Mabel recognized an old woman sitting on a rusted tractor plow overgrown with weeds and black-eyed susans—Mrs. Lindley, who raised emu. Mrs. Lindley clutched a black tube of sunblock in her fist: SPF 50. “I’m glad you finally came out to see Brandi Stitch,” Mrs. Lindley said. “What’d you bring to show her?”
“Nothing,” Mabel said. She wanted to keep the panther mostly unseen, to keep it her own secret for as long as she could. Too many questions about it, too much explanation, might take away its power.
Mrs. Lindley held forth a dime. “I found this in the pocket of one of Mr. Lindley’s trousers that I’d boxed up years ago,” she said. “Brandi’s finally going to be able to reveal it all to me this time, I’m certain. I just have a feeling about it. It’s evidence, of some kind, this coin, of an affair that he had a few years before he died. I just know it. This is change back from something he bought for her. A Hallmark card maybe. Maybe violets.”
Just a dime, Mabel thought, touching at her pocket, at the panther inside. How sad.
A cobblestone walk led Mabel and Mrs. Lindley toward the tin-roof lean-to in the pasture, under which Brandi did all her communing with the dead. A crowd gathered at the fence, many standing up on the slats like at a rodeo. Everyone craned their necks to try to see into the lean-to just yards from the padlocked gate. Shadows stretched and moved across the ground as workers, hidden by the tin wall, prepared for the morning’s seance. Mabel could hear country music buzzing from broken speakers. The sun was already beating down, and Mabel held her umbrella above Mrs. Lindley’s head. Despite the sun block, Mrs. Lindley’s bleach-white skin cooked swiftly to pink.
As Mr. Stitch stepped from around the lean-to, as the people caught their breath with anticipation, Mabel wanted to rush away from the whole event, to once again be a person too serious for Stitch Farm. The man looked silly with a long peacock feather stuck in the band of his straw cowboy hat. Mabel giggled, both nervous and embarrassed, at the feather bristling and fluttering in the wind, strutting, like it was still attached to its bird.
But when Mr. Stitch beckoned the crowd, saying, “Come to Brandi,” in a deep and kind voice as he unhitched the fence gate, Mabel stepped forward. His chin was stubbly and gray. No one had ironed his shirt. He’d lost his little girl, basically, and what could be worse?
She dropped a donation into an overflowing kettle as she followed the crowd around the corner of the lean-to. Some cotton-candy-scented candles flickered in jelly jars lined up atop a railroad tie on the ground. Mabel walked along the tin wall; stretched across the front of it was a coiling barbed wire. To the barbs, people had stuck photos, newspaper clippings, wedding invitations, hospital bracelets. People had signed their names to poems and prayers they hadn’t written, about serenity and footsteps in the sand. Mabel took from her pocket a clipping she had cut for Lily, an article about a Coney Island amusement park ride spinning off its axis and severing the leg of a woman. She gingerly placed the clipping in the curl of the concertina wire. A woman smiled at Mabel as she tied a frayed hair ribbon to the wire, and Mabel blushed, feeling welcomed into the terrible miseries they were all there to share.
Mr. Stitch pushed Brandi’s wheelchair out to the lip of a pickup’s open tailgate. Brandi, now a woman of about twenty-five, had to have been sweltering in her raggedy cashmere suit. The suit’s skirt showed many snags from the edges of the chair. “That’s the suit Sally Jessy gave her for the show they did,” Mrs. Lindley whispered to Mabel. Mabel remembered having heard about Brandi’s appearance on Sally Jessy. It had to have been five years, or more, before.
Mr. Stitch stood beside Brandi and began without ceremony. He held out his arms, his palms up and open, wiggling his fingers. “Anybody got something?” he asked the crowd. Two women stepped forward, one holding out what looked to be a piece of string. Mr. Stitch took it from her, balled it up, and put it into Brandi’s hand. He then leaned over, putting his ear to Brandi’s lips, hiding her blank face from everyone. He straightened up and returned the string. “She says, ’A hat,’ ” he said.
“A hat?” the woman mumbled.
“A hat?” the other woman said.
The crowd waited silently for the women to make some connection. Mabel pictured a straw hat and a colorful scarf. A hat, she whispered, desperate for the women to find their way back to a particular sunny afternoon.
“Oh, yes,” the woman with the string finally said. “Oh, oh, yes.” She put her hands to her face and cried. “A hat,” she sobbed. “Of course. The hat.” Her friend took her by the shoulders and directed her back toward the gate.
People stepped forward, one by one, with their bits of cloth and pieces of jewelry and letters bound with ribbon. ” ‘A flower,’” Mr. Stitch imparted. A book. A picture. A necktie. A map. Some merely shrugged and walked away, but most collapsed in heartbreak and tears. The panther felt heavy in Mabel’s front pocket, and she could feel its edges pressing into her breast, could feel its tiny claws scratching for purchase. Her heart beat fast with both her belief and her disbelief. She so wanted to fall apart, but she knew that whatever Mr. Stitch told her, whatever words Brandi passed on from beyond a supposed grave, would be meaningless. But she also knew she’d return to Stitch Farm with everything she could find that her father had touched. If Mr. Stitch said the right word in the right way it might work, she thought. I could be haunted too.
With all the shade from the umbrella working to keep pale Mrs. Lindley from sizzling away to nothing, Mabel felt the sun’s heat weaken her knees and ankles. She noticed a few people fall slowly to the ground, some with something like a Hallelujah wail, almost gleeful in their pain. Mabel lowered herself to the dirt, then became frightened by all the crazies towering above her, mere footsteps from trampling her. But she was too dizzy to move. “Do you need my sunblock, Mabel?” Mrs. Lindley said, as Mabel pressed both hands to the ground to feel still. She closed her eyes and all the most banal junk of her life swam among the dots of her vision—just spoons and forks, pairs of scissors, shoelaces, pencils, light bulbs. She then saw her mother, her mind lost, on one hectic afternoon with her coat over a flesh-colored slip, frayed lace at her knees. That day, months before her father’s suicide, Mabel’s mother went from store to store secretly slipping her things from her deep coat pockets onto the shelves in a kind of reverse kleptomania. She left a Hummel among boxes of cough elixir in a drugstore, her wedding ring in a china cup in a department store. In a dress shop, she took a Swiss Army knife from her coat pocket and dropped it into the pocket of a coat on a mannequin. Mabel and Lily ran along behind her, huffing and puffing and tumbling over each other’s legs as they struggled to keep up with their mother’s quick pace. Lily, frightened, had put her hand in Mabel’s pocket.
“Anyone else?” Mr. Stitch said, wiggling his fingers. “Anyone else?” Mabel caught his eye as she took the panther into her fist. A coffin, she thought, as if prompting him. A little girl in her best dress.
“I’ve got something,” a man shouted, and the crowd, tilting their heads with sad smiles of recognition, parted for him and the others following him. Mabel saw that they were the men who’d been pushing the broken-down truck on the highway.
“Yes,” Mr. Stitch said, “come forward, Mr. Roseleaf.”
The one young man wore black boots held together with silver duct tape; another wore blue jeans torn at the knees and at the back pockets. The men looked to Mabel like they had just crawled out into the sun after a long afternoon of sleep. This was exactly what she’d hoped to see, she realized, all these little signs of helplessness.
“It’s Roseleaf and his boys,” Mrs. Lindley told Mabel, as she helped her up from the ground and offered some of the umbrella’s shade. “The boys lost their sister in that swimming pool incident. They’re out here every week with something.”
Mabel now remembered the Roseleaf family, who lived in the next county over, from a newspaper article she clipped for Lily years before. The sister, a girl of about fourteen, swam with one
of her brothers. As she dove underwater at the deepest end of the pool, her hand or her foot caught with the suction of the drain, and her brother, unable to loosen her, swam to the surface to shout for help. Her other brothers came out then, and her father and her mother, and all they could offer her was their breath. They took turns swimming to the bottom to hold their lips to the girl’s, filling her cheeks. One after the other they dove, carrying air to her, keeping her alive for a while with a graceful, wordlessly devised system. But she died before help arrived.
Mabel had been close to the girl’s age at the time. After first hearing of it, she had tried to experience what it had been like for the girl as she had drowned. She swam to the bottom of the municipal pool and imagined that the girl taught herself to find comfort in the water, in the blur of her hand before her own face, in the veins of sunlight at the floor. It would be something like being inside your own body, pulsing through your own flood of bloodstream. The shouts of her family would have been as soft as the popping of a far distant gun.
Mr. Roseleaf held out a half-eaten candy necklace to Mr. Stitch, who put it into Brandi’s fist. The Roseleaf brothers all held hands, standing as close as sisters, as Mr. Stitch listened to Brandi. He straightened up, nervously tugging at his ear and at his chin. He took off his hat and put it back on. He was clearly struggling with his imagination, wanting to offer the Roseleaf family something profound-sounding, something poetic and new. Oh Christ, just say anything, Mabel thought.
“A . . .” he said, “a . . . um . . . a starfish . . . a wet starfish . . . in the sand.” Mabel liked that, the starfish, and it brought to her mind the soft crashing of the oceans she’d never visited. Mr. Roseleaf wailed and sobbed, but the older brother, with the swift, certain manner of a reasonable man, simply stepped up to the truck to retrieve the candy necklace. Mabel couldn’t take her eyes off them and their ragged, dirty clothes and hair that needed cutting. I can believe in your ghost, she wanted to whisper to the sweet, lost men, and you can believe in mine.
“You know,” Mrs. Lindley said as the crowd dispersed, “my cousin’s daughter’s stepdaughter got the Roseleaf girl’s marrow. Or they think so, anyway. That information is kept confidential. They sent a letter to the Roseleafs, through a caseworker, but they never got a response.”
“They haven’t recovered,” Mabel said before following the Roseleafs back to their truck. She watched, in a daze, as the boy got behind the wheel again and as the two older brothers gave the truck a push to get the engine sputtering. They’ve lost everything, she thought. As she memorized the phone number painted on the truck’s door, tapping the number out on the back of her teeth with the tip of her tongue, she became determined to know them, and to know all their methods of grief.
9.
AT THE COUNTER OF A TRUCK STOP café, Lily dropped some tiny plastic cups of creamer into her purse. She took out a little clear baggie of milagros and spilled them like a pocketful of fortune-telling runes across the speckled Formica. As she looked out the window, watching Jordan talk to a mechanic in the garage, she rubbed the milagro between her fingers. She put it in her mouth, held it at the tip of her tongue.
As Lily had driven west in the middle of the night, Jordan sleeping deeply in the back, she was afraid the Monte Carlo would pop another tire or fall apart completely. With her hands on the wheel, her foot on the pedal, the car became an extension of her arms and legs, and she could feel the car’s damage in her body; every catch of the brakes she could feel in her ankles and knees, and every click in the steering column snapped in her wrist. She had made Jordan stop for some adjustments at the first station they’d found open in the early hours of the morning.
Lily’s list of questions for her mother was folded neatly, buried at the bottom of the purse at her feet. With this milagro on her tongue, her eyes closed, she could almost hear her mother’s voice damp with tears. She could feel her mother’s breath hot in her ear and could see her lips form around words that offered no answers.
Then Lily saw into the past and felt the weight of all those afternoons when her mother lay on the living room sofa with her black hair weaving about the tassels of the pillow. Her mother’s sleep had exhausted them all; she always slept in the middle of the room, in the middle of the house, controlling everyone without a single word or look or gesture. So as not to disturb their mother, they stepped lightly, mouthed their conversation, chewed their hard candy with slow, hesitant bites. Her mother’s constant sleep had especially exhausted her father, weakening him day by day.
“Are you all by yourself?” a waitress asked with a cluck of concern, her hair an unwashed beehive, tiny wrinkles rimming her bright red lips from years of puffing on cigarettes. She set the coffee in front of Lily. Where’s your mother? Lily half-expected next. It was a question she’d been asked a lot as a girl, constantly separated from her grandmother and Mabel at the grocery store, the school events, the carnivals. “Where’s your mother?” said the strangers, their eyes gentle on hers.
“None of your fucking business,” Lily said, then she immediately felt bad for the kindly waitress. She picked up her purse and walked outside and around the corner to the restroom. She felt a twitch in her eyelid. Maybe Mabel, back on the farm, got a piece of gravel in her eye. A talk show on the TV above the café counter had featured two sisters: The one in California got stung in the foot by a mean red ant, and the one in New Jersey couldn’t walk for a day from the stabbing pain of it. But Mabel was too dull for psychic connection, Lily concluded. If she wanted to communicate with Mabel, she’d have to call her. But she didn’t want Mabel to know that she and Jordan were stranded nowhere near Mexico.
After locking the restroom door, Lily dropped her purse on the sink and rummaged around for her bottle of orange-flavored baby aspirin. The chewable pills always helped to settle her nervous stomach. Lily found the bottle, but inside was only a dark yellow dust.
Lily suddenly missed Mabel terribly and longed for her resourcefulness and her overprotection. She hoped Mabel wasn’t mad at her for saying nothing about leaving, and leaving no note. Lily would tell her—and this was partly true—that she’d worried about such words hanging in the air. Something like I’ll be back soon had too much a ring of final irony, sounded too much like the last line of a girl lost forever. She could see Mabel, years in the future, taking Lily’s crumbling good-bye note from the fire-safe box, saying, But she wasn’t back soon.
On the wall, a vending machine featured novelty condoms, with YOU LIKE CANDY, LITTLE GIRL written above the list of flavors: peppermint stick; blowberry; cream soda; pink lemonade. Lily, amused for a moment, put her quarter in and turned the crank, hoping for honeydew. She got cherry pop and opened the package to lick it. It wasn’t terrible, though the taste of latex did overwhelm. Lily closed her eyes and comforted herself with thoughts of her room back at the house, of the antique paper valentines she’d pinned up along a long crack in the wall. Haven’t I been desperate to see you again? she wanted to ask her mother. Isn’t this what I always wanted?
Lily hoped the Monte Carlo was a wreck. Jordan could take her to some roadside motel, to sheets that smelled daily of fresh detergent, to long baths with the little wrapped-up bars of face soap and tiny bottles of shampoo placed every afternoon at the side of the tub. She wasn’t as decided about all this, about this journey, as she had thought. Now that Mabel was nowhere around to be shocked and bothered, Lily didn’t feel so defiant. She really did want to see her mother again but only if her mother wanted to be seen. The slightest bit of disappointment on her mother’s face, and Lily wouldn’t know what to do or say.
Jordan knocked at the door. “Lily?” he called out. “You in there?”
“No,” Lily said.
“Don’t be mad,” he said. “It’s not my fault. The mechanic’s taking his own sweet time.”
Sweet time. Lily thought about sneaking home on foot. But what she really wanted was to go back years, to when her father’s death had yet to seem real, when
she didn’t yet know that her mother would never return. The days before that, when they all lived in the old apartment with its bright yellow walls, seemed too far away to be even believed and longed for. His own sweet time.
“Lily,” Jordan said softly, “I’ve got an idea.” She could tell he was leaning his head against the other side of the door, his lips close to the crack.
“Can I ask you something?” Lily said. “Did Mabel and me turn out all right? Despite everything, do we seem okay?”
“Well, hell, yeah,” Jordan said. “I mean, you guys are a little fucked up, but who the fuck isn’t?”
“Lots of people aren’t,” Lily said, thinking of the commercials she’d been watching on the TV at the counter. Lily resented the ads of daytime television, the false sense of security—the images of women strolling beaches, the housewives dissolving in bubble baths, the mothers in kitchens discussing cleanliness with their daughters. Lily had read about cultures in which the women were exiled from their homes during their periods, sent out into the wilds. Actually, she thought she wouldn’t mind living in such a culture—having even a few days a month to drop from society, to go sit in a river and bleed.
“We could leave the Monte Carlo behind, Lily,” Jordan said. “You don’t have to be in that car anymore.” Jordan’s worried, Lily thought, deeply relieved. I’ve worried him. “The mechanic told me about a bus that goes to Vegas direct. Vegas is out of our way, but we could get married there, if you wanted to.”
Lily leaned against the closed door. “Is that how you’re supposed to propose to a girl?” she said, but she felt herself blushing, anxious to accept. If she didn’t marry Jordan soon, her destiny might be thrown off by years. She wanted to become a professional clairvoyant, so Las Vegas would be the perfect place to set up shop, to make a living easing guilt and psychic pain, locating missing persons and missing dead. People, she thought, like to have their lives told back to them, like to hear from a stranger who they’ve been and who they’ll be.
The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters Page 9
