Delta Girls

by Gayle Brandeis

  I waved as they walked away. So lovely to see Quinn comfortable with Ben. So lovely to be able to look at Ben from behind. So lovely to have the ice all to myself as they walked toward the farmhouse.

  The ice was not great. It was slushy in places. But it was ice and I was on it, and I wanted to see what I could do in my clunky boots. I tried a simple scratch spin, not too fast, my free leg crossing, sliding down the front of the other, my hands pulled together in front of my heart. It felt good and not good all at once; my body was happy to be spinning again, but I found myself distressingly dizzy. I put my hands on my knees until I caught my bearings again. I thought of all the pears that had been in that cold-storage building over the years, “sleeping” as Mr. Vieira called them, holding still inside their green skins before they were allowed to come out and ripen. Maybe the spins were sleeping inside my muscles all these years, shoved into cold storage, waiting to be unpacked. Maybe the jumps were there, too. I stood and inhaled deeply.

  There wasn’t much stroking room, wasn’t much decent ice, but I took a few sliding steps and tried the easiest jump—a waltz jump, just half a rotation. The landing wasn’t the same as on skates—I landed planted rather than sliding backwards, but it felt wonderful to be up in the air. I tried a single jump—a loop: back outside edge, full rotation in the air, back outside edge again, not that my boots had edges. But that felt good, as well. Then an axel, one and a half rotations, taking off forward, landing backwards, a waltz jump and a loop combined in the air. A little wobbly on landing, but the form felt right as I corkscrewed through the room, the wooden slats of the walls spinning with me. A double was the next obvious move—a double lutz, like a double loop, but starting with a toe pick. I slipped a bit on takeoff and the landing was a little squirrelly, but not bad. I was contemplating whether I should attempt a double axel, when I saw someone out of the corner of my eye. Ben, standing in the doorway.

  “You sure know what you’re doing,” he said.

  “I used to,” I said, heart pounding.

  “Left my hat.” He bent to pick it up; the bill was partly melded to the ice and took some tugging.

  His eyes suddenly seemed closed off. Quinn appeared behind him, eating a green pear she had swiped from one of the remaining boxes.

  “You shouldn’t eat too many of those,” I said, “you’ll get a stomachache.”

  I held my breath and waited for Ben to say something to Quinn like “Did you know your mom could do tricks like that?” or “Do you know who your mom is?” but he just said, “I’ve eaten hundreds of green pears. I’m still alive.”

  WHEN NATHAN WENT INTO THE BATHROOM, KAREN RAN downstairs to the lobby. It was full of skaters, coaches, all looking stricken, looking for answers. Reporters were busy corralling the most famous skaters they could find; Karen walked sideways, head down, trying to avoid the cameras. She needed to get outside, get some fresh air.

  Isabelle was standing by the doorway. She and her cousin had made it to Nationals for the first time; Karen was happy for her, but kind of sad, too—Isabelle seemed more serious this year. Her emails had focused on her diet and training regimen lately, her body mass index, her costume design. Karen hoped Isabelle would still take time to visit the Liberty Bell and whatever other fun touristy things she could find in Philadelphia. Things Karen knew she herself would never see, unless she was driving or jogging past them.

  “Karen!” Isabelle yelled. Karen had been excited to see Isabelle, but not like this.

  “I need to get out of here.” Karen felt sick. Isabelle ushered her outside, and Karen threw up on the sidewalk.

  “Your trademark move!” Isabelle laughed nervously before she said, “Isn’t it awful what’s happened? Poor Lance—poor Cindy!”

  “I need to get out of here,” Karen said again.

  “You need to see a doctor?” Isabelle asked.

  Karen nodded, looking back to make sure Nathan hadn’t followed her.

  “Do you need a ride?” Isabelle asked.

  “You have a car?” Karen perked up.

  “My mom’s …”

  “Can I borrow it?” asked Karen.

  “Are you sure you’re up to driving?” Isabelle asked. “God, I hope you don’t have the same thing as Lance.” She took a step back from Karen.

  “I’ll be fine,” Karen said, but thought, No I won’t. Nothing will ever be fine again. Ever.

  “It’s the blue Pontiac with the polar bears in the back window.” Isabelle tossed over a set of keys with an Epcot Center key chain. Karen ran off to the parking lot without saying thanks, without saying good-bye, without thinking anything but Get out, get out, get out.

  WHEN ABCDE ASKED IF I WANTED TO GO OUT TO DINNER with her in Isleton, I jumped at the chance. It would be a relief to get away from the orchard for a while, to get away from Ben’s unspoken questions, to get in the car and drive. Maybe we should have followed Jorge and the other guys up to Oregon. Maybe it still wasn’t too late to join them.

  Abcde had heard about a restaurant and hotel called Rogelio’s that featured American, Chinese, Italian, and Mexican food all on one menu. It looked like a Wild West saloon on the outside—I was worried it might not be a good place for kids when we pulled up to it—but the inside was full of cozy tables and fake flowers and big families sitting down to plates of chile relleno and fettuccine Alfredo and sweet and sour pork. We couldn’t even tell people were playing blackjack and poker on the other side of the back wall.

  Quinn slid into the aqua-colored booth next to Abcde. They were wearing the necklaces they had made—Abcde’s had her name spelled out in alphabet beads; Quinn’s spelled INNQU, her name in alphabetical order. She told me she was going to use it as her pen name when she herself became a famous abecedarian poet.

  Our server, an older Asian woman, set down bowls of chips and salsa and handed us large menus.

  “At least they don’t serve whale,” said Abcde, thumbing through the pages. “They serve just about everything else here.” She ordered the spinach and mushroom enchiladas—so did Quinn, who wanted to become a vegetarian, just like her new idol. I was going to order the veal scaloppine, but Abcde and Quinn gave me such withering looks, I changed my order to pasta primavera al pesto.

  “Nice alliteration,” said Abcde. “We approve.” Quinn nodded. Since when had they become “we”? I felt continents away even though I was just across the table. I wanted to say something, but then I thought about how Abcde’s boys truly were continents away, out of her reach even when they were close by, and I held my tongue.

  “You plan on keeping in touch with Danny?” Abcde said after we got our meals. I was kind of glad to see spinach stuck in her teeth. I hoped my own teeth weren’t slathered with green from the pesto.

  “Fallen-fruit guy?” I shook my head.

  “He’s cute,” she said.

  “If you like them hairy and smelly.”

  “Oh, I do.” Abcde grinned wickedly. “I do.”

  “My mom’s in love with Ben,” Quinn said, digging into her little cup of pinto beans.

  “Quinn!”

  “You were holding his hand,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “You were, were you?” Abcde’s eyes sparkled as she leaned forward. “Tell me. Everything.”

  “That’s all there is to tell,” I said, blushing.

  “Your mom,” Abcde said to Quinn. “She’s full of secrets, isn’t she?”

  I swallowed my sip of water the wrong way.

  “She’s going to marry him,” Quinn said with her mouth full.

  “Quinn, I held his hand once,” I said, coughing. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to marry him.”

  “And then we can stay at the orchard for ever and ever.” Quinn held up her hand for a high five, but Abcde wrapped her arms around her instead, and Quinn, to my surprise, started to cry.

  She was still crying when the woman brought us our fortune cookies. Mine said, Now is the time to try something new. I didn’t show it to Quinn—she ha
d been on the “try something new” tour all her life. I knew she was ready to stay put.

  KAREN HAD NEVER DRIVEN ALONE BEFORE. EITHER HER mom was teaching her or Nathan was teaching her, or one of them was coming along for the ride. More often than not, she was in the passenger seat—sometimes the back seat, with her mom and Nathan up front. The driver’s seat felt like a throne, the unfamiliar car cavernous as she drove. At first, her heart was pounding so hard, she could barely see where she was going, but once she found the highway, everything turned cool and silent. Every once in a while, she turned a corner and one of the plush polar bears in the back shifted, startling her, but otherwise, a strange calm descended upon her. She was no longer a competitive figure skater, a girl whose boyfriend had just killed someone. She was just a body moving forward through space, stopping only to drain money from her savings account or use the bathroom or get something at a drive-through, the grease a serious shock to her system.

  She drove and drove well into the night. She wasn’t sure what state she was in, what state she was heading toward. All she could see were her headlights scraping the road, bits of snow gleaming softly from the surrounding pine trees. The whole world blanketed by silence.

  She fished around in her purse for her cellphone; she had turned off the ringer. There were eleven missed calls. She listened to her messages, deleting most as soon as she heard her mother’s voice. One from Nathan, from jail, said, “You need to turn yourself in, sweetheart. It’s the right thing to do.” A second, logged in a few minutes later, said, “Karen! You can’t do this to me! I love you!” She didn’t know prisoners were allowed more than one call, but there was a third, too, his voice sharper now, harder: “If I’m going down, Karen,” he said, “you’re going down, too.” A fourth said, simply, “Bitch.” Karen swallowed the acid rising in her throat, tears warm on her cheeks. There was one more message, from Isabelle: “You better ditch the car soon.” She sounded frantic. “My mom just noticed it’s gone.”

  WHEN WE GOT BACK TO THE VIEIRAS’, THE LIGHTS WERE on in the distillery and Mr. Vieira was standing outside, screaming his head off.

  I stopped the car and got out.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “That asshole Roberts!” I had never seen Mr. Vieira so upset. “That fucking asshole Roberts!”

  “We don’t know it’s him, Dad,” Ben said. Mrs. Vieira paced in tight circles behind him, talking to herself in rapid Portuguese.

  “What happened?” Quinn looked terrified.

  “Fucking Roberts smashed all our eau-de-vie,” Mr. Vieira said, before shouting something in Portuguese to his wife. She stopped pacing and scurried into the distillery, her large body moving faster than I had ever seen.

  All that work we had put into those bottles. All that income they were expecting …

  “Not all of it,” said Ben. He couldn’t seem to look at me.

  “More than half!” his father shouted. “I’m going to beat the life out of that sonofabitch.”

  “We need to let the police deal with it,” said Ben. “No need to take matters into your own hands.”

  “He took matters into his hands,” said Mr. Vieira. “Now I’ll take matters into mine.”

  KAREN PULLED INTO A FOREST PRESERVE, STOPPED the car in front of a small frozen lake. The headlights illuminated the icy surface, bumpy, almost grainy-looking. How could she go back to smooth, slick ice now? There was nothing she could do to make things better. Nothing she could do but disappear.

  Hot air blasted from the vents; she turned the heat off so she could feel the coldness of the night against her face. She found a thin gas-station pen in the glove compartment, a page with directions on one side. She turned it over and wrote:

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Finkel (and Cindy),

  I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean what I said to Nathan. I never meant to hurt anyone. I was just joking around—I never thought he would really do it. You have to believe me. I am sorry. I am so sorry. I know I can’t bring Lance back, but at least you won’t have to worry about me anymore.

  Karen

  ———

  CIRCLES OF LIGHT continued to float in front of Karen’s eyes after she turned off the headlights. She blinked until they faded away, until she saw nothing but the dull glow of the winter night. She got out of the car and took a few steps forward, her boots crunching through the crust of snow, then inching onto ice. She took careful steps farther out onto the frozen lake, until she started to hear the ice creak, feel it crackle and shift beneath her. She was tempted to turn back to the safety of the car, tempted to think about the baby growing inside her, but she forced herself to stay where she was. She forced herself to stand still and let the ice split all around her, filling the air with its broken song.

  GLASS WAS EVERYWHERE. IF IT HADN’T BEEN SO AWFUL, it would have been beautiful—the shards reflecting the light, sending their shimmer all over the distillery walls. The room smelled amazing, too, all that pear essence released into the air, perfect green fruit lounging all over the floor.

  Mr. Vieira had stormed toward the bridge, Ben following him.

  Mrs. Vieira grabbed a broom and started to sweep up some of the glass. Most of the alcohol had already evaporated, but the floor was still wet.

  “Can we help you?” I asked, and she just shrugged. I went to the main house and found another broom and a mop in the pantry. I tried not to look at the bowl of Bartletts as I walked through the kitchen, the fruit full of dark splotches now, well past its prime.

  “Isn’t this typical?” said Abcde as I handed her a broom. “The men go off to fight and the women are left to clean up the mess.”

  ———

  BEN AND MR. Vieira eventually stumbled back, Mr. Vieira cradling one fist.

  “Well, he bloodied Roberts’s nose,” said Ben.

  “Fucking asshole said he didn’t know anything about the bottles,” Mr. Vieira grumbled.

  “He honestly didn’t seem to know what we were talking about,” said Ben.

  “Bullshit!” Mr. Vieira opened and closed his fingers a few times, wincing.

  “There was a big crowd here today,” said Abcde. “Maybe someone came back …”

  I had a sudden flash of the man I thought I saw across the slough. A shudder ran through me.

  “I know it was that sonofabitch,” said Mr. Vieira. “Probably broke the pipe in the icehouse, too.”

  Quinn continued to help clean, carefully lifting one pear after another from the ground and putting them in a trash bin, but I could tell she was shaken.

  WHEN THE POLICE finally arrived, I busied myself with the broom, making sure to avoid eye contact.

  “Thank God you’re here,” said Mr. Vieira.

  Before he could continue, an officer said, “Demetrio Vieira, you have the right to remain silent,” and pulled out his handcuffs. He looked as if he knew Mr. Vieira personally, as if he hated to have to arrest him.

  “You have the wrong man!” Mr. Vieira yelled as the officer gently pulled his arms behind his back and cuffed his hands.

  “I’ll call your lawyer,” said Ben. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him flash me a look before he followed his father to the police car. Mrs. Vieira trailed behind, wailing as if someone had died.

  “We better get back to the boat,” I said, and Quinn nodded, a serious expression on her face. “We can drop off Abcde on the way.”

  EVEN THOUGH I had closed all the windows, the houseboat was still a little wet inside, the whales’ stunning acrobatics powerful enough to send water through the tiny gaps in the frames. When I went to turn down the thankfully dry bedspread, my nerve endings lit up like a switchboard. There was a perfect, whole Comice sitting on the pillow, still smelling of eau-de-vie, a couple of chips of glass glinting from its sides like dew. Or ice.

  “Eema!” Quinn whimpered. I gestured for her to be quiet so I could try to tell if anyone was still inside the houseboat. I grabbed a heavy-duty flashlight as a potential weapon of self-defense, and
slid open the closet, the bathroom door, all the cabinets. When those turned up clear, I told Quinn to stay inside and I went onto the deck to check inside the life preserver box. No sign of anyone. Just the whales, whose sudden blowhole puffs almost made me jump out of my skin.

  “Eema!” Quinn clung to me when I came back inside. “I don’t want to sleep here.”

  “I don’t either,” I said. “Pack your bags.”

  WE CONVINCED ABCDE to come with us to the hotel.

  “It’s not quite a horse head in the bed,” said Abcde when we told her about the pear, “but it’s still a bit close for comfort.”

  Ben’s truck was pulling into the driveway as we were pulling out. Mrs. Vieira was in the passenger seat; there was no sign of Mr. Vieira.

  “They’re keeping him overnight,” Ben said after we both rolled down our windows. He looked more exhausted than I had ever seen him. He still seemed to have trouble looking at me.

  “We’re spending the night at Rogelio’s,” Abcde said, leaning over my lap. “Someone left a pear on Izzy’s pillow. From the eau-de-vie.”

  “Maybe I’ll head over there later,” he said. This time he looked into my eyes so directly, my heart knocked against my ribs. “Izzy, we need to talk.”

  “OOOH,” ABCDE SAID as we drove down the dark levee roads. “He wants to ‘talk,’ eh?”

  Quinn giggled a bit, although she still looked nervous.

  “In a hotel, no less?” Abcde teased.

  I just kept driving toward Isleton and tried to remember how to breathe.

  THE CHECK-IN DESK at Rogelio’s was the bar, and it was packed. As cozy as the restaurant had felt, I wondered whether I had brought my child to a safe place for the night. A bunch of heads swiveled toward us—I would guess dreadlocked poets and nine-year-olds were not their typical bar clientele. I was tempted to scoot onto a barstool, ask for whatever was strongest, whatever would knock me out for a few days; instead, I just asked for a room.