Malus Domestica (3 page)

Most strangers who heard Annie speak assumed she was deaf and spoke loudly to her, carefully enunciating their words. But she was never offended. She dryly looked up at whoever was speaking to her and said, “I’m not deaf,” and then stuck out her tongue. Robin hated the way they would recoil in horror at her twisted scar, but Mama always laughed gaily and carried on as if it were nothing but a bawdy joke.

“No. What about a book? I like books.”

“Books are the best. Even better than toys and videogames, I think. Definitely better than videogames.”

“I want a Harry Potter book.”

Annie sneered in mock disgust.
“Harry Potter?
What do you want to read about Harry Potter for?”

“Harry Potter does magic.” Robin rolled her eyes. “I want to read about magic. And swords and kings and dragons and wizards.” She waved her fork around as if it were a wand, touching her eggs, her orange juice, the table. “I love wizards. I wish I could do magic.”

As she always did when her daughter spoke of magic, Annie smiled bitterly, as if the word dredged some long ago slight from the water under the bridge. “No, you don’t, honey.”

“But I do.”

“You
know
there’s no talk of magic in this house, ma’am.” Annie folded the newspaper and set it aside, cradling her coffee in both hands. The steam curled lazily against her face. “Magic is wrong. Magic goes against God. And in this house, God’s rules come before man’s now. We’ve been over this.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“You’re more than welcome to read your Harry Potter book, but I won’t have any talk about magic. Okay? A book is just a book. It’s not real.”

Robin sucked on her lip for a moment. She summoned a little courage and asked, “If magic isn’t real, why does God not want it in our house?”

Annie gave her that exasperated don’t-be-a-dummy scowl from under her eyebrows. “I didn’t say
magic
wasn’t real. I was saying that Harry Potter isn’t real. You can read them as long as you understand the difference between reality and fiction. Harry does ‘good magic’, and that’s okay—he’s a good little boy—but in real life, good magic doesn’t exist. In real life, honey,
all
magic is bad.”

The little girl sighed. “Yes, Mama.”

Tick. Tick. Tick.
The clock on the kitchen wall chiseled away at the morning. The short hand and the long hand were racing each other around the dial as though reality were in fast forward. The numbers were unintelligible sigils.

Annie had finished her coffee by the time she spoke up again, cutting through the droning of the lawnmower. “Hurry up and finish, and we’ll go down to the bookstore in town. You can pick something out.”

After breakfast, they went out the back door, marching down the little wooden stoop. Their back yard was huge, occupied by a stunted oak tree and a lonely gray shed fringed with ragged weeds. A board swing twisted and wobbled in the breeze. In the distance, out by the treeline, Robin’s father Andy Martine bumped and roared along on his gas-stinking Briggs and Stratton.

“We’ll go tell Andy we’re going to town,” said Annie, referring to Daddy by the secret identity all superhero Daddies had. She started off across the grass. “Don’t want him to come in and find us gone without telling him where we went.”
You know how he can get.

Robin clutched Mr. Nosy to her side, the Muppet mosquito flopping around with every step.

Daddy was apparently doing a bad job at cutting the lawn, because there were long thin tiger stripes of unmowed grass every ten or twenty feet. Annie walked through them, kicking up drifts of chewed-up lawn that looked like canned spinach. Robin plowed through it, making soft explosion noises with her mouth as she went.

“You shouldn’t strew the grass around like that,” said Mr. Nosy. “You know he doesn’t like it.”

Robin’s heart lurched. “Oh, right.” She laid the mosquito on top of her head like a hat, so he could see better. “Buzz buzz buzz.” His soft legs flopped against her face like blue dreadlocks.

The back yard was so big. Why was it so big? It seemed like the farther they walked, the bigger it got. The sun bounced up off the dry, prickly grass with a hard, walloping heat, and the tufts of lawn got taller and thicker until they were wading through a thicket of crabgrass, clover, and wild onions.

“Hold on, Mama,” Robin said, stopping to search the ground, “I want to find a four leaf clover.”

Annie stopped, took a knee, and swept her hand like a beachcomber with a metal detector. Easy as pie, she plucked a lucky four leaf and held it up for her daughter to count the leaves.

It never failed to amaze Robin that while she could wander the yard for hours stooped over like an old woman and never see a single one, her mother never seemed to have any trouble finding them. “You’re so lucky. But you’re not as lucky as me.” She inserted the clover’s stem behind Robin’s ear so that it flowered against her temple like a hibiscus in a hula girl’s hair. “You’re not as lucky as
me,
because I have
you.”
Annie grinned. Instead of their usual eggshell white, her teeth were made of wood, brown and swirly dark. “I’m the luckiest mommy in the world, you know that?”

Robin stared at her mother in horror. “Why is your teeth made of wood, Mama?”

“What?” Annie threw her head back and laughed. “You’re so silly. Such a silly-billy. Come on, we’d better get going. We don’t want to be late for the market, we’ll miss all the best veggies.”

Veggies?
“But I thought we was going to the bookstore.”

Annie said nothing. She kept trudging across the endless back lawn in her delicately inexorable way.

Shuff, shuff, shuff, their feet plowed across the interminable lawn, breaking up clumps of mulch. Robin squinted into the heat. Beyond an invisible motion swirling in the air, she could still see her father on his red-and-black riding mower. He didn’t seem any closer, but somehow she could smell his briny dungeon aura of Old Spice and Budweiser. He always smelled faintly of alcohol, even when he hadn’t been drinking, that cold dank funk of old nickels and wet dirt cellars.

For some reason Annie seemed to be slowing. Not all at once but gradually as they walked, as if each step were a centimeter shorter than the last.

Her mother seemed to be the only one succumbing to it, though, like a peat bog, because soon Dear Mama was up to her ankles in the turf. Ripples bobbed outward from her toes, lapping over her instep. “Don’t want him to come in and find us gone without telling him where we went,” she said, the grass welling around her shins.

“Mama?”

“Not as lucky as me.” Now Annie was positively forging against the grass, the sun breaking over her glossy tresses. She reached with every step, leaning forward, steaming across the yard. Robin looked the way they came, hugging Mr. Nosy against her chest. She wiped her hair out of her eyes.

The house was a brick of blue clapboard behind them, as faraway as Christmas, the swingin’-tree and woodshed tiny and model-like as if they’d been made of popsicle sticks and reindeer moss. “We’ve come a long way,” said the mosquito. His real voice sounded nothing like the one Robin did for him—it was rumbly, friendly,
sandy,
the best word for it, sandy, rough but warm. Grandfatherly. “Why aren’t we any closer to your father?”

“It’s always like this.”

“Don’t want him to come in and find us gone,” said Annie. The lawn had swallowed her up to the knees. Her fists pistoned in and out like a boxer working a belly, as if she were walking in treacle. “Not as lucky as me.” Her mother was walking so slowly now that Robin could overtake her.

Polished cedar. Annie’s eyes were made of wood. The sclera were a pale alabaster with streaks of pink, and ragged black knotholes gaped where her irises and pupils should have been. Goatish eyes. “Don’t want him to come in and find us.”

“What do you mean?” asked Robin, standing in front of her mama, clutching Mr. Nosy. Annie was no longer driving forward, but halted mid-stride. Her feet were rooted in the earth as firmly as any fencepost and her arms were at kung-fu angles, one punched forward and the other’s elbow jutting out behind her. She was a statue locked in an action pose.

“What do you mean?” Robin repeated, her voice climbing. Now she was shrieking. “What do you mean?
Goddammit why don’t you ever tell me what you mean?”

“Language!” said Mr. Nosy.

“Fuck language!”

She reached out and slapped her mother’s motionless face with a six-year-old’s hand.

Annie’s cheek came loose like a deflated blister, a sag of translucent candle-skin, and the wind flaked a bit of it away, revealing dark brown underneath.

Then more came away, and Annie Martine’s face began to peel as easy as old paint, spiraling like burning paper into the breeze. Below the flaking skin was bark, smooth black-brown bark, studded with jagged wooden teeth. A lovely wooden skull lurked behind that ivory Annie mask, intricately-carved, beautiful, horrifying.

Robin’s lungs refused to inflate. Stepping back, she watched as the outermost layer of her mother deteriorated inch by inch, crumbling off and blowing away. Scrolls drooped from her shoulders, breaking off at the elbow; waxy-green leaves spotted with worm-rust sprouted from her hair, and uncurled from her knuckles and the tips of her fingers.

Annie’s arms and wrists lengthened, reaching out in front of her, and over her head, and her legs thickened, elongated, becoming like those of an elephant, covered in cobbly flesh. The terrible sound of rending muscle-fibers whispered underneath Annie’s bark as she stretched, reaching for the sky, and then she was a tree, she was a goddamn
tree
towering over her daughter, her skull-carving face buried in her trunk so that only her sightless eyes and maniacal Jolly Roger grin were visible.

She had become a Titan’s arm, reaching up from the crust and grass clutching a handful of leaves.

Then the tree that had been Annie burst into flames, all that foliage going up in a bonfire
WHOOSH
of hot light, and the woman-thing inside screamed in pain and terror, and

Little Robin screamed,

and

old women cackled, ceaselessly echoing back on themselves,

and—

❂

—a twenty-one-year-old Robin woke from a nightmare of trees and flame. She gulped a deep breath as if she’d surfaced from the ocean and lay staring at the carpeted ceiling, breathing hard and fast, trembling.

Condensation dribbled down the curve of the van’s rear windows, refracting stony gray light.

Her cellphone told her it was a few minutes after ten the morning of October 23, 2014. She sat up and lifted a camcorder from its customary place in a tub lined with soft black foam, then wriggled out of her sleeping bag and dug through a tub full of rolled clothes.

The smell of burning bark still floated among the dust, as if the smoke had permeated her skin and hair. She wore nothing but a pair of gray panties and even inside the van, warmed by her farts and body heat all night, the air was graveyard-clammy, so she knew the late autumn morning outside would require something a little more substantial than usual.

Damn Georgia humidity,
she thought, pulling on a pair of moss-green skinny jeans and a light jacket over a band T-shirt.
Makes the summers hotter and the winters colder.

The entire back half of the van was lined with rails, shelves, and wire frames in which nested dozens of small plastic bins containing all manner of things:

• packets of trail mix
  
• electronics parts still in their blister packs
  
• condiment packets from just about every restaurant under the sun
  
• barbers’ clippers
  
• toiletries and shaving razors
  
• USB cables
  
• name-brand double-A, triple-A, D-cell, and tiny dime-like watch batteries
  
• a rats’-nest of power adapter cables.
  

One tub held Gerber baby-food jars emptied of their contents and refilled with water. Another tub contained handfuls of stacked twigs, another was full of something that might have been ginger root, or perhaps bits of wild mushroom.

A large pegboard occupied one half of a wall directly behind the driver’s seat. Several edged weapons had been mounted on pegs and held in place with little clips—a broadsword, a short-sword, a kuhkri knife like a boomerang with a handle, a wicked black tomahawk, a Cold Steel katana painted matte black, a gilded silver dagger that looked like something that belonged in a saint’s tomb.

A fifteen-year-old stuffed mosquito peeked over the edge of a tub, his own personal plastic sarcophagus.

Mr. Nosy’s
proboscis
was a lot more limp these days; both of his glassy wings and four of his six legs had been stitched back on at some point, but he was still whole and had both of his big white Kermit eyes. Robin leaned over and gave her oldest friend a kiss on the nose.

Once she was dressed, she put the camera on a screw-mount in the corner, facing her. There were several mounts around the van, including two on the dash and two clamped to the wing mirrors.

Tucked into the pocket of yesterday’s jeans was an orange prescription bottle. She transferred it to today’s jeans. Taking a moment to screw the heels of her hands into her eyes again to grind away any remaining sleep, she slapped a bongo beat on her cheeks to redden them, then turned the camera on and started recording.

“Good morning,” she said, her whiskey-and-cigarettes rasp exploding like a hand-grenade in the silence.

She put on her socks and boots as she talked, long green Army socks and a pair of comfortable combat boots. “Malus here. You might be able to hear I’ve got a bit of a sinus thing right now. And I think I might be getting a sore throat. I guess that’s what I get for not eating enough oranges?” She paused, glanced down at the van floor as if to screw up her courage, then went back to cramming her feet in her boots.

The black Army boots were like big sneakers, with a padded ankle, an Air Jordan profile, and soles like tractor tires. She’d bought them at a PX in Kentucky earlier that year for almost two hundred dollars, and they had earned the nickname ‘shit-kickers’ before she’d even paid for them. Post-modern punk-rock couture.