The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

by Timothy Schaffert

  After putting the towel in Lily’s hand and moving Lily’s hand to hold the towel to her nose, Fiona touched her cheek. Lily felt the many rings on her fingers and the rough skin of her hands. Fiona pushed the hair from Lily’s forehead and pressed her palm there like feeling for a fever. She then stepped back and took a whole look, and Lily felt too fat standing there in front of her mother who shared Mabel’s frailty.

  Fiona pointed at the new burn hole in Lily’s dress. “You smoke cigarettes,” she said. “I wish you girls wouldn’t smoke. You know, other people can smell it, the smoke, really strongly, on you. You don’t really know that when you’re a smoker. And, I mean, I don’t mean to be critical, it’s just that I used to be a heavy smoker too, not so long ago, so I know a little something about it. You know, while you’re here, over in Nogales, you should get some of that nicotine gum or nicotine patches or something. Everything like that’s real cheap down here. Any prescription, really. I don’t know if you, you know, if you have medicines that you . . .”

  “No,” Lily said.

  “That’s good,” her mother said, sighing with what sounded like great relief. They stood not speaking for a moment. Lily was terrified that her mother might suggest cheap diet pills, some black market concoction unavailable in the United States. “Anyway, I’ve been expecting you, really,” Fiona said. “I wished it, really. Thought you two might have come looking for your mother some time ago.”

  Lily only smiled politely, but her mother kept looking at her, nodding, seemingly waiting for some excuse. Lily thought of what Mabel had said the night Lily told her she was going to Mexico. What were we supposed to do? Mabel had said. Crawl across the desert with our little plastic suitcases? It infuriated Lily, this idea that she and Mabel were somehow, in any way, responsible for the many years apart from their mother. You stink like smoke, her mother says. What drugs do you take? Why didn’t you come sooner? “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?” Lily found herself saying. “You expected us some years ago? We were supposed to come for you? That doesn’t seem at all backwards to you?”

  Fiona held one hand at her own throat with worry. “Please watch your language, Lily, or . . .” Fiona started, but didn’t finish.

  “Or? Or what? What? ’Or I’ll ask you to leave’?” Lily said. “Could that have possibly been what you were about to say to me? Were you going to ask me to leave? Was my ffff . . .” She stopped herself, but started again, “ffffucking whore of a . . . of a piece-of-shit . . . cunt mother going to ask me to fucking leave?”

  Her mother’s entire lack of response, the way she didn’t even take her eyes away from Lily, as if she’d long been prepared for Lily to be crude and foul and insulting, made her feel sick to her stomach again. Lily held the blood-spotted towel up to cover her face. I’m so fucked-up, she thought. Lily wished to be felled by a sudden crying jag, but she was much too exhausted.

  “Lily,” her mother said, softly. She held her hands gently at Lily’s elbows. “Lily, listen to me,” but she didn’t say anything else. After a long moment, Fiona took the towel from Lily and cleaned up Lily’s face. “We haven’t been together five minutes, and there’s already been tears and blood.”

  “This isn’t me,” Lily said. “I don’t know why I’m being like this. I didn’t come all this way to call you terrible names.” How, Lily wondered, on God’s green earth, do you apologize to your mother for calling her a piece-of-shit cunt? “I mean, back at home, I’m constantly the one who defends you to Mabel. We have these fights about . . . about how you must feel and about how things must have been for you. Where you’re concerned, I’ve always been, you know, understanding.” She felt guilty for speaking poorly of Mabel, but just now it felt like a gesture of kindness to her mother.

  Fiona dabbed a bit more at Lily’s bloody nose. “It’s so dry down here,” she said. She tucked the towel back into the waist of her pants and took Lily’s arm. “I’m just down the road,” she said, walking with Lily to the door.

  Outside, Fiona pointed toward her back-road bungalow, a small, square red house in an enclave of other small red houses in the middle of nowhere. Fiona had had many addresses over the years, but Lily had always imagined her in the same house of dark rooms, looking exactly as she had the day she left. Now all the details she’d conjured in her mind as she’d read her mother’s letters—the painted-white writing table and the grandmotherly lamp with a ruffled pink shade—would be replaced with her true surroundings. Lily would miss that house she’d pictured for so long.

  “Saint Adelaide,” Fiona said, as she and Lily walked through the shade cast by the nun’s clusters of vine, “was a blind leper, who was paralyzed and had visions of people released from purgatory because of her suffering.” Lily smiled, feeling rubbed raw from all the complaining. Fiona told Lily about the rattlesnake that sometimes lived coiled beneath the air conditioner of the tasting room, and the family of javelina pigs that lost too many of its babies to bobcats.

  “I hate to have to tell you this,” Fiona said, and Lily’s heart jumped. Lily was anxious to hear anything that her mother hated to have to tell her. But all Fiona said was “You’re beginning to really burn. You have such a fair complexion.”

  Lily and Fiona passed unstung beneath a blossoming tree that swarmed thick with bees. Lily could feel the hectic, threatening buzz shivering in the hair on her neck. She and her mother didn’t talk about the particulars of their lives. Lily didn’t mention Jordan or her Las Vegas nuptials, and Fiona didn’t speak of her many fiancés and ended engagements. For just a moment, there seemed something completely perfect about it all, like the quiet, slow afternoons Lily had fantasized that she’d someday have with her mother—an afternoon uneventful, both Lily and her mother so familiar with each other that they were without much to say.

  IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE, Fiona broke off a paddle of prickly pear cactus. “For soup,” she explained. “Tastes like green bean.” Near the porch, a hummingbird nearly brushed Lily’s ear in its beeline for a feeder of red-dyed sugar water. “The hummingbirds are treacherous certain times of the year,” Fiona said. “But they’re good luck, I think.”

  The porch was crowded by a long sofa piled on with boxes of weathered paperbacks. The plants in all the pots had long since burned dry, and a string of dried chile peppers hung alongside the door. Leaning against the sofa were metal road signs warning DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED and FALLING ROCKS.

  Fiona instructed Lily in how to cut the cactus paddle down to its limp, bright green insides, then went to her bedroom and closed the door. As Lily sliced the skin away, repeatedly pricking her fingers on the cactus needles, she could hear her mother on the phone. She closed her eyes and listened, trying to catch a stray word here and there, but everything she heard sounded foreign. Her mother was speaking Spanish. Lily put down the knife and studied the many snapshots on the refrigerator door. Though Lily and Mabel had always sent wallet-sized portraits of them taken annually in the school lunchroom, in front of a swirling blue backdrop, none were among these pictures of strangers. There were also a few postcards tacked up, notes from friends on vacations around the world. One photo showed Fiona with her arm around a dark-skinned, dark-haired girl about Lily’s age. They both wore coats, their hair blown by wind, ocean waves frothing and foaming behind them. Why did I come here? Lily thought, wishing she could keep her mother in that dark, lonely room that she’d imagined for so long.

  Lily put her sore, scratched fingertips in her mouth as she pressed her forehead against the kitchen window, feeling homesick. Looking past the bungalows as the sun set behind them, she tried to conjure up Jordan in Starkweather’s Packard kicking up dust and coming to her rescue. He’d take her from her mother and they’d spend the night driving the unpaved roads of Mexico and drinking worm-at-the-bottom mescal. Once they were good and lost in the desert, he’d sing to her, loudly, to get the coyotes to howling, playing all the wrong notes on his guitar.

  Lily’s stomach hurt with hunger. “Mom,” she s
aid softly, hesitantly, realizing it was the first time she’d called her mother that, called her mother anything but a piece-of-shit cunt, since arriving. “Mom,” she said a little louder, and “Mom” again, louder still. But her mother stayed in her room.

  Lily poured herself some raspberry-flavored wine and then stepped out onto the porch, exhausted from the hours of travel and the thoughts of her mother’s other life. After only a few sips of the wine as the sun dropped away, Lily fell asleep on the sofa. She woke when she felt a sharp pinch at her arm. “I haven’t been able to wake you,” her mother said, tears in her eyes, her hand rubbing her throat. “I always hated the way you girls slept so deep.” Lily rubbed at the spot of skin still stinging and pink from her mother’s fingers. The pink quickly faded, and Lily pinched her arm again to bring it back.

  Fiona had undone the braid from her hair, and Lily thought she looked beautiful and years younger. The tears in her mother’s eyes, the catch in her voice, made Lily worry, and the worry made her angry. She didn’t come all this way to offer her mother comforting words.

  “You were on the phone for so long,” Lily said.

  Fiona sat on the porch step, her back to Lily, and she began to run a brush through her long hair. “It was the daughter of an old friend of mine,” Fiona said. “Ana. Always in crisis. She’s in a bad, bad marriage. He hits her, I know he does, but she won’t admit it.” She pulled hair from the brush, then released the strands into the hot breeze. “You think you’re unhappy,” she said.

  Lily started to say something, to somehow defend her own unhappiness. I just walked out on my husband, she almost said, a man who loves me so much. But instead she said, “I never said I was unhappy.” She picked up her wineglass and blew at the tiny fruit flies that had collected on the rim. “If you were so certain that your daughters would show up some day,” she said, “wouldn’t a person have something to say to them? Some excuse? Even a weak one would be nice.”

  “I’m sure it would be nice,” Fiona said, with what sounded like sympathy.

  Lily leaned over, reaching across to tuck the faded tag of Fiona’s blouse back into the collar. She’s gone forever, Lily thought, watching her mother look out and across the moonlit desert. When she left, she left for good.

  “You know,” Fiona said, “you hear about some mothers who drown their babies or suffocate them. Everybody loves to read about loco mothers leaving their babies in dumpsters or on buses.”

  “I guess I should be glad you didn’t do anything like that,” Lily said, meaning it, sort of, as a joke. Her mother glanced sharply back, startling Lily.

  “I never hurt you girls,” Fiona said, pointing her finger at Lily, her voice shaking. “I may have swatted you a few times, but that’s it. But I never really hurt you . . . you know, not in any terrible way. You know I didn’t.”

  For just a moment, moved by her mother’s minute of passion, Lily was tempted to sit on the porch step with her, put her arm around her, tell her everything was perfectly fine.

  But then Lily leaned forward, feeling both cautious and cruel. “The first thing I forgot about you was the sound of your voice,” she whispered. “A few months after you stopped calling us. Then I started forgetting other things that Mabel could remember. I forgot the red slippers you used to wear and how they slapped against your heels as you walked. And there’s some night I can’t remember, one wedding anniversary when we all went out for fried fish and cake, I guess, and you gave us sips of your beer. And when I was little, I thought ‘Oh, that’s why she hasn’t come back. She’s not coming back, because she knows I’m forgetting about her.’ ”

  Fiona sighed, looking down to tear distractedly at a loose thread in the stitch of her canvas shoe. Finally, she stood from the steps and sat beside Lily on the sofa. “I never thought I’d be gone for so long,” Fiona said. “Not for a minute did I think that. My intentions were always to come back for you girls, I swear it.”

  Lily rested her leg against her mother’s and looked toward the vineyard, hoping for her father’s young ghost to stumble in from the dark, to come sit with them. Lily had always asked for what he had left in his lunch bucket—a partly eaten apple, a spoonful of cold tomato soup from his Thermos. She closed her eyes and her tongue burned with the memory of the taste of the toothpicks he soaked in cinnamon extract.

  “What should I say, Lily?” Fiona said, some desperation in her voice. “What do you need to hear?”

  Lily looked at her open hand, but all the ink had worn off. “I don’t know,” she said, running her finger along the lines of her palm. “You could tell me that you think about us. That you’ve always thought about us as much as we’ve thought about you. That you’ve worried constantly.”

  Fiona put her arm around Lily and her head on her shoulder. When she spoke, she sounded as if she hadn’t slept for days. “That’s what I’ll say then,” she said. “I’ve worried constantly. Go back and tell Mabel that I’ve worried constantly.”

  Lily nearly believed her. Her breathing rose and fell with her mother’s slow, restful breaths. If they sat there awhile longer, her mother might, like a child, drift off to sleep against her. Mabel and I could have taken such good care of her, Lily thought.

  13.

  CALLIE, THE DROWNED SISTER, CAME dripping into the Roseleaf basement in the middle of the night after the storm. Feathers dropped from her waterlogged angel wings, and her skin was pale and pruney from too long in the pool. She got down on the basement floor and pressed her lips against Mabel’s, and Mabel smelled the stink of swimming-pool chemicals in Callie’s hair and swimsuit, and she choked on the water Callie forced into her throat. Everything went black for Mabel, and hours later, just before morning, opening just one eye, she saw Mr. Roseleaf kneeling at her side. He held Mabel’s hand in his—such a sweet sight that she almost drifted off again to dream of it. Then she realized he’d unlatched her bracelet, a silver piece with cheap yellow stones and was taking it from her wrist. “Oh,” he said, caught in his theft, and he gently placed her hand back at her side. Mabel sat up and stretched and saw all the Roseleaf boys standing above her, watching her. Jesse held out a convenience-store lemon Danish, and Cody handed her a Thermos lid of hot coffee. Mabel, starved, devoured the Danish and burned her tongue drinking too quickly. She was too hungry and disoriented to worry about being only in her bra and panties.

  “I told them about you,” Wyatt said, “and about Callie’s eye.” He squatted down beside her and redid the clasp of her bracelet. “We didn’t want to wake you. They just wanted something of yours to take to Brandi Stitch.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in her,” Mabel whispered. “She’s nothing more than a fraud, you said.”

  “I just want to know what she’d say,” he whispered back. “Just out of curiosity. Just to hear what she’d come up with. Why don’t you come with us? Let us take you there? To see her?”

  “I can’t go like this,” Mabel said, picking up her dress. “It’s all wrinkly and torn.”

  “Wear something from out of here,” Mr. Roseleaf said, taking from a closet a box marked SALVATION ARMY. “Some of these clothes might fit you.”

  A bird in a puddle flapped water from its feathers, brushing its wings against the basement window, and the fluttering worked up Mabel’s spine. Callie’s angel had tried to suffocate her in the night. Mabel shut her eyes, shook off the chill, and tried to remember the nightmare more clearly. What had Callie come for? To pluck out Mabel’s eyes to wear in her own empty sockets, likely.

  Mabel rummaged through the box, pricking her fingers on an unfinished Butterick dress project, the tissue pattern still pinned to flowery material. She unearthed a pair of jellies, a jean skirt with an applique butterfly, and a T-shirt that said SUSHI ICHIBAN, a restaurant in Omaha, above a cartoon of a little Japanese girl in a too-big kimono. The T-shirt was a bit tight but it fit. With the girl’s shirt warm against her skin, she regretted lying to these men who were so terribly weak, so much weaker than she’d e
ver been. Why hadn’t she just walked up to them that day at Stitch Farm and said, “I’ve lost someone too”?

  It was raining again, and the Roseleafs had all piled into the front of the pickup. Mabel crawled in over Wyatt’s knees. She had to practically sit on Jesse’s lap, Jesse’s shoulder in her back, Wyatt’s elbow in her ribs. Cody sat on his father’s legs, his own legs up on the dashboard, his head against the roof. Wyatt drove rough down the rutted driveway, knocking all their heads together with each bump. Whenever Wyatt turned a corner, the iron spinner on the steering wheel cracked Mabel on the knee. She remembered a scene from a Marx Brothers movie—a ship’s small stateroom filling with the brothers, the engineer, the engineer’s assistant, the steward, the manicurist, the maids, and others, until they all spilled out the door.

  “Aren’t we going to Closed Mondays first?” Mabel said. “For some decaf? For some toast?” The Roseleafs all looked at each other, puzzled, as if they weren’t even aware of their own routines.

  “That was Callie’s T-shirt,” Jesse said with a sigh, poking a finger at Mabel’s belly. When he spoke, she could feel the tremors of his deep voice in her own throat. “It was her favorite restaurant. She’d order a few yellowtail and some eel. And she’d ask for her root beer in a sake cup.” She’s just a rotting corpse on wings, Mabel thought.

  “Shhh,” Wyatt said, reaching around Mabel’s knees to turn up the radio. “I want to hear this.” As it turned out, two tornadoes had touched down in the night miles away, kicking up whole farms and trailer courts, driving trucks into trees, snapping the necks of horses and cows. “The tiny town sparkles with the dusting of broken glass,” said the radio reporter, like some foreign correspondent in a war-torn city, stepping through the wreckage and speaking in near whisper. “The wind left everything in disarray. A man and his son attempt to push their Chevy off the roof of their house. A woman plays her piano in a tree. Some children make a fort of a refrigerator on its back in a schoolyard.”