sadness, she took the afternoon off from work and drove to Micanopy to look at antiques, because she feels solace when she touches things that have survived generations of human hands.
She stood in the center of Micanopy hating her unsweet tea because it was encased in plastic foam that would disintegrate and float on the surface of the waters forever; but then she found the plaque about William Bartram, who had passed through Micanopy in 1774, when it was a Seminole trading post called Cuscowilla.
The chief there at the time was called the Cowkeeper.
When the Cowkeeper heard what Bartram was doing, traipsing about Florida collecting floral specimens and faunal observations, he nicknamed him Puc-Puggy.
This translates, roughly, to Flower Hunter, which—as bestowed upon Bartram by a warrior and hunter and proud owner of slaves he’d stripped from the many tribes he’d brutally subjugated—was probably no great compliment.
Still, what would bright-eyed Puc-Puggy have seen of Florida before the automobile, before the airplane, before the planned communities, before the swarms of Mouseketeers?
A damp, dense tangle.
An Eden of dangerous things.
A trio of witches comes up the walk, and not one says thank you when she drops her bad candy into their bags.
An infant dressed as a superhero, something like sweet potato crusted on his cheeks, looks on as his mother holds the pillowcase open for the treat and then clicks her tongue in disappointment.
But her street is a dark one and full of rentals, and the savvy trick-or-treaters mostly stay away.
