House Arrest (3 page)

Pippa stirred the soup and lowered the flame. Tian expected her to keep things together in his absence. She leaned over and scratched under the rubber ankle strap with the handle of the long wooden spoon. Even though she was the newest member of the family, being his woman carried certain responsibilities, and she wasn’t going to let him down.

A volley of kick-thuds brought Pippa to the back door. Marshall kept promising to fix it. Just needs a quarter-inch shaved off the top, he said whenever anyone complained how badly it stuck. This time it was Marshall trying to kick the door open with an armload of library books resting against his protruding middle. The twins carried more books and they squeezed through the doorway at the same time.

“We went to the planetarium.” Timothy started talking as soon as he saw Pippa. “Did you know that the planets are named for ancient gods and that olden people thought the planet-gods in heaven controlled everything on earth?”

Jeremy dropped his canvas bag of library books on the linoleum floor. “Uh huh and Mars was named for this fierce dude and Mercury was the fastest runner and Saturn was cruel.”

“It was way cool,” Timothy said, grabbing a slice of pear. “You lean way back and look up at the stars and planets on the dome and it looks realer than real.”

Pippa took the pear from Timothy and nudged him towards the kitchen sink. “That’s great, but wash your hands first. You too, Jeremy.”

She still sometimes mixed them up. Two minutes older, Jeremy was a tad taller than his twin brother. When Pippa first joined the family, the boys were only five and she couldn’t tell them apart at all. Back then she was confused about all the relationships in the household, who loved who, whose kids were whose. But now Pippa could see that the twins were a perfect blend of Tian’s dark beauty and Francie’s light hair. Her curls reminded Pippa of creamsicles from the ice cream truck that jingled on the street every afternoon in the summer, but was gone now. Now she could see behind their identical faces to the softness that Jeremy tried to hide from his brother and his dad. And that Timothy’s ears were big and stuck out. Back home, those ears would have earned him the nickname of Dumbo, but here nobody teased Timothy.

The brothers splashed each other at the sink, hips and elbows jostling, and raced for their favorite corner seat in the breakfast nook.

“What’s for lunch?” Marshall frowned at the platter of sliced fruit, the bowl of greens and sprouts, and the round loaf of dark bread with sunflower seeds poking through the crust. He fingered the turquoise bandana knotted around his neck. It might have looked jaunty, if he washed it once in a while. “Anything besides rabbit food?” Marshall had known Tian in Newark. He had been with the family from the beginning, but he still didn’t accept Tian’s rules about junk food. “Don’t put that crap into your sacred body,” Tian liked to say. Marshall’s response was automatic too. “Shit comes out, no matter what goes in.” His fingers drummed on his belly and Pippa looked away from the soft ripples under his shirt.

“Leftover lentils.” Pippa ladled the soup into pottery bowls, each one stamped with the House of Isis logo of Bast’s paw print.

“Ugh.” Timothy mock-gagged. The twins made it clear that they were in Marshall’s camp on food. The three of them probably snuck off together for hamburgers, but she wouldn’t rat on them. It amazed her that the boys, just turned nine, were confident enough to joke about meals, and that the adults didn’t punish them for speaking their minds.

At nine years old Pippa wouldn’t have dreamed of complaining about food that Ma put on the table. Even Stanley, full-grown at eighteen, wouldn’t. Father’s calloused hand would have connected with the side of his head faster than heat lightning on a June evening. So Stanley kept quiet, even when Ma served up chicken livers fried with collard greens. He would close his eyes, force down a few bites, and hold the rest under the table for the Doberman who replaced the German Shepherd that Father shot.

The Family of Isis children weren’t timid at all, and that was good. That meant they were growing up healthy and strong, not warped like the District Attorney claimed at the arraignment. “Can you imagine the unhealthy, perverted environment these poor children suffer?” the D.A.’s voice had trumpeted across the courtroom.

Pippa banished the D.A. from her thoughts and listened to Jeremy talk about the homeless guy they met that morning hanging around the library, his frizzy white beard decorated with dribbles of green stuff. He had told the twins a story about Saturn while they waited for the bus.

“He said Saturn was named after Cronus, this god who wanted to be king,” Jeremy said. “But his daddy wouldn’t give up the throne, so Cronus cut off his daddy’s privates.”

Timothy burst into giggles and goosed Jeremy in his privates and they wrestled on the bench, sending Newark dashing from the room and spilling Timothy’s soymilk.

Pippa mopped it up, then grinned at the twins. “That sounds like Lettuce Man. He scrounges for discarded salads in the dumpsters behind the downtown restaurants.” Pippa remembered him from the days before Francie found her. Lettuce Man liked to hang out with the street kids, shoving wilted greens into his mouth and telling dirty stories to make them laugh. Timothy said that he and Jeremy bought Lettuce Man a bus token so they could hear the end of the story about how Cronus worried that his kids would overthrow him.

“Cronus swallowed his kids when they were born,” Jeremy said. “Whole.”

“Then he barfed them up,” Timothy added.

“Morning, everyone,” Francie called from the hallway. She pulled her terrycloth bathrobe snug around her shoulders and stopped to turn up the thermostat before entering the kitchen. With her blue eyes and hair like carrot curls tangled over her white robe, Francie looked just like the drawing of the princess in Abby’s book.

“It’s afternoon.” Jeremy pointed to the clock on the wall.

“Why don’t you get dressed,” Marshall asked, “instead of cranking up the furnace and sending dollar bills up the chimney?”

“Give it a break.” Francie sat down next to Timothy on the bench and both cats jumped onto her lap. Francie kissed Timothy’s cheek and pouted when he wiped it off with the back of his fist. Then she kissed her pointer finger and reached over to touch first the tip of Jeremy’s nose and then Marshall’s stubbly cheek. Pippa thought Francie hesitated slightly before blowing a kiss to Pippa at the stove.

“Work okay last night?” Marshall asked. It looked like he was staring deep into the vee of Francie’s bathrobe, where her skin was even whiter than her face. No one in the family ever wanted to talk about who was sleeping together behind flimsy curtains. No one owns anyone in this family, Tian taught, but Pippa was curious anyway. Francie used to be with Tian, that much was clear from looking at the twins. Pippa carried soup bowls to the table for the boys and then for Marshall.

“Work wasn’t bad.” Francie reached for a slice of apple. “The E.R. was wild, but the switchboard was quiet. Good thing, since the supervisor called out sick and it was just me.”

“I didn’t hear you come in,” Marshall said.

“It was late.” Francie accepted the steaming bowl from Pippa, cradling it with both hands. Bast jumped onto the table and sniffed.

“How can you eat lentils for breakfast?” Timothy asked.

“That’s life when you work nights, sweetie.” Francie turned to Pippa. “Did that nurse come this morning?”

Pippa emptied the last ladle of soup into her bowl. “Yeah.”

“What was she like?”

“Not awful.” Pippa pictured Emily’s nose that seem to change course in the middle. “Not as bad as I expected.”

“What about your ankle device? You figured out how to get it off?”

“How can I do that?” Pippa set down her spoon. “They’ll slap me in jail.”

Timothy slid down under the table, pulling his brother along. They tugged at the strap around Pippa’s ankle. Timothy popped up with a serious expression. “We can figure this out. Marshall’s been helping us take things apart and put them back together.”

“That monitor is a whole different ballgame than clocks and toaster ovens,” Marshall said. “Electronics are in next year’s curriculum.”

Francie shrugged her shoulders, extending the opening of her robe. She looked at Pippa. “It’s your turn this year. Don’t let us down.”

Francie was right. This was Pippa’s year, her turn to dance in the center of the circle. Since the moment she joined the Family of Isis four years ago, she had been waiting for this. Except everything was different now. Now, there was a hunk of plastic strapped to her ankle. Now, Abby and Terrence were dead.

The morning after last year’s solstice, the family had searched for the toddlers in the blowing, drifting snow. All day they hunted and the next and the next, taking turns staying with the twins. Timothy wanted to help in the search, but Jeremy couldn’t stop crying, and Tian decided they should both stay home. On the third day, the wind got fiercer and everything froze. The snow grew a crust that gave way with each step, hacking bruises on Pippa’s legs above the top of her hiking shoes. That evening, Tian called them together at the goddess stone and announced that Isis had called Abby and Terrence home to her.

“No.” Pippa shook her head back and forth, back and forth. Tian pulled her close and held her head tight against his chest to stop the shaking.

In bed that night, Pippa couldn’t stop weeping. “If Isis has the power to bring back the sun and resurrect the dead,” she asked Tian over and over, “why didn’t she save our babies?” Pippa would never understand, no matter how many times Tian tried to explain that just because Isis could, didn’t mean she would. Finally he gave up, and turned away. Leaning her wet cheek against his back, Pippa felt his solitary shudders slow into sleep.

Pippa took another spoonful of lentil soup, but she wasn’t hungry. Recently Francie had been so mean. Maybe she wished she and Tian were still together. Marshall was a nice enough guy, and he was great with the twins, but his belly was gross. He sure wasn’t Tian.

The telephone in the hallway rang. Pippa ignored it and looked at Francie. “I know it’s my turn and I don’t want to let everyone down. What can I do?”

“Don’t ask me.” Francie got up from the table. “You’re the wise Mother this year.”

Pippa stared at Francie’s white terrycloth back leaving the kitchen. How could the woman who had rescued her have changed so drastically? Never mind Francie, Pippa told herself. Tian is counting on you to keep the family together until he comes home. But in the meantime they didn’t feel much like a family at all. More like a few people stuck together, with nothing much in common except being different from the folks outside. A lot like her family back home, the one she’d left.

•

Pippa knew early that there was something wrong with her family. People treated her father as if he might bite, like the German Shepherd they had when she was little, who growled and snapped and finally took a chunk out of Stanley’s leg, so Father put him down behind the barn with one rifle shot. When she and Stanley were late with their chores, or left the basket of eggs on the grass to play with a garter snake or a barn kitty, their father would clench his eyebrows and aim his searchlight stare at them. They would drop the snake wiggling into the grass and run to the house, careful not to drop the eggs.

Mostly, her father ignored her, and when he noticed at all, he treated her like a small farmhand. She couldn’t do heavy work, but she fed the chickens and gathered eggs, weeded the vegetable patch, milked the goats and finally, when she was five, she started mucking out the stinky stalls with Stanley.

One afternoon her father was haying the front field when the yellow bus spat the four of them out at the mouth of their dirt driveway. Charley and Martha headed home and Stanley ran straight to the barn, but Pippa walked slowly toward the milk and cookies set out on the kitchen table. Her father leaned on the tractor instead of driving it, smoking a cigarette and staring at her. Later, she was setting the table when he came in the house. She was trying to remember which side the fork went on. She couldn’t tell left from right, but she had a birthmark on her right hand, just where the thumb and pointer finger met, and she always tried to remember by that. “B” for birthmark. “B” for butter knife. Knife on the birthmark side. Problem was she had to look at her hands and think about it and that took time. That’s what she was doing when her father came in and watched her. He looked like he wanted to say something, but Ma shooed him right out of the kitchen. “George,” she grumbled, “you take that filthy cigarette outside.”

Being cut off from their relatives was the other reason Pippa knew that something was wrong with her father. Stanley told her that they had two uncles and a passel of cousins living about ten miles south. Years before, after a big argument, the uncles sold off a piece of the family farm and gave her father the money to buy his own place. They never saw their kin, not even at Christmas or Easter. At holidays it was just the four of them; the cold feeling around the dinner table seeped into the walls of the parlor. Ma loved her and Stanley, but Ma was insubstantial, like someone who could walk through walls. Her hugs were thin and the safe feeling evaporated right after she let go.

When Pippa left Georgia, the night she followed her father and saw what he did, she had never heard of Springfield, Massachusetts, but it seemed as good a destination as any. Alone in the Springfield bus station with no more money, no plan, no place to go, she hid in the end toilet stall in the ladies’ room. When she ran out of sobs and came out to the sink, a tall woman in a sky-blue wool coat handed her a paper towel to dry her face, and introduced herself as Mrs. Carney. She offered a hot meal and a place to sleep. Pippa might be a hick but she wasn’t stupid. She recognized the roughness in the woman’s face, but what choice did she have? She stayed a few nights, before running away again. The streets were frightening, but safer than in Mrs. Carney’s house.